Finally Friday Reads: Waking up to?

Posted: October 24, 2025 | Author: dakinikat | Filed under: #We are so Fucked, American Fascists, Breaking News, Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Psychopaths in charge | Tags: @johnbuss.bsky.social John Buss, Bombing Fishing Boats, Eminem - No Kings (Donald Trump Diss), Pardons for the Guilty, Who the Fuck Voted for this? | 4 Comments

“So, a supposed desperately needed huge ballroom that seats anywhere from 650 to 1K people doesn’t include necessary parking for that kind of crowd? Seems a real estate genius would have thought of that. If only he hadn’t sold the hotel next door.’ @repeat1968, John Buss

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

Each news cycle brings us to yet another fresh hell. Considering the breaking news cycle is now endless, we’re suffering ongoing PTSD. I admit that I’ve always been a night person. However, I now sleep away as much of the morning as possible. Given that I teach in the evenings, it’s easy for me to hand over the morning to the Poland Avenue Rooster and the commuters from Chalmette bound for whatever the sons of overseers have planned for them on any particular day. So, yes, I’m late. It’s lucky my dog is very patient with me about morning walks.

The news from today is just as full of shock and awe as usual. We’re still blowing up fishing boats and watching the people’s house being turned into a tacky midcentury modern whore house. Who can be auctioned off next? Who is losing their livelihood and next meal today? Today’s attack on hapless South Americans in boats is another demonstration of how far the illegal, expensive, murder of innocents will be allowed by rapists Trump and the Drunkard Secretary of “War” will go to attempt to overcompensate for their lack of true manhood. This is from the AP as reported by Konstantin Toropin. “US is sending an aircraft carrier to Latin America in major escalation of military buildup.” We’re a rogue, terrorist country now demonstrating that the rule of law is no longer our guiding North Star.

The U.S. military is sending an aircraft carrier to the waters off South America, in the latest escalation and buildup of military forces in the region, the Pentagon announced Friday.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the USS Gerald R. Ford and its strike group to deploy to U.S. Southern Command to “bolster U.S. capacity to detect, monitor, and disrupt illicit actors and activities that compromise the safety and prosperity of the United States,” Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said in a social media post.

The USS Ford, which has five destroyers in its strike group, is currently deployed to the Mediterranean Sea. A person familiar with the operation told The Associated Press that one of those destroyers is in the Arabian Sea and another is in the Red Sea. At the time of the announcement, the USS Ford was in port in Croatia on the Adriatic Sea.

The person, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military operations, would not say how long it would take for the strike group to arrive in the waters off South America or if all five destroyers would make the journey.

Deploying an aircraft carrier is a major escalation of military power in a region that has already seen an unusually large U.S. military buildup in the Caribbean Sea and the waters off Venezuela.

Hours before Parnell announced the news, Hegseth said the military had conducted the 10th strike on a suspected drug-running boat, leaving six people dead and bringing the death count for the strikes that began in early September to at least 43 people.

The move to deny Americans and bully them away from their ability to vote has begun. This move was announced by the JustICE department today. We are dismantling our democracy in plain sight. “Justice Department to Monitor Polling Sites in California, New Jersey.” All we need now are fierce dogs and ‘literacy’ tests.

” Today, the Department of Justice announced that it will monitor polling sites in six jurisdictions ahead of the upcoming November 4, 2025, general election to ensure transparency, ballot security, and compliance with federal law.

The Department, through the Civil Rights Division, enforces federal voting rights laws that protect the rights of all eligible citizens to access the ballot. The Department regularly deploys its staff to monitor for compliance with federal civil rights laws in elections in communities across the country.

“Transparency at the polls translates into faith in the electoral process, and this Department of Justice is committed to upholding the highest standards of election integrity,” said Attorney General Pamela Bondi. “We will commit the resources necessary to ensure the American people get the fair, free, and transparent elections they deserve.”

So, we can find funds to demolish the East Wing of the White House, carry out bombing of fishing boats, and harass voters, but we can’t pay any of our Federal Workers or Soldiers. How can this be? Charlie Savage has this political analysis of our current situation in the New York Times. “The Peril of a White House That Flaunts Its Indifference to the Law. The White House has made no legal argument explaining its bald claim that the president has wartime power to summarily kill people suspected of smuggling drugs.” It’s been a few foreign atrocities ago since I read the term “summary executions” used. If any of our rogue soldiers were caught doing this, they would be hauled in to a military tribunal immediately. What do we do with a rogue President?

Since he returned to office nine months ago, President Trump has sought to expand executive power across numerous fronts. But his claim that he can lawfully order the military to summarily kill people accused of smuggling drugs on boats off the coast of South America stands apart.

A broad range of specialists in laws governing the use of lethal force have called Mr. Trump’s orders to the military patently illegal. They say the premeditated extrajudicial killings have been murders — regardless of whether the 43 people blown apart, burned alive or drowned in 10 strikes so far were indeed running drugs.

The administration insists that the killings are lawful, invoking legal terms like “self-defense” and “armed conflict.” But it has offered no legal argument explaining how to bridge the conceptual gap between drug trafficking and associated crimes, as serious as they are, and the kind of armed attack to which those terms can legitimately apply.

The irreversible gravity of killing, coupled with the lack of a substantive legal justification, is bringing into sharper view a structural weakness of law as a check on the American presidency.

It is becoming clearer than ever that the rule of law in the White House has depended chiefly on norms — on government lawyers willing to raise objections when merited and to resign in protest if ignored, and on presidents who want to appear law-abiding. This is especially true in an era when party loyalty has defanged the threat of impeachment by Congress, and after the Supreme Court granted presidents immunity from prosecution for crimes committed with official powers.

Every modern president has occasionally taken some aggressive policy step based on a stretched or disputed legal interpretation. But in the past, they and their aides made a point to develop substantive legal theories and to meet public and congressional expectations to explain why they thought their actions were lawful, even if not everyone agreed.

I keep seeing that Monty Python skit in my mind. “Nobody expects …” The stacking of the Supreme Court, the complete cowardice and compliance of all Republican elected officials, and the responses of the Democratic Party, which seems lost in Wonderland at times, is something no one from the founders forward ever completely expected. Even when we’ve seen things inch towards totalitarianism, the institutions of governance would eventually pull through. Now we seem to capitulate on all fronts except with lawsuits brought by private lawyers to key judges. Even when we win the lawsuits, however, Trump just ignores things. It’s hard to see the impeachment remedy even being discussed with the current, feckless Speaker of the House. Please take time to read that article.

The Department of Homeland Security has turned into the Gestapo. I always had a problem with the creation of that Department and felt it would be likely open to abuse at some point, but I never had this on my dance card. “DHS Tries To Unmask Ice Spotting Instagram Account by Claiming It Imports Merchandise.” Again, the most interesting information comes from alternative media sources these days. In this case, it’s 404 Media. The big media companies are too busy paying for the Ballroom Atrocity.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is trying to force Meta to unmask the identity of the people behind Facebook and Instagram accounts that post about Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activity, arrests, and sightings by claiming the owners of the account are in violation of a law about the “importation of merchandise.” Lawyers fighting the case say the move is “wildly outside the scope of statutory authority,” and say that DHS has not even indicated what merchandise the accounts, called Montcowatch, are supposedly importing.

“There is no conceivable connection between the ‘MontCo Community Watch’ Facebook or Instagram accounts and the importation of any merchandise, nor is there any indicated on the face of the Summonses. DHS has no authority to issue these summonses,” lawyers with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) wrote in a court filing this month. There is no indication on either the Instagram or Facebook account that the accounts are selling any type of merchandise, according to 404 Media’s review of the accounts. “The Summonses include no substantiating allegations nor any mention of a specific crime or potential customs violation that might trigger an inquiry under the cited statute,” the lawyers add.

A judge temporarily blocked DHS from unmasking the owners last week.

“The court now orders Meta […] not to produce any documents or information in response to the summonses at issue here without further order of the Court,” the judge wrote in a filing. The move to demand data from Meta about the identities of the accounts while citing a customs statute shows the lengths to which DHS is willing to go to attempt to shut down and identify people who are posting about ICE’s activities.

We know the Trump Criminal Syndicate is all about the grift. Here are some thoughts by Sidney Blumenthal writing at The Guardian. “Donald Trump has built a regime of retribution and reward. The president’s purges and attacks on his enemies have developed into a system in which injustice is made routine.” Nice use of alliteration there!

Donald Trump’s voracious desire for retribution has quickly evolved into a regular and predictable system. In the year since his election, the president’s rage and whims have assumed the form of policies in the same way that Joseph Stalin’s purges could be called policies. Figures within the federal system of justice who do not do his bidding are summarily fired and replaced by loyalists. Leaders who have called him to account or are in his way may face indictment, trial and punishment. Opponents have been designated under Presidential National Security Memorandum No 7 as “Antifa”: “anti-American”, “anti-Christian” and “anti-capitalist”, and threatened with prosecution as a “terrorist”. Meanwhile, many aligned with him escape justice, whether through the hand of the Department of Justice (DoJ) or the presidential pardon power. Now, he demands compensation for having been prosecuted to the tune of $230m from the DoJ budget.

Each of the cases involving prosecution of Trump’s enemies and, on the other hand, the leniency extended to his allies has its own peculiarities of outrage. But whatever their unique and arbitrary perversities, they are expressions of what has emerged as a technique. These episodes are not isolated or coincidental. Trump’s purge of DoJ prosecutors and FBI agents, accompanied by his installment of flunkies in senior positions, started in a rush and quickly assumed a pattern, but has now been molded into a regime. The justice department and the FBI have been remade into political agencies under Trump’s explicit command to carry out his wishes. Injustice is made routine. It is the retribution system.

The origin of this system has been exposed in the complaint of three former senior FBI officials filed on 10 September in the US district court in DC against the FBI director, Kash Patel, and the US attorney general, Pam Bondi, for illegal termination in “a campaign of retribution against Plaintiffs for what Defendants deemed to be a failure to demonstrate sufficient political loyalty”. In the complaint, Brian Driscoll, the former acting FBI director, describes a conversation in which Patel “openly acknowledged the unlawfulness of his actions”.

Driscoll had tried to shield FBI agents from being fired, the complaint alleges. Patel told him that “they” – understood by Driscoll to be the White House and justice department – had directed him to fire anyone whom they identified as having worked on a criminal investigation against Trump. The complaint continues: “Patel explained that he had to fire the people his superiors told him to fire, because his ability to keep his own job depended on the removal of the agents who worked on cases involving the President. Patel explained that there was nothing he or Driscoll could do to stop these or any other firings, because ‘the FBI tried to put the President in jail and he hasn’t forgotten it.’” When Driscoll told Patel he was violating the FBI’s own internal rules, Patel allegedly said “he understood that and he knew the nature of the summary firings were likely illegal”.

Read more and weep at the link. Orange Caligula’s favorite presidential power is that of the pardon. He’s been going wild recently, letting white guys who commit high crimes out for no particular reason other than he relates to them and the crimes. Plus, he loves the power. This is from AXIOS’ Steve Neukam. “Exclusive: Senate Dems move to condemn Trump’s Binance pardon.” This is the case where the evidence and crime were so obvious that the guy copped to the crime. Evidently, saying you’re actually guilty doesn’t count as being actually guilty in TrumpLandia. That doesn’t even count the amount of the Bribes that bribed Trump for the pardon by throwing crypto at Trump Klan’s plan.

Senate Democrats are moving to officially condemn President Trump’s pardon of Changpeng Zhao, better known as CZ, the founder of crypto exchange Binance, Axios has learned.

Why it matters: Some Senate Republicans have already criticized the pardon, with Democrats eyeing rare bipartisan pushback against the White House.

Trump’s pardon of CZ, who was facing four months in prison related to money laundering, likely provides a path for Binance to operate in the U.S. after more than a year of lobbying from the president.

Democrats argue the pardon is blatant “corruption,” urging Congress to take steps to avoid similar acts in the future.

The resolution was led by Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), two longtime Trump foes.

The big picture: The Trump family’s crypto empire has drawn the ire of Capitol Hill this year. Their connection to Binance is only intensifying the scrutiny.

In May, World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s crypto venture, announced that an Emirati state-backed venture fund would use World Liberty’s new stablecoin to complete a $2 billion investment in Binance.

“We thank President Trump for his leadership and for his commitment to make the US the crypto capital of the world,” a Binance spokesperson said in a statement.

What they’re saying: Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said this week that the pardon “is a bad signal.”

Let me know when “officially condemning” actually works with this asshole. He wears that label like a tribute. Another Democratic Governor has stepped up to the fight to contain the Trump Regime. This time it’s Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer. Her latest speech on the audacities committed by Trump is highlighted in this article in The Hill. “Whitmer: ‘No one is worried about building a ballroom’.” This is reported by Ryan Mancini.

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) brushed off debate over the demolition of the East Wing of the White House and President Trump’s plans to build a ballroom, saying Thursday the focus should instead be on the government shutdown’s impact on federal workers in her state.

Whitmer appeared on MSNBC’s “The Briefing with Jen Psaki” to talk about the shutdown when the host shared an “insane split screen” that featured the East Wing’s demolition “happening while the shutdown is leaving so many workers without pay and critical benefits.”

“I just wonder, from your vantage point as a governor of a state, what are you making of that split screen?” Psaki asked.

“Well, as I have talked to people, I’m telling you right now, no one is worried about building a ballroom in Washington, D.C.,” Whitmer replied. “What they want is to make sure that they can feed their kids next week. And the longer the shutdown goes, the more precarious it gets for people.”

The governor said most Americans are “never going to step foot in a ballroom over the course of their lifetime.”

“But what they do every single day is try to feed their kids, make sure that they get a job to show up to, make sure that they don’t hit a pothole on their drive to work and they have to take money out of their rent or their child care to pay to fix their damn car,” she continued. “That’s why we got to stay focused on the issues that matter to people.”

On Thursday, excavators completed the demolition of the White House’s East Wing. Set to replace is a ballroom the Trump administration expects will be finished before the end of the president’s second term in 2029. Trump said this week the project would cost roughly $300 million, and the administration released a list of donors Thursday who it said it funding the project.

I’m really getting tired of these obvious steps back to Kings, autocracy, and huge wastes of money. Who the Fuck voted for this?

What’s on your Reading, Blogging, and Action List today?

Mostly Monday Reads: Whitewashing Indigenous Peoples’ Day

Posted: October 13, 2025 | Author: dakinikat | Filed under: #FARTUS, #MAGAnomics, #We are so Fucked, kakistocracy, Polycrisis | Tags: Stagflation, Trump Chaos and Incompetency, Trump Stagflation, Trump Tarriffs, Trump Unemployment, Trump War on Science, Trup War on History | 7 Comments

“If it looks like a pig, smells like a pig, acts like a pig….” John Buss, @repeat1968

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

Today, we celebrate the Indigenous tribes of America. Joe Biden was the first president to recognize the day in 2021. We still haven’t dropped Columbus Day, which glorifies a man who truly represents the worst of European colonization of other continents.

Christopher Columbus has become a controversial figure over the years, despite the federal holiday in his honor. While many credit the explorer with “discovering” America, many others condemn Columbus for forced conversion of native peoples to Christianity, the use of violence and slavery, and the introduction of new diseases that would cause serious and long-lasting harm to Indigenous people.

In 2021, former President Joe Biden became the first president to recognize Indigenous Peoples Day, celebrating it in tandem with Columbus Day. In 2025, President Donald Trump issued a proclamation condemning critics of Columbus.

Yes, you read that right. Trump issued one of his ugly proclamations, criticizing those of us who don’t stand by whitewashed history. Yam Tits and his ugly band of White Christian Nationalists reject the idea that anyone but them created places worth saving and celebrating.

On Oct. 9, Trump issued a proclamation titled “Columbus Day, 2025.”

Trump celebrated Italian explorer Columbus as “the original American hero” in the proclamation, accusing his critics of slander.

“Outrageously, in recent years, Christopher Columbus has been a prime target of a vicious and merciless campaign to erase our history, slander our heroes, and attack our heritage,” reads the proclamation.

Meanwhile, in the world of bill paying and trying to live, it’s still the Economy Stupid! This is from Reuters. “How the United States is eating Trump’s tariffs.” This is reported by “Francesco Canepa and Howard Schneider.”

U.S. companies and consumers are bearing the brunt of the country’s new import tariffs, early indications show, contradicting assertions by President Donald Trump and complicating the Federal Reserve’s fight against inflation.
Trump famously predicted that foreign countries would pay the price of his protectionist policies, wagering that exporters would absorb that cost just to keep a foothold in the world’s largest consumer market

But academic studies, surveys and comments from businesses show that through the first months of Trump’s new trade regime it is U.S. companies that are footing the bill and passing on some of it to the consumer – with more price hikes likely.

“Most of the cost seems to be borne by U.S. firms,” Harvard University professor Alberto Cavallo said in an interview to discuss his findings. “We have seen a gradual pass-through to consumer prices and there’s a clear upward pressure.

A White House spokesperson said “Americans may face a transition period from tariffs” but the cost would “ultimately be borne by foreign exporters.” Companies were diversifying supply chains and bringing production to the United States, the spokesperson added.

Cavallo and researchers Paola Llamas and Franco Vasquez have been tracking the price of 359,148 goods, from carpets to coffee, at major online and brick-and-mortar retailers in the United States.
They found that imported goods have become 4% more expensive since Trump started imposing tariffs in early March, while the price of domestic products rose by 2%.

The biggest increases for imports were seen in goods that the United States cannot produce domestically, such as coffee, or that come from highly penalised countries, like Turkey.

These price hikes, while material, have been generally far smaller than the tariff rate on the products in question – implying that sellers were absorbing some of the cost as well.

Yet U.S. import prices, which don’t include tariffs, showed foreign exporters have been raising their prices in dollars and passing on to their U.S. buyers part of the greenback’s depreciation against their currencies.

“This suggests foreign producers are not absorbing much if any of the U.S. tariffs, consistent with prior economic research,” researchers at Yale University’s Budget Lab think-tank said in a blog post.
National indices of export prices paint the same picture. The cost of goods exported by China, Germany, Mexico, Turkey and India have all risen, with Japan the only exception.

Dr. Paul Krugman has a serious economic analysis of the evolving trade relationship between the US and China today in his Substack. “How Trump Is Making China Great. Why we’re going to lose the trade war, and much more besides.” Yes, we’re still practicing the dismal science, but being forewarned is better than being caught unprepared.

There is, however, one big difference between Trump’s trade policy and China’s. Namely, the Chinese appear to know what they’re doing.

It should have been obvious from the beginning that if America were to get into a full-scale trade war with China, the Chinese would have the upper hand. For one thing, in real terms China has the bigger economy.

Furthermore, while our economies are interdependent, America is more vulnerable to a rupture than China is. True, Chinese industry has relied to an important degree on sales to the United States. But the U.S. economy is dependent on China for critical inputs, above all those rare earths. And here’s the thing: China can quickly compensate, at least in part, for the loss of the U.S. export market by stimulating domestic demand. Given time, America could wean itself from dependence on Chinese inputs — but doing so would take years.

That said, a year ago the United States still had some important advantages over China. Although China has made great strides in science and technology, America still had a commanding position, thanks in large part to our unmatched research establishment, our great research universities, and our ability — thanks in large part to the openness of our society — to recruit talent from all over the world.

Furthermore, America had allies — which, as Phillips O’Brien emphasizes, are a vastly underrated source of national power. China may sometimes make alliances of convenience, but no more than that. The U.S. could and did build a powerful alliance system, because America was more than a nation: It was an idea and a set of values, values we shared with the rest of the democratic world. And you should always bear in mind that Europe, in particular, while it sometimes acts weak, is an economic superpower in the same league as China and America.

OK, you know what’s coming: Since taking office, Trump and his minions have been systematically demolishing each of these pillars of U.S. strength.

The first pillar mentioned, and the most obvious, is the destruction of the institutions and incentives that support scientific research, which include universities, private industry, and government agencies. You may read more details on that at the link. It’s been rather obvious to most of us, but his list is a good, quick reference.

This administration is characterized by cruelty and incompetence. The absolute destruction of government institutions and specialists made to enhance advancements that private industries can’t afford to fund profitably is a hallmark of both. Nowhere is this felt more than in institutions that support Public Health. Firing experts, then attempting to either rehire or replace them, is unbelievably disruptive to any science-based endeavor. This article is from CNN’s Brenda Goodman and Meg Terrill. “More than half of CDC staffers recently fired by Trump administration have been reinstated.”

Hundreds of staff fired from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention late Friday have been reinstated, according to the American Federation of Government Employees.

After a new round of layoff notices sent late Friday night to around 1,300 workers at the CDC, approximately 700 were reinstated on Saturday, while about 600 remain laid off, according to the union, which represents federal workers.

“The employees who received incorrect notifications were never separated from the agency and have all been notified that they are not subject to the reduction in force,” said Andrew Nixon, director of communications for the US Department of Health and Human Services.

Among reinstated employees are staff that publish the agency’s flagship journal, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, according to Dr. Debra Houry, who recently resigned as the agency’s chief medical officer and deputy director for program and science. Houry and other high-level CDC officials resigned in August in protest over the firing of recently confirmed CDC Director Dr. Susan Monarez.

Athalia Christie, the incident commander for the measles response, was among hundreds of employees mistakenly fired on Friday. The annual total of measles cases in the US – now up to 1,563 cases since January – is the highest by a significant margin since measles was declared eliminated in America a quarter-century ago.

Staff were also reinstated at the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, the Global Health Center, and the Public Health Infrastructure Center, which manages more than $3 billion in grants to 107 state and local governments to help build local public health workforces, said Dr. Brian Castrucci, who is president and chief executive officer of the de Beaumont Foundation, a nonprofit that advocates for public health workers.

Staff and officers at the CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service who were able to check their emails have also received notices that their firings were in error, according to a CDC official with knowledge of the situation who asked not to be named for fear of retaliation.

An analysis of the jobs and people reinstated is provided in the article. Meanwhile, the inhumanity and violence surrounding operations by ICE continue. Andrew Schwartz reports this headline. Documents Allege a Federal Agent at Portland ICE Threatened to Shoot an Ambulance Driver. Feds delayed medics who had come to pick up an injured protester. Then, according to confidential incident reports, the agents became aggressive.”

Late on Oct. 5, a Portland ambulance crew informed dispatchers over the radio that it was attempting to transport a patient from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to Legacy Emanuel Medical Center but that ICE officers were impeding its departure. Six minutes later, at 9:40 pm, according to publicly archived radio records, the medic driving the vehicle delivered an update: “We are still not being allowed to leave by ICE officers.”

Two confidential incident reports obtained by WW offer insight into what was going on inside the South Portland ICE facility at the time. The written accounts were filed by the ambulance crew members shortly after the incident—one report to their employer, American Medical Response, and another to a union representative—as documentation, as one report puts it, of a “conflict with federal agents.”

The two reports, filed by different medical workers, mirror each other’s accounts, and are consistent with publicly available audio recordings of emergency medical services radio communications, as well as 911 calls and dispatch reports obtained under public records law.

Both reports say that federal agents, in an effort to block the ambulance’s departure, stood directly in front of the vehicle. As the delay dragged on, according to the reports, the ambulance operator put the vehicle into park, causing it to lurch forward slightly.

The reports indicate the federal agents did not like this—so much so that an agent threatened to shoot and arrest the driver. The driver, frightened, asked why. An agent, according to the reports, responded that the driver had attempted to hit him with the ambulance.

“I was still in such shock,” the driver later wrote, “that they were not only accusing me of such a thing, but crowding and cornering me in the seat, pointing and screaming at me, threatening to shoot and arrest me, and not allowing the ambulance to leave the scene. This was no longer a safe scene, and in that moment, I realized that the scene had not actually been safe the entire time that they were blocking us from exiting, and that we were essentially trapped.”

The latest child abduction by ICE has occurred in Boston. This is from MASS LIVE. “Mass. 13-year-old was picked up by ICE after a police interaction and now he’s hundreds of miles from home.” The story was filed by Adam Bass. Is this really the kind of country we want to live in?

A 13-year-old boy from Everett who was arrested and detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has been transferred to a juvenile facility in Virginia.

Andrew Lattarulo, of Georges Cotes Law, said his firm received an email from the U.S. Attorney’s Office confirming the child was transferred on Friday at 9:30 a.m. He forwarded the email to MassLive.

The boy is still in custody, Lattarulo said.

The transfer occurred on the same day Judge Richard G. Stearns of the Boston federal court ordered the boy’s release by Tuesday unless ICE and the Department of Homeland Security could provide grounds for continued detention, according to court documents

ICE arrested the boy, whose family is from Brazil, after an interaction with the Everett Police Department, the Boston Globe reported.

The boy’s mother received a call on Thursday to pick her son up from the department; however, an hour and a half later, she was told ICE had taken her son, the Globe reported.

Something is very wrong with a human being who can support this level of cruelty. Meanwhile, The Hill‘s Emily Brooks reports on the callous and snivelling Speaker of the House’s latest shrug. “Johnson: ‘We’re barreling toward one of the longest shutdowns in American history’.

Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said Monday the government shutdown is on its way to being one of the longest in history unless Democrats accept the House-passed, GOP-crafted stopgap bill to reopen the government.

“We’re barreling toward one of the longest shutdowns in American history, unless Democrats dropped their partisan demands and passed a clean, no-strings-attached budget to reopen the government and pay our federal workers,” Johnson said in a press conference on the 13th day of the government shutdown.

Congressional leaders have been locked in a standoff over government funding as Democrats demand that Republicans make concessions on health care, notably Affordable Care Act tax credits that are expiring at the end of the year. Republican leaders have refused to negotiate on health care during a shutdown, arguing that that Democrats must accept the “clean” funding stopgap the House passed in September — and which has failed to advance in the Senate seven times.

The shutdown, 13 days and counting, already marks one of the longest federal government funding lapses in modern history.

The longest government shutdown, which was also the last time a federal funding lapse occurred, was from 2018 to 2019 during President Trump’s first term, lasting 35 days.

Things are not going to get better until we’re rid of these tinpot Republicans. The signs of stagflation and the accompanying suffering are on the increase. I’m going wonky on you again with this article from Investors Observer. “This is stagflation (literally): U.S. hiring crashes to recession levels as ‘second stagflation mountain’ rises.”

Stagflation is no longer just a rhetorical device to describe the U.S. economy in 2025.

Real signs of its toxic mix of stagnant growth and stubborn inflation are emerging across both the labor market and consumer prices, painting a grim near-term outlook.

According to Apollo chief economist Torsten Slok, the U.S. hiring rate, a number of hires as a percentage of total employment, has fallen to recessionary levels.

A recent Apollo chart comparing the quits rate and hiring rate shows that hiring has plunged to levels last seen during the 2020 pandemic crash, and is now approaching lows from the Global Financial Crisis.

With slower job growth and rising unemployment, Slok warned that the labor market is nearing a virtual standstill, “where workers are not getting hired or changing jobs.”

At the same time, inflation remains stubbornly high. A separate Apollo analysis found that 60% of the CPI basket is currently rising at an annualized rate above 3%, well above the Federal Reserve’s 2% target.

While that marks an improvement from recent months, when 72% of CPI components ran above 3%, the persistence underscores how broad-based inflation remains.

“Is a second inflation mountain emerging?” Slok asked, referencing the first inflation surge that began in 2021 and peaked in mid-2022 with headline CPI at 9.1%.

Together, the data of higher inflation and slower growth strengthen the case that the U.S. is now grappling with stagflation, a scenario the Fed may find difficult to reverse without triggering deeper economic pain.

One and done! One of the most disruptive institutions since the Trump regime of Terror has been the Supreme Court. This report by Adam Lipak finally shows how the Republican Appointees really are christofascists trying to hide behind the cloak of Conservatism and Originalism. We’ve seen more radical interpretations by the Roberts court than not. This was published in the New York Times. “Originalist ‘Bombshell’ Complicates Case on Trump’s Power to Fire Officials. As the Supreme Court seems poised to expand the president’s power, a leading scholar whose work the justices have often cited issued a provocative dissent.”

The Supreme Court will hear arguments in December about whether President Trump can fire government officials for any reason, or no reason, despite laws meant to shield them from politics.

There is little question that the court will side with the president. Its conservative majority has repeatedly signaled that it plans to adopt the “unitary executive theory,” which says the original understanding of the Constitution demands letting the president remove executive branch officials as he sees fit.

But a new article, from a leading originalist law professor, has complicated and perhaps upended the conventional wisdom. The legal academy treated the development like breaking news.

“Bombshell!” William Baude, a law professor at the University of Chicago who himself is a prominent originalist, wrote on social media. “Caleb Nelson, one of the most respected originalist scholars in the country, comes out against the unitary executive interpretation” of the Constitution.

Professor Nelson, who teaches at the University of Virginia and is a former law clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas, wrote that the text of the Constitution and the historical evidence surrounding it grants Congress broad authority to shape the executive branch, including by putting limits on the president’s power to fire people.

Professor Nelson’s article was published Sept. 29 by the Democracy Project, an initiative at the New York University School of Law that plans to release 100 essays in 100 days by an ideologically mixed group.

The article is particularly notable, said Richard H. Pildes, who is a law professor at N.Y.U. and one of the project’s founders.

“If a highly respected originalist scholar like Professor Nelson, on whom the court relies frequently, denies that originalism supports the unitary executive theory,” Professor Pildes said, “that inevitably raises serious questions about an originalist justification for the court’s looming approach.”

Professor Nelson’s scholarship has been exceptionally influential. It has been cited in more than a dozen Supreme Court opinions, including ones by every member of the six-justice conservative majority.

Finally Friday Reads: Gone, Gone, the Damage Done

Posted: October 10, 2025 | Author: dakinikat | Filed under: #FARTUS, #We are so Fucked | Tags: @johnbuss.bsky.social John Buss, Facist #FARTUS, Got big Crime in the White House, Maria Corina Machado, MIT’s president, Neil Young, Sally Kornbluth | 4 Comments

“Oops!” John Buss, @repeat1968

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

It’s been another tough week watching the news and goings on in what used to be a mostly civilized democracy. The Nobel Prizes came out today, and of course, Yam Tit’s Caligula-level chaos and search for the 2025 Peace Prize once again went unrequited. He seems to be unaware of what these represent and the type of people rewarded. Does any of this sound remotely familiar? It seems that holding up the best among us shows the worst guy on the planet what he lacks.

The Nobel Peace Prize for 2025 goes to a brave and committed champion of peace – to a woman who keeps the flame of democracy burning amid a growing darkness.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided to award the Nobel Peace Prize for 2025 to Maria Corina Machado.

She is receiving the Nobel Peace Prize for her tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy.

As the leader of the democracy movement in Venezuela, Maria Corina Machado is one of the most extraordinary examples of civilian courage in Latin America in recent times.

Ms Machado has been a key, unifying figure in a political opposition that was once deeply divided – an opposition that found common ground in the demand for free elections and representative government. This is precisely what lies at the heart of democracy: our shared willingness to defend the principles of popular rule, even though we disagree. At a time when democracy is under threat, it is more important than ever to defend this common ground.

Venezuela has evolved from a relatively democratic and prosperous country to a brutal, authoritarian state that is now suffering a humanitarian and economic crisis. Most Venezuelans live in deep poverty, even as the few at the top enrich themselves. The violent machinery of the state is directed against the country’s own citizens. Nearly 8 million people have left the country. The opposition has been systematically suppressed by means of election rigging, legal prosecution and imprisonment.

Venezuela’s authoritarian regime makes political work extremely difficult. As a founder of Súmate, an organisation devoted to democratic development, Ms Machado stood up for free and fair elections more than 20 years ago. As she said: “It was a choice of ballots over bullets.” In political office and in her service to organisations since then, Ms Machado has spoken out for judicial independence, human rights and popular representation. She has spent years working for the freedom of the Venezuelan people.

Ahead of the election of 2024, Ms Machado was the opposition’s presidential candidate, but the regime blocked her candidacy. She then backed the representative of a different party, Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia, in the election. Hundreds of thousands of volunteers mobilised across political divides. They were trained as election observers to ensure a transparent and fair election. Despite the risk of harassment, arrest and torture, citizens across the country held watch over the polling stations. They made sure the final tallies were documented before the regime could destroy ballots and lie about the outcome.

The efforts of the collective opposition, both before and during the election, were innovative and brave, peaceful and democratic. The opposition received international support when its leaders publicised the vote counts that had been collected from the country’s election districts, showing that the opposition had won by a clear margin. But the regime refused to accept the election result, and clung to power.

Democracy is a precondition for lasting peace. However, we live in a world where democracy is in retreat, where more and more authoritarian regimes are challenging norms and resorting to violence. The Venezuelan regime’s rigid hold on power and its repression of the population are not unique in the world. We see the same trends globally: rule of law abused by those in control, free media silenced, critics imprisoned, and societies pushed towards authoritarian rule and militarisation. In 2024, more elections were held than ever before, but fewer and fewer are free and fair.

Reading the entire announcement is not only a history lesson but a reminder of what a civilized democracy looks like. I’ve decided to showcase Editorial cartoons from around the globe to put things into perspective. It’s not a fun time when a small group of crazies has basically dropped you into the hands of a crazed Bond Villain. I’m continually reminded that the diverse group of humanity sits on the anti-Trump bench.

Here’s the Bulwark‘s Andre Egger’s Friday thoughts, as many of us take note of who stood up and who folded. The hero institution of the Nixon Watergate Scandal has gone beyond soft. It’s one of the many obvious places to be filled with the howls of surrender monkeys.

One of the most insidious things about Donald Trump’s decade-long turn atop our politics is the way it has seared our political conscience. For years, it has been a cliché to call his various awful behaviors and decisions “shocking, but not surprising.” These days, however, we seem to be losing some of our inability even to feel the shock.

You could see this in some of the early reactions last night to the news of Letitia James’s indictment on two counts of mortgage fraud. The New York attorney general has been near the top of Trump’s enemies list for a while, and literally nobody—at least that I can dig up—seems to be trying to argue that this indictment isn’t an act of naked political retribution. (To be fair, arguing this would be difficult after Trump removed all doubt last month by accidentally putting a post out in public that he had meant to send as a DM to Attorney General Pam Bondi demanding James’s prosecution.)

Instead, the Republican line—parroted by some who should really know better—is that this is a justified act of retribution, in some sort of street-justice sense. Or if not justified, at least understandable, from Trump’s point of view: They tried to get him, now he’s trying to get them. Most charitably, they say, it is an unfortunate tit-for-tat that can’t go on indefinitely—but also a situation in which Trump is just one bad actor in a cast of many.

An editorial from the new-look, more Trump-forgiving Washington Post editorial board this week cast the current moment along those lines. “Many Democrats still cannot see how their legal aggression against Trump during his four years out of power set the stage for the dangerous revenge tour on which he is now embarked,” it mourned. Those who were trying to hold Trump accountable had “show[n] little restraint” in their investigations—a big part of why he was now “showing still less restraint” while hitting back. It’s unfortunate that he lashed out at you like that—but maybe you shouldn’t have made him so mad.

We should be clear about this. There is no comparison between the acts Letitia James took as attorney general of New York to hit Trump’s companies and the ones he is now taking to hit “back” at her. The difference between them is not the difference between a lesser act of political malice and a greater one. (Although it is worth noting the massive difference of scale here: While James’s civil suit accused Trump’s companies of pocketing hundreds of millions of dollars off a years-long practice of misrepresenting properties, the indictment against James accuses her of filing a misleading loan application andcoming out ahead less than $20,000.) It’s the difference between the application of law and the application of raw power.

When people accuse James of “lawfare,” or of pursuing a “politicized” civil fraud case against Trump, they mean that she pursued that case with a zeal they believe she would not have shown against another target. Could be! But her fundamental case, as the New York Times noted last month, was not unreasonable. It was rooted in sworn testimony Trump’s former personal lawyer Michael Cohen had made before Congress that Trump habitually inflated the value of his properties to get favorable treatment in loans. She won her civil case against Trump at trial. This year, an appeals court vacated the financial penalty the initial judge had handed down, but did not vacate Trump’s civil liability. Trump had his day to argue in court that James’s investigations into him were vindictive and politically motivated—and the courts threw that argument out.

Justin Glawe from Public Notice explains Trump’s autocratic invasion and occupation of Portland, Oregon. “The impossibly dumb reason for Trump’s invasion of Portland. It’d be hilarious if he wasn’t the commander in chief.”

“Well wait a minute, am I watching things on television that are different from what’s happening?”

That was Donald Trump, making an incredible admission to Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek that he was confused about unrest in Portland while watching TV. The call took place on September 26. That same day, Fox News ran two segments in which b-roll of rioting in Portland from 2020 ran in the background as guests spoke to on-air personalities.

A Wall Street Journal report has details:

Trump recounted his conversation with Kotek during a weekend interview with NBC News’ correspondent Yamiche Alcindor. He alluded to their conflicting accounts of Portland.

“I spoke to the governor, she was very nice,” Trump said. “But I said, ‘Well wait a minute, am I watching things on television that are different from what’s happening? My people tell me different.’ They are literally attacking and there are fires all over the place … it looks like terrible.”

In short, it sounds like Trump was watching old riot footage on Fox, thought it was happening in real time, then went on Truth Social the next day and said he was ordering troops to “war ravaged” Portland with “full force, if necessary.”

Trump’s confusion isn’t just darkly comical (and a troubling reminder of the president’s growing senility) — it’s also a stark illustration of the whiplash-inducing disconnect between his rhetoric and the reality on the ground in cities like Portland and Chicago.

Portland is not “on fire” as Trump has claimed. In fact, things are so calm there that Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem took time on Tuesday to stand on the roof of the city’s ICE facility and have a staring contest with a man in a chicken suit. It was filmed, of course.

Between the attacks on L.A., Portland, and Chicago, I’d say those events will go down as days of infamy. The main difference from the usual usage of the term is that the hostile government attacking innocent Americans is our own. Is this really what those stupid Trump voters actually wanted?

We also have our own version of Tokyo Rose, ICE Barbie. This is from CNN. “Video of Kristi Noem blaming Democrats for shutdown rolling out at TSA security checkpoints across the country.” State propaganda, anyone?

In an extraordinary effort to inject politics into millions of Americans’ travel experiences, the Trump administration plans to roll out a video at airports across the United States that will blame Democrats for lapses in Transportation Security Administration workers’ pay because of the government shutdown.

People waiting in airport security lines will now be met with a new video of the Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem addressing the shutdown.

“It is TSA’s top priority to make sure that you have the most pleasant and efficient airport experience as possible while we keep you safe,” she says. “However, Democrats in Congress refuse to fund the federal government, and because of this, many of our operations are impacted, and most of our TSA employees are working without pay.”

The video was first obtained by Fox News.

The Department of Homeland Security responded to CNN’s questions about the video in a statement that noted the “public service video is rolling out across the country,” then repeated the language in the video almost verbatim.

“We will continue to do all that we can to avoid delays that will impact your travel, and our hope is that Democrats will soon recognize the importance of opening the government,” the video concludes.

TSA checkpoints often include videos featuring government officials welcoming travelers and explanations of procedures, but they usually do not contain political messages.

MIT becomes the latest university to take arms in the War against Stupidity. This is from the once great Washington Post and Susan Svrluga. “MIT rejects Trump administration deal for priority federal funding. MIT is one of the nine schools that were asked to agree to adopt conservative priorities and policies in exchange for funding perks.”

MIT’s president turned down the Trump administration’s offer of priority access for federal funding Friday, publicly releasing a letterthat emphasized the eliteuniversity’s values including free expression and “the core belief that scientific funding should be based on scientific merit alone.”

Last week, the Trump administration offered nine universities a “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” presented as an opportunity to receive competitive advantages from the federal government and from private donors for institutions that sign on. It was the latest attempt by the administration to force colleges into compliance with President Donald Trump’s ideological priorities, after months of federal research funding freezes and investigations into schools’ adherence to civil rights laws.

The administration asked the schools to, among other changes, agree toprohibit consideration of factors such as gender, race or political views in admissions, scholarships or programming; freeze tuition for five years; adopt a strict definition of gender; and maintain neutrality at all levels when representing the institution. In a letter to universities, administration officials asked for feedback to the compact by Oct. 20.

One higher education leader in Texas immediately said it was an honor to be among the first schools asked to participate, and a White House official said other colleges had asked to sign on.

But free speech advocates and some experts in higher educationwarned the sweeping terms of the document would threaten universities’ independence and urged universities to turn it down. They also saidthat rejecting it would bring considerable risk, as the compact appeared to threaten research funding and access to student loans. Visas for international students and scholars could be yanked from universities that sign the compact and do not comply. “Institutions of higher education are free to develop models and values other than those below,” the compact stated, “if the institution elects to [forgo] federal benefits.”

Sally Kornbluth, MIT’s president, wasthe first to publicly turn down the offer. She shared her letter to U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon on Friday with the campus community. In it, she wrote that she appreciated the chance to meet with McMahon earlier this year “to discuss the priorities we share for American higher education.” MIT’s clear values put excellence above all and MIT prides itself on rewarding merit, she wrote.

Notice the number of women doing the hard work of standing up to Fear Leader?

Anyway, I have to go to the clinic and get a check-up before they yank my Medicare or do something else awful to it. I hope you have a peaceful weekend. Tomorrow is my Dad’s birthday and the anniversary of his death. I miss him dearly, although I am glad he doesn’t have to see all this. Please listen to Neil Young’s song. It’s spot on. I almost transported myself back to Junior High School with my first guitar. I’m warming this song and that guitar up for October 18th. It even has a Woodstock guitar strap.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

No more great again
No more great again
Got big crime in DC at the White House
Don’t need no fascist rules
Don’t want no fascist schools
Don’t want soldiers walking on our streets
Got big crime in DC at the White House
There’s big crime in DC at the White House
Got to get the fascists out
Got to clean the White House out
Don’t want no soldiers on our streets
Got big crime in DC at the White House
Got big crime in DC at the White House
No more great again
No more great again
Got big crime in DC at the White House
No more money to the fascists
The billionaire fascists
Time to blackout the system
(No) no more great again
No more great again
Time to blackout the system
Got big crime in DC at the White House
Got big crime in DC at the White House
No more great again
No more great again
Got big crime in DC at the White House
No more great again
No more great again
Got big crime in DC at the White House
Got big crime in DC at the White House
No more great again
No more great again

Finally Friday Reads: Project 2025 Plan to Destroy America is Offical

Posted: October 3, 2025 | Author: dakinikat | Filed under: #FARTUS, #MAGAnomics, #We are so Fucked, People Power, Russell Vought, U.S. Politics | Tags: @repeat1968, Destruction of Federal Agencies, government shutdown 2025m, John Buss, Lousiana's Cancer Alley, People Power, Project 25, Russ Vought, Steven Brodner | 6 Comments

“I’m pretty sure all the Military Brass are impressed that the Secretary of War had his own personal makeup room built in the Pentagon. John Buss, @repeat1968

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

Most of us knew that Project 2025 would be the basis of policy. Republicans have wanted an Imperial Presidency for some time. Republicans have elected at least 3 useful idiots as President with the goal of destroying American democracy in mind. It’s why we have a huge deficit, and spending has been concentrated on the rich who can pay-to-play to get massive tax cuts and huge government subsidies.

There are examples in every state they control. Here in Louisiana, the damage from oil extraction and affiliated chemical industries has created massive damage, and just at the precise time that the EPA has been fully filleted. Not only has nothing real been done to abate the chemical spill that happened earlier this summer after a poorly managed plant that exploded in Roseland, a primarily black community, but it has not been fully abated. The actions behind the removal of LSU’s premier Lake Maurapas researcher have become clearer. Today, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health released this important research. “Louisiana’s ‘Cancer Alley’ Is More Deadly Than Previously Imagined. New research shows that the industrial pollution—and the risk to human health—on Louisiana’s Cancer Alley have been significantly underestimated.

On an 85-mile stretch of the Mississippi River between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, communities exist alongside some 200 fossil fuel and petrochemical production plants. Since the 1980s, the area has been known as Cancer Alley.

These plants process about 25% of the U.S.’s petrochemical products, Peter DeCarlo, PhD, associate professor in Environmental Health and Engineering, said in the July 2 episode of Public Health On Call—with many of the byproducts and emissions winding up in nearby communities’ air, water, and soil.

Residents of these communities suffer the effects of extreme air pollution, including increased rates and risks of maternal, reproductive, and newborn health harms; respiratory illnesses; and cancer. One area has the highest risk of cancer from industrial air pollution in the U.S.—more than seven times the national average.

But new research from DeCarlo, Keeve Nachman, PhD ’06, MHS ’01, professor in Environmental Health and Engineering, and their teams shows that the pollution—and the risk to human health—has been significantly underestimated.

In this Q&A, adapted from that podcast episode, DeCarlo and Nachman discuss their work measuring levels of pollutants in Louisiana and explain what these conclusions mean for how the U.S. should regulate carcinogens.

We may be drowning in toxic chemicals, but other states and cities are experiencing ICE Raids that resemble SS maneuvers. Additionally, we have new threats. Since the reality on the ground has embarrassed the Trump plan to send the military to “wartorn” Portland to defuse his imagined war on the ground, he’s come up with an alternative plan. This is from ABC News. “Leavitt says Trump exploring cutting aid to Portland.”White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump is exploring plans to cut federal funding to Portland due to what she said was a rise in “Antifa” related incidents.”

“We will not fund states that allow anarchy,” she told reporters.

Antifa is not a group, but rather a political philosophy or movement. The term comes from the longer “anti-fascist” and is used as a catchall for groups that oppose the concept of authoritarianism, neo-Nazism and white supremacy.

If you want to sum it up, try this hypothesis for size. Republicans are willing to let all of us starve and die as long as they can get paid for enabling modern-day Robber Barons.

About six months into this reign of terror, murder, and destruction, I’m still not certain the legacy media is getting the bigger picture. However, yesterday, an announcement by Trump made them perk their ears once more. Will it be enough? This is from the AP. “Trump no longer distancing himself from Project 2025 as he uses the shutdown to further pursue its goals.”

President Donald Trump is openly embracing the conservative blueprint he desperately tried to distance himself from during the 2024 campaign, as one of its architects works to use the government shutdown to accelerate his goals of slashing the size of the federal workforce and punishing Democratic states.

In a post on his Truth Social site Thursday morning, Trump announced he would be meeting with his budget chief, “Russ Vought, he of PROJECT 2025 Fame, to determine which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut, and whether or not those cuts will be temporary or permanent.”

The comments represented a dramatic about-face for Trump, who spent much of last year denouncing Project 2025, The Heritage Foundation’s massive proposed overhaul of the federal government, which was drafted by many of his longtime allies and current and former administration officials.

You may recall that the implication of this document was central to the Democratic Party campaign. Kamala Harris made it a focal point of the convention and other speeches.

Top Trump campaign leaders spent much of 2024 livid at The Heritage Foundation for publishing a book full of unpopular proposals that Democrats tried to pin on the campaign to warn a second Trump term would be too extreme.

While many of the policies outlined in its 900-plus pages aligned closely with the agenda that Trump was proposing — particularly on curbing immigration and dismantling certain federal agencies — others called for action Trump had never discussed, like banning pornography, or Trump’s team was actively trying to avoid, like withdrawing approval for abortion medication.

Trump repeatedly insisted he knew nothing about the group or who was behind it, despite his close ties with many of its authors. They included John McEntee, his former director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office, and Paul Dans, former chief of staff at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.

“I know nothing about Project 2025,” Trump insisted in July 2024. “I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”

Trump’s campaign chiefs were equally critical.

“President Trump’s campaign has been very clear for over a year that Project 2025 had nothing to do with the campaign, did not speak for the campaign, and should not be associated with the campaign or the President in any way,” wrote Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita in a campaign memo. They added, “Reports of Project 2025’s demise would be greatly welcomed and should serve as notice to anyone or any group trying to misrepresent their influence with President Trump and his campaign — it will not end well for you.”

Trump has since gone on to stock his second administration with its authors, including Vought, “border czar” Tom Homan, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, immigration hard-liner Stephen Miller and Brendan Carr, who wrote Project 2025’s chapter on the Federal Communications Commission and now chairs the panel.

Heritage did not respond to a request for comment Thursday. But Dans, the project’s former director, said it’s been “exciting” to see so much of what was laid out in the book put into action.

“It’s gratifying. We’re very proud of the work that was done for this express purpose: to have a doer like President Trump ready to roll on Day One,” said Dans, who is currently running for Senate against Lindsey Graham in South Carolina.

It was frequently averred that Stephen Miller was central to all plans for the project’s implementation. Only a few public intellectuals continued to warn of the plan and steps taken, while Yam Tit still shrugged off any implication that he was following the plan’s blueprint during the first six months. Well, that curtain has dropped.

AXIOS sums this evolution up neatly. “Trump charts path to total control amid government shutdown.’ This is reported by Zachary Basu.

President Trump is seizing on the government shutdown as an “unprecedented opportunity” to consolidate control in the Oval Office, accelerating a trend toward unchecked power.

Why it matters: Many Democrats see the shutdown as a necessary evil to halt — or at least slow — Trump’s steamrolling of democratic norms and independent institutions. So far, the standoff is only emboldening the White House.

Zoom in: Trump said he met Thursday with White House budget chief Russ Vought to discuss what “Democrat agencies” should get cuts, casting the shutdown as a chance to shrink a federal workforce Trump has long viewed as hostile.

Goading Democrats, Trump flaunted Vought’s role in Project 2025 (“he of PROJECT 2025 Fame”) — the hard-right blueprint for expanding executive power that Trump disavowed on the campaign trail after it became a political liability.
For Vought, the shutdown offers a unique opening: a live test of theories he has spent years refining on how to weaken Congress, purge the bureaucracy and concentrate power in the presidency.

Already, Vought has announced the termination of nearly $8 billion in funding for clean-energy projects in 16 states, all of which voted for Kamala Harris in 2024 and have Democratic senators.

He also has frozen $18 billion in New York City infrastructure projects, a thinly veiled shot at Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.).
Legal challenges are inevitable: Congress controls the power of the purse, and federal officials privately have warned that Vought’s plans for mass firings during the shutdown may violate appropriations law.

The big picture: As Axios has documented, the shutdown is only one front in Trump’s broader campaign of consolidation.

Military: In an unprecedented partisan address this week, Trump told more than 800 generals and admirals to prepare for a “war” against domestic “enemies,” urging them to treat America’s cities as “training grounds.”
Academia: The administration is asking universities to sign a 10-point “compact” that would grant preferential access to federal funding if schools agree to freeze tuition, protect conservative speech, apply strict definitions of gender, limit international students and other Trump priorities.
Rule of law: Days after Trump publicly pressured Attorney General Pam Bondi to charge his political enemies, the Justice Department indicted former FBI director James Comey. Other Trump foes, including New York Attorney General Letitia James and Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), are under investigation.
Civil society: FBI director Kash Patel severed ties with the Anti-Defamation League on Thursday, accusing the Jewish civil rights group of “functioning like a terrorist organization” after MAGA activists discovered that Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA was listed in its now-removed “Glossary of Extremism and Hate.” Trump also has urged the Justice Department to investigate Democratic megadonor George Soros’ Open Society Foundations as part of a crackdown on liberal groups following Kirk’s assassination.
Corporate America: Trump demanded last week that Microsoft fire its head of global affairs, Lisa Monaco, because she served in the Biden administration — a reminder that even corporate giants aren’t immune from political retaliation. Trump had previously called on Intel’s CEO to resign over alleged ties to China, but backed off after the U.S. government took a 10% equity stake in the chip-maker.

Mostly Monday Reads: Of Protests, Grass Roots, and Boycotts

Posted: September 22, 2025 | Author: dakinikat | Filed under: #FARTUS, #MAGAnomics, #We are so Fucked, kakistocracy | Tags: @johnbuss.bsky.social John Buss, Charlie Boy Kirk hate speech, Defend the democracy, Donald Trump's Big Pirate Adventure, John Buss @repeat1968, Trump Team Grift and Incompetence | 6 Comments

“It’s a movement!” John Buss, @repeat1968 (me: Check his diaper)

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

There are signs of democracy that indicate that a lot of us are not going to go peacefully into the dark night of authoritarianism. Instead, we’re going peacefully into the streets day after day to protest the takeover of American Cities by ICE and the military. The next big “No Kings” protest is on October 18th. It looks to be much larger than the first. The number of Americans concerned about First Amendment Speech Rights can be seen in the growing numbers impacting the Disney stock prices and sales. The outrage surrounding the firing of Jimmy Kimmel has grown into its own movement. You can see it in the numbers. Trump is extremely unpopular. You may see that in the numbers, too.

You may have noticed that I’m relying a lot on the Substacks of what are generally known as public intellectuals. Well-known researchers like Dr Paul Krugman and many others have switched from the Op-Ed pages of compromised newspapers to the platform. Happy little nerds like me thrive on folks who can produce the evidence.

Today, I give you “Strength in Numbers.” This is the substack of G. Elliot Morris, who calls himself a data-driven journalist. “A lot of powerful people just don’t realize how unpopular Trump is. The backlash to ABC/Disney canceling Kimmel shows why it’s important for businesses and the public to understand that two-thirds of Americans are not Trump voters.” It’s hard to fight back against an executive branch full of incompetence, extremist thinking, and chaos. However, underlying trends and events show that the resistance is clearly growing. Go look at the graph. To describe the increase in the number of Google searches for “Cancel Disney” is eye-popping.

Last week, ABC/Disney canceled Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show after the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, threatened to revoke the broadcast licenses of television stations that carry the program. The backlash has been swift: As I pointed out Saturday morning, search interest for “Cancel Disney+” has hit an all-time high — even higher than the boycott movements from when Disney “went woke” in 2020-2022. The current Disney boycott is now 4x as large as any over the last 5 years, gauged by search interest:

Last week, ABC/Disney canceled Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show after the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, threatened to revoke the broadcast licenses of television stations that carry the program. The backlash has been swift: As I pointed out Saturday morning, search interest for “Cancel Disney+” has hit an all-time high — even higher than the boycott movements from when Disney “went woke” in 2020-2022. The current Disney boycott is now 4x as large as any over the last 5 years, gauged by search interest.

This is not limited to internet posters and Google searchers; investors are worried too. Disney’s stock is down 2% over the last week, while the overall market is up nearly 1%.

This all intersects with a point I’ve been making in this newsletter for a while: many people fundamentally underestimate how unpopular Trump is. As the Disney episode illustrates, they do this at their own peril.

The graphs for Trump’s unpopularity are also astounding. Now, if we can just get out the vote and overcome all the anti-democratic election tampering going on in Republican States. The challenge will be a strong GOTV for all these Trump Haters. However, the intensity measures are astounding. We could do it.

Compare Trump’s topline job approval (-11) to that of other recent presidents, and he stands out quite clearly (not in a good way).

The president’s entire domestic policy agenda is underwater, too — especially on the economy and inflation, the two issues that won him the 2024 election.

This analysis by CNN’s Stephan Collinson highlights the nonsense performance by Trump and his cronies in an attempt to take the bases’ short, hateful, attention span away from military attacks, the destruction of the White House, and, however you frame all the nonsense surrounding Charlie Boy’s untimely death by gun violence that he clearly encouraged. “Trump will never change, but Kirk’s death shines a path to MAGA’s future.”

Of course, now that fascism has been clearly implanted in America, it is “wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.”

President Donald Trump wants the world to understand that Charlie Kirk’s killing will not temper him or induce him to mend the country’s divides.

…

But Trump bluntly and deliberately signaled that forgiveness and unity were for others, and that he’d use Kirk’s assassination to intensify his efforts to impose personal power even more ruthlessly.

He therefore confirmed that the immediate political consequence of Kirk’s shocking assassination will be more political discord.

The president described the Turning Point USA founder as “a missionary with a noble spirit and a great, great purpose.”

“He did not hate his opponents. He wanted the best for them,” Trump said. But in a moment of brazen self-awareness that epitomized his presidency, he then broke from the script. “That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponent.” Trump went on, “And I don’t want the best for them.” Trump seemed to almost apologize to Erika Kirk. But it was a moment when couldn’t stop himself. Or didn’t want to, so he could remain true to himself.

Statements like these are why we must remember the lessons of the civil rights movement. We cannot afford to surrender the high ground or make it invisible. We also must continue to shine a light on the ongoing grift that is the primary feature of any Trump endeavor. This reminder is from NOTUS and written by Jose Peliery. Trump’s public appearances are sideshows and attention grabs. Pulling the curtain back is mandatory. “The Justice Department Had 36 Lawyers Fighting Corruption Full-Time. Under Trump, It’s Down to Two. The Public Integrity Section is the latest casualty in the administration’s attacks on Nixon-era good-government reforms.”

All the other lawyers in the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section have either quit under pressure, resigned in protest or been detailed to other matters across the nation, according to several sources who spoke with NOTUS. The section has also lost all but one of more than a dozen paralegals.

“To me, it just screams that public corruption cases are no longer a priority of DOJ,” said Andrew Tessman, a prosecutor who left the Justice Department this month. “I cannot understand why we would want to restrict that section.”

Sources with knowledge of the section’s operations say the reduction in staff means it can no longer advise the 94 U.S. attorneys’ offices around the country on how to build cases against crooked government officials — let alone prosecute new cases on its own.

To protect against politically motivated abuses, the DOJ’s Justice Manual has long required prosecutors in local U.S. attorneys’ offices to consult with the Public Integrity Section on any “federal criminal matter that involves alleged or suspected violations of federal or state campaign financing laws, federal patronage crimes, or corruption of the election process.”

But Trump’s DOJ reversed that policy in June. “Department leadership is currently revising this section,” this part of the Justice Manual now says. “The consultation requirement is suspended while revisions are ongoing.”

Several former Justice Department employees expressed extreme concern that the change in the Justice Manual, coupled with the flattening of the Public Integrity Section, opens the door for the Trump administration to engage in partisan prosecutions of Democrats by assigning the job to prosecutors working for U.S. attorneys — political appointees nominated by the president.

This news is no surprise, given the rest of what we’ve examined today. Maybe we can get rid of them with the latest 2-day extravaganza Rapture that never happens. Once again, I bring you William Kristol from The Bulwark: “Bag Man.”

Who uses cash anymore? Tom Homan, that’s who. On September 20, 2024, Trump’s border czar accepted $50,000 from undercover FBI agents. And no, it wasn’t Venmoed. The cash was in a bag from the food chain Cava. (Since you asked: I’m partial to the Spicy Lamb + Avocado combo. But I haven’t yet tried the newly minted Garlicky Chicken Shawarma Bowl. Morning Shots readers, let me know how it is in the comments).

The story broke Saturday afternoon in a detailed and well-sourced MSNBC News report by star investigative reporter Carol Leonnig, a four-time Pulitzer Prize winner who left the Washington Post less than two months ago, and Ken Dilanian, who has covered the Justice Department and the intelligence agencies for NBC and MSNBC for a decade.

Here’s the heart of the story:

In an undercover operation last year, the FBI recorded Tom Homan, now the White House border czar, accepting $50,000 in cash after indicating he could help the agents — who were posing as business executives — win government contracts in a second Trump administration, according to multiple people familiar with the probe and internal documents reviewed by MSNBC.

The FBI and the Justice Department planned to wait to see whether Homan would deliver on his alleged promise once he became the nation’s top immigration official. But the case indefinitely stalled soon after Donald Trump became president again in January, according to six sources familiar with the matter. In recent weeks, Trump appointees officially closed the investigation, after FBI Director Kash Patel requested a status update on the case, two of the people said.

The federal investigation was launched in western Texas in the summer of 2024 after a subject in a separate investigation claimed Homan was soliciting payments in exchange for awarding contracts should Trump win the presidential election, according to an internal Justice Department summary of the probe reviewed by MSNBC and people familiar with the case. The U.S. Attorney’s office in the Western District of Texas, working with the FBI, asked the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section to join its ongoing probe “into the Border Czar and former Acting Director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement Tom Homan and others based on evidence of payment from FBI undercover agents in exchange for facilitating future contracts related to border enforcement.”

Remarkably, the Trump Justice Department isn’t actually denying the cash payment or any other fact reported by Leonnig and Dilanian. FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche simply asserted that their review of the case “found no credible evidence of any criminal wrongdoing.”

A New York Times report soon followed up on MSNBC’s story, adding the fun Cava bag detail and also the intriguing fact that the sting “grew out of a long-running counterintelligence investigation that had not been targeting Mr. Homan.” In other words, the Biden Justice Department was not out to get Homan.

Steve Levy of Wired has this interesting bit of news today. “I Thought I Knew Silicon Valley. I Was Wrong. Tech got what it wanted by electing Trump. A year later, it looks more like a suicide pact.” Go look at the artwork. It’s genius.

For decades, Mark Lemley’s life as an intellectual property lawyer was orderly enough. He’s a professor at Stanford University and has consulted for Amazon, Google, and Meta. “I always enjoyed that the area I practice in has largely been apolitical,” Lemley tells me. What’s more, his democratic values neatly aligned with those of the companies that hired him.

But in January, Lemley made a radical move. “I have struggled with how to respond to Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook’s descent into toxic masculinity and Neo-Nazi madness,” he posted on LinkedIn. “I have fired Meta as a client.”

This is the Silicon Valley of 2025. Zuckerberg, now 41, had turned into a MAGA-friendly mixed martial arts fan who didn’t worry so much about hate speech on his platforms and complained that corporate America wasn’t masculine enough. He stopped fact-checking and started hanging out at Mar-a-Lago. And it wasn’t only Zuckerberg. A whole cohort of billionaires seemed to place their companies’ fortunes over the well-being of society.

When I meet Lemley at his office at Stanford this July, he is looking vacation-ready in a Hawaiian shirt. In the half year since he fired Meta, very few powerful people have followed his lead. Privately, they tell him, you go! Publicly, they’re gone. Lemley has even considered how he might be gone if things get bad for anti-Trumpers. “Everybody I’ve talked to has a potential exit strategy,” he says. “Could I get citizenship here or there?”

It should be the best of times for the tech world, supercharged by a boom in artificial intelligence. But a shadow has fallen over Silicon Valley. The community still overwhelmingly leans left. But with few exceptions, its leaders are responding to Donald Trump by either keeping quiet or actively courting the government. One indelible image of this capture is from Trump’s second inauguration, where a decisive quorum of tech’s elite, after dutifully kicking in million-dollar checks, occupied front-row seats.

“Everyone in the business world fears repercussions, because this administration is vindictive,” says venture capitalist David Hornik, one of the few outspoken voices of resistance. So Silicon Valley’s elite are engaged in a dangerous dance with a capricious administration—or as Michael Moritz, one of the Valley’s iconic VCs, put it to me, “They’re doing their best to avoid being held up in a protection racket.”

Nothing ever surprises me when you separate the businesses where profits are the guiding light instead of the things Disney is suddenly learning about, like integrity and a sense of who your customers are, what they value, and what they expect from you in terms of corporate character. Speaking of lack of integrity and character, “Transcript: Trump Boat Bombings Get Worse as Damning Info Emerges/ As Trump’s military attacks on supposed drug smugglers in the Caribbean Sea get worse, a legal expert explains what we know and what we don’t—and why we may be headed toward even darker lawlessness.” This is from The New Republic‘s Greg Sargeant’s podcast.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

Everybody seems to have moved on from the awful story involving President Trump’s decision to bomb a small boat allegedly carrying drugs in the Caribbean Sea. That’s a shame because really bad stuff is continuing to happen on this front. The White House is now circulating a draft of a bill that would vastly expand Trump’s authority for exactly these types of bombings. We’ve also had another one of these strikes, and it appears just as dubious as the first one. And Trump announced that strike with an absolutely deranged tweet that should raise alarms everywhere, but isn’t. Meanwhile, Democrats just introduced a measure to restrain Trump, and the prospects for getting the GOP support it needs are approximately zero. Brian Finucane, an editor at Just Security, has been doing some great writing on this topic. So we’re talking to him about all of it. Brian, thanks for coming on.

Brian Finucane: My pleasure.

Sargent: So let’s start with the second bombing. It occurred in international waters, killed three people. Trump said these people were quote unquote positively identified as drug smugglers or narco-terrorists. But according to [The New York Times], he hasn’t identified the group or the people. Brian, has that changed? Can you bring us up to date on this bombing and how forthcoming the administration has been about it?

Finucane: Well, the administration has not been very forthcoming, unfortunately. We don’t have much additional information. We have various assertions from Trump and others in the administration, mostly in his Truth Social post, including the characterization of the people aboard the vessel as confirmed narco-terrorists, characterization of the supposed illegal narcotics aboard as, “a deadly weapon poisoning Americans,” representations about the threat this supposedly poses to Americans that would justify the use of lethal force here. But we don’t have information about the identity [of] people aboard the vessel, who they might have been affiliated with, the destination or the exact nature of the cargo.

Sargent: Yeah. And the reason he’s calling the drugs a deadly weapon is to try and recast this as a strike against a war combatant, right?

Finucane: Right. So the administration is trying to cloak its operations in the Caribbean under the mantle of counterterrorism and war more broadly. And it’s using not just the wording, but also the tools and the tropes of counterterrorism and war. But that’s a misappropriation of those frameworks because this is not a war, this is not an armed conflict, and this is not like prior counterterrorism strikes the U.S. has been conducting for two decades post 9/11.

Sargent: It certainly isn’t, and the administration, by the way, still hasn’t even presented any kind of detailed legal rationale or any information about the first strike, which killed 11 people. Now the Times reports that the White House is circulating this bill that would essentially let him unilaterally wage war against drug cartels that he decides to label terrorists and against nations that harbor them. It seems to say that part of this would be done in consultation with Congress, but it doesn’t define what it would entail to consult with Congress. The Times says this bill is setting off, “alarm bells among some people,” at least in the White House and on Capitol Hill. Brian, what do we know about this, and what do you make of it?

Finucane: So I want to caveat at the top that it’s hard to know at this point how seriously to take this legislation. Reportedly, it was introduced or was put forward by Representative Cory Mills of Florida. It’s also been reported that it’s been circulated by [the Office of Management and Budget] to departments and agencies for comment. That’s normally a process associated with legislation that the administration takes somewhat seriously, but I don’t think we know for certain just how seriously the administration is taking this. But the text is really quite striking. It is modeled on the 2001 Authorization of Use of Military Force, which has been the principal statutory authority for the U.S. war on terror for the use of force against the Taliban, against Al Qaeda, ISIS, Al Shabaab, and other Al Qaeda and ISIS affiliates. And it really gives the president a blank check to use force anywhere in the world against anyone he designates under the provisions of this as a narco-terrorist. There are no geographic restrictions, so potentially they could include the United States. It would provide detention authority. And I think it’s really important to note here that this represents a dramatic reallocation of Congress’s war powers to the executive. It would be the president deciding who the United States goes to war with and where that takes place.

A pirating we go! Ho Ho Ho!

I’d really like to say that this entire new Trump term is literally making me sick. The stress, the craziness, the dysfunctional brains of the cast and characters are like some kind of dystopian, D-grade horror movie. But my No Kings t-shirt is clean. I have a new pair of walking shoes coming via UPS soon, and I have grandchildren to think about. I’m still standing. Plus, I have to read this article from CNN before I see students tonight. The few with inquiring minds want to know and do ask. Plus, it’s data! And I’m a numbers nerd! “The U.S. economy has a new problem: Democracy is under siege. The nation’s top economic statistician was fired. Central bank independence is being undermined. The federal government is buying chunks of private companies and demanding cuts of revenue streams. Presidential power to lob tariffs has been wielded in unprecedented fashion. And federal regulators are threatening media companies over late-night comics.” Matt Egan has the byline.

These events all took place this year, and not in a third-world country, but in the world’s preeminent democracy under President Donald Trump.

Some political scientists see a pattern that suggests American democracy is being undermined in real time. The stakes are massive for the US economy and the business world.

“I have never been this concerned about democracy in the United States,” Vanessa Williamson, a senior fellow of governance studies at the nonpartisan Brookings Institution, told CNN in a phone interview.

CEOs are growing alarmed — even if they’re publicly staying quiet to avoid the wrath of the White House.

Business leaders are “quite alarmed” in private about the state of democracy in the United States, according to Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, the Yale professor known as the “CEO Whisperer” due to his extensive rolodex in the business community.

“We’ve had a serious erosion of the foundations of democracy,” Sonnenfeld, founder and president of the Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute, told CNN

Research shows that democracies tend to thrive financially.

“Democracy is just good for the economy. And autocracy is bad for the economy,” Williamson said. “Autocrats are just not good at managing economies. Policymaking tends to be erratic as democratic institutions decline.”

Democratizations increase GDP per capita by about 20% in the long run, according to a 2019 study titled “Democracy does cause growth” that was published in the Journal of Political Economy, a University of Chicago peer-reviewed journal.

Researchers said the positive effects of democracy “appear to be driven by greater investment in capital, schooling and health.”

Well, I’ll just keep lecturing on this until they throw me in one of those made-for-profit prisons down here in Lousyana for people with brains and different viewpoints.

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