phyncke

The Washington Post was gutted today

2026-02-04T19:32:14Z

Jeff Bezos gutted the Washington Post today like he was cleaning a fish.

Here is a letter from the head of Meidas Touch — independent journalist.

Dear Jeff Bezos and the leadership team of The Washington Post,

As you know, I am Ben Meiselas, the co-founder and chairman of the MeidasTouch Network, now the largest independent news network in the world.

I never thought I would need to write this letter.

The Washington Post was once a standard-bearer for American journalism. It stood for fearless investigative reporting, for holding the powerful accountable, and for the simple but radical idea that democracy cannot survive without a free press.

That institution is now being destroyed.

Roughly one-third of your reporting staff has been eliminated. Some of the most respected journalists in the profession—people with decades-long careers devoted to serious investigative work—were discarded. Not with dignity. Not with gratitude. But with a cold, generic letter from human resources.

That level of callousness tells us everything.

Let’s be clear about what this really is. This is not restructuring. This is not belt-tightening. This is not a difficult but necessary business decision.

This is capitulation to authoritarianism.

While journalists were being purged from The Washington Post, Jeff Bezos chose to spend approximately $75 million funding a movie about Melania Trump. At the same time, Donald Trump, an open fascist who has vowed revenge against the press, continues his campaign to crush independent journalism, aided by billionaire allies and compliant corporate media executives.

This is what bending the knee looks like.

Trump’s movement is not simply hostile to journalism. It is fundamentally authoritarian. It seeks to silence dissent, punish truth-tellers, and replace reporting with propaganda. We are already watching this play out across corporate media, including at CBS, where pressure, intimidation, and capitulation have become routine.

What is happening at The Washington Post fits squarely into that pattern.

When you gut investigative reporting, you are not being neutral.
When you purge respected journalists, you are taking a side.
And when you do it as Trump and his right-wing oligarchs escalate their fascist attacks on the press, the intent is unmistakable.

This is how journalism is killed. Not all at once, but piece by piece, through fear, obedience, and surrender.

It is painful to watch a once-great institution fall this way. But it has also made something else clear.

As corporate media collapses under the weight of billionaire cowardice, independent journalism is rising.

At the MeidasTouch Network, we are expanding our investigative reporting, growing our reach, and holding authoritarians accountable because we refuse to bow to fascism. We believe journalism’s job is not to appease power, but to confront it.

To the journalists who were just laid off: if you want to do real investigative work, if you want to expose corruption, if you want to defend democracy instead of accommodating authoritarianism, we see you. As we continue to grow, those are exactly the voices we intend to bring into this movement.

This is the crossroads.

Corporate news organizations are betraying their mission.

And authoritarianism is advancing because too many institutions are surrendering without a fight.

Independent journalism is fighting back. But we cannot do it alone.

If you’re reading this and you believe democracy requires a free and fearless press, please subscribe. And if you can, become a paid subscriber. Your support allows us to hire more journalists, expand investigations, and build the kind of media ecosystem that fascism fears most.

As corporate media kneels, we stand.
As journalism is attacked, we fight.
And as authoritarianism rises, we will not be silent.

— Ben Meiselas

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And finally! Hanukkah night 8

2025-12-22T05:31:24Z

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Hanukkah night 7

2025-12-21T05:30:10Z

The candles get trippier by the day.

Tonight's menorah.

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Continuing on - with night 6 of Hanukkah!

2025-12-20T02:38:00Z

Here we go!

Tonight's menorah

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The year is winding down

2025-12-19T14:39:57Z

As the year winds down, and I am finishing work today for the holidays, I am thinking about things and I think I will try and do more journaling in the new year. I have let my blogs go dead and think I will do more here. I love posting my Hanukkah pics and think I have thoughts to put out here. Especially about the current state of things in the United States which are very troubling. So I will post more or some at least.

I hope you all are having a good holiday season this year. We are troubled here in the United States. It is disturbing here to be honest. I will share more of what is going on. I feel like I am in a bit of a liberal bubble here in California - surrounded by like minded people where I live and work - but I still have trouble believing we have a fascist in the White House and that they paved over the Rose Garden - and tore down the East Wing of the White House - it's unbelievable to me and don't get me started on healthcare. I really cannot believe it. I do think that Trump has dementia and is not well and that he is not really in charge - that is my theory. He is not all there.

Anyway - I have problems with all of what is going on here and really am disturbed by it.

I am staying in Berkeley for the holidays - I could not afford the airfare prices for Christmas travel. I am planning an East Coast trip over the summer to visit. I love visiting in the Summer so will do that.

I will spend Christmas with friends here and I do love how quiet it is here during the holidays - the students all leave and it is nice here. It is supposed to rain most of the break so it will be storming here - atmospheric rivers and all that - new term for storms.

Anyhoo - Happy Holidays to all of you and I have three more Hanukkah posts to do - let's bring it on home!
Love and light!

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Hanukkah Night 5

2025-12-19T04:28:02Z

here we go!

Menorah pic

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Late again! Last night was night 4!

2025-12-18T16:10:22Z

Sorry all - I got tired last night!

Night 4 menorah pic

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Late Menorah Pic - Night 3

2025-12-17T15:02:15Z

posting last night's pic this morning. I blew it.

last night's pic

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Hanukkah Los Dos

2025-12-16T01:52:35Z

Night two - and we get a little more light. My candles are showing how defective they are - they are waaaaarped.

Tonight's menorah

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First night of Hanukkah 2025!

2025-12-15T01:19:24Z

And I open my candles to find that some of them are warped. I will just have to roll with it and go with the curvy candles. It will be fine - lol. I got a good deal on the candles anyway - I always by them after Hanukkah on sale - this is what happens.

Night one menorah here

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Almost Hanukkah!

2025-12-13T16:53:40Z

You guys — it's almost Hanukkah! It starts on Sunday. I will try and post my menorah pics this year. It is like my favorite time of the year — I love posting it. Hope you enjoy it.
Woo hoo!

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NSS Foreign Policy Announcement - Crazy Pants

2025-12-06T23:14:57Z

From Heather Cox Richardson - Letters from an American - Dec 05, 2025

Late last night, the Trump administration released the 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS) of the United States of America. It did so quietly, although as foreign affairs journalist at Politico Nahal Toosi noted, the release of the NSS is usually accompanied by fanfare, as it shows an administration’s foreign policy priorities and the way it envisions the position of the U.S. in the world.

The Trump administration’s NSS announces a dramatic reworking of the foreign policy the U.S. has embraced since World War II.

After a brief introduction touting what it claims are the administration’s great successes, the document begins by announcing the U.S. will back away from the global engagements that underpin the rules-based international order that the World War II Allies put in place after that war to prevent another world war. The authors of the document claim that the system of institutions like the United Nations, alliances like the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and free trade between nations that established a series of rules for foreign engagement and a web of shared interests around the globe has been bad for the U.S. because it undermined “the character of our nation.”

Their vision of “our country’s inherent greatness and decency,” requires “the restoration and reinvigoration of American spiritual and cultural health,” “an America that cherishes its past glories and its heroes, and that looks forward to a new golden age,” and “growing numbers of strong, traditional families that raise healthy children.”

Observers referred to the document as National Security Council Report (NSC) 88 and noted that it could have been written in just 14 words. White supremacists use 88 to refer to Adolf Hitler and “fourteen words” to refer to a popular white supremacist slogan.

To achieve their white supremacist country, the document’s authors insist they will not permit “transnational and international organizations [or] foreign powers or entities” to undermine U.S. sovereignty. To that end, they reject immigration as well as “the disastrous ‘climate change’ and ‘Net Zero’ ideologies that have so greatly harmed Europe, threatened the United States, and subsidize our adversaries.”

The document reorients the U.S. away from traditional European allies toward Russia. The authors reject Europe’s current course, suggesting that Europe is in danger of “civilizational erasure” and calling for the U.S. to “help Europe correct its current trajectory” by “restoring Europe’s civilizational self-confidence and Western identity.” Allowing continued migration will render Europe “unrecognizable” within twenty years, the authors say, and they back away from NATO by suggesting that as they become more multicultural, Europe’s societies might have a different relationship to NATO than “those who signed the NATO charter.”

In contrast to their complaints about the liberal democracies in Europe, the document’s authors do not suggest that Russia is a country of concern to the U.S., a dramatic change from past NSS documents. Instead, they complain that “European officials…hold unrealistic expectations” for an end to Russia’s war against Ukraine, and that European governments are suppressing far-right political parties. They bow to Russian demands by calling for “[e]nding the perception, and preventing the reality, of NATO as a perpetually expanding alliance.”

In place of the post–World War II rules-based international order, the Trump administration’s NSS commits the U.S. to a world divided into spheres of interest by dominant countries. It calls for the U.S. to dominate the Western Hemisphere through what it calls “commercial diplomacy,” using “tariffs and reciprocal trade agreements as powerful tools” and discouraging Latin American nations from working with other nations. “The United States must be preeminent in the Western Hemisphere as a condition of our security and prosperity,” it says, “a condition that allows us to assert ourselves confidently where and when we need to in the region.”

The document calls for “closer collaboration between the U.S. Government and the American private sector. All our embassies must be aware of major business opportunities in their country, especially major government contracts. Every U.S. Government official that interacts with these countries should understand that part of their job is to help American companies compete and succeed.”

It went on to make clear that this policy is a plan to help U.S. businesses take over Latin America and, perhaps, Canada. “The U.S. Government will identify strategic acquisition and investment opportunities for American companies in the region and present these opportunities for assessment by every U.S. Government financing program,” it said, “including but not limited to those within the Departments of State, War, and Energy; the Small Business Administration; the International Development Finance Corporation; the Export-Import Bank; and the Millennium Challenge Corporation.” Should countries oppose such U.S. initiatives, it said, “[t]he United States must also resist and reverse measures such as targeted taxation, unfair regulation, and expropriation that disadvantage U.S. businesses.”

The document calls this policy a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, linking this dramatic reworking to America’s past to make it sound as if it is historical, when it is anything but.

President James Monroe outlined what became known as the Monroe Doctrine in three paragraphs in his annual message to Congress on December 2, 1823. The concept was an attempt for the new American nation to position itself in a changing world.

In the early nineteenth century, Spain’s empire in America was crumbling, and beginning in 1810, Latin American countries began to seize their independence. In just two years from 1821 to 1822, ten nations broke from the Spanish empire. Spain had restricted trade with its American colonies, and the U.S. wanted to trade with these new nations. But Monroe and his advisors worried that the new nations would fall prey to other European colonial powers, severing new trade ties with the U.S. and orienting the new nations back toward Europe.

So in his 1823 annual message, Monroe warned that “the American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.” American republics would not tolerate European monarchies and their system of colonization, he wrote. Americans would “consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety.” It is “the true policy of the United States to leave the [new Latin American republics] to themselves, in hope that other powers will pursue the same course,” Monroe wrote.

In fact, with very little naval power, there wasn’t much the U.S. could do to enforce this edict until after the Civil War, when the U.S. turned its attention southward. In the late nineteenth century, U.S. corporations joined those from European countries to invest in Latin American countries. By the turn of the century, when it looked as if those countries might default on their debts, European creditors threatened armed intervention to collect.

After British, German, and Italian gunboats blockaded the ports of Venezuela in 1902, and President Theodore Roosevelt sent Marines to the Dominican Republic to manage that nation’s debt, the president announced the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. On December 6, 1904, he noted with regret that “[t]here is as yet no judicial way of enforcing a right in international law. When one nation wrongs another or wrongs many others, there is no tribunal before which the wrongdoer can be brought.” If countries allowed the wrong, he wrote, they “put a premium upon brutality and aggression.”

“Until some method is devised by which there shall be a degree of international control over offending nations,” he wrote, “powers…with most sense of international obligations and with keenest and most generous appreciation of the difference between right and wrong” must “serve the purposes of international police.” Such a role meant protecting Latin American nations from foreign military intervention; it also meant imposing U.S. force on nations whose “inability or unwillingness to do justice at home and abroad had violated the rights of the United States or had invited foreign aggression to the detriment of the entire body of American nations.”

Couched as a form of protection, the Roosevelt Corollary justified U.S. military intervention in Latin American countries, but it still recognized those nations’ right to independence.

Now Trump has added his own “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, promising not to protect Latin American countries from foreign intrusion but to “reward and encourage the region’s governments, political parties, and movements broadly aligned with our principles and strategy.” In a speech in January, Secretary of State Marco Rubio noted that the administration is “more than willing to use America’s considerable leverage to protect our interests.”

The administration says it will promote “tolerable stability in the region” by turning the U.S. military away from its European commitments and focusing instead on Latin America, where it will abandon the “failed law enforcement-only strategy of the last several decades” and instead use lethal force when necessary to secure the U.S. border and defeat drug cartels. Then, it says, the U.S. will extract resources from the region. “The Western Hemisphere is home to many strategic resources that America should partner with regional allies to develop,” the plan says, “to make neighboring countries as well as our own more prosperous.”

Walking away from the U.S.-led international systems that reinforce the principles of national self-determination and have kept the world relatively safe since World War II, the Trump administration is embracing the old idea of spheres of influence in which less powerful countries are controlled by great powers, a system in place before World War II and favored now by Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, among others.

National security specialist Anne Applebaum wrote: “The new National Security Strategy is a propaganda document, designed to be widely read. It is also a performative suicide. Hard to think of another great power ever abdicating its influence so quickly and so publicly.”

European Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow Ulrike Franke commented: “The transatlantic relationship as we know it is over. Yes, we kinda knew this. But this is now official US White House policy. Not a speech, not a statement. The West as it used to be no longer exists.”

Today, Gram Slattery and Humeyra Pamuk of Reuters reported that Pentagon officials this week told European diplomats in Washington, D.C., that the U.S. wants Europe to take over most of NATO’s defense capabilities by 2027.

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Democrats sweep the election

2025-11-06T14:17:49Z

In a clear message to the Administration in power the Democrats swept this week's election - winning just about everything. Here is Heather Cox Richardson talking about Zohran Momdani winning the mayoral race of NYC - he is a social democrat.

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New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, a member of both the Democratic Party and the Democratic Socialists of America, began his victory speech last night with a nod to Eugene V. Debs, labor organizer and Socialist candidate for president at the turn of the last century.

“The sun may have set over our city this evening, but as Eugene Debs once said: ‘I can see the dawn of a better day for humanity.’”

The 34-year-old mayor-elect’s speech went on to deliver something that was more than a victory speech. It marked a new era much like the one that had given rise to Debs himself. After more than forty years in which ordinary Americans had seen the political system being stacked against them and, over time, forgotten they had agency to change it, they had woken up.

Mamdani began by lifting up New York City’s working people, noting that “[f]or as long as we can remember,” they “have been told by the wealthy and the well-connected that power does not belong in their hands…. And yet,” he said, “over the last 12 months, you have dared to reach for something greater.”

“Tonight,” he said, “against all odds, we have grasped it. The future is in our hands.” New York, he said, had delivered “[a] mandate for change. A mandate for a new kind of politics. A mandate for a city we can afford. And a mandate for a government that delivers exactly that.”

Mamdani thanked “the next generation of New Yorkers who refuse to accept that the promise of a better future was a relic of the past.” And that was the heart of his message: that democracy belongs to ordinary people. “We will fight for you,” he said, “because we are you.”

He thanked “Yemeni bodega owners and Mexican abuelas. Senegalese taxi drivers and Uzbek nurses. Trinidadian line cooks and Ethiopian aunties.” He assured “every New Yorker in Kensington and Midwood and Hunts Point” that “this city is your city, and this democracy is yours too.”

Mamdani celebrated the hard work of democracy in his win. It was a victory not just for all those who make up New York City, he said, but also for “the more than 100,000 volunteers who built this campaign into an unstoppable force…. With every door knocked, every petition signature earned, and every hard-earned conversation, you eroded the cynicism that has come to define our politics.”

With that base of Americans engaged in the work of democracy, Mamdani welcomed a new era. “There are many who thought this day would never come, who feared that we would be condemned only to a future of less, with every election consigning us simply to more of the same,” he said. “And there are others who see politics today as too cruel for the flame of hope to still burn.”

But in New York City last night, he said, “we have answered those fears…. Hope is alive. Hope is a decision that tens of thousands of New Yorkers made day after day, volunteer shift after volunteer shift, despite attack ad after attack ad. More than a million of us stood in our churches, in gymnasiums, in community centers, as we filled in the ledger of democracy.”

“And while we cast our ballots alone, we chose hope together. Hope over tyranny. Hope over big money and small ideas. Hope over despair. We won because New Yorkers allowed themselves to hope that the impossible could be made possible. And we won because we insisted that no longer would politics be something that is done to us. Now, it is something that we do.”

Mamdani promised a government that would answer to the demands of the people. It would address the city’s cost-of-living crisis, invest in education, improve infrastructure, and cut bureaucratic waste. It would, he said, work with police officers to reduce crime while also defending community safety and demanding excellence in government.

Mamdani pushed back not just against the smears thrown his way during the campaign, but also against the deliberate division of the country that has been a staple of Republican rhetoric since 1972, when President Richard Nixon’s vice president Spiro Agnew embraced his role as the key purveyor of “positive polarization.” In its place, he called for community and solidarity.

“In this new age we make for ourselves,” Mamdani said, “we will refuse to allow those who traffic in division and hate to pit us against one another…. Here, we believe in standing up for those we love, whether you are an immigrant, a member of the trans community, one of the many Black women that Donald Trump has fired from a federal job, a single mom still waiting for the cost of groceries to go down, or anyone else with their back against the wall. Your struggle is ours, too.”

Mamdani, who is Muslim, promised to “build a City Hall that stands steadfast alongside Jewish New Yorkers and does not waver in the fight against the scourge of antisemitism. Where the more than 1 million Muslims know that they belong—not just in the five boroughs of this city, but in the halls of power.”

He called for a government of both competence and compassion. “For years,” he said, “those in City Hall have only helped those who can help them. But on January first, we will usher in a city government that helps everyone.”

Mamdani took on the problem of disinformation in modern politics, noting that “many have heard our message only through the prism of misinformation. Tens of millions of dollars have been spent to redefine reality and to convince our neighbors that this new age is something that should frighten them.” He laid that disinformation at the feet of the very wealthy in their quest to divide working Americans to make sure they retain power. “[A]s so often occurred,” he said, “the billionaire class has sought to convince those making $30 an hour that their enemies are those earning $20 an hour. They want the people to fight amongst ourselves so that we remain distracted from the work of remaking a long-broken system.”

Mamdani urged New Yorkers to embrace a “brave new course, rather than fleeing from it.” If they do, he said, “we can respond to oligarchy and authoritarianism with the strength it fears, not the appeasement it craves.”

Mamdani identified the popular momentum to defeat President Donald J. Trump, but made the point that the goal is not simply to stop Trump, but also to stop the next Trump who comes along. While Mamdani’s prescription focused on the avenues of resistance open to New York City government, he emphasized that for the president “to get to any of us,” he will have to “get through all of us.”

Mamdani called for New Yorkers to “leave mediocrity in our past,” and for Democrats to “dare to be great.” When Mamdani said, “New York, this power, it’s yours,” and told New Yorkers, “[t]his city belongs to you,” millions of Americans heard a reminder that they, too, are powerful and that the government of the United States of America belongs to them.

Mamdani won election yesterday backed by just over half the city’s voters, in an election characterized by extraordinarily high turnout. Andy Newman of the New York Times noted yesterday that in the last four New York City mayoral elections, fewer than a third of registered voters turned out. Yesterday, more than 2 million voters voted, the highest turnout for a mayoral election since 1969.

And that turnout is a key part of the story of yesterday’s Democratic wave. As Mamdani said, American voters appear, once again, to be aware of their agency in our democracy.

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Trump and Musk break up and flame each other on social media

2025-06-06T23:28:13Z

So I am going to share this email I got from Robert Reich today because he has all the posts in here from Trump and Musk as they flame each other on social media. They have broken up and it is glorious. Gloriously dramatic and in the public sphere. I figured this would happen as they are two really irrational people and this was bound to happen. They both suck and they are sucking out loud. It's so great to see. I hope they keep going and do all these things they are threatening. I want to see it really implode.

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Dear Friends - I’m trying not to be too delighted about the new reality TV show starring Elon and Donald, but the dialogue is truly extraordinary (I’m quoting them verbatim but putting their volley in what appears to be its intended order).

ELON (February 7, 2025): “I love @realDonaldTrump as much as a straight man can love another man.”

ELON (June 3, 2025, four days after leaving the Trump regime): “[Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill is a] disgusting abomination” and “shame on those who voted for it” and “In November next year, we fire all politicians who betrayed the American people”

DONALD (June 5, 2025): “You saw a man who was very happy when he stood behind the Oval desk. Even with a black eye. I said, do you want a little makeup? He said, no, I don’t think so. Which is interesting, Elon and I had a great relationship. I don’t know if we will any more.”

ELON (June 5, 2025): “Without me, Trump would have lost the election, Dems would control the House and the Republicans would be 51-49 in the Senate. … Such ingratitude.

DONALD: “Elon was ‘wearing thin,’ I asked him to leave, I took away his EV Mandate that forced everyone to buy Electric Cars that nobody else wanted (that he knew for months I was going to do!), and he just went CRAZY!”

ELON: “Such an obvious lie. So sad. … This bill was never shown to me even once and was passed in the dead of night so fast that almost no one in Congress could even read it!”

ELON (in response to a Musk supporter who calls for Trump to be impeached): “Yes.”

DONALD: “The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts. I was always surprised that Biden didn’t do it!”

ELON: “In light of the President’s statement about cancellation of my government contracts, @SpaceX will begin decommissioning its Dragon spacecraft immediately.”

DONALD: “Elon is suffering from Trump derangement syndrome.”

ELON: “Time to drop the really big bomb: @realDonald Trump is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public. Have a nice day, DJT! … Mark this post for the future. The truth will come out.”

ELON: [Reposts video of Trump partying with Epstein in 1992 with a “hmm” emoji.]

ELON [Posts a poll and asks]: “Is it time to create a new political party in America that actually represents the 80% in the middle?”

ELON: “The Trump tariffs will cause a recession in the second half of this year.”

I’ve been predicting the divorce for six months. It was inevitable. Both have massive egos and insatiable needs for money, power, and attention.

I’m not a psychoanalyst, but both had abusive fathers who humiliated them — and I suspect that this contributed to their cruelty. Both turned their rage on the U.S. government and many people dependent on it. And in just a few months they destroyed institutions that had been built over decades or more.

Now, they’re turning their rage on each other.

It’s mutual destruction. Tesla’s market value has fallen 17 percent since the outbreak of hostilities. I assume Trump’s polls are showing similar declines.

Other than their pathological narcissism, the other similarity between Musk and Trump is that both have grown far richer since Election Day by using the government to pad their pockets.

Trump’s corruption has been well documented. Musk’s corruption isn’t far behind: His net worth has increased by more than $100 billion since Election Day. A new report from the staff of Senator Elizabeth Warren shows in remarkable detail how Musk used the U.S. government for personal gain. Musk has also scraped up more government data about every American and much of the rest of the world’s people than any other person controls.

The biggest difference between them? Trump values loyalty above all other attributes. Musk values disruption above all else.

The end of their storied bromance raises two questions:

1. Does Trump’s anger over Musk’s disloyalty toward him exceed Musk’s delight in disrupting Trump’s signature goals?

2. How much will they destroy each other in the process?

What do you think?

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The cowards passed their bill in the middle of the night

2025-05-22T17:29:07Z

So they passed their "beautiful bill" and it is nothing but a monstrous joke on the American people - Here is what Heather Cox Richardson reports - she says it better.

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Just after 1:00 this morning, the House Rules Committee began its hearing on what congressional Republicans have officially named The One Big, Beautiful Bill. If passed, this measure will put Trump’s wish list into law. Although this is technically a budget bill, items in it from that wish list include a significant restriction on “the authority of federal courts to hold government officials in contempt when they violate court orders,” as Dean of Berkeley Law School Erwin Chemerinsky explained in Just Security Monday. “Without the contempt power,” he writes, “judicial orders are meaningless and can be ignored.”

Three judges are currently considering whether the administration is in contempt of court over its apparent disregard for court orders over its rendition of undocumented immigrants to third countries.

But the center of the law is indeed related to money: it is the $3.8 trillion extension of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, which disproportionately benefit the wealthy and corporations. Yesterday the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said that Americans in the lowest tenth of earners will lose money under the measure while people in the top five percent of earners will see a tax cut of $117.2 billion, more than 20% of the tax cuts in the bill.

Poorer Americans take a hit from the bill because it cuts federal healthcare and food assistance programs to partially offset the costs of the tax cuts. Cuts to Medicaid are expected to leave at least 9 million people without healthcare coverage. Cuts of about 30% to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program would be “the biggest cut in the program’s history,” Ty Jones Cox, vice president for food assistance policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, told Lorie Konish of CNBC. They would cut about $300 billion from the program through 2034. More than 40 million people, including children, seniors, and adults with disabilities, receive food assistance.

Yesterday the CBO reported that the measure will add $2.3 trillion to the deficit over ten years, and noted that when a budget adds too much to the federal deficit, it triggers cuts to Medicare (not a typo) under the Pay-As-You-Go law. The CBO explains that those cuts are limited by law to 4% but would still total about $490 billion from 2027 through 2034.

Tobias Burns of The Hill summed it up: “Republicans’ tax-and-spending cut bill will take from the poor and give to the rich, Congress’s official scoring body has found.”

Tonight, after 22 hours of debate and after a set of amendments made steeper cuts to Medicaid to woo far-right Republicans, the House Rules Committee agreed to move the bill forward to the House itself. There, Republican leadership intends to push it through as quickly as possible, originally hoping to have the vote over by 6:00 Thursday morning.

In 2025 the Republicans’ signature bill redistributes wealth from the poorest Americans to the richest. Knowing the provisions in the bill will be enormously unpopular, the Republicans have been jamming it through, often in the middle of the night, as quickly as they could.

I have not been able to stop thinking today of the significance of the timing of the Republicans’ push for this bill, and what it says about how dramatically the U.S. has changed in the past 60 years.

On May 22, 1964, in a graduation speech at the University of Michigan, President Lyndon Johnson put a name to a new vision for the United States. He called it “the Great Society” and laid out the vision of a country that did not confine itself to making money, but rather used its post–World War II prosperity to “enrich and elevate our national life.” That Great Society would demand an end to poverty and racial injustice.

But it would do more than that, he promised: it would enable every child to learn and grow, and it would create a society where people would use their leisure time to build and reflect, where cities would not just answer physical needs and the demands of commerce, but would also serve “the desire for beauty and the hunger for community.” It would protect the natural world and would be “a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.”

“But most of all,” he said, it would look forward. “[T]he Great Society is not a safe harbor, a resting place, a final objective, a finished work. It is a challenge constantly renewed, beckoning us toward a destiny where the meaning of our lives matches the marvelous products of our labor.”

Johnson proposed rebuilding the cities, protecting the countryside, and investing in education to set “every young mind…free to scan the farthest reaches of thought and imagination.” He admitted that the government did not have the answers to addressing the problems in the country “But I do promise this,” he said: “We are going to assemble the best thought and the broadest knowledge from all over the world to find those answers for America. I intend to establish working groups to prepare a series of White House conferences and meetings—on the cities, on natural beauty, on the quality of education, and on other emerging challenges. And from these meetings and from this inspiration and from these studies we will begin to set our course toward the Great Society.”

Johnson’s vision of a Great Society came from a very different place than the reworking of society launched by his predecessor, Franklin D. Roosevelt, in the 1930s. Roosevelt’s New Deal had used the federal government to address the greatest economic crisis in U.S. history, leveling the playing field between workers and employers to enable workingmen to support their families. Johnson, in contrast, was operating in a country that was enjoying record growth. Far from simply saving the country, he could afford to direct it toward greater things.

Immediately, the administration turned to addressing issues of civil rights and poverty. Under Johnson’s pressure, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibiting voting, employment, or educational discrimination based on race, religion, sex, or national origin. Johnson also won passage of the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, which created an Office of Economic Opportunity, which would oversee a whole series of antipoverty programs, and of the Food Stamp Act, which helped people who didn’t make a lot of money buy food.

When Republicans ran Arizona senator Barry Goldwater for president in 1964, calling for rolling back business regulation and civil rights to the years before the New Deal, voters who quite liked the new system gave Democrats such a strong majority in Congress that Johnson and the Democrats were able to pass 84 new laws to put the Great Society into place.

They cemented civil rights with the 1965 Voting Rights Act protecting minority voting, created jobs in Appalachia, and established job-training and community development programs. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 gave federal aid to public schools and established the Head Start program to provide comprehensive early education for low-income children. The Higher Education Act of 1965 increased federal investment in universities and provided scholarships and low-interest loans to students.

The Social Security Act of 1965 created Medicare, which provided health insurance for Americans over 65, and Medicaid, which helped cover healthcare costs for folks with limited incomes. Congress advanced the war on poverty by increasing welfare payments and subsidizing rent for low-income families.

Congress took on the rights of consumers with new protective legislation that required cigarettes and other dangerous products to carry warning labels, required products to carry labels identifying the manufacturer, and required lenders to disclose the full cost of finance charges in loans. Congress also passed legislation protecting the environment, including the Water Quality Act of 1965 that established federal standards for water quality.

But the government did not simply address poverty. Congress also spoke to Johnson’s aspirations for beauty and purpose when it created the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities. This law created both the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities to make sure the era’s emphasis on science didn’t endanger the humanities. In 1967 it would also establish the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, followed in 1969 by National Public Radio.

Opponents of this sweeping program picked up 47 seats in the House and three seats in the Senate in the 1966 midterm elections, and U.S. News and World Report wrote that “the big bash” was over. And now, exactly 61 years later, we are seeing Republican lawmakers dismantle the Great Society and replace its vision with the idea that the government must work for the wealthy few.

“For better or worse,” Johnson told the University of Michigan graduates in 1964, “your generation has been appointed by history to deal with those problems and to lead America toward a new age. You have the chance never before afforded to any people in any age. You can help build a society where the demands of morality, and the needs of the spirit, can be realized in the life of the Nation.

“So, will you join in the battle to give every citizen the full equality which God enjoins and the law requires, whatever his belief, or race, or the color of his skin?” he asked.

“Will you join in the battle to give every citizen an escape from the crushing weight of poverty?...”

“There are those timid souls who say this battle cannot be won; that we are condemned to a soulless wealth. I do not agree. We have the power to shape the civilization that we want. But we need your will, your labor, your hearts, if we are to build that kind of society.”

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Al Gore - Climate Week - Last Week

2025-04-29T03:18:27Z

It is abundantly clear, after only three months and one day, that the new Trump administration is attempting to do everything it possibly can to try to halt the transition to a clean energy future and a deep reduction in the burning of fossil fuels. The climate crisis is a fossil fuel crisis, basically 80% of it.

Many of you here today have likely felt the chilling effect of the policies and the rhetoric coming from Washington, D.C. and what the effect has been on businesses and investors and far beyond.

The Dow Jones, of course, today fell another thousand points and since Donald Trump’s inauguration it’s gone down six thousand points. But while the most visible impacts of what the new administration is doing may be in the market for stocks and bonds, that’s not the only thing that he has caused to crash.

The trust market has crashed.

The market for democracy has taken a major hit.

Hope is being arbitraged in the growing market for fear.

Truth has been devalued and confidence in U.S. leadership around the world has plummeted.

We are facing a national emergency for our democracy and a global emergency for our climate system.

We have to deal with the democracy crisis in order to solve the climate crisis.

The scale and scope of the ongoing attacks on liberty are literally unprecedented. With that in mind, I want to note before I use what is not a precedent, I understand very well why it is wrong to compare Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich to any other movement. It was uniquely evil, full stop. I get it.

But there are important lessons from the history of that emergent evil, and here is one that I regard as essential.

In the immediate aftermath of World War II, a small group of philosophers who had escaped Hitler’s murderous regime returned to Germany and performed a kind of moral autopsy on the Third Reich. The most famous of the so-called Frankfurt School of Philosophers was a man named Jurgen Habermas – best known, I would say. But it was Habermas’ mentor, Theodor Adorno, who wrote that the first step of that nation’s descent into Hell was, and I quote, “the conversion of all questions of truth into questions of power.” He described how the Nazis, and I quote again, “attacked the very heart of the distinction between true and false.”

The Trump administration is insisting on trying to create their own preferred version of reality. They say Ukraine attacked Russia instead of the other way around, and expect us to believe it! At home, they attack heroes who have defended our nation in war and against cyberattacks as traitors.

They say the climate crisis is a “hoax” invented by the Chinese to destroy American manufacturing.

They say coal is clean.

They say wind turbines cause cancer.

They say sea level rise just creates more beachfront property.

Their allies in the oligarchic backlash to climate action argue that those who want to stop using the sky as an open sewer, for God’s sake, need to be more “realistic” and acquiesce to the huge increases in the burning of more and more fossil fuels (which is what they’re pushing), even though that is the principal cause of the climate crisis.

You may not be surprised to learn that this propagandistic notion of “climate realism” is one that the fossil fuel industry has peddled for years.

The CEO of the largest oil company in the world, Saudi Aramco has said “We should abandon the fantasy of phasing out oil and gas.”

His colleague, Exxon CEO Darren Woods, has claimed that “the world needs to get real. … The problem is not oil and gas. It’s emissions.”

The American Petroleum Institute says that we need “a more realistic energy approach” – one that, you guessed it, includes buying and burning even more oil and gas.

So, allow me to put this question to all of you: What exactly is it that they want us to be realistic about?

Their twisted version of “realism” is colliding with the reality that humanity is now confronting.

The accumulated global warming pollution (because these molecules linger there on average about 100 years and it builds up over time), it’s trapping as much extra heat now every single day as would be released by the explosion of 750,000 first generation atomic bombs blowing up on the Earth every single day!

Is it realistic to let that continue?

Is it realistic to think that if we opt out of taking action to reduce greenhouse gas pollution, we’ll be able to just wish it away and continue with business as usual? Well, Mother Nature makes a pretty good case against that argument. Every night on the TV news is like a nature walk through the Book of Revelation.

Is it realistic, for example, to continue stoking the risk of wildfire in California, after what has already happened to so many communities in Northern California? And just look at the devastation caused by the Los Angeles wildfires in January.

Is it realistic to tell homeowners around the world that the global housing market is expected to suffer a $25 trillion loss in the next 25 years? Fifteen percent of all the residential housing stock in the world if we do not change what we’re doing? Is that realistic in their view?

Is it realistic to continue quietly accepting 8.7 million deaths every single year from breathing in the particulate co-pollution that also comes from the burning of fossil fuels? That is the number of people who are already being killed. According to health experts, it is, and I quote, “the leading contributor to the global disease burden.” When you’re burning coal, oil and gas, it puts the heat trapping pollution up there and it puts the particulate and PM 2.5 pollution into the lungs of people downwind from where the facilities are burning the fossil fuels.

Is it realistic, in their view, for governments to manage 1 billion climate migrants crossing international borders in the balance of this century? That’s how many the Lancet Commission estimates will be crossing borders in the decades to come, if we continue driving temperatures and humidity higher and making the physiologically unlivable regions of the world vastly larger by continuing to put 175 million tons of man-made heat-trapping pollution into that thin shell of the troposphere surrounding the planet. You know what that blue line looks like, that thin blue shell is blue because that’s where the oxygen is. And it’s so thin, if you could drive a car straight up in the air at highway speeds, you’d get to the top of that blue line in five to seven minutes.

That’s what we’re using as an open sewer. Is that realistic? I don’t think it is.

We’ve already seen, by the way, how populist authoritarian leaders have used migrants as scapegoats and have fanned the fires of xenophobia to fuel their own rise to power. And power-seeking is what this is all about. Our Constitution, written by our founders, is intended to protect us against a threat identical to Donald Trump: someone who seeks power at all costs to get more power. Imagine what the demagogues would do as we continued toward a billion migrants crossing international borders. We could face a grave threat to our capacity for self-governance.

Is it “realistic” to continue inflicting the financial toll that the climate crisis is taking on the global economy? According to Deloitte, climate inaction will cost the economy $178 trillion over the next half century. And is it realistic to miss out on the economic opportunity that we could seize by going toward net-zero? Over that same period, climate action would increase the size of the global economy by $43 trillion.

A question with particular relevance in nearby Silicon Valley: is it realistic for the semiconductor industry to experience losses of up to 35% of annual revenues due to supply chain disruptions caused by the stronger and more severe cyclonic storms and supercell storms?

Is it realistic to continue with a system of financing that leaves the entire continent of Africa completely out? Right now, the entire continent of Africa, fastest-growing population in the world, has fewer solar panels installed than the single state of Florida in the United States of America. That’s a disgrace to the makeup of our financial system. But Africa has three times as many oil and gas pipelines under construction and preparing for construction to begin than all of North America. It is ridiculous to allow this system to continue as it is. How is that realistic? Or fair? Or just?

Is it realistic for us, all of us here, to consign our children and grandchildren to what scientists warn us would be Hell on Earth in order to conserve the profits of the fossil fuel industry? The predictions of the scientists 50 years ago have turned out to be spot on correct. Their predictions just a few decades ago have turned out to be exactly right. Should not that cause us to listen more carefully to what they’re warning us will happen if we do not sharply and quickly reduce the emissions from burning fossil fuels?

Is that unrealistic to listen to a proven source of advice?

This newfound so-called climate realism is nothing more than climate denial in disguise. It is an attempt to pretend there is no problem and to ignore the reality that is right in front of our faces.

What’s never present in any of this so-called “realism” is any credible challenge whatsoever to the conclusions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC. They never address that. They just wish it away and say, “Oh it’s unrealistic to actually do anything about it.”

I wish we could wish it away, but we cannot.

The hard reality is that the fossil fuel industry has grown desperate for more capital. They’re seeing their two largest markets wither away: electricity generation, number one and transportation, number two. They’ve been losing their share of investment in the energy market to renewables and so they’re panicked.

That explains why they are so aggressively using their captive policymakers to block meaningful solutions. Of course, as you know, they’re way better at capturing politicians than they are at capturing emissions. They’ve grown very skillful at that.

They are the wealthiest and most powerful industry lobby in the history of the world. They make the East India Company look like a popcorn vendor. They are the effective global hegemon.

They have used their war chests and their legacy network of political and economic power to block any reductions of fossil fuel burning emissions – whether at the international conferences that we call the COPs, the Conference of Parties in the UN process, or at the global negotiations for a plastic treaty. They blocked anything there, too.

Why? They’re losing the first market of electricity generation because 93% of all the new electricity generation installed worldwide last year was solar and wind. They’re losing that market steadily. EVs are rising dramatically. They say they’ve slowed down. Well, we just got the new figures – an 18% increase year-on-year here in the United States. In many countries much faster than that.

And so, their third market – they’re telling Wall Street that they’re going to make up all of the expected lost revenue in their first two markets by tripling the production of plastics over the next 35 years.

Well, we might have a word to say about that. Is that realistic? Because we’ve already found – the scientists say – that some seabirds are manifesting symptoms like Alzheimer’s disease from the plastic particles in their brains and they found that it crosses the blood-brain barrier in humans, and the size of the amount has doubled just in the last decade.

Do we really want to continue that?

It’s crazy, but they are blocking action at both of these international forums and they’re blocking action in the deliberations of nation-states, even in states and provinces, and even at the local level. Anywhere in the world where there is an effort to pass legislation or regulations that reduces the burning of fossil fuels, they are there with their money, with their lobbyists, with their captive politicians, blocking it as best they can.

And the solution is what you’re doing here at Climate Week here in San Francisco. We have got to rise up and change this situation.

That’s also why they are ballyhooing ridiculously expensive and hilariously impractical technologies like building giant mechanical vacuuming machines to suck it back out of the atmosphere after they put it up there. Could that someday be a realistic part of the solution? Perhaps, perhaps. But not now! Not even close.

They use it as a bright, shiny object to distract attention and say, ‘see this, see this, this could be so miraculous, we don’t have to stop burning fossil fuels at all! We can actually continue to increase the burning of fossil fuels because look at this bright, shiny object. We’ve got this vacuuming machine.’

Well, CO2 is 0.035% of the molecules in the air. You’re gonna use an energy-intensive, ridiculous, expensive process to filter through the other 99.965% of the molecules? It’s absolutely preposterous.

In reality, the Sustainability Revolution is powering more and more of our global economy. It has the scale and impact of the Industrial Revolution and is moving at the pace of the Digital Revolution.

By the way, in Texas, which used to have a free market for energy, over 90% of all their new electricity generation last year was solar and wind. And, you know, they’ve got captured politicians there. They’re pushing legislation in Texas to legally require any developers of solar and wind to spend time and money developing more oil and gas before they’re given permission to develop renewables.

That’s not realism, that’s pathetic.

That is a sign of desperation.

They don’t trust the free market. They’re just relying more and more on the politicians who will jump when they tell them jump and ask how high when they tell them to jump again.

So, around the world, the market is transforming. Since the Paris Agreement, the cost of solar has dropped 76%. The cost of wind is down 66%. Utility-scale batteries are down 87%.

In 2004, when Generation was founded, it took a full year for the world to install one gigawatt of solar power. Now it takes one day to install one gigawatt of solar power.

And it’s not just renewables. We’re seeing the Sustainability Revolution rapidly take hold across the rest of the global economy from transportation, to regenerative agriculture, to circular manufacturing, and so much more.

So, as we gather here to kick off Climate Week and as we gather on the eve of Earth Day, we have to treat this moment as a call to action.

So, I’m here not only to respond to the invitation for which I’m grateful…. I’m here to recruit you.

Many of you are already working on this, but those of you who are not, I’m here to recruit you. We need you. This is the time and this is a break glass moment. This is an all hands on deck moment.

Now is the time to look at every aspect of your businesses, your investments, and your civic engagement to determine whether or not you can contribute even more to solving the climate crisis.

It’s easy to adopt our own versions of climate realism to say that the challenge is too great. Some people worry about that. To say that our individual role is too small to have an impact. Some use that as an excuse: that if the government won’t act, what can any of us do about it?

Well, just as the climate crisis does not recognize borders between countries, it does not either recognize delineations between the duty of government and businesses and all significant participants in the global economy.

Climate change is already impacting your life and work and will more so through disrupted supply chains, increased liability, changes in consumer demand, and more.

This is a moment when we all have to mobilize to defend our country. And remember the antidote to climate despair is climate action. It was in this city in the 1960s that Joan Baez first said that the antidote to despair is action. And we need to remember that now.

And during a time of when people were tempted to despair in the struggle for civil rights in this country, Martin Luther King said something about overcoming the forces that try to discourage you and halt progress. He said this: “If you can’t fly, run. If you can’t run, walk. If you can’t walk, crawl. But by all means, keep moving.”

And that’s where we are.

Every one of the morally based movements in the past had periods when advocates felt despair. But when the central choice was revealed as a choice between right and wrong, then the outcome at a very deep level became foreordained.

Because of the way Pope Francis reminded us we have been created as God’s children.

We love our families.

We are devoted to our communities.

We have to protect our future.

And if you doubt for one moment ever that we as human beings have the capacity to muster sufficient political will to solve this crisis, just remember that political will is itself a renewable resource.

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Thinking of Khylea

2025-04-24T04:06:13Z

She passed away a few years ago tomorrow — she was a fandom person and a really good friend of mine. Not sure many people remember her here now. She was great and I miss her. Truly awesome person. Very fun. Cancer sucks.

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People are disappearing - it's real fascism here in the USA

2025-04-15T16:33:15Z

From Heather Cox Richardson ---- April 14, 2025

Today, U.S. president Donald J. Trump met in the Oval Office with the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, along with a number of Cabinet members and White House staff, who answered questions for the press. The meeting appeared to be as staged as Trump’s February meeting with Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky, designed to send a message. At the meeting, Trump and Bukele, who is clearly doing Trump’s bidding, announced they would not bring Kilmar Abrego Garcia home, defying the U.S. Supreme Court.

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.

At the meeting, it was clear that Trump’s team has cooked up a plan to leave Abrego Garcia without legal recourse to his freedom, a plan that looks much like Trump’s past abuses of the legal system. The White House says the U.S. has no jurisdiction over El Salvador, while Bukele says he has no authority to release a “terrorist” into the U.S. (Abrego Garcia maintains a full-time job, is married to a U.S. citizen, has three children, and has never been charged or convicted of anything.) No one can make Trump arrange for Abrego Garcia’s release, the administration says, because the Constitution gives the president control over foreign affairs.

Marcy Wheeler of Empty Wheel noted that “all the people who should be submitting sworn declarations before [U.S. District Court] Judge Paula Xinis made comments not burdened by oaths or the risk of contempt, rehearsed comments for the cameras.” They falsely claimed that a court had ruled Abrego Garcia was a terrorist, and insisted the whole case was about the president’s power to control foreign affairs.

As NPR’s Steven Inskeep put it: “If I understand this correctly, the US president has launched a trade war against the world, believes he can force the EU and China to meet his terms, is determined to annex Canada and Greenland, but is powerless before the sovereign might of El Salvador. Is that it?”

On April 6, Judge Xinis wrote that “there were no legal grounds whatsoever for [Abrego Garcia’s] arrest, detention, or removal.… Rather, his detention appears wholly lawless.” It is “a clear constitutional violation.” The Supreme Court agreed with Xinis that Abrego Garcia had been illegally removed from the U.S. and must be returned, but warned the judge to be careful of the president’s power over foreign affairs.

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.”

He also noted that when the administration filed its required declaration about Abrego Garcia’s case today, it included a link to the Oval Office meeting, thus submitting Miller’s lies about its decision directly to the Supreme Court. Geidner wished the administration's lawyers: “Good luck there…!”

Legal analyst Harry Litman of Talking Feds wrote: “What we all just witnessed had all the earmarks of a criminal conspiracy to deprive Abrego-Garcia of his constitutional rights, as well as an impeachable offense. The fraud scheme was a phony agreement engineered by the US to have Bukele say he lacks power to return Abrego Garcia and he won't do it.”

As Adam Serwer wrote today in The Atlantic, The “rhetorical game the administration is playing, where it pretends it lacks the power to ask for Abrego Garcia to be returned while Bukele pretends he doesn’t have the power to return him, is an expression of obvious contempt for the Supreme Court—and for the rule of law.”

Serwer notes that if the administration actually thought there was enough evidence to convict these men, it could have let the U.S. legal process play out. But Geidner of Law Dork noted that Trump’s declaration this morning that he wanted to deport “homegrown criminals” suggests that the plan all along has been to be able to get rid of U.S. citizens by creating a “Schroedinger’s box” where anyone can be sent but where once they are there the U.S. cannot get them back because they are “in the custody of a foreign sovereign.”

“If they can get Abrego Garcia out of the box,” Geidner writes, “the plan does not work.”

On August 12, 2024, in a discussion on billionaire Elon Musk’s X of what Trump insisted were caravans coming across the southern border of the U.S., Trump told Musk that other countries were doing something “brilliant” by sending streams of people out of their country. “You know the caravans are coming in and…who’s doing this are the heads of the countries. And you would be doing it and so would I, and everyone would say ‘oh what a terrible thing to say.’”

He continued: “The fact is, it’s brilliant for them because they're taking all of their bad people, really bad people and—I hate to say this—the reason the numbers are much bigger than you would think is they’re also taking their nonproductive people. Now these aren’t people that will kill you…but these are people that are nonproductive. They are just not productive, I mean, for whatever reason. They’re not workers or they don’t want to work, or whatever, and these countries are getting rid of nonproductive people in the caravans…and they’re also getting rid of their murderers and their drug dealers and the people that are really brutal people….”

Scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder explained the larger picture: “On the White House’s theory, if they abduct you, get you on a helicopter, get to international waters, shoot you in the head, and drop your corpse into the ocean, that is legal, because it is the conduct of foreign affairs.” He compared it to the Nazis’ practice of pushing Jews into statelessness because “[i]t is easier to move people away from law than it is to move law away from people. Almost all of the killing took place in artificially created stateless zones.”

Yesterday, Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) requested a meeting with Bukele today “to discuss the illegal detention of my constituent, Kilmar Abrego Garcia.” He said that he would travel to El Salvador this week if Abrego Garcia “is not home by midweek.”

Judge Xinis has set the next hearing in Abrego Garcia’s case for tomorrow, April 15, at 4:00 p.m.

Today, Dauphin County Magisterial District Judge Dale Klein denied bail for Cody Balmer, the 38-year-old man charged in connection with the arson attack on the home of Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro on April 13, saying he is a danger to the community. Balmer allegedly set alight beer bottles full of gasoline in the same room in the governor's mansion where, just hours before, the family had held a Passover meal. Shapiro and his wife Lori, their four children, and another family were asleep in the house. Emergency personnel rescued the people and pets, but the historic mansion sustained significant damage.

Balmer said he has a high-school education. He is currently unemployed, does not have any income or savings, and has been living with his parents. Balmer was charged with assault in 2023, allegedly punching both his wife (from whom he is now separated) and their 13-year-old son in the face during an argument. He was due in court this week. His mother says he has mental health issues.

Balmer said he “harbor[ed] hatred” for Governor Shapiro and would have beaten him with a hammer if he had found him.

Governor Shapiro called it “an attack not just on our family, but on the entire Commonwealth of Pennsylvania…. This type of violence is not okay. This kind of violence is becoming far too common in our society. And I don’t give a damn if it’s coming from one particular side or the other, directed at one particular party or another, or one particular person or another. It is not okay and it has to stop. We have to be better than this. We have a responsibility to all be better.”

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BREAKING: U.S. STOCK MARKET IN FREE FALL THIS MORNIN

2025-04-07T13:52:46Z

Here we go!

Aaron Parnas reports -

In a stunning and chaotic start to the trading week, U.S. markets have entered a steep and sudden free fall this morning, sending shockwaves across Wall Street and raising concerns that trading may be halted if losses accelerate further.

Just minutes after the opening bell, the S&P 500 dropped 3.36%, the Dow Jones Industrial Average shed 3.11%, and the NASDAQ cratered by 3.90%. Market sentiment is in a tailspin, and analysts are already bracing for a potential triggering of the circuit breaker mechanism — a rare event designed to curb panic selling.

Circuit breakers, established after the 1987 market crash, are triggered when the S&P 500 falls 7% or more from the previous day's close. If that happens, trading is paused for 15 minutes to give the market a chance to stabilize. If the bleeding continues, additional thresholds at 13% and 20% could trigger further halts or even a market-wide shutdown for the rest of the day.

If the pace of decline continues at this rate, we may see trading halted within the next several hours. Financial institutions and analysts across the board are scrambling to assess exposure and risk. Social media is also flooded with speculation and fear, further amplifying the sense of crisis.

Buckle in!

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5 Million People Marched Against Trump Yesterday!!!

2025-04-06T22:14:56Z

So it was amazing - 5 million people in the United States and globally - marched in protest of the Trump Administration yesterday. Glorious! That says something - that shows something for sure. We have a strong resistance to this oligarchy and his craziness. Yes! Truly amazing. Non violent protest. Yes. It totally matters and I am sure Trump is fearful about it. He should be - resistance is mounting. Corey Booker did his thing in the Senate Chamber and now this - we are not rolling over. Not at all. And more economic resistance happening - Tesla stocks are on the decline and people are trading in their Teslas and there are ongoing protests at Tesla dealerships. Elon Musk - going down. I want them all to go down.

The world is going to respond to their ridiculously stupid tariff plan and I hope they do. I mean - they put tariffs on an uninhabited island full of penguins - seriously. I am not making that up. These have to be idiots running the government right now.

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article from Bryan Tyler Cohen

Petitioning the King

Trump believes crashing the economy is worth it if he can extract what he needs from the rest of the world.

It’s clear by now that Trump’s imposition of tariffs has been a disaster. The market has crashed, wiping away all gains since he took office, companies are laying off employees by the hundreds, fears of a recession are reaching a fever pitch, and far from pressuring other countries into coming to the negotiating table, they’re going around the United States and entering into new trade agreements without us. New reporting suggests that Japan and South Korea are coordinating with China to respond to our tariffs. How’s that for 4D chess? At a time when American superiority is threatened by China, Trump is driving other countries into the arms of China.

And so given how disastrous these tariffs are on the economy, and given how potent the issue of high costs are (Trump himself admitted that he won the 2024 election as a result of high costs), it would lend itself to reason that he would want to avoid this like the plague. Even someone like Trump (who can’t bring himself to admit fault because he views any capitulation as a sign of weakness) can see how disastrous this is and should want to cut his losses.

Which raises the question: why plow ahead?

The answer is that Trump doesn’t care, because what he stands to gain is far greater than what he stands to lose. He wants blanket tariffs on every country in hopes that, as a condition for removing them, the countries each pledge to give him something. And that “something” usually benefits him personally.

Think about how he’s employed this strategy before. Take, for example, the law firms. He imposes blanket punishments in the form of executive orders, and then one by one the firms fold. And that includes giving him between $40 and $100 million in pro bono legal services, not to mention a tacit understanding that they’re unlikely to litigate against him. In other words, he owns them. And now his biggest obstacle - the courts - just got a little easier for him.

Consider the news networks that have capitulated. ABC News settled a frivolous defamation lawsuit for $15 million. CBS seems likely to settle in Trump’s $20 million defamation suit against 60 Minutes. Do you honestly believe that those networks are going to be as hostile to Trump after paying him millions? Me neither.

Consider the tech billionaires. Mark Zuckerberg immediately revamped Meta’s content moderation policies and moved its fact checking operation from California to the totally, definitely more neutral state of Texas. Jeff Bezos neutered the Washington Post and spent $40 million on a Melania Trump documentary that I’m sure tens of people enjoyed. They’ve created a much more favorable environment for the president; he knows it and so do they.

Trump has employed the same strategy over and over. He preemptively targets the entities or people who pose a threat to him, knowing that the only way for them to crawl out of that hole is if they not only capitulate, but also pledge some degree of loyalty. It’s already worked with law firms and media companies and tech billionaires and universities. He wants them to come and beg, knowing full well that whatever they offer to get back into his good graces will ultimately benefit him. Only now, it’s not just getting some university to capitulate, it’s getting a world leader to capitulate on behalf of an entire country. That’s valuable for him; by his estimation, certainly enough to offset the pain he’s causing. After all, the pain doesn’t impact him, so ultimately, he’s not particularly concerned. He doesn’t need to pull from his 401k. He doesn’t have to worry about the impacts of tariffs on housing or rent or groceries or cars or electronics or food. He is a billionaire who doesn’t pay for anything. Americans suffering is a price that he’s willing to have us pay.

So Trump will impose these tariffs and sit back and wait for other world leaders to petition the king and grovel with their offerings that will ultimately expand his power and influence, all the while we are the collateral damage. We all get thrown under the bus; 350 million people suffer so that one man can benefit.

Now comes the hopeful part: we’re wise to his plan.

There is a reason that the Trump administration suddenly rescinded the nomination of Elise Stefanik to be UN ambassador, fearing Republicans would lose a seat in a district that Trump won by 21 points in November. And they saw what happened in Wisconsin, where Trump-endorsed conservative candidate Brad Schimel lost by 10 points in a 50-50 state. And they saw what happened in Florida, where even though Democrats lost a pair of special elections, the races saw an average 16-point swing to the left. And on Saturday, they saw millions of Americans take to the streets to protest their overreach. This matters because this administration derives its power from the perception that it is untouchable and can act with impunity. The fact that Americans are standing up, turning out, and fighting back threatens their entire power structure. I know it doesn’t feel like we have much to celebrate, but I want to be clear: the energy, the momentum, and the enthusiasm is on one side right now, and it’s not Donald Trump’s.

as seen on Substack.

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Live from Dumb-fuckistan!

2025-04-04T01:13:44Z

I could not make this up if I tried — The Donald and his moronic tariffs. We are in a nose dive here in the USA. Totally going down — prices are going to go way up and this is just a shit show. The Magats voted for this! It is unbelievable how stupid people can be! Here is an article from CNN on the tariffs and this is just the beginning — I am not making this up!

THIS IS PRETTY BAD

Serious question. What are we, like, doing?

Markets are in a tailspin. Business leaders are panicking. Consumers, if they’re reading the news, are rightly confused or scared or both. Economists are squinting at the Trump administration’s tariff agenda and trying to make it, somehow, make sense.

Here’s a tip for anyone else who finds themselves gobsmacked: Stop trying to make it make sense.

Looking for logic? You won’t find it. As we’ve written before, President Donald Trump’s stated goals for his tariff agenda are full of contradictions. Even the math the administration used to calculate “reciprocal” tariffs on trading partners is more performance art than, well, math (more on that in a moment).

America’s economy is the envy of the world. Yet Trump believes it’s the victim of other nations’ unfair trade practices. Tariffs are his catch-all theory of how to level the playing field and revive American manufacturing. He is unshakable on that — even if it means pushing the US economy into a recession.

He claims tariffs will hurt foreign countries, and he’s not wrong. But he has so far shrugged at the fact that tariffs will needlessly punish Americans, too.

For no reason at all, the US government is now going to force Americans to pay more for things that we simply cannot produce domestically. Like, coffee. Certain wines. Rare earth minerals that are essential to the tech industry. Countless other things.

And perhaps most quixotically, Trump seems to believe we can undo decades of globalization and bring back the manufacturing jobs we already shipped overseas. (Even if we could “reshore” those industries, it would take many, many years.)

“There is no strategy,” said Mary E. Lovely, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute, during a Brookings Institution event Thursday. “Are we supposed to knit our own knickers?”

Lovely added: “When people say they want manufacturing in the US, they’re saying high-tech, sustainable jobs” — not the lower-skilled and labor-intensive jobs that have migrated to developing economies.

“I think a great exercise is everybody go home, and when you’re dressing tonight for bed, look at where your clothes are made,” Lovely said. “All of these countries have large deficits, and that gives them the high ‘reciprocal’ tariffs.”

Bad Math

Lovely and others have made the point that if you wanted to balance out some trade deficits, there are strategic ways to do it. Maybe you’d assemble a team of leading economists and policy experts and take a scalpel to each trade agreement and figure out where you have leverage.

But Trump’s government did not do painstaking dollar-for-dollar studies to try to nail down an accurate rate for each trading partner.

Instead, it took a country’s trade deficit, divided it by its exports to the United States, then divided that number by two. That’s it.

A lot of analysts were shocked by that sledgehammer approach.

“If a ninth grader in high school presented this tariff chart to a teacher in a basic economics class, the teacher would laugh and say ‘sit down and work on the assignment,’” Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives wrote in a note on Thursday.

Or, as Lovely put it: “It’s like going to your doctor, finding out you have cancer, and the basis for your medication is your weight divided by your age.”

Here’s my favorite part, though: When economist and author James Surowiecki figured out the convoluted formula, the White House tried to say he was wrong and released a scary-looking equation with Greek letters to try to illustrate the very sophisticated math they used to calculate this monumental change to global economic policy.

Turns out, that equation worked out to exactly what Surowiecki said it was, just dressed up with symbols that make it look more complicated — and to intimidate people who question what they’re doing, as economist Brendan Duke told me.

That is not economic policy — it is Russian roulette in an economic policy costume.

Our Collective “Oh sh—” Moment

Since the president’s Orwellian “Liberation Day” speech, the global response hasn’t exactly been celebratory.

Stocks began tumbling almost immediately, shedding trillions of dollars in market value overnight. All three major US indexes posted their biggest single-day drop since 2020.
Global leaders expressed shock; and some, including allies like France and Canada, promised to retaliate.
Oil fell more than 6%.
Stellantis, the carmaker behind Jeep and Chrysler, is already laying off 900 American workers and pausing production at some of its Canadian and Mexican plants, citing the impact of tariffs.

When the CEO of RH (formerly Restoration Hardware) saw his company’s stock fall 40% during an earnings call Wednesday evening, shortly after Trump’s speech, he uttered two words that just about summed up the thoughts of every other executive that day: “Oh, sh—.”

Shares of multinational companies like Nike and Apple were hit hard, as were retailers like Five Below and Dollar Tree, which rely heavily on cheap imports from Asia.

“This is the policymaking equivalent of a suicide bomber,” Michael Block, market strategist at Third Seven Capital, told my colleague Matt Egan.

“They’re ignoring every rule of classic micro and macroeconomics.”

So that’s the word on the Street, the institution that Trump has previously viewed as a real-time report card on his presidency.

On Thursday, though, Trump shrugged off the market reaction, telling reporters: “I think it’s going very well.”

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Boycott here in the USA February 28 2025

2025-02-27T21:18:17Z

From Robert Reich

Friends,

A grassroots movement is calling on all Americans to abstain from shopping with major retailers — including Amazon — tomorrow, February 28, as part of an “economic blackout.”

The purpose is to send a clear message: We have the power. We don’t have to accept corporate monopolies. We don’t have to live with corporate money corrupting our politics.

We don’t have to accept more tax cuts for billionaires. We don’t have to pay more of our hard-earned cash to Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg or the other billionaire oligarchs.

We don’t have to reward corporations that have abandoned their DEI policies to align themselves with Trump’s racist, homophobic, misogynistic agenda.

We have choices.

Most Americans are struggling to keep up. Most live from paycheck to paycheck. Most can barely afford housing costs, food prices, and pharmaceuticals — kept high by monopolies, and fueled by private equity.

If politicians won’t hear the voices of average Americans who are being shafted by corporate America, we have to deliver our message to corporate America directly.

From midnight tonight to midnight Friday night, please: No Amazon, no Walmart, no Best Buy, no Target, no Disney, no Google. Don’t spend on fast food, major retailers, or gas.

Avoid using credit or debit cards to make nonessential purchases.

Buy essentials such as medicine, food, and emergency supplies, of course, but make those purchases at small, local businesses.

(Tomorrow’s economic blackout is an initiative of The People’s Union USA, which describes itself as a “grassroots movement dedicated to economic resistance, government accountability, and corporate reform.”)

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Here in the USA

2025-02-18T20:04:50Z

So here in the USA - it is a dumpster fire of a situation - that is my perspective. Our government is being raided by the oligarchy and it is pretty much a shitshow. People voted for this but I don't think they knew it would be this bad. There were protests all over the country for "Not My President's Day" but we need more than that - we need a revolution. Real people are going to be hurt by this situation. I am not optimistic. I think it will take a while for the MAGA voters to figure it out - when they start hurting they will figure it out. Their food stamps are already being cut - once they come for their social security - that's when it will get real.

Here is some stuff from Robert Reich.

------------paste

Musk and his associates have not only burrowed into the Treasury’s payments system; they are now burrowing into the Internal Revenue Service and the Social Security Administration.

They are gaining access to the most sensitive personal information about Americans available anywhere, along with computer codes capable of altering that information and those systems. The Muskrats have been able to turn off government funding without Congress’s consent, even in the face of federal court orders to turn the funding back on.

This is blatantly illegal yet Congress remains silent.

Congress is supine because Republicans are in charge, and Musk has also become Trump’s hatchet man — threatening Republican members of Congress if they deviate from Trump.

Iowa’s Republican Senator Joni Ernst was firmly set against Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense until Musk hinted that he’d finance a primary challenger to Ernst, who’s up for reelection next year. Presto: Ernst supported Hegseth.

Indiana’s Republican Senator Todd Young expressed concern about the nomination of Tulsi Gabbard to be director of national intelligence until Musk tweeted against him. A besieged Young spoke with JD Vance, who arranged a call with Musk. Presto: Young announced he would back Gabbard.

Musk warned Republican lawmakers in December that he was compiling a “naughty list” of members who buck Trump’s agenda. He also pledged shortly after Election Day that his political action committee would “play a significant role in primaries” next year.

A Republican senator told The Hill that Musk’s wealth makes primary threats “a bigger deal.”

Musk’s financial and political power have been enough to intimidate even the mainstream media. An advertisement set to run in The Washington Post yesterday calling for Musk to be fired from his role in government was abruptly canceled, according to Common Cause, one of the groups that had ordered the ad. When asked why the Post had pulled the ad, the Post said it was not at liberty to give a reason.

When and if America ever wrests back control of our government, we must remember this: The combination of great wealth and great power — epitomized by Elon Musk — is destroying American democracy.

Oligarchy is the enemy of democracy.

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Our current form of government here in the United States

2025-01-23T05:42:06Z

kak·i·sto·cra·cy
/kakəˈstäkrəsē/
noun
government by the least suitable or competent citizens of a state.
"the danger is that this will reduce us to kakistocracy"
a state or society governed by its least suitable or competent citizens.
plural noun: kakistocracies
"the modern regime is at once a plutocracy and a kakistocracy"

The United States should be called Kakistan from now on.

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Hanukkah 2024 - 8th night!

2025-01-02T02:05:48Z

And here it is in all its glory - the menorah on the final night - blazing for all to see!

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