“Of course, they’ll blame Biden for the missing gold. The plan all along. John Buss, @johnbuss.bsky.social
The grift and chaos are real. There is nothing golden about this new Gilded Age. The rich guys may have been rotten back then, but they did it by building railroads and steel plants. This new set throws their Dad’s money at things and tells everyone they are smart when they are anything but intelligent.
The Republican party deserves ignominious defeat at the polls.
Musk’s claws are all over Medicaid, and he’s being aided by Republican Congress Critters. Trump’s recent shake-down of the mayor of New York City is already giving Musk his jollies by throwing immigrants housed at the Roosevelt Hotel the boot. But that’s only one of 53 sites that will be shuttered without indicating who is waiting to hear their case in a court of law, which is likely a good portion if not all of them. Neo-Nazi encampments are on the rise too. But take heart: hackers have joined voters in trolling these folks. The midterm elections cannot come fast enough for me. Let’s take this news in order.
This analysis of the coming Medicare evisceration is provided by the site The Last Billionaires and is written by Jason Sattler. Guillotines one? “Here’s how Republicans are planning to throw millions off Medicaid and lie about it. Trump is teaching his minions to say, “We didn’t insure anyone”/”They deserved it.”
A lot of the horror in the Donald Trump sequel is new.
Sure, he was terrible the first time James Comey and Vladimir Putin made him president. But his misery couldn’t measured in donated kidneys that had to be junked, cures for diseases that won’t be found, and intentional infant deaths due to HIV.
That’s what Elon Musk has given us by singlehandedly electing Trump a second time.
However, one aspect of this Trump administration is nearly identical to the last. He wants to give rich people sloppy, unnecessary tax cuts and then “pay” for those tax cuts by basically ending Medicaid as we know it.
You’ll remember that he succeeded in the giveaways to the rich, but thanks to millions of activated Americans and John McCain’s thumb, he failed to gut Medicaid. Thankfully, because you may also remember that Trump bungled us into the worst response to COVID-19 in the rich world with a yearlong supercut of unforced errors that would have been infinitely worse if he’d succeeded in his dream of swiping insurance from masses of struggling workers and their families.
This time around, Trump, MAGA, and the Nerd Reich are determined to punish us for the few weeks rich people had to take out Olive Garden rather than enjoying the lush dining room by destroying the best medical research system ever created and simultaneously gutting the worst health insurance system in the rich world.
To be clear, we’re not sure how the details of this will look.
Republicans only need 50 votes in the Senate, which they have for pretty much anything Trump wants. The House is a mess. Speaker Mike Johnson only has a few votes to lose. While there are no true moderate Republicans in Congress, there are Republicans in losable districts—more than enough of them to lose the House in 2026 if democracy continues somewhat usually. If things go wrong enough, the GOP could even conceivably lose the House in special elections before November 2026.
One way they could go wrong is if Republicans touch a third rail and gut the largest provider of insurance in America. And that’s Trump’s plan. He has endorsed $880 billion in cuts for Medicaid, which is actually $44 billion MORE than House Republicans under his and Paul Ryan’s direction tried to cut Medicaid last time.
Because they tried this before, we have a decent idea of what the result would be, according to the Congressional Budget Office:
“In calendar year 2026, Medicaid enrollment is estimated to be 8 million lower under the AHCA than under current law due to the combination of two factors: (i) a decline of 6 million in enrollment for newly eligible adults under current law and (ii) a decline of 2 million in enrollment for all other Medicaid enrollees attributable to more frequent — 2 — eligibility redeterminations, the repeal of retroactive eligibility, and optional State work requirements for adults.”
That’s at least 8 million who’d be thrown off the program due to paperwork and ridiculous requirements that undermine the very nature of Medicaid, which exists to supplement Americans who can’t get insurance because they’re aged and not rich or taking care of a family member or trying to find a job or a kid.
As Kelly Hooper of Politico reminds us “Republicans’ plans for Medicaid have a political problem. GOP lawmakers expected to vote soon on slashing the insurance program for low-income people represent tens of millions reliant on it.
House Republicans who represent large numbers of Medicaid recipients are pushing back on their leaders’ plans to slash billions in funding for the insurance program for low-income people.
That dissension could grow considering that President Donald Trump has made the GOP more appealing to the working class. Republicans rely on low-income voters more than they have in decades, with Trump the first Republican presidential candidate to win the poorest third of the electorate since the 1960s.
A POLITICO review of enrollment in Medicaid by congressional district found that 11 Republicans in competitive seats represent larger-than-average Medicaid populations — collectively nearly 2.7 million recipients. A vote to cut the program presents a politically sensitive decision that may come back to haunt them in 2026.
With a 218-215 House split — the tightest in modern history — Republicans will be fighting for every seat during the midterms to keep control of the chamber. And they can only lose one vote in the House and still pass their budget bill.
House Republican leaders plan to use Medicaid cuts to pay for tax relief, border security and energy production in the coming weeks.
“The bulk of these cuts would have to be in Medicaid, and that’s why they’re not going to get the requisite votes they need to get it passed with the margins that they have right now,” said Bill Hoagland, senior vice president at the Bipartisan Policy Center and a former GOP Senate Budget Committee staffer. “Leaders are going to have a lot of difficulty getting the votes to pass this resolution.”
Nationally, about 24 percent of people in the United States are enrolled in Medicaid, according to an estimate compiled by NYU Langone Health. Just over 72 million people nationwide had Medicaid coverage as of October 2024, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
Garret Graff has written “An Obituary for the FBI. America’s dream of a politically independent bureau is officially dead” at his blog Dooms Day Scenario. This year, Richard Nixon’s FBI and DOJ will be a quaint takeover by comparison.
The Sunday night announcement that Dan Bongino — a bombastic MAGA podcast host, fiery right-wing troll, one-time Secret Service agent, and three-time failed Republican congressional candidate — would be the new FBI deputy director and join the newly confirmed director Kash Patel, another MAGA loyalist better known for his hucksterism of Trump merchandise than his management, leadership, or law enforcement experience, and lead the FBI marked an almost certainly permanent alteration of the fabric of the institution.
In the entire modern history of the bureau, the deputy director — the #2 person who serves as the day-to-day operational leader of the FBI — has always been a civil servant and career special agent, one who has worked his (they’ve always been men) way up the ranks over a two-decade career and is deeply familiar with the workings of the bureau, its wide-ranging missions, and curious culture.
All previous modern directors, meanwhile, have had deep experience with the FBI — working in senior roles in law enforcement, atop the Justice Department, or as federal judges. Patel and Bongino, who does not require Senate confirmation in the role, bring none of that acquired expertise or wisdom to the role; neither has worked for the FBI for a single day and neither has meaningful senior management experience.
Both have been installed, effectively, to troll the libs — and, more dangerously for every American, to weaponize the normally fiercely independent bureau in service to Donald Trump personally. Don’t take my word for it — Bongino said it himself in 2018: “My entire life right now is about owning the libs.” He added then: “We win, you lose, the new rules are in effect.” Or try this video:
More recently, he said this on his podcast: “What matters? Anyone? Power.” Listen to that clip, watch the glee on his face as he says, and imagine him as the second most-powerful person in a vital national law enforcement agency that holds enormous sway over Americans of all stripes, and tell me that isn’t one of the darkest things you’ve seen yet out of the Trump administration.
Dan Bongino, who hosts a popular pro-Trump podcast and has appeared regularly on Fox News, will serve under Kash Patel. http://www.ft.com/content/510e…
— Financial Times (@financialtimes.com) 2025-02-24T17:46:58.462Z
FARTUS’ shakedown of the Mayor of New York City is already paying off big time. This is from NBC News. “NYC Mayor Eric Adams to close Roosevelt Hotel migrant center targeted by Musk, Trump administration. The hotel’s closure comes as Adams promises to close another 53 emergency shelter sites by June.” I wonder if they’ll ship The Statue of Liberty out, too?
New York City Mayor Eric Adams announced Monday that the city will close the Asylum Seeker Arrival Center at the Roosevelt Hotel, a site that was the frequent target of criticism from Elon Musk and the Trump administration.
Over 173,000 migrants completed registrations at the Manhattan hotel since its opening in May 2023, accounting for nearly three quarters of the 232,000 migrants who entered the city since the spring of 2022, the Adams administration reported.
“While we’re not done caring for those who come into our care, today marks another milestone in demonstrating the immense progress we have achieved in turning the corner on an unprecedented international humanitarian effort,” Adams said in a Monday statement.
The mayor added that his administration has “skillfully managed this crisis,” and that the Roosevelt Hotel has been “key in allowing us to effectively manage our operations.”
On top of closing the arrival center at the hotel, Adams also announced the closure of the Humanitarian Emergency Response and Relief Center located at Roosevelt.
The mayor cited a downtick of migrant registrations as well as the success of migrants who have “sought care” from the city to take their “next steps in their journeys,” as inspiring the move to shut down the core center at Roosevelt Hotel.
Adams’ administration said that while an average 4,000 migrants were arriving each week to New York City during the “height of the international asylum seeker crisis,” the average number of registrants in the city has dropped down to the about 350 migrants per week in recent months.
“Now, thanks to the sound policy decisions of our team, we are able to announce the closure of this site and help even more asylum seekers take the next steps in their journeys as they envision an even brighter future, while simultaneously saving taxpayers millions of dollars,” Adams said in a statement.
Remember, seeking asylum is not illegal in the US. It’s a process that’s part of an international treaty that we signed. Our government’s site about the process is still online. You may read about it here. However, bribing foreign politicians is a big no-no. The BBC reports that “Ex-Reform UK Wales leader accused of taking Russian-linked bribes.” Sound familiar?
The former leader of Reform UK in Wales has appeared in court accused of accepting bribes to make statements in the European Parliament that would benefit Russia.
Nathan Gill, 51, from Llangefni on Anglesey, is facing eight counts of bribery and one count of conspiracy to commit bribery.
The court heard Mr Gill, who was a UKIP and later a Brexit Party MEP between 2014 and 2020, was alleged to have received money from his co-defendant and former Ukrainian politician Oleg Voloshyn.
He appeared at Westminster Magistrates Court by video link on Monday, speaking to confirm his name, date of birth and address.
While FARTUS is still trying to turn the US Military into his own private force, he still has these guys and they are building. This is from The Guardian. “Neo-Nazi group plots rebuild as Trump’s FBI chief takes helm, audio reveals. Exclusive: Terrorist group the Base appears defiant as new administration aims to deprioritize threat from far right.”
An international neo-Nazi terrorist group with origins in the US appears to be quickly rebuilding its global and stateside ranks, according to information obtained by the Guardian from its digital accounts.
Founded in 2018, the Base has been the intense focus of a years-long FBI counter-terrorism investigation that has resulted in more than a dozen of its members arrested. It has plotted an assassination, mass shootings and other actions in Europe, which made it a proscribed terrorist organization in several countries.
By 2022, it seemed to disappear. Yet its founder and leader, Rinaldo Nazzaro, a former US special forces contractor residing in Russia, used the safety of Russian apps before the November election to recruit and reorganize during a tense political moment. At one point, he even solicited ex-American soldiers with an offer of $1,200 a month to put members through paramilitary training somewhere in the Pacific north-west.
The Base’s regrouping comes at a time when the Trump administration has made it a policy goal to move away from policing far-right extremism and during the appointment of Kash Patel – a Maga acolyte who lauds January 6 attackers and has peddled Qanon conspiracy theories – to helm the FBI. Experts say federal law enforcement ignoring far-right groups such as the Base could expose Americans to increased domestic terror threats.
Nazzaro’s efforts, so far, appear to be paying off: the Guardian was tipped to an audio message released in mid-February from an assumed new leader of the Base with an American accent, discussing the ambitious future of the group.
After criticizing other neo-Nazi organizations such as Blood Tribe for publicly protesting against drag-queen story hours in the midwest, the voice preached covert action and quiet preparations for armed cells throughout the US rather than flashy activism.
“Are we just going to be reactionary? Or are we going to be part of the solution? The military solution,” they said. “Because inevitably we’re going to end up in some sort of military situation, what are the choices?”
The voice then describes a “black scenario” where the US government soon collapses and there’s a need to “provide for your family” and for “white women”.
“There is no political solution, only a military solution,” they can be heard saying under heavy voice modulation. “So act accordingly.”
So, there have been various ways to express concern about what has happened these first 6 weeks under the FARTUS Triumvarite and Kakistocracy. MTN has this about recent contributions by hackers. “Hack at Department of Housing and Urban Development Trolls Donald Trump and Elon Musk | Report
The hack has ended, but the images are circulating on the internet.”
A hack at the Department of Housing and Urban Development this morning has now trolled Donald Trump and Elon Musk by playing a short, AI-generated video of Donald Trump kissing Elon Musk’s feet with the title “Long Live The Real King” over the video. Below is a screen grab taken by reporters this morning at the Department:
The video was on display for a short period of time this morning before being taken down by Housing and Urban Development officials. The “long live the real king” message on the video likely refers to a recent statement made by Donald Trump stating “long live the king” after he said that he would be ending congestion pricing in New York City.
It is unclear at this point who is responsible for the hack this morning, whether it was done internally by a HUD employee, or whether authorities have any leads.
Well, it stands to irritate them more than many of our protests since internet surfing, trolling, and golfing appear to be the only presidential duty these days. I’m not sure how long it will take to stop all of this and try to rebuild our infrastructure, but this sure will kill a lot of people in the process. Just the firing of all the best and brightest of the top brass in the military is a huge loss of knowledge and leadership. The Republicans are working on those billionaire tax cuts already, so the bilking of the Treasury continues.
The U.S. Army Chorus sang ‘Les Mis’ at the White House Governors’ Ball. The U.S. Army Chorus ‘Do You Hear the People Sing?’ performance from ‘Les Misérables’ is going viral?
So, our lonely eyes turn to the Democratic Party. Nicholas Wu, writing for Politico, filed this report today. “House Democrats are ramping up their attacks on the GOP agenda. Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries urged “maximum attendance” this week ahead of a tight vote.”
House Democrats are sharpening their attacks on the Republican policy agenda ahead of an expected Tuesday budget vote, with Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries laying out a plan for pushback in a letter to Democratic colleagues Monday.
With one House Republican, Rep. Victoria Spartz (R-Ind.) already publicly opposing the plan and others privately dug in against it, Jeffries urged “maximum attendance” from his caucus to keep the pressure on Speaker Mike Johnson and his minuscule GOP majority. Democrats are also playing up the backlash some Republican members of Congress faced at recent town halls (some of it organized by liberal advocacy groups) as they try to harness grassroots resistance to the GOP.
House Democrats will gather Tuesday on the House steps, Jeffries said, to “make sure that the country can hear from everyday Americans whose lives will be devastated by the Republican budget scheme.”
Even Bernie Sanders is back on the road again. This time, he’s holding town meetings in deeply red republican states and cities. So, I’m going to use this article from the Nebraska Examiner. “Overflow Omaha crowd launches U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders’ ‘Fighting Oligarchy’ tour. ‘We are living in two Americas,’ says the Vermont senator and former presidential candidate.” Hey, it’s an improvement over giving speeches on the floor to a camera.
U.S. Sen Bernie Sanders kicked off his “Fighting Oligarchy” nationwide tour in Omaha Friday night, drawing an overflow crowd of more than 2,500, with hundreds more turned away.
The progressive independent from Vermont spoke to supporters about what he said is division in the United States under the leadership of President Donald Trump and billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk of the Department of Government Efficiency.
Sanders said he chose Omaha as his first tour stop because of its working-class voters who were swayed toward Republican candidates in the 2024 election. The former presidential candidate said he wants to encourage people, similar to those living in the Omaha-based 2nd Congressional District, to recognize policies that could hurt them and their livelihoods.
He said that 60% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck while rich people are receiving tax cuts.
His tour continues Saturday in Iowa, aimed at promoting democracy and encouraging the working class to stand up to signs of oligarchy.
“We are living in two Americas,” said Sanders. “What we do now will impact our lives. [Americans] need a grassroots movement that says no to oligarchy.”
Kitty Brougham, 65, of Omaha was among those cheering at the Omaha Marriott Downtown at the Capitol District.
She said she wanted to attend the event because she was losing hope. She is the mother of Sammie Peterson, 24, a transgender woman, and is worried for her future.
“I am watching my country be taken away from me,” said Brougham. “I needed hope.”
Sanders’ call to stand up inspired Peterson as well. She said she has not been very politically active in the past but feels that now is the time. As she worries for her future, she finds the ability to speak out.
Sanders spoke for about 30 minutes, at one point reciting the Gettysburg Address and reminding supporters that America was built on pushback against oligarchs. He encouraged people to speak up and said they are stronger when they come together — regardless of political party.
Originally set for the Laborers International Union building, the event was moved to the larger Marriott to accommodate a turnout estimated at 2,580 in the ballroom and two overflow rooms. Organizers said hundreds of others were turned away due to space constraints.
Alexander Beavers, 13, a middle school student from Omaha, was with his family cheering from the front row.
“Trump already ruined the state,” said Beavers.
Now, if these folks’ comments could only show up on the front page of any of the legacy national newspapers.
I don’t look forward to MSNBC really making a big effort for anything if this is typical of their reactions. You may have been here when I did an interview as one of the original “Reiders” back in the day on Zerlina Maxwell’s podcast. I’ve been a fan of hers forever. I attended her book signing at Baldwin Books when she launched a tour of her book on the Evers. This has me both sad and mad. They’ve canceled her show. They’re also moving Jen Psaki to Rachel’s current and old spot. Two women of color out their shows. Alex Wagner will be an at-large reporter. That is sure to be tough on her young family.
I just want to say thank you to everyone who has reached out with kindness and encouragement, both personally and in these social media streets. So very proud of The Reidout @joy.msnbc.com team, who are truly family, and all of our supporters & friends. See you tomorrow night at 7, one more time ‼️
— Joy-Ann Reid (@joyannreid.bsky.social) 2025-02-24T05:16:06.613Z
This is from The Independent. “Joy Reid’s staff had ‘tense’ meeting with MSNBC chiefs after learning her show was being axed in media, report says. Joy Reid hosted ‘The ReidOut’ for more than four years on MSNBC.”
MSNBC has canceled Joy Reid’s evening news show and held a “tense” meeting with her staff after the news was leaked to the press.
The final episode ofThe ReidOutwill air this week, The New York Times reports. Her slot will be replaced by a show led by a trio of hosts: Democratic strategist Symone Sanders Townsend, former Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele and journalist Alicia Menendez. They currently host The Weekend, which airs on Saturday and Sunday mornings.
Rebecca Kutler, the network’s newly-appointed leader, made the call amid larger plans to overhaul MSNBC’s programming, according to the Times.
Now, media journalist Oliver Darcy reports Reid’s staff found out they were losing their jobs in a tense and emotional 30-minute impromptu meeting Sunday morning. Staffers were reportedly frustrated they learned about the show shutting down from media reports, rather than directly from leadership.
Reid has hosted a 7 p.m. show on the network since 2020. She had been with the company since 2014.
The network has also removed Alex Wagner from her weekday evening spot, and Darcy reports Kutler held a “similar” meeting with the show’s staff. However, Wagner is expected to stay with MSNBC as a contributor.
Now, many are mourning Reid’s departure.
“I owe the television part of my career to Joy Reid, as do so many other Black voices y’all never would have heard of if not for her,” journalist Elie Mystal wrote on X. “And *that’s* why she’s gone. They can treat black folks as interchangeable, but everybody Black knows that Joy was indispensable.”
I’m getting too old for this shit.
#BlueskyResistance #Voices4Victory #ProudBlurAdvertisement at a London bus stop. Ya gotta love the British…
— Libby Whittemore (@libbage55.bsky.social) 2025-02-24T14:58:45.189Z
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
“Updated version of an oldie. Probably will be doing a lot of that since it’s like deja vu all over again.” John Buss
I still have this dreadful sinus infection. Last night, the temperature dropped to what usually doesn’t appear until the end of January here. The last two years have been insane, climate-wise. We’ve got many active candidates for the next probable pandemic. We’ve got an economy that’s currently the envy of the world. The number of ongoing hot wars is frightening, with one being labeled a genocide by the well-respected Amnesty International. “Polycrisis” is the term now used by folks who form the intellectual community of Strategic Advisors. That would imply “military, geopolitical, economic, political, climate, and other crises.”
The convergence of all these crises creates a situation where we need to work globally more than ever. So, the country, usually seen as the leader on the global stage, has a voting populace that just sent a clown car. Tom Nichols has this analysis written in The Atlantic. “Trump Voters Got What They Wanted. Those who expect Donald Trump will hurt others, and not them, are likely to be unpleasantly surprised.” The pathology of Trump voters is clearly stated in the clip below from The Bulwark Podcast. “The American people made their choice, and the fight to preserve the global democratic coalition against the global authoritarian movement continues. But maybe letting those voters see unadulterated Trumpism in the White House, without the baby bumpers—at least for a little while—is how we save America. Plus, the price of eggs v fascism, and Trump is going to inherit a great economy and claim responsibility for it.”
What do we do now that the lemmings are plunging over the cliff while chanting, “We really owned the libs”?
I think we can sum it up with a simple quote by George Carlin. “Think of how stupid the average person is and realize half of them are stupider than that.”
So, given that we’re firmly in a state of Polycrisis, what can be made of Trump’s ill-suited cabinet choices? For one, we know they’re there to throw out every specialist in each Federal Department to cripple that department and to lessen the number of folks that carry out the mandates (i.e., laws) established by Congress over the years over a few centuries. Are we really going to be stuck with Patel of the Crazy Eyes and crazier thoughts? RFK jr, who is responsible for killing children in Samoa with his bizarre, unschooled thoughts on vaccines? Will he really yank all the passports of his so-called enemies, and how long will that list eventually be? The entire west wing will be filled with sociopaths, narcissists, and conspiracy nuts at this rate.
So here’s Pete again. Is Trump still trying to inflict him on our military? You know, the ones that President-Reject Incontinentia Buttocks called ‘Losers’ and ‘Suckers’? Here are some thoughts by writer Cathy Young. “In Pete Hegseth’s Totalitarian Vision, Opponents of Christian Nationalism Are Commies and Political Enemies. Trump’s defense pick will help him pave the way to an authoritarian America.”
President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, is in trouble. While initial reactions to his nomination focused on the absurdity of this former Fox News anchor being elevated to second in command of the military, the main obstacles to Hegseth’s confirmation remain his various problems with women: a sexual assault allegation from 2017, disparaging comments about women in the military, and a newly surfaced 2018 email from his mother berating him for habitual mistreatment of the opposite sex.
But even more alarmingly: Hegseth is an ideological extremist who views political opponents as “the enemy” and political differences as war by another name. Worse, he’s a Christian nationalist of the stridently militaristic kind, which raises disturbing questions about his potential willingness to misuse the U.S. military for political purposes. This is not a characterization pieced together from the odd soundbite or two—Hegseth himself tells us who he is in his books. The image of Hegseth that emerges from The War on Warriors (2024), Battle for the American Mind (2022), and American Crusade (2020), is of a militant Christian extremist who is obsessed with the Crusades and whose highest aspiration is redesigning the U.S. military into his ideological mold.
The central idea of American Crusade is that the survival of the United States as a free country requires a “holy war” to achieve “a single paramount objective: the categorical defeat of the Left.” Hegseth accuses the left—by which he doesn’t just mean an extremist fringe but the Democratic Party and its supporters in general—of seeking the “utter annihilation” of true patriots. “We are two Americas; a house divided,” he declares, and the other half is full of people whose “ignorance and ideologies threaten America’s very survival.” Hegseth writes: “Only the categorical defeat of the Left will secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. We must reelect Donald Trump in 2020 and continue the cultural counterattack until Leftists are no longer electorally viable.” The implication is clear: liberty requires one-party rule. This is far from an unrepresentative line. In The War on Warriors, complaining that “the Left has never fought fair,” Hegseth lists “electing Obama” among its dirty tricks, despite the fact that Obama won a greater share of both the popular and the electoral vote in 2008 and 2012 than Trump did in 2016 and 2024.
Amanda Marcotte also writes about his love affair with White Christian Nationalism, a truly perverse twist on the New Testament, at Salon.
The central idea of American Crusade is that the survival of the United States as a free country requires a “holy war” to achieve “a single paramount objective: the categorical defeat of the Left.” Hegseth accuses the left—by which he doesn’t just mean an extremist fringe but the Democratic Party and its supporters in general—of seeking the “utter annihilation” of true patriots. “We are two Americas; a house divided,” he declares, and the other half is full of people whose “ignorance and ideologies threaten America’s very survival.” Hegseth writes: “Only the categorical defeat of the Left will secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. We must reelect Donald Trump in 2020 and continue the cultural counterattack until Leftists are no longer electorally viable.” The implication is clear: liberty requires one-party rule. This is far from an unrepresentative line. In The War on Warriors, complaining that “the Left has never fought fair,” Hegseth lists “electing Obama” among its dirty tricks, despite the fact that Obama won a greater share of both the popular and the electoral vote in 2008 and 2012 than Trump did in 2016 and 2024.
In addition to treating a broadly defined “Left” as the enemy, American Crusade also heaps scorn on ostensibly patriotic but overly complacent “fifty-fifty Americans.” The term comes from Theodore Roosevelt, who is quoted in the epigraph to the first part of the book: “There is not room in the country for any fifty-fifty American, nor can there be but one loyalty—to the Stars and Stripes.” The quote appears to be a garbled amalgam of several passages in Roosevelt’s speeches and writings, all of them from a very specific context: divided loyalties among some German-Americans during World War I. Hegseth’s “fifty-fifty American,” by contrast, refers to a well-meaning non-combatant in the culture war: a “squish” who disapproves of the perceived excesses of the progressive left but shrugs them off in the hope that “common sense will prevail,” or who doesn’t want to be “overly political,” or who thinks his or her local public school is great. For all his talk of reverence for America’s founding ideals, Hegseth’s version of Americanism sounds at times more like proto-totalitarian French Jacobinism, whose ideologues asserted that not only “traitors” but the “indifferent” and the “passive” must be punished.
After reading these analyses and their supporting citations, you can only be left with the idea that this man will have no problem turning the military on Americans out of step with his bizarre beliefs. I focus on this because Incontinentia Buttocks’ most recent picks have to do with ICE and his planned massive deportations and establishment of Concentration Camps. This is from Politico‘s Myah Ward. “Trump names ICE chief and makes another round of immigration announcements. The president-elect is planning an ambitious immigration agenda during his first 100 days.”
Trump said he was nominating Rodney Scott as commissioner of Customs and Border Protection. Scott served for almost three decades in the Border Patrol, and as the chief of the agency during the last year of the Trump administration and beginning of the Biden administration. He helped implement Trump’s Remain in Mexico Policy, Title 42 and Safe Third Country agreements.
Trump also announced he was tapping Caleb Vitello, who’s currently the assistant director of the Office of Firearms and Tactical Programs in Immigration and Customs Enforcement, to serve as acting director of ICE.
And the president-elect picked Tony Salisbury, who serves as the special agent in charge for ICE Homeland Security Investigations in Miami, to serve as the deputy homeland security adviser on the White House Homeland Security Council. Brandon Judd, the president of the National Border Patrol Council, which represents more than 17,000 Border Patrol Agents and support staff, was also announced as Trump’s nominee to be ambassador to Chile.
Immigration was Trump’s top priority on the campaign trail, and in his first 100 days he plans to begin the process of deporting hundreds of thousands of people and to roll back President Joe Biden’s immigration policies. Outside allies expect the administration’s immigration policy, similar to Trump’s first term, to be run out of the White House by incoming Border Czar Tom Homan and Stephen Miller, deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security adviser.
So, what happens with those Concentration Camps once he starts outloading Hispanic Americans? Also, will we ever rid ourselves of Biggest Dickus? More about his funding of the Trump campaign is coming out, and it’s horrifying! This is from NBC. “Elon Musk spent a quarter-billion dollars electing Trump, including financing mysterious ‘RBG PAC’. The super PAC, which defended Trump on abortion, got its more than $20 million from the “Elon Musk Revocable Trust.” This guy’s the Make American Apartheid South Africa freak!
Billionaire Elon Musk poured more than $20 million into a mysterious super PAC at the end of the 2024 campaign, part of more than $250 million he spent overall to boost President-elect Donald Trump, new campaign finance reports show.
Musk financed RBG PAC, according to the report the group filed Thursday night with the Federal Election Commission. The super PAC, which did not disclose its donors before the election, launched ads contending that Trump did not support a federal abortion ban.
All of the money the group pulled in — $20.5 million — came from a single donation from the Elon Musk Revocable Trust in Austin, Texas. RBG PAC spent almost all of its money on digital ads, mailers and text messages, according to the campaign finance report, which covered Oct. 17 through Nov. 25.
Robert Reich believes that Trump might just bring on a Civil War. That’s a frightening thought that was discussed during his first term. But that was before he figured out how to blow things up. “How Trump could bring on a second civil war. “With his plans to use the military to root out undocumented immigrants and to use the Justice Department and FBI to punish his political enemies.”
Trump may force a second civil war on America with his plan to use the military to round up at least 11 million undocumented people inside the United States — even if it means breaking up families — send them to detention camps, and then deport them.
As well as his plan to target his political enemies for prosecution — including Democrats, journalists, and other critics.
What happens when we, especially those of us in blue states and cities, resist these authoritarian moves — as we must, as we have a moral duty to?
What happens when we try to protect hardworking members of our communities who have been our neighbors and friends for years, from Trump’s federal troops?
What happens when we refuse to allow Trump’s lackeys to wreak revenge on his political enemies who live within our states and communities?
Will our resistance give Trump an excuse to use force against us?
This is not far-fetched. We need to answer these questions for ourselves. We should prepare.
Trump has said he’ll use the Insurrection Act — which grants a president the power to “take such measures as he considers necessary” to suppress “any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy.”
He’s also said he’ll use the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to end sanctuary cities. Such cities now limit cooperation with federal immigration authorities. Trump told Fox News’s Harris Faulkner that “we can do things in terms of moving people out.”
Those are all very good questions. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Richard Blumenthal are trying to get some changes made to the Insurrection Act right now. The Brennan Center has this analysis. “The Insurrection Act: A Presidential Power That Threatens Democracy. Congress must reform the outdated law, which is ripe for abuse.”
When former President Trump says he would conduct mass deportations of millions of people if elected again, some of his advisers talk about deploying the states’ National Guard to help carry out the task, even in states that oppose this extreme immigration policy.
But would he have the legal authority to do that? The answer is yes, it is legally possible under the Insurrection Act, an outdated law that is in urgent need of reform to prevent abuses of power and adapt to modern times.
The Insurrection Act is among the most powerful emergency powers at the disposal of a president, who can use it to deploy the U.S. armed forces and the militia to suppress insurrections, quell civil unrest or domestic violence, and enforce the law when it is being obstructed.
There are few constraints to this presidential power — neither Congress nor the courts play a role in deciding what constitutes an obstruction or rebellion — and the law does not limit what actions military forces may take once deployed.
The law, which was last amended in the 1870s, has been rarely invoked. But it has been both used and misused in the past. Past uses include enforcing civil rights laws, helping companies break strikes, and suppressing so-called “race riots.”
Currently, there are calls for President Biden to invoke it to gain control of the Texas National Guard and order it to stand down in the city of Eagle Pass, where National Guard soldiers have occupied a park along the southern border to militarize the border and deny federal border protection agents access.
And let’s not forget Trump’s supporters urged him to use it to impede the transition of power after the 2020 presidential election.
Although there is no question that Biden could turn to the Insurrection Act to respond to a deliberate obstruction that prevents the federal government from performing immigration duties, he should refrain from doing so and instead seek to assert federal authority through the courts. The act should be a tool of last resort, and any power of this magnitude requires robust checks and balances that it currently lacks.
That’s why the Brennan Center has proposed comprehensive reforms that would narrow the criteria for deployment, specify what actions are and are not authorized when the act is invoked, and give Congress and the courts approval and review authority to serve as checks against abuse or overreach.
The current changes asked for by Warren and Blumenthal are outlined here by the Washington Insider. “Democratic Senators Urge Biden to Restrict Military Deployment, Citing Concerns Over Trump’s Plans.” Stacy M. Brown reports the details.
Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) have called on President Joe Biden and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to issue a directive limiting the use of military personnel for domestic purposes, warning against potential misuse by President-elect Donald Trump after he takes office on Jan. 20.
The senators stressed the importance of clear guidelines to prevent the military from being deployed against American citizens without explicit constitutional or congressional authorization.
The request is rooted in the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits using federal troops in domestic law enforcement unless authorized by the Constitution or Congress.
While the Insurrection Act provides a narrow exception in cases of insurrection, rebellion, or extreme unrest, Warren and Blumenthal called for further restrictions to prevent abuse.
“Any deployment of federal forces must occur only when state or local authorities are overwhelmed and unable to ensure public safety,” the senators wrote.
They also emphasized the importance of consulting Congress before deploying troops and ensuring service members understand their obligations to reject unlawful orders.
The senators’ letter notes growing concerns over Trump’s rhetoric and past actions.
During his first term, Trump considered invoking the Insurrection Act to respond to Black Lives Matter protests, and some allies urged him to declare martial law after his 2020 election defeat. More recently, Trump has suggested using the military to deport immigrants without permanent legal status and relocating troops from overseas to the southern border.
Trump has picked a deputy for Kristy Noem at Homeland Security. This is reported by South Florida’s Channel 6 News. “Trump picks Miami HSI special agent in charge for deputy homeland security advisor. Anthony Salisbury is currently a Miami Homeland Security Investigations special agent in charge.”
In his current role, Anthony W. Salisbury “manages all of HSI’s complex Federal Law Enforcement investigative programs related to National Security and smuggling violations, including counter-proliferation, financial crimes, commercial fraud, human trafficking, human smuggling, narcotics smuggling, transnational,” the former president shared in a post on Truth Social.
He has previously served as the acting deputy executive associate director of HSI in Miami, and supervised the activities of HSI offices throughout the Republic of Mexico as the deputy attaché.
In his post, Trump wrote: “Tony will bring his vast Law Enforcement, counter-narcotics, and counter-cartel experience to the White House where he will serve under Stephen Miller, Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland Security Advisor.”
Miller is Trump’s pick for deputy chief of policy, longtime adviser and an immigration hard-liner, AP News reports.
The more deeply these picks get embedded and embed The True Believers, the more difficult it will be to find and remove them as needed. Again, I see most of the action needed to stop this lies within the courts and Congress. Fortunately and unfortunately, the House and Senate are quite close even though they will be controlled by Republicans. Are there enough sane people to stand up to these MAGA terrorists? The courts will likely follow the law until we hit SCOTUS. There are obviously embedded MAGA nuts there who continue to rewrite the Constitution and precedent.
We’ve got less than a month to develop a strategy that lets them know that We, the People, are not interested in becoming MAGA-compliant serfs. This won’t be pretty, but I’m not gonna quietly take it.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
S0, this is for all of you butt-wipers for Incontinentia Buttocks …
“Make America Garbage Again,” John Buss, @repeat1968
After sleeping through last week, I have finally decided that PTSD has kicked in, and I’m in survival mode. At least I woke up to find the word that best describes what we’re watching unfold. From the Merriam-Webster Dictionary:
*kakistocracy noun
kak·is·toc·ra·cy ˌkakə̇ˈstäkrəsē
plural kakistocracies
:government by the worst people
Greek kakistos (superlative of kakos bad) + English -cracy
The Cambridge Dictionary is more blunt. It evidently was coined sometime in the 17th century. Now we know how far we’re going to fall back.
A government that is ruled by the least suitable, able, or experienced people in a state or country:Who rules in a kakistocracy?
Fewer examples:
- Kakistocracies are governments ruled by the stupid and ignorant.
- What we have here is the world’s only kakistocracy.
- The total lack of integrity of the administration is proof that we now live in a kakistocracy.
This is what we will have after January 20,2025, which is, ironically enough, not only the inauguration of the first felon to ever hold office but also the holiday celebrating Martin Luther King. Somewhere, the Greek Muses have entered the realm of Greek Tragedy. All we need is a chorus.
I turned to some TV news last night to watch the faces of the political class chatter about the proposed cabinet members with the look of teenagers stuck in a summer camp horror film. Yes, this all does feel like a very bad movie or dream that you want to be over when you awaken. However, it is more like the idea of the tyranny of the masses that Alexis de Tocqueville dreamed of while writing his book Democracy in America. He was very afraid of the unwashed masses, and now we know why.
The greatest danger Tocqueville saw was that public opinion would become an all-powerful force, and that the majority could tyrannize unpopular minorities and marginal individuals. In Volume 1, Part 2, Chapter 7, “Of the Omnipotence of the Majority in the United States and Its Effects,” he lays out his argument with a variety of well-chosen constitutional, historical, and sociological examples.
I love that last part because it comes from the National Endowment for the Humanities and is a history class curriculum prepared for teachers on the topic. Quick, go read it or get your copy of the book before both are banned and defunded. It’s an independent agency, like the Fed, and we’ll see how long into the kakistocracy that remains to be true for both. I imagine I would never get grants to be funded as I did in 1982 to bring Kate Millet and Betty Friedan to Omaha and funds to expand our Women’s Festival to include black women presenters. That was even during the Reagan years. He must have been damned woke or completely asleep, drooling on the Resolute desk to miss that opportunity.
“Matt is the man selected to hide all the criming, appropriate.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Okay, so let me really depress you now with some headlines. This is from Public Notice‘s Lisa Needham. “Trump moves to burn down the rule of law. His cabinet nominations are obscene and augur dark days to come.” And you thought I was being a bummer!
When the sordid history of the second Trump administration is written, should we all survive that long, it will be difficult to sort out which of his early cabinet picks were the most atrocious. And while handing over control of the military to a weekend Fox News host or putting an anti-vax creep in charge of America’s top public health agency are really bad, it will be hard to sink lower than Matt Gaetz being nominated as the nation’s top law enforcement official.
Let’s pretend, for just a moment, that Gaetz isn’t just being given this job because he’s a lib-triggering Trump crony and evaluate him on the merits. Gaetz’s legal experience, such as it is, seems to consist of a stint at a small firm in Florida, Anchors Garden, where he worked after graduating from law school in 2007. The firm currently has only nine attorneys, and Gaetz devotes precisely one line to the experience in his self-servingly weird House bio, saying, “Prior to serving in Congress, Matt worked as an attorney in Northwest Florida with the Keefe, Anchors & Gordon law firm, where he advocated for a more open and transparent government.”
Advocating for a more open and transparent government sounds pretty important, right? But while the firm does have a government affairs and public records practice, when Mother Jones did a deep dive into Gaetz’s experience there, what they turned up instead was that he working on things like debt collection and representing a homeowners’ association over a dispute about a beach volleyball net. It isn’t even entirely clear when Gaetz stopped working at the firm. His House bio skips ahead to his 2010 election to the Florida House, and his legal work is never mentioned again.
This is not the biography of someone you would hire to be an assistant district attorney in a mid-size American city, much less the head of the entire Department of Justice.
Compare Gaetz to Jeff Sessions, Trump’s first attorney general pick during his previous term. Sure, Sessions was so racist that he couldn’t get confirmed as a judge. But he also spent 12 years as the US Attorney for the Southern District of Alabama and two years as the Alabama attorney general before being elected to four consecutive Senate terms. During his time in the Senate, he served on the Senate Judiciary Committee, becoming its ranking member in 2009. Sessions was a repulsive and retrograde choice for AG, but he wasn’t a demonstrably unqualified one.
That’s a sunny note to start your weekend on. Wait, there’s more! If you want to see real pearl-clutching, you must go to WAPO or NYT. But they’re a little too late for me. Here’s something from The Bulwark. I’ve suddenly gone all in for the alt-press like I did in 1970 when I started writing for Omaha’s underground Newspaper, The Aardvark, to write terrible things about Richard Nixon. “Gaetz Begins Lobbying Lawmakers, Hoping He Hasn’t Burned All the Bridges/ The congressman and his team are trying to convince Senators to overlook a potentially damning ethics report and his history of political histrionics.” This analysis is coauthored by Mark Caputo and Joe Perticone.
Though Trump has made a slew of controversial picks (the latest being Thursday’s nomination of anti-vaccine activist Robert Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services), Gaetz stands out as a singularly polarizing figure because of the investigations into his conduct, the accusations against him, and his strained personal relationship with fellow Republican members of Congress he has torched, including allies of former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, whose ouster he masterminded.
“We have 53 senators and we might not have 50 votes to confirm right now. It’s really up in the air,” said a member of Trump’s team briefed on its preliminary vote-counting. “Gaetz can be a real asshole. But he can be a great guy. The senators need to see the great guy and kind of hear the asshole apologize and tell them why all this stuff about sex crimes isn’t true.”
The push to confirm Gaetz is the latest test of his ability to survive crises that would have ruined any other politician. It also will provide an early indication of Trump’s ability to bend the Senate to his will. The president-elect has quickly moved to force votes on high-profile nominees that no other person in his position would have dared put forward. And as a fallback, he is pressuring incoming Senate Majority Leader John Thune into giving him the right to bypass the Senate to make temporary appointments.
Doing so would get Trump’s cabinet in place. But it could come at a political cost if it perceived that the president is jamming through highly-controversial nominees. On Thursday, ABC reported that the woman at the center of the sex-crimes case had told House investigators that Gaetz had paid to have sex with her in 2017 when she was a minor. Gaetz was also allegedly implicated in paying other women for sex, which he has denied, and in illicit drug use.
The succession of nominations and reporting left Republican senators in an uncomfortable spot. Some, including those on the Senate Judiciary Committee—which would first vote on Gaetz’s nomination—said they wanted to see the House ethics report into Gaetz.
A quick look at several of the appointments finds quite a few rapists and serial adulterers. Trump obviously wants mini-mes. The BBC has this list up to date and is waiting for more. “Who has joined Trump’s team so far?” Some of the appointees are not getting sanguine coverage.’
This article is specific to Gaetz and was written by North American Correspondent Anthony Zurcher. “Trump picking Gaetz to head justice sends shockwaves – and a strong message.”
Donald Trump’s nomination of congressman Matt Gaetz to be his attorney general has arrived like a thunderclap in Washington.
Of all the president-elect’s picks for his administration so far, this is easily the most controversial – and sends a clear message that Trump intends to shake up the establishment when he returns to power.
The shockwaves were still being felt on Thursday morning as focus shifted to a looming fight in the Senate over his nomination.
Trump is assembling his team before he begins his term on 20 January, and his choice of defence secretary, Fox News host Pete Hegseth, and intelligence chief, former Democratic congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, have also raised eyebrows.
But it is Gaetz making most headlines. The Florida firebrand is perhaps best known for spearheading the effort to unseat then-Republican Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy last year. But he has a history of being a flamethrower in the staid halls of Congress.
In 2018, he brought a right-wing Holocaust denier to the State of the Union, and later tried to expel two fathers who lost children in a mass shooting from a hearing after they objected to a claim he made about gun control.
His bombastic approach means he has no shortage of enemies, including within his own party. And so Trump’s choice of Gaetz for this crucial role is a signal to those Republicans, too – his second administration will be staffed by loyalists who he trusts to enact his agenda, conventional political opinion be damned.
Gasps were heard during a meeting of Republican lawmakers when the nomination for America’s top US prosecutor was announced, Axios reported, citing sources in the room.
Republican congressman Mike Simpson of Idaho reportedly responded with an expletive.
“I don’t think it’s a serious nomination for the attorney general,” Alaska Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski said. “This one was not on my bingo card.”
Gaetz is playing Rocky and is already running up and down the Capitol stairs trying to find the few people that like him. But even the New York Post is taking on the RFK appointment to HHS. I know, I can’t believe I’m doing this. It’s even it’s Editorial Board. “Putting RFK Jr. in charge of health breaks the first rule of medicine.”
The overriding rule of medicine is: First, do no harm.
We’re certain installing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head Health and Human Services breaks this rule.
Maybe he’s sworn to focus narrowly on areas where he clearly can help — inspiring Americans to embrace healthier diets and more exercise, etc.
I wonder where eating roadkill and fish laded with mercury comes into that equation?
But wait! There are reasons to question every one of his appointments. This is from The Guardian. “Trump defense secretary nominee involved in 2017 sexual assault investigation, no charges filed – report.”
Fox News host Pete Hegseth, who Donald Trump nominated to be defense secretary, was involved in a sexual assault investigation in California seven years ago, but no charges were filed against him, the San Francisco Chronicle reports.
The incident happened in 2017 at a hotel and golf course in the city of Monterey, but there were few details of how Hegseth was involved, or what happened. Here’s more, from the Chronicle:
In a brief statement late Thursday, the city manager’s office in Monterey confirmed the sexual assault investigation, but provided few details.
The city said the incident was reported to have happened between almost midnight on Oct. 7, 2017, and 7 a.m. the next morning at the Hyatt Regency Monterey Hotel and Spa on Del Monte Golf Course, less than a mile from Monterey Bay and across Highway 1 from the Naval Postgraduate School.
“The Monterey Police Department investigated an alleged sexual assault at 1 Old Golf Course Road,” the city said. It said the victim’s name was confidential and that the alleged assault was reported on Oct. 12, 2017. The city said no weapons were involved, but that there was a report of “contusions to right thigh.”
The city declined to release the police report, saying it was exempt from public disclosure, and said it would not make any further remarks on the probe.
The Monterey County District Attorney’s Office did not reply to a request for comment late Thursday, but an online database indicated no criminal charges had been filed against Hegseth in that county.
Vanity Fair reports that news of the allegation sent Trump’s transition team scrambling over the past few days:
Donald Trump’s transition team scrambled Thursday after Trump’s incoming chief of staff Susie Wiles was presented with an allegation that former Fox & Friends cohost Pete Hegseth, Trump’s nominee to be Defense Secretary, had engaged in sexual misconduct. According to two sources, Wiles was briefed Wednesday night about an allegation that Hegseth had acted inappropriately with a woman. One of the sources said the alleged incident took place in Monterey, California in 2017.
According to the transition source, the allegation is serious enough that Wiles and Trump’s lawyers spoke to Hegseth about it on Thursday. A source with knowledge of the meeting said that Hegseth said the allegation stemmed from a consensual encounter and characterized the episode as he-said, she-said.
On Thursday evening, Hegseth’s lawyer Timothy Parlatore said: “This allegation was already investigated by the Monterey police department and they found no evidence for it.”
Trump’s communications director Steven Cheung said: “President Trump is nominating high-caliber and extremely qualified candidates to serve in his Administration. Mr. Hegseth has vigorously denied any and all accusations, and no charges were filed. We look forward to his confirmation as United States Secretary of Defense so he can get started on Day One to Make America Safe and Great Again.”
That guy puts the sleaze in sleazy. Plus, he was investigated for war crimes and would be in charge of dealing with war criminals. This is from Time Magazine. “Pete Hegseth’s Role in Trump’s Controversial Pardons of Men Accused of War Crimes.”
President-elect Donald Trump’s announcement that he would nominate Fox News host Pete Hegseth to lead the Department of Defense in his second term has already stirred controversy.
Hegseth, a military veteran, staunch defender of Trump’s “America First” agenda, and an outspoken critic of what he calls the military’s “woke” culture, has built a career around challenging the military establishment. He held an influential role in advocating for Trump to intervene on behalf of service members in three cases involving war crime accusations in 2019—cases that divided the military and ignited fierce debates over the limits of executive power and military accountability.
Now, if he is confirmed as the next Secretary of Defense, Hegseth will oversee 1.3 million active-duty service members and manage military strategy at a time of global instability, raising questions about how his past approach towards accused war criminals will impact his military leadership and discipline.
During Trump’s first term in office, Hegseth lobbied for the pardons of Army Lieutenant Clint Lorance and Army Major Mathew Golsteyn, and pushed to support Navy SEAL Edward Gallagher, each of whom were facing charges or convictions related to alleged war crimes committed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Hegseth’s advocacy on behalf of the three service members appeared to pay off: in Nov. 2019, Trump granted pardons to Lorance and Golsteyn, and reversed a demotion of Gallagher, citing Hegseth and Fox News when he tweeted about his decision to review one of the cases.
Hegseth’s vocal defense of these men as victims of overzealous prosecution raised eyebrows in the military community, where such interventions by civilians are seen by some as a threat to the integrity of the justice system. “These are men who went into the most dangerous places on earth with a job to defend us and made tough calls on a moment’s notice,” Hegseth said on Fox & Friends in May 2019. “They’re not war criminals, they’re warriors.”
Lorance had been convicted by a military court in 2013 for the murder of two Afghan men during a military operation in 2012 in which he ordered his soldiers to open fire on a group of unarmed Afghan civilians he suspected of being insurgents. Lorance served six years of a 19-year sentence before Trump, after lobbying from Hegseth and others, granted him a pardon in Nov. 2019, arguing that he was unfairly targeted by military prosecutors and that his actions were justified in a combat environment where split-second decisions were often necessary for survival.
This is from Military.com. ‘He’s Going to Have to Explain It’: Surprise Defense Secretary Pick’s History Takes Center Stage.”
He has repeatedly called to ban women from serving in combat roles in the military.
He advocated extensively to gain pardons for troops accused and convicted of war crimes.
And he was one of a dozen troops turned away from serving on the National Guard mission to defend the Capitol, allegedly over tattoos that are popular with neo-Nazi and far-right groups.
Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald Trump’s surprise pick to be the next defense secretary, has an extensive history of combat in the culture wars that have been brewing over the military for the past decade.
Prior to Trump’s announcement Tuesday evening that he was nominating Hegseth, the National Guard veteran was most known as a co-host on the weekend edition of “Fox and Friends,” one of Trump’s favorite TV shows. But in choosing Hegseth, Trump landed on a defense secretary nominee with a record of public statements that line up with the promises Trump made on the campaign trail to root out alleged “wokeness” within the military.
Senators from both parties tasked with considering his nomination responded Wednesday by saying that they have a lot of questions about Hegseth’s history and those past statements, but broadly insisted they were reserving judgment.
“I’m going to have to visit with him about those remarks,” Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, the Senate’s first female combat veteran who was rumored to be in the running for Trump’s defense secretary, told reporters Wednesday when asked about Hegseth’s opposition to women in combat.
“Even a staff member of mine, she is an infantry officer. She’s back in Iowa now. She is a tumble. So he’s going to have to explain it,” Ernst added, though she did not answer when Military.com asked whether she would vote against Hegseth over the issue.
So, this is basically a band of misfits and less than mediocre wipipo. But I’ll just let Muse tell it like it is. Yes, there are a lot of f-bombs in the lyrics!
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
“They’re back…”, John Buss, @repeat1968
Farewell, Cruel X! You will not locate Sky Dancing, JJ, or me on that site. The accounts have been deleted. We’re shifting to our Blue Sky Accounts. We set them up about a year ago, but it’s more promising now that Jack Dorsey is gone. The CEO is a woman, Jay Graber. It’s also a Public Benefit Corporation. I feel better about it. It’s also open source. There seems to be quite the exodus to that site. Most of the journos I follow have headed there with the note they will only be posting publications on what I hope will become the Zombie site. We’ve also seen an uptick from our neighbors in the Fediverse. The blog is there and active. JJ and I also maintain an active presence there. You have alternatives. Now is a good time to check them out.
Our election sent another “shot heard round the world” and not in a particularly promising way. This is from CNN. “Eyeing Trump support, Israeli minister pushes for West Bank settlement annexation.”
Israel’s far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, has ordered preparations for the annexation of settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
Smotrich, who is in charge of the settlements, said on Monday that he had instructed his department to “prepare the necessary infrastructure for applying sovereignty.”
It is unclear whether his long-standing desire to apply full Israeli law in West Bank settlements has any chance of being implemented soon. His announcement was likely motivated in large part by staking out political ground in Israel’s fractious domestic politics.
Still, his announcement drew swift condemnation from the Palestinian Authority, whose foreign affairs ministry characterized such comments as “a blatantly colonial and racist extension of the ongoing campaign of extermination and forced displacement against the Palestinian people.”
Nabil Abu Rudeineh, the spokesperson for the Palestinian Authority’s presidency, said the comments confirmed “the Israeli government’s intention to finalize its plans for taking control of the West Bank by 2025” and said he held both the “Israeli occupation authorities” and the US administration responsible for allowing Israel to “persist in its crimes, aggression and defiance of international legitimacy and international law.”
Smotrich told the Knesset, or Israeli parliament, that US President-elect Donald Trump’s victory in the US election “brings an important opportunity for the State of Israel.”
Young girl, a French Resistance fighter. 20 August 1944. © AP Photo
I am pretty certain that many in the Jewish community here and in Israel itself do not support this. But, this election is like Pandora’s box. It will release things we are really not prepared for. Also, in the news is something we’ve all been dreading. This is also from CNN. It is reported by Alayna Treene. “Trump expected to announce Stephen Miller as deputy chief of staff for policy.”
President-elect Donald Trump is expected to announce in the coming days that Stephen Miller, his top immigration adviser, will serve as White House deputy chief of staff for policy, two sources familiar with the plans told CNN.
Miller, who served as a senior adviser to Trump and was his lead speechwriter during his first administration, has been a leading advocate for a more restrictive immigration policy and is expected to take on an expanded role in the president-elect’s second term. He’s been closely involved in Trump’s transition process and will have a key role in future staffing decisions. During the campaign, he frequently traveled to rallies with Trump on his private plane and was increasingly visible as a speaker at events in recent months.
Miller is also a lead architect of the president-elect’s plans for mass deportations of undocumented immigrants. He has said that a second Trump administration would seek a tenfold increase in the number of deportations to more than 1 million per year. In an interview on Fox News last week, Miller expressed eagerness at the prospect of beginning mass deportations as soon as possible.
“They begin on Inauguration Day, as soon as he takes the oath of office,” he said.
Asked about the expected announcement, Trump spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt told CNN, “President-elect Trump will begin making decisions on who will serve in his second administration soon. Those decisions will be announced when they are made.”
A longtime hardliner on immigration, Miller was instrumental in setting up immigration restrictions during the first Trump administration, advocating for child separation in migrant detention facilities and a travel ban targeting people from majority-Muslim countries.
After Trump left office, Miller started an advisory group called America First Legal, which went on to contribute to Project 2025, the sweeping conservative blueprint for the next Republican president created by the Heritage Foundation. On the campaign trail, Trump repeatedly distanced himself from Project 2025, claiming that he had no idea who was behind it, despite its close ties to Miller and other crucial figures in Trump’s orbit.
In an interview with The New York Times last year, Miller said that under a second Trump term, the military would build detention centers to house immigrants who have been arrested and are facing deportation. The new camps would likely be built “on open land in Texas near the border,” he told The Times.
Miller told The Times that Trump’s immigration plans are being designed to avoid having to create new substantial legislation. During Trump’s first term, he relied heavily on executive orders to implement immigration policy. Many of those moves were challenged in the courts, something Miller acknowledged would likely happen again in a second Trump term.
In his comments last year, Miller was up-front about his belief that Trump would not hesitate to implement harsh immigration measures in a second term.
“Any activists who doubt President Trump’s resolve in the slightest are making a drastic error: Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown,” Miller said at the time.
French refugees living in the quarries, 26 July 1944. © AP Photo
I’m glad I’m teaching from home these days because I would hate to work for some place where this happens. “Trump ‘border czar’ says administration will conduct workplace immigration raids.” It’s written at The Hill by Rafael Bernal.
Incoming “border czar” Tom Homan said Monday that President-elect Trump’s administration will crank up workplace raids as part of its broader immigration crackdown.
Speaking on “Fox & Friends,” the former director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) said workplace raids would address labor and sex trafficking.
“Where do we find most victims of sex trafficking and forced labor trafficking? At worksites,” Homan told Steve Doocy.
But advocates say that approach is unlikely to help combat trafficking.
“He’s conflating the traffickers with the people being trafficked,” said Heidi Altman, director of federal advocacy at the National Immigration Law Center.
“Tom Homan is skilled at using public safety rhetoric to justify vicious tactics that tear families apart.”
Homan, an early proponent of the “zero tolerance” policy that separated more than 4,000 children from their parents in the first Trump administration, said he will prioritize “public safety threats and national security threats” for deportation as border czar.
But Homan said foreign nationals with orders of deportation “became a fugitive,” suggesting immigrants without criminal records but with final orders of deportation would be high on the list of deportation priorities.
There’s more information about this piece of shit human being at CBS. “What to know about Tom Homan, Trump’s new “border czar”.”
Between 1940 and 1944, 6,700 women were deported from occupied France, the vast majority of them Resistance members ,
None of this will not be pretty. The Guardian has more details on the plans for the Justice Department. It also has other appalling bits and pieces come out of all the secret machinations going on in Southern Florida updating live as they become available
Conservative attorney Mark Paoletta, who is helping plan Donald Trump’s transition, warned lawyers at the justice department that those who refuse to work on advancing Trump’s agenda should resign or risk being fired.
Paoletta, in a post on X responding to a Politico story on widespread fear among the DoJ, wrote:
“Once the decision is made to move forward, career employees are required to implement the President’s plan.”
Lawrence Tribe–speaking to Ali Velshi on MSNBC–has this to say.
Unlike the sudden slide into authoritarianism seen in other countries, the United States benefits from a decentralized government that can serve as a strong counterweight to Trump’s authoritarian ambitions. It’s within this space — the system of checks and balances — that the resistance will emerge, argues Harvard’s Professor Laurence Tribe, one of the foremost constitutional law experts in the country. The Constitution is not just a “remarkable piece of prose,” says Tribe, and he underscores the prominent role that state legislatures will play in resisting Trump. Civil society, like journalists and educators, will also play a crucial role in creating a cultural-political resistance to any attempts to erase democratic norms. “It’s not over,” says Tribe. “We are about to see all of the institutions activated in a way that we haven’t had to see before.” The law is “an area where reality bites,” says Tribe.
The thing that worries me most is what happens when anything hits the Roberts court. Pema Levy–writing for Mother Jones–has this to say. “How John Roberts Brought Back Donald Trump. The Supreme Court empowered billionaires, blocked voters, and ran interference.”
There will be endless ink spilled over the 2024 election, trying to sort out the overlapping reasons why the world’s oldest democracy placed its fate in the hands of a would-be strongman who promises to dismantle democratic norms. There are many culprits—rising costs, raw white supremacy—but among them, let’s not forget the role of Chief Justice John Roberts and the US Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court has become a major force in American politics in recent years. Increasingly, it has stepped in not just to decide questions of legal importance, but to resolve heated partisan disputes. From abortion and gun rights to gerrymandering and voting rights, the justices have become the arbiters of our toughest political questions. This wasn’t a sudden change, though it has accelerated in the last four years, leaving Americans as the proverbial frog in the pot. The water is now boiling.
Why Americans chose a demagogue to helm their democracy may be partially explained by the fact that, in many ways, the United States isn’t a democracy any longer—and in many ways, that’s thanks to the Roberts court. Our system was never perfect; on a basic level, the US only became a democracy in 1965 when it finally gave all Black people the right to vote.
But for nearly two decades, Roberts and his colleagues have done immense damage to the underpinnings of the democracy Americans painstakingly built. They have reallocated political power from ordinary citizens to billionaires, worsened congressional paralysis, and transformed many elections into meaningless exercises. If you are looking to explain why America picked Trump, you could do worse than look to these five Roberts-era Supreme Court cases that weakened our democracy and faith in government. After all, voters seem to have decided that when there’s so little to protect, there’s much less to lose.
Young Maquisade South of France Getty Images
Levy looks at the major decisions recently that did this to it and it’s worth look into the detail of decisions like Citizens’ United, Shelby County, Rucho v. Common Cause, Biden v. Nebraska, and Trump v. United States in particular. Read about these decisions in the link above. More horrid appointments are coming. “Trump chooses Rep. Elise Stefanik to serve as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Stefanik, a staunch defender of Israel, is the president-elect’s first Cabinet pick for his second term.” All of this makes me wonder what some of his voters were thinking about. This comes from NBC news. I have to mention that I cannot watch anything on tv with moving pictures and sound. It’s all too nightmarish.
President-elect Donald Trump has tapped House Republican Conference chair and longtime ally Rep. Elise Stefanik, of New York, to serve as ambassador to the United Nations, a Trump transition official confirmed to NBC News on Monday.
Stefanik is Trump’s first Cabinet pick for his second term in the White House.
“I am honored to nominate Chairwoman Elise Stefanik to serve in my Cabinet as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. Elise is an incredibly strong, tough, and smart America First fighter,” Trump said in a statement.
The news was first reported by CNN. NBC News has reached out to Stefanik’s office for comment.
Stefanik, 40, has been a staunch defender of Israel in its response to Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks and has been outspoken over the last year about antisemitism on college campuses. A day before last week’s election, Stefanik reiterated her call for the defunding of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East because she alleges it has been infiltrated by Hamas.
Israel has accused staff members of the organization of participating in the Oct. 7 terror attacks, prompting it to fire at least 10 people. Israel’s parliament voted in late October to ban the organization’s operations.
French Resistance fighter Simone Segouin; women of the Maquis; Greek partisans.
I’m just waiting for them all to don brownshirt uniforms in solidarity with the historical NAZIs. HuffPo has this reaction from Ruth Ben-Giat, an expert on facism. “Authoritarianism Expert Shatters A Trump ‘Illusion’: ‘One Of The Biggest Scams Of All’. Ruth Ben-Ghiat said this reason for voting for Trump would have “very sad” consequences.” This is reported by Lee Moran.
Authoritarianism expert Ruth Ben-Ghiat spoke on MSNBC’s “The Weekend” about one particular appeal that President-elect Donald Trump had for some voters that resulted in his decisive 2024 election victory ― and how the “illusion of competency” is “one of the biggest scams of all” of authoritarian leaders.
Many people “would like to be relieved of the burden of choice” when it comes to voting in elections, and that is what Trump promised during the campaign to evangelical Christians, Ben-Ghiat noted.
“They are not afraid of being relieved of that burden of choice and letting somebody else make the decisions,” she explained. “And so, in fact, often authoritarian personalities who are like the big boss at home or in the workplace, the bullies, they are the ones who are glad in the political ground to give up their agency and voice to somebody else.”
Trump promised voters that “I alone can fix it,” Ben-Ghiat recalled.
“This is reassuring to some people,” she continued, calling it “very sad” because, throughout history, people have all eventually discovered “that this brought disaster upon the country.”
“The illusion of competency is very important,” she added. “That’s why they’re going to put their trust in him to solve their problems because they think he’s competent. And that’s one of the biggest scams of all.”
Great Lady Of The Resistance: Yvette Lundy
Codename: Possum. Yvette Lundy was a French schoolteacher and resistance fighter who saved Jewish families and survived two Nazi concentration camps.
This analysis from Richard Seymor at The Guardian reminds us that the US isn’t the only country looking towards its hard right. “Far-right leaders are winning across the globe. Blaming ‘the economy’ or ‘the left-behinds’ won’t cut it. The economy matters, but the likes of Trump succeed by offering voters revenge for problems both real and imagined” I always felt there was something else.
Donald Trump, for the first time, won a majority of the popular vote. He took the US presidency with huge swings in his favour, increasing his share of first-time voters, young voters, black voters and Latino voters. And he gained among voters earning under $100,000, while wealthier voters preferred Harris – a reversal of the class alignments in 2020. Current voting tallies suggest the swing to the Republicans was largely caused by mass abstention among Democrat voters. This result echoes global trends. Trump and his new coalition will now head a loose alliance of far-right governments from India to Hungary, Italy, the Philippines, Argentina, the Netherlands and Israel.
The rhythm of far-right successes began with Viktor Orbán’s landslide in Hungary’s 2010 parliamentary election. Since Narendra Modi’s victory in the 2014 Indian general election, it has scarcely paused: Trump’s first ascent to the White House, the Brexit vote and Rodrigo Duterte’s success in the Philippines all took place in 2016. Two years later, Jair Bolsonaro scored an upset in Brazil. Since the pandemic, the Brothers of Italy won the Italian general election in 2022 and Javier Milei took the Argentinian presidency in 2023. For most of this period, Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud has ruled Israel in coalition with far-right parties. Even where it is not in power, the far right is gaining, as in France and Germany. In the long view, the defeat of Trump in 2020 and Bolsonaro in 2022 were predictable oscillations in a general pattern of ascent.
Why does the far right keep winning? Is it “the economy, stupid”, as James Carville put it during Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential run? The idea that far-right voting reflects a protest by the economically “left behind” is quite popular.
There is a kernel of truth to this: the state of the economy was the single biggest motive for Trump voters in 2024. Liberals, snarking about the “vibecession” – the mistaken belief by the public that the economy is in recession – say GDP is growing and inflation is modest at 2.4%. But headline figures don’t reflect how most people experience the economy. Prices are 20% higher than before the pandemic and, more importantly, prices for essentials such as food are up 28%. Household debt was a major stress factor. Biden also cut a raft of popular benefits established during the pandemic. Unsurprisingly, most people don’t believe the headline figures.
Yet this narrative barely scratches the surface. First, the evidence suggests that people don’t always vote with their wallets: studies from the 20th century up to the present show that simple measures of economic self-interest aren’t a very good predictor of voting behaviour. The economy matters, of course, but not as a simple metric of aggregate wellbeing. It is a space in which people judge their personal standing relative to how they perceive the state of society. Personal setbacks are generally only politicised when they are perceived as part of a wider crisis. Second, while the far right can’t win without gaining some working-class support, in the US, Brazil, India and the Philippines, it relies on a bedrock of middle-class support. Besides, millions regularly have their economic lives wrecked without going far right: the poorest in most societies generally aren’t very susceptible to their message. Third, in strictly material terms the economic offer of today’s far right is paltry, yet incumbency has been incredibly forgiving for nationalist governments.
In India, after average consumer expenditure fell, Modi was re-elected in 2019 with a 6% swing. In the Philippines, as the number of “poor” Filipinos surged, Duterte’s successor Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr won 58% of the vote in 2022 – an increase of almost 20 points. Even in defeat, they do surprisingly well. Average incomes rose more slowly under Trump than his predecessor, yet he added 10 million voters to his base in 2020. And if people voted with their wallets, why would many working-class Americans back a candidate committed to cutting taxes for the rich?
The political effects of economic misery are more indirect than “It’s the economy, stupid” implies. Economic shocks are mediated by the existing emotional currents in society. The middle-class and more affluent workers can identify with the rich and resent the poor, migrants and “spongers” who threaten their lifestyle. Mostly resentment results in impotent complaint. Hit by shocks, most people are ill-placed to confront their causes and tend to withdraw from politics.
Today’s far right offers a different answer – what the political theorist William Connolly calls a “politics of existential revenge”. It replaces real disasters with imaginary disasters. Trump warns of “communist” takeover and amplifies the “great replacement” conspiracy theory. His supporters rail against “white genocide” and satanic child-molesting elites. Instead of opposing injustice, they vilify those who threaten social hierarchies like class, race and gender. Instead of confronting systems, they give you enemies you can kill. This is disaster nationalism.
It runs deeper than elections. Rising from the cauldrons of cyberfascism, “lone wolf” murders have increased since 2010. Pogroms have erupted in Delhi and the West Bank. In the US, vigilantes attacked Black Lives Matter protesters. Britain and Ireland have been shaken by racist riots. And in recent years, there have been bungled “insurrections” such as the storming of the Capitol by Trump supporters in January 2021 and the trucker blockades intended to block Lula’s accession to power in Brazil.
This is a global social contagion. And far from being discredited by outbursts of collective violence, the new far right is galvanised by it. Modi’s rise to power began with an anti-Muslim pogrom in his home state of Gujarat. Trump’s 2020 campaign was electrified by vigilante violence. Bolsonaro came from nearly 20 points behind to almost winning after a summer of deadly violence.
There’s more at the link.
So, that’s about all I can take today. I’ve been hibernating like a bear these last few days. I can’t decide if I like the reality of my dreams better than waking up to the reality in this reality or not. We are not alone.
We need to do what we can to ensure this will not stand.
“The End Times are nigh. The Prodigal Son returns to Madison Square Garden.” John Buss @repeat1968
I was lucky that working with students last night interfered with any attempt to turn on the Fascist Rally at the World’s Most Famous Arena. This wasn’t exactly Ali against Frazier or Holyfield vs Lewis. This was more like #DonOld vs the Majority of the country. The opening bouts were lame.
My short take on this is it was basically a Crazy Old Cult Leader warming his brood up for the Ultimate Kool-Aid moment. Unfortunately, we previewed that on January 6, so I hope that law enforcement agencies are prepared. The Ultimate Chaos Agent is making his play for a coup
This brings me to this dangerous conspiracy theory making the rounds. To think, I was simply walking the dog around the block! I got told a conspiracy theory by a short-order cook at a local bar who has said crazy things before, so I thought I’d look into it to prove him wrong. His favorite spiel is that the right wing and the left wing are the same, and the government is corrupt. Which is partially correct. Look at Jill Stein and Robert Kennedy hooked up with the Fascists and Putin. If you take populism to its furthest corners of the right and the left, they eventually bump butts with each other. However, the left wing and the right in the United States do not wield the same power, and they are not of equal size. There’s no real leftist power in this country. The billionaire class has been funding the extreme right-wing for decades now, and it shows. Polls on issues show that most Americans agree on the major things. The problem is that the political system does not play towards consensus.
This guy insisted the DOD is sneaking a policy to Congress to approve the use of military force on civilians. Now, if DJT was in power, I believe he’d try that, although it would take a lot more than a policy of the DOD or an act of Congress to amend the Constitution. Even when I came back to show him the actual act to show him it says nothing of the kind, he insisted he’d read it, and that’s what he said. But when I invested it, I thought, wow, that looks like the will of the Ultimate Chaos Agent!
This link leads to DOD DIRECTIVE 5240.01 (DOD INTELLIGENCE AND INTELLIGENCE-RELATED ACTIVITIES, AND DEFENSE INTELLIGENCE COMPONENT, ASSISTANCE TO LAW ENFORCEMENT AGENCIES AND OTHER CIVIL AUTHORITIES.) It’s short, and the language is easy to comprehend. So, I did some research, and now I think it’s important enough of the conspiracy theory in light of the Prepare for War rally in Madison Square. Here’s what I found with a little dank rabbit hole exploring. “Far-Right Suggests Military Just Authorized Lethal Force Against Americans Ahead of the Election. It Didn’t. As Trump warns about an “enemy from within,” a Defense Department directive set off a firestorm on alt-tech social media. But the Insurrection Act is the real threat, experts say.” This is from a Blog Called The War Horse and it’s written by Sonner Kehrt.
Just as former president Donald Trump told Fox News last week that he wanted to use the U.S. military to “handle” what he called the “enemy from within” on Election Day, an obscure military policy was beginning to make the rounds on social media platforms favored by the far right.
The focus? Department of Defense Directive 5240.01.
The 22-page document governs military intelligence activities and is among more than a thousand different policies that outline Defense Department procedures.
The Pentagon updated it at the end of September. Although military policies are routinely updated and reissued, the timing of this one—just six weeks before the election and the same day Hurricane Helene slammed into the Southeast—struck right-wing misinformation merchants as suspicious.
They latched onto a new reference in the updated directive—“lethal force”—and soon were falsely claiming that the change means Kamala Harris had authorized the military to kill civilians if there is unrest after the election.
That’s flat-out not true, the Pentagon and experts on military policy told The War Horse.
“The provisions in [the directive] are not new, and do not authorize the Secretary of Defense to use lethal force against U.S. citizens, contrary to rumors and rhetoric circulating on social media,” Sue Gough, a Department of Defense spokesperson, said Wednesday night.
But as Trump doubles down on his “enemy from within” rhetoric, DOD Directive 5240.01 continues to gain traction among his supporters as ostensible proof that Harris, not Trump, wants to use the military against American citizens.
By early last week, “5240.01” began to spike on alt-tech platforms such as Rumble, 4chan, and Telegram, as well as on more mainstream platforms like X, according to an analysis by The War Horse and UC Berkeley’s Human Rights Center.
On Ron Paul’s Liberty Report, a YouTube show, the former Texas congressman told viewers that the policy meant that the country is now a “police state.” Republican Maryland congressman Andy Harris told Newsmax host Chris Salcedo last Wednesday that he was concerned the Defense Department was pushing through policies without congressional oversight.
“This is exactly what the Democrats said Trump would do. And they’re doing it,” he said. “This means that after an election, they could declare national emergency and literally call out the Army in the United States.”
Former Trump national security adviser and retired Army Lieutenant Gen. Michael Flynn tweeted the policy update out to his 1.7 million followers, just as he shared the week before a video suggesting the military had manipulated the weather to focus Hurricane Helene’s deadly fury on Republican voters in the South.
“Republican election fraud season is in full swing.” John Buss, @repeat1968
I really see this as a way to ensure their well-armed militia shows up at the local courthouse or state house well-armed when the vote count starts meaningfully leaning towards a Harris/Walz Administration. The ACLU has had this policy firmly in its FOIA grip since 1982. The documents are out there with no commentary or urgent lawsuits filed. You would think they’d be interested.
The Center for Informed Policy at the University of Washington is more interested in those conspiracy theories. “Rumors rapidly spreading about reissued Department of Defense Directive 5240.01” explains the right wing’s angst on this one in its 2024 U.S. ELECTIONS RAPID RESEARCH BLOG.
Key Takeaways
- Early last week, rumors started to spread between multiple social media platforms and across political communities online about a recently reissued Department of Defense Directive 5240.01 that documents procedures when there is a potential use of lethal force.
- Some online communities have speculated that the directive’s changes are timed with the upcoming election, with some suggesting without evidence that the intent behind the change is that the government is planning to use force against Americans.
- The viral spread could be exploiting a data void – a situation where there is no reliable information about a topic in search results — given there are no published fact-checks or traditional journalist coverage of the directive’s changes.
Just Security calls it “Much Ado About Nothing.” Oddly enough, this was an article my neighborhood weirdo was about to show me when he read the title and then suddenly closed it, and just as I said oh, Just Security is a reliable source. They conclude with this, which is similar to a thought in The War Horse. That’s the real danger is the Insurrection Act that Trump used to go after George Floyd Protestors with the National Guard. His stated goal was to support local law enforcement in Lafayette Park in Washington, D.C., on May 30, 2020. You probably will remember this culminating with the upside-down bible event. The ACLU is very interested in that event.
To be sure, there are good reasons to be concerned about the federal government’s power to use the armed forces domestically against Americans, but the new language in Directive 5240.01 is not one of them. The Insurrection Act represents a far greater danger. It gives the president broad discretion to use the military as a domestic police force and contains virtually no safeguards to prevent abuse. The Brennan Center for Justice, where we work, has put forward a comprehensive proposal for reforming the Insurrection Act, and a bipartisan group of former national security officials convened by the American Law Institute has similarly called for Insurrection Act reform. Those who are currently sounding the alarm about Directive 5240.01 would do well to refocus their energies on that critical task.
I just messaged it off to one of the MSNBC Anchors I chat with on occasion, so I’m about to see if I can get someone serious journalism on it with the hope of getting rid of the data void.
So, before I tackle the main event, I have one more nerdy article to suggest. This is about the odds makers. This is from Good Authority. The analysis is provided by Josh Clinton. “Poll results depend on pollster choices as much as voters’ decisions. Simple changes in how to weight a single poll can move the Harris-Trump margin 8 points.”
There is no end of scrutiny of the 2024 election polls – who is ahead, who is behind, how much the polls will miss the election outcome, etc., etc. These questions have become even more pressing because the presidential race seems to be a toss-up. Every percentage point for Kamala Harris or Donald Trump matters.
But here’s the big problem that no one talks about very much: Simple and defensible decisions by pollsters can drastically change the reported margin between Harris and Trump. I’ll show that the margin can change by as much as eight points. Reasonable decisions produce a margin that ranges from Harris +0.9% to Harris +8%.
This reality highlights that we ask far too much of polls. Ultimately, it’s hard to know how much poll numbers reflect the decisions of voters – or the decisions of pollsters.
The 4 key questions for pollsters
After poll data are collected, pollsters must assess whether they need to adjust or “weight” the data to address the very real possibility that the people who took the poll differ from those who did not. This involves answering four questions:
1. Do respondents match the electorate demographically in terms of sex, age, education, race, etc.? (This was a problem in 2016.)
2. Do respondents match the electorate politically after the sample is adjusted by demographic factors? (This was the problem in 2020.)
3. Which respondents will vote?
4. Should the pollster trust the data?
To show how the answers to these questions can affect poll results, I use a national survey conducted from October 7 – 14, 2024. The sample included 1,924 self-reported registered voters drawn from an online, high-quality panel commonly used in academic and commercial work.
After dropping the respondents who said they were not sure who they would vote for (3.2%) and those with missing demographics, the unweighted data give Harris a 6 percentage point lead – 51.6 % to 45.5% – among the remaining 1,718 respondents.
You may read more details about those factors at the link. I try not to put my students to sleep during statistics lectures, so I certainly won’t do it to you. The reporting and clips on the Madison Square Garden Rally kept me up most of the night. I felt like the child in grade school watching the teacher thread the film through those blue projectors only to see things my Dad didn’t want to remember about World War 2. I don’t know about you, but my school district did not hold back on the World War 2 experience. One of my high school teachers wrote a book on his experience as a prisoner taken during the Battle of the Bulge. I was surrounded by friends’ parents and my parents’ friends who were Veterans. We watched the films of the 1936 Olympics and heroes like Jesse Owens and, of course, all the Hitler and Mussolini public speeches. If you were like little me, I couldn’t understand who could fall for any of that.
I also saw films of the United States turning away Jewish people in ships fleeing Europe and films of the internment of Japanese-Americans. All of these seemed surreal to me at the ripe old age of 11.
Now, I know more. Now I can identify people that just love to goosestep with whom I would not share the location of any modern day Anne Frank.
Tom Toles Editorial Cartoon
CNN Analyst Stephen Collinson has this analysis. “Trump unveils the most extreme closing argument in modern presidential history.” The MAGA movement is about hating and eliminating everyone who isn’t like them.
Donald Trump anchored his bid to win a second White House term next week on searing anti-migrant fear at a rally at Madison Square Garden, doubling down on his promise for a massive deportation program on Day 1 to reverse an “immigrant invasion.”
As the ex-president’s allies defend him against Democratic claims he is a “fascist” and an authoritarian in waiting, based in part on warnings by his ex-chief of staff John Kelly, Trump on Sunday delivered a screed that may augur the most extreme presidency in modern history if he beats Democratic nominee Kamala Harris on November 5.
“The United States is an occupied country,” Trump said, as Democrats projected messages on the exterior of the storied New York City arena, reading “Trump is Unhinged” and “Trump praised Hitler.”
The huge rally was billed as the launch of the final stage of Trump’s bid to pull off one of the greatest comebacks in American political history after trying to overturn the result of the last election and leaving office in disgrace in 2021. Before he spoke, some of the ex-president’s top supporters flung race-based and vulgar rhetoric. Former congressional candidate David Rem called Harris the “antichrist” and “the devil,” while others lashed out at Hillary Clinton, “illegals” and homeless people. Comedian Tony Hinchcliffe called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.”
This is from Politico. The analysis is by Andrew Howard. “Fallout spreads from racist rhetoric at Trump’s MSG rally. “What you saw last night is a divisive America. That’s race-baiting. It’s all the things that we were doing in the ‘30s and ‘40s,” former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci said Monday.”
Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally Sunday evening was supposed to provide his closing argument against Kamala Harris. Instead, Trump and his supporters are being forced to answer for hateful and racist rhetoric delivered from the podium Sunday night with just eight days left in the campaign.
The comments, while reminiscent of many made by Trump in the campaign’s final weeks, were made by a comedian early in the night’s schedule and were supposed to be jokes. Now, they are dominating the news cycle and putting Trump’s campaign on the backfoot with just under a week until the election.
Longtime Trump adviser Peter Navarro is calling the comedian, Tony Hinchcliffe, “the biggest, stupidest asshole that ever came down the comedy pike” after he called Puerto Rico a “floating island of hot garbage” during his often-vulgar opening set.
And Trump’s opponents are using the rally as proof of the former president’s divisiveness, going as far as likening the rhetoric from Sunday’s rally to the sinister 1939 Nazi rally that took place in the same venue.
“My reaction is that was a combination of 1933 Germany, 1939 Madison Square Garden last night,” former Trump adviser Anthony Scaramucci said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” Monday morning. “What you saw last night is a divisive America. That’s race baiting. It’s all the things that we were doing in the ‘30s and ‘40s.”
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D-N.Y.), called Sunday night’s event a “hate rally.”
“This was not just a presidential rally, this was not just a campaign rally. I think it’s important for people to understand these are mini January 6 rallies, these are mini Stop the Steal rallies,” she said on “Morning Joe.”
Florida GOP Rep. Byron Donalds blamed the media for the backlash surrounding Sunday’s rally during an interview on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Monday, saying the media is too focused on “fear-mongering” and not “the facts and the substance.”
“So to the New York Daily News, is it a racist rally if you have a Black man from Florida who’s originally from New York speaking at the rally? I don’t think so,” Donalds said. Still, Donalds distanced himself from Hinchcliffe’s comments.
“I didn’t agree with what the comedian said. None of us did,” Donalds said. “When it came out, we were all like, ‘Wait what? Who? Did that get out? No, no, no.’ Nobody agreed with that. Nobody.”
Last night, Florida Republican Sen. Rick Scott, up for reelection this year in a state heavily populated with Puerto Ricans, wrote on social media that the “joke bombed for a reason,” and “Puerto Ricans are amazing people and amazing Americans!”
Yet another Floridian, GOP Rep. María Elvira Salazar, was also quick to condemn the comedian. “This rhetoric does not reflect GOP values,” she wrote in a post on X Sunday evening.
Early Monday morning, the Harris campaign was quick to jump in, highlighting headlines in 17 newspapers, eight clips from TV shows, and 29 other statements from politicians, celebrities and journalists.
Famous Puerto Ricans rushed to bolster Harris, including pop-phenom Bad Bunny, along with Jennifer Lopez and Ricky Martin.
Hinchcliffe’s backlash-inducing comments were not limited to Puerto Rico. The comedian also made a crude remark about “carving watermelons” after seeing a Black man in the audience. Another opener, businessman Grant Cardone, likened Harris’ advisers to “pimp handlers.”
And Trump adviser Stephen Miller, who has shaped many of Trump’s immigration policies, said Americans are having their jobs “looted and stolen from them” and sent to foreign countries.
I always turn to Historian Heather Cox Richardson for the final thoughts.
I stand corrected. I thought this year’s October surprise was the reality that Trump’s mental state had slipped so badly he could not campaign in any coherent way.
It turns out that the 2024 October surprise was the Trump campaign’s fascist rally at Madison Square Garden, a rally so extreme that Republicans running for office have been denouncing it all over social media tonight.
There was never any question that this rally was going to be anything but an attempt to inflame Trump’s base. The plan for a rally at Madison Square Garden itself deliberately evoked its predecessor: a Nazi rally at the old Madison Square Garden on February 20, 1939. About 18,000 people showed up for that “true Americanism” event, held on a stage that featured a huge portrait of George Washington in his Continental Army uniform flanked by swastikas.
Like that earlier event, Trump’s rally was supposed to demonstrate power and inspire his base to violence.
Apparently in anticipation of the rally, Trump on Friday night replaced his signature blue suit and red tie with the black and gold of the neofascist Proud Boys. That extremist group was central to the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and has been rebuilding to support Trump again in 2024.
On Saturday the Trump campaign released a list of 29 people set to be on the stage at the rally. Notably, the list was all MAGA Republicans, including vice presidential nominee Ohio senator J.D. Vance, House speaker Mike Johnson (LA), Representative Elise Stefanik (NY), Representative Byron Donalds (FL), Trump backer Elon Musk, Trump ally Rudy Giuliani, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., right-wing host Tucker Carlson, Trump sons Don Jr. and Eric, and Eric’s wife, Republican National Committee co-chair Lara Trump.
Libbey Dean of NewsNation noted that none of the seven Republicans running in New York’s competitive House races were on the list. When asked why not, according to Dean, Trump senior advisor Jason Miller said: “The demand, the request for people to speak, is quite extensive.” Asked if the campaign had turned down anyone who asked to speak, Miller said no.
We could see the signs that he knew he probably wouldn’t win the minute Biden backed out. We could taste the panic in the air. We know his campaign is already spending more time in the Court trying to fuck with elections than with the ground game he delegated to Musk, who is out there basically running a personal game show with a million-dollar giveaway for attention.
Marc Elias and his team have been in court for the Harris/Walz campaign, which has been fighting Trump’s legal team that is “flooding the zone” with lawsuits and election tricks. #DonOld is clearly not physically or mentally capable of carrying on a campaign that requires giving cogent speeches and long hours. The only thing he excels at is creating chaos. “Marc Elias, Voting Rights Attorney, joins Nicolle Wallace on Deadline White House with a look at the work that Trump allies and attorneys are doing ahead of the 2024 Election in order to create doubt and confusion which will enable Donald Trump to deny the results of the 2024 Election should he lose again. ”
Here are the arguments for the Ultimate Chaos Agent in the Wallace/Elias interview.
The question is, will creating chaos be enough to bring the Republic and the voting and judicial systems to their knees? Can he knock out the Constitution, or will We the People knock him out on November 5th. We need the KO. These things keep me awake at night with my stomach churning and jumping like a kid about to take his ACTs.
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Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Memeorandum Crooks and Liars Democracy NOW The UK Guardian
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