Mostly Monday Reads: Of Wars and Kings

“A good time was had by all.” John Buss, @repeat1968

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

The contrast between weekend events could not have been more glaring. All over the country, in cities big and small, as well as rural areas, people turned out for the No Kings event. Then, there was a very boring, sparsely attended military parade in Washington, D.C. Another contrast was the protest, which was peaceful except for a few Police officers who couldn’t seem to control themselves.  Then, there were the political assassinations in Minnesota, where the suspect has all the components of today’s Republican Party and MAGA Domestic Terrorism.  Minnesota Law Enforcement caught up to him last night, and his resume is replete with activities you’d expect of a lone wolf shooter’s wet dreams.

This is from the AP this morning. “Friends say Minnesota shooting suspect was deeply religious and conservative.” I think those two words don’t mean what they’re supposed to imply.  The Pope is deeply religious without the need to kill and hate people who disagree with him.  I’m not even sure how to define conservatism anymore, but it seems to be ever-evolving as we march backward to fascism.  This man was a monster and could’ve been profiled as such if anyone was paying attention.  I guess it’s easier for Republicans to demonize folks by color, ethnic background, religions not of their choosing, and women who won’t be enslaved. His actions and words should have caught attention much earlier.

The man accused of assassinating the top Democrat in the Minnesota House held deeply religious and politically conservative views, telling a congregation in Africa two years ago that the U.S. was in a “bad place” where most churches didn’t oppose abortion.

Vance Luther Boelter, 57, was captured late Sunday following a two-day manhunt authorities described as the largest in the state’s history. Boelter is accused of impersonating a police officer and gunning down former House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, in their home outside Minneapolis. Democratic Gov. Tim Walz described the shooting as “a politically motivated assassination.”

Sen. John Hoffman, also a Democrat, and his wife, Yvette, were shot earlier by the same gunman at their home nearby but survived.

Friends and former colleagues interviewed by AP described Boelter as a devout Christian who attended an evangelical church and went to campaign rallies for President Donald Trump. Records show Boelter registered to vote as a Republican while living in Oklahoma in 2004 before moving to Minnesota where voters don’t list party affiliation.

Tom Toles Editorial Cartoon

Lisa Leur, writing in this Morning’s New York Times, also states the sad facts. “Like School Shootings, Political Violence Is Becoming Almost Routine. Threats and violent acts have become part of the political landscape, still shocking but somehow not so surprising.”  All of this has sent me back to 1992 when my toddler and I were stalked by them and continually harassed.  They’ve been bombing clinics and horse barns and murdering health care workers.  Timothy McVeigh would thrive in this environment. His type of people are just out in the open now. (“Former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio was spotted Saturday at a No Kings protest near the Torch of Friendship in downtown Miami.“)  The continual escalation of this has not been difficult to predict. The FBI, prior to Yam Tits, continually warned Congress of the issue.  The Republicans charged them with being politically motivated. They have evolved a completely useless definition of law and order these days.

“Such horrific violence will not be tolerated in the United States of America,” the president said.

And yet the expanding club of survivors of political violence seemed to stand as evidence to the contrary.

In the past three months alone, a man set fire to the Pennsylvania governor’s residence while Mr. Shapiro and his family were asleep inside; another man gunned down a pair of workers from the Israeli Embassy outside an event in Washington; protesters calling for the release of Israeli hostages in Boulder, Colo., were set on fire; and the Republican Party headquarters in New Mexico and a Tesla dealership near Albuquerque were firebombed.

And those were just the incidents that resulted in death or destruction.

Against that backdrop, it might have been shocking, but it was not really so surprising, when on Saturday morning, a Democratic state representative in Minnesota, Melissa Hortman, and her husband, Mark, were assassinated in their home, and a Democratic state senator, John A. Hoffman, and his wife, Yvette, were shot and wounded.

Slowly but surely, political violence has moved from the fringes to an inescapable reality. Violent threats and even assassinations, attempted or successful, have become part of the political landscape — a steady undercurrent of American life.

For months now, Representative Greg Landsman, Democrat of Ohio, has been haunted by the thought that he could be shot and killed. Every time he campaigns at a crowded event, he said, he imagines himself bleeding on the ground.

“It’s still in my head. I don’t think it will go away,” he said of the nightmarish vision. “It’s just me on the ground.”

The image underscores a duality of political violence in America today. Like school shootings, it is both sickening and becoming almost routine, another fact of living in an anxious and dangerously polarized country.

Catching actual criminals is not on the radar with this administration. In fact, they’re doubling down on their anti-immigrant antics despite recent polls showing it highly unpopular.  “New poll: Trump and deportations unpopular with voters, Dems up 8 in House vote. More: 60% see ethics/corruption problems in Trump administration, and the “Abundance Agenda” is popular (except zoning reform).” This is from the substack of G. Elliot Morris.  However, the White House is not watching those polls.  The AP has this report today. “Trump directs ICE to expand deportations in Democratic-run cities, undeterred by protests.” My guess is that he was pissed by the lack of interest in his parade and wants more cities to experience the chaos that he brought L.A. with marines and National Guard interference.  This is reported by Aamer Madhani.

President Donald Trump on Sunday directed federal immigration officials to prioritize deportations from Democratic-run cities, a move that comes after large protests erupted in Los Angeles and other major cities against the Trump administration’s immigration policies.

Trump in a social media posting called on U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials “to do all in their power to achieve the very important goal of delivering the single largest Mass Deportation Program in History.”

He added that to reach the goal officials ”must expand efforts to detain and deport Illegal Aliens in America’s largest Cities, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, where Millions upon Millions of Illegal Aliens reside.”

Trump’s declaration comes after weeks of increased enforcement, and after Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff and main architect of Trump’s immigration policies, said ICE officers would target at least 3,000 arrests a day, up from about 650 a day during the first five months of Trump’s second term.

At the same time, the Trump administration has directed immigration officers to pause arrests at farms, restaurants and hotels, after Trump expressed alarm about the impact aggressive enforcement is having on those industries, according to a U.S. official familiar with the matter who spoke only on condition of anonymity.

This seems to verify that Yam Tits’ policy depends on who he talks to last.   Also, the police in most large cities are bad enough. Why up the stakes with military with no crowd control training?

Protests over federal immigration enforcement raids have been flaring up around the country.

Opponents of Trump’s immigration policies took to the streets as part of the “no kings” demonstrations Saturday that came as Trump held a massive parade in Washington for the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army.

Saturday’s protests were mostly peaceful.

But police in Los Angeles used tear gas and crowd-control munitions to clear out protesters after the event ended.

Officers in Portland, Oregon, also fired tear gas and projectiles to disperse a crowd that protested in front of a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement building well into the evening.

This term has already been a lesson on why Trump basically runs every business to bankruptcy and begging to renegotiate the terms of his debt. Trump’s pet projects are massively expensive and have never been funded by Congress.  As I mentioned last week, ICE is running out of funds.  This is from AXIOS as reported by Britanny Gibson.  “ICE’s cash crisis deepens amid immigration crackdown.”

President Trump‘s immigration crackdown is burning through cash so quickly that the agency charged with arresting, detaining and removing unauthorized immigrants could run out of money next month.

Why it matters: Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is already $1 billion over budget by one estimate, with more than three months left in the fiscal year. That’s alarmed lawmakers in both parties — and raised the possibility of Trump clawing funds from agencies to feed ICE.

• Lawmakers say ICE’s parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), is at risk of violating U.S. law if it continues to spend at its current pace.
• That’s added urgency to calls for Congress to pass Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” which could direct an extra $75 billion or so to ICE over the next five years.
• It’s also led some lawmakers to accuse DHS and ICE of wasting money. “Trump’s DHS is spending like drunken sailors,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), the top Democrat on the DHS appropriations subcommittee.

Zoom in: ICE’s funding crisis is being fueled by Trump’s team demanding that agents arrest 3,000 immigrants a day — an unprecedented pace ICE is still trying to reach.

• Its detention facilities — about 41,000 beds — are far past capacity as DHS continues to seek more detention space in the U.S. and abroad.

The intrigue: If Trump’s big bill isn’t passed soon, he could use his authority to declare a national emergency to redirect money to ICE from elsewhere in the government — similar to what he did in 2020 to divert nearly $4 billion in Pentagon funds to his border wall project.

• “I have a feeling they’re going to grant themselves an exception apportionment, use the life and safety exception, and just keep burning money,” a former federal budget official told Axios.

• “You could imagine a new emergency declaration that pertains to interior enforcement that would trigger the same kind of emergency personnel mobilization statutes,” said Chris Marisola, a professor at the University of Houston Law Center and a former lawyer for the Defense Department.

• “These statutory authorities authorizing the president to declare emergencies” … unlock “a whole host of other authorities for these departments and agencies [that] are often written incredibly broadly and invest a lot of discretion in the president,” Marisola added.

Everything he wants is a national emergency to this guy.  He’s a toddler. Give him a blankie and a Nuk! I suppose we’re going to the courts some more for lessons in the U.S. Constitution.

One of the big stories that’s never in the mainstream news is that researchers are looking for other places to carry on their work, and Europe is happily recruiting them. France is making a big effort to attract the kinds of minds that used to flee to the U.S. for freedom, knowledge, and research funding. This is turning into something more than just a brain drain. It’s blowing up our entire Brain Trust, which is the number one thing we’ve excelled at in the world. We fund innovation and encourage it.  Well, not anymore.

Nature, one of the two premier science research publishers in this country, has an intriguing article about the search to move researchers out of the United States.  “Some US researchers want to leave the country. Can Europe take them? As the Trump administration steps up attacks on US universities and scientific institutions, the European Union is campaigning hard to attract scientists from the United States. But how many can the bloc take?”

In early May, European politicians and university leaders gathered in Paris at Sorbonne University to deliver a message to US researchers affected by cuts made by the administration of US President Donald Trump: move here instead.

Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, and French President Emmanuel Macron announced a 2-year funding package worth €500 million (US$571 million) to support researchers who want to move to the continent, as part of a scheme named Choose Europe.

Although von der Leyen didn’t name the United States or its president explicitly at the 5 May gathering, she said that parts of the world were questioning “free and open research”, describing that attitude as a “gigantic miscalculation”.

In April, the French government announced that money from the country’s €54-billion France 2030 strategic investment initiative had been set aside to fund international researchers who would like to work in France. Macron confirmed at the Sorbonne meeting that the separate €100-million cash boost would fund half of the costs of scientific projects involving international researchers moving to France.

We’ve already discussed how many US professors have left for Canada. Here’s an interview from the pair we featured earlier.  This is especially true of those who specialize in research around democratic backsliding and fascist takeovers in formerly democratic countries.  This new Interview from The Guardian. It’s authored by Jonathan Freedland. “Why a professor of fascism left the US: ‘The lesson of 1933 is – you get out’.” If only I could. I’ve even searched for universities in France.

She finds the whole idea absurd. To Prof Marci Shore, the notion that the Guardian, or anyone else, should want to interview her about the future of the US is ridiculous. She’s an academic specialising in the history and culture of eastern Europe and describes herself as a “Slavicist”, yet here she is, suddenly besieged by international journalists keen to ask about the country in which she insists she has no expertise: her own. “It’s kind of baffling,” she says.

In fact, the explanation is simple enough. Last month, Shore, together with her husband and fellow scholar of European history, Timothy Snyder, and the academic Jason Stanley, made news around the world when they announced that they were moving from Yale University in the US to the University of Toronto in Canada. It was not the move itself so much as their motive that garnered attention. As the headline of a short video op-ed the trio made for the New York Times put it, “We Study Fascism, and We’re Leaving the US”.

Starkly, Shore invoked the ultimate warning from history. “The lesson of 1933 is: you get out sooner rather than later.” She seemed to be saying that what had happened then, in Germany, could happen now, in Donald Trump’s America – and that anyone tempted to accuse her of hyperbole or alarmism was making a mistake. “My colleagues and friends, they were walking around and saying, ‘We have checks and balances. So let’s inhale, checks and balances, exhale, checks and balances.’ I thought, my God, we’re like people on the Titanic saying, ‘Our ship can’t sink. We’ve got the best ship. We’ve got the strongest ship. We’ve got the biggest ship.’ And what you know as a historian is that there is no such thing as a ship that can’t sink.”

Since Shore, Snyder and Stanley announced their plans, the empirical evidence has rather moved in their favour. Whether it was the sight of tanks transported into Washington DC ahead of the military parade that marked Trump’s birthday last Saturday or the deployment of the national guard to crush protests in Los Angeles, alongside marines readied for the same task,recent days have brought the kind of developments that could serve as a dramatist’s shorthand for the slide towards fascism.

“It’s all almost too stereotypical,” Shore reflects. “A 1930s-style military parade as a performative assertion of the Führerprinzip,” she says, referring to the doctrine established by Adolf Hitler, locating all power in the dictator. “As for Los Angeles, my historian’s intuition is that sending in the national guard is a provocation that will be used to foment violence and justify martial law. The Russian word of the day here could be provokatsiia.”

Let’s read about a different angle.

The introduction to Chaplin’s speech is written on the SubStack of Oliver Marcus Malloy.  Since many Holocaust survivors compare Trump’s pogroms to Hitler, it’s a good chance to see this classic movie again.

The Great Dictator (1940), directed by and starring Charlie Chaplin, is a satirical comedy that mocks Adolf Hitler and fascism.

Chaplin plays dual roles: a ruthless dictator named Adenoid Hynkel and a kind-hearted Jewish barber, who looks just like the dictator.

As Hynkel plots world domination, the barber, mistaken for the dictator, delivers a powerful speech advocating peace and unity.

The film blends slapstick humor with poignant political commentary, offering a timeless critique of tyranny and intolerance.

Meanwhile, Trump’s foreign policy continues to threaten world stability as everyone considers him and the United States as useless fools these days.

So yes, Reuters reports that Russia has entered the hot war between Iran and Israel, initiated by Israel. “Russia urges Israeli restraint, says Iran has right to defend itself.”  Also reported by Reuters is this headline. “Russia says US has cancelled next round of talks on easing tensions,”

Russia said on Monday that the United States had cancelled the next round of talks between the two countries, an apparent setback in a process launched by presidents Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump to improve bilateral ties.

In a statement, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova did not say if Washington had given any reason for the break in the talks, which began after Trump returned to the White House in January.

We cannot afford a bimbo for President who drifts from one policy approach to another. It’s fucking dangerous to the country and to our allies.  I usually have a strict no video of Yam Tits and defintely not with him speaking rule, but I’m putting this up. It’s short, at least.  Trump is in Canada today for the G7 meetings.  You can see the enthusiasm in the Canadian PM’s face as Trump announces he’s a “tariff guy.” He thinks the PM’s ideas on the economy are complete,x so they’re going to look at both. The PM of Canada is a fucking economist you moron!

Here are some links to follow the G7 summit.

From the BBC: “Trump says expelling Russia from G7 was a ‘mistake’ as he meets Carney.”

From NBC: Live updates:  “Trump meets with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney at G7 summit amid trade tensions.  The president said he expected to reach new trade agreements at the summit.”

From Fortune:  “G7 summit in Canada won’t release a joint statement as world leaders focus on not riling a Trump they disagree with.”

From AP News: “G7 leaders want to contain the Israel-Iran conflict, as Trump calls for talks between the countries.”

I guess we’re not the only ones who desperately want to get rid of him for good. I can only imagine what the footage will look like during the news this evening.

So, it’s continually raining here.  There was a crack of lightning last night that made the sky white, and the sound was so loud that Temple, while scrambling to hide under my desk, fell out of bed. I’ve had to lift her back up to the bed several times now. We’re going to the vet this afternoon for her annual.  I think she’s just a little store.  She’s walking around the house.

The Rooster has a girlfriend in a house 3 doors down from me. She’s caged him in the backyard and fenced in with a thick horizontal wood fence, but he sits at the same spot every morning just to be close to her.

The outdoor kitty still comes for breakfast. I’m not sure if she’s bringing friends, but an entire cup of food disappears pretty quickly.

I’m still here in New Orleans. I didn’t make it to the protest yesterday, but here’s the one in the Marigny neighborhood, which is next to mine.  Have a good week!

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?