Tuesday Cartoons: History is telling us something.

Posted: January 28, 2025 | Author: | Filed under: 2025 What Fresh Hell?, just because, Political and Editorial Cartoons | 10 Comments

That could have been written this past weekend, about this country.

History is yelling at us, but it won’t teach us a thing.

If we seek solace in the prisons of the distant past 
Security in human systems we’re told will always always last 
Emotions are the sail and blind faith is the mast 
Without the breath of real freedom we’re getting nowhere fast 

If God is dead and an actor plays his part 
His words of fear will find a place in your heart 
Without the voice of reason every faith is its own curse 
Without freedom from the past things can only get worse 

Sooner or later just like the world first day 
Sooner or later we learn to throw the past away 
Sooner or later just like the world first day 
Sooner or later we learn to throw the past away 
Sooner or later we learn to throw the past away 

History will teach us nothing 
History will teach us nothing 

Our written history is a catalog of crime 
The sordid and the powerful, the architects of time 
The mother of invention, the oppression of the mild 
The constant fear of scarcity, aggression as its child 

Sooner or later 
Sooner or later 
Sooner or later 
Sooner or later 

Convince an enemy, convince him that he’s wrong 
Is to win a bloodless battle where victory is long 
A simple act of faith 
In reason over might 
To blow up his children will only prove him right 
History will teach us nothing 
Sooner or later just like the world first day 
Sooner or later we learn to throw the past away 
Sooner or later just like the world first day 
Sooner or later we learn to throw the past away 
Sooner or later we learn to throw the past away 

History will teach us nothing 
History will teach us nothing 

Know your human rights 
Be what you come here for 
Know your human rights 
Be what you come here for 
Know your human rights 
Be what you come here for 
Know your human rights 
Be what you come here for

Source: LyricFind

That was an intense beginning to a cartoon post. But the truth is, we need to wake the fuck up.

Big news about Trump cutting funding…it’s down a bit in the post. So look for it.

A few other things before the cartoons:

https://www.instagram.com/p/DFXin9IuT8p/?img_index=4&igsh=MWI1anAxZzQxOW5hbg==

I don’t know what to say about that last bit of news…it is too cruel, but then…that is the point.

Now the cartoons:

Stay safe.

Mostly Monday Reads: Coping with Crazy

Posted: January 27, 2025 | Author: | Filed under: Colombia, Democratic Backsliding, kleptocracy | Tags: , , , , , , , , | 8 Comments

“It just comes naturally, “John (repeat1968) Buss
@johnbuss.bsky.social

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

Well, one of the most unqualified, mediocre white men ever started a full-scale attack on our troops and their morale as the American Defense Secretary.  He’s lowering troop morale. My Daddy didn’t tell me many stories about his time bombing NAZIs while based in Ipswich, England. His favorite story was that the crew was on a mission one day, and the mission commander was Jimmy Stewart. Can you imagine hearing that voice issuing orders from your radio?  My High School Russian History teacher was taken prisoner during the Battle of the Bulge. He wrote a memoir and it’s sitting in the National Archives. The one thing that really defines the Boomer generation is the war and the stories of our family members, who were all involved in one way or another. My Grandfather was in charge of War Bonds at the Kansas City Fed.  My other Grandfather worked for the Railroad, where troops and supplies were vital. One of my uncles was in the Navy, and the other was in Army Intelligence. They all had stories about that time. There were all kinds of people doing all kinds of things to save the American Way and its democracy.

If you ever find your way to New Orleans, I highly recommend the National World War 2 Museum. When the daughters and I took Dad there, it was very new. Dad was given hero treatment.  They only had their European theatre displays up, but there are more now.  Their big feature was the Higgins boats that stormed the beaches during D-Day that were made in New Orleans. Never in a million years would I expect some of the most honored war heroes to be erased from the textbooks of the military, the USAF’s military curriculum. This is from WSAF Channel 12 in Montgomery, Alabama.  A historic city for many reasons, but a lot of it comes from essential changes that improved the status of black Americans. You undoubtedly know their story. “Defense secretary orders immediate reversal of USAF’s removal of Tuskegee Airmen from the curriculum,”

Newly-confirmed Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth confirmed Sunday in a social media post that the U.S. Air Force will continue teaching about the famed Tuskegee Airmen.

In a statement posted Sunday afternoon, Sen. Katie Britt said she has “no doubt” Hegseth will “correct and get to the bottom of the malicious compliance we’ve seen in recent days.”

Senator Katie Boyd Britt immediately sent this out to what’s left of Twitter.

“Little Big Man” Walt Handelsman,  https://www.nola.com/opinions/walt_handelsman/ 

Newsweek has more details here. 

The Air Force says it has reinstated training material on the Tuskegee Airmen and Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs) after a brief delay to revise it in line with the Trump administration’s rollback of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies.

In a post on X (formerly Twitter) on Sunday, Hegseth clarified that any attempt to cut the Tuskegee Airmen training material had been “immediately reversed.”

The decision resolves a controversy that emerged as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth began his first day at the Pentagon.

After announcing this intervention, the country’s worst mediocre white christianist nationalist man in an office he’s got no busy holding making completely insulting and inappropriate decisions.  This happens when people are hired based on skin color, religion, and favoritism from the boss. We get the rule of mediocre white men and their misplaced confidence that makes the rest of us do the work so the entire outfit doesn’t go down the shitter.

Trump is also announcing big changes for the military comprised of volunteers who may soon be volunteering their asses straight back to being civilians at all this moral-lowering hate. It wasn’t enough that he summarily ousted the first woman Coast Guard Chief on his first full day in the office. This is what CNN has in its big story today. “Trump expected to sign executive orders to reshape the military, including banning transgender troops.”  This is the man who called people in the military “suckers” and “losers.”  Let’s just call all this for what it is.  It is racist.  It is misogynistic.  It defines every person by their sex and not by their gender identity or sexual preferences.  In short, it demeans every human being who is not a white male christianist and strips them of their Constitutional rights..

President Donald Trump on Monday is expected to sign four executive orders that would reshape the military, including banning transgender service members from serving in the US armed forces, gutting the military’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs, and reinstating with back pay service members who were discharged for refusing to get vaccinated from Covid-19, two White House officials told CNN.

The orders, which were first reported by the New York Post, come as Trump’s nominee to lead the Pentagon, Pete Hegseth, was sworn in as secretary of defense on Saturday. Hegseth has long stated he planned to implement major cultural changes to the military, including ending DEI practices and removing “woke” service members.

Moments after his arrival at the Pentagon on Monday, Hegseth told reporters that there are “more executive orders coming.”

This is a purge and a crusade. We need to know more to protect ourselves, our loved ones, and our country.

That same FARTUS, the mediocre white man-in-chief, had a hissy fit at Colombia over the weekend.  The BBC reports today.“Colombia yields on US deportation flights to avert trade war.  Today’s lesson is not to surrender in advance. All those coffee-drinking Americans would not like the result more than Colombians. You have no idea how reliant we are on Colombia for goods. And to top it off, he couldn’t even spell the country’s name correctly in his Social Media Barf zone.  You can read about that at the BBC link.

A looming trade war between the US and Colombia appears to have been averted after the Colombian government agreed to allow US military flights carrying deported migrants to land in the Andean country.

The spat erupted on Sunday when President Gustavo Petro barred two military planes carrying Colombians deported from the US from landing.

The Trump administration responded by threatening to slap punitive tariffs on Colombian exports to the US.

President Petro at first said Colombia would retaliate by imposing tariffs on US goods, but the White House later announced that Colombia had agreed to accept migrants – including those arriving on US military aircraft – “without limitation or delay”.

The White House hailed the agreement with Colombia as a victory for Trump’s hard-line approach, after the country’s two leaders had exchanged threats on social media on Sunday.

“Today’s events make clear to the world that America is respected again,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt wrote in a statement.

She added that the tariffs and sanctions which the Trump administration had threatened to impose on Colombia, should it not comply, would be “held in reserve, and not signed, unless Colombia fails to honour this agreement”.

She also said that President Donald Trump “expects all other nations of the world to fully co-operate in accepting deportation of their citizens illegally present in the United States”.

A cornerstone of Trump’s immigration policy is removing unlawful migrants from the US, with the promise of “mass deportations”.

It seems even the legacy media of the UK are weasel-wording his insanity.  A “spat”?  Look at those words as what we are talking about: human beings being herded around like cattle.

How do we cope with all of this? According to sociologist Jennifer Walter we must understand what is happening in this country and what to do about it. It is all about overwhelming our feelings, responses, and lives.

 As a sociologist, I need to tell you:
 
𝗬𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘄𝗵𝗲𝗹𝗺 𝗶𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗴𝗼𝗮𝗹.
 
1/ The flood of 200+ executive orders in Trump’s first days exemplifies Naomi Klein’s “shock doctrine” — using chaos and crisis to push through radical changes while people are too disoriented to effectively resist. This isn’t just politics as usual — it’s a strategic exploitation of cognitive limits.
2/ Media theorist McLuhan predicted this: When humans face information overload, they become passive and disengaged. The rapid-fire executive orders create a cognitive bottleneck, making it nearly impossible for citizens and media to thoroughly analyze any single policy.
3/ Agenda-setting theory explains the strategy: When multiple major policies compete for attention simultaneously, it fragments public discourse.
Traditional media can’t keep up with the pace, leading to superficial coverage. The result? Weakened democratic oversight and reduced public engagement.
What now?
1/ Set boundaries: Pick 2-3 key issues you deeply care about and focus your attention there. You can’t track everything — that’s by design. Impact comes from sustained focus, not scattered awareness.
2/ Use aggregators & experts: Find trusted analysts who do the heavy lifting of synthesis. Look for those explaining patterns, not just events.
3/ Remember: Feeling overwhelmed is the point. When you recognize this, you regain some power. Take breaks. Process. This is a marathon.
4/ Practice going slow: Wait 48 hrs before reacting to new policies. The urgent clouds the important. Initial reporting often misses context.
5/ Build community: Share the cognitive load. Different people track different issues. Network intelligence beats individual overload.
 
Remember: They want you scattered. Your focus is resistance.

You may read many sources to get you to focus on how they will continue to manipulate you if you let them. This one actually comes from the period of the first adventure of FARTUS (Felon, Adjudicated Rapist, and Traitor of the US)  in 2018. “The Authoritarian Regime Survival Guide” is posted on  Verfassungblog.   It’s written by Martin Mycielski, who studies Democratic Backsldiing

1. They will come to power with a campaign based on fear, scaremongering and distorting the truth. Nevertheless, their victory will be achieved through a democratic electoral process. But beware, as this will be their argument every time you question the legitimacy of their actions. They will claim a mandate from the People to change the system.

Remember – gaining power through a democratic system does not give them permission to cross legal boundaries and undermine said democracy.

2. They will divide and rule. Their strength lies in unity, in one voice and one ideology, and so should yours. They will call their supporters Patriots, the only “true Americans”. You will be labelled as traitors, enemies of the state, unpatriotic, the corrupt elite, the old regime trying to regain power. Their supporters will be the “People”, the “sovereign” who chose their leaders.

Don’t let them divide you – remember you’re one People, one Nation, with one common good.

You may read a lot more at that link.  So, the most recent rabbit hole I went down deals with learning more about Global Backsliding. I thought I’d share some reads for you. The first comes from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.  “Understanding and Responding to Global Democratic Backsliding. As the world faces a democratic recession, many of the most common explanations fall short. But looking more closely at antidemocratic leaders’ motivations and methods reveals valuable insights about different types of backsliding and how international actors should respond.” The paper is written by by Thomas Carothers and Benjamin Press. This is its summary page.

Over the past two decades, democratic backsliding has become a defining trend in global politics. However, despite the extensive attention paid to the phenomenon, there is surprisingly little consensus about what is driving it. The most common explanations offered by analysts—ranging from the role of Russia and China and disruptive technologies to the rise of populism, the spread of political polarization, and democracies’ failure to deliver—fall short when tested across a wide range of cases.

A more persuasive account of backsliding focuses on the central role of leader-driven antidemocratic political projects and the variety of mechanisms and motivations they entail. This paper identifies and analyzes three distinct types of backsliding efforts: grievance-fueled illiberalism, opportunistic authoritarianism, and entrenched-interest revanchism. In cases of grievance-fueled illiberalism, a political figure mobilizes a grievance, claims that the grievance is being perpetuated by the existing political system, and argues that it is necessary to dismantle democratic norms and institutions to redress the underlying wrongs. Opportunistic authoritarians, by contrast, come to power via conventional political appeals but later turn against democracy for the sake of personal political survival. In still other backsliding cases, entrenched interest groups—generally the military—that were displaced by a democratic transition use undemocratic means to reassert their claims to power. Although motivations and methods differ across backsliding efforts, a key commonality among them is their relentless focus on undermining countervailing governmental and nongovernmental institutions that are designed to keep them in check.

As international democracy supporters continue to refine their strategies of responding to democratic backsliding, they must better differentiate between facilitating factors and core drivers. Such an approach will point to the need for a stronger focus on the nature of leader-driven antidemocratic projects, identifying ways to create significant disincentives for backsliding leaders, and bolstering crucial countervailing institutions. Moreover, they should deepen their differentiation of strategies to take account of the diverse motivations and methods among the three main patterns of backsliding. Only in this way will they build the needed analytic and practical capacity to meet the formidable challenge that democratic backsliding presents.

The concept that grabbed me was the type of backsliding and the first type, grievance-fueled illiberalism, which sounds pretty spot on for what we are enduring and fighting against now. You’ll notice our new technologies are helping these movements spread.  It helps to see where else this has happened. I have no doubt FARTUS, and his close relationship with Erdogan are that of student and mentor.

Some backsliding leaders employ a grievance-centered strategy: they mobilize a widely held sense of frustration to justify dismantling the existing set of democratic norms and institutions, which they blame for having created the conditions that gave rise to the grievance. The grievances they embrace are diverse—ranging well beyond core economic conditions to include racial, religious, and ethnic marginalization and public frustration over corruption, crime, or general governance fecklessness.

A grievance-fueled illiberal drive typically begins with a political figure articulating and politicizing a grievance. In some cases, this grievance is widely and openly shared, especially in cases where corruption or misgovernance has disillusioned many with the existing political system and inspires a search for political alternatives. In Hungary, for example, Orbán and his Fidesz party came to power in 2010 by appealing to the widely held frustration among Hungarians with the previous Socialist government and its perceived mishandling of the economy and its inability to address the devastation of the 2007–2008 global financial crisis. Similarly, in Brazil, Bolsonaro exploited widespread citizen outrage at the Brazilian political class for its pervasive corruption, which had been put on vivid display during the mid-2010s by a series of prominent scandals and investigations.

In other cases, entrepreneurial illiberal political actors articulate grievances that have festered below the political surface for some time. Advancing such grievances may, at first, seem taboo. But as they tap into that grievance, they normalize it and thus reframe what is politically possible. In Turkey, for example, Erdoğan found electoral success in the early 2000s by making appeals to conservative religious values, in a break from long-standing norms of the staunchly secular Turkish Republic. As he appealed to the latent sense among many Turkish citizens that religion had been unduly displaced from public life, he normalized increasingly explicit calls to revisit the principles underlying liberal democracy, including strict separation of religion and public life, respect for religious minority groups, and an equal playing field for opposition. Similarly, in India under the BJP, Modi has articulated a novel vision of Hindu nationalism and directly confronted the country’s liberal founding ideas by arguing that a single religious group should hold a special place in sociopolitical life. And in the United States, Trump appealed to racial and social class grievances that had long simmered below the surface of the country’s politics, normalizing discriminatory speech and stoking anti-minority sentiments as well as anti-elite anger. In still other cases, political leaders politicize frustrations that had not previously been salient. In the Philippines, for example, Duterte played up the threat of drug use and trafficking, which until his campaign had not registered among voters’ major concerns.35

The next phase of the grievance-fueled illiberal drive entails linking the grievance with democratic norms and institutions. In many cases where the grievance is explicitly directed at the governing class—as in Brazil or Hungary—this process is relatively straightforward. But in others, some political maneuvering and artfulness are required to make this link. In India, for example, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a Hindu nationalist organization, and the BJP, its political wing, spent years arguing that the country’s Hindu majority was being unfairly oppressed by the country’s long-standing liberal, secular political order and that correcting this wrong would require a wholesale reform of norms and institutions. And in the Philippines, Duterte argued during his campaign that drug use was enabled by political elites who didn’t do enough to punish them. He ran on a campaign of rooting out corruption and circumventing democratic norms and institutions that would stop him from solving the problem—namely by killing criminals.

If and when such drives yield an electoral victory, the government then sets about confronting the norms and institutions that have putatively perpetuated the grievance.

You may read more at the link if you want to. I’m beginning to feel like I’m assigning homework, which is not my intent.  I think, though, we must embrace the concept that this was the plan all along, and there were a lot of organizations and people enabling our slide. My hope is that through knowing these things, we can deal better with what is going on around us.  I still believe that knowledge is power.

So, it’s finally thawed out here. Temple and I can take our usual walks.  There’s a lot of mess to clean up because most of the plants will need a good few whacks with my machete. I really hope that you are doing every self-care trick that you know and that you can discover new, more powerful ones.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

Sunday Cartoons:

Posted: January 26, 2025 | Author: | Filed under: 2025 What Fresh Hell?, just because | 2 Comments

This past week has been one of the hardest I’ve ever had to deal with…

As you can see from the picture above, some of my trumpet family members don’t get it.

I just have cartoons for you today. Via Cagle:

I don’t have the energy for anything else right now.

Stay safe.

Lazy Caturday Reads

Posted: January 25, 2025 | Author: | Filed under: American Fascists, cat art, caturday, Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Donald Trump, Foreign Affairs, immigration, U.S. Politics | 11 Comments

Good Afternoon!!

Alexandr Klemens The White Cat’s Slumber in the Library

Everything is going to hell in a handbasket, as everyone here knows. Trump is issuing shock executive orders at an unbelievable pace. His goal is to overwhelm us and force us to give up in despair. Of course many of his orders are illegal and/or unconstitutional and many others are simply idiotic. We’re in for four years of this–if we still have elections in the future.

I was born right after World War II, in 1947. In the aftermath of the war, there were dramatic changes in U.S. culture. The culture continued to change in many positive ways during my lifetime–until recently.

Trump managed to put the Supreme Court under right wing control, and they proceeded to overturn Roe v. Wade, making women once again second-class citizens.

The court had already weakened many of the advances in Civil Rights that took place in of 1960s and 1970s, such as voting rights. Now they are poised to continue overturning more of the rights we have gained in recent years, including the right to same sex marriage. This was happening before Trump, but he has greatly speeded up the process.

I’ve been thinking about all this, because of  a wonderful essay I read this morning by historian Heather Cox Richardson at “Letter from an American.”

She begins by describing events that took place after D-Day. U.S. troops were exhausted and were told to rest in the Ardennes region of Belgium. Then the Germans organized a massive offensive on the Ardennes that led to the Battle of the Bulge. The Germans told allied soldiers they had no choice but to surrender, but they refused.

“NUTS!”

That was the official answer Brigadier General Anthony C. McAuliffe delivered to the four German soldiers sent on December 22, 1944, to urge him to surrender the town of Bastogne in the Belgian Ardennes….

Members of his staff were more colorful when they had to explain to their German counterparts what McAuliffe’s slang meant. “Tell them to take a flying sh*t,” one said. Another explained: “You can go to hell.”

By the time of this exchange, British forces had already swung around to stop the Germans, Eisenhower had rushed reinforcements to the region, and the Allies were counterattacking. On December 26, General George S. Patton’s Third Army relieved Bastogne. The Allied counter offensive forced back the bulge the Germans had pushed into the Allied lines. By January 25, 1945, the Allies had restored the front to where it had been before the attack and the battle was over.

The Battle of the Bulge was the deadliest battle for U.S. forces in World War II. More than 700,000 soldiers fought for the Allies during the 41-day battle. The U.S. alone suffered some 75,000 casualties that took the lives of 19,000 men. The Germans lost 80,000 to 100,000 soldiers, too many for them ever to recover.

The Allied soldiers fighting in that bitter cold winter were fighting against fascism, a system of government that rejected the equality that defined democracy, instead maintaining that some men were better than others. German fascists under leader Adolf Hitler had taken that ideology to its logical end, insisting that an elite few must lead, taking a nation forward by directing the actions of the rest. They organized the people as if they were at war, ruthlessly suppressing all opposition and directing the economy so that business and politicians worked together to consolidate their power. Logically, that select group of leaders would elevate a single man, who would become an all-powerful dictator. To weld their followers into an efficient machine, fascists demonized opponents into an “other” that their followers could hate, dividing their population so they could control it.

In contrast to that system was democracy, based on the idea that all people should be treated equally before the law and should have a say in their government. That philosophy maintained that the government should work for ordinary people, rather than an elite few. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt inspired the American people to defend their democracy—however imperfectly they had constructed it in the years before the war—and when World War II was over, Americans and their allies tried to create a world that would forever secure democracy over fascism.

Winter Slumber, Shawn Braley

After we defeated the fascists, many dramatic changes took place:

The 47 allied nations who had joined together to fight fascism came together in 1945, along with other nations, to create the United Nations to enable countries to solve their differences without war. In 1949 the United States, along with Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, and the U.K., created the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a peacetime military alliance to stand firm against aggression, deterring it by declaring that an attack on one would be considered an attack on all.

At home, the government invested in ordinary Americans. In 1944, Congress passed the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, more commonly known as the G.I. Bill, to fund higher education for some 7.8 million former military personnel. The law added to the American workforce some 450,000 engineers, 180,000 medical professionals, 360,000 teachers, 150,000 scientists, 243,000 accountants, 107,000 lawyers, and 36,000 clergymen.

In 1946 the Communicable Disease Center opened its doors as part of an initiative to stop the spread of malaria across the American South. Three years later, it had accomplished that goal and turned to others, combatting rabies and polio and, by 1960, influenza and tuberculosis, as well as smallpox, measles, and rubella. In the 1970s it was renamed the Center for Disease Control and took on the dangers of smoking and lead poisoning, and in the 1980s it became the Centers for Disease Control and took on AIDS and Lyme disease. In 1992, Congress added the words “and Prevention” to the organization’s title to show its inclusion of chronic diseases, workplace hazards, and so on.

More changes: investments in infrastructure such as the interstate highway system, efforts to end racial discrimination.

After the war, President Harry Truman desegregated the armed forces in 1948, and as Black and Brown Americans claimed their right to be treated equally, Congress expanded recognition of those rights with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Shortly after Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed Executive Order 11246, translating FDR’s 1941 measure into the needs of the peacetime country. “It is the policy of the Government of the United States to provide equal opportunity in Federal employment for all qualified persons, to prohibit discrimination in employment because of race, creed, color, or national origin, and to promote the full realization of equal employment opportunity through a positive, continuing program in each executive department and agency.”

This democratic government was popular, but as the memory of the dangers of fascism faded, opponents began to insist that such a government was leading the United States to communism. Tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, along with the deregulation of business and cuts to the social safety net, began to concentrate wealth at the top of society. As wealth moved upward, lawmakers chipped away at the postwar government that defended democracy.

And now, since the inauguration of President Donald Trump on Monday, the dismantling of that system is happening all at once…

Richardon lists the horrors we’ve seen from Trump in recent days: read about them at the link above. But she is suggesting that we don’t have to give up; we can still fight fascism when things look the darkest, as they did in the Ardennes when they faced being overwhelmed by the Nazis.

January 25, 2025, marks eighty years since the end of the Battle of the Bulge.

The Germans never did take Bastogne.

I’ve quoted a great deal, but I still hope you’ll go read the whole essay.

More reads:

NBC News: Senate confirms Pete Hegseth as defense secretary, with VP Vance breaking a tie.

The Republican-controlled Senate on Friday night confirmed Pete Hegseth as defense secretary by the narrowest of margins, with Vice President JD Vance casting a tie-breaking vote and delivering a victory for President Donald Trump.

The initial vote was 50-50, with three Republicans — Sens. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine — joining all 47 Democrats in voting no.

Vance then cast the 51st vote, putting Hegseth over the top and ending weeks of uncertainty over the fate of Trump’s controversial pick to lead the Pentagon.

It marked only the second time in history a vice president was needed to break a tie for a Cabinet level nominee. In 2017, then-Vice President Mike Pence broke a 50-50 tie to confirm Betsy DeVos as Education secretary in Trump’s first term….

McConnell’s vote was a stunning rebuke of Hegseth and Trump, whom the former Senate Republican leader has clashed with repeatedly over the years.

“Effective management of nearly 3 million military and civilian personnel, an annual budget of nearly $1 trillion, and alliances and partnerships around the world is a daily test with staggering consequences for the security of the American people and our global interests,” McConnell said in a scathing statement that suggested Hegseth had not shown he is up for the job.

“Mr. Hegseth has failed, as yet, to demonstrate that he will pass this test,” McConnell’s statement continued. “But as he assumes office, the consequences of failure are as high as they have ever been.”

Shortly after the vote began, Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., who in recent days was still seeking answers from Hegseth, announced on X that he would vote in favor of him.

Politico: Trump fires independent inspectors general in Friday night purge.

President Donald Trump fired multiple independent federal watchdogs, known as inspectors general, in a Friday night purge, removing a significant layer of accountability as he asserts his control over the federal government in his second term, according to two people with knowledge of the dismissals, granted anonymity to share details they were not authorized to speak about publicly.

One of the two people briefed on the dismissals said the number is at least a dozen and includes inspectors general at the departments of State, Agriculture, Interior, Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, Education, Labor and Defense, as well as the Small Business Administration, the U.S. Energy Corp., and the Environmental Protection Agency.

By Tatiana Rodionova

Together, those agencies make up large swaths of the federal government, with control over billions of dollars in taxpayer money and broad global reach.

The inspectors general were dismissed via emails from the White House Presidential Personnel Office, with no notice sent to lawmakers on Capitol Hill, who have pledged bipartisan support for the watchdogs, in advance of the firings, the person said. The emails gave no substantive explanation for the dismissals, with at least one citing “changing priorities” for the move, the person added….

Hannibal Ware, the inspector general of the Small Business Administration and leader of a council that represents inspectors general across government, suggested that the removals may be invalid because they appear to violate federal law requiring a 30-day notification to Congress before any watchdogs can be removed.

Politico: State Department issues immediate, widespread pause on foreign aid.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio halted spending Friday on most existing foreign aid grants for 90 days. The order, which shocked State Department officials, appears to apply to funding for military assistance to Ukraine.

Rubio’s guidance, issued to all diplomatic and consular posts, requires department staffers to issue “stop-work orders” on nearly all “existing foreign assistance awards,” according to the document, which was obtained by POLITICO. It is effective immediately.

It appears to go further than President Donald Trump’s recent executive order, which instructed the department to pause foreign aid grants for 90 days pending review by the secretary. It had not been clear from the president’s order if it would affect already appropriated funds or Ukraine aid.

The new guidance means no further actions will be taken to disperse aid funding to programs already approved by the U.S. government, according to three current and two former officials familiar with the new guidance.

The order shocked some department officials for its sweeping mandate. “State just totally went nuclear on foreign assistance,” said another State Department official.

Still, the document leaves room for interpretation and does provide some exceptions. It specifies that foreign military financing for Egypt and Israel will continue and allows emergency food assistance and “legitimate expenses incurred prior to the date of this” guidance “under existing awards.” At points, it also says the decisions need to be “consistent with the terms of the relevant award.”

CNN: Scientists at NIH can’t purchase supplies for their studies after Trump administration pauses outside communications.

Scientists at the National Institutes of Health have been told the communications pause announced by the Trump Administration earlier this week includes a pause on all purchasing, including supplies for their ongoing studies, according to four sources inside the agency with knowledge of the purchasing hold.

The supply crunch follows a directive first issued on Tuesday by the acting director of the Department of Health and Human Services, which placed a moratorium on the release of any public communication until it had been reviewed by officials appointed or designated by the Trump Administration, according to an internal memo obtained by CNN. Part of this pause on public communication has been widely interpreted to include purchasing orders to outside suppliers. One source noted they had been told that essential requests can proceed and will be reviewed daily.

Researchers who have clinical trial participants staying at the NIH’s on-campus hospital, the Clinical Trial Center, said they weren’t able to order test tubes to draw blood as well as other key study components. If something doesn’t change, one researcher who was affected said his study will run out of key supplies by next week. If that happens, the research results would be compromised, and he would have to recruit new patients, he said.

CNN is not naming the scientists because they were not authorized to speak with the media.

While it’s unclear if the communications moratorium was intended to affect purchasing supplies for NIH research, outside experts said the motivation wasn’t all that important.

“It’s difficult to tell if what’s going on is rank incompetence or a willful attempt to throw sand in the gears, but it really could be either, neither reflects well on them,” said Dr. Peter Lurie, who is president and executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest. Dr. Lurie was previously an official at the US Food and Drug Administration.

The clinical center only has a few weeks of medication on hand, according to a source who had knowledge of the pharmaceutical supply but was not authorized to speak with reporters.

Before I get to the latest immigration horrors, I recommend reading this piece by Patrick Reis at Vox: The Logoff: The truth about “mass deportations.” Trump often promises instant results. Don’t fall for it.

President Donald Trump made headlines today with a threat to do something he can’t accomplish on his own: attaching conditions to disaster aid for California. We’ll see if Congress goes along. Instead, I want to focus on an area where he does have power: deportations.

Mass deportations were one of Trump’s most controversial promises. Now, the Trump administration is claiming they have begun, touting deportation flights on military aircraft and ICE’s arrest of more than 500 people on Thursday.

Cat looking on winter, Olena Kaenetska-Ostapchuk

But deportation flights went out all the time under the Biden administration — all that’s new here is the use of military aircraft. And 500 arrests are, essentially, a normal day for ICE, at or below their daily average during the final year of the Biden administration.

So why am I hearing about this now? A hallmark of the first Trump administration was the president taking something that was already happening and claiming it was the result of his revolutionary leadership. That seems to be what’s happening here.

So were mass deportations an empty threat? No — they just aren’t happening instantly. Throughout the campaign, experts cautioned that deportations on the scale Trump was promising — and his team wants to deliver — would require massive spending on ICE agents and detention facilities. Republicans in Congress are promising to deliver those resources. But none of that means they can do it right away.

What has changed already? Many things, including a Trump executive order that gives federal immigration agents the authority to raid schools, churches, and other sensitive locations. It remains to be seen how often they’ll use it. (ICE is denying a report of agents attempting to enter a Chicago public school, and it’s not clear yet what happened.)

Biden didn’t film his ICE raids and deportation flights for the media. That’s what Trump is doing. But so far, he isn’t deporting any more immigrants than Biden did.

Now some horrors.

The New York Times: Deportation Fears Spread Among Immigrants With Provisional Legal Status.

Bearing Social Security numbers and employment authorization, workers who recently arrived from places like Haiti and Venezuela have been packing and sorting orders at Amazon; making car parts for Toyota and Honda; and working in hotels, restaurants and assisted-living facilities.

On Friday, they woke up to the news from the Trump administration that many of them could be abruptly detained and swiftly deported.

A memo issued by the acting secretary of Homeland Security instructs immigration agents to speed up the deportation of immigrants who have been admitted under certain programs that were created by the Biden administration and have benefited about 1.5 million people.

Many of them have a protected status that stretches for another year or two. Tens of thousands, who arrived more recently, likely do not.

This is going to be a big problem here in Massachusetts, where we have many of these immigrants with protected status.

Experts said that immigrants had every reason to worry because the memo turned hundreds of thousands of people who have been in the country lawfully into unauthorized immigrants.

“After they came in doing everything the government told them to do, they are in the same boat as someone who came here unlawfully,” said Lynden Melmed, former chief counsel at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

“Right now, even though you are holding valid documents that allow you to work and be in the U.S., this guidance makes you vulnerable to being picked up by immigration agents and arrested at any time,” said Mr. Melmed, a partner at the firm Berry Appleman & Leiden.

Former President Biden used executive authority to admit people with temporary statuses that do not automatically offer a path to permanent residence. But, crucially, the initiatives shielded beneficiaries from deportation for at least two years and allowed them to work legally

The memo issued late on Thursday by Benjamine C. Huffman, the acting homeland security secretary, directs immigration agents to identify for expedited removal the population of migrants who benefited from two specific Biden-era initiatives related to border management.

This policy will also affect Ukrainians and Afghans who have been allowed into the U.S. temporarily. Read more details at the NYT.

Greg Sargent at The New Republic: Trump’s Awful New “Invasion” Executive Order is One of His Darkest Yet.

The blitzkrieg of executive actions that President Donald Trump signed on day one was fully intended to be disorienting in its scope of horrors, and it is delivering. They would end birthright citizenship in the United States, pull us out of the Paris climate agreement, facilitate the wholesale purging of insufficiently loyal government workers, and pardon hundreds of rioters who attacked the Capitol, including those who violently savaged cops. That’s only a very partial list.

But one executive order in particular is quietly drawing attention from immigration lawyers because of its unusually radical implications. It appears to declare that Trump’s authority to seal the Southern border and entirely nullify the right to seek asylum exists wholly independent of any statute and is rooted in his constitutional powers, all because we are allegedly coping with a migrant “invasion.” What determines whether we’re subject to an “invasion,” you ask? Trump declaring it to be so, that’s what.

This suggests that Trump and his team may be laying the groundwork to argue, to an unprecedented degree, that he is largely unbounded by Congress in executing key aspects of his immigration agenda. The justification of this on “invasion” grounds also suggests something else: The government will be corrupted deeply to produce outright propaganda designed to sustain the impression of that “invasion.”

Cats in the Snow, by Benben-Cai

The relevant provision is buried in this new executive order, which declares that Trump is closing the country to migrants on grounds that they constitute an “invasion across the southern border.” Critically, the order also says that migrants who are “engaged” in this invasion no longer can seek asylum protections—ones authorized under the Immigration and Nationality Act, or INA—until Trump issues “a finding that the invasion at the southern border has ceased.”

The sloppily written order doesn’t define precisely who constitutes a migrant engaged in this invasion. In other words, Trump appears essentially to be declaring an open-ended power to say that any and all migrants who enter unlawfully do constitute invaders. Trump can suspend the INA’s provisions mandating certain treatment of these migrants for as long as he says the “invasion” is underway.

The order gives several rationales for this. One is that migrants could be “potentially carrying communicable diseases.” That’s more radical than the Title 42 Covid-19 restrictions on entry—which Trump originally instituted and Joe Biden kept in place—as those relied on a governmentally declared public health emergency. This new order merely rests on the possibility of migrants carrying diseases. Putting aside history’s dark lessons about the consequences of casting migrants as bearers of disease, there’s no documented link between migrants and such diseases to begin with, as the Cato Institute’s Alex Nowrasteh details.

The order’s other rationale may be even more dangerous. It says that the Constitution gives Trump the authority—pursuant to conducting foreign affairs and protecting states from invasion—to take any actions he deems necessary to “achieve the objectives of this proclamation,” i.e., halt or reverse the “invasion” by migrants. That seems to apply to anyone who enters the country illegally after the signing of the order. Under it, Trump would not be bound by congressional statute in determining what to do with them, immigration lawyers tell me.

Read the rest at the link.

That’s about all I can stomach for today. I need to go back to taking care of myself as best I can. I hope you all are pacing yourselves and being kind to yourselves. I love you all.

Finally Friday Reads: First, they came for …

Posted: January 24, 2025 | Author: | Filed under: Incontinentia Buttocks Cabinet picks, kakistocracy, kleptocracy, MAGA Domestic Terrorism | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , | 13 Comments

First, they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me

Pastor Martin Niemöller

“Spoken like a true felon.” John (repeat1968) Buss  @johnbuss.bsky.social

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

The snow is beginning to melt here in chilly New Orleans.  The last bit I have to tackle is on the kitchen stairs. It’s been a trying week from many standpoints.  I’m not sure when I first read the poem by Pastor Martin Niemöller, which is reprinted at this link at the Holocaust Memorial. I imagine it was sometime in my early teens, but that’s irrelevant. What’s relevant is the headlines today that are horrifying and familiar to anyone familiar with the movies, the documentaries, and the stories from relatives of Germany before and during World War 2. No wonder the MAGAs are trying to ban The Diary of a Yong Girl by Anne Frank. Children and families are being snatched by ICE now.

So far, I have heard two over-the-top stories about the zealotry with which ICE, and soon, the military and other Federal Law Agencies are going after people. I read yesterday about Indigenous people getting scooped up in raids as well. We knew this would happen. This is from Newsweek.  “US Citizens Are Being Told To Carry Birth Certificates Amid ICE Raids.”

United States citizens, including Native Americans, are being warned to carry ID with them after reports of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers questioning and detaining people this week.

One such warning came from the Navajo Nation President, Buu Nygren, in Arizona, following reports that some residents had been approached by officials.

Newsweek reached out to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and ICE for comment via email Friday morning.

With President Donald Trump’s plan to ramp up deportations of illegal immigrants, ICE and DHS will likely come under increased scrutiny in the coming weeks and months as they seek to show force when it comes to immigration enforcement. Any overstepping could result in legal action against the agencies.

Nygren’s post on Facebook Wednesday came a day before ICE carried out a raid in Newark, New Jersey, in which a U.S. veteran was reportedly detained by officials, along with some American citizens.

According to the tribal leader in Arizona, there had been “several concerns and unconfirmed reports” that immigration officials had detained Diné people in urban areas.

“My office is looking into this matter and will provide updates as they come,” he said in the post. “I am working actively with our state leaders and law enforcement to protect our Diné people.”

The speculation of who FARTUS and his gang of White Christian Nationalists will come after first is obvious and just as he promised. I’ll start with them coming for “leftist” professors first. This is from the New York Times. It’s Michelle Goldberg’s offering on her Op-Ed Column. “Trump’s Plan to Crush the Academic Left.”

Creeley, at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, predicts that many state legislatures, local officials and university trustees are going to enlist, either out of enthusiasm or expediency, in the crusade to bring the academic left to heel. “I think you’ll see professors investigated and terminated. I think you’re going to see students punished, and I think you’re going to see a pre-emptive action on those fronts,” he said.

Just look at what’s happened at Harvard this week. On Tuesday it announced that, as part of a lawsuit settlement, it would adopt a definition of antisemitism that includes some harsh criticisms of Israel and Zionism, such as holding Israel to a “double standard” and likening its policies to Nazism. Though Harvard claims that it still adheres to the First Amendment, under this definition a student or professor who accuses Israel of genocidal action in Gaza — as the Israeli American Holocaust scholar Omer Bartov has — might be subject to disciplinary action.

In a further act of capitulation, the Harvard Medical School canceled a lecture and panel on wartime health care that was to feature patients from Gaza because of objections that it was one-sided, The Harvard Crimson reported.

“I think that Harvard likely read the room, so to speak, from a political perspective, and decided to cut their losses,” said Creeley. In this period of capitulation, it probably won’t be the last school to fall in line.

Sara Dorn has written this for Forbes Magazine. “Deportations Have Started, White House Says: Everything To Know About Trump’s Plan. The “largest deportation operation” in U.S. history is underway as hundreds of “illegal immigrant criminals” were arrested Thursday and flown out of the U.S., the White House said, as the federal government, U.S. cities, and Mexico brace for a string of executive orders targeting illegal immigration to take effect.”

  • The White House said deportation flights began Friday, after Immigration and Customs Enforcement made 538 arrests and lodged 373 detainees on Thursday, in addition to hundreds of “illegal immigrant criminals” who were flown out of the U.S. on military aircraft.
  • ICE made 308 arrests Tuesday, Trump’s first full day in office, Border Czar Tom Homan told Fox News, similar to figures under the Biden administration, which made 282 daily arrests on average in September, the last month for which data is available.
  • The administration says removals will pick up quickly, though: ICE and Border Patrol agents have been ordered to deport people who cross the border without authorization immediately and conduct “expedited removals” for people found within the interior of the United States, CBS reports, while major raids are expected in various cities.
  • Trump on Monday signed a string of executive orders targeting immigration: The military was ordered to the border, migrants can no longer make advance appointments with border officials and they must wait in Mexico while their asylum cases play out.
  • Trump also suspended the parole program for migrants from four countries and is attempting to restrict birthright citizenship for children of undocumented and non-permanent immigrants, though a judge on Thursday blocked the policy while legal challenges to the order work their way through the courts.
  • While Trump has said the deportations would begin “very quickly,” the operations will likely require Congress to approve additional funding, as ICE already faces a budget shortfall to maintain existing deportation levels in the current spending plan that expires on March 14, according to NBC.
  • There are also logistical hurdles like a limited number of beds to hold people in pre-deportation and planes to use for deportation flights, though Trump ordered the military to assist with aircraft and detention space—and removals are only possible if countries are willing to accept deportees, posing a challenge, especially for people from U.S. adversaries like Venezuela.

“To be fair… there were a lot of flies on the stage.” John (repeat1968) Buss
‪@johnbuss.bsky.social‬

In The Atlantic, Jonathan Chait writes, “There Is No Resistance. The response to the January 6 pardons shows that the president faces no effective constraints from within his party.” Very few will stand up to him.

To see how far the lines of normal have moved since President Donald Trump freed the January 6ers, briefly return to the closing days of the 2024 presidential campaign. At the time, a hot issue was whether Trump harbored fascist tendencies, as some of his former aides alleged. The very notion struck most conservatives, including some who have criticized him from time to time, as ludicrous. “Trump says crude and unworthy things and behaved abysmally after the 2020 election,” National Review’s editor-in-chief, Rich Lowry, conceded, “but the idea that he bears any meaningful resemblance to these cracked movements is a stupid smear.”

Looking to dismiss the case, Lowry then reached for the wildest example of fascist behavior he could think of: “Obviously, Trump isn’t deploying a paramilitary wing of the GOP to clash with his enemies on the streets.”

I think the one thing we can say about the days since he took the reins is that he’s definitely a fascist, and what he is doing is fascist.  The lies and propaganda are over the top. I am tired of being gaslighted about Elon Musk’s Seig Heil.  If you haven’t seen the films of NAZI German and the Seig Heil that starts from the heart, you know what it is.  Holding your hand up in a wave is totally different.

While the Anti-Defamation League condemned the Seig Heil, Bebe Netanyahu defended him. This is from The Economic Times.  “Israeli PM Netanyahu defends Elon Musk: ‘Falsely smeared’ over Nazi salute row.”

On Thursday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu defended Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk against accusations of making a Nazi salute. Netanyahu took to X (formerly Twitter) to express his support for Musk, stating, “Elon Musk is being falsely smeared. Elon is a great friend of Israel. He visited Israel after the October 7 massacre in which Hamas terrorists committed the worst atrocity against the Jewish people since the Holocaust.” He added,  “He has since repeatedly and forcefully supported Israel’s right to defend itself against genocidal terrorists and regimes who seek to annihilate the one and only Jewish state. I thank him for this.”

The controversy began on January 20, during the inauguration of US President Donald Trump. Musk made a gesture that many social media users likened to the “sieg heil” used by Nazi leader Adolf Hitler. Musk responded to the allegations by calling them baseless and stating that the gesture was taken out of context. “The ‘everyone is Hitler’ attack is sooo tired,” Musk posted on X.

Meanwhile,  “War crimes court issues warrants for Netanyahu and former Israeli defense minister.”     However, this is most important today. This article can be found at AXIOS with its analysis by Andrew Solender.  Can we all start realizing the clear and present danger now?

A House Republican on Thursday introduced a proposed change to the Constitution that would allow President Trump to seek a third term in office.

Why it matters: The amendment has virtually no chance of becoming ratified but it is a marker of the depths of fealty the new president enjoys within the House GOP.

  • Republican House members have rushed to introduce bills that would codify Trump’s vision for expanding the U.S. borders by acquiring Greenland and the Panama Canal, for instance.
  • The measure is an extreme long-shot: It would need a two-thirds vote in both chambers of Congress and be ratified by 38 states to be added to the Constitution.

Driving the news: Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) said Thursday he is introducing a two-page joint resolution to amend the 22nd Amendment, which sets the current two-term limit for presidents.

  • Ogles’ amendment would allow any president to serve a third term if their first two terms were non-consecutive.
  • The text of the amendment would still prohibit a third term if the first two were consecutive — prohibiting former Presidents Bush, Obama and Clinton from running again — or a third full term for anyone who has served more than two years of someone else’s term.

What they’re saying: “It is imperative that we provide President Trump with every resource necessary to correct the disastrous course set by the Biden administration,” Ogles said in a statement.

    • “He is dedicated to restoring the republic and saving our country, and we, as legislators and as states, must do everything in our power to support him.”
    • Ogles is a member of the Trump-aligned House Freedom Caucus who introduced legislation to allow him to negotiate a purchase of Greenland.

The world must think the entire country has gone nuts to let these freaks back into office. This is from King’s College London. “What Trump’s second presidential term could mean for the world. With Donald Trump now sworn in as the 47th US President, academics from King’s have been sharing insights into the implications of his presidency for the USA and the rest of the world.”

Donald Trump’s latest term as US President is set to transform American politics, according to Dr Georgios Samaras, Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the International School for Government.

He said Trump’s influential circle, including Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, and the drive to safeguard free speech has placed Facebook, Instagram, and X in near-complete control of cultural narratives. He said some of these involve “hateful rhetoric, authoritarian themes and misinformation which is increasingly going unchecked.”

…

Professor Andrew Blick appeared on LBC with Andrew Marr, who suggested Trump is behaving like “an old-fashioned European monarch”.

In response, Professor Blick said the US constitution was designed with in-built checks and balances, such as a separate election of the President to Congress, two chambers in the Congress and the Supreme Court. However he said the problem with this was that Trump, or those close to him, seemed to have a hold of all these things.

Comparing the US to the UK, he said there are weaker protections within Britain’s constitutional system which means if someone has strong majority in the House of Commons there are less limitations on what they can do.

He added that the UK has already “seen the Musk effect before the Trump presidency even started” with the owner of X shaping the agenda of British politics, such as the government announcing reviews following a series of posts by Musk. “Without his intervention would that have happened?” he asked.

Professor Blick suggested Keir Starmer and his team will be worried about upsetting Trump and what the consequences might be, although he said the obvious differences between the two political leaders could prove to be Starmer’s “superpower”.

The people of the UK are clearly not amused.  I still remember, as a kid watching Hitler Documentaries at school, how the German people fell for this nonsense. Now I know that being stupid, lazy, racist, and wanting to blame everyone else is an easy out.  It just takes one nutter with that snake oil to make these kinds of people fall in line. And as the poem implies, it takes the rest of us to be complacent.  It also takes legacy media and a corporate culture that values revenues and power over the people they sell stuff to.

Just watch out for yourselves! I can’t see this being reversed very quickly.  The only thing the courts have slowed down is the obvious attack on the 14th Amendment of the Constitution. However, we also know that the Supreme Court has been corrupted.  This is from CNN, as reported by Joan Biskupic, CNN’s Chief Supreme Court Analyst. “How the modern Supreme Court might view the 14th Amendment and birthright citizenship.”   Many court decisions are explored in this article, and I suggest you review them. It includes Dred Scott and Wong Kim Ark.  These quotes from Justice Roberts from his confirmation hearings scare me.  Will we actually revisit Dred Scott?

Chief Justice Roberts received no questions about the Wong Kim Ark case during his 2005 Senate confirmation hearings. But Dred Scott was raised, and Roberts responded by calling it, “perhaps the most egregious examples of judicial activism in our history … in which the Court went far beyond what was necessary to decide the case.”

“And really, I think historians would say that the Supreme Court tried to put itself in the position of resolving the dispute about the extension of slavery, and resolving it in a particular way that it thought was best for the Nation,” he added. “And we saw what disastrous consequences flowed from that.”

Since then, Roberts has also alluded to Dred Scott in terms of his own legacy.

“You wonder if you’re going to be John Marshall or you’re going to be Roger Taney,” he said in 2010, contrasting the great 19th century chief justice with the chief justice who wrote Dred Scott.

“The answer is, of course, you are certainly not going to be John Marshall,” Roberts said. “But you want to avoid the danger of being Roger Taney.”

We are so fucked.

The final thing that scares the shit out of me is what the pardons of jailed domestic terrorists that threatened abortion clinics will do to further radicalize the movement again. This is from the BBC.  “Trump pardons anti-abortion activists ahead of rally.” It’s reported by Robert Greenall.

US President Donald Trump has pardoned 23 anti-abortion activists, including some convicted of blockading a reproductive health clinic and intimidating staff and patients.

The pardons were part of a round of executive orders signed by Trump on Thursday, one of several in the first week of his presidency.

Trump described the convictions as “ridiculous”, but abortion rights campaigners said the move was evidence of his opposition to abortion access.

The orders came a day before anti-abortion protesters were due to come to Washington DC for the annual March for Life, which the president is due to address by videolink.

He’s the only US President who has attended the rally in person.

So, today’s big thing will be the Pete Hegseth Vote in the Senate.  This is from The Guardian. “Senate to vote on Pete Hegseth confirmation for secretary of defense. Former Fox News host accused of sexual assault, financial mismanagement and excessive alcohol use appears to have enough Republican votes.”

The Senate will vote on Friday night on the nomination of Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s controversial pick for US secretary of defense, but mounting concerns over Hegseth’s personal history and inexperience have raised doubts about his chances of confirmation.

Hegseth, a former Fox News host and army veteran, cleared a key procedural hurdle on Thursday, after 51 Republican senators voted to advance his nomination toward a final vote. But two Senate Republicans, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, joined their Democratic colleagues in voting against advancing Hegseth’s nomination because of their skepticism about his qualifications.

“After thorough evaluation, I must conclude that I cannot in good conscience support his nomination for secretary of defense,” Murkowski said in a statement on Thursday. “I commend Pete Hegseth’s service to our nation, including leading troops in combat and advocating for our veterans. However, these accomplishments do not alleviate my significant concerns regarding his nomination.”

Hegseth can only afford to lose the votes of three Senate Republicans, assuming every Democratic senator opposes his nomination, so it appears he is still on track for confirmation. Two Republican senators who had been viewed as potential no votes, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Thom Tillis of North Carolina, both supported advancing Hegseth’s nomination on Thursday.

In a floor speech delivered on Friday, the Senate majority leader, Republican John Thune, praised Hegseth’s qualifications and predicted he would steer the Pentagon in a new, forward-thinking direction.

“A veteran of the army national guard who served tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, Mr Hegseth will bring a warrior’s perspective to the role of defense secretary and will provide much-needed fresh air at the Pentagon,” Thune said.

And yet, Hegseth continues to be dogged by questions about allegations of sexual assault, excessive alcohol use and financial mismanagement of two non-profits that he led. On Thursday, news broke that Hegseth paid $50,000 in a settlement to a woman who accused him of sexual assault in 2017.

Did I mention we are so fucked?  Vive la résistance

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

 

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