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.
Mostly Monday Reads: It’s the Policies Stupid!
Posted: April 28, 2025 Filed under: #FARTUS, #MAGAnomics, American Fascists, Broligarchy, Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Constitutional Crises, kakistocracy, kleptocracy, MAGA Assholes, MAGA goes after the Rule of Law, MAGA Political Carnage | Tags: #Fartus #DeportUs, @johnbuss.bsky.social John Buss, All Apologies, Bombastic Rhetoric, FARTUS, Kash Patel, Pam Bondi weirdo, Pete Hegseth weirdo sexual assaulter, Verbal Bully Bombs, Yam Tits 100 days of oops 6 Comments
“Arresting development,” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
I don’t know about you, but these first 100 days of #FARTUS have taken a toll on me. So many bad policies in such a short time have me spinning and anxious. I can’t even plan my one-person, small-house, semi-retired life. I can’t even figure out what state and local governments, big and small businesses, and the courts have on their hands right now.
The assessment of these first 100 days, coming from polls and pundits, is stunningly bad. Bad to the point that any polling firm is considered to be a criminal organization by yam tits. I will start with this analysis in The Guardian by Steven Greenhouse. “Trump’s second term will be the worst presidential term ever. Tragically, the president’s second term is already more lawless and more authoritarian than any in US history.”
In his first 100 days back in office, Donald Trump has made a strong case that his second term will be by far the worst presidential term in US history. So many of his flood-the-zone actions have been head-spinning and stomach-turning. His administration seems to be powered by ignorance and incoherence, spleen and sycophancy. Both he and his right-hand man, Elon Musk, with their resentment-fueled desire to disrupt everything, seem intent on pulverizing the foundations of our government, our democracy, our alliances as well as any notions of truth. Tragically, Trump’s second term is already more lawless and more authoritarian than any in US history.
The worst and most dangerous part of Trump’s agenda is his war against our democracy and constitution – defying judges’ orders, deporting people without due process, suggesting he will run for a third term, calling to impeach judges who rule against him, pardoning hundreds of January 6 criminals, gutting federal agencies and firing thousands of federal employees in flagrant violation of the law, and banning books from military libraries. (One wonders: will book burning be next?) Underlining just how dangerous and lawless Trump is, he is talking publicly about disappearing US citizens to foreign countries where they could be locked in prison forever. For those who care about democracy and basic freedoms, this is Defcon 1 stuff.
From Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan to Joe Biden, every president since the second world war has worked hard to build alliances to promote peace and prosperity and deter aggression. But right out of the box, Trump 2.0 has rushed to blow up our alliances and cavalierly alienate our allies. Trump quickly rejected the US’s traditional foreign policy and ideals by warmly embracing Vladimir Putin, a brutal dictator, and turning against Ukraine and its noble fight against Putin’s aggression. Trump sounded like a rapacious 19th-century imperialist when he threatened to take over the Panama canal and, ditto, when he talked of using force to seize control of Greenland, which belongs to our longtime Nato ally, Denmark. Then there’s Trump’s astoundingly idiotic talk – and taunt – that Canada should be our 51st state. What a way to anger and alienate a nation that has long been the US’s best friend.
Then there is the disaster – or should we say clown show – of Trump’s on-again, off-again, on-again, who-knows-what’s-going-to-happen-tomorrow tariffs. His “liberation day” tariffs were put together by a clown-car crew, just three hours before he announced it, and Trump and company seemed to have zero idea that his hodgepodge of tariffs would send the world’s stock markets into a nervous breakdown. Trump’s team was stupid enough to think that China was too feeble to respond effectively to Trump’s trade war – treasury secretary Scott Bessent said China had “a losing hand” with just “a pair of twos”. Trump and his clown car failed to realize that China had the ability to retaliate in devastating ways – by clamping down on rare earth exports that American manufacturers and tech companies desperately need, and perhaps by selling off hundreds of billions of dollars in US bonds. Former treasury secretary Janet Yellen was appalled, saying: “This is the worst self-inflicted policy wound I’ve ever seen in my career inflicted on our economy.”
What really gets to me is his “bombastic rhetoric.” It’s like you’re either with the bully or being bullied. But what appalls me is his stewardship of the US and global Economy. He is completely detached from all we have learned about policy impacts from the 1930s. It was clear that as industrialization increased, the old mercantilism of the colonial days was fading fast. Industrialization created a different trade paradigm.
The switch from the Gold Standard created a different-looking financial economic system. The Information Age and the rise of advanced technology like robotics have changed us even more. We have complex, intertwined, mixed market economies. While the basics of market structure remain similar, the frictions within them have become much more complicated. You may check the academic research of Nobel Prize-winning Joseph E. Stiglitz for his legendary study on how the various quirks in producing specific goods and services can lead to fairly serious economic issues.
I don’t think anyone in the West Wing or the Agencies knows how economic policy works. For that matter, Trump doesn’t even know how many countries there are in the world since he keeps mentioning 200 trade deals when there are only 195. Maybe the Penguin islands are more autonomous than we know?
In fact, the communication style of the entire MAGA movement makes it an impossible environment for governing. This is how Amanda Marcotte–writing for Salon— puts it. “MAGA loves a tantrum: How public meltdowns became the preferred method of GOP communication. Why Nancy Mace, Pete Hegseth, and Stephen Miller keep throwing fits on camera.”
If there were an Oscar for the category “hard to watch,” I’d have to nominate the video of Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., barking expletives at a constituent after he asked her if she would have a town hall soon. It’s produced in a beauty supply store instead of a movie studio, but in a brief minute and 42 seconds, the video finds its place in the canon of horror films shot from the villain’s perspective. The camera focuses entirely on the story’s hero, a man in a polo and shorts holding a bottle of what appears to be face cleanser, as he holds his own against his congressional representative getting increasingly shrill as she yells invective at him. Even though he said nothing about gay marriage, she demands his gratitude for voting “for gay marriage twice.” When he gets annoyed at her reductive assumption, she calls him “crazy” and “absolutely f—king crazy,” and repeatedly says “f—k you” to him.
In the eyes of normal people, Mace, as her interlocutor said when he fled from this encounter, is a “disgrace.” Most adults who act like Mace in public immediately wish to disappear off the face of the earth in shame. But not our Nancy! No, she’s the one who posted this video online, proud of her emotional incontinence. She even offered a homophobic “gay panic” defense, by describing the man as “wearing daisy dukes, at a makeup store.” (Sorry, Miss Nancy, they aren’t daisy dukes until we see cheeks.) To people outside the MAGA bubble, it’s a baffling choice. She’s not even a fun villain. There’s none of the sleek appeal of Loki from the “Avengers” franchise or camp glee of Ursula from “The Little Mermaid.” Mace is serving pure toddler here. She likely wished to throw herself to the floor and start pounding it, but doing so would have meant dropping her iPhone.
Mace isn’t wrong, however, to think that what most adults find embarrassing, the MAGA base will eat right up. The public meltdown, in which you declare yourself the world’s greatest victim, is the preferred GOP method of political communication these days. Despite this effort, Mace didn’t even come close to nabbing last week’s gold star for the most histronic MAGA performance. She was outdone by Stephen Miller, whose usual register on TV is “verge of a nervous breakdown,” but got so shrill on Fox News Tuesday that Lauren Tousignant at Jezebel worried she’d soon have to “look at Stephen Miller’s face as he pops a dozen blood vessels as his brain explodes.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth turned in two performances that would cause Al Pacino to tell him to settle down. While carping about “the fake news media” during the White House Easter egg roll, Hegseth’s whining got so pitched his voice started to crack, while his children stood behind him, embarrassed at the spectacle.
Despite his own family’s discomfort with his antics, Hegseth kept up the scenery-chewing, bellowing about the all-powerful, forever-mysterious “they” have “come after me from day one.” (“They,” in this case, means close friends and advisors who got pushed out after beginning to question Hegseth’s fitness for the job.)
All this yelling and bellyaching serves a pragmatic purpose: to distract from how what they’re saying makes no sense. Miller’s claim that the six Republican judges on the Supreme Court — three appointed by Trump — are “communist” wouldn’t withstand even a moment’s thought at a normal volume. Because he’s delivering his commentary at “front row at Led Zepplin” levels, the brain can’t even process how preposterous the lie is. Mace’s routine showed this working in a literal way. Her target runs away, because trying to talk to someone behaving like her is like trying to converse with a wildfire.
It’s part of the overall too-muchness that is the signature of the MAGA aesthetic, which goes right back to Trump’s gold-plated tastelessness. We see it in the infamous “Mar-a-Lago” face, which uses plastic surgery and spackled-on make-up to turn women into terrifyingly exaggerated caricatures of femininity. Or the love of roided-out male bodies, which try to recreate the impossibly huge muscles of comic books on human bodies. It’s a maximalist aesthetic, minus all the playfulness of Las Vegas casinos or “RuPaul’s Drag Race.” There’s a grim vibe to the undertaking, as if they’re trying to pound your head into the ground with the excess.
“Fake Melania mystery solved. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer–writing for The Atlantic—dialed up Trump on his private phone one day in late March. He spoke to them even though he had described them both heinously.
The week our interview was supposed to occur, Trump posted a vituperative message on Truth Social, attacking us by name. “Ashley Parker is not capable of doing a fair and unbiased interview. She is a Radical Left Lunatic, and has been as terrible as is possible for as long as I have known her,” he wrote. “To this date, she doesn’t even know that I won the Presidency THREE times.” (That last sentence is true—Ashley Parker does not know that Trump won the presidency three times.) “Likewise, Michael Scherer has never written a fair story about me, only negative, and virtually always LIES.”
Yes, it was full-on #FARTUS Bully Verbal Bombing them publicly. They actually just called him later. He picked up. This article is the result
Despite his attacks on us a few days earlier, the president, evidently feeling buoyed by a week of successes, was eager to talk about his accomplishments. As we spoke, the sounds of another conversation, perhaps from a television, hummed in the background.
The president seemed exhilarated by everything he had managed to do in the first two months of his second term: He had begun a purge of diversity efforts from the federal government; granted clemency to nearly 1,600 supporters who had participated in the invasion of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, including those caught beating police officers on camera; and signed 98 executive orders and counting (26 of them on his first day in office). He had fired independent regulators; gutted entire agencies; laid off great swaths of the federal workforce; and invoked 18th-century wartime powers to use against a criminal gang from Venezuela. He had adjusted tariffs like a DJ spinning knobs in the booth, upsetting the rhythms of global trade and inducing vertigo in the financial markets. He had raged at the leader of Ukraine, a democratic ally repelling an imperialist invasion, for not being “thankful”—and praised the leader of the invading country, Russia, as “very smart,” reversing in an instant 80 years of U.S. foreign-policy doctrine, and prompting the countries of NATO to prepare for their own defense, without the protective umbrella of American power, for the first time since 1945.
…
We asked Trump why he thought the billionaire class was prostrating itself before him.
“It’s just a higher level of respect. I don’t know,” Trump said. “Maybe they didn’t know me at the beginning, and they know me now.”
“I mean, you saw yesterday with the law firm,” he said. He was referring to Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, one of the nation’s most prestigious firms, whose leader had come to the Oval Office days earlier to beg for relief from an executive order that could have crippled its business. Trump had issued the order at least partially because a former partner at the firm had in 2021 gone to work for the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, where he was part of an investigation of the Trump Organization’s business practices. Also that week, an Ivy League institution, threatened with the cancellation of $400 million in federal funding, had agreed to overhaul its Middle Eastern–studies programs at the Trump administration’s request, while also acceding to other significant demands. “You saw yesterday with Columbia University. What do you think of the law firm? Were you shocked at that?” Trump asked us.
Yes—all of it was shocking, much of it without precedent. Legal scholars were drawing comparisons to Franklin D. Roosevelt and the early stages of the New Deal, when Congress had allowed FDR to demolish norms and greatly expand the powers of the presidency.
As ever, Trump was on the hunt for a deal. If he liked the story we wrote, he said, he might even speak with us again.
“Tell the people at The Atlantic, if they’d write good stories and truthful stories, the magazine would be hot,” he said. Perhaps the magazine can risk forgoing hotness, he suggested, because it is owned by Laurene Powell Jobs, which buffers it, he implied, from commercial imperatives. But that doesn’t guarantee anything, he warned. “You know at some point, they give up,” he said, referring to media owners generally and—we suspected—Bezos specifically. “At some point they say, No más, no más.” He laughed quietly.
Media owners weren’t the only ones on his mind. He also seemed to be referring to law firms, universities, broadcast networks, tech titans, artists, research scientists, military commanders, civil servants, moderate Republicans—all the people and institutions he expected to eventually, inevitably, submit to his will.
We asked the president if his second term felt different from his first. He said it did. “The first time, I had two things to do—run the country and survive; I had all these crooked guys,” he said. “And the second time, I run the country and the world.”
More like the country and the world run from him. I have to admit. I admire the Chinese method of trolling him. It’s funny and effective. Philip Bump at the Washington Post analyzes this self-defeating policy of the second term. “The bubble that created Trump is the reason he’s stumbling. The White House is now a bubble where loyalty, not ability, defines success.”
Consider Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
No one should be surprised that Hegseth is flailing in his new role, one of the most arduous and complicated in the U.S. government, if not the world. When Donald Trump proposed that Hegseth run the agency, the response was broadly unified: Hegseth lacked the experience needed to do the job effectively. You could debate the other controversies surrounding his bid for the role ad nauseam, but there was no way to reasonably argue that the Fox News talk-show host was prepared to run the Pentagon.
Hegseth was confirmed by the Republican-controlled Senate anyway because Trump and a universe of voices who support him insisted Hegseth was the best choice for the job — because he was Trump’s choice for the job. Republican senators who undoubtedly knew better went along, betting that things wouldn’t get so bad under Hegseth that it was worth stirring up the fury of that pro-Trump bubble.
It’s the same bet that prominent Republicans have been making on Trump himself since 2015. Now, as Trump too is flailing — polling and the data make clear that he is — it’s trivial to identify that insular chorus of cheerleaders and cynics as a root cause.
The president owes his political career to that same bubble. Over the past few decades, the fringe right and then Republicans more broadly embraced discussions of the world that were mostly devoid of nuance: left bad, right good. The internet allowed for the emergence of bespoke “news” organizations (and, later, social media accounts) catering to conspiratorial partisan rhetoric — an alternative to traditional reporting unhampered by criticism or unpopular truths.
Trump secured the 2016 Republican nomination not because he was the best spokesperson for the Republican Party but because he echoed the refrains of that surreal universe of information. When you hear his supporters praise his straightforwardness, this is what they are referring to: He says the false things with which they agree.
We’re about to say goodbye to Musk. Hopefully, Hegseth will be a quick second out. But what comes next? Certainly, nothing better. Even Rubio seems to have caught the munificently Kiss Ass Fever. The speed of light is the rate at which he contradicts the old Little Marco makes me wonder if he a Musk AI robot and the ex-Senator is up in space some where. Here’s the latest example from The Independent. “Marco Rubio claims Canada should be 51st state as PM told Trump they ‘couldn’t survive’ without U.S. Rubio says State Department has not taken action on the president’s push to annex Canada and Greenland.”
America’s top diplomat was questioned on Sunday about Donald Trump’s reasoning for repeatedly calling for Canada to join the United States as the 51st state.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio appeared on NBC’s Meet the Presson Sunday where moderator Kristen Welker asked him if the administration was actually taking any steps to make Trump’s vision a reality.
The president has made his opinion clear: he wants Canada to join the United States and suggested his administration would also acquire the Danish-held territory Greenland by any means.
The secretary of state gave his own translation of the president’s remarks on the matter:
“What the president has said, and he has said this repeatedly, is he was told by the previous prime minister that Canada could not survive without unfair trade with the United States, at which point he asked, ‘Well, if you can’t survive as a nation without treating us unfairly in trade, then you should become a state.’ That’s what he said.”
Rubio told Welker that the administration had taken no action to realize this particular strain of Trump’s bluster, which has alarmed U.S. allies.
There’s a U.S. military base on Greenland, and the president has cited the self-governing nation’s geographical importance as a reasoning for his expansionist goal. Trump has made the comments on numerous occasions, including in conversations with his Canadian counterparts.
Trump himself made his goals of northward expansion apparent during his address to Congress in February.
“We need Greenland for national security and even international security. And we’re working with everybody involved to try and get it,” Trump said at the time. “And I think we’re going to get it one way or the other. We’re going to get it.”
But he was making similar remarks publicly as early as December 2024.
“No one can answer why we subsidize Canada to the tune of over $100,000,000 a year? Makes no sense!” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Many Canadians want Canada to become the 51st State.”
“They would save massively on taxes and military protection. I think it is a great idea,” added Trump.
So tell me if you ever thought you’d see the day that an American Secretary of State believes annexing your best allies, the ones you’ve fought beside in Wars, and stood by you when you were attacked, would say that sort of thing? Meanwhile, the entire Deportation debacle continues on its cruel and ugly path. This is from Politico. “Homan presses undocumented immigrants to self-deport, threatening prosecution. The push comes as the monthly deportation numbers have lagged behind the Biden administration’s.” Homan is now the antonym for Human. Deportation in this country does not just fall on the undocumented. It impacts everyone.
White House border czar Tom Homan on Monday warned undocumented immigrants that they “cannot hide” and will be prosecuted in they remain in the U.S. illegally — the latest effort from the Trump administration to push self-deportation.
“Get your affairs in order. If you’re in the country illegally, work with ICE, go to CBP One Home app, and leave on your own,” Homan said from the White House press briefing room.
Homan said every immigrant in the U.S. illegally must register with the federal government and carry documentation. And those who fail to register with the Department of Homeland Security or neglect to update any new address will have those actions treated as criminal offenses “starting today.” He also warned other undocumented immigrants that if they have a final order to leave the country but remain anyway, the Trump administration will “aggressively prosecute” and issue daily monetary fines of up to $998.
The border czar’s briefing room appearance comes as the Trump administration marks its 100th day in office this week, with Homan touting the administration’s progress on border security. He pointed to a significant drop in illegal border crossings, which have plunged since Trump took office to the lowest level in decades.
Homan said Monday that the administration has deported 139,000 migrants since Jan. 20 as Trump officials have struggled to ramp up removal numbers. This figure includes people deported by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection and the Coast Guard, who would have been encountered at or before they reached the border, according to a DHS official. The Trump administration’s monthly deportation numbers have lagged behind the Biden administration’s, according to data obtained by NBC News.
The bluster is abusive, but the actions are unconstitutional, illegal, and inhumane. The New York Times reports on the weekend’s 60 Minutes sign-off. Every voice raised against the dismantling of US democracy is a voice that counts! “‘60 Minutes’ Chastises Its Corporate Parent in Unusual On-Air Rebuke. The show’s top producer abruptly said last week he was quitting. “Paramount began to supervise our content in new ways,” the correspondent Scott Pelley told viewers.”
In an extraordinary on-air rebuke, one of the top journalists at “60 Minutes” directly criticized the program’s parent company in the final moments of its Sunday night CBS telecast, its first episode since the program’s executive producer, Bill Owens, announced his intention to resign.
“Paramount began to supervise our content in new ways,” the correspondent, Scott Pelley, told viewers. “None of our stories has been blocked, but Bill felt he lost the independence that honest journalism requires.”
A spokesman for Paramount had no immediate comment, and has previously declined to comment on Mr. Owens’s departure.
Mr. Owens stunned the show’s staff on Tuesday when he said he would leave the highest-rated program in television news over disagreements with Paramount, CBS’s corporate parent, saying, “It’s clear the company is done with me.”
Mr. Owens’s comments were widely reported in the press last week. The show’s decision to repeat those grievances on-air may have exposed viewers to the serious tensions between “60 Minutes” and its corporate overseers for the first time.
Shari Redstone, the controlling shareholder of Paramount, has been intent on securing approval from the Trump administration for a multibillion-dollar sale of her media company to a studio run by the son of Larry Ellison, the tech billionaire.
President Trump sued CBS last year, claiming $10 billion in damages, in a case stemming from a “60 Minutes” interview with the 2024 Democratic presidential nominee, Kamala Harris, that Mr. Trump said was deceptively edited. Ms. Redstone has expressed her desire to settle Mr. Trump’s lawsuit, although legal experts have called the case far-fetched.
So that’s it for me today. I’m just trying to keep my head above water and my thoughts on calm, clear awareness. I hope you’re finding a way to cope with this mess. I try to tune out as much as possible, but my job is to teach folks about financial and economic policies, so I can only shut out so much. A friend of mine posted a picture of American NAZIs partying in the French Quarter and getting drinks from the Dungeon. The tattoos and the t-shirts said it all. What’s most disturbing about all of this is these folks are out of their hidey holes, and they don’t care who sees them and what they say. I’ll be out on Wednesday at a protest in front of the ICE offices here in the Central Business District. I need to do something, even just being with like-minded people.
Also, we’re finding some older Dem Pols stepping down to make way for new blood. “Rep. Gerry Connolly, the top Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, will step down from his leadership post on the panel and not run for reelection.” Let’s try to hope.
What’s on your Reading and Blogging list today?
Finally Friday Reads: The Incompetent and The Cruel
Posted: March 28, 2025 Filed under: Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, education, FARTUS, Hillary Clinton, kakistocracy, kleptocracy, MAGA Assholes | Tags: @johnbuss.bsky.social John Buss, @repeat1968. John Buss, abu ghraib torture and prisoner abuse, Cabinet of incompetent imbeciles, Department of Education Blues, Elise Stefanik is a cunt, Every one goes to El Salvador!, FARTUS, higher education, Hillary Clinton on SignalGate, Kidnapping Graduate Students, Kristi Noem Sociopath and Cunt, Pete Hegseth weirdo sexual assaulter, The Whiskey Leaks 11 Comments
“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.“If you come to our country illegally, this is one of the consequences you could face,” Noem said.
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.”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.”
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:
These changes will affect the management of federal education funding streams totaling over $150 billion annually, including:
- 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
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.
- $18.8 billion in Title I funding for high-poverty schools, serving approximately 26 million students
- $15.5 billion in IDEA funding, supporting 7.3 million students with disabilities
- $120.8 billion in Federal Student Aid programs, helping 10.8 million college students
“The backpedaling is something to behold..” John Buss, @repeat1968.
@johnbuss.bsky.social
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.
The primary tool of Trump’s spokespeople is to lie and deny and protect FARTUS at all times.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.
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.
There’s more at the link, which has been gifted.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.
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.
Okay, that’s enough shock and awe for now. What’s on your reading and blogging list today? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufw9dVys3t0President 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.”
Mostly Monday Reads: We have a Constitutional Crisis
Posted: March 17, 2025 Filed under: #FARTUS, kakistocracy, kleptocracy, MAGA Assholes, MAGA goes after the Rule of Law, Polycrisis | Tags: @johnbuss.bsky.social John Buss, constitutional crisis, Cruel Trumpist Immigration policies, FARTUS, muzzling the press, Trump defies Court Orders, Viktor Orban 5 Comments
” Today, I memorialize Elmo and his new toy.” John Buss, @repeat1988,
@johnbuss.bsky.social
It’s a Grim Day, Sky Dancers!
Last night, after my usual teaching gig, after a few silly games, I decided to doom scroll. I was already following one story and hoping I wasn’t seeing what I was seeing. But, you do have to believe your eyes in this dark age. We no longer have to speculate about Trump defying a Federal Judge’s order. That happened this weekend, and the Secretary of State agreed to it. “Exclusive: How the White House ignored a judge’s order to turn back deportation flights.” This is from Axios. The reporting is from Marc Caputo. I know this is a large quote, but it’s succinct and something we all need to know. There is actually more at the link. You should read it all.
Why it matters: The administration’s decision to defy a federal judge’s order is exceedingly rare and highly controversial.
- “Court order defied. First of many as I’ve been warning and start of true constitutional crisis,” national security attorney Mark S. Zaid, a Trump critic, wrote on X, adding that Trump could ultimately get impeached.
- The White House welcomes that fight. “This is headed to the Supreme Court. And we’re going to win,” a senior White House official told Axios.
- A second administration official said Trump was not defying the judge whose ruling came too late for the planes to change course: “Very important that people understand we are not actively defying court orders.”
State of play: Trump’s advisers contend U.S. District Judge James Boasberg overstepped his authority by issuing an order that blocked the president from deporting about 250 alleged Tren de Aragua gang members under the Alien Enemies Act of 1789.
- The war-time law gives the executive extreme immense power to deport noncitizens without a judicial hearing. But it has been little-used, particularly in peacetime.
- “It’s the showdown that was always going to happen between the two branches of government,” a senior White House official said. “And it seemed that this was pretty clean. You have Venezuelan gang members … These are bad guys, as the president would say.”
How it happened: White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller “orchestrated” the process in the West Wing in tandem with Homeland Security Secretary Kristy Noem. Few outside their teams knew what was happening.
- They didn’t actually set out to defy a court order. “We wanted them on the ground first, before a judge could get the case, but this is how it worked out,” said the official.
The timeline: The president signed the executive order invoking the Alien Enemies Act on Friday night, but intentionally did not advertise it. On Saturday morning, word of the order leaked, officials said, prompting a mad scramble to get planes in the air.
- At 2:31 p.m. Saturday, an immigration activist who tracks deportation flights, posted on X that “TWO HIGHLY UNUSUAL ICE flights” were departing from Texas to El Salvador, which had agreed to accept Venezuelan gang members deported from the U.S.
- Hours later, during a court hearing filed by the ACLU., Boasberg ordered a halt to the deportations and said any flights should be turned around mid-air.
- “This is something that you need to make sure is complied with immediately,” he told the Justice Department, according to the Washington Post.
- At that point, about 6:51 p.m., both flights were off the Yucatan Peninsula, according to flight paths posted on X.
Inside the White House, officials discussed whether to order the planes to turn around. On advice from a team of administration lawyers, the administration pressed ahead.
- “There was a discussion about how far the judge’s ruling can go under the circumstances and over international waters and, on advice of counsel, we proceeded with deporting these thugs,” the senior official said.
- “They were already outside of US airspace. We believe the order is not applicable,” a second senior administration official told Axios.
Yes, but: The Trump administration was already spoiling for a fight over the Alien Enemies Act — one of several fronts on which they believe legal challenges to the president’s authority will only end up strengthening it when the Supreme Court rules in his favor.
Between the lines: Officially, the Trump White House is not denying it ignored the judge’s order, and instead wants to shift the argument to whether it was right to expel alleged members of Tren de Aragua.
- “If the Democrats want to argue in favor of turning a plane full of rapists, murderers, and gangsters back to the United States, that’s a fight we are more than happy to take,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told Axios when asked about the case.
- It’s unclear how many of the roughly 250 Venezuelans were deported under the Alien Enemies Act and how many were kicked out of the U.S. due to other immigration laws.
- It’s also not clear whether all of them were actually gang members.
What they are saying: On Sunday morning, El Salvador President Nayib Bukele posted a video on X hailing the arrival of the Venezuelans in his country. Bukele also mockingly featured an image of a New York Post story about the judge’s order halting the flights.
- “Oopsie … too late,” Bukele wrote on X with a crying-laughing emoji
- U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio retweeted the post.
Joyce Vance was on top of the story yesterday morning in her Substack Civil Discourse. This brief begins with the background of the lawsuit filed by the ACLU and Democracy Forward.
The ACLU and Democracy Forward sued the government over its efforts to deport people alleged to be Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang members using the Alien Enemies Act. It asked the Judge to enjoin the deportations. The Alien Enemies Act that the government claimed it was operating under is the same law used to put people of Japanese ancestry in camps during World War II. The law, passed in 1798, gives a president, once he issues a public proclamation, wartime authority to arrest and deport citizens of a country engaged in a “declared war” or “invasion or predatory incursion” against the United States.
Federal Judge James Boasberg in the District of Columbia issued a temporary restraining order to stop deportations under the law while he considered the issues. He ordered planes that were up in the air at the time of his decision to return to the United States. There is some suggestion the government didn’t do that, but there are some technical issues involving what happened and when, like the location and timing of flights, some differences between the Judge’s oral directions in court and the minute order he entered in the record, and when the order became effective. The legal position the government is in isn’t entirely clear yet. It’s *possible* that they didn’t technically violate an order that was in effect.
But, whatever the outcome of the legal argument, the government skipped over the spirit of the ruling and, as lawyers know (see above), you don’t slice that close to violating a court order. You comply with it and then you appeal if you disagree with it. If there’s any doubt, you err on the side of caution.
The government didn’t do that and according to reporting in Axios, there is some indication that they are spoiling for a fight on this issue. Axios also reports, “White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller ‘orchestrated’ the process in the West Wing in tandem with Homeland Security Secretary Kristy Noem. Few outside their teams knew what was happening.” After the plaintiffs learned Saturday afternoon that two ICE flights were flying from Texas to El Salvador, they went to court to ask the Judge for the emergency order. El Salvador, which had agreed to accept Venezuelan gang members deported from the U.S in a for-pay prison situation, is not exactly known as a bastion of human rights. There are good reasons to doubt the legality of the scheme.
This is clearly an impeachable defense. More cases are dealing with illegal deportation and the accompanying violation of rights headed to court, as reported in Politico by Jack Blanchard. Trump believes he’s above the law, and now we’ll see what the US Legal System says about that. That would be everyone but Alito and Thomas, who are clearly on the side of overthrowing the country. “Playbook: The ‘law and order’ presidency.” This is a follow-up on the First Amendment issue of political speech by holders of Green Cards by BB on Saturday.
SEE YOU IN COURT: Donald Trump’s White House is gearing up for the most significant legal showdowns of his second term thus far after dramatically escalating the deportation of foreign nationals this past weekend. In a Massachusetts courtroom this morning, Judge Leo Sorokin will demand answers after Customs and Border officials deported Rasha Alawieh, a 34-year-old Rhode Island-based doctor and reportedly a valid U.S. visa holder, back to Lebanon despite a court order blocking them from doing so. In D.C., an even bigger showdown is brewing after the White House chose to ignore a federal judge’s order that two planeloads of Venezuelan migrants being deported to a brutal El Salvador prison be turned around and flown back to the U.S. The Trump administration vehemently insists it’s not defying the courts — but all that chatter about a “constitutional crisis” is now reaching fever pitch.
First, to Boston … where at a 10 a.m. hearing this morning, Judge Sorokin will quiz government lawyers on the deportation last Friday of Alawieh, a kidney specialist with Brown Medicine. Alawieh flew into Logan Airport on Thursday after visiting family in her native Lebanon. She was detained despite holding a valid H1-B visa, her lawyers say, and on Friday, Judge Sorokin issued a temporary order demanding the courts be given 48 hours’ notice of any deportation attempt. But instead, that night, she was sent back to Lebanon via Paris. The Providence Journal has all the details.
Not happy: Judge Sorokin has ordered the government to explain itself in writing ahead of this morning’s hearing, where he will seek to ascertain both the grounds for Alawieh’s deportation and the reason why his order was not followed. Alawieh’s lawyers say the CBP “willfully” disobeyed the court order and have provided “a detailed and specific timeline in an under-oath affidavit” to support the accusation, Sorokin said, describing these as “serious allegations.”
Right of reply: The CBP issued a statement last night which failed to comment on the specifics of the case, but noted that “arriving aliens bear the burden of establishing admissibility to the United States” and insisted CBP officers “adhere to strict protocols to identify and stop threats.” We should learn a lot more in the next few hours.
Donald Trump just loves to jam up the courts with his law-breaking activities. Tom Mooney reports on the Rhode Island Doctor’s story at the Providence Journal. “Documents shed light on why RI doctor was detained, deported. What we know.” This is this is the second case where Trump’s DOJ willfully ignored a court order.
A federal judge has postponed a hearing to allow U.S. Customs and Border officials to respond to allegations they “willfully” disobeyed his order not to deport a Rhode Island doctor until he could review her case.
Documents filed in federal court ahead of the hearing allege that it was the contents of Dr. Rasha Alawieh’s cellphone that led to her detention, and ultimate deportation, from Logan Airport in Boston.
Federal authorities say in court documents filed in the deportation case of Alawieh, 34, that custom and border officials found “sympathetic photos and videos” of Hezbollah leaders on her cell phone.
They also found “various other Hezbollah militants” in the deleted photo folder of her cell phone.
“With the discovery of these photographs and videos CHP questioned Dr. Alawieh and determined that her true intentions in the United States could not be determined,” the documents allege.
“As such CBP canceled her visa and deemed Dr. Alawieh inadmissible to the United States.”
On Friday U.S. District Judge Leo T. Sorokin, in Massachusetts, issued an order that Alawieh not be deported without giving the court 48 hours notice. That hearing was continued until March 25.
Despite his order, the Brown Medicine kidney doctor and Lebanese citizen departed for Paris Friday evening. Alawieh arrived back in Lebanon Sunday morning, said a friend and colleague
You may read about the story more in-depth at The Guardian. “Brown University professor deported despite judge’s order, defying US court. Rasha Alawieh’s case highlights Donald Trump’s escalating immigration policies and tensions with universities.”
Nonetheless, in clear defiance of Sorokin’s order from Friday, US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) put Alawieh on a flight to Paris that presumably was a layover back to Lebanon.
On Sunday, Sorokin said in court documents that CBP had received notice of the court order but “nonetheless thereafter willfully disobeyed the order by sending [Alawieh] out of the United States”. Sorokin ordered the government to respond to the “serious allegations with a legal and factual response” and a description of their version of events by Monday morning, ahead of a scheduled court hearing.
CBP did not immediately respond to the Guardian’s request for comment. In a comment to Reuters, a CBP spokesperson said that officers “adhere to strict protocols to identify and stop threats” and the burden is on migrants to establish admissibility into the US.
In a statement, a Brown spokesperson said that the university was “seeking to learn more about what has happened, but we need to be careful about sharing information publicly about any individual’s personal circumstances”.
Brown noted that Alawieh had a clinical appointment with the university but was an employee of Brown Medicine, a non-profit that is affiliated with the medical school but is not operated by the university.
On Sunday, after Alawieh’s deportation, Brown sent an email advising international students and faculty members to avoid international travel due to “potential changes in travel restrictions and travel bans”.
Dr George Bayliss, a Brown medical professor who works with Alawieh at the university’s division of kidney disease and hypertension, told the New York Times that the staff “are all outraged”.
“None of us know why this happened,” he said.
Noticing a pattern? I was just on the verge of finishing my Truly Wild Berry and going to sleep when someone sent this FARTUS tweet on Blue Sky. I knew we were no longer in Kansas with this one. The Daily Beast has coverage this morning. “Trump Declares Biden’s J6 Pardons ‘Void’ in Late-Night Truth Social Meltdown. The president claimed that his predecessor’s pardons were void and threatened to investigate lawmakers who blamed him for the deadly Capitol riot.” Janna Branncolini has the lede. I can’t imagine having to read FARTUS TSPs for a living.
President Donald Trump capped off a weekend of golf with a late-night social media rant claiming former President Joe Biden’s pardons for the members of Congress who investigated Trump’s role in the Capitol riot were “VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER EFFECT.”
“Those on the Unselect Committee, who destroyed and deleted ALL evidence obtained during their two-year Witch Hunt of me, and many other innocent people, should fully understand that they are subject to investigation at the highest level,” he wrote in a Truth Social post.
In one of Biden’s final acts as president, he preemptively pardoned people whom Trump had identified during the campaign as his “enemies from within,” including members of the House committee that investigated Trump’s role in the deadly Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol building.
During a weekend trip to his private Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida—which cost taxpayers about $3 million—Trump apparently became fixated on the idea that the pardons might have been signed by an autopen and therefore were not “real.”
Since Harry Truman’s time in office, presidents (including Trump) have used autopens—a machine that replicates the president’s signature—to sign documents, according to Smithsonian magazine. But earlier on Sunday, Trump pinned a meme to his Truth Social account implying the autopen had been the real president during Biden’s term.
“In other words, Joe Biden did not sign [the pardons] but, more importantly, he did not know anything about them! The necessary Pardoning Documents were not explained to, or approved by, Biden. He knew nothing about them, and the people that did may have committed a crime,” Trump wrote, without providing any evidence to back up the claim.
In fact, top White House officials debated the pardons for months, both because their scope was unprecedented and because pardons typically carry a tacit admission of guilt or wrongdoing, the AP reported at the time.
“These are exceptional circumstances, and I cannot in good conscience do nothing,” Biden said in a Jan. 20 statement announcing the pardons. “Even when individuals have done nothing wrong—and in fact have done the right thing—and will ultimately be exonerated, the mere fact of being investigated or prosecuted can irreparably damage reputations and finances.”
At the time, House committee leaders Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS) and then-Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) said they were grateful for the pardons, and that they were being pardoned “not for breaking the law but for upholding it,” according to the AP.
With the release of the J6 adjudicated Felons, who knows what these brain farts might lead to?
So here’s more of today’s Constitutional Shit Storm news. This is from The Atlantic. “Trump’s Attempts to Muzzle the Press Look Familiar. Much of what the U.S. president has done to curb independent media echoes the Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán’s playbook.” The author is András Pethő.
When Viktor Orbán gave a speech in 2022 at a Conservative Political Action Conference gathering in Budapest, he shared his secret to amassing power with Donald Trump’s fan base. “We must have our own media,” he told his audience.
As a Hungarian investigative journalist, I have had a firsthand view of how Orbán has built his own media universe while simultaneously placing a stranglehold on the independent press. As I watch from afar what’s happening to the free press in the United States during the first weeks of Trump’s second presidency—the verbal bullying, the legal harassment, the buckling by media owners in the face of threats—it all looks very familiar. The MAGA authorities have learned Orbán’s lessons well.
I saw the roots of Orbán’s media strategy when I first met him for an interview, in 2006. He was in the opposition then but had served as prime minister before and was fighting hard to get back in power. When we met in his office in a hulking century-old building that overlooked the Danube River in Budapest, he was very friendly, even charming. Like Trump, he is the kind of politician who knows how to connect with people when he thinks he has something to gain.
During the interview, his demeanor shifted. I still remember how his face went dark when I pushed on questions that he obviously did not want to answer. It was a tense exchange, but he reverted to his cordial mode when we finished the interview, and I turned off the recorder.
What happened afterwards was less friendly. In Hungary, journalists are expected to send edited interview transcripts to their interviewees. The idea is that if the interviewees think you took something they said out of context, they can ask for changes before publication. But in this case, Orbán’s press team sent back the text with some of his answers entirely deleted and rewritten. When my editors and I told them we wouldn’t accept this, they said they wouldn’t allow the interview to be published.
In the end, we published it without their edits. That was the last time I interviewed Viktor Orbán. And when he returned to power in 2010 after a landslide election victory, he made sure that he would never have to answer uncomfortable questions again.
What follows is a list of laws and actions Orbán took to control the press. It’s long and very interesting. One of the Organizations that FARTUS is after is ProPublica. Here’s their latest on how he’s trying to expand the Constitution to suit himself. “How a Push to Amend the Constitution Could Help Trump Expand Presidential Power.” The analysis is by Pheobe Patrivic from the Wisconsin Watch. Notice how independent journalists are shaking the trees?
A behind-the-scenes legal effort to force Congress to call a convention to amend the Constitution could end up helping President Donald Trump in his push to expand presidential power.
While the convention effort is focused on the national debt, legal experts say it could open the door to other changes, such as limiting who can be a U.S. citizen, allowing the president to overrule Congress’ spending decisions or even making it legal for Trump to run for a third term.
Wisconsin Watch and ProPublica have obtained a draft version of a proposed lawsuit being floated to attorneys general in several states, revealing new details about who’s involved and their efforts to advance legal arguments that liberal and conservative legal scholars alike have criticized, calling them “wild,” “completely illegitimate” and “deeply flawed.”
The endeavor predates Trump’s second term but carries new weight as several members of Trump’s inner circle and House Speaker Mike Johnson have previously expressed support for a convention to limit federal government spending and power.
Article V of the Constitution requires Congress to call a convention to propose and pass amendments if two-thirds of states, or 34, request one. This type of convention has never happened in U.S. history, and a decadeslong effort to advance a so-called balanced budget amendment, which would prohibit the government from running a deficit, has stalled at 28.
Despite that, the lawsuit being circulated claims that Congress must hold a convention now because the states reached the two-thirds threshold in 1979. To get there, these activists count various calls for a convention dating back to the late 1700s. Wisconsin’s petition, for example, was written in 1929 and was an effort to repeal Prohibition. The oldest petition they cite, from New York, predates the Bill of Rights. Some others came on the eve of the Civil War.
“It is absurd, on the face of it, that they could count something that had to do with Prohibition as a call for a constitutional convention in 2025,” said Russ Feingold, a former Democratic senator from Wisconsin who co-wrote a book critical of convention efforts like this one. “They’re just playing games to try to pretend that the founders of this country wanted you to be able to mix and match resolutions from all different times in American history.”
To avoid the threat of a convention, the legislatures in some states like Colorado and Illinois have passed resolutions withdrawing their petitions. The draft lawsuit says those actions don’t count because “once the Article V bell has been rung, it cannot be unrung.” Nearly half the states the draft counts have rescinded their petitions.
The draft lawsuit is the work of the Federal Fiscal Sustainability Foundation, a low-profile nonprofit that has drawn support from balanced budget advocates and the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council. The group’s chair, David M. Walker, oversaw government accountability as U.S. comptroller general during both the Clinton and Bush administrations. The draft lawsuit is signed by Charles “Chuck” Cooper, a high-powered conservative lawyer in Washington, D.C., who represented Trump’s previous attorney general during the special counsel’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
All roads eventually lead back to Russia Russia Russia! And, of course, the Propaganda of Fox News. Just to let you know, they’re already doing their thing; here’s the headline and the link. They’re full of nonsense, as usual. “Liberal claim Trump’s causing a constitutional crisis ignores a key reality, Trump opponents who claim this is a constitutional crisis were fine when Biden forgave $400 billion in student loans.” Because violating and ignoring people’s Constitutional rights equals giving fooks a financial break on a Federal Loan program. Right?
Since I’m exhausted today and this will go over 4000 words, I’ll end with this. Judd Legume, an Independent Journalist, writes this at his site Popular Information. I’ve been worried sick about Musk and the Douch boys upending our Social Security Checks, and this one isn’t helping. “EXCLUSIVE: Memo details Trump plan to sabotage the Social Security Administration.” They had already declared one poor man in Seattle dead, and it took him a lot of effort to convince them he wasn’t.
An internal Social Security Administration (SSA) memo, sent on March 13 and obtained by Popular Information, details proposed changes to the claims process that would debilitate the agency, cause significant processing delays, and prevent many Americans from applying for or receiving benefits.
The memo, authored by Acting Deputy SSA Commissioner Doris Diaz, purports to be motivated by a desire to mitigate “fraud risks.”
Elon Musk has pushed several false claims about the nature and scope of Social Security fraud. In a recent interview on Fox Business, Musk suggested that 10% of federal expenditures were related to Social Security fraud. This is false. Social Security fraud does exist, but “improper” Social Security payments amounts to about $9 billion annually — less than 1% of total Social Security benefits paid and 0.1% of the federal budget. Most improper payments are not criminal fraud but the result of beneficiaries or the SSA failing to update records.
The biggest change contemplated by Diaz’s memo is to require “internet identity proofing” for “benefit claims… made over the phone.” When an SSA customer is “unable to utilize the internet ID proofing, customers will be required to visit a field office to provide in-person identity documentation.”
Currently customers can make claims and verify their identity without using the internet or visiting a SSA office. Fraud is extremely rare because there are many safeguards in place. After initiating a call, customers must provide their social security number, date of birth, parents’ names, mother’s maiden name, and date of birth. After the initial teleapplication is completed, the information provided is checked against tax returns, pay stubs, bank statements, and medical information, depending on the nature of the claim. If there are any discrepancies, a customer may need to mail a copy of their birth certificate to the SSA. About 40% of all claims are currently processed over the phone.
Because the SSA serves a large population that is either older or physically disabled, many cannot access the internet. Under the new system, this would force these populations to visit an office to have their claim processed. The Diaz memo estimates it would require 75,000 to 85,000 in-person visitors per week to SSA’s offices to implement the policy.
SSA offices do not currently have the resources to handle an influx of in-person appointments of this size. In 2023, the most recent data available, there were about 119,128 daily visits, on average, to SSA offices. Eight-five thousand more week visits would be a 14% increase. SSA offices no longer accept walk-ins and the wait time for an appointment, even before these changes, averaged over a month.
You may see the Memo along with this analysis at the site.
So, that’s it for me. I don’t celebrate Columbus Day or St Patrick’s Day because they’re both about colonizing and enslaving people. I seriously hope I don’t have to write any more crap about FARTUS wanting us to colonize Panama, Canada, or Greenland. We should dump some of these celebrations for good! Again, I wish the Ides of March would’ve happened when Julius Caesar was in the cradle so we might never have gone down the path to useless empires. These worthless bits of hangover propaganda need to be put to rest.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Finally Friday Reads: Backpfeifengesicht
Posted: March 7, 2025 Filed under: Economy, Equity Markets, FARTUS, kakistocracy, MAGA Assholes, MAGA Political Carnage, Polycrisis, Psychopaths in charge | Tags: a face worthy of being slapped, Backpfeifengesicht, CryptoCurrency Ponzi Scheme from Trump and Musk, Declaration of Independence, FARTUS, martial-law, People are not Illegal, Space X explosion, The Insurrection Act, White Male Christian Supremacists 8 Comments
“EEK!” John Buss, @repeat1968, @johnbuss.bsky.social
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
Backpfeifengesicht is the German word for “a face worthy of being slapped.” That might be the most usable word in the dark timeline, which is the second term of #FARTUS (Felon, Adjudicated Rapist, Traitor of the United States). JJ found this sweet article at The Guardian and shared it with BB and me this morning. It’s an Op-Ed written by Marina Hyde about JD Vance, but it could apply to any subhuman of the modern MAGA movement. “There are 1,000 grotesque memes of JD Vance – and they’re all more likable than the real thing. Angry, rude and addicted to web troll-ery, the vice-president has the Make America Awful Again portfolio. Seems a perfect fit.” Ayup.
You may well be aware that Backpfeifengesicht is the German word for a face that is worthy of being slapped. Even so, how has this not been internationalised? Or at the very least Americanised, where its dictionary definition would presumably be adorned by a picture of the face of US vice-president JD Vance – already faultlessly playing the role of worst American at your hotel. You can immediately picture him at breakfast, can’t you? Every single other guest on the terrace with their shoulders up round their ears, just thinking: “Where is he now? How unbearable is he being NOW?” Next, imagine breakfast lasting four years.
I say the Backpfeifengesicht definition would be accompanied by JD Vance’s face … but then again, what is the face of JD Vance? The internet is awash with people suffering an acute case of not being able to remember it any more, having seen so many hideous comic distortions of Vance that those meme versions are not simply the only results on the first page of your own mental Google search, but stretch deep beyond the second and into the third. Somewhere on page four, where you might as well publish the nuclear codes or pictures of Taylor Swift giving cocaine to babies, is an unmodified snap of what JD Vance actually looks like. Or at least what he looks like with eyeliner.
Before you get there – and you don’t, really – your synaptic filing systems throw up every variety of Photoshopped Vancefake: swollen manboy, face wearing a Minion suit, a bearded egg … I’m hoping that sooner or later, an American news outlet will accidentally use a modified photo, because even the picture editor has forgotten what the vice-president looks like, and then we can have one of those massively self-regarding legacy media-blow-ups, where the entire staff has to resign after a remorseless investigation by the executive editor reveals Vance isn’t actually a big purple grape. “This is a stain on our newspaper’s history. A big purple stain.”
Vance is more meme than man, now, and it is, of course, something of a consolation that he is so extremely online that he can’t help but have noticed this. The VP is like a one-man government troll-feeding programme – please don’t cut him, Elon! – which is probably why people have become so heroically committed to taking the piss. The probability of the vice-president seeing you insulting him is basically one.
Just as previous holders of his office like Teddy Roosevelt and Richard Nixon once did, Vance spent a notable amount of this week both denying he suggested Britain and France were random countries that hadn’t fought a war in 40 years, and replying to random X posters called things like “Jeff Computers” to counter the suggestion that he wasn’t loved and feted on his recent skiing holiday.
While JJ found that amusing read today. BB brought home the rancid bacon. This is an op-ed by Brett Wagner in The San Francisco Chronicle today. “Is Trump preparing to invoke the Insurrection Act? Signs are pointing that way. A joint Department of Defense and Homeland Security report will soon recommend whether or not to invoke the Insurrection Act over illegal migration.”
The clock is ticking down on a crucial but little-noticed part of President Donald Trump’s first round of executive orders — the one tasking the secretaries of the Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security to submit a joint report, within 90 days, recommending “whether to invoke the Insurrection Act.”
Many of us are now holding our collective breath, knowing that the report and what it contains could put us on the slippery slope toward unchecked presidential power under a man with an affinity for ironfisted dictators.
Adding to the suspense was the recent “Friday Night Massacre” at the Pentagon — the firing of the nation’s top uniformed officer and removing other perceived guardrails (i.e., the top uniformed lawyers at the Army, Navy and Air Force) standing between the president and his long-stated intention to declare martial law upon returning to power.
Coincidence?
As we wait to find out, this would be a good time to take a closer look.
Say, for example, that Trump were to invoke the Insurrection Act and declare martial law. He wouldn’t even be required, by the letter of the law, to allege an “insurrection.” All that would be required is to assert that “unlawful obstruction” has made it “impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States” (as President Dwight D. Eisenhower did when he ordered the Arkansas National Guard to enforce the desegregation of Little Rock, Ark., schools).
This is where all the false claims and outright lies Trump and his political allies have been pushing will come into play: Trump falsely alleging, for example, that an entire city in Colorado has been taken over by Venezuelan street gangs, that a city in Ohio has been overrun by Haitian refugees who are eating all the cats and dogs, and other vague assertions that “millions and millions” of “illegals” are pouring into our country every week (or “day” depending on who’s telling the lie at the moment).
Each of these false claims and outright lies could be distilled, to declare martial law, into catchy phrases (beginning with the legalese word “Whereas”) to establish the legal premise for invoking the Insurrection Act, and to lay the predicate to begin going door-to-door, wherever they please, under the pretense of searching for undocumented immigrants who don’t exist.
I bring you the reality on the ground from Joy Reid on Threads. “This is inhumane, hideous and repugnant. If this is what MAGA America is, count me out. I’m ashamed that this is what our government is doing. Shame on them. Shame.” What it is is a 21-year-old girl with cancer who relies completely on her immigrant mother, who is in no way a criminal or bothering anyone. When protesters came to protest, they were arrested. How many laws and constitutional rights can this miserable administration break before they completely break all of us? This story comes from El Monte, California. You can read the hatred of the MAGA monsters in the threads below on YouTube. I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t want to leave the house and take a chance at seeing a FARTUS supporter in my neighborhood. I’m fine with all the immigrants, though. Everything they do makes my neighborhood a better place.
“I can’t even wake up properly… she helps me, she bathes me, she changes me, she makes my food.”Deportation didn’t protect anyone it only stole a mother from the child who needs her most-Blake Coronadowww.threads.net/@blakecorona…
— Audrey (@parickards.bsky.social) 2025-03-06T23:59:31.294Z
The US Military and US Vets are under attack from this Administration. This cannot be denied. This is from the AP this morning. FARTUS has always had a thing against military service and those who fight for values that he seems to hate very much. “War heroes and military firsts are among 26,000 images flagged for removal in Pentagon’s DEI purge.” So much of this just comes as an attack against the diversity of our nation being represented in all of its institutions. But is that really it? Why the disappearance of all people of color, women, and the LGBTQ community? Are white cis men really that sensitive?
References to a World War II Medal of Honor recipient, the Enola Gay aircraft that dropped an atomic bomb on Japan and the first women to pass Marine infantry training are among the tens of thousands of photos and online posts marked for deletion as the Defense Department works to purge diversity, equity and inclusion content, according to a database obtained by The Associated Press.
The database, which was confirmed by U.S. officials and published by AP, includes more than 26,000 images that have been flagged for removal across every military branch. But the eventual total could be much higher.
One official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to provide details that have not been made public, said the purge could delete as many as 100,000 images or posts in total, when considering social media pages and other websites that are also being culled for DEI content. The official said it’s not clear if the database has been finalized.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had given the military until Wednesday to remove content that highlights diversity efforts in its ranks following President Donald Trump’s executive order ending those programs across the federal government.
The vast majority of the Pentagon purge targets women and minorities, including notable milestones made in the military. And it also removes a large number of posts that mention various commemorative months — such as those for Black and Hispanic people and women.
Are they just trying to up their odds that one will be less likely to disrupt the plan when martial law is declared? Everything they’ve been doing shows their delight in being the worst kind of bullies. Just yesterday, they announced they will deport Ukrainians who fled to the US for safety. We are no longer a safe harbor. Not even close. Heather Cox Richardson discusses this in detail this morning in her Substack Letters from an American.
This morning, Ted Hesson and Kristina Cooke of Reuters reported that the Trump administration is preparing to deport the 240,000 Ukrainians who fled Russia’s attacks on Ukraine and have temporary legal status in the United States. Foreign affairs journalist Olga Nesterova reminded Americans that “these people had to be completely financially independent, pay tax, pay all fees (around $2K) and have an affidavit from an American person to even come here.”
“This has nothing to do with strategic necessity or geopolitics,” Russia specialist Tom Nichols posted. “This is just cruelty to show [Russian president Vladimir] Putin he has a new American ally.”
The Trump administration’s turn away from traditional European alliances and toward Russia will have profound effects on U.S. standing in the world. Edward Wong and Mark Mazzetti reported in the New York Times today that senior officials in the State Department are making plans to close a dozen consulates, mostly in Western Europe, including consulates in Florence, Italy; Strasbourg, France; Hamburg, Germany; and Ponta Delgada, Portugal, as well as a consulate in Brazil and another in Turkey.
In late February, Nahal Toosi reported in Politico that President Donald Trump wants to “radically shrink” the State Department and to change its mission from diplomacy and soft power initiatives that advance democracy and human rights to focusing on transactional agreements with other governments and promoting foreign investment in the U.S.
Elon Musk and the “Department of Government Efficiency” have taken on the process of cutting the State Department budget by as much as 20%, and cutting at least some of the department’s 80,000 employees. As part of that project, DOGE’s Edward Coristine, known publicly as “Big Balls,” is embedded at the State Department.
As the U.S. retreats from its engagement with the world, China has been working to forge greater ties. China now has more global diplomatic posts than the U.S. and plays a stronger role in international organizations. Already in 2025, about 700 employees, including 450 career diplomats, have resigned from the State Department, a number that normally would reflect a year’s resignations.
Shutting embassies will hamper not just the process of fostering goodwill, but also U.S. intelligence, as embassies house officers who monitor terrorism, infectious disease, trade, commerce, militaries, and government, including those from the intelligence community. U.S. intelligence has always been formidable, but the administration appears to be weakening it.
Trump, bitcoin, political cartoon
We’re being turned into part of the Trump Grift Mafia. Nothing will be left standing of any of the good we have done in the world. This is neocolonialism and neomercantilism. We’ve retreated to some of the worst historical ideologies ever. The most symbolic thing happened yesterday. The latest Space X project blew up in the sky and shut down many flights yesterday. “Breakup of SpaceX’s Starship Rocket Disrupts Florida Airports. The video showed the upper stage of the most powerful rocket ever built spinning out of control in space, a repeat of an unsuccessful test flight in January that led to debris falling over the Caribbean.” This is what we’re spending money for? Elonia is pushing his company to the brink of getting to Mars and looking down at the rest of us. The report is from The New York Times‘s Kenneth Chang.
Starship — the huge spacecraft that Elon Musk says will one day take people to Mars — failed during its latest test flight on Thursday when its upper stage exploded in space, raining debris and disrupting air traffic at airports from Florida to Pennsylvania.
It was the second consecutive test flight of the most powerful rocket ever built where the upper-stage spacecraft malfunctioned. It started spinning out of control after several engines went out and then lost contact with mission control.
Photographs and videos posted on the social media site X by users saying they were along the Florida coast showed the spacecraft breaking up. The falling debris disrupted flights at airports in Miami, Orlando, Palm Beach and Fort Lauderdale, and as far away as Philadelphia International Airport.
The Starship rocket system is the largest ever built. At 403 feet tall, it is nearly 100 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty atop its pedestal.
It has the most engines ever in a rocket booster: The Super Heavy booster is powered by 33 of SpaceX’s Raptor engines. As those engines lift Starship off the launchpad, they will generate 16 million pounds of thrust at full throttle.
The upper part, also called Starship or Ship for short, looks like a shiny rocket from science fiction movies of the 1950s, is made of stainless steel with large fins. This is the upper stage that will head toward orbit, and ultimately could carry people to the moon or even Mars.
The rocket lifted off a little after 6:30 p.m. Eastern time on Thursday from the SpaceX site known as Starbase at the southern tip of Texas near the city of Brownsville.
Starship’s mammoth booster again successfully returned to the launchpad, just as it had during the previous test flight. In the last half minute before the upper-stage engines were to shut off, several of them malfunctioned. Video from the rocket showed a tumbling view of Earth and space until it cut off.
Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer wrote this analysis for The Atlantic. “Trump’s Own Declaration of Independence. The president, who has flirted with regal rhetoric, wants a historic copy of America’s founding document placed in the Oval Office.”
Long live the king!
Down with the king!
President Donald Trump sees the appeal of both.
Trump jokingly declared himself a sovereign last month, while his advisers distributed AI-generated photos of him wearing a crown and an ermine robe to celebrate his order to end congestion pricing in New York City. “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” he’d decreed a few days earlier, using a phrase sometimes attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte, the emperor of the French.
I had no idea one of my greats who signed the Declaration had made of the copies of it. But the weird thing here is that Trump seriously wants the document to hang in the Oval Office. My question is, why take it from the people who can see it in the archives?
Since returning to power, Trump has moved quickly to redesign his working space. He has announced plans to pave over the Rose Garden to make it more like the patio at his private Mar-a-Lago club, as well as easier to host events with women wearing heels. He has also revived planning for a new ballroom on the White House grounds. “It keeps my real-estate juices flowing,” Trump explained in a recent interview with The Spectator.
Golden trophies now line the Oval Office’s mantlepiece. Military flags adorned with campaign streamers have returned. And portraits of presidents past now climb the walls—George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Martin Van Buren, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan, among others. Gilded mirrors hang upon the recessed doors. A framed copy of his Georgia mug shot appears in the outside hallway. And the bright-red valet button, encased in a wooden box, is back on the desk.
In addition to the National Archives’ original Declaration, the government has in its possession other versions of the document. The collection includes drafts by Jefferson and copies of contemporaneous reprintings, known as broadsides, that were distributed among the colonies.
Alarmed by the deterioration of the original Declaration in the 1820s, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams commissioned William J. Stone to create an engraving of it with the signatures appended. That version forms the basis of the document since reproduced in school history books—the one with which most Americans are familiar. Adams tasked Stone with engraving 200 copies—but in what passes for a mini 19th-century scandal, Stone made an extra facsimile to keep for himself, the documents dealer and expert Seth Kaller told us.
Many of those Stone copies of the document have now been lost; roughly 50 are known to survive, Kaller said. The White House already has in its archives at least one of the Stone printings. Kaller told us that one of his clients who had recently purchased a Stone facsimile was visiting the White House when President Barack Obama asked him whether he could help procure a Stone printing for the White House.
“The client called me, and I said, ‘I can’t—because, one, there aren’t any others on the market right now, and two, the White House already has one,’” Kaller told us. In 2014, Kaller visited the White House to view the Stone Declaration, which the curator displayed for him in one of the West Wing’s rooms. (The White House curator’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment, including on whether the Stone copy still resides under its purview.)
It is unclear where Trump first got the idea to add a Declaration to the Oval Office’s decor. Since returning, Trump has shown interest in the planning for celebrations next year of the 250th anniversary of the document’s signing. Days after taking office, he issued an executive order to create “Task Force 250,” a White House commission that will work with another congressionally formed commission to plan the festivities.
I hope he’s not trying to go with one of those grandiose military parades again. And if he does, will he eliminate everyone but the white guys? It can’t be anything other than another way for him to get attention, that’s for sure. Again, this all continues to be an appalling cosplay of how FARTUS wants to view himself in relation to his imagined ideas of American History. I can’t even with the economy today. Just know he’s changed his mind on tariffs again for Canada and Mexico, and employment figures are worsening. He’s turned a strong economy into a weak one in a matter of weeks. He’s also shaken the Equity markets to their core. What’s on is this: “Trump’s “Crypto Reserve” is a world historical grift. Corruption doesn’t get much more blatant than this.” My Finance Daughter and I both find crypto to be a huge Ponzi scheme. I lecture against it. She doesn’t consider it a product that brokers should be involved in. In short, we stay as far away as possible. But, you know, grifters gotta grift. This is from Public Notice.
Authoritarian regimes by definition have no accountability to voters or the public. That means autocrats and their cronies can gorge themselves at the public trough and blatantly steal from taxpayers with few if any consequences.
It’s not really a surprise, then, that as part of his authoritarian power grab, Trump has embraced brazen and open self-dealing. The most ludicrous example of this is the scheme he announced last Sunday for a national crypto reserve.
As with many of Trump’s big orange dreams, it’s not exactly clear what the crypto reserve will entail or how it will work. But the brilliance of the half-baked idea is that Trump and his cronies can make bank just by talking about it. The president can use his bully pulpit to manipulate markets. And who’s going to stop him?
Trump, fresh off avoiding 88 felony charges, obviously feels confident that the answer is “no one.”
Government on the blockchain
Crypto refers to digital currencies which are generated and stored in a digital ledger, or blockchain. In theory, cryptocurrencies do not rely on a central government authority. Proponents say they are useful for quick or anonymous transactions. Critics point out that cryptocurrency seems designed for hiding illegal transactions and/or creating what are essentially Ponzi investment schemes.
Because of the downsides, President Biden created moderate guidelines to try to regulate some of the worst excesses of the industry, which made him an enemy of hardcore crypto boosters. But Trump in his first term expressed even deeper skepticism about cryptocurrencies, saying they are based on “thin air.”
During the 2024 election, though, crypto investors spent tens of millions on Republican campaigns. Trump, who never saw a quid pro quo he didn’t love, changed his tune, embracing crypto-friendly policies. After his victory, he followed through by appointing venture capitalist and Elon Musk crony David Sacks as a White House crypto czar.
Another reason Trump flip-flopped on crypto is that his family figured out how to cash in. Following the election, Trump squandered some of the goodwill he had built up with the crypto industry when he and his wife Melania launched memecoins — essentially valueless crypto confidence games — that both surged in value, making the Trumps billions (but undermining the credibility of crypto in the process). That came after his two adult sons, Eric and Don Jr, launched their own crypto company during the campaign called World Liberty Financial. Boosting crypto as president, then, allows Trump and his family to profit directly from his public office.
Trump announced his thank you to the industry last Sunday, when he declared that he would create a “Crypto Strategic Reserve” in order to make the US “the Crypto Capital of the World.” He of course claimed the move is part of “MAKING AMERICA GREAT AGAIN.”
But the actual point of the crypto reserve, much less the details, are sketchy at best. Proponents argue crypto is a store of value, like gold, and could help damp inflation. But the major cryptocurrencies tend to rise and fall in value based on broader macroeconomic sentiment. And since crypto is volatile and, unlike gold, has no intrinsic value, it’s hard to credit its usefulness as a currency stabilizer.
If you have any questions about any of this, I’d be glad to try to answer them. Seeing such craziness in our economic policy has been hard on me. I’m just waiting for the major attack on the Federal Reserve Bank. They’re the only ones that bring credibility to the dollar these days, and I’m afraid he’ll have a go at them. The mess at the Treasury is already impacting the banking business. Don’t even get me started on the Budget Crisis, either. I’m tired of the repeats of that one by disingenuous Republicans.
I hope all of you can close your doors and stay sane inside the one place you can control, home. I have a few more tests next week, so I will be out at clinics again, being poked and prodded. This weekend, I will just relax and try to avoid the ever-changing Trump Surreality Show.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Mostly Monday Reads: VIllainy! Winning!
Posted: March 3, 2025 Filed under: #FARTUS, American Fascists, Equity Markets, kakistocracy, MAGA Assholes, MAGA Political Carnage, Political and Editorial Cartoons, Polycrisis, Psychopaths in charge | Tags: @johnbuss.bsky.social John Buss, CryptoCurrency Ponzi Scheme from Trump and Musk, Elderly and Vets, FARTUS, Starving Children, Trump Tariffs 13 Comments
“Honorable Douche Member.” John Buss, @repeat1968, @johnbuss.bsky.social
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
Once again, the transformation of American democracy into a theocratic fascist state–which once was unimaginable–is shaking global confidence. The closing argument came Friday when #FARTUS and JDank tried to shake down Ukraine’s President like a classic Mafia Don. The US is no longer the leader of the free world. We are becoming the lap dog of evil men.
It was further announced that the dollar will no longer be the world’s currency as the Bad Men of faithless investments are rolling back protections and trying to install the Ponzi scheme of the century–cryptocurrency–as something it can never be. This dodgy investment does not meet any of the criteria that define money. It cannot be used as a universal means of exchange. It has no role as a store of value. Indeed, it is quite a risky gamble. It does not represent a measure of exchange. Help us, Federal Reserve Board of Governors! You may be the only chance because the Treasury’s Rules and Regulations, which were based on stopping another Great Depression, are being dismantled even as we speak.
William Kristol, Andre Egger, and Sam Stein had this headline at The Bulwark that rang true to me this morning. “What a Weekend for Putin! It’s been a long time since the Russian dictator had it this good.” All enemies of the USA and democracy had a good week. All those with greed as a defining characteristic are likely celebrating. I’m certainly glad I moved my 403(B) money to the Eurozone. They were slow coming off COVID-19, but they’re getting stronger while we are getting economically, militarily, and democratically weaker by the drop of every grain of sand.
It was a hell of a weekend for bad men getting what they paid for out of Donald Trump. And while we’ll focus on Vladimir Putin here, we don’t want to fully ignore venture capitalist David Sacks, Donald Trump’s “crypto czar,” who seemingly stands to make bank following Trump’s weekend announcement of a “strategic cryptocurrency reserve.” Hey, we’re glad someone’s having fun. Happy Monday.
Helluva Weekend doesn’t even cover the outrage heard around the country. However, it appears it’s getting a little late in the game to shut down this offensive move on the American Experiment. Just seeing the polling and the angry constituents all over the country over the Zelinsky Shake Down should’ve lit a fire under the proud party of Chicken Hawks. It didn’t. We have more evidence of chickens than hawks. This is also part of The Bulwark’s Monday Money Quarter-backing.
SEE ROGER RUN: How to cope with all the grisly news? One increasingly common strategy: Blowing off some steam by yelling at your Republican lawmaker.
On Saturday, Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall became the latest victim of this hot new trend at an overstuffed town hall in the small town of Oakley (pop. ~2000). Attendees booed his arrival and rolled their eyes at his answers throughout the prickly hour-long event, while Marshall castigated them as “rude.” He suggested they’d fallen victim to “misinformation” about DOGE and ultimately cut the event short.
A possible opportunity for introspection for the senator? Apparently not. In a statement, Marshall’s office suggested the fix was in, the town hall “sabotaged” by “Democrat operatives.” “Real Kansans,” the statement continued, “overwhelmingly support President Trump’s DOGE initiative.”
It was true that some attendees had schlepped to the event from the Kansas City area to give Marshall a piece of their mind. But some of their concerns were plainly shared by locals. The last crowd comment came, according to local media, from local resident Chuck Nunn, who politely and sorrowfully mourned DOGE’s reckless slashing of veteran jobs. Identifying himself as “a dying breed, a conservative Democrat,” Nunn said he supported the mission of identifying waste in government—but that “the way that we are going about it is so wrong, because there are unintended consequences.”
“What the government is doing right now, as far as cutting out those jobs, a huge percentage of those people—and I know you care about the veterans—are veterans,” Nunn went on. “And that’s a damn shame. A damn shame.”
Acting like this sentiment is nothing but scurrilous left-wing astroturf may be comforting to Republicans. But it’s also remarkably short-sighted. There’s a reason “do right by our veterans” has long been a more or less universal tenet of our politics. Scoffing off that extremely normie critique of the DOGEbros is something Republicans do at their peril.
If you think that’s bad, check out the opinions of House Leader Mike Johnson. No Republican has been left out of this party. Heather Cox Richardson has another example of Mike Johnson’s inability to lead or take a stand for our country. He’s staked out the coward’s gavel. She wrote this yesterday in her Substack Letters From an American.
On Face the Nation this morning, Representative Mike Turner (R-OH), a strong supporter of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and Ukraine, contradicted that information. “Considering what I know, what Russia is currently doing against the United States, that would I’m certain not be an accurate statement of the current status of the United States operations,” he said. Well respected on both sides of the aisle, Turner was in line to be the chair of the House Intelligence Committee in this Congress until House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) removed him from that slot and from the intelligence committee altogether.
And yet, as Stephanie Kirchgaessner of The Guardian notes, the Trump administration has made clear that it no longer sees Russia as a cybersecurity threat. Last week, at a United Nations working group on cybersecurity, representatives from the European Union and the United Kingdom highlighted threats from Russia, while Liesyl Franz, the State Department’s deputy assistant secretary for international cybersecurity, did not mention Russia, saying the U.S. was concerned about threats from China and Iran.
Kirchgaessner also noted that under Trump, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which monitors cyberthreats against critical infrastructure, has set new priorities. Although Russian threats, especially those against U.S. election systems, were a top priority for the agency in the past, a source told Kirchgaessner that analysts were told not to follow or report on Russian threats.
“Russia and China are our biggest adversaries,” the source told Kirchgaessner. “With all the cuts being made to different agencies, a lot of cybersecurity personnel have been fired. Our systems are not going to be protected and our adversaries know this.” “People are saying Russia is winning,” the source said. “Putin is on the inside now.”
Another source noted that “There are dozens of discrete Russia state-sponsored hacker teams dedicated to either producing damage to US government, infrastructure and commercial interests or conducting information theft with a key goal of maintaining persistent access to computer systems.” “Russia is at least on par with China as the most significant cyber threat, the person added. Under those circumstances, the source said, ceasing to follow and report Russian threats is “truly shocking.”
Trump’s outburst in the Oval Office on Friday confirmed that Putin has been his partner in politics since at least 2016. “Putin went through a hell of a lot with me,” Trump said. “He went through a phony witch hunt where they used him and Russia… Russia, Russia, Russia—you ever hear of that deal?—that was a phony Hunter Biden, Joe Biden, scam. Hillary Clinton, shifty Adam Schiff, it was a Democrat scam. And he had to go through that. And he did go through it, and we didn’t end up in a war. And he went through it. He was accused of all that stuff. He had nothing to do with it. It came out of Hunter Biden’s bathroom.”
Putin went through a hell of a lot with Trump? It was an odd statement from a U.S. president, whose loyalty is supposed to be dedicated to the Constitution and the American people.
Jen Ruben writes this at The Contrarian. “It’s not Dickens—it’s the MAGA agenda. Taking food from children; healthcare from the informed.” The #FARTUS team has already destroyed our soft power with the end of USAID. Next up is Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security. Get your gardens started now! Cruelty is the mission.
Given the scope of the MAGA assault on the foundations of our democracy, many Democrats, responsible media outlets, and concerned Americans have (understandably) been focused on its attempt to obliterate the rule of law, the separation of powers, and the First Amendment. But we should never lose track of the abject immorality that is part and parcel of an ideology based on vengeful victimhood, conspiracy-mongering, and repudiation of science.
From the outbreak of measles to stalling grants to the pursuit of cures for “diseases ranging from heart disease and cancer to Alzheimer’s and allergies” to renewing the starvation crisis in Sudan to devasting cuts at the Veterans Administration to dismissal of patriotic, highly-trained trans members of the armed services…we cannot miss this administration’s abject cruelty; its almost-boisterous disregard for human life and dignity.
House and Senate Republicans bear just as much responsibility as President in Name Only (PINO) Donald Trump and acting president Elon Musk for mutely going along with these actions. Moreover, we must view the House budget as yet another exercise in cruelty and reckless endangerment of human life.
“Trump and Musk have slashed roughly 2,400 VA jobs…A decision that won’t make things more efficient, like they claimed, but will actually lead to longer wait times, more backlog and more chaos for Veterans,” Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-Illinois.) recently said at a virtual town hall. “They’ve also launched a wider purge of federal workers—firing, in total, an estimated 6,000 Veterans, includingthe folks behind the Veterans Crisis Line.” She emphasized, “The only reason they are doing this is to try to find enough loose change behind the couch cushions so that they can give even bigger tax breaks to the rich guys they pal around with on the golf course.”
Breaking the sacred obligation to care for our veterans is only one aspect of the onslaught. Perhaps the most egregious is the plan to slash $880B from Medicaid. The argument that cuts of that magnitude can be achieved by “reform” or by cutting “waste, fraud, and abuse,” frankly, insults our intelligence.
The impact of such cuts is immense given the reach of Medicaid. The Kaiser Family Foundation notes, “Medicaid is the primary program providing comprehensive health and long-term care to one in five people living in the U.S. and accounts for nearly $1 out of every $5 spent on health care.” Medicaid covers not only the poorest Americans, but seniors’ long-term health care, drug addicts, and the disabled. More than 72 million Americans are enrolled in some aspect of the program.
Whatever funds they’ve raised by the deaths and disposal of humanity, they will turn over to Greedy Billionaires and Businesses. However, the focus right now is still on #FARTUS upending World Order. This is from Vox’s Nicole Narea. “How Trump upended the world order, over one weekend A hectic 48 hours in Europe-Ukraine-US-Russia relations, explained.
A blowup at the White House on Friday proved a rude awakening for some of the US’s closest partners in Europe, and left them scrambling to contemplate a world in which they can no longer be sure that the US is a reliable ally in Russia’s war on Ukraine.
In the wake of President Donald Trump and his team accosting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in a heated, televised exchange in the Oval Office, European leaders met to devise a plan for protecting Ukraine from Russian aggression absent any security guarantees from the US.
And though multiple leaders, from UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer to NATO leader Mark Rutte, insisted that they still view the US as an important partner, the meeting nevertheless seemed like it might mark the abrupt beginning of a new Western world order — one in which Europe stands alone.
The UK and France have led efforts in recent weeks to advance Ukraine’s cause and to convince Trump to keep Ukraine’s (and Europe’s) best interests in mind as he attempts to craft a ceasefire or peace deal in Russia’s years-long war on Ukraine.
Sunday, Starmer presided over a summit of more than a dozen mostly European leaders and announced that the attendees would form a “coalition of the willing” to defend Ukraine and strengthen Europe’s military capabilities.
“Not every nation will feel able to contribute but that can’t mean that we sit back,” Starmer said. “Instead, those willing will intensify planning now with real urgency.”
That coalition could lead to UK troops on the ground in Ukraine as part of a peacekeeping force, should a ceasefire or peace deal come about, Starmer said. France and the UK reportedly have a ceasefire framework that Zelenskyy said he’s been briefed on.
Starmer did emphasize, however, that many in the group, including the UK, believe lasting peace will not be possible without US support. And while Starmer said he had a productive conversation with Trump about Ukraine this weekend, it’s not clear that US support will materialize.
That’s in part because the Trump administration and its allies reiterated throughout the weekend that they believe their current approach to peace — that is, holding talks with Russia sans Ukraine and blaming Ukraine for the war — is the right one. Trump adviser Elon Musk suggested on X that the US contemplate leaving the NATO security alliance.
The Trump team also redoubled their attacks on Zelenskyy on Sunday, with some going so far as to suggest the Ukrainian president ought to be replaced.
So, I will get to some of the economic impact of Trump’s Tariff Mania. I hope you don’t need a new car, just for starters. This is from Bloomberg. “Car Prices Are Poised for $12,000. Surge on Trump’s New Tariffs.”
Impending tariffs on Canada and Mexico risk driving up US car prices by as much as $12,000, further squeezing consumers and wreaking havoc across the intricate web of automotive supply lines spanning the continent.
The cost to build a crossover utility vehicle will rise by at least $4,000, while the increase would be three times that for an electric vehicle examined in a new study from Anderson Economic Group, an automotive consultant in East Lansing, Michigan. And those costs would likely be passed on to consumers, the study found.
“That kind of cost increase will lead directly — and I expect almost immediately — to a decline in sales of the models that have the biggest trade impacts,” Patrick Anderson, chief executive officer of Anderson Economic Group, said in an interview.
These are some more depressing headlines concerning our economy and prices.
From CNN: “Trump’s tariff chaos threatens an economy already flashing yellow lights.”
Layoffs are rising. Consumer spending — the backbone of the economy — unexpectedly dropped in January. Consumer confidence has plunged. A key GDP forecast suddenly turned negative. And extreme fear is back on Wall Street as stocks slide.
Despite the murky picture, President Donald Trump continues to inject chaos into the economy with almost-constant tariff threats.
Now he’s just hours away from lobbing tariffs on not just one or two but all three of America’s biggest trading partners.
Starting on Tuesday, Trump has vowed to impose a 25% tariff on imported goods from Mexico and Canada, and to double tariffs on those from China to 20%.
Those tariffs — if they get imposed — could increase costs for Americans at a time when inflation remains stubbornly high. That, in turn, could prevent the Federal Reserve from lowering borrowing costs, another source of pain in the cost-of-living problem confronting consumers.
Mexico and Canada have all vowed to retaliate by slapping their own tariffs on US goods, setting the stage for a potential trade war inside of North America. China has promised to respond to higher tariffs, too.
From the New York Times: “A Key Interest Rate Falls, but Not for the Reasons Trump Wanted. Investors’ increasingly gloomy sentiment about economic growth appears to be driving down the 10-year Treasury yield.” That’s our safe haven investment btw.
President Trump campaigned on a promise to bring down interest rates. And he has fulfilled that pledge in one key way, with U.S. government bond yields falling sharply.
But the reason for the drop is an unnerving one: Investors appear to be more on edge about the outlook for the economy.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has said that the Trump administration considers the 10-year Treasury yield a benchmark of its success in lowering rates. The yield tracks the rate of interest the government pays to borrow from investors over 10 years and has dropped since mid-January, to around 4.2 percent from 4.8 percent. The decline in February was the steepest in several months.
The administration is targeting the 10-year yield because it underpins borrowing costs on mortgages, credit cards, corporate debt and a host of other rates, making it arguably the most important interest rate in the world. As it drops, that should filter through the economy, making many types of debt cheaper.
Unlike the short-term interest rate that is set by the Federal Reserve, the 10-year yield is a market rate, meaning that nobody has direct control over it. Instead, it reflects investors’ views on the economy, inflation, the government’s borrowing needs and changes the Fed may make to its rate in the years ahead.
That’s why the drop in February is troubling, analysts say. It shows, at least in part, that bond investors are growing gloomy about the economic outlook — and quickly.
“The market is pricing a growth scare,” said Blerina Uruci, chief U.S. economist at T. Rowe Price.
A better outcome would be for the declining 10-year yield to reflect slowing inflation, the prospect of more rate cuts by the Fed and a shrinking deficit that would require less government borrowing — all while the economy remains strong.
Instead, inflation expectations have risen this year amid worries that Mr. Trump’s tariff plans, alongside mass deportations, could reignite price increases throughout the economy. Stubborn inflation means the interest rates controlled by the Fed are likely to stay elevated for longer. Some analysts and investors fear that this could weigh on the economy until it cracks and the central bank is pushed into rapidly lowering rates.
So, if you can’t say you’re cutting all these things to end runaway government spending, try not reporting it. That might work, right? This is from the relentlessly brave AP. “The Trump administration may exclude government spending from GDP, obscuring the impact of DOGE cuts.” That way, no one, including economists, can possibly know what is happening. Let’s hope the Federal Reserve can remain independent and report US data if the Labor and Commerce Department can’t.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said Sunday that government spending could be separated from gross domestic product reports, in response to questions about whether the spending cuts pushed by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency could possibly cause an economic downturn.
“You know that governments historically have messed with GDP,” Lutnick said on Fox News Channel’s “Sunday Morning Futures.” “They count government spending as part of GDP. So I’m going to separate those two and make it transparent.”
Doing so could potentially complicate or distort a fundamental measure of the U.S. economy’s health. Government spending is traditionally included in the GDP because changes in taxes, spending, deficits and regulations by the government can impact the path of overall growth. GDP reports already include extensive details on government spending, offering a level of transparency for economists.
Musk’s efforts to downsize federal agencies could result in the layoffs of tens of thousands of federal workers, whose lost income could potentially reduce their spending, affecting businesses and the economy at large.
Yahoo Finance, a good place to stalk the markets, has this report on what’s going on as I write. “Stock market today: Dow, S&P 500, Nasdaq slide as Trump tariffs stalk markets.”
US stocks retreated on Monday as a looming deadline fueled uncertainty around President Donald Trump’s tariff plans and investors looked ahead to the monthly jobs report and key retail earnings.
The S&P 500 (^GSPC) fell 0.2% while the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite (^IXIC) erased early morning gains to fall 0.4%, weighed down by shares of Nvidia (NVDA). The Dow Jones Industrial Average (^DJI) fell below the flat line, as the major US indexes came off a volatile week and a losing February.
Nvidia stock plummeted on Monday as reports surfaced that the tech giant’s AI chips are reaching China despite export controls.
March trading kicked off with investors encountering more questions than answers as tariff deadlines loom, the Federal Reserve’s next meeting fast approaches, and the US economy faces the test of disproving investors’ fears about growth. First quarter economic growth is expected to slide following a string of weaker-than-expected economic data.
Tariffs on Canada and Mexico are set to come into effect on Tuesday, with no indication that a planned March 4 implementation date will be pushed back again. While 25% duties are planned, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick hinted that they could be lower by describing it as a “fluid situation.” New tariffs on China are also due on March 4, with Beijing said to be eyeing retaliatory measures on US agricultural products.
Elsewhere, European leaders’ weekend effort to rally around Ukraine prompted traders to boost bets on a bump in defense spending in the region, lifting related stocks.
It’s a depressing time for us Dismal Scientists. It’s one thing to have something bad happen, like a black swan event, but to watch your own government tank a perfectly healthy economy is tough to watch. I’ve already dropped so many reads that I’m hitting a word count of 3600. I’ll give you a break while I go play a new little game I picked up. It’s a gorgeous little anime game where I’ve just reincarnated as a walking, talking Mushroom, and I can solve everyone’s problems! The bad guy is a fat real estate developer, and the place is inhabited by people with both human and furry animal traits. It’s my new sanctuary beside the Star Wars Series.
I’ve lived here in New Orleans for 30 years now, and this is the first Mardi Gras I’ve just sat out. Somewhat for health problems, as I took another little fall today while walking Temple, and I don’t see the neurologist until next week. It’s tough not trusting your legs. Also, there are MAGAs around town, and many of my friends have reported they’ve destroyed things in the yard and homes if they have any display of having voted for Kamala. This is on all the uptown routes. It’s all just really depressing.
So, you stay very safe, warm, and cozy as we continue this very dark year. XOXO
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
peej
Carissa
bostonboomer
dakinikat
ecocatwoman
mablue2
Mama Lopez
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Sky Dancing 
Recent Comments