unraveling

30.Apr.2025

Our Bizarro-president

My headline started with "anti," but that's not enough anymore, is it? We used to extol (if not always honor) values of common decency, integrity, competence, compassion, sharing, honesty, and so on. Family values. What you (were supposed to have) learned in kindergarten, or Sunday school, or praying to Jesus.

This time around, a plurality of voters (and most importantly, just enough in the "swing states" to tip the balance, our an antiquated, reviled, and so far immutable anti-majority electoral system) decided to go in a different direction. Anti-government on steroids, beyond Ronald Reagan's and his team's wildest dream. Billionaire and AI-powered, taking a chainsaw to nearly a century of beneficial progress.

The work plan was made public, as Project 2025, the second term's transition plan (and team) spelling it all out. It was too long and too detailed for most of the class to read the assignment, and besides, the Don said he knew nothing about it, had no idea who was behind it, and disagreed with some of the "absolutely ridiculous and abysmal" proposals. (That he knew nothing about.)

“I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”

Sung to the tune of Fleetwood Mac's Little Lies.

If I could turn the page
In time then I'd rearrange just a day or two
Close my, close my, close my eyes
But I couldn't find a way
So I'll settle for one day to believe in you
Tell me, tell me, tell me lies

He was happy to oblige, and the Project 2025 team and campaign operatives, and the MAGA, and the poorly educated with their own burr of retribution against the people they imagine think they're better than, but most of all the billionaires, greedy for more billions (how is that even possible?) and more power, and control put a felon in the highest office of the land, an office elevated—on his behalf—by a feckless Supreme Court with delusions of its own grandeur being enhanced by promoting a psychopathic megolamaniac.

"I run the country and the world," he says now. This while he's running the global economy into a ditch, so there's that. The University of Pennsylvania's Wharton school of business (where Don got his BS in Economics in 1968, embarrassingly) took a look at the economic effects of Trump's tariffs and boils it down:

"Summary: Many trade models fail to capture the full harm of tariffs. PWBM projects Trump’s tariffs (April 8, 2025) will reduce long-run GDP by about 6% and wages by 5%. A middle-income household faces a $22K lifetime loss."

But the economic disaster and a worldwide recession now on simmer aren't the worst of it. It's a hell of a contest deciding what will be the worst of this criminal reign of terror, actually. As historian Heather Cox Richardson describes "the first 100 days" that have earned him "the lowest job approval rating after 100 days of any president in 80 years,"

"Trump has turned the nation away from 92 years of a government that sought to serve ordinary Americans by regulating business, providing a basic social safety net, promoting infrastructure, protecting civil rights, and stabilizing global security and trade. Instead, he is trying to recreate the nation of more than 100 years ago, in which the role of government was to protect the wealthy and enable them to make money from the country’s resources and its people."

Back when the world population was around 2 billion, by the way, and most of the rurals didn't have electricity, and sewer socialism was yet to become a thing.

"Trump set out to destroy the modern American state, gutting the civil service and illegally shuttering federal agencies, as well as slashing through government programs. His team has withdrawn the U.S. from its global leadership and rejected democratic allies in favor of autocrats like Russia’s Vladimir Putin. At home he has imitated those autocrats, ignoring the rule of law and rendering migrants to prison in El Salvador without due process, and using the power of the state to threaten those he perceives as his enemies.

"As is typical with autocratic governments, corruption appears to be running deep in this White House. The president and his family are openly profiting from his office. And it would be hard to find a better example of a government letting cronies profit off public resources than Interior Secretary Doug Burgum’s relinquishing of control over the department to a DOGE operative, or of a government permitting businesses to profit from ordinary Americans than billionaire Elon Musk’s apparent creation of a master database of Americans’ information."

And the cruelty remains the signature point. Trump Says He Could Free Abrego Garcia From El Salvador, but Won’t. (We have to wonder how the Supremes will respond to that direct defying of their recent order; perhaps Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito are chortling.)

In the absence of actual facts to support his opinion, let alone the due process and adjudication to assess them; and contrary to what facts and adjudication are on record, the Trump-Miller-Homan triumvarate are going with the gut, a smörgåsbord of lies and spoiled red meat for the MAGA faithful and the rump Republican quislings, over the law itself, mocking the idea that law even exists.

29.Apr.2025

Vexatious vexillology

While reviewing the word's (recent!) etymology, I see there "the flag of the international Federation of Vexilllogical Associations depicts a sheet bend," taking me back to when it and I were both new(ish). They did kind of miss a trick though, because the beneficial purpose of a sheet bend (the way I remember it from my knotting days) is to join ropes of different diameters, and their flag does not do that. But then neither does that Wikipedia entry for the knot, other than its note and illustration for the double sheet bend.

Our days of increasing right-wing extremism have brought flags to the fore, as banners to rally under, as images of solidarity and dissent, as flapping warnings of idiocy on vehicles not in a parade, and, of course, in parades. And ball games. And political gatherings. And violent insurrections, where they (and their poles, especially) served double duty as offensive weapons.

Our Ohio-imported RWNJ up in the panhandle infamously flouted a Confederate battle flag to show her anti-government colors. “Protecting and promoting our freedom of speech is an honor,” she declared on Facebook back in the day.

A few folks in my neighborhood flew TRUMP flags before and after he'd been voted out of office; one is still sticking with the red one, while another switched to the Idaho flag after Inauguration Day, and others have gone quiet. I remember at least one Banner of Heaven, and a Gadsen flag, and there are still Ukraine flags, now a Canadian flag (and congratulations to our neighbors on yesterday's election result, affirming their former Goldman Sachs executive liberal as PM).

There have been upside down flags. One household had three large flag poles along the front of the lot, and I forget what all they were flying, but the Green Bay Packers flag was (is) up, and that always makes me smile. The US flag was properly at the top of the tallest, center pole, until recently, when the upper section of the center pole was taken down, and now... there's something missing, without explanation to the casual passerby.

Our legislature took it upon itself to write a dodgy new law this past session, with, oh look, there's Heather Scott with something to say about it, sponsoring HB 96 because "uniting." "We need to get back to unity in this country, and unity in this state," she said. The Senate tweaked it a little, adding "official" school flags to the limited ok-list, an ample majority of both chambers approved, and the governor signed it into law, complete with its fatuous "DECLARING AN EMERGENCY" as if a bill aimed at Boise, mostly, needed immediate enactment.

While looking up the news, I found there was another flag bill that passed into law (also said to be an EMERGENCY, although only a "July 1" emergency, rather than "immediately after passage and approval," as HB 96 demanded). HB 41 out of the Education committee provides for "ensur[ing] that flags and banners displayed on public school property do not promote political, religious, or ideological viewpoints," with explicit exceptions fo "achievement flags" and a bunch of other stuff, ending with a weird, generic loophole for "displays in the school parking lot."

The only whoopsadaisy in the main job, HB 96, was that it was rushed out the door near the end of the session, without an enforcement clause. We now have the opportunity for harumphing, grandstanding, castigation and finger pointing, so there's that. Oue avowedly partisan Attorney General has huffed and puffed and not blown anything down, after Ada County's Sheriff helpfully pointed out that "there are no penalties, no information about what level of crime is involved (misdemeanor or felony, for example) and no explanation as to how an officer would enforce the law" in the bill.

He also reported being vexed by the public expressing its opinion with messages coming in "through nearly every channel available to the public — Ada County Dispatch, patrol supervisors, our social media accounts, and our general public inbox.” I didn't call the Sheriff, but I did call the Mayor's office to thank her for continuing to fly the banner that seeks to show Boise is "a safe and welcoming city where everyone means just that — everyone." Even the legislature, I guess. Even though they're nothing but trouble when they come to town.

28.Apr.2025

Bad joke

Michael Cohen had an inside, front row seat for the Schlump Show for a lot of years, before the cold facts of one of his "fixer" deals prompted him to start telling the truth, and violating mob rule #1, "Loyalty above all." He did the time, unlike his old boss, felon47, who the feckless electorate (just barely) put back in charge, after his (consequence-free) conviction, for a second whack at authoritarianism. It's taking off like a house afire now.

Trump 2028: The Joke That’s About to Kill American Democracy is a blunt instrument, not as profane as it deserves to be.

"Here is what to expect: Expect institutional collapse. Expect loyalty tests at every level of government. Expect federal agents knocking on doors. Expect blacklists. Expect Trump Jr. in a cabinet position and sycophants like Stephen Miller writing executive orders that read like the fever dreams of every dictator who ever lived."

23.Apr.2025

This land is DOGE's land

Missed my chance to blog something for the 56th (!) Earth Day yesterday, as Heather Cox Richardson's April 22, 2025 Letter from an American reminds me. (I did get outside for several hours, at least.) She recounts the history that led to "more than 20 million Americans—10% of the total population of the country at the time—to call for the nation to address the damage caused by 150 years of unregulated industrial development," in 1970, "still one of the largest protests in American history. That came after a massive oil spill off the California coast, and Ohio's Cuyahoga River catching fire. A lot of good work was done to turn things around, but there's always more to do. "A garden is never finished," a friend reminds me.

Our current "president who follows science" in the bitterly ironic styling of his flacks wants to champion a policy of “opening more federal lands and waters for oil, gas, and critical mineral extraction.” And to that end, has injected the CEO of a Houston-based energy company, and "DOGE operative" Tyler Hassen into "control over the Department of the Interior, including its personnel and its budget." That's a hell of a step up from assistant secretary for policy, management, and budget. Out of Wes Siler's April 18 newsletter:

“The purpose of this Order is to authorize and direct the actions necessary to effectuate the consolidation, unification and optimization of administrative functions within the Department of the Interior,” reads Burgum’s order. “The Assistant Secretary – Policy, Management and Budget (AS-PMB) is hereby assigned to lead and coordinate the consolidation, unification and optimization efforts within the Department and its Bureaus and Offices.”

Hassen has not been confirmed as AS-PMB by the Senate, as "in normal times" would be required. Among the responsibilities Burgum has handed to Hassen, "delegating any authority necessary":

“Ensuring the appropriate transfer of funds, programs, records, and property, as well as taking required personnel actions, to carry out the consolidation.”

Siler continues:

"This is wild. Not only is Burgum handing total authority to manage daily operations at DOI and all of its 11 bureaus and offices over to a hitherto unknown political operative, but that political operative is assuming all of that power while holding his position illegally, in violation of the Constitution’s Appointments Clause.

"That is an insane amount of power. In addition to the National Park Service, DOI manages the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Bureau of Indian Education, Bureau of Land Management, Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Bureau of Reclamation, Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, Bureau of Trust Funds Administration, Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the U.S. Geological Survey. As such, Hassen is now responsible for 70,000 employees, the administration of numerous international treaties, the welfare of 574 Native American Tribes, 433 national park sites, over 500 million acres of public lands, 700 million acres of subsurface minerals, and 3.2 billion acres of the Outer Continental Shelf."

HCR noted that our delegate-everything SecInt "appears to be on board with [the] plan" to grant the ‘wish list’ for oil and gas and mining industries and private developers, including "selling off more land to private developers."

21.Apr.2025

The art of the self-deal

There's a lot I'm not keeping up with, and it includes most of The Hartmann Report's "Daily Takes." The author sends out a weekly wrap, "what you may have missed" (yes), giving another chance. I picked three from the lastest wave, and read the first of my picks before it got lost in the daily sea of tabs. It was interesting first of all for the autobiographical context he opens with, one arresting paragraph:

"I’ve spent a good chunk of my adult life doing international relief work for a nonprofit based out of Europe. From the mass slaughter in Darfur to the famine following the Civil War in Uganda to deeply impoverished rural Russia and Southeast Asia to hunt clubs in Colombia where young men shoot “feral” children for sport, I’ve seen horrors few can even imagine, much less would want to live through."

Will Trump's Corruption Be the Fatal Flaw That Even MAGA Can’t Defend? "Every bribe has a receipt. Every payoff leaves a trail. Is the cult finally cracking?"

Not holding my breath, but Hartmann's direct experience with bribe culture, and his observations about Schlump's "transactional" corruption are certainly descriptive of the depth of the noisome swamp we're in, from groundwork laid in the so-called "Reagan Revolution,"

"when five Republicans on the Supreme Court declared in the 1978 Bellotti decision (written by Lewis Powell himself) that money is free speech and corporations are persons, very little has been done by Congress to help average people."

My emphasis added, his link in the original, to another of his two dozen books.

"It’s time to wake America up, before we end up like the countries in which I used to work. Believe me, as someone who’s been there and seen that, it’s not a future any of us want for our nation or our children and grandchildren."

Today's Daily Take was another on the theme of the dismantling of American democracy, They’re Doing It in Broad Daylight—Because They Think No One Will Stop Them. "It" is the list from history's dictator playbook:

— Legitimize political violence,
— Capture the media,
— Intimidate lawyers,
— Install corrupt leaders within regulatory and police agencies,
— Disappear first minorities and later opposition leaders,
— Silence universities, and
— Starve opposition movements by denying their nonprofit status and funding.

Yesterday, you probably noticed, was Easter. Jeanette and I rode our tandem to church in the cool, sunny morning decorated with glorious, flowering trees, the scent of flowers in the air. For that, and the longer, scenic ride home, we got the usual share of "a tandem! cool!" responses (the younger, the better), along with cheery "Happy Easter" wishes from complete strangers.

I can't recap the whole experience for you, the singing and shouting of hallelujahs, and the message of hope. But we were reminded that Jesus was a radical, a rabble-rouser, an egalitarian teacher who promoted diversity, equity, and inclusion, who did not build walls not limit who was within his circle of caring. (He did have a thing about money-changers in the temple, however.)

The message, not of "end times," but BETTER TIMES was a hopeful one. And a reminder that a small group of people can change the world. The movement that Jesus started had a circle of 72 followers at first.

Our current, extreme self-dealing FOTUS also sent Easter greetings, in two "trooths" from his personal anti-social media site. The first one was three sentences of celebratory phatic, "full of Peace and Joy" you'd never imagine him experiencing, and the second started "Happy Easter to all" before descedning into a remarkable message of hate and division. The Sermon from the Swamp, if you will.

19.Apr.2025

The next terrorist attack

On this 30th anniversary of the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Timothy Snyder's thinking about the next one, and what comes after. As "the present government invites a terror attack" through sabotage of our intelligence agencies, and incompetence of the dodgy sychophants who've been put in charge, he reminds us of lesson #18 from On Tyranny:

18. Be calm when the unthinkable arrives. Modern tyranny is terror management. When the terrorist attack comes, remember that authoritarians exploit such events in order to consolidate power. The sudden disaster that requires the end of checks and balances, the dissolution of opposition parties, the suspension of freedom of expression, the right to a fair trial, and so on, is the oldest trick in the Hitlerian book. Do not fall for it.

WSJ ed board speaks up for the Fed

Not that they're willing to come out of the paywall to say it, but so close to the punchline before the print fades in the middle of The Lesson of Trump vs. Powell.

"The problem for Mr. [Schlump] is that Mr. Powell spoke the truth. Tariffs are a tax, which means higher prices for tariffed goods. Mr. [Schlump] has imposed a minimum tariff on the world of 10%, which is roughly four times the previous average U.S. tariff rate of 2.4%."

That's the truth alright, tariffs will blow a hole in the inflation target of 2%, but you have to pay for the "Lesson," or get it from someone else who paid. The Hill spills the beans:

“The main lesson from [Schlump] vs. Powell is that the central bank can’t make up for the economic policy errors of politicians.”

And a politician driven by his sorry gut (which "tells me more sometimes than anybody else's brain can ever tell me") who can't admit error will do a lot of damage before he can be stopped. (If he can be stopped.) As David Frum puts it:

"The rescue that the economy needs is a change not in monetary policy but in [Schlump’s] economic aggression against trading partners. End the tariffs, let trade recover, and then the Fed can do its convalescent work. But intelligent policy begins by admitting that [the big guy's] policy was stupid—and [he] will not soon admit that. So Powell must be fingered as the fall guy instead."

Which won't fix the economy, by the way. The Week's magic 8-ball says "Market turmoil seems likely," with no adults in the room to talk FOTUS off the ledge.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is privately warning the White House that firing Powell "would risk destabilizing financial markets," said Politico. That's because the Fed's reputation for making decisions based on the economy, rather than "short-term politics," is a "key underpinning of the U.S.'s global financial reputation." So Powell's job may be safe for now. "I don't think he'll do it," an anonymous official said of Trump to Politico, "but frankly, this is a grenade with the pin pulled."

For a fee

From the New York Times report by Alan FeuerHamed Aleaziz and Abbie VanSickle (with additional reporting from Annie Correal, Maggie Haberman and Zolan Kanno-Youngs), we read that Supreme Court acted with alacrity after "ACLU lawyers mounted challenges in three different courts within five hours" yesterday. One of them was

"an emergency petition to the Supreme Court, asking the justices to step in and issue an immediate pause on any deportations because many of the Venezuelan men had “already been loaded on to buses, presumably headed to the airport.”

Seven of nine justices responded with an emergency order. (The most corrupt two, Clarence Thomas, and Sam Alito, dissented.)

“The government is directed not to remove any member of the putative class of detainees from the United States until further order of this court,” the court said in a brief, unsigned order that gave no reasoning, as is typical in emergency cases.

There's so much that's chilling in our descent into authoritarianism, but those last three words:

"Since March 15, the Trump administration has sent five flights carrying deportees to El Salvador under a deal with its president, Nayib Bukele, to hold detainees deemed by U.S. authorities to be part of criminal gangs in his country’s prison system, for a fee."

17.Apr.2025

The Hungary model

The boundaries of a periodical used to be tidier. We're still getting The Atlantic in print, and it's a great magazine, the sort I used to read cover to cover, back before distractions took over. (That was pre-web, IIRC, so a lot less writing-in-response to what I read, too.) Having read an excellent, and succinct piece by Anne Applebaum in the May issue, I went looking for a link to it and did not find it, decided maybe I was too early? This morning, I tried harder, and found it dated March 31, so go figure. (The "archive" link has /2025/05 in it.) Oh, and it was also in their "One Story to Read Today" newsletter, which, I don't think I capacity for another daily.)

America’s Future Is Hungary was the hed. "MAGA conservatives love Viktor Orbán. But he's left his country corrupt, stagnant, and impoverished."

"Once widely perceived to be the wealthiest country in Central Europe (“the happiest barrack in the socialist camp,” as it was known during the Cold War), and later the Central European country that foreign investors liked most, Hungary is now one of the poorest countries, and possibly the poorest, in the European Union. Industrial production is falling year-over-year. Productivity is close to the lowest in the region. Unemployment is creeping upward.... [T]wo-thirds of the citizens describe the national education system as “bad,” and where hospital departments are closing because so many doctors have moved abroad. Maybe talented people don’t want to stay in a country perceived as the most corrupt in the EU for three years in a row."

"The model" Hungary offers, as Applebaum describes, is an autocratic takeover how-to. Destroying the professional civil service, attacking the press, universities' independence, politicizing the court system.

"Orbán also talks a lot about “the people” while using his near-absolute power not to build Hungarian prosperity but to enrich a small group of wealthy businessmen, some of whom are members of his family."

Speaking of Hungarians in the news, how 'bout that Sebastian Gorka?! Born in the UK to Hungarian parents, and now risen to "counterterrorism czar" in the +rump Imperium, and with a wink, wink, nudge, nudge, he's turned anyone who supports due process (as, you know, in the 5th and 14th amendments: "No person shall ... be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.") as aiding and abetting terrorism.

That was after he described American politics as having just "one line" now: "Do you love America, or do you hate America?"

"People who love America" are "like the President, like his Cabinet, like the directors of his [sic] agencies," obviously. And anyone who doesn't bow and scrape to those America lovers are on the other side. Or "sssside," as Gorka ssssays it.

"Then there is the other side, that is on the sssside of the cartel members, on the sssside of the illegal aliens, on the sssside of the terrorists.

"You have to ask yourself, are they technically aiding and abbetting them? Because aiding and abbetting criminals, and terrorists is a crime in federal statute, Rob."

IDK if Newsmax-Rob pushed back on that outrageous gaslighting logic, because the clip on The Daily Beast ends there.

Over on the original State Media®, Jesse Watters and Stephen Miller apparently yukked it up about "liberals" and casual slander of the man who was not given due process, and who the government admitted was swept up, deported and imprisoned in El Salvador by mistake. I didn't have the stomach for that clip. Even a still photo of Miller makes my skin crawl.

At this point, the American-lovin' team is on a marketing blitz to try, and to convict the illegally detained, and now illegally imprisoned Kilmar Abrego Garcia in the court of low-IQ public opinion.

It seems there's some evidence about Kilmar Abrego Garcia's supposed "gang-banger" days, just not anything that would stand up in an actual court. A Chicago Bulls hat and a hoodie, "an informant supposedly telling police" something, with the officer who wrote the field report subsequently suspended in a sex-worker scandal. That un-cross-examined, double hearsay allegation from 2019 "is the only evidence the government has ever produced to support its MS-13 claim." More to the point,

"Abrego Garcia applied for asylum and was granted a “withholding of removal” order, a legal form of protection that says the government won’t deport someone to their home country if the person is “more likely than not” to face persecution there."

The perverted "America-loving" sssside ignored that court order, and the Constitution to kidnap, deport, and facilitate the false imprisonment of Abrego Garcia (among many others), abetted by a Central American dictator, following the model of brazen lawlessness provided by another dictator of a failing eastern European state.

16.Apr.2025

Elect a felon, expect a crime

Expect a lot of criming, actually. The latest episode of Felons in the Oval had the tieless (so "coolest") dictator of El Salvador performing like a trained pony for our big Don, and the whole gang having a larf at sending "homegrowns" to an expanding prison-industrial complex in Central America, as the Adelanto ICE Processing Center, Aurora ICE Processing Center, Boone County Detention Center, Butler County Jail, Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center, Deported to Australia, Donald W. Wyatt Detention Facility, Elizabeth Contract Detention Facility, Ferndale ICE Facility, Geauga County Safety Center, Jackson Parish Correctional Center, Kandiyohi County Jail, Karnes County Detention Facility, Krome North SPC, Montgomery Processing Center, Moshannon Valley Processing Center, Northwest Detention Center, Northwest ICE Processing Center, Otay Mesa Detention Center, Phelps County Jail, Pine Prairie ICE Processing Center, Plymouth County Correctional Facility, Prairieland Detention Facility, San Luis Detention Center, Sherburne County Jail, South Louisiana Processing Center, Strafford County Department of Corrections, Terrorism Confinement Center, Torrance County Detention Facility, Tukwila ICE facility, Washoe County Jail, Webb County Detention Center, and Yuma Station reach capacity here.

We'll be outsourcing a lot of business, it seems, not least because it facilitates criminal cruelty. (The Supreme Court has declared that our president is immune from criminal prosecution, everywhere in the umbra, penumbra, and dungeons of his "official duties.")

Yes, there will also be domestic "opportunities" in for-profit immigration detention, complete with federal override of any states that might want to limit or block new contracts with private prison companies.

"Private immigration detention is growing fast — again. The Trump administration is rapidly expanding immigration detention through billion-dollar contracts with private prison companies, including GEO Group and CoreCivic. Dozens of facilities may reopen across at least eight states, including places with long histories of abuse."

In case that's not dark enough for you, try this:

Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons told attendees of the 2025 Border Security Expo in Arizona this week that he wants the agency to become as efficient at deporting immigrants as e-commerce giant Amazon is at delivering packages.

“We need to get better at treating this like a business,” Lyons said, describing his ideal deportation process as “like [Amazon] Prime, but with human beings.”

Remember when Tableau apps were tracking the Covid-19 pandemic? Now there's a United States Disappeared Tracker. As of this morning, the "total persons disappeared by ICE" tally is at 1,523, and the 33 "processing centers," jails, detention facilities and what-not are in one of the filter lists. From HCR's April 14 edition:

"Bukele was livestreaming the event on his official X account and wearing a lapel microphone as he and Trump walked into the Oval Office, so Trump’s pre-meeting private comments were audible in the video Bukele posted. “We want to do homegrown criminals next…. The homegrowns.” Trump told Bukele. “You gotta build about five more places.” Bukele appeared to answer, “Yeah, we’ve got space.” “All right,” Trump replied.

"Rather than being appalled, the people in the room—including Vice President J.D. Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Attorney General Pam Bondi—erupted in laughter."

Don't forget the deputy chief of staff, "TEMU Göbbels," Stephen Miller.

"At the Oval Office meeting, when Trump asked what the Supreme Court ruled, deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller said it had ruled “9–0…in our favor,” claiming “the Supreme Court said that the district court order was unlawful and its main components were reversed 9–0 unanimously.” Legal analyst Chris Geidner of Law Dork called Miller’s statement “disgusting, lying propaganda.”

15.Apr.2025

Trump got played

Like a "businessman" who bankrupted a casino. In two parts: The Grownups Are Quietly Running the World, and The World Is Holding Our Receipts. From part 2, and "one reader":

"[T]his year alone, the U.S. is on track to refinance $10 trillion of maturing debt, at more than double the interest rates of a decade ago. What we borrowed at 2% in 2015, we’re now refinancing at 4.5% or higher. That’s an extra $250 billion a year in interest. Altogether, we’ll soon be spending over $1.2 trillion annually just to service the debt, more than our entire defense budget. And that’s before Trump’s next round of tax cuts for billionaires....

"The U.S. isn’t just flirting with a recession. We're toying with the collapse of the dollar’s role as the world’s reserve currency, the one thing that’s kept our paper empire afloat since Bretton Woods. If we lose that privilege, it’s not a downgrade. It’s a reclassification from global superpower to banana republic with nukes."

Tax and Terror Day

We performed our duty of voluntary compliance and sent in our tax returns (last week), and money (today), same as usual. As if it were usual. But yesterday, the ten-year wind-up of monomania reached a vile nadir. Professor Timothy Snyder boils it down, above the scroll: State Terror; A brief guide for Americans.

"Yesterday the president defied a Supreme Court ruling to return a man who was mistakenly sent to a gulag in another country, celebrated the suffering of this innocent person, and spoke of sending Americans to foreign concentration camps.

"This is the beginning of an American policy of state terror, and it has to be identified as such to be stopped."

Stephen Miller got a shout-out, for his role in "deterring the press, or anyone else, from challenging the perversion by associating anyone who objects with crime and terror." Miller accused reporters of "want[ing] foreign terrorists in the country who kidnap women and children."

"In the United States, we are governed by a Constitution. Basic to the Constitution is habeas corpus, the notion that the government cannot seize your body without a legal justification for doing so. If that does not hold, then nothing else does. If we have the law, then violence may not be committed by one person against another on the basis of namecalling or strong feelings. This applies to everyone, above all to the president, whose constitutional function is to enforce the laws."

Ot at least it used to, from time to time.

"To a very sad degree, Supreme Court justices and members of Congress are already complicit in this experiment in state terror. They might find their way back to an America in which their offices have meaning, but only with the help of we the people."

Update:
If you like your dire warnings in sub-5 minute video podcast form, here's Politics Girl's Emergency Announcement from yesterday. "As of today, April 14th, 2025, everything you knew about America has changed."

14.Apr.2025

It is happening here

The opening paragraph of Heather Cox Richardson's Letter from an American for April 13, 2025:

"This evening, lawyers for the Department of Justice told a federal court that the administration does not believe it has a legal obligation to return Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia to the United States, despite a court order to do so."

ICYMI, Abrego Garcia was swept up in the mass deportation of supposed bad guys in Venezuelan gangs with an utter lack of due process and in defiance of a court order to stop, flown to El Salvador, and incarcerated in a notorious prison there. HCR details his story and interactions with ICE before this latest episode; he'd been following the rules, it seems, under the previous administration. And there has been no credible evidence given that he was an MS-13 gang member.

"On March 31 the government admitted that its arrest and rendition of Abrego Garcia happened because of “administrative error” but said he couldn’t be brought back because, in El Salvador, he is outside the jurisdiction of the United States."

And so on, up to the Supreme Court, once, for a unanimous but somewhat toothless opinion that the Trump administration must "facilitate" his release from custody, but confused about what "effectuate" would mean, with “due regard for the deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs.”

Except that none of Abrego Garcia's arrest, detention, and rendition were "foreign affairs." The greatest nation in the world, the exceptional, essential hegemon pretends its hands are tied, arguing in bad faith that it is powerless to undo the evil that it has done. With my emphasis added:

"Let’s be very clear about exactly what’s happening here: President Donald J. Trump is claiming the power to ignore the due process of the law guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, declare someone is a criminal, kidnap them, send them to prison in a third country, and then claim that there is no way to get that person back.

"All people in the United States are entitled to due process, but Trump and his officers have tried to convince Americans that noncitizens are not....

"Here’s the thing: Once you give up the idea that we are all equal before the law and have the right to due process, you have given up the whole game. You have admitted the principle that some people have more rights than others. Once you have replaced the principle of equality before the law with the idea that some people have no rights, you have granted your approval to the idea of an authoritarian government. At that point, all you can do is to hope that the dictator and his henchmen overlook you."

13.Apr.2025

How to Defy a Dealth Cult

That's the headline for Andrea Pitzer's latest NEXT COMES WHAT podcast, brought to my desktop via Jason "LOLGOP" Sattler's post, There's no normal to go back to.

Pritzer's worth the (34 min.) listen. She mentions "the role of malicious incomptence," not least that of Kilmar Abrego Garcia's being "sent to El Salvador by mistake," (and now with a team of cuckolded lawyers doing their damndest to AVOID FIXING THE MISTAKE), to that of "the tariffs that have been an obsession of Trump's since the 1980s, now threatening to tank the economy." Not to put too fine a point on it, "the second Trump administration has enough momentum and authority to destroy the current global financial system."

"Trump destroys functioning things, grifts from there where he can, and then lies about it."

By "more of an instinct than anything else," he says. No need for pencil and paper, even. "Somebody had to pull the trigger," he said. "I was willing to pull the trigger."

"We are living in the ashes of the of the Covid death cult, building the machinery of an even great one," Pitzer winds up, and I'm reminded that the Idaho legislature found time this session to make an anti-parasite medication (with some antiviral activity) available over the counter. Still no scientific basis for it having effectiveness against Covid. Maybe the FDA under RFKJr can cook the books (they're now in control of), and whip up a study to show he was right all along about the "cause of autism."

All that before I read through the LOLGOP post, which starts with the Ebola outbreak that led to zero deaths from transmission in the US, and "successful" fear-mongering that helped the Republicans take the Senate majority in 2014. Which eventually led to...

"Trump's response to the novel coronavirus [being] the worst in the rich world. His only competition is former Brazilian president and fellow failed coup-ster Jair Bolsonaro. Both wannabe strongmen didn't just incompetently handle the deadliest pandemic of the century; they turned their rabid followers against the best methods we had to contain the virus....

"Trump's ability to turn his worst atrocities into advantages should have us genuinely freaked out. It should inspire us to step up the challenge of facing him, knowing that his superpower is avoiding consequences. But it also should remind us that giving into his worst instincts—his indifference for human life, his unquenchable desire to dominate others in public, his passion for weaponizing simplistic solutions against convenient enemies to feed his corruption—will only feed his sick lust for power....

"[T]he current generation of politicians now in office has been traumatized by Donald Trump, possibly irreparably. He sent mobs to kill them, got away with it, and has more consolidated power than ever to show for it."

Ok, ok, I know! What's the HOW TO? First of all, the way forward is not to "compromise harder."

"There is no compromise with tyranny. At this moment, all you can do is stand up for something. And if you aren't sure what you should be standing for, I have a simple Ten Point Plan:"

Spoiler alert: it's the Bill of Rights.

11.Apr.2025

Our vulnerable con-man is crippling America

Timothy nails it: Trump's Psychological Vulnerability "places the American economy at risk."

"All his adult life, Trump has been ripping people off. That is his modus operandi. Rather than a conscience, he has the habit of displacement. It is not that he is ripping people off. Everyone else is ripping him off.

"As he has aged this has grown into an vulnerability. He actually seems to believe that everyone is ripping him off. He makes no distinction between himself and the government. And he has no grasp of how any significant policy actually works. This means that anyone who has access to him and understands his vulnerability can generate a self-destructive American policy."

Ron Filipkowski summarized the current status of the self-destructive American policy on Bluesky yesterday:

The credibility of the US government is completely shot.

Gone.

Annihilated.

Nobody anywhere in the world can believe a single word that comes out of this Administration.

Ever.

As we tote up the internal damage of a felon unleashing a team of sychophants, including a border czar who loves the idea of extreme rendition, an anti-vax Secretary of HHS, a SecDef with a drinking problem, a National Intelligence team that doesn't know how to keep a secret (or vote straight), an unhinged billionaire unleashing marauding hackers of government databases (mid-April seems like a good time for a "hackathon" at the IRS, doesn't it?), and Sebastian Gorka as "counterterrorism czar" coming after protestors as "domestic terrorists," this snippet from F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel, The Great Gatsby is popping up:

“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

P.S. Speaking of Seb Gorka, get a load of Hungary's Magyar Nemzet gushing over him. Below that there's a link to a story about the Hungarian Foreign Minister bragging that "We were Trump well before Trump."

10.Apr.2025

Here's looking at you

Coming to print in May-June (which I'm guessing happens in April), or online now, from Mother Jones: The Shocking Far-Right Agenda Behind the Facial Recognition Tech Used by ICE and the FBI

A friend referred me, with mild deprecation that it was "verbose, breathless, and conspiratorial," and when I pushed back on that, insisted that either of us could have edited it to stronger. Ok, I'd omit "Shocking" from the title at least, because, damn, the competition right now is fierce. The George W. Bush administration off-shored torture and emprisonment, and the current bad sequel of Trump is now outsourcing it, to El Salvador, and the goddamned Roberts Court might just greenlight that, too. That's shocking.

Clearview AI (and similar) facial recognition technology is an alarming tool in the techbro arsenal, talked about for some years now (links below), and deployed to a far greate extent in China's surveillance state than here, but yeah, this half of the subtitle is a little sickening:

"Clearview AI’s founders always intended to target immigrants and the political left."

That has the fault of a mind-reading inference, but the piece is (long, and) well-researched. There's ample evidence. Context:

"Clearview had compiled a massive biometric database that would eventually contain billions of images the company scraped off the internet and social media without the knowledge of the platforms or their users. Its AI analyzed these images, creating a “faceprint” for every individual. The company let users run a “probe photo” against its database, and if it generated a hit, it displayed the matching images and links to the websites where they originated. This made it easy for Clearview users to further profile their targets with other information found on those webpages: religious or political affiliation, family and friends, romantic partners, sexuality. All without a search warrant or probable cause."

As for targeting... enabled by one deeply shocking Supreme Court decision after another, everyone, citizens included, may be candidates for extreme rendition without due process of any sort, liable to be sent to a foreign gulag from which the now-quisling DOJ throws up its hands and says "sorry, out of our jurisdiction." Or, "you should have filed a habeus corpus petition, and now we're out of pens and paper."

I wonder, under what pretense might they come after me, personally. And even if I'm too far down in the noise of dissent to be worth the trouble, what it means to live in a society where due process is over.

Timothy Snyder and his wife (and another Yale professor, Jason Stanley) are voting with their feet, moving to Canada.

Clearview’s business model is based on “weaponizing our own images against us without a license, without consent, without permission,” says Albert Fox Cahn, executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project....

"Clearview is already well positioned to capitalize on Trump’s xenophobic plans. Today, one of the company’s top customers is US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a relationship cemented during Joe Biden’s presidency, as the agency inked bigger deals with the startup. Under the Biden administration, ICE records show, the agency deployed Clearview widely, even as officials there charged with monitoring the technology were in the dark about how it was being used and by whom. As the agency executes Trump’s emboldened mission—“Border Czar” Tom Homan has vowed to unleash “shock and awe” against undocumented immigrants—the dragnet surveillance outlined by Ton-That during the company’s earliest years may already be underway."

Tom Homan makes appearances in middle-of-the-road media that I follow, and I try not to let appearances distract me, but seeing and hearing him speak, he is one of the ugliest human beings I've ever seen.

"No federal laws regulate facial recognition, and many federal agencies have deployed Clearview for years with little accountability. Consider that the FBI—now run by Kash Patel, who has claimed FBI agents incited January 6, pledged to target journalists, and penned a book containing the names of officials he planned to settle scores with—is another major federal customer. Patel’s new deputy director, Dan Bongino, is a conspiratorial right-wing influencer who has used violent rhetoric about liberals and called for jailing Democrats."

The other main thread of the article is the techbro oligarchy's interest in this, "neoreactionaries" who "consider themselves a high-IQ natural aristocracy and long for a corporatist strongman—a CEO monarch—to usher in what [Peter] Thiel calls a “futuristic” version of the past, one in which technocrats rule as an ennobled caste. They view technology as the engine to remake society on their terms, an ambition that Thiel has never disguised...."

And now Thiel has groomed and installed J.D. Vance as his political protege. Another name to watch is Curtis Yarvin, "an intellectual muse" to Thiel, Vance, "and other prominent right-wingers." We didn't watch soon enough, perhaps.

"The godfather of neoreaction in America, Yarvin ... believes democracy is a “dangerous, malignant form of government” and has argued for a soft coup and a purge of civil servants in favor of political loyalists. This “butterfly revolution,” as Yarvin called it in 2022, looks eerily similar to Trump and Musk’s blitzkrieg against the federal bureaucracy."

At the end, the article mentions the US Commission on Civil Rights convening experts in March 2024, with former Clearview CEO (and still its president) Hoan Ton-That coolly keeping his racist and political predilections under the radar. There are plenty of mentions of Clearview, and footnotes point to two important NYT articles, The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It (with an amazingly annoying animated image at the web-top), in January 2020, and a Magazine (interactive, online) feature in March, 2021, Your Face Is Not Your Own.

In the 194 page Commission report, The Civil Rights Implications of the Federal Use of Facial Recognition Technology (Sept. 2024), Ton-That is quoted bragging that

"Our technology has been proven to be extremely effective to law enforcement. For example, our technology played an essential role in the investigation that followed the storming of the capital on January 6 by helping law enforcement agencies investigate unidentified persons pictured engaging in violence that day."

"Today, there is no longer a need for Clearview to pretend to be apolitical," is a bit of an understatement in the prepenultimate graf. Their interests will be served by being blatantly political, for at least the next few years. "And then you won't have to worry about voting anymore," as Mr. T. said.

"Days before Trump was again sworn in as president, vowing to pardon the insurrectionists who attacked the Capitol in his name, the company updated its website. Deleted were any references to its role in identifying the far-right marauders who had laid siege to democracy."

7.Apr.2025

So much for radical transparency

Gunica Singh, staff attorney for the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said FOIA requests to HHS for public records often took months or years to produce a response. Requests submitted by university researchers, state governments, laboratories, pharmaceutical companies, animal rights groups, law firms, and news organizations, including KFF Health News. Records requested by law firms in regard to investigations of illnesses, outbreaks, drugs, medical devices, and products. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s sweeping layoffs across agencies

"eliminated workers who handled Freedom of Information Act requests at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and cut FOIA staff at the FDA and the National Institutes of Health, said six current and former federal workers KFF Health News agreed not to name because they fear retaliation and are not authorized to speak to the press....

"FOIA is a transparency law that guarantees public access to the inner workings of federal agencies by requiring officials to release government documents. The 1966 law is a crucial tool for law firms, advocates, businesses, journalists, and the general public. It has been used to hold officials accountable and uncover harm, corruption, and political meddling in policymaking."

Rule by chaos and division

I'm not keeping up. I was a couple of days behind on HCR, I thought, read the April 4 letter, delivered after the market was in mid-crash on Friday, when our president was golf-schmoozing with the Saudis, and having a $million-a-plate soiree for super-PAC "MAGA Inc" (which is "not coordinating" with the chief MAGAt in any way, ha ha). An inbox search on her name showed editions I'd missed, and dog almighty, it likes almost half of them. And here I kept saying it was my "daily read." From October 29, 2024, in the Before Time:

"Republican presidential nominee former president Donald Trump offered Americans his closing argument in the 2024 presidential race on Sunday, October 27, at Madison Square Garden. At a rally that evoked a Nazi rally at the old Madison Square Garden on February 20, 1939, Trump’s warm-up acts set the terms of Trump’s final pitch to voters by calling Puerto Rico “a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean” and railing against “f*cking illegals.” They called Vice President Kamala Harris “the Antichrist” and “the devil,” and called former secretary of state Hillary Clinton “a sick son of a b*tch.” When Trump took the stage about two hours late, he echoed the warm-up acts, and then reiterated that he believes fellow Americans are “the enemy within.”

"The racism and fascism Trump’s MAGA Republicans displayed at Madison Square Garden is usually expressed within their media bubble, where it passes for normal conversation. The backlash against it among people in the real world appears to have shocked the Trump campaign so much that the candidate is running away from his own closing argument...."

He went so far as to tell a Georgia audience the next day, “I’m not a Nazi.” This came after he supposedly "ran away" from Project 2025, but now we're soaking in it. HCR quoted Kamala Harris' "closing argument," too:

“One week from today, you will have the chance to make a decision that directly impacts your life, the life of your family, and the future of this country we love,” she said. “[I]t will probably be the most important vote you ever cast. And this election is more just than a choice between two parties and two different candidates. It is a choice about whether we have a country rooted in freedom for every American or ruled by chaos and division.”

There's lots more of Harris' speech, describing her thoughtful, positive vision for the way forward, that just didn't enliven the electorate, as it turned out.

In her Nov. 26, 2024 letter, PEOTUS' early roll-out of TARIFFS was coming through antisocial media, and she spent some paragraphs describing why what he was saying did not make economic (or political) sense, ending with "Trump apologists immediately began to assure investors that he really didn’t mean it." But whoops, he did too mean it. Bigly.

A week earlier than that, November 20, it was already clear that (as "one of its key architects, Russell Vought, told undercover filmmakers") Trump was only running away from Project2025 as political cover, and yeah, it was totally on, with Vought named to lead the OMB, to lead the charge for “aggressive use of the vast powers of the executive branch” to “bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will.”

Then there was the January 21, 2025 I GOT A PARDON BABY! edition. So much for the party of "law and order."

Concede the unread mountain, and back to today, Monday morning, with stock markets around the world crashing on the Don's big plan for forcing everyone to make a personal deal with our dictator. The promise of regressive taxation in the form of tariffs ensures we'll see inflation heat up. (Remember how worried we were about that when Joe Biden was president?)

At the top of April 6, 2025, she noted Mr. T's "Liberation Day" liberated $5 trillion from the stock market. With so many Big Numbers flying around, can we put that in context? An estimated 5 million people came out to protests on Saturday.

Not counting the debacle continuing in markets today, last week's losses would equal ONE $MILLION FOR EACH of those protesters. (Gee, if only the Fountain of Lies' canard about some shadowy Hungarian paying actors were true! FoL "truthed" that it was $100 MILLION each, but numbers were never his strong suit.) Nero fiddled, the story goes. The Donold played golf.

Middle of last October, The Economist put up a special report on the American economy, calling it The envy of the world. "The American economy has left other rich countries in the dust. Expect that to continue, argue Simon Rabinovitch and Henry Curr." A whole series, about economic output, income inequality, energy, stocks, the dollar, and, Looking ahead:

What can stop the American economy now?
Toxic politcs could derail America's economic boom. The world should hope it does not

It's not just the stock markets that are crashing.

"A second child has now died of measles in West Texas, and as of this morning, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has a history of opposing vaccines, had continued to call vaccines a personal decision. Although he is not a doctor, he pushed the idea that ingesting Vitamin A helps patients recover from measles. Since his suggestion, a hospital in Texas says it is now treating children whose bodies have toxic levels of Vitamin A."

It's so bad that even RFKjr relented on X to say “The most effective way to prevent the spread of measles is the MMR vaccine.” Used to go without saying.

Brings to mind the Idaho legislature, which just passed a bill to make ivermectin, an antiparasite medication, available WITHOUT PRESCRIPTION OR CONSULTATION WITH A HEALTH PROFESSIONAL, because, ah, EMERGENCY. It awaits the governor's signature.

Even the weather is bad. Reposting a video of a home floating down a river in Kentucky, James Fallows noted that the senators from Arkansas, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Missouri, Tennessee, and Texas are all Republicans, all backed the DOGE sabotage of NOAA and FEMA.

3.Apr.2025

In other news

Laura Loomer is kibitzing on firing people from the NSC (not including Mike Waltz, because even though SignalGate is ample justification, the big man "does not want to give the media the satisfaction," as if media satisfaction mattered).

Hillbilly vice president Vance is doubling down on extreme rendition without due process, calling it "the American people's business."

A Kremlin enoy is in US for talks with the +rump administration.

Senator Lindsey Graham is set to declare extending the budget-busting 2017 tax cuts will be "cost-free" as the Senate skips around its Parliamentarian to go nuclear, while Chuck Shumer battles with a wagging finger.

"Nonpartisan budget scorekeepers have estimated that extending the tax cuts would cost roughly $4 trillion over a decade." and "The resolution [Senate Republicans] unveiled on Wednesday would pave the way for extending the 2017 tax cuts, tee up $1.5 trillion in new tax cuts and increase the debt limit by $5 trillion."

Can't wait to hear Idaho's fake-deficit hawk Mike Crapo spin that as fiscal responsibility.

Fake emergency on, WW recession coming

First of all, this country has not been looted, pillaged, raped, or plundered by any other nations lately, and you know, every accusation is a confession, so take our fatuous felon at his word on plunder and rape. With "friends" like him, who needs enemies?

“Never before has an hour of Presidential rhetoric cost so many people so much,” former treasury secretary Lawrence Summers posted. “The best estimate of the loss from tariff policy is now [close] to $30 trillion or $300,000 per family of four.” “The Trump Tariff Tax is the largest peacetime tax hike in U.S. history,” posted former vice president Mike Pence.

Secondly, the "reciprocal" tariff schedule was been confirmed to have been literally based on reciprocals. Nonsensically.

"[F]inancial journalist James Surowiecki figured out that the White House “just took our trade deficit with [each] country and divided it by the country’s exports to us.” He called it “extraordinary nonsense.” Washington Post economic writer Catherine Rampell posted that she was reluctant to amplify Surowiecki’s theory that the tariff rates were based on such a “dumb calculation,” but then the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative confirmed it."

In her April 2, 2025 Letter from an American I'm quoting from, Heather Cox Richardson suggests one explanation of the bees in the +rump's head (my emphasis added):

"There is also Trump’s apparent fascination with President William McKinley, who held office from 1897 to 1901, at a time when high tariffs concentrated wealth in the hands of industrialists while workers and farmers, as well as their families, faced injury, hunger, and homelessness from dangerous working conditions, low wages and commodity prices, and seasonal factory closings.

"Trump has frequently claimed those years were the nation’s wealthiest, and today he helped to explain his focus on that era when he referred to the 1913 Revenue Act, a law that has angered the right wing for decades. That act began the process of replacing the high tariffs of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with an income tax, thus shifting the burden of funding the treasury from ordinary Americans through tariffs to wealthier Americans through the income tax. At least some of Trump’s tariff plans seem tied to his enthusiasm for tax cuts on wealthy individuals and corporations."

As usual, HCR has links to all that, and more, including Josh Marshall's important observation that “Presidents have no inherent power over tariffs whatsoever.” Just what Congress concedes, and through the president's power to "declare a national emergency" (without bothering with any actual facts to justify it), that's quite a lot.

"[The] law allows Congress to end such a declaration of emergency," but at present, Congress is still too infested with quislings to resist.

2.April.2025

April Fools

No clever jokes this time around, I was busy with other stuff yesterday, including finding time to watch some of New Jersey Senator Cory Booker's bravura speech, holding the floor for more than 25 hours with a wake up call seen (in part!) by hundreds of millions.

It seems that Facebook is disappearing the daily Letters from an American that Heather Cox Richardson has been reposting there. But you can see them (and subscribe, for free, if you like) on her substack blog. Her April 1st letter gives a good account of Booker's speech, with a few other current items worked in.

The "other" included Wisconsin circuit court Judge Susan Crawford winning the special election to that state's supreme court, overcoming unapologetic trumper Brad Schimel by a quarter million votes—10 points—despite the best efforts and $20 million that f'Elon Musk poured into Schimel's effort.

And if only it was possible to have a scandal with consequences, can you believe this? Trump's national security adviser Michael Waltz and his staff have been using personal gmail accounts for government communications. Just, you know, "highly technical" stuff "involving sensitive military positions and powerful weapons systems relating to an ongoing conflict."

The fire from the SignalGate scandal (which +rump concluded must be a "witch hunt," due to his stunted vocabulary, and willful ignorance) is still raging, and before Waltz' three-step about the journalist's number being magically "sucked in" to his phone had run its course, we find out about gmail, and oh, icymi over the weekend,

Waltz has also created and hosted other Signal chats with Cabinet members on sensitive topics, including on Somalia and Russia’s war in Ukraine, said a senior administration official. The existence of those groups was first reported by the Wall Street Journal on Sunday.

Massachusetts Rep. Jake Auchincloss boils it down in one minute:

"This hypocrisy and incompetence is a gut punch to the American military. I was a Captain in the Marine Corps. If I had shared highly classified operational plans over Signal—and yes, that's illegal—my career would have been over. Done. And Secretary Hegseth right now is lying to the American public, he is lying to Congress, he is lying to the military in order to avoid the same accountability that would befall a captain or a corporal. And those double standards are toxic to the good order and discipline in the ranks.

"But even worse than that, this is incompetence incarnate. This kind of conduct is why America is being outnegotiated right now, by Russia over Ukraine. The Russians are protecting their Black Sea fleet, the Russians are protecting their assets in Europe, the Russians are getting sanctions relief, and they're giving up nothing?! And the reason they're able to have these wins in the rounds of negotiations, is Donald Trump is sending these Keystone Kops to get out-negotiated by hardened Kremlin apparatchiks. It's embarrassing, and it's dangerous."

Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel aren't going to investigate anything. Will Congress find its hind legs?!

raveling

Tom von Alten