The Corporation for Public Broadcasting announced last week that it would shut down after Congress voted to claw back over $500 million of federal funding from the organization. The announcement imperils local PBS and NPR stations around the country that have provided news and educational content for kids for nearly half a century.
Finally Friday Reads: V is for Vendetta, Violence, Vengence, and Victims
Posted: August 8, 2025 Filed under: #FARTUS, #MAGAnomics, #We are so Fucked | Tags: @repeat1968. John Buss, American Fascism, DOJ tool of vengence, South Park, Trump stacking courts 9 Comments
“Call out the National Guard!” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
I never thought our democracy would collapse so easily and so quickly, yet here we are. Our supposed checks and balances have fallen to incompetence, corruption, and the fear of a tribal cult. I don’t think anyone figured that the Supreme Court would be stacked by sycophants, one of the political parties would surrender its powers to a cult of fascists, and that the executive branch and its functions would be set on destroying itself. Nothing is more symbolic of this than the People’s House being turned into some tacky version of Versailles.
Yet, here we are. The HHS Secretary is crazy and wants to kill us with Voodoo. The DOJ has turned into a vehicle for vengeance. Homeland Security has turned on our citizens and immigrants. Other departments like Education and the EPA are being dismantled. Voodoo economics would be a kind description of the craziness that passes for economic policy.
This is from CNN. “Justice Department opens investigation into New York attorney general who won civil fraud case against Trump.”
The Justice Department has subpoenaed New York Attorney General Letitia James’ office as part of a criminal investigation into President Donald Trump’s long-time adversary, according to multiple sources, in the latest example of the Trump administration taking on the president’s perceived enemies.
Two grand jury subpoenas were issued by the US attorney’s office for the Northern District of New York seeking information about James’ investigations into the Trump Organization and National Rifle Association, the sources said.
A grand jury investigation into James has also convened in Albany, New York, according to a source familiar. The grand jury probe into James is said to be looking into deprivation of rights, which means violating someone’s constitutional rights, against Trump.
The Justice Department declined to comment on the subpoenas and grand jury investigation.
Abbe Lowell, an attorney for James, said, “Investigating the fraud case Attorney General James won against President Trump and his businesses has to be the most blatant and desperate example of this administration’s carrying out the president’s political retribution campaign.”
Lowell added: “Weaponizing the Department of Justice to try to punish an elected official for doing her job is an attack on the rule of law and a dangerous escalation by this administration. If prosecutors carry out this improper tactic and are genuinely interested in the truth, we are ready and waiting with the facts and law.”
Politico‘s Kyle Cheney questions the strategy. “MAGA world swallows a difficult truth: Arresting Trump’s opponents is easier said than done. From the Epstein saga to Texas redistricting, the far right’s bluster about criminal consequences often leads to disappointment.” Here’s hoping he’s right.
The calls from President Donald Trump’s MAGA base are getting noisier: Texas Democrats who fled the state to derail a hyperpartisan GOP redistricting maneuver should be criminally charged, arrested and dragged back to Austin.
Now, it appears the FBI is involved in the hunt.
But those screaming the loudest appear likely to wind up disappointed. There’s no known evidence that the absconding lawmakers have actually broken any federal or state laws, despite Gov. Greg Abbott’s strained suggestion that they may have committed bribery.
It’s a familiar refrain for Trump’s second term: The far right lusts to see prominent Democrats or Trump adversaries hauled off in handcuffs, only to be let down when their revenge fantasies run into reality.
“They voted for that and now they realize they can’t have retribution because it’s not legally sound,” said Gene Rossi, a white collar criminal defense lawyer who spent 30 years at the Justice Department.
This cycle — impetuous promises of criminal consequences followed by dejection when Trump’s enemies aren’t immediately arrested — has already happened with Jack Smith, with James Comey, even with Joe Biden and Barack Obama (and their top advisers). The Trump administration has ordered investigations of all these figures, but legal experts say the probes are largely performative and unlikely to prompt serious or legitimate criminal charges.
It’s also happening, perhaps most profoundly, with MAGA loyalists’ dissatisfaction over the Jeffrey Epstein saga. The base believed Trump would vindicate conspiracy theories about Democrats and other public figures being involved in Epstein’s sex trafficking, leading to a new wave of arrests and prosecutions. That hasn’t materialized.
Brash promises and MAGA backlash
Trump, of course, has long stoked his base’s hunger for criminal reprisals, even dating back to his 2016 “Lock her up” pledge against Hillary Clinton.
He escalated that rhetoric during the 2024 campaign. “I am your retribution,” he promised his supporters.
And ever since he returned to office, administration officials and influential MAGA figures have suggested that high-profile arrests are justified and imminent, often vowing that “justice is coming.”
But both Trump and his base are learning that it’s not simple to round up political opponents, even with Trump loyalists in charge of the Justice Department.
“I want arrest[s] not DOJ people making promises on Fox News,” said Trump-aligned podcaster and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones in a recent post on X, which appended a list of MAGA-fueled scandals that have not led to any notable legal consequences.
Jones isn’t alone. A cascade of Trump’s influential backers have wondered aloud why the president and his Justice Department have not delivered the arrests and indictments they crave.
The issue flared most prominently last month when the Justice Department and FBI made the whiplash-inducing admission that the so-called Epstein files do not contain a “client list” of celebrity sex traffickers. The existence of such a list has been an article of faith among MAGA influencers for years, and Trump aides’ efforts to unwind the conspiracy theories have plunged the administration into weeks of turmoil and recriminations.
“What’s the time? Oh look, it’s no-one-has-been-arrested-o’clock again,” Elon Musk wrote in a July 7 post on X.
There’s more of this analysis at the link. All kinds of institutions are failing to hold Yam TIts’ government accountable, even though many court cases stall and constrain him. The Administration has taken to ignoring court orders. Back in mid-July, the Independent provided a report of this strategy. “What order? Trump team ignoring 1 in 3 major judicial rulings against them, analysis finds. Federal judges have accused the Trump administration of resisting court orders in approximately 34 percent of cases.”
Multiple federal court judges have accused the Trump administration of deliberately defying court orders by being slow to respond, misrepresenting facts in filings, and not taking prompt action as President Donald Trump continues an unprecedented campaign to expand his executive authority.
In an analysis of 165 court orders filed against the Trump administration, the Washington Post found that it was accused of resisting court orders in at least 57 of those cases – approximately 34 percent.
Since taking office, Trump has sought to implement his agenda as swiftly as possible, particularly in cases involving his immigration policies and attempts to drastically reduce the federal workforce.
Despite multiple district court judges issuing temporary injunctions to stop the administration from deporting immigrants without due process or sending them to third countries they’ve never been to, filings indicate the administration has continued its efforts.
This has, most notably, occurred in the case involving Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran immigrant who was previously granted permission to remain in the U.S. by a court. The administration inadvertently sent Abrego Garcia to a maximum security prison in El Salvador, under accusations that he was a gang member.
Multiple courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, ordered the administration to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return, yet officials made no swift efforts – leading to a judge’s admonishment.
“Defendants have failed to respond in good faith, and their refusal to do so can only be viewed as willful and intentional noncompliance,” Judge Paula Xinis, appointed by former president Barack Obama, said after the administration failed to provide updates on how it was returning Abrego Garcia.
It was just one of several immigration cases in which judges have raised concerns about the administration not following orders.
The DOJ’s arguments have not been able to breach the law. Now, the strategy is to stack the Federal Courts as badly as the Supreme Court. This is from NPR. It was published on the same day as the article above. “Is Emil Bove the face of a new MAGA judiciary?” No wonder they also went after funding for NPR. You may listen to the nine-minute analysis at the link. The Alliance for Justice created a huge list of reasons the man should be put on the bench. “10 Reasons Emil Bove Should Not Become a Judge (A Non-Exhaustive List).” However, the Senate has become as bad as the House of Representatives and the man was put on the bench despite protest.
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, Chancellor Palpatine shattered the Jedi by taking Anakin Skywalker, a member of the Jedi Council, as his Sith apprentice, Darth Vader. In becoming Palpatine’s apprentice, Vader relinquished his commitment to peace and justice, bowed his knee to power, and became the Emperor’s attack dog. He then used his power to ruthlessly purge Jedis from the Galactic Empire.
In the here and now, fiction may forecast reality, as Emil Bove, a partisan henchman from Trump’s inner circle, is about to be elevated to a lifelong position on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals — not because he embodies qualities that a federal judge should possess, but because he has served as Trump’s personal hit man.
A judgeship on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals is not an obscure role. The Third Circuit decides major cases on civil rights, voting, immigration, and more. Many of its decisions never even reach the Supreme Court. If confirmed, Bove will create a majority of Republican appointees on the Third Circuit, guaranteeing him many opportunities to impose his will on one of the most consequential courts in the country. And yet, the man Trump has nominated has a track record that should disqualify him outright.
Right at the top of the list is this. “He Used the Justice Department for Political Prosecutions,” followed by “He Tramples on Free Speech and Due Process.”
Bove played a central role in turning the Department of Justice into a tool of political retribution. As a senior official under Trump, he helped orchestrate the sudden abandonment of a federal corruption case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams — reportedly because Adams agreed to help implement Trump’s mass deportation plan. At least 10 DOJ attorneys, including some affiliated with the conservative legal movement, resigned in protest of the apparent quid pro quo.
As the acting deputy attorney general at the DOJ, Bove demanded the names of FBI agents investigating the January 6 insurrection so he could punish them for “insubordination.” He also removed experienced prosecutors from the Jan. 6 investigation when they wouldn’t bend to political pressure. That kind of intimidation does not belong anywhere near a courtroom.
He did get appointed thanks to the cowardly acquiescence of Republican Senators. Republicans in Congress are also doing nothing about protecting our Veterans. This is from ProPublica. “Veterans’ Care at Risk Under Trump as Hundreds of Doctors and Nurses Reject Working at VA Hospitals. Amid concerns about the stability of the agency, records show nearly 40% of the doctors offered jobs at the VA from January through March of this year turned them down — quadruple the rate of rejections for the same period a year earlier.”
Veterans hospitals are struggling to replace hundreds of doctors and nurses who have left the health care system this year as the Trump administration pursues its pledge to simultaneously slash Department of Veterans Affairs staff and improve care.
Many job applicants are turning down offers, worried that the positions are not stable and uneasy with the overall direction of the agency, according to internal documents examined by ProPublica. The records show nearly 4 in 10 of the roughly 2,000 doctors offered jobs from January through March of this year turned them down. That is quadruple the rate of doctors rejecting offers during the same time period last year.
The VA in March said it intended to cut its workforce by at least 70,000 people. The news sparked alarm that the cuts would hurt patient care, prompting public reassurances from VA Secretary Doug Collins that front-line health care staff would be immune from the proposed layoffs.
Last month, department officials updated their plans and said they would reduce the workforce by 30,000 by the end of the fiscal year, which is Sept. 30. So many staffers had left voluntarily, the agency said in a press release, that mass layoffs would not be necessary.
“VA is headed in the right direction,” Collins said in a statement.
But a review of hundreds of internal staffing records, along with interviews with veterans and employees, reveal a far less rosy picture of how staffing is affecting veterans’ care.
After six years of adding medical staff, the VA this year is down more than 600 doctors and about 1,900 nurses. The number of doctors on staff has declined each month since President Donald Trump took office. The agency also lost twice as many nurses as it hired between January and June, records viewed by ProPublica show.
In response to questions, a VA spokesperson did not dispute numbers about staff losses at centers across the country but accused ProPublica of bias and of “cherry-picking issues that are mostly routine.”
Agency spokesperson Peter Kasperowicz said that the department is “working to address” the number of doctors declining job offers by speeding up the hiring process and that the agency “has several strategies to navigate shortages,” including referring veterans to private providers and telehealth appointments. A nationwide shortage of health care workers has made hiring and retention difficult, he said.
I watched the latest episode of South Park last night. At least we have them on our side. Here are two articles about the reactions from Noem and Vance. Noem is very thin-skinned despite all the surgical and cosmetic enhancements. This is from Daily Kos. “Poor Kristi Noem doesn’t like ‘South Park’ highlighting her awfulness.”
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is trying to play the victim after the satirical animated show “South Park” mercilessly mocked her on Wednesday night’s episode.
“It’s so lazy to just constantly make fun of women for how they look. It’s only the liberals and the extremists who do that,” Noem told right-wing podcaster Glenn Beck on Thursday night, referring to how “South Park” made fun of her obviously Botox- and filler-filled face. “If they wanted to criticize my job, go ahead and do that, but clearly, they can’t. They just pick something petty like that.”
Of course, the show made fun of more than just Noem’s looks. It also ridiculed her cringeworthy cosplaying, the fact that she shot and killed her own puppy, and that she’s one of the biggest cheerleaders for President Donald Trump’s evil immigration plan.
But more than that, Noem claiming that only “liberals” make fun of how women look is insane, given that she works for Trump, the king of making crude and disgusting comments about how women look.
Over the years, he’s made fun of pop icon Cher’s plastic surgery, called actor Bette Midler “ugly,” said Angelina Jolie is “not a beauty,” said Rosie O’Donnell has a “fat, ugly face,” and accused MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski of “bleeding badly from a face-lift,” just to name a few.
Here’s JD Vance’s response via the Independent. “JD Vance responds to South Park’s brutal takedown of Trump admin. ‘Well, I’ve finally made it,’ Vance writes on X after mini-version of vice president seen waiting on Trump in animated episode.” They can dish it out, but they can’t take it, as the old saying goes.
Vice President JD Vance took to X on Thursday morning to respond to South Park’s brutal takedown of the Trump administration.
The South Park account shared an image of Vance and President Donald Trump with the caption “Welcome to Mar-a-Lago!”
“Well, I’ve finally made it,” Vance wrote.
The second episode of the 27th season of South Park took aim at the president and many of his colleagues and supporters. At one point, a mini version of the vice president is shown waiting on the president, who’s in bed with Satan.
The episode also includes a parody of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who became known for having shot her own dog. Meanwhile, Cartman imitates conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
The episode outlines the financial struggles of Mr. Mackey after he was laid off from South Park Elementary. Mackey’s banker suggests that he join Immigration and Customs Enforcement because of their good salaries.
Mackey ends up joining ICE, watching an orientation video with Noem, which mocks the fact that she once confessed to killing her own dog.
“A few years ago, I had to put my puppy down by shooting it in the face, because sometimes doing what’s important means doing what’s hard,” she says in the episode before shooting a number of dogs during her ICE orientation speech.
Trump campaign alum Matt Mowers responded to Vance on X, saying being featured on South Park was “A key life milestone appreciated by any millennial.”
Meanwhile, our foreign policy stinks as bad as the domestic policies. Both Putin and Netanyahu feel empowered to take over whatever they want. This is from Axios. “Even Republicans have questions about Israel’s plan to occupy Gaza City.” The analysis is by Alexand Solender.
Some congressional Republicans are raising questions about Israel’s planned occupation of Gaza City as pro-Israel Democrats push back on the operation with unusual ferocity.
Why it matters: Israel’s coalition of political allies in the U.S. has become scrambled in recent weeks amid a growing humanitarian crisis is Gaza — and a coinciding drop in U.S. public opinion toward Israel.
- Lawmakers sympathetic to Israel are warning that the plan could be a logistical nightmare and warning the country to tread carefully and avoid further alienating the international community.
- It’s not just Democrats questioning the plan. “I’d like to know who is actually going to run it,” Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.), a member of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee that oversees the Middle East, told Axios.
- Rep. Ryan Zinke (R-Mont.), another member of the panel, told Axios: “Occupation for security also comes with the responsibility of providing humanitarian assistance and creating an economic future.”
State of play: The Israeli Security Cabinet on Thursday approved Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s proposal to have the IDF “take control” of Gaza City in an effort to defeat Hamas.
- In addition to occupying Gaza City, which is expected to take months and displace around 1 million Palestinian civilians, the IDF will also be charged with distributing humanitarian aid, Axios’ Barak Ravid reported.
- The IDF’s chief of staff pushed back during the Cabinet meeting, arguing the plan could endanger Israeli hostages in Gaza and lead to protracted Israeli military governance.
- President Trump, who has split with Netanyahu on allegations of famine in Gaza, is not planning to intervene to oppose the operation.
Driving the news: Rep. Brad Schneider (D-Ill.), the chair of the roughly 100-member New Democrat Coalition and a vocal pro-Israel centrist, called the plan “tactically questionable and strategically self-defeating.”
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“If implemented, the decision is more likely to play into Hamas’s original objectives in starting this war and further unite much of the world against Israel than it is to bring home the last surviving hostages and advance the security needs of the nation,” Schneider said in a statement.
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Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.), one of Democrats’ staunchest Israel backers, said in a statement that Israel is the “ultimate arbiter of its own security” but that “the war in Gaza is in danger of becoming a quagmire.”
Trump is still looking to solve the Russian Invasion of Ukraine, but Putin has him by the balls. This is from Bloomberg. “US and Russia Plan Truce to Cement Putin’s Gains in Ukraine.”
Washington and Moscow are aiming to reach a deal to halt the war in Ukraine that would lock in Russia’s occupation of territory seized during its military invasion, according to people familiar with the matter.
US and Russian officials are working toward an agreement on territories for a planned summit meeting between Presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin as early as next week, the people said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations. The US is working to get buy-in from Ukraine and its European allies on the deal, which is far from certain, the people said.
Putin is demanding that Ukraine cede its entire eastern Donbas area to Russia as well as Crimea, which his forces illegally annexed in 2014. That would require Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to order a withdrawal of troops from parts of the Luhansk and Donetsk regions still held by Kyiv, handing Russia a victory that its army couldn’t achieve militarily since the start of the full-scale invasion in February 2022.
Such an outcome would represent a major win for Putin, who has long sought direct negotiations with the US on terms for ending the war that he started, sidelining Ukraine and its European allies. Zelenskiy risks being presented with a take-it-or-leave-it deal to accept the loss of Ukrainian territory, while Europe fears it would be left to monitor a ceasefire as Putin rebuilds his forces
And for all of Trump’s lying about it, The Daily Beast reports that “White House Did Have Secret Talks on Epstein Crisis. Trump had forced JD Vance to deny that a meeting was taking place.” This story is reported by Erikky Foster.
Turns out the Trump administration really did huddle behind closed doors to talk about the Jeffrey Epstein files, despite JD Vance’s public denial.
On Wednesday, the vice president dismissed mounting media reports claiming he was hosting secret Epstein talks at his house.
“It’s completely fake news,” Vance declared. President Donald Trump had told reporters, “I don’t know” and redirected them to the vice president.
Yet, top Trump administration officials did convene to map out next steps regarding the files on the late convicted sex offender, CNN reported, citing a source familiar with the logistics.
The meeting was reportedly relocated from Vance’s D.C. home to the White House. Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel were also in attendance, according to MSNBC.
It’s unclear whether the talks included Vance, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, who were initially reported to be joining the dinner at the vice president’s Naval Observatory mansion.
Vance’s supposed involvement in the talks had drawn criticism. Ever since Watergate, the Justice Department has kept criminal investigations separate from White House influence, to prevent any appearance of political interference.
One last story and then I’ll leave you to your weekend. This one from VOX has me screaming. “The White House has a preferred alternative to PBS. It may already be in countless classrooms. How the right-wing network PragerU could fill the void left by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s defunding.” They’ve stuck this abomination in Louisiana classrooms, and there’s nothing truthful in any of its materials.
Amid the stripping of these federal funds, last month, the White House debuted a new educational partner at its launch event for its new Founders Museum exhibit: PragerU, a nonprofit organization that specializes in creating right-leaning educational short videos for adults and children. Department of Education Secretary Linda McMahon introduced the partnership, followed by PragerU CEO Marissa Streit.
For the White House exhibit, PragerU created AI-generated videos of the Founding Fathers delivering patriotic accounts of the Revolution. In one, an AI-generated John Adams borrows a catchphrase from conservative pundit Ben Shapiro and tells the viewer, “Facts do not care about our feelings.”
Since its founding in 2009, PragerU has become a juggernaut in the conservative educational media space, with their videos reaching millions of followers across social media. The organization has helped launch the media careers of right-wing figures like Candace Owens. Their popular videos elevate narratives that have been sharply criticized as climate denialist, Islamophobic, and “misleading” about slavery.
PragerU’s partnership with the Department of Education is not the first time the conservative content mill has partnered with the government. Over the past few years, the organization has partnered with states and superintendents throughout the country to make their educational material widely available to public school children and teachers.
Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram spoke with Laura Meckler, national education writer for the Washington Post, about how PragerU partnered with states to bring its content to the classroom and if the organization is poised to fill the educational void left by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
So, I agree with Rachel and Krugman. We’re a fascist state, and I don’t like it at all.
What’s on your Reading, Blogging, and Action List for today?
Finally Friday Reads: It’s late but I took some ME time
Posted: April 11, 2025 Filed under: #FARTUS, #MAGAnomics, Broligarchy, Federal Budget and Budget deficit | Tags: @johnbuss.bsky.social John Buss, @repeat1968. John Buss, Disastrous Don, economic impact of #FARTUS tariffs, kakistocracy, Markets continue to Crash 1 Comment
“Well, I don’t know why I came here tonight
I’ve got the feeling that something ain’t right
I’m so scared in case I fall off my chair
And I’m wondering how I’ll get down the stairs” John Buss, Repeat1968 with h.t t;o Stealers Wheels
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
I took some time today to enjoy a friend from FDL, sushi from Lin’s at St Roch Market, and the Bywater and Marigny right up to the edge of the Quarter. The only way to explore my neighborhood is by foot or by bus. That way, you really get to know us. The stores on LA49 (better known as St. Claude Avenue) are small, locally owned, and full of surprises. I don’t think I can ever emphasize how much I love this city. It’s probably why I stay here and don’t go elsewhere anymore. I first discovered this because when I ventured around the state or country, I had dreams about not being able to find or go home, which ended immediately when I opened the front door. I really wish you this feeling. It’s amazing.
It gave me a breath from reading stuff today. So, here I go, right into the thick of it. This is from Dr. Paul Krugman’s Substack. “The Third-Worlding of America. How to destroy 80 years of credibility in less than 3 months.” Like all excellent economists, he’s got charts and numbers to prove it. I got all these degrees to help people understand financial markets and economic policy. Now, I live with knowledge; I just pray it still empowers people, even if it feels disheartening today.
Remarkably, the sanewashing continues despite the unprecedented craziness of the past 10 days. Many observers assert that Trump has backed down on tariffs and will speedily make a bunch of trade deals. The first assertion is just false, while the second is very unlikely.
In fact, savvy traders have realized that there’s no coherent economic strategy. There’s an old line about military analysis: “Amateurs talk about tactics, but professionals talk about logistics.” Well, when it comes to taking the pulse of financial markets, amateurs talk about stocks, but professionals talk about bond and currency markets. That’s because bond and currency markets are generally less driven by emotion. There’s no “meme
gamblinginvesting” in bond and currency markets. And these markets are both signaling major loss of faith in America.First, about tariffs: It’s true that for the time being Trump has scaled back some of the tariffs displayed on his big piece of cardboard last week. For example, unless we have another policy swerve, the European Union will now face a 10 percent tariff over the next three months rather than a 20 percent tariff. But the tariff on China, our third-biggest trading partner after Canada and Mexico, has gone from 34 percent to more than 130 percent. And we still have high tariffs on steel, aluminum and so on. In effect, observers who claim that tariffs have gone down are missing the biggest part of the story.
Economists who have actually run the numbers, like those at the Yale Budget Lab, estimate that the April 9 tariff regime will raise consumer prices more than the April 2 regime because of the extraordinarily high tariff rate on Chinese imports. Specifically, the budget lab estimates that the latest version of Trump’s trade war will raise consumer prices by 2.9 percent. This is roughly ten times the probable impact of the infamous Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930.
It’s hard to overstate the craziness of announcing a radical tariff plan, then announcing a quite different but equally radical plan just a week later. Furthermore, the claim that the wild zigzags in policy were always part of Trump’s plan just adds to the destruction of the administration’s credibility.
But are these tariffs just an opening gambit for trade negotiations? I doubt it. Bear in mind that Trump and Peter Navarro, his tariff guru, start from the premise that other countries are cheating, that they’re taking advantage of America and treating us unfairly. In fact, however, most of them aren’t. Take the case of the European Union. The EU imposes an average tariff on U.S. goods of just 1.7%, and there aren’t any significant hidden barriers.
So what are we supposed to be negotiating about? Nations can’t promise to lower their trade barriers when there aren’t any barriers. Navarro has been claiming that value-added taxes are de facto tariffs, but they aren’t, and EU nations literally can’t afford to give them up.
I guess other countries might make fake concessions that Trump can claim as fake victories. This is what he did with China during his first term, claiming that it had made significant concessions — claims which were, in the end, false. In fact, American soybean farmers have never fully recovered the loss of market share. And remember too how Trump made minor changes to NAFTA and claimed to have negotiated a whole new trade pact.
However, Trump is now clearly high on his own supply. Even with the April 9 tariff regime, Trump is imposing high tariff rates on our three largest trading partners. Currency and bond market traders — no fools they — are certainly not acting as if we’re on a path to successful deals.
The Chinese are pranking Trump today. This is from the Washington Post. “China raises tariffs on U.S. goods to 125 percent as trade war deepens. Beijing hit back in response to the Trump administration’s move to raise tariffs on Chinese goods to 145 percent, saying it would “fight to the end.” They can afford to. They’re making deals with South Korea and Japan, among other countries. The only group this is hurting is US importers and Exporters. This includes farmers.
The response underscored China’s decision to stand firm in the face of pressure from Washington and deepened the showdown between the world’s two largest economies.
“If the U.S. insists on substantively damaging China’s interests, China will firmly retaliate and fight to the end,” China’sState Council said in a statement.
The move came after Trump increased the levies on Chinese goods to 145 percent on Wednesday, while also announcing that the tariffs he had previously imposed on more than six dozen other countries would be fixed at 10 percent during a 90-day pause.
The State Council derided Trump’s move to continue ratcheting up the levies and said it would ignore further hikes. The tariffs are a “joke” and “no longer have any economic significance,” its statement said, because the current levels make U.S. exports to China not financially viable. The new Chinese tariffs, which increased from 84 percent, are effective Saturday.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping, in a meeting with Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez on Friday, stressed that trade wars have no winners and called for China and Europe to “jointly oppose unilateral bullying,” according to state media. European leaders also emphasized the damaging effects of uncertainty beyond the 90-day pause.
Experts in Beijing expressed concern about the latest turn in tensions with Washington. “U.S.-China trade will soon be almost nonexistent,” said Shi Yinhong, an international relations professor at China’s Renmin University. “To ease tensions, Trump must first make concessions.”
Turmoil over tariffs drove fluctuations in global markets on Friday.
Japan’s Nikkei 225 and Topix indexes dropped by5percent, before trimming their losses to under 3 percent by market close. South Korea’s Kospi and Australia’s ASX 200 fell by less than1 percent, while Taiwan’s bourse kicked off the day with a fall of under 1 percent before logging a 2.5 percent gain. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index and China’s Shanghai composite index were mostly flat, with the Hang Seng closing just over 1 per cent higher.
Major European markets fell slightly after opening on Friday, following rebounds the previous day. By 6 a.m. Eastern time, Germany’s DAX was down 1.62 percent, France’s benchmark CAC fell by 1.11 percent and London’s FTSE 100 was down around 0.3 percent.
CNN has this headline today for a story written by Ella Nilsen. “Trump’s budget plan eviscerates weather and climate research, and it could be enacted immediately.” I guess I better hurry to put that Weather Station up in the Pergalo.
The Trump administration intends to eliminate the research arm of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, close all weather and climate labs and eviscerate its budget along with several other NOAA offices, according to internal documents obtained by CNN.
The documents describe the administration’s budget proposal for 2026, but indicate the administration expects the agency to enact the changes immediately.
The cuts would devastate weather and climate research as weather is becoming more erratic, extreme and costly. It would cripple the US industries — including agriculture — that depend on free, accurate weather and climate data and expert analysis. It could also halt research on deadly weather, including severe storms and tornadoes.
The administration intends to make significant cuts to education, grants, research and climate-related programs in NOAA, the plan says, which the administration believes “are misaligned with the … expressed will of the American people.”
While the phrase “climate change” refers to the manmade influence on the global climate system via planet-warming fossil fuel pollution, “climate” in NOAA parlance is simply the weather that has been observed over time.
CNN has reached out to the White House and the Department of Commerce, which houses NOAA, for comment on the plan.
Additionally, NASA is on the chopping block! Does this include all that money going to Elonia? This is from ars TECHICA‘s Eric Berger. “Trump White House budget proposal eviscerates science funding at NASA. “This would decimate American leadership in space.” #FARTUS seems dead set on sending us back to the Gilded Age. Even the best of the Modern Era is about to be erased.
This week, as part of the process to develop a budget for fiscal-year 2026, the Trump White House shared the draft version of its budget request for NASA with the space agency.
This initial version of the administration’s budget request calls for an approximately 20 percent overall cut to the agency’s budget across the board, effectively $5 billion from an overall topline of about $25 billion. However, the majority of the cuts are concentrated within the agency’s Science Mission Directorate, which oversees all planetary science, Earth science, astrophysics research, and more.
According to the “passback” documents given to NASA officials on Thursday, the space agency’s science programs would receive nearly a 50 percent cut in funding. After the agency received $7.5 billion for science in fiscal-year 2025, the Trump administration has proposed a science topline budget of just $3.9 billion for the coming fiscal year.
Among the proposals were: A two-thirds cut to astrophysics, down to $487 million; a greater than two-thirds cut to heliophysics, down to $455 million; a greater than 50 percent cut to Earth science, down to $1.033 billion; and a 30 percent cut to Planetary science, down to $1.929 billion.
Although the budget would continue support for ongoing missions such as the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope, it would kill the much-anticipated Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, an observatory seen as on par with those two world-class instruments that is already fully assembled and on budget for a launch in two years.
We’re also unlikely to see other countries send their best and brightest to our US Universities with all this craziness. As some with with multiple degrees and ones that aren’t that easy to achieve, I would just like to say that my teachers, my students and grad assistants, and my colleagues and fellow students were consistently the best part of higher education school. I owe so much of my math chops to fellow students from India, Iran, Hong Kong, Turkey, and Taiwan. Both of my Doctorate advisors came here as students. One from India. The other is from Bangladesh. This brain drain will put us on the road to mediocrity.
This is from the AP. “Immigration judge finds that Columbia University activist Mahmoud Khalil can be deported.”
Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil can be kicked out of the U.S. as a national security risk, an immigration judge in Louisiana found Friday during a hearing over the legality of deporting the activist who participated in pro-Palestinian demonstrations.
The government’s contention that Khalil’s presence in the United States posed “potentially serious foreign policy consequences” was enough to satisfy requirements for his deportation, Immigration Judge Jamee E. Comans said at the conclusion of a hearing in Jena.
Comans said the government had “established by clear and convincing evidence that he is removable.”
Lawyers for Khalil said they plan to keep fighting. The judge gave them until April 23 to seek a waiver. Meanwhile, a federal judge in New Jersey temporarily barred Khalil’s deportation.
Addressing the judge at the end of the hearing, Khalil mentioned that she said at a hearing earlier in the week that “there’s nothing more important to this court than due process rights and fundamental fairness.”
Let me just say that Jena, Louisiana, is a hell realm.
Is it a Constitutional Crisis Yet, Momma? Brad Reed has that Raw Story headline.
The United States Department of Justice said on Friday that it will not comply with an order from Judge Paula Xinis to reveal information on the whereabouts and status of deported immigrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia.
As reported by Politico’s Kyle Cheney on BlueSky, the DOJ information Judge Xinis that it would not be able to provide the information she requested on Garcia because the court set an “impracticable” deadline to do so.
Judge Xinis had originally demanded that the DOJ provide information about Garcia’s status by 9:30 a.m. on Friday after the United States Supreme Court ruled that the Trump administration needed to facilitate bringing him back from the prison in El Salvador where he had been sent improperly.
The judge extended the deadline to 11:30 a.m. on Friday morning and scheduled a court hearing on the case for 1 p.m.
So, I hope you’re trying to stay positive and calm. I’m going to go walk Temple and feed the kitties. That’s something I can do right now without feeling depressed.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Finally Friday Reads: The Incompetent and The Cruel
Posted: March 28, 2025 Filed under: Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, education, FARTUS, Hillary Clinton, kakistocracy, kleptocracy, MAGA Assholes | Tags: @johnbuss.bsky.social John Buss, @repeat1968. John Buss, abu ghraib torture and prisoner abuse, Cabinet of incompetent imbeciles, Department of Education Blues, Elise Stefanik is a cunt, Every one goes to El Salvador!, FARTUS, higher education, Hillary Clinton on SignalGate, Kidnapping Graduate Students, Kristi Noem Sociopath and Cunt, Pete Hegseth weirdo sexual assaulter, The Whiskey Leaks 11 Comments
“Kristi Noem is so thoughtful.” John Buss, @repeat1968.
@johnbuss.bsky.social
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
Cartoonist John Buss continues to blow me away with his renditions of all the monsters inhabiting the Trump Regime. You never know how far they will go. Incompetency and cruelty are their defining parameters. The only thing you know about this regime is that they are negatively correlated and huge. You know the negative impact on the country in a big way, but the actual actions leading to the outcomes are unimaginable. You know they’re going to a new low that will be shocking and unimaginable. I’m beginning to think that some are designed to take our eyes away from the dismantling of our government and democracy. Today’s Featured Funny was more than I had hoped when I put this on his Facebook thread. “Hi! It’s your dark muse again. You have to do something about Kristin Noem doing a glam shot in front of all the shirtless, bearded men she likely sent to be tortured and enslaved. Abu Ghraib, but this administration has no shame!” She had paraded down here in a similar outfit during the Super Bowl, but instead of looking like a slutty ICE agent, she looked like a Slutty police officer. She just oozes psychopath, doesn’t she? She’s LARPing all those war criminals that psychologically torture whatever they capture. Just thinking about how the really bad ones torture animals first, and her poor puppy. This is from the Washington Post (article gifted). “How Kristi Noem’s $50,000 Rolex in a Salvadoran prison became a political flash point. The high-end Swiss watch lent a striking contrast to her tour of a notoriously overcrowded mega-prison in one of Latin America’s poorest countries.” I supposed she could wear that “I don’t care, do you?” jacket, but then everyone would miss her signature whitie tightie boob shot op. She must have a closet full of those. She wore them daily during her Super Bowl tour. This is reported by Drew Harwell and Alec Dent.When Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem visited El Salvador’s most notorious mega-prison on Wednesday, she sported an eye-catching piece on her wrist that experts have identified as an 18-karat gold Rolex Cosmograph Daytona watch that sells for about $50,000.“If you come to our country illegally, this is one of the consequences you could face,” Noem said.
Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin confirmed the make of the watch in a statement, saying that “then-Governor Noem chose to use the proceeds from her New York Times best selling books to purchase an item she could wear and one day pass down to her children.”Noem’s choice of watch kicked off a race among internet sleuths to identify it and infuriated immigration advocates, who said the juxtaposition was insensitive to the harsh reality of mass imprisonment and deportation.
“You’re in front of all these people in a very poor country, who are in the bottom 10 or 20 percent of their country … and it looks like you’re just flaunting your wealth while you flaunt your freedom,” said Adam Isacson, an analyst at the Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights group.
“This is an administration that is trying to be populist, anti-elite, appeal to the common man,” he added. Meanwhile, there’s “people stacked up like cordwood behind her.”
While the #FARTUS purge of immigrants looks like an SS round-up. I fear escalation to Hitler’s Einsatzgruppen (killing squads). It is difficult to predict if they will actually go that far. We’ve already had children in cages and family separation. We also have midnight raids that have spirited away graduate students who have taken part in demonstrations or written op-eds against the bombing of Palestinian civilians in GAZA. This is from Mike Masnik from TechDirt. “Trump’s Secret Police Are Now Disappearing Students For Their Op-Eds.”
For years, we’ve been hearing breathless warnings about a “campus free speech crisis” from self-proclaimed free speech warriors. Their evidence? College students doing what college students have done for generations: protesting speakers they disagree with, challenging institutional policies, and yes, sometimes attempting to create heckler’s vetoes. This kind of campus activism — while occasionally messy and uncomfortable — has been a feature of American higher education since the 1960s. It’s how young people learn to engage with ideas and exercise their own speech rights. Sometimes that activism is silly and sometimes it’s righteous. Often it’s somewhere in between, but it’s kind of a part of being a college student, and learning what you believe in. But now we face an actual free speech crisis on campus that goes beyond just speech. It’s an attack on personal freedoms, due process, and liberty. The federal government isn’t just pressuring universities over speech — it’s literally disappearing students for their political expression. If you support actual free speech, now is the time to speak up. The latest example of this authoritarian overreach is particularly chilling: Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish PhD student at Tufts who was here legally on a student visa, was abducted by masked agents in broad daylight. She was disappeared without due process or explanation — only later did we learn she had been renditioned to a detention center in Louisiana. The video of her kidnapping (because that’s what it was) is terrifying enough. If you listen, you hear her quite understandably surprised reaction with a scream, and then she asks to call the police, only to be told “we’re the police.” None of them are in uniforms. Most of them are masked. Her supposed crime? A year ago, she co-authored an op-ed in The Tufts Daily criticizing her university administration’s stance on the Israel-Palestine conflict. Not advocating violence. Not supporting terrorism. Not even criticizing the U.S. government. Just exercising core First Amendment rights by publishing criticism of her own university’s policies in a student newspaper. The government has attempted to justify similar renditions (and there is a growing list of victims) by falsely painting targets as “terrorist supporters” — a dangerous conflation of political speech supporting Palestinian rights with support for terrorism. But even those cases typically involved people involved in public protests, which are themselves constitutionally protected activities. This case goes even further: disappearing someone over an innocuous piece of student journalism published a year ago. Everyone should be alarmed. Everyone should be demanding that she (and others) be released and that ICE and DHS stop this horrifying and unconscionable practice. Everyone should be demanding that Trump and Marco Rubio and Kristi Noem stop this Gestapo bullshit. Even if — especially if — you disagree with her views on Israel and Palestine. This isn’t about that. This is about the very concept of freedom. The rights everyone — even visitors — are supposed to have in this country. The right to speak your mind, even if (especially if!) it is opposed to those in power. The right to walk down a street without being kidnapped. The right to due process. If the government genuinely believed Ozturk had violated immigration law or her visa terms (she hadn’t), there are established legal procedures to address such issues. Instead, they chose to send masked goons to disappear her without warning or due process — a chilling message to every other international student that their supposed right to express political opinions comes with the risk of rendition. And, of course, the implied threat is that this won’t stop at international students.
I have taught university classes for decades. Finance and Economic policy are inherently political. We stick to established theory and mention policies in the past that did not work. The two big ones are Tariffs and Tax cuts for the very rich. We have data that shows they don’t work and years of published papers. I fear the Commerce and Labor Secretaries will kill the data, so we cannot teach the theory and the reality using current economic and financial data. Since I’m now technically retired and only teach as an adjunct, I worry a lot about the current faculty. The Republicans have been after tenure for years. Universities and research are a significant source of progress. The attacks on research and the inability to run graduate programs and graduate Doctoral students will mean a lack of qualified professors after we old folks retire, which will severely curtail our leadership in science and the exercise of free thought. That is their goal.
This is from Forbes Magazine. “Trump Orders Department Of Education Closure: What Happens Next.” The story is reported by Sarah Hernholm.
President Trump has issued an executive order to close the Department of Education, a move that will reshape federal education policy and affect America’s 49.5 million public school students. The order mandates redistributing the department’s functions across multiple federal agencies by the end of the year, marking a major change in how the federal government approaches education. This decision, long championed by conservatives who believe education should remain primarily a state and local matter, has sparked disagreement about the federal government’s role in education policy, funding, and oversight.The executive order outlines specific transitions for key education functions:
These changes will affect the management of federal education funding streams totaling over $150 billion annually, including:
- Civil rights enforcement will move to the Justice Department
- Federal student loan programs will shift to the Treasury
- Special education oversight will transition to Health and Human Services
Educational stakeholders stress the importance of ensuring these resources continue without disruption during the transition period, particularly for disadvantaged students who rely heavily on federally funded programs. This will hurt rural and poor urban schools that rely on the funding to offer help for disadvantaged students and students with disabilities. I’m also wondering what will happen to ESL (English as a second language) teachers, programs, school nurses, and psychologists. These things are incredibly expensive.
- $18.8 billion in Title I funding for high-poverty schools, serving approximately 26 million students
- $15.5 billion in IDEA funding, supporting 7.3 million students with disabilities
- $120.8 billion in Federal Student Aid programs, helping 10.8 million college students
“The backpedaling is something to behold..” John Buss, @repeat1968.
@johnbuss.bsky.social
Current and former US officials have told CNN they believe two texts sent by national security adviser Mike Waltz and CIA Director John Ratcliffe in the now-infamous group chat involving senior US officials discussing battle plans to strike Houthi targets in Yemen, may have done long-term damage to the US’s ability to gather intelligence on the Iran-backed group going forward.
The primary tool of Trump’s spokespeople is to lie and deny and protect FARTUS at all times.Although messages from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth detailing the sequencing, timing and weapons to be used in a March attack on the Houthis have drawn the most scrutiny because they could have endangered US servicemembers if revealed, the messages from Waltz and Ratcliffe, in the chat Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg was added to, contained equally sensitive information, these sources said.
In one of the messages, Ratcliffe told other Cabinet members who were discussing whether to delay the strikes that the CIA was in the act of mobilizing assets to collect intelligence on the group, but that a delay might offer them the opportunity to “identify better starting points for coverage on Houthi leadership.”
That text, according to the current and former officials, exposed the mere fact that the US is gathering intelligence on them — bad in and of itself — but also hinted at how the agency is doing it. The language about “starting points,” these people said, suggests clearly that the CIA is using technical means like overhead surveillance to spy on their leadership. That could allow the Houthis to change their practices to better protect themselves.
Then, in a later message, Waltz offered an extremely specific after-action report of the strikes, telling the thread that the military had “positive ID” of a particular senior Houthi leader “walking into his girlfriend’s building” — offering the Houthis a clear opportunity to see who the US was surveilling and potentially figure out how, thus enabling them to avoid that surveillance in the future, the sources said.
The Houthis have “always been difficult to track,” said a former intelligence official. “Now you just highlight for them that they’re in the crosshairs.”
Trump administration officials, including both Waltz and Ratcliffe, have repeatedly insisted that no classified information was shared in the text. Ratcliffe, in his testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday, specifically referenced his text about “starting points.”
But current and former officials have disagreed vehemently with that assessment: The kinds of information in not just Hegseth’s texts, but Ratcliffe’s and Waltz’s, included very clear references to sources and methods. Even if it wasn’t an explicit or technical description, these people say, it is information that the US government would typically withhold because it might allow an adversary to make an educated interference about US sources and methods.
Ratcliffe’s use of the Signal app in this way is raising eyebrows inside Langley, current and former officials said.
“I think he is going to be viewed skeptically for using the app for that purpose,” one US official told CNN.
“(Ratcliffe) was basically talking as if he was in a SCIF,” said another former intelligence official, referring to a secure room hardened against electronic surveillance that is designed for discussions of classified material.
“He’s the director,” said the first former official, calling Ratcliffe’s text “irresponsible.” “He should know better.”
A CIA spokesperson told CNN, “Director Ratcliffe takes his responsibility to safeguard America’s ability to gather intelligence extremely seriously.”
“Nothing he conveyed in the chat posed any risk to any sources or methods,” the spokesperson said. “The only lasting damage is to the Houthi terrorists who have been eliminated.”
CNN has reached out to the National Security Council for comment.
Former Secretary of State penned this Op-Ed in the New York Times today. “Hillary Clinton: How Much Dumber Will This Get?” Remember, it will get worse; we just can’t forecast how because only the incompetent and cruel can come up with such batshit crazy pogroms. Throw in narcissism and sociopathy, and it’s a forecaster’s nightmare. Clinton’s name has been evoked recently because the same folks who were traumatized by her personal emails being released by their Russian buddies are taking this incredible breach of security cavalierly.
There’s more at the link, which has been gifted.It’s not the hypocrisy that bothers me; it’s the stupidity. We’re all shocked — shocked! — that President Trump and his team don’t actually care about protecting classified information or federal record retention laws. But we knew that already. What’s much worse is that top Trump administration officials put our troops in jeopardy by sharing military plans on a commercial messaging app and unwittingly invited a journalist into the chat. That’s dangerous. And it’s just dumb.
This is the latest in a string of self-inflicted wounds by the new administration that are squandering America’s strength and threatening our national security. Firing hundreds of federal workers charged with protecting our nation’s nuclear weapons is also dumb. So is shutting down efforts to fight pandemics just as a deadly Ebola outbreak is spreading in Africa. It makes no sense to purge talented generals, diplomats and spies at a time when rivals like China and Russia are trying to expand their global reach.
In a dangerous and complex world, it’s not enough to be strong. You must also be smart. As secretary of state during the Obama administration, I argued for smart power, integrating the hard power of our military with the soft power of our diplomacy, development assistance, economic might and cultural influence. None of those tools can do the job alone. Together, they make America a superpower. The Trump approach is dumb power. Instead of a strong America using all our strengths to lead the world and confront our adversaries, Mr. Trump’s America will be increasingly blind and blundering, feeble and friendless.
Let’s start with the military, because that’s what he claims to care about. Don’t let the swagger fool you. Mr. Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth (of group chat fame) are apparently more focused on performative fights over wokeness than preparing for real fights with America’s adversaries. Does anyone really think deleting tributes to the Tuskegee Airmen makes us more safe? The Trump Pentagon purged images of the plane that dropped the atomic bomb that ended World War II because its name is the Enola Gay. Dumb.
Instead of working with Congress to modernize the military’s budget to reflect changing threats, the president is firing top generals without credible justification. Five former secretaries of defense, Republicans and Democrats, rightly warned that this would “undermine our all-volunteer force and weaken our national security.” Mass layoffs are also hitting the intelligence agencies. As one former senior spy put it, “We’re shooting ourselves in the head, not the foot.” Not smart.
It’s hard to get through the day without the next chain of what the hell did they do now coming out to beat us senseless. They’re worried about the midterms because FARTUS sent Elise Stefanik back to Congress yesterday. The poor woman won’t get that deluxe apartment in the sky now. This is from Politico. “Stefanik’s withdrawal suggests Republicans are sweating their thin margins. Democrats insist Republicans are panicking.” Democrats shouldn’t be so complacent.
Okay, that’s enough shock and awe for now. What’s on your reading and blogging list today? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufw9dVys3t0President Donald Trump’s decision to keep Rep. Elise Stefanik in Congress is the clearest sign yet that the political environment has become so challenging for Republicans that they don’t want to risk a special election even in safe, red seats.
A pair of April elections in deep-red swaths of Florida next week was supposed to improve the GOP’s cushion in the House and clear the path for Stefanik’s departure, until Trump said he didn’t “want to take a chance on anyone else running for Elise’s seat.”
The decision to pull Stefanik’s nomination came as Republicans grew increasingly anxious about the race to fill the seat of National Security Advisor Mike Waltz on April 1. Polling in the district, which Trump carried by 30 points, had tightened, and the president himself is hosting a tele-town hall there to try and bail out Republican Randy Fine. An internal GOP poll from late March showed Democrat Josh Weil up 3 points over Fine, 44 to 41 percent, with 10 percent undecided, according to a person familiar with the poll and granted anonymity to discuss it. Tony Fabrizio, Trump’s pollster, conducted the survey. That result spooked Republicans and spurred them to redouble efforts to ensure a comfortable win in the district, according to two people familiar with internal conversations. Some Republican strategists said it’s not worth taking the risk of losing Stefanik’s sprawling northern New York seat, which Trump won by 20 points in 2024.“Can they defend her seat? Absolutely. But why do you do that right now?” asked Charlie Harper, who was a top aide to former Rep. Karen Handel on her successful 2017 bid in a special election in Georgia.
Harper is not the only Republican making that calculation.
“If we’re far underperforming in seats Trump won by 30 then there’s obvious concern about having to chance special elections in seats Trump won by a lot less,” said one top GOP operative granted anonymity to speak candidly. “The juice is not worth the squeeze sweating them out.”
Finally Friday Reads: Shutdown or Meltdown?
Posted: March 14, 2025 Filed under: #FARTUS, #MAGAnomics, Elon Musk, kakistocracy, kleptocracy, Polycrisis, Psychopaths in charge | Tags: @repeat1968. John Buss, Chuck Schumer, Doge, FARTUS, government shutdown, Judge orders rehire of Federal workers 12 Comments
“So, not even two months. Here we are.” John Buss, @repeat1968, @johnbuss.bsky.social
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
I’ve always been an opponent of letting the US Government shut down. As an economist, I know what kind of misery that creates for many people as well, as the possibility of a government default, which could haunt us for many years. My worry is real, but this situation is unique, and typically, the party that tries to shut the government down takes the political heat. I understand what he’s worried about. If we default on debt we become a risky debtor. If we shut the Government down, the weakest among us will suffer needlessly. Default has incredible consequences for the Social Security trust fund, the strength of our dollar, and if anyone will ever buy a US t-bill or t-bond now or ever. That includes war bonds if we ever need them again. I don’t like it, but a default would be unbelievably destructive to the country’s future. I hate that we’re in this position.
How it played out this last night and this morning pitted Schumer against many of his most strong-willed colleagues. Schumer’s support even earned him a pat on the head from #FARTUS. Trump’s always one to take advantage of a bad situation. He interpreted the move as support of the Doge Bulldozer moving through government agencies and policy. That was something one of my Canadian friends from way back in my Fired Dog Lake days predicted. I’d like to read your thoughts on that because I’m unsure how it will be received by folks outside Beltway machinations.
Let’s review what’s out there in the Press and Social media about the move that separated many Democratic senators from the leader. This is from AXIOS as proffered by Andrew Sollender. “House Dems go into “complete meltdown” as Schumer folds”.
House Democrats erupted into apoplexy Thursday night after Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said he would support Republicans’ stopgap government funding measure.
Why it matters: House Democrats feel like they “walked the plank,” in the words of one member. They voted almost unanimously against the measure, only to watch Senate Democrats seemingly give it the green light.
- “Complete meltdown. Complete and utter meltdown on all text chains,” said the member, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to offer sensitive details of members’ internal conversations.
- A senior House Democrat said “people are furious” and that some rank-and-file members have floated the idea of angrily marching onto the Senate floor in protest.
- Others are talking openly about supporting primary challenges to senators who vote for the GOP spending bill.
Driving the news: Schumer said in a floor speech Thursday that while the GOP measure is “very bad,” the possibility of a government shutdown “has consequences for America that are much, much worse.”
- “A shutdown would give Donald Trump the keys to the city, the state and the country,” Schumer said.
- The comments likely clear a path for at least eight Senate Democrats to vote for the bill — enough for Republicans to overcome the upper chamber’s 60-vote filibuster threshold.
Zoom in: All but one House Democrat voted against the bill earlier this week, in large part because it lacks language to keep the Trump administration from cutting congressionally approved spending.
- “There were many battleground Dems in the House … that were uncomfortable, semi-uncomfortable, with the vote,” said one House Democrat. “The Senate left the House at the altar.”
- House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), in remarks to his House colleagues at their annual retreat Thursday, lauded them for standing up to President Trump by voting against the bill, according to multiple sources.
- When he praised House Democrats’ votes, he received a standing ovation. When he mentioned Senate Democrats, members booed.
What we’re hearing: House Democrats’ text chains lit up Thursday night with expressions of blinding anger, according to numerous lawmakers who described the conversations on the condition of anonymity.
- “People are PISSED,” one House Democrat told Axios in a text message.
- Several members — including moderates — have begun voicing support for a primary challenge to Schumer, floating Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.) as possible candidates, three House Democrats said.
- One lawmaker even vowed at the House Democratic retreat to “write a check tonight” supporting Ocasio-Cortez, said the senior House Democrat.
- Another Democrat told Axios the ideation has gone a step further: “There is definitely a primary recruitment effort happening right now … not just Schumer, but for everyone who votes no.”
More gossip and speculation at the link.
Schumer himself appeared on Chris Hayes last night as well as wrote an Op-Ed for the New York Times. “Chuck Schumer: Trump and Musk Would Love a Shutdown. We Must Not Give Them One.”
Over the past two months, the United States has confronted a bitter truth: The federal government has been taken over by a nihilist.
President Trump has taken a blowtorch to our country and wielded chaos like a weapon. Most Republicans in Congress, meanwhile, have caved to his every whim. The Grand Old Party has devolved into a crowd of Trump sycophants and MAGA radicals who seem to want to burn everything to the ground.
Now, Republicans’ nihilism has brought us to a new brink of disaster: Unless Congress acts, the federal government will shut down Friday at midnight.
As I have said many times, there are no winners in a government shutdown. But there are certainly victims: the most vulnerable Americans, those who rely on federal programs to feed their families, get medical care and stay financially afloat. Communities that depend on government services to function will suffer.
This week Democrats offered a way out: Fund the government for another month to give appropriators more time to do their jobs. Republicans rejected this proposal.
Why? Because Mr. Trump doesn’t want the appropriators to do their job. He wants full control over government spending.
He isn’t the first president to want this, but he may be the first president since Andrew Jackson to successfully cow his party into submission. That leads Democrats to a difficult decision: Either proceed with the bill before us or risk Mr. Trump throwing America into the chaos of a shutdown.
This, in my view, is no choice at all.
Emptywheel (a friend from my Fire Dog Lake Doays) wrote a scathing piece on the situation. It indicates how desperately we need the Democrats in Congress to get their acts together. It isn’t easy dealing with chaos, but it’s even worse if you contribute to it. “Democrats Have to Stop Making Political Decisions with an Eye Towards 2026.” I’m unsure if that’s all they’re thinking about or if they’re just running around like chickens with their heads caught up.
I’ve been out of pocket as events moved towards today’s cloture vote on the dogshit continuing resolution Republicans have written. It’s not yet clear whether seven Democrats (in addition to John Fetterman) will join Chuck Schumer — who has said he’ll vote for cloture — in helping Republicans pass it, or whether a Democrat will buy some time.
It’s clear that Schumer’s excuse only emphasizes that there are no good options. He says if there’s a shutdown, Republicans will only reopen those parts of government they want. In the face of the shuttering of USAID and dismantlement of Department of Education, that seems like a futile worry.
Among the best arguments I’ve seen against a shutdown, laid out but dropped here by Josh Marshall, is that a shutdown would provide Trump a way to halt legal proceedings by deeming those lawyers non-essential.
I was told yesterday that a major driver for Dems was the fear that a shutdown would slow down or stop the various court cases against DOGE. Honestly, that sounded so stupid to me that I was skeptical. But this afternoon I heard it from other key directions. I don’t know if it’s the biggest driver but just on the basis of what I heard I get a sense that it’s a major one. That seems so wrongheaded, so lawyer-brained, that when I got the final piece of the puzzle in front of me and realized this was a real thing, it was hard for me to even process.
Schumer described it this way in his speech yesterday:
Justice, and the courts, extremely troubling, I believe. A shutdown could stall Federal court cases, one of the best redoubts against Trump’s lawlessness, and could require a furlough of critical staff at the courts, denying victims and defendants alike their day in court, dragging out appeals and clogging the justice system for months and even years.
I don’t think this is lawyer-brained at all. Trump could simply call the lawyers engaged in these suits non-essential, stalling legal challenges in their current status, and then finding new test cases to establish a precedent while judges were stymied.
In both Phoenix, where a reduction in force affected all the people running the courthouse, and in the Perkins Coie lawsuit, where a hearing the other day reviewed all the Executive Branch personnel, from Marshals to GSA, who keep the courthouse running, the Executive’s ability to limit the Judiciary via manipulation of facilities and staff has already become a live issue. Here’s how Beryl Howell described the way in which Trump’s attempt to exclude Perkins Coie from federal buildings could be enforced via Executive branch personnel.
THE COURT: I just want to make sure because we, in the judiciary — we’re the third branch. We are not the executive branch. We are not subject to this guidance. But our landlord, and all of the federal courthouses around the country is GSA —
MR. BUTSWINKAS: GSA.
THE COURT: — General Services Administration. And the people who do the security at our front doors, all across the country in federal courthouses, are DOJ-component employees from the U.S. Marshals Service or court security officers. So they are all executive branch employees.
Meanwhile the court cases are making progress. Just this week, we’ve had two judges order reinstatement of all the people fired, grant FOIA status to DOGE, and grant discovery to Democratic Attorneys General (plus in one of the two reinstatement cases, Judge Alsup ordered a deposition from an OPM person involved in the firing). As of this week, DOGE now has to answer for its actions in the courts.
Imagine, for example, if a shutdown made it easier for DHS to keep Mahmoud Khalil in Louisiana for the duration of a shutdown, even if they simply said moving him back to SDNY (or New Jersey) is not a priority. There are other cases where the government is being ordered to pay back payments; a shutdown would make such recourse unavailable to anyone who has not yet sued. In the financial clawback cases (where EPA and FEMA seized funds already awarded), a shutdown would give the FBI time to try to frame the case against plaintiffs they’re pursuing, while the plaintiffs get no protection in the meantime. A key flaw was revealed in the lawsuit against Perkins Coie in the hearing the other day (which I’ll return to); if given the time, I would expect Trump to try the same trick against another law firm, fixing that flaw, in an attempt to eliminate any anti-Trump legal teams in the country.
So the concern that a shutdown would eliminate one of two sources of power is real.
I’m agnostic about whether a shutdown brings more advantage than risks.
The rest of her essay argues that everyone is far too interested in the midterm elections.
(snip)
One thing I am absolutely certain of, however, is that Democrats on both sides of this debate are framing it in terms of 2026. Those justifiably furious at Chuck Schumer are thinking in terms of primaries against any Senator who supports cloture. They’re demanding a filibuster so that elected Democrats, as Democrats, be seen wielding some power, so the party doesn’t look feckless to potential voters. Those afraid of a shutdown are discussing electoral consequences in 2026. Polls are measuring who would be blamed in the polls.
This mindset has plagued both sides of Democratic debates for two months, with disastrous consequences.
Democracy will be preserved or lost in the next three months. And democracy will be won or lost via a nonpartisan political fight over whether enough Americans want to preserve their way of life to fight back, in a coalition that includes far more than Democrats. You win this fight by treating Trump and Elon as the villain, not by making any one Democrat a hero (or worse still, squandering week after week targeting Democratic leaders while letting Elon go ignored).
Either way, this is an untenable situation.
Today is another day of the country finding out none of this is normal. NBC News has a running thread on every crazy thing on deck for the Beltway today. “Government shutdown live updates: Senate to vote on funding bill today; Dr. Mehmet Oz faces confirmation hearing. President Donald Trump will deliver remarks at the Justice Department, a frequent target of his and his allies’ government weaponization claims.” Have I mentioned I have a TV, but it’s been sitting in a box for nearly three years? I just don’t have the stamina to set it up and watch all this craziness on a big screen.
Reality TV stars and swindlers are about all Trump has to offer up these days.
The only good news I found today was this.
Judges order Trump to rehire thousands of fired federal workers.
Two federal courts are ruling that the firings of probationary federal workers were improper and that tens of thousands of those employees must be immediately reinstated. The Trump administration is calling the ruling absurd and unconstitutional and is vowing to fight back. NBC’s Garrett Haake reports for “TODAY.”
It seems we are fully reliant on the Judiciary Branch to stop the destruction of our Government and democracy. It’s not like we didn’t warn people, either. This is in Fortune, as reported by the AP. ” The Trump administration must bring back thousands of federal workers fired by Elon Musk’s DOGE, judge rules.” The Judge really read the riot act to the Federal attorney also.
A federal judge on Thursday ordered President Donald Trump’s administration to reinstate thousands—if not tens of thousands—of probationary workers let go in mass firings across multiple agencies last month, saying that the terminations were directed by a personnel office that had no authority to do so.
U.S. District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco ordered the departments of Veterans Affairs, Agriculture, Defense, Energy, the Interior and the Treasury to immediately offer reinstatement to employees terminated on or about Feb. 13 and 14 using guidance from the Office of Personnel Management and its acting director, Charles Ezell.
Alsup directed the agencies to report back within seven days with a list of probationary employees and an explanation of how the departments complied with his order as to each person.
The temporary restraining order came in a lawsuit filed by a coalition of labor unions and organizations as the Republican administration moves to dramatically downsize the federal workforce.
The White House and the Department of Justice did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment.
Alsup expressed frustration with what he called the government’s attempt to sidestep laws and regulations governing a reduction in its workforce — which it is allowed to do — by firing probationary workers who lack protections. He was appalled that employees were fired for poor performance despite receiving glowing evaluations just months earlier.
“It is sad, a sad day, when our government would fire some good employee and say it was based on performance when they know good and well that’s a lie,” he said. “That should not have been done in our country.”
Opinion: 3 ways DOGE challengers could win court cases from CNN
It’s the day before my favorite holiday, The Ides of March. For those who don’t know, if I could go back in time and eliminate before they came into power, it would be the baby that became Julius Ceasar. They offed him too late to help history. So, there’s likely a few folks walking around the White House right now that should Beware the Ides of March. Nipping the Roman Empire in the bud would have definitely put us farther away from the Dark Time Line.
Here’s tomorrow’s version of the Ides of March.
-
Donald Trump has suggested that the US should buy Gaza, will get Greenland “one way or another” as well as the Panama Canal, ignited a new trade war, floated the annexation of Canada, and hired the world’s richest weirdo (who also happens to be the world’s richest man) to fire tens of thousands of federal employees. And that’s just one country.
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Romania’s leading presidential candidate was arrested after winning the first round of elections with the assistance of Russian bots, showing that Putin is determined to mess with all his neighbors. Look for the Moldovan election in a few months; Russia is sowing chaos with energy sabotage.
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Germany’s most successful far-right party since World War II just had a record-breaking result after the the US basically endorsed them. And don’t be fooled by Friedrich Merz’s lack of flair: The Europeans are about to try to build an independent defense, give the American abdication.
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China’s DeepSeek has upended the AI market, throwing Silicon Valley into full-blown panic mode. And it will soon dominate the renewable energy market and have just been given a monumental soft-power gift the US abdication of 80 years of global leadership of the free world.
Tara Palmeri writes this on her blog, Red Letter. “Fear and Loathing in the West Wing. Inside the revolt against Elon Musk…”
The tolerance for Elon Musk inside of the White House is wearing thin, as they deal with the fallout of his calamitous interview with Larry Kudlow when he touched the third rail – entitlements. Even though Trump’s staffers are terrified of Musk, they know that if you try to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, you die, politically speaking.
“It’s no longer simmering resistance, people are fucking furious,” said a source with knowledge of the situation.
“Medicaid is not just for Black people in the ghetto, these are our voters,” said a Republican operative close to the White House.
Even before the interview, I’m told that the White House communications team was adamantly against letting Musk do the interview with Kudlow, even though he’s a former administration official and ally. They know that FOX News is a network that their older, white working-class voters watch closely and this was a rare televised interview for Musk, not the same as getting high with Joe Rogan.
Now they’re playing cleanup. Sure, they sent out a “Fact Check” memo from the White House highlighting that his words were garbled when he said he’s looking at the “waste and fraud in entitlement spending,” not entitlements all together. But then Musk went further, falsely claiming in the interview that Democrats use entitlement programs to attract illegal immigrants into the country so that they can add them to their voter rolls. It doesn’t help that earlier this month, Musk referred to Social Security as “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time.”
You can even see Kudlow shifting around uncomfortably during the interview.
Trump’s spokesperson Steven Cheung denied that there was an issue. “We love [Musk] doing media,” he said, pointing to his joint interview with Trump on Sean Hannity.
As promised, I want to share the ins and outs of my reporting process with you, so I first reached out to Trump’s personal pollster John McLaughlin after I learned about the meltdown over Musk’s interview to ask if he’s been polling Musk’s response in the interview. And I was shocked to learn that McLaughlin has not polled Musk at all, even though he’s clearly a political liability to the President. McLaughlin has been polling Trump for decades and was one of the main pollsters alongside Tony Fabrizio on the campaign. He said the last poll that he conducted that even remotely touched on Musk was about DOGE in November 2024 and it did not mention Musk by name.
“No one has asked us to do that poll,” McLaughlin told me.
Well, the public polling shows that the numbers for Musk – what some would call Trump’s heat shield – have been in free fall since Trump took office, with more than 53 percent of people having an unfavorable opinion of Musk, according to a new CNN poll. But surely Trump’s political operation, which to be fair is an impressive one, would want to know if Musk was starting to become a liability. No political consultant in Washington trusts public polling. They’d probably trust the opposition party’s polling over public polling. So that leaves me to believe that they are afraid of Trump’s appendage or it’s because Musk just donated $100 million to Trump’s political arm, which just so happens to be run by Trump’s other pollster Fabrizio. When I asked Fabrizio if he’s conducting polls on Musk favorables, he didn’t get back to me.
Regardless, I’ve heard that the White House is aware that Musk’s numbers are “dog shit,” according to a source. “
More at the link.
Just one more thing to ruin your weekend and I’m sorry but it’s story that needs telling. This is from The New Republic. “Trump Gives New Orders to U.S. Military on Panama Canal Takeover, Donald Trump is moving forward on his plans to seize the Panama Canal.”
The Trump administration has asked the U.S. military to draw up options for retaking the Panama Canal.
President Trump has been pushing for retaking the canal since December, and repeated his desire in a joint address to Congress last week, without any elaboration. The rest of the Trump administration hasn’t attempted to explain what he means, either.
The military is drawing up options, according to NBC News, that range from a closer partnership with the Panamanian military to soldiers seizing the Panama Canal by force, according to unnamed officials. The use of force depends on how much Panama’s military is willing to work with the United States, the officials told NBC News.
The commander of U.S. Southern Command, Admiral Alvin Holsey, presented the different strategies to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth earlier this week. The plan to use military force against Panama will only be considered if posting additional U.S. military personnel does not accomplish Trump’s goal of “reclaiming” the canal, the officials said.
Right now, the U.S. has more than 200 troops in the country, including Special Forces units working with Panamanian units to combat internal unrest. Trump claims China has troops in the canal, which Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino denies, as does China. In February, Panama decided not to renew an infrastructure agreement with China, drawing criticism from the country toward the U.S.
One tin soldier rides again.
So, I just want to watch a few more Star Wars movies and eat the tabouli I made last night. We’re seriously in trouble, and I don’t see Captain America out there anywhere, or Wonder Woman, or any of the other Super Heros we could use right now. At least it’s almost crawfish season.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Frustrating Friday Reads: Where are the pitchforks, torches, and guillotines?
Posted: February 14, 2025 Filed under: "presidential immunity", kakistocracy, misogyny, Project 2025, Psychopaths in charge, public corruption, racism in MAGA, religious extremists | Tags: @johnbuss.bsky.social John Buss, @repeat1968. John Buss, CDC massive firings, From Russia with bad intentions, JD Vance Weirdo and perv, Kash Patel, My funny valentine, Pete Hegseth weirdo sexual assaulter, Saturday Night Massacre, Thursday Night Slaughter, US Attorneys 5 Comments
“Resist!”
John (repeat1968) Buss
@johnbuss.bsky.social
It’s another Sad Day, Sky Dancers!
This may be the only hope we have left. Three GOP seats are heading to Special Elections. A Democratic Party Trifecta would be enough for Dems to regain control! The rest of the news has the indicators of a Constitutional Crisis and, as BB and JJ have said, a Coup. Former US Attorneys Barbara McQuade and Harry Littman have inside information on something that makes Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre look like a picnic. JJ and BB are flooding my sms with some of the worst headlines I have ever seen.
The last three weeks have been unending and brutal. The roll-out of Project 2025 is the most consequential threat to our Republic since the Civil War. And it’s coming from the White House. This headline from The Salt Lake Tribune shows how horrifying it’s getting in the states that are Republican Red have gone down the War Path against everything decent, just, and fair. “Nazi flags can fly in Utah schools, but not pride flags, GOP lawmaker says. A new bill would allow for Nazi and Confederate flags to be displayed in some instances in Utah schools and government buildings, but pride flags would be banned.”
Here are the Litman and McQuade conversations about the DOJ’s Thursday night Slaughter.
Strong rumor with credible sourcing: DOJ has put all of public integrity line attorneys in a room and told them they have an hour for someone to choose who will sign motion to dismiss and if nobody does, they will all be fired. The nastiest strong-arming in DOJ history by a long shot.
— Harry Litman (@harrylitman.bsky.social) 2025-02-14T16:07:55.931Z
This is Saturday night massacre in free fall. A day that will live in infamy in DOJ. 22 people in room. it's savage. hard to imagine greater disrespect for DOJ professionals.
— Harry Litman (@harrylitman.bsky.social) 2025-02-14T16:11:12.111Z
Very proud of the 8 DOJ attorneys who have refused to dismiss the Adams case. Their oath is to the Constitution, not the president.
— Barb McQuade (@barbmcquade.bsky.social) 2025-02-14T12:28:35.393Z
McQuade shared this from the New York Times.
In less than a month in power, President Trump’s political appointees have embarked on an unapologetic, strong-arm effort to impose their will on the Justice Department, seeking to justify their actions as the simple reversal of the “politicization” of federal law enforcement under their Biden-era predecessors.
The ferocious campaign, executed by Emil Bove III — Mr. Trump’s former criminal defense lawyer who is now the department’s acting No. 2 official — is playing out in public, in real time, through a series of moves that underscore Mr. Trump’s intention to bend the traditionally nonpartisan career staff in federal law enforcement to suit his ends.
That strategy has quickly precipitated a crisis that is an early test of how resilient the norms of the criminal justice system will prove to be against the pressures brought by a retribution-minded president and his appointees.
On Thursday, the interim U.S. attorney in Manhattan, Danielle R. Sassoon, resigned rather than sign off on Mr. Bove’s command to dismiss the corruption charges against Mayor Eric Adams of New York. Ms. Sassoon is no member of the liberal resistance: She clerked for the conservative Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia, and had been appointed to her post by Mr. Trump’s team.
Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of the Department of Defense Pete Hegseth headed to Europe to evidently blow up the relationships with all of our major allies. The two surly men’s visit was not appreciated. This happened while Trump announced that he and Putin would be visiting each other’s country to tie up Ukraine’s surrender. Vance has been sent to chat with Ukriane’s President Zelensky at the Munich Conference, which they are both attending. Analysis of his speech can be found at this link. ‘Threat I worry most is threat from within,’ Vance criticises European leaders – summary.”
US vice-president JD Vance has urged Europe to put forward a positive case for freedom and act against “the threat that I worry most, the threat from within” which he put as “the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values” through restrictions on free speech, content moderation rules online, and political firewalls against radical parties.
Meanwhile, The Guardian also reports a drone attack on Chornobyl. “Russian drone detonates on Chornobyl nuclear plant containment shell.” The International Atomic Energy Agency has some astounding pictures shown in the article.
A Russian drone carrying a high-explosive warhead struck the protective containment shell of the Chornobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine overnight, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said.
He described the move, coming amid speculation about potential peace talks with Russian president Vladimir Putin, as “a very clear greeting from Putin and Russian Federation to the security conference.”
Ukrainian security services said the drone was a Geran-2, the Russian name for the Iranian-designed Shahed-136, and had been intended to hit the reactor enclosure, Reuters noted.
Zelenskyy said the damage to the shelter was “significant” and had started a fire, but he added that radiation levels at the plant had not increased.
The Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, denied Moscow was responsible for the attack. Without presenting evidence, he said Ukrainian officials wanted to thwart efforts to end the war through negotiations between Trump and Putin.
In a wide-ranging and fiery speech peppered with European references, he accused European leaders of abandoning their roots as “defenders of democracy” during the cold war by what he believes is the process of shutting down dissenting voices (14:51).
He said they were increasingly looking “like old entrenched interests hiding behind ugly Soviet era words like misinformation … who simply don’t like that idea that somebody with an alternative viewpoint might express a different opinion” (14:55).
He criticised “cavalier” statements from European officials “sounding delighted” about the cancelled presidential elections in Romania or expansive content moderation powers or other free speech restrictions in the US, Germany and Sweden, saying there were “shocking to American ears” (14:46).
He also criticised European leaders for “running in fear of your own voters,” including on migration, saying that risks destroying democracy from within by disenchanting the population from taking part in democratic processes (15:01).
He dismissed any criticism of Elon Musk’s alleged interference in European elections, saying “if American democracy can survive 10 years of Greta Thunberg’s scolding, you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk.”
He called for an end of political “firewalls,” a pointed reference to the German arrangement keeping out the far-right parties such as the Alternative für Deutschland, just nine days before the federal election next Sunday (15:01).
But notably, he doesn’t say much about Ukraine, other than a brief comment that the US administration “believes we can come to a reasonable settlement between Russia and Ukraine” (14:44).
The New Republic’s Hafiz Rashid has this take. “JD Vance Escalates Conflict With Europe in Alarming Speech at Munich.”
The vice president criticized European leaders for being afraid of their own voters, in a nod to European far-right parties, such as the AfD in Germany, seeming to threaten a chilling of relations with governments whose ideologies differ from his and Trump’s.
“If you’re running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you, nor, for that matter, is there anything that you can do for the American people who elected me and elected President Trump,” Vance said.
Hanging over the conference was Thursday’s attack in the German city, where a car driven by an Afghan immigrant ran into a crowd of people, injuring at least 28. Vance used the incident to bolster a nativist argument for restricting immigration.
“How many times must we suffer these appalling setbacks before we change course and take our shared civilization in a new direction?” Vance asked.
“If American democracy can survive 10 years of Greta Thunberg’s scolding, you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk,” Vance said, downplaying a man currently threatening America’s democracy, as well as that of Germany, and drawing a false equivalence between a climate activist and the world’s richest man.
The vice president may think he struck a blow for the Trump administration’s worldview in Munich Friday, but he’s missing the hypocrisy of his own words. The Trump administration has so far rammed through executive orders instead of passing laws, gutted the federal workforce, undermined the right to a free press, and ignored the outcry from all Americans outside of the MAGA bubble.
Politico has the hot take on Pete Hegseth’s visit to the Munich Security Conference. An actual Republic Congress critter may have a criticism! Amazing! Well, he did try to soften the blow with some obvious ass kissing too. Read for yourself. “Senior Republican senator ‘puzzled’ and ‘disturbed’ by Hegseth’s Ukraine remarks. Senate Armed Services Chair Roger Wicker is breaking with the line from the Trump White House.”
U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made a “rookie mistake” when he said a return to Ukraine’s pre-war borders was “unrealistic,” Senate Armed Services Chair Roger Wicker said Friday.
Hegseth on Thursday pulled back some of the comments he made about Ukraine a day earlier, where he said that NATO membership for Kyiv was off the table and that the country could not return to its internationally recognized borders.
“Hegseth is going to be a great defense secretary, although he wasn’t my choice for the job,” the Mississippi Republican told POLITICO on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference. “But he made a rookie mistake in Brussels and he’s walked back some of what he said but not that line.”
“I don’t know who wrote the speech — it is the kind of thing Tucker Carlson could have written, and Carlson is a fool,” Wicker said, referring to the pro-Putin broadcaster.
Speaking to Jonathan Martin at the POLITICO Pub in the Munich conference, Wicker — a staunch Ukraine supporter — said he was “surprised” by Hegseth’s original comments and “heartened” that the new defense secretary had reversed course. Wicker said he favors a firm posture with Moscow.
“Everybody knows … and people in the administration know you don’t say before your first meeting what you will agree to and what you won’t agree to,” Wicker said, adding that he was “puzzled” and “disturbed” by Hegseth’s comments.
While I just criticized the governor of Utah, let me not forget to kick the governor of Lousyana in the balls a few times. He’s trying to kill us. This is also from Politico. “Louisiana to end mass vaccine promotion, state’s top health official says. The department will still “stock and provide vaccines,” according to a department memo.”
The Louisiana Department of Health “will no longer promote mass vaccination” according to a Thursday memo written by the state’s top health official and obtained by The Associated Press.
A department spokesperson confirmed Louisiana Surgeon General Ralph Abraham had ordered his staff to stop engaging in media campaigns and community health fairs to encourage vaccinations, even as the state has experienced a surge in influenza.
Abraham’s announcement occurred the same day vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was sworn in by the U.S. Senate to serve as President Donald Trump’s health secretary.
In a separate letter posted on the department’s website, Louisiana’s surgeon general decried “blanket government mandates” for vaccines and criticized the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s COVID-19 vaccination push. Individuals should make their own decisions about vaccinations, Abraham said.
“Government should admit the limitations of its role in people’s lives and pull back its tentacles from the practice of medicine,” said Abraham, a Republican.
I gagged on that last statement because that certainly doesn’t apply to women and girls with functioning ovaries and uteruses. Meanwhile, Trump is planning mass firings at the CDC. Bird Flu, anyone? This is from STAT. “Trump administration to fire thousands at health agencies. Employees across agencies who were hired in the past one to two years are being targeted.” Considering he also wants to end Medicaid, I would say we are about to have a serious amount of deaths on our hands.
The Trump administration is set to eliminate thousands of federal health care jobs Friday, targeting employees across public health and science agencies who were hired in the past one to two years.
Senior officials were informed in meetings Friday morning that roughly 5,200 people on probationary employment — recent hires — across agencies including the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will be fired that afternoon, according to sources briefed on the meetings. CDC leadership was told the Atlanta-based agency would lose about 1,300 workers. The numbers at the NIH are not clear, but exceptions are being made for certain probationary employees, according to a memo viewed by STAT.
The workers will be given a month’s paid leave but lose access to work systems by the end of Friday, according to sources.
In addition to the probationary workers, an unspecified number of contract workers at the CDC and other Health and Human Services agencies have been informed over the course of the past week that their jobs had been terminated, including dozens at the Vaccine Research Center housed at NIH. Many jobs at these agencies are done by contract workers.
Other changes are expected, particularly at the leadership levels of organizations. When Susan Monarez, a former ARPA-H official, was named acting director of the CDC, she informed staff she would transition into the role of acting principal deputy director once Dave Weldon, the nominee to lead the agency, is confirmed. That move signaled that the current acting principal deputy director, Nirav Shah, who joined the CDC in March 2023, was likely out of a job. Earlier this week, Shah told CDC staff that his last day at the agency would be Feb. 28, a source told STAT.
Head of ARPA-H and Biden appointee Renee Wegrzyn told staff Friday morning that she was fired, a source told STAT. The agency, established in 2022 by Biden to work with the private sector on breakthrough medical technology, employs less than 200 workers. Because of the agency’s newness, most employees are considered probationary and could be targeted for layoffs.
Once again, I feel the need to share Tim Miller’s latest at The Bulwark. Trying to preserve American democracy makes for strange bedfellows. Also, they have a Valentine’s poem for everyone!
Roses are red,
The Bulwark is rad—
As we’ve always said:
Orange Man Bad.
Here’s Miller’s lede. “Kash’s Honesty Problem.” Ya think?
For all the many, many, MANY faults of Trump’s other nominees, none of them impulse-lied to senators’ faces while under oath in a confirmation hearing, as if they were a troublemaking toddler telling their parents they didn’t drop the cake, hoping no one noticed their face was covered in chocolate icing.
But that seems to be what Kash Patel did—and not on a matter of negligible import. Patel told the Senate Judiciary Committee that “I don’t know what’s going on right now over there” in the FBI, and that he was “not aware” of plans to fire FBI agents and officials who had investigated Donald Trump and January 6th. But according to several whistleblowers and contemporaneous notes, this was not true. From the Washington Post:
“KP wants movement at FBI,” one attendee purportedly wrote in the notes Durbin reviewed.
This was just the latest in a string of ostentatious lies that Patel told the senators set to confirm him—and basically anyone else who has had the displeasure of recently encountering him. Here’s just a modest sampling:
- Patel had previously said “we went to the studio and recorded [the J6 Prison Choir], mastered it, digitized it, and put it out as a song” but during his confirmation hearing he told Sen. Adam Schiff that the “we” repeatedly invoked in that sentence did not actually include him because he was not involved. He claimed he was using “the proverbial we”—I guess he means the royal “We”—you know, the editorial. It is the type of semantic lie that would make even Slick Willy blush.
- A state court judge overseeing one of the January 6th cases said Patel was “not a credible witness” because his testimony was “not only illogical . . . but completely devoid of any evidence in the record.”
- Patel has vastly exaggerated his résumé, claiming, among other things, that he was the “the Main Justice lead prosecutor for Benghazi” when in fact he had a junior supportive role—one he began after the investigation had started and left before the first case went to trial.
- A Trump adviser told the Atlantic that Patel had more than once claimed he was the person who “‘gave the order’ for U.S. forces to move in and kill the ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in 2019”—even though he was not even in the Situation Room.
- Former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper wrote in his book that Patel’s lies about a Seal Team Six hostage rescue in Africa led to an international incident that put their lives at risk.
- Patel has repeatedly lied about the FBI having a role in January 6th, advancing the absurd Ray Epps conspiracy theory.
- Then there were his claims that he was present when Trump magically declassified the documents he was keeping at Mar-a-Lago, and then pleaded the Fifth when asked about it in front of a grand jury.
I could keep going, but really, the story of Kash is best summed up in this anecdote from Elaina Plott Calabro’s Atlantic profile. Calabro wrote that Patel often says he and Trump are “just a ‘couple of guys from Queens,’” when Patel isn’t even from Queens. He’s from Garden City! That’s not the 313.
We’re still not living in the United States of America, are we? The abhorrent actions of Trump, Musk, and underlings puts the word Banana in the Republic.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
peej
Carissa
bostonboomer
dakinikat
ecocatwoman
mablue2
Mama Lopez
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Sky Dancing 
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