Good morning. It is a bit of a sad news today. Last night Keely crossed over, she was Dak’s beloved cat. Keely had been through a lot the last couple years and she passed away in Dak’s arms. Peace to her and to our Dak. We love you honey.
I will keep this post short today. And share a couple of things with you. I think we all need a break.
And lastly, this…the best fucking halftime show ever, Prince. You have to watch it on YouTube.
This is an open thread.
Good Morning!!Pangur Bán
From the ninth-century Irish poem
Pangur Bán and I at work,Adepts, equals, cat and clerk:His whole instinct is to hunt,Mine to free the meaning pent.**More than loud acclaim, I loveBooks, silence, thought, my alcove.Happy for me, Pangur BánChild-plays round some mouse’s den.**Truth to tell, just being here,Housed alone, housed together,Adds up to its own reward:Concentration, stealthy art.**Next thing an unwary mouseBares his flank: Pangur pounces.Next thing lines that held and heldMeaning back begin to yield**All the while, his round bright eyeFixes on the wall, while IFocus my less piercing gazeOn the challenge of the page.**With his unsheathed, perfect nailsPangur springs, exults and kills.When the longed-for, difficultAnswers come, I too exult.**So it goes. To each his own.No vying. No vexation.Taking pleasure, taking pains,Kindred spirits, veterans.**Day and night, soft purr, soft pad,Pangur Bán has learned his trade.Day and night, my own hard workSolves the cruxes, makes a mark.Source: Poetry (April 2006)
This is what the poem sounds like in the original medieval Irish:
Now do I really have to think about politics news? I suppose I do.
Wired: A US Treasury Threat Intelligence Analysis Designates DOGE Staff as ‘Insider Threat’
Members of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team have had access to the US Treasury Department’s payment systems for over a week. On Thursday, the threat intelligence team at one of the department’s agencies recommended that DOGE members be monitored as an “insider threat.”
Sources say members of the Bureau of the Fiscal Service’s IT division and others received an email detailing these concerns.
“There is ongoing litigation, congressional legislation, and widespread protests relating to DOGE’s access to Treasury and the Bureau of the Fiscal Service,” reads a section of the email titled “Recommendations,” reviewed by WIRED. “If DOGE members have any access to payment systems, we recommend suspending that access immediately and conducting a comprehensive review of all actions they may have taken on these systems.”
Although Treasury and White House officials have repeatedly denied it, WIRED has reported that DOGE technologists had the ability to not only read the code of sensitive payment systems but also rewrite it. Marko Elez, one of a number of young men identified by WIRED who have little to no government experience but are associated with DOGE, was granted read and write privileges on two of the most sensitive systems in the US government: the Payment Automation Manager and Secure Payment System at the BFS, an agency that according to Treasury records paid out $5.45 trillion in fiscal year 2024.
“There is reporting at other federal agencies indicating that DOGE members have performed unauthorized changes and locked civil servants out of the sensitive systems they gained access to,” the “Recommendations” portion of the email continues. “We further recommend that DOGE members be placed under insider threat monitoring and alerting after their access to payment systems is revoked. Continued access to any payment systems by DOGE members, even ‘read only,’ likely poses the single greatest insider threat risk the Bureau of the Fiscal Service has ever faced.”
The recommendations were part of a weekly report sent out by the BFS threat intelligence team to hundreds of staffers. “Insider threat risks are something [the threat intelligence team] usually covers,” a source told WIRED. “But they have never identified something inside the bureau as an insider threat risk that I know of.”
Wow.
The Washington Post: Federal judge blocks Musk’s DOGE from access to Treasury Department material.
NEW YORK — A federal judge issued an emergency order early Saturday prohibiting Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service from accessing personal and financial data on millions of Americans kept at the Treasury Department, noting the possibility for irreparable harm.
The ruling came hours after attorneys general from 19 states sued to stop Musk’s team from dealing with sensitive files during its review of federal payment systems — an unprecedented effort that skirted firm security measures that permitted access to systems only to trained Treasury employees.
In a four-page order, Engelmayer said the states that sued the Trump administration “will face irreparable harm in the absence of injunctive relief.”
“That is both because of the risk that the new policy presents of the disclosure of sensitive and confidential information and the heightened risk that the systems in question will be more vulnerable than before to hacking,” Engelmayer wrote.
He adopted arguments by the states that Treasury records from the agency’s Bureau of Fiscal Services can only legally be accessed by specialized civil servants “with a need for access to perform their job duties.”
Under the order, the Trump administration is prohibited from giving access to political appointees, special government employees or government employees that are not assigned to the Treasury Department. The White House has said that Musk has been designated a special government employee.
The lawsuit, led by New York Attorney General Letitia James (D), says DOGE, a group operating under the direction of President Donald Trump, had no authority to access the Treasury Department’s systems and that doing so was a potentially massive cybersecurity and privacy risk.
A judge halts Musk’s efforts to completely destroy USAID. NBC News: Judge pauses Trump administration effort to gut USAID’s workforce by thousands.
A federal judge on Friday paused a midnight deadline for the U.S. Agency for International Development to be stripped down to a few hundred workers from a workforce of more than 5,000.
U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols issued a pause on efforts to place 2,200 staff on administrative leave and to expedite evacuations for personnel abroad until next Friday at 11:59 p.m
He also rescinded leave for 500 workers already put on leave.
“All USAID employees currently on administrative leave shall be reinstated until that date, and shall be given complete access to email, payment, and security notification systems until that date, and no additional employees shall be placed on administrative leave before that date,” Nichols wrote.
Nichols also paused the administration’s plans to impose a 30-day deadline for USAID personnel abroad to return the the United States, saying “such short notice disrupts long-settled expectations and makes it nearly impossible for evacuated employees to adequately plan for their return to the United States.”
Nichols said he would not impose a pause on the funding freeze and scheduled an in-person preliminary injunction hearing for Wednesday.
A spokesperson for Democracy Forward, a progressive nonprofit group that filed a lawsuit against the Office of Management and Budget that resulted in a judge temporarily halting the Trump administration’s freeze on most federal grants and loans, said the organization is confident it will demonstrate standing.
“We are confident our clients will be able to demonstrate standing with more fulsome briefing and are committed to continuing to use the legal process to protect the privacy of the American people and to uphold the rule of law,” the spokesperson said.
Krebs on Security: Teen on Musk’s DOGE Team Graduated from ‘The Com.’
Efficiency (DOGE) was given access to sensitive US government systems even though his past association with cybercrime communities should have precluded him from gaining the necessary security clearances to do so. As today’s story explores, the DOGE teen is a former denizen of ‘The Com,’ an archipelago of Discord and Telegram chat channels that function as a kind of distributed cybercriminal social network for facilitating instant collaboration.
Since President Trump’s second inauguration, Musk’s DOGE team has gained access to a truly staggering amount of personal and sensitive data on American citizens, moving quickly to seize control over databases at the U.S. Treasury, the Office of Personnel Management, the Department of Education, and the Department of Health and Human Resources, among others.
Wired first reported on Feb. 2 that one of the technologists on Musk’s crew is a 19-year-old high school graduate named Edward Coristine, who reportedly goes by the nickname “Big Balls” online. One of the companies Coristine founded, Tesla.Sexy LLC, was set up in 2021, when he would have been around 16 years old.
“Tesla.Sexy LLC controls dozens of web domains, including at least two Russian-registered domains,” Wired reported. “One of those domains, which is still active, offers a service called Helfie, which is an AI bot for Discord servers targeting the Russian market. While the operation of a Russian website would not violate US sanctions preventing Americans doing business with Russian companies, it could potentially be a factor in a security clearance review.”
Mr. Coristine has not responded to requests for comment. In a follow-up story this week, Wired found that someone using a Telegram handle tied to Coristine solicited a DDoS-for-hire service in 2022, and that he worked for a short time at a company that specializes in protecting customers from DDoS attacks.
Internet routing records show that Coristine runs an Internet service provider called Packetware (AS400495). Also known as “DiamondCDN,” Packetware currently hosts tesla[.]sexy and diamondcdn[.]com, among other domains.
DiamondCDN was advertised and claimed by someone who used the nickname “Rivage” on several Com-based Discord channels over the years. A review of chat logs from some of those channels show other members frequently referred to Rivage as “Edward.”
From late 2020 to late 2024, Rivage’s conversations would show up in multiple Com chat servers that are closely monitored by security companies. In November 2022, Rivage could be seen requesting recommendations for a reliable and powerful DDoS-for-hire service.
Read more complex stuff at the link. Basically this kid is a cybercriminal and he could have access to our social security numbers.
There’s lots of creepy news about creepy Elon Musk today.
Greg Sargent at The New Republic: Did Trump Quietly Kill a Sensitive Pentagon Probe into Elon Musk?
In December, more than a month before Donald Trump took the presidential oath of office, The New York Times reported a blockbuster scoop: Elon Musk and his SpaceX company had repeatedly failed to meet federal reporting requirements designed to safeguard national security despite being deeply entangled with the military and intelligence bureaucracy. These included a failure to provide details to the government of Musk’s meetings with foreign leaders, the Times reported.
Those lapses had triggered a number of internal federal reviews, according to the Times. Perhaps most interestingly, the Defense Department’s inspector general had opened a probe of the matter sometime during 2024. The Air Force and the Pentagon Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security also launched reviews in November.
Now that Trump is president and controls the executive branch—including the Defense Department—it’s time to raise what appears to be a forgotten question: What exactly is going on with these government reviews into Musk? Have they continued? Or are they effectively dead?
When Trump fired over a dozen independent inspectors general last month, one of them was the Defense Department IG, Robert Storch. We don’t know whether the Musk probe was a reason for this firing, but it now seems awfully convenient for the SpaceX billionaire, who is known to be enraged about having to face regulations and oversight while enjoying immensely lucrative contracts with the federal government.
Now Democrats fear that Trump’s firing of the Defense Department IG has had the effect of closing down the IG’s investigation into Musk. And they’re demanding that the Pentagon clarify its status.
“I want to know, where is this investigation?” said Representative Adam Smith of Washington State, the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee (HASC), in an interview with me. “My deep concern is that it’s just basically been shut down and buried—and will not be pursued.”
Smith told me that Democrats on the HASC are asking the Defense Department for an update on the IG investigation. It will certainly be interesting to see if the agency clarifies this point, though Smith said there’s “no reason to expect a response anytime soon.”
Read the rest at TNR.
The Washington Post: Lawmakers flooded with calls about Elon Musk: ‘It is a deluge on DOGE.’
Good morning. You are stuck with Sighve today…Dak and I switched days, so be sure to check back on Sunday for her most excellent review of the news.
For now I want to share a video of an Australian politician speaking about what is happening now in the US. H/T to my daughter on this find:
Fuck yeah!
We need some of our own politicians speaking this kind of truth. Just as bluntly.
At least you have states like Rhode Island stepping up…
You can find this tracker here:
https://www.justsecurity.org/107087/tracker-legal-challenges-trump-administration-actions/
Some news:
If that link is behind a paywall, this one may work:
Cartoons via Cagle:
I’m sure more shit will hit the fan, I will post updates in the comments.
Stay safe.
You know, when all this shit was about to start…and I restarted my persona here on the blog…I picked the name Sigh-ve (spelled Sadhbh) because I was sighing all the time. It is an old Celtic Irish name probably derived from the old Celtic root swadu meaning sweet. (Remember, my degree is in medieval history, specifically ancient Irish Literature.)
So the name Sighve seemed to fit. But now I am so fucking pissed off, every day, I should probably change it to: Tá mé dubh dóite de, I am heartily sick of it.
So today I have a bunch of cartoons. Before we get to that, some newsy stuff:
Trump earlier today…at 5:30 am:
Just a note, if you have trouble seeing any of the images below, just click the image and it will get larger.
Now, cartoons via Cagle:
Stay safe.
Good Afternoon!!Of course it’s a coup, and it is moving unbelievably rapidly.
Timothy Snyder at Thinking About: Of course it’s a coup. Miss the obvious, lose your republic.
Ten Tesla cybertrucks, painted in camouflage colors with a giant X on each roof, drive noisily through Washington DC. Tires screech. Out jump a couple of dozen young men, dressed in red and black Devil’s Champion armored costumes. After giving Nazi salutes, they grab guns and run to one government departmental after another, calling out slogans like “all power to Supreme Leader Skibidi Hitler.”
And that sort of coup attempt would have failed.
Now imagine that, instead, the scene goes like this.
A couple dozen young men go from government office to government office, dressed in civilian clothes and armed only with zip drives. Using technical jargon and vague references to orders from on high, they gain access to the basic computer systems of the federal government. Having done so, they proceed to grant their Supreme Leader access to information and the power to start and stop all government payments.
In the third decade of the twenty first century, power is more digital than physical. The buildings and the human beings are there to protect the workings of the computers, and thus the workings of the government as a whole, in our case an (in principle) democratic government which is organized and bounded by a notion of individual rights.
The ongoing actions by Musk and his followers are a coup because the individuals seizing power have no right to it. Elon Musk was elected to no office and there is no office that would give him the authority to do what he is doing. It is all illegal. It is also a coup in its intended effects: to undo democratic practice and violate human rights.
In gaining data about us all, Musk has trampled on any notion of privacy and dignity, as well as on the explicit and implicit agreements made with our government when we pay our taxes or our student loans. And the possession of that data enables blackmail and further crimes.
In gaining the ability to stop payments by the Department of the Treasury, Musk would also make democracy meaningless. We vote for representatives in Congress, who pass laws that determine how our tax money is spent. If Musk has the power to halt this process at the level of payment, he can make laws meaningless. Which means, in turn, that Congress is meaningless, and our votes are meaningless, as is our citizenship.
Joyce Vance at Civil Discourse: Is It Really a Coup?
Is it really a coup if it doesn’t feel like one? If your day-to-day life hasn’t changed? Can it be a coup if I can still write posts like this?
What we’ve seen over the last two weeks and accelerating over the weekend looks like a coup, a hostile, undemocratic takeover of government. Merriam-Webster says a coup is “a sudden decisive exercise of force in politics and especially the violent overthrow or alteration of an existing government by a small group.” No violence so far because this is a coup fueled by tech bros, not the military. But we’re watching the alteration of government happen before our eyes.
Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat calls it “a new kind of coup,” writing in Lucid about Elon Musk’s seeming power sharing with Trump: “And here is where the U.S. 2025 situation starts to look different. The point of personalist rule is to reinforce the strongman. There is only room for one authoritarian leader at the top of the power vertical. Here there are two.” It is unusual, but it is still an effort to use extra-legal, undemocratic practices to radically alter American democracy, undoing the balance of power the Founding Fathers established between the three branches of government by consolidating power in the hands of the presidency as a complacent, Republican-led Congress looks on.
Monday night, Heather Cox Richardson started her nightly column by explaining that if Republicans wanted to do away with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the federal agency the Trump administration suddenly shuttered over the weekend, they could do that legally. Republicans now control the White House and Congress. There is a 6-3 majority of justices appointed by Republican presidents on the Supreme Court. But instead of doing it lawfully, with Congress passing a bill for Donald Trump to sign, Richardson writes, “They are permitting unelected billionaire Elon Musk, whose investment of $290 million in Trump and other Republican candidates in the 2024 election apparently has bought him freedom to run the government, to override Congress and enact whatever his own policies are by rooting around in government agencies and cancelling those programs that he, personally, dislikes.”
Richardson concluded: “The replacement of our constitutional system of government with the whims of an unelected private citizen is a coup. The U.S. president has no authority to cut programs created and funded by Congress, and a private citizen tapped by a president has even less standing to try anything so radical.”
So, “coup” is the correct way to label the transformation of government we are living through. But with so much continuing normally, it’s easy to doubt what you’re seeing. Even experiencing it from the perspective of historians who understand this moment through the lens of history, it doesn’t seem quite real.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat at Lucid: A New Kind of Coup: Trump and Musk are Updating the Autocratic Playbook.
It seems like the plot of a political thriller. We are living through a new kind of coup in which Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, has taken over the payment and other administration systems that allow the American government to function, and has locked out federal employees from computer systems. Many of Musk’s collaborators in this endeavor previously worked for his private companies and/or helped him take over Twitter.
Musk is subject to no Congressional or other oversight because he seems to have no real official function other than as head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, a plunder operation that was named after the cryptocurrency DOGE….
What is happening now builds on classic authoritarian dynamics as I described them in Strongmen and in many essays for Lucid. There is always an “inner sanctum” that really runs the show, with its mix of family members and cronies, some with histories of working with or for foreign powers. And there is almost always a purge of the federal bureaucracy. That is now being carried out on a mass scale.
Historian Heather Cox Richardson, former FBI agent Asha Rangappa, former U.S. Attorney Joyce White Vance, and others have analyzed these processes and the interrelated factions that are implementing what I have called a Fascist-style counterrevolution: the MAGA loyalists inside and outside of the GOP, the Project 2025/Heritage Foundation crew (roughly two-thirds of the executive orders Trump has issued conform to Project 2025 plans), and the technocrats around Musk and Peter Thiel.
Vice President J.D. Vance shows the overlap among the categories. Vance is a MAGA loyalist; he wrote the forward to Heritage CEO Kevin Robert’s book Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington To Save America; and he is the surrogate of Thiel, who bankrolled not only Vance’s Senate race but also his private business ventures.
All of these individuals and groups want to rearrange government around an extremist ideological project of Christian nationalism and White supremacy, and most of them want to enact neoliberal deregulation and privatization meaures to “free” America from “corruption” and “drain the swamp.” This is part of the “revolution” Roberts has long talked about, and it has a history that runs through right-wing dictatorships across a century.
The speed of its implementation makes Trump’s takeover stand out within an authoritarian framework. The more corrupt and criminal the autocrat, the more he is obsessed with punishing enemies and feeling safe. Cue the immediate execution of the revenge and retribution part of this plan, with anyone who was involved in attempts to bring Trump and his collaborators to justice for the Jan. 6 insurrection or anything else, FBI employees included, is now a target.
Dave Troy at America 2.0: America Under Attack, Week 2: What We’re Monitoring.
Attacks on the United States have unfolded much as anticipated, with Donald Trump issuing an overwhelming number of executive orders and provocations, while Elon Musk dismantles the government from the inside out. Frankly, the number of individual actions taking place are too many to count, much less keep up with. Tariffs and market crashes are old news, while capturing Gaza is the latest provocation. Rather than react to everything, we are taking an active stance in monitoring several specific attack vectors. Here’s what we’re monitoring this week.
Neoreactionary Movement and Network State
In addition to Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, the public is beginning to become aware of the names Curtis Yarvin, Nick Land, and Balaji Srinavasan. Those of us watching the rise of extremism in tech circles know these names well, but they have been less well-known to lawmakers. Yarvin seeks to eliminate government where possible and privatize the rest. One of Yarvin’s proposals, called “RAGE” stands for “Retire All Government Employees.” Yarvin is also a monarchist, and Musk sees himself as king. Several of his team of young DOGE engineers are also aligned with Monarchism. Several politicians are being briefed on the Neoreactionary movement and its connections to Musk. The related “Network State” movement led by Srinavasan is also rooted in Neoreactionary philosophy and has been linked to Trump’s efforts to annex Greenland. (See: Meet the Bros Behind Trump’s Greenland Bluster; See: Neoreactionary Movement Memo)
DOGE: Agency ‘Deletions’ and Illegal Activity
Elon Musk has engaged a team of young engineers to attack and shut down the US Agency for International Development (USAID) as well as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and 18F, a technology services arm of the General Services Administration. DOGE has also been reported to have altered contracts across multiple agencies (including plans to sell or eliminate real estate holdings), as well as gained direct read-write access to the US Treasury’s payments systems, pushing new code into live production use. This presents a serious security and operational risk to the United States. The House Oversight Committee has voted to subpoena Elon Musk for testimony before the committee.
Project Russia
We have previously reported on Project Russia, the Kremlin’s plans for destroying Western democracies. Musk’s current actions — nullifying the rule of law, bypassing Congress, introducing financial instability — are aligned with prescriptions outlined in Project Russia, which include replacing democracy with a supranational monarchy led by an enlightened prince-king. Project Russia also includes plans to collapse the global economy, especially the dollar. Uncertainty around tariffs along with government shutdown (March 14) and potential US debt default (Q2 2025) pose major national security risks. (See: Project Russia: The Kremlin’s Playbook for Undermining Democracies)
David Kurtz at Talking Points Memo: A Full-Blown Constitutional Crisis With No End In Sight.
President Trump’s extraordinary assault on the constitutional order is inflicting unimaginable damage on democracy at home, on U.S. national interests abroad, on individual rights, and on the health, safety and welfare of all Americans. It is a full frontal assault on the people and on the government they elected him to run.
What now?
With congressional Republicans in abject subservience to Trump, the only potential constraint on his lawlessness are the federal courts. Emphasis on “potential.” But even if a judiciary stacked with Trump appointees stands tall, it’s critical to understand that the courts alone cannot save us from the constitutional disorder of a sidelined legislative branch over which the executive runs roughshod or of an immunized president who is not only failing to take care that the laws be faithfully executed but is violating the laws on a near-daily basis.
As I’ve emphasized this week, one important measure of how bad things will get is whether Trump begins to ignore court orders. That wouldn’t spell a constitutional crisis only because this already is a constitutional crisis. But it would mean that we’ve well and truly crossed the Rubicon into something that is no longer a democracy, with Trump as an American strongman, even if he continues to prop up some of the trappings of the former republic, like Congress. We may already be there.
Whether the judicial branch serves as a bulwark against Trump’s worst excesses or is merely the next domino to fall will play out over the coming weeks. But even if the judiciary holds the line, it cannot undo all the colossal damage already wreaked by Trump and his billionaire wingman. It can’t fully stop ongoing damage from what has already been done or fully corral future yet-to-be-done damage from a renegade Trump.
While the focus is now shifting to the courts and the dozens of important lawsuits that have been filed in recent days to try to rein in all manner of blatant presidential lawlessness, judges can only do so much. While fighting Trump in the courts is critical and could shape much of the next four years and beyond, it an extremely limited response to the breakdown in the constitutional order that is underway….
A sampling of just some of important lawsuits filed in recent days:
- FBI agents suing to stop the release of the names of employees involved in the Trump and Jan. 6 prosecutions;
- federal employee unions suing over Trump’s bogus deferred retirement offer;
- a doctors group suing over the removal of public health data from government websites;
- two anonymous federal workers suing to stop Elon Musk’s team from continuing to use an unauthorized server at OPM to send blast emails to everyone in government;
- a coalition of labor union suing to block the Musk team from continuing to access sensitive payment systems at Treasury.
This is only a partial list and excludes a whole different category of lawsuits by targets of Trump seeking to vindicate their individual rights, like trans prisoners.
Tyler McBrien at the New York Times: What Is ‘State Capture’? A Warning for Americans.
On Friday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent reportedly granted aides of Elon Musk access to the department’s payments system, which handles more than $5 trillion and sensitive data on Social Security and Medicare benefits and grants. The system also contains data on government contractors in direct competition with Mr. Musk’s own companies.
It was the latest troubling report of the administration’s interventions into practically every corner of the federal government that also include President Trump’s firing, sidelining and encouraging civil servants to quit.
The full picture of the government overhaul has yet to come into focus, and the contours of Mr. Musk’s role and mission in that transformation remain sketchy. (On Monday, President Trump tried to offer some clarity, saying that “Elon can’t do and won’t do anything without our approval.”)
But the cumulative effect of these stories offers at best a complicated answer to what should be an uncomplicated question: Who exactly is running the federal government?
It’s troubling enough not to be able to answer emphatically with “democratically elected leaders.” Even more troubling is the possibility that the actual answer is Mr. Musk — the world’s richest man — and other unaccountable, unelected, unconfirmed allies cozy with the president.
Political economists have a name for that: state capture. State capture occurs when wealthy private interests influence a government to such a degree that they can freely direct policy decisions and public funds for their own benefit or for the benefit of their ideological fellow travelers (or both).
Revelations of this especially pernicious, widespread form of corruption have occurred in other countries — a striking example occurred in the country of Mr. Musk’s birth, South Africa — and they offer cautionary tales for democratic governments everywhere.
The details vary by context, but the political scientist Elizabeth David-Barrett lays out three general mechanisms of state capture. They now sound familiar: shaping the rules of the game through law and policy; influencing administrative decisions by capturing the budget, appointments, government contracts and regulatory decisions; and disabling checks on power by dismantling accountability structures like the judiciary, law enforcement and prosecution, and audit institutions like the inspectors general and the media.
Some of these strategies could come straight from the Project 2025 playbook or Trump administration executive orders. This should disturb all Americans. According to Ms. David-Barrett, state capture creates broad, long-lasting systemic inequality and diminished public services. Changing the rules of the game to allow such collusion to flourish, she writes, “leaves those few holders of economic power in a strong position to influence future political elites, consolidating their dominance in a self-perpetuating dynamic.”
Garrett Graff at Doomsday Scenario: Today, Right Now, is the Easiest Moment To Draw the Line Against Donald Trump.
Needless to say, things haven’t gotten better since Saturday. I watched with sadness, but not surprise, over the last 24 hours as Sen. Susan Collins, who has never hesitated over the last decade to disappoint American democracy, agreed to support Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence, a move sure to undermine American security and erode our standing with allies, and Bill Cassidy — a doctor! a lifelong vaccine advocate! — agreed to support antivax conspiracist RFK Jr. as the head of nation’s health services, overseeing programs he couldn’t even correctly explain at his confirmation hearing.
At the same time, as Elon Musk continues his junta-style takeover of the operations of the federal government, we are watching spreading chaos and the wholesale, illegal, and unconstitutional destruction of the US civil service—arguably not just one of the most important institutions in American life but one of the most important and revered institutions in the entire world, a force of millions of nonpartisan dedicated public servants that has been the backbone of the entire last eighty years of the American Century.
Here’s the challenge and sad truth we face, the challenge this week makes crystal clear:
Today, right now, right here, is the easiest moment to draw the line against Donald Trump. Every day from here, it will get harder — the politics more inevitable, the destruction more irreversible, the sheer waste more costly, the downstream impacts on American life and the world beyond more catastrophic.
The challenge is that fact has also been true every day for the last nine years.
Yet every day for the last nine years, nearly every Republican and every institution in American life in the US has hoped that someone else would be the one to draw the line against Donald Trump.
It would have been easiest for the Republican Party to draw the line against birtherism even before Donald Trump ever ran for president.
Then it would have been next easiest to oppose Trump in 2015 and 2016 in his first presidential primary. It would have been easiest to draw the line after he’d insulting Mexicans in his speech declaring his presidential run, easiest to next the draw the line the following month after he’d insulted John McCain for being a POW, easiest to draw the line in the months that followed the same way that — right or wrong — the Democratic Party actually did against unite against Bernie Sanders in 2020 as it coalesced in the course of 48 hours around Joe Biden.
Yet each of Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, Rick Perry, John Kasich, Ted Cruz, and the rest each hoped that one of the others would be the leader needed at the time. Had any of them—or all of them—acted then, we might be just wrapping up the end of eight years of the Rubio, Bush, Perry, or Kasich administration, a period of time where hundreds of thousands of extra Americans didn’t have to die because of the mismanaging of the Covid pandemic.
And so on…please read the rest at the Substack link.
I have no commentary to share today, because I have no words. I’m overwhelmed and heartbroken and completely at a loss.
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The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
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