Hegseth’s nomination suggests a coming battle over social and personnel issues within the armed forces, historically one of the nation’s most diverse institutions. He has been among Trump’s most high-profile supporters to champion the cause of rolling back initiatives designed to promote diversity.
Lazy Caturday Reads
Posted: March 29, 2025 Filed under: cat art, caturday, Donald Trump, education, Elon Musk, just because | Tags: campus activism, Columbia University, Doge, Hamas, higher education, international students, Marco Rubio, Pete Hegseth, Peter Marks, Phil Hegseth, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Rumeysa Ozturk, Social Security, Tufts University 7 Comments
Stephanie Lambourne, Blissful Teatime
Good Afternoon!!
As usual, so much is happening that I don’t know where to begin, so I’ll begin with the Trump administration’s war on higher education.
The most detailed story I’ve seen so far is at The Times of India, but they don’t allow copying. I hope you’ll go to the link and read the article. The gist is that the Trump administration is emailing international students who were involved in campus activism to self-deport. The administration spies are searching social media for any comments from foreign students that they interpret as anti-American. In addition, Marco Rubio is using AI to find student that appear to support Hamas or other terrorist groups and revoke their visas. There’s more at the link.
This is from Ken Klippenstein.com: Trump Admin Spies on Social Media of Student Visa Holders. Ideological purge of foreign students revealed in new leaked directive.
The Trump administration is requiring that foreign students studying in, or seeking to study in the United States, pass an ideological test in order to obtain a visa, according to a “sensitive” State Department directive issued by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and which I obtained.
The crackdown, instituted on Tuesday, makes it “mandatory” for consular officers and State Department personnel to conduct a “social media review” — including screenshotting posts — of new and returning student visa applicants for any evidence of terrorist connections. Such connections are defined broadly to include “advocating for, sympathizing with, or persuading others to endorse or espouse terrorist activities or support” a terrorist organization. Though the document doesn’t explicitly define what counts as advocacy, it mentions “conduct that bears a hostile attitude toward U.S. citizens or U.S. culture (including government, institutions, or founding principles).
Specific reference is made to students seeking to participate “in pro-Hamas events,” which is how the Trump administration has characterized student protests against the war in Gaza.
“When you apply to enter the United States and you get a visa, you are a guest,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on March 16 in remarks quoted in the directive “If you tell us when you apply for a visa, I’m coming to the U.S. to participate in pro-Hamas events, that runs counter to the foreign policy interest of the United States ….. if you had told us you were going to do that, we never would have given you the visa.”
The order to “comprehensively review and screen every visa applicant” appears directed at Palestinian and other foreign students who are “sympathetic” to Hamas, but typical of every government directive, it also opens the door for broader ideological vetting. It also directs the social media of visa applicants to be assessed for “potential security and non-security related ineligibilities [that] pose a threat to U.S. national security.”
The directive, dated March 25, bears the subject line “Enhanced Screening and Social Media Vetting for Visa Applicants.” It begins with a reference to two of Trump’s executive orders, including one on “measures to combat anti-semitism” and another on combating foreign terrorists and other national security threats to public safety.
There’s more detail at the link.
The LA Times: California international students on alert as Trump ramps up arrests of pro-Palestinian activists.
Ali, a UCLA student who joined pro-Palestinian protests last year, avoided arrest when riot police dismantled the school’s encampment last May. An international student who took part in a surge of campus activism around Israel’s war in Gaza, he was wary of having a record that could affect his visa. But he did not otherwise hide his activism.
Now, as federal authorities act on President Trump’s directive to deport international student activists he accuses of being antisemitic “pro-Hamas” terrorism supporters, Ali has taken new precautions. He’s moved out of his apartment — the address listed with the government — and is staying with a friend. He attends classes but avoids social events. He carries a piece of paper with the number for a 24-hour hotline faculty set up for students detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Arthur’s Morning, by Vicky Mount
As more arrests unfold, fears among California international students are growing — and frustrations mounting — as they accuse campus administrators of not doing enough to protect them in the state with the largest foreign student population in the nation and universities at the forefront of national activism.
“It’s a matter of time before it gets here,” said Ali, who did not want his full name, nationality, area of study or age published because he is worried about being tracked. “This is free speech. Isn’t this what this country is supposed to be known for?” [….]
At UCLA, faculty members recently circulated advice to international students: “Don’t say anything to ICE. Don’t sign anything. Tell them to speak to your attorney,” it said alongside a hotline number. “… Please have a stamped, pre-addressed envelope to someone you trust with you in the event of an ICE arrest, you can send the mail to alert them you have been detained.”
During “know your rights” training events, some international students have been told to “not go out unless you need to and make sure someone knows where you are going if you do go out,” said Randall Kuhn, a UCLA professor of public health who last year joined protesters.
Apparently, Trump is attempting to cancel the First Amendment for international students, and he is working on ending it for all college students, professors, and administrators as well.
The New York Times (gift link): Columbia President Is Replaced as Trump Threatens University’s Funding.
The interim president of Columbia University abruptly left her post Friday evening as the school confronted the loss of hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding and the Trump administration’s mounting skepticism about its leadership.
The move came one week after Columbia bowed to a series of demands from the federal government, which had canceled approximately $400 million in essential federal funding, and it made way for Columbia’s third leader since August. Claire Shipman, who had been the co-chair of the university’s board of trustees, was named the acting president and replaced Dr. Katrina Armstrong.
The university, which was deeply shaken by a protest encampment last spring and a volley of accusations that it had become a safe haven for antisemitism, announced the leadership change in an email to the campus Friday night. The letter thanked Dr. Armstrong for her efforts during “a time of great uncertainty for the university” and said that Ms. Shipman has “a clear understanding of the serious challenges facing our community.”
Less than a week ago, the Trump administration had signaled that it was satisfied with Dr. Armstrong and the steps she was taking to restore the funding. But in a statement on Friday, its Joint Task Force to Combat Antisemitism said that Dr. Armstrong’s departure from the presidency was “an important step toward advancing negotiations” between the government and the university.
The statement included a cryptic mention of a “concerning revelation” this week, which appeared to refer to comments from Dr. Armstrong at a faculty meeting last weekend. According to a faculty member who attended, Dr. Armstrong and her provost, Angela Olinto, confused some people when they seemed to downplay the effects of the university’s agreement with the government. A transcript of the meeting had been leaked to the news media, as well as to the Trump administration, according to two people familiar with the situation.
Ms. Shipman, a journalist with two degrees from Columbia, is taking charge of one of the nation’s pre-eminent universities at an extraordinarily charged moment in American higher education.
The federal government is threatening to end the flow of billions of dollars to universities across the country, many of which are facing inquiries from agencies that range from the Justice Department to the Department of Health and Human Services.
Reuters has an update on Rumeysa Ozturk, the Tufts University graduate student who was recently kidnapped by ICE in Somerville, Massachusetts: US judge halts deportation of Turkish student at Tufts.
BOSTON, March 29 (Reuters) – A federal judge in Massachusetts on Friday temporarily barred the deportation of a Turkish doctoral student at Tufts University, who voiced support for Palestinians in Israel’s war in Gaza and was detained by U.S. immigration officials this week.
Rumeysa Ozturk, 30, was taken into custody by U.S. immigration authorities near her Massachusetts home on Tuesday, according to a video showing the arrest by masked federal agents. U.S. officials revoked her visa.
Artist unknown
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has accused Ozturk, without providing evidence, of “engaging in activities in support of Hamas,” a group which the U.S. government categorizes as a “foreign terrorist organization.”
Oncu Keceli, a spokesperson for Turkey’s foreign ministry, said efforts to secure Ozturk’s release continued, adding consular and legal support was being provided by Turkish diplomatic missions in the U.S.
“Our Houston Consul General visited our citizen in the center where she is being held in Louisiana on March 28. Our citizen’s requests and demands have been forwarded to local authorities and her lawyer,” Keceli said in a post on X….
In Friday’s order, opens new tab, U.S. District Judge Denise Casper in Boston said that to provide time to resolve whether her court retained jurisdiction over the case, she was barring Ozturk’s deportation temporarily.
She ordered the Trump administration to respond to Ozturk’s complaint by Tuesday.
Mahsa Khanbabai, a lawyer for Ozturk, called the decision “a first step in getting Rumeysa released and back home to Boston so she can continue her studies.”
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has been very busy undermining our health in his position as head of the Department of Health and Human Services. Here’s the latest.
ProPublica: The CDC Buried a Measles Forecast That Stressed the Need for Vaccinations.
Leaders at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ordered staff this week not to release their experts’ assessment that found the risk of catching measles is high in areas near outbreaks where vaccination rates are lagging, according to internal records reviewed by ProPublica.
In an aborted plan to roll out the news, the agency would have emphasized the importance of vaccinating people against the highly contagious and potentially deadly disease that has spread to 19 states, the records show.
A CDC spokesperson told ProPublica in a written statement that the agency decided against releasing the assessment “because it does not say anything that the public doesn’t already know.” She added that the CDC continues to recommend vaccines as “the best way to protect against measles.”
But what the nation’s top public health agency said next shows a shift in its long-standing messaging about vaccines, a sign that it may be falling in line under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime critic of vaccines:
“The decision to vaccinate is a personal one,” the statement said, echoing a line from a column Kennedy wrote for the Fox News website. “People should consult with their healthcare provider to understand their options to get a vaccine and should be informed about the potential risks and benefits associated with vaccines.”
ProPublica shared the new CDC statement about personal choice and risk with Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University School of Public Health. To her, the shift in messaging, and the squelching of this routine announcement, is alarming.
“I’m a bit stunned by that language,” Nuzzo said. “No vaccine is without risk, but that makes it sound like it’s a very active coin toss of a decision. We’ve already had more cases of measles in 2025 than we had in 2024, and it’s spread to multiple states. It is not a coin toss at this point.”
CBS News: RFK Jr. to gut vaccine promotion and HIV prevention office, sources say.
The entire staff of the federal government’s Office of Infectious Disease and HIV/AIDS Policy is expected to be laid off, multiple federal health officials told CBS News Friday. The moves are part of a broader restructuring plan ordered by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that involves cutting 20,000 HHS positions.
Much of the government’s efforts to buoy lagging childhood vaccination rates nationwide have been run through OIDP, including a new campaign called “Let’s Get Real” that had launched in the final months of the Biden administration to provide resources and information to health care providers talking to hesitant parents.
“Spreading the truth saves lives, so use our resources to help parents understand how vaccines work, why they’re safe, and how they help protect kids,” the department had said of the campaign after it was launched.
The Office of Minority Health has also been informed that it should expect to be dissolved, sources said.
OIDP, overseen by the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health or OASH, had numbered around 60 employees at the end of the Biden administration. The cuts come as the Trump administration is trying to merge the other offices in OASH into a new HHS agency called the Administration for a Health America, or AHA….
The National Vaccine Program has also been run by OIDP, which works with an advisory committee to coordinate the department’s agencies to develop vaccines, oversee their safety and increase their availability and use.
The New York Times: Top F.D.A. Vaccine Official Resigns, Citing Kennedy’s ‘Misinformation and Lies.’
The Food and Drug Administration’s top vaccine official, Dr. Peter Marks, resigned under pressure Friday and said that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s aggressive stance on vaccines was irresponsible and posed a danger to the public.
“It has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies,” Dr. Marks wrote to Sara Brenner, the agency’s acting commissioner. He reiterated the sentiments in an interview, saying: “This man doesn’t care about the truth. He cares about what is making him followers.”
By Karyn Lyons
Dr. Marks resigned after he was summoned to the Department of Health and Human Services Friday afternoon and told that he could either quit or be fired, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Dr. Marks led the agency’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, which authorized and monitored the safety of vaccines and a wide array of other treatments, including cell and gene therapies. He was viewed as a steady hand by many during the Covid pandemic but had come under criticism for being overly generous to companies that sought approvals for therapies with mixed evidence of a benefit.
His continued oversight of the F.D.A.’s vaccine program clearly put him at odds with the new health secretary. Since Mr. Kennedy was sworn in on Feb. 13, he has issued a series of directives on vaccine policy that have signaled his willingness to unravel decades of vaccine safety policies. He has rattled people who fear he will use his powerful government authority to further his decades-long campaign of claiming that vaccines are singularly harmful, despite vast evidence of their role in saving millions of lives worldwide.
“Undermining confidence in well-established vaccines that have met the high standards for quality, safety and effectiveness that have been in place for decades at F.D.A. is irresponsible, detrimental to public health, and a clear danger to our nation’s health, safety and security,” Dr. Marks wrote.
This is insane:
Mr. Kennedy has, for example, promoted the value of vitamin A as a treatment during the major measles outbreak in Texas while downplaying the value of vaccines. He has installed an analyst with deep ties to the anti-vaccine movement to work on a study examining the long-debunked theory that vaccines are linked to autism.
And on Thursday, Mr. Kennedy said on NewsNation that he planned to create a vaccine injury agency within the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He said the effort was a priority for him and would help bring “gold-standard science” to the federal government….
In his letter, Dr. Marks mentioned the deadly toll of measles in light of Mr. Kennedy’s tepid advice on the need for immunization during the outbreak among many unvaccinated people in Texas and other states.
Dr. Marks wrote that measles, “which killed more than 100,000 unvaccinated children last year in Africa and Asia,” because of complications, “had been eliminated from our shores” through the widespread availability of vaccines.
Dr. Marks added that he had been willing to address Mr. Kennedy’s concerns about vaccine safety and transparency with public meetings and by working with the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, but was rebuffed.
Next up, the latest Musk news.
The latest DOGE plan for Social Security is terrifying. Wired: DOGE Plans to Rebuild SSA Code Base in Months, Risking Benefits and System Collapse.
The so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is starting to put together a team to migrate the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) computer systems entirely off one of its oldest programming languages in a matter of months, potentially putting the integrity of the system—and the benefits on which tens of millions of Americans rely—at risk.
The project is being organized by Elon Musk lieutenant Steve Davis, multiple sources who were not given permission to talk to the media tell WIRED, and aims to migrate all SSA systems off COBOL, one of the first common business-oriented programming languages, and onto a more modern replacement like Java within a scheduled tight timeframe of a few months.
Under any circumstances, a migration of this size and scale would be a massive undertaking, experts tell WIRED, but the expedited deadline runs the risk of obstructing payments to the more than 65 million people in the US currently receiving Social Security benefits.
“Of course, one of the big risks is not underpayment or overpayment per se; [it’s also] not paying someone at all and not knowing about it. The invisible errors and omissions,” an SSA technologist tells WIRED….
SSA has been under increasing scrutiny from president Donald Trump’s administration. In February, Musk took aim at SSA, falsely claiming that the agency was rife with fraud. Specifically, Musk pointed to data he allegedly pulled from the system that showed 150-year-olds in the US were receiving benefits, something that isn’t actually happening. Over the last few weeks, following significant cuts to the agency by DOGE, SSA has suffered frequent website crashes and long wait times over the phone, The Washington Post reported this week.
By Fernando Botero
Why this is problematic:
This proposed migration isn’t the first time SSA has tried to move away from COBOL: In 2017, SSA announced a plan to receive hundreds of millions in funding to replace its core systems. The agency predicted that it would take around five years to modernize these systems. Because of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, the agency pivoted away from this work to focus on more public-facing projects.
Like many legacy government IT systems, SSA systems contain code written in COBOL, a programming language created in part in the 1950s by computing pioneer Grace Hopper. The Defense Department essentially pressured private industry to use COBOL soon after its creation, spurring widespread adoption and making it one of the most widely used languages for mainframes, or computer systems that process and store large amounts of data quickly….
As recently as 2016, SSA’s infrastructure contained more than 60 million lines of code written in COBOL, with millions more written in other legacy coding languages….
SSA’s core “logic” is also written largely in COBOL. This is the code that issues social security numbers, manages payments, and even calculates the total amount beneficiaries should receive for different services, a former senior SSA technologist who worked in the office of the chief information officer says. Even minor changes could result in cascading failures across programs.
“If you weren’t worried about a whole bunch of people not getting benefits or getting the wrong benefits, or getting the wrong entitlements, or having to wait ages, then sure go ahead,” says Dan Hon, principal of Very Little Gravitas, a technology strategy consultancy that helps government modernize services, about completing such a migration in a short timeframe.
The New York Times: Elon Musk Says He Has Sold X to His A.I. Start-Up xAI.
Elon Musk said on Friday that he had sold X, his social media company, to xAI, his artificial intelligence start-up, in an unusual arrangement that shows the financial maneuvering inside the business empire of the world’s richest man.
The all-stock deal valued xAI at $80 billion and X at $33 billion, Mr. Musk said on X. X’s price was down from the $44 billion that Mr. Musk paid for the social media company in 2022, but higher than the $12 billion valuation that some of X’s investors have recently assigned it. The last valuation of xAI, at a December fund-raising round, was about $40 billion.
Both companies are privately held and already share significant resources, such as engineers. A chatbot called Grok, made by xAI, is trained on data posted by X users and is available on X. Last month, bankers for X told investors that some of the social media company’s revenue came from xAI.
Mr. Musk wrote in his post that “xAI and X’s futures are intertwined.”
“Today,” he said, “we officially take the step to combine the data, models, compute, distribution and talent.” He added, “The combined company will deliver smarter, more meaningful experiences to billions of people while staying true to our core mission of seeking truth and advancing knowledge.”
The deal shows how Mr. Musk can play with different parts of his business empire. In this case, he folded a company that has been losing value, X, into one that has been gaining value, xAI. Mr. Musk made a similar maneuver in 2016 when he used stock of his electric car company, Tesla, to buy SolarCity, a clean energy company where he was the largest shareholder and his cousin Lyndon Rive was chief executive.
While Tesla is a publicly traded company that must disclose its finances and other information to shareholders, most of Mr. Musk’s companies are privately held and more opaque. Those include the rocket manufacturer SpaceX; the Boring Company, a tunneling start-up; and Neuralink, a brain interface company. Mr. Musk often moves resources and employees among his companies, defying traditional business norms and operating his various companies as one big Musk enterprise.
The latest on Pete Hegseth.
The Wall Street Journal: Hegseth Brought His Wife to Sensitive Meetings With Foreign Military Officials.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who is facing scrutiny over his handling of details of a military strike, brought his wife, a former Fox News producer, to two meetings with foreign military counterparts where sensitive information was discussed, according to multiple people who were present or had knowledge of the discussions.
Artist unknown
One of the meetings, a high-level discussion at the Pentagon on March 6 between Hegseth and U.K. Secretary of Defense John Healey, took place at a sensitive moment for the trans-Atlantic alliance, one day after the U.S. said it had cut off military intelligence sharing with Ukraine. The group that met at the Pentagon, which included Adm. Tony Radakin, the head of the U.K.’s armed forces, discussed the U.S. rationale behind that decision, as well as future military collaboration between the two allies, according to people familiar with the meeting.
A secretary can invite anyone to meetings with visiting counterparts, but attendee lists are usually carefully limited to those who need to be there and attendees are typically expected to possess security clearances given the delicate nature of the discussions, according to defense officials and people familiar with the meeting. There is often security near the meeting space to keep away uninvited attendees.
Hegseth’s wife, Jennifer Hegseth, isn’t a Defense Department employee, defense officials said. It isn’t uncommon for spouses of senior officials to possess low-level security clearances, but a Pentagon spokesperson declined to say whether Jennifer has one. Jennifer didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Jennifer Hegseth also attended a meeting last month at North Atlantic Treaty Organization headquarters in Brussels where allied defense officials discussed their support for Ukraine, according to two people who attended the meeting. Hegseth’s brother Philip Hegseth has also been traveling with him on official visits, the Pentagon said.
The Brussels meeting, which took place on the sidelines of a February conference of NATO defense ministers, was a gathering of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, a U.S.-led forum of some 50 nations that periodically meets to coordinate on production and delivery of weapons and other support for Ukraine. At the closed-door discussions, national representatives routinely present confidential information, such as donations to Ukraine that they don’t want to be made public, according to officials.
You can get past the paywall and read the rest if you click the link at http://www.memeorandum.com.
Defense News: Hegseth’s younger brother is serving in a key role inside the Pentagon.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s younger brother is serving in a key position inside the Pentagon as a Department of Homeland Security liaison and senior adviser, Hegseth’s office confirmed.
The high-profile job has meant meetings with a UFC fighting champion, a trip to Guantanamo Bay and, right now, traveling on the Pentagon’s 747 aircraft as Hegseth makes his first trip as defense secretary to the Indo-Pacific.
Phil Hegseth’s official title is senior adviser to the secretary for the Department of Homeland Security and liaison officer to the Defense Department, spokeswoman Kingsley Wilson said in a statement Thursday.
“Phil Hegseth, one of a number of talented DHS liaisons to DOD, is conducting touch points with U.S. Coast Guard officials on the Secretary’s Indo-Pacific trip,” which includes stops in Hawaii, Guam, the Philippines and Japan, Wilson said in response to a query by The Associated Press….
It’s common for the Defense Department and other federal agencies to have liaisons. Each military branch sends liaisons to Capitol Hill. The Pentagon, State Department and others all use interagency liaisons to more closely coordinate and keep tabs on policy.
But it is not common for those senior-level positions to be filled by family members of the Cabinet heads, said Michael Fallings, a managing partner at Tully Rinckey PLLC, which specializes in federal employment law.
Based on Phil Hegseth’s publicly available resume, his past experience includes founding his own podcast production company, Embassy and Third, and working on social media and podcasts at The Hudson Institute.
He sounds about as qualified as his older brother Pete.
That’s all I have for you today. What’s on your mind?
Lazy Caturday Reads: Trump Shames Himself and Our Country
Posted: March 1, 2025 Filed under: cat art, caturday, Donald Trump, Foreign Affairs, JD Vance, just because, Russia-Ukraine War, Ukraine | Tags: Marco Rubio, Post-WWII alliances, Vladimir Putin, Volodymyr Zelenskyy 8 Comments
Catch, by Laural Seeley
Good Afternoon!!
I wonder if Trump is enjoying his reviews this morning? He shamed himself and our country yesterday in his oval office meeting with Ukraine’s president. But he is unable to feel shame, so I assume he’s happy with what he did. He is working to turn the U.S. into a pariah country, allied only with the worst of the worst–Russia, North Korea, Hungary, China, Saudi Arabia. We are now part of what George W. Bush called the “axis of evil.”
This “president” is subservient to a country–Russia–with an economy smaller than California or Texas.
Yale faculty members Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and Steven Tian at Yale Insights: CEOs Don’t Want to Return to Russia, Because They Know It’s Bad Business.
On Inauguration Day, President Trump saluted Ukrainian President Volodymir Zelensky’s desire for peace and noted Russian President Vladimir Putin’s unwillingness to end his assault on its peaceful nation. We congratulated Trump for seeing through Putin’s diplomatic propaganda and economic bluffs. From peace negotiations to economic partnership, Trump has reverted to trusting the devil. Now as Putin is dangling business opportunities for U.S. firms in Russia as a part of his U.S. negotiations over Ukraine, Trump seems to be eager to make a deal. What CEOs know, but which Trump misses, is that Putin’s vague offer is much less than meets the eye.
No American companies are eager to return. Russia is an imploding economy, with decayed infrastructure and impossible supply chain gaps. It is a dangerous, unsafe, unreliable place to conduct business.
CEOs’ disdain for Putin’s Russia is anchored in their knowledge that Putin is an untrustworthy dictator who might well nationalize their businesses at a moment’s notice. Just this weekend, Putin has admitted his plans to step up the expropriation of private enterprises, including the seizure of many Western company assets.
Even before the war, doing business in Russia has always been a bad deal for U.S. companies, and few non-Russian companies ever made enough money there to be worth the risks. “A lot of people lost a whole lot of money over there in Russia. I think they’re going to be very reticent to want to go back. Once in a while, peace breaks out over there, but not very often,” oilman and Trump ally Harold Hamm recently told the Financial Times.
CEOs resistant to returning to Russia are merely rational capital allocators who perceive Russia to be a bad deal for shareholders. From a pure money perspective, CEOs would face a shareholder revolt if they tried to squander shareholder capital on risky investments in Russia. Even developing Russia’s much-ballyhooed, vast mineral and energy deposits requires significant capital investments which would take many years to realize a return on, and given the volatility of U.S.-Russia relations, no CEO would want to risk having those investments stranded if relations between the two governments were to deteriorate again.
The truth is that Putin is desperate for U.S. businesses to return to stave off his economic collapse. This is desperation masquerading as generosity, and nobody should be fooled. Russian is not remotely a major superpower. Its economy is smaller than that of Chile and produces few finished goods—industrial or consumer—sold into world markets. Like a vassal state in the ancient mercantile system, all Putin has to sell are raw materials in energy, metals, and agriculture. And now, with all these commodities available more cheaply and more safely around the world, Russia is economically irrelevant.
Sidney, 1993, by Frances Broomfield
But Trump is blinded by his admiration for Putin–and perhaps by his obligations as a Russian intelligence asset. He is both stupid and evil. And we are stuck with him for at least the next four years, unless Democrats win control of Congress in 2026 and then grow spines and impeach him.
Press reviews of Trump’s performance:
JJ sent me this article from The Guardian that summarizes responses from the British press: ‘A spectacle to horrify the world’: what the papers say about Trump and Vance’s meeting with Zelenskyy.
The unprecedented scenes in the Oval Office dominated the front pages on Saturday, with the papers united in their horror. Adjectives including disastrous and vile were used to describe the meeting in which Donald Trump and his vice-president JD Vance openly berated the Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
The Guardian leads with a quote from Donald Trump: “You are gambling with world war three”, characterising the meeting between the US and Ukrainian presidents as “disastrous”. In a separate sketch of the furious row, David Smith wrote that “Trump on Friday presided over one of the greatest diplomatic disasters in modern history.”
The Daily Mail called the meeting “A spectacle to horrify the world” and said that during the “shouting match in the Oval Office” a “raging Trump humiliates Zelensky on live TV”.
The Daily Mirror went for “Shock & War” as its front page headline, with subheads reading “Trump stuns the world with vile rant at Zelensky” and “Ukraine hero forced home without a deal.”
The Daily Telegraph summed up Trump and Vance’s approach to the Ukrainian president on its front page: “Make a deal or we’re out”. The paper said that during a “shouting match” at the White House, Trump had told Zelenskyy to “come back when you’re ready for peace”.
The Financial Times headlined with “Zelenskyy’s White House talks break down in blaze of acrimony”, saying the minerals deal proposed by Trump had been left unsigned.
Read more at the link.
Here at home, the reactions were unrelentingly negative.
Even the Wall Street Journal editorial board disapproved or Trump’s performance: Putin Wins the Trump-Zelensky Oval Office Spectacle. Vice President Vance starts a public fight that only helps Russia’s dictator.
Toward the end of his on-camera, Oval Office brawl with Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky on Friday, President Trump quipped that it was “great television.” He’s right about that. But the point of the meeting was supposed to be progress toward an honorable peace for Ukraine, and in the event the winner was Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
“He disrespected the United States of America in its cherished Oval Office,” Mr. Trump wrote on social media on Friday afternoon after the exchange, while booting the Ukrainian president from the White House. “He can come back when he is ready for Peace.” The two didn’t sign a planned agreement on minerals that would have at least given Ukraine some hope of future U.S. support.
The meeting between Messrs. Trump and Zelensky started out smoothly enough. “It’s a big commitment from the United States, and we appreciate working with you very much, and we will continue to do that,” Mr. Trump said of the mineral deal. Mr. Zelensky showed photos of Ukrainians mistreated as prisoners of war. “That’s tough stuff,” Mr. Trump said.
But then the meeting, in front of the world, descended into recriminations. The nose dive began with an odd interjection from Vice President JD Vance, who appeared to be defending Mr. Trump’s diplomacy, which Mr. Zelensky hadn’t challenged. Mr. Zelensky rehearsed the many peace agreements Mr. Putin has shredded and essentially asked Mr. Vance what would be different this time.
Mr. Vance unloaded on Mr. Zelensky—that he was “disrespectful,” low on manpower, and gives visitors to Ukraine a “propaganda” tour. President Trump appeared piqued by Mr. Zelensky’s suggestion that the outcome in Ukraine would matter to the U.S. “Your country is in big trouble. You’re not winning,” Mr. Trump said at one point.
Why did the Vice President try to provoke a public fight? Mr. Vance has been taking to his X.com account in what appears to be an effort to soften up the political ground for a Ukraine surrender, most recently writing off Mr. Putin’s brutal invasion as a mere ethnic rivalry. Mr. Vance dressed down Mr. Zelensky as if he were a child late for dinner. He claimed the Ukrainian hadn’t been grateful enough for U.S. aid, though he has thanked America countless times for its support. This was not the behavior of a wannabe statesman.
Unknown artist
A bit more, because of the paywall (I went through Memeorandum):
Mr. Zelensky would have been wiser to defuse the tension by thanking the U.S. again, and deferring to Mr. Trump. There’s little benefit in trying to correct the historical record in front of Mr. Trump when you’re also seeking his help.
But as with the war, Mr. Zelensky didn’t start this Oval Office exchange. Was he supposed to tolerate an extended public denigration of the Ukrainian people, who have been fighting a war for survival for three years?
It is bewildering to see Mr. Trump’s allies defending this debacle as some show of American strength. The U.S. interest in Ukraine is shutting down Mr. Putin’s imperial project of reassembling a lost Soviet empire without U.S. soldiers ever having to fire a shot. That core interest hasn’t changed, but berating Ukraine in front of the entire world will make it harder to achieve.
Turning Ukraine over to Mr. Putin would be catastrophic for that country and Europe, but it would be a political calamity for Mr. Trump too. The U.S. President can’t simply walk away from that conflict, much as he would like to. Ukraine has enough weapons support to last until sometime this summer. But as the war stands, Mr. Putin sees little reason to make any concessions as his forces gain ground inch by bloody inch in Ukraine’s east.
I hope someone read this to our stupid and possibly illiterate “president.”
David E. Sanger at The New York Times: Behind the Collision: Trump Jettisons Ukraine on His Way to a Larger Goal.
After five weeks in which President Trump made clear his determination to scrap America’s traditional sources of power — its alliances among like-minded democracies — and return the country to an era of raw great-power negotiations, he left one question hanging: How far would he go in sacrificing Ukraine to his vision?
The remarkable showdown that played out in front of the cameras early Friday afternoon from the Oval Office provided the answer.
As Mr. Trump admonished President Volodymyr Zelensky and warned him that “you don’t have the cards” to deal with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, and as Vice President JD Vance dressed down the Ukrainian leader as being “disrespectful” and ungrateful, it was clear that the three-year wartime partnership between Washington and Kyiv was shattered.
Whether it can be repaired, and whether a deal to provide the United States revenue from Ukrainian minerals that was the ostensible reason for the visit can be pieced back together, remains to be seen.
But the larger truth is that the venomous exchanges — broadcast not only to an astounded audience of Americans and Europeans who had never seen such open attacks on each other, but to Mr. Putin and his Kremlin aides — made evident that Mr. Trump regards Ukraine as an obstacle to what he sees as a far more vital project.
What Mr. Trump really wants, one senior European official said this week before the blowup, is a normalization of the relationship with Russia. If that means rewriting the history of Moscow’s illegal invasion three years ago, dropping investigations of Russian war crimes or refusing to offer Ukraine long-lasting security guarantees, then Mr. Trump, in this assessment of his intentions, is willing to make that deal….
Secretary of State Marco Rubio — once a defender of Ukraine and its territorial sovereignty, now a convert to the Trump power plays — made clear in an interview with Breitbart News that it was time to move beyond the war in the interest of establishing a triangular relationship between the United States, Russia and China.
“We’re going to have disagreements with the Russians, but we have to have a relationship with both,” Mr. Rubio said. He carefully avoided any wording that would suggest, as he often said as a senator, that Russia was the aggressor, or that there was risk that, if not punished for its attack on Ukraine, it might next target a NATO nation.
“These are big, powerful countries with nuclear stockpiles,” he said of Russia and China. “They can project power globally. I think we have lost the concept of maturity and sanity in diplomatic relations.”
Ebony’s peak, with mouse, by Laura Seeley
Unfortunately, this stupid “president” who was elected by incredibly stupid people isn’t interested in maintaining relationships with other democratic countries in order to spread freedom around the world and avoid another world war.
Mr. Trump makes no secret of his view that the post-World War II system, created by Washington, ate away at American power.
Above all else, that system prized relationships with allies committed to democratic capitalism, even maintaining those alliances that came with a cost to American consumers. It was a system that sought to avoid power grabs by making the observance of international law, and respect for established international boundaries, a goal unto itself.
To Mr. Trump, such a system gave smaller and less powerful countries leverage over the United States, leaving Americans to pick up far too much of the tab for defending allies and promoting their prosperity.
While his predecessors — both Democrats and Republicans — insisted that alliances in Europe and Asia were America’s greatest force multiplier, keeping the peace and allowing trade to flourish, Mr. Trump viewed them as a bleeding wound. In the 2016 presidential campaign, he repeatedly asked why America should defend countries running trade surpluses with the United States.
Read more at the NYT link.
David Rothkopf at The Daily Beast: Trump Thinks He Humiliated Zelensky. He Really Humiliated the United States.
The Trump-Putin Axis came fully out of the closet today.
The new U.S. administration has clearly embraced what might be called a “mob boss” foreign policy—because of the criminal pasts of the men who are leading it and because of the tactics they appear to favor.
In an Oval Office meeting with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, Donald Trump and his dangerously ill-informed yes-man, JD Vance, the U.S. president pressed for a deal to squeeze mineral assets out of Ukraine in exchange for some ill-defined level of continued support for that country that could only be described as extortionate.
Then, when Zelensky failed to fall to his knees and kiss the hem of Trump’s garments in thanks, both Trump and Vance began to try to bully Zelensky in the most thuggish and repulsive way imaginable.
It was an ugly display of foreign policy crudeness, the likes of which we have never seen in the White House. It is tempting to call it inept. But it was not. It achieved precisely the goal that Putin and Trump had long sought, to produce a public break between the United States and Ukraine that would directly and meaningfully support Russia’s illegal, brutal conquest of its neighbor.
Trump and Vance, however, were rebuffed by Zelensky in important ways. When the Americans sought to perpetuate lies that have been a staple of Kremlin propaganda and Trump campaign speeches, Zelensky stood up to them. He refuted the idea that Ukraine provoked Russia’s invasion.
He rejected the ahistorical nonsense that Putin only invaded Ukraine because he sensed former President Joe Biden’s weakness. He reminded those viewing the encounter on U.S. national television that in fact Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014 (a point on which Trump embarrassingly tried to correct him) and that the war raged for all four years Trump was in office the last time. He pointed out that he sought a diplomatic solution only to have Putin violate the terms of deals that had been struck.
With each correction Trump and Vance grew more furious and out of control. Trump vainly tried to intimidate a man who has stood up to far worse since he assumed Ukraine’s presidency. Vance criticized Zelensky for not thanking Trump publicly for…well, for what?
Read more at The Daily Beast.
Tom Nichols at The Atlantic: It Was an Ambush. Today marked one of the grimmest days in the history of American diplomacy.
Leave aside, if only for a moment, the utter boorishness with which President Donald Trump and Vice President J. D. Vance treated Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House today. Also leave aside the spectacle of American leaders publicly pummeling a friend as if he were an enemy. All of the ghastliness inflicted on Zelensky today should not obscure the geopolitical reality of what just happened: The president of the United States ambushed a loyal ally, presumably so that he can soon make a deal with the dictator of Russia to sell out a European nation fighting for its very existence.
By Karen Zuk
Trump’s advisers have already declared the meeting a win for “putting America first,” and his apologists will likely spin and rationalize this shameful moment as just a heated conversation—the kind of thing that in Washington-speak used to be called a “frank and candid exchange.” But this meeting reeked of a planned attack, with Trump unloading Russian talking points on Zelensky (such as blaming Ukraine for risking global war), all of it designed to humiliate the Ukrainian leader on national television and give Trump the pretext to do what he has indicated repeatedly he wants to do: side with Russian President Vladimir Putin and bring the war to an end on Russia’s terms. Trump is now reportedly considering the immediate end of all military aid to Ukraine because of Zelensky’s supposed intransigence during the meeting.
Vance’s presence at the White House also suggests that the meeting was a setup. Vance is usually an invisible backbencher in this administration, with few duties other than some occasional trolling of Trump’s critics. (The actual business of furthering Trump’s policies is apparently now Elon Musk’s job.) This time, however, he was brought in to troll not other Americans, but a foreign leader. Marco Rubio—in theory, America’s top diplomat—was also there, but he sat glumly and silently while Vance pontificated like an obnoxious graduate student.
Zelensky objected, as he should have, when the vice president castigated the Ukrainian president for not showing enough personal gratitude to Trump. And then in a moment of immense hypocrisy, Vance told Zelensky that it was “disrespectful for you to come into the Oval Office and try to litigate this in front of the American media.” But baiting Zelensky into fighting in front of the media was likely the plan all along, and Trump and Vance were soon both yelling at Zelensky. (“This is going to be great television,” Trump said during the meeting.) The president at times sounded like a Mafia boss—“You don’t have the cards”; “you’re buried there”—but in the end, he sounded like no one so much as Putin himself as he hollered about “gambling with World War III,” as if starting the biggest war in Europe in nearly a century was Zelensky’s idea.
After the meeting, Trump dismissed the Ukrainian leader and then issued a statement that could only have pleased Moscow:
I have determined that President Zelensky is not ready for Peace if America is involved, because he feels our involvement gives him a big advantage in negotiations. I don’t want advantage, I want PEACE. He disrespected the United States of America in its cherished Oval Office. He can come back when he is ready for Peace.
Trump might as well have dictated this post on Truth Social before the meeting, because Zelensky didn’t stand a chance of having an actual discussion at the White House. When he showed Trump pictures of brutalized Ukrainian soldiers, Trump shrugged. “That’s tough stuff,” he muttered. Perhaps someone told Zelensky that Trump doesn’t read much, and reacts to images, but Trump, uncharacteristically, seems to have been determined to stay on message and pick a fight.
More at the Atlantic. Here is a gift link.
Charles Pierce at Esquire: President Trump Embarrassed Himself, the Nation, and Every Thinking Human on Earth.
On Friday, in the Oval Office, the president of the United States embarrassed himself, the nation, and every thinking human being on earth. He—and his vice president—berated Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in front of the press and public. Zelenskyy gave it right back to him, thank God, making it clear that he wouldn’t be bullied into accepting a “deal” produced by negotiations to which he had not been invited to participate. The president of the United States reacted like an angry child, repeatedly calling the Ukrainian president an ingrate, relitigating the whole mock “scandal” regarding Hunter Biden and Burisma, apologizing to Vladimir Putin for the mean things that people like “Shifty Schiff” said about him during Impeachment 1, and, eventually, lapsing completely into angry incoherence while Zelenskyy looked to be on the edge of decking him right there on the carpet. Zelenskyy left town without signing the mineral-rights deal that the president had sought so enthusiastically.
Politico called the episode “remarkable.” That’s one way to put it.
“TRUMP: You have to be thankful. You don’t have the cards. You’re buried there. Your people are dying. You’re running low on soldiers…. You’ve got to be more thankful, because let me tell you, you don’t have the cards. With us, you have the cards, but without us, you don’t have any cards. It’s going to be a tough deal to make, because the attitudes have to change…. You’re either going to make a deal or we’re out. And if we’re out, you’ll fight it out. And I don’t think it’s going to be pretty.”
European Cat at St. Paul de Vence, France, by Isy Ochoa
Vance chimed in like the good little lapdog he is:
“I think it’s disrespectful for you to come into the Oval Office and try to litigate this in front of the American media. Right now, you guys are going around and forcing conscripts to the front lines because you have manpower problems. You should be thanking the president for trying to bring an end to this conflict…. Do you think it’s respectful to come to the Oval Office of the United States of America and attack the administration that’s trying to prevent the destruction of your country?””
Man, fck these people. I thought the Nixon tapes were the wildest things I’d ever heard out of the Oval Office.
It is considered axiomatic among cradle Catholics that adult converts are the worst. Too many of them are attracted to HMC because they have a sweet-tooth for ancient ceremony, imperial pageantry, and really big hats. None of these plush accoutrements have the slightest thing to do with the teachings of a young rabbi in first-century Judea, of course, and I continue to subscribe to Garry Wills’s admonishment that Jesus did not create a papacy of any kind, let alone a garish and extravagant one. For that matter, he didn’t create an institutional church, let alone one with its own secret archives, its own library, and a collection of art that is second to none. Yet too many adult converts see all of this incense-stained filigree as the real message of the gospels. And the American members of the species are also particularly interested in political power and the means to acquire it. Newt Gingrich, for example, was one of them, as was Sam Brownback and the late Robert Novak. Their public activities never demonstrated an affection for the beatitudes or for the 25th chapter of Matthew.
More reactions and other news, links only:
Reactions:
Anton Troianovski, Nataliya Vasilyeva and Paul Sonne at The New York Times: Trump’s Dressing Down of Zelensky Plays Into Putin’s War Aims.
Jonathan Chait at The Atlantic: The Real Reason Trump Berated Zelensky. He simply likes Vladimir Putin better.
David Frum at The Atlantic: At Least Now We Know the Truth. It’s ugly, but necessary to face.
Josh Kovensky at Talking Points Memo: Trump And Vance Ambush Zelensky In Prelude To Betrayal.
Kevin Liptak and Jeff Zeleny at CNN: Inside the 139 minutes that upended the US-Ukraine alliance.
Other News:
CNN: A Russian state media reporter gained entry to the Oval Office for Trump-Zelensky sit-down.
Politico: What 130-day cap? Musk is ‘here to stay’ in the Trump admin, adviser says.
The New Republic: Musk’s Purges Suddenly Take a Horrific Turn—and Wreck an Ugly MAGA Lie.
HuffPost: Georgia Nonprofit That Produces Life-Saving Food For Kids Has Federal Contract Cut.
Martin Matishak at Cyber Daily: Exclusive: Hegseth orders Cyber Command to stand down on Russia planning.
***The Washington Post: FBI returns materials seized at Mar-a-Lago to Trump, White House says.
The New York Times: Voice of America Journalists Face Investigations for Trump Comments.
That’s all I have for you today. Please take care everyone.
Wednesday Reads: And So It Begins . . .
Posted: November 13, 2024 Filed under: 2024 Elections, American Fascists, Donald Trump | Tags: Donald Trump, Elon Musk, John Thune, Lara Trump, Marco Rubio, news, politics, Senate Majority Leader, Trump, Vivek Ramaswamy 12 CommentsGood Afternoon!!
BREAKING NEWS– We dodged a bullet! Rick Scott will not be Senate Majority Leader.
John Thune, South Dakota Senator
The Hill: Thune elected Senate majority leader.
Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) has been elected Senate majority leader, setting the stage for him to replace retiring Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who has held the top Senate GOP leadership job for the past 18 years.
Thune has served as Senate Republican whip, the No. 2-ranking position in the Senate GOP leadership, since 2019, and largely managed operation of the Senate floor since McConnell suffered a concussion from a fall in 2023.
Thune beat Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) by a vote of 25 to 24, according to two sources familiar.
Thune led after the first ballot. He won 25 votes while Cornyn won 15 votes and Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) collected 13 votes.
“I am extremely honored to have earned the support of my colleagues to lead the Senate in the 119th Congress, and I am beyond proud of the work we have done to secure our majority and the White House,” he said in a statement after the vote. “This Republican team is united behind President Trump’s agenda, and our work starts today.”
And So It Begins . . . Trump’s appoints all the best people:
This is like 2016 only so much worse. For the past couple of days, Trump has been announcing his picks for the Cabinet and other important government posts, and his choices are even worse than we could have imagined.
Trump announced his choice of Marco Rubio as Secretary of State, which I guess is sort of reasonable. But it’s likely that one reason for appointing Rubio would be to open up the Senate seat in Florida so that he can give it to Lara Trump. Eventually, Trump will likely fire Rubio in humiliating fashion.
NBC News: Trump’s Cabinet moves hand Ron DeSantis a gift — but possibly with strings attached.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis will have a chance to put another stamp on state politics with a big appointment if Sen. Marco Rubio becomes secretary of state. But one major question hangs over that opportunity: How badly does President-elect Donald Trump want his daughter-in-law, Lara, to become a U.S. senator?
Lara Trump, future Senator?
DeSantis, like any Florida governor, has the ability to unilaterally appoint the person who would fill a vacant Senate seat, which may come into play following Monday’s news of Trump’s expected nomination of Rubio to lead the State Department. Trump could still change his mind, cautioned three sources familiar with the selection process, who said the decision wouldn’t be final until the president-elect makes a formal announcement.
But if Rubio’s Senate seat becomes open, there is little doubt DeSantis will face at least some pressure from Trump’s team to appoint a candidate they want, which would almost certainly be Lara Trump, according to seven people tracking deliberations around the potential vacancy.
Perhaps the worst appointment so far came yesterday with the announcement that Fox News weekend host Pete Hegseth will serve as Secretary of Defense. Hegseth is the person who urged Trump to pardon war criminal Eddie Gallagher.
Dave Philipps at The New York Times, Dec. 27, 2029, wrote about the aftermath of the Trump pardon: Anguish and Anger From the Navy SEALs Who Turned In Edward Gallagher.
The Navy SEALs showed up one by one, wearing hoodies and T-shirts instead of uniforms, to tell investigators what they had seen. Visibly nervous, they shifted in their chairs, rubbed their palms and pressed their fists against their foreheads. At times they stopped in midsentence and broke into tears.
“Sorry about this,” Special Operator First Class Craig Miller, one of the most experienced SEALs in the group, said as he looked sideways toward a blank wall, trying to hide that he was weeping. “It’s the first time — I’m really broken up about this.”
Video recordings of the interviews obtained by The New York Times, which have not been shown publicly before, were part of a trove of Navy investigative materials about the prosecution of Special Operations Chief Edward Gallagher on war crimes charges including murder.
They offer the first opportunity outside the courtroom to hear directly from the men of Alpha platoon, SEAL Team 7, whose blistering testimony about their platoon chief was dismissed by President Trump when he upended the military code of justice to protect Chief Gallagher from the punishment.
Eddie Gallagher
“The guy is freaking evil,” Special Operator Miller told investigators. “The guy was toxic,” Special Operator First Class Joshua Vriens, a sniper, said in a separate interview. “You could tell he was perfectly O.K. with killing anybody that was moving,” Special Operator First Class Corey Scott, a medic in the platoon, told the investigators.
Such dire descriptions of Chief Gallagher, who had eight combat deployments and sometimes went by the nickname Blade, are in marked contrast to Mr. Trump’s portrayal of him at a recent political rally in Florida as one of “our great fighters.” [….]
Platoon members said they saw Chief Gallagher shoot civilians and fatally stab a wounded captive with a hunting knife. Chief Gallagher was acquitted by a military jury in July of all but a single relatively minor charge, and was cleared of all punishment in November by Mr. Trump.
Video from a SEAL’s helmet camera, included in the trove of materials, shows the barely conscious captive — a teenage Islamic State fighter so thin that his watch slid easily up and down his arm — being brought in to the platoon one day in May 2017. Then the helmet camera is shut off.
In the video interviews with investigators, three SEALs said they saw Chief Gallagher go on to stab the sedated captive for no reason, and then hold an impromptu re-enlistment ceremony over the body, as if it were a trophy.
“I was listening to it, and I was just thinking, like, this is the most disgraceful thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” Special Operator Miller, who has since been promoted to chief, told investigators.
Hegseth is famous at Fox News for announcing that for ten years he never washed his hands.
More on Hegseth from CNN: Trump picks Fox News host and Army veteran Pete Hegseth to serve as secretary of defense.
Hegseth’s selection was a surprise, as he was not among those considered as a likely pick by members of Trump’s team, sources familiar with the discussions told CNN.
Sources said that it came down to Trump having a longstanding relationship with Hegseth, noting that the president-elect always thought he was “smart” and was impressed by his career. Trump also likes that Hegseth is a military veteran and the account of his service in his book, the sources said.
While Hegseth’s name had not been on the initial shortlist, Trump was struggling to land on a choice for the job, and he liked Hegseth from Trump’s last term when he briefly considered him for leading the Department of Veterans Affairs before being warned that he may not get confirmed by the Senate, one source familiar said.
“Trump also thinks he has the look,” one source said….
Trump’s choice of Hegseth is a notable departure from his picks for defense secretary in his first term, when he selected a four-star general, James Mattis, and an Army secretary, Mark Esper, to lead the Pentagon. But Trump ultimately soured on both of those secretaries and was sharply critical of them after Mattis resigned and Esper was fired.
One defense official told CNN, “Everyone is simply shocked.” Another Pentagon official who was following the potential picks for defense secretary learned about the possibility of Hegseth only in the hours before the nomination and, like others who spoke on condition of anonymity with CNN, didn’t know how to react.
Even some former Trump officials who have remained close to former colleagues and have been in touch with the transition were caught off guard. One former Trump official also said they were “shocked” by the selection and expect there’s going to be an effort to “take him down.”
Indeed, in choosing Hegseth, Trump has likely set off what could be his first contentious confirmation fight for a Cabinet pick. While Senate Republicans newly in the majority are likely to be deferential to Trump’s selections, Trump’s nominees can only afford to lose a handful of Republicans to win confirmation.
The article notes that Hegseth opposes women serving in combat. A bit more info:
The Princeton and Harvard grad also served as CEO for veterans advocacy organization Concerned Veterans for America and holds two Bronze Stars, according to Simon & Schuster, the company that published his 2017 book “In the Arena.”
Hegseth says he was removed from inauguration duty in 2021 because of what he described as a religious tattoo.
In his book, Hegseth wrote that he had served under former Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Trump. His unit was tasked to work the inauguration of Joe Biden as well on January 20, 2021.
“Ultimately, members of my unit in leadership deemed that I was an extremist or a white nationalist because of a tattoo I have, which is a religious tattoo,” Hegseth told Fox News during an interview promoting his book in June. Hegseth said the tattoo is a Jerusalem cross.
Hegseth first job will probably be to lead a purge of generals who are not sufficiently loyal to Trump.
From The New Republic: Trump’s First Executive Order May Be a Military Purge. The order could place the military under the president’s total command, like never before.
Trump’s transition team has a “warrior board” executive order ready for the president-elect’s desk.
An executive order draft is floating around MAGA world that would establish a Trump-appointed “warrior board” with the power to purge any three- or four-star generals as it sees fit. The board would send its dismissal recommendations to Trump and they would be acted upon within 30 days.
The draft executive order, which was first reported on by The Wall Street Journal, makes it easy to quickly remove military officials “lacking in requisite leadership qualities” but leaves open the question of what those requisite qualities are. The executive order draws on General George C. Marshall’s 1940 creation of a “plucking board” led by retired general officers to “remove from line promotion any officer for reasons deemed good and sufficient.” But that plucking board was to uplift young officers with high potential, not to cull anyone not perfectly aligned with MAGA.
It’s not yet clear if Trump will sign the executive order, but Trump has held vitriol toward certain military leaders for some time now. He has vowed to weaponize them against the “enemy within,” to fire anyone involved in the 2021 U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and to create a task force to weed out “woke generals.”
Pete Hegseth
Here is what Hegseth has promoted in the past. The Washington Post: Pete Hegseth has said exactly how he will shake up the Pentagon.
President-elect Donald Trump’s selection of Fox News host Pete Hegseth as his nominee for defense secretary would place atop the Pentagon a combat veteran and political ally who has assailed the military as ineffective and “woke,” mused about firing the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,and blasted the top brass as having failed to safeguard American strength.
Throughout his campaign, Trump made a distinction between fighting generals and “woke” generals, vowing to fire the latter. Asked in a podcast interview with the “Shawn Ryan Show” published last week what he would do, Hegseth set a tone that looks ominous for senior Pentagon officials.
“First of all, you’ve got to fire the chairman of the Joint Chiefs,” Hegseth said, referring to Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. “Any general, any admiral, whatever,” who was involved in diversity, equity and inclusion programs or “woke s—” has “got to go,” Hegseth said.
Now that Ivanka has stepped back from politics, it seems that Don Jr. has become an important adviser to Trump, according the WaPo article:
His [Hegseth’s] nomination represents a major victory for Donald Trump Jr., who has lobbied for the inclusion of more unorthodox candidates, such as Vice President-elect JD Vance and biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, against the wishes of establishment Republicans who favored filling key administration roles with those they see as more traditional choices, such as former secretary of state Mike Pompeo.
The breakneck speed of the Hegseth nomination also underscores the value Trump places on TV personalities who have used their platform to promote his agenda.
It’s difficult to believe that Senate Republicans would confirm this nomination, but Trump has demanded that the Senate stay in recess at the beginning of his term so he can put his corrupt choices in place though recess appointments.
Some more appointments that Trump announced yesterday: Mike Huckabee to be Ambassador to Israel; Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to lead a government efficiency department.
Rolling Stone: Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy to Lead Trump’s New ‘Department of Government Efficiency.’
A month ago, billionaire Elon Musk warned that if Donald Trump won a second presidential term and gave him a role in government, Americans would need to “reduce spending to live within our means” and suffer “temporary hardship” in order to address the national debt. On Tuesday, the Tesla CEO seemed closer to achieving that goal after the president-elect announced Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy will lead a new “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE).
The two entrepreneurs will be tasked with paving the way for Trump’s administration “to dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies,” Trump said in a statement.
Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk
He added that DOGE could “become, potentially, ‘The Manhattan Project’ of our time. Republican politicians have dreamed about the objectives of ‘DOGE’ for a very long time” and that the department would partner with the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Exactly how DOGE would “provide advice and guidance from outside of government” was not clear.
In the statement shared by Trump, Musk declared that DOGE “will send shockwaves through the system and anyone involved in Government waste, which is a lot of people!”
“Importantly, we will drive out the massive waste and fraud which exists throughout our annual $6.5 Trillion Dollars of Government Spending. They will work together to liberate our Economy, and make the U.S. Government accountable to ‘WE THE PEOPLE,’” Trump continued. The president-elect ended by stating DOGE’s work will “conclude” no later than July 4, 2026, and that a “smaller government” will be the “perfect gift” to the American people, marking the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
Presumably, the DOGE will not tamper with all the government contracts that Musk’s companies receive.
Apparently Musk is still in Trump’s good graces, but he’s wearing out his welcome with many staff members and other Mar-a-Lago denizens. He has been horning in on Trump’s meetings and phone calls. Musk even wanted to go along with Trump for his meeting with President Joe Biden today!
The New York Times: At Mar-a-Lago, ‘Uncle’ Elon Musk Puts His Imprint on the Trump Transition.
In nearly every meeting that President-elect Donald J. Trump holds at Mar-a-Lago, alongside him is someone who has been elected to nothing, nominated to nothing and, only a few months ago, had no meaningful relationship with him.
Elon Musk.
The world’s richest person has ascended to a position of extraordinary, unofficial influence in Mr. Trump’s transition process, playing a role that makes him indisputably America’s most powerful private citizen. He has sat in on nearly every job interview with the Trump team and bonded with the Trump family, and he is trying to install his Silicon Valley friends in plum positions in the next administration.
Elon Musk jumping around like a complete idiot
Mr. Trump announced on Tuesday that Mr. Musk would help lead what he called the Department of Government Efficiency, a new body to “dismantle government bureaucracy.” But Mr. Musk’s true influence on the Trump transition effort goes well beyond that posting.
Mr. Musk has assumed an almost mythical aura in Mr. Trump’s inner circle. At Mar-a-Lago one recent evening, he walked into the dining room about 30 minutes after the president-elect did and received a similar standing ovation, according to two people who saw him enter.
Mr. Musk, often with his 4-year-old son X on his lap, has spent most of the last week at Mar-a-Lago, joining not just interviews but almost every meeting and many meals that Mr. Trump has had. He briefly shuttled back to Austin, Texas, where he has a $35 million compound, before returning on Friday, where he ate in Mar-a-Lago’s dining room and on its patio, roamed the gift shop and spent time on the golf course — all alongside the president-elect.
“I’m happy to be the first buddy!” he replied to a social-media follower this weekend.
CNBC: Elon Musk attends Trump’s first post-election meeting with House Republicans in D.C.
Elon Musk on Wednesday joined President-elect Donald Trump for his first post-election meeting with the House Republican conference in Washington, D.C., an adviser to Trump told NBC News. Trump and Musk flew to the nation’s capital together from Florida aboard Trump’s plane.
The development is the latest example of how Musk, the world’s richest man and one of the top backers of Trump’s winning campaign, has grown his presence and influence in the future president’s orbit.
Here’s Politico Playbook’s take: Playbook: Elon wears out his welcome.
ELON BUTTS IN — Later this morning, Trump travels to Washington for the first time since his sweeping presidential victory last week, where he’ll make the customary visit to the White House and huddle with allies on Capitol Hill.
Earlier this week, however, Trump’s inner circle was abuzz that he might have a traveling companion for the trip: not wife MELANIA, who is remaining in Florida, but ELON MUSK — who privately expressed interest in joining Trump for his visit with President JOE BIDEN, to the vexation of some Trump insiders.
To be fair, there have been few boundaries on Musk’s involvement in Trump’s campaign and now in his transition. Last night, Trump announced that Musk would co-lead a “Department of Government Efficiency” — a sort of meme-ified Simpson-Bowles commission — alongside MAGA hype man VIVEK RAMASWAMY.
But the notion of allowing Musk to tag along to the White House, for a hallowed ritual in the peaceful transfer of power, prompted a bewildered reaction inside Trump world: Was that even allowed? What was the protocol for such a thing?
As of last night, it appears the plan might not materialize. After appearing earlier this week on a draft manifest for this morning’s flight to D.C., we couldn’t get a clear answer last night on whether Musk is coming or not.
The bigger picture, however, is how Musk is starting to wear out his welcome with some in Trump’s orbit. After initially making a huge splash with his endorsement, made just moments after the July attempt on Trump’s life, some insiders now say he’s become almost a comical distraction, hanging around Mar-a-Lago, sidling into high-level transition meetings and giving unsolicited feedback on Trump’s personnel decisions.
“Elon is getting a little big for his britches,” one insider tells Playbook.
Trump, for his part, doesn’t seem to mind, relishing the attention he’s getting from the richest man in the world. Over the weekend, our colleagues Meridith McGraw and Natalie Allison reported, Trump was zipping Musk around in his golf cart, introducing him to club members and showing him the resort’s gift shop.
That proximity has given Musk access to some of the most intimate details of the Trump transition. For example: While much was made about Musk joining Trump’s recent call with Ukrainian President VOLODYMYR ZELENSKYY, we’re told that the encounter was more or less a fluke: Musk happened to be in the room when Zelenskyy called, and Trump put him on the phone.
I could go on, but this post is already too long. I have no doubt there will be more horrors to deal with today. today.
Tuesday Reads: Super Duper Tuesday
Posted: March 15, 2016 Filed under: morning reads, U.S. Politics | Tags: 2016 presidential primaries, Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, Florida, Hillary Clinton, Illinois, Marco Rubio, Missouri, NEGATIVE campaigning, North Carolina, Ohio, Super Duper Tuesday March 15 47 Comments
Voting day is coming up soon oh boy, Richard Hubal
Good Day!!
Sorry to be so late in posting today. I’m really struggling with a sinus/chest cold and I don’t have much energy these days.
Today’s primary elections will actually be bigger for the Democrats than Super Tuesday was. The media is playing up the possibility that Sanders could win in Ohio, Illinois, and Missouri; but even if that happens, which I think is doubtful, Clinton should win handily in Florida and North Carolina. She will most likely end the night with an expanded delegate lead.
Trump will probably sew up the Republican nomination, especially if he beats Marco Rubio in Florida, which looks likely.
The attacks on Hillary Clinton are escalating as she gets closer to becoming the first woman presidential nominee of a major political party.
It’s kind of difficult to remember now, but at the beginning of the primary campaign, Bernie Sanders promised to run a positive campaign focused on the issues. It’s been quite awhile now since he switched to attacking Hillary Clinton personally and using innuendo to question her integrity. NBC News examines his move to negative campaigning.
Election Day 1944, Norman Rockwell
A Month on Offense: How Sanders Upped His Attacks on Clinton.
The candidate who went out of his way to avoid attacking his rival throughout the summer, fall and winter has relentlessly unleashed on Clinton for three straight weeks, focusing on familiar talking points now strung together as a fixture of his stump speech.
“Now let me say a few words about some of the strong differences of opinion that I have with Secretary Clinton,” he now normally begins one portion of his speeches before hitting her on a litany of issues. The go-to critiques include trade, the Iraq War, and Clinton’s use of Super PACs.
Boos and heckles quickly arrive from his supporters as they outwardly delight in hearing the differences between their candidate and the Democratic frontrunner.
Chairing the Member, Hogarth 1755 (London)
Sanders no longer makes any effort to tone down his followers’ abuse of Clinton and her supporters–whether in rallies or on social media. Instead, he encourages it.
Depending on the day, Sanders also has dinged Clinton on her and her husband’s support of the “homophobic” Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and her support from former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.
“I do not want Henry Kissinger to ever praise me!” he roared during a Michigan rally at Grand Valley State University near Grand Rapids.
The shift in tone has been drastic. In 2015 and early 2016, even uttering Clinton’s name would draw headlines—then unwanted by the candidate himself.
“I cannot walk down the street—Secretary Clinton knows this—without being told how much I have to attack Secretary Clinton,” Sanders told NBC News’ Andrea Mitchell during the NBC’s January Democratic Debate, “Want to get me on the front page of the paper? I make some vicious attack. I have avoided doing that. I am trying to run an issue-oriented campaign.”
He still emphasizes issues, but things have changed since that debate.
They certainly have. Sanders has become just another dirty politician shouting lies and half-truths about his opponent. In on-line forums, his followers have taken his behavior as encouragement for stunningly sexist and racist attacks on Clinton. The similarities between the Trump and Sanders campaign are growing as time goes on. I don’t like to think what will happen if Sanders loses in Illinois or Ohio tonight.
Go to the NBC link to read the rest. It’s a long piece.
Philadelphia Election Day 1815, John Lewis Kimmel
The media has found another gaffe to hang on Hillary. In her “town hall” with Chris Matthews on MSNBC last night, she said that “we didn’t lose a single person” in the 2011 Libyan intervention. Naturally, that is being interpreted to mean that she has forgotten the deaths of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and four others in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2012. Politico:
“Libya was a different kind of calculation. And we didn’t lose a single person. We didn’t have a problem in supporting our European and Arab allies in working with NATO,” the former secretary of state said during an MSNBC town hall on Monday night.
Clinton may have been referring strictly to the U.S.-backed overthrow of Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi in 2011, which indeed saw no loss of American lives and cost just around $1 billion. But her comments ignore the 2012 attacks at the U.S. mission and CIA outpost in Benghazi, which killed four people including U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens.
Right. After years of being attacked and blamed for the deaths of four people, Clinton has probably just forgotten all about them. Good grief.
The Sanders campaign committed a far worse gaffe yesterday.
Jane Sanders appeared with racist, anti-immigrant Sheriff Joe Arpaio in Arizona and actually let him lead her on a tour of his “tent city.” It’s not clear the campaign planned this meeting, but why didn’t they hustle her away immediately when Arpaio showed up?
Channel 12 News: Jane Sanders meets with Sheriff Joe Arpaio, tours Tent City.
Jane Sanders wasn’t planning a tour of Tent City on Monday, but Sheriff Joe Arpaio made her an offer she couldn’t refuse.
Sanders planned to view Tent City from the fence, with the help of Puente leader Carlos Garcia. But Arpaio hustled over here from another news conference and the two of them talked policy, politics and Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream. Sanders also asked inmates about the conditions and why they were in Tent City.
The County Election, George Caleb Bingham
And of course, we know that Sanders surrogate Ben Cohen told Fox News he didn’t know if he could vote for Hillary Clinton in November. Jane Sanders later tweeted that she wasn’t expecting Arpaio to show up, but the damage was done.
As an antidote to the Clinton bashing from Sanders and the media, I suggest reading this post by Peter Daou at Blue Nation Review: Hillary Clinton Is (By Far) the Most Trusted Candidate in 2016.
Let’s define “most trusted” in its literal — and most measurable — sense: More people trust X than anyone else.
And let’s further refine that definition to an act of trust, such as a vote or public endorsement….
Hillary has been endorsed by a greater number of respected public figures and organizations than any other candidate. And more importantly, she leads all other candidates in the popular vote….
Take Bernie Sanders. He had the opportunity to vote against Hillary’s nomination for Secretary of State. After all, he voted against Tim Geithner for Treasury Secretary. Instead, he voted to confirm her, an affirmation of his trust in her ability to represent America to the world….
Think about the numerous political leaders, public officials, organizations, and labor unions who trust Hillary with their future. President Obama, John Lewis, Emily’s List, Lilly Ledbetter, Dolores Huerta, Jim Clyburn, Planned Parenthood, Human Rights Campaign, Julian Castro, Brady Campaign, Eric Holder, League of Conservation Voters, Tammy Baldwin, Kirsten Gillibrand, Claire McCaskill, Cory Booker, Sheila Jackson Lee, Bernice King, and countless more….
Most significantly:
NEARLY 5 MILLION VOTERS HAVE PLACED THEIR TRUST IN HILLARY.
That’s more than any other candidate in the 2016 election.
Let’s see what the media is saying about the possible outcomes of today’s primaries.
Graffiti in the central square of Tixtla, home of the rural normal school at Ayotzinapa, reads “Ayotzinapa lives. Voting causes death. Cursed government,” in Tixtla, Mexico, Saturday, June 6, 2015. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell)
The Guardian: From Ohio to Florida, your cheat sheet for the next crucial primaries.
Although this Tuesday will be less frantic than Super Tuesday two weeks ago, when 12 states and one territory held primary elections, it’s just as important. By 16 March, the race for the White House could look very different depending on how Florida, Illinois, Missouri, North Carolina and Ohio vote.
That’s partly because the delegate numbers in those states are so high – in total, 367 Republican and 792 Democratic delegates are available on 15 March. That brings us significantly closer to the finish line of having just two presidential candidates: at the moment, 33% of Democratic delegates have been pledged but by the time the polls have closed on 15 March, that number will rise to 50%. For Republicans, pledged delegates will jump from 46% to 61%.
Those percentages just mean that playing catch-up gets harder from here. Hillary Clinton is still on track for the nomination – to change that, Bernie Sanders needs to pick up at least 326 of the pledged delegates (in the Democratic race there are also 712 “superdelegates” who are not pledged to a specific candidate based on primary results, so they’re less relevant here).
On the Republican side:
The Republican contest is also likely to change significantly. If, for example,Marco Rubio fails again to pick up a single delegate (and polling suggests that’s a real possibility), his pursuit of the 1,237 delegates needed to win the Republican nomination becomes futile – even if he were to win every single remaining delegate after 15 March. That’s partly because, unlike Democrats, Republicans do not always distribute delegates in proportion to votes. In fact, four states holding Republican primaries on 15 March will be the first in this election to assign delegates on a winner-takes-all basis, which is why this date is such a turning point in the 2016 political calendar.
Check out some interesting charts as well as detailed discussions of each state’s demographics at the link.
Election day graffiti in Afghanistan, 4/4/2014
The Washington Post: March 15 primaries: Will voting in 5 states cement front-runners?
Voters are casting ballots in the five states across the Midwest and Southeast holding primaries Tuesday — contests that could shore up the two front-runners or breathe new life into the lagging campaigns of their challengers.
On the Democratic side, Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.) was working to pull off more come-from-behind wins in states where voters feel damaged by globalization, allowing him to claim momentum from Hillary Clinton. The former secretary of state enjoys a sizable lead in delegates but has not been able to seal the nomination.
The contests are especially important on the Republican side, offering a chance for billionaire Donald Trump’s remaining rivals to finally slow his march to the nomination with two winner-take-all contests that have particularly high stakes for a pair of favorite sons, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida and Gov. John Kasich of Ohio.
This one is a long and interesting read. I suggest you check out the whole thing at the link.
CNN: What’s Next if Marco Rubio Loses Florida?
Rubio, who began his White House campaign 11 months ago as a hero of Florida Republicans, now faces the prospect of defeat in his home state. For years, Republicans believed that Rubio was destined to be a presidential nominee and that even if he fell short in 2016, he would be well-positioned to run for governor in 2018.
But polls suggest Rubio might not just lose Florida — but get thumped here. A Quinnipiac survey released Monday found Rubio trailing Trump by 24 points in his home state.
A loss of that magnitude could be devastating to Rubio, and leave him in a tough spot if he ever wanted to seek public office again.
Quite a comedown. It will be interesting to see what happens when the polls close in Florida.
Florida’s polls close at 7PM ET (8PM in the Panhandle), North Carolina’s and Ohio’s at 7:30 ET, and Illinois’s and Missouri’s at 8PM ET.
So . . . what are you hearing and reading? Let us know in the comment thread, and please stick around for an exciting day! I’ll add a live blog later on for discussion of the returns.
Tuesday Reads: Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?
Posted: February 23, 2016 Filed under: morning reads, U.S. Politics | Tags: Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Marco Rubio, Nevada Caucuses, Ted Cruz 44 Comments
The World of Peace and Harmony, Prinsa S., Kathmandu, Nepal
Age:13
Good Morning!!
Today the Republicans will caucus in Nevada, and Donald Trump will probably win. The Republican leadership is slowly moving through the stages of grief as they come to terms with the likelihood that the clowniest clown in the clown car will be at the top of their ticket in November.
Politico: GOP wakes up to Trump nightmare.
Establishment Republicans are reckoning with something they thought would never happen: That it might soon be too late to stop Donald Trump.
With the controversial businessman the clear front-runner heading into Nevada and next week’s Super Tuesday contests, there’s an emerging consensus that the odds of dislodging him are growing longer by the day. Whispered fears that Trump could become the Republican nominee have given way to a din of resigned conventional wisdom – with top party officials and strategists openly wondering what the path to defeating him will be….
”World Peace from Nagasaki Megami Bridge: Tamako and Maria” by 47 children of 175 members of Club Kids Peace in Tomachi Elementary School.
Lately they are telling themselves that if only the weaker candidates would drop out maybe Rubio or Cruz could win.
The biggest hurdle confronting the mogul’s four rivals is that they continue to divide support among themselves. In each of the three contests that have been held so for, the anti-Trump field has fractured, making it impossible for any single contender to surpass him. A similar dynamic could play out again in Nevada, with Trump failing to win a majority of support but still earning more than his opponents.
While the field has winnowed somewhat in recent days, the compressed nature of this year’s Republican primary calendar means there is precious little time for the anti-Trump field to consolidate. Should Trump notch his third consecutive win on Tuesday, some foresee him steamrolling through Super Tuesday a week later, when a quarter of the party’s delegates are awarded. A batch of newly released polls show him with sizable leads in several of those states, including Massachusetts and Georgia.
“Either Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio would have a shot at the nomination, but I don’t see how they can stop Donald Trump while both of them are splitting votes,” said Al Cardenas, a former Florida Republican Party and American Conservative Union chairman who had supported Jeb Bush. “I don’t see either senator, both of whom have strong-willed backers, dropping out any time soon. Maybe after March 15, but will that be too late to stop Trump?”
It should be funny to see the GOP panicking, but I dread having to watch the repulsive spectacle that the presidential election would be if Trump were one of the candidates. The primary race has already been way beyond disgusting.
If We Could Just Join Hands
Washington Post: GOP candidates make intense 11th-hour arguments in Nevada.
Front-runner Donald Trump delivered a broadside against competitor Ted Cruz, telling thousands in Las Vegas he thinks the Texas senator “is sick.”
“There’s something wrong with this guy,” said Trump.
For his part, Cruz spent significant time Monday seeking to explain the ouster of his spokesman for tweeting a story that falsely accused White House hopeful Marco Rubio of insulting the Bible. And when the candidates weren’t directing their fire at each other, they used scattered appearances on the eve of Tuesday’s caucuses to assail Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.
So raucous was this day that Trump stopped short at one point in his talk to bemoan the very delegate-selection he was in Nevada to tap.
“Forget the word caucus,” he told a crowd of some 5,000. “Just go out and vote, OK?” At another point, he said, “What the hell is caucus?”
This is the kind of idiocy that we have to look forward to this fall.
Prize-winning poster by middle school student Daniel Mendoza
Ted Cruz tried to steal some of Trump’s thunder by promising to deport 12 million undocumented immigrants. The Dallas Morning News:
Ted Cruz said…that he would use federal immigration officers to round up and deport all 12 million people in the country illegally — a markedly tougher stance that he has struck in the past.
“Yes, we should deport them,” Cruz told Fox host Bill O’Reilly. “That’s what ICE exists for. We have law enforcement that looks for people who are violating the laws, that apprehends them and deports them.”
The toughening stance comes after a disappointing, if narrow, third place finish in South Carolina on Saturday, with immigration hardliner Donald Trump strengthening his grip on the race.
“There’s no change here,” Cruz spokeswoman Catherine Frazier said late Monday by email. “Cruz has been very clear: people who are here illegally should be deported. That is the law today. Period. They broke the law, they face the consequence. ICE exists for that purpose and they should continue to do their job. And on top of that any law enforcement that encounters those here illegally should follow the law and deport them.”
Marco Rubio is still the GOP “establishment’s” chosen candidate, but it’s difficult to see how he has much chance against Trump.
Here’s Paul Waldman at The Week: Donald Trump is about to do terrible things to Marco Rubio.
As bullies go, Donald Trump is unusually skilled.
When Trump decides to go after you, he considers carefully both your weak points and the audience for his attack. So when he decided to pummel Jeb Bush — apparently for his own amusement, as much as out of any real political concerns — he hit upon the idea that Bush was “low energy,” something Bush had a hard time countering without sounding like a whiny grade-schooler saying, “Am not!” More than anything else it was a dominance display, a way of showing voters he could push Jeb around and there was nothing Jeb could do about it. With a primary electorate primed by years of watching their candidates fetishize manliness and aggression, the attack touched a nerve.
And now with the Republican race effectively narrowed to three candidates, the one Trump hasn’t bothered to go after too often — Marco Rubio — must prepare for the mockery and rumor-mongering that will surely be coming his way from the frontrunner. Whether he can withstand it could go a long way toward determining how this race turns out.
Until now, Trump has been relatively soft on Rubio. But with the increasing possibility that Rubio could be the greatest threat to Trump winning the nomination, he’s almost certain to go after him. If the past is any guide, Trump will throw a bunch of different attacks Rubio’s way until he happens upon one that seems to resonate; then he’ll stick with it as long as it works. Trump is already dabbling in Rubio birtherism (though he doesn’t seem quite committed to it), but eventually he’ll find a line of personal criticism with just the right note of cruelty and derision….
Rubio may have avoided Trump’s wrath up until now, but that won’t last. The only question is what brand of contempt Trump will heap on him. It might be some kind of attack based on Rubio’s ethnicity, or it might be the same kind of you’re-a-girly-man insults he used on Bush. That could be effective, since Rubio does look like he didn’t graduate high school all that long ago. He could go after Rubio’s occasionally shaky finances, which Trump surely looks on with utter contempt, since as far as he’s concerned, not being rich makes you a loser.
To be honest, the insanity is really getting to me today. I can barely stand to read about these clowns anymore, much less actually watch them spew their hateful nonsense on TV. That’s why I’ve illustrated this post with art by children and adults about world peace.
Our world our future, Tongbram Mahesh Singh
A couple more links on Nevada:
Time: What to Watch at the Nevada Caucuses.
LA Times: Four big questions await answers Tuesday in Nevada’s Republican caucuses.
On the Democratic side, Senator Bernie Sanders is starting to look really desperate. Yesterday, instead of campaigning in South Carolina, where the primary is this Saturday, he came to Boston and then held a rally at another university–U. Mass Amherst. The appearance in Boston was billed as a “press conference,” but Sanders didn’t take questions. He just gave a variation of his stump speech with some more mean-spirited than usual attacks on Hillary Clinton thrown in. NBC News reports:
BOSTON—Just two days after losing to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the Nevada caucuses, Senator Bernie Sanders launched a broadside against his rival, aggressively emphasizing differences between himself and Clinton on issues of campaign finance and trade policy.
“What I intend to do over the next number of weeks is kind of contrast my record to Secretary Clinton’s” Sanders began as he addressed the press at Boston’s International Association of Ironworkers, Local 7.
Keeping true to his word, the Vermont senator — who boasts of having never run a negative campaign — dove into a litany of contrast points he sees between himself and Clinton, launching some of the most direct swipes Sanders has taken at his competitor during this campaign season.
“I am delighted that Secretary Clinton month after month seems to be adopting more and more of the positions that we have advocated, that’s good,” he said.
“And in fact, she is beginning to use a lot of the language and phraseology that we have used,” Sanders added, joking that he saw a TV ad and thought it was him speaking despite Clinton’s photo being pictured in the spot.
Sanders hit Clinton hardest on her use of a Super PAC— the pro-Clinton Priorities USA – and used the group to tie her to Wall Street and big donor influences.
Nothing new there–just the same tired old smears and innuendo.
The headline in The Boston Globe this morning is kind of pathetic if you know anything about where most of the delegates are going to be won.
Bernie Sanders’ path to the nomination runs squarely through Massachusetts.
The Democratic primary could be effectively decided within the next two weeks, if Hillary Clinton’s campaign gets the outcome they’re looking for. With more than 1,000 delegates up for grabs, early March will be do-or-die for Bernie Sanders’ campaign….
“On Tuesday, March 1, we’re going to make history here in Massachusetts,” Sanders told a crowd Monday at UMass Amherst. “This great state is going to lead us forward to a political revolution.”
If Sanders’ political revolution is going anywhere on Super Tuesday, it will have to be in states like Massachusetts, where he has a demographic advantage [meaning lots of white liberals]….
As of Monday night, Clinton leads Sanders in pledged delegates 52 to 51, after votes were cast in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada. Clinton is expected to trounce in South Carolina, where she has the strong support of black voters. Polls also show strong leads for the former secretary of state in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Texas, and Virginia—all of which vote March 1.
But even if Sanders wins in states with lots of white people–like Massachusetts, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Colorado–there no way he will win enough delegates to compete with Clinton. I just don’t see a path to the nomination for him when he’s polling so badly with people of color.’
Poster by Lianwei H. Chengdu, Sichuan, China age 17
I actually think it’s time for Clinton supporters to begin showing empathy and compassion for Sanders supporters–especially the young ones who really don’t understand how politics works. They are going to have broken hearts soon, and we need to help bind their wounds and make them feel welcome in the party. I don’t think we should start telling Bernie to quit–let him go on as long as he wants and let his followers vote for him.
More stories to check out:
Pew Research Center: Majority of Public Wants Senate to Act on Obama’s Court Nominee.
New York Times: Seas are Rising at Fastest Rate in Last 28 Centuries.
Washington Post: ‘Slaps on the wrist’ for white men who watched friend throw black man onto train tracks.
Politico: Spike Lee backs Sanders in radio ad.
Politico: Ben Carson: Obama was ‘raised white.’
Gawker: Hot Mic Captures Trump Chatting With Morning Joe Hosts: “You Had Me Almost As a Legendary Figure.”
Media Matters: 8 Things Trump And Morning Joe Hosts Discussed When Cameras Were Off.
Digby: When is MSNBC going to do something about this?
Mass Politics Profs: Warren Won’t Endorse Sanders.
AP: Gun maker seeks dismissal of lawsuit over Newtown shooting. (Thanks to the bill Sanders voted for.)
Politico: Bernie’s Spring Break Blues. “When Bernie Sanders will need college students the most, they’ll be watching Netflix and partying.”
So . . . what stories are you following today?
peej
Carissa
bostonboomer
dakinikat
ecocatwoman
mablue2
Mama Lopez
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Sky Dancing 
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