unraveling

31.March.2025

The flogging will continue until morale improves

The co-presidents, outreach chair and a delegate of the georgetwon energy law group decided that they'd skip the recruiting event for skadden, arps, slate, meagher & flom llp, given sasm&f's capitulation to trump in discontinuing their dei program and offering $100 million (!) in pro bono legal services "to causes selected by the administration." in a nutshell:

"[Diversity, equity and inclusion] initiatives are not talking points or marketing tools; they are critical efforts to correct longstanding societal harms. by allowing candidates from systematically marginalized populations an equal opportunity to compete, diversity initiatives promote merit-based hiring. to suggest otherwise is to blame marginalized people for their own marginalization."

Here in idaho, our legislature will still be in session on april fools day, missing their self-declared deadline for adjournment, as ever, because of garbage such as SB 1198. Laura Guido reports in the Idaho Press that it's "a bill with sweeping bans on requiring or incentivizing public university and college courses or training related to diversity, equity and inclusion."

Bill sponsor Ben Toews (R-CdA), bringing forth legilsation to ban certain types of thought and ideas said “we don’t want a system where we’re banning certain types of thoughts or certain types of ideas from being taught,” but just, you know, don't even think of making anything DEI-flavored a part of required studies.

And of course, it's always AN EMERGENCY to do that, and to provide a private cause of action, because our Constitution does not allow our government to do the kind of censorship they have in mind.

Only 8 people testified on Friday, and only 5 of them were opposed. They're wearing us down with incessant bad bills. One Idahoan got straight to the point:

“This bill reveals a stunning level of hypocrisy, in the name of supporting free inquiry, it proposes a massive amount of censorship, including punishing the wrong kind of speech by instructors and staff at universities with extremely costly lawsuits,” Viola resident Karen Hanson said. “University students are not mindless fools that wander onto campus to be brainwashed. They can and do think for themselves. They do not need the Legislature insulting their intelligence by protecting them from controversial ideas.”

The usual suspect arguments in favor came from the Idaho Freedom Foundation, the Idaho Family Policy Center and the Ada County Republican Party. IFF spox Sam Lair is unhappy that Boise State University’s Student Connections and Support Center (previously the Gender Equity Center) still exists, and says it "serves all students of sexual orientations, racial, ethnic identities, gender identities, cultural identities, cultural identities and abilities," which... is a bad thing? Yes.

[Lair] said he supported the bill to “purge the subversive and pernicious ideology from our college campuses and universities once and for all.”

The one democrat on the 9 member Senate State Affairs Committee (James Ruchti) was joined by Chairman Jim Guthrie in voting against advancing the bill, but that wasn't enough. (Guthrie might have just kept the bill in his drawer, and have the committee work on more worthy items, but it seems we must continue to flog the demon of DEI.

29.March.2025

Corruption running wild

Who knows how long the U.S. Office of Government Ethics can stay in legitimate business, but an email from Sen. Adam Schiff highlighting a point of law led me to the OGE page for 18 U.S.C. § 208: Acts affecting a personal financial interest. The summary there is a heck of a lot more readable than the actualy chapter and verse (with its exceptions), boiling it down to a very sensible prohibition against executive branch employees (and "certain individuals with whom he has ties outside the Government") from "participating personally and substantially in a particular Government matter that will affect his own financial interests," which, you know, the big DOGE hisself, Melon Usk "seems to be doing every day," as Schiff put it.

"Trump has given Musk unfettered access to millions of Americans’ data. Kash Patel is in charge of the FBI and can investigate whomever he wants. Pam Bondi can order the Justice Department to seek vengeance against any and all of Trump’s rivals—including me. We have already seen the Justice Department threaten democratic officials for speaking out."

28.March.2025

Devolution

Lively conversation between Anne Applebaum and Jeffrey Goldberg about SignalGate, and current devolution into authoritarianism. This about 12 minutes in to the half hour.

"...Anybody who's in a leadership position in any organization knows this: when you make a mistake and you're called out on it, and you know it's a mistake, you have choices.

"You can own the mistake... if you have to fall on your sword, you fall on your sword. If you get a second chance, great, you learn from it... you just deal with it...

"You could just say, 'wow, that was a doozy,' and 'we're not going to do that again,' and 'we're not going to use Signal and other private, commercial apps to communicate war plans, or attack plans...

"We have to be open to the idea that people in government just like everybody else make mistakes and sometimes the mistakes have profound consequences, and the test is, how do you respond to the mistake?

"The Waltz-Hegseth tactic in this case was to say crazy things..."

The Leader's rubric, learned at the foot of his father and at the side of Roy Cohn is, "you don't apologize, you don't explain, you double down."

Unfortunately, that's been working for him for much of his life; a decade in national politics, now. In 2015, when the then-clown candidate said he didn't like people who got shot down to diss Senator (and GOP candidate for President in 2008) John McCain... Why wasn't that the end of the psychopath's bid for leadership?

Now we seem to be in a race between his dementia, and the depredation of the most powerful agents leveraging his power. Elon Musk, obviously, but J.D. Vance, and Stephen Miller, who I expect is outlining or authoring many of the Executive Orders that are implementing the sabotage and theft of "Project 2025."

(The conversation at the New Orleans Book Festival continues, with McKay Coppins, Elaina Plott-Calabro, and Adam Serwer, for a second half hour.)

26.March.2025

This is what fascism looks like

There's a Wikipedia page for the United States government group chat leak. A.k.a. the Houthi PC Small Group. Our Bigs have never been so small. The Atlantic shared the Attack Plans That Trump’s Advisers Shared on Signal, just to, you know, make it clear who's "deceitful and highly discredited" in the national security cluster.

Marcy Wheeler observed that "among the things Tulsi, Hegseth, and Mike Waltz claim was not classified at all is that Whiskey Pete authorized a strike on the apartment of a target's girlfriend, and destroyed the whole thing. It'll make an interesting international law argument."

Jim Wright has an informed opinion.

"Based on my own experience with numerous similar operations, it's pretty obvious everyone involved was lying during their congressional testimony yesterday. Big surprise there.

"It's all there. Time. Date. Locations. Weapons. Targets. Units. All of that, made public before or during a mission (and even sometimes after) can lead directly to mission failure and put our assets at risk....

"For the military, this like the [1967] fire on USS Forrestal. It's so bad that it's HISTORICALLY bad. The kind of monumental ridiculously insane terrible cascading bad that we'll use as a flaming example to teach generations of Sailors, Soldiers, Marines, Airman, and even Space Guard Whatever They're Called, how NOT to do things. They'll make training movies about this. Military who aren't even born right now will know about this in detail 30 years from now."

But that doesn't look like the most disturbing thing this morning, compared to "the abduction of an international graduate student by federal authorities, [with video] circulating on Twitter and Reddit."

And on Bluesky. Rumeysa Ozturk, a student from Turkey, wrote an op-ed advocating for Palestine and the "equal dignity and humanity of all people." A year ago.

"Neighbors had seen agents in unmarked cars monitoring her apartment for two days prior to the arrest...

23.March.2025

Kindergarten rules

Joe Walsh is one of the people on the other side of the political spectrum who stopped short of drinking the Kool-aid. I used to see more from him on Twitter, before that went to X-hell. I appreciate one of his succinct posts being pushed into my Bluesky feed, by Democratic strategist Jon Cooper, although I wish he'd taken the trouble to put the verbiage in alt-text. Retyping for you:

"Donald Trump is EVERYTHING you teach your children NOT to be. He's cruel, ignorant, lawless, a bully, a coward, a cheat, an extreme narcissist, and a pathological liar. You'd never work with him, you'd never work for him, you'd never want any women you cared about involved with him. He's a horrible human being. Shame on us for electing him again."

Alternative media

Digging through old newspapers, I came across the month-old New York Times magazine, featuring nonagenarian Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch and some fragments of his reticulating family tree on the cover. The feature headline is The Murdoch Family Plot; online, it's Inside the Murdochs' Succession Drama.

The lengthy ("listen" link says it's an hour, 23 minutes!), three-part drama, is by Jonathan Mahler and Jim Rutenberg, who "have reported on the Murdochs for more than two decades and across three continents." It centers around the "inviolable" trust that "KRM" (Keith Rupert Murdoch, who knew?) set up when he was a father of four, and wanted to share his empire with his children. It's not just the $billions at issue:

"It is about the future of the most powerful media empire in the English-speaking world. No two news companies have done more to reshape the modern geopolitical order than Fox Corporation and News Corp."

The courtroom drama unfolded in Reno, Nevada, because that state is "known for its favorable estate-planning laws," and filed under seal "to ensure that it would remain out of public view." Savor the saucy irony of the 15 years-ago scandal of Murdoch's News of the World tabloid "systematically hacking into the phones of royals, politicians and others in Britain," as the Murdoch's have their sealed court kerfuffle hacked.

"[W]e obtained the bulk of the trial record, totaling more than 3,000 pages: most of the briefs, all the rulings and the full transcript of the trial itself, including private messages between family members that were entered as evidence."

There's also the $787.5 million petard Fox News was hoist upon to settle their defamation of Dominion Voting System, carried out between election day 2020 and January 2021 by FN talking heads Maria Bartiromo, Tucker Carlson, Lou Dobbs, Sean Hannity, and Jeanine Pirro, with guests including Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell. (They declared that paying more than three-quarters of a billion dollars "reflect[ed] Fox's continued commitment to the highest journalistic standards.")

The Magazine piece is a fascinating read, from which I'm here to highlight part of the supporting cast: three new "managing directors" brought into the trust to execute a devious plan (a.k.a. "a carefully crafted charade" as Washoe County probate commissioner Edmund Gorman put it), to use a narrow loophole to cut out the Troublesome Beneficiary, James Murdoch.

The new directors were to be led by the Zelig of legal malfeasance, former US Attorney General William Barr, and two former members of the Nevada Senate. The plan was for the three stooges to "vot[e] to change a family trust without ever speaking to a majority of its beneficiaries or their legal counsel." Their employment agreement would include this rather amazing preëmptive waiver:

They received agreements from Rupert and Lachlan indemnifying them for nearly all of their conduct as managing directors, including negligence, bad faith and “fraud in the exercise of fiduciary duties and services.”

The plan was to use the provision allowing for amendment (in “good faith,” for the sole benefit of one beneficiary), and expand that to cover the trust as a whole, and so the supposed benefit of all the beneficiaries, as a group. Barr testified that "the uncertainty around succession was already affecting Fox and News Corp. and that its impact would only grow, further harming the companies."

James Murdoch's director in the trust, Jesse "Angelo asked if he had any evidence to support this claim. As it turned out, the report Barr had requested looking at how succession-related infighting affects corporate valuations had been completed and submitted by one of News Corp.’s advisers, Bank of America. It examined seven family-owned companies that had experienced succession crises. The results were mixed, according to the trial transcripts. In four of the seven cases, the crises had in fact created value for shareholders by spurring a sale or breakup of the companies. In one case, the entrenchment of the leader of a family-owned company had had a negative effect on its valuation. But Barr didn’t mention the report, merely saying, “I think there are studies.”

What a guy. I won't spoil the rest of the drama; it's an engaging read.

22.March.2025

Selective outrage

My social network doesn't cross over into +rumpworld much, but you know how family goes, there's always the odd branch. One cousin-in-law who is a good person, hard-working, honest, and so forth, leans (at least) right. These days, that puts you at risk of being sucked into the black hole of "conservatism," the ultimate destination of the historical path we've been on since Ronald Reagan declared war on the federal government. I'm seeing reminders that "dismantling the Department of Education" was one of his clarion calls back in the 1980s, responding to the Civil Rights Act that Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law, and the "threat" of integration of public schools.

It took a while, a lot of weird twists and turns (Clinton, Gingrich's Contract on America, George W. Bush's hellish response to 9/11, Obama getting elected, and so on), but here we are.

My CIL posted a condemnation to Facebook of vandals going after Tesla cars. Fair enough. But is that really the worst thing going on right now? Our "president" used his antisocial media to threaten anyone convicted of damaging or destroying the vehicles—including U.S. citizens—with being sent to prison in El Salvador.

“I look forward to watching the sick terrorist thugs get 20-year jail sentences for what they are doing to Elon Musk and Tesla,” Mr. Trump said, adding, “Perhaps they could serve them in the prisons of El Salvador, which have become so recently famous for such lovely conditions!”

And we're doing enemies lists again. One of +rump's many now includes three secretaries of state (Hillary Clinton, Antony Blinken, and Mike Pompeo), two former National Security Advisors (Jake Sullivan, John Bolton), NY AG Letitia James, Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, Fiona Hill, Alexander Vindman, Norman Eisen, Liz Cheney, and Adam Kinzinger. All had their security clearances revoked.

I'm old enough to remember when Jared Kushner couldn't get a security clearance to be a "special advisor" until DIL waived him through, last go 'round. Before the $3 billion vigorish from Saudi Arabia came his way.

Update: There are so many larger outrages we could feature in juxtaposition, but since +rump has framed this as "terrorism," the quickmeme shared by Feminist News on Facebook fits the bill nicely. View of a Capitol Police officer in the ICU, with this caption:

"On Jan. 6, 2021, six men tased and beat this officer until he had a heart attack and brain injury. All six of those men were pardoned!"

By you-know-who.

21.March.2025

When push comes to shove

Former Air National Guard Lt. Colonel, member of the House of Represenatives from 2011-2023 Adam Kinzinger posted on Bluesky today:

Dear Canada and MAGA:

The vast majority of military members would refuse to execute military operations against Canada.

Period.

Discussion in the comments included lots of expressions of hope that he's right, a lot of uncertainty. "Would they?" "Are you sure?" And this central fact:

"I think that's a bit naive, [given] how many 'that will never happen' things have happened since trump rode down that escalator in '15"

19.March.2025

How we got here

Overview and link to Gil Durán's new “The Nerd Reich” podcast, from The Cause, with LOLGOP: The Roberts Court invited tech fascists to take over America.

"In a world where the Supreme Court hadn't made the Citizens United case and said, you know what, money is speech and people can spend basically whatever they want, this level of spending would have been so flatly illegal that we wouldn't have seen it. So, I mean, 15, 20 years ago, it's not that the very rich didn't want to influence politics. It's that there were limits. And then the Supreme Court decided, well, how about if there just aren't limits anymore?"

18.March.2025

So, a hundred thousand needless deaths

Week ago short take on The New Republic, Marco Rubio Announces Stunning Extent of USAID Purge. Using Xitter, the new state medium, our Secretary of State said the "6 week review" had concluded with a plan to cancel 5200 contracts; more than 80% of the portfolio.

“In consultation with Congress, we intend for the remaining 18% of programs we are keeping (approximately 1000) to now be administered more effectively under the State Department,” Rubio continued. “Thank you to DOGE and our hardworking staff who worked very long hours to achieve this overdue and historic reform.”

“Tough, but necessary. Good working with you,” purger-in-chief Elon Musk commented under Rubio’s post. “The important parts of USAID should always have been with Dept of State.”

Not that f'Elon knows what the hell he's talking about; Nicholas Enrich, most recently USAID's acting assistant administrator, outlined the Risks to U.S. National Security and Public Health that would be the likely consequences of ending global health funding for lifesaving humanitarian assistance. In appropriately bullet-list form,

• 12.5–17.9 million cases of malaria with an additional 71,000–166,000 deaths annually;
• A 28 to 32 percent increase in tuberculosis globally;
• An additional 200,000 paralytic polio cases a year;
• And, in a worst-case scenario, more than 28,000 cases of Ebola, Marburg, or related diseases.

There's more, on the way to "a geopolitical and economic catastrophe entirely of our own making."

16.March.2025

Totalitarianism creeping

Both explicit and implicit promises are being fulfilled. The big orange man told us who he was, over and over and over again. It attracted some people; if you've been bullied, I suppose you want to imagine there's a bully on your side. Once you've given up on facts, you don't need any factual basis to believe something. Imagining is enough. Lots of people who voted for +rump imagined he was on their side, "for" them, whatever that could mean.

If you imagine that about a psychopath, you'll find out you were wrong, sooner or later. Usually sooner. But there are lieutenants, chosen for their "good" looks, non-diverse appearance, their pliability, their willingness to pay homage and give fealty to a criminal who soils the Constitution nearly every waking hour. Then quiet squadrons who imagine themselves part of the team, unwilling (or afraid) to speak up against anything. 271 members of Congress—a majority in each chamber—are showing themselve unwilling to resist in any meaningful way.

Friend of a friend at yesterday's rally, still employed in the federal government, said the word came down, if you attend a protest rally (any protest "the administration" doesn't care for), you'll be fired. Unless you're working as in informant, I suppose.

We now have an executive order waving the banner of "anti-Semitic harassment and violence" as an excuse to punish, and the ability to treat attending a protest as "terrorist sympathizing." When ICE came for Mahmoud Khalil, "of Palestinian descent," so yes, he would sympathize with Palestinians,

"that his student visa had been canceled. But he's not on a visa; he's a legal permanent resident. His wife went to get his green card from their apartment, but officers said his lawful permanent residency had been revoked."

There's more detail in a New York Times report today, with context about his background, his (apparently lawful) outspokenness, and how his (apparently unlawful) detention went down, including this:

“‘This guy has a green card,’” [his wife] heard the officer say on his phone. “And then the guy on the phone with him told him, ‘Let’s bring him in anyway.’”

If it's not chilly enough for you, keep going almost to the end, for this, emphasis added:

"Mr. Khalil has not been accused of any crime. Instead, Secretary Rubio has cited a little-used statute as the rationale for Mr. Khalil’s detention. The law says that the government can initiate deportation proceedings against anyone whose presence in the country is deemed adversarial to the United States’ foreign policy interests."

Since, Trump and his lickspittles are now in the bag for Putin, that could be "deemed" to include anyone being adversarial toward Russia's dictator. (I can't get Sergey Lavrov's incredulity out of my head. "You are kidding!")

Just before Khalil was taken, the +rump administration canceled $400 million of Columbia’s federal grants, then a few days later, "warned 60 universities that a similar fate could await them. Harvard, Cornell and Johns Hopkins, among them, "where Michael Bloomberg, who once called President Trump “a carnival barking clown,” made a $1 billion gift in July."

In other "Trump news" we're calling it now, an EO invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 has justified deporting Venezuelans with little to no due process, sending them to El Savador (close enough?!) "a day after a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to cease such deportations.... The judge on Saturday said any planes carrying immigrants that had departed the United States under Mr. Trump’s order must turn around."

Does it feel like a constitutional crisis, yet? How about "a third attack against a private law firm, restricting its business activities just days after a federal judge ruled such measures appeared to violate the Constitution.

How about if a reporter has the temerity to ask Irish Taoiseach Micheal Martin about our president's stated intent to "take over" Gaza, relocate its inhabitants elsewhere and turn the territory into the "Riviera of the Middle East" and +rump responds by shutting down the Voice of America and indefinitely suspencing more than 1,000 employees? (After he'd put Kari Lake in charge of it, no less.)

How about finding out the DOGE team's ignorant rampage through federal IT systems results in you being declared dead?

"Johnson’s strange trip through the netherworld began in February, when a letter from his bank arrived addressed to his wife, Pam.

“We recently received notification of LEONARD A. JOHNSON’s passing,” it began. “We offer our sincerest condolences …”

Sounds like a scam, eh? "Her husband, after all, was sitting right there." But the bank's letter went on, saying "we’re here to help,” by which they meant they were there to help the Social Security Administration remove $5,201 from the not-dead man's bank account.

After firing most of the humans in agencies, f'Elon Musk's plan is reportedly to plug in AI. Imagine how well that will work when you read how a news site “empowered by A.I. capabilities,” and no named reporters published a story about someone's "connections" to a group, prompting Yale University to bar their professor from campus, and put her on administrative leave?

Peace of mind

The Ides of March slipped past without a gang of senators getting together to address the Big Issue in the country right now. We have further to descend into the pit of despair, it seems.

It was good to join a couple thousand folks at our state capitol yesterday, another "50501" rally ("50 Protests. 50 States. One Movement."), another wave of organizers feeling the urge to Do Something, and figuring out exactly what to do as they go. Lots of good, angry, spirited, motivated people, carryin' signs that mostly said how awful the "other" side looks to us. Lots of thoughtful, home-made sentiments, like the one shown here:

SUPPORT
Veterans
Ukraine
Federal Workers
Public Lands
Librarians
Idaho doctors
Public Schools
Medicare/Medicaid
Free Speech/Free Press
DEMOCRACY

The big, three-word theme of yesterday's rally was REMOVE, RESIST, and RECLAIM.

I brought our artfully (and union) printed One Idaho sign, ended up with a small US flag from some friends who had to leave before the event ended.

Many photos of people and signs were taken. (Someone asked for one of me, and mine, so that's out there. Somewhere.) The well-armed police kept watch on things without any disturbances that I noticed. A drone hovered with eyes in the sky. Just keeping track of things. And people, here in this little blue dot in the middle of our big red state. No counter-protesters garnered any of my attention. There was a march, but we'd slipped away before it came to that, as a moment of lovely, warm sun gave way to more chilly, windy, spits of rain.

Terri Pickens, who's running for governor had some good things to say about the way forward. We need to welcome back the people who are realising how badly misled and used they were in voting for the leaders selling us out. If they're ready to apologize, accept their apology. We need to show compassion, and empathy to our friends, neighbors, family members, and we need to build community among them.

It's not as dramatic (nor as fast) as the feeding federal agencies into a woodchipper over weekends, and a rain of mindless, fascist terror on organizations, science, civility, cooperation, and the rule of law from our immigrant president f'Elon Musk, but it's what needs to be done.

Pi Day, 2025

Temporary Restraining Order

Joyce Vance's report of Yesterday in Court is another sobering read, "in the case filed by the Perkins Coie law firm against President Trump over the executive order he signed that is little more than an attack on the firm because Trump doesn’t like some of the clients they’ve represented in the past."

He's bent the executive branch to his will, he's bent the congress; can he bend the judiciary, too? Not Judge Beryl Howell, but there are more layers to go. She quotes the Wall Street Journal editorial board pointing out that the executive order "violates a bedrock principle of American law." But they say that "Mr. Trump told voters he wouldn't seek political retribution if he won."

Did he now? Is that like when he said his J6 mob would be "peaceful" over at the capitol while they fought like hell to stop congress from validating him losing the 2020 election?

At CPAC in 2023, Trump declared “I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.” And of course, he has a litany of how he has been wronged and betrayed, a typically fact-free fire hose of whinging. (One Dec. 2024 roasting chestnut, quoted in the NYT: “They went after me. You know, they went after me, and I did nothing wrong.”)

Fox News host Sean Hannity asked Trump in Dec. 2023 if he would promise that he “would never abuse power as retribution against anybody.” Trump responded, “Except for day one.” Ha ha. Just that one day he said he'd be dictator.

ABC News, June 2024: Trump's conviction intensifies his calls for retribution in a second term. "Sometimes revenge can be justified," he said. That same month, Voice of America News reported that Trump’s vows of ‘revenge’ against his opponents [were] gain[ing] volume.

Nov. 6, 2024, Politico reported on the Donald John Trump we've all seen too much of: Trump promised to get revenge. They made a long list of his expected individual, and group targets, threatened in various, explicitly detailed ways. Did the WSJ editorial board sleep through all that?

"For years, Trump has peppered his speeches and social media posts with vengeful calls for his political opponents, his critics and members of the media to be prosecuted, locked up, deported and even executed. In the waning weeks of the 2024 campaign, he escalated those promises of retaliation to a fever pitch."

And now on day 54, he's still working to consolidate his dictatorial powers, bent on revenge broad enough to include every lawyer who has argued a case against him. As just one example.

13.March.2025

Your days are no longer numbered

In the unending capitulation of its powers, the Republican caucus in our House of Representatives has declared that for the rest of the session, a day is not a day, so that there can be no challenge to king Donold's declaration of a National Emergency enabling him to go nuts on whatever tariffs suit his fancy on a given day. From their House Resolution 211, emphasis added:

"Each day for the remainder of the first session of the 119th Congress shall not constitute a calendar day for purposes of section 202 of the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1622) with respect to a joint resolution terminating a national emergency declared by the President on February 1, 2025."

Heather Cox Richardson explains:

"The International Emergency Economic Powers Act allows the president to impose tariffs if he declares a national emergency under the National Emergencies Act, which Trump did on February 1. That same law allows Congress to end such a declaration of emergency, but if such a termination is introduced—as Democrats have recently done—it has to be taken up in a matter of days."

Said "emergency" was proclaimed specifically in regard to our southern border (you know, illicit drugs, illegal aliens) on coronation day, January 20, 2025. Making days go away makes the possibility of undoing the authoritarian powers go away as well.

From something something Mexico border, we're now in a full-blown trade war with our largest trading partners, including Canada and the EU, with the taxing effect of tariffs guaranteed to hike prices (remember "inflation"?) to new levels. Financial markets are being whipsawed by the random declarations, including that maybe we'll have a recession. (But don't worry, it'll be good for you? Especially if you're a short-seller.)

12.March.2025

This time, no brains

One of the things that made Commedia dell'arte (and all its successors; "Seinfeld" if you need a Boomer/GenX reference) funny is that there was "no learning" by the characters. The audience learned (what to expect, at least, sometimes the larger lesson), and it's funny (apparently!) to see people who can't or won't learn make the same mistake, over and over.

The writing challenge is to come up with different situations, different unlearned lessons, different characters, while still rubbing the trusty orb of human nature. A comedy of errors, if you will. Of ignorance. Of stubbornness.

Out here in real life, with the pain of error, ignorance, and stubbornness being visited on a lot of innocent bystanders, the joke is wearing thin. All that comes to mind from reading Heather Cox Richardson's March 11 daily, which opens with the stock market report, and:

"Unable to admit that he might be wrong, President Donald Trump is doubling down on the policies that are crashing the economy."

The latest episode is fleshed out with the same outrageous and idiotic concepts that Donold can not let go of, but with minor twists. The nation of Canada, population 40 million, or so, somehow becoming "our cherished Fifty First State."

"More than 100 top business leaders met with Trump" yesterday "to urge him to stop destabilizing what had been a booming economy with his on-again-off-again tariffs." But the densest guy in the room, certain that he's the smartest of them all, was unmoved. He's going to make American grate again, and again, no matter what anyone tries to tell him. Just like the "reality" TV show that made him famous enough to be the Russian candidate for American president three times.

"...in the middle of Monday’s stock market plunge, Trump posted or reposted more than 100 messages on his social media channel. All of them showed him in a positive light, including reminders of the 2004 first season of the television show The Apprentice, in which Trump starred: a golden moment in Trump’s past when his ratings were high and the audience seemed to believe he was a brilliant and powerful businessman."

We've all been turned into supernumeraries for his new show, The Psychopath. Super! Next time, on The Psychopath: his WWE executive pal continues her smackdown of the Department of Education, putting 1,300 people out of jobs. And watch as "Mr. Secretary," L'il Marco Rubio shuttles back to Saudi Arabia, and turns US military aid to Ukraine back on! a little. (Rubio insisted “This is not ‘Mean Girls.’ This is not some episode of some television show.”)

We're so topsy-turvy that Bret Stephens is starting to talk sense! Democracy Dies in Dumbness is his latest. Policymakers, economists, high school students with a grasp of history all know that "tariffs are a terrible idea" that helped start WWII.

"Thirteen successive presidents all but vowed never to repeat those mistakes. Until Donald Trump. Until him, no U.S. president has been so ignorant of the lessons of history. Until him, no U.S. president has been so incompetent in putting his own ideas into practice."

Stephens has a list of What Else Isn't Going To End Well. And there's a "More on" box (how appropriate) under that op-ed, "The Thing That Could Be Trump's Undoing," "The Right's Trump Derangement Syndrome," and "The Six Principles of Stupidity."

11.March.2025

Every accusation is a confession

Quoted from an ABC News Facebook post:

As House Republicans are slated to vote Tuesday on their spending bill to fund the government, GOP Conference Chairwoman Lisa McClain says, “Democrats have become chaos agents.”

The video bite of her whiny voice and freaky performance with big daddy Mike Johnson grinning over her shoulder is too awful for me to get past half a minute. "Deranged Democrats," and "hate."

Vox concilium

As opposed to vox populi. "The people" expressed their opposition, thirteen-to-one last week, against another imposition from the Idaho legislature, Joe Palmer's bill to "fix" the Ada County Highway District, by adding two appointed representatives to the five-member, elected-by-district commission. The legislature previously interjected itself to make it "by district," and has tried, but so far failed to force it to be "partisan" so their people could vote for the (R) and not bother have to learn anything about candidates. Palmer said you should "go out and look ... where the votes really come from." Which is to say, he didn't like the election results.

"Boise resident Robert Elliott remarked that the bill contradicts principles of limited government and cited the preamble of the Idaho Republican Party Platform which states “the most effective, responsible and responsive government is government closest to the people.”

Yes, but, folks in the District districts elected some people the Republicans don't care for, so that can't be right! (Enough.) Palmer "said that the bill was spurred by an increasing number of complaints about ACHD’s commissioner system in recent years," according to the Idaho Press coverage. Palmer said that this system has made people “feel like they’re not represented.” Palmer seems to be speaking for the GOP legislative caucus more than the voters in Ada County. He's definitely not representing the people who took the trouble to come to the state house and testify last Tuesday.

Having two more members of the commission, one appointed by the governor, and one appointed by the county commissioners would... well, it doesn't have to make sense, does it?

The only person to testify in favor of the bill was the mayor of Garden City, John Evans, whose unhappiness will also not be solved by "adding bureaucracy" (in the form of two appointed commissioners).

"Evans posited that a joint powers agreement, which would shift away from ACHD’s standing as an independent entity and insert local governments into the decision-making process, could facilitate his desired level of collaboration with municipal governments."

That'd be great, except for the fact that the county-wide body is representative, and does facilitate collaboration between the half dozen cities and unincorporate population of the county. Garden City is the smallest of the six (sorry), with less than 2.5% of the county's population, and less than 0.4% of the land. (Its main arterial, Chinden Blvd., is a segment of US highways 20 & 26, managed by the state transportation department. Sorry about that, too.)

Palmer, of Meridian (the 2nd largest city in the county if that matters, with a quarter of its population, and sprawling over parts of five legislative districts) is the chair of the Transporation and Defense committee that held the hearing on the bill. The committee went ahead and sent it to the whole house with its perfunctory "do pass" recommendation. Perhaps the Senate (or its Transportation chair, Doug Okuniewicz) can park this lemon in the legislative junkyard.

10.March.2025

Closer to home: bad doge!

The barn is on fire, and there's a bucket brigade working... through the courts. The AFL-CIO's American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the AARP, and the American Federation of Teacher have filed a lawsuit against the Social Security Administration, Leland Dudek, in his official capacity as Acting Commissioner, the "U.S. DIGITAL SERVICE (U.S. DOGE SERVICE)," and the U.S. DOGE SERVICE TEMPORARY ORGANIZATION.

Leland who? you may be asking. He was "a vocal member of [Michael] Russo’s team, "then a former mid-level SSA staffer who had worked with DOGE for weeks leading up to Inauguration Day." In the midst of the melee, on Feb. 16, Leland Dudek was brought out of "administrative leave" from his mid-level position ("for—in his telling—bulling coworkers in his pursuit to assist DOGE," even before the new administration was sworn in?), and made Acting Commissioner of the Social Security Administration. Fealty to do whatever for the big man, is now the golden coin of the realm.

Russo was the point of the spear, "the first DOGE aide embedded at the SSA," Michael Russo, named chief information officer (CIO) on February 3. "Not long after his induction, Russo began urging senior SSA executives to accept Musk’s deferred resignation offer..."

Musk Watch reports on the latest development: an affidavit from Tiffany Flick, the acting chief of staff to the commissioner of the agency until mid-February. Her affidavit describes in some detail what has been put at risk—including private, personal data that may have been (read "almost certainly has been") exfiltrated, for whatever purposes +rump admin miscreants may prefer.

"[Russo] also pressured the agency to quickly onboard Akash Bobba, a 22-year-old software engineer who works for DOGE. “I worked for multiple SSA commissioners across multiple administrations, and that request was unprecedented,” Flick wrote in an affidavit filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland. “I did not understand the apparent urgency with which Mr. Bobba needed to be onboarded and given access to SSA's systems and data, which are highly sensitive.” ...

"Bobba was sworn in on February 10 over the phone in an aberrant ceremony. Russo then assigned Bobba to “audit” the work of agency experts.

"...Russo demanded that he be given “full access to SSA data in the Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW),” according to Flick. The EDW contains sensitive information on every individual assigned a Social Security number, including employment history, marital status, a list of dependents, and banking and financial information. Gaining full access to the system would provide users with the ability to export and edit data. “Russo repeatedly stated that Mr. Bobba needed access to ‘everything, including source code,’” wrote Flick, who described such an arrangement as unprecedented even for the agency’s most adept technologists. There were also concerns within the SSA about Bobba accessing the data remotely from a U.S. Office of Personnel Management workplace surrounded by other DOGE aides and White House staffers."

Prepare for your agency being "streamlined" by removal of all the adults formerly in charge. Benefits to some (or all?!) of the 71+ million Americans served by the SSA might be streamlined right off the map as a side effect (at least) of an unprecedented data breach. From Flick's affidavit:

"Some of the [systems] operate based on old programming languages that require specialized knowledge. Such systems are vulnerable to being broken by inadvertent user error if SSA's longstanding development, separation of duties, and information security policies and procedures are not followed. That could result in benefits payments not being paid out or delays in payments… Additionally, even with only read access DOGE can, and has already, used SSA data to spread mis/disinformation about the amount of fraud in Social Security benefit programs."

Still bewildered after all these years

In my ever-failing attempts to "keep up," there are the end-of-the-day bookmarked tabs, Mastodon's bookmarks, and Facebook and Bluesky links saved in draft emails (since they both lack useful bookmarking). 75 'marks in Firefox for February, 29 already this month. Not counting the others, but one with a familiar theme from Marcy Wheeler on March 2d caught my eye this morning: Russia Russia Russia. The centerpiece is a CNN report, throwing up (figurative) hands in (literal) bewilderment about "why the US president would choose the Kremlin over America's traditional partners."

Why indeed. And who could've seen this coming, and coming, and coming, over the last 9 years? With Wheeler's links, and emphasis:

CNN asserted there’s no evidence to back the claim that Trump is “beholden to Putin” in spite of the fact that Russia helped Trump win in 2016, after which Dmitriev reached out and discussed a bunch of investments — investments which would require ending sanctions — as a way to improve relations. CNN asserted there’s no evidence to back the claim that Trump is “beholden to Putin” in spite of the fact that Russia attempted to help Trump win in 2020 at least by sending disinformation framing Joe Biden and his kid via Russian agent Andrii Derkach to Trump’s personal lawyer. CNN asserted there’s no evidence to back the claim that Trump is “beholden to Putin” in spite of the fact that Derkach made similar efforts in 2024, and a bunch of Russian malign influence efforts (possibly including bomb threats that forced the evacuation of Democratic precincts) similarly aimed to help Trump and others who would “oppose aid to Ukraine.”

"No evidence," other than the volumes of evidence from and about and willful obstruction of (and some cooperation from) Michael Cohen, George Papadopoulos, Roger Stone, Don Jr., Paul Manafort, Mike Flynn, Steve Bannon. "All of the people who lied to cover up the true nature of Trump’s Russian contacts in 2016, save Michael Cohen, were pardoned." Cutting to the chase (this time with my emphasis added):

"On November 11, one of Putin’s closest allies complained about how, “election pledges in the United States can [d]iverge from subsequent actions.” Patrushev warned that, this time, Trump will “be obliged to fulfill” his “corresponding obligations.”

"And what we are seeing in real time, in plain sight, protected by an Attorney General who has promised to investigate neither the campaign assistance nor the bribery, is Trump picking up precisely where things left off in 2017.

"Starting with the very same offers Dmitriev was offering eight years ago."

We don't have to quibble about exactly how long Donold has been an agent for Russia's interests. It's obvious that Russia could not have hoped for a more compliant stooge to take over the Republican Party on its behalf. Start wherever you like. The Manafort-induced change to the Republican Party platform in the summer of 2016 is my convenient mnemonic; the start of the betrayal of Ukraine being officially made Republican policy.

8.March.2025

TIMELINE OF CORRUPTION

Twenty-nine minute recap plumbing the depths of the swamp, brought to the public record by Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy. With transcript. Jump to the chase:

“This is how democracies die. Democracies die when the very powerful people steal from us so regularly, so openly, so unapologetically, that we come to believe that it's normal."

Now that that spoiler's out of the way, some more from the chalk talk:

"Today, the world is littered with corrupt governments, governments where the leaders, and the really rich men who surround the leaders, the "oligarchs," they steal from people. That's what they do.

"Vladimir Putin, for instance, has never had a job outside of government, but he's reportedly worth two hundred billion dollars."

("Worth" in a manner of speaking. I wouldn't give you $19.99 for him.) Brazen, uncorrected theft and corruption are normalized, made "mainstream." "That's what's happening in America today."

"In the first six months [sic] of the Trump presidency," he said, meaning six weeks (as in, his 6-WEEK TIMELINE OF CORRUPTION demonstrative, two dozen examples from Jan. 20 to March 4), which have felt like six months to anyone paying even a little attention. (Finding a readable standalone image, it occurs to me the title should have been "FIRST SIX-WEEK'S TIMELINE...")

"Trump, and Elon Musk, and their billionaire friends have engaged in a stunning rampage of open, public corruption. It's not fundamentally different from what happened in Russia."

It's an unprecedented rampage. "This White House is on its way to being the most corrupt in the history of the country."

When he gets to the details, he starts on January 17. That was when "Trump launch[ed] the 'meme coin'."

"This is maybe the most corrupt of all the acts..." providing "a mechanism by which Russian oligarchs or corporate CEOs can literally send money privately, directly to Donald Trump. Nobody knows who buys the meme coin, but Trump makes money when people buy it." It's "an open sewer valve."

"He reserves 80% of the coin, he waits to release that coin until the price jumps back up again... he's waiting for people who want favors from him to buy a bunch of the coin to inflate the value... This is essentially Trump just posting his Venmo for anybody [to] secretly wire him as much money as they want."

On January 20th, Trump delivered for the oil and gas industry, ROI for the donations he solicited in his campaign. Welcome to the failing petro-state!

Five days later, the—illegal!—firing of 17 Inspectors General, those civil servants most directly tasked with rooting out waste, fraud, and corruption. January 27, Trump attempts to disable the National Labor Relations Board by firing board member Gwyn Wilcox, the first member of the NLRB to be removed by a US president since it started, in 1935. A favor to Amazon and SpaceX, among others, who have cases pending before the board.

(Whoops, she's been reinstated by Judge Beryl A. Howell.)

Then the weaponization of the Department of Justice, for real this time, not just the performative fever dreams of "Gym" Jordan and James "Jim" Comer. "...the DOJ is turned into an entity that drops cases to those who are loyal to Donald Trump and pursues aggresively investigations against [his critics]."

Here's one I missed: Pam Bondi, on her very first day in office as Attorney General, "issued a sweeping memorandum laying out what the DOJ's enforcement priorities will be going forward under her leadership. It seems that the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) will not be among those priorities..." From the National Law Review, Feb. 11:

"First, the Attorney General has disbanded the Foreign Influence Task Force, established in 2017 by then-FBI Director Chris Wray to counter Russia’s attempts to influence U.S. elections and undermine democratic institutions and values. (The task force later expanded its focus to include similar malign foreign influence operations by China, Iran, and other U.S. adversaries).

"Second, the Corporate Enforcement Unit within the National Security Division, the DOJ division that administers FARA, has also been disbanded, and its personnel are being reassigned.

"Third, and most importantly here, criminal charges will now be brought under FARA only for “alleged conduct similar to more traditional espionage by foreign government actors.”...

Then quid pro quo deal with NYC mayor Eric Adams, easily outdoing Nixon's "Saturday night massacre," with seven federal prosecutors resigning rather than compromise their oaths. US Attorney for the Southern District of NY, Danielle Sassoon refused former Trump lawyer turned into acting Deputy Attorney General, Emil Bove III's demand. The next guy in line, already put on leave, Hagan Scotten went out in a blaze of glory:

"...I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion. But it was never going to be me."

And the deal for $400 million for armored Teslas?! That one seems to have been disinfected by the light of publicity, but I'm sure it'll come back around.

It keeps going. Musk and the DOGE team invading the government—illegally. Working weekends. Killing regulation, exfiltrating confidential data on friends, enemies, and all Americans.

The Feb. 26 items include the sublimely corrupt "$2.4 billion gift to Musk's Starlink," and the ridiculously corrupt MAGA hats "for sale on his website, displayed in the Oval Office."

7.March.2025

Our cultural revolution, in process

Anne Applebaum, in The Atlantic: There’s a Term for What Trump and Musk Are Doing. "How regime change happens in America."

The architect of Project 2025, "Russell Vought, at a 2023 planning meeting organized in preparation for this moment, promised [to break the morale of the professional civil service]. People who had previously viewed themselves as patriots, working for less money than they could make in the private sector, must be forced to understand that they are evil, enemies of the state. His statement has been cited before, but it cannot be quoted enough times: “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said at the time. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains … We want to put them in trauma.”

DOGE isn't about "efficiency." It's villainy, aiming for annihilation.

"Already, DOGE has attacked at least 11 federal agencies that were embroiled in regulatory fights with Musk’s companies or were investigating them for potential violations of laws on workplace safety, workers’ rights, and consumer protection."

The attempted destruction of the US Agency for International Development is horrific enough, complete with disinformation "blasted to hundreds of millions of people." This is not about rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse, but it is, definitely, about abuse; by the DOGE berserkers:

"Information taken from grant databases is also being selectively circulated, in some cases fed to internet trolls who are now hounding grant recipients, in order to smear people and organizations that had legitimate, congressionally approved goals. Musk and others used a similar approach during the so-called Twitter Files scandal to discredit researchers and mischaracterize their work."

(Early) Farewell to Publisher

Like most households, we have a mix of Microsoft products. My old workstation (back when I worked!) has Office 2013 stuff, which still works great, thanks. Newer Office apps on a laptop. The "x" file formats (.docx, .xlsx, etc.) interop just fine, unlike that one time so long ago I don't remember which version it was, when interop blew up. (I haven't had to remember that for a long time, that's nice.)

Jeanette's desktop has Microsoft 365, the "Software as a Service" model, more attractive for the vendor than "software we license to you, that keeps on working for a decade or more." I write because there's an Important update to [her] Microsoft 365 subscription in my inbox, informing me that "Beginning October 01, 2026," (so, plenty of notice) "Microsoft Publisher will no longer be supported as part of Microsoft 365. Many common Publisher scenarios are available in other Microsoft 365 apps, including Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Designer."

"Scenarios" is weirdly comic. I'm old enough to remember when "Desktop publishing" was an exciting, burgeoning field. Aldus Pagemaker! Page layouts! Typography! WYSIWYG promises not always fulfilled. I wrote my own markup language (and text editor) on my first peecee in 1983. I lived the history.

(Of course, I lived history before all that, too, back when "cut and paste" was literal. I built a light table for layout work on a community free newspaper. And oh, that pings the memory of the newsletter I started in grade school, duplicated on the mimeograph. Waaay back.)

Searching my files, I find 34 .pub files, all of them the means to an end come and gone a while ago. Dates range from 2006 to 2017, sizes 56kB to 41MB.

The link to "plans for Publisher" could have been boiled down to the headline. It's not just a Microsoft 365 thing: "In October 2026, Microsoft Publisher will reach its end of life." You can handle some of your "scenarios" with Word or Powerpoint, which don't do some things you (once) might (have) like(d) to do with Publisher very well at all, but then you probably don't have many of those things to do any more, do you? I don't.

Deep in the FAQ there's mention of "the Perpetual version of Publisher," which is to say, desktop software that you download and install, as opposed to SaaS that comes and goes like ships in the night.

If you're interested in a different slice of software history, my last update to My most-used home software was in July, 2001, when I still had a "work place," replete with more expensive software, and the disclaimer read that "I'm not a software developer per se," before I became one, and before I retired from it. Good old WordPerfect (and Windows 95!) is on that list. Nothing for DTP among my "most used." (I used Word at work for "published" documents.) The opening paragraph has two long-dead links in it; such is the way of the (software) world.

6.March.2025

This is what fascism sounds like

Elisabeth Bumiller reports in the New York Times: "The silence grows louder every day." ‘People Are Going Silent’: Fearing Retribution, Trump Critics Muzzle Themselves.

"Fired federal workers who are worried about losing their homes ask not to be quoted by name. University presidents fearing that millions of dollars in federal funding could disappear are holding their fire. Chief executives alarmed by tariffs that could hurt their businesses are on mute.

"Even longtime Republican hawks on Capitol Hill, stunned by President Trump’s revisionist history that Ukraine is to blame for its invasion by Russia, and his Oval Office blowup at President Volodymyr Zelensky, have either muzzled themselves, tiptoed up to criticism without naming Mr. Trump or completely reversed their positions.

"More than six weeks into the second Trump administration, there is a chill spreading over political debate in Washington and beyond."

The deliberate sabotage of our government, trade, and international relations makes Trump even more worthy of impeachment and conviction than he was in 2019, and 2021. The Republican caucus had two chances to do the right thing, and with a very few exceptions could not bring themselves to even try. Now they're too frightened to do it, too frightened to even meet their constituents at a town hall.

Another NYT piece (and gift link): They were the watchdogs, charged with ferreting out waste, fraud, abuse, misconduct. All fired because the new administration's "priorities have changed." Listen to their "exit interviews," if you can.

Asked "Is the government is corrupt?" none of them would say yes. That was then. This is now. All these inspectors general were illegally fired.

Asked "How much money did you save American taxpayers?" The answers (I'll bet are a lot more reliable than numbers DOGE is putting up—and then taking down): Department of Labor, $75 billion; Department of Defense, "well over $10 billion"; Small Business Administration, "30 billion hard dollars"; Health and Human Services, "14 and a half billion dollars, at least"; "hundreds of millions of dollars at NASA"; "$47 billion in potential fraud in the unemployment insurance program."

What's one word you would use to describe DOGE? "Dangerous" is the one that matters. "Is democracy in danger?" Mike Ware, former IG for the SBA:

"It's no longer a democracy when people don't have the freedom to speak truth to power."

Paul Martin, who stood up for USAID and got fired the next day:

"I'm worried about the deafening silence that's coming from Congress... with respect to the removal of the Inspectors General, not as individuals, but the harm and the chilling effect this is having on independent oversight in the federal government."

It's not a bug, it's a feature

If you're not looking forward to the economic "opportunity" of an economic crash, well, welcome to the 99% club. In the middle of Heather Cox Richardson's March 5, 2025 Letter from an American (commented on at length, below), this deserves its own highlight. With link embedded, and emphasis added:

Jess Piper of The View From Rural Missouri notes that what seems to be a deliberate attempt to crash what was, when Trump took office, a booming U.S. economy, is a feature of the administration’s plan, not a bug. It creates “curated failure” that enables oligarchs to buy up the assets of the state and of desperate individuals for “rock-bottom prices.”

Meanwhile, Thom Friedman's latest op-ed in the NYT is barking, but up the wrong tree. Based on how badly the war in Iraq was handled (after we'd "won" it—Mission Accomplished!), he imagines the chain saw coming for America is just misguided ideology run amok. Kleptocracy isn't about stumbling incompetence; it's about deliberate smash and grab.

History is pretty damn sobering right now

So much of "how we got here," recounted in the "March 5, 2025" history lesson from Professor Richardson is familiar to me. The post-war (so to speak) setting was already going when I showed up in the mid-50s, but the whole battle against Communist totalitarianism thing, supposedly ended (along with "history") in 1989, was the Zeitgeist of my first three decades of political awareness. But history has a way of carrying on.

We were in the crowd (me out in the Quad, Jeanette inside MemAud, thanks to her volunteering for Lively Arts—she was way in the back, sitting next to a guy talking to his lapel) when the last leader of the Soviet Union, Michail Gorbachev visited Stanford in June, 1990.

“Glasnost” and “perestroika” — openness and restructuring — were the talk of the town. As David Middlecamp recounted in the San Luis Obispo Tribune, just after Gorbachev died at age 91 in 2022, Gorbachev was considered "weak" at home, and "when the Soviet Union collapsed Gorbachev was blamed."

"in many ways, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s reign is an attempt to “Make Russia great again” and help the nation regain its superpower status."

"Superpowers" aren't what they used to be. Going by GDP in 2024, Russia isn't in the top 10, behind Brazil, GDP less than one tenth that of the US. They still have enough nuclear weapons to light off WWIII, of course. Estimated by count to be on par with the US these days.

In 1990, Ukraine made the list with 2,321 weapons; The current estimate from the Nuclear Threat Initiative is that it had "over 1,700 Soviet nuclear weapons" upon its independence in 1991. The 1994 Budapest Memorandum, signed by Ukraine, Russia, the US, and the UK,

prohibited Russia, the United States, and the United Kingdom from threatening or using military force or economic coercion against Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan, "except in self-defence or otherwise in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations."

Paul Manafort (who also worked for Nixon, and Reagan, HCR reminds us) helped Russian stooge Viktor Yanukovych win Ukraine's 2010 election, but the people rose up in 2014 and sent Yanukovych packing back to Mother. Then Russia broke the non-aggression agreement by invading and annexing Crimea. And so on. From HCR, with the Senate Intelligence Committee link embedded:

According to a 2020 report from the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee, “the Russian government engaged in an aggressive, multifaceted effort to influence, or attempt to influence, the outcome of the 2016 presidential election…by harming Hillary Clinton’s chances of success and supporting Donald Trump at the direction of the Kremlin.”

That effort was “part of a broader, sophisticated, and ongoing information warfare campaign designed to sow discord in American politics and society…a vastly more complex and strategic assault on the United States than was initially understood…the latest installment in an increasingly brazen interference by the Kremlin on the citizens and democratic institutions of the United States.” It was “a sustained campaign of information warfare against the United States aimed at influencing how this nation’s citizens think about themselves, their government, and their fellow Americans.”

The Russian "political technology" that helped Trump win in 2016 was on top of the long-term Republican campaign to demonize the Clintons. And while it didn't quite get the job done in 2020, they kept at it, and have now got their stooges back in the White House.

HCR's letter is another must-read for the moment we're in. Don't let me cutting to the chase of the final paragraph stop you from reading the whole thing.

“We were at war with a dictator,” said French center-right politician Claude Malhuret of Europe’s stand against Putin. “[N]ow we are at war with a dictator backed by a traitor.”

A question for all of us

In the morning, phone scroll (sorry, it's just what we do now), Gurdeep Pandher asks:

"Why can't all countries in the world work together, knowing that none of us will live permanently on this planet?"

"Countries" are such a large abstraction, one could also ask why can't all people work together. It's a big, big question either way. We humans have a history. It brought to mind what we sang in church last Sunday morning...

Karen MacKay and Nancy L. Nordlie set and answer to music (their song collected by Sorrel Hays and Marilyn Ries out of the Women's Encampment for a Future of Peace & Justice). With an easy meld of the first two verses, it goes like this:

If ev’ry person in the world had their mind set on freedom,
if ev’ry person in the world dreamed a sweet dream of peace,
if ev’ry person of ev’ry nation,
young and old, each generation,
held their hands out in the name of love,
there would be no more war.

Then ev'ry leader. Then ev'ry nation.

I see there's "The Gurdeep Magazine," too. Nice. Yesterday's post: Alone Together: Unraveling the Paradox of Connection in Our Modern Age. "Loneliness can manifest even when surrounded by others, creating a peculiar form of isolation that exists within shared spaces."

4.March.2025

Considerations

- Jeanette Ross, January 16, 2023

3.March.2025

Morning read #2: "The United States is Your Enemy"

The second episode of Carole Cadwalladr's new podcast, How to Survive the Broligarchy (with transcript for the "audio-averse," thanks for that). She's in Britain (O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us and all) ; her conversation "about fascism as Europe faces the darkness in the west," with Jason Stanley, the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University, and a Distinguished Professor at the Kyiv School of Economics. "[R]ecorded before the most recent, explosive developments," and yet Stanley outlined Friday's debacle to a T before it happened:

"The fascist leader looks like a mob boss. They enforce discipline like a mob boss. They draw on loyalty rather than competence. [T]hese are all useful points because you see people saying, &dlquo;Wow, Trump is behaving like a mob boss.&drquo;"

Cadwalladr's introduction:

"[T]he spectacle of Donald Trump and JD Vance acting like mafia mob bosses has done what previously seemed impossible. The seismic shockwaves that have been pulsing through the international order, felt but ignored by world leaders and nation states, have now finally caused the first real earthquake....

"We are in the middle of a European war, fought on European soil, and the coming together of European nations (and Canada) in response to the emergence of the United States as a rogue state now aligned with Russia is the first real sign of any adequate response to the autocratic coup taking place in the world’s biggest superpower."

She also emphasizes a point that I've tried to make, but more succinctly, explaining her ground for the podcast:

"This isn’t a political crisis: it’s a geopolitical, technological, national security, information, transnational crisis that is now impacting politics."

I'd add environmental to her list. The habitability of our planet for its billions of humans is in the balance.

Morning read #1; call to action

Joyce Vance, The Week Ahead:

"On Tuesday, Trump gives his first State of the Union address for his second term in office. He will assume the podium in front of a joint session of Congress with no credibility whatsoever. People who are being honest—that includes Republicans in the House and the Senate—understand how horribly he undermined the world order last week. He abandoned longtime allies in the process, not only Ukraine but NATO allies who now face an unpredictable future. Trump will offer his comments Tuesday after confirming the view of those who believed him to be Putin’s toady."

Not sure I understand how "people who are being honest" includes the GOP caucuses, but yeah. Neville Chamberlain must be spinning in his grave with "peace in our time" now comprising "forcing Kyiv to take responsibility for Russia’s invasion, give up valuable resource rights, and accept permanent occupation."

Not to put too fine a point on it, Vance writes "If this was a functioning Congress, there would be a prompt move in the House to impeach and in the Senate to convict both the president and the vice president for engaging in high crimes and misdemeanors."

The third time would be the charm, eh. If. I called one of my senators, Jim Risch, chair of the Foreign Relations committee, if that matters, spoke to a staffer who said she'd pass along my message, which was to support Ukraine. Not holding my breath. I did that before I got to the end of Vance's post, below the cute puppy photo, so I'm halfway to answering her call to action:

"Monday is a good day to call your senators and representatives and ask them how they feel about NATO and whether they believe Ukraine invaded Russia. If they say they think it’s a mistake for the U.S. to be aligned with Putin, and especially if they’re Republicans, demand that they show up and stand up, that they state their views clearly and plainly. Otherwise, the coup continues."

2.March.2025

Down the rathole

Is it only the 2nd of March? It seems like a long month already. I'm thinking my readers might already be subscribers to the substacks I'm following more regularly than the newspaper accounts these days. In his column yesterday, Professor Timothy Snyder wrote about The War Trump Chooses. "That wasn't Trump against Zelens'kyi. It was Americans against reason." (As ever, I encourage you to read the whole thing for yourself.)

Not the Americans I know, but ok: "The attempted mugging of a visiting president was about the world war that Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and JD Vance have chosen." In the latest +rumpian oval debacle, among the essential facts that the bullies shamefully pretended did not exist:

"The Russians have betrayed every truce and every ceasefire since their first invasion in 2014. And that first invasion of course violated a number of treaties between Ukraine and Russia, as well as the basic principles of international law. Zelens'kyi ran for president in 2019 as the peace candidate, promising to negotiate with Putin to end what was then a war that had been ongoing for five years. Russia did not respond to these overtures, except with contempt, and then with the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022."

More importantly, for our future under the current corrupt and lawless regime,

"...Trump confessed his fundamental sympathy for Putin. In Trump's view, he and Putin "had gone through a lot together."The grievance on display here was so capacious that not everyone could grasp what Trump meant. Trump said that he had been the victim of a "hoax," because people thought that Putin assisted Trump's presidential campaigns. But Putin, Trump claimed, rather extraordinarily, was also the victim of the "hoax." And indeed, according to Trump, this had been a very meaningful bonding experience between the two men."

Indeed, they are bonded in corruption and lawlessness (and pyschopathy), creating "an emotional connection," a "commitment based upon a carefully curated unreality" between them that matters more to +rump than all the suffering inflicted by Russia's war on Ukraine.

"There was, of course, no hoax. Putin supported Trump in all three of his presidential campaigns, right down to Russian bomb threats against predominantly Democratic districts last election day.... For Trump, the imagined wound of ego to his friend Putin was the pertinent reality."

And since +rump brought up "world war," this:

"Yesterday Vance and Trump repeated familiar Russian propaganda. One example was Trump's claim that it was the Ukrainians who, by resisting Russia, were risking "World War Three." The truth is exactly the opposite. By abandoning Ukraine, Trump is risking a terrible escalation and, indeed, a world war. Everything that Ukraine has done these last three years can be reversed. Now that the Trump administration has chosen to throw American power to Russia's side, Russia could indeed win the war. (This was always Russia's only chance, as the Russians themselves well knew, and openly said.)"

The US joining forces to defeat Ukraine—the Trump agenda, at this point—would encourage Russia to start new wars (to satisfy Putin's desire to reassemble the Soviet Union); China would be emboldened, must certainly already be embolded to expand its claims over SE Asia and Tawiwan. "American endorsement of wars of aggression leads to global chaos."

And our surrender on another front is already under way: as The Guardian reports (linked by Snyder), "The Trump administration has publicly and privately signaled that it does not believe Russia represents a cyber threat against US national security or critical infrastructure," contrary to voluminous facts and intelligence.

Meanwhile, the "threat from within," as J.D. Vance likes to talk about, Elon Musk's massive IT invasion and data theft under cover of DOGE with exfiltration to Russia possible; perhaps even likely. This will not end well for Americans.

1.Mar.2025

It always was Russia

Joyce White Vance provides the short sentence headline this morning. In particular, Putin's Russia. We knew the betrayal and capitulation was coming, but who could have imagined it would be a scene as tawdry and vile as yesterday's performance in the Oval Office? What she wrote yesterday:

"We just watched Trump & Vance do Putin’s bidding in the Oval Office & it was horrific. Not even two months into this administration & it’s a disaster for the free world."

The excerpted scenes I saw on the news last night filled me with abject horror, disgust, and shame. Our red-faced psychopath and his attack dog veep imagining they were punching down and "so much winning" by humiliating... themselves. They only humiliated themselves, and the country they're supposed to be representing.

Part of the exchange (thanks to the AP for the transcript) that a post on Bluesky highlighte for me this morning teases out some of the reality of the last decade, stretching back to Russia's takeover of Crimea that didn't alarm us in the USA as much as it should have. Back to Obama's 2nd term, "then President Trump, then President Biden, now President Trump."

Zelenskyy: “And God bless, now, President Trump will stop [Putin]. But during 2014, nobody stopped him. He just occupied and took. He killed people. You know what the --"

Trump: “2015?”

Zelenskyy: “2014.”

Trump: “Oh, 2014? I was not here.”

Vance: “That’s exactly right.”

As if... history didn't start for Trump and Vance until they were in power? The point that soared right past our wrestlemania tag team was that "a lot of conversations, my bilateral conversation" with Putin, and a signed deal with a "ceasefire" didn't quite work.

“[H]e broke the ceasefire, he killed our people, and he didn’t exchange prisoners. We signed the exchange of prisoners. But he didn’t do it. What kind of diplomacy, JD, you are speaking about? What do you mean?”

Vance went on punching, about "diplomacy" in case the irony wasn't deep enough, how Zelenskyy's job #1 was to be "thanking the president." Then imagining Zelenskyy was "attack[ing] the administration"?! (He wasn't, but there was mention of the Cardinal Sin of Opposition In Any Form Even If We Have to Imagine It. “You went to Pennsylvania and campaigned for the opposition in October,” as Vance claimed. Zelenskyy visited a munitions plant in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and afterwards issued a statement:

"Thank you America, thank you for your support, thank you for this visit. Thank you @POTUS, Congress, and the American people. Ukraine needs just and lasting peace, and we are working exactly for that."

Thanking President Biden amounted to campaigning in Trump's eyes, of course. Given Trump's record of abuse and non-support of Ukraine, it was a form of campaigning, I suppose. Desperately attempting to serve his country, suffering from Russia's war of aggression, and recognizing who supported Ukraine, and who did not. For the folks in the back who were distracted by something on their phones, At Least, Now We Know the Truth. "It's ugly," David Frum writes, "but necessary to face." Now then, back to the Oval yesterday.

Zelenskyy: “Let’s start from the beginning.”

Vance: “Sure.”

Zelenskyy: “First of all, during the war, everybody has problems, even you. But you have nice ocean and don’t feel now. But you will feel it in the future. God bless –”

Trump: “You don’t know that. You don’t know that. Don’t tell us what we’re going to feel. We’re trying to solve a problem. Don’t tell us what we’re going to feel.”

Zelenskyy: “I’m not telling you. I am answering on these questions.”

Trump: “Because you’re in no position to dictate that.”

Vance: “That’s exactly what you’re doing.”

Trump: “You are in no position to dictate what we’re going to feel. We’re going to feel very good.”

Zelenskyy: “You will feel influenced.”

Trump: “We are going to feel very good and very strong.”

Zelenskyy: “I am telling you. You will feel influenced.”

We here in the United States do not feel "very good," nor "very strong" right now. We are sick at heart for what a narrow plurality of people who troubled themselves to vote last November have wrought through the deeply corrupt and psychopathic president, and his minions. We are watching our nation's strength being sabotaged, dissipated, and systematically dismantled, in service to oligarchs and dictators.

"Everything that was said by America's leaders has been said by Russia," Timothy Snyder observed in his somber reflection yesterday, detailing the failures, of basic hospitality and decency, of democracy, strategy, and independence. Russia specializes in sabotaging our infrastructure, and stealing out technology, primarily. We're seeing the consequences of the ultimate sabotage right now.

We have felt influenced, going back to when Paul Manafort was serving oligarchs and selling out his country to maintain his obscene lifestyle, manipulating the Republican Party platform before the 2016 election, feeding demographic data to Konstantin Kilimnik, to when Trump fired the FBI director to stop the investigation of influence, to when the Russian foreign minister and ambassador met "privately" with Trump in the Oval Office (with a TASS photographer paying attention), and when Jeff Sessions was replaced with Bill Barr as Attorney General, and Barr waved away the Report On The Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election as if it didn't matter that the Russian government "interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion" and "violated U.S. criminal law." (Because Trump "won!" Nothing else mattered.) We have felt influenced hearing that "perfect phone call" when our president tried to extort Ukraine for dirt on his political opponent (you remember, the one who won the 2020 election), and we started to grasp the extent of the influence when Fiona Hill and Lt. Colonel Alexander Vindman testified before the House inquiry for the first impeachment of President Donald J. Trump, and the Republicans in the Senate circled the wagons to protect their party's hijacker.

There's more. A lot more. All quite well documented. And now we feel not just influenced, but utterly disgusted to see how yesterday's shit show is playing in Russia, where its former president Dmitry Medvedev applauded yesterday's "proper slap down," and gleefully echoed our current president's echoing of the "gambling with WWIII" Russian talking point.

raveling

Tom von Alten