“For once, I have to agree with JD” John Buss @repeat1968
Good Morning, Sky Dancers!
I’m trying to get this posted early since the Poland Avenue Rooster and the thunder have me awake, and I have another doctor’s appointment today. The weather is not good here. We have flash flood warnings. My first look at the headlines this morning made me want to go back to sleep. My first two suggested reads come from two of my favorite writers. The articles are both horrifying, but these are the times we live in. We cannot look away. Marcy Wheeler and Anne Applebaum tell it like it is.
This first one is by independent journalist Marcy Wheeler, whom I have not since our days at the long-gone Fire Dog Lake, my first stop in blogdom. She writes this at her home at emptywheel. This is about how the press has been instrumental in trying to normalize a regime that is other than normal with their “hypothetical discussions” about the U.S. Constitution. I know I have a new term to add to our tags today: instrumental language. I will use Google’s AI function to give you a brief definition before Marcy applies the term.
In the context of language, “instrumental” refers to language used as a tool or means to fulfill a need or achieve a goal, such as obtaining something or expressing a desire
There is no doubt in my mind that the intent of the Trump team is to retain power indefinitely, via whatever means.
To fight that effectively, you should focus your action and words on the most pressing issues before us — elections on Tuesday, legal cases before appeals courts, legal US residents in detention — rather than trying to discern the means by which Trump will codify all the actions he is taking today, yesterday, last week. The actions he is taking in real time, and their goals, are utterly transparent.
Which is why I think it a colossal waste of time that the punditocracy spent much of Sunday talking about Kristen Welker’s “report” that Trump says he wants a third term.
You don’t say?
Rather than spending the day discussing Trump’s Executive Order presuming to dictate to states how they — with the involvement of DOGE!! — must start suppressing the vote over the next months, we talked about something that might happen in 2028. Rather than spending the day talking about how Trump is already using federal funding and immigration law to silence speech protected by the First Amendment, we discussed what gimmick Trump might use in the future to evade the 22nd Amendment.
Almost no one even tried to use Trump’s comments about a third term as a way to explain the end goal of assaults on civil society, speech, and voting — to connect the actions Trump took in the last week to what he says he’ll do in 2028 — something that would at least make use of Trump’s own rhetoric to educate low-information voters. Instead, they talked about Trump’s assault on democracy in the way Trump wanted it framed — distant, allegedly constitutional, and uncertain, rather than an imminent unconstitutional assault on democracy.
What the fuck are we doing here, folks?
Indeed. Please go read this.
“The fact that Welker brought up this plot for a third term herself, mentioning Steve Bannon (who was presenting it on another channel), suggests that was the entire point: Trump called her, she dutifully brought it up, she got video but used almost none of it, leaving only Markwayne Mullin on camera (who should never be invited as a credible interlocutor in any case) to answer for the Administration on MTP itself. Not that it mattered; Welker was even more solicitous than usual yesterday.
Trump’s genius is in managing attention: both keeping it, and directing it away and towards topics of his choosing. He has long integrated assertions about a third term into his political spiel. This is nothing new (indeed, NBC linked an earlier instance in the story). And yet NBC — along with a pack of credulous pundits — chose to focus on Trump’s third term comments all day Sunday rather on the things he did in the last week, covering up disappearances on Monday, tampering in elections on Tuesday, assaulting the independence of another law firm on Wednesday, attacking unions and whitewashing history on Thursday, compromising DC self-rule on Friday, that are obviously about a third term and beyond.
How can you have lived through that week, or any of the last nine, and have doubts about the intent here? Why do you think hypothetical discussions about assaults on the Constitution will better serve fighting back than concrete discussion and organizing about specific assaults on it?
This seems to be yet another instance where journalists and liberals, both of whom institutionally presume that language is transparent, misunderstand how authoritarians use language instrumentally and therefore forgo the most effective response to instrumental language.”
Human guardrails are not present in this administration. I’m not even certain you may call anyone in the administration fully human. Constitutional Guardrails are questionable even as we are not even in the first 100 days of this surreal mess. It’s no wonder former Yale History Professor Timothy Snyder and his wife have taken off for the Great White North. It appears Fascism scholars can read the writing on the wall from the capitulation of major universities on the attacks they’ve received.
Here’s The Guardian‘s take on yesterday’s advance notice on the march to dictatorship. “Donald Trump criticized for suggesting there are ‘methods’ for a third term – US politics live. President attracting criticism from some in both parties after telling NBC ‘there are methods’ in securing a third term despite constitutional barriers.”
Republican John Dean, former White House counsel to Richard Nixon as president, who was jailed for his involvement in the cover-up of Watergate and later testified to Congress as a witness for the investigation into the scandal, criticized Trump’s apparent aspiration for a third term, in an interview with CNN.
“He likes constitutional end-runs … and that’s what seems to be on his mind is how he can get around the very clear language of the 22nd amendment [to the US constitution], which precludes getting elected to more than two terms,” Dean said.
CNN asked, if there are ways to get around the law, constitutionally what could those be?
Dean said: “They would have to be written by the supreme court, that would redefine the constitution. I just describe it as a constitutional end run.”
An end run is an American football term for the ball-carrier running around the end of the defensive line in their attempt to reach the line to score a touchdown.
The key line from the 22nd amendment, forbidding anyone who has been elected president twice from being elected again. reads:
“No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once.”
The US Congress approved the amendment in 1947, and submitted it to the state legislatures, where it was then ratified in 1951.
It’s the end-runs that worry me. He’s already got a history of back-to-back self-coups. I really don’t think most people realize how serious this is. FARTUS also has two Supreme Court justices in the tank for him; the rest of the right-wing majority is wobbly at best.
The other must-read article today comes from The Atlantic. It’s written by Anne Applebaum. “America’s Future Is Hungary. MAGA conservatives love Viktor Orbán. But he’s left his country corrupt, stagnant, and impoverished.” This is a bleak picture of our economic future, given the fascination with Orbán by this administration and its crazy White Nationalist Christian wing.
Once widely perceived to be the wealthiest country in Central Europe (“the happiest barrack in the socialist camp,” as it was known during the Cold War), and later the Central European country that foreign investors liked most, Hungary is now one of the poorest countries, and possibly the poorest, in the European Union. Industrial production is falling year-over-year. Productivity is close to the lowest in the region. Unemployment is creeping upward. Despite the ruling party’s loud talk about traditional values, the population is shrinking. Perhaps that’s because young people don’t want to have children in a place where two-thirds of the citizens describe the national education system as “bad,” and where hospital departments are closing because so many doctors have moved abroad. Maybe talented people don’t want to stay in a country perceived as the most corrupt in the EU for three years in a row. Even the Index of Economic Freedom—which is published by the Heritage Foundation, the MAGA-affiliated think tank that produced Project 2025—puts Hungary at the bottom of the EU in its rankings of government integrity.
Tourists in central Budapest don’t see this decline. But neither, apparently, does the American right. For although he has no critical mineral wealth to give away and not much of an army, Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, plays an outsize role in the American political debate. During the 2024 presidential campaign, Orbán held multiple meetings with Donald Trump. In May 2022, a pro-Orbán think tank hosted CPAC, the right-wing conference, in Budapest, and three months later, Orbán went to Texas to speak at the CPAC Dallas conference. Last year, at the third edition of CPAC Hungary, a Republican congressman described the country as “one of the most successful models as a leader for conservative principles and governance.” In a video message, Steve Bannon called Hungary “an inspiration to the world.” Notwithstanding his own institution’s analysis of Hungarian governance, Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation has also described modern Hungary “not just as a model for modern statecraft, but the model.”
What is this Hungarian model they so admire? Mostly, it has nothing to do with modern statecraft. Instead it’s a very old, very familiar blueprint for autocratic takeover, one that has been deployed by right-wing and left-wing leaders alike, from Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to Hugo Chávez. After being elected to a second term in 2010, Orbán slowly replaced civil servants with loyalists; used economic pressure and regulation to destroy the free press; robbed universities of their independence, and shut one of them down; politicized the court system; and repeatedly changed the constitution to give himself electoral advantages. During the coronavirus pandemic he gave himself emergency powers, which he has kept ever since. He has aligned himself openly with Russia and China, serving as a mouthpiece for Russian foreign policy at EU meetings and allowing opaque Chinese investments in his country.
This autocratic takeover is precisely what Bannon, Roberts, and others admire, and are indeed seeking to carry out in the U.S. right now. The destruction of the civil service is already under way, pressure on the press and universities has begun, and thoughts of changing the Constitution are in the air. But proponents of these ideas rarely talk about what happened to the Hungarian economy, and to ordinary Hungarians, after they were implemented there. Nor do they explore the contradictions between Orbán’s rhetoric and the reality of his policies. Orbán talks a lot about blocking immigration, for example, but at one point his government issued visas to any non-EU citizen who bought 300,000 euros’ worth of government bonds from mysterious and mostly offshore companies.
He rhapsodizes about family values, even though his government spends among the lowest amounts per capita on health care in the EU, controls access to IVF, and notoriously decided to pardon a man who covered up sexual abuse in children’s homes.
Remember the idea of visas for $5 million dollars? Well, now we know where that scatterbrained idea came from. Politico‘s Jack Blanchard warns us we are in for another mind-blowing week.
Get ready: We’ve got special and state-level elections happening Tuesday; Donald Trump’s latest tariff bonanza unveiled Wednesday; a budget vote-a-rama expected in the Senate Thursday and the TikTok ban deadline looming Friday night. On top of that, we’re expecting another big Trump phone call with Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and potentially the first Supreme Court ruling on the president’s efforts to deport migrants using an 18th-century wartime law. And that’s just the stuff weknow about.
With decision day looming this week for President Donald Trump’s latest round of tariffs, Goldman Sachs expects aggressive duties from the White House to raise inflation and unemployment and drag economic growth to a near-standstill.
The investment bank now expects that tariff rates will jump 15 percentage points, its previous “risk-case” scenario that now appears more likely when Trump announces reciprocal tariffs on Wednesday. However, Goldman did note that product and country exclusions eventually will pull that increase down to 9 percentage points.
When the new trade moves are enacted, the Goldman economic team led by head of global investment research Jan Hatzius sees a broad, negative impact on the economy.
In a note published on Sunday, the firm said “we continue to believe the risk from April 2 tariffs is greater than many market participants have previously assumed.”
On inflation, the firm sees its preferred core measure, excluding food and energy prices, hitting 3.5% in 2025, a 0.5 percentage point increase from the prior forecast and well above the Federal Reserve’s 2% goal.
That in turn will come with weak economic growth: Just a 0.2% annualized growth rate in the first quarter and 1% for the full year when measured from the fourth quarter of 2024 to Q4 of 2025, down 0.5 percentage point from the prior forecast. In addition, the Wall Street firm now sees unemployment reaching 4.5%, a 0.3 percentage point raise from the previous forecast.
Taken together, Goldman now expects a 35% chance of recession in the next 12 months, up from 20% in the prior outlook.
The forecast paints a growing chance of a stagflation economy, with low growth and high inflation. The last time the U.S. saw stagflation was in the late 1970s and early ’80s. Back then, the Paul Volcker-led Fed dramatically raised interest rates, sending the economy into recession as the central bank chose fighting inflation over supporting economic growth.
“Sadopopulism” is the notion that you’re doing half of populism. You promise people things, but then when you get power you have no intention of even trying to implement any policy on behalf of the people. Instead, you deliberately make the suffering worse for your critical constituency. The people who got Trump into office, for example, are traditional Republican voters plus people in counties who are doing badly in terms of health care and other measures, and who need help.
Under Trump, of course, things will just get worse in terms of both the opioid addictions and in terms of wealth inequality. But that’s OK, because the logic of sadopopulism is that pain is a resource. Sadopopulist leaders like Trump use that pain to create a story about who’s actually at fault. The way politics works in that model is that government doesn’t solve your problems, it blames your problems on other people — and it creates the cycle that goes around over and over and over again. I started talking about sadopopulism because I got tired of people talking about populism.
In such a toxic relationship between the leader, the followers and the larger public, the abuse and misery actually bond them all closer together. The most loyal followers see their leader as simultaneously a source of protection and safety, even as he or she hurts them. To that point, the more Trump’s policies hurt his followers, the more likely they are to cling to him. Trump’s followers are also going to misdirect their rage, anger, blame, and other negative emotions and behavior at some “enemy.” In the Age of Trump, that enemy is Black and brown people and other nonwhites, “Woke” and “DEI, “illegal immigrants” and migrant “invaders,” the LGBTQ community and specifically transgender people, social “parasites” and “takers,” government employees, those not deemed sufficiently “patriotic” and therefore disloyal to MAGA and Trump (which here is synonymous with “Real America”), Muslims and other non-“Christians,” the Democrats, “liberals,” the news media (“fake news” and “lugenpresse”) and other targeted groups and individuals.
Hold on to the family silver. It might be more valuable than the dollar and more useful than cryptocurrency. Hold on to anything gold. That’s about to go way up. It ain’t that pretty at all out there. Remember stagflation? We really don’t need to see that again, but then, we have an incompetent Dotard with insane ideas in charge of the country. He’s got equally incompetent Dotards out there wrecking the government.
Well, that’s enough of what looks like a Debbie Downer Day for me, and it’s just started. At least the thunder is letting up.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wwpagb-_Zk0
Did you like this post? Please share it with your friends:
“Resist!” John (repeat1968) Buss @johnbuss.bsky.social
It’s another Sad Day, Sky Dancers!
This may be the only hope we have left. Three GOP seats are heading to Special Elections. A Democratic Party Trifecta would be enough for Dems to regain control! The rest of the news has the indicators of a Constitutional Crisis and, as BB and JJ have said, a Coup. Former US Attorneys Barbara McQuade and Harry Littman have inside information on something that makes Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre look like a picnic. JJ and BB are flooding my sms with some of the worst headlines I have ever seen.
The last three weeks have been unending and brutal. The roll-out of Project 2025 is the most consequential threat to our Republic since the Civil War. And it’s coming from the White House. This headline fromThe Salt Lake Tribuneshows how horrifying it’s getting in the states that are Republican Red have gone down the War Path against everything decent, just, and fair. “Nazi flags can fly in Utah schools, but not pride flags, GOP lawmaker says. A new bill would allow for Nazi and Confederate flags to be displayed in some instances in Utah schools and government buildings, but pride flags would be banned.”
Here are the Litman and McQuade conversations about the DOJ’s Thursday night Slaughter.
Strong rumor with credible sourcing: DOJ has put all of public integrity line attorneys in a room and told them they have an hour for someone to choose who will sign motion to dismiss and if nobody does, they will all be fired. The nastiest strong-arming in DOJ history by a long shot.
This is Saturday night massacre in free fall. A day that will live in infamy in DOJ. 22 people in room. it's savage. hard to imagine greater disrespect for DOJ professionals.
In less than a month in power, President Trump’s political appointees have embarked on an unapologetic, strong-arm effort to impose their will on the Justice Department, seeking to justify their actions as the simple reversal of the “politicization” of federal law enforcement under their Biden-era predecessors.
The ferocious campaign, executed by Emil Bove III — Mr. Trump’s former criminal defense lawyer who is now the department’s acting No. 2 official — is playing out in public, in real time, through a series of moves that underscore Mr. Trump’s intention to bend the traditionally nonpartisan career staff in federal law enforcement to suit his ends.
That strategy has quickly precipitated a crisis that is an early test of how resilient the norms of the criminal justice system will prove to be against the pressures brought by a retribution-minded president and his appointees.
On Thursday, the interim U.S. attorney in Manhattan, Danielle R. Sassoon, resigned rather than sign off on Mr. Bove’s command to dismiss the corruption charges against Mayor Eric Adams of New York. Ms. Sassoon is no member of the liberal resistance: She clerked for the conservative Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia, and had been appointed to her post by Mr. Trump’s team.
Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of the Department of Defense Pete Hegseth headed to Europe to evidently blow up the relationships with all of our major allies. The two surly men’s visit was not appreciated. This happened while Trump announced that he and Putin would be visiting each other’s country to tie up Ukraine’s surrender. Vance has been sent to chat with Ukriane’s President Zelensky at the Munich Conference, which they are both attending. Analysis of his speech can be found at this link. ‘Threat I worry most is threat from within,’ Vance criticises European leaders – summary.”
US vice-president JD Vance has urged Europe to put forward a positive case for freedom and act against “the threat that I worry most, the threat from within” which he put as “the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values” through restrictions on free speech, content moderation rules online, and political firewalls against radical parties.
A Russian drone carrying a high-explosive warhead struck the protective containment shell of the Chornobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine overnight, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said.
He described the move, coming amid speculation about potential peace talks with Russian president Vladimir Putin, as “a very clear greeting from Putin and Russian Federation to the security conference.”
Ukrainian security services said the drone was a Geran-2, the Russian name for the Iranian-designed Shahed-136, and had been intended to hit the reactor enclosure, Reuters noted.
Zelenskyy said the damage to the shelter was “significant” and had started a fire, but he added that radiation levels at the plant had not increased.
The Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, denied Moscow was responsible for the attack. Without presenting evidence, he said Ukrainian officials wanted to thwart efforts to end the war through negotiations between Trump and Putin.
In a wide-ranging and fiery speech peppered with European references, he accused European leaders of abandoning their roots as “defenders of democracy” during the cold war by what he believes is the process of shutting down dissenting voices (14:51).
He said they were increasingly looking “like old entrenched interests hiding behind ugly Soviet era words like misinformation … who simply don’t like that idea that somebody with an alternative viewpoint might express a different opinion” (14:55).
He criticised “cavalier” statements from European officials “sounding delighted” about the cancelled presidential elections in Romania or expansive content moderation powers or other free speech restrictions in theUS, Germany and Sweden, saying there were “shocking to American ears” (14:46).
He also criticised European leaders for “running in fear of your own voters,” including on migration, saying that risks destroying democracy from within by disenchanting the population from taking part in democratic processes (15:01).
He dismissed any criticism of Elon Musk’s alleged interference in European elections, saying “if American democracy can survive 10 years of Greta Thunberg’s scolding, you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk.”
He called for an end of political “firewalls,” a pointed reference to the German arrangement keeping out the far-right parties such as the Alternative für Deutschland, just nine days before the federal election next Sunday (15:01).
But notably, he doesn’t say much about Ukraine, other than a brief comment that the US administration “believes we can come to a reasonable settlement between Russia and Ukraine” (14:44).
The New Republic’s Hafiz Rashid has this take. “JD Vance Escalates Conflict With Europe in Alarming Speech at Munich.”
The vice president criticized European leaders for being afraid of their own voters, in a nod to European far-right parties, such as the AfD in Germany, seeming to threaten a chilling of relations with governments whose ideologies differ from his and Trump’s.
“If you’re running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you, nor, for that matter, is there anything that you can do for the American people who elected me and elected President Trump,” Vance said.
Hanging over the conference was Thursday’s attack in the German city, where a car driven by an Afghan immigrant ran into a crowd of people, injuring at least 28. Vance used the incident to bolster a nativist argument for restricting immigration.
“How many times must we suffer these appalling setbacks before we change course and take our shared civilization in a new direction?” Vance asked.
“If American democracy can survive 10 years of Greta Thunberg’s scolding, you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk,” Vance said, downplaying a man currently threatening America’s democracy, as well as that of Germany, and drawing a false equivalence between a climate activist and the world’s richest man.
The vice president may think he struck a blow for the Trump administration’s worldview in Munich Friday, but he’s missing the hypocrisy of his own words. The Trump administration has so far rammed through executive orders instead of passing laws, gutted the federal workforce, undermined the right to a free press, and ignored the outcry from all Americans outside of the MAGA bubble.
Politico has the hot take on Pete Hegseth’s visit to the Munich Security Conference. An actual Republic Congress critter may have a criticism! Amazing! Well, he did try to soften the blow with some obvious ass kissing too. Read for yourself. “Senior Republican senator ‘puzzled’ and ‘disturbed’ by Hegseth’s Ukraine remarks. Senate Armed Services Chair Roger Wicker is breaking with the line from the Trump White House.”
U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made a “rookie mistake” when he said a return to Ukraine’s pre-war borders was “unrealistic,” Senate Armed Services Chair Roger Wicker said Friday.
Hegseth on Thursday pulled back some of the comments he made about Ukraine a day earlier, where he said that NATO membership for Kyiv was off the table and that the country could not return to its internationally recognized borders.
“Hegseth is going to be a great defense secretary, although he wasn’t my choice for the job,” the Mississippi Republican told POLITICO on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference. “But he made a rookie mistake in Brussels and he’s walked back some of what he said but not that line.”
“I don’t know who wrote the speech — it is the kind of thing Tucker Carlson could have written, and Carlson is a fool,” Wicker said, referring to the pro-Putin broadcaster.
Speaking to Jonathan Martin at the POLITICO Pub in the Munich conference, Wicker — a staunch Ukraine supporter — said he was “surprised” by Hegseth’s original comments and “heartened” that the new defense secretary had reversed course. Wicker said he favors a firm posture with Moscow.
“Everybody knows … and people in the administration know you don’t say before your first meeting what you will agree to and what you won’t agree to,” Wicker said, adding that he was “puzzled” and “disturbed” by Hegseth’s comments.
While I just criticized the governor of Utah, let me not forget to kick the governor of Lousyana in the balls a few times. He’s trying to kill us. This is also from Politico. “Louisiana to end mass vaccine promotion, state’s top health official says. The department will still “stock and provide vaccines,” according to a department memo.”
The Louisiana Department of Health “will no longer promote mass vaccination” according to a Thursday memo written by the state’s top health official and obtained by The Associated Press.
A department spokesperson confirmed Louisiana Surgeon General Ralph Abraham had ordered his staff to stop engaging in media campaigns and community health fairs to encourage vaccinations, even as the state has experienced a surge in influenza.
Abraham’s announcement occurred the same day vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was sworn in by the U.S. Senate to serve as President Donald Trump’s health secretary.
In a separate letter posted on the department’s website, Louisiana’s surgeon general decried “blanket government mandates” for vaccines and criticized the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s COVID-19 vaccination push. Individuals should make their own decisions about vaccinations, Abraham said.
“Government should admit the limitations of its role in people’s lives and pull back its tentacles from the practice of medicine,” said Abraham, a Republican.
I gagged on that last statement because that certainly doesn’t apply to women and girls with functioning ovaries and uteruses. Meanwhile, Trump is planning mass firings at the CDC. Bird Flu, anyone? This is from STAT. “Trump administration to fire thousands at health agencies. Employees across agencies who were hired in the past one to two years are being targeted.” Considering he also wants to end Medicaid, I would say we are about to have a serious amount of deaths on our hands.
The Trump administration is set to eliminate thousands of federal health care jobs Friday, targeting employees across public health and science agencies who were hired in the past one to two years.
Senior officials were informed in meetings Friday morning that roughly 5,200 people on probationary employment — recent hires — across agencies including the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will be fired that afternoon, according to sources briefed on the meetings. CDC leadership was told the Atlanta-based agency would lose about 1,300 workers. The numbers at the NIH are not clear, but exceptions are being made for certain probationary employees, according to a memo viewed by STAT.
The workers will be given a month’s paid leave but lose access to work systems by the end of Friday, according to sources.
In addition to the probationary workers, an unspecified number of contract workers at the CDC and other Health and Human Services agencies have been informed over the course of the past week that their jobs had been terminated, including dozens at the Vaccine Research Center housed at NIH. Many jobs at these agencies are done by contract workers.
Other changes are expected, particularly at the leadership levels of organizations. When Susan Monarez, a former ARPA-H official, was named acting director of the CDC, she informed staff she would transition into the role of acting principal deputy director once Dave Weldon, the nominee to lead the agency, is confirmed. That move signaled that the current acting principal deputy director, Nirav Shah, who joined the CDC in March 2023, was likely out of a job. Earlier this week, Shah told CDC staff that his last day at the agency would be Feb. 28, a source told STAT.
Head of ARPA-H and Biden appointee Renee Wegrzyn told staff Friday morning that she was fired, a source told STAT. The agency, established in 2022 by Biden to work with the private sector on breakthrough medical technology, employs less than 200 workers. Because of the agency’s newness, most employees are considered probationary and could be targeted for layoffs.
Once again, I feel the need to share Tim Miller’s latest at The Bulwark. Trying to preserve American democracy makes for strange bedfellows. Also, they have a Valentine’s poem for everyone!
Roses are red, The Bulwark is rad—
As we’ve always said:
Orange Man Bad.
Here’s Miller’s lede. “Kash’s Honesty Problem.” Ya think?
For all the many, many, MANY faults of Trump’s other nominees, none of them impulse-lied to senators’ faces while under oath in a confirmation hearing, as if they were a troublemaking toddler telling their parents they didn’t drop the cake, hoping no one noticed their face was covered in chocolate icing.
But that seems to be what Kash Patel did—and not on a matter of negligible import. Patel told the Senate Judiciary Committee that “I don’t know what’s going on right now over there” in the FBI, and that he was “not aware” of plans to fire FBI agents and officials who had investigated Donald Trump and January 6th. But according to several whistleblowers and contemporaneous notes, this was not true. From the Washington Post:
“KP wants movement at FBI,” one attendee purportedly wrote in the notes Durbin reviewed.
This was just the latest in a string of ostentatious lies that Patel told the senators set to confirm him—and basically anyone else who has had the displeasure of recently encountering him. Here’s just a modest sampling:
Patel had previously said “we went to the studio and recorded [the J6 Prison Choir], mastered it, digitized it, and put it out as a song” but during his confirmation hearing he told Sen. Adam Schiff that the “we” repeatedly invoked in that sentence did not actually include him because he was not involved. He claimed he was using “the proverbial we”—I guess he means the royal “We”—you know, the editorial. It is the type of semantic lie that would make even Slick Willy blush.
A state court judge overseeing one of the January 6th cases said Patel was “not a credible witness” because his testimony was “not only illogical . . . but completely devoid of any evidence in the record.”
Patel has vastly exaggerated his résumé, claiming, among other things, that he was the “the Main Justice lead prosecutor for Benghazi” when in fact he had a junior supportive role—one he began after the investigation had started and left before the first case went to trial.
A Trump adviser told the Atlantic that Patel had more than once claimed he was the person who “‘gave the order’ for U.S. forces to move in and kill the ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in 2019”—even though he was not even in the Situation Room.
Former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper wrote in his book that Patel’s lies about a Seal Team Six hostage rescue in Africa led to an international incident that put their lives at risk.
Then there were his claims that he was present when Trump magically declassified the documents he was keeping at Mar-a-Lago, and then pleaded the Fifth when asked about it in front of a grand jury.
I could keep going, but really, the story of Kash is best summed up in this anecdote from Elaina Plott Calabro’s Atlantic profile. Calabro wrote that Patel often says he and Trump are “just a ‘couple of guys from Queens,’” when Patel isn’t even from Queens. He’s from Garden City! That’s not the 313.
We’re still not living in the United States of America, are we? The abhorrent actions of Trump, Musk, and underlings puts the word Banana in the Republic.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Did you like this post? Please share it with your friends:
“Deleted earlier versions of this, as I found an error that surely would have upset AI bots. Let this one rip!” John (repeat1968) Buss
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
Wipipo are very confused by the Super Bowl halftime and complaining that it had no music. I still laugh at the fact that they think everything is all about them. I didn’t watch any of it until the clips were available, but wow, the hassle and occupation down here were well worth the halftime performance. That is, if you weren’t one of the poor homeless folks who got sent to a broken-down warehouse in Gentilly. If you really want the opposite version of what really happened, it’s all over FARTUS’ social media. That’s even more deluded than the MAGA cult themselves. It’s a Black History Month, for the records!
Kendrick Lamar’s very normal Super Bowl halftime show had the MAGA faithful pearl-clutching and conspiracy theorizing.
The iconic Pulitzer Prize and 22-time Grammy winner livened up an otherwise uncompetitive game with a classic performance that centered hip-hop and Black American culture—and featured the likes of Samuel L. Jackson (dressed in American flag garb as Uncle Sam), Serena Williams, and SZA. It only makes sense that right-wingers hated everything about it.
“The halftime show you just watched is clearly the regime’s response to Trump’s historic gains with black men,” shamed former Representative Matt Gaetz wrote on X, even though Lamar was announced as the halftime show performer months before Election Day.
“Raise your hand if you survived the black nationalist Super Bowl LIX halftime show,” right-wing commentator Eric Daugherty wrote on X, even as Lamar’s stage and costume designs were rife with American flag imagery.
“Hey NFL, Trump won. We no longer let talentless mumbling pagan satanic cultists do halftime shows and pretend like people like it,” MAGA media shill Benny Johnson said. “Thanks, everyone.”
In reality, the halftime show was fine, and Kendrick Lamar is an excellent rapper. These people took issue with the show because it didn’t fit into their narrow “post-woke” vision of America—but neither does a very large chunk of this country. This isn’t the first time Kendrick Lamar has performed at the Super Bowl, and it isn’t the first time Blackness has been a major theme of the show. And yet MAGA continues to cry about it.
A very special car made an appearance during the Super Bowl halftime show performance on Sunday night.
Kendrick Lamar’s most recent album is named after the most famous car, released in his birth year, 1987, and the sister car to the Buick Regal that his father brought him home from the hospital. Thus, it’s no surprise that he entered the Super Bowl for his halftime performance in a GNX.
The GNX becomes the symbol of a victory lap for Lamar, who won five Grammys last week for a diss track written in his ongoing battle with Canadian rapper Drake.
Now Kendrick sits atop one of the most American cars in history at America’s biggest sporting event.
That seems harmless enough. Right? Not to these folks!
Tanya Marie Lawson “All I needed to know was how to change to another channel. It’s supposed to be entertainment…not political or an opportunity to attack your rival.”
(Evidently, Tanya sees an imaginary opponent of black culture and music in there that no one else saw.)
Richard Thompson Such a shame they don’t have music for the half time show anymore.
Debbie Feigler Schexnaildre So what about the car the performance was terrible we had no clue what he was saying!! Definitely not entertainment.
(Debbie, Debbie, Debbie! Everything is always about Debbie but who knows how to pronounce those last names of her’s anyway?
Kevin Romano Sr Isn’t that beef in rap music how a lot of them get assassinated.
It was filled with dis tracks against the rapper Drake, subliminal racism, and political innuendo, made to look like the main performers life was a video game.
It’s sad that a teenager pointed this out to me.
I spent time looking this up, hoping the teenager was wrong.
The main performer sounded very monotone.
Very poor performance. It didn’t need to be a Louisiana artist, but more family friendly and without the dis tracks, subliminal racism, and political innuendo, would have been nice.
Weird AL Yankovic would have given a better halftime show.
The NFL audience spans all political and ethnic backgrounds of America and the world.
(Adam had to white-mansplain everything to us! How else would we know that white men are the real victims of racism!)
The run up to the Superbowl was dominated by news that Donald Trump and his hangers on would make an appearance, the first for a sitting President.
Trump arrived at the stadium with Daughter – Wife Ivanka and took to the field with a mix of cheers and Boos.
Trump wandered the field as if dazed and confused but he had initially praised and predicted a Kansas City Chiefs win.
Trump is enamored with the Chiefs who were clearly the MAGA white choice especially with MAGA Mahomes and his hillbilly family being big Trump supporters.
The Philadelphia Eagles did not come to play, they came to slay and scalped the Chiefs early on, eventually winning 40-22.
Trump was not having it and got up and left after 10 mins of the second half or maybe the half time show was just too Black.
Strange that Hitler did the same thing when Jesse Owens dominated the 1936 Olympics.
Donald Trump couldn’t resist a swipe at Taylor Swift following the Kansas City Chiefs Super Bowl defeat, taking jabs even as he departed the event early. The current President hopped onto his social media haven Truth Social, posting while en route back to Florida aboard what was likely Air Force One: “The only one that had a tougher night than the Kansas City Chiefs was Taylor Swift. She got BOOED out of the Stadium. MAGA is very unforgiving! ”
On his platform, Trump uploaded several clips including glimpses of himself amid celebratory fans and another clip purportedly capturing jeers as Swift and Ice Spice appeared on the stadium’s Skycam.
His contentious post, left without commentary, fired up discussions—was Trump implying that the crowd’s applause was for him and jeers for Swift, or were the reactions intertwined at the moment? Videos circulating don’t clarify whether the President received cheers, or simply joined in on crowd acclaim.
Former first Lady and Grandson definitely were given cheers. However, the stories are still being spun as I type. The worst thing is the entire focus on these things and not the impact on New Orleans. You may read about a lot of it in my post here.
The panem et circenses in New Orleans look and feel like a military takeover. We've been #occupied. http://www.facebook.com/reel/5999453… No one can cross Canal Street without a search. They've thrown the homeless in an overpriced warehouse dump. There are military helicopters overhead and bomb dogs
Trump says he has directed the Treasury to stop minting new pennies due to cost. No mention of his $15 million Super Bowl trip or his almost daily $3 million golf excursions.
I am waiting to see the actual economic impact on the city because up until Friday night, the military and police definitely had a bigger presence than tourists. I’m hoping my friends finally made some money to tide them over until the Big Mardi Gras Parades startup.
So, let me pop a few reads up about the Muskanator and his gang of adolescent droogies. There are a lot of lawsuits going on, that’s for certain. This is from Public Notice‘s Lisa Needham. “Trump and his lawyers embrace the logic of dictatorship. And they’re not even trying to hide it at this point.”
Donald Trump is busy seizing power through executive orders and letting Elon Musk and his gang of racist DOGE bros run amok through America’s government agencies. It’s an unprecedented upending of the separation of powers, an authoritarian reshaping of America.
While Trump and his henchmen deconstruct the administrative state, his lawyers are embracing the logic of dictatorship. The core argument emerging in their legal filings and executive orders — one without support anywhere in the Constitution or the law — is that simply by being elected, Trump has the power to do whatever he wants.
The issue is not the use of executive orders as such. The authority to issue them comes from Article II of the Constitution, which vests executive power in the president and requires him to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” Executive orders are meant to tell the executive branch how to implement existing laws. However, in part because Congress is now so routinely deadlocked, every president in the 21st century has issued scores of them that attempt to implement policies outside of the legislative process.
But executive orders aren’t laws, and the authority of presidents to issue them is not absolute. They can’t contradict or overturn existing statutes. Subsequent presidents can undo executive orders just by issuing a new executive order saying so. And federal courts have routinely struck down EOs for being unconstitutional or for exceeding the scope of the president’s authority.
When executive orders are challenged in court, government attorneys typically point to the underlying laws that give the president the authority to issue the order. Trump seems to have dispensed with that requirement, however.
Trump’s imperial ambitions have made for some laughably thin legal theories. As Just Security noted, the government’s argument in defense of Trump’s birthright citizenship EO does not reference any citizenship statutes nor point to any authority that would give Trump the right to undo birthright citizenship via the stroke of a pen. Instead, after quoting the relevant part of the Fourteenth Amendment — ”All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside” — the EO just goes on to state that it “has never been interpreted to extend citizenship universally to everyone born within the United States.”
The problem for Trump is that the Fourteenth Amendment has absolutely historically been interpreted to do just that. The EO attempts to say that “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” are magic words that have always excluded people whose parents were not citizens when they were born, but that’s nothing but a recent crackpot theory from election denier attorney John Eastman.
This is from Bloomberg. “DOGE-Backed Halt at CFPB Comes Amid Musk’s Plans for ‘X’ Digital Wallet. Government-efficiency team’s initial ‘read-only’ access expanded quickly to encompass closely guarded data, internal emails say.” This is reported by Jason Leopold and Evan Weinberger. I told you they were trying to tank the dollar and replace it with their cryptocurrency grift.
In another weekend takeover of a federal agency’s operations, staffers from an efficiency initiative led by billionaire Elon Musk helped to effectively shut down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — as they gained access to an array of the bureau’s protected information.
The actions began last Thursday, when four young staffers working under Musk for the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, showed up at CFPB’s Washington headquarters. At first, they had what was described as read-only access to a limited array of documents, including the agency’s internal personnel files, procurement records and budgeting and financial data, according to an email shared among CFPB officials.
Then, late Friday night, the DOGE staffers were granted access to all the CFPB’s data systems, including sensitive bank examination and enforcement records, according to five people familiar with the matter and emails seen by Bloomberg News. The people asked not to be identified, citing concerns over potential retribution. By Sunday, the agency was a skeleton, with its funding limited and activities suspended.
Musk, whose social-media platform X has recently begun firming up plans to enter the online payments industry, had already predicted the demise of the consumer-watchdog agency. He didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The weekend’s events came after Russell Vought, who heads the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, ordered wider access for DOGE, according to an email to CFPB officials that was seen by Bloomberg. Vought sent the email Friday evening, about 90 minutes before news broke that he’d also been named acting director of the financial-enforcement agency.
Vought is an architect of the Heritage Foundation’s influential and controversial government-overhaul plan called Project 2025, which appears to have guided DOGE’s attempts to dismantle portions of the federal bureaucracy. Earlier this month, the team played a key role in the administration’s effort to shut down the US Agency for International Development, another longstanding conservative bête noire.
Bloomberg News sought comment from Musk, Vought, the DOGE team members and the White House. None responded.
It just gets worse, and there’s no accountability because the Republicans have gone all squishy. And as usual, women and minorities are being deleted from American History and the recognition they deserve. This is from Popular Informationand is written by Jude Legum and Rebecca Crosby. “The NSA’s “Big Delete'”
Today, the National Security Agency (NSA) is planning a “Big Delete” of websites and internal network content that contain any of 27 banned words, including “privilege,” “bias,” and “inclusion.” The “Big Delete,” according to an NSA source and internal correspondence reviewed by Popular Information, is creating unintended consequences. Although the websites and other content are purportedly being deleted to comply with President Trump’s executive orders targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion, or “DEI,” the dragnet is taking down “mission-related” work. According to the NSA source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to the media, the process is “very chaotic,” but is plowing ahead anyway.
A memo distributed by NSA leadership to its staff says that on February 10, all NSA websites and internal network pages that contain banned words will be deleted. This is the list of 27 banned words distributed to NSA staff:
The memo acknowledges that the list includes many terms that are used by the NSA in contexts that have nothing to do with DEI. For example, the term “privilege” is used by the NSA in the context of “privilege escalation.” In the intelligence world, privilege escalation refers to “techniques that adversaries use to gain higher-level permissions on a system or network.”
The purge extends beyond public-facing websites to pages on the NSA’s internal network, including project management software like Jira and Confluence.
I am really not sure I can take much more of this.
Anyway, I’d like to thank JJ for filling in for me with my various hospital appointments and the time I spent with Keely as she exited the Earthly Door. It has been a rough few weeks. Actually, this entire year has sucked big time.
I hope the courts stand firm and we figure out what to do if FARTUS ignores them. Perhaps there are a few good men and women left in the Republican part of Congress. I certainly hope that there are a few appointees to SCOTUS that do not want the country to go down in flames.
Take care y’all!
Be safe!
Did you like this post? Please share it with your friends:
“If you tune into the alien drone invasion, it is possible to prognosticate.” John (repeat1968) Buss @johnbuss.bsky.social
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
The Felon, Adjudicated Rapist, and Traitor (FARTUS) has secured a Get out of Jail Free Card. This morning, Justice Juan Merchan went through the motions of affirming the 34 Felony criminal counts as affirmed by a Jury, but that was the extent of the punishment. This Politico headline says it all. “Trump receives no punishment for hush money conviction. A New York judge declined to impose a penalty for the president-elect at his long-awaited sentencing hearing.”
Donald Trump was not punished for his criminal conviction in the Manhattan hush-money case, bringing a lackluster end to the legal saga that will make him the country’s first felon-turned-president.
At a sentencing hearing on Friday, a New York judge declined to sentence the president-elect to prison time or impose fines after a jury found him guilty of 34 felony counts of business fraud in connection with a $130,000 payment to porn star Stormy Daniels in the final days of the 2016 presidential election.
“This court has determined that the only lawful sentence that permits entry of judgment of conviction without encroachment on the highest office of the land is a sentence of unconditional discharge,” Justice Juan Merchan told Trump.
While acknowledging the “extraordinary legal protections” Trump is set to enjoy as president, Merchan emphasized that “they do not reduce the seriousness of the crime or justify its commission in any way.”
Friday’s sentencing, however inconsequential in terms of punishment, caps a remarkable chapter in Trump’s tangles with the justice system. At one point battling four simultaneous criminal indictments, he emerged with a single conviction last May that didn’t obstruct his path to reelection and will likely linger as little more than a stigma.
Though Trump’s felony conviction allowed Justice Juan Merchan to send Trump to prison for up to four years or impose other penalties, the judge said in court papers prior to the sentencing that he wouldn’t do so, writing that incarceration was not “practicable” given Trump’s imminent return to the White House.
Instead, Merchan imposed the sentence of “unconditional discharge” on Trump, which carries no punishment. The president-elect appeared virtually from Florida, his image presented via a video feed on large monitors in the Manhattan courtroom as the judge announced his decision. Prosecutors from the office of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, as well as Bragg himself, attended in person.
Trump displayed his typical scowl throughout the proceedings, defending himself by saying he’s “totally innocent.”
U. S. President Donald Trump is depicted beheading the Statue of Liberty in this illustration on the cover of a 2017 issue of German news magazine Der Spiegel. Spiegel/Handout via REUTERS
Stormy Daniels and Michael Cohen were the only ones punished for this. The third would be the U.S. system of Justice. I just hope Stormy is some place safe right now.
In remarks to the court before Merchan delivered the sentence, prosecutor Joshua Steinglass said his office endorsed the sentence of unconditional discharge because of the circumstances of the case. But he warned that Trump has been a destructive force toward law enforcement.
“Put simply, this defendant has caused enduring damage to public perception of the criminal justice system and has placed officers of the court in harm’s way,” Steinglass said.
Steinglass also disclosed that Trump’s probation report noted that he “sees himself as above the law and won’t accept responsibility for his actions.”
After the sentencing, Trump posted on social media that he will appeal. “Today’s event was a despicable charade, and now that it is over, we will appeal this Hoax, which has no merit, and restore the trust of Americans in our once great System of Justice,” he wrote on Truth Social.
A sentence of “unconditional discharge,” though not uncommon in low-level cases, is rare in felony cases, according to legal experts.
This still means he’s considered a convicted Felon, so he wants to appeal again. It certainly didn’t hurt his brand during the election, seeing that his cult could care less about any behaviors as long as they are accompanied by a spoonful of vitriol and bigotry that justifies their pitiful existence.
While we heard this week about his plans for Panama, Greenland, and Canada, we’ve not heard much about how he plans to improve the economy. It’s likely because, in the case of his first term, the economy is just fucking fine. It’s his to wreck again. The price of eggs is likely to rise, though, because of the Bird Flu. Fortunately, Trump picked someone who knows his business to head the FDA. There’s also a vaccine for humans for this flu if RFK, Jr. doesn’t tank it somehow, or Elonia and Viv don’t go after the FDA or the CDC.
So, there are a lot of headlines and links in that paragraph. Let’s start at the very beginning. I’ve heard it’s a very fine place to start.
CNBC has this headline on the stellar job market performance at the end of last year. “U.S. payrolls grew by 256,000 in December, much more than expected; unemployment rate falls to 4.1%.” This is reported by Jeff Cox. Any president in the 70s or 80s would’ve been a hero if they found a way to reach these numbers.
Nonfarm payrolls surged by 256,000 for the month, up from 212,000 in November and above the 155,000 forecast.
The unemployment rate edged down to 4.1%, one-tenth of a point below expectations. A broader jobless measure moved down to 7.5%, a decrease of 0.2 percentage point and the lowest since June 2024.
Average hourly earnings increased 0.3% on the month, which was in line with forecasts, but the 12-month gain of 3.9% was slightly below the outlook.
Stock market futures plunged after the report while Treasury yields soared as traders price in a lower probability of Fed rate cuts this year.
Job growth was much stronger than expected in December, likely providing the Federal Reserve less incentive to cut interest rates this year
The current egg shortage is likely to get worse. So, if we’re speaking in terms of getting a guy who everyone thought would lower their egg prices, entire villages of idiots are about to get a surprise. This is from ABC News. “What experts want shoppers to know about egg prices amid new bird flu implications. Shoppers have flocked to social media showing stores in short supply.” Kelly McCarthy has the story.
Rising cases of avian influenza — commonly referred to as bird flu — have continued to impact egg laying flocks in the U.S. forcing egg suppliers to cut production and in turn causing shortages nationwide, skyrocketing prices.
Almost all confirmed cases in humans involve direct contact with infected cattle or infected livestock and the CDC says there is currently no evidence of human-to-human transmission and the risk to the general public is low.
Brooke Jones, who first shared her own experience on TikTok, told “Good Morning America” that she visited three grocery stores in the Dallas area in search of eggs recently.
“We decided to go out and actually check some different egg sections at stores. And so that’s how we came across empty shells, high prices, sign,” she said of the placard on the refrigerated case.
According to the latest USDA market data, egg prices are up nearly 38% in the past year with prices spiking 8% just in November due to the high-demand of holiday baking season.
On average, a dozen eggs will cost people $3.65 right now, compared to $2.14 one year ago. Prices have been the cheapest in the south averaging $3.40 per carton and most expensive on the West Coast at $4.20 per carton.
And at the wholesale side of the equation, retailers are buying eggs in California for nearly $9 per carton, according to the USDA report.
CDC has sequenced the influenza viruses in specimens collected from the patient in Louisiana who was infected with, and became severely ill from HPAI A(H5N1) virus. The genomic sequences were compared to other HPAI A(H5N1) sequences from dairy cows, wild birds and poultry, as well as previous human cases and were identified as the D1.1 genotype. The analysis identified low frequency mutations in the hemagglutinin gene of a sample sequenced from the patient, which were not found in virus sequences from poultry samples collected on the patient’s property, suggesting the changes emerged in the patient after infection.
I’m not sure why, but FARTUS has picked a John Hopkins Doctor to head the FDA that criticized his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and believes in vaccines. Let’s just hope that no one crazy notices him. RFK, jr comes to mind there. This is from HealthCare Dive. He was actually picked around Thanksgiving last year. “Johns Hopkins surgeon Makary is Trump’s pick to lead FDA. A prolific medical researcher and author, Marty Makary criticized the FDA and CDC for their decision-making during the pandemic, although he describes himself as pro-vaccine.” But there’s a bit more to that story.
President-elect Donald Trump on Friday named Johns Hopkins University surgeon Marty Makary to lead the Food and Drug Administration, choosing a prolific medical researcher who bucked consensus on the necessity of frequent vaccination during the COVID-19 pandemic.
As FDA commissioner, Makary would oversee an agency of some 18,000 employees who assess new drugs and devices, review the performance of approved medicines and monitor food quality and safety. The agency typically evaluates and makes decisions on more than 50 new drug and biological products each year. The FDA also regulates medication abortion, including mifepristone, which was at the center of a U.S. Supreme Court case earlier this year. In June, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously to preserve access to the medication.
Makary, whose specialty is pancreatic surgery, is something of a more traditional health nominee than Trump’s controversial picks of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services and Mehmet Oz to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
Both the FDA and the CMS are overseen by HHS, giving Kennedy, who has alarmed many in the medical community with his views on vaccines, substantial power over the two agencies and Trump’s healthcare agenda. And in naming all three, Trump emphasized their willingness to take on industry and shake up the agencies he’s selected them to lead.
A man who fired a gun inside a restaurant in the nation’s capital after a fake online conspiracy theory called “Pizzagate” motivated him to do so nearly a decade ago was shot and killed by North Carolina police during a weekend traffic stop.
Edgar Maddison Welch was a passenger in a vehicle stopped by officers in Kannapolis on Saturday night, according to a Kannapolis Police Department news release. One of the officers recognized the SUV as one he’d seen Welch drive before, police said. The officer had arrested Welch before and knew he had an outstanding warrant for a felony probation violation at the time, according to authorities.
When the officers approached the vehicle to arrest Welch, police said the man pulled out a handgun and pointed it at one of the officers. After he was instructed to drop the weapon but didn’t, two officers shot Welch, authorities said.
Emergency responders took Welch to the hospital and he died from his injuries two days later, according to the release. None of the officers, nor the driver and another passenger, were injured.
In 2016, authorities said, Welch drove from North Carolina with an assault rifle to Comet Ping Pong restaurant in Washington after believing an unfounded conspiracy theory that prominent Democrats were operating a child sex trafficking ring out of the pizzeria. The fake theory, dubbed “Pizzagate,” began circulating online during the 2016 presidential election.
Suicide by Cops? Who knows. We might find out more, but it seems to be the season of the more domestic terrorists.
One last Felonius Trump item.
As of 12:02 am, DOJ has advised the 11th Cir of its appeal of Judge Cannon's order in the So. District of Florida & restated its intention of releasing the J6 volume of the report & sharing the classified documents volume with Congressional leaders.
It’s going to be a long fucked-up four years. Oh, another one of my candidates for grave dancing has exited the Earthly Door. We will not miss you, Anita Byrant.
In ten days, we get Trumpapocalypse again. Fly your flags at half mast to remember Former President James Earl Carter. Find a good series to binge-watch and spoil yourself!
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
One more gift for you. Is it appropriate for a President of the United States to say the Pledge of Allegiance with his hand on his stomach? What’s he protesting?
Did you like this post? Please share it with your friends:
There’s not a lot of exciting politics news today; and that is probably a good thing, considering how bad things are looking for the country in the long run. We only have a little more than a month until Trump moves into the White House and tries to become president for life.
Have you heard the latest gossip? Donald Trump, Jr., who is still engaged to Kimberly Guilfoyle, has a new girlfriend.
Is there trouble in paradise for one of America’s most unsettling couples? Sure seems like it. Donald Trump Jr. and Kimberly Guilfoyle may be on the rocks, if the Daily Mail is to be believed. While the fiancés were spotted together about a week after the election, the tabloid has been all over what looks like Don Jr.’s new relationship with Bettina Anderson, a Republican socialite who lives in Florida. So what’s going on here?
Let’s back up a few months. In September, the Daily Mail reported that Don Jr. and Anderson had been “spotted canoodling” during a brunch date the month prior. According to their sources, this new fling was “the talk of Palm Beach.” One source said that Anderson reached over “to plant a sexy kiss” on Don Jr. three times during their meal at the Honor Bar.
“She seemed totally smitten with Don — and he with her,” the source told the Daily Mail.
Bettina Anderson
Guilfoyle was probably shocked to learn this information, right? Well, not so fast. The day after the first Daily Mail reports, friends of the former Fox News host told the tabloid that she might have had an idea of what was going on.
“Kimberly either didn’t know about Bettina — or didn’t want to know. Did she hear whispers that Don Jr. was fooling around with someone else? Probably,” one of Guilfoyle’s so-called friends said. “She’s no fool but it’s easy to deceive yourself when you’re so committed to someone and believe he’s committed to you.”
Guilfoyle and Trump have been together since 2018, and got engaged on New Year’s Eve 2020 (his birthday). During their time together, she became a mainstay in the MAGA world, often seen at Trump events, delivering speeches at Republican National Conventions, and sharing almost nothing but pro-Trump content on Instagram. By Election Night this year, it seemed like she and Trump Jr. had worked things out, as she stood by his side at his father’s victory speech.
But all was reportedly not well. The Daily Mail is back on the Trumpfoyle beat, and on Tuesday, they reported that the purportedly engaged couple has not been spotted together since November 12. Meanwhile, on Monday, Don Jr. and Bettina were photographed holding hands while out to dinner to celebrate her 38th birthday. The tabloid also reported that he has been living with his new girlfriend at her West Palm Beach townhouse instead of in the $15.5 million mansion he and Guilfoyle bought in 2021.
Gross. Who would want to hang around with Don Jr., much less live with him? I guess it takes all kinds.
According to US Magazine, via Yahoo News, Anderson is “a model and an influencer” with “more than 38,000 followers on” Instagram.
Anyway, Trump Sr. is giving Guilfoyle a consolation prize–He plans to appoint her Ambassador to Greece.
“For many years, Kimberly has been a close friend and ally,” the president-elect said in his announcement, which he posted to Truth Social.
Kimberly Guilfoyle and Don Jr
“Her extensive experience and leadership in law, media, and politics along with her sharp intellect make her supremely qualified to represent the United States, and safeguard its interests abroad. Kimberly is perfectly suited to foster strong bilateral relations with Greece, advancing our interests on issues ranging from defense cooperation to trade and economic innovation.”
Guilfoyle’s nomination requires Senate confirmation and would see her handling foreign affairs.
The announcement hit conspicuously soon after Trump Jr., 46, was pictured cozying up with Palm Beach socialite Bettina Anderson, 38.
Trump Jr. made no comment on the rumors on social media when he congratulated Guilfoyle in a brief statement to X Tuesday night: “I am so proud of Kimberly. She loves America and she always has wanted to serve the country as an Ambassador. She will be an amazing leader for America First.”
There’s more information coming out on Luigi Mangione, the man who has been arrested and charged with murdering of United Health Care CEO Brian Thompson in NYC. Here’s the latest:
The mainstream media has refused to publish Mangione’s “manifesto,” but Ken Klippenstein has posted it on his website:
I’ve obtained a copy of suspected killer Luigi Mangione’s manifesto — the real one, not the forgery circulating online. Major media outlets are also in possession of the document but have refused to publish it and not even articulated a reason why. My queries to The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN and NBC to explain their rationale for withholding the manifesto, while gladly quoting from it selectively, have not been answered.
I’ll have more to say on this later — on how unhealthy the media’s drift away from public disclosure is — but for now, here’s the manifesto:
“To the Feds, I’ll keep this short, because I do respect what you do for our country. To save you a lengthy investigation, I state plainly that I wasn’t working with anyone. This was fairly trivial: some elementary social engineering, basic CAD, a lot of patience. The spiral notebook, if present, has some straggling notes and To Do lists that illuminate the gist of it. My tech is pretty locked down because I work in engineering so probably not much info there. I do apologize for any strife of traumas but it had to be done. Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming. A reminder: the US has the #1 most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy. United is the [indecipherable] largest company in the US by market cap, behind only Apple, Google, Walmart. It has grown and grown, but as our life expectancy? No the reality is, these [indecipherable] have simply gotten too powerful, and they continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allwed them to get away with it. Obviously the problem is more complex, but I do not have space, and frankly I do not pretend to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument. But many have illuminated the corruption and greed (e.g.: Rosenthal, Moore), decades ago and the problems simply remain. It is not an issue of awareness at this point, but clearly power games at play. Evidently I am the first to face it with such brutal honesty.”
When the identity of Luigi Mangione, the alleged UnitedHealthcare CEO shooter, was revealed on Monday, the online search — a reporting process that’s become a collective online ritual — began. It turns out he left a lot of information online: an active account on X, an Instagram, a Facebook, a Goodreads, a Reddit account, and maybe even a Tinder profile. The dossier came together fast.
Luigi Mangione
Reporters and social-media users noted possible red flags, strange and eerie fragments of information, and small ironies. On Goodreads, he had posted a contrarian riff on Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto. Was it evidence of violent tendencies? He also reviewed a couple of books about back pain. On X, he posted about AI superintelligence and followed some anti-woke pundits. Had he tumbled down a slippery slope? Was he blackpilled? Some sort of accelerationist? On Reddit, he posted about backpacks and spinal injuries. Had he been hiding in plain sight all along?
In isolation, with the hindsight that they were posted by someone who went on to allegedly assassinate a health-care CEO, these accounts, and some of these posts, assumed new meaning, which is reasonable and understandable: It’s a crazy story that people want to understand, and the way social media has been processing it more broadly is unprecedented in about six different ways. But what’s most striking about Mangione’s extensive online dossier is that, had it been studied before the shooting took place, it wouldn’t have raised much alarm. You can spend hours reading these posts, sifting through his follows, and looking for clues about what Type of Guy he is, but the supportable theories are pretty thin: Mangione had an online profile consonant with his identity and context. He shared and posted and followed like a 20-something striver with a foot in the tech industry, listened to Rogan, and considered himself a rationalist or at least unusually rational….
His media consumption — wellness podcasts, a dash of “heterodox” punditry, tech personalities on X — might have placed him near some worrying ideological tendencies, but no more so than millions of other young men in his social milieu; on digital paper, he’s a bit like one of those young male swing voters that dominated post-election recriminations, albeit with an Ivy on his LinkedIn. If a dating profile led you to these accounts, you might wonder if he was going to talk at you about AI or if he might be sort of socially awkward. You might wonder if he’s a bit of a pod bro, or an RFK guy, but you’d also see a lot of stuff that looks — again, without future context — if not normal, then demographically typical. You wouldn’t have wondered if he was planning an assassination. You’d probably have assumed he was friendly! Now, everyone’s looking for the online trail that leads directly the sidewalk in front of the Midtown Hilton, but they haven’t quite found it. Nor, in 2024, should they expect to.
Herrmann argues that a criminal’s “on-line footprint” doesn’t really reveal who a person is anymore, if it ever did.
Faith in the existence of meaning in the “online trail” started waning when social media achieved full ubiquity. By the mid-2010s, the sorts of evidence you’d find in the aftermath of a shocking news event tended to be either hidden in places like 4chan — intentionally inscrutable communities within a fully mainstream internet — or left behind intentionally to be found and shared in the form of a manifesto, an archived Discord channel, or a recording of the act itself. These revelations could still be illuminating or at least shocking — the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter left a trail of posts on the right-wing social-media site Gab, for example — but in recent years, the post-news deep-dive, which has become a messy and fraught spectacle unto itself, wasn’t producing much in the way of understanding. Mostly, if you were planning a dramatic crime, you knew better than to post about it. If you wanted nobody to see you, or suspect you of anything, you simply didn’t post about it.
Mangione’s stubbornly normal online footprint, and the way the media and public have feasted upon it, marks the closing of this circle. Online, he was a guy with unremarkable niche interests and a serious appetite for boring productivity books. The reflexive assumption that his digital trail must contain essential, decodable truths about his motives has produced less in the way of insight than of fandom, which is constructed online through a similar process of breathless driven data aggregation.
Luigi Mangione, who has been charged with killing the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare at a company investors’ day, was arrested with a notebook that detailed plans for the shooting, according to two law enforcement officials.
The notebook described going to a conference and killing an executive, the officials said.
Luigi Mangione
“What do you do? You wack the C.E.O. at the annual parasitic bean-counter convention. It’s targeted, precise, and doesn’t risk innocents,” was one passage written in the notebook, the officials said….
When Mr. Mangione was arrested, the authorities also found a 262-word handwritten note with him, which begins by appearing to take responsibility for the murder. The note, which officials described as a manifesto, also mentioned the existence of a notebook. The recovery of the notebook was first reported by CNN.
The suspect saw the killing as a “symbolic takedown,” according to a New York Police Department internal report that detailed parts of a three-page manifesto found with him at the time of his arrest. The report added that the suspect “likely views himself as a hero of sorts who has finally decided to act upon such injustices” and expressed concern that others might see him as a “martyr and an example to follow.” [….]
On his way into court on Tuesday afternoon, Mr. Mangione shouted about “an insult to the intelligence of the American people and their lived experience.”
It was not exactly clear what he was referring to as deputies worked to push him into the courthouse. On Wednesday, the sheriff of Blair County, James E. Ott, said that otherwise Mr. Mangione had not given deputies any problems.
Even when Luigi Mangione was surrounded with people who cared about him, he was isolated by a spinal defect that dealt the athletic young man crippling pain and contributed to a jaundiced view of the American health-care system.
Authorities charged Mangione, 26, with murder in the shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York, but have said little about a motive for the killing. They found a three-page, handwritten document on Mangione that expressed disdain for the American health-care system, they’ve said.
On Reddit in April, Mangione foreshadowed that skepticism about the health-care industry as he offered advice for getting a doctor to perform spinal surgery.
“Tell them you are ‘unable to work’ / do your job,” he wrote. “We live in a capitalist society. I’ve found that the medical industry responds to these key words far more urgently than you describing unbearable pain and how it’s impacting your quality of life.”
Nothing in his Reddit posts reviewed by The Postindicate violent intentions. Authorities have not laid out their case for what drove Mangione to escalate his frustration with the health system, which is common in the United States, into an allegedly premeditated murder of a prominent health-care executive….
Mangione’s arrest has stunned his friends and family, most of whom appear to have lost touch with him in the last six months.
“We all condemn violence of any kind,” said Josiah Ryan, a spokesman for Surfbreak HNL, a co-living community in Honolulu where Mangione lived for six months in 2022. He added, “There’s sadness, because he was a person who was well-loved and no one saw this coming.”
Mangione’s back X-ray
Ryan said that Mangione’s back pain was well known within the Surfbreak community. “It was a real problem for him, and he had to think about that in a way that most 24-year-old young men living in Hawaii would not have to worry about their health,” he said.
Mangione’s struggles with his back pain offer a glimpse into the interior life of a young man who outwardly lived a charmed existence — the scion of a wealthy family in Maryland who was valedictorian of his prestigious private school in Baltimore and earned degrees in computer science from the University of Pennsylvania….
In archived Reddit comments, Mangione doesn’t express anger toward UnitedHealthcare or other health insurers. But the posts chronicle his struggle over years to deal with back pain that became increasingly debilitating.
“From childhood until age 23, my back would always ache if I stood too long, but it wasn’t too bad,” he wrote in February. But as he entered his mid-20s, the pain began to disrupt his life, and he also struggled with cognitive issues.
In a Reddit group focused on brain fog, he wrote, “The people around you probably won’t understand your symptoms — they certainly don’t for me.”
Lots of people live with chronic pain (including me), but we don’t kill people over it.
In an 82-page court filing made public Tuesday, Manhattan prosecutors say Donald Trump’s “history of malicious conduct” is too serious for his hush-money case to be dismissed.
The filing, signed by DA Alvin Bragg, also fights Trump’s claim that he enjoys something called presidential-elect immunity — above and beyond the presidential immunity bestowed on him by the US Supreme Court in June.
“There are no grounds for such relief now, prior to inauguration,” Bragg wrote in opposing Trump’s 11th-hour motion to dismiss, “because President-elect immunity does not exist.”
With just six weeks left before his January 20 inauguration — and six months after a Manhattan jury convicted him — Trump is again demanding that New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan immediately dismiss his hush-money case.
It’s his third time trying to void his indictment or his conviction. If successful, Trump would escape altogether his already thrice-delayed sentencing.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg
The president elect faces as little as no jail time and a potential maximum of four years prison for falsifying 34 business records throughout his first year of office to retroactively hide a hush-money payment to adult actress Stormy Daniels. (Legal experts have said that it’s unlikely Trump would be sentenced to jail time as a 78-year-old first-time offender convicted of low-level felonies, and any jail sentence would be stayed as he appeals.)
Trump paid for Daniels’ silence just eleven days before 2016 election, and jurors unanimously found that he thereby conspired to promote his own election by unlawful means, Bragg wrote.
The evidence presented against Trump was “overwhelming,” reads the filing, which is also signed by a lead prosecutor on the case, Christopher Conroy.
“The crimes that the jury convicted defendant of committing are serious offenses that caused extensive harm to the sanctity of the electoral process and to the integrity of New York’s financial marketplace,” which relies on honest record-keeping, Bragg wrote.
One of the strangest aspects in living in a declining democracy is that everyone is forced to learn about arcane areas of the law … if only to see them trampled by the despot.
The first Trump administration taught us about the Logan Act, the Federal Vacancies Reform Act, and the Presidential Records Act. Those were all about the limits of the president’s authority. Could Trump dispatch Mike Flynn to secretly negotiate with the Russian ambassador before taking office? Could he simply stack federal agencies with his cronies serving in an acting capacity and avoid Senate confirmation? Could he steal or destroy government records?
The answer was an enthusiastic “yes,” thanks to the Supreme Court, with an assist from Judge Aileen Cannon. In the name of ensuring that he can act “boldly” and “without hesitation,” six conservative justices gave the president unlimited authority to commit crimes without fear of prosecution. The imperial presidency is upon us.
But even that blank check isn’t enough for Trump and his enablers. To reshape society, they need the legislative and judicial branches to be more than supine. They need to steal Congress’s power, too. And so, while we’re learning about Trump’s plans to use recess appointments to sidestep the senate’s constitutionally mandated “advice and consent” role, we now have to learn about the Impoundment Control Act of 1974.
I can’t do this important post justice with excerpts, but there’s no paywall, so please go read it at Public Notice. Here’s a bit more.
It all goes back to Nixon
The Constitution vests “the power of the purse” in Congress.
Article I, Section 8, Clause 1, AKA the Spending Clause, specifies that “Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States.” And Section 9 says that “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.”
Congress passes the budget and allocates government revenues as it sees fit — that’s just black-letter law. And so in 1972, Congress passed the Federal Water Pollution Control Act, allocating $5 billion for 1973, $6 billion for 1974, and $7 billion for 1975 for municipal sewer updates. President Richard Nixon tried and failed to veto the law, and, after it was passed, he instructed EPA Administrator William Ruckelshaus to allot “[n]o more than $2 billion of the amount authorized for the fiscal year 1973, and no more than $3 billion of the amount authorized for the fiscal year 1974.”
The City of New York sued, and in a 1975 case called Train v. City of New York, the Supreme Court held that Nixon had no discretion to refuse to spend money allocated by Congress. Ruckelshaus was obligated to dispense the $18 billion over three years, despite Nixon’s strong belief that cities should simply live with rotting pipes.
And while that case was percolating through, Congress went one further and passed the Impoundment Control Act, to make it clear to Nixon that he should quit encroaching on their turf and monkeying with the budget….
Under the ICA, the president must either spend the funds obligated by the legislature, or come to Congress with a “special message” and explain why not. Congress then has 45 days to vote for rescission, rescinding the original allocation. If Congress doesn’t agree, or simply ignores the message, the funds must be spent as originally ordained. (Here’s a handy ICA fact sheet from the Dems on the House Budget Committee.)
Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who clearly don’t know or care about the separation of powers, are currently promising to slash $2 trillion from the federal budget and delete entire federal agencies through their fake DOGE committee. But even in his first administration, Trump violated the ICA by withholding the defense allocation for Ukraine in 2019.
Read the rest at the link.
That’s all I have for today. We’re having a stormy day here, so I’m going to try to distract myself with a good book. Have a nice day, everyone.
Did you like this post? Please share it with your friends:
The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
Indeed. Please go read this.
Human guardrails are not present in this administration. I’m not even certain you may call anyone in the administration fully human. Constitutional Guardrails are questionable even as we are not even in the first 100 days of this surreal mess. It’s no wonder former Yale History Professor Timothy Snyder and his wife have taken off for the Great White North. It appears
It’s the end-runs that worry me. He’s already got a history of back-to-back self-coups. I really don’t think most people realize how serious this is. FARTUS also has two Supreme Court justices in the tank for him; the rest of the right-wing majority is wobbly at best.
The other must-read article today comes from 
Remember the idea of visas for $5 million dollars? Well, now we know where that scatterbrained idea came from. 
One more read from me, and it’s off to the shower. 
Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of the Department of Defense Pete Hegseth headed to Europe to evidently blow up the relationships with all of our major allies. The two surly men’s visit was not appreciated. This happened while Trump announced that he and Putin would be visiting each other’s country to tie up Ukraine’s surrender. Vance has been sent to chat with Ukriane’s President Zelensky at the Munich Conference, which they are both attending. 
Meanwhile, The Guardian also reports a drone attack on Chornobyl. 
The New Republic’
Politico
While I just criticized the governor of Utah, let me not forget to kick the governor of Lousyana in the balls a few times. He’s trying to kill us. This is also from
I gagged on that last statement because that certainly doesn’t apply to women and girls with functioning ovaries and uteruses. Meanwhile, Trump is planning mass firings at the CDC. Bird Flu, anyone? 
Once again, I feel the need to share Tim Miller’s latest at 
For more racist takes, follow the link! Or better yet, follow FARTUS! He spoiled the event for all sides of the fee fees. 
I am waiting to see the actual economic impact on the city because up until Friday night, the military and police definitely had a bigger presence than tourists. I’m hoping my friends finally made some money to tide them over until the Big Mardi Gras Parades startup.
This is from 
It just gets worse, and there’s no accountability because the Republicans have gone all squishy. And as usual, women and minorities are being deleted from American History and the recognition they deserve. This is from 
I am really not sure I can take much more of this.
CNBC has this headline on the stellar job market performance at the end of last year. “U.S. payrolls grew by 256,000 in December, much more than expected; unemployment rate falls to 4.1%.” This is reported by Jeff Cox. Any president in the 70s or 80s would’ve been a hero if they found a way to reach these numbers.
The current egg shortage is likely to get worse. So, if we’re speaking in terms of getting a guy who everyone thought would lower their egg prices, entire villages of idiots are about to get a surprise. This is from ABC News. 
This link to the CDC has information on the vaccine and includes one Louisiana family where the flu jumped from animals to people. “
This last story I want to look at takes us back to the loon in the Pizza Gate shooting. I wonder if Hillary can sleep better now. 
peej
Carissa
bostonboomer
dakinikat
ecocatwoman
mablue2
Mama Lopez
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Sky Dancing 
Recent Comments