As requested by Sarah’s Mum…I wondered that the other one was getting too fearsome in size as well.
oh right the month day
Neophyte said:
As requested by Sarah’s Mum…I wondered that the other one was getting too fearsome in size as well.
ta.
DOGE looks to finagle a building the federal government doesn’t own
who knew this was possible?
From Fear and Loathing: Closer to the Edge’s Facebook page…
SOMETHING ISN’T RIGHT
On March 31, 2025, one of the most trusted historians in America watched her own words disappear from the internet. Heather Cox Richardson confirmed that two of her Facebook posts were no longer visible — not just to her followers, but to herself and her husband.
“Hi Folks: my two posts from last night have disappeared for many of us, including me and Buddy, but appear to be here for others. I’m trying to figure it out but if anyone has any ideas, do let me know in the comments. Eager to see if this post shows up.”
Then, in a follow-up:
“OK, this is now gone for me, as well.”
Not flagged. Not disputed. Not taken down with explanation. Just gone — silently, and without warning. This is what erasure looks like in the age of algorithmic control.
USERS CONFIRM THE SILENCE
Across the platform, her readers confirmed what she feared: the posts were no longer on her wall:
“Seeing this but no other posts, not even on your wall.”
“No posts after March 26. Gone.”
“I can’t see anything on her page past March 26.”
The rhythm of her voice — so consistent, so reliable — had been broken. Not by choice. Not by glitch. By force.
Heather Cox Richardson’s reply?
“Oh, this is SO not good….”
THE POSTS THAT VANISHED
One of the missing posts dealt with allegations that senior members of Donald Trump’s administration had discussed military strikes on Yemen over unsecured channels. It was already spreading fast — more than 130,000 likes, 60,000 shares — before it disappeared.
That matters. Because this is not a celebrity being muted. This is a historian documenting power. And that history — our history — is now being selectively hidden.
This isn’t content moderation. This is strategic memory loss.
HER MESSAGE: GET OFF FACEBOOK
Richardson, sounding the alarm as best she could, urged readers to escape the platform altogether:
“Please remember you can get these letters from Substack at Letters from an American, and can sign up to get them by email there, too. No paywall, and all free.”
Her Substack:
THIS IS NOT A DRILL
If Facebook can make the voice of a presidential historian vanish — not just from your feed, but from her own timeline — then what else is being filtered? What else is being buried? What else are we being kept from seeing?
This isn’t about one post. This is about the infrastructure of truth itself.
And the scariest part?
There will be no notification when history is deleted.
Only silence.
Pretty sure Facebook was implicated in the past few elections for Russian interference. Zuck was right up front at the inauguration with the other tech billionaires like Musk and Bezos. Why is anyone surprised?
Divine Angel said:
Pretty sure Facebook was implicated in the past few elections for Russian interference. Zuck was right up front at the inauguration with the other tech billionaires like Musk and Bezos. Why is anyone surprised?
I’ve been paying attention, anyone who is watching what is happening isn’t surprised.
kii said:
Divine Angel said:
Pretty sure Facebook was implicated in the past few elections for Russian interference. Zuck was right up front at the inauguration with the other tech billionaires like Musk and Bezos. Why is anyone surprised?
I’ve been paying attention, anyone who is watching what is happening isn’t surprised.
Or been cheering it on: nowt as queer as folk.
Witty Rejoinder said:
kii said:
Divine Angel said:
Pretty sure Facebook was implicated in the past few elections for Russian interference. Zuck was right up front at the inauguration with the other tech billionaires like Musk and Bezos. Why is anyone surprised?
I’ve been paying attention, anyone who is watching what is happening isn’t surprised.
Or been cheering it on: nowt as queer as folk.
Actually that doesn’t really work. There could be surprised MAGA folks who feel Trump is exceeding their expectations.
kii said:
From Fear and Loathing: Closer to the Edge’s Facebook page…SOMETHING ISN’T RIGHT
On March 31, 2025, one of the most trusted historians in America watched her own words disappear from the internet. Heather Cox Richardson confirmed that two of her Facebook posts were no longer visible — not just to her followers, but to herself and her husband.
“Hi Folks: my two posts from last night have disappeared for many of us, including me and Buddy, but appear to be here for others. I’m trying to figure it out but if anyone has any ideas, do let me know in the comments. Eager to see if this post shows up.”
Then, in a follow-up:
“OK, this is now gone for me, as well.”
Not flagged. Not disputed. Not taken down with explanation. Just gone — silently, and without warning. This is what erasure looks like in the age of algorithmic control.
USERS CONFIRM THE SILENCE
Across the platform, her readers confirmed what she feared: the posts were no longer on her wall:
“Seeing this but no other posts, not even on your wall.”
“No posts after March 26. Gone.”
“I can’t see anything on her page past March 26.”
The rhythm of her voice — so consistent, so reliable — had been broken. Not by choice. Not by glitch. By force.
Heather Cox Richardson’s reply?
“Oh, this is SO not good….”
THE POSTS THAT VANISHED
One of the missing posts dealt with allegations that senior members of Donald Trump’s administration had discussed military strikes on Yemen over unsecured channels. It was already spreading fast — more than 130,000 likes, 60,000 shares — before it disappeared.
That matters. Because this is not a celebrity being muted. This is a historian documenting power. And that history — our history — is now being selectively hidden.
This isn’t content moderation. This is strategic memory loss.
HER MESSAGE: GET OFF FACEBOOK
Richardson, sounding the alarm as best she could, urged readers to escape the platform altogether:
“Please remember you can get these letters from Substack at Letters from an American, and can sign up to get them by email there, too. No paywall, and all free.”
Her Substack:
THIS IS NOT A DRILL
If Facebook can make the voice of a presidential historian vanish — not just from your feed, but from her own timeline — then what else is being filtered? What else is being buried? What else are we being kept from seeing?
This isn’t about one post. This is about the infrastructure of truth itself.
And the scariest part?
There will be no notification when history is deleted.
Only silence.
Sad as it is, the writing was on the wall.
Heather needs somewhere not politiically aligned, to post her very accurate recent histories.
roughbarked said:
kii said:
From Fear and Loathing: Closer to the Edge’s Facebook page…SOMETHING ISN’T RIGHT
There will be no notification when history is deleted.
Only silence.
Sad as it is, the writing was on the wall.
Heather needs somewhere not politiically aligned, to post her very accurate recent histories.
Glad that sm has been copy pasting to here because forum history will have kept this. Might be an idea to collate it all under the one thread?
kii said:
Divine Angel said:
Pretty sure Facebook was implicated in the past few elections for Russian interference. Zuck was right up front at the inauguration with the other tech billionaires like Musk and Bezos. Why is anyone surprised?
I’ve been paying attention, anyone who is watching what is happening isn’t surprised.
no way
pretty sure nobody could have foreseen any of this
SCIENCE said:
kii said:
Divine Angel said:
Pretty sure Facebook was implicated in the past few elections for Russian interference. Zuck was right up front at the inauguration with the other tech billionaires like Musk and Bezos. Why is anyone surprised?
I’ve been paying attention, anyone who is watching what is happening isn’t surprised.
no way
pretty sure nobody could have foreseen any of this
Definitely those who decided it would be safer not to join facebook did.
roughbarked said:
SCIENCE said:kii said:
I’ve been paying attention, anyone who is watching what is happening isn’t surprised.
no way
pretty sure nobody could have foreseen any of this
Definitely those who decided it would be safer not to join facebook did.
Ah, you’re full of stupid comments again.
FFS!
Ah, fb.. dodgy af…
Of course, human solidarity was never the aim of Facebook, and capitalism quickly reared its ugly head. After effectively luring a significant sector of humanity into digital addiction, the Facebook powers that be went about eviscerating the very concept of privacy as a basic human right. And as Facebook now celebrates its 20th anniversary on February 4, the panorama is bleak indeed…
Consider Amnesty International’s denunciation, in 2019, of Facebook’s business model of “surveillance capitalism”, which consists of “aggregating vast amounts of data on people, using it to infer incredibly detailed profiles on their lives and behaviour, and monetising it by selling these predictions to others such as advertisers”. Furthermore, Amnesty specified, the company had explored “how to manipulate emotions, and target people based on psychological vulnerabilities such as when they felt ‘worthless’ or ‘insecure’”…
For young people growing up in an online world, the toxic effects of Facebook’s all-consuming, soul-sucking alienation – not to mention the fertile environment the platform provides for bullying and sexual harassment – cannot be understated.
From a political standpoint, too, Facebook’s operations rarely fail to disturb. Back in 2012, for example, the New York Times reported that Facebook had acquired an Israeli facial recognition company, Face.com, which specialised in technology “designed not only to identify individuals but also their gender and age”.
The firm’s nationality was no surprise; after all, there’s nothing like having a captive Palestinian population at one’s disposal on which to test repressive surveillance techniques and other more lethal mechanisms.
I experienced another disconcerting intersection between Facebook and Israel in 2016 when I posted a photograph from the south Lebanese town of Adaisseh and was prompted to tag the location as “Misgav Am, Hazafon, Israel” – a case of digital colonisation if there ever was one.
And while Palestinians and pro-Palestine activists have long suffered from censorship and discrimination on social media, Facebook’s seemingly special relationship with Israel has become even more sinister in light of the ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip, which has now killed more than 27,000 Palestinians in less than four months…
kii said:
roughbarked said:
SCIENCE said:no way
pretty sure nobody could have foreseen any of this
Definitely those who decided it would be safer not to join facebook did.
Ah, you’re full of stupid comments again.
FFS!
It must make you feel stupid answering them.
It was a perfectly cromulent statement.
kii said:
From Fear and Loathing: Closer to the Edge’s Facebook page…SOMETHING ISN’T RIGHT
On March 31, 2025, one of the most trusted historians in America watched her own words disappear from the internet. Heather Cox Richardson confirmed that two of her Facebook posts were no longer visible — not just to her followers, but to herself and her husband.
“Hi Folks: my two posts from last night have disappeared for many of us, including me and Buddy, but appear to be here for others. I’m trying to figure it out but if anyone has any ideas, do let me know in the comments. Eager to see if this post shows up.”
Then, in a follow-up:
“OK, this is now gone for me, as well.”
Not flagged. Not disputed. Not taken down with explanation. Just gone — silently, and without warning. This is what erasure looks like in the age of algorithmic control.
USERS CONFIRM THE SILENCE
Across the platform, her readers confirmed what she feared: the posts were no longer on her wall:
“Seeing this but no other posts, not even on your wall.”
“No posts after March 26. Gone.”
“I can’t see anything on her page past March 26.”
The rhythm of her voice — so consistent, so reliable — had been broken. Not by choice. Not by glitch. By force.
Heather Cox Richardson’s reply?
“Oh, this is SO not good….”
THE POSTS THAT VANISHED
One of the missing posts dealt with allegations that senior members of Donald Trump’s administration had discussed military strikes on Yemen over unsecured channels. It was already spreading fast — more than 130,000 likes, 60,000 shares — before it disappeared.
That matters. Because this is not a celebrity being muted. This is a historian documenting power. And that history — our history — is now being selectively hidden.
This isn’t content moderation. This is strategic memory loss.
HER MESSAGE: GET OFF FACEBOOK
Richardson, sounding the alarm as best she could, urged readers to escape the platform altogether:
“Please remember you can get these letters from Substack at Letters from an American, and can sign up to get them by email there, too. No paywall, and all free.”
Her Substack:
THIS IS NOT A DRILL
If Facebook can make the voice of a presidential historian vanish — not just from your feed, but from her own timeline — then what else is being filtered? What else is being buried? What else are we being kept from seeing?
This isn’t about one post. This is about the infrastructure of truth itself.
And the scariest part?
There will be no notification when history is deleted.
Only silence.
Bugger.
Perhaps it’s not that bad yet. It seems sm still gets her letter, I’m guessing from facebook. The latest sm posted is the latest on HCR’s substack.
roughbarked said:
roughbarked said:
kii said:
From Fear and Loathing: Closer to the Edge’s Facebook page…SOMETHING ISN’T RIGHT
There will be no notification when history is deleted.
Only silence.
Sad as it is, the writing was on the wall.
Heather needs somewhere not politiically aligned, to post her very accurate recent histories.
Glad that sm has been copy pasting to here because forum history will have kept this. Might be an idea to collate it all under the one thread?
If the writer themselves hasn’t been also saving their stuff somewhere in an offline document, then that’s on them. I mean we can be upset about the censorship, but the loss of information should not be an issue.
roughbarked said:
kii said:
From Fear and Loathing: Closer to the Edge’s Facebook page…SOMETHING ISN’T RIGHT
On March 31, 2025, one of the most trusted historians in America watched her own words disappear from the internet. Heather Cox Richardson confirmed that two of her Facebook posts were no longer visible — not just to her followers, but to herself and her husband.
“Hi Folks: my two posts from last night have disappeared for many of us, including me and Buddy, but appear to be here for others. I’m trying to figure it out but if anyone has any ideas, do let me know in the comments. Eager to see if this post shows up.”
Then, in a follow-up:
“OK, this is now gone for me, as well.”
Not flagged. Not disputed. Not taken down with explanation. Just gone — silently, and without warning. This is what erasure looks like in the age of algorithmic control.
USERS CONFIRM THE SILENCE
Across the platform, her readers confirmed what she feared: the posts were no longer on her wall:
“Seeing this but no other posts, not even on your wall.”
“No posts after March 26. Gone.”
“I can’t see anything on her page past March 26.”
The rhythm of her voice — so consistent, so reliable — had been broken. Not by choice. Not by glitch. By force.
Heather Cox Richardson’s reply?
“Oh, this is SO not good….”
THE POSTS THAT VANISHED
One of the missing posts dealt with allegations that senior members of Donald Trump’s administration had discussed military strikes on Yemen over unsecured channels. It was already spreading fast — more than 130,000 likes, 60,000 shares — before it disappeared.
That matters. Because this is not a celebrity being muted. This is a historian documenting power. And that history — our history — is now being selectively hidden.
This isn’t content moderation. This is strategic memory loss.
HER MESSAGE: GET OFF FACEBOOK
Richardson, sounding the alarm as best she could, urged readers to escape the platform altogether:
“Please remember you can get these letters from Substack at Letters from an American, and can sign up to get them by email there, too. No paywall, and all free.”
Her Substack:
THIS IS NOT A DRILL
If Facebook can make the voice of a presidential historian vanish — not just from your feed, but from her own timeline — then what else is being filtered? What else is being buried? What else are we being kept from seeing?
This isn’t about one post. This is about the infrastructure of truth itself.
And the scariest part?
There will be no notification when history is deleted.
Only silence.
Sad as it is, the writing was on the wall.
Heather needs somewhere not politiically aligned, to post her very accurate recent histories.
Strangely she’s way ahead of you…
One can subscribe to receive her newsletters via email, one can read her on Substack, listen to her on a podcast.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/letters-from-an-american/id1730358737
https://substack.com/@heathercoxrichardson/posts
https://bsky.app/profile/hcrichardson.bsky.social
roughbarked said:
kii said:
roughbarked said:Definitely those who decided it would be safer not to join facebook did.
Ah, you’re full of stupid comments again.
FFS!
It must make you feel stupid answering them.
It was a perfectly cromulent statement.
Nope. I get great amusement from your empty comments.
Arts said:
roughbarked said:
roughbarked said:Sad as it is, the writing was on the wall.
Heather needs somewhere not politiically aligned, to post her very accurate recent histories.
Glad that sm has been copy pasting to here because forum history will have kept this. Might be an idea to collate it all under the one thread?
If the writer themselves hasn’t been also saving their stuff somewhere in an offline document, then that’s on them. I mean we can be upset about the censorship, but the loss of information should not be an issue.
Seems like she has been. https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/ So all good as far as the information.
kii said:
roughbarked said:
kii said:
From Fear and Loathing: Closer to the Edge’s Facebook page…SOMETHING ISN’T RIGHT
On March 31, 2025, one of the most trusted historians in America watched her own words disappear from the internet. Heather Cox Richardson confirmed that two of her Facebook posts were no longer visible — not just to her followers, but to herself and her husband.
“Hi Folks: my two posts from last night have disappeared for many of us, including me and Buddy, but appear to be here for others. I’m trying to figure it out but if anyone has any ideas, do let me know in the comments. Eager to see if this post shows up.”
Then, in a follow-up:
“OK, this is now gone for me, as well.”
Not flagged. Not disputed. Not taken down with explanation. Just gone — silently, and without warning. This is what erasure looks like in the age of algorithmic control.
USERS CONFIRM THE SILENCE
Across the platform, her readers confirmed what she feared: the posts were no longer on her wall:
“Seeing this but no other posts, not even on your wall.”
“No posts after March 26. Gone.”
“I can’t see anything on her page past March 26.”
The rhythm of her voice — so consistent, so reliable — had been broken. Not by choice. Not by glitch. By force.
Heather Cox Richardson’s reply?
“Oh, this is SO not good….”
THE POSTS THAT VANISHED
One of the missing posts dealt with allegations that senior members of Donald Trump’s administration had discussed military strikes on Yemen over unsecured channels. It was already spreading fast — more than 130,000 likes, 60,000 shares — before it disappeared.
That matters. Because this is not a celebrity being muted. This is a historian documenting power. And that history — our history — is now being selectively hidden.
This isn’t content moderation. This is strategic memory loss.
HER MESSAGE: GET OFF FACEBOOK
Richardson, sounding the alarm as best she could, urged readers to escape the platform altogether:
“Please remember you can get these letters from Substack at Letters from an American, and can sign up to get them by email there, too. No paywall, and all free.”
Her Substack:
THIS IS NOT A DRILL
If Facebook can make the voice of a presidential historian vanish — not just from your feed, but from her own timeline — then what else is being filtered? What else is being buried? What else are we being kept from seeing?
This isn’t about one post. This is about the infrastructure of truth itself.
And the scariest part?
There will be no notification when history is deleted.
Only silence.
Sad as it is, the writing was on the wall.
Heather needs somewhere not politiically aligned, to post her very accurate recent histories.
Strangely she’s way ahead of you…
One can subscribe to receive her newsletters via email, one can read her on Substack, listen to her on a podcast.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/letters-from-an-american/id1730358737
https://substack.com/@heathercoxrichardson/posts
https://bsky.app/profile/hcrichardson.bsky.social
I wouldn’t thiink that strange all. Since she noticed the problem early on.
kii said:
From Fear and Loathing: Closer to the Edge’s Facebook page…SOMETHING ISN’T RIGHT
On March 31, 2025, one of the most trusted historians in America watched her own words disappear from the internet. Heather Cox Richardson confirmed that two of her Facebook posts were no longer visible — not just to her followers, but to herself and her husband.
“Hi Folks: my two posts from last night have disappeared for many of us, including me and Buddy, but appear to be here for others. I’m trying to figure it out but if anyone has any ideas, do let me know in the comments. Eager to see if this post shows up.”
Then, in a follow-up:
“OK, this is now gone for me, as well.”
Not flagged. Not disputed. Not taken down with explanation. Just gone — silently, and without warning. This is what erasure looks like in the age of algorithmic control.
USERS CONFIRM THE SILENCE
Across the platform, her readers confirmed what she feared: the posts were no longer on her wall:
“Seeing this but no other posts, not even on your wall.”
“No posts after March 26. Gone.”
“I can’t see anything on her page past March 26.”
The rhythm of her voice — so consistent, so reliable — had been broken. Not by choice. Not by glitch. By force.
Heather Cox Richardson’s reply?
“Oh, this is SO not good….”
THE POSTS THAT VANISHED
One of the missing posts dealt with allegations that senior members of Donald Trump’s administration had discussed military strikes on Yemen over unsecured channels. It was already spreading fast — more than 130,000 likes, 60,000 shares — before it disappeared.
That matters. Because this is not a celebrity being muted. This is a historian documenting power. And that history — our history — is now being selectively hidden.
This isn’t content moderation. This is strategic memory loss.
HER MESSAGE: GET OFF FACEBOOK
Richardson, sounding the alarm as best she could, urged readers to escape the platform altogether:
“Please remember you can get these letters from Substack at Letters from an American, and can sign up to get them by email there, too. No paywall, and all free.”
Her Substack:
THIS IS NOT A DRILL
If Facebook can make the voice of a presidential historian vanish — not just from your feed, but from her own timeline — then what else is being filtered? What else is being buried? What else are we being kept from seeing?
This isn’t about one post. This is about the infrastructure of truth itself.
And the scariest part?
There will be no notification when history is deleted.
Only silence.
fk.
!
kii said:
roughbarked said:
kii said:Ah, you’re full of stupid comments again.
FFS!
It must make you feel stupid answering them.
It was a perfectly cromulent statement.
Nope. I get great amusement from your empty comments.
Laughter is great medicine, they say.
Arts said:
roughbarked said:
roughbarked said:Sad as it is, the writing was on the wall.
Heather needs somewhere not politiically aligned, to post her very accurate recent histories.
Glad that sm has been copy pasting to here because forum history will have kept this. Might be an idea to collate it all under the one thread?
If the writer themselves hasn’t been also saving their stuff somewhere in an offline document, then that’s on them. I mean we can be upset about the censorship, but the loss of information should not be an issue.
yes, i’m sure Heather doesn’t write her posts direct onto FB.
Arts said:
roughbarked said:
roughbarked said:Sad as it is, the writing was on the wall.
Heather needs somewhere not politiically aligned, to post her very accurate recent histories.
Glad that sm has been copy pasting to here because forum history will have kept this. Might be an idea to collate it all under the one thread?
If the writer themselves hasn’t been also saving their stuff somewhere in an offline document, then that’s on them. I mean we can be upset about the censorship, but the loss of information should not be an issue.
what if the capture of all interests by giant media companies is so complete that authors must use software and hardware they have supplied that allows only online records to be kept through their proprietary systems
Ian said:
Ah, fb.. dodgy af…Of course, human solidarity was never the aim of Facebook, and capitalism quickly reared its ugly head. After effectively luring a significant sector of humanity into digital addiction, the Facebook powers that be went about eviscerating the very concept of privacy as a basic human right. And as Facebook now celebrates its 20th anniversary on February 4, the panorama is bleak indeed…
Consider Amnesty International’s denunciation, in 2019, of Facebook’s business model of “surveillance capitalism”, which consists of “aggregating vast amounts of data on people, using it to infer incredibly detailed profiles on their lives and behaviour, and monetising it by selling these predictions to others such as advertisers”. Furthermore, Amnesty specified, the company had explored “how to manipulate emotions, and target people based on psychological vulnerabilities such as when they felt ‘worthless’ or ‘insecure’”…
For young people growing up in an online world, the toxic effects of Facebook’s all-consuming, soul-sucking alienation – not to mention the fertile environment the platform provides for bullying and sexual harassment – cannot be understated.
From a political standpoint, too, Facebook’s operations rarely fail to disturb. Back in 2012, for example, the New York Times reported that Facebook had acquired an Israeli facial recognition company, Face.com, which specialised in technology “designed not only to identify individuals but also their gender and age”.
The firm’s nationality was no surprise; after all, there’s nothing like having a captive Palestinian population at one’s disposal on which to test repressive surveillance techniques and other more lethal mechanisms.
I experienced another disconcerting intersection between Facebook and Israel in 2016 when I posted a photograph from the south Lebanese town of Adaisseh and was prompted to tag the location as “Misgav Am, Hazafon, Israel” – a case of digital colonisation if there ever was one.
And while Palestinians and pro-Palestine activists have long suffered from censorship and discrimination on social media, Facebook’s seemingly special relationship with Israel has become even more sinister in light of the ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip, which has now killed more than 27,000 Palestinians in less than four months…
no we think this is CHINA’s fault
SCIENCE said:
Arts said:
roughbarked said:Glad that sm has been copy pasting to here because forum history will have kept this. Might be an idea to collate it all under the one thread?
If the writer themselves hasn’t been also saving their stuff somewhere in an offline document, then that’s on them. I mean we can be upset about the censorship, but the loss of information should not be an issue.
what if the capture of all interests by giant media companies is so complete that authors must use software and hardware they have supplied that allows only online records to be kept through their proprietary systems
They don’t.. so again, not an issue.
SCIENCE said:
what if the capture of all interests by giant media companies is so complete that authors must use software and hardware they have supplied that allows only online records to be kept through their proprietary systems
Samizdat.
roughbarked said:
kii said:
roughbarked said:Definitely those who decided it would be safer not to join facebook did.
Ah, you’re full of stupid comments again.
FFS!
It must make you feel stupid answering them.
It was a perfectly cromulent statement.
wait is this a race to the bottom well don’t worry we’re the stupidest of the stupids here
SCIENCE said:
roughbarked said:
kii said:Ah, you’re full of stupid comments again.
FFS!
It must make you feel stupid answering them.
It was a perfectly cromulent statement.
wait is this a race to the bottom well don’t worry we’re the stupidest of the stupids here
…and i fill in on his days off.
SCIENCE said:
roughbarked said:
kii said:Ah, you’re full of stupid comments again.
FFS!
It must make you feel stupid answering them.
It was a perfectly cromulent statement.
wait is this a race to the bottom well don’t worry we’re the stupidest of the stupids here
don’t fret mate, we still love you.
captain_spalding said:
Arts said:
SCIENCE said:
Arts said:
If the writer themselves hasn’t been also saving their stuff somewhere in an offline document, then that’s on them. I mean we can be upset about the censorship, but the loss of information should not be an issue.
what if the capture of all interests by giant media companies is so complete that authors must use software and hardware they have supplied that allows only online records to be kept through their proprietary systems
They don’t.. so again, not an issue.
Samizdat.
yeah we’re all for running air gapped UNIX-like off-grid locally-stored independent systems but then again they’re in America so probably only a matter of time before such independents are declared enemies of the state and boom
freedom of speech.
Did Heather say anything particularly “bad” in those missing posts?
sarahs mum said:
freedom of speech.
Provided for by the First Amendment to the US Constitution.
However, as Trump has already stated that he has people working on finding ways to negate or circumvent the 22nd Amendment (limiting Presidents to two terms in office), nothing that’s provided in the US Constitution or its amendments should be considered to be safe.
captain_spalding said:
sarahs mum said:
freedom of speech.
Provided for by the First Amendment to the US Constitution.
However, as Trump has already stated that he has people working on finding ways to negate or circumvent the 22nd Amendment (limiting Presidents to two terms in office), nothing that’s provided in the US Constitution or its amendments should be considered to be safe.
Trump has repeatedly suggested that the constitution needs scrapping.
European Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen, has delivered a striking rebuke to the Trump’s tariffs saying that the European single market has a strong plan to combat the US’s protectionist economics.
This Is Not a Drill: Trump’s Day-One Order Sets the Stage for Martial Law
By Tony Pentimalli
“On January 20, 2025, while the press focused on the optics of Donald Trump’s indoor inauguration, something far more dangerous was set in motion—off-camera, away from ceremony, and beneath the radar of a public lulled by spectacle.
Trump signed an executive order declaring a national emergency at the southern border. But the most alarming part? It gave the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security just 90 days to deliver a joint report on whether he should invoke the Insurrection Act.
That deadline is April 20.
This wasn’t about immigration. It was about power.
The Insurrection Act, passed in 1807, gives the president the authority to deploy the U.S. military on American soil. That means troops in our cities. That means bypassing governors. That means suspending protest rights. That means the death of democratic dissent—under the false pretense of restoring “order.”
And Trump’s not hiding it. He’s preparing it.
We’ve seen this before. In June 2020, after the murder of George Floyd, millions of Americans rose up in protest. Trump didn’t respond with compassion—he called for “domination.” When the military hesitated to invoke the Insurrection Act, Trump sent federal forces to violently clear peaceful protesters from Lafayette Square so he could wave a Bible in front of a church. Not an ounce of remorse followed. He was angry the generals didn’t go far enough.
This time, he’s made sure they won’t hesitate.
Since returning to power, Trump has purged the Pentagon of independent thinkers. In their place? Loyalists. Pete Hegseth is now Secretary of Defense. Tulsi Gabbard runs intelligence. And J.D. Vance—Vice President—is openly on board with using military force against Americans on American soil.
Then, on March 19, those three—Vance, Gabbard, and Hegseth—staged a photo op at the southern border. Not a routine visit. Not a strategy session. A performance.
Think about it. Why would the Vice President, the head of military intelligence, and the Defense Secretary all need to go to the border together? Why make a media spectacle of it?
Because it wasn’t about the border. It was about the optics. It was about laying the emotional groundwork for invoking the Insurrection Act. They were building the narrative. “We had to act.” “We had no choice.” “The crisis was too big.”
And what comes next?
It’s June 2025. Trump goes on national TV and declares that Democratic cities are under siege by “radicals” and “illegals.” He signs the Insurrection Act order. Troops hit the streets of Atlanta, Chicago, Philadelphia. Protesters are arrested under “emergency provisions.” Journalists are detained. Social media accounts vanish. Immigrants are swept into detention centers. The press is told to stand down. The public is told to shut up.
And it’s all legal.
Some of you might think, “He’s bluffing. The military won’t go along. The courts will stop him.”
Really?
Were they bluffing when federal agents brutalized peaceful protesters in Lafayette Square?
Did the military refuse? No. The National Guard was deployed. Many in uniform carried out the order. It was only later that a few expressed regret—after the damage was done.
Did the courts stop January 6? No. They prosecuted rioters after the fact, but the attack happened. Congress fled. Democracy was nearly strangled live on TV.
Did they stop the family separation policy? No. Thousands of children were taken from their parents before courts intervened—long after the trauma was inflicted.
Did they stop the Muslim ban? No. The Supreme Court upheld it. Entire families were stranded or banned simply because of where they came from.
Did they stop ICE raids or CBP abuses? Rarely. A handful of rulings. A few headlines. But the system kept grinding, unchecked and cruel.
So if you’re waiting for “the system” to save us, you’re waiting for something that has already failed.
The April 20 report is coming. If it recommends using the Insurrection Act—and let’s be honest, it will—Trump will frame it as a reluctant but necessary move. He’ll say he tried everything else. He’ll claim it’s about protecting America.
But what he’s really protecting is his own authority.
This is how authoritarianism arrives: not with tanks, but with legal memos, press events, and a scared public hoping someone else will stop it.
So what do we do?
We speak now. Loudly. Forcefully.
Call your representatives and demand they investigate Trump’s January 20 order.
Push the media to report on the Insurrection Act report before it’s too late.
Demand public statements from military and intelligence leaders—now, not after.
Organize. Educate. Resist.
If you’ve never joined a protest before, this is the moment.
If you’ve never spoken up politically, this is the time.
If you’ve never thought it could happen here—it already is.
The threat isn’t coming.
It’s here.
And silence is exactly what Trump is counting on.
Tony Pentimalli 𝘪𝘴 𝘢 𝘱𝘰𝘭𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘭 𝘢𝘯𝘢𝘭𝘺𝘴𝘵 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘢𝘵𝘰𝘳 𝘧𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘥𝘦𝘮𝘰𝘤𝘳𝘢𝘤𝘺, 𝘦𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘰𝘮𝘪𝘤 𝘫𝘶𝘴𝘵𝘪𝘤𝘦, 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘴𝘰𝘤𝘪𝘢𝘭 𝘦𝘲𝘶𝘪𝘵𝘺. 𝘍𝘰𝘭𝘭𝘰𝘸 𝘩𝘪𝘮 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘴𝘩𝘢𝘳𝘱 𝘢𝘯𝘢𝘭𝘺𝘴𝘪𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘩𝘢𝘳𝘥-𝘩𝘪𝘵𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘤𝘳𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘲𝘶𝘦𝘴.
captain_spalding said:
sarahs mum said:
freedom of speech.
Provided for by the First Amendment to the US Constitution.
However, as Trump has already stated that he has people working on finding ways to negate or circumvent the 22nd Amendment (limiting Presidents to two terms in office), nothing that’s provided in the US Constitution or its amendments should be considered to be safe.
yawn
sarahs mum said:
freedom of speech.
only applies to the government censoring you. private companies can do whatever they like. plus any UN policy regarding the right of free speech is purely a guideline and unless countries actually have laws in place to enforce it then it is worthless.
diddly-squat said:
captain_spalding said:
sarahs mum said:
freedom of speech.
Provided for by the First Amendment to the US Constitution.
However, as Trump has already stated that he has people working on finding ways to negate or circumvent the 22nd Amendment (limiting Presidents to two terms in office), nothing that’s provided in the US Constitution or its amendments should be considered to be safe.
yawn
*best kii impersonation.
fuck off.
sarahs mum said:
diddly-squat said:
captain_spalding said:Provided for by the First Amendment to the US Constitution.
However, as Trump has already stated that he has people working on finding ways to negate or circumvent the 22nd Amendment (limiting Presidents to two terms in office), nothing that’s provided in the US Constitution or its amendments should be considered to be safe.
yawn
*best kii impersonation.
fuck off.
The “Trump will circumvent the Constitution” argument is specifically designed to create outrage and misdirect focus from other stuff that is going on the background. Low and behold the third term story comes out just in time to redirect the news cycle way from the Signal chat scandal…
People need to dial down their inner Chicken Little.
Booker’s anti-Trump speech surpasses 24 hours on Senate floor
Cory Booker, the Democratic senator from New Jersey, has surpassed 24 hours of speaking on the Senate floor.
Booker took to the floor at 7pm ET on Monday in an attempt to disrupt the normal business of the Senate to protest the “grave and urgent” danger of Donald Trump’s presidential administration.
As he approached a full day of speaking, Booker had begun to stumble slightly in his speech, but was still on his feet, making sweeping gestures as he spoke.
Over the past hour, Booker has evoked the Founding Fathers, Civil Rights leaders and lawmakers who stood up against McCarthyism in his calls for congressmembers to more assertively hold the Trump administration accountable.
Yielding to a question from Connecticut senator Chris Murphy, while retaining the floor, Booker rested a moment while Murphy recounted the longest speech in Senate history, given in 1957 by Republican senator Strom Thurmond to filibuster the Civil Rights Act.
“What you have done here today Senator Booker couldn’t be more different than what occurred on this floor in 1957,” he said. “Strom Thurmond was standing in the way of inevitable progress.” He added, “Today, you are standing in the way not of progress but of retreat.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2025/apr/01/donald-trump-elon-musk-special-elections-florida-wisconsin-texas-arizona-us-politics-live
diddly-squat said:
captain_spalding said:
sarahs mum said:
freedom of speech.
Provided for by the First Amendment to the US Constitution.
However, as Trump has already stated that he has people working on finding ways to negate or circumvent the 22nd Amendment (limiting Presidents to two terms in office), nothing that’s provided in the US Constitution or its amendments should be considered to be safe.
yawn
Are you waking up from your dreaming then?
Cory Booker is winding up his filibuster, broke the record.
party_pants said:
diddly-squat said:
captain_spalding said:Provided for by the First Amendment to the US Constitution.
However, as Trump has already stated that he has people working on finding ways to negate or circumvent the 22nd Amendment (limiting Presidents to two terms in office), nothing that’s provided in the US Constitution or its amendments should be considered to be safe.
yawn
Are you waking up from your dreaming then?
He’s a pathetic troll.
kii said:
party_pants said:
diddly-squat said:yawn
Are you waking up from your dreaming then?
He’s a pathetic troll.
I don’t think so. I just don’t agree with his optimism on how the US democratic system works.
kii said:
party_pants said:
diddly-squat said:yawn
Are you waking up from your dreaming then?
He’s a pathetic troll.
The assumption is also that it has to be done by finding some loop hole or altering law
It could be done by force
party_pants said:
diddly-squat said:
captain_spalding said:Provided for by the First Amendment to the US Constitution.
However, as Trump has already stated that he has people working on finding ways to negate or circumvent the 22nd Amendment (limiting Presidents to two terms in office), nothing that’s provided in the US Constitution or its amendments should be considered to be safe.
yawn
Are you waking up from your dreaming then?
no but it’s true they totally won’t break the law until they break the law
party_pants said:
kii said:
party_pants said:Are you waking up from your dreaming then?
He’s a pathetic troll.
I don’t think so. I just don’t agree with his optimism on how the US democratic system works.
He has weaponised optimism, He’s laughing at anyone who disagrees or calls him out. He gets his little jollies from people arguing with him when he throws out his shitty comments.
I want to know what side of the aisle his wife’s family sit?
Cymek said:
kii said:
party_pants said:
Are you waking up from your dreaming then?
He’s a pathetic troll.
The assumption is also that it has to be done by finding some loop hole or altering law
It could be done by force
they have a point, use one thing to distract from another but one of the mistakes is that a fork isn’t always a feint
kii said:
party_pants said:
kii said:
He’s a pathetic troll.
I don’t think so. I just don’t agree with his optimism on how the US democratic system works.
He has weaponised optimism, He’s laughing at anyone who disagrees or calls him out. He gets his little jollies from people arguing with him when he throws out his shitty comments.
I want to know what side of the aisle his wife’s family sit?
pretty sure the flood isn’t happening until one’s place is flooded
party_pants said:
kii said:
party_pants said:Are you waking up from your dreaming then?
He’s a pathetic troll.
I don’t think so. I just don’t agree with his optimism on how the US democratic system works.
i do not agree with his ‘optimism’ either but I really do not like his put downs.
party_pants said:
kii said:
party_pants said:Are you waking up from your dreaming then?
He’s a pathetic troll.
I don’t think so. I just don’t agree with his optimism on how the US democratic system works.
it’s not optimism, it’s pragmatism. There really is no practical way for Trump to serve more then two terms at POTUS
Cymek said:
kii said:
party_pants said:Are you waking up from your dreaming then?
He’s a pathetic troll.
The assumption is also that it has to be done by finding some loop hole or altering law
It could be done by force
how exactly could it be done by force?
sarahs mum said:
party_pants said:
kii said:
He’s a pathetic troll.
I don’t think so. I just don’t agree with his optimism on how the US democratic system works.
i do not agree with his ‘optimism’ either but I really do not like his put downs.
nah they’re not put downs we’re all just stood
stupid
SCIENCE said:
Cymek said:
kii said:
He’s a pathetic troll.
The assumption is also that it has to be done by finding some loop hole or altering law
It could be done by force
they have a point, use one thing to distract from another but one of the mistakes is that a fork isn’t always a feint
They are relying on everyone else to rigidly obey the law and all the democratic social conventions while they break it willy nilly. For everyone else to just let them get away with it because stopping them would involve doing illegal things or the use of force etc. A perverse form of self regulation that creates a space for the corrupt to operate.
I can see it.
diddly-squat said:
party_pants said:
kii said:He’s a pathetic troll.
I don’t think so. I just don’t agree with his optimism on how the US democratic system works.
it’s not optimism, it’s pragmatism. There really is no practical way for Trump to serve more then two terms at POTUS
Except if he just does it and nobody stops him.
sarahs mum said:
party_pants said:
kii said:He’s a pathetic troll.
I don’t think so. I just don’t agree with his optimism on how the US democratic system works.
i do not agree with his ‘optimism’ either but I really do not like his put downs.
That’s a bold claim; please show where I’ve made derogatory comment toward someone here.
party_pants said:
SCIENCE said:Cymek said:
The assumption is also that it has to be done by finding some loop hole or altering law
It could be done by force
they have a point, use one thing to distract from another but one of the mistakes is that a fork isn’t always a feint
They are relying on everyone else to rigidly obey the law and all the democratic social conventions while they break it willy nilly. For everyone else to just let them get away with it because stopping them would involve doing illegal things or the use of force etc. A perverse form of self regulation that creates a space for the corrupt to operate.
I can see it.
Peace in our time.
diddly-squat said:
Cymek said:
kii said:He’s a pathetic troll.
The assumption is also that it has to be done by finding some loop hole or altering law
It could be done by force
how exactly could it be done by force?
As in a military take over
The US is set up for such an event.
Its already semi fascist in nature with their huge sense of superiority drummed into them from birth
Guns everywhere, militias, people given power by popularity that appeal to fanatics.
party_pants said:
diddly-squat said:
party_pants said:I don’t think so. I just don’t agree with his optimism on how the US democratic system works.
it’s not optimism, it’s pragmatism. There really is no practical way for Trump to serve more then two terms at POTUS
Except if he just does it and nobody stops him.
how would he do this in practice?
party_pants said:
SCIENCE said:
Cymek said:
The assumption is also that it has to be done by finding some loop hole or altering law
It could be done by force
they have a point, use one thing to distract from another but one of the mistakes is that a fork isn’t always a feint
They are relying on everyone else to rigidly obey the law and all the democratic social conventions while they break it willy nilly. For everyone else to just let them get away with it because stopping them would involve doing illegal things or the use of force etc. A perverse form of self regulation that creates a space for the corrupt to operate.
I can see it.
Yeah much was said about the “you go high we go low” pattern last time around and there are similarities with the paradox of tolerance. We’re not sure what the peaceful progressive solution for them is or even if there is one but we have more immediate matters to think about so we leave it to the experts.
Cymek said:
diddly-squat said:
Cymek said:The assumption is also that it has to be done by finding some loop hole or altering law
It could be done by force
how exactly could it be done by force?
As in a military take over
The US is set up for such an event.
Its already semi fascist in nature with their huge sense of superiority drummed into them from birth
Guns everywhere, militias, people given power by popularity that appeal to fanatics.
ok, what do you think the likelihood is of a coup d’état in the US?
Cymek said:
diddly-squat said:
Cymek said:The assumption is also that it has to be done by finding some loop hole or altering law
It could be done by force
how exactly could it be done by force?
As in a military take over
The US is set up for such an event.
Its already semi fascist in nature with their huge sense of superiority drummed into them from birth
Guns everywhere, militias, people given power by popularity that appeal to fanatics.
I don’t think it will happen but it could, history tells us such events occur
His entitlement this time is huge and last time he didn’t give up without a fight.
Cymek said:
diddly-squat said:
Cymek said:The assumption is also that it has to be done by finding some loop hole or altering law
It could be done by force
how exactly could it be done by force?
As in a military take over
The US is set up for such an event.
Its already semi fascist in nature with their huge sense of superiority drummed into them from birth
Guns everywhere, militias, people given power by popularity that appeal to fanatics.
don’t worry nobody will be POTUS for more than 2 terms, it’ll be FOTUS before long and then it’ll be all right
Cymek said:
Cymek said:
diddly-squat said:
how exactly could it be done by force?
As in a military take over
The US is set up for such an event.
Its already semi fascist in nature with their huge sense of superiority drummed into them from birth
Guns everywhere, militias, people given power by popularity that appeal to fanatics.
I don’t think it will happen but it could, history tells us such events occur
His entitlement this time is huge and last time he didn’t give up without a fight.
yeah but they didn’t actually take over the Capitol so it’ll never happen it’s all good
happy April 1 anyway
diddly-squat said:
sarahs mum said:
party_pants said:I don’t think so. I just don’t agree with his optimism on how the US democratic system works.
i do not agree with his ‘optimism’ either but I really do not like his put downs.
That’s a bold claim; please show where I’ve made derogatory comment toward someone here.
i read your yawn as ‘this is boring.’ I read it as a put down. your next post addressed the comment in a far more civil way.
diddly-squat said:
Cymek said:
diddly-squat said:how exactly could it be done by force?
As in a military take over
The US is set up for such an event.
Its already semi fascist in nature with their huge sense of superiority drummed into them from birth
Guns everywhere, militias, people given power by popularity that appeal to fanatics.
ok, what do you think the likelihood is of a coup d’état in the US?
I suppose we will see what happens over the next four or years.
It could also be a corporate takeover, relax laws that minimising corporate power/monopolies
They manipulate people and convince them Trump should get another term
sarahs mum said:
read it as a put down
no way they were just joking, they were being sarcastic, they misspoke, they actually love yous all, they can’t believe they did that
Cymek said:
It could also be a corporate takeover, relax laws that minimising corporate power/monopolies
this hasn’t happened and it never will
sarahs mum said:
diddly-squat said:
sarahs mum said:i do not agree with his ‘optimism’ either but I really do not like his put downs.
That’s a bold claim; please show where I’ve made derogatory comment toward someone here.
i read your yawn as ‘this is boring.’ I read it as a put down. your next post addressed the comment in a far more civil way.
This particular point has done the circle here multiple times, the yawn comment did in fact indicate my boredom with the continued arguments that it will just somehow happen providing any real evidence to suggest how.
I apologies if Cpt Spalding was offended – but it certainty wasn’t intended as a personal attack and I’d be surprised if it was taken as one. Maybe the good captain could clarify for us.
But if it’s personal attacks and put down that you don’t like then there are certainty other people here that could be held to account more often.
good news your house isn’t on fire until it’s fucking burning down
roughbarked said:
Senator Cory Booker speaks for record time on Senate floor, criticising Trump and Musk
did it work
diddly-squat said:
sarahs mum said:
diddly-squat said:That’s a bold claim; please show where I’ve made derogatory comment toward someone here.
i read your yawn as ‘this is boring.’ I read it as a put down. your next post addressed the comment in a far more civil way.
This particular point has done the circle here multiple times, the yawn comment did in fact indicate my boredom with the continued arguments that it will just somehow happen providing any real evidence to suggest how.
I apologies if Cpt Spalding was offended – but it certainty wasn’t intended as a personal attack and I’d be surprised if it was taken as one. Maybe the good captain could clarify for us.
But if it’s personal attacks and put down that you don’t like then there are certainty other people here that could be held to account more often.
yawn
diddly-squat said:
sarahs mum said:
diddly-squat said:yawn
*best kii impersonation.
fuck off.
The “Trump will circumvent the Constitution” argument is specifically designed to create outrage and misdirect focus from other stuff that is going on the background. Low and behold the third term story comes out just in time to redirect the news cycle way from the Signal chat scandal…
People need to dial down their inner Chicken Little.
Yeah, you may be right about that. The politics of distraction has never been so heavily employed as it is today.
It might well be a ‘dead cat on the table’ move by Trump, or his ‘advisers’. Or it might be a ‘why not?’ project: if they find a way to get him a third term, there’s a win for him. If they don’t, then it served the purpose of distraction.
diddly-squat said:
party_pants said:
diddly-squat said:it’s not optimism, it’s pragmatism. There really is no practical way for Trump to serve more then two terms at POTUS
Except if he just does it and nobody stops him.
how would he do this in practice?
It has already been done this election over the Mar-a-Lago documents case. The SC refused to hear the legal case on the 14 th amendment over acts of insurrection being grounds for disqualification and said it was up to Congress to determine. Thus making a legal question a political question. But the Congress is too partisan to deal with it, and it got nowhere. Biden was even forced to pardon those investigating the Jan 6 cases. These people are all being purged by Elon from positions of power. Positions that will be refilled with political loyalists.
So how it works, the SC refuse to do their job and hands a legal question to a political body to make it a political decision. The Congress is already stacked, and will be further stacked by vote-rigging. The legal departments, the FBI and the military will have been purged by then and stacked with loyalists too. If none of them act to stop Trump, he wins. Loyalists are the sort of grubby people who fear losing their own little slice of wealth and power above all else and won’t act to kick away the stepladder while they are still climbing it.
party_pants said:
diddly-squat said:
party_pants said:Except if he just does it and nobody stops him.
how would he do this in practice?
It has already been done this election over the Mar-a-Lago documents case. The SC refused to hear the legal case on the 14 th amendment over acts of insurrection being grounds for disqualification and said it was up to Congress to determine. Thus making a legal question a political question. But the Congress is too partisan to deal with it, and it got nowhere. Biden was even forced to pardon those investigating the Jan 6 cases. These people are all being purged by Elon from positions of power. Positions that will be refilled with political loyalists.
So how it works, the SC refuse to do their job and hands a legal question to a political body to make it a political decision. The Congress is already stacked, and will be further stacked by vote-rigging. The legal departments, the FBI and the military will have been purged by then and stacked with loyalists too. If none of them act to stop Trump, he wins. Loyalists are the sort of grubby people who fear losing their own little slice of wealth and power above all else and won’t act to kick away the stepladder while they are still climbing it.
And the US Constitution will exist simply as a curio of political history.
kii said:
diddly-squat said:
sarahs mum said:i read your yawn as ‘this is boring.’ I read it as a put down. your next post addressed the comment in a far more civil way.
This particular point has done the circle here multiple times, the yawn comment did in fact indicate my boredom with the continued arguments that it will just somehow happen providing any real evidence to suggest how.
I apologies if Cpt Spalding was offended – but it certainty wasn’t intended as a personal attack and I’d be surprised if it was taken as one. Maybe the good captain could clarify for us.
But if it’s personal attacks and put down that you don’t like then there are certainty other people here that could be held to account more often.
yawn
well, that is a put down too. but I read it as a ‘you’re not better than me’ rather than a ‘I am superior to you.’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_backsliding
Democratic backsliding or autocratization is a process of regime change toward autocracy in which the exercise of political power becomes more arbitrary and repressive. The process typically restricts the space for public contest and political participation in the process of government selection. Democratic decline involves the weakening of democratic institutions, such as the peaceful transition of power or free and fair elections, or the violation of individual rights that underpin democracies, especially freedom of expression. Democratic backsliding is the opposite of democratization.
sarahs mum said:
kii said:
diddly-squat said:
This particular point has done the circle here multiple times, the yawn comment did in fact indicate my boredom with the continued arguments that it will just somehow happen providing any real evidence to suggest how.
I apologies if Cpt Spalding was offended – but it certainty wasn’t intended as a personal attack and I’d be surprised if it was taken as one. Maybe the good captain could clarify for us.
But if it’s personal attacks and put down that you don’t like then there are certainty other people here that could be held to account more often.
yawn
well, that is a put down too. but I read it as a ‘you’re not better than me’ rather than a ‘I am superior to you.’
wait can the same expressions be interpreted differently based on the contrasting power differentials across the participants of a communicative exchange
captain_spalding said:
diddly-squat said:
sarahs mum said:*best kii impersonation.
fuck off.
The “Trump will circumvent the Constitution” argument is specifically designed to create outrage and misdirect focus from other stuff that is going on the background. Low and behold the third term story comes out just in time to redirect the news cycle way from the Signal chat scandal…
People need to dial down their inner Chicken Little.
Yeah, you may be right about that. The politics of distraction has never been so heavily employed as it is today.
It might well be a ‘dead cat on the table’ move by Trump, or his ‘advisers’. Or it might be a ‘why not?’ project: if they find a way to get him a third term, there’s a win for him. If they don’t, then it served the purpose of distraction.
Dems and the media are constantly being goaded into being outraged in an effort to misdirect the conversation. Meanwhile people become desensitized to what they should actually be outraged about because the volume has already been turned up to 11 on every single channel they listen to.
That, and it also dials directly into subconscious of the MAGA diehards and their “own the libs’ narrative.
the Dems and the media need to be more disciplined and more focused on the things that actually matter and not allow themselves to be suckered into being the boy that calls wolf, only to be ignored when the wolf actually shows up.
don’t worry stop crying about it 2 cases of measles isn’t bad just wait and you’ll see 200 cases but you should shut up about that as well since you ain’t seen nothing until you see the 20000 about to happen but that’s just alarmism because 2000000 is where we want it at
captain_spalding said:
It has already been done this election over the Mar-a-Lago documents case. The SC refused to hear the legal case on the 14 th amendment over acts of insurrection being grounds for disqualification and said it was up to Congress to determine. Thus making a legal question a political question. But the Congress is too partisan to deal with it, and it got nowhere. Biden was even forced to pardon those investigating the Jan 6 cases. These people are all being purged by Elon from positions of power. Positions that will be refilled with political loyalists.So how it works, the SC refuse to do their job and hands a legal question to a political body to make it a political decision. The Congress is already stacked, and will be further stacked by vote-rigging. The legal departments, the FBI and the military will have been purged by then and stacked with loyalists too. If none of them act to stop Trump, he wins. Loyalists are the sort of grubby people who fear losing their own little slice of wealth and power above all else and won’t act to kick away the stepladder while they are still climbing it.
And the US Constitution will exist simply as a curio of political history.
Fixed that for you.
party_pants said:
diddly-squat said:
party_pants said:Except if he just does it and nobody stops him.
how would he do this in practice?
It has already been done this election over the Mar-a-Lago documents case. The SC refused to hear the legal case on the 14 th amendment over acts of insurrection being grounds for disqualification and said it was up to Congress to determine. Thus making a legal question a political question. But the Congress is too partisan to deal with it, and it got nowhere. Biden was even forced to pardon those investigating the Jan 6 cases. These people are all being purged by Elon from positions of power. Positions that will be refilled with political loyalists.
So how it works, the SC refuse to do their job and hands a legal question to a political body to make it a political decision. The Congress is already stacked, and will be further stacked by vote-rigging. The legal departments, the FBI and the military will have been purged by then and stacked with loyalists too. If none of them act to stop Trump, he wins. Loyalists are the sort of grubby people who fear losing their own little slice of wealth and power above all else and won’t act to kick away the stepladder while they are still climbing it.
But the election isn’t run by the federal government – the question of who is voted for is one that is controlled by state legislatures.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting that it impossible; that a actual constitutional crisis can’t (or won’t) happen. I’m just saying that there is no practical means by which Trump can run for a third term.
diddly-squat said:
party_pants said:
diddly-squat said:how would he do this in practice?
It has already been done this election over the Mar-a-Lago documents case. The SC refused to hear the legal case on the 14 th amendment over acts of insurrection being grounds for disqualification and said it was up to Congress to determine. Thus making a legal question a political question. But the Congress is too partisan to deal with it, and it got nowhere. Biden was even forced to pardon those investigating the Jan 6 cases. These people are all being purged by Elon from positions of power. Positions that will be refilled with political loyalists.
So how it works, the SC refuse to do their job and hands a legal question to a political body to make it a political decision. The Congress is already stacked, and will be further stacked by vote-rigging. The legal departments, the FBI and the military will have been purged by then and stacked with loyalists too. If none of them act to stop Trump, he wins. Loyalists are the sort of grubby people who fear losing their own little slice of wealth and power above all else and won’t act to kick away the stepladder while they are still climbing it.
But the election isn’t run by the federal government – the question of who is voted for is one that is controlled by state legislatures.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting that it impossible; that a actual constitutional crisis can’t (or won’t) happen. I’m just saying that there is no practical means by which Trump can run for a third term.
I mean, there were some people who said that y2k wasn’t going to do anything, you know, because we saw it coming and things were done to mitigate the effects, but then others were worried about their milk expiring and planes dropping from the sky… oh wait on…
SCIENCE said:
don’t worry stop crying about it 2 cases of measles isn’t bad just wait and you’ll see 200 cases but you should shut up about that as well since you ain’t seen nothing until you see the 20000 about to happen but that’s just alarmism because 2000000 is where we want it at
Ha!
Arts said:
diddly-squat said:
party_pants said:
It has already been done this election over the Mar-a-Lago documents case. The SC refused to hear the legal case on the 14 th amendment over acts of insurrection being grounds for disqualification and said it was up to Congress to determine. Thus making a legal question a political question. But the Congress is too partisan to deal with it, and it got nowhere. Biden was even forced to pardon those investigating the Jan 6 cases. These people are all being purged by Elon from positions of power. Positions that will be refilled with political loyalists.
So how it works, the SC refuse to do their job and hands a legal question to a political body to make it a political decision. The Congress is already stacked, and will be further stacked by vote-rigging. The legal departments, the FBI and the military will have been purged by then and stacked with loyalists too. If none of them act to stop Trump, he wins. Loyalists are the sort of grubby people who fear losing their own little slice of wealth and power above all else and won’t act to kick away the stepladder while they are still climbing it.
But the election isn’t run by the federal government – the question of who is voted for is one that is controlled by state legislatures.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting that it impossible; that a actual constitutional crisis can’t (or won’t) happen. I’m just saying that there is no practical means by which Trump can run for a third term.
I mean, there were some people who said that y2k wasn’t going to do anything, you know, because we saw it coming and things were done to mitigate the effects, but then others were worried about their milk expiring and planes dropping from the sky… oh wait on…
or eggs becoming unaffordable and high rise towers collapsing
On one hand, the constitution states that “no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of president shall be eligible to that of vice-president of the United States.”
On the other, this SC has already made decisions that on the face of them appear to be unconstitutional: presidential immunity undermines the 14th amendment on the issue of equality before the law.
Liberal Justice Susan Crawford has been elected to the Wisconsin Supreme Court in what many are seeing as one of the first real electoral tests since the election of DJT.
dv said:
On one hand, the constitution states that “no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of president shall be eligible to that of vice-president of the United States.”
On the other, this SC has already made decisions that on the face of them appear to be unconstitutional: presidential immunity undermines the 14th amendment on the issue of equality before the law.
I mean if the SCOTUS rules that DJT can run for a third term (which would only happen once the ticket was announced) then I suppose Obama gets rolled out by the Dems.
I mean a third Obama term doesn’t sound like the end of the world…
dv said:
On one hand, the constitution states that “no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of president shall be eligible to that of vice-president of the United States.”
On the other, this SC has already made decisions that on the face of them appear to be unconstitutional: presidential immunity undermines the 14th amendment on the issue of equality before the law.
As i said, yesterday or the day before, if Trump musters enough support from the right quarters, the US Constitution ceases to be relevant or effective. It’s a set of conventions that only work when the government, courts, and military agree to have it work.
diddly-squat said:
dv said:
On one hand, the constitution states that “no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of president shall be eligible to that of vice-president of the United States.”
On the other, this SC has already made decisions that on the face of them appear to be unconstitutional: presidential immunity undermines the 14th amendment on the issue of equality before the law.I mean if the SCOTUS rules that DJT can run for a third term (which would only happen once the ticket was announced) then I suppose Obama gets rolled out by the Dems.
I mean a third Obama term doesn’t sound like the end of the world…
Always supposing that Obama wants another stint.
captain_spalding said:
diddly-squat said:
dv said:
On one hand, the constitution states that “no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of president shall be eligible to that of vice-president of the United States.”
On the other, this SC has already made decisions that on the face of them appear to be unconstitutional: presidential immunity undermines the 14th amendment on the issue of equality before the law.I mean if the SCOTUS rules that DJT can run for a third term (which would only happen once the ticket was announced) then I suppose Obama gets rolled out by the Dems.
I mean a third Obama term doesn’t sound like the end of the world…
Always supposing that Obama wants another stint.
Get that tan suit out of the cupboard.
There were two special elections for the House today.
Florida 6th was previously won by Republicans by 33% in 2024. It was won again today, by 14%, so it is a considerable swing but won’t change the make up in Congress.
Almost identical stats in the 1st district, Matt Gaetz’s old seat.
But for crying out loud the man’s bloodstream mainly contains beef tallow and 11 herbs and spices, would God really be so cruel as to stretch out his life another 4 years?
Divine Angel said:
captain_spalding said:
diddly-squat said:
I mean if the SCOTUS rules that DJT can run for a third term (which would only happen once the ticket was announced) then I suppose Obama gets rolled out by the Dems.
I mean a third Obama term doesn’t sound like the end of the world…
Always supposing that Obama wants another stint.
Get that tan suit out of the cupboard.
oh wait their fix to that was that only presidents that haven’t served 2 consecutive terms can have a 3rd but nah no way that was just a joke as well
dv said:
On one hand, the constitution states that “no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of president shall be eligible to that of vice-president of the United States.”
On the other, this SC has already made decisions that on the face of them appear to be unconstitutional: presidential immunity undermines the 14th amendment on the issue of equality before the law.
well, you’re wrong, nobody violates the constitution unless they violate all the amendments
dv said:
But for crying out loud the man’s bloodstream mainly contains beef tallow and 11 herbs and spices, would God really be so cruel as to stretch out his life another 4 years?
a deity is not required to fix this
dv said:
But for crying out loud the man’s bloodstream mainly contains beef tallow and 11 herbs and spices, would God really be so cruel as to stretch out his life another 4 years?
Kissinger was how old…?
dv said:
But for crying out loud the man’s bloodstream mainly contains beef tallow and 11 herbs and spices, would God really be so cruel as to stretch out his life another 4 years?
He’s more machine orangeutan now than man, twisted and evil
Cymek said:
dv said:
But for crying out loud the man’s bloodstream mainly contains beef tallow and 11 herbs and spices, would God really be so cruel as to stretch out his life another 4 years?
He’s more
machineorangeutan now than man, twisted and evil
He served with me in the Clown wars
dv said:
But for crying out loud the man’s bloodstream mainly contains beef tallow and 11 herbs and spices, would God really be so cruel as to stretch out his life another 4 years?
Odds are he may not.
Divine Angel said:
dv said:
But for crying out loud the man’s bloodstream mainly contains beef tallow and 11 herbs and spices, would God really be so cruel as to stretch out his life another 4 years?
Kissinger was how old…?
Old enough for everyone to be tired of him.
The El Paso Walmart shooter won’t face the death penalty for murdering 23 people in 2019.
Luigi Mangioni is facing the death penalty for shooting that arsehole insurance guy.
I hate this fucking country.
dv said:
But for crying out loud the man’s bloodstream mainly contains beef tallow and 11 herbs and spices, would God really be so cruel as to stretch out his life another 4 years?
No chicken in the KFC FLG bits and bobs?
kii said:
The El Paso Walmart shooter won’t face the death penalty for murdering 23 people in 2019.Luigi Mangioni is facing the death penalty for shooting that arsehole insurance guy.
I hate this fucking country.
Isn’t going to get any better either.
kii said:
The El Paso Walmart shooter won’t face the death penalty for murdering 23 people in 2019.Luigi Mangioni is facing the death penalty for shooting that arsehole insurance guy.
I hate this fucking country.
It would suck if he chose NYC because they couldn’t execute him…
dv said:
some people need to look for the silver lining.. in fairness to DJT, if that news is true, then is pretty good news irrespective of who deliverers it
Heather Cox Richardson
5m ·
April 1, 2025 (Tuesday)
Today Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) made history.
For more than 25 hours he held the floor of the Senate, not reading from the phone book or children’s literature, as some of his predecessors have done, but delivering a coherent, powerful speech about the meaning of America and the ways in which the Trump regime is destroying our democracy.
On the same day that John Hudson of the Washington Post reported that members of Donald Trump’s National Security Council, including national security advisor Michael Waltz, have been skirting presidential records laws and exposing national security by using Gmail accounts to conduct government business, and the same day that mass layoffs at the Department of Health and Human Services gutted the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Booker launched a full-throated defense of the United States of America.
Booker began his marathon speech at 7:00 on the evening of March 31 with little fanfare. In a video recorded before he began, he said that he had “been hearing from people from all over my state and indeed all over the nation calling upon folks in Congress to do more, to do things that recognize the urgency—the crisis—of the moment. And so we all have a responsibility, I believe to do something different to cause, as John Lewis said, good trouble, and that includes me.”
On the floor of the Senate, Booker again invoked the late Representative John Lewis of Georgia, who had been one of the original Freedom Riders challenging racial segregation in 1961 and whose skull law enforcement officers fractured on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, in 1965 as Lewis joined the marchers on their way to Montgomery to demand their voting rights be protected.
Booker reminded listeners that Lewis was famous for telling people to “get in good trouble, necessary trouble. Help redeem the soul of America.” Booker said that in the years since Trump took office, he has been asking himself, “ow am I living up to his words?”
“Tonight I rise with the intention of getting in some good trouble. I rise with the intention of disrupting the normal business of the United States Senate for as long as I am physically able. I rise tonight because I believe sincerely that our country is in crisis and I believe that not in a partisan sense,” he said, “because so many of the people that have been reaching out to my office in pain, in fear, having their lives upended—so many of them identify themselves as Republicans.”
Standing for the next 25 hours and 5 minutes, without a break to use the restroom and pausing only when colleagues asked questions to enable him to rest his voice, Booker called out the Trump administration’s violations of the Constitution and detailed the ways in which the administration is hurting Americans.
Farmers have lost government contracts, putting them in a financial crisis. Cuts to environmental protections that protect clean air and water are affecting Americans’ health. Housing is unaffordable, and the administration is making things worse. Cuts to education and medical research and national security breaches have made Americans less safe. The regime accidentally deported a legal resident because of “administrative error” and now says it cannot get him back.
“These are not normal times in America, and they should not be treated as such,” he said. “This is our moral moment. This is when the most precious ideas of our country are being tested…. Where does the Constitution live, on paper or in our hearts?”
Throughout his speech, Booker emphasized the power of the American people. He told their stories and read their letters. And he urged them to stand up for the country. “In this democracy,” he said, “the power of people is greater than the people in power.”
He emphasized the power of the people by calling out South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, who until today held the record for the longest Senate speech: a filibuster he launched in 1957 to try to stop the passage of that year’s Civil Rights Act. Thurmond spoke for 24 hours and 18 minutes, but unlike Booker, who used his time to make a powerful and coherent case for reclaiming American democracy, Thurmond filled time with tactics like reading from an encyclopedia.
But, Booker noted, Thurmond’s attempt to stop racial equality failed. After he ended his filibuster, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1957, and Black Americans and their allies used it to demand the equal protection of the law, including the right to vote. “I’m not here…because of his speech,” Booker said. “I’m here despite his speech. I’m here because as powerful as he was, the people were more powerful.”
“It is time to heed the words of the man I began this whole thing with: John Lewis. I beg folks to take his example of his early days when he made himself determined to show his love for his country at a time the country didn’t love him, to love this country so much, to be such a patriot that he endured beatings, savagely, on the Edmund Pettus bridge, at lunch counters, on freedom rides. He said he had to do something. He would not normalize a moment like this. He would not just go along with business as usual. He wouldn’t know how to solve it, but there’s one thing that he would do, that I hope we all can do, that I think I did a little bit of tonight.
“He said for us to go out and cause some good trouble, necessary trouble, to redeem the soul of our nation. I want you to redeem the dream…. Let’s be bolder in America with a vision that inspires with hope. It starts with the people of the United States of America—that’s how this country started: ‘We the people.’ Let’s get back to the ideals that others are threatening, let’s get back to our founding documents…. Those imperfect geniuses had some very special words at the end of the Declaration of Independence…when our founders said we must mutually pledge, pledge to each other ‘our lives, our fortunes, and our Sacred Honor.’ We need that now from all Americans. This is a moral moment. It’s not left or right, it’s right or wrong.
“Let’s get in good trouble.
“My friend, madam president, I yield the floor.”
According to Washington Post technology reporter Drew Harwell, before he was through, Booker’s speech had been liked on TikTok 400 million times.
The people spoke today in special elections. Republican candidates in Florida won by about 14 points in each of two U.S. House races, but just five months ago, Republicans won those seats by 30 and 37 points. It appears that voters are angry at the Republican Party.
In Wisconsin, the state supreme court race showed a similar dynamic. The candidate endorsed by President Trump and backed by more than $20 million from Elon Musk, lost the race to his opponent, circuit court judge Susan Crawford. Musk had campaigned in the state for Crawford’s opponent, handing out two $1 million checks and saying that the election could determine “the future of America and Western Civilization.”
Crawford won by about 10 points.
“As a little girl growing up in Chippewa Falls,” Crawford said in her victory speech, “I never could have imagined that I’d be taking on the richest man in the world for justice in Wisconsin. And we won.”
that post was from facebook. hopefully it sticks.
each of heather’s posts is followed by a post of references. does anyone want me to post those too?
sarahs mum said:
that post was from facebook. hopefully it sticks.each of heather’s posts is followed by a post of references. does anyone want me to post those too?
From Facebook? Didn’t last long, then, can’t see it on my FB feed.
Neophyte said:
sarahs mum said:
that post was from facebook. hopefully it sticks.each of heather’s posts is followed by a post of references. does anyone want me to post those too?
From Facebook? Didn’t last long, then, can’t see it on my FB feed.
yep. its gone.
sarahs mum said:
Neophyte said:
sarahs mum said:
that post was from facebook. hopefully it sticks.each of heather’s posts is followed by a post of references. does anyone want me to post those too?
From Facebook? Didn’t last long, then, can’t see it on my FB feed.
yep. its gone.
Hang on, now it’s there….sheesh
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cc1dq9837w8
sarahs mum said:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cc1dq9837w8
Hopefully no tanks roll out
https://www.threads.net/@debbieelledgeofficial/post/DH6is_Cy4R8?xmt=AQGzhOx2w3pGIn1PmDsVrz3vVvWfxSBYcgg76DRt39JBkA
dv said:
https://www.threads.net/@debbieelledgeofficial/post/DH6is_Cy4R8?xmt=AQGzhOx2w3pGIn1PmDsVrz3vVvWfxSBYcgg76DRt39JBkA
Propaganda Barbie.. haha
Cymek said:
sarahs mum said:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cc1dq9837w8Hopefully no tanks roll out
At present, members of the US armed forces are sworn to defend the US Constitution. They take that very seriously.
It would be a breach the oath that each one of them took if they were to act against US citizens exercising the rights, privileges, and protections that the Constitution provides to them.
Any order to carry out acts contrary to the Consititution could, and would, be interpreted as an illegal order, and service people would be entirely justified in refusing to obey such orders.
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1HQtpMASwN/
dv said:
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1HQtpMASwN/
Private page.
ChrispenEvan said:
dv said:
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1HQtpMASwN/
Private page.
He’s not here, i think he went to the showers.
sarahs mum said:
Heather Cox Richardson
5m ·
April 1, 2025 (Tuesday)Today Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) made history.
—————————————————cut————————————————
Hmmm. She’s still there. Is the earlier post incorrect?
sarahs mum said:
Neophyte said:
sarahs mum said:
that post was from facebook. hopefully it sticks.each of heather’s posts is followed by a post of references. does anyone want me to post those too?
From Facebook? Didn’t last long, then, can’t see it on my FB feed.
yep. its gone.
Oh. It came and then went.
Bugger.
Neophyte said:
sarahs mum said:
Neophyte said:From Facebook? Didn’t last long, then, can’t see it on my FB feed.
yep. its gone.
Hang on, now it’s there….sheesh
WTF?
wHy isN’t KId rOCk weARinG a SuiT?
Divine Angel said:
wHy isN’t KId rOCk weARinG a SuiT?
And, has he said ‘thank you’?
Trump’s Tariff Day.
Liberation Day= Oligarchy Day
Fixed.
Divine Angel said:
wHy isN’t KId rOCk weARinG a SuiT?
I mean people say it’s poor manners to wear a hat inside
diddly-squat said:
party_pants said:
diddly-squat said:how would he do this in practice?
It has already been done this election over the Mar-a-Lago documents case. The SC refused to hear the legal case on the 14 th amendment over acts of insurrection being grounds for disqualification and said it was up to Congress to determine. Thus making a legal question a political question. But the Congress is too partisan to deal with it, and it got nowhere. Biden was even forced to pardon those investigating the Jan 6 cases. These people are all being purged by Elon from positions of power. Positions that will be refilled with political loyalists.
So how it works, the SC refuse to do their job and hands a legal question to a political body to make it a political decision. The Congress is already stacked, and will be further stacked by vote-rigging. The legal departments, the FBI and the military will have been purged by then and stacked with loyalists too. If none of them act to stop Trump, he wins. Loyalists are the sort of grubby people who fear losing their own little slice of wealth and power above all else and won’t act to kick away the stepladder while they are still climbing it.
But the election isn’t run by the federal government – the question of who is voted for is one that is controlled by state legislatures.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting that it impossible; that a actual constitutional crisis can’t (or won’t) happen. I’m just saying that there is no practical means by which Trump can run for a third term.
It won’t happen because I expect Trump will be unelectable and impeached before then but I have read that if he did try run and did win the SCOTUS would most likely acquiesce to what would effectively be a national referendum and let him remain president regardless of the 22nd amendment.
kii said:
The El Paso Walmart shooter won’t face the death penalty for murdering 23 people in 2019.Luigi Mangioni is facing the death penalty for shooting that arsehole insurance guy.
I hate this fucking country.
If you don’t love it leave! Yes please ASAP.
Witty Rejoinder said:
diddly-squat said:
party_pants said:It has already been done this election over the Mar-a-Lago documents case. The SC refused to hear the legal case on the 14 th amendment over acts of insurrection being grounds for disqualification and said it was up to Congress to determine. Thus making a legal question a political question. But the Congress is too partisan to deal with it, and it got nowhere. Biden was even forced to pardon those investigating the Jan 6 cases. These people are all being purged by Elon from positions of power. Positions that will be refilled with political loyalists.
So how it works, the SC refuse to do their job and hands a legal question to a political body to make it a political decision. The Congress is already stacked, and will be further stacked by vote-rigging. The legal departments, the FBI and the military will have been purged by then and stacked with loyalists too. If none of them act to stop Trump, he wins. Loyalists are the sort of grubby people who fear losing their own little slice of wealth and power above all else and won’t act to kick away the stepladder while they are still climbing it.
But the election isn’t run by the federal government – the question of who is voted for is one that is controlled by state legislatures.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting that it impossible; that a actual constitutional crisis can’t (or won’t) happen. I’m just saying that there is no practical means by which Trump can run for a third term.
It won’t happen because I expect Trump will be unelectable and impeached before then but I have read that if he did try run and did win the SCOTUS would most likely acquiesce to what would effectively be a national referendum and let him remain president regardless of the 22nd amendment.
I’m not so sure about that simply because that’s not the way the Constitution is amended. I think if he tried to run there would be an almost instant legal challenge that would trigger a decision from SCOTUS.
Witty Rejoinder said:
It won’t happen because I expect Trump will be unelectable and impeached before then but I have read that if he did try run and did win the SCOTUS would most likely acquiesce to what would effectively be a national referendum and let him remain president regardless of the 22nd amendment.
If there’s another 215 days of Trump Presidency like it’s been up until now, he should have managed to well and truly give evey American of voting age the shits with himself when the next election comes around.
Witty Rejoinder said:
diddly-squat said:
party_pants said:It has already been done this election over the Mar-a-Lago documents case. The SC refused to hear the legal case on the 14 th amendment over acts of insurrection being grounds for disqualification and said it was up to Congress to determine. Thus making a legal question a political question. But the Congress is too partisan to deal with it, and it got nowhere. Biden was even forced to pardon those investigating the Jan 6 cases. These people are all being purged by Elon from positions of power. Positions that will be refilled with political loyalists.
So how it works, the SC refuse to do their job and hands a legal question to a political body to make it a political decision. The Congress is already stacked, and will be further stacked by vote-rigging. The legal departments, the FBI and the military will have been purged by then and stacked with loyalists too. If none of them act to stop Trump, he wins. Loyalists are the sort of grubby people who fear losing their own little slice of wealth and power above all else and won’t act to kick away the stepladder while they are still climbing it.
But the election isn’t run by the federal government – the question of who is voted for is one that is controlled by state legislatures.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting that it impossible; that a actual constitutional crisis can’t (or won’t) happen. I’m just saying that there is no practical means by which Trump can run for a third term.
It won’t happen because I expect Trump will be unelectable and impeached before then but I have read that if he did try run and did win the SCOTUS would most likely acquiesce to what would effectively be a national referendum and let him remain president regardless of the 22nd amendment.
Impeachment doesn’t mean jack, apparently.
diddly-squat said:
I’m not so sure about that simply because that’s not the way the Constitution is amended. I think if he tried to run there would be an almost instant legal challenge that would trigger a decision from SCOTUS.
You do so cling to this notion that Trump, the Supreme Court, and the Republican party will play by what you see as ‘the established rules’.
Trump already owns the Supreme Court. If the Republicans still control government after the mid-term elections, there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, to stop them doing whatever they please, ‘;egitimate’ or otherwise.
Rules only work when the players agree to abide by them. If one side chooses to totally disregard the rules, then there are no rules.
Divine Angel said:
Witty Rejoinder said:
diddly-squat said:But the election isn’t run by the federal government – the question of who is voted for is one that is controlled by state legislatures.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting that it impossible; that a actual constitutional crisis can’t (or won’t) happen. I’m just saying that there is no practical means by which Trump can run for a third term.
It won’t happen because I expect Trump will be unelectable and impeached before then but I have read that if he did try run and did win the SCOTUS would most likely acquiesce to what would effectively be a national referendum and let him remain president regardless of the 22nd amendment.
Impeachment doesn’t mean jack, apparently.
It’s a two step process: impeachment in the House and conformation in the Senate but the entire process is generally just referred to as ‘impeachment’.
captain_spalding said:
Witty Rejoinder said:It won’t happen because I expect Trump will be unelectable and impeached before then but I have read that if he did try run and did win the SCOTUS would most likely acquiesce to what would effectively be a national referendum and let him remain president regardless of the 22nd amendment.
If there’s another 215 days of Trump Presidency like it’s been up until now, he should have managed to well and truly give evey American of voting age the shits with himself when the next election comes around.
I’d put money on there being no election at the due time. Shitler is a fascist dictator and will not give up power, ever. He’ll pull whatever shit he needs to for that to happen, and no-one will be able to stop him.
Spiny Norman said:
I’d put money on there being no election at the due time. Shitler is a fascist dictator and will not give up power, ever. He’ll pull whatever shit he needs to for that to happen, and no-one will be able to stop him.
That’s what he, and the Republican party, will be devoting all their energy to: ensuring that, from here onwards, while it may not be a one-party state, there’s only ever one party in the White House, and in government.
One plus to come out of the Republican party cementing itself into power, with no elections any more (at least, no proper elections), is that the religious ratbags might find that politicians don’t listen to them any more.
If the Republicans know that they’re going to win every time, then they don’t have to pander to the God-botherers for votes.
They might even lose tax-exempt status!
Spiny Norman said:
captain_spalding said:
Witty Rejoinder said:It won’t happen because I expect Trump will be unelectable and impeached before then but I have read that if he did try run and did win the SCOTUS would most likely acquiesce to what would effectively be a national referendum and let him remain president regardless of the 22nd amendment.
If there’s another 215 days of Trump Presidency like it’s been up until now, he should have managed to well and truly give evey American of voting age the shits with himself when the next election comes around.
I’d put money on there being no election at the due time. Shitler is a fascist dictator and will not give up power, ever. He’ll pull whatever shit he needs to for that to happen, and no-one will be able to stop him.
A lot of left-wing Americans also have guns and won’t be afraid to use them I expect. Employing the Insurrection Act will be the beginning of the end of Trump IMO.
Witty Rejoinder said:
Spiny Norman said:
captain_spalding said:If there’s another 215 days of Trump Presidency like it’s been up until now, he should have managed to well and truly give evey American of voting age the shits with himself when the next election comes around.
I’d put money on there being no election at the due time. Shitler is a fascist dictator and will not give up power, ever. He’ll pull whatever shit he needs to for that to happen, and no-one will be able to stop him.
A lot of left-wing Americans also have guns and won’t be afraid to use them I expect. Employing the Insurrection Act will be the beginning of the end of Trump IMO.
Interesting times ahead indeed, no matter which way it goes.
I also predict a bloody war of sorts. The problem is that millions of rednecks with guns is not going to beat the military.
Spiny Norman said:
Witty Rejoinder said:
Spiny Norman said:I’d put money on there being no election at the due time. Shitler is a fascist dictator and will not give up power, ever. He’ll pull whatever shit he needs to for that to happen, and no-one will be able to stop him.
A lot of left-wing Americans also have guns and won’t be afraid to use them I expect. Employing the Insurrection Act will be the beginning of the end of Trump IMO.
Interesting times ahead indeed, no matter which way it goes.
I also predict a bloody war of sorts. The problem is that millions of rednecks with guns is not going to beat the military.
The questions, which side will the military take?
If Trump and his mob continue on their present path, and the military retains its oath to defend the Constitution, then they may well end up on the side of the ‘rebels’ against Trump and his minions.
If, however, Trump has managed by then to somehow suborn the military into swearing their allegiance to him personally (like whats-his-name did), then they may be on the other side.
captain_spalding said:
diddly-squat said:
I’m not so sure about that simply because that’s not the way the Constitution is amended. I think if he tried to run there would be an almost instant legal challenge that would trigger a decision from SCOTUS.
You do so cling to this notion that Trump, the Supreme Court, and the Republican party will play by what you see as ‘the established rules’.
Trump already owns the Supreme Court. If the Republicans still control government after the mid-term elections, there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, to stop them doing whatever they please, ‘;egitimate’ or otherwise.
Rules only work when the players agree to abide by them. If one side chooses to totally disregard the rules, then there are no rules.
oh c’m‘on there’s still the rules of physics
captain_spalding said:
Spiny Norman said:
Witty Rejoinder said:A lot of left-wing Americans also have guns and won’t be afraid to use them I expect. Employing the Insurrection Act will be the beginning of the end of Trump IMO.
Interesting times ahead indeed, no matter which way it goes.
I also predict a bloody war of sorts. The problem is that millions of rednecks with guns is not going to beat the military.
The questions, which side will the military take?
If Trump and his mob continue on their present path, and the military retains its oath to defend the Constitution, then they may well end up on the side of the ‘rebels’ against Trump and his minions.
If, however, Trump has managed by then to somehow suborn the military into swearing their allegiance to him personally (like whats-his-name did), then they may be on the other side.
Yep, interesting times ahead.
captain_spalding said:
Spiny Norman said:
Witty Rejoinder said:A lot of left-wing Americans also have guns and won’t be afraid to use them I expect. Employing the Insurrection Act will be the beginning of the end of Trump IMO.
Interesting times ahead indeed, no matter which way it goes.
I also predict a bloody war of sorts. The problem is that millions of rednecks with guns is not going to beat the military.
The questions, which side will the military take?
If Trump and his mob continue on their present path, and the military retains its oath to defend the Constitution, then they may well end up on the side of the ‘rebels’ against Trump and his minions.
If, however, Trump has managed by then to somehow suborn the military into swearing their allegiance to him personally (like whats-his-name did), then they may be on the other side.
I expect the actual US military will try to stand back and keep the peace but the state militias employed on the national stage may be more aligned to the general partisanship of their prospective states. I don’t think the New York State Militia being employed in Texas and vice versa being a situation accommodating of law and order. And even within states I presume militias are organized on geographical hierarchies where rural citizens might not take kindly city folk enforcing the law and again the vice versa.
captain_spalding said:
Spiny Norman said:
Witty Rejoinder said:A lot of left-wing Americans also have guns and won’t be afraid to use them I expect. Employing the Insurrection Act will be the beginning of the end of Trump IMO.
Interesting times ahead indeed, no matter which way it goes.
I also predict a bloody war of sorts. The problem is that millions of rednecks with guns is not going to beat the military.
The questions, which side will the military take?
If Trump and his mob continue on their present path, and the military retains its oath to defend the Constitution, then they may well end up on the side of the ‘rebels’ against Trump and his minions.
If, however, Trump has managed by then to somehow suborn the military into swearing their allegiance to him personally (like whats-his-name did), then they may be on the other side.
I expect the actual US military will try to stand back and keep the peace but the state militias employed on the national stage may be more aligned to the general partisanship of their prospective states. I don’t think the New York State Militia being employed in Texas and vice versa being a situation accommodating of law and order. And even within states I presume militias are organized on geographical hierarchies where rural citizens might not take kindly city folk enforcing the law and again the vice versa.
captain_spalding said:
Spiny Norman said:
Witty Rejoinder said:A lot of left-wing Americans also have guns and won’t be afraid to use them I expect. Employing the Insurrection Act will be the beginning of the end of Trump IMO.
Interesting times ahead indeed, no matter which way it goes.
I also predict a bloody war of sorts. The problem is that millions of rednecks with guns is not going to beat the military.
The questions, which side will the military take?
If Trump and his mob continue on their present path, and the military retains its oath to defend the Constitution, then they may well end up on the side of the ‘rebels’ against Trump and his minions.
If, however, Trump has managed by then to somehow suborn the military into swearing their allegiance to him personally (like whats-his-name did), then they may be on the other side.
I expect the actual US military will try to stand back and keep the peace but the state militias employed on the national stage may be more aligned to the general partisanship of their prospective states. I don’t think the New York State Militia being employed in Texas and vice versa being a situation accommodating of law and order. And even within states I presume militias are organized on geographical hierarchies where rural citizens might not take kindly city folk enforcing the law and again the vice versa.
Oooops.
captain_spalding said:
Spiny Norman said:
Witty Rejoinder said:A lot of left-wing Americans also have guns and won’t be afraid to use them I expect. Employing the Insurrection Act will be the beginning of the end of Trump IMO.
Interesting times ahead indeed, no matter which way it goes.
I also predict a bloody war of sorts. The problem is that millions of rednecks with guns is not going to beat the military.
The questions, which side will the military take?
If Trump and his mob continue on their present path, and the military retains its oath to defend the Constitution, then they may well end up on the side of the ‘rebels’ against Trump and his minions.
If, however, Trump has managed by then to somehow suborn the military into swearing their allegiance to him personally (like whats-his-name did), then they may be on the other side.
They are sworn to uphold the Big C, but the POTUS is their C-in-C. It is assumed that both of the latter are in lock-step.
But the Supreme Court adjudicate matters, and if they decide to continue to abrogate their duty (having already set a precedent) then many in the military will probably see it as their duty to accept a SC decision even if blatantly wrong. They don’t want to be the ones to step over the lines and be seen to be making their own decision. Give it another 3 years and all those key positions will be loyalists anyway – reliant on the incumbent administration for their current positions and knowing they’d be purged and out on their arse with any new administration.
Spiny Norman said:
captain_spalding said:
Witty Rejoinder said:It won’t happen because I expect Trump will be unelectable and impeached before then but I have read that if he did try run and did win the SCOTUS would most likely acquiesce to what would effectively be a national referendum and let him remain president regardless of the 22nd amendment.
If there’s another 215 days of Trump Presidency like it’s been up until now, he should have managed to well and truly give evey American of voting age the shits with himself when the next election comes around.
I’d put money on there being no election at the due time. Shitler is a fascist dictator and will not give up power, ever. He’ll pull whatever shit he needs to for that to happen, and no-one will be able to stop him.
I’ll take that bet, what are you prepared to wager?
Witty Rejoinder said:
Oooops.
s’ok. i do it all the time.
captain_spalding said:
diddly-squat said:I’m not so sure about that simply because that’s not the way the Constitution is amended. I think if he tried to run there would be an almost instant legal challenge that would trigger a decision from SCOTUS.
You do so cling to this notion that Trump, the Supreme Court, and the Republican party will play by what you see as ‘the established rules’.
Trump already owns the Supreme Court. If the Republicans still control government after the mid-term elections, there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, to stop them doing whatever they please, ‘;egitimate’ or otherwise.
Rules only work when the players agree to abide by them. If one side chooses to totally disregard the rules, then there are no rules.
my point has nothing to do with “people playing by the rules”… I was mealy saying that if Trump were to run for POTUS or as running mate to someone else then there would be an an immediate challenge made by (at the very least, the Democratic Party) and this case would trigger a decision by the SCOTUS.
The initial claim was that a post election trump victory would be waved through by the SCOTUS because it would be viewed, in large, as a result by referendum. My issue here is that the constitution isn’t amended by popular vote, it’s amended through a legislative process so there would be no standing. In any case, as I said above I think the matter would be addressed long before any election.
diddly-squat said:
captain_spalding said:
diddly-squat said:I’m not so sure about that simply because that’s not the way the Constitution is amended. I think if he tried to run there would be an almost instant legal challenge that would trigger a decision from SCOTUS.
You do so cling to this notion that Trump, the Supreme Court, and the Republican party will play by what you see as ‘the established rules’.
Trump already owns the Supreme Court. If the Republicans still control government after the mid-term elections, there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, to stop them doing whatever they please, ‘;egitimate’ or otherwise.
Rules only work when the players agree to abide by them. If one side chooses to totally disregard the rules, then there are no rules.
my point has nothing to do with “people playing by the rules”… I was mealy saying that if Trump were to run for POTUS or as running mate to someone else then there would be an an immediate challenge made by (at the very least, the Democratic Party) and this case would trigger a decision by the SCOTUS.
The initial claim was that a post election trump victory would be waved through by the SCOTUS because it would be viewed, in large, as a result by referendum. My issue here is that the constitution isn’t amended by popular vote, it’s amended through a legislative process so there would be no standing. In any case, as I said above I think the matter would be addressed long before any election.
My point is that SCOTUS will decline to rule on it directly, and refer the immensely difficult task of counting to 2, to the Congress. Wherer it becomes a question of the numbers and political vested interests.
Even of the Congress were to assert that 2 = 2 that decision would become politically tainted with accusations of bias and partisanship. Leading to another Jan 6 type event to prevent the Congress from carrying out their duty. Remember all those Jan 6 criminals that got pardoned and released? They’ll be back and in greater numbers.
party_pants said:
diddly-squat said:
captain_spalding said:You do so cling to this notion that Trump, the Supreme Court, and the Republican party will play by what you see as ‘the established rules’.
Trump already owns the Supreme Court. If the Republicans still control government after the mid-term elections, there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, to stop them doing whatever they please, ‘;egitimate’ or otherwise.
Rules only work when the players agree to abide by them. If one side chooses to totally disregard the rules, then there are no rules.
my point has nothing to do with “people playing by the rules”… I was mealy saying that if Trump were to run for POTUS or as running mate to someone else then there would be an an immediate challenge made by (at the very least, the Democratic Party) and this case would trigger a decision by the SCOTUS.
The initial claim was that a post election trump victory would be waved through by the SCOTUS because it would be viewed, in large, as a result by referendum. My issue here is that the constitution isn’t amended by popular vote, it’s amended through a legislative process so there would be no standing. In any case, as I said above I think the matter would be addressed long before any election.
My point is that SCOTUS will decline to rule on it directly, and refer the immensely difficult task of counting to 2, to the Congress. Wherer it becomes a question of the numbers and political vested interests.
Even of the Congress were to assert that 2 = 2 that decision would become politically tainted with accusations of bias and partisanship. Leading to another Jan 6 type event to prevent the Congress from carrying out their duty. Remember all those Jan 6 criminals that got pardoned and released? They’ll be back and in greater numbers.
in order for it to get to the SCOTUS it will first have to go before a federal court, that court will make a ruling and that ruling will then be appealed by whomever loses. there is no recourse for this to “not be ruled upon” as it can’t be sent anywhere. This is an up and down constitution matter, not matter of legislation.
party_pants said:
diddly-squat said:
captain_spalding said:You do so cling to this notion that Trump, the Supreme Court, and the Republican party will play by what you see as ‘the established rules’.
Trump already owns the Supreme Court. If the Republicans still control government after the mid-term elections, there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, to stop them doing whatever they please, ‘;egitimate’ or otherwise.
Rules only work when the players agree to abide by them. If one side chooses to totally disregard the rules, then there are no rules.
my point has nothing to do with “people playing by the rules”… I was mealy saying that if Trump were to run for POTUS or as running mate to someone else then there would be an an immediate challenge made by (at the very least, the Democratic Party) and this case would trigger a decision by the SCOTUS.
The initial claim was that a post election trump victory would be waved through by the SCOTUS because it would be viewed, in large, as a result by referendum. My issue here is that the constitution isn’t amended by popular vote, it’s amended through a legislative process so there would be no standing. In any case, as I said above I think the matter would be addressed long before any election.
My point is that SCOTUS will decline to rule on it directly, and refer the immensely difficult task of counting to 2, to the Congress. Wherer it becomes a question of the numbers and political vested interests.
Even of the Congress were to assert that 2 = 2 that decision would become politically tainted with accusations of bias and partisanship. Leading to another Jan 6 type event to prevent the Congress from carrying out their duty. Remember all those Jan 6 criminals that got pardoned and released? They’ll be back and in greater numbers.
___
I think their strategy is, in 3 years time the supreme court will be so clogged with challenges that they will rule until sorted
look we’re not saying this guy won’t be fuhrer for life, we’re saying that when he does it it will be in direct contravention to the rules
diddly-squat said:
party_pants said:
diddly-squat said:my point has nothing to do with “people playing by the rules”… I was mealy saying that if Trump were to run for POTUS or as running mate to someone else then there would be an an immediate challenge made by (at the very least, the Democratic Party) and this case would trigger a decision by the SCOTUS.
The initial claim was that a post election trump victory would be waved through by the SCOTUS because it would be viewed, in large, as a result by referendum. My issue here is that the constitution isn’t amended by popular vote, it’s amended through a legislative process so there would be no standing. In any case, as I said above I think the matter would be addressed long before any election.
My point is that SCOTUS will decline to rule on it directly, and refer the immensely difficult task of counting to 2, to the Congress. Wherer it becomes a question of the numbers and political vested interests.
Even of the Congress were to assert that 2 = 2 that decision would become politically tainted with accusations of bias and partisanship. Leading to another Jan 6 type event to prevent the Congress from carrying out their duty. Remember all those Jan 6 criminals that got pardoned and released? They’ll be back and in greater numbers.
in order for it to get to the SCOTUS it will first have to go before a federal court, that court will make a ruling and that ruling will then be appealed by whomever loses. there is no recourse for this to “not be ruled upon” as it can’t be sent anywhere. This is an up and down constitution matter, not matter of legislation.
The SCOTUS is the ultimate constitutional court in the US. Nothing is final until they’ve had their say on it.
So was insurrection under the 14th Amendment. Purely a legal question under the constitution, But the SCOTUS made it a political one, Having set an awful precedent, they might follow it.
word on the street is that this act of incendiarism is the most monstrous act of terrorism carried out by Bolshevism in Germany
SCIENCE said:
word on the street is that this act of incendiarism is the most monstrous act of terrorism carried out by Bolshevism in Germany
I don’t get what you mean here, sorry.
Michael V said:
SCIENCE said:word on the street is that this act of incendiarism is the most monstrous act of terrorism carried out by Bolshevism in Germany
I don’t get what you mean here, sorry.
He’s a mysterious fellow
Michael V said:
SCIENCE said:
word on the street is that this act of incendiarism is the most monstrous act of terrorism carried out by Bolshevism in Germany
I don’t get what you mean here, sorry.
Hitler was having dinner with Joseph Goebbels at Goebbels’ apartment in Berlin. When Goebbels received an urgent phone call informing him of the fire, he regarded it as a “tall tale” at first and hung up. Only after the second call did he report the news to Hitler. Both left Goebbels’ apartment and arrived by car at the Reichstag, just as the fire was being put out. They were met at the site by Hermann Göring, Interior Minister of Prussia, who told Hitler, “This is communist outrage! One of the communist culprits has been arrested.” Hitler called the fire a “sign from God” and claimed it was a signal meant to mark the beginning of a communist revolt. The next day, Hitler reported that “this act of incendiarism is the most monstrous act of terrorism carried out by Bolshevism in Germany”. The Vossische Zeitung newspaper warned its readers that “the government is of the opinion that the situation is such that a danger to the state and nation existed and still exists”.
SCIENCE said:
Michael V said:
SCIENCE said:
word on the street is that this act of incendiarism is the most monstrous act of terrorism carried out by Bolshevism in Germany
I don’t get what you mean here, sorry.
Hitler was having dinner with Joseph Goebbels at Goebbels’ apartment in Berlin. When Goebbels received an urgent phone call informing him of the fire, he regarded it as a “tall tale” at first and hung up. Only after the second call did he report the news to Hitler. Both left Goebbels’ apartment and arrived by car at the Reichstag, just as the fire was being put out. They were met at the site by Hermann Göring, Interior Minister of Prussia, who told Hitler, “This is communist outrage! One of the communist culprits has been arrested.” Hitler called the fire a “sign from God” and claimed it was a signal meant to mark the beginning of a communist revolt. The next day, Hitler reported that “this act of incendiarism is the most monstrous act of terrorism carried out by Bolshevism in Germany”. The Vossische Zeitung newspaper warned its readers that “the government is of the opinion that the situation is such that a danger to the state and nation existed and still exists”.
Ah. Thanks.
I had no idea about the 1933 event in Germany, so TIL about the Reichstag fire.
(Whether that learning is retained is quite another matter.)
dv said:
LOLOLOL….so much stupid.
kii said:
dv said:
LOLOLOL….so much stupid.
wait how good they know that was anti Trump graffiti
The announcements on tariffs has started. Seems all over the place.
kii said:
That boy’s cheese done slid right off his cracker
dv said:
kii said:
That boy’s cheese done slid right off his cracker
https://autos.yahoo.com/trump-didnt-actually-spoke-long-221007034.html
Skipping ahead to the relevant part of the speech, Trump says, “He’s an older guy. Real pro. Really top guy with Lee Iacocca.” When it’s laid out like that, it seems pretty clear that Trump meant the guy who spoke to him once worked with Iacocca, presumably in some sort of management or executive position. The long pause between “top guy” and “with Lee Iacocca” definitely made it sound like they were two separate statements, but listening back, that doesn’t appear to be the case.
ChrispenEvan said:
dv said:
kii said:
That boy’s cheese done slid right off his cracker
https://autos.yahoo.com/trump-didnt-actually-spoke-long-221007034.html
Skipping ahead to the relevant part of the speech, Trump says, “He’s an older guy. Real pro. Really top guy with Lee Iacocca.” When it’s laid out like that, it seems pretty clear that Trump meant the guy who spoke to him once worked with Iacocca, presumably in some sort of management or executive position. The long pause between “top guy” and “with Lee Iacocca” definitely made it sound like they were two separate statements, but listening back, that doesn’t appear to be the case.
Nothing he said was true in that speech.
dv said:
ChrispenEvan said:
dv said:That boy’s cheese done slid right off his cracker
https://autos.yahoo.com/trump-didnt-actually-spoke-long-221007034.html
Skipping ahead to the relevant part of the speech, Trump says, “He’s an older guy. Real pro. Really top guy with Lee Iacocca.” When it’s laid out like that, it seems pretty clear that Trump meant the guy who spoke to him once worked with Iacocca, presumably in some sort of management or executive position. The long pause between “top guy” and “with Lee Iacocca” definitely made it sound like they were two separate statements, but listening back, that doesn’t appear to be the case.
Nothing he said was true in that speech.
well, that is beside the point.
ChrispenEvan said:
dv said:
ChrispenEvan said:https://autos.yahoo.com/trump-didnt-actually-spoke-long-221007034.html
Skipping ahead to the relevant part of the speech, Trump says, “He’s an older guy. Real pro. Really top guy with Lee Iacocca.” When it’s laid out like that, it seems pretty clear that Trump meant the guy who spoke to him once worked with Iacocca, presumably in some sort of management or executive position. The long pause between “top guy” and “with Lee Iacocca” definitely made it sound like they were two separate statements, but listening back, that doesn’t appear to be the case.
Nothing he said was true in that speech.
well, that is beside the point.
Quite.
I’m not entirely sure about the Iacoca thing because his emphasis kind of makes it sound like he is talking about Iacoca. It is often hard to pin down his meaning.
dv said:
ChrispenEvan said:
dv said:Nothing he said was true in that speech.
well, that is beside the point.
Quite.
I’m not entirely sure about the Iacoca thing because his emphasis kind of makes it sound like he is talking about Iacoca. It is often hard to pin down his meaning.
yes, he is a poor speaker. not coherent most of the time nor cogent.
ChrispenEvan said:
dv said:
kii said:
That boy’s cheese done slid right off his cracker
https://autos.yahoo.com/trump-didnt-actually-spoke-long-221007034.html
Skipping ahead to the relevant part of the speech, Trump says, “He’s an older guy. Real pro. Really top guy with Lee Iacocca.” When it’s laid out like that, it seems pretty clear that Trump meant the guy who spoke to him once worked with Iacocca, presumably in some sort of management or executive position. The long pause between “top guy” and “with Lee Iacocca” definitely made it sound like they were two separate statements, but listening back, that doesn’t appear to be the case.
I don’t care.
kii said:
ChrispenEvan said:
dv said:That boy’s cheese done slid right off his cracker
https://autos.yahoo.com/trump-didnt-actually-spoke-long-221007034.html
Skipping ahead to the relevant part of the speech, Trump says, “He’s an older guy. Real pro. Really top guy with Lee Iacocca.” When it’s laid out like that, it seems pretty clear that Trump meant the guy who spoke to him once worked with Iacocca, presumably in some sort of management or executive position. The long pause between “top guy” and “with Lee Iacocca” definitely made it sound like they were two separate statements, but listening back, that doesn’t appear to be the case.
I don’t care.
LOL 😂
dv said:
ChrispenEvan said:
dv said:Nothing he said was true in that speech.
well, that is beside the point.
Quite.
I’m not entirely sure about the Iacoca thing because his emphasis kind of makes it sound like he is talking about Iacoca. It is often hard to pin down his meaning.
Personally, I don’t have the mental fortitude to decipher every spew of verbal vomit that pours out of his foul brain.
Those Jan Mayanese are going to be sorry now
sarahs mum said:
distract divert disrupt
dv said:
Those Jan Mayanese are going to be sorry now
Wait Until The North Sentinels Hear About This
sarahs mum said:
TIL British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT) is an Overseas Territory of the United Kingdom.
Surprising thing is that Antarctica, which does in fact have some exports, got off Scott (no pun intended) Free,
Ian said:
sarahs mum said:
TIL British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT) is an Overseas Territory of the United Kingdom.
I don’t want to be unkind but you should probably have already worked that out …
sarahs mum said:
FMD, but
LOLOLOL
:)
Michael V said:
sarahs mum said:
FMD, but
LOLOLOL
:)
It’s sort of like they got an atlas, opened it at the index at the back, and used that as the listing name source. I wonder if they remembered to take out the American place names.
SCIENCE said:
dv said:
Those Jan Mayanese are going to be sorry now
Wait Until The North Sentinels Hear About This
LOL
dv said:
Ian said:
sarahs mum said:
TIL British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT) is an Overseas Territory of the United Kingdom.
I don’t want to be unkind but you should probably have already worked that out …
Clues in the name.. ja
:)
Its interesting I think with Trump bullying tactics that all other nations are pushing back.
Perhaps the USA has never really been respected more feared even by allies.
Trump is thought of with disgust quite rightly so and people won’t put of with it.
Ian said:
dv said:
Ian said:TIL British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT) is an Overseas Territory of the United Kingdom.
I don’t want to be unkind but you should probably have already worked that out …
Clues in the name.. ja
:)
Putting a tariff on BIOT means the US has put a tariff on its own miltary establishments on Diego Garcia.
buffy said:
Michael V said:
sarahs mum said:
FMD, but
LOLOLOL
:)
It’s sort of like they got an atlas, opened it at the index at the back, and used that as the listing name source. I wonder if they remembered to take out the American place names.
it’s only going to get worse after they cull the geographers from unis.
sarahs mum said:
buffy said:
Michael V said:FMD, but
LOLOLOL
:)
It’s sort of like they got an atlas, opened it at the index at the back, and used that as the listing name source. I wonder if they remembered to take out the American place names.
it’s only going to get worse after they cull the geographers from unis.
At least Trump’s tariffs programme has educated a very small number of Americans about the fact that there are countries other than the United States.
ABC News:
I’m puzzled as to why anyone would want to travel to Bankstown from Sydenham. Or vice versa.
Destinations that figure on no-one’s bucket list, ever.
captain_spalding said:
ABC News:
I’m puzzled as to why anyone would want to travel to Bankstown
hold that thought
dv said:
Ian said:
sarahs mum said:
TIL British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT) is an Overseas Territory of the United Kingdom.
I don’t want to be unkind but you should probably have already worked that out …
The Biot Savant law.
captain_spalding said:
ABC News:
I’m puzzled as to why anyone would want to travel to Bankstown from Sydenham. Or vice versa.
Destinations that figure on no-one’s bucket list, ever.
Bankstown is a major employment centre with its own little CBD, so I would imagine much of this travel would be commuting for work
Now the part I don’t understand. What’s the end game of turning people against each other? For its entire existence, Sesame Street has strived for inclusivity. It had Black and Hispanic people before it was cool. There’s an autistic character. It showed what grief was like. It’s not just for preschool education, it’s education to be human. Learning to give a shit about other people.
dv said:
captain_spalding said:
ABC News:
I’m puzzled as to why anyone would want to travel to Bankstown from Sydenham. Or vice versa.
Destinations that figure on no-one’s bucket list, ever.
Bankstown is a major employment centre with its own little CBD, so I would imagine much of this travel would be commuting for work
Also it’s an extension of the line from the City through to Bankstown, so the numbers wanting to go from Sydenham to Bankstown isn’t really the point.
Divine Angel said:
wHy isN’t KId rOCk weARinG a SuiT?
I think it’s a 10 grand Louis Vuitton suit.
Liberation day = Oligarchy day
I suppose now with the USA a no-mans land and dystopia, aliens will no longer land at the capitol
Cymek said:
I suppose now with the USA a no-mans land and dystopia, aliens will no longer land at the capitol
unless they are space nazis.
Cymek said:
I suppose now with the USA a no-mans land and dystopia, aliens will no longer land at the capitol
Yeah, what happened to all those drones over New Jersey, six months ago?
Lesotho: What we done now?
Ian said:
Lesotho: What we done now?
Also Madagascar, Vietnam and Cambodia.
dv said:
Ian said:
Lesotho: What we done now?
Also Madagascar, Vietnam and Cambodia.
Random toss in the air of pieces of paper with the disliked country names on them. Pick x number for 50% tariffs, pick y number for whatever the next level is…continue for a bit, get sick of it, put 10% on the rest.
dv said:
Ian said:
Lesotho: What we done now?
Also Madagascar, Vietnam and Cambodia.
And the uninhabited Australian territory of Heard and McDonald Islands.
buffy said:
dv said:
Ian said:
Lesotho: What we done now?
Also Madagascar, Vietnam and Cambodia.
Random toss in the air of pieces of paper with the disliked country names on them. Pick x number for 50% tariffs, pick y number for whatever the next level is…continue for a bit, get sick of it, put 10% on the rest.
:)
Trump’s tariffs will probably plunge the global economy into recession this year, JPMorgan analysts says
From CNN’s David Goldman and Elisabeth Buchwald
If President Donald Trump maintains the massive tariffs he announced today, his unprecedented trade policies will probably cause both the US and global economies to fall into a recession in 2025, JPMorgan analysts said in a note to investors.
That’s not exactly a shock: Prior to Trump’s universal and reciprocal tariff announcements today, JPMorgan analysts gave the US economy a 40% shot of entering a recession.
JPMorgan noted that the tariffs would hike taxes on Americans by $660 billion a year, the largest tax increase in recent memory by a longshot. It will cause prices to surge, too, adding 2% to the Consumer Price Index, a measure of US inflation that has struggled to come back down to earth in recent years.
Ian said:
dv said:
Ian said:
Lesotho: What we done now?
Also Madagascar, Vietnam and Cambodia.
And the uninhabited Australian territory of Heard and McDonald Islands.
I suppose they must be exporting porpoise oil to the US?
dv said:
Out in force I see. Tthat’s some picket line.
roughbarked said:
Ian said:
dv said:Also Madagascar, Vietnam and Cambodia.
And the uninhabited Australian territory of Heard and McDonald Islands.
I suppose they must be exporting porpoise oil to the US?
Deliberately, like on porpoise ?
Cymek said:
roughbarked said:
Ian said:And the uninhabited Australian territory of Heard and McDonald Islands.
I suppose they must be exporting porpoise oil to the US?
Deliberately, like on porpoise ?
Well, something must be getting the tariff imposed on it?
Ian said:
Hmmmmm.
“Trump’s tariffs are just trade balance ratios”
https://www.reddit.com/r/economy/s/i8×7LgfIJH
And the list of “countries” from members of the Universal Postal Union.. maybe.
From Crikey…
The administration’s announcement included figures that it claimed were the tariffs that other countries impose on the US. Analysts struggled to understand where these figures came from, with editor of The Yale Review and former financial journalist for The New Yorker James Surowiecki appearing to eventually work it out:
“They didn’t actually calculate tariff rates + non-tariff barriers, as they say they did. Instead, for every country, they just took our trade deficit with that country and divided it by the country’s exports to us. So we have a $17.9 billion trade deficit with Indonesia. Its exports to us are $28 billion. $17.9/$28 = 64%, which Trump claims is the tariff rate Indonesia charges us. What extraordinary nonsense this is.”
Ian said:
wdgi
Neophyte said:
From Crikey…The administration’s announcement included figures that it claimed were the tariffs that other countries impose on the US. Analysts struggled to understand where these figures came from, with editor of The Yale Review and former financial journalist for The New Yorker James Surowiecki appearing to eventually work it out:
“They didn’t actually calculate tariff rates + non-tariff barriers, as they say they did. Instead, for every country, they just took our trade deficit with that country and divided it by the country’s exports to us. So we have a $17.9 billion trade deficit with Indonesia. Its exports to us are $28 billion. $17.9/$28 = 64%, which Trump claims is the tariff rate Indonesia charges us. What extraordinary nonsense this is.”
From experience we know that everything coming out of Trump and his associates is extraordinary nonsense.
None of it makes any sense.
roughbarked said:
Neophyte said:
From Crikey…The administration’s announcement included figures that it claimed were the tariffs that other countries impose on the US. Analysts struggled to understand where these figures came from, with editor of The Yale Review and former financial journalist for The New Yorker James Surowiecki appearing to eventually work it out:
“They didn’t actually calculate tariff rates + non-tariff barriers, as they say they did. Instead, for every country, they just took our trade deficit with that country and divided it by the country’s exports to us. So we have a $17.9 billion trade deficit with Indonesia. Its exports to us are $28 billion. $17.9/$28 = 64%, which Trump claims is the tariff rate Indonesia charges us. What extraordinary nonsense this is.”
From experience we know that everything coming out of Trump and his associates is extraordinary nonsense.
None of it makes any sense.
Are they stupid or really stupid I wonder.
Do they know they are just making it up and expect people to believe it
Or are they so stupid they don’t even realise what they say is nonsense.
SCIENCE said:
Ian said:
wdgi
bsky
Cymek said:
roughbarked said:
Neophyte said:
From Crikey…
The administration’s announcement included figures that it claimed were the tariffs that other countries impose on the US. Analysts struggled to understand where these figures came from, with editor of The Yale Review and former financial journalist for The New Yorker James Surowiecki appearing to eventually work it out:
“They didn’t actually calculate tariff rates + non-tariff barriers, as they say they did. Instead, for every country, they just took our trade deficit with that country and divided it by the country’s exports to us. So we have a $17.9 billion trade deficit with Indonesia. Its exports to us are $28 billion. $17.9/$28 = 64%, which Trump claims is the tariff rate Indonesia charges us. What extraordinary nonsense this is.”
From experience we know that everything coming out of Trump and his associates is extraordinary nonsense.
None of it makes any sense.
Are they stupid or really stupid I wonder.
Do they know they are just making it up and expect people to believe it
Or are they so stupid they don’t even realise what they say is nonsense.
they know that it distracts and diverts and disrupts and that when people brush it off as stupidity then they get away with it
Cymek said:
roughbarked said:
Neophyte said:
From Crikey…The administration’s announcement included figures that it claimed were the tariffs that other countries impose on the US. Analysts struggled to understand where these figures came from, with editor of The Yale Review and former financial journalist for The New Yorker James Surowiecki appearing to eventually work it out:
“They didn’t actually calculate tariff rates + non-tariff barriers, as they say they did. Instead, for every country, they just took our trade deficit with that country and divided it by the country’s exports to us. So we have a $17.9 billion trade deficit with Indonesia. Its exports to us are $28 billion. $17.9/$28 = 64%, which Trump claims is the tariff rate Indonesia charges us. What extraordinary nonsense this is.”
From experience we know that everything coming out of Trump and his associates is extraordinary nonsense.
None of it makes any sense.
Are they stupid or really stupid I wonder.
Do they know they are just making it up and expect people to believe it
Or are they so stupid they don’t even realise what they say is nonsense.
‘They’ are all scared of saying no to a geriatric child brain who will immediately attempt to destroy the reputation of anyone who says no.
roughbarked said:
Cymek said:
roughbarked said:From experience we know that everything coming out of Trump and his associates is extraordinary nonsense.
None of it makes any sense.
Are they stupid or really stupid I wonder.
Do they know they are just making it up and expect people to believe it
Or are they so stupid they don’t even realise what they say is nonsense.
‘They’ are all scared of saying no to a geriatric child brain who will immediately attempt to destroy the reputation of anyone who says no.
Yeah I’d believe that
Cymek said:
roughbarked said:
Cymek said:Are they stupid or really stupid I wonder.
Do they know they are just making it up and expect people to believe it
Or are they so stupid they don’t even realise what they say is nonsense.
‘They’ are all scared of saying no to a geriatric child brain who will immediately attempt to destroy the reputation of anyone who says no.
Yeah I’d believe that
They’ll lose their jobs. Which is highly likely why they will all start saying no by the midterms.
“In 1929, it all came to a very abrupt end with the Great Depression, and it would have never happened if they had stayed with the tariff policy, would have been a much different story,” Trump said.
He added, “They tried to bring back tariffs to save our country, but it was gone, it was gone, it was too late. Nothing could have been done, took years and years to get out of that depression.”
The Tariff Act of 1930, also known as the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, raised tariffs on tens of thousands of goods into the U.S. and was known as a protectionist policy.
—-
The upside down
dv said:
“In 1929, it all came to a very abrupt end with the Great Depression, and it would have never happened if they had stayed with the tariff policy, would have been a much different story,” Trump said.He added, “They tried to bring back tariffs to save our country, but it was gone, it was gone, it was too late. Nothing could have been done, took years and years to get out of that depression.”
The Tariff Act of 1930, also known as the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, raised tariffs on tens of thousands of goods into the U.S. and was known as a protectionist policy.
—-
The upside down
He seems to forget that there was a war in those years and years.
fsm said:
Sure!
dv said:
“In 1929, it all came to a very abrupt end with the Great Depression, and it would have never happened if they had stayed with the tariff policy, would have been a much different story,” Trump said.He added, “They tried to bring back tariffs to save our country, but it was gone, it was gone, it was too late. Nothing could have been done, took years and years to get out of that depression.”
The Tariff Act of 1930, also known as the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, raised tariffs on tens of thousands of goods into the U.S. and was known as a protectionist policy.
—-
The upside down
Surely tariffs would always result in a tit for tat response.
If nothing else its human nature
Neophyte said:
From Crikey…The administration’s announcement included figures that it claimed were the tariffs that other countries impose on the US. Analysts struggled to understand where these figures came from, with editor of The Yale Review and former financial journalist for The New Yorker James Surowiecki appearing to eventually work it out:
“They didn’t actually calculate tariff rates + non-tariff barriers, as they say they did. Instead, for every country, they just took our trade deficit with that country and divided it by the country’s exports to us. So we have a $17.9 billion trade deficit with Indonesia. Its exports to us are $28 billion. $17.9/$28 = 64%, which Trump claims is the tariff rate Indonesia charges us. What extraordinary nonsense this is.”
Sure looks like it (nonsense, that is).
How were the rates for Australia and Macquarie and Heard Islands worked out?
Michael V said:
Neophyte said:
From Crikey…The administration’s announcement included figures that it claimed were the tariffs that other countries impose on the US. Analysts struggled to understand where these figures came from, with editor of The Yale Review and former financial journalist for The New Yorker James Surowiecki appearing to eventually work it out:
“They didn’t actually calculate tariff rates + non-tariff barriers, as they say they did. Instead, for every country, they just took our trade deficit with that country and divided it by the country’s exports to us. So we have a $17.9 billion trade deficit with Indonesia. Its exports to us are $28 billion. $17.9/$28 = 64%, which Trump claims is the tariff rate Indonesia charges us. What extraordinary nonsense this is.”
Sure looks like it (nonsense, that is).
How were the rates for Australia and Macquarie and Heard Islands worked out?
Slap a 10% on anything else?
Ian said:
Ha!
Cymek said:
dv said:
“In 1929, it all came to a very abrupt end with the Great Depression, and it would have never happened if they had stayed with the tariff policy, would have been a much different story,” Trump said.He added, “They tried to bring back tariffs to save our country, but it was gone, it was gone, it was too late. Nothing could have been done, took years and years to get out of that depression.”
The Tariff Act of 1930, also known as the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, raised tariffs on tens of thousands of goods into the U.S. and was known as a protectionist policy.
—-
The upside down
Surely tariffs would always result in a tit for tat response.
If nothing else its human nature
Not always.
Michael V said:
Ian said:
Ha!
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/vuln#English
dv said:
Michael V said:
Ian said:
Ha!
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/vuln#English
Open misere?
dv said:
Michael V said:
Ian said:
Ha!
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/vuln#English
Heh!
ChrispenEvan said:
Cymek said:
I suppose now with the USA a no-mans land and dystopia, aliens will no longer land at the capitol
unless they are space nazis.
Fascists welcome as well.
Oligarchs too.
Tau.Neutrino said:
ChrispenEvan said:
Cymek said:
I suppose now with the USA a no-mans land and dystopia, aliens will no longer land at the capitol
unless they are space nazis.
Fascists welcome as well.
Oligarchs too.
Happy oligarchy day.
Tau.Neutrino said:
ChrispenEvan said:
Cymek said:
I suppose now with the USA a no-mans land and dystopia, aliens will no longer land at the capitol
unless they are space nazis.
Fascists welcome as well.
Oligarchs too.
Once more for those in the back
Americans are always talking about how poor old Europe is on the way out which kind of makes me wonder how they manage a 200 billion dollar trade surplus with the USA.
dv said:
Americans are always talking about how poor old Europe is on the way out which kind of makes me wonder how they manage a 200 billion dollar trade surplus with the USA.
Don’t mention the war
dv said:
Americans are always talking about how poor old Europe is on the way out which kind of makes me wonder how they manage a 200 billion dollar trade surplus with the USA.
Surely only about 44% of Americans?
I wonder with a concerted effort if everyone worldwide boycotted USA made or created products we could tank their economy.
Cymek said:
I wonder with a concerted effort if everyone worldwide boycotted USA made or created products we could tank their economy.
in the link I posted Racel does discuss the tanking of futures and the money market.
Cymek said:
I wonder with a concerted effort if everyone worldwide boycotted USA made or created products we could tank their economy.
I believe it was me who suggested that the entire world may end up at or in some type of war with the USA/ er; Donald Trump.
Divine Angel said:
Once more for those in the back
That is bonkers. Completely and utterly bonkers.
Michael V said:
Divine Angel said:
Once more for those in the back
That is bonkers. Completely and utterly bonkers.
He’s the one with tariffs in his belfry. He would probably have been better to announce that he had bats?
Heather Cox Richardson
1h ·
April 2, 2025 (Wednesday)
Just five months ago, on October 19, 2024, The Economist ran a special report on America’s economy. That economy was, the magazine said, “the envy of the world.” Today, stock market futures plummeted after President Donald J. Trump announced that he will impose a 10% tariff on all imports to the United States, with higher rates on about 60 countries he claims engage in unfair trade practices, including China, Japan, Vietnam, and South Korea, as well as the European Union.
Dow Jones Industrial Average futures lost more than 1,000 points upon the news, falling by 2.5%; the S&P 500 dropped 3.6%.
Trump’s erratic approach to the economy had already rattled markets, which dropped significantly in the first quarter of this year, and consumer confidence, which recently hit a twelve-year low. Trump waited until the stock market had closed today before he announced the new tariffs. Then, in a speech in the White House Rose Garden, he said: “For decades, our country has been looted, pillaged, raped and plundered by nations near and far, both friend and foe alike. But it is not going to happen anymore.” Instead, he said, tariffs would create “the golden age of America.”
“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 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.
Trump claims he is imposing “reciprocal tariffs” and says they are about half of what other countries levy on U.S. goods. In fact, the numbers he is using for his claim that other countries are imposing high tariffs on U.S. goods are bonkers. Economist Paul Krugman points out that the European Union places tariffs of less than 3% on average on U.S. goods, while Trump maintained its tariffs are 39%.
Krugman said he had no idea where that number had come from, but financial journalist James Surowiecki figured out that the White House “just took our trade deficit with 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.
Certain observers in business had apparently persuaded themselves that Trump didn’t really intend to raise tariffs very much and that his many vows to do so were simply rhetoric, since economists agree that tariffs are a tax on consumers and will raise inflation and slow down growth. Today’s tariffs are higher than expected, and business leaders are alarmed.
JPMorgan tonight said that they “view the full implementation of these policies as a substantial macro economic shock not currently incorporated in our forecasts” and that “these policies, if sustained, would likely push the US and global economy into recession this year.”
Economist Brad Setser of the Council on Foreign Relations agreed. He told David J. Lynch and Jeff Stein of the Washington Post: “In the short run, the effect is probably a recession. It’s going to raise the price of so many goods that can’t be made in the United States…. In the long run, it’s a vision of the U.S. that is very isolated from the world.”
But not from every other country. While Trump imposed tariffs on Australia’s remote Heard and McDonald Islands, which are uninhabited except by wildlife like seals and penguins, it did not put tariffs on Russia. A different financial shift lifted sanctions against senior Russian negotiator Kirill Dmitriev, to permit him to travel to Washington, D.C., today to meet with U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff for what Alex Marquardt, Jennifer Hansler, and Alayna Treene of CNN refer to as “talks on strengthening relations between the two countries as they seek to end the war in Ukraine.”
Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) noted tonight that the tariffs make no economic sense because “hey aren’t designed as economic policy. The tariffs are simply a new, super dangerous political tool.” Murphy suggests they are a way to make private industry dependent on the president the same way he has tried to make law firms and universities dependent on him. Industries and companies “will need to pledge loyalty to Trump in order to get sanctions relief.”
Murphy warns that “he tariffs are DESIGNED to create economic hardship…o that Trump has a straight face rationale for releasing them, business by business or industry by industry. As he adjusts or grants relief, it’s a win-win: the economy improves and dissent disappears.”
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.
But in trying to reestablish the financial patterns of the late nineteenth century—patterns that led to profound economic instability in the U.S., including economic crashes—Trump is undermining the system of global trade that has fostered international cooperation since World War II. CNN global economic analyst Rana Foroohar told CNN’s John Vause: “This is Trump saying…I am going to overturn globalization as we’ve known it.” She added: “I’m hoping it doesn’t push the U.S. and the world into recession.”
Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo makes the important point that “Presidents have no inherent power over tariffs whatsoever.” The Constitution gives to Congress, not the president, the power to impose tariffs. But the International Emergency Economic Powers Act allows the president to impose tariffs if he declares a national emergency under the National Emergencies Act, which Trump did today, declaring a “national emergency to increase our competitive edge, protect our sovereignty, and strengthen our national and economic security.”
That same law allows Congress to end such a declaration of emergency, but so far, Republicans have declined to do so. Today the Senate rebuked Trump by passing a resolution to block his tariffs on Canadian products, with four Republicans—Susan Collins (ME), Mitch McConnell (KY), Lisa Murkowski (AK), and Rand Paul (KY)—joining Democrats to pass the resolution. House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is unlikely to take the measure up.
sarahs mum said:
Heather Cox Richardson
1h ·
April 2, 2025 (Wednesday)Just five months ago, on October 19, 2024, The Economist ran a special report on America’s economy. That economy was, the magazine said, “the envy of the world.” …
Under Biden.
wait so are we saying that Americans are just going to pay for these tariffs out of their own pockets or are we saying that the genius Trump tariffs really are going to punish the other countries in the world too so they’re actually a success
Michael V said:
Divine Angel said:
Once more for those in the back
That is bonkers. Completely and utterly bonkers.
Looks good to me.
Just they made a couple of mistakes on the Aus tariff. Just add a – and another zero after the 1 and it’s all good.
SCIENCE said:
wait so are we saying that Americans are just going to pay for these tariffs out of their own pockets or are we saying that the genius Trump tariffs really are going to punish the other countries in the world too so they’re actually a success
If by we you mean you are dragging me into it, nah. Yes The north Americans will be paying.
SCIENCE said:
wait so are we saying that Americans are just going to pay for these tariffs out of their own pockets or are we saying that the genius Trump tariffs really are going to punish the other countries in the world too so they’re actually a success
… …are …… Americans are just going to pay for these tariffs out of their own pockets…
Yes. But there will be less demand, because the product prices will be higher.
or …… (Old el Paso?)are …… Trump tariffs really are going to punish the other countries in the world too…
Yes. There will be fewer sales to USA, because as the price increases, demand drops.
so they’re actually a success
Nope. Unintended consequences, you see.
diddly-squat said:
dv said:
diddly-squat said:The latest ep of Pod Save America talks Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson about their new book Abundance. Worth a listen if people are interested in ideas around how a progressive future could be built.
I did see NS’s review and another.
It does seem a bit US-centric, in that it is about problems that the US hasn’t solved but that other developed economies are doing okay with. The ideas seem reasonable but the fundamental problem is that there’s no major left of centre party in the US to put them forth: no Labour or Social Dem party, just a centre Right party and a far Right party. Citizens United seems have doomed the US because it made it impossible to win elections without the support of at least part of the billionaire class.
yeah, very US centric but it’s not as though housing isn’t a problem in a bunch of countries. it also seems discuss how progressive government has failed to deliver on its promises as a result of tripping over it’s own feet; again the US is not Robinson Crusoe in this regard.
One other thing I was going to mention …
I’ve not read the book but if NS’s review is any indication, they’ve misrepresented the nature and purpose of California High Speed Rail. The system will connect San Francisco, San Jose, Gilroy, Sacramento, Merced, Fresno, Anaheim, San Fernando, San Diego and places between, all up around 37 million people now though by the time of completion probably over 40 million, as well as connecting to the high speed rail system to Nevada. Ultimately the ride from LA to SF will be 2.6 hours with a top speed of 350 km/h. The completed statewide system will have a line length of 1250 km. This will enable most intercity travel within CA to be by rail rather than air or road Two of the biggest cost and complexity hurdles will be the building of tunnels at the San Gabriel Mountains and Pacheco pass, and ROW acquisition in the LA and SF areas. Inasmuch, the two areas of work so far have been on the Initial Operating Segment in the Central Valley, and on upgrading the San Francisco to Gilroy lines to be compatible with high speed rail.
It’s a long term project and given the long term purpose, that isn’t a problem. Trying to build a system that’s half the size of the French TGV system in a short span of time would probably run into labour and material shortages. Having said that, I do think the funding rate is a bit slower than it should be, I’d probably double it. Cali has a gross product of 4 trillion dollars a year: they could afford to assign an instrument to fund this at a rate of 2 billion per year for the foreseeable future just to get the IOS into operation a bit sooner. But (shrugs) as long as it is in place by the time the Net Zero commitments kick in I suppose it is all good.
Having said all this the legislators made a mistake that cost the project a couple of years and probably 4 billion dollars. I suppose we could put this down to “teething problems” because this is the first project of this kind in the USA but they could have, idk, done some fact finding. The deadlines and penalties they set incentivised contractors to complete building bridges etc to meet timing benchmarks without completing the service relocation (water and electricity lines etc), leading to additional costs and delays later.
I do smh at some of the coverage that the project gets in the US press and I think Americans just aren’t used to this kind of project. In France they are working on a new line to Turin: it’s only 271 km long and has a relatively modest top speed of 220 km/h, that is also going to include an extensive tunnel under the Alps. Major boring began in 2016 and it is going to be completed in 2032, with a price tag of 35 billion USD. It will take as long as it takes … it’s not in danger of being shut down because of newspapers saying “OMG is this still not finished?” It’s a major project.
sarahs mum said:
Heather Cox Richardson
1h ·
April 2, 2025 (Wednesday)————————————————————-cut———————————————————————————
HCR notes that Trump didn’t impose tariffs on Russia.
Hmmmmm.
Michael V said:
sarahs mum said:Heather Cox Richardson
1h ·
April 2, 2025 (Wednesday)————————————————————-cut———————————————————————————
HCR notes that Trump didn’t impose tariffs on Russia.
Hmmmmm.
Surely there must be a whole load of Republican voters who aren’t happy with his relationship with Putin at all.
SCIENCE said:
wait so are we saying that Americans are just going to pay for these tariffs out of their own pockets or are we saying that the genius Trump tariffs really are going to punish the other countries in the world too so they’re actually a success
I’m hoping that the ROTW is quietly making plans to cut the USA out of the loop.
Disruption is costly but apart from some armaments, what does the US make that can’t be equivalently sourced elsewhere?
dv said:
Yeah.
:)
The Rev Dodgson said:
Michael V said:
sarahs mum said:Heather Cox Richardson
1h ·
April 2, 2025 (Wednesday)————————————————————-cut———————————————————————————
HCR notes that Trump didn’t impose tariffs on Russia.
Hmmmmm.
Surely there must be a whole load of Republican voters who aren’t happy with his relationship with Putin at all.
You’d expect so.
dv said:
SCIENCE said:
wait so are we saying that Americans are just going to pay for these tariffs out of their own pockets or are we saying that the genius Trump tariffs really are going to punish the other countries in the world too so they’re actually a success
I’m hoping that the ROTW is quietly making plans to cut the USA out of the loop.
Disruption is costly but apart from some armaments, what does the US make that can’t be equivalently sourced elsewhere?
qanons
Michael V said:
The Rev Dodgson said:
Michael V said:HCR notes that Trump didn’t impose tariffs on Russia.
Hmmmmm.
Surely there must be a whole load of Republican voters who aren’t happy with his relationship with Putin at all.
You’d expect so.
I’m sure the more marginal will have noticed the swing.
Michael V said:
SCIENCE said:
wait so are we saying that Americans are just going to pay for these tariffs out of their own pockets or are we saying that the genius Trump tariffs really are going to punish the other countries in the world too so they’re actually a success
… …are …… Americans are just going to pay for these tariffs out of their own pockets…
Yes. But there will be less demand, because the product prices will be higher.
or …… (Old el Paso?)are …… Trump tariffs really are going to punish the other countries in the world too…
Yes. There will be fewer sales to USA, because as the price increases, demand drops.
so they’re actually a success
Nope. Unintended consequences, you see.
yeah we just thought that the “oh look more stupidity from kkk the tariffs will hurt only Americans” line trotted out constantly was a bit one sided, especially given tariffs are often applied as protectionist measures, but both certainly makes sense
dv said:
diddly-squat said:
dv said:I did see NS’s review and another.
It does seem a bit US-centric, in that it is about problems that the US hasn’t solved but that other developed economies are doing okay with. The ideas seem reasonable but the fundamental problem is that there’s no major left of centre party in the US to put them forth: no Labour or Social Dem party, just a centre Right party and a far Right party. Citizens United seems have doomed the US because it made it impossible to win elections without the support of at least part of the billionaire class.
yeah, very US centric but it’s not as though housing isn’t a problem in a bunch of countries. it also seems discuss how progressive government has failed to deliver on its promises as a result of tripping over it’s own feet; again the US is not Robinson Crusoe in this regard.
One other thing I was going to mention …
I’ve not read the book but if NS’s review is any indication, they’ve misrepresented the nature and purpose of California High Speed Rail. The system will connect San Francisco, San Jose, Gilroy, Sacramento, Merced, Fresno, Anaheim, San Fernando, San Diego and places between, all up around 37 million people now though by the time of completion probably over 40 million, as well as connecting to the high speed rail system to Nevada. Ultimately the ride from LA to SF will be 2.6 hours with a top speed of 350 km/h. The completed statewide system will have a line length of 1250 km. This will enable most intercity travel within CA to be by rail rather than air or road Two of the biggest cost and complexity hurdles will be the building of tunnels at the San Gabriel Mountains and Pacheco pass, and ROW acquisition in the LA and SF areas. Inasmuch, the two areas of work so far have been on the Initial Operating Segment in the Central Valley, and on upgrading the San Francisco to Gilroy lines to be compatible with high speed rail.It’s a long term project and given the long term purpose, that isn’t a problem. Trying to build a system that’s half the size of the French TGV system in a short span of time would probably run into labour and material shortages. Having said that, I do think the funding rate is a bit slower than it should be, I’d probably double it. Cali has a gross product of 4 trillion dollars a year: they could afford to assign an instrument to fund this at a rate of 2 billion per year for the foreseeable future just to get the IOS into operation a bit sooner. But (shrugs) as long as it is in place by the time the Net Zero commitments kick in I suppose it is all good.
Having said all this the legislators made a mistake that cost the project a couple of years and probably 4 billion dollars. I suppose we could put this down to “teething problems” because this is the first project of this kind in the USA but they could have, idk, done some fact finding. The deadlines and penalties they set incentivised contractors to complete building bridges etc to meet timing benchmarks without completing the service relocation (water and electricity lines etc), leading to additional costs and delays later.
I do smh at some of the coverage that the project gets in the US press and I think Americans just aren’t used to this kind of project. In France they are working on a new line to Turin: it’s only 271 km long and has a relatively modest top speed of 220 km/h, that is also going to include an extensive tunnel under the Alps. Major boring began in 2016 and it is going to be completed in 2032, with a price tag of 35 billion USD. It will take as long as it takes … it’s not in danger of being shut down because of newspapers saying “OMG is this still not finished?” It’s a major project.
I didn’t know about this project. Thanks for sharing.
I’m not sure I’d like to be the engineering geologist on the project. Several extremely active faults are crossed, some seemingly in tunnels. How do you reduce the real risk of catastrophic geological failure?
What’s Colorado got?
Michael V said:
I didn’t know about this project. Thanks for sharing.
I’m not sure I’d like to be the engineering geologist on the project. Several extremely active faults are crossed, some seemingly in tunnels. How do you reduce the real risk of catastrophic geological failure?
Quite. The Burbank to Palmdale section is likely to be the spiciest in that regard. They will be build the tunnels with extra width to allow for reallignment. I doubt there is anyway to make it completely safe but there are early warning systems with live seismogram feed and in the event of a major quake they’d basically have to shut down. You’d expect that during decades of operation there would be some safety incidents of that kind, but hey nothing is 100% safe.
MV, here’s a little document with some details on the Palmdale to Burbank section
https://hsr.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/SENER-P-B-EIRS-Tunneling-Fact-Sheet-2pgs-ver01rev05-Remediated-061124.pdf
dv said:
MV, here’s a little document with some details on the Palmdale to Burbank section
https://hsr.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/SENER-P-B-EIRS-Tunneling-Fact-Sheet-2pgs-ver01rev05-Remediated-061124.pdf
Thanks.
:)
SCIENCE said:
wait so are we saying that Americans are just going to pay for these tariffs out of their own pockets or are we saying that the genius Trump tariffs really are going to punish the other countries in the world too so they’re actually a success
yes is the only correct answer to that question.
dv said:
diddly-squat said:
dv said:I did see NS’s review and another.
It does seem a bit US-centric, in that it is about problems that the US hasn’t solved but that other developed economies are doing okay with. The ideas seem reasonable but the fundamental problem is that there’s no major left of centre party in the US to put them forth: no Labour or Social Dem party, just a centre Right party and a far Right party. Citizens United seems have doomed the US because it made it impossible to win elections without the support of at least part of the billionaire class.
yeah, very US centric but it’s not as though housing isn’t a problem in a bunch of countries. it also seems discuss how progressive government has failed to deliver on its promises as a result of tripping over it’s own feet; again the US is not Robinson Crusoe in this regard.
One other thing I was going to mention …
I’ve not read the book but if NS’s review is any indication, they’ve misrepresented the nature and purpose of California High Speed Rail. The system will connect San Francisco, San Jose, Gilroy, Sacramento, Merced, Fresno, Anaheim, San Fernando, San Diego and places between, all up around 37 million people now though by the time of completion probably over 40 million, as well as connecting to the high speed rail system to Nevada. Ultimately the ride from LA to SF will be 2.6 hours with a top speed of 350 km/h. The completed statewide system will have a line length of 1250 km. This will enable most intercity travel within CA to be by rail rather than air or road Two of the biggest cost and complexity hurdles will be the building of tunnels at the San Gabriel Mountains and Pacheco pass, and ROW acquisition in the LA and SF areas. Inasmuch, the two areas of work so far have been on the Initial Operating Segment in the Central Valley, and on upgrading the San Francisco to Gilroy lines to be compatible with high speed rail.It’s a long term project and given the long term purpose, that isn’t a problem. Trying to build a system that’s half the size of the French TGV system in a short span of time would probably run into labour and material shortages. Having said that, I do think the funding rate is a bit slower than it should be, I’d probably double it. Cali has a gross product of 4 trillion dollars a year: they could afford to assign an instrument to fund this at a rate of 2 billion per year for the foreseeable future just to get the IOS into operation a bit sooner. But (shrugs) as long as it is in place by the time the Net Zero commitments kick in I suppose it is all good.
Having said all this the legislators made a mistake that cost the project a couple of years and probably 4 billion dollars. I suppose we could put this down to “teething problems” because this is the first project of this kind in the USA but they could have, idk, done some fact finding. The deadlines and penalties they set incentivised contractors to complete building bridges etc to meet timing benchmarks without completing the service relocation (water and electricity lines etc), leading to additional costs and delays later.
I do smh at some of the coverage that the project gets in the US press and I think Americans just aren’t used to this kind of project. In France they are working on a new line to Turin: it’s only 271 km long and has a relatively modest top speed of 220 km/h, that is also going to include an extensive tunnel under the Alps. Major boring began in 2016 and it is going to be completed in 2032, with a price tag of 35 billion USD. It will take as long as it takes … it’s not in danger of being shut down because of newspapers saying “OMG is this still not finished?” It’s a major project.
I think the the discussion of high speed rail (and I also haven’t read it, but have listened to a few long form interviews with the authors) is more an example; a proxy for the failure of liberal governments to delivber on their promises. They also speak extensively about the failure of the roll of high speed internet in rural areas (much like our NBN) because of the way the liberal government created (mostly green-tape style) barriers to development of large scale infrastructure projects and how this has hurt their brand.
The moral of the story, if there is one, seems to be that people want efficient government that provides a vision for a better future through increasing people’s standard of living.
diddly-squat said:
dv said:
diddly-squat said:yeah, very US centric but it’s not as though housing isn’t a problem in a bunch of countries. it also seems discuss how progressive government has failed to deliver on its promises as a result of tripping over it’s own feet; again the US is not Robinson Crusoe in this regard.
One other thing I was going to mention …
I’ve not read the book but if NS’s review is any indication, they’ve misrepresented the nature and purpose of California High Speed Rail. The system will connect San Francisco, San Jose, Gilroy, Sacramento, Merced, Fresno, Anaheim, San Fernando, San Diego and places between, all up around 37 million people now though by the time of completion probably over 40 million, as well as connecting to the high speed rail system to Nevada. Ultimately the ride from LA to SF will be 2.6 hours with a top speed of 350 km/h. The completed statewide system will have a line length of 1250 km. This will enable most intercity travel within CA to be by rail rather than air or road Two of the biggest cost and complexity hurdles will be the building of tunnels at the San Gabriel Mountains and Pacheco pass, and ROW acquisition in the LA and SF areas. Inasmuch, the two areas of work so far have been on the Initial Operating Segment in the Central Valley, and on upgrading the San Francisco to Gilroy lines to be compatible with high speed rail.It’s a long term project and given the long term purpose, that isn’t a problem. Trying to build a system that’s half the size of the French TGV system in a short span of time would probably run into labour and material shortages. Having said that, I do think the funding rate is a bit slower than it should be, I’d probably double it. Cali has a gross product of 4 trillion dollars a year: they could afford to assign an instrument to fund this at a rate of 2 billion per year for the foreseeable future just to get the IOS into operation a bit sooner. But (shrugs) as long as it is in place by the time the Net Zero commitments kick in I suppose it is all good.
Having said all this the legislators made a mistake that cost the project a couple of years and probably 4 billion dollars. I suppose we could put this down to “teething problems” because this is the first project of this kind in the USA but they could have, idk, done some fact finding. The deadlines and penalties they set incentivised contractors to complete building bridges etc to meet timing benchmarks without completing the service relocation (water and electricity lines etc), leading to additional costs and delays later.
I do smh at some of the coverage that the project gets in the US press and I think Americans just aren’t used to this kind of project. In France they are working on a new line to Turin: it’s only 271 km long and has a relatively modest top speed of 220 km/h, that is also going to include an extensive tunnel under the Alps. Major boring began in 2016 and it is going to be completed in 2032, with a price tag of 35 billion USD. It will take as long as it takes … it’s not in danger of being shut down because of newspapers saying “OMG is this still not finished?” It’s a major project.
I think the the discussion of high speed rail (and I also haven’t read it, but have listened to a few long form interviews with the authors) is more an example; a proxy for the failure of liberal governments to delivber on their promises. They also speak extensively about the failure of the roll of high speed internet in rural areas (much like our NBN) because of the way the liberal government created (mostly green-tape style) barriers to development of large scale infrastructure projects and how this has hurt their brand.
The moral of the story, if there is one, seems to be that people want efficient government that provides a vision for a better future through increasing people’s standard of living.
For me this goes back to the issue of wealth concentration. In Aust, things aren’t perfect, but mean wages and min wages have increased with the scale of the economy, and in the US they’ve stagnated or gone backwards as the benefits of economic growth have been directed upwards. The bipartisan infrastructure bill was a glimpse of what can be done to put a dint in the works deficit and boost construction and manufacturing: it’s not clear how much of it will survive as the current admin seeks to wipe anything of Biden’s legacy.
SCIENCE said:
Closing the gap
From an article about Trump’s beef tariffs:
“ Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie said in their 2017 book ‘Let Trump be Trump’ that the president’s go-to McDonald’s order was two Big Macs, two Fillet-O-Fish and a chocolate malted milkshake.”
I doubt Trump knows how much his Big Mac costs even without tariffs.
Divine Angel said:
From an article about Trump’s beef tariffs:“ Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie said in their 2017 book ‘Let Trump be Trump’ that the president’s go-to McDonald’s order was two Big Macs, two Fillet-O-Fish and a chocolate malted milkshake.”
I doubt Trump knows how much his Big Mac costs even without tariffs.
I have no go-to McDonald’s; I don’t go there.
Michael V said:
SCIENCE said:
dv said:
Those Jan Mayanese are going to be sorry now
Wait Until The North Sentinels Hear About This
LOL
well
fuck
this is not funny any more
just fucking leave the islanders alone
Anyway, Russia didn’t get any tariffs.
roughbarked said:
Anyway, Russia didn’t get any tariffs.
this must have been some accident they couldn’t prove there was any collusion
SCIENCE said:
roughbarked said:
Anyway, Russia didn’t get any tariffs.
this must have been some accident they couldn’t prove there was any collusion
Heh.
SCIENCE said:
Michael V said:
SCIENCE said:
Wait Until The North Sentinels Hear About This
LOL
well
fuck
this is not funny any more
just fucking leave the islanders alone
actually maybe it is funny because now the trade balance is like -INF unless you count it as USAID in which case
nah this is shit
From – Fear and Loathing: Closer to the Edge
In a nation once governed by adults, Laura Loomer would be yelling at pigeons behind a locked gate. Instead, she’s in the Oval Office advising the President on who to fire from the National Security Council. And the President — who once sold steaks at Sharper Image — is taking her advice like she’s George Kennan with a face tattoo.
This week, Donald Trump fired several NSC officials not because they posed a threat — but because they didn’t kiss the ring hard enough. The move came directly after a face-to-face Oval Office meeting with Loomer, a woman best known for handcuffing herself to Twitter HQ because people stopped liking her posts.
Let’s be clear: This isn’t just a humiliation for American governance. It’s a prelude to collapse, brought to you by a failed Broadway protestor, a sweaty Florida golf tyrant, and a security team so careless they once invited a journalist into a Signal chat about classified military operations.
“It was an honor to meet with President Trump and present him with my research findings,” Loomer posted, as if a scrapbook of fever dreams constitutes national intelligence.
Her “findings” led directly to the firings of Brian Walsh, Thomas Boodry, and David Feith — serious professionals sacrificed because they weren’t MAGA enough for the Uber-banned conspiracy lady.
LAURA LOOMER: FROM LYFT BAN TO NATIONAL POWER BROKER
Loomer has been banned from more platforms than most people have credit cards. Uber. PayPal. Instagram. Lyft. Even GoFundMe wanted nothing to do with her — and GoFundMe has hosted campaigns for flat earthers, civil war cosplayers, and at least one guy trying to marry his toaster.
But Loomer’s real talent isn’t hate. It’s failure. She lost elections, botched stunts, alienated everyone but her own reflection — and somehow, that made her a perfect fit for Trump’s White House.
She once said she didn’t want Muslims in America. Now she’s vetting people for national security clearances. The same woman who claimed Ilhan Omar was infiltrating Congress for Hamas is now whispering into the ear of a president who can’t spell “counsel.”
This is not a joke. It’s what happens when a nation lets its fringe become its front office.
JD VANCE, SUSIE WILES, AND THE REST OF THE BACKUP DANCERS
Let’s not let the rest off the hook. Vice President JD Vance was in the room. So was Susie Wiles. So was NSA Mike Waltz, who’s currently under fire for creating a group chat on Signal to coordinate airstrikes — and accidentally adding The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg.
Imagine being so incompetent, you make Jeffrey Goldberg the war correspondent by accident.
Waltz took responsibility for the error but still has a job. Why? Because he’s useful — for now. Loomer’s already muttering about “neocons” and “deep state shills,” and Waltz’s days are numbered unless he swears eternal fealty while wearing a QAnon lanyard and quoting Truth Social posts like scripture.
TRUMP DOESN’T WANT COMPETENCE — HE WANTS DEVOTION
This is the Trump doctrine now: hire clowns, purge thinkers, and praise whoever flatters him loudest. Loomer rose not through merit, but through megaphone. She shouted louder than the rest, believed stranger things, hated more people, and did it all while failing upward like a MAGA-powered balloon.
Trump didn’t tap her for advice in spite of her delusions — he picked her because of them. Because she sees enemies everywhere. Because she makes him feel like a king being protected from imaginary assassins. Because reality is a threat to a man whose power depends on illusion.
FINAL ROUND: WHO’S REALLY IN CHARGE?
The truth is brutal: The woman who thought the Vegas shooting was a hoax now influences the most sensitive personnel decisions in the United States government. She is dictating purges of national security experts, pushing out seasoned professionals, and replacing them with true believers and bootlickers.
That’s not just dangerous. That’s dictatorship cosplay with live ammo.
Loomer is not the outlier. She is the blueprint. This is what happens when power is handed to those who hate reality — they try to dismantle it, one paranoid whisper at a time.
And Trump? He’s not the strongman. He’s the mark. The easiest con of all. A sweaty old man clapping along while the carnival barker he hired sets fire to the tent.
A FASCIST FAN CLUB
So here we are. The commander-in-chief is taking cues from a woman who’s been banned from more apps than she’s read books. His war plans leak through group chats. His allies cower before trolls. And his administration is now a live-action roleplay of the darkest corners of 4chan.
This isn’t a presidency.
It’s a fascist fan club run by failures, with a loyalty oath, a merch table, and a body count.
And the ringmaster?
She’s still out there — tweeting, scheming, vetting, purging — all while America burns behind her like a stage she never deserved to stand on.
Oregon’s Bay Area is feeling puzzled.
We finally have our answer. After years of vague slogans and red hats, Donald Trump has revealed exactly when he believes America was great: 1789. Yes, the year George Washington became president. The year the U.S. Constitution took effect. The year “we the people” meant wealthy white landowners, while women, Black people, Indigenous peoples, and the working class were denied basic rights, voices, or dignity. That’s the America he wants to bring back, not just in spirit, but in economic policy.
In what may go down as the most chaotic and economically incoherent press conference in modern history, Trump took to the White House Rose Garden to announce sweeping new tariffs that immediately sent markets into a tailspin. The plan? A blanket 10 percent baseline tariff on all countries, effective April 5, with even steeper “reciprocal” tariffs for specific countries based on whatever Trump perceives as “cheating.” What the market expected was a moderate, maybe even symbolic gesture. What it got was Trump doing economic cosplay with a magic marker and a flimsy chart, channeling the ghosts of mercantilism and the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act like they’re founding fathers.
Wall Street reacted like a cat thrown into a bathtub. Dow futures plummeted more than 1,000 points. The S&P 500 dropped 3.6 percent. The Nasdaq? Down 4.5 percent. This wasn’t a mild correction, it was an after-hours crash. Shares of major multinationals like Nike and Apple each fell around 7 percent. Retailers that rely on imports got obliterated: Five Below cratered 14 percent, Dollar Tree fell 11, and Gap dropped 8.5. Even tech giants weren’t spared, with Nvidia shedding 5 percent and Tesla down 7, ironic, considering Trump’s awkward love-hate tango with Musk.
The administration tried to clarify, but only made things worse. According to a White House follow-up, countries like China could now face an effective 54 percent tariff rate once you add Trump’s new “reciprocal” logic to existing penalties. Traders had hoped for a capped rate of 10 to 20 percent across the board. Instead, they got a fever dream of vengeance tariffs, delivered like a kindergarten show-and-tell, complete with oversized charts and half-formed math.
Art Hogan, chief market strategist at B. Riley Wealth Management, didn’t mince words. “What was delivered was as haphazard as anything this administration has done to date,” he told CNBC. “The level of complication on top of the ultimate level of new tariffs is worse than had been feared and not yet priced into the market.” Larry Tentarelli of the Blue Chip Trend Report echoed that if Trump had simply stuck to the 10 percent, markets might have gone up. But Trump can’t help himself. He had to go big, chaotic, and wildly unpredictable.
Then came the history lesson. Trump declared, with his usual smug certainty, that from 1789 to 1913, the United States was the wealthiest it’s ever been, purely because of tariffs. According to him, we were collecting so much money so fast that the government didn’t know what to do with it. Of course, he left out the part where most Americans lived in poverty, where wealth was concentrated in a few monopolists’ hands, and where child labor and 14-hour workdays were the norm. The “wealth” he refers to was largely theoretical for the average citizen and absolutely real for the Carnegies, the Rockefellers, and other Robber Barons of the Gilded Age. Tariffs weren’t some magic goose laying golden eggs, they were regressive taxes that hit working people hardest, all while padding the profits of a corrupt elite. Sound familiar?
In the same breath, Trump launched a bizarre tirade against Canada, yes, Canada. Our closest ally, trading partner, and the only country that says “sorry” when we mess up. He claimed the U.S. subsidizes Canada to the tune of $200 billion a year, and that it’s time for them to fend for themselves. Canadian officials, not surprisingly, are now organizing boycotts of U.S. goods and tourism. That’s what you get when you treat allies like enemies and think you’re negotiating a Manhattan real estate deal instead of running global trade.
As Trump spun his globetrotting list of economic enemies, from Vietnam to Taiwan to the European Union, he declared this moment “Liberation Day.” Liberation Day He actually said that years from now, we’ll all look back on this press conference as the day we got “so rich, so fast.” You know who else promises riches if you just believe hard enough? Cult leaders.
And while the markets reeled and global confidence in American leadership sank, Trump rambled about plastic Easter eggs. You read that right. Midway through the economic collapse, he paused to thank someone named Brooke for ensuring there’d be enough plastic eggs for Easter. He praised the term “groceries” as a beautiful, old-fashioned word. These are the thoughts swirling around in the mind of the man who just launched a global trade war.
And just when you thought it couldn’t get more absurd, Trump forgot to sign the executive order he had spent the entire press conference hyping. An aide had to remind him. He ambled back, scribbled his name, then wandered off again, apparently satisfied that he’d just rescued the economy by detonating a stick of dynamite under it.
This is economic sabotage. Whether through malice or incompetence or, more likely, both Trump is isolating the United States on the world stage, tanking the markets, worsening inflation, and burdening working families with the cost of his 18th-century cosplay. These aren’t policies. They’re performance art. And the rest of us are footing the bill.
History won’t remember this as Liberation Day. It will remember it as the day America’s last shreds of economic sanity were tossed into a bonfire of delusion, lit by a man who thinks tariffs are magic beans and “groceries” is a fancy word for freedom.
kii said:
From – Fear and Loathing: Closer to the Edge
This week, Donald Trump fired several NSC officials not because they posed a threat — but because they didn’t kiss the ring hard enough.
uh yeah
dudes
not because they posed a threat — but because they didn’t kiss the ring hard enough
that literally is a threat
ChrispenEvan said:
Traders had hoped for a capped rate of 10 to 20 percent across the board.
LOL so they’re fucking stupid
oh no actually genius
nobody could have foreseen this
dv said:
WTF did those mobs do to Trump to garner his ire?
Michael V said:
dv said:
WTF did those mobs do to Trump to garner his ire?
Never invited him on to ‘The Muppet Show’.
Michael V said:
dv said:
WTF did those mobs do to Trump to garner his ire?
this has nothing to do with garnering ire and everything to do with misdirecting public discourse..
don’t want to talk about tariffs; call Sesame Street woke
had enough of Signal-gate; say you’ll run for a third term
the war in Ukraine not panning out the way you envisaged; talk about invading Greenland
“Overeducated pencilneck” is why Republicans want to defund education.
captain_spalding said:
Michael V said:
dv said:
WTF did those mobs do to Trump to garner his ire?
Never invited him on to ‘The Muppet Show’.
Bloody!
I didn’t think of that.
Trump: “Muppet Supremo”.
Now now, the Muppets are wholesome and entertaining. The same cannot be said for Trump.
diddly-squat said:
Michael V said:
dv said:
WTF did those mobs do to Trump to garner his ire?
this has nothing to do with garnering ire and everything to do with misdirecting public discourse..
don’t want to talk about tariffs; call Sesame Street woke
had enough of Signal-gate; say you’ll run for a third term
the war in Ukraine not panning out the way you envisaged; talk about invading Greenland
I see.
Divine Angel said:
“Overeducated pencilneck” is why Republicans want to defund education.
I call him KKK or Dunny Dump. And other thins, too.
Divine Angel said:
Now now, the Muppets are wholesome and entertaining. The same cannot be said for Trump.
the feebles is more him?
Michael V said:
Divine Angel said:
“Overeducated pencilneck” is why Republicans want to defund education.
I call him KKK or Dunny Dump. And other thins, too.
Manchurian Cantaloupe
Tau.Neutrino said:
Nonsense’: Experts baffled by ‘BS’ formula used to calculate Trump tariffs
Ask ChatGPT for tariffs and it will spit out exactly what Trump announced.
https://futurism.com/trump-tariffs-signs-ai
Tau.Neutrino said:
Nonsense’: Experts baffled by ‘BS’ formula used to calculate Trump tariffs
Didn’t we solve that one here yesterday?
Exclusive: Aquarium systems, Timberland boots and recycling plant parts were mislabelled as coming from remote Norfolk Island or Heard and McDonald islands
In some cases involving Norfolk Island, which is 1,600km north-east of Sydney and has a population of 2,188, the confusion appears to have resulted from the fact that the company’s address or port of departure is Norfolk, UK, or the destination is Norfolk, Virginia in the US, or a company’s registered address in New Hampshire (NH) has been listed instead as Norfolk Island (NI).
—
The Rev Dodgson said:
Tau.Neutrino said:
Nonsense’: Experts baffled by ‘BS’ formula used to calculate Trump tariffs
Didn’t we solve that one here yesterday?
oh
what was the solution
dv said:
Exclusive: Aquarium systems, Timberland boots and recycling plant parts were mislabelled as coming from remote Norfolk Island or Heard and McDonald islandsIn some cases involving Norfolk Island, which is 1,600km north-east of Sydney and has a population of 2,188, the confusion appears to have resulted from the fact that the company’s address or port of departure is Norfolk, UK, or the destination is Norfolk, Virginia in the US, or a company’s registered address in New Hampshire (NH) has been listed instead as Norfolk Island (NI).
—
FMD
Bump for those outside the back:
Divine Angel said:
Once more for those in the back
dv said:
Exclusive: Aquarium systems, Timberland boots and recycling plant parts were mislabelled as coming from remote Norfolk Island or Heard and McDonald islandsIn some cases involving Norfolk Island, which is 1,600km north-east of Sydney and has a population of 2,188, the confusion appears to have resulted from the fact that the company’s address or port of departure is Norfolk, UK, or the destination is Norfolk, Virginia in the US, or a company’s registered address in New Hampshire (NH) has been listed instead as Norfolk Island (NI).
—
Incompetence reigns.
buffy said:
dv said:
Exclusive: Aquarium systems, Timberland boots and recycling plant parts were mislabelled as coming from remote Norfolk Island or Heard and McDonald islandsIn some cases involving Norfolk Island, which is 1,600km north-east of Sydney and has a population of 2,188, the confusion appears to have resulted from the fact that the company’s address or port of departure is Norfolk, UK, or the destination is Norfolk, Virginia in the US, or a company’s registered address in New Hampshire (NH) has been listed instead as Norfolk Island (NI).
—
Incompetence reigns.
See, this is why we can be as rude and comtemptuous as we like towards Trump.
They’ll take it out on Austria.
captain_spalding said:
buffy said:
dv said:
Exclusive: Aquarium systems, Timberland boots and recycling plant parts were mislabelled as coming from remote Norfolk Island or Heard and McDonald islandsIn some cases involving Norfolk Island, which is 1,600km north-east of Sydney and has a population of 2,188, the confusion appears to have resulted from the fact that the company’s address or port of departure is Norfolk, UK, or the destination is Norfolk, Virginia in the US, or a company’s registered address in New Hampshire (NH) has been listed instead as Norfolk Island (NI).
—
Incompetence reigns.
See, this is why we can be as rude and comtemptuous as we like towards Trump.
They’ll take it out on Austria.
:)
Divine Angel said:
Tau.Neutrino said:
Nonsense’: Experts baffled by ‘BS’ formula used to calculate Trump tariffs
Ask ChatGPT for tariffs and it will spit out exactly what Trump announced.
https://futurism.com/trump-tariffs-signs-ai
>>>last sentence
President Donald Trump announced sweeping tariffs on most goods imported into the US yesterday, affecting over 100 countries — including uninhabited territories in the middle of the ocean.
roughbarked said:
captain_spalding said:
buffy said:Incompetence reigns.
See, this is why we can be as rude and comtemptuous as we like towards Trump.
They’ll take it out on Austria.
:)
And Heard Island got included because someone was a little bit deaf:
‘…and we don’t want to forget Ireland.’
‘What did you say?’
‘I said “Ireland”’
‘I thought i heard “island”.’
(Person taking the minutes notes ‘…heard island’.)
captain_spalding said:
buffy said:
dv said:
Exclusive: Aquarium systems, Timberland boots and recycling plant parts were mislabelled as coming from remote Norfolk Island or Heard and McDonald islandsIn some cases involving Norfolk Island, which is 1,600km north-east of Sydney and has a population of 2,188, the confusion appears to have resulted from the fact that the company’s address or port of departure is Norfolk, UK, or the destination is Norfolk, Virginia in the US, or a company’s registered address in New Hampshire (NH) has been listed instead as Norfolk Island (NI).
—
Incompetence reigns.
See, this is why we can be as rude and comtemptuous as we like towards Trump.
They’ll take it out on Austria.
LOL
——————————
Reminds me of a personal incident in the US: Asked where we were from, I replied “Australia”. The other person said “You speak English so well, and with not much of an accent at all.”
Tau.Neutrino said:
Divine Angel said:
Tau.Neutrino said:
Nonsense’: Experts baffled by ‘BS’ formula used to calculate Trump tariffs
Ask ChatGPT for tariffs and it will spit out exactly what Trump announced.
https://futurism.com/trump-tariffs-signs-ai
>>>last sentence
President Donald Trump announced sweeping tariffs on most goods imported into the US yesterday, affecting over 100 countries — including uninhabited territories in the middle of the ocean.
Wait until the Penguins and polar bears respond.
LOL
https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-ice-air-deportation-flights
oh wait happy April 1 ahaha
told you that Persians were the
On Thursday, the Australian economist John Simon, a former head of the Reserve Bank’s economic research department, was disparaging of the whole exercise. “The US sounds like a Persian carpet salesman with its tariff discounts: ‘US imports were 20 per cent, now half-off at only 10 per cent’,” Mr Simon wrote on LinkedIn.
worst in the world
Tau.Neutrino said:
Tau.Neutrino said:
Divine Angel said:Ask ChatGPT for tariffs and it will spit out exactly what Trump announced.
https://futurism.com/trump-tariffs-signs-ai
>>>last sentence
President Donald Trump announced sweeping tariffs on most goods imported into the US yesterday, affecting over 100 countries — including uninhabited territories in the middle of the ocean.
Wait until the Penguins and polar bears respond.
Heather Cox Richardson
3h ·
April 3, 2025 (Thursday)
Trump’s announcement last night that he was placing high tariffs on countries around the world came after the stock market closed, but it drove stock futures dramatically downward. Overseas, global markets also plunged. Today, before the stock market opened, Trump posted on his social media site: “THE OPERATION IS OVER! THE PATIENT LIVED, AND IS HEALING. THE PROGNOSIS IS THAT THE PATIENT WILL BE FAR STRONGER, BIGGER, BETTER, AND MORE RESILIENT THAN EVER BEFORE. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!”
Fittingly, it was former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani who rang the bell opening the stock market today. Giuliani represented Newsmax, the right-wing media channel with ties to Trump. As soon as the market opened, stocks fell straight down. By the end of the day, the Dow Jones Industrial Average had dropped 1,679 points, falling about 4%, its biggest fall since the coronavirus pandemic took hold in 2020. The S&P 500 fell 274 points, or 4.8%. The Nasdaq Composite fell more than 1,050 points, or almost 6%. The losses wiped out about $2 trillion.
Trump justified the tariffs by declaring that the U.S. is in the midst of a national emergency, but this afternoon he left the White House for a long weekend in Florida, where his private Doral resort outside of Miami is holding the first domestic golf tournament of the season of LIV Golf, which is financed by the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia.
Trump’s tariffs are not an economic policy. Tariffs are generally imposed on products, not on nations. By placing them on countries, the White House was able to arrive at its numbers with a nonsensical formula that appears to have been reached by asking AI how to impose tariffs—a suggestion so outlandish that I dismissed when I saw it last night, but economist Paul Krugman today identified it as being a likely possibility. CNBC’s Steve Liesman said: “Nobody ever heard of this formula. Nobody has ever used this formula. So I’m sorry, but the conclusion seems to be the president kind of made this up as he went along….”
Today, former treasury secretary Lawrence Summers posted: “It’s now clear that the Administration computed reciprocal tariffs without using tariff data. This is to economics what creationism is to biology, astrology is to astronomy, or RFK thought is to vaccine science. The Trump tariff policy makes little sense EVEN if you believe in protectionist mercantilist economics.”
Editor of The American Prospect David Dayen notes that there is no apparent policy behind the tariffs, no thought, for example, as to whether it is even possible for the U.S. to ramp up the kind of domestic manufacturing Trump claims to want. While Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told CBS, “You’re going to see employment leaping starting today,” in fact, both automaker Stellantis and appliance manufacturer Whirlpool announced layoffs because of the tariffs.
Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo points out that building and establishing a new plant in the U.S. will take a minimum of three to five years even if investors are inclined to support one, but Victoria Guida reported in Politico that corporate executives are saying they cannot invest in manufacturing until they can project costs, and Trump is far too unpredictable to enable them to do that with any confidence.
Dayen writes that Trump’s tariffs are essentially sanctions on the rest of the world. His behavior is, Dayen says, “no different from a mob boss moving into town and sending his thugs to every business on Main Street, roughing up the proprietors and asking for protection money so they don’t get pushed out of business.” Dayen notes that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent argued last year for using the extraordinary power of the U.S. economy to force other countries to do as the U.S. wants, creating a U.S. sphere of influence through economic pressure.
Extending the comparison to a mob boss, Dayen notes that “protection money” could take many forms: “curbing migration, taking in more U.S. farm exports or weapons systems, reducing industrial capacity in China and forcing more consumption, buying long-dated U.S. debt on the cheap, siding with a war strategy against Iran, literally anything the White House wants.”
Trump’s son Eric appeared to confirm that the tariffs are a shakedown when he posted: “I wouldn’t want to be the last country that tries to negotiate a trade deal with . The first to negotiate will win—the last will absolutely lose. I have seen this movie my entire life.…” Foreign affairs journalist David Rothkopf was more graphic: “These aren’t tariffs,” he wrote. “They are a horse’s head in the bed of (almost) every world government and business leader.” Hedge fund manager Bill Ackman suggested that if a government refused to negotiate with Trump, that country’s major companies should deal directly with Trump, exempting that company’s products from tariffs in exchange for a new factory or some other investment Trump wants.
Trump is overturning the past 80 years of global trade cooperation in order to concentrate power in his own hands. Congress began to take down the tariff walls of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when it passed the 1934 Reciprocal Tariff Act enabling the president to lower the high tariff rates Republicans had established with the 1930 Smoot-Hawley tariff. That tariff had worsened the Great Depression. With the turn away from tariff walls and toward international cooperation, global trade has fostered international cooperation and created the rising prosperity of the twentieth century.
“The global economy is fundamentally different today than it was yesterday,” Canada’s prime minister Mark Carney said today. “The system of global trade anchored on the United States…is over. Our old relationship of steadily deepening integration with the United States is over. The 80-year period when the United States embraced the mantle of global economic leadership, when it forged alliances rooted in trust and mutual respect and championed the free and open exchange of goods and services is over. While this is a tragedy, it is also the new reality.”
Ending systems of global free trade dovetails with the idea of getting rid of the international rules-based order created after World War II. After that horrific war, world leaders decided to create a system of international institutions, like the United Nations and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), to provide ways in which countries could protect their sovereignty and work out their differences without going to war.
Trump’s threats against other countries, including Greenland, an autonomous territory of NATO ally Denmark, are a direct rejection of those principles. That rejection reinforces the Trump regime’s embrace of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, which invaded Ukraine first in 2014 and again in 2022 and is trying to justify grabbing Ukrainian territory. Under Trump, the U.S. is siding with Russia rather than Ukraine in this war in a stunning rejection of the institutions and principles that have stabilized the globe since World War II.
Putin is now threatening NATO countries, prompting them to prepare for defense. “We are not at war,” NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said recently, “but we are certainly not at peace either.”
Some of those advocating tariff walls and forcing our allies to maintain their own defense suggest that creating a U.S. sphere of influence is the best way to counter a rising China, but there is no doubt that the concept of such spheres caters to the worldview of Russian and Chinese leaders. As scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder points out, weakening the U.S. and its allies also benefits Russia by increasing Russia’s power relative to other countries, making it easier to establish the multipolar world Russia wants.
The Trump administration is also undermining post–World War II democracy at home. Last night, Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) identified Trump’s tariffs as “a tool to collapse our democracy. A means to compel loyalty from every business that will need to petition Trump for relief.” Murphy pointed to Trump’s shakedown of prominent law firms, four of which he has attacked with executive orders. He also pointed to Trump’s attacks on universities, withholding government funding until their administrators bow to MAGA’s ideological demands.
Sarah D. Wire of USA Today reported that earlier this week the Institute for Museum and Library Studies was effectively closed, and over the past two days the administration told libraries across the country that grants awarded last year have been terminated. Today the administration cut federal grants for arts and humanities across the country: museums, archives, historic sites, educational projects, and so on—all defunded. It also cut this year’s funding for National History Day, a popular history program in schools that is already underway.
On Tuesday, the Department of Health and Human Services slashed jobs and programs in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), even as measles continues to spread and two Louisiana infants have died of whooping cough. Today, news broke that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is implementing a hiring freeze even as flash floods and tornadoes just today have killed at least seven people in the Midwest to the mid-South.
The plan, as Vice President J.D. Vance explained in a 2021 interview, is to destroy the current government, business, educational, cultural, and scientific pillars of the United States in order to replace them with a new system, although there is tension between the Project 2025 wing of MAGA and the technocrats’ wing over whether that new system will be a theocracy or a technocracy. In either case, it will be an authoritarian government in which power and money concentrate in a very few hands.
The administration’s crusade against the state of Maine shows what this looks like. After Maine governor Janet Mills told Trump the state would follow state and federal law rather than bow to his demands, acting Social Security Administration commissioner Leland Dudek canceled contracts permitting Maine parents to apply for Social Security numbers for their newborns from the hospital and for Maine families to report deaths from funeral homes. Told such a change would risk identity theft and wasteful spending, Dudek told the agency to do it anyway in order to punish Mills.
After an outcry, Dudek backtracked, but yesterday the Secretary of Agriculture, Brooke Rollins, announced she was freezing federal funds for Maine educational programs. The Trump administration would stand against “a leftist social agenda,” Rollins wrote.
The problem for Republicans is that while the sort of inflammatory language Rollins used has been a staple of the party for decades, the MAGA agenda itself is not popular. Only about 4% of voters who knew about Project 2025 wanted to see it enacted, and billionaire Elon Musk, who runs the “Department of Government Efficiency” that is slashing through government programs, is so unpopular that his support for a candidate in Tuesday’s Wisconsin Supreme Court election actually appeared to have hurt, rather than helped, that candidate.
Now party members have to deal with the fact their president has tanked the economy by enacting what the National Review says is likely the largest peacetime tax hike in U.S. history. Now countries around the globe are imposing reciprocal tariffs on the U.S. while also negotiating their own trade agreements that cut out the U.S. Those agreements are not only for products like soybeans, but also for weapons, a development the administration is protesting.
Republican members of Congress could stop Trump at any time. In the case of tariffs, they could simply reassert their constitutional power to manage tariffs. If they choose not to and the economy doesn’t recover and thrive as Trump keeps promising, voters can be expected to hold them, as well as him, to account.
Right now Republican leaders appear to be hoping that Trump’s attempt to extort other countries will work and the tariffs will be short lived. But their enthusiasm for that strategy seems to be well under control.
Today, Bill Ackman resorted to defending the tariffs by posting: “Sometimes the best strategy in a negotiation is convincing the other side you are crazy.”
sarahs mum said:
Heather Cox Richardson
3h ·
April 3, 2025 (Thursday)Trump’s announcement last night that he was placing high tariffs on countries around the world came after the stock market closed, but it drove stock futures dramatically downward. Overseas, global markets also plunged. Today, before the stock market opened, Trump posted on his social media site: “THE OPERATION IS OVER! THE PATIENT LIVED, AND IS HEALING. THE PROGNOSIS IS THAT THE PATIENT WILL BE FAR STRONGER, BIGGER, BETTER, AND MORE RESILIENT THAN EVER BEFORE. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!”
—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————Right now Republican leaders appear to be hoping that Trump’s attempt to extort other countries will work and the tariffs will be short lived. But their enthusiasm for that strategy seems to be well under control.
Today, Bill Ackman resorted to defending the tariffs by posting: “Sometimes the best strategy in a negotiation is convincing the other side you are crazy.”
The cruelty is not just the method, it’s the point.
Neophyte said:
Tau.Neutrino said:
Tau.Neutrino said:>>>last sentence
President Donald Trump announced sweeping tariffs on most goods imported into the US yesterday, affecting over 100 countries — including uninhabited territories in the middle of the ocean.
Wait until the Penguins and polar bears respond.
I’m sure I heard Trump say that America will be rolling in money when they all pay the tariffs.
I wonder when he’ll wake up?
roughbarked said:
Neophyte said:
Tau.Neutrino said:Wait until the Penguins and polar bears respond.
I’m sure I heard Trump say that America will be rolling in money when they all pay the tariffs.
I wonder when he’ll wake up?
I’m wondering how long till his takes his “final sleep”.
party_pants said:
roughbarked said:
Neophyte said:
I’m sure I heard Trump say that America will be rolling in money when they all pay the tariffs.
I wonder when he’ll wake up?
I’m wondering how long till his takes his “final sleep”.
Might have to talk to Vlad about that.
Michael V said:
party_pants said:
roughbarked said:I’m sure I heard Trump say that America will be rolling in money when they all pay the tariffs.
I wonder when he’ll wake up?
I’m wondering how long till his takes his “final sleep”.
Might have to talk to Vlad about that.
I’m not talking to Vlad until he withdraws from Ukraine and gives up Kaliningrad and St Petersburg.
sarahs mum said:
Heather Cox Richardson
3h ·
April 3, 2025 (Thursday)
This stuff is overwhelming.
party_pants said:
Michael V said:
party_pants said:I’m wondering how long till his takes his “final sleep”.
Might have to talk to Vlad about that.
I’m not talking to Vlad until he withdraws from Ukraine and gives up Kaliningrad and St Petersburg.
Why St Petersburg?
Michael V said:
party_pants said:
Michael V said:Might have to talk to Vlad about that.
I’m not talking to Vlad until he withdraws from Ukraine and gives up Kaliningrad and St Petersburg.
Why St Petersburg?
So he has no ports left on the Baltic. Make Russia as good as land-locked, save for far northern ports which get iced up, or whatever Türkiye lets through the straits to the Black Sea.
party_pants said:
Michael V said:
party_pants said:I’m not talking to Vlad until he withdraws from Ukraine and gives up Kaliningrad and St Petersburg.
Why St Petersburg?
So he has no ports left on the Baltic. Make Russia as good as land-locked, save for far northern ports which get iced up, or whatever Türkiye lets through the straits to the Black Sea.
I can see your point, and it has significant merit. But then, snaffling part of Russia (as reparations, punishment, or whatever), may have very serious unintended consequences.
party_pants said:
Michael V said:
party_pants said:I’m not talking to Vlad until he withdraws from Ukraine and gives up Kaliningrad and St Petersburg.
Why St Petersburg?
So he has no ports left on the Baltic. Make Russia as good as land-locked, save for far northern ports which get iced up, or whatever Türkiye lets through the straits to the Black Sea.
Of course, there’s still Vladivostok. Vladivostok is generally considered ice-free year-round, but it can have occasional troubles.
Michael V said:
party_pants said:
Michael V said:Why St Petersburg?
So he has no ports left on the Baltic. Make Russia as good as land-locked, save for far northern ports which get iced up, or whatever Türkiye lets through the straits to the Black Sea.
I can see your point, and it has significant merit. But then, snaffling part of Russia (as reparations, punishment, or whatever), may have very serious unintended consequences.
I was thinking they’d both become independent states, leaning towards integration with the EU.
A National-Security Fiasco
For a few months, the Donald Trump White House managed, at least in public, to keep some of the right’s fringiest figures at bay. Until yesterday.
The far-right celebrity Laura Loomer was at the White House on Wednesday. If you don’t spend a lot of time online, you probably don’t know who Loomer is, and that’s healthy. To say that she is a “conspiracy theorist” is not quite enough: She has referred to herself as a “proud Islamophobe” and has claimed that 9/11 was an “inside job”; she has charged that some school shootings were staged, accused Florida First Lady Casey DeSantis of “exaggerating” her struggle with breast cancer, and questioned whether the “deep state” might have used an atmospheric-research facility in Alaska to create a snowstorm over Des Moines. (Why? So that foul weather would suppress the turnout in the 2024 Iowa GOP caucuses and hurt Trump’s campaign.)
Loomer has even alienated her ostensible allies in the MAGA movement, to say nothing of the hostility she has engendered among various other Republicans. (Peter Schorsch, a former Republican operative who now runs the website Florida Politics, described her to The Washington Post as “what happens when you take a gadfly and inject it with that radioactive waste from Godzilla.”) Indeed, Trump’s own aides found Loomer so toxic that they tried to keep her away from the 2024 campaign, as my colleague Tim Alberta reported last year. A source close to the Trump campaign told Semafor last fall that Trump’s people were “‘100%’ concerned about her exacerbating Trump’s weaknesses,” but that attempts to put “guardrails” around her weren’t working. Trump clearly likes the 31-year-old provocateur, and in Trumpworld, there’s apparently very little anyone can do once the boss takes a shine to someone.
And so Loomer reportedly walked into the Oval Office yesterday with a list of people who should be removed from the National Security Council because of their disloyalty to Trump and the MAGA cause. (Asked for comment, Loomer declined to divulge “any details about my Oval Office meeting with President Trump.” She added, “I will continue working hard to support his agenda, and I will continue reiterating the importance of strong vetting, for the sake of protecting the President and our national security.”)
The next day, at least six staff members, including three senior officials, were fired. If Loomer had nothing to do with it, that’s a hell of a coincidence. (The NSC spokesperson Brian Hughes told The Atlantic that the NSC does not comment on personnel matters.)
Today, an unnamed U.S. official told Axios that Loomer went to the White House because she was furious that “neocons” had “slipped through” the vetting process for administration jobs. The result, according to the official, was a “bloodbath” that took down perhaps as many as 10 NSC staff members. Most reports named Brian Walsh, the senior director for intelligence, and Thomas Boodry, the senior director for legislative affairs; other reports claim that David Feith, a senior director overseeing technology and national security, and Maggie Dougherty, senior director for international organizations, are among those dismissed. Walsh formerly worked as a senior staff member for Marco Rubio on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Boodry was National Security Adviser Michael Waltz’s legislative director when Waltz was a House member, and Feith was a State Department appointee in the first Trump administration.
The firings at the NSC represent an ongoing struggle between the most extreme MAGA loyalists and what’s left of a Republican foreign-policy establishment. Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, for example, has been in an online tussle with the Republican fringe—a group that makes Cotton seem almost centrist by comparison—over Alex Wong, another Trump NSC official, whom Loomer and others have, for various reasons, accused of disloyalty to Trump. Other conflicts, however, seem to center on a struggle between Waltz and the head of the White House Presidential Personnel Office, Sergio Gor, who has reportedly been blocking people Waltz wants on his team because Gor and others doubt their commitment to the president’s foreign policy.
Such internal ideological and political food fights are common in Washington, but the national security adviser usually doesn’t have to stand by while his staff gets turfed on the say-so of an online troll. If these firings happened because Loomer wanted them, it’s difficult to imagine how Waltz stays in his job—or why he’d want to.
Waltz, of course, is already slogging through a mess of his own creation because of the controversy surrounding his use of the chat app Signal to have a highly sensitive national-security discussion about a strike on Houthi targets, to which he inadvertently invited a journalist—The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg. (Waltz’s week wasn’t getting any better before Loomer showed up: New reports claim that the meeting about the Yemen strikes was only one of many conversations about important national-security operations that Waltz held over Signal.) Trump reportedly kept Waltz on the team purely to deny giving “a scalp” to the Democrats and what he perceives as their allies in the mainstream media.
Now Waltz’s authority as national security adviser is subject to a veto from … Laura Loomer? It’s one thing to dodge the barbs of the administration’s critics; that’s a normal part of life in the capital. It’s another entirely to have to stand there and take it when an unhinged conspiracy monger walks into the White House and then several accomplished Republican national-security staffers are fired.
The reason all of this is happening is that in his second term, Trump is free of any adult supervision. The days when a Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis or a Chief of Staff John Kelly would throw themselves in front of the door rather than let someone like Loomer anywhere near the Oval Office are long gone. Trump has surrounded himself with sycophants who are apparently so scared of being exiled from their liege’s presence that they can’t bring themselves to stop someone as far out on the fringe as Loomer from advising the president of the United States.
Meanwhile, a person close to the administration told my colleague Michael Scherer today that “Loomer has been asked to put together a list of people at State who are not MAGA loyalists.” Waltz might yet get fired, but whether he stays or goes, he doesn’t seem to be in charge of the NSC. Perhaps next we’ll see if Marco Rubio is actually running the State Department.
…
‘The Atlantic’ Email Newsletter.
captain_spalding said:
party_pants said:
Michael V said:Why St Petersburg?
So he has no ports left on the Baltic. Make Russia as good as land-locked, save for far northern ports which get iced up, or whatever Türkiye lets through the straits to the Black Sea.
Of course, there’s still Vladivostok. Vladivostok is generally considered ice-free year-round, but it can have occasional troubles.
bit of a long railway journey.
party_pants said:
captain_spalding said:
party_pants said:So he has no ports left on the Baltic. Make Russia as good as land-locked, save for far northern ports which get iced up, or whatever Türkiye lets through the straits to the Black Sea.
Of course, there’s still Vladivostok. Vladivostok is generally considered ice-free year-round, but it can have occasional troubles.
bit of a long railway journey.
They’re all long journeys, in Russia.
party_pants said:
captain_spalding said:
party_pants said:So he has no ports left on the Baltic. Make Russia as good as land-locked, save for far northern ports which get iced up, or whatever Türkiye lets through the straits to the Black Sea.
Of course, there’s still Vladivostok. Vladivostok is generally considered ice-free year-round, but it can have occasional troubles.
bit of a long railway journey.
They’re all long journeys, in Russia.
Michael V said:
party_pants said:
Michael V said:Why St Petersburg?
So he has no ports left on the Baltic. Make Russia as good as land-locked, save for far northern ports which get iced up, or whatever Türkiye lets through the straits to the Black Sea.
I can see your point, and it has significant merit. But then, snaffling part of Russia (as reparations, punishment, or whatever), may have very serious unintended consequences.
Thing is, like all the other hot spots, they have too learn to live together peacefully.
I know it is a hard ask but it really is the only way to be able to concentrate on keeping the place healthy for our childrens childrens children.
captain_spalding said:
party_pants said:
captain_spalding said:Of course, there’s still Vladivostok. Vladivostok is generally considered ice-free year-round, but it can have occasional troubles.
bit of a long railway journey.
They’re all long journeys, in Russia.
Too long and too costly. My plan is that Russia will have to play nice to get overland access to European ports and rail for its trade.
party_pants said:
captain_spalding said:
party_pants said:bit of a long railway journey.
They’re all long journeys, in Russia.
Too long and too costly. My plan is that Russia will have to play nice to get overland access to European ports and rail for its trade.
Any plan that patently aims to isolate Russia only feeds their paranoia.
They have this obsession that everyone wants to invade them, and take over Russia. OK, there’s been seven invasions since the 13th century, but none of them have been long-term successful, or totally successful.
But, times have changed, people are smarter, and crikey, it’s not like no other country has ever been invaded. Just ask Poland.
No-one with an operating brain-cell would want to take on the immense pain in the gonads that would be the reward for trying to govern Russia (hmm…that doesn’t exclude Trump).
But, the Russians have been brought up on steady diet of propaganda that says that everyone wants Russia, and they have an inbred and pathological fear of being ‘surrounded’.
So, any threat to their borders provokes a knee-jerk response.
captain_spalding said:
party_pants said:
captain_spalding said:They’re all long journeys, in Russia.
Too long and too costly. My plan is that Russia will have to play nice to get overland access to European ports and rail for its trade.
Any plan that patently aims to isolate Russia only feeds their paranoia.
They have this obsession that everyone wants to invade them, and take over Russia. OK, there’s been seven invasions since the 13th century, but none of them have been long-term successful, or totally successful.
But, times have changed, people are smarter, and crikey, it’s not like no other country has ever been invaded. Just ask Poland.
No-one with an operating brain-cell would want to take on the immense pain in the gonads that would be the reward for trying to govern Russia (hmm…that doesn’t exclude Trump).
But, the Russians have been brought up on steady diet of propaganda that says that everyone wants Russia, and they have an inbred and pathological fear of being ‘surrounded’.
So, any threat to their borders provokes a knee-jerk response.
I don’t want to invade or take them over the vast plains, just the coastal bits on the Baltic. Make them a land power wherein they can do as they please, but if they want trade with the rest of the world they must play nice.
party_pants said:
captain_spalding said:
party_pants said:Too long and too costly. My plan is that Russia will have to play nice to get overland access to European ports and rail for its trade.
Any plan that patently aims to isolate Russia only feeds their paranoia.
They have this obsession that everyone wants to invade them, and take over Russia. OK, there’s been seven invasions since the 13th century, but none of them have been long-term successful, or totally successful.
But, times have changed, people are smarter, and crikey, it’s not like no other country has ever been invaded. Just ask Poland.
No-one with an operating brain-cell would want to take on the immense pain in the gonads that would be the reward for trying to govern Russia (hmm…that doesn’t exclude Trump).
But, the Russians have been brought up on steady diet of propaganda that says that everyone wants Russia, and they have an inbred and pathological fear of being ‘surrounded’.
So, any threat to their borders provokes a knee-jerk response.
I don’t want to invade or take them over the vast plains, just the coastal bits on the Baltic. Make them a land power wherein they can do as they please, but if they want trade with the rest of the world they must play nice.
Just because Russia has never known the benefits of liberal democracy is no reason to impose a new autocracy in territories traditionally Russian.
party_pants said:
captain_spalding said:
party_pants said:Too long and too costly. My plan is that Russia will have to play nice to get overland access to European ports and rail for its trade.
Any plan that patently aims to isolate Russia only feeds their paranoia.
They have this obsession that everyone wants to invade them, and take over Russia. OK, there’s been seven invasions since the 13th century, but none of them have been long-term successful, or totally successful.
But, times have changed, people are smarter, and crikey, it’s not like no other country has ever been invaded. Just ask Poland.
No-one with an operating brain-cell would want to take on the immense pain in the gonads that would be the reward for trying to govern Russia (hmm…that doesn’t exclude Trump).
But, the Russians have been brought up on steady diet of propaganda that says that everyone wants Russia, and they have an inbred and pathological fear of being ‘surrounded’.
So, any threat to their borders provokes a knee-jerk response.
I don’t want to invade or take them over the vast plains, just the coastal bits on the Baltic. Make them a land power wherein they can do as they please, but if they want trade with the rest of the world they must play nice.
No, it’s the ‘isolating’ that they fear most.
They can’t handle the idea of having ‘hostile’ countries just across every border that they have. That’s one reason why Stalin was so keen to have puppet states as a ‘buffer zone’ between Russia and Western Europe (sheer megalomania was another reason). It’s one reason why Putin attacked Ukraine, and why Russia trod carefully with Finland (don’t want them joining NATO…oops!).
To cut them off from having ports of their own would serve to confirm to them that the rest of the world was acting to ‘weaken’ Russia.
That’d send them full-on bull-goose loony.
Witty Rejoinder said:
party_pants said:
captain_spalding said:Any plan that patently aims to isolate Russia only feeds their paranoia.
They have this obsession that everyone wants to invade them, and take over Russia. OK, there’s been seven invasions since the 13th century, but none of them have been long-term successful, or totally successful.
But, times have changed, people are smarter, and crikey, it’s not like no other country has ever been invaded. Just ask Poland.
No-one with an operating brain-cell would want to take on the immense pain in the gonads that would be the reward for trying to govern Russia (hmm…that doesn’t exclude Trump).
But, the Russians have been brought up on steady diet of propaganda that says that everyone wants Russia, and they have an inbred and pathological fear of being ‘surrounded’.
So, any threat to their borders provokes a knee-jerk response.
I don’t want to invade or take them over the vast plains, just the coastal bits on the Baltic. Make them a land power wherein they can do as they please, but if they want trade with the rest of the world they must play nice.
Just because Russia has never known the benefits of liberal democracy is no reason to impose a new autocracy in territories traditionally Russian.
I’d write a nice sensible constitution for St Petersburg and Konigsberg. If they prove any good at being a democracy they might be allowed good trade deals with the EU in good time.
party_pants said:
Witty Rejoinder said:
party_pants said:I don’t want to invade or take them over the vast plains, just the coastal bits on the Baltic. Make them a land power wherein they can do as they please, but if they want trade with the rest of the world they must play nice.
Just because Russia has never known the benefits of liberal democracy is no reason to impose a new autocracy in territories traditionally Russian.
I’d write a nice sensible constitution for St Petersburg and Konigsberg. If they prove any good at being a democracy they might be allowed good trade deals with the EU in good time.
I don’t know if such a scheme is any better than Putin’s ambitions.
party_pants said:
I’d write a nice sensible constitution for St Petersburg and Konigsberg. If they prove any good at being a democracy they might be allowed good trade deals with the EU in good time.
It’s a grand idea, but what you’re suggesting is really just re-runs of what’s happened to Ukraine.
Ukraine wasn’t doing too badly on the democracy and economy things, and was looking like a bright prospect for both the EU and NATO.
Some Russians were noticing that, and were asking, why are they managing to improve things for themselves, while we’re still stuck just about where we were in the early 1990s?
Which is another reason why Putin attacked Ukraine.
You could be setting up St. Pete and K’grad for the same treatment.
captain_spalding said:
party_pants said:
captain_spalding said:Any plan that patently aims to isolate Russia only feeds their paranoia.
They have this obsession that everyone wants to invade them, and take over Russia. OK, there’s been seven invasions since the 13th century, but none of them have been long-term successful, or totally successful.
But, times have changed, people are smarter, and crikey, it’s not like no other country has ever been invaded. Just ask Poland.
No-one with an operating brain-cell would want to take on the immense pain in the gonads that would be the reward for trying to govern Russia (hmm…that doesn’t exclude Trump).
But, the Russians have been brought up on steady diet of propaganda that says that everyone wants Russia, and they have an inbred and pathological fear of being ‘surrounded’.
So, any threat to their borders provokes a knee-jerk response.
I don’t want to invade or take them over the vast plains, just the coastal bits on the Baltic. Make them a land power wherein they can do as they please, but if they want trade with the rest of the world they must play nice.
No, it’s the ‘isolating’ that they fear most.
They can’t handle the idea of having ‘hostile’ countries just across every border that they have. That’s one reason why Stalin was so keen to have puppet states as a ‘buffer zone’ between Russia and Western Europe (sheer megalomania was another reason). It’s one reason why Putin attacked Ukraine, and why Russia trod carefully with Finland (don’t want them joining NATO…oops!).
To cut them off from having ports of their own would serve to confirm to them that the rest of the world was acting to ‘weaken’ Russia.
That’d send them full-on bull-goose loony.
Yes I know that.
This is in a post nuclear non-proliferation treaty era (i.e. withing the next 5 years), when at least Poland and Germany have their own independent nuclear deterrent. They can’t go full-on looney with nuclear armed near neighbours. Ironically, breaking up NATO by taking over the USA and getting them out of it, might just relocate the decision making centres of power right on their borders. A false win.
party_pants said:
This is in a post nuclear non-proliferation treaty era (i.e. withing the next 5 years), when at least Poland and Germany have their own independent nuclear deterrent. They can’t go full-on looney with nuclear armed near neighbours. Ironically, breaking up NATO by taking over the USA and getting them out of it, might just relocate the decision making centres of power right on their borders. A false win.
Look back at the Cuban missile crisis.
There was a situation where a major power was faced with what it saw as an antagonistic country, close to its borders, becoming armed with nuclear weapons.
That pushed things to the brink of nuclear war.
Do you imagine that, with all thier obsessive paranoia, the Russians would not go to even more extreme lengths if they perceived a ‘threat’ like that?
captain_spalding said:
party_pants said:This is in a post nuclear non-proliferation treaty era (i.e. withing the next 5 years), when at least Poland and Germany have their own independent nuclear deterrent. They can’t go full-on looney with nuclear armed near neighbours. Ironically, breaking up NATO by taking over the USA and getting them out of it, might just relocate the decision making centres of power right on their borders. A false win.
Look back at the Cuban missile crisis.
There was a situation where a major power was faced with what it saw as an antagonistic country, close to its borders, becoming armed with nuclear weapons.
That pushed things to the brink of nuclear war.
Do you imagine that, with all thier obsessive paranoia, the Russians would not go to even more extreme lengths if they perceived a ‘threat’ like that?
One would hope that a reciprocal threat from the russians would be roughly the same.
Paraphrasing Jeff K in reverse, “Any attack on Russia from (neighbouring country) will be seen as an attack from the USA.
That’s fine, coz (neighbouring country) doesn’t intend on attacking russia unless in self defense.
lazy bastards
Kingy said:
That’s fine, coz (neighbouring country) doesn’t intend on attacking russia unless in self defense.
You know that. I know that. (neighbouring country) knows that.
Hell, even the Russians know that.
But, they’re Russians. They don’t trust their own government about anything. They don’t trust what their media tells them about anything. They don’t trust other Russians. It’s inculcated into them.
They know that (neighbouring country) won’t attack them.
But…they’re not sure.
captain_spalding said:
party_pants said:This is in a post nuclear non-proliferation treaty era (i.e. withing the next 5 years), when at least Poland and Germany have their own independent nuclear deterrent. They can’t go full-on looney with nuclear armed near neighbours. Ironically, breaking up NATO by taking over the USA and getting them out of it, might just relocate the decision making centres of power right on their borders. A false win.
Look back at the Cuban missile crisis.
There was a situation where a major power was faced with what it saw as an antagonistic country, close to its borders, becoming armed with nuclear weapons.
That pushed things to the brink of nuclear war.
Do you imagine that, with all thier obsessive paranoia, the Russians would not go to even more extreme lengths if they perceived a ‘threat’ like that?
Without the American security guarantee, the NNPT is dead. The various countries of Europe couldn’t re-equip and re-arm with conventional forces fast enough. The only thing they can do is go for their own nuclear arsenal as fast as possible. I’ve heard estimates that Poland, Germany and Japan could do it in less than a year. They might already be doing it in secret, if a mug like me is just talking about it. the Russians might just end up with a fait accompli.
captain_spalding said:
Kingy said:That’s fine, coz (neighbouring country) doesn’t intend on attacking russia unless in self defense.
You know that. I know that. (neighbouring country) knows that.
Hell, even the Russians know that.
But, they’re Russians. They don’t trust their own government about anything. They don’t trust what their media tells them about anything. They don’t trust other Russians. It’s inculcated into them.
They know that (neighbouring country) won’t attack them.
But…they’re not sure.
Today I learnted:
https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/inculcate
https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1F9fKZk9AH/
Congressman Joe Courtney reflects on the tariffs on Australia.
Another strange one, the British Indian Ocean Territory gets a 10% tariff.
The islands consist of half a dozen major atolls, one of which is the major US air and naval base of Diego Garcia. Apart from that base, the local population is zero. The locals were all rounded up and forcibly evicted back in the 1970s by the British, at the request of the US, and are still fighting for a right to return. So the Orange Dunny Trumpet is imposing a 10% tariff on US personnel living and working at the base.
There should be a betting pool on how soon till we see the first person in a penguin costume at a protest rally.
Neophyte said:
There should be a betting pool on how soon till we see the first person in a penguin costume at a protest rally.
Neophyte said:
There should be a betting pool on how soon till we see the first person in a penguin costume at a protest rally.
As long as they include inside the mouth.
Kinda scary looking.
party_pants said:
Michael V said:
party_pants said:So he has no ports left on the Baltic. Make Russia as good as land-locked, save for far northern ports which get iced up, or whatever Türkiye lets through the straits to the Black Sea.
I can see your point, and it has significant merit. But then, snaffling part of Russia (as reparations, punishment, or whatever), may have very serious unintended consequences.
I was thinking they’d both become independent states, leaning towards integration with the EU.
Interesting notion.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/03/mehmet-oz-confirmation-medicare-medicaid
Hilarious
SCIENCE said:
lazy bastards
:)
The deaths of the 4 US soldiers in Lithuania sounds horrendous.
Their armored recovery vehicle sunk in a peat bog.
mr kii had many photos of the work he did in Germany as an Engineer working with heavy equipment, this reminded me of them.
Trump won’t be present today for the dignified transfer of four U.S. soldiers at Dover Air Force Base, Delaware.
Instead, he’ll be attending a LIV Golf dinner reception in Florida.
The White House and the Defense Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment on which administration officials might be in attendance.
The soldiers died during a training exercise in Lithuania. They were honored during a dignified departure ceremony from Lithuania, with Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda and other dignitaries paying tribute.
https://www.threads.net/@actupps/post/DIBfI02pi6j?xmt=AQGzrkSiT9ht_eyh8LMR_28DgWDL2nNlxRv2JzLSLNvx4w
Alan Kohler describes the tariff situation
Trump’s use of emergency powers to unilaterally adjust tariffs without Congressional approval increases uncertainty, because he has no expertise
alleged
wait does that mean these things should have 50000% tariffs
kii said:
Trump won’t be present today for the dignified transfer of four U.S. soldiers at Dover Air Force Base, Delaware.
Instead, he’ll be attending a LIV Golf dinner reception in Florida.
The White House and the Defense Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment on which administration officials might be in attendance.
The soldiers died during a training exercise in Lithuania. They were honored during a dignified departure ceremony from Lithuania, with Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda and other dignitaries paying tribute.
alleged
kii said:
Trump won’t be present today for the dignified transfer of four U.S. soldiers at Dover Air Force Base, Delaware.Instead, he’ll be attending a LIV Golf dinner reception in Florida.
The White House and the Defense Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment on which administration officials might be in attendance.
The soldiers died during a training exercise in Lithuania. They were honored during a dignified departure ceremony from Lithuania, with Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda and other dignitaries paying tribute.
So what happens when you alienate your military and then you need them to do something for you?
kii said:
Trump won’t be present today for the dignified transfer of four U.S. soldiers at Dover Air Force Base, Delaware.Instead, he’ll be attending a LIV Golf dinner reception in Florida.
The White House and the Defense Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment on which administration officials might be in attendance.
The soldiers died during a training exercise in Lithuania. They were honored during a dignified departure ceremony from Lithuania, with Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda and other dignitaries paying tribute.
It’s probably good he won’t be there. He’d just make the occasion all about him, holding an unhinged press conference, ranting about shit while the bodies are being unloaded from the plane.
I dunno which penguins are doing the Heard Island social media account, but they’re rockin’ it
https://bsky.app/profile/heardislandgov.bsky.social
they reposted this, not original content
Divine Angel said:
I dunno which penguins are doing the Heard Island social media account, but they’re rockin’ ithttps://bsky.app/profile/heardislandgov.bsky.social
they reposted this, not original content
Where are yanks to get their cutting edge technology if not from Wakanda?
Hah. US stock market down 10% in two days. Who could have predicted that?
The global reaction to Trump’s tariffs, in 10 candid quotes
The punitive tariffs drew strong reactions from world
Updated yesterday at 6:26 a.m. EDT
By Rachel Pannett and Kelsey Ables
President Donald Trump’s sprawling new tariff regime sent world markets plunging and officials reeling at the prospect of a global trade war.
The punitive tariffs roiled rivals and allies alike. “This is not the act of a friend,” lamented Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. China said they “represent an act of unilateral bullying.” Canada’s new leader, Mark Carney, said the global trade system anchored on the United States “is over.”
Trump stood by his plan Thursday as stocks fell sharply in the steepest one-day drop since 2020. “Every country is calling us,” he told reporters on Air Force One.
“If we would have asked these countries to do us a favor, they would have said no. Now they will do anything for us,” he said
Some trade experts said the way the Trump administration calculated the tariffs makes no sense. Lawrence H. Summers, an economist and treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton, said on social media that the tariffs are “to economics what creationism is to biology, astrology is to astronomy.”
Here are some of the notable reactions from former and current leaders and officials around the world.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese
The administration’s tariffs have no basis in logic, and they go against the basis of our two nations’ partnership. This is not the act of a friend.
— Told to reporters in a news conference
Albanese stressed at a news conference on Thursday: “It is the American people who will pay the biggest price,” adding that Australia does not plan to retaliate and “will not join a race to the bottom.”
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney
The global economy is fundamentally different today than it was yesterday. The system of global trade anchored on the United States that Canada has relied on since the end of the Second World War — a system that, while not perfect, has helped to deliver prosperity for our country for decades — is over.
— Told to reporters in a news conference
Relations with Canada have changed dramatically since Trump took office. The president has repeatedly asserted that Canada should become the 51st state, angering many Canadians, who have responded by canceling U.S. trips and boycotting American goods.
Tariff levied by Trump administration: No new tariff Wednesday, but facing 25 percent tariffs on steel and aluminum products, along with other tariffs.
This is a typical act of unilateral bullying. … History has shown that raising tariffs will not solve the U.S.’s own problems.
— Statement from China’s Commerce Ministry
Analysts warn that Trump’s tariffs risk playing “into China’s narrative that the U.S. is an unreliable, distant partner that can come and go,” Susannah Patton, director of the Southeast Asia Program at the Lowy Institute, told The Washington Post.
Tariff levied by Trump administration: 34 percent (in addition to 20 percent tariff already in place)
Madagascar’s former ambassador to Washington, Eric Andriamihaja Robson
This calculation is flawed and unfair because imports aren’t driven by emotional choices, but rather a set of parameters.
— Post on social media
Madagascar was among those hardest hit by Trump’s tariffs. According to the U.S. Embassy in Madagascar, key exports from the island nation to the United States include apparel, vanilla, titanium, cobalt and nickel, which together make up about 15 percent of the country’s exports.
Tariff levied by Trump administration: 47 percent
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. There seems to be no order in the disorder. No clear path through the complexity and chaos that is being created as all U.S. trading partners are hit.
— News statement
Von der Leyen added in the statement, referring to Europe, “If you take on one of us, you take on all of us.” Tariffs on the European Union have strained relations between longtime allies — when announcing the tariffs, Trump specifically identified the E.U., saying, “They rip us off very badly.”
Tariff levied by Trump administration: 20 percent
Thai Chamber of Commerce Chairman Poj Aramwattananont
Return to menu
Don’t panic, as other countries are also facing higher tariffs. … The U.S. will also have some impact from this as they still can’t produce to replace the imports fast enough.
— Reported by local media
The Thai government also said in a statement that it has prepared “mitigation measures” to support exporters who rely mainly on the U.S. market. Thai Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra told reporters Thursday, “I think we can still negotiate,” the Bangkok Post reported.
Tariff levied by Trump administration: 36 percent
Vendors prepare fruit for sale to customers at a fresh fruit market on Friday in Bangkok. (Lauren DeCicca/Getty Images)
French government spokeswoman Sophie Primas
Return to menu
thinks he is the master of the world. … It is an imperialist stance that we had somewhat forgotten about but which is returning with great force and great determination.
— Reported by local media
French President Emmanuel Macron also responded to the tariffs in a video, calling them “brutal and unfounded,” and he called for the suspension of investment in the United States, Reuters reported.
Advertisement
Tariff levied by Trump administration: 20 percent
Colombian President Gustavo Petro
Today, neoliberalism, which proclaimed a free-trade policy across the globe, has died. Those who cling to this extreme ideology from the opposition must know that they are clinging to a corpse.
— Post on social media
Petro went on to say in a post on X that the U.S. believes the import tariffs can increase its own production and wealth, and that “this may be a big mistake.”
Tariff levied by Trump administration: 10 percent
Former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev
We’ll take the advice of Lao Tzu and sit by the river, waiting for the body of the enemy to float by. The decaying corpse of the E.U. economy.
— Post on social media
Russia was spared from new tariffs Wednesday, with U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent saying U.S. sanctions against Russia had already significantly cut trade between the countries after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But the U.S. had a substantial trade deficit in recent years.
No new tariff levied by the Trump administration
Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto
The European economy and ultimately the European people are drinking the juice of the incompetence of the politicians in Brussels again. The situation is clear after yesterday’s customs announcements by the U.S. president: The European Commission should have negotiated!
— Post on social media
Hungary has been clashing with its fellow E.U. members for years. Szijjarto blamed the European Commission for not making a deal with Trump, an ally of Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s. Earlier in the week Szijjarto had posted on X: “We urge the European Commission to finally get its act together and negotiate with the Americans.”
Tariff levied by Trump administration: 20 percent
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/04/04/trump-tariffs-world-reaction-quotes/
Witty Rejoinder said:
Hah. US stock market down 10% in two days. Who could have predicted that?
The Heard Island penguins.
SCIENCE said:
alleged
wait does that mean these things should have 50000% tariffs
My Pregablin costs $7.70
Divine Angel said:
Witty Rejoinder said:
Hah. US stock market down 10% in two days. Who could have predicted that?
No one of you it would seem – I can’t find a US stock market drop or rise prediction or mention thereof in most threads here. Didn’t do an exhaustive search though.
poikilotherm said:
Divine Angel said:
Witty Rejoinder said:
Hah. US stock market down 10% in two days. Who could have predicted that?
No one of you it would seem – I can’t find a US stock market drop or rise prediction or mention thereof in most threads here. Didn’t do an exhaustive search though.
True.
so as the great kkk says, good time for rich pricks to buy in and get rich at the next pump phase
Messed up the quoting , oops.
Divine Angel said:
Witty Rejoinder said:
Hah. US stock market down 10% in two days. Who could have predicted that?
No one of you it would seem – I can’t find a US stock market drop or rise prediction or mention thereof in most threads here. Didn’t do an exhaustive search though.
Hmm, I don’t recall saying that
poikilotherm said:
Divine Angel said:
Witty Rejoinder said:
Hah. US stock market down 10% in two days. Who could have predicted that?
No one of you it would seem – I can’t find a US stock market drop or rise prediction or mention thereof in most threads here. Didn’t do an exhaustive search though.
I did. Posted as few articles by Stephen Bartholomew from the SMH too.
And any economist with her salt has predicted that tariffs, anti immigrant crackdowns and the politicisation of the Fed would cause inflation, subsequently tank the money markets, cause a recession and as predictions of corporate earnings collapsed would cause a stock market crash.
Witty Rejoinder said:
And any economist with her salt has predicted that tariffs, anti immigrant crackdowns and the politicisation of the Fed would cause inflation, subsequently tank the money markets, cause a recession and as predictions of corporate earnings collapsed would cause a stock market crash.
I just didn’t think it would happen so quickly. I predicted six months.
Witty Rejoinder said:
And any economist with her salt has predicted that tariffs, anti immigrant crackdowns and the politicisation of the Fed would cause inflation, subsequently tank the money markets, cause a recession and as predictions of corporate earnings collapsed would cause a stock market crash.
Kamala Harris said during the debate that he would tank the economy, leading to a mid-year recession.
kii said:
Trump won’t be present today for the dignified transfer of four U.S. soldiers at Dover Air Force Base, Delaware.Instead, he’ll be attending a LIV Golf dinner reception in Florida.
The White House and the Defense Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment on which administration officials might be in attendance.
The soldiers died during a training exercise in Lithuania. They were honored during a dignified departure ceremony from Lithuania, with Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda and other dignitaries paying tribute.
Colour me shocked…
Witty Rejoinder said:
And any economist with her salt has predicted that tariffs, anti immigrant crackdowns and the politicisation of the Fed would cause inflation, subsequently tank the money markets, cause a recession and as predictions of corporate earnings collapsed would cause a stock market crash.
You say that, but they’d be rich as all folk if they were any good at it , they fluff around then after the fact say they saw it coming.
SCIENCE said:
alleged
wait does that mean these things should have 50000% tariffs
Who the fk knows?
SCIENCE said:
kii said:
Trump won’t be present today for the dignified transfer of four U.S. soldiers at Dover Air Force Base, Delaware.
Instead, he’ll be attending a LIV Golf dinner reception in Florida.
The White House and the Defense Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment on which administration officials might be in attendance.
The soldiers died during a training exercise in Lithuania. They were honored during a dignified departure ceremony from Lithuania, with Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda and other dignitaries paying tribute.
alleged
LOLOLOL
Michael V said:
SCIENCE said:alleged
wait does that mean these things should have 50000% tariffs
Who the fk knows?
The cost of medicines on that table is all kinds of wrong and disingenuous.
poikilotherm said:
Witty Rejoinder said:
And any economist with her salt has predicted that tariffs, anti immigrant crackdowns and the politicisation of the Fed would cause inflation, subsequently tank the money markets, cause a recession and as predictions of corporate earnings collapsed would cause a stock market crash.
You say that, but they’d be rich as all folk if they were any good at it , they fluff around then after the fact say they saw it coming.
Short selling stocks inn anticipation of a very predictable stock market downturn is not very wise when Trump is so unpredictable.
Divine Angel said:
I dunno which penguins are doing the Heard Island social media account, but they’re rockin’ ithttps://bsky.app/profile/heardislandgov.bsky.social
they reposted this, not original content
LOLOLOL
Witty Rejoinder said:
poikilotherm said:
Witty Rejoinder said:
And any economist with her salt has predicted that tariffs, anti immigrant crackdowns and the politicisation of the Fed would cause inflation, subsequently tank the money markets, cause a recession and as predictions of corporate earnings collapsed would cause a stock market crash.
You say that, but they’d be rich as all folk if they were any good at it , they fluff around then after the fact say they saw it coming.
Short selling stocks inn anticipation of a very predictable stock market downturn is not very wise when Trump is so unpredictable.
Haha – so it wasn’t very predictable because trump is un predictable? Pure economist gold witty.
poikilotherm said:
Witty Rejoinder said:
poikilotherm said:You say that, but they’d be rich as all folk if they were any good at it , they fluff around then after the fact say they saw it coming.
Short selling stocks inn anticipation of a very predictable stock market downturn is not very wise when Trump is so unpredictable.
Haha – so it wasn’t very predictable because trump is un predictable? Pure economist gold witty.
I mean, who could have predicted that Trump woould be unpredictable? j/k
poikilotherm said:
Witty Rejoinder said:
poikilotherm said:You say that, but they’d be rich as all folk if they were any good at it , they fluff around then after the fact say they saw it coming.
Short selling stocks inn anticipation of a very predictable stock market downturn is not very wise when Trump is so unpredictable.
Haha – so it wasn’t very predictable because trump is un predictable? Pure economist gold witty.
Oh dear…
Witty Rejoinder said:
poikilotherm said:
Witty Rejoinder said:Short selling stocks inn anticipation of a very predictable stock market downturn is not very wise when Trump is so unpredictable.
Haha – so it wasn’t very predictable because trump is un predictable? Pure economist gold witty.
Oh dear…
Oh well, it is done now.
fsm said:
and there are sadly, no vaccinations for it.
roughbarked said:
fsm said:
and there are sadly, no vaccinations for it.
What if Patient Zero was given a massive dose of Ivermectin, mixed with bleach?
Divine Angel said:
kii said:
Trump won’t be present today for the dignified transfer of four U.S. soldiers at Dover Air Force Base, Delaware.Instead, he’ll be attending a LIV Golf dinner reception in Florida.
The White House and the Defense Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment on which administration officials might be in attendance.
The soldiers died during a training exercise in Lithuania. They were honored during a dignified departure ceremony from Lithuania, with Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda and other dignitaries paying tribute.
It’s probably good he won’t be there. He’d just make the occasion all about him, holding an unhinged press conference, ranting about shit while the bodies are being unloaded from the plane.
Quite. He dignifies the event with his absence
dv said:
Son, I have a greater responsibility than you could possibly fathom. You weep for Harris and you curse the Republicans. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know.
Blast from the past with JDV
In fairness they are so focused on education that they are elininating the whole department.
dv said:
Blast from the past with JDV
In fairness they are so focused on education that they are elininating the whole department.
Ha!
Michael V said:
dv said:
Blast from the past with JDV
In fairness they are so focused on education that they are elininating the whole department.
Ha!
space laser focus
Here’s a clip of Trump complaining about Obama taking time off to play golf. But that’s not the point. Listen to him in these clips from 2015/2016 and compare them to how he speaks now.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Fauxmoi/s/cbuQKP1zBy
Divine Angel said:
Here’s a clip of Trump complaining about Obama taking time off to play golf. But that’s not the point. Listen to him in these clips from 2015/2016 and compare them to how he speaks now.https://www.reddit.com/r/Fauxmoi/s/cbuQKP1zBy
Divine Angel said:
Here’s a clip of Trump complaining about Obama taking time off to play golf. But that’s not the point. Listen to him in these clips from 2015/2016 and compare them to how he speaks now.https://www.reddit.com/r/Fauxmoi/s/cbuQKP1zBy
Yeah.
Tau.Neutrino said:
TARIFF OF THE PENGUINS (March of the Penguins parody)
The penguins are in shock, the krell are devastated, the sea lions want payback.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJbZCbBLqkk
The ridiculous real story behind the tariff plan that turned Donald Trump into a global disaster
MSNBC Maddow.
JudgeMental said:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJbZCbBLqkkThe ridiculous real story behind the tariff plan that turned Donald Trump into a global disaster
MSNBC Maddow.
So, a con man conned the con man.
Heather Cox Richardson
35m ·
April 4, 2025 (Friday)
The stock market rout continued today. As expected, China announced retaliatory tariffs in response to those President Donald Trump announced on Wednesday. Chinese leaders say they will impose a 34% tariff on all U.S. goods imported into China next Thursday. Apparently, Trump did not think China would respond to his tariffs, and tried to sound as if he was still in control of the situation.
Trump is spending a long weekend in Florida, where he is attending the LIV golf tournament at his Doral club. But at 8:25 this morning, he reposted on his social media channel a video in which the narrator claimed that Trump is crashing the markets on purpose. The video claimed that legendary investor Warren Buffet “just said Trump is making the best economic moves he’s seen in over fifty years.” It went on to explain how “the secret game he’s playing” “could make you rich.” Buffett’s conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway quickly denied Buffett had said any such thing as the video claimed. “All such reports are false,” it said. In March, Buffett called tariffs “an act of war, to some degree.”
Then, about an hour before the U.S. markets opened, Trump posted on his social media channel: “CHINA PLAYED IT WRONG, THEY PANICKED—THE ONE THING THEY CANNOT AFFORD TO DO!” About twenty minutes later, he posted: “TO THE MANY INVESTORS COMING INTO THE UNITED STATES AND INVESTING MASSIVE AMOUNTS OF MONEY, MY POLICIES WILL NEVER CHANGE. THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO GET RICH, RICHER THAN EVER BEFORE!!!”
When the markets opened, they plummeted again. During trading today, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 2,231 points, or 5.5%, on top of the 1,679 points it fell yesterday. The S&P 500 fell 5.97% following the 4.84% it lost yesterday. The Nasdaq Composite dropped a further 5.8% after yesterday’s drop of nearly 6%. Oil prices also fell sharply despite the fact that Trump had exempted the U.S. energy industry from tariffs, as traders anticipate lower economic growth and thus less demand for gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel.
Twenty-five minutes before the market closed, Trump posted: “ONLY THE WEAK WILL FAIL!”
After-market trading continued downward.
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said today that Trump’s tariffs are “highly likely” to increase inflation and risk throwing people out of work. Economists at JPMorgan now place the odds of global recession at 60% unless the tariffs are ended.
Natalie Allison, Jeff Stein, Cat Zakrzewski, and Michael Birnbaum of the Washington Post reported how Trump came to impose the tariffs. After aides from a number of different government agencies came up with options for Trump to review, he decided instead on a different option, one that has drawn ridicule because it is crude and has nothing to do with tariffs at all. He reached the amounts of tariff levies by dividing the trade deficit of each nation (not including services) by the value of its imports and then dividing the final number by 2.
The reporters note that Trump didn’t land on a plan until less than three hours before he announced it, and made his choice with little input from business or foreign leaders. Neither Republican lawmakers nor the president’s team knew what Trump would do. “He’s at the peak of just not giving a f*ck anymore,” a White House official told the reporters. “Bad news stories? Doesn’t give a f*ck. He’s going to do what he’s going to do. He’s going to do what he promised to do on the campaign trail.”
While right-wing media and Republican lawmakers have worked hard to spin the economic crisis sparked by Trump’s tariffs, Financial Times chief data reporter John Burn-Murdoch used charts on social media to show that Americans are not happy. Consumers give Trump’s economic plan the worst ratings of any administration’s economic policy since records began. He has had the same impact on economic uncertainty as the global coronavirus pandemic did. Almost 60% of Americans expect the economy to deteriorate over the next year, and they are very worried about job losses.
Burn-Murdoch noted that despite the attempt of right-wing media to hide the crisis, more than half of Americans have heard unfavorable business news coverage of the government’s policies. While MAGA continues to approve of Trump, he’s rapidly losing support among the rest of the coalition that put him into office.
The administration apparently doesn’t care much more about the law than it does about the reactions to the tariffs that are crashing the economy. Today, U.S. District Court judge Paula Xinis ordered the government to bring back to the United States no later than 11:59 p.m. on April 7 a legal resident it mistakenly sent to a notorious prison for terrorists in El Salvador. On Monday, administration lawyers told the court that the government had swept up Kilmar Abrego Garcia because of an “administrative error” but that it could not bring him back because he was outside the reach of American laws.
Priscilla Alvarez and Emily R. Condon of CNN note that in a hearing about the case, Xinis said that Abrego Garcia, who was in the U.S. legally and was not charged with any crimes, was arrested last month “without legal basis” and was deported “without justification of legal basis.” “This was an illegal act,” Xinis said. “Congress said you can’t do it, and you did it anyway.”
Trump’s deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, responded to the judge’s order by calling Xinis a “Marxist judge” who “thinks she’s president of El Salvador.” The White House responded to the judge’s order by saying, “We suggest the Judge contact President Bukele because we are unaware of the judge having jurisdiction or authority over the country of El Salvador.”
Legal analyst Steve Vladeck responded that while a U.S. federal court cannot order the Salvadoran government to release Abrego Garcia, the U.S. government should be able to secure his release. If it can—and in this case it should be able to—the court can order it to do so.
If that were not the case, the administration could simply get rid of anyone it wanted to by sending them to a prison outside the jurisdiction of the United States and then claiming it had no way to get them back.
Tonight, as the economy is in turmoil, Trump is speaking at a $1 million-per-person candlelight fundraising dinner at the Trump Organization’s Mar-a-Lago property for the super PAC, MAGA Inc., that supports Trump. By law, MAGA Inc. can’t coordinate with Trump’s campaign organization, so the invitations for the dinner say that Trump is simply a guest speaker and is not asking for donations.
The terrible storms in the middle of the country continue. Authorities have issued flash flood emergencies in parts of Missouri, Texas, and Arkansas, and heavy rains are also expected in Kentucky.
Finally, four soldiers who died when their military vehicle sank in a deep swamp in Lithuania during a training exercise came home to Dover Air Force Base, in Dover, Delaware, today. Their recovery took about 200 U.S., Polish, Estonian, and Lithuanian personnel a week and required drones, search dogs, Navy divers, and ground-penetrating radar, as well as 70 tons of sand and gravel.
“We consider US soldiers in Lithuania as our own,” the Lithuanian Defense Ministry said after thousands of people joined Lithuanian president Gitanas Nausėda and other dignitaries in a dignified departure ceremony of the soldiers from Lithuania. “The farewell ceremony once again demonstrated our society’s solidarity, respect, and gratitude to the Americans.”
For a million dollars per person, he can afford to turn on the lights and put the candles away.
sarahs mum said:
If that were not the case, the administration could simply get rid of anyone it wanted to by sending them to a prison outside the jurisdiction of the United States and then claiming it had no way to get them back.
LOL
right
have we got news for yous
sarahs mum said:
I bet that Trump is just the absolute idol of the Boeing boardroom right now.
sarahs mum said:
Hmmmm.
Will those bits now be made in the US?
captain_spalding said:
sarahs mum said:
I bet that Trump is just the absolute idol of the Boeing boardroom right now.
maybe more the voodoo doll now…
Michael V said:
sarahs mum said:
Hmmmm.
Will those bits now be made in the US?
In 2024, the United States imported approximately 4.8 million metric tons of aluminum for consumption. Canada is the largest aluminum exporter to the US, with roughly half of the aluminum used in the US being imported.
Here’s a more detailed breakdown:
Total Imports:
The US imported about 4.8 million metric tons of aluminum for consumption in 2024.
Apparent Consumption:
The apparent consumption of aluminum totaled about 4.3 million metric tons in 2024.
Main Supplier:
Canada is the largest supplier of aluminum to the US, with imports from Canada accounting for nearly 40% of US aluminum imports between March 2024 and January 2025, totaling nearly 3 million metric tonnes.
Other Suppliers:
Other key suppliers include the United Arab Emirates, China, South Korea, and Bahrain.
Dependency on Imports:
The US is heavily reliant on aluminum imports, with roughly half of all aluminum used in the country being imported.
Bauxite Imports:
The US imports nearly all the bauxite (the only commercial aluminum ore) used in producing primary aluminum, as it produces less than 1% of the bauxite used to make aluminum.
sarahs mum said:
Michael V said:
sarahs mum said:
Hmmmm.
Will those bits now be made in the US?
In 2024, the United States imported approximately 4.8 million metric tons of aluminum for consumption. Canada is the largest aluminum exporter to the US, with roughly half of the aluminum used in the US being imported.
Here’s a more detailed breakdown:
Total Imports:
The US imported about 4.8 million metric tons of aluminum for consumption in 2024.
Apparent Consumption:
The apparent consumption of aluminum totaled about 4.3 million metric tons in 2024.
Main Supplier:
Canada is the largest supplier of aluminum to the US, with imports from Canada accounting for nearly 40% of US aluminum imports between March 2024 and January 2025, totaling nearly 3 million metric tonnes.
Other Suppliers:
Other key suppliers include the United Arab Emirates, China, South Korea, and Bahrain.
Dependency on Imports:
The US is heavily reliant on aluminum imports, with roughly half of all aluminum used in the country being imported.
Bauxite Imports:
The US imports nearly all the bauxite (the only commercial aluminum ore) used in producing primary aluminum, as it produces less than 1% of the bauxite used to make aluminum.
Bottom line: US aircraft manufacturing go bye-bye.
JudgeMental said:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJbZCbBLqkkThe ridiculous real story behind the tariff plan that turned Donald Trump into a global disaster
MSNBC Maddow.
Heck.
captain_spalding said:
sarahs mum said:
Michael V said:Hmmmm.
Will those bits now be made in the US?
In 2024, the United States imported approximately 4.8 million metric tons of aluminum for consumption. Canada is the largest aluminum exporter to the US, with roughly half of the aluminum used in the US being imported.
Here’s a more detailed breakdown:
Total Imports:
The US imported about 4.8 million metric tons of aluminum for consumption in 2024.
Apparent Consumption:
The apparent consumption of aluminum totaled about 4.3 million metric tons in 2024.
Main Supplier:
Canada is the largest supplier of aluminum to the US, with imports from Canada accounting for nearly 40% of US aluminum imports between March 2024 and January 2025, totaling nearly 3 million metric tonnes.
Other Suppliers:
Other key suppliers include the United Arab Emirates, China, South Korea, and Bahrain.
Dependency on Imports:
The US is heavily reliant on aluminum imports, with roughly half of all aluminum used in the country being imported.
Bauxite Imports:
The US imports nearly all the bauxite (the only commercial aluminum ore) used in producing primary aluminum, as it produces less than 1% of the bauxite used to make aluminum.
Bottom line: US aircraft manufacturing go bye-bye.
Quite possibly.
captain_spalding said:
sarahs mum said:
Michael V said:Hmmmm.
Will those bits now be made in the US?
In 2024, the United States imported approximately 4.8 million metric tons of aluminum for consumption. Canada is the largest aluminum exporter to the US, with roughly half of the aluminum used in the US being imported.
Here’s a more detailed breakdown:
Total Imports:
The US imported about 4.8 million metric tons of aluminum for consumption in 2024.
Apparent Consumption:
The apparent consumption of aluminum totaled about 4.3 million metric tons in 2024.
Main Supplier:
Canada is the largest supplier of aluminum to the US, with imports from Canada accounting for nearly 40% of US aluminum imports between March 2024 and January 2025, totaling nearly 3 million metric tonnes.
Other Suppliers:
Other key suppliers include the United Arab Emirates, China, South Korea, and Bahrain.
Dependency on Imports:
The US is heavily reliant on aluminum imports, with roughly half of all aluminum used in the country being imported.
Bauxite Imports:
The US imports nearly all the bauxite (the only commercial aluminum ore) used in producing primary aluminum, as it produces less than 1% of the bauxite used to make aluminum.
Bottom line: US aircraft manufacturing go bye-bye.
Well, there go a lot of their export sales. The cost of US assembled aircraft using imported components will be uncompetitive if all those components get tariffed. But presumably there would also be a huge tariff on US airlines buying imported planes. So this is likely to end up as US airlines being forced to buy US aircraft at inflated prices, while the rest of the world buy cheaper equivalents from Airbus.
A bit of an own goal.
Michael V said:
captain_spalding said:
sarahs mum said:In 2024, the United States imported approximately 4.8 million metric tons of aluminum for consumption. Canada is the largest aluminum exporter to the US, with roughly half of the aluminum used in the US being imported.
Here’s a more detailed breakdown:
Total Imports:
The US imported about 4.8 million metric tons of aluminum for consumption in 2024.
Apparent Consumption:
The apparent consumption of aluminum totaled about 4.3 million metric tons in 2024.
Main Supplier:
Canada is the largest supplier of aluminum to the US, with imports from Canada accounting for nearly 40% of US aluminum imports between March 2024 and January 2025, totaling nearly 3 million metric tonnes.
Other Suppliers:
Other key suppliers include the United Arab Emirates, China, South Korea, and Bahrain.
Dependency on Imports:
The US is heavily reliant on aluminum imports, with roughly half of all aluminum used in the country being imported.
Bauxite Imports:
The US imports nearly all the bauxite (the only commercial aluminum ore) used in producing primary aluminum, as it produces less than 1% of the bauxite used to make aluminum.
Bottom line: US aircraft manufacturing go bye-bye.
Quite possibly.
the tariff on aluminium is really daft.
party_pants said:
captain_spalding said:
sarahs mum said:In 2024, the United States imported approximately 4.8 million metric tons of aluminum for consumption. Canada is the largest aluminum exporter to the US, with roughly half of the aluminum used in the US being imported.
Here’s a more detailed breakdown:
Total Imports:
The US imported about 4.8 million metric tons of aluminum for consumption in 2024.
Apparent Consumption:
The apparent consumption of aluminum totaled about 4.3 million metric tons in 2024.
Main Supplier:
Canada is the largest supplier of aluminum to the US, with imports from Canada accounting for nearly 40% of US aluminum imports between March 2024 and January 2025, totaling nearly 3 million metric tonnes.
Other Suppliers:
Other key suppliers include the United Arab Emirates, China, South Korea, and Bahrain.
Dependency on Imports:
The US is heavily reliant on aluminum imports, with roughly half of all aluminum used in the country being imported.
Bauxite Imports:
The US imports nearly all the bauxite (the only commercial aluminum ore) used in producing primary aluminum, as it produces less than 1% of the bauxite used to make aluminum.
Bottom line: US aircraft manufacturing go bye-bye.
Well, there go a lot of their export sales. The cost of US assembled aircraft using imported components will be uncompetitive if all those components get tariffed. But presumably there would also be a huge tariff on US airlines buying imported planes. So this is likely to end up as US airlines being forced to buy US aircraft at inflated prices, while the rest of the world buy cheaper equivalents from Airbus.
A bit of an own goal.
‘We cross now to the Airbus boardroom, where our correspondent Theo Germanus reports. Hello, Theo, what is the reaction there to Trump’s aluminium tariffs?’
‘I’m sorry, Sarah, i can’t quite hear you, i’m being deafened by the popping of champagne corks.’
captain_spalding said:
party_pants said:
captain_spalding said:Bottom line: US aircraft manufacturing go bye-bye.
Well, there go a lot of their export sales. The cost of US assembled aircraft using imported components will be uncompetitive if all those components get tariffed. But presumably there would also be a huge tariff on US airlines buying imported planes. So this is likely to end up as US airlines being forced to buy US aircraft at inflated prices, while the rest of the world buy cheaper equivalents from Airbus.
A bit of an own goal.
‘We cross now to the Airbus boardroom, where our correspondent Theo Germanus reports. Hello, Theo, what is the reaction there to Trump’s aluminium tariffs?’
‘I’m sorry, Sarah, i can’t quite hear you, i’m being deafened by the popping of champagne corks.’
Just about.
If only there was a third big aircraft conglomerate to provide competition…
sarahs mum said:
The first thing my brain did with that was subtract all the bits not American. Not a lot of plane left.
party_pants said:
captain_spalding said:
party_pants said:Well, there go a lot of their export sales. The cost of US assembled aircraft using imported components will be uncompetitive if all those components get tariffed. But presumably there would also be a huge tariff on US airlines buying imported planes. So this is likely to end up as US airlines being forced to buy US aircraft at inflated prices, while the rest of the world buy cheaper equivalents from Airbus.
A bit of an own goal.
‘We cross now to the Airbus boardroom, where our correspondent Theo Germanus reports. Hello, Theo, what is the reaction there to Trump’s aluminium tariffs?’
‘I’m sorry, Sarah, i can’t quite hear you, i’m being deafened by the popping of champagne corks.’
Just about.
If only there was a third big aircraft conglomerate to provide competition…
Maybe Bombardier needsto move up a notch?
captain_spalding said:
party_pants said:
captain_spalding said:‘We cross now to the Airbus boardroom, where our correspondent Theo Germanus reports. Hello, Theo, what is the reaction there to Trump’s aluminium tariffs?’
‘I’m sorry, Sarah, i can’t quite hear you, i’m being deafened by the popping of champagne corks.’
Just about.
If only there was a third big aircraft conglomerate to provide competition…
Maybe Bombardier needsto move up a notch?
Didn’t they get bought out by one of the big 2? Same with Embraer in Brazil.
Antonov in Ukraine have a few more immidiate problems going on too.
party_pants said:
captain_spalding said:
party_pants said:Well, there go a lot of their export sales. The cost of US assembled aircraft using imported components will be uncompetitive if all those components get tariffed. But presumably there would also be a huge tariff on US airlines buying imported planes. So this is likely to end up as US airlines being forced to buy US aircraft at inflated prices, while the rest of the world buy cheaper equivalents from Airbus.
A bit of an own goal.
‘We cross now to the Airbus boardroom, where our correspondent Theo Germanus reports. Hello, Theo, what is the reaction there to Trump’s aluminium tariffs?’
‘I’m sorry, Sarah, i can’t quite hear you, i’m being deafened by the popping of champagne corks.’
Just about.
If only there was a third big aircraft conglomerate to provide competition…
There’s at least one in China, CAC I think they’re called, and Sukhoi in Russia though for obvious reasons they aren’t getting a lot of sales lately. There’s also Embraer, though they seem to be in some kind of partnership with Airbus – For example I think I remember seeing that the Airbus A220 is a rebadged Embraer of some type.
The demand for aluminium in the airliner industry in the US would be relatively trivial to the numerous other industries that need it, such as car manufacturers and many others. To build, say, 100 Boeings of various types per year would only take a few thousand tonnes of aluminium at best. The increasing use of composites in airliner structure is reducing the need for it.
Spiny Norman said:
party_pants said:
captain_spalding said:‘We cross now to the Airbus boardroom, where our correspondent Theo Germanus reports. Hello, Theo, what is the reaction there to Trump’s aluminium tariffs?’
‘I’m sorry, Sarah, i can’t quite hear you, i’m being deafened by the popping of champagne corks.’
Just about.
If only there was a third big aircraft conglomerate to provide competition…
There’s at least one in China, CAC I think they’re called, and Sukhoi in Russia though for obvious reasons they aren’t getting a lot of sales lately. There’s also Embraer, though they seem to be in some kind of partnership with Airbus – For example I think I remember seeing that the Airbus A220 is a rebadged Embraer of some type.
The demand for aluminium in the airliner industry in the US would be relatively trivial to the numerous other industries that need it, such as car manufacturers and many others. To build, say, 100 Boeings of various types per year would only take a few thousand tonnes of aluminium at best. The increasing use of composites in airliner structure is reducing the need for it.
Coke cans…
all this talk about aluminum but ah well luckily they don’t use it to build the bulk of any nuclear submarines now
wait
Alt National Park Service
We know this post is long, but it’s important to read to understand what’s going on. A lot of people are asking, “Why is Trump just out golfing while things are falling apart?” It’s simple: the emergency isn’t something he’s reacting to — it’s something he’s building.
Trump recently declared a national economic emergency under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) — granting himself sweeping authority over international trade by labeling foreign economic practices an “unusual and extraordinary threat.”
But here’s the real play: by declaring a national emergency, Trump didn’t just respond to a crisis — he created one. And in doing so, he unlocked access to over 120 statutory powers scattered throughout federal law. Many of these powers have nothing to do with trade — and everything to do with expanding presidential authority inside the U.S.
What This Move Enables: Expanded Domestic Powers
1. Control of Domestic Communications
- 47 U.S.C. §606©: Allows the president to take control of, shut down, or regulate wire and radio communications — including the internet, social media platforms, broadcast networks, and telecom infrastructure — in the name of national defense. Originally intended for wartime, this Cold War-era law remains on the books.
2. Asset Freezing and Financial Surveillance
- Under IEEPA and related laws, the president can freeze the assets and bank accounts of individuals or organizations accused of aiding foreign threats. These powers are vague and can be stretched to include domestic political groups, journalists, or activists — especially if they’re perceived as having foreign ties or influence.
3. Domestic Military Deployment
- Under the Insurrection Act (10 U.S.C. §§ 251–255), the president can deploy active-duty U.S. military to enforce laws or suppress civil unrest within the country. In certain scenarios, this can be done without state governor consent — especially if the president claims state authorities are failing to uphold federal law.
4. Emergency Detention Powers (Non-Citizens)
- The Alien Enemies Act (50 U.S.C. §21) — a law dating back to 1798 — allows the president to detain or restrict the movement of non-citizens from nations deemed hostile. The criteria for “hostile” can be broad and undefined during a declared emergency.
5. Control of Energy and Transportation
- Under laws like 42 U.S.C. §6272 and others, the president can redirect or restrict domestic fuel production, electricity usage, or energy transportation. Additionally, 49 U.S.C. §40106(b) allows the president to limit, reroute, or suspend civil aviation, giving the executive branch near-total control over U.S. airspace in a crisis.
6. Suspension of Labor Regulations
- During a declared emergency, the president can waive federal labor regulations and override contract protections. This includes removing limits on hours, wages, and workplace safety for federal contractors and any industries deemed vital to national security.
7. National Security Letters & Warrantless Surveillance
- Emergency declarations expand the reach and use of National Security Letters (NSLs) — tools that let federal agencies demand financial, telecom, and internet records without a warrant. These also come with gag orders, preventing the recipient (e.g., Google or a bank) from disclosing that they’re under surveillance.
Why it Matters?
Even when legal domestic powers are limited, a national emergency lets the president:
- Frame the issue as a national security crisis, justifying aggressive action
- Bypass Congress and the courts by acting unilaterally
- Sway public opinion using fear, urgency, and patriotic rhetoric
Bottom Line
IEEPA is focused on foreign threats — but once the emergency is declared, the president taps into a hidden arsenal of domestic control powers. What began as a trade issue could quickly shift into civil liberties restrictions, mass surveillance, or even crackdowns under the legal shield of an “emergency.”
This isn’t just about tariffs. It’s about redefining the boundaries of executive power. Imagine if this economic crisis keeps getting worse — the amount of power he will gain.
JudgeMental said:
the amount of power he will gain.
… That’s the whole point. He’s using the Putin and Hitler playbooks to gain ultimate power over the country, and a couple of others if he gets his way. It’s all laid out in Project 2025.
Damn.
He did it.
He made America great again.
esselte said:
Damn.He did it.
He made America great again.
As in Great Depression?
ruby said:
:)
Also consider King Komrade Krasnov, who might make that 6 silent k’s.
The US government says it will revoke all visas held by passport holders of South Sudan after complaining the African nation was not accepting deportees from its migrant blitz.
It means South Sudanese people in America could be sent home, while new arrivals would be blocked, according to Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
This is the first such measure singling out of all passport holders from a particular country since Donald Trump was re-elected, having campaigned on an anti-immigration platform.
https://www.news.com.au/travel/travel-updates/warnings/us-to-cancel-south-sudanese-visas-block-arrivals/news-story/bd345d614e3ef105c37ff93d6395ff7d
Michael V said:
ruby said:
:)
Also consider King Komrade Krasnov, who might make that 6 silent k’s.
I just love the forum invention of King Komrade Krasnov.
I’m just watching some videos of the Hands Off protests in the US. Trump is getting great crowds (for all the wrong reasons)
Divine Angel said:
The US government says it will revoke all visas held by passport holders of South Sudan after complaining the African nation was not accepting deportees from its migrant blitz.It means South Sudanese people in America could be sent home, while new arrivals would be blocked, according to Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
This is the first such measure singling out of all passport holders from a particular country since Donald Trump was re-elected, having campaigned on an anti-immigration platform.
https://www.news.com.au/travel/travel-updates/warnings/us-to-cancel-south-sudanese-visas-block-arrivals/news-story/bd345d614e3ef105c37ff93d6395ff7d
Fk KKK.
ruby said:
Michael V said:
ruby said:
:)
Also consider King Komrade Krasnov, who might make that 6 silent k’s.
I just love the forum invention of King Komrade Krasnov.
I’m just watching some videos of the Hands Off protests in the US. Trump is getting great crowds (for all the wrong reasons)
Love this sign. (From the ABC news article about the marches)
buffy said:
ruby said:
Michael V said::)
Also consider King Komrade Krasnov, who might make that 6 silent k’s.
I just love the forum invention of King Komrade Krasnov.
I’m just watching some videos of the Hands Off protests in the US. Trump is getting great crowds (for all the wrong reasons)
Love this sign. (From the ABC news article about the marches)
Sorry, the ABC link Link
ruby said:
Um
buffy said:
ruby said:
Michael V said::)
Also consider King Komrade Krasnov, who might make that 6 silent k’s.
I just love the forum invention of King Komrade Krasnov.
I’m just watching some videos of the Hands Off protests in the US. Trump is getting great crowds (for all the wrong reasons)
Love this sign. (From the ABC news article about the marches)
:)))
ruby said:
buffy said:
ruby said:I just love the forum invention of King Komrade Krasnov.
I’m just watching some videos of the Hands Off protests in the US. Trump is getting great crowds (for all the wrong reasons)
Love this sign. (From the ABC news article about the marches)
:)))
LOL
:)
dv said:
https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1F9fKZk9AH/Congressman Joe Courtney reflects on the tariffs on Australia.
Ta.
I haven’t listened to it because going by the comments it wouldn’t be worth it.
https://www.facebook.com/Therealreclaimaustralia/videos/2157363311375933
maga asks musk, where is my cheque?
Heather Cox Richardson
1h ·
April 5, 2025 (Saturday)
It’s been quite a week.
On Monday, Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) began an epic speech in the Senate calling out the crisis in which the nation finds itself. He finished just over 25 hours later, on Tuesday, setting a new record for the longest Senate speech. In it, he urged Americans to speak up for our democracy and to “be bolder in America with a vision that inspires with hope.”
Shortly after Booker yielded the floor on Tuesday night, election officials in Wisconsin announced the results of an election for a seat on the state supreme court. The candidate endorsed by President Donald Trump and backed by more than $20 million from billionaire Elon Musk lost the race to his opponent, circuit court judge Susan Crawford, by more than ten points.
On Wednesday, April 2, a day that he called “Liberation Day,” President Trump announced unexpectedly high tariffs on goods produced by countries around the world. On Thursday the stock market plummeted. Friday, the plummet continued while Trump was enjoying a long weekend at one of his private golf resorts.
And then today, across the country, millions of people turned out for “Hands Off” protests to demonstrate opposition to the Trump administration, Musk and the “Department of Government Efficiency” that has been slashing government agencies and employees, and, more generally, attacks on our democracy.
In San Francisco, where Buddy and I joined a protest, what jumped out to me was how many of the signs in the crowd called for the protection of the U.S. Constitution, our institutions, and the government agencies that keep us safe.
Scholars often note that the American Revolution of 250 years ago was a movement not to change the status quo but to protect it. The colonists who became revolutionaries sought to make sure that patterns of self-government established over generations could not be overturned by foreign officials seeking to seize power.
We seem to be at it again….
People’s Liberation Army Day
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-04-07/tariffs-trump-world-will-move-on/105143574
From Quora:
“Why has Trump imposed a 10% tariff on islands occupied solely by penguins? Where is the reciprocity here?
A lot of people are foolishly trying to use this as a pitiful excuse to mock Trump. But the truth is that those people just don’t have Donald’s knowhow. They don’t have his foresight. They don’t have Donald’s almost supernatural ability to just “do business”.
So, yes, perhaps at the moment there is no trade deficit with places like Heard Island and the McDonald Islands. But what do you think would happen if they hadn’t been included? Do you really think the penguins would have just looked this gift horse in the mouth? No! Without Donny’s brilliant pre-emptive strike, the penguins would soon be banding together to take advantage of poor old USA. In no time at all you’d see the American market flooded with penguin cars, penguin mobile phones, even penguin biscuits*! And don’t forget, labour costs in these places are virtually nothing. Penguins have absolutely no housing costs at all and are prepared to work for just a few fish a day. The truth is that without Trump’s quick thinking, the US would probably have had a near 100 billion dollar trade deficit by the end of the year with these penguin-infested islands.
And for anyone thinking that penguins aren’t clever enough to take advantage of favourable trading conditions, then you are dead wrong. Indeed a recent study of Antipodean penguins has found that penguins are far more intelligent than once believed and that their average IQ is actually higher than Donald Trump’s! And yes, I do mean that it can be as high as double figures!
I would be ok with supporting the penguins by using penguin mobile phones. Penguin cars? I don’t get why The Penguin drives a duck car.
The Rev Dodgson said:
From Quora:“Why has Trump imposed a 10% tariff on islands occupied solely by penguins? Where is the reciprocity here?
A lot of people are foolishly trying to use this as a pitiful excuse to mock Trump. But the truth is that those people just don’t have Donald’s knowhow. They don’t have his foresight. They don’t have Donald’s almost supernatural ability to just “do business”.
So, yes, perhaps at the moment there is no trade deficit with places like Heard Island and the McDonald Islands. But what do you think would happen if they hadn’t been included? Do you really think the penguins would have just looked this gift horse in the mouth? No! Without Donny’s brilliant pre-emptive strike, the penguins would soon be banding together to take advantage of poor old USA. In no time at all you’d see the American market flooded with penguin cars, penguin mobile phones, even penguin biscuits*! And don’t forget, labour costs in these places are virtually nothing. Penguins have absolutely no housing costs at all and are prepared to work for just a few fish a day. The truth is that without Trump’s quick thinking, the US would probably have had a near 100 billion dollar trade deficit by the end of the year with these penguin-infested islands.
And for anyone thinking that penguins aren’t clever enough to take advantage of favourable trading conditions, then you are dead wrong. Indeed a recent study of Antipodean penguins has found that penguins are far more intelligent than once believed and that their average IQ is actually higher than Donald Trump’s! And yes, I do mean that it can be as high as double figures!
Like.
Stacey Patton
It’s wild to me to see how you racists come on my threads and celebrate deportations like they are some kind of sport. Y’all laugh when Black and Brown students are snatched from classrooms, dragged from dorm rooms, and shipped to secret prisons.
It’s even wilder to me when y’all throw around the word “ILLEGAL” at foreign students, asylum seekers, and migrant workers like it doesn’t belong to YOUR own bloodline. Y’all are the genetic leftovers of America’s original trespassers. Your ancestors were this land’s first ILLEGALS.
Your ancestors showed up uninvited, unwashed, and unwanted, carrying plague breath and Puritan delusions, and planted flags like fools mistaking theft for destiny. Your ancestors really thought conquest was a birthright and not a crime scene.
The only immigration crisis this land ever had was the day Indigenous folks didn’t deport your ancestors. That was the original border breach. The failure to turn those rickety-ass ships around was humanity’s most expensive clerical error. And what did we get for it?
Genocide.
Slavery.
Environmental collapse.
Capitalism.
All of these are side effects of not checking that first batch of undocumented Europeans at the damn shoreline.
And just who were these illegals, eh?
Do you racists think your ancestors were royalty? Scholars? No! They were Europe’s WORST! Your ancestors were the runoff. The debtors, the zealots, the convicts, the beggars. Europe saw your ancestors as trash and dumped them here like toxic waste with muskets. And y’all been cosplaying as “founding fathers” ever since.
You racists love to forget THAT history.
Y’all like to pretend that your lineage glows with divine right. But your fairytale is just whitewashed poverty and exile. Your ancestors were so broke, dirty, and miserable that risking death across an ocean seemed like a better idea than staying put. And y’all got here and immediately started stealing shit. Stealing land, labor, resources, lives. Because that’s all your people knew how to do.
And when we remind you people of this history, ya’ll get quiet. Because you know good and well that your family tree has more in common with a wanted poster than a passport. Y’all don’t want to admit that if the same rules you apply to immigrants today had existed back then, y’all would have been fish food off the Atlantic coast.
And y’all CHOOSE to forget how your own people were seen when they got here: Dirty. Lazy. Drunk. Uncivilized. Untrustworthy. Y’all weren’t even considered “white” by Anglo standards. Lest we forget how y’all were depicted:
The Irish? Y’all were barely considered human. Just basically whiskey with legs. The Italians? Every one of you was either baking bread or running the mafia. The Jews? Y’all were the shadowy subversives secretly running the banks and the weather.
The Germans? Ticking time bombs with bratwurst breath. The Polish? Just dumb as hell. “How many Poles does it take” wasn’t just a joke, it was policy.
The Greeks? Lazy philosophers with too many opinions and not enough deodorant. The Russians? Cold, scheming, and apparently born with a bottle of vodka in one hand and a spy manual in the other.
The Hungarians? Anarchists with thick accents and questionable hygiene. The French? Snooty, soft, and always losing wars they started. The Scandinavians? Too quiet, too blonde, and always assumed to be harboring Viking rage just under the surface.
The whole damn European immigrant family was treated like the trash heap of the continent. Your great-grandparents were treated like vermin until whiteness was extended to them like a membership card with conditions. And now y’all have the gall to turn around, mouths frothing, and cheer when ICE snatches up and cages brown bodies.
You are the descendants of stowaways and squatters, and yet you dare to moralize about legality. Before y’all come for people chasing safety, education, or survival, maybe reflect on the fact that your whole existence here rests on nothing but Indigenous mercy and centuries of theft.
JudgeMental said:
Stacey PattonIt’s wild to me to see how you racists come on my threads and celebrate deportations like they are some kind of sport. Y’all laugh when Black and Brown students are snatched from classrooms, dragged from dorm rooms, and shipped to secret prisons.
It’s even wilder to me when y’all throw around the word “ILLEGAL” at foreign students, asylum seekers, and migrant workers like it doesn’t belong to YOUR own bloodline. Y’all are the genetic leftovers of America’s original trespassers. Your ancestors were this land’s first ILLEGALS.
Your ancestors showed up uninvited, unwashed, and unwanted, carrying plague breath and Puritan delusions, and planted flags like fools mistaking theft for destiny. Your ancestors really thought conquest was a birthright and not a crime scene.
The only immigration crisis this land ever had was the day Indigenous folks didn’t deport your ancestors. That was the original border breach. The failure to turn those rickety-ass ships around was humanity’s most expensive clerical error. And what did we get for it?
Genocide.
Slavery.
Environmental collapse.
Capitalism.
All of these are side effects of not checking that first batch of undocumented Europeans at the damn shoreline.
And just who were these illegals, eh?Do you racists think your ancestors were royalty? Scholars? No! They were Europe’s WORST! Your ancestors were the runoff. The debtors, the zealots, the convicts, the beggars. Europe saw your ancestors as trash and dumped them here like toxic waste with muskets. And y’all been cosplaying as “founding fathers” ever since.
You racists love to forget THAT history.
“ We’re Americans, with a capital ‘A’, huh? You know what that means? Do ya? That means that our forefathers were kicked out of every decent country in the world. We are the wretched refuse. “ – John Winger (Bill Murray) ‘Stripes’ 1981
JudgeMental said:
Stacey PattonIt’s wild to me to see how you racists come on my threads and celebrate deportations like they are some kind of sport. Y’all laugh when Black and Brown students are snatched from classrooms, dragged from dorm rooms, and shipped to secret prisons.
It’s even wilder to me when y’all throw around the word “ILLEGAL” at foreign students, asylum seekers, and migrant workers like it doesn’t belong to YOUR own bloodline. Y’all are the genetic leftovers of America’s original trespassers. Your ancestors were this land’s first ILLEGALS.
Your ancestors showed up uninvited, unwashed, and unwanted, carrying plague breath and Puritan delusions, and planted flags like fools mistaking theft for destiny. Your ancestors really thought conquest was a birthright and not a crime scene.
The only immigration crisis this land ever had was the day Indigenous folks didn’t deport your ancestors. That was the original border breach. The failure to turn those rickety-ass ships around was humanity’s most expensive clerical error. And what did we get for it?
Genocide.
Slavery.
Environmental collapse.
Capitalism.
All of these are side effects of not checking that first batch of undocumented Europeans at the damn shoreline.
And just who were these illegals, eh?Do you racists think your ancestors were royalty? Scholars? No! They were Europe’s WORST! Your ancestors were the runoff. The debtors, the zealots, the convicts, the beggars. Europe saw your ancestors as trash and dumped them here like toxic waste with muskets. And y’all been cosplaying as “founding fathers” ever since.
You racists love to forget THAT history.Y’all like to pretend that your lineage glows with divine right. But your fairytale is just whitewashed poverty and exile. Your ancestors were so broke, dirty, and miserable that risking death across an ocean seemed like a better idea than staying put. And y’all got here and immediately started stealing shit. Stealing land, labor, resources, lives. Because that’s all your people knew how to do.
And when we remind you people of this history, ya’ll get quiet. Because you know good and well that your family tree has more in common with a wanted poster than a passport. Y’all don’t want to admit that if the same rules you apply to immigrants today had existed back then, y’all would have been fish food off the Atlantic coast.
And y’all CHOOSE to forget how your own people were seen when they got here: Dirty. Lazy. Drunk. Uncivilized. Untrustworthy. Y’all weren’t even considered “white” by Anglo standards. Lest we forget how y’all were depicted:
The Irish? Y’all were barely considered human. Just basically whiskey with legs. The Italians? Every one of you was either baking bread or running the mafia. The Jews? Y’all were the shadowy subversives secretly running the banks and the weather.The Germans? Ticking time bombs with bratwurst breath. The Polish? Just dumb as hell. “How many Poles does it take” wasn’t just a joke, it was policy.
The Greeks? Lazy philosophers with too many opinions and not enough deodorant. The Russians? Cold, scheming, and apparently born with a bottle of vodka in one hand and a spy manual in the other.
The Hungarians? Anarchists with thick accents and questionable hygiene. The French? Snooty, soft, and always losing wars they started. The Scandinavians? Too quiet, too blonde, and always assumed to be harboring Viking rage just under the surface.The whole damn European immigrant family was treated like the trash heap of the continent. Your great-grandparents were treated like vermin until whiteness was extended to them like a membership card with conditions. And now y’all have the gall to turn around, mouths frothing, and cheer when ICE snatches up and cages brown bodies.
You are the descendants of stowaways and squatters, and yet you dare to moralize about legality. Before y’all come for people chasing safety, education, or survival, maybe reflect on the fact that your whole existence here rests on nothing but Indigenous mercy and centuries of theft.
Some gems in that text.
roughbarked said:
Some gems in that text.
Australians are hardly better.
The only excuse that some can offer is that their predecessors came here not by their own choice.
I understand that some of mine came here because staying in Ireland amounted to suicide.
At least we’re not deporting people en masse. At least, not yet.
TIL that the poorest state in the US (Mississippi) has a higher GDP per capita than the UK, France or Japan. So much with US economic decline, hey.
roughbarked said:
JudgeMental said:
Stacey PattonIt’s wild to me to see how you racists come on my threads and celebrate deportations like they are some kind of sport. Y’all laugh when Black and Brown students are snatched from classrooms, dragged from dorm rooms, and shipped to secret prisons.
It’s even wilder to me when y’all throw around the word “ILLEGAL” at foreign students, asylum seekers, and migrant workers like it doesn’t belong to YOUR own bloodline. Y’all are the genetic leftovers of America’s original trespassers. Your ancestors were this land’s first ILLEGALS.
Your ancestors showed up uninvited, unwashed, and unwanted, carrying plague breath and Puritan delusions, and planted flags like fools mistaking theft for destiny. Your ancestors really thought conquest was a birthright and not a crime scene.
The only immigration crisis this land ever had was the day Indigenous folks didn’t deport your ancestors. That was the original border breach. The failure to turn those rickety-ass ships around was humanity’s most expensive clerical error. And what did we get for it?
Genocide.
Slavery.
Environmental collapse.
Capitalism.
All of these are side effects of not checking that first batch of undocumented Europeans at the damn shoreline.
And just who were these illegals, eh?Do you racists think your ancestors were royalty? Scholars? No! They were Europe’s WORST! Your ancestors were the runoff. The debtors, the zealots, the convicts, the beggars. Europe saw your ancestors as trash and dumped them here like toxic waste with muskets. And y’all been cosplaying as “founding fathers” ever since.
You racists love to forget THAT history.Y’all like to pretend that your lineage glows with divine right. But your fairytale is just whitewashed poverty and exile. Your ancestors were so broke, dirty, and miserable that risking death across an ocean seemed like a better idea than staying put. And y’all got here and immediately started stealing shit. Stealing land, labor, resources, lives. Because that’s all your people knew how to do.
And when we remind you people of this history, ya’ll get quiet. Because you know good and well that your family tree has more in common with a wanted poster than a passport. Y’all don’t want to admit that if the same rules you apply to immigrants today had existed back then, y’all would have been fish food off the Atlantic coast.
And y’all CHOOSE to forget how your own people were seen when they got here: Dirty. Lazy. Drunk. Uncivilized. Untrustworthy. Y’all weren’t even considered “white” by Anglo standards. Lest we forget how y’all were depicted:
The Irish? Y’all were barely considered human. Just basically whiskey with legs. The Italians? Every one of you was either baking bread or running the mafia. The Jews? Y’all were the shadowy subversives secretly running the banks and the weather.The Germans? Ticking time bombs with bratwurst breath. The Polish? Just dumb as hell. “How many Poles does it take” wasn’t just a joke, it was policy.
The Greeks? Lazy philosophers with too many opinions and not enough deodorant. The Russians? Cold, scheming, and apparently born with a bottle of vodka in one hand and a spy manual in the other.
The Hungarians? Anarchists with thick accents and questionable hygiene. The French? Snooty, soft, and always losing wars they started. The Scandinavians? Too quiet, too blonde, and always assumed to be harboring Viking rage just under the surface.The whole damn European immigrant family was treated like the trash heap of the continent. Your great-grandparents were treated like vermin until whiteness was extended to them like a membership card with conditions. And now y’all have the gall to turn around, mouths frothing, and cheer when ICE snatches up and cages brown bodies.
You are the descendants of stowaways and squatters, and yet you dare to moralize about legality. Before y’all come for people chasing safety, education, or survival, maybe reflect on the fact that your whole existence here rests on nothing but Indigenous mercy and centuries of theft.
Some gems in that text.
And a whole load of crap in that text.
Trying to convince racist people to change their ways by directing racist abuse at the ancestors of the racist people just isn’t going to work.
Not admitting we just took the list of countries from the index in the back of the atlas…we’ll just say something completely stupid…
>>Mr Lutnick also defended the decision to implement tariffs on uninhabited islands, suggesting trading partners could have rerouted their American-bound shipments through them to dodge paying duties.
“Basically said, ‘I can’t let any part of the world be a place where China or other countries can ship through them,’” he said.<<
captain_spalding said:
roughbarked said:Some gems in that text.
Australians are hardly better.
The only excuse that some can offer is that their predecessors came here not by their own choice.
I understand that some of mine came here because staying in Ireland amounted to suicide.
At least we’re not deporting people en masse. At least, not yet.
Nods.
The Rev Dodgson said:
roughbarked said:
JudgeMental said:
Stacey PattonIt’s wild to me to see how you racists come on my threads and celebrate deportations like they are some kind of sport. Y’all laugh when Black and Brown students are snatched from classrooms, dragged from dorm rooms, and shipped to secret prisons.
It’s even wilder to me when y’all throw around the word “ILLEGAL” at foreign students, asylum seekers, and migrant workers like it doesn’t belong to YOUR own bloodline. Y’all are the genetic leftovers of America’s original trespassers. Your ancestors were this land’s first ILLEGALS.
Your ancestors showed up uninvited, unwashed, and unwanted, carrying plague breath and Puritan delusions, and planted flags like fools mistaking theft for destiny. Your ancestors really thought conquest was a birthright and not a crime scene.
The only immigration crisis this land ever had was the day Indigenous folks didn’t deport your ancestors. That was the original border breach. The failure to turn those rickety-ass ships around was humanity’s most expensive clerical error. And what did we get for it?
Genocide.
Slavery.
Environmental collapse.
Capitalism.
All of these are side effects of not checking that first batch of undocumented Europeans at the damn shoreline.
And just who were these illegals, eh?Do you racists think your ancestors were royalty? Scholars? No! They were Europe’s WORST! Your ancestors were the runoff. The debtors, the zealots, the convicts, the beggars. Europe saw your ancestors as trash and dumped them here like toxic waste with muskets. And y’all been cosplaying as “founding fathers” ever since.
You racists love to forget THAT history.Y’all like to pretend that your lineage glows with divine right. But your fairytale is just whitewashed poverty and exile. Your ancestors were so broke, dirty, and miserable that risking death across an ocean seemed like a better idea than staying put. And y’all got here and immediately started stealing shit. Stealing land, labor, resources, lives. Because that’s all your people knew how to do.
And when we remind you people of this history, ya’ll get quiet. Because you know good and well that your family tree has more in common with a wanted poster than a passport. Y’all don’t want to admit that if the same rules you apply to immigrants today had existed back then, y’all would have been fish food off the Atlantic coast.
And y’all CHOOSE to forget how your own people were seen when they got here: Dirty. Lazy. Drunk. Uncivilized. Untrustworthy. Y’all weren’t even considered “white” by Anglo standards. Lest we forget how y’all were depicted:
The Irish? Y’all were barely considered human. Just basically whiskey with legs. The Italians? Every one of you was either baking bread or running the mafia. The Jews? Y’all were the shadowy subversives secretly running the banks and the weather.The Germans? Ticking time bombs with bratwurst breath. The Polish? Just dumb as hell. “How many Poles does it take” wasn’t just a joke, it was policy.
The Greeks? Lazy philosophers with too many opinions and not enough deodorant. The Russians? Cold, scheming, and apparently born with a bottle of vodka in one hand and a spy manual in the other.
The Hungarians? Anarchists with thick accents and questionable hygiene. The French? Snooty, soft, and always losing wars they started. The Scandinavians? Too quiet, too blonde, and always assumed to be harboring Viking rage just under the surface.The whole damn European immigrant family was treated like the trash heap of the continent. Your great-grandparents were treated like vermin until whiteness was extended to them like a membership card with conditions. And now y’all have the gall to turn around, mouths frothing, and cheer when ICE snatches up and cages brown bodies.
You are the descendants of stowaways and squatters, and yet you dare to moralize about legality. Before y’all come for people chasing safety, education, or survival, maybe reflect on the fact that your whole existence here rests on nothing but Indigenous mercy and centuries of theft.
Some gems in that text.
And a whole load of crap in that text.
Trying to convince racist people to change their ways by directing racist abuse at the ancestors of the racist people just isn’t going to work.
Can’t argue with that.
The Rev Dodgson said:
roughbarked said:
JudgeMental said:
Stacey PattonIt’s wild to me to see how you racists come on my threads and celebrate deportations like they are some kind of sport. Y’all laugh when Black and Brown students are snatched from classrooms, dragged from dorm rooms, and shipped to secret prisons.
It’s even wilder to me when y’all throw around the word “ILLEGAL” at foreign students, asylum seekers, and migrant workers like it doesn’t belong to YOUR own bloodline. Y’all are the genetic leftovers of America’s original trespassers. Your ancestors were this land’s first ILLEGALS.
Your ancestors showed up uninvited, unwashed, and unwanted, carrying plague breath and Puritan delusions, and planted flags like fools mistaking theft for destiny. Your ancestors really thought conquest was a birthright and not a crime scene.
The only immigration crisis this land ever had was the day Indigenous folks didn’t deport your ancestors. That was the original border breach. The failure to turn those rickety-ass ships around was humanity’s most expensive clerical error. And what did we get for it?
Genocide.
Slavery.
Environmental collapse.
Capitalism.
All of these are side effects of not checking that first batch of undocumented Europeans at the damn shoreline.
And just who were these illegals, eh?Do you racists think your ancestors were royalty? Scholars? No! They were Europe’s WORST! Your ancestors were the runoff. The debtors, the zealots, the convicts, the beggars. Europe saw your ancestors as trash and dumped them here like toxic waste with muskets. And y’all been cosplaying as “founding fathers” ever since.
You racists love to forget THAT history.Y’all like to pretend that your lineage glows with divine right. But your fairytale is just whitewashed poverty and exile. Your ancestors were so broke, dirty, and miserable that risking death across an ocean seemed like a better idea than staying put. And y’all got here and immediately started stealing shit. Stealing land, labor, resources, lives. Because that’s all your people knew how to do.
And when we remind you people of this history, ya’ll get quiet. Because you know good and well that your family tree has more in common with a wanted poster than a passport. Y’all don’t want to admit that if the same rules you apply to immigrants today had existed back then, y’all would have been fish food off the Atlantic coast.
And y’all CHOOSE to forget how your own people were seen when they got here: Dirty. Lazy. Drunk. Uncivilized. Untrustworthy. Y’all weren’t even considered “white” by Anglo standards. Lest we forget how y’all were depicted:
The Irish? Y’all were barely considered human. Just basically whiskey with legs. The Italians? Every one of you was either baking bread or running the mafia. The Jews? Y’all were the shadowy subversives secretly running the banks and the weather.The Germans? Ticking time bombs with bratwurst breath. The Polish? Just dumb as hell. “How many Poles does it take” wasn’t just a joke, it was policy.
The Greeks? Lazy philosophers with too many opinions and not enough deodorant. The Russians? Cold, scheming, and apparently born with a bottle of vodka in one hand and a spy manual in the other.
The Hungarians? Anarchists with thick accents and questionable hygiene. The French? Snooty, soft, and always losing wars they started. The Scandinavians? Too quiet, too blonde, and always assumed to be harboring Viking rage just under the surface.The whole damn European immigrant family was treated like the trash heap of the continent. Your great-grandparents were treated like vermin until whiteness was extended to them like a membership card with conditions. And now y’all have the gall to turn around, mouths frothing, and cheer when ICE snatches up and cages brown bodies.
You are the descendants of stowaways and squatters, and yet you dare to moralize about legality. Before y’all come for people chasing safety, education, or survival, maybe reflect on the fact that your whole existence here rests on nothing but Indigenous mercy and centuries of theft.
Some gems in that text.
And a whole load of crap in that text.
Trying to convince racist people to change their ways by directing racist abuse at the ancestors of the racist people just isn’t going to work.
no harm in trying though by pointing out the realities.
buffy said:
Not admitting we just took the list of countries from the index in the back of the atlas…we’ll just say something completely stupid…>>Mr Lutnick also defended the decision to implement tariffs on uninhabited islands, suggesting trading partners could have rerouted their American-bound shipments through them to dodge paying duties.
“Basically said, ‘I can’t let any part of the world be a place where China or other countries can ship through them,’” he said.<<
For that, he needed to put 50% on Heard Island then.
roughbarked said:
The Rev Dodgson said:
roughbarked said:Some gems in that text.
And a whole load of crap in that text.
Trying to convince racist people to change their ways by directing racist abuse at the ancestors of the racist people just isn’t going to work.
Can’t argue with that.
Pffft, hold my beer.
😎
JudgeMental said:
The Rev Dodgson said:
roughbarked said:Some gems in that text.
And a whole load of crap in that text.
Trying to convince racist people to change their ways by directing racist abuse at the ancestors of the racist people just isn’t going to work.
no harm in trying though by pointing out the realities.
:)
JudgeMental said:
roughbarked said:
The Rev Dodgson said:And a whole load of crap in that text.
Trying to convince racist people to change their ways by directing racist abuse at the ancestors of the racist people just isn’t going to work.
Can’t argue with that.
Pffft, hold my beer.
😎
I left it up to you. ;)
JudgeMental said:
The Rev Dodgson said:
roughbarked said:Some gems in that text.
And a whole load of crap in that text.
Trying to convince racist people to change their ways by directing racist abuse at the ancestors of the racist people just isn’t going to work.
no harm in trying though by pointing out the realities.
Yes, there is harm.
It normalises racism.
Jesus fuck, it’s another one of those days, isn’t it?
SCREAMS!!!!!!
JudgeMental said:
The Rev Dodgson said:
roughbarked said:Some gems in that text.
And a whole load of crap in that text.
Trying to convince racist people to change their ways by directing racist abuse at the ancestors of the racist people just isn’t going to work.
no harm in trying though by pointing out the realities.
them deplorables will learn eventually
The Rev Dodgson said:
JudgeMental said:
The Rev Dodgson said:And a whole load of crap in that text.
Trying to convince racist people to change their ways by directing racist abuse at the ancestors of the racist people just isn’t going to work.
no harm in trying though by pointing out the realities.
Yes, there is harm.
It normalises racism.
Racism doesn’t really need to be more normalised than it is or can be.
diddly-squat said:
JudgeMental said:
The Rev Dodgson said:And a whole load of crap in that text.
Trying to convince racist people to change their ways by directing racist abuse at the ancestors of the racist people just isn’t going to work.
no harm in trying though by pointing out the realities.
them deplorables will learn eventually
even if we have to beat it into them!!!
buffy said:
Not admitting we just took the list of countries from the index in the back of the atlas…we’ll just say something completely stupid…>>Mr Lutnick also defended the decision to implement tariffs on uninhabited islands, suggesting trading partners could have rerouted their American-bound shipments through them to dodge paying duties.
“Basically said, ‘I can’t let any part of the world be a place where China or other countries can ship through them,’” he said.<<
What a dickhead.
Trump put a 29% tariff on goods coming from Norfolk Island. Norfolk Island is not uninhabited.
But, i would dearly like to have a front-row seat to watch attempts by China, or other countries, to stage their shipments through Norfolk Island.
I’ve been there a couple of times, and i can tell you, getting anything of substantial size on or off the island is quite the performance.
There is no port. There’s one very short, very small, concrete jetty. There are no facilities for unloading or loading ships. Anything which gets unloaded from or loaded onto the ship which shunts back and forth between NI and NZ has to be transferred to/from shore by ‘lighters’ – large double ended boats, like old-style oceanliner lifeboats.
So, the chance to watch container ships attempting to unload/load large numbers of containers at Norfolk Island would be worth the trip.
Lutnick is demonstrably talking out of his arse.
JudgeMental said:
diddly-squat said:
JudgeMental said:no harm in trying though by pointing out the realities.
them deplorables will learn eventually
even if we have to beat it into them!!!
they will thank you for it, I’m sure
The MAGAs are really this dumb.
captain_spalding said:
roughbarked said:Some gems in that text.
Australians are hardly better.
The only excuse that some can offer is that their predecessors came here not by their own choice.
I understand that some of mine came here because staying in Ireland amounted to suicide.
At least we’re not deporting people en masse. At least, not yet.
Unfortunately, there are some people in Australia who would like to do that.
sarahs mum said:
:)
:)
:)
buffy said:
Not admitting we just took the list of countries from the index in the back of the atlas…we’ll just say something completely stupid…>>Mr Lutnick also defended the decision to implement tariffs on uninhabited islands, suggesting trading partners could have rerouted their American-bound shipments through them to dodge paying duties.
“Basically said, ‘I can’t let any part of the world be a place where China or other countries can ship through them,’” he said.<<
LOL
:)
kii said:
Jesus fuck, it’s another one of those days, isn’t it?SCREAMS!!!!!!
And again?
And more?
The post-“liberation day” rout has accelerated with Wall Street now down more than 10 per cent or $US9 trillion in two days, with sharper falls still expected to come.
The Australian share market is following, with the
benchmark ASX 200 index plunging more than 6 per cent at the open, as the local currency falls below 60 US cents.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-04-07/asx-markets-business-news-live-updates/105144276
This is 7 years old but still
dv said:
This is 7 years old but still
The experiment has been done, and the results are coming in…
Lololol, I swear this guy is such a typical racist piece of shit. White, old and fat. Ugly and stupid.
Spiny Norman said:
Every time something anti-military is added to his list I’m so glad that mr kii didn’t live to see a lot of this stuff.
Spiny Norman said:
All fair.
kii said:
Lololol, I swear this guy is such a typical racist piece of shit. White, old and fat. Ugly and stupid.
he is not an animal, he is a Homan being.
Not really sure what he is expecting the menu of a taco place to say. What’s the English word for taco?
dv said:
kii said:
Lololol, I swear this guy is such a typical racist piece of shit. White, old and fat. Ugly and stupid.
he is not an animal, he is a Homan being.
Not really sure what he is expecting the menu of a taco place to say. What’s the English word for taco?
Wad.
dv said:
kii said:
Lololol, I swear this guy is such a typical racist piece of shit. White, old and fat. Ugly and stupid.
he is not an animal, he is a Homan being.
Not really sure what he is expecting the menu of a taco place to say. What’s the English word for taco?
yum
fsm said:
How long til American is great again?
kii said:
Lololol, I swear this guy is such a typical racist piece of shit. White, old and fat. Ugly and stupid.
I used to work with a lass from Spain, who similarly held that Mexicans ‘do not really speak Spanish’.
Watch collecting talk.
“Are tariffs applied if the watch was originally made and cased in the U.S.? “
That is the ironic part of this tariff non-sense. If you can provide proof the country of origin is the USA, there is no tariff. Similarly, if the watch was originally made in England but is being imported from Germany, then you pay the UK 10% tariff instead of the EU 20%.
“Is it really as sophisticated as that? Doesn’t sound like they have put that much thought into it.”
IIt is that specific. There is a clause detailing it.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/05/i-was-a-british-tourist-trying-to-leave-america-then-i-was-detained-shackled-and-sent-to-an-immigration-detention-centre
captain_spalding said:
kii said:
Lololol, I swear this guy is such a typical racist piece of shit. White, old and fat. Ugly and stupid.
I used to work with a lass from Spain, who similarly held that Mexicans ‘do not really speak Spanish’.
Isn’t it a similar situation with French from France and French from Canadia?
dv said:
kii said:
Lololol, I swear this guy is such a typical racist piece of shit. White, old and fat. Ugly and stupid.
he is not an animal, he is a Homan being.
Not really sure what he is expecting the menu of a taco place to say. What’s the English word for taco?
it’s taco but said slowly.
kii said:
captain_spalding said:
kii said:
Lololol, I swear this guy is such a typical racist piece of shit. White, old and fat. Ugly and stupid.
I used to work with a lass from Spain, who similarly held that Mexicans ‘do not really speak Spanish’.
Isn’t it a similar situation with French from France and French from Canadia?
Yeah, but the French sort of ‘understand’ that the Quebecois can’t help it, it’s what they’ve been taught.
I found some French-language books in a second-hand bookshop one day, bought a few, and showed them to my French teacher.
He said (not too derisively) ‘pfft, ils sont seulement Quebecois’, and proceeded to show me the differences in grammar, spelling, syntax.
captain_spalding said:
kii said:
captain_spalding said:
I used to work with a lass from Spain, who similarly held that Mexicans ‘do not really speak Spanish’.
Isn’t it a similar situation with French from France and French from Canadia?
Yeah, but the French sort of ‘understand’ that the Quebecois can’t help it, it’s what they’ve been taught.
I found some French-language books in a second-hand bookshop one day, bought a few, and showed them to my French teacher.
He said (not too derisively) ‘pfft, ils sont seulement Quebecois’, and proceeded to show me the differences in grammar, spelling, syntax.
we mean Australian can be a language or a collection of languages too
The Rev Dodgson said:
JudgeMental said:
The Rev Dodgson said:And a whole load of crap in that text.
Trying to convince racist people to change their ways by directing racist abuse at the ancestors of the racist people just isn’t going to work.
no harm in trying though by pointing out the realities.
Yes, there is harm.
It normalises racism.
so in this subject oversimplification is acceptable
Why US Has Banned Diplomats From Romantic, Sexual Relations With Chinese
https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/why-the-us-has-banned-diplomats-from-romantic-sexual-relations-with-chinese-8078314
The U.S. government has implemented a strict policy prohibiting American government personnel, family members, and contractors with security clearances from engaging in romantic or sexual relationships with Chinese citizens, per the Associated Press. This policy, put in place by the former U.S. Ambassador Nicholas Burns in January, is a significant departure from previous guidelines, which only restricted relationships with Chinese citizens working in specific roles, such as embassy guards.
Such a blanket “non-fraternisation” policy has been unheard of since the Cold-War, since it’s not uncommon for American diplomats in other countries to date locals or marry them. Until the new ban in January, US personnel in China were expected to inform their seniors about any intimate contact with Chinese citizens, but were not explicitly forbidden from sexual or romantic relationships.
dv said:
Why US Has Banned Diplomats From Romantic, Sexual Relations With Chinesehttps://www.ndtv.com/world-news/why-the-us-has-banned-diplomats-from-romantic-sexual-relations-with-chinese-8078314
The U.S. government has implemented a strict policy prohibiting American government personnel, family members, and contractors with security clearances from engaging in romantic or sexual relationships with Chinese citizens, per the Associated Press. This policy, put in place by the former U.S. Ambassador Nicholas Burns in January, is a significant departure from previous guidelines, which only restricted relationships with Chinese citizens working in specific roles, such as embassy guards.
Such a blanket “non-fraternisation” policy has been unheard of since the Cold-War, since it’s not uncommon for American diplomats in other countries to date locals or marry them. Until the new ban in January, US personnel in China were expected to inform their seniors about any intimate contact with Chinese citizens, but were not explicitly forbidden from sexual or romantic relationships.
So, hookers are still OK?
captain_spalding said:
dv said:
Why US Has Banned Diplomats From Romantic, Sexual Relations With Chinesehttps://www.ndtv.com/world-news/why-the-us-has-banned-diplomats-from-romantic-sexual-relations-with-chinese-8078314
The U.S. government has implemented a strict policy prohibiting American government personnel, family members, and contractors with security clearances from engaging in romantic or sexual relationships with Chinese citizens, per the Associated Press. This policy, put in place by the former U.S. Ambassador Nicholas Burns in January, is a significant departure from previous guidelines, which only restricted relationships with Chinese citizens working in specific roles, such as embassy guards.
Such a blanket “non-fraternisation” policy has been unheard of since the Cold-War, since it’s not uncommon for American diplomats in other countries to date locals or marry them. Until the new ban in January, US personnel in China were expected to inform their seniors about any intimate contact with Chinese citizens, but were not explicitly forbidden from sexual or romantic relationships.
So, hookers are still OK?
No, not if they are Chinese citizens.
party_pants said:
captain_spalding said:
dv said:
Why US Has Banned Diplomats From Romantic, Sexual Relations With Chinesehttps://www.ndtv.com/world-news/why-the-us-has-banned-diplomats-from-romantic-sexual-relations-with-chinese-8078314
The U.S. government has implemented a strict policy prohibiting American government personnel, family members, and contractors with security clearances from engaging in romantic or sexual relationships with Chinese citizens, per the Associated Press. This policy, put in place by the former U.S. Ambassador Nicholas Burns in January, is a significant departure from previous guidelines, which only restricted relationships with Chinese citizens working in specific roles, such as embassy guards.
Such a blanket “non-fraternisation” policy has been unheard of since the Cold-War, since it’s not uncommon for American diplomats in other countries to date locals or marry them. Until the new ban in January, US personnel in China were expected to inform their seniors about any intimate contact with Chinese citizens, but were not explicitly forbidden from sexual or romantic relationships.
So, hookers are still OK?
No, not if they are Chinese citizens.
“…US personnel in China were expected to inform their seniors about any intimate contact with Chinese citizens, but were not explicitly forbidden from sexual or romantic relationships.’
I reckon that means ‘it’s ok, as long as you restrict your conversation to the essentials of the transaction’.
captain_spalding said:
dv said:
Why US Has Banned Diplomats From Romantic, Sexual Relations With Chinesehttps://www.ndtv.com/world-news/why-the-us-has-banned-diplomats-from-romantic-sexual-relations-with-chinese-8078314
The U.S. government has implemented a strict policy prohibiting American government personnel, family members, and contractors with security clearances from engaging in romantic or sexual relationships with Chinese citizens, per the Associated Press. This policy, put in place by the former U.S. Ambassador Nicholas Burns in January, is a significant departure from previous guidelines, which only restricted relationships with Chinese citizens working in specific roles, such as embassy guards.
Such a blanket “non-fraternisation” policy has been unheard of since the Cold-War, since it’s not uncommon for American diplomats in other countries to date locals or marry them. Until the new ban in January, US personnel in China were expected to inform their seniors about any intimate contact with Chinese citizens, but were not explicitly forbidden from sexual or romantic relationships.
So, hookers are still OK?
Yes, unless they are videotaped pissing on the President.
Then he has to change sides.
captain_spalding said:
party_pants said:
captain_spalding said:So, hookers are still OK?
No, not if they are Chinese citizens.
“…US personnel in China were expected to inform their seniors about any intimate contact with Chinese citizens, but were not explicitly forbidden from sexual or romantic relationships.’
I reckon that means ‘it’s ok, as long as you restrict your conversation to the essentials of the transaction’.
Read the whole line: Until the new ban US personnel in China were expected to inform …(snip)
captain_spalding said:
party_pants said:
captain_spalding said:So, hookers are still OK?
No, not if they are Chinese citizens.
“…US personnel in China were expected to inform their seniors about any intimate contact with Chinese citizens, but were not explicitly forbidden from sexual or romantic relationships.’
I reckon that means ‘it’s ok, as long as you restrict your conversation to the essentials of the transaction’.
That phrase is describing the previous situation. The new situation is a ban.
party_pants said:
captain_spalding said:
party_pants said:No, not if they are Chinese citizens.
“…US personnel in China were expected to inform their seniors about any intimate contact with Chinese citizens, but were not explicitly forbidden from sexual or romantic relationships.’
I reckon that means ‘it’s ok, as long as you restrict your conversation to the essentials of the transaction’.
Read the whole line: Until the new ban US personnel in China were expected to inform …(snip)
Oh.
You’re right. Well, there’s nothing wrong with a regime of cold showers.
dv said:
captain_spalding said:
party_pants said:No, not if they are Chinese citizens.
“…US personnel in China were expected to inform their seniors about any intimate contact with Chinese citizens, but were not explicitly forbidden from sexual or romantic relationships.’
I reckon that means ‘it’s ok, as long as you restrict your conversation to the essentials of the transaction’.
That phrase is describing the previous situation. The new situation is a ban.
All the times Chinese gentleman slipped me $20,000 were purely platonic.
seems fair who wants chlamydia anyway
captain_spalding said:
party_pants said:
captain_spalding said:“…US personnel in China were expected to inform their seniors about any intimate contact with Chinese citizens, but were not explicitly forbidden from sexual or romantic relationships.’
I reckon that means ‘it’s ok, as long as you restrict your conversation to the essentials of the transaction’.
Read the whole line: Until the new ban US personnel in China were expected to inform …(snip)
Oh.
You’re right. Well, there’s nothing wrong with a regime of cold showers.
That’s Incel talk. Mark my words if you can’t score with someone else taking care of the job on your own is almost as good and leaves you satisfied and satiated. Nothing good has ever came of moody abstinence.
SCIENCE said:
seems fair who wants chlamydia anyway
bit harsh, Bill
also
hey so uh you know how citizens of civilised countries with a healthy regard for civil rights are encouraged to boycott abusive sweatshop manufactured products
this’ll make the economy must grow again
totally fix that trade balance
LOL
genius
SCIENCE said:
also
It’s kind of funny how the fact that President of the United States is a convicted felon with dozens of other pending felony cases just isn’t news any more
dv said:
SCIENCE said:
also
It’s kind of funny how the fact that President of the United States is a convicted felon with dozens of other pending felony cases just isn’t news any more
well that’s not important, how someone’s shares are doing is
dv said:
SCIENCE said:
also
It’s kind of funny how the fact that President of the United States is a convicted felon with dozens of other pending felony cases just isn’t news any more
I heard an ABC interview today where the reporter stopped listening to the bullshit and spoke over the bullshitter to question the bullshit.
If only the US media did the same, we wouldn’t be in this potential recession.
One would assume that the only reason that the felon is still in power is because he is going to tank the markets so that the mega wealthy are going to buy in on the dip and sell when he is incarcerated.
One would also assume that the mega wealthy are also questioning their decisions about now.
Kingy said:
dv said:
SCIENCE said:
also
It’s kind of funny how the fact that President of the United States is a convicted felon with dozens of other pending felony cases just isn’t news any more
I heard an ABC interview today where the reporter stopped listening to the bullshit and spoke over the bullshitter to question the bullshit.
If only the US media did the same, we wouldn’t be in this potential recession.
At some stage Trump was only going to let certain media into the inner sanctum, has he done that yet?
dv said:
SCIENCE said:
also
It’s kind of funny how the fact that President of the United States is a convicted felon with dozens of other pending felony cases just isn’t news any more
I think you can safely assume that the two federal cases against DJT have been extinguished, there is a chance, I guess, that the Georgia Election Interference case could be rebought after Trump’s terms finishes but I wouldn’t hold my breath on that…
I would be interested to know the exact status of the payments ordered in the NY Fraud case though.
Kingy said:
One would assume that the only reason that the felon is still in power is because he is going to tank the markets so that the mega wealthy are going to buy in on the dip and sell when he is incarcerated.One would also assume that the mega wealthy are also questioning their decisions about now.
I think it is going to be a case of these people thinking they are so clever to stick a wild horse to cart to shaske things up a bit, while forgetting that they are the passengers riding the cart. There will be no winners.
Divine Angel said:
Kingy said:
dv said:It’s kind of funny how the fact that President of the United States is a convicted felon with dozens of other pending felony cases just isn’t news any more
I heard an ABC interview today where the reporter stopped listening to the bullshit and spoke over the bullshitter to question the bullshit.
If only the US media did the same, we wouldn’t be in this potential recession.
At some stage Trump was only going to let certain media into the inner sanctum, has he done that yet?
yes, the White House has placed strict controls on the make up of the press pool – they banned the AP
Divine Angel said:
Kingy said:
dv said:It’s kind of funny how the fact that President of the United States is a convicted felon with dozens of other pending felony cases just isn’t news any more
I heard an ABC interview today where the reporter stopped listening to the bullshit and spoke over the bullshitter to question the bullshit.
If only the US media did the same, we wouldn’t be in this potential recession.
At some stage Trump was only going to let certain media into the inner sanctum, has he done that yet?
He’s exclude quite a few organisations from the WH press corp yes.
“I think you can safely assume that the two federal cases against DJT have been extinguished”
Sometimes they keep some charges in the tank for this kind of scenario…
dv said:
“I think you can safely assume that the two federal cases against DJT have been extinguished”Sometimes they keep some charges in the tank for this kind of scenario…
you think Pam Bondi is keeping a charge in her back pocket?
diddly-squat said:
dv said:
“I think you can safely assume that the two federal cases against DJT have been extinguished”Sometimes they keep some charges in the tank for this kind of scenario…
you think Pam Bondi is keeping a charge in her back pocket?
I’m hoping the Deep State has tucked some evidence away.
dv said:
diddly-squat said:
dv said:
“I think you can safely assume that the two federal cases against DJT have been extinguished”Sometimes they keep some charges in the tank for this kind of scenario…
you think Pam Bondi is keeping a charge in her back pocket?
I’m hoping the Deep State has tucked some evidence away.
funny, it’s usually me that is accused of being unduly optimistic.
dv said:
SCIENCE said:
also
It’s kind of funny how the fact that President of the United States is a convicted felon with dozens of other pending felony cases just isn’t news any more
Didn’t those pending cases evaporate upon Trump’s election victory?
Neophyte said:
dv said:
SCIENCE said:
also
It’s kind of funny how the fact that President of the United States is a convicted felon with dozens of other pending felony cases just isn’t news any more
Didn’t those pending cases evaporate upon Trump’s rigged* election victory?
*fixed
kii said:
Did he think that one up?
dv said:
kii said:
Did he think that one up?
His marketing department did. It’ll be on the new summer range of merch. Sold from behind the Resolute desk.
Wacko! It seems that Dear Leader is going to get his military parade in D.C. with tanks and fighter jets. He wanted it back in 2018, but was denied because, um…tanks on city streets would damage the city streets.
dv said:
but it’s all books
Donald Trump may finally get his long-desired military parade through the streets of Washington.
The Washington City Paper, citing an unnamed D.C. source, reports that the president has chosen June 14, 2025—the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army, Flag Day, and coincidentally also his own 79th birthday—as the big day. If it goes ahead, the four-mile procession would go from the Pentagon in Arlington to the White House.
Seven years ago, Trump made his desire for a grand military parade well known after he saw a French parade in 2017, telling people at the time, “We’re going to have to try and top it.” But the idea got a lot of pushback from military leaders as well the D.C. government, who estimated that it would cost the military $92 million and the district over $21 million in public safety costs.
Trump angrily abandoned the idea, accusing D.C. politicians of wanting “a number so ridiculously high that I canceled it. Never let someone hold you up!” At the time, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser shot down the idea on Twitter, saying she “finally got thru to the reality star in the White House with the realities ($21.6M) of parades/events/demonstrations in Trump America (sad).”
This time, though, Trump has overhauled military leadership, firing four-star Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as well as leaders in the Navy and Air Force, including the top lawyers of those two branches and the Army. The legal firings presumably give Trump loyalists who would defend his parade if it is challenged in the courts.
As far as D.C. leadership, Bowser and the rest of the D.C. government appear to be cowed by the administration out of fear that Trump will follow through on threats to take over the local government. Bowser chose to remove a Black Lives Matter memorial to appease administration officials and has stepped up the removal of graffiti and homeless encampments following Trump’s complaints.
Trump has also set up a federal task force on D.C. crime fighting that does not include a single local official, indicating that he plans to keep interfering with how the city runs. That will now include a massively wasteful parade for his own ego, spending millions of dollars from both local and federal coffers despite claims that his administration is eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse. Will anyone push back against it this time?
https://newrepublic.com/post/193674/trump-military-parade-birthday
Divine Angel said:
Donald Trump may finally get his long-desired military parade through the streets of Washington.The Washington City Paper, citing an unnamed D.C. source, reports that the president has chosen June 14, 2025—the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army, Flag Day, and coincidentally also his own 79th birthday—as the big day. If it goes ahead, the four-mile procession would go from the Pentagon in Arlington to the White House.
Seven years ago, Trump made his desire for a grand military parade well known after he saw a French parade in 2017, telling people at the time, “We’re going to have to try and top it.” But the idea got a lot of pushback from military leaders as well the D.C. government, who estimated that it would cost the military $92 million and the district over $21 million in public safety costs.
Trump angrily abandoned the idea, accusing D.C. politicians of wanting “a number so ridiculously high that I canceled it. Never let someone hold you up!” At the time, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser shot down the idea on Twitter, saying she “finally got thru to the reality star in the White House with the realities ($21.6M) of parades/events/demonstrations in Trump America (sad).”
This time, though, Trump has overhauled military leadership, firing four-star Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as well as leaders in the Navy and Air Force, including the top lawyers of those two branches and the Army. The legal firings presumably give Trump loyalists who would defend his parade if it is challenged in the courts.
As far as D.C. leadership, Bowser and the rest of the D.C. government appear to be cowed by the administration out of fear that Trump will follow through on threats to take over the local government. Bowser chose to remove a Black Lives Matter memorial to appease administration officials and has stepped up the removal of graffiti and homeless encampments following Trump’s complaints.
Trump has also set up a federal task force on D.C. crime fighting that does not include a single local official, indicating that he plans to keep interfering with how the city runs. That will now include a massively wasteful parade for his own ego, spending millions of dollars from both local and federal coffers despite claims that his administration is eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse. Will anyone push back against it this time?
https://newrepublic.com/post/193674/trump-military-parade-birthday
He’s been watching too much footage from the Kremlin and North Korea.
roughbarked said:
He’s been watching too much footage from the Kremlin and North Korea.
Stating the fucking obvious again.
roughbarked said:
Divine Angel said:
Donald Trump may finally get his long-desired military parade through the streets of Washington.The Washington City Paper, citing an unnamed D.C. source, reports that the president has chosen June 14, 2025—the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army, Flag Day, and coincidentally also his own 79th birthday—as the big day. If it goes ahead, the four-mile procession would go from the Pentagon in Arlington to the White House.
Seven years ago, Trump made his desire for a grand military parade well known after he saw a French parade in 2017, telling people at the time, “We’re going to have to try and top it.” But the idea got a lot of pushback from military leaders as well the D.C. government, who estimated that it would cost the military $92 million and the district over $21 million in public safety costs.
Trump angrily abandoned the idea, accusing D.C. politicians of wanting “a number so ridiculously high that I canceled it. Never let someone hold you up!” At the time, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser shot down the idea on Twitter, saying she “finally got thru to the reality star in the White House with the realities ($21.6M) of parades/events/demonstrations in Trump America (sad).”
This time, though, Trump has overhauled military leadership, firing four-star Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as well as leaders in the Navy and Air Force, including the top lawyers of those two branches and the Army. The legal firings presumably give Trump loyalists who would defend his parade if it is challenged in the courts.
As far as D.C. leadership, Bowser and the rest of the D.C. government appear to be cowed by the administration out of fear that Trump will follow through on threats to take over the local government. Bowser chose to remove a Black Lives Matter memorial to appease administration officials and has stepped up the removal of graffiti and homeless encampments following Trump’s complaints.
Trump has also set up a federal task force on D.C. crime fighting that does not include a single local official, indicating that he plans to keep interfering with how the city runs. That will now include a massively wasteful parade for his own ego, spending millions of dollars from both local and federal coffers despite claims that his administration is eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse. Will anyone push back against it this time?
https://newrepublic.com/post/193674/trump-military-parade-birthday
He’s been watching too much footage from the Kremlin and North Korea.
I dunno. The Frenchies love a parade. He enthused about Bastille Day when he saw it live during his first term.
kii said:
roughbarked said:He’s been watching too much footage from the Kremlin and North Korea.
Stating the fucking obvious again.
Well aren’t you in a mood…
Witty Rejoinder said:
kii said:
roughbarked said:He’s been watching too much footage from the Kremlin and North Korea.
Stating the fucking obvious again.
Well aren’t you in a mood…
She waits for me to post. So I deliver.
I don’t know anything about the maths on this one.
Trump Administration Aims to Spend $45 Billion to Expand Immigrant Detention
A request for proposals for new detention facilities and other services would allow the government to expedite the contracting process and rapidly expand detention.
CoreCivic signed a five-year, $246 million contract to reopen a family detention center in Dilley, Texas, seen in 2015. The company is one of several private detention operators to have already signed new contracts since
By Allison McCann, Alexandra Berzon and Hamed Aleaziz
April 7, 2025
Updated 2:58 p.m. ET
The Trump administration is seeking to spend tens of billions of dollars to set up the machinery to expand immigrant detention on a scale never before seen in the United States, according to a request for proposals posted online by the administration last week.
The request, which comes from the Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement, calls for contractors to submit proposals to provide new detention facilities, transportation, security guards, medical support and other administrative services worth as much as $45 billion over the next two years.
ICE does not yet have that much money itself. But if funded, the maximum value would represent more than a sixfold increase in spending to detain immigrants. It is the latest indication that President Trump and his administration are laying the groundwork to rapidly follow through on his promise for a mass campaign to rid the country of undocumented immigrants.
The sprawling request to contractors was posted last week with a deadline of Monday. In the last fiscal year, D.H.S. allocated about $3.4 billion for the entire custody operation overseen by ICE.
ICE is already expecting a large windfall from the G.O.P. budget plan, which Senate Republicans approved on Saturday. That measure lays out a significant spending increase for the administration’s immigration agenda — up to $175 billion over the next 10 years to the committees overseeing immigration enforcement, among other things. The $45 billion request to contractors would put ICE in a position to more readily spend those funds.
The request also invites the Defense Department to use its own money for immigrant detention under the same plan.
“This is D.H.S. envisioning and getting ready to unroll — if it gets the money — an entirely new way of imprisoning immigrants in the U.S.,” said Heidi Altman, the vice president for policy at the National Immigration Law Center.
Tom Homan, Mr. Trump’s border czar, has insisted repeatedly that a major part of raising deportation numbers will require, among other things, more detention beds and funding. The request is the first concrete step toward ICE being able to quickly scale up detention.
“Our level of success depends on the resources I have,” he said in an interview in February. “The more money we have, the more beds we can buy.”
Typically, detention contracts go through a lengthy process for each facility, and ICE specifies the type, size and location. (A request from February, for example, sought up to 950 beds in the Denver area.) But this latest request is what is known as a bulk or blanket purchase agreement. It essentially creates a Rolodex of every detention facility and all auxiliary services and then allows ICE to place individual orders as more funding comes through.
Kevin Landy, the director of detention policy and planning for ICE under President Barack Obama, said that the government’s request was a clear sign that the Trump administration was looking to spend money quickly. “What’s going on is the administration is very concerned that they don’t have enough detention capacity to accomplish their immigration enforcement needs,” he said.
Immigrant detention is already above capacity, and reports have emerged of overcrowded facilities. Last year, Congress provided funding for ICE to detain a daily average of 41,500 people. As of March 23, the detained population was about 47,900.
Note: The total detainee population is as of Mar. 23 and has been rounded. The total number of detention beds funded by Congress was for fiscal year 2024. Sources: Department of Homeland Security; Immigration and Customs Enforcement; Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse
The stopgap spending measure Congress passed last month allocated an extra $500 million to ICE — increasing the agency’s budget to nearly $10 billion this year — though the funding fell far short of the agency’s request for an additional $2 billion to continue enforcement at its current level.
Lower standards and military detention
The government’s request included several changes to how immigrant detention currently operates, including an invitation to the Defense Department to use its own funding to play a role in detaining immigrants. Previous administrations have held some immigrants temporarily at military bases as a backup, but the Trump administration has hinted at plans to establish a nationwide network of military detention facilities for immigrants.
“D.H.S. takes its commitment to promoting safe, secure and humane conditions for those in our custody very seriously,” a senior homeland security official said in a statement. “We will continue to make sure those in our custody are housed in facilities that adequately provide for their safety, security and medical needs.”
Facilities under the contract will not have to meet the standards for services and detainee care that ICE has typically set for large detention providers. Instead, they can operate under the less rigorous standards the agency uses for contracts with local jails and prisons. These facilities typically do not include comprehensive medical care, like access to mental health services, nor do they offer access to information about immigrants’ legal rights.
Mr. Homan had previously said that he was seeking to lower detention standards, and that he would do away with some of the government oversight and inspections intended to ensure compliance.
Even under existing standards, government inspections for years have found evidence of negligence at private detention facilities, including lack of access to medical care and unsanitary conditions, and problems that may have led to deaths of detainees.
In response to concerns, Congress in 2019 created the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman, an independent department to provide a recourse for detainees to address concerns and to inform them of upcoming hearings or the status of their removal process. But the Trump administration recently gutted the department.
Now, under the new request from the government, such services will be back in private hands, a development that former government officials and immigrant advocates denounced.
“They’re going to end up paying more for oversight that is less independent and likely less efficient,” said Deborah Fleischaker, a senior D.H.S. official during the Biden administration.
Private companies were already gearing up
The government’s request is staggering not only for its size and scope, experts said, but also for the speed at which submissions were due. Vendors were initially given just three days to submit proposals.
Private detention contractors were most likely not caught off guard. On an investor call in February, Damon Hininger, the chief executive of CoreCivic, said the company was in daily communication with the administration.
Several private detention operators had already signed new contracts since Mr. Trump took office. Last month, CoreCivic signed a five-year, $246 million contract to reopen a family detention center in Dilley, Texas, and Geo Group announced the reopening of a 1,000-bed facility in Elizabeth, N.J., for a 15-year, $1 billion contract.
Representatives for CoreCivic and Geo Group did not respond to requests for comment on the government’s proposal.
Joe Gomes, a research analyst with Noble Capital who monitors immigration detention companies, said that the companies and their investors had been anticipating a huge windfall when Mr. Trump took over. But what is on offer now would dwarf that.
“It reinforces what the general consensus was, that the Trump administration policies here should be a significant boon for both CoreCivic and Geo at least in the short term as they continue to put more people under detention,” Mr. Gomes said. “This would seem to reinforce that the federal government is going to do what they have said — putting money where your mouth is, so to speak.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/07/us/politics/trump-administration-immigrant-detention-facilities-services.html
Witty Rejoinder said:
kii said:
roughbarked said:He’s been watching too much footage from the Kremlin and North Korea.
Stating the fucking obvious again.
Well aren’t you in a mood…
roughbarked said:
Witty Rejoinder said:
kii said:Stating the fucking obvious again.
Well aren’t you in a mood…
She waits for me to post. So I deliver.
Nup, I don’t wait for you to post. Your reputation of posting useless comments is well known.
kii said:
roughbarked said:
Witty Rejoinder said:Well aren’t you in a mood…
She waits for me to post. So I deliver.
Nup, I don’t wait for you to post. Your reputation of posting useless comments is well known.
So tell me, what percentage of your posts are not useless?
you’re all our souls
roughbarked said:
Witty Rejoinder said:
kii said:Stating the fucking obvious again.
Well aren’t you in a mood…
She waits for me to post. So I deliver.
LOL.
SCIENCE said:
you’re all our souls
our souls are useful.
roughbarked said:
kii said:
roughbarked said:She waits for me to post. So I deliver.
Nup, I don’t wait for you to post. Your reputation of posting useless comments is well known.
So tell me, what percentage of your posts are not useless?
Depends on who you’re asking. At the very least I don’t go around dropping +1s everywhere, or using sentences that sound like fortune cookie messages or stating the fucking obvious (except sometimes) .
JudgeMental said:
SCIENCE said:
you’re all our souls
our souls are useful.
I watched a bit of footage which showed DT signing off on a return for plastic straws. He was rabbiting on about how plastic straws are far superior and they can’t possibly kill all the sharks (or something like that) and how inferior paper straws are… so he used a sharpie to sign the document… every comment he made (inane or even more inane) was met with a chorus of giggles from whoever it was I couldn’t see…
no wonder the guy has such an obscured image of himself… if people constantly respond with laughter – then he is really embracing the role of the jester – but he thinks he is a king… because laughter and false admiration feeds his ego.
it was the single worst thing I have watched all month
Arts said:
I watched a bit of footage which showed DT signing off on a return for plastic straws. He was rabbiting on about how plastic straws are far superior and they can’t possibly kill all the sharks (or something like that) and how inferior paper straws are… so he used a sharpie to sign the document… every comment he made (inane or even more inane) was met with a chorus of giggles from whoever it was I couldn’t see…no wonder the guy has such an obscured image of himself… if people constantly respond with laughter – then he is really embracing the role of the jester – but he thinks he is a king… because laughter and false admiration feeds his ego.
it was the single worst thing I have watched all month
:(
Thanks for that. I know now not to watch it.
WASHINGTON, April 7 (Reuters) – The U.S. Justice Department dispatched armed U.S. marshals to deliver a letter warning a fired career pardon attorney about testifying to congressional Democrats, her lawyer said in a letter seen by Reuters on Monday.
“This highly unusual step of directing armed law enforcement officers to the home of a former Department of Justice employee who has engaged in no misconduct, let alone criminal conduct, simply to deliver a letter, is both unprecedented and completely inappropriate,” Michael Bromwich, a lawyer representing fired pardon attorney Liz Oyer, wrote to the Justice Department.
Oyer, who served as the pardon attorney during President Joe Biden’s tenure, was one of several career officials fired by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche on March 7.
Oyer has since told U.S. media outlets that her firing came shortly after she declined to recommend restoring gun rights to actor Mel Gibson, a supporter of President Donald Trump.
She was one of several Justice Department officials who testified on Monday afternoon before a hearing organized by Democrats in the House of Representatives and Senate about the Trump administration’s treatment of the Justice Department and law firms who act in cases disliked by the Republican president.
—-
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-justice-dept-mobilized-armed-marshals-warn-ex-lawyer-over-congressional-2025-04-07/
dv said:
WASHINGTON, April 7 (Reuters) – The U.S. Justice Department dispatched armed U.S. marshals to deliver a letter warning a fired career pardon attorney about testifying to congressional Democrats, her lawyer said in a letter seen by Reuters on Monday.
“This highly unusual step of directing armed law enforcement officers to the home of a former Department of Justice employee who has engaged in no misconduct, let alone criminal conduct, simply to deliver a letter, is both unprecedented and completely inappropriate,” Michael Bromwich, a lawyer representing fired pardon attorney Liz Oyer, wrote to the Justice Department.Oyer, who served as the pardon attorney during President Joe Biden’s tenure, was one of several career officials fired by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche on March 7.
Oyer has since told U.S. media outlets that her firing came shortly after she declined to recommend restoring gun rights to actor Mel Gibson, a supporter of President Donald Trump.
She was one of several Justice Department officials who testified on Monday afternoon before a hearing organized by Democrats in the House of Representatives and Senate about the Trump administration’s treatment of the Justice Department and law firms who act in cases disliked by the Republican president.—-
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-justice-dept-mobilized-armed-marshals-warn-ex-lawyer-over-congressional-2025-04-07/
Maybe they were having high tea
This US-China trade war showdown is gonna be interesting. I don’t see President Xi backing down on their escalation.
Spiny Norman said:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/tom-homan-family-release-sackets-b2729039.html
Arts said:
I watched a bit of footage which showed DT signing off on a return for plastic straws. He was rabbiting on about how plastic straws are far superior and they can’t possibly kill all the sharks (or something like that) and how inferior paper straws are… so he used a sharpie to sign the document… every comment he made (inane or even more inane) was met with a chorus of giggles from whoever it was I couldn’t see…no wonder the guy has such an obscured image of himself… if people constantly respond with laughter – then he is really embracing the role of the jester – but he thinks he is a king… because laughter and false admiration feeds his ego.
it was the single worst thing I have watched all month
Don’t worry. There is plenty of month left yet.
buffy said:
Arts said:
I watched a bit of footage which showed DT signing off on a return for plastic straws. He was rabbiting on about how plastic straws are far superior and they can’t possibly kill all the sharks (or something like that) and how inferior paper straws are… so he used a sharpie to sign the document… every comment he made (inane or even more inane) was met with a chorus of giggles from whoever it was I couldn’t see…no wonder the guy has such an obscured image of himself… if people constantly respond with laughter – then he is really embracing the role of the jester – but he thinks he is a king… because laughter and false admiration feeds his ego.
it was the single worst thing I have watched all month
Don’t worry. There is plenty of month left yet.
I am doubtful it will lose the crown
Arts said:
buffy said:
Arts said:
I watched a bit of footage which showed DT signing off on a return for plastic straws. He was rabbiting on about how plastic straws are far superior and they can’t possibly kill all the sharks (or something like that) and how inferior paper straws are… so he used a sharpie to sign the document… every comment he made (inane or even more inane) was met with a chorus of giggles from whoever it was I couldn’t see…no wonder the guy has such an obscured image of himself… if people constantly respond with laughter – then he is really embracing the role of the jester – but he thinks he is a king… because laughter and false admiration feeds his ego.
it was the single worst thing I have watched all month
Don’t worry. There is plenty of month left yet.
I am doubtful it will lose the crown
Every time you think it can’t get worse (or more stupid) it does.
Witty Rejoinder said:
Trump Administration Aims to Spend $45 Billion to Expand Immigrant DetentionA request for proposals for new detention facilities and other services would allow the government to expedite the contracting process and rapidly expand detention.
CoreCivic signed a five-year, $246 million contract to reopen a family detention center in Dilley, Texas, seen in 2015. The company is one of several private detention operators to have already signed new contracts since
By Allison McCann, Alexandra Berzon and Hamed Aleaziz
April 7, 2025
Updated 2:58 p.m. ETThe Trump administration is seeking to spend tens of billions of dollars to set up the machinery to expand immigrant detention on a scale never before seen in the United States, according to a request for proposals posted online by the administration last week.
The request, which comes from the Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement, calls for contractors to submit proposals to provide new detention facilities, transportation, security guards, medical support and other administrative services worth as much as $45 billion over the next two years.
ICE does not yet have that much money itself. But if funded, the maximum value would represent more than a sixfold increase in spending to detain immigrants. It is the latest indication that President Trump and his administration are laying the groundwork to rapidly follow through on his promise for a mass campaign to rid the country of undocumented immigrants.
The sprawling request to contractors was posted last week with a deadline of Monday. In the last fiscal year, D.H.S. allocated about $3.4 billion for the entire custody operation overseen by ICE.
ICE is already expecting a large windfall from the G.O.P. budget plan, which Senate Republicans approved on Saturday. That measure lays out a significant spending increase for the administration’s immigration agenda — up to $175 billion over the next 10 years to the committees overseeing immigration enforcement, among other things. The $45 billion request to contractors would put ICE in a position to more readily spend those funds.
The request also invites the Defense Department to use its own money for immigrant detention under the same plan.
“This is D.H.S. envisioning and getting ready to unroll — if it gets the money — an entirely new way of imprisoning immigrants in the U.S.,” said Heidi Altman, the vice president for policy at the National Immigration Law Center.
Tom Homan, Mr. Trump’s border czar, has insisted repeatedly that a major part of raising deportation numbers will require, among other things, more detention beds and funding. The request is the first concrete step toward ICE being able to quickly scale up detention.
“Our level of success depends on the resources I have,” he said in an interview in February. “The more money we have, the more beds we can buy.”
Typically, detention contracts go through a lengthy process for each facility, and ICE specifies the type, size and location. (A request from February, for example, sought up to 950 beds in the Denver area.) But this latest request is what is known as a bulk or blanket purchase agreement. It essentially creates a Rolodex of every detention facility and all auxiliary services and then allows ICE to place individual orders as more funding comes through.
Kevin Landy, the director of detention policy and planning for ICE under President Barack Obama, said that the government’s request was a clear sign that the Trump administration was looking to spend money quickly. “What’s going on is the administration is very concerned that they don’t have enough detention capacity to accomplish their immigration enforcement needs,” he said.
Immigrant detention is already above capacity, and reports have emerged of overcrowded facilities. Last year, Congress provided funding for ICE to detain a daily average of 41,500 people. As of March 23, the detained population was about 47,900.
Note: The total detainee population is as of Mar. 23 and has been rounded. The total number of detention beds funded by Congress was for fiscal year 2024. Sources: Department of Homeland Security; Immigration and Customs Enforcement; Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse
The stopgap spending measure Congress passed last month allocated an extra $500 million to ICE — increasing the agency’s budget to nearly $10 billion this year — though the funding fell far short of the agency’s request for an additional $2 billion to continue enforcement at its current level.Lower standards and military detention
The government’s request included several changes to how immigrant detention currently operates, including an invitation to the Defense Department to use its own funding to play a role in detaining immigrants. Previous administrations have held some immigrants temporarily at military bases as a backup, but the Trump administration has hinted at plans to establish a nationwide network of military detention facilities for immigrants.“D.H.S. takes its commitment to promoting safe, secure and humane conditions for those in our custody very seriously,” a senior homeland security official said in a statement. “We will continue to make sure those in our custody are housed in facilities that adequately provide for their safety, security and medical needs.”
Facilities under the contract will not have to meet the standards for services and detainee care that ICE has typically set for large detention providers. Instead, they can operate under the less rigorous standards the agency uses for contracts with local jails and prisons. These facilities typically do not include comprehensive medical care, like access to mental health services, nor do they offer access to information about immigrants’ legal rights.
Mr. Homan had previously said that he was seeking to lower detention standards, and that he would do away with some of the government oversight and inspections intended to ensure compliance.
Even under existing standards, government inspections for years have found evidence of negligence at private detention facilities, including lack of access to medical care and unsanitary conditions, and problems that may have led to deaths of detainees.
In response to concerns, Congress in 2019 created the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman, an independent department to provide a recourse for detainees to address concerns and to inform them of upcoming hearings or the status of their removal process. But the Trump administration recently gutted the department.
Now, under the new request from the government, such services will be back in private hands, a development that former government officials and immigrant advocates denounced.
“They’re going to end up paying more for oversight that is less independent and likely less efficient,” said Deborah Fleischaker, a senior D.H.S. official during the Biden administration.
Private companies were already gearing up
The government’s request is staggering not only for its size and scope, experts said, but also for the speed at which submissions were due. Vendors were initially given just three days to submit proposals.Private detention contractors were most likely not caught off guard. On an investor call in February, Damon Hininger, the chief executive of CoreCivic, said the company was in daily communication with the administration.
Several private detention operators had already signed new contracts since Mr. Trump took office. Last month, CoreCivic signed a five-year, $246 million contract to reopen a family detention center in Dilley, Texas, and Geo Group announced the reopening of a 1,000-bed facility in Elizabeth, N.J., for a 15-year, $1 billion contract.
Representatives for CoreCivic and Geo Group did not respond to requests for comment on the government’s proposal.
Joe Gomes, a research analyst with Noble Capital who monitors immigration detention companies, said that the companies and their investors had been anticipating a huge windfall when Mr. Trump took over. But what is on offer now would dwarf that.
“It reinforces what the general consensus was, that the Trump administration policies here should be a significant boon for both CoreCivic and Geo at least in the short term as they continue to put more people under detention,” Mr. Gomes said. “This would seem to reinforce that the federal government is going to do what they have said — putting money where your mouth is, so to speak.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/07/us/politics/trump-administration-immigrant-detention-facilities-services.html
Sounds like concentration camps.
buffy said:
Arts said:
I watched a bit of footage which showed DT signing off on a return for plastic straws. He was rabbiting on about how plastic straws are far superior and they can’t possibly kill all the sharks (or something like that) and how inferior paper straws are… so he used a sharpie to sign the document… every comment he made (inane or even more inane) was met with a chorus of giggles from whoever it was I couldn’t see…no wonder the guy has such an obscured image of himself… if people constantly respond with laughter – then he is really embracing the role of the jester – but he thinks he is a king… because laughter and false admiration feeds his ego.
it was the single worst thing I have watched all month
Don’t worry. There is plenty of month left yet.
LOL
dv said:
George takes a lot of flak.
dv said:
That’s one hell of a casting call!
You put out the word that you want 5 million people, each of whom will be paid $100 million…
…there’s going to be a stampede unlike any seen before. The gold rushes, the land rushes, would be inconsequential by comparison. The entire population will be signing up for it. Who wouldn’t?
Yet, it seems that it was a cleverly organised covert scam, which every one of those 5 million people kept under their hat, not leaking a word of it. It took little Donny Golf Champ to reveal it to the other 335 million Americans, who had somehow both missed the casting call, and not heard one word of it from any of the 5 million recruits.
Barron Trump’s $50K Rolex watch causes a social media storm
“So what. You were expecting a Timex on a billionaire’s son?” added another X user, “So what he has a Rolex and what’s your point? Let’s look at all the democrats who own a Rolex as well. Again I ask what is your point because Barron Trump can wear whatever watch he wants,” commented another.
dv said:
I’m so glad actors have so much paid work these days 🥰
Divine Angel said:
dv said:
I’m so glad actors have so much paid work these days 🥰
And, just think of the opportunities it opens up for the next generation of actors!
There’s 5 million actors who will never need to work again.
Actors are going to be in huge demand for quite long while to come.
BRB, going to the US to become an actor.
so who do we think runs/wins in the Democratic primaries ?
Bob Ossoff, Pete Buttigieg, Josh Shapiro, Gretchen Whitmer, Gavin Newsom??
Former Republican Congressman Justin Amash
Various responses
I particularly like the tariffs reversing the masculinity crisis, whatever that is.
There’s a great term used for male Trump supporters…bearded thumbs. It’s got nothing to do with thumbs up.
kii said:
There’s a great term used for male Trump supporters…bearded thumbs. It’s got nothing to do with thumbs up.
IDGI.
Court clears way for Trump to use 18th-century law for deportations
By Mark Sherman
April 8, 2025 — 2.38pm
Washington: The Supreme Court has allowed the Trump administration to use an 18th-century wartime law to deport Venezuelan migrants but says they must get a court hearing before they are taken from the United States.
In a bitterly divided decision, the court said on Tuesday (AEST) the administration must give Venezuelans it claims are gang members “reasonable time” to go to court.
But the conservative majority said the legal challenges must take place in Texas, instead of a Washington courtroom.
The court’s action appears to bar the administration from immediately resuming the flights that last month carried hundreds of migrants to a notorious prison in El Salvador. The flights came soon after US President Donald Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act for the first time since World War II to justify the deportations under a presidential proclamation, calling the Tren de Aragua gang an invading force.
The majority said nothing about those flights, which took off without providing the hearing which the justices now say is necessary.
In dissent, the three liberal justices said the administration had sought to avoid judicial review in this case, and the court “now rewards the government for its behaviour”. Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined portions of the dissent.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor said it would be harder for people to challenge deportations individually, wherever they were being held, and noted that the administration had also said in another case before the court that it was unable to return people who had been deported to the El Salvador prison by mistake.
“We, as a nation and a court of law, should be better than this,” she wrote.
The justices acted on the administration’s emergency appeal after the federal appeals court in Washington left in place an order temporarily prohibiting deportations of the migrants accused of being gang members under the rarely used Alien Enemies Act.
“For all the rhetoric of the dissents,” the court wrote in an unsigned opinion, the high court order confirms “that the detainees subject to removal orders under the AEA are entitled to notice and an opportunity to challenge their removal”.
The case has become a flashpoint amid escalating tension between the White House and the federal courts. It’s the second time in less than a week that most conservative justices has handed Trump at least a partial victory in an emergency appeal after lower courts had blocked parts of his agenda.
Several other cases are pending, including over Trump’s plan to deny citizenship to US-born children of parents who are in the country illegally.
“The Supreme Court has upheld the Rule of Law in our Nation by allowing a President, whoever that may be, to be able to secure our Borders, and protect our families and our Country, itself. A GREAT DAY FOR JUSTICE IN AMERICA!” Trump wrote on his Truth Social site.
The original order blocking the deportations to El Salvador was issued by US District Judge James Boasberg, the chief judge at the federal courthouse in Washington.
Attorneys from the American Civil Liberties Union filed the lawsuit on behalf of five Venezuelan non-citizens who were being held in Texas, hours after the proclamation was made public and as immigration authorities were shepherding hundreds of migrants to waiting airplanes.
ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt said the “critical point” of the high court’s ruling was that people must be allowed due process to challenge their removal. “That is an important victory,” he said.
Boasberg imposed a temporary halt on deportations and also ordered planeloads of Venezuelan immigrants to return to the US. That did not happen. The judge held a hearing last week over whether the government defied his order to turn the planes around. The administration has invoked a “state secrets privilege” and refused to give Boasberg any additional information about the deportations.
Trump and his allies have called for impeaching Boasberg. In a rare statement, Chief Justice John Roberts said “impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision”.
https://www.theage.com.au/world/north-america/court-clears-way-for-trump-to-use-18th-century-law-for-deportations-20250408-p5lq66.html
https://newrepublic.com/post/193674/trump-military-parade-birthday
Trump plans use $100 millions of public money for a military parade on his birthday
dv said:
https://newrepublic.com/post/193674/trump-military-parade-birthdayTrump plans use $100 millions of public money for a military parade on his birthday
If thousands turn up to protest, he’ll spin it as thousands coming out for his parade.
https://youtu.be/RRKJiM9Njr8?si=3CnZNxALy-WUj5PU
dv said:
https://newrepublic.com/post/193674/trump-military-parade-birthdayTrump plans use $100 millions of public money for a military parade on his birthday
we just need one tank crew to go rogue.
missed this one.
Heather Cox Richardson
23h ·
April 6, 2025 (Sunday)
After President Donald Trump’s tariff announcements on April 2 wiped $5 trillion dollars from the stock market, the Republican Party is scrambling.
Farmers, who were a part of Trump’s base, are “struck and shocked” by the tariffs, the president of the South Dakota Farmers Union told Lauren Scott of CBC News, saying they will have a “devastating effect.” Rob Copeland, Lauren Hirsch, and Maureen Farrell of the New York Times report that Wall Street leaders who backed Trump are now criticizing him publicly, with one calling for someone to stop him. The size of yesterday’s peaceful protests around the country, less than 100 days into Trump’s term when he should be enjoying a honeymoon, demonstrated growing fury at the administration’s actions.
Yesterday, in the midst of the economic crisis and as millions of protesters gathered across the country, the White House announced that “he President won his second round matchup of the Senior Club Championship today in Jupiter, FL, and advances to the Championship Round tomorrow.” This afternoon, President Donald J. Trump posted a video of himself hitting a golf ball off a tee, perhaps as a demonstration that he is unconcerned about the chaos in the markets.
When Trump administration officials Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and National Economic Council director Kevin Hassett appeared on this morning’s Sunday shows, their attempts to reassure Americans and deflect concerns also sounded out of touch.
Bessent, a billionaire, told Kristen Welker of NBC’s Meet the Press that the administration is creating a new, more secure economic system and that Americans “who have put away for years in their savings accounts, I think don’t look at the day-to-day fluctuations of what’s happening.” He went on to suggest that the losses were likely not that significant and would turn out fine in the long term.
Lutnick insisted that the tariffs are about national security and bringing back manufacturing, although the administration has frozen the Inflation Reduction Act funding for the manufacturing President Joe Biden brought to the U.S., overwhelmingly in Republican-dominated districts. Lutnick kept hitting on the MAGA talking point that other countries are ripping the U.S. off, and insisted that the tariffs are here to stay.
On This Week by ABC News, Hassett took the opposite position: that countries are already calling the White House to begin tariff negotiations. Host George Stephanopoulos asked Hassett about the video Trump posted on his social media account claiming that he was crashing the market on purpose, forcing him to say that crashing the economy was not part of Trump’s strategy. Hassett claimed that the tariffs will not cost consumers more and that Trump is “trying to deliver for American workers.”
The tariffs not only have forced administration officials into contradictory positions, but also have brought into the open the rift between old MAGA and billionaire Elon Musk.
Trump’s tariff policy reflects the ideas of his senior counselor on manufacturing and trade, Peter Navarro, a China hawk who invented an “expert” to support his statements in his own books. Musk, who opposes the tariffs, has taken shots at Navarro on his social media platform X. On Saturday, Musk directly contradicted Trump and MAGA when he told a gathering of right-wing Italians that he wants the U.S. and Europe to create a tariff-free zone as well as “more freedom of people to move between Europe and North America.”
On the Fox News Channel this morning, Navarro retorted that Musk “sells cars” and is just trying to protect his own interests.
Republicans also have to quell fires as the demands of the very different constituencies Trump brought into his coalition to win in 2024 are creating growing anger. 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.
During the confirmation process for his post, Kennedy seems to have promised Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA), chair of the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions and a medical doctor, that he would not alter vaccine systems, but since taking office he has made dramatic cuts. Today, Cassidy posted on X, “Everyone should be vaccinated!” and added: “Top health officials should say so unequivocally b/4 another child dies.”
Evidently feeling the pressure as the measles outbreak spreads, Kennedy this afternoon conceded on X that “he most effective way to prevent the spread of measles is the MMR vaccine.”
Today, Dan Diamond and Hannah Natanson of the Washington Post reported that cuts to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have even Republican lawmakers and former Trump officials from his first term worried that the country is at risk of food-related disease outbreaks like the 2022 contamination of infant formula. On April 4, Heather Vogell of ProPublica reported that the Abbott Laboratories factory at the heart of the 2022 crisis continues to use the same unsanitary practices. Employees told her that workers still take shortcuts when cleaning and checking equipment for bacteria as supervisors try to increase production and retaliate against those who complain about problems.
The White House told Diamond and Natanson that cuts to the FDA and other health agencies will make them more “nimble and strategic.” Abbott Laboratories told Vogell that the workers’ assertions were “untrue or misleading” and said it “stands behind the quality and safety of all our products.”
Diamond and Natanson note that experts who worked under both Republican and Democratic presidents, as well as former Trump officials and Republican lawmakers are also concerned about cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which monitors atmospheric and ocean systems and predicts weather, and to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) that responds to disasters. Storms across the South have been wreaking havoc in the past days. Today alone saw deadly weather in Arkansas, Texas, Missouri, and Oklahoma; the governors of Tennessee and Kentucky have declared states of emergency.
Reporter James Fallows notes that the U.S. senators from the states hardest hit—Arkansas, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Missouri, Tennessee, and Texas—are all Republicans and are all backing Trump and Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency,” which is behind the cuts to NOAA and FEMA.
Today, Michael Sainato of The Guardian reported that workers at the Social Security Administration say that cuts to staffing and services along with policy changes have created “complete, utter chaos” at the agency that is threatening to cause a “death spiral.” Acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration Leland Dudek told Sainato that “we are updating our policy to provide better customer service to the country’s most vulnerable populations.”
Late Thursday, Trump fired General Timothy D. Haugh, the director of the National Security Agency (NSA) and of the U.S. Cyber Command, as well as Haugh’s deputy at the NSA, Wendy Noble, and several staff members from the White House National Security Council. He apparently did so at the recommendation of right-wing conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer. The NSA collects information from overseas computer networks, while Cyber Command engages in both offensive and defensive operations on them.
While Democrats are out front, lawmakers across the political spectrum are concerned about the firings. Senator Angus King (I-ME), who sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee, told Julian E. Barnes of the New York Times: “Our country is under attack right now in cyberspace, and the president has just removed our top general from the field for no reason at the recommendation of someone who knows nothing about national security or even the job this general does.”
And then there is the crisis over the arrest and rendition of Kilmar Abrego Garcia to prison in El Salvador. Abrego Garcia was in the U.S. legally, is married to a U.S. citizen, and is the father of a U.S. citizen. In 2019 a court barred the government from deporting him to El Salvador. On March 31 an official from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) told the court under oath that Abrego Garcia had been arrested and deported to prison because of an “administrative error.” And yet the government also said it could not get him back because he is no longer in U.S. jurisdiction.
After a hearing on Friday, U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis ordered the government to bring Abrego Garcia back to the United States no later than 11:59 p.m. on April 7. The administration immediately filed an emergency motion to stop the order while it appeals her decision. Today, Xinis filed her opinion, which said that “there were no legal grounds whatsoever for his arrest, detention, or removal…. is detention appears wholly lawless.” It is “a clear constitutional violation.” And yet administration officials “cling to the stunning proposition that they can forcibly remove any person—migrant and U.S. citizen alike—to prisons outside the United States, and then baldly assert they have no way to effectuate return because they are no longer the ‘custodian,’ and the Court thus lacks jurisdiction.”
Today, Cecilia Vega, Aliza Chasan, Camilo Montoya-Galvez, Andy Court, and Annabelle Hanflig of CBS News’s 60 Minutes reported that 75% of the Venezuelans the Trump administration sent to prison in El Salvador “have no apparent criminal convictions or even criminal charges.” Another 22% have records for nonviolent crimes like shoplifting or trespassing. A dozen or so are accused of murder, rape, assault, or kidnapping. When the reporters reached out to the Department of Homeland Security about these numbers, a spokesperson said that those without criminal records “are actually terrorists, human rights abusers, gangsters, and more; they just don’t have a rap sheet in the U.S.”
This utter disregard for the constitutional right to due process is raising alarm among Americans who have noted that when Trump declared an emergency at the southern border on January 20, he ordered the secretary of defense and the secretary of homeland security to advise him whether they thought it necessary to invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act. That act allows a president during times of civil unrest to use the military against U.S. citizens.
U.S. stock futures plunged again tonight, with Dow Jones Industrial Average futures down 1,250 points, or 3.3%, S&P 500 futures down 3.7%, and Nasdaq futures down 4.6%. And yet Trump is doubling down on tariffs, posting that they are “a beautiful thing to behold…. Some day people will realize that Tariffs, for the United States of America, are a very beautiful thing!”
Republican leaders have not silenced the chatter about Trump serving a third term, despite its obvious unconstitutionality, at least in part because they know he is the only person who can turn out MAGA voters. But their calculations appear to be changing. Today, Attorney General Pam Bondi told Fox News Sunday that Trump is a “very smart man, and…I wish we could have him for 20 years as our president,” but that “I think he’s going to be finished, probably, after this term.”
dv said:
Former Republican Congressman Justin Amash
so they’re starting to realise what antiantifa is
sarahs mum said:
missed this one.Heather Cox Richardson
23h ·
April 6, 2025 (Sunday)After President Donald Trump’s tariff announcements on April 2 wiped $5 trillion dollars from the stock market, the Republican Party is scrambling.
————————————CUT——————————————
Thanks.
JudgeMental said:
dv said:
https://newrepublic.com/post/193674/trump-military-parade-birthdayTrump plans use $100 millions of public money for a military parade on his birthday
we just need one tank crew to go rogue.
Anwar Sadat.
captain_spalding said:
JudgeMental said:
dv said:
https://newrepublic.com/post/193674/trump-military-parade-birthdayTrump plans use $100 millions of public money for a military parade on his birthday
we just need one tank crew to go rogue.
Anwar Sadat.
I’m not sure I understand.
Michael V said:
captain_spalding said:
JudgeMental said:we just need one tank crew to go rogue.
Anwar Sadat.
I’m not sure I understand.
Wikipedia:
On 6 October 1981, Sadat was assassinated during the annual victory parade held in Cairo to celebrate Egypt’s crossing of the Suez Canal. Islambouli emptied his assault rifle into Sadat’s body while in the front of the grandstand, mortally wounding the President. In addition to Sadat, eleven others were killed, including the Cuban ambassador, an Omani general, a Coptic Orthodox bishop and Samir Helmy, the head of Egypt’s Central Auditing Agency (CAA). Twenty-eight were wounded, including Vice President Hosni Mubarak, Irish Defence Minister James Tully, and four US military liaison officers.
Michael V said:
captain_spalding said:
JudgeMental said:we just need one tank crew to go rogue.
Anwar Sadat.
I’m not sure I understand.
sadat was gunned down at a military parade.
These tariffs don’t make sense under an efficiency lens because for this group, that’s not what they are for – the tariffs are to prepare the United States (and her allies) so that they are capable of opposing China geopolitically. The tariffs are about building resilience and capacity, not efficiency. Ultimately, they are about preparing the United States to be able to fight a great power war, if it came to that.
To fight a major war, a country (or at least its allies) must be able to quickly manufacture all of the weapons needed for that war, while also being able to produce all of the goods and services that its society depends on.
Right now, the United States can’t do that, and in this group’s view, that needs to urgently change. Hence the dramatic April 2nd announcement.
more…
https://www.livewiremarkets.com/wires/trump-2-0-the-king-s-court
sarahs mum said:
These tariffs don’t make sense under an efficiency lens because for this group, that’s not what they are for – the tariffs are to prepare the United States (and her allies) so that they are capable of opposing China geopolitically. The tariffs are about building resilience and capacity, not efficiency. Ultimately, they are about preparing the United States to be able to fight a great power war, if it came to that.To fight a major war, a country (or at least its allies) must be able to quickly manufacture all of the weapons needed for that war, while also being able to produce all of the goods and services that its society depends on.
Right now, the United States can’t do that, and in this group’s view, that needs to urgently change. Hence the dramatic April 2nd announcement.
more…
https://www.livewiremarkets.com/wires/trump-2-0-the-king-s-court
(shrugs) if that was your goal, you’d be working with allies to isolate China.
Instead, they’ve worked against allies to isolate the USA. The ROTW is going to have to work more closely with China now because of these tariffs.
captain_spalding said:
Michael V said:
captain_spalding said:Anwar Sadat.
I’m not sure I understand.
Wikipedia:
On 6 October 1981, Sadat was assassinated during the annual victory parade held in Cairo to celebrate Egypt’s crossing of the Suez Canal. Islambouli emptied his assault rifle into Sadat’s body while in the front of the grandstand, mortally wounding the President. In addition to Sadat, eleven others were killed, including the Cuban ambassador, an Omani general, a Coptic Orthodox bishop and Samir Helmy, the head of Egypt’s Central Auditing Agency (CAA). Twenty-eight were wounded, including Vice President Hosni Mubarak, Irish Defence Minister James Tully, and four US military liaison officers.
Ha!
I read the start of the article, thinking it must have been related to something Sadat himself did…
dv said:
sarahs mum said:
These tariffs don’t make sense under an efficiency lens because for this group, that’s not what they are for – the tariffs are to prepare the United States (and her allies) so that they are capable of opposing China geopolitically. The tariffs are about building resilience and capacity, not efficiency. Ultimately, they are about preparing the United States to be able to fight a great power war, if it came to that.To fight a major war, a country (or at least its allies) must be able to quickly manufacture all of the weapons needed for that war, while also being able to produce all of the goods and services that its society depends on.
Right now, the United States can’t do that, and in this group’s view, that needs to urgently change. Hence the dramatic April 2nd announcement.
more…
https://www.livewiremarkets.com/wires/trump-2-0-the-king-s-court(shrugs) if that was your goal, you’d be working with allies to isolate China.
Instead, they’ve worked against allies to isolate the USA. The ROTW is going to have to work more closely with China now because of these tariffs.
that article claims that to get the US to remove tariffs we have to impose them on China.. fuck that.
sarahs mum said:
dv said:
sarahs mum said:
These tariffs don’t make sense under an efficiency lens because for this group, that’s not what they are for – the tariffs are to prepare the United States (and her allies) so that they are capable of opposing China geopolitically. The tariffs are about building resilience and capacity, not efficiency. Ultimately, they are about preparing the United States to be able to fight a great power war, if it came to that.To fight a major war, a country (or at least its allies) must be able to quickly manufacture all of the weapons needed for that war, while also being able to produce all of the goods and services that its society depends on.
Right now, the United States can’t do that, and in this group’s view, that needs to urgently change. Hence the dramatic April 2nd announcement.
more…
https://www.livewiremarkets.com/wires/trump-2-0-the-king-s-court(shrugs) if that was your goal, you’d be working with allies to isolate China.
Instead, they’ve worked against allies to isolate the USA. The ROTW is going to have to work more closely with China now because of these tariffs.
that article claims that to get the US to remove tariffs we have to impose them on China.. fuck that.
WtF knows what the game is?
dv said:
sarahs mum said:
These tariffs don’t make sense under an efficiency lens because for this group, that’s not what they are for – the tariffs are to prepare the United States (and her allies) so that they are capable of opposing China geopolitically. The tariffs are about building resilience and capacity, not efficiency. Ultimately, they are about preparing the United States to be able to fight a great power war, if it came to that.To fight a major war, a country (or at least its allies) must be able to quickly manufacture all of the weapons needed for that war, while also being able to produce all of the goods and services that its society depends on.
Right now, the United States can’t do that, and in this group’s view, that needs to urgently change. Hence the dramatic April 2nd announcement.
more…
https://www.livewiremarkets.com/wires/trump-2-0-the-king-s-court(shrugs) if that was your goal, you’d be working with allies to isolate China.
Instead, they’ve worked against allies to isolate the USA. The ROTW is going to have to work more closely with China now because of these tariffs.
As well, it takes time to build factories and production lines.
sarahs mum said:
So what I’m hearing is that Trump is saving the planet
dv said:
sarahs mum said:
So what I’m hearing is that Trump is saving the planet
+1
sarahs mum said:
dv said:
sarahs mum said:
These tariffs don’t make sense under an efficiency lens because for this group, that’s not what they are for – the tariffs are to prepare the United States (and her allies) so that they are capable of opposing China geopolitically. The tariffs are about building resilience and capacity, not efficiency. Ultimately, they are about preparing the United States to be able to fight a great power war, if it came to that.
To fight a major war, a country (or at least its allies) must be able to quickly manufacture all of the weapons needed for that war, while also being able to produce all of the goods and services that its society depends on.
Right now, the United States can’t do that, and in this group’s view, that needs to urgently change. Hence the dramatic April 2nd announcement.
more…
https://www.livewiremarkets.com/wires/trump-2-0-the-king-s-court(shrugs) if that was your goal, you’d be working with allies to isolate China.
Instead, they’ve worked against allies to isolate the USA. The ROTW is going to have to work more closely with China now because of these tariffs.
that article claims that to get the US to remove tariffs we have to impose them on China.. fuck that.
well the good news is
nobody wants to be friends with those dirty ASIANS so in the end getting in bed with the fascists is the correct final solution
I mean there’s more sense in NZ becoming part of Australia than Greenland joining the US and A
sarahs mum said:
These tariffs don’t make sense under an efficiency lens because for this group, that’s not what they are for – the tariffs are to prepare the United States (and her allies) so that they are capable of opposing China geopolitically. The tariffs are about building resilience and capacity, not efficiency. Ultimately, they are about preparing the United States to be able to fight a great power war, if it came to that.To fight a major war, a country (or at least its allies) must be able to quickly manufacture all of the weapons needed for that war, while also being able to produce all of the goods and services that its society depends on.
Right now, the United States can’t do that, and in this group’s view, that needs to urgently change. Hence the dramatic April 2nd announcement.
more…
https://www.livewiremarkets.com/wires/trump-2-0-the-king-s-court
I tend to resile against reading any intelligent or deep thinking into Trump’s actions. These may be unintended side-effects, but thet still unintended. I think he is just a dumbcunt.
Incompetence Can Never Be Weaponised
dv said:
I mean there’s more sense in NZ becoming part of Australia than Greenland joining the US and A
It was part of Australia/New South Wales, originally.
SCIENCE said:
Incompetence Can Never Be Weaponised
Ohhh.. fuck!
Well put. I am so stealing that!
Michael V said:
captain_spalding said:
Michael V said:I’m not sure I understand.
Wikipedia:
On 6 October 1981, Sadat was assassinated during the annual victory parade held in Cairo to celebrate Egypt’s crossing of the Suez Canal. Islambouli emptied his assault rifle into Sadat’s body while in the front of the grandstand, mortally wounding the President. In addition to Sadat, eleven others were killed, including the Cuban ambassador, an Omani general, a Coptic Orthodox bishop and Samir Helmy, the head of Egypt’s Central Auditing Agency (CAA). Twenty-eight were wounded, including Vice President Hosni Mubarak, Irish Defence Minister James Tully, and four US military liaison officers.
Ha!
I read the start of the article, thinking it must have been related to something Sadat himself did…
I was working for a commodities futures trading company at the time, and designed an ad which appeared on page one of The Weekend Australian – it showed Sadat in a gunsight with the headline “Who’s Next?” pointing out that canny trading on the commodities markets could turn a profit from such unfortunate occurrences.
Apparently Derryn Hinch blasted it on his radio the following Monday.
Heather Cox Richardson
1h ·
April 7, 2025 (Monday)
Major indexes on the stock market began down more than 3% today when, as Allison Morrow of CNN reported, a rumor that Trump was considering delaying his tariffs by three months sent stocks surging upward by almost 8%. The rumor was unfounded—it appeared to begin from a small account on X—but it indicated how desperate traders are to see an end to President Donald J. Trump’s trade war.
As soon as the rumor was discredited, the market began to fall again, although Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s announcement that he is opening trade negotiations with Japan and looking forward to talks with other countries appeared to reassure some traders that Trump’s tariffs will not last. The wild swings made the day one of the most volatile in stock market history. It ended with the Dow Jones Industrial Average down by 349 points and the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq Composite staying relatively flat. Futures for tomorrow are up slightly.
Foreign markets fared badly today, suggesting that the reality of Trump’s tariffs is beginning to sink in. Sam Goldfarb of the Wall Street Journal notes that Hong Kong’s Hang Seng took its biggest dive since the 1997 Asian financial crisis, losing 13%, and that other markets also fell today.
Goldfarb reports that in the U.S., traders are deeply worried about losses but also anxious about missing a rebound if the administration changes its policies. Hence the extreme volatility of the market. Generally, values over 30 are considered indicators of increased risk and uncertainty in the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) Volatility Index, the so-called fear gauge. Today, it spiked to 60.
Business leaders are speaking out publicly against Trump’s tariffs. Today, Ken Langone, the co-founder of Home Depot and a major Republican donor, told the Financial Times: “I don’t understand the goddamn formula.”
Senate Republicans are also starting to push back. Seven Republican senators have now signed onto a bill that would limit Trump’s ability to impose tariffs. The power to levy tariffs belongs to Congress, but Congress has permitted a president to adjust tariffs on an emergency basis. Trump declared an emergency, and it is on that ground that he has upended more than 90 years of global economic policy.
Trump has threatened to veto any such legislation, but he will not need to if Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) and House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) refuse to bring the measure to a vote. Jordain Carney and Meredith Lee Hill of Politico report that while Republicans express concern about the tariffs in private, leaders will stand with the president because they must have the votes of MAGA lawmakers to pass any of their legislative agenda through Congress, and to get that they will need Trump’s support. Others are worried about incurring Trump’s wrath and, with it, a primary challenger.
“People are skittish. They’re all worried about it,” Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) told Carney and Hill. “But they are putting on a stiff upper lip to act as though nothing is happening and hoping it goes away.”
But so far, it does not look as if it’s going to go away. Today the European Commission has announced 25% countertariffs in retaliation for Trump’s tariffs.
Trump’s response to the crisis has been to double down on his tariff plan. This morning he wrote on his social media network that he will impose additional 50% tariffs on China effective on Wednesday unless it drops the retaliatory tariffs it has placed on U.S. products. Rather than backing down, China said it would “fight to the end.”
Today, in a press conference convened in the Oval Office, Trump explained his thinking behind why he has begun a global tariff war. “You know, our country was the strongest, believe it or not, from 1870 to 1913. You know why? It was all tariff based. We had no income tax,” he said. “Then in 1913, some genius came up with the idea of let’s charge the people of our country, not foreign countries that are ripping off our country, and the country was never, relatively, was never that kind of wealth. We had so much wealth we didn’t know what to do with our money. We had meetings, we had committees, and these committees worked tirelessly to study one subject: we have so much money, what are going to do with it, who are we going to give it to? And I hope we’re going to be in that position again.”
Aside from this complete misreading of American history—Civil War income taxes lasted until 1875, for example, tariffs are paid by consumers, the Panics of 1873 and 1893 devastated the economy, few Americans at the time thought the Gilded Age was a golden age, and I have no clue what he’s referring to with the talk about committees—Trump’s larger motivation is clear: he wants to get rid of income taxes.
Congress passed the 1913 Revenue Act imposing income taxes to shift the cost of supporting the government from ordinary Americans, especially the women who by then made up a significant portion of household consumers, to men of wealth. Tariffs were regressive because they fell disproportionately on working-class Americans through their everyday purchases. Income taxes spread costs more evenly, according to a man’s ability to pay. The switch from tariffs to income taxes helped to break the power of the so-called robber barons, the powerful industrialists who controlled the U.S. economy and government in the late nineteenth century.
To get rid of income taxes, Trump and his Republicans have backed the decimation of the government services that support ordinary Americans.
Today, in the Oval Office press conference, Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth suggested where they intend to put government money, promising a defense budget of $1 trillion, a significant jump from the current $892 defense budget. “e have to be strong because you’ve got a lot of bad forces out there now,” Trump said.
Allison McCann, Alexandra Berzon, and Hamed Aleaziz of the New York Times reported today that the administration also intends to spend as much as $45 billion over the next two years on new detention facilities for immigrants. In the last fiscal year, the total amount of federal money allocated to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement was about $3.4 billion. The new facilities will be in private hands and will operate with lower standards and less oversight than current detention facilities.
TL;DR Trump’s larger motivation is clear: he wants to get rid of income taxes
sarahs mum said:
Heather Cox Richardson
1h ·
April 7, 2025 (Monday)few Americans at the time thought the Gilded Age was a golden age, and I have no clue what he’s referring to with the talk about committees—Trump’s larger motivation is clear: he wants to get rid of income taxes.
Congress passed the 1913 Revenue Act imposing income taxes to shift the cost of supporting the government from ordinary Americans, especially the women who by then made up a significant portion of household consumers, to men of wealth.
so she likes communism
captain_spalding said:
so the paedophile Republican deep state are the ones playing chess while using kkk as a front to appear clueless and incompetent
surprise us
Fascists Aren’t Racists
“We borrow money from Chinese peasants to buy the things those things Chinese peasants manufacture,” Mr Vance said.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-04-09/vance-s-china-peasants-remark/105153968
well, he is never ever coming back from it, anyway
hey no worries the institutions of fascist states never simply fall into line behind the fascists oh no
MAGA Maoism is spreading through the populist right
A new conservative strain dreams of sending the bourgeoise to work the factories.
April 8, 2025 at 7:15 a.m.
By Rotimi Adeoye
Rotimi Adeoye is a political writer and former congressional speechwriter to then-Rep. Dan Kildee (D-Michigan).
On “Liberation Day” this past week, President Donald Trump announced a 10 percent universal tariff on all imported goods and far greater ones on individual countries. His administration framed it as a course correction to make America “competitive” again. But if you listened closely, especially to his supporters, this wasn’t just about trade. It was about work and the kinds of work that still count.
Recently, a viral meme in MAGA circles captured the moment, featuring a cartoon Trump addressing a faceless American: “Your great grandfather worked the mines, your grandfather worked in a steel plant, and you thought you could be a ‘product manager’ ???” It’s a joke, but it’s also a worldview — one where white-collar ambition is seen not as a step forward, but as a fall into decadence. The meme doesn’t just mock digital work; it exalts physical labor as the only authentic form of contribution.
What we’re seeing is a kind of MAGA Maoism, remixed for the algorithm age. Like the Chinese Cultural Revolution, it glorifies physical labor as moral purification, only now the purification is from the supposed “wokeness” of desk work, filtered through TikTok, X and Twitch. It’s not about creating jobs. It’s about creating vibes: strong men doing hard things, reshared until they become ideology. As one MAGA influencer put it, “Men in America don’t need therapy. Men in America need tariffs and DOGE. The fake email jobs will disappear.”
This style, what some might call online pastoralism, is no longer fringe. It is a governing strategy. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently hinted to Tucker Carlson that the administration plans to restock America’s factories with recently fired federal workers. It’s a sharp evolution of the old MAGA line, which claimed elites abandoned the working class by offshoring jobs and hoarding the degrees that powered the new economy. Now, those same college-educated liberals once seen as the future of work are being recast as its obstacle.
This new turn is also punitive: It challenges the idea drilled into millennial and Gen Z brains — especially immigrant families, like my own — that education and meritocracy are the path to the American Dream. It says not only that you were left behind, but that you were wrong to try to get ahead. Populists used to share memes about miners who were condescendingly told to “learn to code” while their towns struggled. The coders, in this updated version, need to be thrown back in the mines.
What makes this iteration feel uniquely American is how aestheticized it has become. Online, there’s an industry of memes and male micro-celebrities fetishizing rural life, manual labor, and a kind of fake rugged masculinity that is less about economic reality and more about identity performance. Trump doesn’t need to build a single factory for that performance to succeed. He only needs to sell the image of one.
There’s political danger to this approach. I expect it to land with a thud in places like Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where I grew up. It’s the kind of suburb that didn’t promise luxury, but offered enough: tree-lined streets, solid schools, and the belief that hard work and good behavior would lead to a decent life.
For the children of immigrants — and for Pennsylvanians whose parents worked with their hands in factories or kitchens or on construction sites — the promise of white-collar stability carried real meaning. We were taught to reach for security, not power: get the degree, land the job, and trade our families’ physical strain for something quieter, safer and more lucrative.
Now, those aspirations are being rebranded as betrayal. The very things that once defined responsibility and success are recast by the new right as signs of softness and elitism. In communities like mine, where the American Dream was treated with reverence, the ground beneath it is starting to feel less like foundation and more like fiction.
The American Dream is not a hammer. It never was. But Trump understands something vital about the moment: People are tired of markets and tired of waiting for politicians to fix the affordability crisis. In many parts of the country — especially in Pennsylvania — communities were hollowed out by deindustrialization, abandoned by a bipartisan consensus that viewed globalization as destiny. Wages stagnated. Towns emptied. The labor that once brought pride became precarious, then obsolete. Voters want to believe in something real — even if it’s made of smoke. That is what his tariff strategy offers: not renewal, but revenge. And revenge sells.
But nostalgia is not a plan. It’s a mirror turned backward. Trump is not bringing back the dignity of work — he’s marketing the image of it. His tariffs won’t rebuild Bethlehem Steel. They won’t revive the coal towns. But they will make life more expensive for working people, while feeding the fantasy that somewhere out there, the old America still waits if you can just hurt the right people to get there.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/04/08/maga-maoism-tariffs-trump/
Musk Disparages Trump’s Trade Adviser, Exposing Rift in President’s Inner Circle
The feud between two of President Trump’s top advisers is playing out as the administration’s new tariffs have caused huge losses across global financial markets.
By Tyler Pager
Reporting from Washington
April 8, 2025
Updated 5:20 p.m. ET
Elon Musk slammed President Trump’s top trade adviser as “dumber than a sack of bricks” on Tuesday, exposing a remarkable rift in the president’s inner circle over the wide-ranging tariffs that have upended the global economy.
The feud between Mr. Musk and Peter Navarro, who has been the architect of many of Mr. Trump’s trade plans, has been simmering for days as the administration’s new tariffs have caused huge losses across global financial markets.
So far, Mr. Trump has not weighed in on the clash between his top aides, both of whom he claims to hold in high regard. But Mr. Musk’s words — though aimed at Mr. Navarro — were a rare criticism of Mr. Trump’s policies from one of his most influential advisers.
Mr. Musk, the world’s richest man, is estimated to have lost roughly $31 billion since Mr. Trump announced sweeping tariffs on foreign countries on April 2, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
The squabble escalated on Monday when Mr. Navarro said on CNBC that Mr. Musk was not a “car manufacturer” but a “car assembler” because Tesla, Mr. Musk’s electric vehicle company, relied on parts from around the world.
Mr. Musk fired back on Tuesday, calling Mr. Navarro a “moron” and “dumber than a sack of bricks” in a post on X, the social media site he owns. Later in the day, Mr. Musk doubled down, posting that he wanted to “apologize to bricks.”
“That was so unfair to bricks,” Mr. Musk wrote. He also used a slur to refer to Mr. Navarro, calling him “Peter Retarrdo.”
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, tried to downplay the feud.
“Boys will be boys, and we will let their public sparring continue,” she told reporters.
Mr. Navarro ignored questions from reporters at the White House on Tuesday afternoon about Mr. Musk’s posts on social media.
Mr. Trump has long allowed, and at times fostered, conflict between his top advisers, but it is unusual for animus between aides to play out so publicly. Mr. Navarro was a senior official on trade issues during Mr. Trump’s first term and stayed loyal to the president afterward, even spending four months in jail after being convicted of contempt of Congress for refusing to testify in its investigation into the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
Mr. Musk, a key member of the president’s inner circle who spent hundreds of millions of dollars to support his presidential campaign, is usually a staunch supporter of Mr. Trump’s policies. But the tariffs have been an exception.
Mr. Musk has rejected Mr. Trump’s approach and called for “zero tariffs” between the United States and Europe. He has chastised Mr. Navarro for having a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard, writing that was “a bad thing, not a good thing,” and then posting that Mr. Navarro “ain’t built” anything, using an expletive. (He later deleted the second post.)
Mr. Musk’s brother, Kimbal, has also critiqued the tariffs, posting a flurry of messages on X over the last several days and defending his brother. He asserted that the president had “implemented a structural, permanent tax on the American consumer.”
Mr. Musk often uses his X account to barrage his critics, insulting them and inciting his nearly 219 million followers to join in. Since acquiring Twitter and renaming it X, Mr. Musk has often targeted judges who have made rulings about his companies that he disagrees with. And in recent months, Mr. Musk lashed out at judges who have slowed or halted his federal cost-cutting efforts at the Department of Government Efficiency.
Since Mr. Trump announced the tariffs last week, administration officials have given varying and, at times, conflicting explanations in public about the president’s plan. Mr. Navarro has been adamant: The tariffs are not a negotiating tactic to win more favorable trade deals with other countries. But Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has signaled that Mr. Trump is open to negotiations as countries flood the White House with calls to discuss new deals.
“President Trump, as you know, is better than anyone at giving himself maximum leverage,” Mr. Bessent said on Fox News.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/08/us/politics/musk-navarro-tariffs-fight.html
Witty Rejoinder said:
MAGA Maoism is spreading through the populist right
A new conservative strain dreams of sending the bourgeoise to work the factories.April 8, 2025 at 7:15 a.m.
By Rotimi AdeoyeRotimi Adeoye is a political writer and former congressional speechwriter to then-Rep. Dan Kildee (D-Michigan).
On “Liberation Day” this past week, President Donald Trump announced a 10 percent universal tariff on all imported goods and far greater ones on individual countries. His administration framed it as a course correction to make America “competitive” again. But if you listened closely, especially to his supporters, this wasn’t just about trade. It was about work and the kinds of work that still count.
Recently, a viral meme in MAGA circles captured the moment, featuring a cartoon Trump addressing a faceless American: “Your great grandfather worked the mines, your grandfather worked in a steel plant, and you thought you could be a ‘product manager’ ???” It’s a joke, but it’s also a worldview — one where white-collar ambition is seen not as a step forward, but as a fall into decadence. The meme doesn’t just mock digital work; it exalts physical labor as the only authentic form of contribution.
———————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
“….the fantasy that somewhere out there, the old America still waits if you can just hurt the right people to get there.”
I think that Rotimi has nailed it there. Spot on. Bullseye.
The MAGA mob feel that they’ve been failed by everyone, in every way. Including their Republican/MAGA leaders, who they know arejust a bunch of clowns.
But, they need someone to blame, a target, something they can hit at, and tell themselves that its the fault of these people, let’s get rid of them, and it’ll be good again.
They don’t know who ‘these people’ are, exactly, but they’re happy to swing wildly at all sorts of people, in the hope that they hit ‘the right ones’ somewhere in the melee.
In Germany, it was the Jews and other groups. In the US today, it’s illegal immigrants/DEIs/Hispanics etc.
captain_spalding said:
Witty Rejoinder said:
MAGA Maoism is spreading through the populist right
A new conservative strain dreams of sending the bourgeoise to work the factories.April 8, 2025 at 7:15 a.m.
By Rotimi AdeoyeRotimi Adeoye is a political writer and former congressional speechwriter to then-Rep. Dan Kildee (D-Michigan).
On “Liberation Day” this past week, President Donald Trump announced a 10 percent universal tariff on all imported goods and far greater ones on individual countries. His administration framed it as a course correction to make America “competitive” again. But if you listened closely, especially to his supporters, this wasn’t just about trade. It was about work and the kinds of work that still count.
Recently, a viral meme in MAGA circles captured the moment, featuring a cartoon Trump addressing a faceless American: “Your great grandfather worked the mines, your grandfather worked in a steel plant, and you thought you could be a ‘product manager’ ???” It’s a joke, but it’s also a worldview — one where white-collar ambition is seen not as a step forward, but as a fall into decadence. The meme doesn’t just mock digital work; it exalts physical labor as the only authentic form of contribution.
———————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
“….the fantasy that somewhere out there, the old America still waits if you can just hurt the right people to get there.”
I think that Rotimi has nailed it there. Spot on. Bullseye.
The MAGA mob feel that they’ve been failed by everyone, in every way. Including their Republican/MAGA leaders, who they know arejust a bunch of clowns.
But, they need someone to blame, a target, something they can hit at, and tell themselves that its the fault of these people, let’s get rid of them, and it’ll be good again.
They don’t know who ‘these people’ are, exactly, but they’re happy to swing wildly at all sorts of people, in the hope that they hit ‘the right ones’ somewhere in the melee.
In Germany, it was the Jews and other groups. In the US today, it’s illegal immigrants/DEIs/Hispanics etc.
genius move, when fascists fuck things up just blame it on communism and call it that
https://www.reuters.com/world/us-officials-object-european-push-buy-weapons-locally-2025-04-02/
No pleasing some people
dv said:
https://www.reuters.com/world/us-officials-object-european-push-buy-weapons-locally-2025-04-02/
No pleasing some people
another genius move promise to increase defence spending oh wait how uh yeah we’re just buying the same thing more expensive locally and LOL like magic the nett spend ends up the same as before
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Tuesday that the Trump administration is not sure it is legal to deport U.S. citizens to El Salvador, but that President Trump has “simply floated” the idea for the sake of transparency.
https://to.pbs.org/3YmD3ek
I don’t have the strength to watch the video. The words are enough.
Once in a while I’ll see something like this on FB in the context of discussion on the stagnant min wage in the US, at $7.25 ph for the last 17 years.
But it’s … kind of not true any more that this is a high income globally.
On a purchasing power parity basis, US min wage is a low wage in much of Asia and Latin America. It’s well below an average income in such places and is broadly similar to minimum wage there. e.g. in Jakarta the min wage is 6.80 USD per hour on a PPP basis. In Delhi, it’s 5.20 per hour on a PPP basis. In Shanghai, 7.60 USD per hour. In Chile, 6.06 USD per hour.
It’s a fair income in a lot of sub—Saharan Africa and Myanmar/Bangladesh but not in most of the world.
dv said:
Once in a while I’ll see something like this on FB in the context of discussion on the stagnant min wage in the US, at $7.25 ph for the last 17 years.
But it’s … kind of not true any more that this is a high income globally.
On a purchasing power parity basis, US min wage is a low wage in much of Asia and Latin America. It’s well below an average income in such places and is broadly similar to minimum wage there. e.g. in Jakarta the min wage is 6.80 USD per hour on a PPP basis. In Delhi, it’s 5.20 per hour on a PPP basis. In Shanghai, 7.60 USD per hour. In Chile, 6.06 USD per hour.
It’s a fair income in a lot of sub—Saharan Africa and Myanmar/Bangladesh but not in most of the world.
but what about those articles / feeds / comments going around out there telling us that the USSA is the richest country there is and has the highest GDP per capita
SCIENCE said:
dv said:
Once in a while I’ll see something like this on FB in the context of discussion on the stagnant min wage in the US, at $7.25 ph for the last 17 years.
But it’s … kind of not true any more that this is a high income globally.
On a purchasing power parity basis, US min wage is a low wage in much of Asia and Latin America. It’s well below an average income in such places and is broadly similar to minimum wage there. e.g. in Jakarta the min wage is 6.80 USD per hour on a PPP basis. In Delhi, it’s 5.20 per hour on a PPP basis. In Shanghai, 7.60 USD per hour. In Chile, 6.06 USD per hour.
It’s a fair income in a lot of sub—Saharan Africa and Myanmar/Bangladesh but not in most of the world.
but what about those articles / feeds / comments going around out there telling us that the USSA is the richest country there is and has the highest GDP per capita
Sure, it’s GDP up there, either in nominal or PPP terms, but the wealth disparity is burgeoning, and its lowest wages are middle of the table.
SCIENCE said:
dv said:
Once in a while I’ll see something like this on FB in the context of discussion on the stagnant min wage in the US, at $7.25 ph for the last 17 years.
But it’s … kind of not true any more that this is a high income globally.
On a purchasing power parity basis, US min wage is a low wage in much of Asia and Latin America. It’s well below an average income in such places and is broadly similar to minimum wage there. e.g. in Jakarta the min wage is 6.80 USD per hour on a PPP basis. In Delhi, it’s 5.20 per hour on a PPP basis. In Shanghai, 7.60 USD per hour. In Chile, 6.06 USD per hour.
It’s a fair income in a lot of sub—Saharan Africa and Myanmar/Bangladesh but not in most of the world.
but what about those articles / feeds / comments going around out there telling us that the USSA is the richest country there is and has the highest GDP per capita
The USA is powerful militarily and economically at a huge cost to its population and others around the world.
For what counts as decency and basic human rights and happiness its way down the list.
I don’t think even amongst allies the USA is respected, its feared as its bullies people into agreeing.
dv said:
SCIENCE said:
dv said:
Once in a while I’ll see something like this on FB in the context of discussion on the stagnant min wage in the US, at $7.25 ph for the last 17 years.
But it’s … kind of not true any more that this is a high income globally.
On a purchasing power parity basis, US min wage is a low wage in much of Asia and Latin America. It’s well below an average income in such places and is broadly similar to minimum wage there. e.g. in Jakarta the min wage is 6.80 USD per hour on a PPP basis. In Delhi, it’s 5.20 per hour on a PPP basis. In Shanghai, 7.60 USD per hour. In Chile, 6.06 USD per hour.
It’s a fair income in a lot of sub—Saharan Africa and Myanmar/Bangladesh but not in most of the world.
but what about those articles / feeds / comments going around out there telling us that the USSA is the richest country there is and has the highest GDP per capita
Sure, it’s GDP up there, either in nominal or PPP terms, but the wealth disparity is burgeoning, and its lowest wages are middle of the table.
so we’re getting a feeling that it’s more an aspirational thing and the country makes its profits off the back of people hoping to make it big but scrambling around a pit with a carrot hanging over them
(not sarcasm this time in case anyone was wondering)
sarahs mum said:
Heather Cox Richardson
1h ·
April 7, 2025 (Monday)————————————————————————CUT————————————————————————-
Thanks.
SCIENCE said:
dv said:
SCIENCE said:
but what about those articles / feeds / comments going around out there telling us that the USSA is the richest country there is and has the highest GDP per capita
Sure, it’s GDP up there, either in nominal or PPP terms, but the wealth disparity is burgeoning, and its lowest wages are middle of the table.
so we’re getting a feeling that it’s more an aspirational thing and the country makes its profits off the back of people hoping to make it big but scrambling around a pit with a carrot hanging over them
(not sarcasm this time in case anyone was wondering)
but what if you were being sarcastic when you said not sarcasm
dv said:
SCIENCE said:dv said:
Sure, it’s GDP up there, either in nominal or PPP terms, but the wealth disparity is burgeoning, and its lowest wages are middle of the table.
so we’re getting a feeling that it’s more an aspirational thing and the country makes its profits off the back of people hoping to make it big but scrambling around a pit with a carrot hanging over them
(not sarcasm this time in case anyone was wondering)
but what if you were being sarcastic when you said not sarcasm
lights pipe
dv said:
SCIENCE said:
dv said:
Sure, it’s GDP up there, either in nominal or PPP terms, but the wealth disparity is burgeoning, and its lowest wages are middle of the table.
so we’re getting a feeling that it’s more an aspirational thing and the country makes its profits off the back of people hoping to make it big but scrambling around a pit with a carrot hanging over them
(not sarcasm this time in case anyone was wondering)
but what if you were being sarcastic when you said not sarcasm
“this statement is totally not sarcastic”
but no we mean we feel like there are a bunch of people for example that could earn USSA minimum wage by working 4 hours a day in Indonesia who go looking for a better life in the fascist states only to realise they’re fucked but then can’t afford to back out and just have to cut their losses and suffer
we could be wrong we’re definitely of the opinion we’re far better off sitting tight in Australia here
dv said:
Sure, its GDP is up there
errata
SCIENCE said:
dv said:
SCIENCE said:
so we’re getting a feeling that it’s more an aspirational thing and the country makes its profits off the back of people hoping to make it big but scrambling around a pit with a carrot hanging over them
(not sarcasm this time in case anyone was wondering)
but what if you were being sarcastic when you said not sarcasm
“this statement is totally not sarcastic”
but no we mean we feel like there are a bunch of people for example that could earn USSA minimum wage by working 4 hours a day in Indonesia who go looking for a better life in the fascist states only to realise they’re fucked but then can’t afford to back out and just have to cut their losses and suffer
we could be wrong we’re definitely of the opinion we’re far better off sitting tight in Australia here
I think that likely happens a lot.
You’d be totally isolated likely with no family or friends as backup
Get some non documented job working illegally with the threat of deportation hanging over your head to make you suck it up and comply
it must be comforting to have such optimism
“Now, whenever there is a conflict, we talk about whether war crimes are being committed, and who might be responsible, and what the evidence might be for those crimes.
“ when somebody — who shall go unnamed — suggests moving the civilian population out of Gaza, we know what that is. That’s forced displacement, it’s a crime of ethnic cleansing, and everyone talks about that and recognises that.”
SCIENCE said:
it must be comforting to have such optimism
“Now, whenever there is a conflict, we talk about whether war crimes are being committed, and who might be responsible, and what the evidence might be for those crimes.
“ when somebody — who shall go unnamed — suggests moving the civilian population out of Gaza, we know what that is. That’s forced displacement, it’s a crime of ethnic cleansing, and everyone talks about that and recognises that.”
I guess but in what way is it different to every other act of forced displacement since Resolution 181 ?
Cymek said:
SCIENCE said:dv said:
Once in a while I’ll see something like this on FB in the context of discussion on the stagnant min wage in the US, at $7.25 ph for the last 17 years.
But it’s … kind of not true any more that this is a high income globally.
On a purchasing power parity basis, US min wage is a low wage in much of Asia and Latin America. It’s well below an average income in such places and is broadly similar to minimum wage there. e.g. in Jakarta the min wage is 6.80 USD per hour on a PPP basis. In Delhi, it’s 5.20 per hour on a PPP basis. In Shanghai, 7.60 USD per hour. In Chile, 6.06 USD per hour.
It’s a fair income in a lot of sub—Saharan Africa and Myanmar/Bangladesh but not in most of the world.
but what about those articles / feeds / comments going around out there telling us that the USSA is the richest country there is and has the highest GDP per capita
The USA is powerful militarily and economically at a huge cost to its population and others around the world.
For what counts as decency and basic human rights and happiness its way down the list.
I don’t think even amongst allies the USA is respected, its feared as its bullies people into agreeing.
How has the US bullied Australia in the period before Trump 2.0?
All those people struggling with the prices of pharmaceuticals in the US will be heartened by DJT’s plan
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/apr/09/donald-trump-flags-major-tariff-on-pharmaceuticals-as-us-senator-criticises-whack-on-australia
to put a “major new tariff on pharmaceuticals”
Witty Rejoinder said:
Cymek said:
SCIENCE said:but what about those articles / feeds / comments going around out there telling us that the USSA is the richest country there is and has the highest GDP per capita
The USA is powerful militarily and economically at a huge cost to its population and others around the world.
For what counts as decency and basic human rights and happiness its way down the list.
I don’t think even amongst allies the USA is respected, its feared as its bullies people into agreeing.
How has the US bullied Australia in the period before Trump 2.0?
Their entire demeanour is one of bullying.
Do as we ask/demand type persona as they decide what is moral in the greater world.
I think you will find many people think of the USA as bullying and domineering.
I don’t subscribe to the simplistic notion that we in the West are righteous.
We are just less terrible than some of the other nations around.
All global powers are bullies, the USA is no different
They take by force or economic or culturally domination
JudgeMental said:
Ha!
:)
Cymek said:
Witty Rejoinder said:
Cymek said:The USA is powerful militarily and economically at a huge cost to its population and others around the world.
For what counts as decency and basic human rights and happiness its way down the list.
I don’t think even amongst allies the USA is respected, its feared as its bullies people into agreeing.
How has the US bullied Australia in the period before Trump 2.0?
Their entire demeanour is one of bullying.
Do as we ask/demand type persona as they decide what is moral in the greater world.
I think you will find many people think of the USA as bullying and domineering.
I don’t subscribe to the simplistic notion that we in the West are righteous.
We are just less terrible than some of the other nations around.
All global powers are bullies, the USA is no different
They take by force or economic or culturally domination
One example?
is this like the whole tacit synchronisation thing again
Cymek said:
Witty Rejoinder said:
Cymek said:The USA is powerful militarily and economically at a huge cost to its population and others around the world.
For what counts as decency and basic human rights and happiness its way down the list.
I don’t think even amongst allies the USA is respected, its feared as its bullies people into agreeing.
How has the US bullied Australia in the period before Trump 2.0?
Their entire demeanour is one of bullying.
Do as we ask/demand type persona as they decide what is moral in the greater world.
I think you will find many people think of the USA as bullying and domineering.
I don’t subscribe to the simplistic notion that we in the West are righteous.
We are just less terrible than some of the other nations around.
All global powers are bullies, the USA is no different
They take by force or economic or culturally domination
I can’t think of an instance where the US has tried to influence our government or intervene in our politics.
diddly-squat said:
Cymek said:
Witty Rejoinder said:How has the US bullied Australia in the period before Trump 2.0?
Their entire demeanour is one of bullying.
Do as we ask/demand type persona as they decide what is moral in the greater world.
I think you will find many people think of the USA as bullying and domineering.
I don’t subscribe to the simplistic notion that we in the West are righteous.
We are just less terrible than some of the other nations around.
All global powers are bullies, the USA is no different
They take by force or economic or culturally dominationI can’t think of an instance where the US has tried to influence our government or intervene in our politics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alleged_CIA_involvement_in_the_Whitlam_dismissal
OK, so in the car while I was driving home from doing the shopping, I heard something along the lines of Trump is boasting about how much money is “coming in” from the tariffs already. “Two billion dollars a day!”. Or something. So in effect he is raising money from the American import companies and pretending it’s being paid by outsiders?
JudgeMental said:
diddly-squat said:
Cymek said:Their entire demeanour is one of bullying.
Do as we ask/demand type persona as they decide what is moral in the greater world.
I think you will find many people think of the USA as bullying and domineering.
I don’t subscribe to the simplistic notion that we in the West are righteous.
We are just less terrible than some of the other nations around.
All global powers are bullies, the USA is no different
They take by force or economic or culturally dominationI can’t think of an instance where the US has tried to influence our government or intervene in our politics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alleged_CIA_involvement_in_the_Whitlam_dismissal
well there you go – there’s a very good reason I don’t remember that (having not even been born yet)
but that seems like a great conspiracy theory
buffy said:
OK, so in the car while I was driving home from doing the shopping, I heard something along the lines of Trump is boasting about how much money is “coming in” from the tariffs already. “Two billion dollars a day!”. Or something. So in effect he is raising money from the American import companies and pretending it’s being paid by outsiders?
no, he’s not pretending it’s being paid by outsiders
diddly-squat said:
JudgeMental said:
diddly-squat said:I can’t think of an instance where the US has tried to influence our government or intervene in our politics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alleged_CIA_involvement_in_the_Whitlam_dismissal
well there you go – there’s a very good reason I don’t remember that (having not even been born yet)
but that seems like a great conspiracy theory
But….I thought you knew EVERYTHING about EVERYTHING!
diddly-squat said:
buffy said:
OK, so in the car while I was driving home from doing the shopping, I heard something along the lines of Trump is boasting about how much money is “coming in” from the tariffs already. “Two billion dollars a day!”. Or something. So in effect he is raising money from the American import companies and pretending it’s being paid by outsiders?
no, he’s not pretending it’s being paid by outsiders
He certainly seems to be implying that it’s not just American money cycling around the system and it’s coming from outside somehow.
https://www.facebook.com/share/v/19sea4xKqk/
fkn lol
buffy said:
diddly-squat said:
buffy said:
OK, so in the car while I was driving home from doing the shopping, I heard something along the lines of Trump is boasting about how much money is “coming in” from the tariffs already. “Two billion dollars a day!”. Or something. So in effect he is raising money from the American import companies and pretending it’s being paid by outsiders?
no, he’s not pretending it’s being paid by outsiders
He certainly seems to be implying that it’s not just American money cycling around the system and it’s coming from outside somehow.
I mean there are millions of people who still haven’t worked it.
dv said:
I mean there are millions of people who still haven’t worked it.
let go Brandon
dv said:
buffy said:
diddly-squat said:no, he’s not pretending it’s being paid by outsiders
He certainly seems to be implying that it’s not just American money cycling around the system and it’s coming from outside somehow.
I mean there are millions of people who still haven’t worked it.
Here is a report on what he said from CNBC. At 00:30. It does say “the United States government is taking in about 2 billion dollars a day”, so I guess theoretically that is right, but it’s the government, not the country “making” that money. It’s money already in the system.
diddly-squat said:
Cymek said:
Witty Rejoinder said:How has the US bullied Australia in the period before Trump 2.0?
Their entire demeanour is one of bullying.
Do as we ask/demand type persona as they decide what is moral in the greater world.
I think you will find many people think of the USA as bullying and domineering.
I don’t subscribe to the simplistic notion that we in the West are righteous.
We are just less terrible than some of the other nations around.
All global powers are bullies, the USA is no different
They take by force or economic or culturally dominationI can’t think of an instance where the US has tried to influence our government or intervene in our politics.
I think that’s a bit naive.
Back when the western alliance existed, Australia was very much under the USA’s military umbrella and it is quite natural that they would use this, subtely or overtly, to influence international policy and defence policy It is hard to imagine that the US didn’t apply some pressure wrt the Aukus deal for instance.
buffy said:
diddly-squat said:
buffy said:
OK, so in the car while I was driving home from doing the shopping, I heard something along the lines of Trump is boasting about how much money is “coming in” from the tariffs already. “Two billion dollars a day!”. Or something. So in effect he is raising money from the American import companies and pretending it’s being paid by outsiders?
no, he’s not pretending it’s being paid by outsiders
He certainly seems to be implying that it’s not just American money cycling around the system and it’s coming from outside somehow.
“I am going to put tariffs on other countries coming into our country, and that has nothing to do with taxes to us. That is a tax on another country,” Trump said.
In September, he repeated the claim during an interview with Fox News: “It’s not a tax on the middle class. It’s a tax on another country.”
And he said again during a rally in Wisconsin Saturday that “it’s not going to be a cost to you, it’s going to be a cost to another country.”
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/09/09/politics/fact-check-trump-vance-tariffs/index.html
buffy said:
OK, so in the car while I was driving home from doing the shopping, I heard something along the lines of Trump is boasting about how much money is “coming in” from the tariffs already. “Two billion dollars a day!”. Or something. So in effect he is raising money from the American import companies and pretending it’s being paid by outsiders?
Or it’s just Trump doing what Trump does best: lying.
buffy said:
diddly-squat said:
buffy said:
OK, so in the car while I was driving home from doing the shopping, I heard something along the lines of Trump is boasting about how much money is “coming in” from the tariffs already. “Two billion dollars a day!”. Or something. So in effect he is raising money from the American import companies and pretending it’s being paid by outsiders?
no, he’s not pretending it’s being paid by outsiders
He certainly seems to be implying that it’s not just American money cycling around the system and it’s coming from outside somehow.
I’ve not heard him make that specific claim – it’s jet “we are brining in all the beautiful money”.. but I accept there is a broad misunderstanding of what tariffs actually are and how they work.
I may have an advantage in understanding tariffs, because I’m old enough to have had to deal with sales tax on contact lens solutions for some years in the early years of running my practice. But the concept is not difficult to understand really. You just had to know how to add your markup onto the wholesale price, and add the sales tax as shown on the wholesaler’s invoice to the price you charged the customer. It’s quite a while ago now, but I think there were penalties if you were found to be marking up on the wholesale+sales tax price, ie marking up the sales tax as well.
Michael V said:
buffy said:
OK, so in the car while I was driving home from doing the shopping, I heard something along the lines of Trump is boasting about how much money is “coming in” from the tariffs already. “Two billion dollars a day!”. Or something. So in effect he is raising money from the American import companies and pretending it’s being paid by outsiders?
Or it’s just Trump doing what Trump does best: lying.
He’s not really telling lies.
In his mind, what he says is the truth.
Someone may well have told him the truth about how tariffs work, but he probably decided that the facts didn’t suit his view of how he’d like things to work.
So, those facts ceased to exist for him, and he operates on a model which he’s created, because that’s the model he likes.
He is no longer aware that there are any alternative facts.
buffy said:
I may have an advantage in understanding tariffs, because I’m old enough to have had to deal with sales tax on contact lens solutions for some years in the early years of running my practice. But the concept is not difficult to understand really. You just had to know how to add your markup onto the wholesale price, and add the sales tax as shown on the wholesaler’s invoice to the price you charged the customer. It’s quite a while ago now, but I think there were penalties if you were found to be marking up on the wholesale+sales tax price, ie marking up the sales tax as well.
Well, there doesn’t seem to be any penalty for anything in Trump’s US right now.
Except the penalties for being one of the ‘target’ groups.
Ian said:
:)
DJT in the same speech
“They used to go crazy when I talked about Hannibal Lecter. The late great Hannibal Lecter, right? Silence of the Lambs. The fake news would say why does he talk about that, he’s a fictional character. He’s actually not.”
Not satire.
captain_spalding said:
Michael V said:
buffy said:
OK, so in the car while I was driving home from doing the shopping, I heard something along the lines of Trump is boasting about how much money is “coming in” from the tariffs already. “Two billion dollars a day!”. Or something. So in effect he is raising money from the American import companies and pretending it’s being paid by outsiders?
Or it’s just Trump doing what Trump does best: lying.
He’s not really telling lies.
In his mind, what he says is the truth.
Someone may well have told him the truth about how tariffs work, but he probably decided that the facts didn’t suit his view of how he’d like things to work.
So, those facts ceased to exist for him, and he operates on a model which he’s created, because that’s the model he likes.
He is no longer aware that there are any alternative facts.
It’s still lies, despite what his mind might think.
diddly-squat said:
JudgeMental said:
diddly-squat said:I can’t think of an instance where the US has tried to influence our government or intervene in our politics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alleged_CIA_involvement_in_the_Whitlam_dismissal
well there you go – there’s a very good reason I don’t remember that (having not even been born yet)
but that seems like a great conspiracy theory
sigh.
dv said:
diddly-squat said:
Cymek said:Their entire demeanour is one of bullying.
Do as we ask/demand type persona as they decide what is moral in the greater world.
I think you will find many people think of the USA as bullying and domineering.
I don’t subscribe to the simplistic notion that we in the West are righteous.
We are just less terrible than some of the other nations around.
All global powers are bullies, the USA is no different
They take by force or economic or culturally dominationI can’t think of an instance where the US has tried to influence our government or intervene in our politics.
I think that’s a bit naive.
Back when the western alliance existed, Australia was very much under the USA’s military umbrella and it is quite natural that they would use this, subtely or overtly, to influence international policy and defence policy It is hard to imagine that the US didn’t apply some pressure wrt the Aukus deal for instance.
I mean I know that the Pacific Theater was coordinated in part out of Australia but we were allies at war at the time. Equally, it’s not like the US can and said you need to take the AUKUS deal or shove off; we actively engaged with them and the Brits after we realiesd that the French subs weren’t going to give us what we wanted. What went on behind closed doors we’ll probably never know, but I do think that situation was a little different.
The original premise was that the US has bullied us into doing stuff, and I just can’t think of a time when that was the case.
dv said:
DJT in the same speech“They used to go crazy when I talked about Hannibal Lecter. The late great Hannibal Lecter, right? Silence of the Lambs. The fake news would say why does he talk about that, he’s a fictional character. He’s actually not.”
Not satire.
lol
diddly-squat said:
dv said:
DJT in the same speech“They used to go crazy when I talked about Hannibal Lecter. The late great Hannibal Lecter, right? Silence of the Lambs. The fake news would say why does he talk about that, he’s a fictional character. He’s actually not.”
Not satire.
lol
to be fair the lecture character is loosely based on a real life serial killer… but I still dont think Trump is making that leap
sarahs mum said:
diddly-squat said:
JudgeMental said:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alleged_CIA_involvement_in_the_Whitlam_dismissal
well there you go – there’s a very good reason I don’t remember that (having not even been born yet)
but that seems like a great conspiracy theory
sigh.
Exactly. He’s either pretending to be stupid or he really is stupid.
kii said:
sarahs mum said:
diddly-squat said:well there you go – there’s a very good reason I don’t remember that (having not even been born yet)
but that seems like a great conspiracy theory
sigh.
Exactly. He’s either pretending to be stupid or he really is stupid.
Maybe it’s his British Museum moment.
Michael V said:
buffy said:
OK, so in the car while I was driving home from doing the shopping, I heard something along the lines of Trump is boasting about how much money is “coming in” from the tariffs already. “Two billion dollars a day!”. Or something. So in effect he is raising money from the American import companies and pretending it’s being paid by outsiders?
Or it’s just Trump doing what Trump does best: lying.
we mean we’ve seen companies that take your stuff and make money from it and then charge you for their privilege so
dv said:
DJT in the same speech
“They used to go crazy when I talked about Hannibal Lecter. The late great Hannibal Lecter, right? Silence of the Lambs. The fake news would say why does he talk about that, he’s a fictional character. He’s actually not.”
Not satire.
Aldous Orwell’s Brave New Eighty Four was fiction too but is it still¿
kii said:
sarahs mum said:
diddly-squat said:
well there you go – there’s a very good reason I don’t remember that (having not even been born yet)
but that seems like a great conspiracy theory
sigh.
Exactly. He’s either pretending to be stupid or he really is stupid.
Old El Paso
Arts said:
diddly-squat said:
dv said:
DJT in the same speech
“They used to go crazy when I talked about Hannibal Lecter. The late great Hannibal Lecter, right? Silence of the Lambs. The fake news would say why does he talk about that, he’s a fictional character. He’s actually not.”
Not satire.
lol
to be fair the lecture character is loosely based on a real life serial killer… but I still dont think Trump is making that leap
Can we give the fucker a window please¿
OK so we would have thought that anyone thinking of travel to USSA right now has more pressing concerns than
The Australian dollar spent only around week below 60 cents in March 2020, amid the global pandemic panic. “For anyone planning a trip to the US, the more relevant time period is 2002-2003 — the last time the Aussie dollar’s purchasing power against the US dollar was so weak,” Mr Callow noted. The Australian dollar is also considered a so-called commodities currency — that is, its value is derived from the performance of commodities, which all fell heavily overnight.
the currency exchange rate but then we realised that it’s all rich angry old white cisgender men going there so yes all fine then.
CIA involvement in the dismissal is a major plot point in the film ‘The Falcon and the Snowman’ which is based on a true story.
buffy said:
dv said:
buffy said:He certainly seems to be implying that it’s not just American money cycling around the system and it’s coming from outside somehow.
I mean there are millions of people who still haven’t worked it.
Here is a report on what he said from CNBC. At 00:30. It does say “the United States government is taking in about 2 billion dollars a day”, so I guess theoretically that is right, but it’s the government, not the country “making” that money. It’s money already in the system.
Taking it in. From American citizens.
esselte said:
buffy said:
diddly-squat said:no, he’s not pretending it’s being paid by outsiders
He certainly seems to be implying that it’s not just American money cycling around the system and it’s coming from outside somehow.
“I am going to put tariffs on other countries coming into our country, and that has nothing to do with taxes to us. That is a tax on another country,” Trump said.
In September, he repeated the claim during an interview with Fox News: “It’s not a tax on the middle class. It’s a tax on another country.”
And he said again during a rally in Wisconsin Saturday that “it’s not going to be a cost to you, it’s going to be a cost to another country.”
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/09/09/politics/fact-check-trump-vance-tariffs/index.html
and nobody is game to convince him of the truth?
roughbarked said:
esselte said:
buffy said:
He certainly seems to be implying that it’s not just American money cycling around the system and it’s coming from outside somehow.
“I am going to put tariffs on other countries coming into our country, and that has nothing to do with taxes to us. That is a tax on another country,” Trump said.
In September, he repeated the claim during an interview with Fox News: “It’s not a tax on the middle class. It’s a tax on another country.”
And he said again during a rally in Wisconsin Saturday that “it’s not going to be a cost to you, it’s going to be a cost to another country.”
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/09/09/politics/fact-check-trump-vance-tariffs/index.html
and nobody is game to convince him of the truth?
regardless someone is going to explode everyone’s brains in a moment with the revelation that even the world economy itself is just a bunch of international moneys cycling around the system without any coming from outside
kii said:
sarahs mum said:
diddly-squat said:well there you go – there’s a very good reason I don’t remember that (having not even been born yet)
but that seems like a great conspiracy theory
sigh.
Exactly. He’s either pretending to be stupid or he really is stupid.
I don’t find it hard to believe because in the late 70s I was together with an ex-CIA agent. Nugan Hand bank times.
For the benefit of d-s and myself, and any other ignoramuses out there:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alleged_CIA_involvement_in_the_Whitlam_dismissal
CIA involvement in the Whitlam dismissal was the alleged involvement of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the dismissal of Prime Minister of Australia Gough Whitlam by Governor-General of Australia John Kerr, who had several ties to the CIA and predecessor.
As documented by CIA whistleblower Christopher John Boyce and several authors, including John Pilger, as well as some Australian politicians, the CIA allegedly backed Governor-General and representative of Queen Elizabeth II in Australia, Kerr, to dismiss Whitlam, due to Whitlam’s perceived left-wing policies including Australian withdrawal from the Vietnam War, as well as his views on Australian sovereignty. His conflict with the CIA is alleged to have come to a head when he discovered several CIA-led operations occurring in Australia and overseas conducted by ASIO and ASIS, leading him to threaten cancellation of the lease on the Pine Gap facility, ending the US-led (nominally joint) operation, which was integral to the CIA’s signals interception operations in the southern hemisphere.
Whitlam’s threat to not renew the lease on the Pine Gap facility was allegedly seen by the CIA as compromising the integrity of intelligence operations pertaining to the satellite projects Rhyolite and Argus, used for monitoring and surveillance of missile launch sites in the Soviet Union and China, which were unknown to the Australian government at the time despite a blanket sharing agreement between the two countries.
Kerr denied any CIA involvement and Whitlam said Kerr did not need any encouragement from the CIA to sack him, and also denied his involvement in private communications, although Kerr allegedly maintained several links to CIA-funded organisations such as LawAsia and the magazine Quadrant, and was referred to as “Our Man” by the CIA according to whistle-blower and leaker Christopher John Boyce.
The action of an unelected representative sacking an elected Prime Minister and replacing him with a caretaker prime minister caused the 1975 Australian Constitutional Crisis, referred to by Australian Labor Party and former Member of the House of Representatives Peter Staples as “the most blatant act of external interference in Australia’s affairs and its autonomy as a nation and a democracy”.
SCIENCE said:
roughbarked said:
esselte said:
“I am going to put tariffs on other countries coming into our country, and that has nothing to do with taxes to us. That is a tax on another country,” Trump said.
In September, he repeated the claim during an interview with Fox News: “It’s not a tax on the middle class. It’s a tax on another country.”
And he said again during a rally in Wisconsin Saturday that “it’s not going to be a cost to you, it’s going to be a cost to another country.”
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/09/09/politics/fact-check-trump-vance-tariffs/index.html
and nobody is game to convince him of the truth?
regardless someone is going to explode everyone’s brains in a moment with the revelation that even the world economy itself is just a bunch of international moneys cycling around the system without any coming from outside
:) that’s why they made it round, to go round.
sarahs mum said:
kii said:
sarahs mum said:sigh.
Exactly. He’s either pretending to be stupid or he really is stupid.
I don’t find it hard to believe because in the late 70s I was together with an ex-CIA agent. Nugan Hand bank times.
So who really killed Frank Nugan?
The Rev Dodgson said:
For the benefit of d-s and myself, and any other ignoramuses out there:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alleged_CIA_involvement_in_the_Whitlam_dismissal
CIA involvement in the Whitlam dismissal was the alleged involvement of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the dismissal of Prime Minister of Australia Gough Whitlam by Governor-General of Australia John Kerr, who had several ties to the CIA and predecessor.
As documented by CIA whistleblower Christopher John Boyce and several authors, including John Pilger, as well as some Australian politicians, the CIA allegedly backed Governor-General and representative of Queen Elizabeth II in Australia, Kerr, to dismiss Whitlam, due to Whitlam’s perceived left-wing policies including Australian withdrawal from the Vietnam War, as well as his views on Australian sovereignty. His conflict with the CIA is alleged to have come to a head when he discovered several CIA-led operations occurring in Australia and overseas conducted by ASIO and ASIS, leading him to threaten cancellation of the lease on the Pine Gap facility, ending the US-led (nominally joint) operation, which was integral to the CIA’s signals interception operations in the southern hemisphere.
Whitlam’s threat to not renew the lease on the Pine Gap facility was allegedly seen by the CIA as compromising the integrity of intelligence operations pertaining to the satellite projects Rhyolite and Argus, used for monitoring and surveillance of missile launch sites in the Soviet Union and China, which were unknown to the Australian government at the time despite a blanket sharing agreement between the two countries.
Kerr denied any CIA involvement and Whitlam said Kerr did not need any encouragement from the CIA to sack him, and also denied his involvement in private communications, although Kerr allegedly maintained several links to CIA-funded organisations such as LawAsia and the magazine Quadrant, and was referred to as “Our Man” by the CIA according to whistle-blower and leaker Christopher John Boyce.
The action of an unelected representative sacking an elected Prime Minister and replacing him with a caretaker prime minister caused the 1975 Australian Constitutional Crisis, referred to by Australian Labor Party and former Member of the House of Representatives Peter Staples as “the most blatant act of external interference in Australia’s affairs and its autonomy as a nation and a democracy”.
Knew about that back then but it will be good to read up and refresh the brian.
roughbarked said:
sarahs mum said:
kii said:
Exactly. He’s either pretending to be stupid or he really is stupid.
I don’t find it hard to believe because in the late 70s I was together with an ex-CIA agent. Nugan Hand bank times.
So who really killed Frank Nugan?
also
NSW Attorney General, Frank Walker, insisted that from the government’s perspective, having good relations between ASIO and the CIA was more important than bringing criminals to justice.
hey is there a rhyme with the current sit
The Rev Dodgson said:
For the benefit of d-s and myself, and any other ignoramuses out there:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alleged_CIA_involvement_in_the_Whitlam_dismissal
CIA involvement in the Whitlam dismissal was the alleged involvement of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the dismissal of Prime Minister of Australia Gough Whitlam by Governor-General of Australia John Kerr, who had several ties to the CIA and predecessor.
As documented by CIA whistleblower Christopher John Boyce and several authors, including John Pilger, as well as some Australian politicians, the CIA allegedly backed Governor-General and representative of Queen Elizabeth II in Australia, Kerr, to dismiss Whitlam, due to Whitlam’s perceived left-wing policies including Australian withdrawal from the Vietnam War, as well as his views on Australian sovereignty. His conflict with the CIA is alleged to have come to a head when he discovered several CIA-led operations occurring in Australia and overseas conducted by ASIO and ASIS, leading him to threaten cancellation of the lease on the Pine Gap facility, ending the US-led (nominally joint) operation, which was integral to the CIA’s signals interception operations in the southern hemisphere.
Whitlam’s threat to not renew the lease on the Pine Gap facility was allegedly seen by the CIA as compromising the integrity of intelligence operations pertaining to the satellite projects Rhyolite and Argus, used for monitoring and surveillance of missile launch sites in the Soviet Union and China, which were unknown to the Australian government at the time despite a blanket sharing agreement between the two countries.
Kerr denied any CIA involvement and Whitlam said Kerr did not need any encouragement from the CIA to sack him, and also denied his involvement in private communications, although Kerr allegedly maintained several links to CIA-funded organisations such as LawAsia and the magazine Quadrant, and was referred to as “Our Man” by the CIA according to whistle-blower and leaker Christopher John Boyce.
The action of an unelected representative sacking an elected Prime Minister and replacing him with a caretaker prime minister caused the 1975 Australian Constitutional Crisis, referred to by Australian Labor Party and former Member of the House of Representatives Peter Staples as “the most blatant act of external interference in Australia’s affairs and its autonomy as a nation and a democracy”.
If true that is certainty an example of interference.. if only it had been proven.. I also read up on the Nugan Hand Bank, which is also interesting, but didn’t really involve any interference with our politics.
all said though, I’m still struggling to draw any lines between the US and political bullying here in Aust.
Like Switzerland has a population of 8.8 million. The USA is llike 340 milliion.
diddly-squat said:
The Rev Dodgson said:
For the benefit of d-s and myself, and any other ignoramuses out there:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alleged_CIA_involvement_in_the_Whitlam_dismissal
CIA involvement in the Whitlam dismissal was the alleged involvement of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the dismissal of Prime Minister of Australia Gough Whitlam by Governor-General of Australia John Kerr, who had several ties to the CIA and predecessor.
As documented by CIA whistleblower Christopher John Boyce and several authors, including John Pilger, as well as some Australian politicians, the CIA allegedly backed Governor-General and representative of Queen Elizabeth II in Australia, Kerr, to dismiss Whitlam, due to Whitlam’s perceived left-wing policies including Australian withdrawal from the Vietnam War, as well as his views on Australian sovereignty. His conflict with the CIA is alleged to have come to a head when he discovered several CIA-led operations occurring in Australia and overseas conducted by ASIO and ASIS, leading him to threaten cancellation of the lease on the Pine Gap facility, ending the US-led (nominally joint) operation, which was integral to the CIA’s signals interception operations in the southern hemisphere.
Whitlam’s threat to not renew the lease on the Pine Gap facility was allegedly seen by the CIA as compromising the integrity of intelligence operations pertaining to the satellite projects Rhyolite and Argus, used for monitoring and surveillance of missile launch sites in the Soviet Union and China, which were unknown to the Australian government at the time despite a blanket sharing agreement between the two countries.
Kerr denied any CIA involvement and Whitlam said Kerr did not need any encouragement from the CIA to sack him, and also denied his involvement in private communications, although Kerr allegedly maintained several links to CIA-funded organisations such as LawAsia and the magazine Quadrant, and was referred to as “Our Man” by the CIA according to whistle-blower and leaker Christopher John Boyce.
The action of an unelected representative sacking an elected Prime Minister and replacing him with a caretaker prime minister caused the 1975 Australian Constitutional Crisis, referred to by Australian Labor Party and former Member of the House of Representatives Peter Staples as “the most blatant act of external interference in Australia’s affairs and its autonomy as a nation and a democracy”.
If true that is certainty an example of interference.. if only it had been proven.. I also read up on the Nugan Hand Bank, which is also interesting, but didn’t really involve any interference with our politics.
all said though, I’m still struggling to draw any lines between the US and political bullying here in Aust.
There was a slight amount of it at the Battle of Brisbane 1942.
roughbarked said:
sarahs mum said:
kii said:Exactly. He’s either pretending to be stupid or he really is stupid.
I don’t find it hard to believe because in the late 70s I was together with an ex-CIA agent. Nugan Hand bank times.
So who really killed Frank Nugan?
the last thing Nuga was heard to say was that the Nugan Hand org could get rid of anybody.
diddly-squat said:
The Rev Dodgson said:
For the benefit of d-s and myself, and any other ignoramuses out there:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alleged_CIA_involvement_in_the_Whitlam_dismissal
CIA involvement in the Whitlam dismissal was the alleged involvement of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the dismissal of Prime Minister of Australia Gough Whitlam by Governor-General of Australia John Kerr, who had several ties to the CIA and predecessor.
As documented by CIA whistleblower Christopher John Boyce and several authors, including John Pilger, as well as some Australian politicians, the CIA allegedly backed Governor-General and representative of Queen Elizabeth II in Australia, Kerr, to dismiss Whitlam, due to Whitlam’s perceived left-wing policies including Australian withdrawal from the Vietnam War, as well as his views on Australian sovereignty. His conflict with the CIA is alleged to have come to a head when he discovered several CIA-led operations occurring in Australia and overseas conducted by ASIO and ASIS, leading him to threaten cancellation of the lease on the Pine Gap facility, ending the US-led (nominally joint) operation, which was integral to the CIA’s signals interception operations in the southern hemisphere.
Whitlam’s threat to not renew the lease on the Pine Gap facility was allegedly seen by the CIA as compromising the integrity of intelligence operations pertaining to the satellite projects Rhyolite and Argus, used for monitoring and surveillance of missile launch sites in the Soviet Union and China, which were unknown to the Australian government at the time despite a blanket sharing agreement between the two countries.
Kerr denied any CIA involvement and Whitlam said Kerr did not need any encouragement from the CIA to sack him, and also denied his involvement in private communications, although Kerr allegedly maintained several links to CIA-funded organisations such as LawAsia and the magazine Quadrant, and was referred to as “Our Man” by the CIA according to whistle-blower and leaker Christopher John Boyce.
The action of an unelected representative sacking an elected Prime Minister and replacing him with a caretaker prime minister caused the 1975 Australian Constitutional Crisis, referred to by Australian Labor Party and former Member of the House of Representatives Peter Staples as “the most blatant act of external interference in Australia’s affairs and its autonomy as a nation and a democracy”.
If true that is certainty an example of interference.. if only it had been proven.. I also read up on the Nugan Hand Bank, which is also interesting, but didn’t really involve any interference with our politics.
all said though, I’m still struggling to draw any lines between the US and political bullying here in Aust.
You don’t think the USA had some influence in Australia’s decisions to aid them in Vietnam and Iraq?
The Rev Dodgson said:
diddly-squat said:
The Rev Dodgson said:
For the benefit of d-s and myself, and any other ignoramuses out there:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alleged_CIA_involvement_in_the_Whitlam_dismissal
CIA involvement in the Whitlam dismissal was the alleged involvement of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the dismissal of Prime Minister of Australia Gough Whitlam by Governor-General of Australia John Kerr, who had several ties to the CIA and predecessor.
As documented by CIA whistleblower Christopher John Boyce and several authors, including John Pilger, as well as some Australian politicians, the CIA allegedly backed Governor-General and representative of Queen Elizabeth II in Australia, Kerr, to dismiss Whitlam, due to Whitlam’s perceived left-wing policies including Australian withdrawal from the Vietnam War, as well as his views on Australian sovereignty. His conflict with the CIA is alleged to have come to a head when he discovered several CIA-led operations occurring in Australia and overseas conducted by ASIO and ASIS, leading him to threaten cancellation of the lease on the Pine Gap facility, ending the US-led (nominally joint) operation, which was integral to the CIA’s signals interception operations in the southern hemisphere.
Whitlam’s threat to not renew the lease on the Pine Gap facility was allegedly seen by the CIA as compromising the integrity of intelligence operations pertaining to the satellite projects Rhyolite and Argus, used for monitoring and surveillance of missile launch sites in the Soviet Union and China, which were unknown to the Australian government at the time despite a blanket sharing agreement between the two countries.
Kerr denied any CIA involvement and Whitlam said Kerr did not need any encouragement from the CIA to sack him, and also denied his involvement in private communications, although Kerr allegedly maintained several links to CIA-funded organisations such as LawAsia and the magazine Quadrant, and was referred to as “Our Man” by the CIA according to whistle-blower and leaker Christopher John Boyce.
The action of an unelected representative sacking an elected Prime Minister and replacing him with a caretaker prime minister caused the 1975 Australian Constitutional Crisis, referred to by Australian Labor Party and former Member of the House of Representatives Peter Staples as “the most blatant act of external interference in Australia’s affairs and its autonomy as a nation and a democracy”.
If true that is certainty an example of interference.. if only it had been proven.. I also read up on the Nugan Hand Bank, which is also interesting, but didn’t really involve any interference with our politics.
all said though, I’m still struggling to draw any lines between the US and political bullying here in Aust.
You don’t think the USA had some influence in Australia’s decisions to aid them in Vietnam and Iraq?
tacit synchronisation is not collusion
The Rev Dodgson said:
For the benefit of d-s and myself, and any other ignoramuses out there:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alleged_CIA_involvement_in_the_Whitlam_dismissal
CIA involvement in the Whitlam dismissal was the alleged involvement of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the dismissal of Prime Minister of Australia Gough Whitlam by Governor-General of Australia John Kerr, who had several ties to the CIA and predecessor.
As documented by CIA whistleblower Christopher John Boyce and several authors, including John Pilger, as well as some Australian politicians, the CIA allegedly backed Governor-General and representative of Queen Elizabeth II in Australia, Kerr, to dismiss Whitlam, due to Whitlam’s perceived left-wing policies including Australian withdrawal from the Vietnam War, as well as his views on Australian sovereignty. His conflict with the CIA is alleged to have come to a head when he discovered several CIA-led operations occurring in Australia and overseas conducted by ASIO and ASIS, leading him to threaten cancellation of the lease on the Pine Gap facility, ending the US-led (nominally joint) operation, which was integral to the CIA’s signals interception operations in the southern hemisphere.
Whitlam’s threat to not renew the lease on the Pine Gap facility was allegedly seen by the CIA as compromising the integrity of intelligence operations pertaining to the satellite projects Rhyolite and Argus, used for monitoring and surveillance of missile launch sites in the Soviet Union and China, which were unknown to the Australian government at the time despite a blanket sharing agreement between the two countries.
Kerr denied any CIA involvement and Whitlam said Kerr did not need any encouragement from the CIA to sack him, and also denied his involvement in private communications, although Kerr allegedly maintained several links to CIA-funded organisations such as LawAsia and the magazine Quadrant, and was referred to as “Our Man” by the CIA according to whistle-blower and leaker Christopher John Boyce.
The action of an unelected representative sacking an elected Prime Minister and replacing him with a caretaker prime minister caused the 1975 Australian Constitutional Crisis, referred to by Australian Labor Party and former Member of the House of Representatives Peter Staples as “the most blatant act of external interference in Australia’s affairs and its autonomy as a nation and a democracy”.
Ooo, I wonder if Quadrant is still CIA funded. Some dear academic friends have had some choice words to say about that publication….and Keith Windschuttle….
The Rev Dodgson said:
diddly-squat said:
The Rev Dodgson said:
For the benefit of d-s and myself, and any other ignoramuses out there:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alleged_CIA_involvement_in_the_Whitlam_dismissal
CIA involvement in the Whitlam dismissal was the alleged involvement of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the dismissal of Prime Minister of Australia Gough Whitlam by Governor-General of Australia John Kerr, who had several ties to the CIA and predecessor.
As documented by CIA whistleblower Christopher John Boyce and several authors, including John Pilger, as well as some Australian politicians, the CIA allegedly backed Governor-General and representative of Queen Elizabeth II in Australia, Kerr, to dismiss Whitlam, due to Whitlam’s perceived left-wing policies including Australian withdrawal from the Vietnam War, as well as his views on Australian sovereignty. His conflict with the CIA is alleged to have come to a head when he discovered several CIA-led operations occurring in Australia and overseas conducted by ASIO and ASIS, leading him to threaten cancellation of the lease on the Pine Gap facility, ending the US-led (nominally joint) operation, which was integral to the CIA’s signals interception operations in the southern hemisphere.
Whitlam’s threat to not renew the lease on the Pine Gap facility was allegedly seen by the CIA as compromising the integrity of intelligence operations pertaining to the satellite projects Rhyolite and Argus, used for monitoring and surveillance of missile launch sites in the Soviet Union and China, which were unknown to the Australian government at the time despite a blanket sharing agreement between the two countries.
Kerr denied any CIA involvement and Whitlam said Kerr did not need any encouragement from the CIA to sack him, and also denied his involvement in private communications, although Kerr allegedly maintained several links to CIA-funded organisations such as LawAsia and the magazine Quadrant, and was referred to as “Our Man” by the CIA according to whistle-blower and leaker Christopher John Boyce.
The action of an unelected representative sacking an elected Prime Minister and replacing him with a caretaker prime minister caused the 1975 Australian Constitutional Crisis, referred to by Australian Labor Party and former Member of the House of Representatives Peter Staples as “the most blatant act of external interference in Australia’s affairs and its autonomy as a nation and a democracy”.
If true that is certainty an example of interference.. if only it had been proven.. I also read up on the Nugan Hand Bank, which is also interesting, but didn’t really involve any interference with our politics.
all said though, I’m still struggling to draw any lines between the US and political bullying here in Aust.
You don’t think the USA had some influence in Australia’s decisions to aid them in Vietnam and Iraq?
I mean sure, allies support each other.
But the point was that the US bullies other nations into doing things. If a nations goes to war, generally its allies support it.
SCIENCE said:
OK so we would have thought that anyone thinking of travel to USSA right now has more pressing concerns than
The Australian dollar spent only around week below 60 cents in March 2020, amid the global pandemic panic. “For anyone planning a trip to the US, the more relevant time period is 2002-2003 — the last time the Aussie dollar’s purchasing power against the US dollar was so weak,” Mr Callow noted. The Australian dollar is also considered a so-called commodities currency — that is, its value is derived from the performance of commodities, which all fell heavily overnight.
the currency exchange rate but then we realised that it’s all rich angry old white cisgender men going there so yes all fine then.
It’s very good for my US$.
SCIENCE said:
kii said:
sarahs mum said:
sigh.
Exactly. He’s either pretending to be stupid or he really is stupid.
Old El Paso
Mmm…wads.
SCIENCE said:
The Rev Dodgson said:
diddly-squat said:
If true that is certainty an example of interference.. if only it had been proven.. I also read up on the Nugan Hand Bank, which is also interesting, but didn’t really involve any interference with our politics.
all said though, I’m still struggling to draw any lines between the US and political bullying here in Aust.
You don’t think the USA had some influence in Australia’s decisions to aid them in Vietnam and Iraq?
tacit synchronisation is not collusion
sarahs mum said:
kii said:
sarahs mum said:sigh.
Exactly. He’s either pretending to be stupid or he really is stupid.
I don’t find it hard to believe because in the late 70s I was together with an ex-CIA agent. Nugan Hand bank times.
The CIA interference was often discussed around my parents’ kitchen table in Brisbane. Beer, boiled peanuts and loud opinions. I’d often dissociate and watch the 6 cats loitering around the room.
dv said:
SCIENCE said:
The Rev Dodgson said:
You don’t think the USA had some influence in Australia’s decisions to aid them in Vietnam and Iraq?
tacit synchronisation is not collusion
maybe CHINA really are going to save the world this millennium
diddly-squat said:
The Rev Dodgson said:
diddly-squat said:If true that is certainty an example of interference.. if only it had been proven.. I also read up on the Nugan Hand Bank, which is also interesting, but didn’t really involve any interference with our politics.
all said though, I’m still struggling to draw any lines between the US and political bullying here in Aust.
You don’t think the USA had some influence in Australia’s decisions to aid them in Vietnam and Iraq?
I mean sure, allies support each other.
But the point was that the US bullies other nations into doing things.
I remember some troubling times in South America in the 70s…..
Thanks Wikipedia (there is more here than I knew about- yikes) – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_regime_change_in_Latin_America
diddly-squat said:
The Rev Dodgson said:
diddly-squat said:If true that is certainty an example of interference.. if only it had been proven.. I also read up on the Nugan Hand Bank, which is also interesting, but didn’t really involve any interference with our politics.
all said though, I’m still struggling to draw any lines between the US and political bullying here in Aust.
You don’t think the USA had some influence in Australia’s decisions to aid them in Vietnam and Iraq?
I mean sure, allies support each other.
But the point was that the US bullies other nations into doing things. If a nations goes to war, generally its allies support it.
OK, but I wasn’t talking about bullying. I was responding to:
“I can’t think of an instance where the US has tried to influence our government or intervene in our politics.”
So I gave 2 (of many) cases where the USA has directly influenced the Australian government.
You can say that is just what allies do, but not all US allies were involved in those conflicts. (And in the case of Vietnam, I’m very lucky that the UK was not involved.)
ruby said:
diddly-squat said:
The Rev Dodgson said:
You don’t think the USA had some influence in Australia’s decisions to aid them in Vietnam and Iraq?
I mean sure, allies support each other.
But the point was that the US bullies other nations into doing things.
I remember some troubling times in South America in the 70s…..
Thanks Wikipedia (there is more here than I knew about- yikes) – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_regime_change_in_Latin_America
what about research and escort ships cruising around the nearby high seas, if it’s done by regional superpowers who speak a different language is it bullying, if it’s done by shared history common language speakers is it just allied moral support and encouragement
“maybe”
The United States is the richest country in the history of the world. Of course we have a trade deficit—we will always buy more from other countries than we sell to them. That’s what happens when you’re wealthy: you consume more. The only way to “fix” this would be to make Americans poorer. Maybe that’s been the plan all along.
surprised face
SCIENCE said:
“maybe”
The United States is the richest country in the history of the world. Of course we have a trade deficit—we will always buy more from other countries than we sell to them. That’s what happens when you’re wealthy: you consume more. The only way to “fix” this would be to make Americans poorer. Maybe that’s been the plan all along.
surprised face
I mean some wealthy countries run a current account surplus, including one to the south of Indonesia.
SCIENCE said:
“maybe”
The United States is the richest country in the history of the world. Of course we have a trade deficit—we will always buy more from other countries than we sell to them. That’s what happens when you’re wealthy: you consume more. The only way to “fix” this would be to make Americans poorer. Maybe that’s been the plan all along.
surprised face
dv said:
SCIENCE said:
“maybe”
The United States is the richest country in the history of the world. Of course we have a trade deficit—we will always buy more from other countries than we sell to them. That’s what happens when you’re wealthy: you consume more. The only way to “fix” this would be to make Americans poorer. Maybe that’s been the plan all along.
surprised face
I mean some wealthy countries run a current account surplus, including one to the south of Indonesia.
so the USSA should go back to mining and farming and educating sleeper agents from CHINA at its tertiary education institutions
The Rev Dodgson said:
You don’t think the USA had some influence in Australia’s decisions to aid them in Vietnam and Iraq?
Australia getting involved in Vietnam was due to quite strenuous efforts of the Australian government of the time to get in involved in Vietnam.
The Americans were rather ambivalent about it, as were the South Vietnamese, while the Australian gfovernment was doing everything it could to make a case for Australia to be part of whatever the US was up to in Vietnam, and trying to finagle an invitation from the South Vietnamese to send Australian forces in.
You don’t have to take my word for it. I can recommend the book ‘War for the Asking : Australia’s Vietnam Secrets’ by Michael Sexton (First published January 1, 1981), which, as one summary says, ‘… brings to light the papers that documents such facts as these :
captain_spalding said:
The Rev Dodgson said:You don’t think the USA had some influence in Australia’s decisions to aid them in Vietnam and Iraq?
Australia getting involved in Vietnam was due to quite strenuous efforts of the Australian government of the time to get in involved in Vietnam.
The Americans were rather ambivalent about it, as were the South Vietnamese, while the Australian gfovernment was doing everything it could to make a case for Australia to be part of whatever the US was up to in Vietnam, and trying to finagle an invitation from the South Vietnamese to send Australian forces in.
You don’t have to take my word for it. I can recommend the book ‘War for the Asking : Australia’s Vietnam Secrets’ by Michael Sexton (First published January 1, 1981), which, as one summary says, ‘… brings to light the papers that documents such facts as these :
- Australia’s early volunteering of combat troops
- Australia’s urging of the Americans to escalate the war by bombing North Vietnam
- Australia’s indifference to the wishes of the government in South Vietnam it purported to defend’.
Oh well, got that one wrong then.
In my defence, I wasn’t here at the time.
The Rev Dodgson said:
captain_spalding said:
The Rev Dodgson said:You don’t think the USA had some influence in Australia’s decisions to aid them in Vietnam and Iraq?
Australia getting involved in Vietnam was due to quite strenuous efforts of the Australian government of the time to get in involved in Vietnam.
The Americans were rather ambivalent about it, as were the South Vietnamese, while the Australian gfovernment was doing everything it could to make a case for Australia to be part of whatever the US was up to in Vietnam, and trying to finagle an invitation from the South Vietnamese to send Australian forces in.
You don’t have to take my word for it. I can recommend the book ‘War for the Asking : Australia’s Vietnam Secrets’ by Michael Sexton (First published January 1, 1981), which, as one summary says, ‘… brings to light the papers that documents such facts as these :
- Australia’s early volunteering of combat troops
- Australia’s urging of the Americans to escalate the war by bombing North Vietnam
- Australia’s indifference to the wishes of the government in South Vietnam it purported to defend’.
Oh well, got that one wrong then.
In my defence, I wasn’t here at the time.
99.5% of Australians would probably also imagine that the US talked Australia into Vietnam.
Heather Cox Richardson
1h ·
April 8, 2025 (Tuesday)
Stocks were up early today as traders put their hopes in Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s suggestion that the Trump administration was open to negotiations for lowering Trump’s proposed tariffs. But then U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said there would not be exemptions from the tariffs for individual products or companies, and President Donald J. Trump said he was going forward with 104% tariffs on China, effective at 12:01 am on Wednesday.
Markets fell again. By the end of the day, the Dow Jones Industrial Average had fallen by another 320 points, or 0.8%, a 52-week low. The S&P 500 fell 1.6% and the Nasdaq Composite fell 2.2%.
Rob Copeland, Maureen Farrell, and Lauren Hirsch of the New York Times reported today that over the weekend, Wall Street billionaires tried desperately and unsuccessfully to change Trump’s mind on tariffs. This week they have begun to go public, calling out what they call the “stupidity” of the new measures.
These industry leaders, the reporters write, did not expect Trump to place such high tariffs on so many products and are shocked to find themselves outside the corridors of power where the tariff decisions have been made.
Elon Musk is one of the people Trump is ignoring to side with Peter Navarro, his senior counselor for trade and manufacturing. Navarro went to prison for refusing to answer a congressional subpoena for information regarding Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Since Musk poured $290 million into getting Trump elected in 2024 and then burst into the news with his “Department of Government Efficiency,” he has seemed to be in control of the administration. But he has stolen the limelight from Trump, and it appears Trump’s patience with him might be wearing thin.
Elizabeth Dwoskin, Faiz Siddiqui, Pranshu Verma, and Trisha Thadani of the Washington Post reported today that Musk was among those who worked over the weekend to get Trump to end his new tariffs. When Musk failed to change the president’s mind, he took to social media to attack Navarro personally, saying the trade advisor is “truly a moron,” and “dumber than a sack of bricks.”
Asked about the public fight between two of Trump’s advisors—two of the most powerful men in the world—White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters: “Boys will be boys.”
Business interests hard hit by the proposed tariffs are less inclined to dismiss the men in the administration as madcap kids. They are certainly not letting Musk shift the blame for the economic crisis off Trump and onto Navarro.
The right-wing New Civil Liberties Alliance, which is backed by billionaire Republican donor Charles Koch, has filed a lawsuit claiming that Trump’s tariffs against China are not permitted under the law. It argues that the president’s claim that he can impose sweeping tariffs by using the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) is misguided. It notes that the Constitution gives to Congress, not the president, the power to levy tariffs.
With Trump’s extraordinary tariffs now threatening the global economy, some of those who once cheered on his dictatorial impulses are now recalling the checks and balances they were previously willing to undermine.
Today the editors of the right-wing National Review urged Congress to take back the power it has ceded to Trump, calling it “preposterous that a single person could enjoy this much power over…the global economy.” They decried the ”raw chaos” of the last week that has made it impossible for any business to plan for the future.
“What has happened since last Thursday is hard to fathom,” they write. “Based on an ever-shifting series of rationales, characterized by an embarrassing methodology, and punctuated with an extraordinary arrogance toward the country’s constitutional order, the Trump administration has alienated our global allies, discombobulated our domestic businesses, decimated our capital markets, and increased the likelihood of serious recession.” While this should worry all Americans, they write, Republicans in particular should remember that in less than two years, they “will be judged in large part on whether the president who shares their brand has done a good job.”
“No free man wants to be at the mercy of a king,” they write.
Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) told the Senate yesterday: “I don’t care if the president is a Republican or a Democrat. I don’t want to live under emergency rule. I don’t want to live where my representatives cannot speak for me and have a check and balance on power.”
Adam Cancryn and Myah Ward reported in Politico today that Republican leaders are worried about Trump’s voters abandoning him as prices go up and their savings and jobs disappear. After all, voters elected Trump at least in part because he promised to lower inflation and spur the economy. “It’s a question of what the pain threshold is for the American people and the Republican voters,” one of Trump’s economic advisors told the reporters. “We’ve all lost a lot of money.”
MAGA influencers have begun to talk of the tariffs as a way to make the United States “manly” again, by bringing old-time manufacturing and mining back to the U.S. Writer Rotimi Adeoye today noted MAGA’s glorification of physical labor as a sort of moral purification. Adeoye points out how MAGA performs an identity that fetishizes “rural life, manual labor, and a kind of fake rugged masculinity.” That image—and the tradwife image that complements it—recalls an imagined American past. In reality, the 1960s manufacturing economy MAGA influencers appear to be celebrating depended on high rates of unionization and taxation, and on government investing heavily in infrastructure, including healthcare and education.
Adeoye notes that Trump is marketing the image of a world in which ordinary workers had a shot at prosperity, but his tariffs will not bring that world back.
In a larger sense, Trump’s undermining of the global economy reflects forty years of Republican emphasis on the myth that a true American man is an individual who operates outside the community, needs nothing from the government, and asserts his will by dominating others.
Associated with the American cowboy, that myth became central to the culture of Reagan’s America as a way for Republican politicians to convince voters to support the destruction of federal government programs that benefited them. Over time, those embracing that individualist vision came to dismiss all government policies that promoted social cooperation, whether at home or abroad, replacing that cooperation with the idea that strong men should dominate society, ordering it as they thought best.
The Trump administration has taken that idea to an extreme, gutting the U.S. government and centering power in the president, while also pulling the U.S. out of the web of international organizations that have stabilized the globe since World War II. In place of that cooperation, the Trump administration wants to invest $1 trillion in the military. It is not just exercising dominance over others, it is reveling in that dominance, especially over the migrants it has sent to prison in El Salvador. It has shown films of them being transported in chains and has displayed caged prisoners behind Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who was wearing a $50,000 gold Rolex watch.
Now Trump is demonstrating his power over the global economy, rejecting the conviction of past American leaders that true power and prosperity rest in cooperation. Trump has always seen power as a zero-sum game in which for one party to win, others must lose, so he appears incapable of understanding that global trade does not mean the U.S. is getting “ripped off.” Now he appears unconcerned that other countries could work together against the U.S. and seems to assume they will have to do what he says.
We’ll see.
For his part, Trump appears to be enjoying that he is now undoubtedly the center of attention. Asked to make “dinner remarks” at the National Republican Congressional Committee tonight, he spoke for close to two hours. Discussing the tariffs, he delivered a story with the “sir” marker that indicates the story is false: “These countries are calling us up. Kissing my ass,” he told the audience. “They are dying to make a deal. “Please, please, sir, make a deal. I’ll do anything. I’ll do anything, sir. And then I’ll see some rebel Republican, you know, some guy that wants to grandstand, saying: ‘I think that Congress should take over negotiations.’ Let me tell you: you don’t negotiate like I negotiate.”
Trump also told the audience that “I really think we’re helped a lot by the tariff situation that’s going on, which is a good situation, not a bad. It’s great. It’s going to be legendary, you watch. Legendary in a positive way, I have to say. It’s gonna be legendary.”
I think that it would be ‘regrettable’ to let Rachel Maddow within punching distance of Donald Trump.
‘Maddow blasts Trump’s ‘terrible, absolutely ridiculous way to run a government’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_4k7di1EZk
(7 min 33 secs)
captain_spalding said:
:)
I think that it would be ‘regrettable’ to let Rachel Maddow within punching distance of Donald Trump.‘Maddow blasts Trump’s ‘terrible, absolutely ridiculous way to run a government’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_4k7di1EZk
(7 min 33 secs)
watched that an hour or so ago.
The Rev Dodgson said:
diddly-squat said:
The Rev Dodgson said:You don’t think the USA had some influence in Australia’s decisions to aid them in Vietnam and Iraq?
I mean sure, allies support each other.
But the point was that the US bullies other nations into doing things. If a nations goes to war, generally its allies support it.
OK, but I wasn’t talking about bullying. I was responding to:
“I can’t think of an instance where the US has tried to influence our government or intervene in our politics.”
So I gave 2 (of many) cases where the USA has directly influenced the Australian government.
You can say that is just what allies do, but not all US allies were involved in those conflicts. (And in the case of Vietnam, I’m very lucky that the UK was not involved.)
I apologize, in hindsight I should have been clearer.. I guess what I meant is that “I can’t think of an instance where the US has tried to coerce our government into doing something it didn’t want to do”.
In both cases you mention Australia entered as a willing participant.
sarahs mum said:
“These countries are calling us up. Kissing my ass,” he told the audience. “They are dying to make a deal. “Please, please, sir, make a deal. I’ll do anything. I’ll do anything, sir. And then I’ll see some rebel Republican, you know, some guy that wants to grandstand, saying: ‘I think that Congress should take over negotiations.’ Let me tell you: you don’t negotiate like I negotiate.”
Trump also told the audience that “I really think we’re helped a lot by the tariff situation that’s going on, which is a good situation, not a bad. It’s great. It’s going to be legendary, you watch. Legendary in a positive way, I have to say. It’s gonna be legendary.”
so the USSA really could get more benefits by throwing its weight around as it should have done long ago
Chrisoula Baikos
7 April at 23:31 ·
He’s setting us up for Martial Law….just in case y’all were wondering how he plans on dealing with the backlash he’s receiving. April 20. What do stupid abusive narcissistic men do when they’re outrageously uncomfortable and widely hated by the majority of the planet??? This. So as bad as things are now, they will get worse if he’s not stopped.
***************************************************
Credit to: Tony Pentimalli
This Is Not a Drill: Trump’s Day-One Order Sets the Stage for Martial Law
By Tony Pentimalli
On January 20, 2025, while the press focused on the optics of Donald Trump’s indoor inauguration, something far more dangerous was set in motion—off-camera, away from ceremony, and beneath the radar of a public lulled by spectacle.
Trump signed an executive order declaring a national emergency at the southern border. But the most alarming part? It gave the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security just 90 days to deliver a joint report on whether he should invoke the Insurrection Act.
That deadline is April 20.
This wasn’t about immigration. It was about power.
The Insurrection Act, passed in 1807, gives the president the authority to deploy the U.S. military on American soil. That means troops in our cities. That means bypassing governors. That means suspending protest rights. That means the death of democratic dissent—under the false pretense of restoring “order.”
And Trump’s not hiding it. He’s preparing it.
We’ve seen this before. In June 2020, after the murder of George Floyd, millions of Americans rose up in protest. Trump didn’t respond with compassion—he called for “domination.” When the military hesitated to invoke the Insurrection Act, Trump sent federal forces to violently clear peaceful protesters from Lafayette Square so he could wave a Bible in front of a church. Not an ounce of remorse followed. He was angry the generals didn’t go far enough.
This time, he’s made sure they won’t hesitate.
Since returning to power, Trump has purged the Pentagon of independent thinkers. In their place? Loyalists. Pete Hegseth is now Secretary of Defense. Tulsi Gabbard runs intelligence. And J.D. Vance—Vice President—is openly on board with using military force against Americans on American soil.
Then, on March 19, those three—Vance, Gabbard, and Hegseth—staged a photo op at the southern border. Not a routine visit. Not a strategy session. A performance.
Think about it. Why would the Vice President, the head of military intelligence, and the Defense Secretary all need to go to the border together? Why make a media spectacle of it?
Because it wasn’t about the border. It was about the optics. It was about laying the emotional groundwork for invoking the Insurrection Act. They were building the narrative. “We had to act.” “We had no choice.” “The crisis was too big.”
And what comes next?
It’s June 2025. Trump goes on national TV and declares that Democratic cities are under siege by “radicals” and “illegals.” He signs the Insurrection Act order. Troops hit the streets of Atlanta, Chicago, Philadelphia. Protesters are arrested under “emergency provisions.” Journalists are detained. Social media accounts vanish. Immigrants are swept into detention centers. The press is told to stand down. The public is told to shut up.
And it’s all legal.
Some of you might think, “He’s bluffing. The military won’t go along. The courts will stop him.”
Really?
Were they bluffing when federal agents brutalized peaceful protesters in Lafayette Square?
Did the military refuse? No. The National Guard was deployed. Many in uniform carried out the order. It was only later that a few expressed regret—after the damage was done.
Did the courts stop January 6? No. They prosecuted rioters after the fact, but the attack happened. Congress fled. Democracy was nearly strangled live on TV.
Did they stop the family separation policy? No. Thousands of children were taken from their parents before courts intervened—long after the trauma was inflicted.
Did they stop the Muslim ban? No. The Supreme Court upheld it. Entire families were stranded or banned simply because of where they came from.
Did they stop ICE raids or CBP abuses? Rarely. A handful of rulings. A few headlines. But the system kept grinding, unchecked and cruel.
So if you’re waiting for “the system” to save us, you’re waiting for something that has already failed.
The April 20 report is coming. If it recommends using the Insurrection Act—and let’s be honest, it will—Trump will frame it as a reluctant but necessary move. He’ll say he tried everything else. He’ll claim it’s about protecting America.
But what he’s really protecting is his own authority.
This is how authoritarianism arrives: not with tanks, but with legal memos, press events, and a scared public hoping someone else will stop it.
So what do we do?
We speak now. Loudly. Forcefully.
Call your representatives and demand they investigate Trump’s January 20 order.
Push the media to report on the Insurrection Act report before it’s too late.
Demand public statements from military and intelligence leaders—now, not after.
Organize. Educate. Resist.
If you’ve never joined a protest before, this is the moment.
If you’ve never spoken up politically, this is the time.
If you’ve never thought it could happen here—it already is.
The threat isn’t coming.
It’s here.
And silence is exactly what Trump is counting on.
Tony Pentimalli is a political analyst and commentator fighting for democracy, economic justice, and social equity. Follow him for sharp analysis and hard-hitting critiques.
https://youtu.be/gtJ-uUzXupI?si=Zc2Y4Zn1gTkES9vN
Legal Eagles: the legal issues around DJT’s use of executive orders to levy tariffs
sarahs mum said:
Credit to: Tony Pentimalli
This Is Not a Drill: Trump’s Day-One Order Sets the Stage for Martial Law
By Tony Pentimalli
On January 20, 2025, while the press focused on the optics of Donald Trump’s indoor inauguration, something far more dangerous was set in motion—off-camera, away from ceremony, and beneath the radar of a public lulled by spectacle.
Trump signed an executive order declaring a national emergency at the southern border. But the most alarming part? It gave the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security just 90 days to deliver a joint report on whether he should invoke the Insurrection Act.
That deadline is April 20.
From: Boris
Date: 5/02/2025 18:53:34
From: Boris
ID: 2246078
Subject: re: US Politics 2025
what I find funny is that people actually believe there will be mid-term elections that will be fair or even happen.
JudgeMental said:
sarahs mum said:Credit to: Tony Pentimalli
This Is Not a Drill: Trump’s Day-One Order Sets the Stage for Martial Law
By Tony Pentimalli
On January 20, 2025, while the press focused on the optics of Donald Trump’s indoor inauguration, something far more dangerous was set in motion—off-camera, away from ceremony, and beneath the radar of a public lulled by spectacle.
Trump signed an executive order declaring a national emergency at the southern border. But the most alarming part? It gave the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security just 90 days to deliver a joint report on whether he should invoke the Insurrection Act.
That deadline is April 20.From: Boris
Date: 5/02/2025 18:53:34
From: Boris
ID: 2246078
Subject: re: US Politics 2025what I find funny is that people actually believe there will be mid-term elections that will be fair or even happen.
The last elections weren’t even fair.
https://youtu.be/iFQnDMYaJgo?si=BNJ14sTH6K7DIE8u
TLDR: why have these tariffs had such a negative effect on markets
JudgeMental said:
sarahs mum said:Credit to: Tony Pentimalli
This Is Not a Drill: Trump’s Day-One Order Sets the Stage for Martial Law
By Tony Pentimalli
On January 20, 2025, while the press focused on the optics of Donald Trump’s indoor inauguration, something far more dangerous was set in motion—off-camera, away from ceremony, and beneath the radar of a public lulled by spectacle.
Trump signed an executive order declaring a national emergency at the southern border. But the most alarming part? It gave the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security just 90 days to deliver a joint report on whether he should invoke the Insurrection Act.
That deadline is April 20.From: Boris
Date: 5/02/2025 18:53:34
From: Boris
ID: 2246078
Subject: re: US Politics 2025what I find funny is that people actually believe there will be mid-term elections that will be fair or even happen.
no one wants to upset diddly.
fsm said:
:)
Kingy said:
JudgeMental said:
sarahs mum said:Credit to: Tony Pentimalli
This Is Not a Drill: Trump’s Day-One Order Sets the Stage for Martial Law
By Tony Pentimalli
On January 20, 2025, while the press focused on the optics of Donald Trump’s indoor inauguration, something far more dangerous was set in motion—off-camera, away from ceremony, and beneath the radar of a public lulled by spectacle.
Trump signed an executive order declaring a national emergency at the southern border. But the most alarming part? It gave the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security just 90 days to deliver a joint report on whether he should invoke the Insurrection Act.
That deadline is April 20.From: Boris
Date: 5/02/2025 18:53:34
From: Boris
ID: 2246078
Subject: re: US Politics 2025what I find funny is that people actually believe there will be mid-term elections that will be fair or even happen.
The last elections weren’t even fair.
Quite possibly not.
sarahs mum said:
JudgeMental said:
sarahs mum said:Credit to: Tony Pentimalli
This Is Not a Drill: Trump’s Day-One Order Sets the Stage for Martial Law
By Tony Pentimalli
On January 20, 2025, while the press focused on the optics of Donald Trump’s indoor inauguration, something far more dangerous was set in motion—off-camera, away from ceremony, and beneath the radar of a public lulled by spectacle.
Trump signed an executive order declaring a national emergency at the southern border. But the most alarming part? It gave the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security just 90 days to deliver a joint report on whether he should invoke the Insurrection Act.
That deadline is April 20.From: Boris
Date: 5/02/2025 18:53:34
From: Boris
ID: 2246078
Subject: re: US Politics 2025what I find funny is that people actually believe there will be mid-term elections that will be fair or even happen.
no one wants to upset diddly.
Lololol 😆
valid.
sarahs mum said:
valid.
Destroy the lives of millions of veterans, and people relying on social security, Insurrection Act deadline report is due April 20, trump’s birthday is early June.
Coincidence? I think not.
kii said:
sarahs mum said:
valid.
Destroy the lives of millions of veterans, and people relying on social security, Insurrection Act deadline report is due April 20, trump’s birthday is early June.
Coincidence? I think not.
it’s most definitely part of his birthday plans.
kii said:
sarahs mum said:
valid.
Destroy the lives of millions of veterans, and people relying on social security, Insurrection Act deadline report is due April 20, trump’s birthday is early June.
Coincidence? I think not.
Huh? April 20 is a long way away from early June. I don’t see the connection.
party_pants said:
kii said:
sarahs mum said:
valid.
Destroy the lives of millions of veterans, and people relying on social security, Insurrection Act deadline report is due April 20, trump’s birthday is early June.
Coincidence? I think not.
Huh? April 20 is a long way away from early June. I don’t see the connection.
You don’t?
They will test the waters prior to the parade. Like riling up some dissent around various issues, like provoking people waiting in line at Social Security offices, or at any organised rallies (I think there are more planned for this month).
kii said:
party_pants said:
sarahs mum said:
kii said:
sarahs mum said:
valid.
Destroy the lives of millions of veterans, and people relying on social security, Insurrection Act deadline report is due April 20, trump’s birthday is early June.
Coincidence? I think not.
it’s most definitely part of his birthday plans.
Huh? April 20 is a long way away from early June. I don’t see the connection.
You don’t?
They will test the waters prior to the parade. Like riling up some dissent around various issues, like provoking people waiting in line at Social Security offices, or at any organised rallies (I think there are more planned for this month).
well we guess a lot can happen in a month and a half but also he could just call it the moment it drops
genius
mmm yeah that saltpeter there is totally just for fertiliser
Have we posted this, from First Dog?
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/picture/2025/apr/07/so-you-want-to-go-to-the-usa-are-you-sure-heres-how-to-prepare-your-machines-for-trumpistan
“What is a Seppo”?
AussieDJ said:
Have we posted this, from First Dog?https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/picture/2025/apr/07/so-you-want-to-go-to-the-usa-are-you-sure-heres-how-to-prepare-your-machines-for-trumpistan
“What is a Seppo”?
I was once told that I am racist for calling Yanks – Seppos.
Do we pay enough attention to Kristi Noem? Remember she murdered her children’s young dog and a goat. Dog for being not trained properly – she was training it. Goat for being a…well, a goat…smelly and head-butting kids.
She is now Secretary of Homeland Defence. She cosplays as a Border Patrol agent.
She’s also part of the glamour do-over brigade that many trump women have done.
Link to Maddow’s recent piece on her.
Watch the guy next to her in the part where she’s aiming a gun towards his head.
kii said:
Do we pay enough attention to Kristi Noem? Remember she murdered her children’s young dog and a goat. Dog for being not trained properly – she was training it. Goat for being a…well, a goat…smelly and head-butting kids.She is now Secretary of Homeland Defence* She cosplays as a Border Patrol agent.
*Secretary of Homeland Security
Pardon me. I got distracted and confused.
Donald Trump has announced a 90-day pause on tariffs effective immediately.
The US president, in a post on his Truth Social platform, wrote:
I have authorized a 90 day PAUSE, and a substantially lowered Reciprocal Tariff during this period, of 10%, also effective immediately.
Trump also said he would be raising tariffs on China to 125%, also effective immediately, citing the “lack of respect that China has shown to the world’s markets”.
.
Didn’t take too long. What an arsehole.
Ian said:
Donald Trump has announced a 90-day pause on tariffs effective immediately.The US president, in a post on his Truth Social platform, wrote:
I have authorized a 90 day PAUSE, and a substantially lowered Reciprocal Tariff during this period, of 10%, also effective immediately.
Trump also said he would be raising tariffs on China to 125%, also effective immediately, citing the “lack of respect that China has shown to the world’s markets”.
.
Didn’t take too long. What an arsehole.
Classic behaviour from an abuser.
He continually re-ignites people’s trauma responses.
There are the ones who feel “safe” when exposed to this abuse – “Daddy loves me that’s why he hits me!”
And then there are the ones who experience strong mental and physical reactions as a result of their abusive backgrounds.
Ian said:
Donald Trump has announced a 90-day pause on tariffs effective immediately.The US president, in a post on his Truth Social platform, wrote:
I have authorized a 90 day PAUSE, and a substantially lowered Reciprocal Tariff during this period, of 10%, also effective immediately.
Trump also said he would be raising tariffs on China to 125%, also effective immediately, citing the “lack of respect that China has shown to the world’s markets”.
.
Didn’t take too long. What an arsehole.
Well, that reinforces his reliability, doesn’t it…who would want to invest in a country that can’t keep the same rules in force for more than 3 days and keeps changing its mind?
buffy said:
Ian said:
Donald Trump has announced a 90-day pause on tariffs effective immediately.The US president, in a post on his Truth Social platform, wrote:
I have authorized a 90 day PAUSE, and a substantially lowered Reciprocal Tariff during this period, of 10%, also effective immediately.
Trump also said he would be raising tariffs on China to 125%, also effective immediately, citing the “lack of respect that China has shown to the world’s markets”.
.
Didn’t take too long. What an arsehole.
Well, that reinforces his reliability, doesn’t it…who would want to invest in a country that can’t keep the same rules in force for more than 3 days and keeps changing its mind?
And even more cynically…buy low…his friends will be pleased…ABC headline says something along the lines of “stock market soars”…
buffy said:
buffy said:
Ian said:
Donald Trump has announced a 90-day pause on tariffs effective immediately.The US president, in a post on his Truth Social platform, wrote:
I have authorized a 90 day PAUSE, and a substantially lowered Reciprocal Tariff during this period, of 10%, also effective immediately.
Trump also said he would be raising tariffs on China to 125%, also effective immediately, citing the “lack of respect that China has shown to the world’s markets”.
.
Didn’t take too long. What an arsehole.
Well, that reinforces his reliability, doesn’t it…who would want to invest in a country that can’t keep the same rules in force for more than 3 days and keeps changing its mind?
And even more cynically…buy low…his friends will be pleased…ABC headline says something along the lines of “stock market soars”…
Indeed, there was a huge spike in 0dte options – on his truth socials he said it was a good time to buy in the morning, then announced the 90 day tariff pause later in the day.
kii said:
sarahs mum said:
valid.
Destroy the lives of millions of veterans, and people relying on social security, Insurrection Act deadline report is due April 20, trump’s birthday is early June.
Coincidence? I think not.
April 20 is Hitlers birthday.
Arts said:
kii said:
sarahs mum said:
valid.
Destroy the lives of millions of veterans, and people relying on social security, Insurrection Act deadline report is due April 20, trump’s birthday is early June.
Coincidence? I think not.
April 20 is Hitlers birthday.
Coincidence? I think not.
kii said:
Arts said:
kii said:
Destroy the lives of millions of veterans, and people relying on social security, Insurrection Act deadline report is due April 20, trump’s birthday is early June.
Coincidence? I think not.
April 20 is Hitlers birthday.
Coincidence? I think not.
well convenience certainly possible though we feel this particular dog whistle is a fairly quiet one
Arts said:
kii said:
sarahs mum said:
valid.
Destroy the lives of millions of veterans, and people relying on social security, Insurrection Act deadline report is due April 20, trump’s birthday is early June.
Coincidence? I think not.
April 20 is Hitlers birthday.
Sarah turns 40.
sarahs mum said:
Arts said:
kii said:Destroy the lives of millions of veterans, and people relying on social security, Insurrection Act deadline report is due April 20, trump’s birthday is early June.
Coincidence? I think not.
April 20 is Hitlers birthday.
Sarah turns 40.
Good lord.
Peak Warming Man said:
sarahs mum said:
Arts said:April 20 is Hitlers birthday.
Sarah turns 40.
Good lord.
Not possible. Sarah is still a teenager, right?
what’s the chances of Trump doing a bit of insider trading today then?
sarahs mum said:
what’s the chances of Trump doing a bit of insider trading today then?
The billions are rolling in for him. ;)
sarahs mum said:
Arts said:
kii said:Destroy the lives of millions of veterans, and people relying on social security, Insurrection Act deadline report is due April 20, trump’s birthday is early June.
Coincidence? I think not.
April 20 is Hitlers birthday.
Sarah turns 40.
I remember taking Sarah to the drag show at the Imperial Pub in Sydney when she was 16.
captain_spalding said:
LOL
Woodie said:
sarahs mum said:
Arts said:April 20 is Hitlers birthday.
Sarah turns 40.
I remember taking Sarah to the drag show at the Imperial Pub in Sydney when she was 16.
those were the days.
sarahs mum said:
JudgeMental said:
sarahs mum said:Credit to: Tony Pentimalli
This Is Not a Drill: Trump’s Day-One Order Sets the Stage for Martial Law
By Tony Pentimalli
On January 20, 2025, while the press focused on the optics of Donald Trump’s indoor inauguration, something far more dangerous was set in motion—off-camera, away from ceremony, and beneath the radar of a public lulled by spectacle.
Trump signed an executive order declaring a national emergency at the southern border. But the most alarming part? It gave the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security just 90 days to deliver a joint report on whether he should invoke the Insurrection Act.
That deadline is April 20.From: Boris
Date: 5/02/2025 18:53:34
From: Boris
ID: 2246078
Subject: re: US Politics 2025what I find funny is that people actually believe there will be mid-term elections that will be fair or even happen.
no one wants to upset diddly.
well at least we know it will be rigged when the Dems win a majority back in the House
sarahs mum said:
what’s the chances of Trump doing a bit of insider trading today then?
sarahs mum said:
sarahs mum said:
what’s the chances of Trump doing a bit of insider trading today then?
This is all very unfair on the people who only voted for Trump out of racism.
dv said:
sarahs mum said:
sarahs mum said:
what’s the chances of Trump doing a bit of insider trading today then?
This is all very unfair on the people who only voted for Trump out of racism.
and they say fucking CHINA plays dirty with currency devaluation
also good luck getting anywhere with that investigation
diddly-squat said:
sarahs mum said:
JudgeMental said:From: Boris
Date: 5/02/2025 18:53:34
From: Boris
ID: 2246078
Subject: re: US Politics 2025what I find funny is that people actually believe there will be mid-term elections that will be fair or even happen.
no one wants to upset diddly.
well at least we know it will be rigged when the Dems win a majority back in the House
and that rigged elections totally get investigated
captain_spalding said:
Peak Warming Man said:
sarahs mum said:
Sarah turns 40.
Good lord.
Not possible. Sarah is still a teenager, right?
damn
where the fuck did those 10 megaminutes go
wow
sarahs mum said:
sarahs mum said:
what’s the chances of Trump doing a bit of insider trading today then?
WTF knows?
fsm said:
:)
Heather Cox Richardson
1m ·
April 9, 2025 (Wednesday)
On April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to General Ulysses S. Grant of the United States Army at Appomattox Court House in Virginia. Lee’s surrender did not end the war—there were still two major armies in the field—but everyone knew the surrender signaled that the American Civil War was coming to a close.
Soldiers and sailors of the United States had defeated the armies and the navy of the Confederate States of America across the country and the seas, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives and almost $6 billion. To the northerners celebrating in the streets, it certainly looked like the South’s ideology had been thoroughly discredited.
Southern politicians had led their poorer neighbors to war to advance the idea that some people were better than others and had the right—and the duty—to rule. The Founders of the United States had made a terrible mistake when they declared, “All men are created equal,” southern leaders said. In place of that “fundamentally wrong” idea, they proposed “the great truth” that white men were a “superior race.” And within that superior race, some men were better than others.
Those leaders were the ones who should rule the majority, southern leaders explained. “We do not agree with the authors of the Declaration of Independence, that governments ‘derive their just powers from the consent of the governed,’” enslaver George Fitzhugh of Virginia wrote in 1857. “All governments must originate in force, and be continued by force.” There were 18,000 people in his county and only 1,200 could vote, he said, “But we twelve hundred…never asked and never intend to ask the consent of the sixteen thousand eight hundred whom we govern.”
But the majority of Americans recognized that if it were permitted to take hold, this ideology would destroy democracy. They fought to defeat the enslavers’ radical new definition of the United States. By the end of 1863, President Abraham Lincoln dated the birth of the nation not to the Constitution, whose protection of property underpinned southern enslavers’ insistence that enslavement was a foundational principle, but to the Declaration of Independence.
“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”
The events of April 9 reassured Americans that they had, in fact, saved “the last best hope of earth”: democracy. Writing from Washington, D.C., poet Walt Whitman mused that the very heavens were rejoicing at the triumph of the U.S. military and the return to peace its victory heralded. “Nor earth nor sky ever knew spectacles of superber beauty than some of the nights lately here,” he wrote in Specimen Days. “The western star, Venus, in the earlier hours of evening, has never been so large, so clear; it seems as if it told something, as if it held rapport indulgent with humanity, with us Americans.”
So confident was General Grant in the justice of his people’s cause that he asked only that Lee and his men give their word that they would never again fight against the United States and that they turn over their military arms and artillery. The men could keep their sidearms and their horses because Grant wanted them “to be able to put in a crop to carry themselves and their families through the next winter.”
Their victory on the battlefields made northerners think they had made sure that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
But their conviction that generosity would bring white southerners around to accepting the equality promised in the Declaration of Independence backfired. After Lincoln’s assassination, Andrew Johnson of Tennessee took over the presidency and worked hard to restore white supremacy without the old legal structure of enslavement, while white settlers in the West brought their hierarchical ideas with them and imposed them on Indigenous Americans, on Mexicans and Mexican Americans, and on Asians and Pacific Islanders.
With no penalty for their attempt to overthrow democracy, those who thought that white men were better than others began to insist that their cause was just and that they had lost the war only because they had been overpowered. They continued to work to make their ideology the law of the land. That idea inspired the Jim Crow and Juan Crow laws of the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as the policies that crowded Indigenous Americans onto reservations where disease and malnutrition killed many of them and lack of opportunity pushed the rest into poverty.
In the 1930s, Nazi leaders, lawyers, and judges turned to America’s Jim Crow laws and Indian reservations for inspiration on how to create legal hierarchies that would, at the very least, wall certain populations off from white society. More Americans than we like to believe embraced facism here, too: in February 1939, more than 20,000 people showed up for a “true Americanism” rally held by Nazis at New York City’s Madison Square Garden, featuring a huge portrait of George Washington in his Continental Army uniform flanked by swastikas.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt rallied Americans to oppose fascism by emphasizing the principles that would, he said, provide “the foundations of a healthy and strong democracy: “Equality of opportunity for youth and for others. Jobs for those who can work. Security for those who need it. The ending of special privilege for the few. The preservation of civil liberties for all. The enjoyment of the fruits of scientific progress in a wider and constantly rising standard of living.” He called for “the cooperation of free countries, working together in a friendly, civilized society.”
The gulf between the ideals of democracy and the reality of life in the segregated U.S. during and after World War II galvanized Black Americans, Mexican Americans, and Asian Americans to demand equality. They successfully challenged school segregation, racial housing restrictions, state laws prohibiting interracial marriage, and anti-Chinese laws based in the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act.
As the military fought fascism in Europe, schools and churches at home emphasized that democracy depended on acceptance of racial, ethnic, and religious differences. Rallies championed diversity, and government-sponsored films warned Americans not to succumb to fascist propaganda. Posters trumpeted slogans such as “Catholics–Protestants–Jews…Working Side By Side…in War and Peace!” and reminded Americans not to “infect” their children “with racial and religious hate.” In a 1947 radio show, Superman fought a Ku Klux Klan–like gang trying to keep foreign-born players off high school sports teams, and in 1949, comic book artist Wayne Boring portrayed him on a poster urging a group of American schoolchildren to defend their classmates from “un-American” attacks on their race, religion, or ethnicity.
In the 1950s those ideas had produced a “liberal consensus,” shared by most Democrats and Republicans alike. The government should regulate business, provide for basic social welfare, and promote infrastructure: in other words, it should reflect democratic values. But when the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision tied the federal government not just to economic equality for white Americans, but also to civil rights, opponents of the liberal consensus resurrected the same argument former Confederates had used after the Civil War to couch their ideology in economic, rather than racial, rhetoric.
Rejecting the idea of equality, they argued that the government’s effort to protect civil rights was tantamount to socialism because it took tax dollars from hardworking white men to provide benefits for undeserving Black people who wanted a handout. This idea gained momentum after Congress passed the Voting Rights Act in 1965, and gradually came to include people of color and women who demanded equality. In 1980, Ronald Reagan rode the idea that the liberal consensus was simply a way to redistribute wealth to undeserving Americans of color or women—or both, like Reagan’s “welfare queen”—into the White House.
As more than $50 trillion moved from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1% between 1981 and 2021, Republicans deflected attention from the hollowing out of the middle class by demonizing racial, religious, and gender minorities. By 2012 they were talking of “makers” and “takers,” and by 2016 they were feeding voters ideas and images straight out of the nation’s white supremacist past.
By 2021 the idea that some people are better than others and have a right to rule—the same ideology that had driven the Confederates—created a mob determined to end American democracy. The rioters who attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election believed they were writing a new history of the United States, one that brought to life the hierarchical version of American history claimed by the Confederates before them. On that day, one of the rioters accomplished what the southern troops during the Civil War had never been able to: he carried the Confederate battle flag into the United States Capitol.
At the end of his life, General Grant recalled the events of April 9, 1865. “What General Lee’s feelings were I do not know,” Grant wrote. “y own feelings, which had been quite jubilant on the receipt of his letter , were sad and depressed. I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.”
sarahs mum said:
!!!!
sarahs mum said:
so it’s legal
Did TRUMP and ELON Actually Rig The 2024 Election? | Titus Podcast Clip
Michael V said:
fsm said:
:)
buy sell make money totally not rigged
SCIENCE said:
Michael V said:
fsm said:
:)
buy sell make money totally not rigged
hillary had an insecure email account.
Michael V said:
sarahs mum said:
sarahs mum said:
what’s the chances of Trump doing a bit of insider trading today then?
WTF knows?
nobody could have foreseen this
sarahs mum said:
SCIENCE said:
Michael V said::)
buy sell make money totally not rigged
hillary had an insecure email account.
Hanging’s too good for her.
dv said:
Russell Brand? US politics?
ruby said:
Ithink that they mean ‘overnight’.
We’re just trying to get some sleep, and he’s out there hell-bent on destroying society because he lost the 2020 election.
ruby said:
Ithink that they mean ‘overnight’.
We’re just trying to get some sleep, and he’s out there hell-bent on destroying society because he lost the 2020 election.
Probably seems unimportant but if he stinks too bad, Congressional Republicans may move to him from office one.way or another before the midterms
dv said:
Probably seems unimportant but if he stinks too bad, Congressional Republicans may move to him from office one.way or another before the midterms
…unless they’re making sufficient money from insider dealing from the effects of his apparent ‘capriciousness’ on the stock market.
dv said:
Ha!
captain_spalding said:
dv said:
Probably seems unimportant but if he stinks too bad, Congressional Republicans may move to him from office one.way or another before the midterms
…unless they’re making sufficient money from insider dealing from the effects of his apparent ‘capriciousness’ on the stock market.
nobody totally didn’t never tell yous that it wasn’t going to be a massive pump and dump oh no
LOL
Gabbard’s Pick to Run Counterterrorism Center Aided Start of a Right-Wing Paramilitary Group
Arts said:
kii said:
sarahs mum said:
valid.
Destroy the lives of millions of veterans, and people relying on social security, Insurrection Act deadline report is due April 20, trump’s birthday is early June.
Coincidence? I think not.
April 20 is Hitlers birthday.
It’s also “420 Day”.
Jim Wright aka Stonekettle Station
Trump signed an executive order about shower heads.
Shower heads.
Because that’s something a President in the middle of a global financial crisis should be focused on. Super important issue for Americans. Shower heads. Drop everything, forget my vaporizing 401k, to hell with the prices of eggs, what are we doing about showerheads?
That’s super important to me.
Trump says he stands in the shower for 15 minutes and can’t get his cotton candy hair wet because Biden regulated water flow. I swear, that’s what he said. 15 minutes. No water. Because Biden.
Imagine that, an alleged billionaire can’t get a shower to deliver enough water to wet his hair — and it’s not like the guy has a lot of actual hair, right?
Hell, I’m nobody, but I got two showers in my house and they both deliver plenty of water. But somehow, the rich billionaire guy who lives in a giant luxury tower with his name on the side in 30 foot high golden letters, somehow that guy can’t get any water to come out of the shower head. It’s just drip, drip, drip and that’s a quote. It’s so bad, in point of fact, Trump had to use the power of the Presidency to correct it.
OR maybe the plumber he didn’t pay just hates him.
kii said:
Kansas, inspecting children’s genitals, transphobia & sexual abuse.
link is shoddy this ed.
in other news my Canadian cousins are not going to Florida but are going to Ireland instead.
sarahs mum said:
kii said:
Kansas, inspecting children’s genitals, transphobia & sexual abuse.
link is shoddy this ed.
in other news my Canadian cousins are not going to Florida but are going to Ireland instead.
I think that is wise. And probably more interesting.
sarahs mum said:
kii said:
Kansas, inspecting children’s genitals, transphobia & sexual abuse.
link is shoddy this ed.
in other news my Canadian cousins are not going to Florida but are going to Ireland instead.
It’s a tiktok. I don’t have the tiktok app on my tablet and it wouldn’t play, but it played on my laptop where I also don’t have the app.
SCIENCE said:
captain_spalding said:
dv said:
Probably seems unimportant but if he stinks too bad, Congressional Republicans may move to him from office one.way or another before the midterms
…unless they’re making sufficient money from insider dealing from the effects of his apparent ‘capriciousness’ on the stock market.
nobody totally didn’t never tell yous that it wasn’t going to be a massive pump and dump oh no
sorry our bad the internet are calling it a reverse pump and dump this is completely different
SCIENCE said:
SCIENCE said:captain_spalding said:
…unless they’re making sufficient money from insider dealing from the effects of his apparent ‘capriciousness’ on the stock market.
nobody totally didn’t never tell yous that it wasn’t going to be a massive pump and dump oh no
sorry our bad the internet are calling it a reverse pump and dump this is completely different
and that because there were public announcements that did not refer to stock then this is all above board
SCIENCE said:
roughbarked said:
so what does it say
What most of us probably are already aware of.
roughbarked said:
SCIENCE said:
roughbarked said:
so what does it say
What most of us probably are already aware of.
so kkk is a genius going for a life term and not meaning in prison
Gangster/thug/fascist, etc.
kii said:
Jim Wright aka Stonekettle StationTrump signed an executive order about shower heads.
Shower heads.
Because that’s something a President in the middle of a global financial crisis should be focused on. Super important issue for Americans. Shower heads. Drop everything, forget my vaporizing 401k, to hell with the prices of eggs, what are we doing about showerheads?
That’s super important to me.
Trump says he stands in the shower for 15 minutes and can’t get his cotton candy hair wet because Biden regulated water flow. I swear, that’s what he said. 15 minutes. No water. Because Biden.
Imagine that, an alleged billionaire can’t get a shower to deliver enough water to wet his hair — and it’s not like the guy has a lot of actual hair, right?
Hell, I’m nobody, but I got two showers in my house and they both deliver plenty of water. But somehow, the rich billionaire guy who lives in a giant luxury tower with his name on the side in 30 foot high golden letters, somehow that guy can’t get any water to come out of the shower head. It’s just drip, drip, drip and that’s a quote. It’s so bad, in point of fact, Trump had to use the power of the Presidency to correct it.
OR maybe the plumber he didn’t pay just hates him.
LOL
kii said:
Arts said:
kii said:Destroy the lives of millions of veterans, and people relying on social security, Insurrection Act deadline report is due April 20, trump’s birthday is early June.
Coincidence? I think not.
April 20 is Hitlers birthday.
It’s also “420 Day”.
only if you write the date using a stupid format.
Arts said:
kii said:
Arts said:April 20 is Hitlers birthday.
It’s also “420 Day”.
only if you write the date using a stupid format.
I still get confused by it.
Arts said:
kii said:
Arts said:April 20 is Hitlers birthday.
It’s also “420 Day”.
only if you write the date using a stupid format.
similar to working out the tariffs?
kii said:
Arts said:
kii said:
It’s also “420 Day”.
only if you write the date using a stupid format.
I still get confused by it.
correct everyone should be using the international standard ISO 8601 and no else
SCIENCE said:
roughbarked said:
what does it do
It doesn’t. That’s the equation.
SCIENCE said:
kii said:
Arts said:
only if you write the date using a stupid format.
I still get confused by it.
correct everyone should be using the international standard ISO 8601 and no else
mr kii used April 20, I think it was a military thing.
dv said:
Yeah…
Michael V said:
dv said:
Yeah…
right but you know if they didn’t push back and he suddenly decided he didn’t like one of them
dv said:
And in case anyone (like me) prefers to read “real” news rather than social media…it’s all over the news.
The paper analyzes 1,779 US policy fights from 1981 to 2002, and conclude that the US only does things that regular people want if those are also things that rich people want:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/10/solidarity-forever-2/#oligarchism
Two videos on the global erosion of trust in the USA
https://youtu.be/12RLA1FgQtw?si=F6ijB8Oqnv9nIolN
Paul Krugman contextualises the current tariff “pause”:
dv said:
Two videos on the global erosion of trust in the USA
https://youtu.be/12RLA1FgQtw?si=F6ijB8Oqnv9nIolN
Paul Krugman contextualises the current tariff “pause”:
- Before the election, commentators were saying that Trump’s suggest across the board 10% tariffs with 60% on China couldn’t possibly be serious because it was crazy idea and no one in their right mind would do that.
- DJT went way beyond that on “Liberation Day”, with tariffs over 20% on most of the US’s key trading partner.
- The “paused” tariff situation is still a higher tariff situation than the “crazy” tariff policy that DJT spruiked on the campaign trail, with 10% across the board with a few countries higher, and China over 100%.
- All of these cases are a higher overall weighted tariff average than the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act that transitioned the US from a recession to The Great Depression.
Oh, and the other one is Paul Warburg’s
https://youtu.be/ZgnsYaIgG7I?si=xvWE2IxTREhhBnFl
dv said:
dv said:
Two videos on the global erosion of trust in the USA
https://youtu.be/12RLA1FgQtw?si=F6ijB8Oqnv9nIolN
Paul Krugman contextualises the current tariff “pause”:
- Before the election, commentators were saying that Trump’s suggest across the board 10% tariffs with 60% on China couldn’t possibly be serious because it was crazy idea and no one in their right mind would do that.
- DJT went way beyond that on “Liberation Day”, with tariffs over 20% on most of the US’s key trading partner.
- The “paused” tariff situation is still a higher tariff situation than the “crazy” tariff policy that DJT spruiked on the campaign trail, with 10% across the board with a few countries higher, and China over 100%.
- All of these cases are a higher overall weighted tariff average than the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act that transitioned the US from a recession to The Great Depression.
Oh, and the other one is Paul Warburg’s
https://youtu.be/ZgnsYaIgG7I?si=xvWE2IxTREhhBnFl
good news the D in DPRNA stands for democratic so after the free and fair elections in 1.7 years the world will have full trust and faith and blind belief in the republic again
dv said:
Two videos on the global erosion of trust in the USA
https://youtu.be/12RLA1FgQtw?si=F6ijB8Oqnv9nIolN
Paul Krugman contextualises the current tariff “pause”:
- Before the election, commentators were saying that Trump’s suggest across the board 10% tariffs with 60% on China couldn’t possibly be serious because it was crazy idea and no one in their right mind would do that.
- DJT went way beyond that on “Liberation Day”, with tariffs over 20% on most of the US’s key trading partner.
- The “paused” tariff situation is still a higher tariff situation than the “crazy” tariff policy that DJT spruiked on the campaign trail, with 10% across the board with a few countries higher, and China over 100%.
- All of these cases are a higher overall weighted tariff average than the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act that transitioned the US from a recession to The Great Depression.
—————————————————————
Heck.
Bloody DJT.
Michael V said:
SCIENCE said:
dv said:
dv said:
Two videos on the global erosion of trust in the USA
https://youtu.be/12RLA1FgQtw?si=F6ijB8Oqnv9nIolN
Paul Krugman contextualises the current tariff “pause”:
- Before the election, commentators were saying that Trump’s suggest across the board 10% tariffs with 60% on China couldn’t possibly be serious because it was crazy idea and no one in their right mind would do that.
- DJT went way beyond that on “Liberation Day”, with tariffs over 20% on most of the US’s key trading partner.
- The “paused” tariff situation is still a higher tariff situation than the “crazy” tariff policy that DJT spruiked on the campaign trail, with 10% across the board with a few countries higher, and China over 100%.
- All of these cases are a higher overall weighted tariff average than the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act that transitioned the US from a recession to The Great Depression.
Oh, and the other one is Paul Warburg’s
https://youtu.be/ZgnsYaIgG7I?si=xvWE2IxTREhhBnFl
good news the D in DPRNA stands for democratic so after the free and fair elections in 1.7 years the world will have full trust and faith and blind belief in the republic again
- All of these cases are a higher overall weighted tariff average than the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act that transitioned the US from a recession to The Great Depression.
—————————————————————
Heck.
Bloody DJT.
right but nobody could have foreseen these things and these kinds of things could never happen they’re impossible
dv said:
dv said:Two videos on the global erosion of trust in the USA
https://youtu.be/12RLA1FgQtw?si=F6ijB8Oqnv9nIolN
Paul Krugman contextualises the current tariff “pause”:
- Before the election, commentators were saying that Trump’s suggest across the board 10% tariffs with 60% on China couldn’t possibly be serious because it was crazy idea and no one in their right mind would do that.
- DJT went way beyond that on “Liberation Day”, with tariffs over 20% on most of the US’s key trading partner.
- The “paused” tariff situation is still a higher tariff situation than the “crazy” tariff policy that DJT spruiked on the campaign trail, with 10% across the board with a few countries higher, and China over 100%.
- All of these cases are a higher overall weighted tariff average than the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act that transitioned the US from a recession to The Great Depression.
Oh, and the other one is Paul Warburg’s
https://youtu.be/ZgnsYaIgG7I?si=xvWE2IxTREhhBnFl
I kind of hope we’ve heard the last of the “oh he’s just grandstanding, it’s just rhetoric” people.
If it’s one of the dumbest, most terrible ideas you’ve ever heard, Trump is deadly serious.
buffy said:
dv said:
And in case anyone (like me) prefers to read “real” news rather than social media…it’s all over the news.
What I’m sharing here is not the news, but John’s poignant response.
China to increase tariffs on US goods to 125 per cent, up from 84 per cent
Does China import a lot of stuff from USA? I’d have thought USA would be importing heaps more from China than the other way around.
buffy said:
China to increase tariffs on US goods to 125 per cent, up from 84 per centDoes China import a lot of stuff from USA? I’d have thought USA would be importing heaps more from China than the other way around.
Yes I’d say you are likely on the money there.
roughbarked said:
buffy said:
China to increase tariffs on US goods to 125 per cent, up from 84 per cent
Does China import a lot of stuff from USA? I’d have thought USA would be importing heaps more from China than the other way around.
Yes I’d say you are likely on the money there.
note that with these nearly infinite tariffs they’re getting close to our suggested 100000% tariffs or whatever it was so see we’re all geniuses
buffy said:
China to increase tariffs on US goods to 125 per cent, up from 84 per centDoes China import a lot of stuff from USA? I’d have thought USA would be importing heaps more from China than the other way around.
They import about $150 billion worth of stuff from the USA. Oil and gas, soybeans, corn, wheat, vehicles, aerospace components, chips, software, tertiary services include education.
The amount China exports to the US is about three times that.
another Old El Paso moment but nah it’s NYT so make it an eitheror teamsport
guess what reassuring rich USAoles does to the market
dv said:
buffy said:
China to increase tariffs on US goods to 125 per cent, up from 84 per centDoes China import a lot of stuff from USA? I’d have thought USA would be importing heaps more from China than the other way around.
They import about $150 billion worth of stuff from the USA. Oil and gas, soybeans, corn, wheat, vehicles, aerospace components, chips, software, tertiary services include education.
The amount China exports to the US is about three times that.
And don’t piss off the Chinese people, they know how to use the interwebs
I particularly like this bit:
>>Thousands of Chinese netizens have also flooded the US embassy’s Weibo account to criticise the US government.
Users accused the embassy in Beijing of disabling comments after a barrage of earlier comments called for an end to “American imperialism.”<<
buffy said:
dv said:
buffy said:
China to increase tariffs on US goods to 125 per cent, up from 84 per cent
Does China import a lot of stuff from USA? I’d have thought USA would be importing heaps more from China than the other way around.
They import about $150 billion worth of stuff from the USA. Oil and gas, soybeans, corn, wheat, vehicles, aerospace components, chips, software, tertiary services include education.
The amount China exports to the US is about three times that.
And don’t piss off the Chinese people, they know how to use the interwebs
I particularly like this bit:
>>Thousands of Chinese netizens have also flooded the US embassy’s Weibo account to criticise the US government.
Users accused the embassy in Beijing of disabling comments after a barrage of earlier comments called for an end to “American imperialism.”<<
lies dirty CHINA effectively suppresses all free speech
Kingy said:
wasn’t that … 20 years ago
The head of the US military base in Greenland, a Danish territory coveted by Donald Trump, has been fired for criticising Washington’s agenda for the island. Col Susannah Meyers, who had served as commander of the Pituffik space base since July, was removed amid reports she had distanced herself and the base from JD Vance’s criticism of Denmark and its oversight of the territory during the US vice-president’s visit to the base two weeks ago. The US Space Force said in a statement on Thursday night: “Commanders are expected to adhere to the highest standards of conduct, especially as it relates to remaining nonpartisan in the performance of their duties.”
Apologies if this action has been posted before.
Anyway, it’s yet another attempt to reduce the number of democrat voters.
we thought this kind of thing was covered in year 3 around here but anyway
Spiny Norman said:
Apologies if this action has been posted before.
Anyway, it’s yet another attempt to reduce the number of democrat voters.
I’d be inclined to think a fair proportion of Trumpers would not have a passport or copy of birth certificate.
buffy said:
Spiny Norman said:
Apologies if this action has been posted before.
Anyway, it’s yet another attempt to reduce the number of democrat voters.
I’d be inclined to think a fair proportion of Trumpers would not have a passport or copy of birth certificate.
Quite possibly, yes, but the majority of white women voted for Harris and the vast majority of non-white women the same. That’s why the GOP has done it.
Spiny Norman said:
Apologies if this action has been posted before.
Anyway, it’s yet another attempt to reduce the number of democrat voters.
Ha! Like a Trump administration will provide free passports.
Michael V said:
Spiny Norman said:
Apologies if this action has been posted before.
Anyway, it’s yet another attempt to reduce the number of democrat voters.
Ha! Like a Trump administration will provide free passports.
It likely will, to republican voters only.
SCIENCE said:
we thought this kind of thing was covered in year 3 around here but anyway
But if all these people have passports, they can exercise their democratic rights to be wrong.
SCIENCE said:
we thought this kind of thing was covered in year 3 around here but anyway
That first expression is poorly written, so I’ve had another go:
100 – 10 = 90 (10 is 10% of 100)
90 + 9 = 99 (9 is 10% of 90)
99 =/= 100
buffy said:
Spiny Norman said:
Apologies if this action has been posted before.
Anyway, it’s yet another attempt to reduce the number of democrat voters.
I’d be inclined to think a fair proportion of Trumpers would not have a passport or copy of birth certificate.
Seems a good bet, only half of Americans have a passport.
Getting one costs $165, which may not seem like much, but if you’re broke and not sure about whether to vote, this extra barrier may be the deciding factor.
Spiny Norman said:
buffy said:
Spiny Norman said:
Apologies if this action has been posted before.
Anyway, it’s yet another attempt to reduce the number of democrat voters.
I’d be inclined to think a fair proportion of Trumpers would not have a passport or copy of birth certificate.
Quite possibly, yes, but the majority of white women voted for Harris and the vast majority of non-white women the same. That’s why the GOP has done it.
I don’t get your point, sorry.
Michael V said:
Spiny Norman said:
Apologies if this action has been posted before.
Anyway, it’s yet another attempt to reduce the number of democrat voters.
Ha! Like a Trump administration will provide free passports.
but they provide free flights right, or wait did they make the non gang members pay for those as well
Spiny Norman said:
Quite possibly, yes, but the majority of white women voted for Harris and the vast majority of non-white women the same. That’s why the GOP has done it.
The majority of white women voted for Trump.
dv said:
Spiny Norman said:
Quite possibly, yes, but the majority of white women voted for Harris and the vast majority of non-white women the same. That’s why the GOP has done it.
The majority of white women voted for Trump.
Apologies, I’m in error with that then.
Michael V said:
Spiny Norman said:
buffy said:I’d be inclined to think a fair proportion of Trumpers would not have a passport or copy of birth certificate.
Quite possibly, yes, but the majority of white women voted for Harris and the vast majority of non-white women the same. That’s why the GOP has done it.
I don’t get your point, sorry.
The GOP is continuing to reduce the number of people that can vote for the democrats, thus helping the GOP in every election. They did extensive voter suppression over the last few years.
SSA is moving all communications to Twitter.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DIUg-snTKDA/?igsh=MWpqeWlrYm1heGFxdg==
surveillance corruption capitalism state capture so good
Spiny Norman said:
Michael V said:
Spiny Norman said:Quite possibly, yes, but the majority of white women voted for Harris and the vast majority of non-white women the same. That’s why the GOP has done it.
I don’t get your point, sorry.
The GOP is continuing to reduce the number of people that can vote for the democrats, thus helping the GOP in every election. They did extensive voter suppression over the last few years.
I don’t see how passport and/or birth certificate possession is linked to women, particularly blue-voting women.
Michael V said:
Spiny Norman said:
Michael V said:I don’t get your point, sorry.
The GOP is continuing to reduce the number of people that can vote for the democrats, thus helping the GOP in every election. They did extensive voter suppression over the last few years.
I don’t see how passport and/or birth certificate possession is linked to women, particularly blue-voting women.
From what I have gleaned by scanning a few things. The name on your birth certificate has to match your current name.
kii said:
Michael V said:
Spiny Norman said:The GOP is continuing to reduce the number of people that can vote for the democrats, thus helping the GOP in every election. They did extensive voter suppression over the last few years.
I don’t see how passport and/or birth certificate possession is linked to women, particularly blue-voting women.
From what I have gleaned by scanning a few things. The name on your birth certificate has to match your current name.
Ah.
Well that’s odd.
kii said:
Michael V said:
Spiny Norman said:The GOP is continuing to reduce the number of people that can vote for the democrats, thus helping the GOP in every election. They did extensive voter suppression over the last few years.
I don’t see how passport and/or birth certificate possession is linked to women, particularly blue-voting women.
From what I have gleaned by scanning a few things. The name on your birth certificate has to match your current name.
So married women don’t get to vote unless they have a passport in their married name then?
Trump’s Secretary of Education.
A1 sauce…
kii said:
Trump’s Secretary of Education.A1 sauce…
She’s just a typical air-headed Trump-sycophant say-heaps-mean-nothing look-overhere-not-at-that blatherer.
But, in passing…
…‘A1’ is a term which originated with Lloyds insurance underwriters in London. ‘A’ means that the hull of a ship is in first-class order, and ‘1’ means that other equipment like anchors, cables, rigging, engines are also quite sound. So, an ‘A1’ ship is a ship that’s a very good underwriting risk, it’s in top condition.
This summary appears to be accurate, based on what I’ve read elsewhere…
“Married Women: you will now need your birth certificate and marriage certificate to prove your name to vote.
This is to strike all women from the Voter Roll.
House passes bill that could make it harder for married women to vote
Voting rights groups warn that the SAVE Act, which requires documentation proving citizenship, adds a burden to people who have changed their last names.
The U.S. House has passed a bill that voting rights groups have repeatedly warned would make it harder for millions of Americans, including married women, to vote.
The Republican-controlled House on Thursday voted for the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act. The legislation purportedly aims to block non-citizens from voting, which is already illegal and is very rare.
The bill would require an individual to present in person a passport, birth certificate or other citizenship document when registering to vote or updating their voter registration information.
Voting rights groups have said the bill will pose a barrier for millions of American women and others who have changed their legal name because of marriage, assimilation or to better align with their gender identity. An estimated 69 million American women and 4 million men do not have a birth certificate that matches their current legal name.
Republicans who support the bill claim that states will be able to create processes so people can prove their citizenship if their name doesn’t match their birth certificate.
Voting rights groups also worry the bill will disenfranchise others from marginalized communities who are less likely to have the necessary documentation on hand. More than 9 percent of citizens of voting age — or 21.3 million people — do not have documents that prove their citizenship readily available.
They also warn the bill, if it becomes law, would eliminate popular methods of voter registration, such as online, mail and registration drives — adding demands on a women-led election workforce that has faced burnout and harassment after years of disinformation about election integrity.
The House also passed the SAVE Act last year, but it died in the Senate. It’s now headed back to upper chamber, where Republicans have a 53-seat majority and the legislation needs 60 votes to pass.”
captain_spalding said:
kii said:
Trump’s Secretary of Education.A1 sauce…
She’s just a typical air-headed Trump-sycophant say-heaps-mean-nothing look-overhere-not-at-that blatherer.
But, in passing…
…‘A1’ is a term which originated with Lloyds insurance underwriters in London. ‘A’ means that the hull of a ship is in first-class order, and ‘1’ means that other equipment like anchors, cables, rigging, engines are also quite sound. So, an ‘A1’ ship is a ship that’s a very good underwriting risk, it’s in top condition.
Well there you go. that’s me learning for today.
Over.
A 32-year-old man has been charged with making threats online to assassinate US President Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and other government officials, the United States Justice Department says.
Shawn Monper, who allegedly posted on YouTube as “Mr Satan”, was charged on Wednesday with four counts of threatening to murder a US official to impede their official duties, according to a criminal complaint filed in the Federal Court in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Attorney-General Pam Bondi said in a statement her department would “seek the maximum appropriate punishment”.
“Rest assured that whenever and wherever threats of assassination or mass violence occur, this Department of Justice (DOJ) will find, arrest and prosecute the suspect to the fullest extent of the law,” she said.
Mr Monper is coincidentally from Butler, Pennsylvania, where Mr Trump was nearly assassinated during a campaign rally last July.
I see a chance for El Salvador to look like the Good Guys here. Send the fellow home before the US people can procrastinate too much. Nothing to lose for them.
roughbarked said:
A 32-year-old man has been charged with making threats online to assassinate US President Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and other government officials, the United States Justice Department says.
Shawn Monper, who allegedly posted on YouTube as “Mr Satan”, was charged on Wednesday with four counts of threatening to murder a US official to impede their official duties, according to a criminal complaint filed in the Federal Court in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Attorney-General Pam Bondi said in a statement her department would “seek the maximum appropriate punishment”.
“Rest assured that whenever and wherever threats of assassination or mass violence occur, this Department of Justice (DOJ) will find, arrest and prosecute the suspect to the fullest extent of the law,” she said.
Mr Monper is coincidentally from Butler, Pennsylvania, where Mr Trump was nearly assassinated during a campaign rally last July.
Law and order partying¡
kii said:
This summary appears to be accurate, based on what I’ve read elsewhere…“Married Women: you will now need your birth certificate and marriage certificate to prove your name to vote.
This is to strike all women from the Voter Roll.House passes bill that could make it harder for married women to vote
Voting rights groups warn that the SAVE Act, which requires documentation proving citizenship, adds a burden to people who have changed their last names.The U.S. House has passed a bill that voting rights groups have repeatedly warned would make it harder for millions of Americans, including married women, to vote.
The Republican-controlled House on Thursday voted for the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act. The legislation purportedly aims to block non-citizens from voting, which is already illegal and is very rare.
The bill would require an individual to present in person a passport, birth certificate or other citizenship document when registering to vote or updating their voter registration information.Voting rights groups have said the bill will pose a barrier for millions of American women and others who have changed their legal name because of marriage, assimilation or to better align with their gender identity. An estimated 69 million American women and 4 million men do not have a birth certificate that matches their current legal name.
Republicans who support the bill claim that states will be able to create processes so people can prove their citizenship if their name doesn’t match their birth certificate.
Voting rights groups also worry the bill will disenfranchise others from marginalized communities who are less likely to have the necessary documentation on hand. More than 9 percent of citizens of voting age — or 21.3 million people — do not have documents that prove their citizenship readily available.
They also warn the bill, if it becomes law, would eliminate popular methods of voter registration, such as online, mail and registration drives — adding demands on a women-led election workforce that has faced burnout and harassment after years of disinformation about election integrity.The House also passed the SAVE Act last year, but it died in the Senate. It’s now headed back to upper chamber, where Republicans have a 53-seat majority and the legislation needs 60 votes to pass.”
Ta.
All passenger flights coming to America will now be Tarriffed.
All flight passengers will be Tarriffed as well.
This will apply to cruise ships too and all cruise ship passengers.
Includes Tarriffed crew too.
Tau.Neutrino said:
All passenger flights coming to America will now be Tarriffed.All flight passengers will be Tarriffed as well.
This will apply to cruise ships too and all cruise ship passengers.
Includes Tarriffed crew too.
WTF? How does he think that works?
wait we thought they wanted a
civil war, what better way to start one c’m‘on
roughbarked said:
Tau.Neutrino said:
All passenger flights coming to America will now be Tarriffed.All flight passengers will be Tarriffed as well.
This will apply to cruise ships too and all cruise ship passengers.
Includes Tarriffed crew too.
WTF? How does he think that works?
It’s fun making things up like Trump does.
:)
Tau.Neutrino said:
roughbarked said:
Tau.Neutrino said:
All passenger flights coming to America will now be Tarriffed.All flight passengers will be Tarriffed as well.
This will apply to cruise ships too and all cruise ship passengers.
Includes Tarriffed crew too.
WTF? How does he think that works?
It’s fun making things up like Trump does.
:)
But he gets three lego bricks stuck together and loses the plot.
https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/h-r-mcmaster-trump-accidental-call/
lol
dv said:
https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/h-r-mcmaster-trump-accidental-call/
lol
Total Landscaping McMaster
‘here”:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYRwTtVBbSU
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/articles/joe-rogan-resurrects-disability-slur-152435978.html
Joe Rogan: “The word ‘retarded’ is back, and it’s one of the great culture victories that I think is spurred on, probably, by podcasts.”
—-
Okay then.
I do wonder why these are things that motivate conservative podcasters. There’s so many real problems but they just want to put their backs into things like bringing this word back.
dv said:
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/articles/joe-rogan-resurrects-disability-slur-152435978.htmlJoe Rogan: “The word ‘retarded’ is back, and it’s one of the great culture victories that I think is spurred on, probably, by podcasts.”
—-
Okay then.
I do wonder why these are things that motivate conservative podcasters. There’s so many real problems but they just want to put their backs into things like bringing this word back.
Retard, to bring back from TDC.
What’s the TDC?
dv said:
What’s the TDC?
Top Dead Center.
dv said:
What’s the TDC?
Tragics Drink Club aka FNDC
dv said:
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/articles/joe-rogan-resurrects-disability-slur-152435978.htmlJoe Rogan: “The word ‘retarded’ is back, and it’s one of the great culture victories that I think is spurred on, probably, by podcasts.”
—-
Okay then.
I do wonder why these are things that motivate conservative podcasters. There’s so many real problems but they just want to put their backs into things like bringing this word back.
Look at this, don’t look at that.
roughbarked said:
dv said:
What’s the TDC?
Top Dead Center.
Doh
sarahs mum said:
‘here”:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYRwTtVBbSU
Cheeses!
captain_spalding said:
dv said:
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/articles/joe-rogan-resurrects-disability-slur-152435978.htmlJoe Rogan: “The word ‘retarded’ is back, and it’s one of the great culture victories that I think is spurred on, probably, by podcasts.”
—-
Okay then.
I do wonder why these are things that motivate conservative podcasters. There’s so many real problems but they just want to put their backs into things like bringing this word back.
Look at this, don’t look at that.
It’s like people who mind their own business are peaceful, people who cannot mind their own business are in conflict.
People who dont throw shit at others are peaceful, people who do throw shit ar others are not at peace with themselves or with those that they throw shit at, it’s like one group of people need to outlet emotional violence at another group for no reason other than lets do it because they can.
Something like that.
dv said:
that stuff would require understanding of conventional logic
Tau.Neutrino said:
captain_spalding said:
dv said:
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/articles/joe-rogan-resurrects-disability-slur-152435978.html
Joe Rogan: “The word ‘retarded’ is back, and it’s one of the great culture victories that I think is spurred on, probably, by podcasts.”
——
Okay then.
I do wonder why these are things that motivate conservative podcasters. There’s so many real problems but they just want to put their backs into things like bringing this word back.
Look at this, don’t look at that.
It’s like people who mind their own business are peaceful, people who cannot mind their own business are in conflict.
People who dont throw shit at others are peaceful, people who do throw shit ar others are not at peace with themselves or with those that they throw shit at, it’s like one group of people need to outlet emotional violence at another group for no reason other than lets do it because they can.
Something like that.
tard, comme d’habitude
dv said:
Hmmmm.
SCIENCE said:
Tau.Neutrino said:
acquitted soon
I think the word you might be looking for is “pardoned”.
buffy said:
SCIENCE said:Tau.Neutrino said:
acquitted soon
I think the word you might be looking for is “pardoned”.
Trump ignites ‘insider trading’ accusations after global tariffs U-turn
I wonder how many other American politicians indulged?
Technically buying the stocks either while they were relatively cheap after their massive falls, or in the hours after Trump himself said it’s a good time to buy, wouldn’t have been inside trading because these trades were based on public information. It’s the unusual trades that others have highlighted that occurred in the 2 hours before the tariff announcement that are suspicious because they stood out from what was happening to the market in general.
tacit synchronisation could never happen
SCIENCE said:
you say it best when you say nothing at all.
JudgeMental said:
SCIENCE said:you say it best when you say nothing at all.
That could have been said better.
So could that.
… and so on.
JudgeMental said:
SCIENCE said:you say it best when you say nothing at all.
My position exactly – about myself.
Why I think this election was stolen:
In 2016, Trump stole the election with the help of Russian trolls and bots.
The Mueller Report was damning and chock-full of real evidence, but it was buried by Bill Barr.
https://bsky.app/profile/bongodave.bsky.social/post/3lbsvkekw4s2o
Many posts detailing some of the shit that’s been going on with the last three elections.
Heather Cox Richardson
1h ·
April 11, 2025 (Friday)
On April 4, Trump fired head of U.S. Cyber Command (CYBERCOM) and director of the National Security Agency (NSA) General Timothy Haugh, apparently on the recommendation of right-wing conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer, who is pitching her new opposition research firm to “vet” candidates for jobs in Trump’s administration.
Former secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall wrote in Newsweek yesterday that the position Haugh held is “one of the most sensitive and powerful jobs in America.” Kendall writes that NSA and CYBERCOM oversee the world’s most sophisticated tools and techniques to penetrate computer systems, monitor communications around the globe, and, if national security requires it, attack those systems. U.S. law drastically curtails how those tools can be used in the U.S. and against American citizens and businesses.
Will a Trump loyalist follow those laws? Kendall writes: “Every American should view this development with alarm.”
Just after 2:00 a.m. eastern time this morning, the Senate confirmed Retired Air Force Lieutenant General John Dan Caine, who goes by the nickname “Razin,” for chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff by a vote of 60–25. U.S. law requires the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to have served as the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the chief of staff of the Army, the chief of naval operations, the chief of staff of the Air Force, the commandant of the Marine Corps, or the commander of a unified or specified combatant command.
Although Caine has 34 years of military experience, he did not serve in any of the required positions. The law provides that the president can waive the requirement if “the President determines such action is necessary in the national interest,” and he has apparently done so for Caine. The politicization of the U.S. military by filling it with Trump loyalists is now, as Kendall writes, “indisputable.”
The politicization of data is also indisputable. Billionaire Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) claims to be saving Americans money, but the Wall Street Journal reported today that effort has been largely a failure (despite today’s announcement of devastating cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that monitors our weather). But what DOGE is really doing is burrowing into Americans’ data.
The first people to be targeted by that data collection appear to be undocumented immigrants. Jason Koebler of 404 Media reported on Wednesday that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has been using a database that enables officials to search for people by filtering for “hundreds of different, highly specific categories,” including scars or tattoos, bankruptcy filings, Social Security number, hair color, and race. The system, called Investigative Case Management (ICM), was created by billionaire Peter Thiel’s software company Palantir, which in 2022 signed a $95.9 million contract with the government to develop ICM.
Three Trump officials told Sophia Cai of Politico that DOGE staffers embedded in agencies across the government are expanding government cooperation with immigration officials, using the information they’re gleaning from government databases to facilitate deportation. On Tuesday, DOGE software engineer Aram Moghaddassi sent the first 6,300 names of individuals whose temporary legal status had just been canceled. On the list, which Moghaddassi said covered those on “the terror watch list” or with “F.B.I. criminal records,” were eight minors, including one 13-year-old.
The Social Security Administration worked with the administration to get those people to “self-deport” by adding them to the agency’s “death master file.” That file is supposed to track people whose death means they should no longer receive benefits. Adding to it people the administration wants to erase is “financial murder,” former SSA commissioner Martin O’Malley told Alexandra Berzon, Hamed Aleaziz, Nicholas Nehamas, Ryan Mac, and Tara Siegel Bernard of the New York Times. Those people will not be able to use credit cards or banks.
On Tuesday, Acting Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Commissioner Melanie Krause resigned after the IRS and the Department of Homeland Security agreed to share sensitive taxpayer data with immigration authorities. Undocumented immigrants pay billions in taxes, in part to demonstrate their commitment to citizenship, and the government has promised immigrants that it would not use that information for immigration enforcement. Until now, the IRS has protected sensitive taxpayer information.
Rene Marsh and Marshall Cohen of CNN note that “ultiple senior career IRS officials refused to sign the data-sharing agreement with DHS,” which will enable HHS officials to ask the IRS for names and addresses of people they suspect are undocumented, “because of grave concerns about its legality.” Ultimately, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent signed the agreement with Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem.
Krause was only one of several senior career officials leaving the IRS, raising concerns among those staying that there is no longer a “defense against the potential unlawful use of taxpayer data by the Trump administration.”
Makena Kelly of Wired reported today that for the past three days, DOGE staffers have been working with representatives from Palantir and career engineers from the IRS in a giant “hackathon.” Their goal is to build a system that will be able to access all IRS records, including names, addresses, job data, and Social Security numbers, that can then be compared with data from other agencies.
But the administration’s attempt to automate deportation is riddled with errors. Last night the government sent threatening emails to U.S. citizens, green card holders, and even a Canadian (in Canada) terminating “your parole” and giving them seven days to leave the U.S. One Massachusetts-born immigration lawyer asked on social media: “Does anyone know if you can get Italian citizenship through great-grandparents?”
The government is not keen to correct its errors. On March 15 the government rendered to prison in El Salvador a legal U.S. resident, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, whom the courts had ordered the U.S. not to send to El Salvador, where his life was in danger. The government has admitted that its arrest and rendition of Abrego Garcia happened because of “administrative error” but now claims—without evidence—that he is a member of the MS-13 gang and that his return to the U.S. would threaten the public. Abrego Garcia says he is not a gang member and notes that he has never been charged with a crime.
On April 4, U.S. District Court Judge Paula Xinis ordered the government to return Abrego Garcia to the U.S. no later than 11:59 pm on April 7. The administration appealed to the Supreme Court, which handed down a 9–0 decision yesterday, saying the government must “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s release, but asked the district court to clarify what it meant by “effectuate,” noting that it must give “due regard for the deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs.”
The Supreme Court also ordered that “the Government should be prepared to share what it can concerning the steps it has taken and the prospect of further steps.”
Legal analyst Joyce White Vance explained what happened next. Judge Xinis ordered the government to file an update by 9:30 a.m. today explaining where Abrego Garcia is, what the government is doing to get him back, and what more it will do. She planned an in-person hearing at 1:00 p.m.
The administration made clear it did not intend to comply. It answered that the judge had not given them enough time to answer and suggested that it would delay over the Supreme Court’s instruction that Xinis must show deference to the president’s ability to conduct foreign affairs. Xinis gave the government until 11:30 and said she would still hold the hearing. The government submitted its filing at about 12:15, saying that Abrego Garcia is “in the custody of a foreign sovereign,” but at the 1:00 hearing, as Anna Bower of Lawfare reported, the lawyer representing the government, Drew Ensign, said he did not have information about where Abrego Garcia is and that the government had done nothing to get him back. Ensign said he might have answers by next Tuesday. Xinis says they will have to give an update tomorrow.
As Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor recently warned, if the administration can take noncitizens off the streets, render them to prison in another country, and then claim it is helpless to correct the error because the person is out of reach of U.S. jurisdiction, it could do the same thing to citizens. Indeed, both President Trump and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt have proposed that very thing.
Tonight, Trump signed a memorandum to the secretaries of defense, interior, agriculture, and homeland security calling for a “Military Mission for Sealing the Southern Border of the United States and Repelling Invasions.” The memorandum creates a military buffer zone along the border so that any migrant crossing would be trespassing on a U.S. military base. This would allow active-duty soldiers to hold migrants until ICE agents take them.
By April 20, the secretaries of defense and homeland security are supposed to report to the president whether they think he should invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act to enable him to use the military to aid in mass deportations.
the US is so fked.
buffy said:
SCIENCE said:Tau.Neutrino said:
acquitted soon
I think the word you might be looking for is “pardoned”.
The investigators and lawyers that enforce this sort of stuff have all been sacked recently.
sarahs mum said:
By April 20, the secretaries of defense and homeland security are supposed to report to the president whether they think he should invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act to enable him to use the military to aid in mass deportations.
Hegseth will do anything to please Trump after the Signal stuff-up.
Noem will see it as a golden opportunity to play some more dress-up games.
I predict a ‘go for it, O Fabulous Leader’, from both of them.
sarahs mum said:
This Is What a Digital Coup Looks Like | Carole Cadwalladr | TED
Thanks sarahs mum. That was really good, it should have more views though. Have sent the link to a few friends
ruby said:
sarahs mum said:
This Is What a Digital Coup Looks Like | Carole Cadwalladr | TED
Thanks sarahs mum. That was really good, it should have more views though. Have sent the link to a few friends
184k of views is an audience though.
ruby said:
sarahs mum said:
This Is What a Digital Coup Looks Like | Carole Cadwalladr | TED
Thanks sarahs mum. That was really good, it should have more views though. Have sent the link to a few friends
It’s given me a nice little bump of energy to get more stuff done, otherwise I just sink to the bottom of the ocean and start drowning with despair.
dv said:
how can you combat it if you don’t have it
LOL what a clever guy
The Trump administration has exempted smartphones, computers and other electronics from its “reciprocal” tariffs — lessening the cost impact on American consumers for a host of popular high-tech products. The exemptions, published late on Friday in a notice by the US Customs and Border Protection office, cover various electronic goods including smartphones and components entering the United States from China, which is currently subject to an additional 145 per cent tariff.
BREAKING: President Trump Diagnosed with “Donmentia” – The First Clinically Unstable Ego Disorder
In a stunning medical breakthrough, President Donald J. Trump has been diagnosed with a rare political condition now officially dubbed Donmentia—a degenerative disorder that causes erratic policy U-turns, uncontrollable self-praise, and spontaneous outbursts of gibberish on social media at 3 a.m.
Doctors say Donmentia is not to be confused with dementia. “This isn’t memory loss,” said Dr. Phil I. Buster of the American Institute of Political Psychosis. “It’s reality loss. He remembers what he said five minutes ago—he just denies it existed. It’s like arguing with a goldfish in a mirror that thinks it’s a shark.”
Symptoms of Donmentia Include: • Announcing massive tariffs on Chinese electronics Monday, then canceling them Tuesday because “I love computers. Some of the best computers have said great things about me.” • Calling himself a genius while forgetting he said bleach might cure COVID. • Screaming “JOBS ARE BACK!” while factories quietly set themselves on fire behind him. • Posing with Bibles upside down, hurricane maps with Sharpie edits, and menus where every item is “Trump Steaks.”
Experts say Donmentia patients often believe they are the greatest leaders in history, despite leaving the country looking like a Wile E. Coyote explosion. They regularly repeat the phrases:
• “I never said that.”
• “Everyone agrees with me.”
• “I’m hearing amazing things, believe me.”
Even when video evidence directly contradicts them.
The Electronics Tariff Debacle
This week, President Trump slapped 145% tariffs on Chinese-made electronics, saying, “We don’t need their lousy computers! I once built a computer out of bricks and patriotism!”
The next day, he reversed course, tweeting:
“Tariffs on electronics BAD idea. Computers are MAGA. Nobody knows tech like me. I invented Wi-Fi. Sleepy Joe still uses dial-up!”
Aides later clarified he was watching a Home Improvement rerun and got confused.
Medical Advice
Dr. Buster recommends exposure therapy for Donmentia patients: • Lock them in a room with all their old tweets and contradicting video clips. • Play them on loop until they either admit the truth or demand a Nobel Prize for “being right in every reality.”
When asked about the diagnosis, President Trump responded:
“I don’t have Donmentia. I have Tremendousmentia. The best kind. No one’s ever had it before. Doctors say my brain is so strong, it intimidates MRIs.”
Coming soon to a pharmacy near you: Donmentia-X, the new prescription-strength truth serum made from expired Trump University diplomas and whatever’s left of Rudy Giuliani’s credibility.
Stay tuned for next week’s diagnosis: Covfefecitis—when you tweet something so incoherent, even your autocorrect gives up and moves to Canada.
fsm said:
BREAKING: President Trump Diagnosed with “Donmentia” – The First Clinically Unstable Ego DisorderIn a stunning medical breakthrough, President Donald J. Trump has been diagnosed with a rare political condition now officially dubbed Donmentia—a degenerative disorder that causes erratic policy U-turns, uncontrollable self-praise, and spontaneous outbursts of gibberish on social media at 3 a.m.
Doctors say Donmentia is not to be confused with dementia. “This isn’t memory loss,” said Dr. Phil I. Buster of the American Institute of Political Psychosis. “It’s reality loss. He remembers what he said five minutes ago—he just denies it existed. It’s like arguing with a goldfish in a mirror that thinks it’s a shark.”
Symptoms of Donmentia Include: • Announcing massive tariffs on Chinese electronics Monday, then canceling them Tuesday because “I love computers. Some of the best computers have said great things about me.” • Calling himself a genius while forgetting he said bleach might cure COVID. • Screaming “JOBS ARE BACK!” while factories quietly set themselves on fire behind him. • Posing with Bibles upside down, hurricane maps with Sharpie edits, and menus where every item is “Trump Steaks.”
Experts say Donmentia patients often believe they are the greatest leaders in history, despite leaving the country looking like a Wile E. Coyote explosion. They regularly repeat the phrases: • “I never said that.” • “Everyone agrees with me.” • “I’m hearing amazing things, believe me.”
Even when video evidence directly contradicts them.The Electronics Tariff Debacle
This week, President Trump slapped 145% tariffs on Chinese-made electronics, saying, “We don’t need their lousy computers! I once built a computer out of bricks and patriotism!”
The next day, he reversed course, tweeting:“Tariffs on electronics BAD idea. Computers are MAGA. Nobody knows tech like me. I invented Wi-Fi. Sleepy Joe still uses dial-up!”
Aides later clarified he was watching a Home Improvement rerun and got confused.
Medical Advice
Dr. Buster recommends exposure therapy for Donmentia patients: • Lock them in a room with all their old tweets and contradicting video clips. • Play them on loop until they either admit the truth or demand a Nobel Prize for “being right in every reality.”
When asked about the diagnosis, President Trump responded:
“I don’t have Donmentia. I have Tremendousmentia. The best kind. No one’s ever had it before. Doctors say my brain is so strong, it intimidates MRIs.”
Coming soon to a pharmacy near you: Donmentia-X, the new prescription-strength truth serum made from expired Trump University diplomas and whatever’s left of Rudy Giuliani’s credibility.
Stay tuned for next week’s diagnosis: Covfefecitis—when you tweet something so incoherent, even your autocorrect gives up and moves to Canada.
:)
captain_spalding said:
Thanks.
But it is depressing.
sarahs mum said:
Heather Cox Richardson
1h ·
April 11, 2025 (Friday)On April 4, Trump fired head of U.S. Cyber Command (CYBERCOM) and director of the National Security Agency (NSA) General Timothy Haugh, apparently on the recommendation of right-wing conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer, who is pitching her new opposition research firm to “vet” candidates for jobs in Trump’s administration.
Former secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall wrote in Newsweek yesterday that the position Haugh held is “one of the most sensitive and powerful jobs in America.” Kendall writes that NSA and CYBERCOM oversee the world’s most sophisticated tools and techniques to penetrate computer systems, monitor communications around the globe, and, if national security requires it, attack those systems. U.S. law drastically curtails how those tools can be used in the U.S. and against American citizens and businesses.
Will a Trump loyalist follow those laws? Kendall writes: “Every American should view this development with alarm.”
Just after 2:00 a.m. eastern time this morning, the Senate confirmed Retired Air Force Lieutenant General John Dan Caine, who goes by the nickname “Razin,” for chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff by a vote of 60–25. U.S. law requires the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to have served as the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the chief of staff of the Army, the chief of naval operations, the chief of staff of the Air Force, the commandant of the Marine Corps, or the commander of a unified or specified combatant command.
Although Caine has 34 years of military experience, he did not serve in any of the required positions. The law provides that the president can waive the requirement if “the President determines such action is necessary in the national interest,” and he has apparently done so for Caine. The politicization of the U.S. military by filling it with Trump loyalists is now, as Kendall writes, “indisputable.”
The politicization of data is also indisputable. Billionaire Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) claims to be saving Americans money, but the Wall Street Journal reported today that effort has been largely a failure (despite today’s announcement of devastating cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that monitors our weather). But what DOGE is really doing is burrowing into Americans’ data.
The first people to be targeted by that data collection appear to be undocumented immigrants. Jason Koebler of 404 Media reported on Wednesday that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has been using a database that enables officials to search for people by filtering for “hundreds of different, highly specific categories,” including scars or tattoos, bankruptcy filings, Social Security number, hair color, and race. The system, called Investigative Case Management (ICM), was created by billionaire Peter Thiel’s software company Palantir, which in 2022 signed a $95.9 million contract with the government to develop ICM.
Three Trump officials told Sophia Cai of Politico that DOGE staffers embedded in agencies across the government are expanding government cooperation with immigration officials, using the information they’re gleaning from government databases to facilitate deportation. On Tuesday, DOGE software engineer Aram Moghaddassi sent the first 6,300 names of individuals whose temporary legal status had just been canceled. On the list, which Moghaddassi said covered those on “the terror watch list” or with “F.B.I. criminal records,” were eight minors, including one 13-year-old.
The Social Security Administration worked with the administration to get those people to “self-deport” by adding them to the agency’s “death master file.” That file is supposed to track people whose death means they should no longer receive benefits. Adding to it people the administration wants to erase is “financial murder,” former SSA commissioner Martin O’Malley told Alexandra Berzon, Hamed Aleaziz, Nicholas Nehamas, Ryan Mac, and Tara Siegel Bernard of the New York Times. Those people will not be able to use credit cards or banks.
On Tuesday, Acting Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Commissioner Melanie Krause resigned after the IRS and the Department of Homeland Security agreed to share sensitive taxpayer data with immigration authorities. Undocumented immigrants pay billions in taxes, in part to demonstrate their commitment to citizenship, and the government has promised immigrants that it would not use that information for immigration enforcement. Until now, the IRS has protected sensitive taxpayer information.
Rene Marsh and Marshall Cohen of CNN note that “ultiple senior career IRS officials refused to sign the data-sharing agreement with DHS,” which will enable HHS officials to ask the IRS for names and addresses of people they suspect are undocumented, “because of grave concerns about its legality.” Ultimately, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent signed the agreement with Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem.
Krause was only one of several senior career officials leaving the IRS, raising concerns among those staying that there is no longer a “defense against the potential unlawful use of taxpayer data by the Trump administration.”Makena Kelly of Wired reported today that for the past three days, DOGE staffers have been working with representatives from Palantir and career engineers from the IRS in a giant “hackathon.” Their goal is to build a system that will be able to access all IRS records, including names, addresses, job data, and Social Security numbers, that can then be compared with data from other agencies.
But the administration’s attempt to automate deportation is riddled with errors. Last night the government sent threatening emails to U.S. citizens, green card holders, and even a Canadian (in Canada) terminating “your parole” and giving them seven days to leave the U.S. One Massachusetts-born immigration lawyer asked on social media: “Does anyone know if you can get Italian citizenship through great-grandparents?”
The government is not keen to correct its errors. On March 15 the government rendered to prison in El Salvador a legal U.S. resident, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, whom the courts had ordered the U.S. not to send to El Salvador, where his life was in danger. The government has admitted that its arrest and rendition of Abrego Garcia happened because of “administrative error” but now claims—without evidence—that he is a member of the MS-13 gang and that his return to the U.S. would threaten the public. Abrego Garcia says he is not a gang member and notes that he has never been charged with a crime.
On April 4, U.S. District Court Judge Paula Xinis ordered the government to return Abrego Garcia to the U.S. no later than 11:59 pm on April 7. The administration appealed to the Supreme Court, which handed down a 9–0 decision yesterday, saying the government must “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s release, but asked the district court to clarify what it meant by “effectuate,” noting that it must give “due regard for the deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs.”
The Supreme Court also ordered that “the Government should be prepared to share what it can concerning the steps it has taken and the prospect of further steps.”
Legal analyst Joyce White Vance explained what happened next. Judge Xinis ordered the government to file an update by 9:30 a.m. today explaining where Abrego Garcia is, what the government is doing to get him back, and what more it will do. She planned an in-person hearing at 1:00 p.m.
The administration made clear it did not intend to comply. It answered that the judge had not given them enough time to answer and suggested that it would delay over the Supreme Court’s instruction that Xinis must show deference to the president’s ability to conduct foreign affairs. Xinis gave the government until 11:30 and said she would still hold the hearing. The government submitted its filing at about 12:15, saying that Abrego Garcia is “in the custody of a foreign sovereign,” but at the 1:00 hearing, as Anna Bower of Lawfare reported, the lawyer representing the government, Drew Ensign, said he did not have information about where Abrego Garcia is and that the government had done nothing to get him back. Ensign said he might have answers by next Tuesday. Xinis says they will have to give an update tomorrow.
As Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor recently warned, if the administration can take noncitizens off the streets, render them to prison in another country, and then claim it is helpless to correct the error because the person is out of reach of U.S. jurisdiction, it could do the same thing to citizens. Indeed, both President Trump and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt have proposed that very thing.
Tonight, Trump signed a memorandum to the secretaries of defense, interior, agriculture, and homeland security calling for a “Military Mission for Sealing the Southern Border of the United States and Repelling Invasions.” The memorandum creates a military buffer zone along the border so that any migrant crossing would be trespassing on a U.S. military base. This would allow active-duty soldiers to hold migrants until ICE agents take them.
By April 20, the secretaries of defense and homeland security are supposed to report to the president whether they think he should invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act to enable him to use the military to aid in mass deportations.
Michael V said:
captain_spalding said:
Thanks.
But it is depressing.
it’s surrealistic.
sarahs mum said:
Michael V said:
captain_spalding said:
Thanks.
But it is depressing.
it’s surrealistic.
Both.
wait we thought it was more like 30% so
proof that the fascists are starting to eat each other
note of course that we disagree with the assertion that chance does not cause clustering
SCIENCE said:
wait we thought it was more like 30% so
The Watch Live button doesn’t work.
Peak Warming Man said:
SCIENCE said:
wait we thought it was more like 30% so
The Watch Live button doesn’t work.
maybe
Fkn Bill Maher. What a joke. He has one dinner with DJT and is all
“Look, I get it. It doesn’t matter who he is at a private dinner with a comedian. It matters who he is on the world stage. I’m just taking as a positive that this person exists. Because everything I’ve ever not liked about him was, I swear to God, absent at least on this night with this guy.”
as though the only thing wrong with DJT is his personal demeanour. What a fatuous and narcissistic take. Where do they kind these people? How do they become famous?
dv said:
Fkn Bill Maher. What a joke. He has one dinner with DJT and is all
“Look, I get it. It doesn’t matter who he is at a private dinner with a comedian. It matters who he is on the world stage. I’m just taking as a positive that this person exists. Because everything I’ve ever not liked about him was, I swear to God, absent at least on this night with this guy.”as though the only thing wrong with DJT is his personal demeanour. What a fatuous and narcissistic take. Where do they kind these people? How do they become famous?
I wonder whether Trump’s silly voice mesmerises people en masse.
Michael V said:
dv said:
Fkn Bill Maher. What a joke. He has one dinner with DJT and is all
“Look, I get it. It doesn’t matter who he is at a private dinner with a comedian. It matters who he is on the world stage. I’m just taking as a positive that this person exists. Because everything I’ve ever not liked about him was, I swear to God, absent at least on this night with this guy.”as though the only thing wrong with DJT is his personal demeanour. What a fatuous and narcissistic take. Where do they kind these people? How do they become famous?
I wonder whether Trump’s silly voice mesmerises people en masse.
sounds like another kkk from maybe 95 years ago
but also seriously it’s about the personal interactions that’s the point
you could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and if you do it with charm then you really will get away with it
Michael V said:
dv said:
Fkn Bill Maher. What a joke. He has one dinner with DJT and is all
“Look, I get it. It doesn’t matter who he is at a private dinner with a comedian. It matters who he is on the world stage. I’m just taking as a positive that this person exists. Because everything I’ve ever not liked about him was, I swear to God, absent at least on this night with this guy.”as though the only thing wrong with DJT is his personal demeanour. What a fatuous and narcissistic take. Where do they kind these people? How do they become famous?
I wonder whether Trump’s silly voice mesmerises people en masse.
Not me. I can’t stand to listen to him speak. Will hit the mute button.
party_pants said:
Michael V said:
dv said:
Fkn Bill Maher. What a joke. He has one dinner with DJT and is all
“Look, I get it. It doesn’t matter who he is at a private dinner with a comedian. It matters who he is on the world stage. I’m just taking as a positive that this person exists. Because everything I’ve ever not liked about him was, I swear to God, absent at least on this night with this guy.”as though the only thing wrong with DJT is his personal demeanour. What a fatuous and narcissistic take. Where do they kind these people? How do they become famous?
I wonder whether Trump’s silly voice mesmerises people en masse.
Not me. I can’t stand to listen to him speak. Will hit the mute button.
I can’t stand his voice either.
But are others mesmerised by it, I wonder?
sarahs mum said:
Heather Cox Richardson
1m ·
April 9, 2025 (Wednesday)————-cut—————-
Ta.
Michael V said:
party_pants said:
SCIENCE said:
Michael V said:
dv said:
Fkn Bill Maher. What a joke. He has one dinner with DJT and is all
“Look, I get it. It doesn’t matter who he is at a private dinner with a comedian. It matters who he is on the world stage. I’m just taking as a positive that this person exists. Because everything I’ve ever not liked about him was, I swear to God, absent at least on this night with this guy.”as though the only thing wrong with DJT is his personal demeanour. What a fatuous and narcissistic take. Where do they kind these people? How do they become famous?
I wonder whether Trump’s silly voice mesmerises people en masse.
sounds like another kkk from maybe 95 years ago
but also seriously it’s about the personal interactions that’s the point
you could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and if you do it with charm then you really will get away with it
Not me. I can’t stand to listen to him speak. Will hit the mute button.
I can’t stand his voice either.
But are others mesmerised by it, I wonder?
sarahs mum said:
Chrisoula Baikos
7 April at 23:31 ·
He’s setting us up for Martial Law….just in case y’all were wondering how he plans on dealing with the backlash he’s receiving. April 20. What do stupid abusive narcissistic men do when they’re outrageously uncomfortable and widely hated by the majority of the planet??? This. So as bad as things are now, they will get worse if he’s not stopped. ***************************************************
Credit to: Tony Pentimalli
This Is Not a Drill: Trump’s Day-One Order Sets the Stage for Martial Law
By Tony Pentimalli
On January 20, 2025, while the press focused on the optics of Donald Trump’s indoor inauguration, something far more dangerous was set in motion—off-camera, away from ceremony, and beneath the radar of a public lulled by spectacle.
Trump signed an executive order declaring a national emergency at the southern border. But the most alarming part? It gave the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security just 90 days to deliver a joint report on whether he should invoke the Insurrection Act.
That deadline is April 20.
This wasn’t about immigration. It was about power.
The Insurrection Act, passed in 1807, gives the president the authority to deploy the U.S. military on American soil. That means troops in our cities. That means bypassing governors. That means suspending protest rights. That means the death of democratic dissent—under the false pretense of restoring “order.”
And Trump’s not hiding it. He’s preparing it.
We’ve seen this before. In June 2020, after the murder of George Floyd, millions of Americans rose up in protest. Trump didn’t respond with compassion—he called for “domination.” When the military hesitated to invoke the Insurrection Act, Trump sent federal forces to violently clear peaceful protesters from Lafayette Square so he could wave a Bible in front of a church. Not an ounce of remorse followed. He was angry the generals didn’t go far enough.
This time, he’s made sure they won’t hesitate.
Since returning to power, Trump has purged the Pentagon of independent thinkers. In their place? Loyalists. Pete Hegseth is now Secretary of Defense. Tulsi Gabbard runs intelligence. And J.D. Vance—Vice President—is openly on board with using military force against Americans on American soil.
Then, on March 19, those three—Vance, Gabbard, and Hegseth—staged a photo op at the southern border. Not a routine visit. Not a strategy session. A performance.
Think about it. Why would the Vice President, the head of military intelligence, and the Defense Secretary all need to go to the border together? Why make a media spectacle of it?
Because it wasn’t about the border. It was about the optics. It was about laying the emotional groundwork for invoking the Insurrection Act. They were building the narrative. “We had to act.” “We had no choice.” “The crisis was too big.”
And what comes next?
It’s June 2025. Trump goes on national TV and declares that Democratic cities are under siege by “radicals” and “illegals.” He signs the Insurrection Act order. Troops hit the streets of Atlanta, Chicago, Philadelphia. Protesters are arrested under “emergency provisions.” Journalists are detained. Social media accounts vanish. Immigrants are swept into detention centers. The press is told to stand down. The public is told to shut up.
And it’s all legal.
Some of you might think, “He’s bluffing. The military won’t go along. The courts will stop him.”
Really?
Were they bluffing when federal agents brutalized peaceful protesters in Lafayette Square?
Did the military refuse? No. The National Guard was deployed. Many in uniform carried out the order. It was only later that a few expressed regret—after the damage was done.
Did the courts stop January 6? No. They prosecuted rioters after the fact, but the attack happened. Congress fled. Democracy was nearly strangled live on TV.
Did they stop the family separation policy? No. Thousands of children were taken from their parents before courts intervened—long after the trauma was inflicted.
Did they stop the Muslim ban? No. The Supreme Court upheld it. Entire families were stranded or banned simply because of where they came from.
Did they stop ICE raids or CBP abuses? Rarely. A handful of rulings. A few headlines. But the system kept grinding, unchecked and cruel.
So if you’re waiting for “the system” to save us, you’re waiting for something that has already failed.
The April 20 report is coming. If it recommends using the Insurrection Act—and let’s be honest, it will—Trump will frame it as a reluctant but necessary move. He’ll say he tried everything else. He’ll claim it’s about protecting America.
But what he’s really protecting is his own authority.
This is how authoritarianism arrives: not with tanks, but with legal memos, press events, and a scared public hoping someone else will stop it.
So what do we do?
We speak now. Loudly. Forcefully.
Call your representatives and demand they investigate Trump’s January 20 order.
Push the media to report on the Insurrection Act report before it’s too late.
Demand public statements from military and intelligence leaders—now, not after.
Organize. Educate. Resist.
If you’ve never joined a protest before, this is the moment.
If you’ve never spoken up politically, this is the time.
If you’ve never thought it could happen here—it already is.
The threat isn’t coming.
It’s here.
And silence is exactly what Trump is counting on.
Tony Pentimalli is a political analyst and commentator fighting for democracy, economic justice, and social equity. Follow him for sharp analysis and hard-hitting critiques.
Ta.
SCIENCE said:
Michael V said:party_pants said:
Not me. I can’t stand to listen to him speak. Will hit the mute button.
I can’t stand his voice either.
But are others mesmerised by it, I wonder?
Ta.
Michael V said:
sarahs mum said:
Chrisoula Baikos
7 April at 23:31 ·
He’s setting us up for Martial Law….just in case y’all were wondering how he plans on dealing with the backlash he’s receiving. April 20. What do stupid abusive narcissistic men do when they’re outrageously uncomfortable and widely hated by the majority of the planet??? This. So as bad as things are now, they will get worse if he’s not stopped. ***************************************************
Credit to: Tony Pentimalli
This Is Not a Drill: Trump’s Day-One Order Sets the Stage for Martial Law
By Tony Pentimalli
On January 20, 2025, while the press focused on the optics of Donald Trump’s indoor inauguration, something far more dangerous was set in motion—off-camera, away from ceremony, and beneath the radar of a public lulled by spectacle.
Trump signed an executive order declaring a national emergency at the southern border. But the most alarming part? It gave the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security just 90 days to deliver a joint report on whether he should invoke the Insurrection Act.
That deadline is April 20.
This wasn’t about immigration. It was about power.
The Insurrection Act, passed in 1807, gives the president the authority to deploy the U.S. military on American soil. That means troops in our cities. That means bypassing governors. That means suspending protest rights. That means the death of democratic dissent—under the false pretense of restoring “order.”
And Trump’s not hiding it. He’s preparing it.
We’ve seen this before. In June 2020, after the murder of George Floyd, millions of Americans rose up in protest. Trump didn’t respond with compassion—he called for “domination.” When the military hesitated to invoke the Insurrection Act, Trump sent federal forces to violently clear peaceful protesters from Lafayette Square so he could wave a Bible in front of a church. Not an ounce of remorse followed. He was angry the generals didn’t go far enough.
This time, he’s made sure they won’t hesitate.
Since returning to power, Trump has purged the Pentagon of independent thinkers. In their place? Loyalists. Pete Hegseth is now Secretary of Defense. Tulsi Gabbard runs intelligence. And J.D. Vance—Vice President—is openly on board with using military force against Americans on American soil.
Then, on March 19, those three—Vance, Gabbard, and Hegseth—staged a photo op at the southern border. Not a routine visit. Not a strategy session. A performance.
Think about it. Why would the Vice President, the head of military intelligence, and the Defense Secretary all need to go to the border together? Why make a media spectacle of it?
Because it wasn’t about the border. It was about the optics. It was about laying the emotional groundwork for invoking the Insurrection Act. They were building the narrative. “We had to act.” “We had no choice.” “The crisis was too big.”
And what comes next?
It’s June 2025. Trump goes on national TV and declares that Democratic cities are under siege by “radicals” and “illegals.” He signs the Insurrection Act order. Troops hit the streets of Atlanta, Chicago, Philadelphia. Protesters are arrested under “emergency provisions.” Journalists are detained. Social media accounts vanish. Immigrants are swept into detention centers. The press is told to stand down. The public is told to shut up.
And it’s all legal.
Some of you might think, “He’s bluffing. The military won’t go along. The courts will stop him.”
Really?
Were they bluffing when federal agents brutalized peaceful protesters in Lafayette Square?
Did the military refuse? No. The National Guard was deployed. Many in uniform carried out the order. It was only later that a few expressed regret—after the damage was done.
Did the courts stop January 6? No. They prosecuted rioters after the fact, but the attack happened. Congress fled. Democracy was nearly strangled live on TV.
Did they stop the family separation policy? No. Thousands of children were taken from their parents before courts intervened—long after the trauma was inflicted.
Did they stop the Muslim ban? No. The Supreme Court upheld it. Entire families were stranded or banned simply because of where they came from.
Did they stop ICE raids or CBP abuses? Rarely. A handful of rulings. A few headlines. But the system kept grinding, unchecked and cruel.
So if you’re waiting for “the system” to save us, you’re waiting for something that has already failed.
The April 20 report is coming. If it recommends using the Insurrection Act—and let’s be honest, it will—Trump will frame it as a reluctant but necessary move. He’ll say he tried everything else. He’ll claim it’s about protecting America.
But what he’s really protecting is his own authority.
This is how authoritarianism arrives: not with tanks, but with legal memos, press events, and a scared public hoping someone else will stop it.
So what do we do?
We speak now. Loudly. Forcefully.
Call your representatives and demand they investigate Trump’s January 20 order.
Push the media to report on the Insurrection Act report before it’s too late.
Demand public statements from military and intelligence leaders—now, not after.
Organize. Educate. Resist.
If you’ve never joined a protest before, this is the moment.
If you’ve never spoken up politically, this is the time.
If you’ve never thought it could happen here—it already is.
The threat isn’t coming.
It’s here.
And silence is exactly what Trump is counting on.
Tony Pentimalli is a political analyst and commentator fighting for democracy, economic justice, and social equity. Follow him for sharp analysis and hard-hitting critiques.
Ta.
I’m telling ya, the only thing that can stop Trump is for the military to refuse such orders and instead turn on them and stage a military coup. Have a big cleanout, rewrite a new Constitution and reform the whole electoral system.
dv said:
so the similarity to the triumph of the willy was more than just superficial who would have foreseen this
oh and nobody could have foreseen this
freedom
liberty
so basically the USSA have been running stacked books and unfair trade practices for 50 years and now they’re finally trying to level the playing field and make things more equitable
saving the world
SCIENCE said:
so basically the USSA have been running stacked books and unfair trade practices for 50 years and now they’re finally trying to level the playing field and make things more equitable
saving the world
After WW2 every other country was broke and in ruins. They did lead the recovery effort and rebuilt things according to a new order. It was thought at the time that empires led to terrible wars and that some new system was required. The US wrote the rules for that new order. by and large it worked, but no system is ever perfect.
Heather Cox Richardson
1m ·
April 12, 2025 (Saturday)
It was just 20 days ago—on March 24—that editor in chief of The Atlantic Jeffrey Goldberg reported that the most senior members of the Trump administration discussed a military strike on the Houthis in Yemen on an unsecure commercial messaging app and that they included him on the chat.
Their Signal chat, which Goldberg published later in response to the administration’s insistence that there was nothing classified in the chat, showed that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had posted precise details of the munitions and planes involved in the strikes. It showed that neither President Donald Trump nor the acting chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—a Biden appointee—was on the chat, and that White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller apparently made the decision to strike based on his interpretation of what President Donald Trump wanted. In violation of the Presidential Records Act, the app was set to delete the messages. There was apparently no larger strategy or diplomatic plan other than to strike, and participants greeted news of the collapse of an apartment building into which a Houthi leader had allegedly walked with emojis of fists, fire, and a U.S. flag.
This extraordinary lapse in national security protections would normally have defined an administration and caused a number of resignations, but the White House called the case “closed” on March 31. And there was more: On April 2, Dasha Burns of Politico reported that the team working with national security advisor Mike Waltz regularly used the unsecure Signal app to communicate about issues involving Ukraine, China, Gaza, the Middle East, the U.S., and Europe. The officials to whom Burns spoke said they had personal knowledge of at least 20 such chats.
That story has been almost completely driven out of the news by President Donald Trump’s tariff machinations since April 2. On that day, after teasing the idea of what he called “Liberation Day,” Trump announced that at 12:01 a.m. on Wednesday, April 9, he would be imposing a 10% tariff on all imports to the United States, with significantly higher rates on countries he claims engage in unfair trade practices. By the next day it had been established that his team, led by trade advisor Peter Navarro, arrived at the tariff rates with a nonsensical formula that simply took the U.S. trade deficit with a country, divided it by the value of that country’s exports to the U.S., and cut the resulting number in half.
For the next week, the stock market plummeted, jumping only with rumors that Trump would back off on the tariffs, while economists and financial analysts revised the chances of inflation and recession upward, and economic growth downward. News coming out of the White House was contradictory: one advisor would say that Trump would not negotiate over tariffs and they were here to stay, while another would say he intended to negotiate and they were just starting points.
Meanwhile, as predicted, other countries began to put tariffs on goods from the United States or pause exports, and global markets fell. Americans from business leaders to small business owners to consumers and wage workers called out the “stupidity” of Trump’s trade war. Others noted that the tariffs appeared to be intended as a shakedown as countries or businesses who offered Trump the right price could get exemptions.
As trillions of dollars in stock values evaporated, Trump insisted the tariffs were here to stay. “I know what the hell I’m doing,” Trump told Republicans on Tuesday, April 8. He boasted that global leaders were “kissing my ass.” On Wednesday, April 9, at 9:33 a.m, he posted: “BE COOL! Everything is going to work out well. The USA will be bigger and better than ever before!” At 9:37, he posted “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!! DJT”
But, as Tyler Pager, Maggie Haberman, Ana Swanson, and Jonathan Swan of the New York Times reported, Trump’s team, led by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, was worried about setting off a financial panic that could not be stopped. Driving their concern was a broad sell-off of U.S. government bonds, which in the past investors had seen as a safe haven during times of market turmoil, and the rise in popularity of the government bonds of other countries.
Former treasury secretary Lawrence Summers noted that global financial markets were backing away from U.S. assets. Fund manager at Penn Mutual Asset Management George Cipolloni told Bernard Condon and Stan Choe of the Associated Press: “The fear is the U.S. is losing its standing as the safe haven. Our bond market is the biggest and most stable in the world, but when you add instability, bad things can happen.”
On April 8, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer defended Trump’s tariffs to the Senate Finance Committee. He was offering similar testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee at 1:18 p.m. when a social media post from Trump pulled the rug out from under him. Trump paused most of the highest tariffs for 90 days and instituted an across-the-board tariff of 10% in their place. But, perhaps unwilling to look weak, he announced that he was raising tariffs on goods from China to 125% effective immediately, “ased on the lack of respect that China has shown to the World’s Markets.”
With Trump’s tariff pause, stocks jumped upward in one of the biggest single-day gains since World War II. Hedge fund manager Spencer Hakimian posted a graph showing that Nasdaq call volume—bets that stock values would rise—spiked minutes before Trump’s announcement. He commented: “Not a good look at all.”
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) reposted Hakimian’s post and added: “Any member of Congress who purchased stocks in the last 48 hours should probably disclose that now. I’ve been hearing some interesting chatter on the floor. Disclosure deadline is May 15th. We’re about to learn a few things. It’s time to ban insider trading in Congress.”
David Smith of The Guardian noted that the juxtaposition of Trump golfing, dining with donors, and meeting with race car drivers even as economic chaos tanked people’s retirement accounts prompted accusations that he has lost touch with reality. A widely circulated video that appears to be Trump bragging to NASCAR drivers visiting the White House that investor Charles Schwab made $2.5 billion on Wednesday and that another investor made $900 million has fed anger at Trump’s economic chaos. On Friday the University of Michigan released its well-respected consumer-sentiment index, showing that consumer sentiment about the economy and personal finances fell for the fourth straight month, dropping 11% from March. Consumers from all political affiliations fear recession, inflation, and unemployment.
This level of consumer sentiment is the second lowest since the index began in 1952. Chief U.S. economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics Samuel Tombs told the Wall Street Journal’s Harriet Torry: “Consumers have spiraled from anxious to petrified.” James Knightley, the chief international economist at the multinational banking and financial services company ING, noted that consumers appear to blame Trump for their concerns. While in January 44% of respondents told researchers that the government was doing a poor job of managing inflation and unemployment, now 67% say so.
The change happened so quickly that White House officials could not tell reporters what the actual tariff rates were for different countries. When more information was available, Kevin Schaul of the Washington Post noted that Trump’s new tariff levies had actually increased tariffs rather than lowered them because he had dropped rates only on goods from countries that don’t export much to the U.S. He had raised them significantly—not just to 125% but to 145%—on China, a major trading partner.
On Friday, China imposed 125% tariffs on goods from the U.S. A spokesperson for the Chinese Finance Ministry said that Trump’s tariff machinations “will become a joke in the history of the world economy.” At 9:20 a.m. President Trump posted: “We are doing really well on our TARIFF POLICY. Very exciting for America, and the World!!! It is moving along quickly. DJT.” The new tariffs had badly threatened Apple Inc., and at 10:36 p.m. the U.S. Customs and Border Protection posted a notice that various electronics, including smartphone and computer monitors, are exempt from the tariffs.
When economist Justin Wolfers commented: “I just want to tip my hat to the crack team of White House economists who were able to discover—in just a few short days—that the U.S. is dependent on China for smartphones, computers and semiconductors.” Dr. Soumya Rangarajan noted that “a basic medicine we use 1000x per day in the hospital, heparin, is also dependent on China, and people will die without it.” As Sabrina Malhi of the Washington Post explained, about 12 million people hospitalized in the U.S. need heparin every year, and it is only one of the many medications that will be affected by Trump’s tariffs on goods from China.
Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo posted that a “ood way to see the current tariffs, as of literally today, is no tariffs on high value add manufactured goods marketed to middle and upper middle classes. Massive tariffs for cheap consumer items” that benefit those lower on the economic ladder.
While the damage from the tariffs both to the domestic and global economy, as well as the USA’s standing in the world, is not yet clear—all the chaos has been about the prospect of Trump’s high tariff rates, not their actual effect—Trump appears to be trying to downplay that story in favor of demonstrating his power.
As the tariff saga played out on Wednesday, Trump signed a memorandum for the heads of executive departments and agencies informing them that they no longer need to let the public know when they get rid of regulations that they determine are obviously unlawful. Kate Riga of Talking Points Memo notes that “unlawful” appears to mean anything Trump doesn’t like.
In a breathtaking violation of the Constitution, on Wednesday Trump also went after two individuals: Christopher Krebs and Miles Taylor. Trump appointed Krebs to head the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), where in 2020 Krebs assured the American people that the presidential election had not been stolen. Trump now claims Krebs thus censored the speech of Trump loyalists.
As a Department of Homeland Security staffer, Taylor wrote an op-ed under the pseudonym “Anonymous” saying that members of the first Trump administration were pushing back against the president’s policies. Taylor later wrote a book about his time in the White House that Trump claims was “designed to sow chaos and distrust in Government” and thus “could properly be characterized as treasonous and as possibly violating the Espionage Act.” A grand jury believed Trump himself violated the Espionage Act by retaining classified documents.
Trump stripped security clearances from Krebs and Taylor and also from their employers. He ordered government officials to investigate the two men and to recommend “appropriate remedial or preventative actions to be taken to protect America’s interests.” Employees at CISA told Kevin Collier of NBC News they were disheartened by the attack on Krebs and noted that staffing cuts at CISA had “already severely degraded our capacity to defend critical infrastructure.”
(Apologies if this has been posted previously.)
Canada’s Checkmate: How Canada’s Quiet Bond Play Forced Trump to Drop Tariffs
https://www.facebook.com/karl.j.martin/posts/pfbid02RpPNs27cG86zihCakTkg2gSKDJEkPFSCrr8K478PKxDbGyWxsrHP9pNiYiJCKBtJl
sarahs mum said:
Heather Cox Richardson
1m ·
April 12, 2025 (Saturday)——————-CUT————————
Ta.
AussieDJ said:
(Apologies if this has been posted previously.)Canada’s Checkmate: How Canada’s Quiet Bond Play Forced Trump to Drop Tariffs
https://www.facebook.com/karl.j.martin/posts/pfbid02RpPNs27cG86zihCakTkg2gSKDJEkPFSCrr8K478PKxDbGyWxsrHP9pNiYiJCKBtJl
Snopes is investigating. No conclusion has been reached yet.
Note that this poster is likely a film set director and designer. The same words have been posted elsewhere. Martin has not referenced anybody, so my bull-shit detector is beeping.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/11/australian-with-us-working-visa-detained-insulted-deported
sarahs mum said:
accounts prompted accusations that he has lost touch with reality. A widely circulated video that appears to
damn surprise
Also we finished The Invasion of Time, six parter. The Doctor is drawn back to Gallifrey by the mysterious Vardans, and for the first three episodes is behaving very oddly: assumes the presidency, exiles Leela and other officials to the wastelands, hands control to the Vardans. It’s a ruse of course but it makes for a nice mystery. Fourth episode is set up as a triumphant finale, and for those watching at home it might have seemed that was the end of the series, but in the last few seconds the real, more familiar, threat is revealed.
Stars Gai Smith, better known to us as colourful racing identity Gai Waterhouse! Also the second of four appearances by Borusa, each a different regeneration so we assume he’s leading an exciting life.
The Doctor: “Maybe I am getting too young for this sort of thing.”
dv said:
Also we finished The Invasion of Time, six parter. The Doctor is drawn back to Gallifrey by the mysterious Vardans, and for the first three episodes is behaving very oddly: assumes the presidency, exiles Leela and other officials to the wastelands, hands control to the Vardans. It’s a ruse of course but it makes for a nice mystery. Fourth episode is set up as a triumphant finale, and for those watching at home it might have seemed that was the end of the series, but in the last few seconds the real, more familiar, threat is revealed.Stars Gai Smith, better known to us as colourful racing identity Gai Waterhouse! Also the second of four appearances by Borusa, each a different regeneration so we assume he’s leading an exciting life.
The Doctor: “Maybe I am getting too young for this sort of thing.”
I don’t think even the Doctor can save the USA.
Wrong thread, I blame SCIENCE
dv said:
Wrong thread, I blame SCIENCE
I don’t blame you.
JudgeMental said:
dv said:
Also we finished The Invasion of Time, six parter. The Doctor is drawn back to Gallifrey by the mysterious Vardans, and for the first three episodes is behaving very oddly: assumes the presidency, exiles Leela and other officials to the wastelands, hands control to the Vardans. It’s a ruse of course but it makes for a nice mystery. Fourth episode is set up as a triumphant finale, and for those watching at home it might have seemed that was the end of the series, but in the last few seconds the real, more familiar, threat is revealed.Stars Gai Smith, better known to us as colourful racing identity Gai Waterhouse! Also the second of four appearances by Borusa, each a different regeneration so we assume he’s leading an exciting life.
The Doctor: “Maybe I am getting too young for this sort of thing.”
I don’t think even the Doctor can save the USA.
Dr Who could apply a time loop to America, from President Washington to President Obama back to President Washington to President Obama etc….
Trump’s rampant dumbfuckery and his ruination of the United States might, ultimately, have some beneficial effect.
There’s a vast number of people, many of them American, who are constantly looking for some kind of messiah, who will wave his hand/Sharpie, and magic away all of their doubts, fears, and problems.
The MAGA mob believed that they had their messiah in the form of Dunny Trumpet, and, by crikey, he’s giving the messianic powers a red-hot try-out.
After a year or two or four of Donny’s ‘magic’, they may be compelled to look around themselves at the smoking ruins, and to then look at the politics of their country in a much more realistic way.
dv said:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/11/australian-with-us-working-visa-detained-insulted-deported
Bloody.
captain_spalding said:
Trump’s rampant dumbfuckery and his ruination of the United States might, ultimately, have some beneficial effect.There’s a vast number of people, many of them American, who are constantly looking for some kind of messiah, who will wave his hand/Sharpie, and magic away all of their doubts, fears, and problems.
The MAGA mob believed that they had their messiah in the form of Dunny Trumpet, and, by crikey, he’s giving the messianic powers a red-hot try-out.
After a year or two or four of Donny’s ‘magic’, they may be compelled to look around themselves at the smoking ruins, and to then look at the politics of their country in a much more realistic way.
I live in hope. I hope many others do, too.
Michael V said:
captain_spalding said:
Trump’s rampant dumbfuckery and his ruination of the United States might, ultimately, have some beneficial effect.
There’s a vast number of people, many of them American, who are constantly looking for some kind of messiah, who will wave his hand/Sharpie, and magic away all of their doubts, fears, and problems.
The MAGA mob believed that they had their messiah in the form of Dunny Trumpet, and, by crikey, he’s giving the messianic powers a red-hot try-out.
After a year or two or four of Donny’s ‘magic’, they may be compelled to look around themselves at the smoking ruins, and to then look at the politics of their country in a much more realistic way.
I live in hope. I hope many others do, too.
got some bad news for yous then
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_suicide
well all right maybe bad news for them, good news for naturally selective phenomena
sarahs mum said:
so was she innocent
SCIENCE said:
sarahs mum said:
so was she innocent
i think she is inferring that she was way more innocent than Trump. And she does have a point.
sarahs mum said:
SCIENCE said:
sarahs mum said:
so was she innocent
i think she is inferring that she was way more innocent than Trump. And she does have a point.
for sure
sarahs mum said:
I hope that Martha gets her favourite cell again, when ‘the authorities’put her back in the slammer for bad-mouthing Dunny Trumpet
SCIENCE said:
sarahs mum said:
SCIENCE said:
so was she innocent
i think she is inferring that she was way more innocent than Trump. And she does have a point.
for sure
what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.
Tau.Neutrino said:
JudgeMental said:
dv said:
JudgeMental said:
dv said:
Also we finished The Invasion of Time, six parter. The Doctor is drawn back to Gallifrey by the mysterious Vardans, and for the first three episodes is behaving very oddly: assumes the presidency, exiles Leela and other officials to the wastelands, hands control to the Vardans. It’s a ruse of course but it makes for a nice mystery. Fourth episode is set up as a triumphant finale, and for those watching at home it might have seemed that was the end of the series, but in the last few seconds the real, more familiar, threat is revealed.
Stars Gai Smith, better known to us as colourful racing identity Gai Waterhouse! Also the second of four appearances by Borusa, each a different regeneration so we assume he’s leading an exciting life.
The Doctor: “Maybe I am getting too young for this sort of thing.”
I don’t think even the Doctor can save the USA.
Wrong thread, I blame SCIENCE
I don’t blame you.
Dr Who could apply a time loop to America, from President Washington to President Obama back to President Washington to President Obama etc….
well we’re sorry
anyway
Michael V said:
Spiny Norman said:
Michael V said:I don’t get your point, sorry.
The GOP is continuing to reduce the number of people that can vote for the democrats, thus helping the GOP in every election. They did extensive voter suppression over the last few years.
I don’t see how passport and/or birth certificate possession is linked to women, particularly blue-voting women.
The name on the birth certificate has to match the current registered name, and for most married women, it won’t.
dv said:
Michael V said:
Spiny Norman said:The GOP is continuing to reduce the number of people that can vote for the democrats, thus helping the GOP in every election. They did extensive voter suppression over the last few years.
I don’t see how passport and/or birth certificate possession is linked to women, particularly blue-voting women.
The name on the birth certificate has to match the current registered name, and for most married women, it won’t.
Discussion of the consequences
https://www.npr.org/2025/04/13/g-s1-59684/save-act-married-women-vote-rights-explained
It passed the house 220-208 with the help of 4 Democratic congresspeople.
dv said:
dv said:
Michael V said:
I don’t see how passport and/or birth certificate possession is linked to women, particularly blue-voting women.
The name on the birth certificate has to match the current registered name, and for most married women, it won’t.
Discussion of the consequences
https://www.npr.org/2025/04/13/g-s1-59684/save-act-married-women-vote-rights-explained
It passed the house 220-208 with the help of 4 Democratic congresspeople.
so they’re making the votes of childless cat ladies count for more
SCIENCE said:
dv said:
dv said:
The name on the birth certificate has to match the current registered name, and for most married women, it won’t.
Discussion of the consequences
https://www.npr.org/2025/04/13/g-s1-59684/save-act-married-women-vote-rights-explained
It passed the house 220-208 with the help of 4 Democratic congresspeople.
so they’re making the votes of childless cat ladies count for more
Of course, these women do have the option of getting a passport but the $130 cost does just add to the barrier that poorer people need to pass in order to vote.
SCIENCE said:
sarahs mum said:
so was she innocent
She seems to want to give that impression, anyway.
Michael V said:
SCIENCE said:sarahs mum said:
so was she innocent
She seems to want to give that impression, anyway.
It should be noted that these aren’t in fact her words. It’s just a meme.
dv said:
Michael V said:
Spiny Norman said:The GOP is continuing to reduce the number of people that can vote for the democrats, thus helping the GOP in every election. They did extensive voter suppression over the last few years.
I don’t see how passport and/or birth certificate possession is linked to women, particularly blue-voting women.
The name on the birth certificate has to match the current registered name, and for most married women, it won’t.
Fair comment, although I understand that Birth Certificate plus Marriage Certificate is acceptable.
I still don’t understand how this affects blue-voting women more than red-voting women.
dv said:
Michael V said:
SCIENCE said:
sarahs mum said:
so was she innocent
She seems to want to give that impression, anyway.
It should be noted that these aren’t in fact her words. It’s just a meme.
we feel like the author of the meme has conveniently exploited that default assumption and therefore was being somewhat dishonest
dv said:
Michael V said:
SCIENCE said:so was she innocent
She seems to want to give that impression, anyway.
It should be noted that these aren’t in fact her words. It’s just a meme.
Ah. Thanks.
dv said:
dv said:
Michael V said:I don’t see how passport and/or birth certificate possession is linked to women, particularly blue-voting women.
The name on the birth certificate has to match the current registered name, and for most married women, it won’t.
Discussion of the consequences
https://www.npr.org/2025/04/13/g-s1-59684/save-act-married-women-vote-rights-explained
It passed the house 220-208 with the help of 4 Democratic congresspeople.
Ta. Read that.
Michael V said:
dv said:
Michael V said:I don’t see how passport and/or birth certificate possession is linked to women, particularly blue-voting women.
The name on the birth certificate has to match the current registered name, and for most married women, it won’t.
Fair comment, although I understand that Birth Certificate plus Marriage Certificate is acceptable.
I still don’t understand how this affects blue-voting women more than red-voting women.
People with incomes under $30000 pa mainly vote Democrat.
To the best of my knowledge, Stewart was rightfully convicted, and this is really just a matter of different treatment of DJT and everyone else.
dv said:
Michael V said:
dv said:The name on the birth certificate has to match the current registered name, and for most married women, it won’t.
Fair comment, although I understand that Birth Certificate plus Marriage Certificate is acceptable.
I still don’t understand how this affects blue-voting women more than red-voting women.
People with incomes under $30000 pa mainly vote Democrat.
Ah. Thanks. I didn’t realise that.
SCIENCE said:
They are still not getting it. They are still saying that only half of the tariff is being paid by American businesses.
dv said:
SCIENCE said:
They are still not getting it. They are still saying that only half of the tariff is being paid by American businesses.
the poster in the comments get it.
Do Fox News hosts just feign stupidity? I mean … this is beyond common knowledge for regular people let alone people whose job it is to be on top of the news
dv said:
dv said:
Michael V said:I don’t see how passport and/or birth certificate possession is linked to women, particularly blue-voting women.
The name on the birth certificate has to match the current registered name, and for most married women, it won’t.
Discussion of the consequences
https://www.npr.org/2025/04/13/g-s1-59684/save-act-married-women-vote-rights-explained
It passed the house 220-208 with the help of 4 Democratic congresspeople.
Why would any Democrats vote for that?
The Rev Dodgson said:
dv said:
dv said:The name on the birth certificate has to match the current registered name, and for most married women, it won’t.
Discussion of the consequences
https://www.npr.org/2025/04/13/g-s1-59684/save-act-married-women-vote-rights-explained
It passed the house 220-208 with the help of 4 Democratic congresspeople.
Why would any Democrats vote for that?
There are some conservative people in the party though I suppose we should not rule out outright corruption
nobody could have foreseen this
Trump envoy’s embrace of Russian demands worries Republicans, U.S. allies
NEW YORK/WASHINGTON, April 11 (Reuters) – Less than 48 hours after dining with a negotiator sent by Russian President Vladimir Putin in Washington last week, Steve Witkoff, the U.S. special envoy leading talks with Moscow, sat down with President Donald Trump in the White House and delivered a clear message. The fastest way to broker a ceasefire in Ukraine, said Witkoff, was to support a strategy that would give Russia ownership of four eastern Ukrainian regions it attempted to annex illegally in 2022, two U.S. officials and five people familiar with the situation told Reuters.
etc
bots gonna botch
Michael V said:
AussieDJ said:
(Apologies if this has been posted previously.)Canada’s Checkmate: How Canada’s Quiet Bond Play Forced Trump to Drop Tariffs
https://www.facebook.com/karl.j.martin/posts/pfbid02RpPNs27cG86zihCakTkg2gSKDJEkPFSCrr8K478PKxDbGyWxsrHP9pNiYiJCKBtJl
Snopes is investigating. No conclusion has been reached yet.
Note that this poster is likely a film set director and designer. The same words have been posted elsewhere. Martin has not referenced anybody, so my bull-shit detector is beeping.
Oh dear. Looks like I’ve been sucked in … again!
Thanks.
How is it possible that you have this job?: RFK Jr.‘s incompetence becomes too glaring to overlook
Rachel Maddow
kii said:
How is it possible that you have this job?: RFK Jr.‘s incompetence becomes too glaring to overlook
Rachel Maddow
“becomes”
SCIENCE said:
kii said:
How is it possible that you have this job?: RFK Jr.‘s incompetence becomes too glaring to overlook
Rachel Maddow
“becomes”
It’s been glaringly obvious since Samoa.
well then if so
It’s usually said that Trump’s grandiose pronouncements should be taken seriously, but not literally, that it’s just the extravagant rhetoric of a showman who can’t help himself. But what if he should be taken literally?
nobody will could have foreseen this could
they
AussieDJ said:
Michael V said:
AussieDJ said:
(Apologies if this has been posted previously.)Canada’s Checkmate: How Canada’s Quiet Bond Play Forced Trump to Drop Tariffs
https://www.facebook.com/karl.j.martin/posts/pfbid02RpPNs27cG86zihCakTkg2gSKDJEkPFSCrr8K478PKxDbGyWxsrHP9pNiYiJCKBtJl
Snopes is investigating. No conclusion has been reached yet.
Note that this poster is likely a film set director and designer. The same words have been posted elsewhere. Martin has not referenced anybody, so my bull-shit detector is beeping.
Oh dear. Looks like I’ve been sucked in … again!
Thanks.
From reading the Snopes analysis, it looks like the degree of co-ordination is overhyped, but the sell off is not imagination. DJT hasn’t really done anything to make other countries trust him. And there are surely other economists who understand how this works. Might be co-incidence that lots decided to sell at the same time, and co-incidence that it’s just after the tariffs were announced. I’m not sure I trust Coincidence. Whispers probably work as well as formal meetings. And selling off the bonds seems wiser to me than putting tariffs on US goods. Doesn’t hurt your populace in the same way that more expensive goods does.
Hey he’s healthy because he wins a lot of golf tournaments!
What a relief!
Spiny Norman said:
Hey he’s healthy because he wins a lot of golf tournaments!
What a relief!
This one seems less fake, though still a little unrealistic in places.
100 kg? Yeah, right.
Spiny Norman said:
Spiny Norman said:
Hey he’s healthy because he wins a lot of golf tournaments!
What a relief!
This one seems less fake, though still a little unrealistic in places.
100 kg? Yeah, right.
It is all lies.
Spiny Norman said:
Hey he’s healthy because he wins a lot of golf tournaments!
What a relief!
Undated, unsigned.
The US is supposedly struggling with swarms of illegal immigrants, flooding into the country across its southern border, all in search of a better way of life.
I hope that Canada is prepared for that sort of thing.
JudgeMental said:
Ha!
A terrorist set fire to the home of Pennsylvania’s Gov. Shapiro using a Molotov firebomb.
MAGA.
kii said:
A terrorist set fire to the home of Pennsylvania’s Gov. Shapiro using a Molotov firebomb.MAGA.
It’s not exactly the Reichstag, but you make do with what’s available.
Peak Warming Man said:
probably using the same doctor as Biden…
diddly-squat said:
Peak Warming Man said:
probably using the same doctor as Biden…
Unlikely. The article (see ABC Justin) states he was appointed by Trump.
Michael V said:
diddly-squat said:
Peak Warming Man said:
probably using the same doctor as Biden…
Unlikely. The article (see ABC Justin) states he was appointed by Trump.
sorry, I was being a little sarcastic – I’m not sure Trump is “fully fit” any more than Biden was
diddly-squat said:
Michael V said:
diddly-squat said:probably using the same doctor as Biden…
Unlikely. The article (see ABC Justin) states he was appointed by Trump.
sorry, I was being a little sarcastic – I’m not sure Trump is “fully fit” any more than Biden was
You just can’t help yourself, can you?
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DIZxMWDNfUT/?igsh=MWFzZ3RlczA1bnVzaQ==
Pete Hegseth claims 75% of ships going through Panama Canal are going “ to or from a port”.
dv said:
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DIZxMWDNfUT/?igsh=MWFzZ3RlczA1bnVzaQ==Pete Hegseth claims 75% of ships going through Panama Canal are going “ to or from a port”.
Well, he’s not wrong.
It could even be as high as 100%.
Or as high as 105%, according to Trumpian mathematics.
dv said:
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DIZxMWDNfUT/?igsh=MWFzZ3RlczA1bnVzaQ==Pete Hegseth claims 75% of ships going through Panama Canal are going “ to or from a port”.
What about 3 hour tours ?
dv said:
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DIZxMWDNfUT/?igsh=MWFzZ3RlczA1bnVzaQ==Pete Hegseth claims 75% of ships going through Panama Canal are going “ to or from a port”.
not much gets past old pete.
captain_spalding said:
dv said:
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DIZxMWDNfUT/?igsh=MWFzZ3RlczA1bnVzaQ==Pete Hegseth claims 75% of ships going through Panama Canal are going “ to or from a port”.
Well, he’s not wrong.
It could even be as high as 100%.
Yeah but he didn’t say “at least”.
In fairness maybe 25% are sinking or being raptured.
dv said:
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DIZxMWDNfUT/?igsh=MWFzZ3RlczA1bnVzaQ==Pete Hegseth claims 75% of ships going through Panama Canal are going “ to or from a port”.
LOL
What a twerp.
dv said:
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DIZxMWDNfUT/?igsh=MWFzZ3RlczA1bnVzaQ==Pete Hegseth claims 75% of ships going through Panama Canal are going “ to or from a port”.
In the sentence before that he was talking about US shipping so one would objectively presume, he was still talking about US shipping.
Peak Warming Man said:
dv said:
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DIZxMWDNfUT/?igsh=MWFzZ3RlczA1bnVzaQ==Pete Hegseth claims 75% of ships going through Panama Canal are going “ to or from a port”.
In the sentence before that he was talking about US shipping so one would objectively presume, he was still talking about US shipping.
(Shrugs)
This doesn’t change the dynamic much does it? I would think very close to 100% of US ships are also heading to a port. (I’ll allow that some ships are heading to other ships for various supply or service purposes.)
dv said:
Peak Warming Man said:
dv said:
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DIZxMWDNfUT/?igsh=MWFzZ3RlczA1bnVzaQ==Pete Hegseth claims 75% of ships going through Panama Canal are going “ to or from a port”.
In the sentence before that he was talking about US shipping so one would objectively presume, he was still talking about US shipping.
(Shrugs)
This doesn’t change the dynamic much does it? I would think very close to 100% of US ships are also heading to a port. (I’ll allow that some ships are heading to other ships for various supply or service purposes.)
He was saying that 75% of ships going through the canal were coming from or going to US ports.
Peak Warming Man said:
dv said:
Peak Warming Man said:In the sentence before that he was talking about US shipping so one would objectively presume, he was still talking about US shipping.
(Shrugs)
This doesn’t change the dynamic much does it? I would think very close to 100% of US ships are also heading to a port. (I’ll allow that some ships are heading to other ships for various supply or service purposes.)
He was saying that 75% of ships going through the canal were coming from or going to US ports.
If that’s what he meant then he needs to go back to talking school.
Peak Warming Man said:
dv said:
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DIZxMWDNfUT/?igsh=MWFzZ3RlczA1bnVzaQ==Pete Hegseth claims 75% of ships going through Panama Canal are going “ to or from a port”.
In the sentence before that he was talking about US shipping so one would objectively presume, he was still talking about US shipping.
When the USA takes the canal
They can have Van Halen blasting out
Trump can stand on an aircraft carrier in a David Lee Roth outfit pantomiming along and encouraging the troops
Cymek said:
Peak Warming Man said:
dv said:
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DIZxMWDNfUT/?igsh=MWFzZ3RlczA1bnVzaQ==Pete Hegseth claims 75% of ships going through Panama Canal are going “ to or from a port”.
In the sentence before that he was talking about US shipping so one would objectively presume, he was still talking about US shipping.
When the USA takes the canal
They can have Van Halen blasting out
Trump can stand on an aircraft carrier in a David Lee Roth outfit pantomiming along and encouraging the troops
I was thinking more Cher “If I Could Turn Back Time” style..
diddly-squat said:
Cymek said:
Peak Warming Man said:In the sentence before that he was talking about US shipping so one would objectively presume, he was still talking about US shipping.
When the USA takes the canal
They can have Van Halen blasting out
Trump can stand on an aircraft carrier in a David Lee Roth outfit pantomiming along and encouraging the troops
I was thinking more Cher “If I Could Turn Back Time” style..
Riding those big guns
Cymek said:
diddly-squat said:
Cymek said:When the USA takes the canal
They can have Van Halen blasting out
Trump can stand on an aircraft carrier in a David Lee Roth outfit pantomiming along and encouraging the troops
I was thinking more Cher “If I Could Turn Back Time” style..
Riding those big guns
A man, a Pres, a laser: Panama!
Cymek said:
diddly-squat said:
Cymek said:When the USA takes the canal
They can have Van Halen blasting out
Trump can stand on an aircraft carrier in a David Lee Roth outfit pantomiming along and encouraging the troops
I was thinking more Cher “If I Could Turn Back Time” style..
Riding those big guns
The Ride of the Valkyries.
diddly-squat said:
Cymek said:
Peak Warming Man said:In the sentence before that he was talking about US shipping so one would objectively presume, he was still talking about US shipping.
When the USA takes the canal
They can have Van Halen blasting out
Trump can stand on an aircraft carrier in a David Lee Roth outfit pantomiming along and encouraging the troops
I was thinking more Cher “If I Could Turn Back Time” style..
Cymek said:
diddly-squat said:
Cymek said:When the USA takes the canal
They can have Van Halen blasting out
Trump can stand on an aircraft carrier in a David Lee Roth outfit pantomiming along and encouraging the troops
I was thinking more Cher “If I Could Turn Back Time” style..
Riding those big guns
How phallic can ya get, hey what but!!
Peak Warming Man said:
Cymek said:
diddly-squat said:I was thinking more Cher “If I Could Turn Back Time” style..
Riding those big guns
The Ride of the Valkyries.
Dunt dah dah daaah daaah….. dunt dah dah daaah daaah…… dunt dah dah daah daaah…, dunt dah dah daaah!
“Life is too short for Wagner” – Horace Rumpole
Heather Cox Richardson
39m ·
April 13, 2025 (Sunday)
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.
The 29-year-old Abrego Garcia came to the U.S. about 2011 when he was 16 to escape threats from a gang that was terrorizing his family. He settled in Maryland with his older brother, a U.S. citizen, and lived there until in 2019 he was picked up by police as he waited at a Home Depot to be picked up for work as a day laborer. Police transferred him to Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE). After a hearing, an immigration judge rejected his claim for asylum but said he could not be sent back to El Salvador, finding it credible that the Barrio 18 gang had been “targeting him and threatening him with death because of his family’s pupusa business.”
Ever since, Abrego Garcia has checked in annually with ICE as directed. He lives with his wife and their three children, and has never been charged with any crime. The Department of Homeland Security issued him a work permit, and he joined a union, working full time as a sheet metal apprentice.
On March 12, ICE agents pulled his car over, told his wife to come pick up their disabled son, and incarcerated Abrego Garcia, pressing him to say he was a member of MS-13. On March 15 the government rendered Abrego Garcia to the infamous CECOT prison for terrorists in El Salvador, alleged to be the site of human rights abuses, torture, extrajudicial killings. The U.S. government is paying El Salvador $6 million a year to incarcerate the individuals it sends there.
On March 24, Abrego Garcia’s family sued the administration over his removal.
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. It also accused him of being a member of the MS-13 gang and said that bringing him back to the U.S. would threaten the public.
On April 4, U.S. District Court Judge Paula Xinis ordered the government to return Abrego Garcia to the U.S. no later than 11:59 pm on April 7.
In her opinion, filed April 6, Judge Xinis wrote that “lthough the legal basis for the mass removal of hundreds of individuals to El Salvador remains disturbingly unclear, Abrego Garcia’s case is categorically different—there were no legal grounds whatsoever for his arrest, detention, or removal.…. is detention appears wholly lawless.” It is “a clear constitutional violation.” And yet administration officials “cling to the stunning proposition that they can forcibly remove any person—migrant and U.S. citizen alike—to prisons outside the United States, and then baldly assert they have no way to effectuate return because they are no longer the ‘custodian,’ and the Court thus lacks jurisdiction.”
The administration had already appealed her April 4 order to the Supreme Court, which handed down a 9–0 decision on Thursday, April 10, requiring the Trump administration “to ‘facilitate’ Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador,” but asking the district court to clarify what it meant by “effectuate,” that release, noting that it must give “due regard for the deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs.”
The Supreme Court also ordered that “the Government should be prepared to share what it can concerning the steps it has taken and the prospect of further steps.” Judge Xinis ordered the government to file an update by 9:30 a.m. on April 11 explaining where Abrego Garcia is, what the government is doing to get him back, and what more it will do. She planned an in-person hearing at 1:00 p.m.
But the administration evidently does not intend to comply. On April 11, the lawyer representing the government, Drew Ensign, said he did not have information about where Abrego Garcia is and ignored her order to provide information about what the government was doing to bring him back. Saturday, it said Abrego Garcia is “alive and secure” in CECOT. Today, it said it had no new information about him, but said that Abrego Garcia is no longer eligible for the immigration judge’s order not to send him to El Salvador “because of his membership in MS-13 which is now a designated foreign terrorist organization.”
There is still no evidence that Abrego Garcia is a member of MS-13.
Today, administration lawyers used the Supreme Court’s warning that the court must give “due regard for the deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs” to lay out a chilling argument. They ignored the Supreme Court’s agreement that the government must get Abrego Garcia out of El Salvador, as well as the court’s requirement that the administration explain what it’s doing to make that happen.
Instead, the lawyers argued that because Abrego Garcia is now outside the country, any attempt to get him back would intrude on the president’s power to conduct foreign affairs. Similarly, they argue that the president cannot be ordered to do anything but remove domestic obstacles from Abrego Garcia’s return.
Because Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador, is currently in the U.S. for a visit with Trump, they suggest they will not share any more updates about Abrego Garcia and the court should not ask for them because it would intrude on “sensitive” foreign policy issues.
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. They have also pushed the idea that those they are offshoring are criminals, but a Bloomberg investigation showed that of the 238 men sent to CECOT in the first group, only five of them had been charged with or convicted of felony assault or gun violations. Three had been charged with misdemeanors like petty theft. Two were charged with human smuggling. In any case, in the U.S., criminals are entitled to due process.
Make no mistake: as Supreme Court Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson recently warned, if the administration can take noncitizens off the streets, render them to prison in another country, and then claim it is helpless to correct the error either because the person is out of reach of U.S. jurisdiction, it could do the same thing to citizens.
Trump has said he would “love” to do exactly that, and would even be “honored” to, and Bukele has been offering to hold U.S. citizens. Dasha Burns and Myah Ward of Politico reported Friday that former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince is pitching a plan to expand renditions to El Salvador to at least 100,000 criminal offenders from U.S. prisons and to avoid legal challenges by making part of CECOT American territory, then leasing it back to El Salvador to run.
When White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt says, “The president’s idea for American citizens to potentially be deported, these would be heinous violent criminals who have broken our nation’s laws repeatedly,” remember that just days ago, Trump suggested that a former government employee was guilty of treason for writing a book about his time in the first Trump administration that Trump claimed was “designed to sow chaos and distrust” in the government.
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.
At least some people understand this. The president of North America’s Building Trades Unions, Sean McGarvey, received a standing ovation when he said to a room full of his fellow union workers: “We need to make our voices heard. We’re not red, we’re not blue. We’re the building trades, the backbone of America.
You want to build a $5 billion data center? Want more six-figure careers with health care, retirement, and no college debt? You don’t call Elon Musk, you call us!… And yeah, that means all of us. All of us. Including our brother apprentice Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who we demand to be returned to us and his family now! Bring him home!”
Woodie said:
Peak Warming Man said:
Cymek said:Riding those big guns
The Ride of the Valkyries.
Dunt dah dah daaah daaah….. dunt dah dah daaah daaah…… dunt dah dah daah daaah…, dunt dah dah daaah!
“Life is too short for Wagner” – Horace Rumpole
I think you’ll find that’s Vagner.
I’m thinking of becoming a intellectual.
Peak Warming Man said:
Woodie said:
Peak Warming Man said:The Ride of the Valkyries.
Dunt dah dah daaah daaah….. dunt dah dah daaah daaah…… dunt dah dah daah daaah…, dunt dah dah daaah!
“Life is too short for Wagner” – Horace Rumpole
I think you’ll find that’s Vagner.
I’m thinking of becoming a intellectual.
You’re too smart to do that.
sarahs mum said:
Heather Cox Richardson
39m ·
April 13, 2025 (Sunday)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.
——————————cut—————————————
Bloody.
:(
LOL
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-04-14/donald-trump-to-announce-tariffs-on-semiconductors/105174046
dv said:
Peak Warming Man said:
dv said:(Shrugs)
This doesn’t change the dynamic much does it? I would think very close to 100% of US ships are also heading to a port. (I’ll allow that some ships are heading to other ships for various supply or service purposes.)
He was saying that 75% of ships going through the canal were coming from or going to US ports.
If that’s what he meant then he needs to go back to talking school.
look fair is fair the USSA is the world so if it’s not a US port then it’s nothing
SCIENCE said:
dv said:
Peak Warming Man said:He was saying that 75% of ships going through the canal were coming from or going to US ports.
If that’s what he meant then he needs to go back to talking school.
look fair is fair the USSA is the world so if it’s not a US port then it’s nothing
USA are the world
USA are the children
USA are the ones who make a brighter day, so let’s start taking
Oh, there’s a choice we’re making
USA saving our own lives
It’s true we’ll make a better day, just you and me
Kind of weird that DJT and I are about the same weight, he’s 8 cm taller than me, but he looks like one of me ate another one of me.
dv said:
Kind of weird that DJT and I are about the same weight, he’s 8 cm taller than me, but he looks like one of me ate another one of me.
Not weird; it’s a lie.
Michael V said:
dv said:
Kind of weird that DJT and I are about the same weight, he’s 8 cm taller than me, but he looks like one of me ate another one of me.
Not weird; it’s a lie.
maybe is really is that weight but when we see him fully clothed those clothes are wrapped around a full body suit of armour because he’s a fraidy cat
Arts said:
Michael V said:
dv said:
Kind of weird that DJT and I are about the same weight, he’s 8 cm taller than me, but he looks like one of me ate another one of me.
Not weird; it’s a lie.
maybe is really is that weight but when we see him fully clothed those clothes are wrapped around a full body suit of armour because he’s a fraidy cat
body armour doesn’t wobble.
Michael V said:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-04-14/trump-tariff-executive-order-showerhead-administrative-procedure/105170714
Yeah, it’s a toe-in-the-water, to establish precedent.
promises to lower fuel prices
engineers a global recession
#maliciouscompliance
dv said:
promises to lower fuel prices
engineers a global recession#maliciouscompliance
Diesel powered gas lighted 爱 will fix this¡
JudgeMental said:
Arts said:
Michael V said:
Not weird; it’s a lie.
maybe is really is that weight but when we see him fully clothed those clothes are wrapped around a full body suit of armour because he’s a fraidy cat
body armour doesn’t wobble.
so what’s a better measure BMI¿ WHR¿ BF%¿ WTF¿ then
Racist dipshit.
SCIENCE said:
JudgeMental said:
Arts said:
maybe is really is that weight but when we see him fully clothed those clothes are wrapped around a full body suit of armour because he’s a fraidy cat
body armour doesn’t wobble.
so what’s a better measure BMI¿ WHR¿ BF%¿ WTF¿ then
If you are still wearing clothes you bought 10 years ago and you can still do up the buttons. I can’t wear the stuff I wore when I was in my middle twenties, but I’m still wearing things I wore in my forties.
JudgeMental said:
because it’sn’t hard to wear a mask
The clothes I bought 10 years ago are like a tent to me now
dv said:
Kind of weird that DJT and I are about the same weight, he’s 8 cm taller than me, but he looks like one of me ate another one of me.
The camera adds dv pounds
dv said:
The clothes I bought 10 years ago are like a tent to me now
you and Donald could wear them together
diddly-squat said:
dv said:
The clothes I bought 10 years ago are like a tent to me now
you and Donald could wear them together
What’s that they say about the camel pissing out?
diddly-squat said:
dv said:
Kind of weird that DJT and I are about the same weight, he’s 8 cm taller than me, but he looks like one of me ate another one of me.
The camera adds dv pounds
Old joke but I think he ate like 20 cameras
PoW meets POTUS
both of these men are 191 cm tall
dv said:
PoW meets POTUS
both of these men are 191 cm tall
Looks like that Prisoner of War chap could do with a good feed.
SCIENCE said:
dv said:
promises to lower fuel prices
engineers a global recession#maliciouscompliance
Diesel powered gas lighted 爱 will fix this¡
LOL
The Rev Dodgson said:
dv said:
It passed the house 220-208 with the help of 4 Democratic congresspeople.
Why would any Democrats vote for that?
I think those Democrats believe that this legislation will backfire on the Republican Party. After all, how many Trump voters do you think have passports? They don’t seem like a jet-setting bunch of people to me… more like xenophobes. I reckon many of them live in the middle of the country so that they have as much America as possible between them and the ocean from where the foreigners come. They’re not going overseas.
dv said:
PoW meets POTUS
both of these men are 191 cm tall
Unsurprisingly, somebody has lied about their height.
KJW said:
I think those Democrats believe that this legislation will backfire on the Republican Party.
Possibly, the Democrats understand Republican voters better than the Republican Party.
This is how Republicans imagine their voters to be:
And this is what Republican voters really are:
How accurate is this?
Kingy said:
How accurate is this?
nfi, sorry. Perhaps those here who study the USA may be able to answer your question.
Kingy said:
How accurate is this?
Yes, Social Security operates as an insurance scheme. It’s in the black but there are concerns that the ageing population will test its resources long term unless entitlements are changed.
Medicare is also funded from a payroll tax but I’m not sure about the state of its overall finances.
The borrowing they are referring to is “intragovernmental debt” … I suppose you could argue that the amount of this reflects non-SS spending? IDK
Kingy said:
I hope she gets paid well enough to compensate for the loss of personal dignity and public respect.
party_pants said:
Kingy said:
I hope she gets paid well enough to compensate for the loss of personal dignity and public respect.
Rememebr when everyone used to make fun of thid guy?
party_pants said:
Kingy said:
I hope she gets paid well enough to compensate for the loss of personal dignity and public respect.
Rememebr when everyone used to make fun of this guy?
Pfft, Kellyanne Conway ( alternative facts ) has her own show on Fox.
This image is everywhere.
It appears to be a pile of bodies and a blood at the confinement centre in El Salvador where they’re shipping all the “illegal” immigrants and illegally seized american citizens too.
Today in the Oval Office…
Brain farts…
I wonder if his unhinged rants are made by AI? Or whatever it’s called.
kii said:
Brain farts…I wonder if his unhinged rants are made by AI? Or whatever it’s called.
Faked. There’s not one grammar, spelling, typo or covfefe in it, hey what but!.
I suppose it is somewhat heartening that the SC is willing to rule 9-0 against the President’s wishes.
But if he’s just not going to comply and there are literally no consequences for ignoring a court order then I think it is just one more step in the US’s journey to becoming a different category of nation.
dv said:
I suppose it is somewhat heartening that the SC is willing to rule 9-0 against the President’s wishes.
But if he’s just not going to comply and there are literally no consequences for ignoring a court order then I think it is just one more step in the US’s journey to becoming a different category of nation.
Will be interesting to see if the court holds the administration in contempt, but I expect there will be enough wiggle room for them to say that they tried to have him returned but our request was refused.
dv said:
I suppose it is somewhat heartening that the SC is willing to rule 9-0 against the President’s wishes.
But if he’s just not going to comply and there are literally no consequences for ignoring a court order then I think it is just one more step in the US’s journey to becoming a different category of nation.
With possibly an un-civil war erupting first.
Michael V said:
dv said:
I suppose it is somewhat heartening that the SC is willing to rule 9-0 against the President’s wishes.
But if he’s just not going to comply and there are literally no consequences for ignoring a court order then I think it is just one more step in the US’s journey to becoming a different category of nation.
With possibly an un-civil war erupting first.
just one more step in the US’s journey to becoming recognised as a different category of nation
SCIENCE said:
Michael V said:
dv said:
I suppose it is somewhat heartening that the SC is willing to rule 9-0 against the President’s wishes.
But if he’s just not going to comply and there are literally no consequences for ignoring a court order then I think it is just one more step in the US’s journey to becoming a different category of nation.
With possibly an un-civil war erupting first.
just one more step in the US’s journey to becoming recognised as a different category of nation
Republicans are going to change their party name to the great oligarchy party. GOP.
diddly-squat said:
dv said:
I suppose it is somewhat heartening that the SC is willing to rule 9-0 against the President’s wishes.
But if he’s just not going to comply and there are literally no consequences for ignoring a court order then I think it is just one more step in the US’s journey to becoming a different category of nation.
Will be interesting to see if the court holds the administration in contempt, but I expect there will be enough wiggle room for them to say that they tried to have him returned but our request was refused.
DJT – “ We’re taking Panama, Greenland and Canada whether they like it or not, we’re blackmailing Taiwan into a new security arrangement, we’re getting El Salvador to build 5 more prisons…”
Also DJT – “Well if they won’t return this prisoner, what can we do? They’re a sovereign country.”
dv said:
diddly-squat said:
dv said:
I suppose it is somewhat heartening that the SC is willing to rule 9-0 against the President’s wishes.
But if he’s just not going to comply and there are literally no consequences for ignoring a court order then I think it is just one more step in the US’s journey to becoming a different category of nation.
Will be interesting to see if the court holds the administration in contempt, but I expect there will be enough wiggle room for them to say that they tried to have him returned but our request was refused.
DJT – “ We’re taking Panama, Greenland and Canada whether they like it or not, we’re blackmailing Taiwan into a new security arrangement, we’re getting El Salvador to build 5 more prisons…”
Also DJT – “Well if they won’t return this prisoner, what can we do? They’re a sovereign country.”
so why are these countries humouring the shit
SCIENCE said:
dv said:
diddly-squat said:Will be interesting to see if the court holds the administration in contempt, but I expect there will be enough wiggle room for them to say that they tried to have him returned but our request was refused.
DJT – “ We’re taking Panama, Greenland and Canada whether they like it or not, we’re blackmailing Taiwan into a new security arrangement, we’re getting El Salvador to build 5 more prisons…”
Also DJT – “Well if they won’t return this prisoner, what can we do? They’re a sovereign country.”
so why are these countries humouring the shit
presumably there is some quid pro quo
Occupy Democrats
6h ·
BREAKING: Donald Trump makes the horrifying announcement with El Salvador’s far-right president that they will NOT be returning the innocent Maryland father who was accidentally deported to a brutal South American mega prison.
This is full-blown fascism and it gets so much worse…
The Supreme Court has already ruled that the United States must “facilitate” the return of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a man who was falsely accused of being a gang member and deported.
The Trump administration previously admitted in court that he should not have been removed from the United States and blamed it on an “administrative error.”
During an appearance in the Oval Office with Trump, El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele was asked if he will be returning Abrego Garcia. He took the opportunity to smear the innocent man—
“Well, I hope you’re not suggesting that I smuggle a terrorist into the United States,” Bukele said. “How can I smuggle— How can I return him to the United States? Like I smuggle him into the United States? Of course I’m not going to do it. It’s like… I mean the question is preposterous.”
“How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States? I don’t have the power to return him to the United States,” he added.
He was then asked if Abrego Garcia would at least be released to freedom in El Salvador. He doubled down on character assassination.
“I’m not releasing— I mean, we’re not very fond of releasing terrorists into our country,” he said. “We just turned the murder capital of the world into the safest country in the Western hemisphere and you want us to go back? Releasing criminals so that we can go back to being the murder capital of the world?”
“No, that’s not going to happen,” he added.
“Well, they’d love to have a criminal released into our country. They would love it,” interjected Trump.
Trump also tore into CNN’s Kaitlan Collins for asking about Abrego Garcia—
“How long do we have to answer this question from you? Why don’t you just say, ‘Isn’t it wonderful that we’re keeping criminals out of our country?’” said Trump.
It should be stressed once again that Abrego Garcia is not a criminal, certainly not a terrorist, and in fact was legally entitled to remain in the United States.
An immigration judge ruled back in 2019 that he could not be deported back to El Salvador because a gang in his native country was “targeting him and threatening him with death because of his family’s pupusa business.”
As is always the case with MAGA, the truth doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter to Trump that Abrego Garcia, an innocent man, is likely being brutalized in an El Salvadoran prison. It doesn’t matter to him that he himself is mutating us into a fully fascist state.
All that matters to him is appearing “strong” to his supporters. He will never admit that he’s wrong. We must all stand up and condemn this, or risk losing our country forever.
diddly-squat said:
SCIENCE said:
dv said:DJT – “ We’re taking Panama, Greenland and Canada whether they like it or not, we’re blackmailing Taiwan into a new security arrangement, we’re getting El Salvador to build 5 more prisons…”
Also DJT – “Well if they won’t return this prisoner, what can we do? They’re a sovereign country.”
so why are these countries humouring the shit
presumably there is some quid pro quo
so they like it
sarahs mum said:
wrong. We must all stand up and condemn this, or risk losing our country forever.
LOL
“risk”
ah well we suppose a probability of 1 is still a probability
sarahs mum said:
Occupy Democrats
6h ·
BREAKING: Donald Trump makes the horrifying announcement with El Salvador’s far-right president that they will NOT be returning the innocent Maryland father who was accidentally deported to a brutal South American mega prison.This is full-blown fascism and it gets so much worse…
The Supreme Court has already ruled that the United States must “facilitate” the return of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a man who was falsely accused of being a gang member and deported.
The Trump administration previously admitted in court that he should not have been removed from the United States and blamed it on an “administrative error.”
During an appearance in the Oval Office with Trump, El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele was asked if he will be returning Abrego Garcia. He took the opportunity to smear the innocent man—
“Well, I hope you’re not suggesting that I smuggle a terrorist into the United States,” Bukele said. “How can I smuggle— How can I return him to the United States? Like I smuggle him into the United States? Of course I’m not going to do it. It’s like… I mean the question is preposterous.”
“How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States? I don’t have the power to return him to the United States,” he added.
He was then asked if Abrego Garcia would at least be released to freedom in El Salvador. He doubled down on character assassination.
“I’m not releasing— I mean, we’re not very fond of releasing terrorists into our country,” he said. “We just turned the murder capital of the world into the safest country in the Western hemisphere and you want us to go back? Releasing criminals so that we can go back to being the murder capital of the world?”
“No, that’s not going to happen,” he added.
“Well, they’d love to have a criminal released into our country. They would love it,” interjected Trump.
Trump also tore into CNN’s Kaitlan Collins for asking about Abrego Garcia—
“How long do we have to answer this question from you? Why don’t you just say, ‘Isn’t it wonderful that we’re keeping criminals out of our country?’” said Trump.
It should be stressed once again that Abrego Garcia is not a criminal, certainly not a terrorist, and in fact was legally entitled to remain in the United States.
An immigration judge ruled back in 2019 that he could not be deported back to El Salvador because a gang in his native country was “targeting him and threatening him with death because of his family’s pupusa business.”
As is always the case with MAGA, the truth doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter to Trump that Abrego Garcia, an innocent man, is likely being brutalized in an El Salvadoran prison. It doesn’t matter to him that he himself is mutating us into a fully fascist state.
All that matters to him is appearing “strong” to his supporters. He will never admit that he’s wrong. We must all stand up and condemn this, or risk losing our country forever.
‘ken arse.
Michael V said:
arse
Totally No Main Character Syndrome Narcissistic Personality Disorders There
China’s leader Xi Jinping is pushing for South-East Asian support in countering American tariffs this week, with a three-nation visit that Donald Trump sees as an effort to hurt the United States. Commenting from Washington on the first meeting of the trip between Xi and Vietnamese leader To Lam, Donald Trump said the pair is “trying to figure out ‘how do we screw the United States of America?’”.
yeah sure no worries people trying to make an honest buck or two are all about trying to screw your sorry donkeys right
SCIENCE said:
Michael V said:
arse
Totally No Main Character Syndrome Narcissistic Personality Disorders There
China’s leader Xi Jinping is pushing for South-East Asian support in countering American tariffs this week, with a three-nation visit that Donald Trump sees as an effort to hurt the United States. Commenting from Washington on the first meeting of the trip between Xi and Vietnamese leader To Lam, Donald Trump said the pair is “trying to figure out ‘how do we screw the United States of America?’”.
yeah sure no worries people trying to make an honest buck or two are all about trying to screw your sorry donkeys right
Trump is like those Klingons that yell about honour and threaten whilst acting very obviously dishonourable
Heather Cox Richardson
49m ·
April 14, 2025 (Monday)
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 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 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 “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 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.”
Cymek said:
SCIENCE said:
Michael V said:
arse
Totally No Main Character Syndrome Narcissistic Personality Disorders There
China’s leader Xi Jinping is pushing for South-East Asian support in countering American tariffs this week, with a three-nation visit that Donald Trump sees as an effort to hurt the United States. Commenting from Washington on the first meeting of the trip between Xi and Vietnamese leader To Lam, Donald Trump said the pair is “trying to figure out ‘how do we screw the United States of America?’”.
yeah sure no worries people trying to make an honest buck or two are all about trying to screw your sorry donkeys right
Trump is like those Klingons that yell about honour and threaten whilst acting very obviously dishonourable
fair maybe it’s darvo and not égocentrisme
SCIENCE said:
Cymek said:
SCIENCE said:
Totally No Main Character Syndrome Narcissistic Personality Disorders There
China’s leader Xi Jinping is pushing for South-East Asian support in countering American tariffs this week, with a three-nation visit that Donald Trump sees as an effort to hurt the United States. Commenting from Washington on the first meeting of the trip between Xi and Vietnamese leader To Lam, Donald Trump said the pair is “trying to figure out ‘how do we screw the United States of America?’”.
yeah sure no worries people trying to make an honest buck or two are all about trying to screw your sorry donkeys right
Trump is like those Klingons that yell about honour and threaten whilst acting very obviously dishonourable
fair maybe it’s darvo and not égocentrisme
What did I do now?
damn that unfortunate nominative coincidence
LOL that’s right better totally not
“At least precautions about some of the views you posted online,” he says. “I’m not suggesting self-censoring, but I’m suggesting protection from searches … by the Trump government at the border.”
say anything that makes it look like that shit hole is an authoritarian fascist national socialist state with repression of freedom of speech
He says travellers should also work to maintain political “neutrality” before heading to the US. “If there are public demonstrations or you want to have a view on what’s happening in America, remember that you are on a visa,” he says. “You need to … stay neutral, and you’ll have a really good time.”
oh no it couldn’t be like that it’s totally just about uh … search prophylaxis and being all neutral that’s what it is
sarahs mum said:
Heather Cox Richardson
49m ·
April 14, 2025 (Monday)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 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 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 “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 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.”
Ta.
oh oooh we see the clever commentators have started to catch up
SCIENCE said:
oh oooh we see the clever commentators have started to catch up
OK. What’s a “burner device” then?
party_pants said:
SCIENCE said:oh oooh we see the clever commentators have started to catch up
OK. What’s a “burner device” then?
A phone that you don’t care about.
You buy it, it’s new, blank, it has none of your history on it, no links, no contacts, no nothing, you use it for the necessary period, and then you can throw it away. Typically cheap, basic, but functional.
party_pants said:
OK. What’s a “burner device” then?
a clean phone with just the basics on it.
JudgeMental said:
party_pants said:OK. What’s a “burner device” then?
a clean phone with just the basics on it.
I always suspected Buffy was a spy.
It’s called a ‘burner’ because disposing of it is like burning a message after you read it.
When you ditch it, it has nothing on it to link it to you or your use of it, especially if you reove the SIM card and dispose of that separately.
Witty Rejoinder said:
JudgeMental said:
party_pants said:OK. What’s a “burner device” then?
a clean phone with just the basics on it.
I always suspected Buffy was a spy.
Ah…but do you know who I am working for?
OK, much as i thought, given the words. Never heard of it before today, and it poped up a couple of times in one post.
buffy said:
Witty Rejoinder said:
JudgeMental said:a clean phone with just the basics on it.
I always suspected Buffy was a spy.
Ah…but do you know who I am working for?
Vanuatu?
party_pants said:
buffy said:
Witty Rejoinder said:I always suspected Buffy was a spy.
Ah…but do you know who I am working for?
Vanuatu?
The only ‘intelligence’ that’s of interest to Vanuatu is, how many hours until the next cyclone hits?
SCIENCE said:
oh oooh we see the clever commentators have started to catch up
trump mentions sending bad judges to El Salvador.
sarahs mum said:
trump mentions sending bad judges to El Salvador.
Well, he’s going to have to send everyone who voted for him down there, because, crikey, weren’t they bad judges of things?
dv said:
in germany de jure or in germany de facto or in germany proper or in germany greater
dv said:
SCIENCE said:
oh oooh we see the clever commentators have started to catch up
holocaust museum eh well two things one that quote will probably be scrubbed quick smart but also two we suppose museums like to update their offerings from time to time so having new material to include might be just the ticket
dv said:
True.
But, there was plenty inside Germany.
Sachsenhausen. Dachau. Buchenwald. Bergen-Belsen. Ravensbruck.Falkensee. Wobbeln. Kaltenkirchen. And many, many more.
Once the fascists are confident enough in their power, they implement their measures everywhere.
party_pants said:
SCIENCE said:oh oooh we see the clever commentators have started to catch up
OK. What’s a “burner device” then?
A telecommunications device that is connected but not registered in anybody’s name.
Spiny Norman said:
LOLOL
Michael V said:
Spiny Norman said:
LOLOL
That’s ableism¡ See, the fascists have tricked dirty communist CHINA into throwing insults and ad hominem losing arguments¡ This is 16777216-dimensional Minecraft they’re playing to get the wokists to join MAGA¡
SCIENCE said:
Michael V said:
Spiny Norman said:
LOLOL
That’s ableism¡ See, the fascists have tricked dirty communist CHINA into throwing insults and ad hominem losing arguments¡ This is 16777216-dimensional Minecraft they’re playing to get the wokists to join MAGA¡
Tamb said:
SCIENCE said:Michael V said:
LOLOL
That’s ableism¡ See, the fascists have tricked dirty communist CHINA into throwing insults and ad hominem losing arguments¡ This is 16777216-dimensional Minecraft they’re playing to get the wokists to join MAGA¡
So many words. So little meaning.
so you’ve been at MAGA rallies nice
SCIENCE said:
Tamb said:
SCIENCE said:That’s ableism¡ See, the fascists have tricked dirty communist CHINA into throwing insults and ad hominem losing arguments¡ This is 16777216-dimensional Minecraft they’re playing to get the wokists to join MAGA¡
So many words. So little meaning.
so you’ve been at MAGA rallies nice
New tactic by Trump’s people.
Judge Esther Salas’s son Daniel Anderl was killed when an assailant, a pro-Trump lawyer, attacked her home in 2000.
Daniel Anderl Judicial Security and Privacy Act of 2021,
Now federal judges are being sent pizzas under the name of Daniel Anderl, presumably as some kind of warning.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14605933/judges-pizza-deliveries-amid-war-trump.html
https://www.nj.com/news/2025/04/pizzas-with-nj-judges-murdered-sons-name-on-them-being-sent-to-intimidate-other-judges.html
dv said:
New tactic by Trump’s people.
Judge Esther Salas’s son Daniel Anderl was killed when an assailant, a pro-Trump lawyer, attacked her home in 2000.
Daniel Anderl Judicial Security and Privacy Act of 2021,Now federal judges are being sent pizzas under the name of Daniel Anderl, presumably as some kind of warning.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14605933/judges-pizza-deliveries-amid-war-trump.html
https://www.nj.com/news/2025/04/pizzas-with-nj-judges-murdered-sons-name-on-them-being-sent-to-intimidate-other-judges.html
2000¿¡
so is this like some horses heads thing
dv said:
New tactic by Trump’s people.Judge Esther Salas’s son Daniel Anderl was killed when an assailant, a pro-Trump lawyer, attacked her home in 2000.
Daniel Anderl Judicial Security and Privacy Act of 2021,Now federal judges are being sent pizzas under the name of Daniel Anderl, presumably as some kind of warning.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14605933/judges-pizza-deliveries-amid-war-trump.html
https://www.nj.com/news/2025/04/pizzas-with-nj-judges-murdered-sons-name-on-them-being-sent-to-intimidate-other-judges.html
FMD.
Stoop. Low.
Arseholes.
ABC News:
I hope that Boeing didn’t contribute what they would now consider ‘too much’ to Trump’s election funds.
captain_spalding said:
ABC News:
I hope that Boeing didn’t contribute what they would now consider ‘too much’ to Trump’s election funds.
China I imagine has the ability to weather the tariff storm better than the USA.
If its people complain they can roll out the tanks.
Cymek said:
captain_spalding said:
ABC News:
I hope that Boeing didn’t contribute what they would now consider ‘too much’ to Trump’s election funds.
China I imagine has the ability to weather the tariff storm better than the USA.
If its people complain they can roll out the tanks.
we thought one man stopped them
SCIENCE said:
dv said:
New tactic by Trump’s people.
Judge Esther Salas’s son Daniel Anderl was killed when an assailant, a pro-Trump lawyer, attacked her home in 2000.
Daniel Anderl Judicial Security and Privacy Act of 2021,Now federal judges are being sent pizzas under the name of Daniel Anderl, presumably as some kind of warning.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14605933/judges-pizza-deliveries-amid-war-trump.html
https://www.nj.com/news/2025/04/pizzas-with-nj-judges-murdered-sons-name-on-them-being-sent-to-intimidate-other-judges.html
2000¿¡
so is this like some horses heads thing
2020
dv said:
flaw: assumes people logic
SCIENCE said:
dv said:
flaw: assumes people logic
Well I don’t know.
I thought it was, good point, well made.
The Rev Dodgson said:
SCIENCE said:
dv said:
flaw: assumes people logic
Well I don’t know.
I thought it was, good point, well made.
yes but they’re implying that in the audience there are actual USSA residents who got to this point not realising they’re fkn themselves and suddenly with the information will realise that they fkd themselves
when we’re saying our souls who got to this point supporting fascism don’t care and aren’t going to think through the consequences and implications
we agree with the point sure
JudgeMental said:
This will probably get banned.
But then if DJT et al can ignore the law…
JudgeMental said:
How come its so small?
The Rev Dodgson said:
JudgeMental said:
How come its so small?
open it in a new tab/window and you can embiggen it.
The Rev Dodgson said:
JudgeMental said:
How come its so small?
The item came from a 10% tariff country.
Michael V said:
The Rev Dodgson said:
JudgeMental said:
How come its so small?
The item came from a 10% tariff country.
Remember the tarriff is on the COST price of the imported item, not the retail/markup price.
sarahs mum said:
The federal government will find you’: DHS mistakenly tells U.S.-born woman to leave countryfk.
What’s DHS stand for? Dept. of Half-arsed Shit?
Heather Cox Richardson
3h ·
April 15, 2025 (Tuesday)
A large crowd of protesters calling for the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man the Trump administration sent to a notorious terrorist prison in El Salvador, milled around the courthouse this afternoon where U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis held a hearing on the case.
Anna Bower, Roger Parloff, and Ben Wittes of Lawfare watched the hearing and explained that Judge Xinis is now building the evidence to determine whether individuals in the administration have acted in contempt of court. The court ordered the administration to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return to the U.S., as well as to give updates on what they are doing to make that return happen. To date, Judge Xinis said, “what the record shows is nothing has been done.” She dismissed the administration lawyer’s argument that yesterday’s Oval Office meeting between President Donald Trump and president of El Salvador Nayib Bukele was part of the effort to “facilitate” the case.
As Bower said, we all know what’s going on, but it’s impossible right now to know which individual is responsible for the stonewalling. For that matter, Bower added, those speaking for the administration usually deny personal knowledge of the case, simply saying they have been made aware of the facts they are representing. Judge Xinis called for two weeks of fact finding to determine if the Trump regime is following her orders that it facilitate his return. The judge told Abrego Garcia’s lawyers that they may conduct four depositions and apply for two more, make up to 15 document requests, and up to 15 interrogatories (these are lists of written questions that must be answered under oath and in writing).
Xinis noted that “every day Mr. Garcia is detained in CECOT is a day of irreparable harm.”
Bower added that the Trump regime is likely drawing this out in part because it permits them to showcase the one part of their agenda that is still polling well. The staged meeting with Bukele enabled officials to get widespread media coverage for the straight-up lie that Abrego Garcia has been found to be a member of the MS-13 gang. As Greg Sargent reported today in the New Republic, this story came from a police officer who, just weeks later, was suspended for “providing information to a commercial sex worker who he was paying in exchange for sexual acts.”
The Oval Office event also enabled White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller both to lie that the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision against the administration was actually in favor of it, and to rerun the litany of heinous crimes he associates with immigrants. The attention to the case has also gotten Miller airtime on news shows, where he repeats those lies.
The administration needs the immigration issue to play to its base, but it’s actually not clear that Americans like Miller’s approach to immigrants. Data journalist G. Elliott Morris noted today in Strength in Numbers that while polls say Americans generally like Trump’s approach to immigration—a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll said 49% were in favor—they hate the specifics.
The same Reuters/Ipsos poll says that 82% of Americans, including 68% of Republicans, think “the president should obey federal court rulings even if he disagrees with them.” Only 40% think he “should keep deporting people despite a court order to stop,” although 76% of Republicans think he should violate a court order.
The questions specifically about immigration are even starker. Trump promised during the campaign that he would deport undocumented immigrants who have committed violent crimes, and people like that plan by an 81-point margin. But according to Morris’s crunching of polls on the subject, U.S. adults oppose deporting undocumented immigrants who have lived more than 10 years in the U.S. by a 37-point margin. They oppose deporting undocumented immigrants who are parents of U.S. citizens by a 36-point margin. By an 18-point margin, they oppose deporting undocumented immigrants who have broken no laws in the U.S. other than immigration laws.
The more visible Abrego Garcia’s case becomes, coupled as it is with the idea that it is a precursor to sending U.S. citizens to CECOT, the less likely it is to be popular. Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) got an earful from his constituents on the topic. “Are you going to bring that guy back from El Salvador?” one man asked, to applause and calls of “Yeah!” from around the room. When Grassley said no, because that wasn’t a power of Congress, the man replied: “The Supreme Court said to bring him back!” and others chimed in, “They’re defying the Constitution.” “Trump don’t care,” the first man said. “If I get an order to pay a ticket for $1,200 and I just say no, does that stand up? Because he’s got an order from the Supreme Court, and he just said no! He just said ‘Screw it!’” “It’s wrong,” someone in the crowd said. The first man concluded: “I’m pissed.”
This evening, Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) noted that “ollowing his abduction and unlawful deportation, U.S. federal courts have ordered the safe return of my constituent Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the United States. It should be a priority of the U.S. government to secure his safe release, which is why tomorrow I am traveling to El Salvador…to visit Kilmar and check on his wellbeing and to hold constructive conversations with government officials around his release. We must urgently continue working to return Kilmar safely home to Maryland.”
Trump’s losing ground on his other major selling point in the 2024 election: that he would improve the economy. He promised to bring prices down “on Day One,” but backed off on that almost immediately. Then an utterly chaotic trade war, tariffs on and off and on again, and a dramatic drop in the bond market as well as the stock market suggesting that the U.S. is losing its status as a safe haven made April an economic disaster. JPMorgan said this week that Trump’s tariffs mean that he is “on track to deliver one of the largest US tax hikes on record,” taxes that will fall on poorer Americans rather than the wealthy and corporations.
Under Biden, Vietnam and the U.S. had strengthened economic ties, but yesterday, China and Vietnam signed dozens of cooperation agreements to combat disruptions caused by Trump’s trade war. Today, Chinese officials stopped accepting Boeing jets or U.S. airline parts. China has also stopped accepting U.S. beef, turning instead to Australia. U.S. beef exports to China have been worth $2.5 billion annually. Last Thursday, Gustaf Kilander of The Independent reported that “fund managers quietly fear Trump doesn’t have a tariff plan and that he ‘might be insane.’”
Meetings in Washington this week did little to calm the situation. Jordan Erb of Bloomberg reported that Maros Sefcovic, the trade chief for the European Union, left yesterday’s trade meeting in Washington unclear about what the U.S. even wants. Erb notes: “The uncertainty around Trump’s chaotic tactics, replete with delays, retreats, new threats and sudden exceptions and trial balloons, hasn’t helped.”
Trump also promised he would end Russia’s war on Ukraine immediately. But it has become obvious that Russia’s president Vladimir Putin is using Trump’s desperation to deliver a peace deal to strike harder at Ukraine. Just after a visit to Moscow by U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff last week, the Russians struck the Ukrainian city of Sumy during Palm Sunday celebrations, killing at least 35 people and injuring another 119, including children. European leaders called the attack a war crime, Trump said it was likely a “mistake.”
After Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky said in a 60 Minutes interview on Sunday night that U.S. officials are echoing Russian disinformation, Trump called for CBS, the channel on which 60 Minutes appears, to lose its license.
Bloomberg reports that the U.S. refused to support a statement by the Group of Seven (G7), an informal group of seven of the countries with the world’s most advanced economies, condemning the Sumy attack. The U.S. said it wouldn’t condemn the mass killing of civilians because it is “working to preserve the space to negotiate peace.”
One of Trump’s key attacks on the Biden administration before the election was his lie that it had shortchanged the North Carolina victims of the devastating Hurricane Helene by sending money for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to undocumented immigrants, likely to buy their votes (it is illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections). In fact, the Biden administration and FEMA had been in the state since the start and approved FEMA’s reimbursement for 100% of disaster relief, particularly emergency protective services and the removal of debris, renewable after six months.
Trump won North Carolina by more than 3 points, but on Saturday the Trump administration denied North Carolina’s application for that extension. “The need in western North Carolina remains immense—people need debris removed, homes rebuilt, and roads restored,” North Carolina governor Josh Stein said. “I am extremely disappointed and urge the President to reconsider FEMA’s bad decision, even for 90 days. Six months later, the people of western North Carolina are working hard to get back on their feet; they need FEMA to help them get the job done.”
Trump’s approval ratings are dropping steadily, with even Republican pollsters showing him “underwater,” meaning that more people disapprove of his presidency than approve of it.
Part of Trump’s fight with the Supreme Court is an attempt to demonstrate dominance as his numbers drop, but institutions, as well as the courts, are standing up to him. With Trump having won concessions from Columbia University and then announced those concessions were only the beginning of his demands, other universities are banding together to defend education, academic freedom, and freedom of speech.
On Monday, Harvard University took a stand against the administration’s demand to regulate the “intellectual and civil rights conditions” at Harvard, including its governance, admissions, programs, and extracurricular activities, in exchange for the continuation of $2.2 billion in multiyear grants and a $60 million contract. Harvard is the country’s oldest university, founded in 1636, and in 2024 had an endowment of more than $53 billion.
In a letter noting that the administration’s demands undercut the First Amendment and the university’s legal rights, Harvard’s lawyers wrote: “The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights. Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government. Accordingly, Harvard will not accept the government’s terms as an agreement in principle…. Harvard is not prepared to agree to demands that go beyond the lawful authority of this or any administration.”
But Harvard didn’t stop there. It turned its website into a defense of the medical research funded by the federal grants Trump is threatening to withhold. It explains the advances Harvard researchers have made in cancer research, heart disease, neurodegenerative diseases, obesity and diabetes, infectious diseases, and organs and transplantation. It highlights the researchers, shows labs, and presents readable essays on different scientific breakthroughs.
As the administration slashes through the government with charges of “waste, fraud, and abuse,” Harvard’s president Alan Garber has made a stand on what he calls “the promise of higher education.”
“Freedom of thought and inquiry, along with the government’s longstanding commitment to respect and protect it, has enabled universities to contribute in vital ways to a free society and to healthier, more prosperous lives for people everywhere,” he wrote. “All of us share a stake in safeguarding that freedom. We proceed now, as always, with the conviction that the fearless and unfettered pursuit of truth liberates humanity—and with faith in the enduring promise that America’s colleges and universities hold for our country and our world.”
captain_spalding said:
sarahs mum said:
The federal government will find you’: DHS mistakenly tells U.S.-born woman to leave country
fk.
What’s DHS stand for? Dept. of Half-arsed Shit?
“mistakenly”
EU gives staff ‘burner phones, laptops’ for US visits
That would put America on the same level as China for espionage
The European Commission is giving staffers visiting the US on official business burner laptops and phones to avoid espionage attempts, according to the Financial Times.
The use of clean and locked-down hardware is common practice for anyone visiting China, Russia, and other states where aggressive electronic surveillance is expected. Apparently the European Union has added the United States to that list.
“The transatlantic alliance is over,” an EU official told the newspaper, which reported the commission “is issuing burner phones and basic laptops to some US-bound staff to avoid the risk of espionage — a measure traditionally reserved for trips to China.”
Spiny Norman said:
EU gives staff ‘burner phones, laptops’ for US visitsThat would put America on the same level as China for espionage
The European Commission is giving staffers visiting the US on official business burner laptops and phones to avoid espionage attempts, according to the Financial Times.
The use of clean and locked-down hardware is common practice for anyone visiting China, Russia, and other states where aggressive electronic surveillance is expected. Apparently the European Union has added the United States to that list.
“The transatlantic alliance is over,” an EU official told the newspaper, which reported the commission “is issuing burner phones and basic laptops to some US-bound staff to avoid the risk of espionage — a measure traditionally reserved for trips to China.”
Sensible. The US is now a rogue state.
sarahs mum said:
Heather Cox Richardson
3h ·
April 15, 2025 (Tuesday)
——————————————CUT————————————————-
Ta.
Fk DJT et al.
Have discovered I’m about a month behind…
Parody song of I will Survive, written about the Tariff threats to Canada by Donald Trump
We Will Survive – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8peiLVFsLdw
AussieDJ said:
Have discovered I’m about a month behind…Parody song of I will Survive, written about the Tariff threats to Canada by Donald Trump
We Will Survive – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8peiLVFsLdw
—
That’s fantastic. Nails it.
JP Morgan chief Jamie Dimon, once a vocal Trump supporter, has shifted stance and called for the US to engage with China, concerned the trade war has begun to chip away at America’s credibility. The US investment banking giant now puts the odds of a US recession at 60 per cent.
LOL
begun to chip away
yeah totally that
The Free Press doesn’t need to know
Rachael Maddow says we finally know what’s behind Trump admin’s ‘inexplicable rummaging’
captain_spalding said:
kii said:
Will they get brain worms, Bobby?
Nazi Slash Soviet SCIENCE Is
wait
no
TIL that twenty US states have a school voucher system that allows the parents of children attending public schools to receive a tuition voucher in lieu of attending a public school so that it can be credited towards fees at a private school.
This is becoming increasingly more common in communities that have been affected by school shootings at large public schools.
I guess this is a generalisation but it does kind of seem that for a lot of them they are fine with any government over reach as long as they can still marry 14 year olds and buy crank on the dark web using bitcoin.
dv said:
I guess this is a generalisation but it does kind of seem that for a lot of them they are fine with any government over reach as long as they can still marry 14 year olds and buy crank on the dark web using bitcoin.
so put them all on an island together with lush fields of opium and teenage sex bots and they can leave the rest of us alone
The US state of California is suing the Trump administration over its global tariffs, claiming the president is abusing his executive powers and causing economic devastation.
sarahs mum said:
Total deity damn surprise oh yes.
This was on the official White House account
dv said:
This was on the official White House account
FMD
sarahs mum said:
Poor bastard and here’s Trump and Jan 6 buddies all should be back in the cells.
sarahs mum said:
FMD
Arseholery. Not compassion. Not empathy.
Just plain arseholery.
sarahs mum said:
This obviously sucks for the student (and is bad for tertiary education sector in that it reduces confidence and lowers student recruitment), but countries cancel visas all the time.
Heather Cox Richardson
11m ·
April 16, 2025 (Wednesday)
In El Salvador today, authorities denied Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) a meeting or a phone call with Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the man the Trump regime sent by “administrative error” to the terrorist prison CECOT. Abrego Garcia is Van Hollen’s constituent, and the senator promised his family to try to get him released. That Salvadoran officials cannot or will not produce him raises concerns about his well-being.
Senator Van Hollen had hoped to meet with El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, but met instead with Vice President Félix Ulloa. Ulloa at first told Van Hollen there had not been enough time to arrange a meeting with Abrego Garcia, but when the senator offered to come back next week, Ulloa allowed as how a meeting might not be possible at all.
Van Hollen reported that when he asked Ulloa why El Salvador was continuing to imprison Abrego Garcia when it had no evidence that he was a gang member, Ulloa answered that the Trump administration is paying El Salvador to hold him.
Evidently, President Donald Trump thinks what he is doing to Abrego Garcia and the optics of CECOT play well to his base. Jordain Carney and Nicholas Wu of Politico reported today that the White House has “heavily encouraged” Republican lawmakers to lean into the idea of Abrego Garcia—who has no criminal record—as an example of the dangerous criminals they insist Democrats want to bring to the U.S. Yesterday, out of the blue and with absolutely no evidence, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed that Abrego Garcia engaged in human trafficking.
At least a dozen Republicans have followed the president’s lead. Congressional reporter Craig Caplan reported that yesterday, House Ways and Means committee chair Jason Smith (R-MO) led a delegation of Republican House members to tour CECOT. The delegation included representatives Ron Estes (KS), Kevin Hern (OK), Mike Kennedy (UT), Carol Miller (WV), Riley Moore (WV), and Claudia Tenney (NY). At least some of the representatives had photographs taken of them in CECOT, standing in front of the caged men.
The delegation also met with U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador William Duncan, who posted on social media that “he delegation is visiting the country to strengthen bilateral ties and discuss initiatives that promote economic development and mutual cooperation.”
Two days ago, Bukele posted a picture of himself and Trump with their arms around each other with the comment: “Friends.” Ron Filipkowski of MeidasNews wrote: “We traded Europe for a guy that builds concentration camps for profit.”
Trump is likely pushing his narrative about criminal undocumented immigrants—although Bloomberg has reported that 90% of the men he has sent to El Salvador have no criminal record—in part because that rendition is stirring up opposition. In addition to popular protests, judges are pushing back.
Today, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg issued an opinion saying that the administration’s “hurried removal” of the men to El Salvador after Boasberg had issued a temporary restraining order (TRO) prohibiting them from doing so, demonstrated “a wilful disregard for its Order, sufficient for the Court to conclude that probable cause exists to find the Government in criminal contempt.”
“The Constitution does not tolerate willful disobedience of judicial orders—especially by officials of a coordinate branch who have sworn an oath to uphold it,” Boasberg wrote. Quoting Chief Justice John Marshall, who laid down the foundations of much of America law, Boasberg wrote: “To permit such officials to freely ‘annul the judgments of the courts of the United States’ would not just ‘destroy the rights acquired under those judgments’; it would make ‘a solemn mockery’ of ‘the constitution itself.’”
If the government decides not to try to repair its contempt, Boasberg says the court will use declarations, hearings, or depositions to identify the individuals responsible for making the judgment to ignore the court. Then he will ask the government to prosecute the contempt, but if—as is likely—it refuses, Boasberg says he will appoint a private prosecutor to move the case along. As legal analyst Joyce White Vance puts it: “These cases are about making sure that, American citizen or not, criminal or not, peoples’ right to have the day in court that the Constitution guarantees them is honored. That’s all. But it’s everything.”
Trump is also likely playing to his base because Americans are terribly concerned about what’s happening to the economy on his watch.
Stocks fell again today after Trump’s administration said it would put limits on chip sales to China and after Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell told the Economic Club of Chicago that Trump’s tariffs will have “significantly larger than anticipated…economic effects, which will include higher inflation and slower growth.” The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 700 points or 1.73%, the S&P 500 fell 2.24%, and the Nasdaq Composite fell 3.07%.
Danielle Kaye of the New York Times reports on a recent Bank of America survey that shows global investors have dumped a record amount of U.S. stocks in the past two months. Trump insists that the U.S. has been bringing in $2 billion a day in tariffs, some of which he claims comes from his new levies, but, in fact, Lori Ann LaRocco of CNBC reported today that U.S. Customs and Border Protection says the U.S. is taking in only $250 million a day.
Leila Fadel of NPR reports that China used to buy more than half the U.S. crop of soybeans and now soybean farmers are gravely concerned they’re going to lose that market. At the same time, we are heading in the prime months for the U.S. tourism industry, and Bloomberg reports that a worst-case scenario by the Goldman Sachs Group Inc. estimates that the U.S. could lose almost $90 billion as foreign tourists stay away from the U.S. and boycott American products.
So Trump is hitting his MAGA themes hard.
Today he escalated his attacks on Maine governor Janet Mills. Trump has demanded that Mills prohibit transgender girls in the public schools from participating in girls’ sports. Mills, who was Maine’s attorney general before she became governor, maintains she is bound by the 2021 state law that explicitly protects against discrimination on the basis of gender identity. As Jeremy Roebuck and Joanna Slater of the Washington Post note, Mills has said that law is “worthy of debate” but that Trump cannot change it by decree.
On February 21, Trump threatened to withhold federal education funding for Maine unless Mills promised to comply with his ban. When she reiterated that “I’m complying with state and federal laws,” and that “We’re going to follow the law,” he warned: “You’d better comply because otherwise you’re not getting any federal funding.” Mills answered: “See you in court.”
Since then, the administration has attacked the state, opening investigations, cutting and then restoring Social Security Administration contracts, and taunting Mills on social media. On Friday the Department of Education said it would pull all federal funding for education in Maine unless the state agreed to ban the state’s two transgender girls from playing on girls sports teams. Today the Justice Department sued Maine’s Department of Education, and Attorney General Pam Bondi threatened to pull past funding retroactively.
Mills said the administration is trying “to pressure the State of Maine to ignore the Constitution and abandon the rule of law.” “For nearly two months, Maine has endured recriminations from the Federal government that have targeted hungry school kids, hardworking fishermen, senior citizens, new parents, and countless Maine people,” Mills said. “We have been subject to politically motivated investigations that opened and closed without discussion, leaving little doubt that their outcomes were predetermined. Let today serve as warning to all states: Maine might be among the first to draw the ire of the Federal government in this way, but we will not be the last.”
Trump is also keeping his attack on Harvard in the news. Yesterday, after Harvard defied the regime’s attempt to take over the school, Trump posted “Perhaps Harvard should lose its Tax Exempt Status and be Taxed as a Political Entity if it keeps pushing political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting ‘Sickness?’ Remember, Tax Exempt Status is totally contingent on acting in the PUBLIC INTEREST!”
Today, Evan Perez, Alayna Treene, and Marshall Cohen of CNN reported that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is planning to take away Harvard University’s tax-exempt status. Law professor Sam Brunson noted that this is illegal. “In 1998,” he wrote, “Congress explicitly provided that the President could not, directly or indirectly, request that the IRS start or end an audit or other investigation of a taxpayer.” Brunson also noted that the move was “dumb.” “Unless Trump has super-secret information, Harvard hasn’t done anything to violate its tax-exempt status.” Brunson added: “there’s not a single competent attorney left in the Administration.”
The Wall Street Journal editorial board helpfully noted that the Supreme Court “has repeatedly held that the government may not use federal benefits or funds to coerce parties to surrender their constitutional rights. This is what the Administration is doing” with its demands on Harvard.
Sarah Longwell of The Bulwark reposted a clip of then-senator J.D. Vance (R-OH) on the Fox News Channel when a right-wing group falsely alleged the IRS was targeting them. “This is about whether we have functional constitutional government in this country,” Vance told host Laura Ingraham. “If the IRS can go after you because of what you think or what you believe or what you do, we’d no longer live in a free country.“
diddly-squat said:
sarahs mum said:
This obviously sucks for the student (and is bad for tertiary education sector in that it reduces confidence and lowers student recruitment), but countries cancel visas all the time.
But is it usually just done on a whim? Are speeding tickets often a reason?
Michael V said:
sarahs mum said:
FMD
Arseholery. Not compassion. Not empathy.
Just plain arseholery.
It’s like there’s some sort of competition going on, to see who can pull the biggest arsehole stunt under the guise of ‘enforcing immigration law’.
I can’t imagine what the prize might be.
Michael V said:
dv said:
This was on the official White House account
FMD
I note that there are no badges or other identifiers on the ‘official’.
buffy said:
diddly-squat said:
sarahs mum said:
This obviously sucks for the student (and is bad for tertiary education sector in that it reduces confidence and lowers student recruitment), but countries cancel visas all the time.
But is it usually just done on a whim? Are speeding tickets often a reason?
reasons change with political imperatives
captain_spalding said:
Michael V said:
sarahs mum said:
FMD
Arseholery. Not compassion. Not empathy.
Just plain arseholery.
It’s like there’s some sort of competition going on, to see who can pull the biggest arsehole stunt under the guise of ‘enforcing immigration law’.
I can’t imagine what the prize might be.
popular opinion – do you not remember the politics of illegal immigration here ??
captain_spalding said:
Michael V said:
sarahs mum said:
FMD
Arseholery. Not compassion. Not empathy.
Just plain arseholery.
It’s like there’s some sort of competition going on, to see who can pull the biggest arsehole stunt under the guise of ‘enforcing immigration law’.
I can’t imagine what the prize might be.
racial purity is the greatest prize of all
National Review is among the most conservative of American magazines.
It’s behind a conditional paywall so I’ll share the full text
https://www.nationalreview.com/2025/04/marco-rubios-disingenuous-explanation-of-the-abrego-garcia-case/
Marco Rubio’s Disingenuous Explanation of the Abrego Garcia Case
By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY
April 16, 2025 10:24 AM
It is inconceivable that the secretary of state is unaware the man had a legal right against deportation to El Salvador that was enforceable in court.
As absurd as was Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s commentary about the Abrego Garcia case in the Oval Office on Monday, he was matched whopper-for-whopper by Trump administration officials. Consider the secretary of state.
Marco Rubio is too smart not to know that what he was saying was utter nonsense. The secretary haughtily pronounced that he didn’t see what all the fuss was because Abrego Garcia is a Salvadoran national who was illegally in the United States, and who was simply deported to his own country, which is what’s supposed to happen.
Rubio has become a key figure in the administration’s push to expel unwanted aliens — he was the decision maker in the Mahmoud Khalil case and will have to play that role again now that the administration is trying to deport Khalil’s sidekick, Mohsen Mahdawi. Presumably, then, Rubio knows enough about the laws he’s enforcing to understand that the repatriation of an alien — even an illegal alien — is not what’s supposed to happen when an immigration judge has ruled that the illegal alien may not be deported to his home country because he has a credible fear of persecution.
That’s exactly what happened in Abrego Garcia’s case in 2019.
The immigration judge did not grant asylum because Abrego Garcia’s claim was time-barred. (Asylum claims must be brought within a year of the alien’s entry, and by 2019 Abrego Garcia had been here for about seven years.) But the immigration judge did grant the illegal alien withholding of removal to El Salvador. As Secretary Rubio undoubtedly realizes, that meant the illegal alien could be deported (i.e., he remained “removable”) but he could not lawfully be deported to El Salvador.
Trump administration officials do not want to dwell on this point because it inconveniently occurred during the first Trump administration. It was the Trump Justice Department that decided not to appeal the withholding of removal order, which is why that order is still binding today.
There is a slim possibility, despite the lapsing of six years, that Attorney General Pamela Bondi could still revisit the withholding of removal order (because immigration courts are part of the Justice Department and subordinate to the AG). But there is to date no public record of her having tried to do that. I have to assume that if the attorney general had taken such action, she would have said so during one of her many appearances on political talk shows, and that her Justice Department would disclose the matter to Judge Paula Xinis rather than continuing to stonewall.
As I said, it’s only a slim possibility, and perhaps the Justice Department decided it was not worth pursuing. But had the attorney general succeeded in the difficult legal process of reopening and reversing a six-year-old withholding of removal order, then Rubio would be right: There would have been no impediment to Abrego Garcia’s removal (and, by the way, it wouldn’t matter whether the Justice Department could prove he is a member of MS-13).
After airbrushing the inconvenient withholding of the removal order out of the picture, Rubio went on a ridiculous rant about how the foreign policy of the United States is run by the president, not by a judge. As the former senator is surely aware, the withholding of removal remedy was enacted by Congress. (See Title 8, U.S. Code, §1231(b)(3), “Restriction on removal to a country where alien’s life or freedom would be threatened.”) In this instance, withholding of removal was ordered by an immigration judge, not by Judge Xinis, the Supreme Court, or some other Article III tribunal. That is, it was ordered by an executive branch officer in the first Trump administration. What is stymieing the president here is statutory law and the actions and inactions of his own administrations, not a federal judge.
Nor is this anything close to a judicial usurpation of the president’s power to conduct U.S. foreign policy. To repeat (see here and here), the courts have not interfered at all with the power of the president to make a bilateral agreement with a foreign head of state in which the foreign country agreed to cooperate with the federal government regarding the custody of prisoners. Whether to make or not make such an agreement is entirely up to the president. On the other hand, if a litigant in the United States has a legitimate claim that is cognizable in federal court, the executive branch may not obstruct the litigant. Pursuant to his oath of office, the president must conduct foreign policy, just as he must carry out all executive duties, consistent with the laws of the United States.
This is perfectly obvious. Let’s say, hypothetically, President Bukele asked President Trump to help him compel testimony from an American witness in a Salvadoran court case. The president could agree to try to help, but that would not mean the executive branch could snatch the American and transport him to El Salvador without due process, while Trump and Rubio chanted, “The president, not some judge, is in charge of foreign relations.” Instead, the president would have to direct the Justice Department to go through established legal process for securing the American’s testimony, and the American would be able to posit any viable legal objections to being forced to travel overseas and testify.
It is inconceivable that the United States secretary of state is unaware that Abrego Garcia had a legal right against deportation to El Salvador that was enforceable in federal court. The Trump Justice Department confessed as much to the Supreme Court. See Noem v. Abrego Garcia (April 10, 2025): “The United States acknowledges that Abrego Garcia was subject to a withholding order forbidding his removal to El Salvador, and that the removal to El Salvador was therefore illegal.”
A federal court’s vindication of a person’s legal rights is not a matter of the judge trying to wrest control of foreign policy. It’s the law. I’m pretty sure Marco Rubio knows that.
Isn it odd?
Two speeding tickets and a dud fishing fine get you kicked out of the country.
Thirty-four felony convictions and the theft of secret documents, and you can be President.
diddly-squat said:
captain_spalding said:
Michael V said:FMD
Arseholery. Not compassion. Not empathy.
Just plain arseholery.
It’s like there’s some sort of competition going on, to see who can pull the biggest arsehole stunt under the guise of ‘enforcing immigration law’.
I can’t imagine what the prize might be.
popular opinion – do you not remember the politics of illegal immigration here ??
Is there a suggestion Onda was an illegal immigrant?
shrug we know things are bad in Gaza but countries demolish buildings all the time
SCIENCE said:
captain_spalding said:
Michael V said:FMD
Arseholery. Not compassion. Not empathy.
Just plain arseholery.
It’s like there’s some sort of competition going on, to see who can pull the biggest arsehole stunt under the guise of ‘enforcing immigration law’.
I can’t imagine what the prize might be.
racial purity is the greatest prize of all
Well, TBH, the Japanese grok that.
dv said:
diddly-squat said:
captain_spalding said:It’s like there’s some sort of competition going on, to see who can pull the biggest arsehole stunt under the guise of ‘enforcing immigration law’.
I can’t imagine what the prize might be.
popular opinion – do you not remember the politics of illegal immigration here ??
Is there a suggestion Onda was an illegal immigrant?
no, my point is that immigration politics is typically divisive and when it’s popular, governments can get away with all sorts of nefarious shit
SCIENCE said:
shrug we know things are bad in Gaza but countries demolish buildings all the time
Lol
SCIENCE said:
shrug we know things are bad in Gaza but countries demolish buildings all the time
in fairness, the government of Gaza hasn’t demolished many buildings of late…
diddly-squat said:
dv said:
diddly-squat said:popular opinion – do you not remember the politics of illegal immigration here ??
Is there a suggestion Onda was an illegal immigrant?
no, my point is that immigration politics is typically divisive and when it’s popular, governments can get away with all sorts of nefarious shit
Never did any party in this country claim that due process does not need to be followed when dealing with suspected illegal immigrants. The process was slow but they did not just skip it.
Democratic Penguins Republic – Trade War (Official Music Video)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJ8qGOe2K0o
! mnin 50 sec
dv said:
diddly-squat said:
dv said:Is there a suggestion Onda was an illegal immigrant?
no, my point is that immigration politics is typically divisive and when it’s popular, governments can get away with all sorts of nefarious shit
Never did any party in this country claim that due process does not need to be followed when dealing with suspected illegal immigrants. The process was slow but they did not just skip it.
we were harsh but fair.
Trump admin science director says American tech can ‘manipulate time and space’
White House Director of Science and Technology Michael Kratsios on Monday suggested the United States has technology that can “manipulate time and space.”
The comment came during remarks on “the golden age of American innovation” at the Endless Frontiers Retreat in Austin, Texas. Kratsios said during the event that American technological developments have stalled compared to the 20th century.
“A gap lies between our moment and the speed of transformation America experienced midcentury,” he said. “Progress has slowed.”
He continued by explaining a recent “stagnation” in technological development happened by choice. The nation, he argued, is “capable of so much more.”
“Our technologies permit us to manipulate time and space,” Kratsios said. “They leave distance annihilated, cause things to grow, and improve productivity.”
“https://abc3340.com/news/offbeat/trump-admin-science-director-says-american-tech-can-manipulate-time-and-space”:
Normally that’d be outrageous, but these days it’s just blends in with the insanity.
Spiny Norman said:
Trump admin science director says American tech can ‘manipulate time and space’White House Director of Science and Technology Michael Kratsios on Monday suggested the United States has technology that can “manipulate time and space.”
The comment came during remarks on “the golden age of American innovation” at the Endless Frontiers Retreat in Austin, Texas. Kratsios said during the event that American technological developments have stalled compared to the 20th century.
“A gap lies between our moment and the speed of transformation America experienced midcentury,” he said. “Progress has slowed.”
He continued by explaining a recent “stagnation” in technological development happened by choice. The nation, he argued, is “capable of so much more.”
“Our technologies permit us to manipulate time and space,” Kratsios said. “They leave distance annihilated, cause things to grow, and improve productivity.”
“https://abc3340.com/news/offbeat/trump-admin-science-director-says-american-tech-can-manipulate-time-and-space”:
Normally that’d be outrageous, but these days it’s just blends in with the insanity.
Try again with the link.
https://abc3340.com/news/offbeat/trump-admin-science-director-says-american-tech-can-manipulate-time-and-space
Spiny Norman said:
Trump admin science director says American tech can ‘manipulate time and space’White House Director of Science and Technology Michael Kratsios on Monday suggested the United States has technology that can “manipulate time and space.”
The comment came during remarks on “the golden age of American innovation” at the Endless Frontiers Retreat in Austin, Texas. Kratsios said during the event that American technological developments have stalled compared to the 20th century.
“A gap lies between our moment and the speed of transformation America experienced midcentury,” he said. “Progress has slowed.”
He continued by explaining a recent “stagnation” in technological development happened by choice. The nation, he argued, is “capable of so much more.”
“Our technologies permit us to manipulate time and space,” Kratsios said. “They leave distance annihilated, cause things to grow, and improve productivity.”
“https://abc3340.com/news/offbeat/trump-admin-science-director-says-american-tech-can-manipulate-time-and-space”:
Normally that’d be outrageous, but these days it’s just blends in with the insanity.
So, can they go back to November 2024, and have another think about it?
Homegrown Criminals
Late last month, Jonathan Braun was arrested on allegations of shoving a 3-year-old, “causing a red mark on his back and substantial pain.” This is only his latest brush with the law over the past four years. He was banned by federal and New York State judges from working in debt collection; fined $20 million; and accused of punching his wife and father-in-law, groping a nanny, and attacking a nurse with an IV-bag holder. He also allegedly threatened a man at his synagogue who asked him to pipe down during services.
This crime spree is stunning, but what makes it national news is that it has all happened since 2021, when President Donald Trump commuted Braun’s 10-year prison sentence for smuggling marijuana. Braun, granted clemency during the last hours of Trump’s first term as president, is one of many recipients of a Trump pardon who has found himself back in trouble with the law. Some of them are people convicted of serious offenses on January 6, 2021, and then pardoned at the outset of Trump’s second term in office. Despite Trump’s depiction of the rioters as peace-loving patriots, more than a few of them have proved to be repeat offenders.
Braun, who is now back in prison, is not the only first-term recipient of clemency to be rearrested. Eli Weinstein, a convicted Ponzi schemer who received a last-minute 2021 commutation, was convicted on March 31 in a $41 million fraud case. Philip Esformes, whose sentence for his role in a $1.3 billion Medicare fraud was commuted in 2020, was arrested last year on domestic-violence-related charges, but the state dropped them a month later. The rapper Kodak Black has also been repeatedly arrested since receiving a commutation.
But the group of people convicted in connection with January 6 has been particularly likely to have found more trouble. Former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, who was sentenced to 22 years for seditious conspiracy and other crimes, was arrested for assault just a month after being pardoned—at the Capitol, no less. (D.C. prosecutors declined to pursue charges.) He also tried unsuccessfully to stir up conflict at a conference of Trump critics in February. Matthew Huttle, an Indiana man who received a pardon for entering the Capitol on January 6, was fatally shot by a deputy on January 27 after reaching for a gun. Emily Hernandez, a Missouri woman, was convicted for causing a fatal drunk-driving crash in 2022; the sentencing came days after her pardon for January 6 offenses. Andrew Taake of Texas was pardoned in January, then arrested in February on an outstanding charge for allegedly sending explicit messages to an undercover cop he believed was an underage girl.
It’s not just that clemency recipients have been accused of crimes since their pardons; they’ve also tried to use the pardons to get off for other offenses. Edward Kelley argued that his pardon from Trump for January 6 also covered his plot to kill the FBI agents who investigated him; a judge disagreed. Daniel Ball said that charges of illegally possessing a gun should be thrown out because the weapon was discovered in a search related to now-pardoned January 6 charges, and the acting U.S. attorney agreed, but Dan Wilson, a pardoned Capitol rioter who made a similar argument, had less luck with a federal appeals court. (Other defendants have made similar claims, with varying results.) David Daniel, who was charged with producing and possessing child pornography, also argued that a search that turned up the material was invalid because of his January 6 pardon, but the U.S. attorney in the case disagreed. (Daniel has pleaded not guilty to the charges.)
Seeing so many people who received pardons get back in trouble with the law should be deeply embarrassing for Trump—though to be fair, pardoning people for a violent assault on the Capitol should have been embarrassing to him as well. He is not the first president to issue clemency for personal reasons, but presidential administrations usually carefully administer commutations and pardons, in part to avoid recidivism. The Trump White House, however, has shown little regard for the process. Last month, it fired Justice Department pardon attorney Elizabeth Oyer after she opposed restoring gun rights for the actor Mel Gibson, then tried to block her from testifying to Congress.
Trump, the first convicted felon to serve as president, has long claimed that he will restore “law and order” in America, but his definition is highly selective. Some of the president’s commutations and pardons are simply favors granted to people who are well connected, but in the case of the January 6 commutations, he was eager to reward loyalty and to make a political point: that he and they had both been subjects of political persecution.
This creates a nauseating contrast with statements this week in which administration officials have claimed that Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland resident living under protected legal status who was deported to El Salvador, is a terrorist, despite a total lack of evidence—and despite the fact that the government has previously acknowledged his deportation was “an administrative error.” The search for some offense to pin on Abrego Garcia is also being done to make a political point. If Trump is eager to find dangerous criminals, he could do so more easily by looking at his pardon list.
‘The Atlantic’ Email Newsletter
dv said:
diddly-squat said:
dv said:Is there a suggestion Onda was an illegal immigrant?
no, my point is that immigration politics is typically divisive and when it’s popular, governments can get away with all sorts of nefarious shit
Never did any party in this country claim that due process does not need to be followed when dealing with suspected illegal immigrants. The process was slow but they did not just skip it.
This was a story about a foreign student that had his visa canceled – there have been plenty of instances in this country where the minister has used personal discretion to cancel visas.
What’s he doing here?’ Trump-Musk bromance feels the strain
Elizabeth Knight
Business columnist
April 17, 2025 — 3.51pm
Relationship experts say that three of the top reasons behind couples breaking up are money, trust and narcissism. So, the appearance of emerging cracks in the world’s most famous bromance between Donald Trump and Elon Musk had an inevitability to it.
This week’s reports that Trump intervened to stop Musk from attending a top secret China briefing at the Pentagon, and questioning “What the f—- is Elon doing here?” is the latest in a series of encounters that suggest this Trump-Musk love affair is waning – or at least has boundaries.
One big source of tension is that Trump’s trade war is applying enormous pressure on Musk’s main source of wealth – Tesla.
In stopping Musk from attending the briefing, Trump was correct in his assessment of this situation – labelling it a conflict of interest for Musk, given Tesla has extensive operations in and reliance on China.
To date this year, Tesla’s share price has plummeted 36 per cent, a slump that was triggered initially by Musk’s inability to take a hands-on approach to managing the company when the lion’s share of his time was devoted to slashing the government’s expenditure by running DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency).
Like so many of his technology entrepreneur brethren, Musk has found that Trump has a curious take on quid pro quo.
(And there is the clear potential for Trump to feel a little let down by Musk’s government cost-cutting endeavours. The New York Times is reporting Musk is falling well short of the savings goals he had claimed. Musk’s latest reported plan to sell special gold US visas for $US5 million a pop won’t move the needle.)
But like so many of his technology entrepreneur brethren, Musk has found that Trump has a curious take on quid pro quo.
Tesla both makes vehicles in China and imports componentry from there and cannot be a fan of the escalating tensions between the two countries.
It provides context for Musk’s lashing of Trump’s senior trade adviser Peter Navarro last week, labelling him “truly a moron” and “dumber than a sack of bricks”.
Trump’s trade war with China has produced plenty of corporate casualties – Musk’s Tesla is only one.
They are rapidly discovering that contributing to Trump’s campaign – or becoming public fanboys – has not provided the insurance policy they had anticipated for their organisations.
AI hotshot Nvidia has just found out the hard way that cosying up to Trump doesn’t guarantee safety.
Nvidia boss Jensen Huang recently dined with Trump and days later declared he would build $US500 billion in artificial intelligence infrastructure on US soil. Yet, he was hit overnight with a US government decision to restrict the sale of certain AI chips to China.
That decision cost Nvidia $US5.5 billion, and investors are now worried about the world’s hottest company becoming collateral damage in Trump’s tariff war.
Amazon founder and shareholder Jeff Bezos, meanwhile, is having to contend with the fact that the company’s goods are becoming more expensive – creating enormous dislocation and uncertainty for its army of third-party sellers. Just how much prices will rise depends on which country they are selling in.
And if Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg had thought his support for Trump would have rewarded him with government support for the antitrust case Meta is facing, he will now have experienced a dose of reality.
And the appearance last week that the tech bros got a reprieve when Trump announced a tariff exclusion for smartphones, computer chips, hard drives, memory chips and other selected electronics was short-lived.
Trump took to social media soon after to declare that “NOBODY is getting off the hook”.
So consumers will need to wait to see, for example, where the price of an iPhone will land.
Even if tech is ultimately dealt with more favourably than other sectors, the shares in these stocks have been savaged as investors factor in the re-emergence of inflation and a slowdown or even a recession in the US economy, on the back of Trump’s trade agenda.
You would have to wonder about the return on investment the rich tech supporters have received on their contributions to Trump’s campaign.
Bezos, Musk and Zuckerberg have collectively lost more than $US80 billion since “Liberation Day”.
https://www.theage.com.au/business/companies/what-s-he-doing-here-trump-musk-bromance-feels-the-strain-20250417-p5lsj6.html?
Witty Rejoinder said:
What’s he doing here?’ Trump-Musk bromance feels the strainElizabeth Knight
Business columnist
April 17, 2025 — 3.51pmRelationship experts say that three of the top reasons behind couples breaking up are money, trust and narcissism. So, the appearance of emerging cracks in the world’s most famous bromance between Donald Trump and Elon Musk had an inevitability to it.
This week’s reports that Trump intervened to stop Musk from attending a top secret China briefing at the Pentagon, and questioning “What the f—- is Elon doing here?” is the latest in a series of encounters that suggest this Trump-Musk love affair is waning – or at least has boundaries.
One big source of tension is that Trump’s trade war is applying enormous pressure on Musk’s main source of wealth – Tesla.
In stopping Musk from attending the briefing, Trump was correct in his assessment of this situation – labelling it a conflict of interest for Musk, given Tesla has extensive operations in and reliance on China.
To date this year, Tesla’s share price has plummeted 36 per cent, a slump that was triggered initially by Musk’s inability to take a hands-on approach to managing the company when the lion’s share of his time was devoted to slashing the government’s expenditure by running DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency).
Like so many of his technology entrepreneur brethren, Musk has found that Trump has a curious take on quid pro quo.
(And there is the clear potential for Trump to feel a little let down by Musk’s government cost-cutting endeavours. The New York Times is reporting Musk is falling well short of the savings goals he had claimed. Musk’s latest reported plan to sell special gold US visas for $US5 million a pop won’t move the needle.)
But like so many of his technology entrepreneur brethren, Musk has found that Trump has a curious take on quid pro quo.
Tesla both makes vehicles in China and imports componentry from there and cannot be a fan of the escalating tensions between the two countries.
It provides context for Musk’s lashing of Trump’s senior trade adviser Peter Navarro last week, labelling him “truly a moron” and “dumber than a sack of bricks”.
Trump’s trade war with China has produced plenty of corporate casualties – Musk’s Tesla is only one.
They are rapidly discovering that contributing to Trump’s campaign – or becoming public fanboys – has not provided the insurance policy they had anticipated for their organisations.
AI hotshot Nvidia has just found out the hard way that cosying up to Trump doesn’t guarantee safety.
Nvidia boss Jensen Huang recently dined with Trump and days later declared he would build $US500 billion in artificial intelligence infrastructure on US soil. Yet, he was hit overnight with a US government decision to restrict the sale of certain AI chips to China.
That decision cost Nvidia $US5.5 billion, and investors are now worried about the world’s hottest company becoming collateral damage in Trump’s tariff war.
Amazon founder and shareholder Jeff Bezos, meanwhile, is having to contend with the fact that the company’s goods are becoming more expensive – creating enormous dislocation and uncertainty for its army of third-party sellers. Just how much prices will rise depends on which country they are selling in.
And if Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg had thought his support for Trump would have rewarded him with government support for the antitrust case Meta is facing, he will now have experienced a dose of reality.
And the appearance last week that the tech bros got a reprieve when Trump announced a tariff exclusion for smartphones, computer chips, hard drives, memory chips and other selected electronics was short-lived.
Trump took to social media soon after to declare that “NOBODY is getting off the hook”.
So consumers will need to wait to see, for example, where the price of an iPhone will land.
Even if tech is ultimately dealt with more favourably than other sectors, the shares in these stocks have been savaged as investors factor in the re-emergence of inflation and a slowdown or even a recession in the US economy, on the back of Trump’s trade agenda.
You would have to wonder about the return on investment the rich tech supporters have received on their contributions to Trump’s campaign.
Bezos, Musk and Zuckerberg have collectively lost more than $US80 billion since “Liberation Day”.
https://www.theage.com.au/business/companies/what-s-he-doing-here-trump-musk-bromance-feels-the-strain-20250417-p5lsj6.html?
Elon is being used. His great plan to sack a whole load of public servants and replace them with AI is never going to work and is just tech-bro bullshit. His plan will be allowed to proceed as far as the mass sackings stage. Then the AI implementation will be abandoned and new staff will be hire to refill all those roles. The new staff will be selected on the basis of their political afiliation, thus effectively ending the civil service as a neutral and non-partisan organisation. Effectively crippling the next few administrations too, who will be stuck with the same idiots unless they want to do a big round of mass sackings and rehirings too.
sarahs mum said:
Heather Cox Richardson
11m ·
April 16, 2025 (Wednesday)——————————————————————————-CUT———————————————————————————————-
Ta.
captain_spalding said:
Michael V said:
sarahs mum said:
FMD
Arseholery. Not compassion. Not empathy.
Just plain arseholery.
It’s like there’s some sort of competition going on, to see who can pull the biggest arsehole stunt under the guise of ‘enforcing immigration law’.
I can’t imagine what the prize might be.
Prize: You can run the SS look-alike branch of government.
dv said:
National Review is among the most conservative of American magazines.It’s behind a conditional paywall so I’ll share the full text
https://www.nationalreview.com/2025/04/marco-rubios-disingenuous-explanation-of-the-abrego-garcia-case/Marco Rubio’s Disingenuous Explanation of the Abrego Garcia Case
By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY
April 16, 2025 10:24 AM
It is inconceivable that the secretary of state is unaware the man had a legal right against deportation to El Salvador that was enforceable in court.
As absurd as was Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s commentary about the Abrego Garcia case in the Oval Office on Monday, he was matched whopper-for-whopper by Trump administration officials. Consider the secretary of state.Marco Rubio is too smart not to know that what he was saying was utter nonsense. The secretary haughtily pronounced that he didn’t see what all the fuss was because Abrego Garcia is a Salvadoran national who was illegally in the United States, and who was simply deported to his own country, which is what’s supposed to happen.
Rubio has become a key figure in the administration’s push to expel unwanted aliens — he was the decision maker in the Mahmoud Khalil case and will have to play that role again now that the administration is trying to deport Khalil’s sidekick, Mohsen Mahdawi. Presumably, then, Rubio knows enough about the laws he’s enforcing to understand that the repatriation of an alien — even an illegal alien — is not what’s supposed to happen when an immigration judge has ruled that the illegal alien may not be deported to his home country because he has a credible fear of persecution.
That’s exactly what happened in Abrego Garcia’s case in 2019.
The immigration judge did not grant asylum because Abrego Garcia’s claim was time-barred. (Asylum claims must be brought within a year of the alien’s entry, and by 2019 Abrego Garcia had been here for about seven years.) But the immigration judge did grant the illegal alien withholding of removal to El Salvador. As Secretary Rubio undoubtedly realizes, that meant the illegal alien could be deported (i.e., he remained “removable”) but he could not lawfully be deported to El Salvador.
Trump administration officials do not want to dwell on this point because it inconveniently occurred during the first Trump administration. It was the Trump Justice Department that decided not to appeal the withholding of removal order, which is why that order is still binding today.
There is a slim possibility, despite the lapsing of six years, that Attorney General Pamela Bondi could still revisit the withholding of removal order (because immigration courts are part of the Justice Department and subordinate to the AG). But there is to date no public record of her having tried to do that. I have to assume that if the attorney general had taken such action, she would have said so during one of her many appearances on political talk shows, and that her Justice Department would disclose the matter to Judge Paula Xinis rather than continuing to stonewall.
As I said, it’s only a slim possibility, and perhaps the Justice Department decided it was not worth pursuing. But had the attorney general succeeded in the difficult legal process of reopening and reversing a six-year-old withholding of removal order, then Rubio would be right: There would have been no impediment to Abrego Garcia’s removal (and, by the way, it wouldn’t matter whether the Justice Department could prove he is a member of MS-13).
After airbrushing the inconvenient withholding of the removal order out of the picture, Rubio went on a ridiculous rant about how the foreign policy of the United States is run by the president, not by a judge. As the former senator is surely aware, the withholding of removal remedy was enacted by Congress. (See Title 8, U.S. Code, §1231(b)(3), “Restriction on removal to a country where alien’s life or freedom would be threatened.”) In this instance, withholding of removal was ordered by an immigration judge, not by Judge Xinis, the Supreme Court, or some other Article III tribunal. That is, it was ordered by an executive branch officer in the first Trump administration. What is stymieing the president here is statutory law and the actions and inactions of his own administrations, not a federal judge.
Nor is this anything close to a judicial usurpation of the president’s power to conduct U.S. foreign policy. To repeat (see here and here), the courts have not interfered at all with the power of the president to make a bilateral agreement with a foreign head of state in which the foreign country agreed to cooperate with the federal government regarding the custody of prisoners. Whether to make or not make such an agreement is entirely up to the president. On the other hand, if a litigant in the United States has a legitimate claim that is cognizable in federal court, the executive branch may not obstruct the litigant. Pursuant to his oath of office, the president must conduct foreign policy, just as he must carry out all executive duties, consistent with the laws of the United States.
This is perfectly obvious. Let’s say, hypothetically, President Bukele asked President Trump to help him compel testimony from an American witness in a Salvadoran court case. The president could agree to try to help, but that would not mean the executive branch could snatch the American and transport him to El Salvador without due process, while Trump and Rubio chanted, “The president, not some judge, is in charge of foreign relations.” Instead, the president would have to direct the Justice Department to go through established legal process for securing the American’s testimony, and the American would be able to posit any viable legal objections to being forced to travel overseas and testify.
It is inconceivable that the United States secretary of state is unaware that Abrego Garcia had a legal right against deportation to El Salvador that was enforceable in federal court. The Trump Justice Department confessed as much to the Supreme Court. See Noem v. Abrego Garcia (April 10, 2025): “The United States acknowledges that Abrego Garcia was subject to a withholding order forbidding his removal to El Salvador, and that the removal to El Salvador was therefore illegal.”
A federal court’s vindication of a person’s legal rights is not a matter of the judge trying to wrest control of foreign policy. It’s the law. I’m pretty sure Marco Rubio knows that.
Ta.
captain_spalding said:
Isn it odd?Two speeding tickets and a dud fishing fine get you kicked out of the country.
Thirty-four felony convictions and the theft of secret documents, and you can be President.
Ha!
Spiny Norman said:
Trump admin science director says American tech can ‘manipulate time and space’White House Director of Science and Technology Michael Kratsios on Monday suggested the United States has technology that can “manipulate time and space.”
The comment came during remarks on “the golden age of American innovation” at the Endless Frontiers Retreat in Austin, Texas. Kratsios said during the event that American technological developments have stalled compared to the 20th century.
“A gap lies between our moment and the speed of transformation America experienced midcentury,” he said. “Progress has slowed.”
He continued by explaining a recent “stagnation” in technological development happened by choice. The nation, he argued, is “capable of so much more.”
“Our technologies permit us to manipulate time and space,” Kratsios said. “They leave distance annihilated, cause things to grow, and improve productivity.”
“https://abc3340.com/news/offbeat/trump-admin-science-director-says-american-tech-can-manipulate-time-and-space”:
Normally that’d be outrageous, but these days it’s just blends in with the insanity.
Yeah.
:(
I’m gunna be nunfa, Mr Panty Parts.
Witty Rejoinder said:
Homegrown CriminalsLate last month, Jonathan Braun was arrested on allegations of shoving a 3-year-old, “causing a red mark on his back and substantial pain.” This is only his latest brush with the law over the past four years. He was banned by federal and New York State judges from working in debt collection; fined $20 million; and accused of punching his wife and father-in-law, groping a nanny, and attacking a nurse with an IV-bag holder. He also allegedly threatened a man at his synagogue who asked him to pipe down during services.
This crime spree is stunning, but what makes it national news is that it has all happened since 2021, when President Donald Trump commuted Braun’s 10-year prison sentence for smuggling marijuana. Braun, granted clemency during the last hours of Trump’s first term as president, is one of many recipients of a Trump pardon who has found himself back in trouble with the law. Some of them are people convicted of serious offenses on January 6, 2021, and then pardoned at the outset of Trump’s second term in office. Despite Trump’s depiction of the rioters as peace-loving patriots, more than a few of them have proved to be repeat offenders.
Braun, who is now back in prison, is not the only first-term recipient of clemency to be rearrested. Eli Weinstein, a convicted Ponzi schemer who received a last-minute 2021 commutation, was convicted on March 31 in a $41 million fraud case. Philip Esformes, whose sentence for his role in a $1.3 billion Medicare fraud was commuted in 2020, was arrested last year on domestic-violence-related charges, but the state dropped them a month later. The rapper Kodak Black has also been repeatedly arrested since receiving a commutation.
But the group of people convicted in connection with January 6 has been particularly likely to have found more trouble. Former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, who was sentenced to 22 years for seditious conspiracy and other crimes, was arrested for assault just a month after being pardoned—at the Capitol, no less. (D.C. prosecutors declined to pursue charges.) He also tried unsuccessfully to stir up conflict at a conference of Trump critics in February. Matthew Huttle, an Indiana man who received a pardon for entering the Capitol on January 6, was fatally shot by a deputy on January 27 after reaching for a gun. Emily Hernandez, a Missouri woman, was convicted for causing a fatal drunk-driving crash in 2022; the sentencing came days after her pardon for January 6 offenses. Andrew Taake of Texas was pardoned in January, then arrested in February on an outstanding charge for allegedly sending explicit messages to an undercover cop he believed was an underage girl.
It’s not just that clemency recipients have been accused of crimes since their pardons; they’ve also tried to use the pardons to get off for other offenses. Edward Kelley argued that his pardon from Trump for January 6 also covered his plot to kill the FBI agents who investigated him; a judge disagreed. Daniel Ball said that charges of illegally possessing a gun should be thrown out because the weapon was discovered in a search related to now-pardoned January 6 charges, and the acting U.S. attorney agreed, but Dan Wilson, a pardoned Capitol rioter who made a similar argument, had less luck with a federal appeals court. (Other defendants have made similar claims, with varying results.) David Daniel, who was charged with producing and possessing child pornography, also argued that a search that turned up the material was invalid because of his January 6 pardon, but the U.S. attorney in the case disagreed. (Daniel has pleaded not guilty to the charges.)
Seeing so many people who received pardons get back in trouble with the law should be deeply embarrassing for Trump—though to be fair, pardoning people for a violent assault on the Capitol should have been embarrassing to him as well. He is not the first president to issue clemency for personal reasons, but presidential administrations usually carefully administer commutations and pardons, in part to avoid recidivism. The Trump White House, however, has shown little regard for the process. Last month, it fired Justice Department pardon attorney Elizabeth Oyer after she opposed restoring gun rights for the actor Mel Gibson, then tried to block her from testifying to Congress.
Trump, the first convicted felon to serve as president, has long claimed that he will restore “law and order” in America, but his definition is highly selective. Some of the president’s commutations and pardons are simply favors granted to people who are well connected, but in the case of the January 6 commutations, he was eager to reward loyalty and to make a political point: that he and they had both been subjects of political persecution.
This creates a nauseating contrast with statements this week in which administration officials have claimed that Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland resident living under protected legal status who was deported to El Salvador, is a terrorist, despite a total lack of evidence—and despite the fact that the government has previously acknowledged his deportation was “an administrative error.” The search for some offense to pin on Abrego Garcia is also being done to make a political point. If Trump is eager to find dangerous criminals, he could do so more easily by looking at his pardon list.
‘The Atlantic’ Email Newsletter
Yes.
Witty Rejoinder said:
What’s he doing here?’ Trump-Musk bromance feels the strainElizabeth Knight
Business columnist
April 17, 2025 — 3.51pmRelationship experts say that three of the top reasons behind couples breaking up are money, trust and narcissism. So, the appearance of emerging cracks in the world’s most famous bromance between Donald Trump and Elon Musk had an inevitability to it.
This week’s reports that Trump intervened to stop Musk from attending a top secret China briefing at the Pentagon, and questioning “What the f—- is Elon doing here?” is the latest in a series of encounters that suggest this Trump-Musk love affair is waning – or at least has boundaries.
—————————————————————————CUT———————————————————————————-
You would have to wonder about the return on investment the rich tech supporters have received on their contributions to Trump’s campaign.
Bezos, Musk and Zuckerberg have collectively lost more than $US80 billion since “Liberation Day”.
https://www.theage.com.au/business/companies/what-s-he-doing-here-trump-musk-bromance-feels-the-strain-20250417-p5lsj6.html?
Thanks.
Woodie said:
I’m gunna be nunfa, Mr Panty Parts.
Me too.
But I no complain.
Christopher Lorenz
11m ·
This is a great writer and a clear legal and historical analysis. Read and share.
Jim Wright
23h ·
Give me a reason why criminals should be afforded due process.
Answer me THAT, demands every flag-waving patriot on my various timelines.
Give me a reason.
Okay, I’ll give you a reason: King George III
Specifically this:
- For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
- For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:
- For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:
Do you recognize those words?
You should, but you probably went to American schools and you probably never got beyond the first line of the Preamble. So, let me spell it out for you: Those are just three of the 27 grievances the Founding Fathers lodged against the King of England and for which they declared Independence.
Those are the grievances outlined in the Declaration of Independence.
Those are the very reasons they fought a bloody war and risked their lives and liberty.
Those are the very reasons they wrote The Constitution.
Due process. THAT’s why. That’s the reason.
All of those subject to the jurisdiction of the United States are entitled to protection under its law and Constitution. Period. NO exceptions.
ALL OF US.
Natural born citizens. Naturalized citizens. Legal Residents. Visitors. Tourists. Adults. Children. POWs. Illegal immigrants. And even and most especially criminals.
That due process was one of the principle reasons the United States exists at all.
Now, of course, those Founders fell short.
That Constitution as first written fell far short.
And there was a time in this nation when many were NOT afforded full protection under the law. They were property. And we fought yet another bloody war over THAT, followed by nearly a hundred years of struggle and inequity and Jim Crow and a couple of Constitutional Amendments before due process applied to all at least in the law if not in everyday practice.
We fell short many times along the way.
The genocide of Native Americans, the rights of women, marginalization of non-Christians, persecution of LGBTQ people, forced incarceration of Asian Americans during WWII, etc, are just some of the examples. We continue to fall short, even though we allegedly learned from those mistakes. If we do not teach this shameful history, we will never be a better nation.
That is the purpose of history: it doesn’t mean we hate America it means we want our nation to be BETTER.
Every case, at the very moment when we fall short, what it comes down to is this: Due Process for all. No exceptions.
Even the most heinous of suspected criminals MUST be afforded due process and full protection under the law.
It’s not about THEM. It’s about US.
It’s about who we are as a people.
It’s about that shameful history and it’s about how history will remember US.
It’s about that better future.
If your government can snatch an alleged criminal off the street in broad daylight and disappear them into some foreign gulag without protest, without due process, without a trial, without appeal, without consequence, without the law, then they can disappear anyone.
If anyone can be declared a criminal without due process, so can your children. So can your neighbors. So can YOU.
This is quite literally the very complaint our ancestors lodged against their King and his army.
The very one.
This is why you were warned repeatedly, LOUDLY, endlessly when you in fear voted to give government the power of Warrantless Faceless Rendition without Appeal in the wake of 9-11. We put the boot on our own throat.
It is long past time to correct that terrible mistake.
Liberty, Justice, the LAW applies to us all, every one, or it means nothing.
The government MUST prove its case in EVERY instance. EVERY. SINGLE. ONE. No exceptions. Every single person who faces our government MUST have the right of appeal.
The cornerstone of American jurisprudence is Blackstone’s Ratio, i.e. “it is better to allow ten guilty individuals to go free than to convict one innocent person.”
To paraphrase both William Blackstone and Benjamin Franklin, it’s better for a hundred gangbangers to go free than one innocent man die in a Salvadorian gulag. That we would afford the accused, even the most heinous of suspected criminals, due process is what once made us exceptional. And either we strive every day to be that shining city on the hill, even if we fall short, or we will NEVER be anything but peasants with our faces in the mud, property under the lash, SUBJECTS groveling before the arbitrary tyranny of a king.
That’s why.
—-
i worry about Chris.he’s about to travel from Mexico to NH. and this is on his phone.
https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1Dsct19hKp/
MeidasTouch
JUST IN: Deputy Assistant to the President and “Counterterrorism Czar” Sebastian Gorka says anyone advocating for due process for Kilmar Abrego Garcia could be viewed as “aiding and abetting a terrorist” and be federally charged. (h/t Philip Germain)
kii said:
https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1Dsct19hKp/MeidasTouch
JUST IN: Deputy Assistant to the President and “Counterterrorism Czar” Sebastian Gorka says anyone advocating for due process for Kilmar Abrego Garcia could be viewed as “aiding and abetting a terrorist” and be federally charged. (h/t Philip Germain)
damn.
kii said:
https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1Dsct19hKp/MeidasTouch
JUST IN: Deputy Assistant to the President and “Counterterrorism Czar” Sebastian Gorka says anyone advocating for due process for Kilmar Abrego Garcia could be viewed as “aiding and abetting a terrorist” and be federally charged. (h/t Philip Germain)
so many guns in the US, so few people willing to rise up against tyranny and form a firing squad.
white, asian, hispanic, nigger or whatever: they’re all just fucking yella
kii said:
https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1Dsct19hKp/MeidasTouch
JUST IN: Deputy Assistant to the President and “Counterterrorism Czar” Sebastian Gorka says anyone advocating for due process for Kilmar Abrego Garcia could be viewed as “aiding and abetting a terrorist” and be federally charged. (h/t Philip Germain)
but they have admitted, oopsie, that it was a mistake to have taken him. he ain’t no terrorist.
sarahs mum said:
This area of South Dakota voted for Trump by roughly 70%. Here’s what they think now
That’s just it, those people are unkind, selfish and thoughtless people.
Michael V said:
Witty Rejoinder said:
Homegrown Criminals If Trump is eager to find dangerous criminals, he could do so more easily by looking at his pardon list.‘The Atlantic’ Email Newsletter
Yes.
kii said:
https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1Dsct19hKp/MeidasTouch
JUST IN: Deputy Assistant to the President and “Counterterrorism Czar” Sebastian Gorka says anyone advocating for due process for Kilmar Abrego Garcia could be viewed as “aiding and abetting a terrorist” and be federally charged. (h/t Philip Germain)
FMD
captain_spalding said:
Isn it odd?Two speeding tickets and a dud fishing fine get you kicked out of the country.
Thirty-four felony convictions and the theft of secret documents, and you can be President.
It is America.
sarahs mum said:
kii said:
https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1Dsct19hKp/
MeidasTouch
JUST IN: Deputy Assistant to the President and “Counterterrorism Czar” Sebastian Gorka says anyone advocating for due process for Kilmar Abrego Garcia could be viewed as “aiding and abetting a terrorist” and be federally charged. (h/t Philip Germain)
but they have admitted, oopsie, that it was a mistake to have taken him. he ain’t no terrorist.
seems fair though, the USSA is a terrorist state, and complaining about their treatment of innocent until proven guilty scapegoats who didn’t receive due process feeds into their bully baby narrative so it does aid and abet a terrorist
From Fear and Loathing: Closer to the Edge
“These are kids who will never pay taxes. They’ll never hold a job. They’ll never play baseball. They’ll never write a poem. They’ll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted.”
— Robert F. Kennedy Jr., April 16, 2025
Let’s stop pretending he was misunderstood. He said what he meant. He meant what he said. And what he said was a declaration of war on autistic people — broadcast from a government podium, camouflaged as public health, and greeted with cheers from the wellness death cult he’s built around himself.
This is not about public safety. This is not about children’s well-being. This is about building a narrative that casts neurodivergent people as subhuman burdens — incapable of love, incapable of work, incapable of art, and apparently, incapable of taking a shit without help.
Forget policy nuance. This is political eugenics in a Whole Foods apron. A Secretary of Health who talks about autistic people like they’re corpses waiting to be buried — not living, breathing human beings navigating a world designed to fail them.
And for what? So he can prop up his war on “toxins”? So he can sell the fantasy that there’s a single, sinister cause to a complex neurodevelopmental condition and that he’s the messianic figure who will expose it? So he can divert resources from support, research, and inclusion into his long-running obsession with discredited junk science and purity culture?
RFK Jr. isn’t trying to understand autism. He’s trying to eradicate it. Not with compassion — but with bureaucracy and fear. He’s rebranding the entire neurodivergent population as broken and unwanted, framing their existence as evidence of a nation gone wrong.
And now he’s giving himself a deadline. September 2025. By then, he promises, he’ll uncover the root cause of autism — as if that’s something he can shake out of a kale leaf or dredge up from a bottle of organic mouthwash. He’s appointed David Geier, a man stripped of his medical license for unethical autism treatments, to help lead the charge. That’s not a public health team. That’s a fucking inquisition.
What Kennedy is building isn’t reform. It’s a purge. A soft, smiling, focus-grouped purge. Not through sterilization or institutional walls — though give him time — but through policy, stigma, and calculated cruelty.
Dr. Oz stands next to him like a coked-up Lazarus, resurrected from daytime disgrace and now offering butter and platitudes while Kennedy redraws the line between worthy and unworthy life.
This isn’t just ableism. It’s a worldview. It’s the belief that people who require support are less than. That the disabled are a burden. That anything outside Kennedy’s fantasy of high-functioning Americana must be prevented, solved, or scrubbed out of the gene pool.
We’re not going to correct him. We’re not going to walk him through CDC data or introduce him to the millions of autistic people who pay taxes, write poetry, hold jobs, fall in love, and piss just fine on their own. He knows. He doesn’t care.
Because this isn’t ignorance. It’s malice in a health department badge.
He’s not confused. He’s not curious. He’s not well-meaning.
He is an enemy. Of the disabled. Of science. Of truth.
And like the worm that once died inside his skull, he’s rotting everything he touches from the inside out.
sarahs mum said:
kii said:
https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1Dsct19hKp/MeidasTouch
JUST IN: Deputy Assistant to the President and “Counterterrorism Czar” Sebastian Gorka says anyone advocating for due process for Kilmar Abrego Garcia could be viewed as “aiding and abetting a terrorist” and be federally charged. (h/t Philip Germain)
but they have admitted, oopsie, that it was a mistake to have taken him. he ain’t no terrorist.
Reasons I have seen that he won’t be freed:
1. He’s already dead.
2. If he’s not and he is released then he can describe what the conditions etc are like.
3. It opens the door to others being released.
kii said:
From Fear and Loathing: Closer to the Edge
“These are kids who will never pay taxes. They’ll never hold a job. They’ll never play baseball. They’ll never write a poem. They’ll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted.”
— Robert F. Kennedy Jr., April 16, 2025
Let’s stop pretending he was misunderstood. He said what he meant. He meant what he said. And what he said was a declaration of war on autistic people — broadcast from a government podium, camouflaged as public health, and greeted with cheers from the wellness death cult he’s built around himself.
This is not about public safety. This is not about children’s well-being. This is about building a narrative that casts neurodivergent people as subhuman burdens — incapable of love, incapable of work, incapable of art, and apparently, incapable of taking a shit without help.
Forget policy nuance. This is political eugenics in a Whole Foods apron. A Secretary of Health who talks about autistic people like they’re corpses waiting to be buried — not living, breathing human beings navigating a world designed to fail them.
And for what? So he can prop up his war on “toxins”? So he can sell the fantasy that there’s a single, sinister cause to a complex neurodevelopmental condition and that he’s the messianic figure who will expose it? So he can divert resources from support, research, and inclusion into his long-running obsession with discredited junk science and purity culture?
RFK Jr. isn’t trying to understand autism. He’s trying to eradicate it. Not with compassion — but with bureaucracy and fear. He’s rebranding the entire neurodivergent population as broken and unwanted, framing their existence as evidence of a nation gone wrong.
And now he’s giving himself a deadline. September 2025. By then, he promises, he’ll uncover the root cause of autism — as if that’s something he can shake out of a kale leaf or dredge up from a bottle of organic mouthwash. He’s appointed David Geier, a man stripped of his medical license for unethical autism treatments, to help lead the charge. That’s not a public health team. That’s a fucking inquisition.
What Kennedy is building isn’t reform. It’s a purge. A soft, smiling, focus-grouped purge. Not through sterilization or institutional walls — though give him time — but through policy, stigma, and calculated cruelty.
Dr. Oz stands next to him like a coked-up Lazarus, resurrected from daytime disgrace and now offering butter and platitudes while Kennedy redraws the line between worthy and unworthy life.
This isn’t just ableism. It’s a worldview. It’s the belief that people who require support are less than. That the disabled are a burden. That anything outside Kennedy’s fantasy of high-functioning Americana must be prevented, solved, or scrubbed out of the gene pool.
We’re not going to correct him. We’re not going to walk him through CDC data or introduce him to the millions of autistic people who pay taxes, write poetry, hold jobs, fall in love, and piss just fine on their own. He knows. He doesn’t care.
Because this isn’t ignorance. It’s malice in a health department badge.
He’s not confused. He’s not curious. He’s not well-meaning.
He is an enemy. Of the disabled. Of science. Of truth.
And like the worm that once died inside his skull, he’s rotting everything he touches from the inside out.
so autists are just like zombies and want everyone else to be bitten by the MMR poison to become just like them see they’re terrorists and should all be eliminated
kii said:
SCIENCE said:
sarahs mum said:
kii said:
https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1Dsct19hKp/
MeidasTouch
JUST IN: Deputy Assistant to the President and “Counterterrorism Czar” Sebastian Gorka says anyone advocating for due process for Kilmar Abrego Garcia could be viewed as “aiding and abetting a terrorist” and be federally charged. (h/t Philip Germain)
but they have admitted, oopsie, that it was a mistake to have taken him. he ain’t no terrorist.
seems fair though, the USSA is a terrorist state, and complaining about their treatment of innocent until proven guilty scapegoats who didn’t receive due process feeds into their bully baby narrative so it does aid and abet a terrorist
Reasons I have seen that he won’t be freed:
1. He’s already dead.
2. If he’s not and he is released then he can describe what the conditions etc are like.
3. It opens the door to others being released.
Hey remember when great totally not fascist countries would move heaven and earth sorry we mean burn heaven and earth and bomb the shit out of hospitals and raze schools and execute paramedics just for a strip of seaside real estate and the bodies of a handful of hostages¿
SCIENCE said:
kii said:
SCIENCE said:
seems fair though, the USSA is a terrorist state, and complaining about their treatment of innocent until proven guilty scapegoats who didn’t receive due process feeds into their bully baby narrative so it does aid and abet a terrorist
Reasons I have seen that he won’t be freed:
1. He’s already dead.
2. If he’s not and he is released then he can describe what the conditions etc are like.
3. It opens the door to others being released.
Hey remember when great totally not fascist countries would move heaven and earth sorry we mean burn heaven and earth and bomb the shit out of hospitals and raze schools and execute paramedics just for a strip of seaside real estate and the bodies of a handful of hostages¿
For fuck’s sake!
Nobody could
The Fed, like Australia’s Reserve Bank, is independent of government and uses inflation and unemployment data to determine interest rates for lenders. Mr Powell told a group of high-level business executives on Wednesday that the Fed’s independence was “very widely understood and supported in Washington”. He drew applause after vowing to resist political pressure when setting interest rates. Mr Trump in his post said Mr Powell was “always too late and wrong”, and critiqued the speech the Fed chair made on Wednesday, calling it “another, and typical, complete mess”.
In response to the latest post by the president, economists said they were concerned about how far Mr Trump would go. “Previously I thought the odds were very much against Trump trying to remove Powell, but my confidence has faded,” Natixis chief US economist Christopher Hodge told Reuters.
have foreseen this¡
kii said:
sarahs mum said:
kii said:
https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1Dsct19hKp/MeidasTouch
JUST IN: Deputy Assistant to the President and “Counterterrorism Czar” Sebastian Gorka says anyone advocating for due process for Kilmar Abrego Garcia could be viewed as “aiding and abetting a terrorist” and be federally charged. (h/t Philip Germain)
but they have admitted, oopsie, that it was a mistake to have taken him. he ain’t no terrorist.
Reasons I have seen that he won’t be freed:
1. He’s already dead.
2. If he’s not and he is released then he can describe what the conditions etc are like.
3. It opens the door to others being released.
4. It would be for the Trump ‘government’ to not only have to admit that they made a mistake, but that they can be forced to rectify the mistakes that they make.
captain_spalding said:
kii said:
sarahs mum said:but they have admitted, oopsie, that it was a mistake to have taken him. he ain’t no terrorist.
Reasons I have seen that he won’t be freed:
1. He’s already dead.
2. If he’s not and he is released then he can describe what the conditions etc are like.
3. It opens the door to others being released.
4. It would be for the Trump ‘government’ to not only have to admit that they made a mistake, but that they can be forced to rectify the mistakes that they make.
Yeah, these arseholes will never accept any blame for anything.
Democrats rolling out their big guns.
Peak Warming Man said:
Democrats rolling out their big guns.
team sports good
A US citizen hijacked a small plane in Belize on Thursday, stabbing two passengers and a pilot, demanding the domestic flight take him out of the country.
The plane circled the airspace for nearly two hours as the hijacking was underway, and began to run dangerously low on fuel, the Belize police commissioner said.
A stabbed passenger fatally shot him with a licensed firearm, allowing the Tropic Air plane to land safely outside Belize City.
roughbarked said:
The history behind controversial laws of sacrilege and blasphemy in Australia
Wong Fred.
kii said:
From Fear and Loathing: Closer to the Edge“These are kids who will never pay taxes. They’ll never hold a job. They’ll never play baseball. They’ll never write a poem. They’ll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted.”
— Robert F. Kennedy Jr., April 16, 2025
Let’s stop pretending he was misunderstood. He said what he meant. He meant what he said. And what he said was a declaration of war on autistic people — broadcast from a government podium, camouflaged as public health, and greeted with cheers from the wellness death cult he’s built around himself.
This is not about public safety. This is not about children’s well-being. This is about building a narrative that casts neurodivergent people as subhuman burdens — incapable of love, incapable of work, incapable of art, and apparently, incapable of taking a shit without help.
Forget policy nuance. This is political eugenics in a Whole Foods apron. A Secretary of Health who talks about autistic people like they’re corpses waiting to be buried — not living, breathing human beings navigating a world designed to fail them.
And for what? So he can prop up his war on “toxins”? So he can sell the fantasy that there’s a single, sinister cause to a complex neurodevelopmental condition and that he’s the messianic figure who will expose it? So he can divert resources from support, research, and inclusion into his long-running obsession with discredited junk science and purity culture?
RFK Jr. isn’t trying to understand autism. He’s trying to eradicate it. Not with compassion — but with bureaucracy and fear. He’s rebranding the entire neurodivergent population as broken and unwanted, framing their existence as evidence of a nation gone wrong.
And now he’s giving himself a deadline. September 2025. By then, he promises, he’ll uncover the root cause of autism — as if that’s something he can shake out of a kale leaf or dredge up from a bottle of organic mouthwash. He’s appointed David Geier, a man stripped of his medical license for unethical autism treatments, to help lead the charge. That’s not a public health team. That’s a fucking inquisition.
What Kennedy is building isn’t reform. It’s a purge. A soft, smiling, focus-grouped purge. Not through sterilization or institutional walls — though give him time — but through policy, stigma, and calculated cruelty.
Dr. Oz stands next to him like a coked-up Lazarus, resurrected from daytime disgrace and now offering butter and platitudes while Kennedy redraws the line between worthy and unworthy life.
This isn’t just ableism. It’s a worldview. It’s the belief that people who require support are less than. That the disabled are a burden. That anything outside Kennedy’s fantasy of high-functioning Americana must be prevented, solved, or scrubbed out of the gene pool.
We’re not going to correct him. We’re not going to walk him through CDC data or introduce him to the millions of autistic people who pay taxes, write poetry, hold jobs, fall in love, and piss just fine on their own. He knows. He doesn’t care.
Because this isn’t ignorance. It’s malice in a health department badge.
He’s not confused. He’s not curious. He’s not well-meaning.
He is an enemy. Of the disabled. Of science. Of truth.
And like the worm that once died inside his skull, he’s rotting everything he touches from the inside out.
Yeah.
:(
kii said:
sarahs mum said:
kii said:
https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1Dsct19hKp/MeidasTouch
JUST IN: Deputy Assistant to the President and “Counterterrorism Czar” Sebastian Gorka says anyone advocating for due process for Kilmar Abrego Garcia could be viewed as “aiding and abetting a terrorist” and be federally charged. (h/t Philip Germain)
but they have admitted, oopsie, that it was a mistake to have taken him. he ain’t no terrorist.
Reasons I have seen that he won’t be freed:
1. He’s already dead.
2. If he’s not and he is released then he can describe what the conditions etc are like.
3. It opens the door to others being released.
Probably one or other.
:(
The satellite images of the yard with a pile of bodies and blood now show a cleaned up area with sand spread out over it.
I posted something about this a day or so ago. I can post the updated images if wanted.
Michael V said:
kii said:
From Fear and Loathing: Closer to the EdgeDr. Oz stands next to him like a coked-up Lazarus, resurrected from daytime disgrace and now offering butter and platitudes while Kennedy redraws the line between worthy and unworthy life.
This isn’t just ableism. It’s a worldview. It’s the belief that people who require support are less than. That the disabled are a burden. That anything outside Kennedy’s fantasy of high-functioning Americana must be prevented, solved, or scrubbed out of the gene pool.
We’re not going to correct him. We’re not going to walk him through CDC data or introduce him to the millions of autistic people who pay taxes, write poetry, hold jobs, fall in love, and piss just fine on their own. He knows. He doesn’t care.
Because this isn’t ignorance. It’s malice in a health department badge.
He’s not confused. He’s not curious. He’s not well-meaning.
He is an enemy. Of the disabled. Of science. Of truth.
And like the worm that once died inside his skull, he’s rotting everything he touches from the inside out.
Yeah.
:(
Ever heard of ‘the T4 programme’?
kii said:
sarahs mum said:
kii said:
https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1Dsct19hKp/MeidasTouch
JUST IN: Deputy Assistant to the President and “Counterterrorism Czar” Sebastian Gorka says anyone advocating for due process for Kilmar Abrego Garcia could be viewed as “aiding and abetting a terrorist” and be federally charged. (h/t Philip Germain)
but they have admitted, oopsie, that it was a mistake to have taken him. he ain’t no terrorist.
Reasons I have seen that he won’t be freed:
1. He’s already dead.
2. If he’s not and he is released then he can describe what the conditions etc are like.
3. It opens the door to others being released.
And the attacks on the Fed have begun in earnest. The third phase in the triumvirate that will lead to the end of the Trump presidency.
captain_spalding said:
kii said:
sarahs mum said:but they have admitted, oopsie, that it was a mistake to have taken him. he ain’t no terrorist.
Reasons I have seen that he won’t be freed:
1. He’s already dead.
2. If he’s not and he is released then he can describe what the conditions etc are like.
3. It opens the door to others being released.
4. It would be for the Trump ‘government’ to not only have to admit that they made a mistake, but that they can be forced to rectify the mistakes that they make.
He can be the new Che Guevara, raises fist.
Honestly I think there is a decent chance that Trump Media will be worth next to nothing soon so this is not a crazy bet.
So weird that the Trump’s Special Envoy Richard Grenell can muscle the Romanian govt into letting a child sex trafficker fly to the US but there’s no pressure that can be applied to bring back someone deported in error.
dv said:
kii said:
SCIENCE said:
kii said:
Reasons I have seen that he won’t be freed:
1. He’s already dead.
2. If he’s not and he is released then he can describe what the conditions etc are like.
3. It opens the door to others being released.
Hey remember when great totally not fascist countries would move heaven and earth sorry we mean burn heaven and earth and bomb the shit out of hospitals and raze schools and execute paramedics just for a strip of seaside real estate and the bodies of a handful of hostages¿
For fuck’s sake!
So weird that the Trump’s Special Envoy Richard Grenell can muscle the Romanian govt into letting a child sex trafficker fly to the US but there’s no pressure that can be applied to bring back someone deported in error.
well maybe that guy can start a tariff free child sex trafficking business and then he can get back home
kii said:
The satellite images of the yard with a pile of bodies and blood now show a cleaned up area with sand spread out over it.
I posted something about this a day or so ago. I can post the updated images if wanted.
Where was this yard?
captain_spalding said:
Michael V said:
kii said:
From Fear and Loathing: Closer to the EdgeDr. Oz stands next to him like a coked-up Lazarus, resurrected from daytime disgrace and now offering butter and platitudes while Kennedy redraws the line between worthy and unworthy life.
This isn’t just ableism. It’s a worldview. It’s the belief that people who require support are less than. That the disabled are a burden. That anything outside Kennedy’s fantasy of high-functioning Americana must be prevented, solved, or scrubbed out of the gene pool.
We’re not going to correct him. We’re not going to walk him through CDC data or introduce him to the millions of autistic people who pay taxes, write poetry, hold jobs, fall in love, and piss just fine on their own. He knows. He doesn’t care.
Because this isn’t ignorance. It’s malice in a health department badge.
He’s not confused. He’s not curious. He’s not well-meaning.
He is an enemy. Of the disabled. Of science. Of truth.
And like the worm that once died inside his skull, he’s rotting everything he touches from the inside out.
Yeah.
:(
Ever heard of ‘the T4 programme’?
No, never, but I have now looked it up.
kii said:
kii said:
sarahs mum said:but they have admitted, oopsie, that it was a mistake to have taken him. he ain’t no terrorist.
Reasons I have seen that he won’t be freed:
1. He’s already dead.
2. If he’s not and he is released then he can describe what the conditions etc are like.
3. It opens the door to others being released.
That’s just one bit of good.
Witty Rejoinder said:
And the attacks on the Fed have begun in earnest. The third phase in the triumvirate that will lead to the end of the Trump presidency.
What were the first two phases, and how will it lead to the end of the Trump presidency?
dv said:
Honestly I think there is a decent chance that Trump Media will be worth next to nothing soon so this is not a crazy bet.
That this has now been made public by Trump Media, may also be potential market manipulation.
A Libertarian Party branch in Texas is sending an Impeachment of Trump message:
From Newsweek – https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-impeachment-resolution-issued-texas-2060344
“The Libertarian Party of Travis County, Texas, has passed a resolution calling for President Donald Trump to be impeached, accusing him of issuing “lawless, dictatorial pronouncements” that “violate the constitutional separation of powers.”
The resolution cited the Trump administration’s inability to get Kilmar Abrego Garcia returned from an El Salvadoran prison, threats to send American citizens to foreign prisons and its deportation of legal U.S. residents “due to their political viewpoints.”
—- jumping to the end —-
The Libertarian Party of Travis County resolution reads: “Whereas, the U. S. District Court for the District of Columbia, affirmed by a unanimous U. S. Supreme Court, ruled that the Government must facilitate Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador.
“Whereas, President Donald J. Trump and members of his administration, admit than (sic) an administrative error was made to send Kilmar Abrego Garcia to an El Salvadoran prison, yet say there is nothing they can do about it, when in reality, they choose to do nothing about it.
“Whereas, President Donald J. Trump and his administration have violated the constitutional rights of numerous legal U. S. residents by denying them due process of law in challenging deportation orders.
“Whereas, President Donald J. Trump and his administration have targeted legal U. S. residents for deportation due to their political viewpoints, in disregard of the First Amendment.
“Whereas, President Donald J. Trump has falsely used the Alien Act of 1798 and other laws to effectuate removal of legal residents, when he should have known that these laws involve wartime measures, not law enforcement measures.
“Whereas, President Donald J. Trump stated that he wants to send U. S. citizens to foreign prisons where they would certainly have no due process of law.
“Whereas, no one in the U. S. appears to be safe from President Donald J. Trump’s lawless, dictatorial pronouncements that he issues as Executive Orders, which he asserts have force of law when they actually violate the constitutional separation of powers.
“Whereas, the Libertarian Party stands for upholding the U. S. Constitution and Bill of Rights, and for respecting the rule of law over dictatorship and tyranny.
“And Whereas, President Donald J. Trump took an oath of office to ‘preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States’ with no obvious intention of doing so.
“Therefore, be it resolved, that the Libertarian Party of Travis County calls for the impeachment of President Donald J. Trump and his removal from office.”
What Happens Next
It remains to be seen whether this resolution will be a one off or whether other Libertarian Party branches will pass similar motions. The Libertarian Party claims to be the third biggest political party in the United States and Trump addressed the Libertarian National Convention in May 2024, though some of the audience booed him.
dv said:
So weird that the Trump’s Special Envoy Richard Grenell can muscle the Romanian govt into letting a child sex trafficker fly to the US but there’s no pressure that can be applied to bring back someone deported in error.
I don’t think that that’s weird. Trump’s a golfer; it’s par for the course.
Michael V said:
dv said:
So weird that the Trump’s Special Envoy Richard Grenell can muscle the Romanian govt into letting a child sex trafficker fly to the US but there’s no pressure that can be applied to bring back someone deported in error.
I don’t think that that’s weird. Trump’s a golfer; it’s par for the course.
Golf clap
AussieDJ said:
A Libertarian Party branch in Texas is sending an Impeachment of Trump message:
From Newsweek – https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-impeachment-resolution-issued-texas-2060344“The Libertarian Party of Travis County, Texas, has passed a resolution calling for President Donald Trump to be impeached, accusing him of issuing “lawless, dictatorial pronouncements” that “violate the constitutional separation of powers.”
The resolution cited the Trump administration’s inability to get Kilmar Abrego Garcia returned from an El Salvadoran prison, threats to send American citizens to foreign prisons and its deportation of legal U.S. residents “due to their political viewpoints.”
—- jumping to the end —-
The Libertarian Party of Travis County resolution reads: “Whereas, the U. S. District Court for the District of Columbia, affirmed by a unanimous U. S. Supreme Court, ruled that the Government must facilitate Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador.
“Whereas, President Donald J. Trump and members of his administration, admit than (sic) an administrative error was made to send Kilmar Abrego Garcia to an El Salvadoran prison, yet say there is nothing they can do about it, when in reality, they choose to do nothing about it.
“Whereas, President Donald J. Trump and his administration have violated the constitutional rights of numerous legal U. S. residents by denying them due process of law in challenging deportation orders.
“Whereas, President Donald J. Trump and his administration have targeted legal U. S. residents for deportation due to their political viewpoints, in disregard of the First Amendment.
“Whereas, President Donald J. Trump has falsely used the Alien Act of 1798 and other laws to effectuate removal of legal residents, when he should have known that these laws involve wartime measures, not law enforcement measures.
“Whereas, President Donald J. Trump stated that he wants to send U. S. citizens to foreign prisons where they would certainly have no due process of law.
“Whereas, no one in the U. S. appears to be safe from President Donald J. Trump’s lawless, dictatorial pronouncements that he issues as Executive Orders, which he asserts have force of law when they actually violate the constitutional separation of powers.
“Whereas, the Libertarian Party stands for upholding the U. S. Constitution and Bill of Rights, and for respecting the rule of law over dictatorship and tyranny.
“And Whereas, President Donald J. Trump took an oath of office to ‘preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States’ with no obvious intention of doing so.
“Therefore, be it resolved, that the Libertarian Party of Travis County calls for the impeachment of President Donald J. Trump and his removal from office.”
What Happens Next
It remains to be seen whether this resolution will be a one off or whether other Libertarian Party branches will pass similar motions. The Libertarian Party claims to be the third biggest political party in the United States and Trump addressed the Libertarian National Convention in May 2024, though some of the audience booed him.
It needs the members of the HoR and Senate to start discussing motions of impeachment. Not just the orange Dunny trumpet, but the VP and half the cabinet too. Get the Speaker of the HoR into the job, and he can sack all the rest of the enablers.
Michael V said:
Witty Rejoinder said:
And the attacks on the Fed have begun in earnest. The third phase in the triumvirate that will lead to the end of the Trump presidency.
What were the first two phases, and how will it lead to the end of the Trump presidency?
Tariffs and crackdowns on immigrants are both inflationary and now Trump is attacking any Fed efforts to combat this inflation. The sharemarket and the bond market will lose all confidence in this administration and the rest of the GOP will be forced to turn on Trump. My prediction.
Witty Rejoinder said:
Michael V said:
Witty Rejoinder said:
And the attacks on the Fed have begun in earnest. The third phase in the triumvirate that will lead to the end of the Trump presidency.
What were the first two phases, and how will it lead to the end of the Trump presidency?
Tariffs and crackdowns on immigrants are both inflationary and now Trump is attacking any Fed efforts to combat this inflation. The sharemarket and the bond market will lose all confidence in this administration and the rest of the GOP will be forced to turn on Trump. My prediction.
Thanks for explaining.
:)
Witty Rejoinder said:
Michael V said:
Witty Rejoinder said:
And the attacks on the Fed have begun in earnest. The third phase in the triumvirate that will lead to the end of the Trump presidency.
What were the first two phases, and how will it lead to the end of the Trump presidency?
Tariffs and crackdowns on immigrants are both inflationary and now Trump is attacking any Fed efforts to combat this inflation. The sharemarket and the bond market will lose all confidence in this administration and the rest of the GOP will be forced to turn on Trump. My prediction.
It is the opinion of many.
https://electrek.co/2025/04/17/trump-admin-ny-offshore-wind-mid-build/
Trump admin halts $5 billion NY offshore wind project mid-build
In its most aggressive attack against offshore wind yet, the Trump administration halted the $5 billion Empire Wind 1, already under construction off New York’s coast…
Kingy said:
https://electrek.co/2025/04/17/trump-admin-ny-offshore-wind-mid-build/Trump admin halts $5 billion NY offshore wind project mid-build
In its most aggressive attack against offshore wind yet, the Trump administration halted the $5 billion Empire Wind 1, already under construction off New York’s coast…
I reckon they should just keep building and see what happens next.
Kingy said:
https://electrek.co/2025/04/17/trump-admin-ny-offshore-wind-mid-build/Trump admin halts $5 billion NY offshore wind project mid-build
In its most aggressive attack against offshore wind yet, the Trump administration halted the $5 billion Empire Wind 1, already under construction off New York’s coast…
Breaking wind is a thing for him.
party_pants said:
Kingy said:
https://electrek.co/2025/04/17/trump-admin-ny-offshore-wind-mid-build/Trump admin halts $5 billion NY offshore wind project mid-build
In its most aggressive attack against offshore wind yet, the Trump administration halted the $5 billion Empire Wind 1, already under construction off New York’s coast…
I reckon they should just keep building and see what happens next.
Agree. The way to defeat him is to fight back by standing ground. If the majority take that stance he won’t have a leg to stand on.
April 1st maybe …
Heather Cox Richardson
1m ·
April 17, 2025 (Thursday)
Today, Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) posted a picture of himself with Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man whom the Trump administration says it sent to the notorious CECOT prison in El Salvador through “administrative error” but can’t get back, and wrote: “I said my main goal of this trip was to meet with Kilmar. Tonight I had that chance. I have called his wife, Jennifer, to pass along his message of love. I look forward to providing a full update upon my return.”
While the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, apparently tried to stage a photo that would make it look as if the two men were enjoying a cocktail together, it seems clear that backing down and giving Senator Van Hollen access to Abrego Garcia is a significant shift from Bukele’s previous scorn for those trying to address the crisis of a man legally in the U.S. having been sent to prison in El Salvador without due process.
Bukele might be reassessing the distribution of power in the U.S.
According to Robert Jimison of the New York Times, who traveled to El Salvador with Senator Van Hollen, when a reporter asked President Donald Trump if he would move to return Abrego Garcia to the United States, Trump answered: “Well, I’m not involved. You’ll have to speak to the lawyers, the .”
Today a federal appeals court rejected the Trump administration’s attempt to stop Judge Paula Xinis’s order that it “take all available steps” to bring Abrego Garcia back to the U.S. “as soon as possible.” Conservative Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson, who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan, wrote the order. Notably, it began with a compliment to Judge Xinis. “e shall not micromanage the efforts of a fine district judge attempting to implement the Supreme Court’s recent decision,” he wrote.
Then Wilkinson turned his focus on the Trump administration. “It is difficult in some cases to get to the very heart of the matter,” he wrote. “But in this case, it is not hard at all. The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order. Further, it claims in essence that because it has rid itself of custody that there is nothing that can be done. This should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear.”
“The government asserts that Abrego Garcia is a terrorist and a member of MS-13. Perhaps, but perhaps not. Regardless, he is still entitled to due process.” The court noted that if the government is so sure of its position, then it should be confident in presenting its facts to a court of law.
Echoing the liberal justices on the Supreme Court, Wilkinson wrote: “If today the Executive claims the right to deport without due process and in disregard of court orders, what assurance will there be tomorrow that it will not deport American citizens and then disclaim responsibility to bring them home?” He noted the reports that the administration is talking about doing just that.
“And what assurance shall there be that the Executive will not train its broad discretionary powers upon its political enemies? The threat, even if not the actuality, would always be present,” he wrote, “and the Executive’s obligation to ‘take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed’ would lose its meaning.”
After Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell’s warning yesterday that Trump’s tariffs will have “significantly larger than anticipated…economic effects, which will include higher inflation and slower growth,” and his statement that the Fed would not cut interest rates immediately as it assesses the situation, Trump today began attacking Powell. Trump wrote on his social media site that Powell is “always TOO LATE AND WRONG.” His missive concluded: “Powell’s termination cannot come fast enough!”
Firing Powell would inject yet more chaos into the economy, and the White House told reporters that Trump’s post “should not be seen as a threat to fire Powell.” Hedge fund founder Spencer Hakimian posted: “Cleanup of orange vomit on Aisle 3.”
There seems to be a change in the air.
Three days ago, on April 14, Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times wrote that the vibe is shifting against the right. Yesterday, former neocon and now fervent Trump critic and editor of The Bulwark Bill Kristol posted a photo of plainclothes Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Officers kidnapping Tufts University graduate student Rümeysa Öztürk, and commented: “Where does the ‘Abolish ICE’ movement go to get its apology.”
Today, in the New York Times, conservative David Brooks called for all those resisting what he called “a multifront assault to make the earth a playground for ruthless men” to work together. He called for a “comprehensive national civic uprising” that would first stop Trump and then create “a long-term vision of a fairer society that is not just hard on Trump, but hard on the causes of Trumpism—one that offers a positive vision.”
Brooks is hardly the first to suggest that “this is what America needs right now.” But a conservative like Brooks not only arguing that “Trump is shackling the greatest institutions in American life,” but then quoting Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto to call for resistance to those shackles—“We have nothing to lose but our chains”—signals that a shift is underway.
That shift has apparently swept in New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, who is generally a good barometer of the way today’s non-MAGA Republicans are thinking. In an interview today, he said: “y feelings about not only Trump, but the administration, are falling like a boulder going into the Mariana Trench. So the memory of things that this administration has done, of which I approve, is drowning in the number of things that are, in my view, reckless, stupid, awful, un-American, hateful and bad—not just for the country, but also for the conservative movement.”
Stephens identified Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance’s bullying of Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office as the event that turned him away from Trump. “America should never treat an ally that way, certainly not one who is bravely fighting a common enemy,” he said. Stephens also noted the meeting had “delighted” Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, who is now “emboldened…to press the war harder.”
We have been in a similar moment of shifting coalitions before.
In the 1850s, elite southern enslavers organized to take over the government and create an oligarchy that would make enslavement national. Northerners hadn’t been paying a great deal of attention to southern leaders’ slow accumulation of power and were shocked when Congress bowed to them and in 1854 passed a law that overturned the Missouri Compromise that had kept slavery out of the West. The establishment of slavery in the West would mean new slave states there would work with the southern slave states to outvote the North in Congress, and it would only be a question of time until they made slavery national. Soon, the Slave Power would own the country.
Northerners of all parties who disagreed with each other over issues of immigration, finance, and internal improvements—and even over the institution of slavery—came together to stand against the end of American democracy.
Four years later, in 1858, Democrat Stephen Douglas complained that those coming together to oppose the Democrats were a ragtag coalition whose members didn’t agree on much at all. Abraham Lincoln, who by then was speaking for the new party coalescing around that coalition, replied that Douglas “should remember that he took us by surprise—astounded us—by this measure. We were thunderstruck and stunned; and we reeled and fell in utter confusion. But we rose each fighting, grasping whatever he could first reach—a scythe—a pitchfork—a chopping axe, or a butcher’s cleaver. We struck in the direction of the sound; and we are rapidly closing in upon him. He must not think to divert us from our purpose, by showing us that our drill, our dress, and our weapons, are not entirely perfect and uniform. When the storm shall be past, he shall find us still Americans; no less devoted to the continued Union and prosperity of the country than heretofore.”
sarahs mum said:
Heather Cox Richardson
1m ·
April 17, 2025 (Thursday)Today, Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) posted a picture of himself with Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man whom the Trump administration says it sent to the notorious CECOT prison in El Salvador through “administrative error” but can’t get back, and wrote: “I said my main goal of this trip was to meet with Kilmar. Tonight I had that chance. I have called his wife, Jennifer, to pass along his message of love. I look forward to providing a full update upon my return.”
While the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, apparently tried to stage a photo that would make it look as if the two men were enjoying a cocktail together, it seems clear that backing down and giving Senator Van Hollen access to Abrego Garcia is a significant shift from Bukele’s previous scorn for those trying to address the crisis of a man legally in the U.S. having been sent to prison in El Salvador without due process.
Bukele might be reassessing the distribution of power in the U.S.
According to Robert Jimison of the New York Times, who traveled to El Salvador with Senator Van Hollen, when a reporter asked President Donald Trump if he would move to return Abrego Garcia to the United States, Trump answered: “Well, I’m not involved. You’ll have to speak to the lawyers, the .”
Today a federal appeals court rejected the Trump administration’s attempt to stop Judge Paula Xinis’s order that it “take all available steps” to bring Abrego Garcia back to the U.S. “as soon as possible.” Conservative Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson, who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan, wrote the order. Notably, it began with a compliment to Judge Xinis. “e shall not micromanage the efforts of a fine district judge attempting to implement the Supreme Court’s recent decision,” he wrote.
Then Wilkinson turned his focus on the Trump administration. “It is difficult in some cases to get to the very heart of the matter,” he wrote. “But in this case, it is not hard at all. The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order. Further, it claims in essence that because it has rid itself of custody that there is nothing that can be done. This should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear.”
“The government asserts that Abrego Garcia is a terrorist and a member of MS-13. Perhaps, but perhaps not. Regardless, he is still entitled to due process.” The court noted that if the government is so sure of its position, then it should be confident in presenting its facts to a court of law.
Echoing the liberal justices on the Supreme Court, Wilkinson wrote: “If today the Executive claims the right to deport without due process and in disregard of court orders, what assurance will there be tomorrow that it will not deport American citizens and then disclaim responsibility to bring them home?” He noted the reports that the administration is talking about doing just that.
“And what assurance shall there be that the Executive will not train its broad discretionary powers upon its political enemies? The threat, even if not the actuality, would always be present,” he wrote, “and the Executive’s obligation to ‘take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed’ would lose its meaning.”
After Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell’s warning yesterday that Trump’s tariffs will have “significantly larger than anticipated…economic effects, which will include higher inflation and slower growth,” and his statement that the Fed would not cut interest rates immediately as it assesses the situation, Trump today began attacking Powell. Trump wrote on his social media site that Powell is “always TOO LATE AND WRONG.” His missive concluded: “Powell’s termination cannot come fast enough!”
Firing Powell would inject yet more chaos into the economy, and the White House told reporters that Trump’s post “should not be seen as a threat to fire Powell.” Hedge fund founder Spencer Hakimian posted: “Cleanup of orange vomit on Aisle 3.”
There seems to be a change in the air.
Three days ago, on April 14, Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times wrote that the vibe is shifting against the right. Yesterday, former neocon and now fervent Trump critic and editor of The Bulwark Bill Kristol posted a photo of plainclothes Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Officers kidnapping Tufts University graduate student Rümeysa Öztürk, and commented: “Where does the ‘Abolish ICE’ movement go to get its apology.”
Today, in the New York Times, conservative David Brooks called for all those resisting what he called “a multifront assault to make the earth a playground for ruthless men” to work together. He called for a “comprehensive national civic uprising” that would first stop Trump and then create “a long-term vision of a fairer society that is not just hard on Trump, but hard on the causes of Trumpism—one that offers a positive vision.”
Brooks is hardly the first to suggest that “this is what America needs right now.” But a conservative like Brooks not only arguing that “Trump is shackling the greatest institutions in American life,” but then quoting Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto to call for resistance to those shackles—“We have nothing to lose but our chains”—signals that a shift is underway.
That shift has apparently swept in New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, who is generally a good barometer of the way today’s non-MAGA Republicans are thinking. In an interview today, he said: “y feelings about not only Trump, but the administration, are falling like a boulder going into the Mariana Trench. So the memory of things that this administration has done, of which I approve, is drowning in the number of things that are, in my view, reckless, stupid, awful, un-American, hateful and bad—not just for the country, but also for the conservative movement.”
Stephens identified Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance’s bullying of Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office as the event that turned him away from Trump. “America should never treat an ally that way, certainly not one who is bravely fighting a common enemy,” he said. Stephens also noted the meeting had “delighted” Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, who is now “emboldened…to press the war harder.”
We have been in a similar moment of shifting coalitions before.
In the 1850s, elite southern enslavers organized to take over the government and create an oligarchy that would make enslavement national. Northerners hadn’t been paying a great deal of attention to southern leaders’ slow accumulation of power and were shocked when Congress bowed to them and in 1854 passed a law that overturned the Missouri Compromise that had kept slavery out of the West. The establishment of slavery in the West would mean new slave states there would work with the southern slave states to outvote the North in Congress, and it would only be a question of time until they made slavery national. Soon, the Slave Power would own the country.
Northerners of all parties who disagreed with each other over issues of immigration, finance, and internal improvements—and even over the institution of slavery—came together to stand against the end of American democracy.
Four years later, in 1858, Democrat Stephen Douglas complained that those coming together to oppose the Democrats were a ragtag coalition whose members didn’t agree on much at all. Abraham Lincoln, who by then was speaking for the new party coalescing around that coalition, replied that Douglas “should remember that he took us by surprise—astounded us—by this measure. We were thunderstruck and stunned; and we reeled and fell in utter confusion. But we rose each fighting, grasping whatever he could first reach—a scythe—a pitchfork—a chopping axe, or a butcher’s cleaver. We struck in the direction of the sound; and we are rapidly closing in upon him. He must not think to divert us from our purpose, by showing us that our drill, our dress, and our weapons, are not entirely perfect and uniform. When the storm shall be past, he shall find us still Americans; no less devoted to the continued Union and prosperity of the country than heretofore.”
It always was a bit wild west.
Glad I was born here.
roughbarked said:
sarahs mum said:Heather Cox Richardson
1m ·
April 17, 2025 (Thursday) When the storm shall be past, he shall find us still Americans; no less devoted to the continued Union and prosperity of the country than heretofore.”
It always was a bit wild west.
Glad I was born here.
Sure kii will have something to say about what kind of fuckhead I am for opening my mouth about anything but it is that the USA is still what it was and is.
All things must pass and hopefully Trump will do all of this.
Kingy said:
https://electrek.co/2025/04/17/trump-admin-ny-offshore-wind-mid-build/Trump admin halts $5 billion NY offshore wind project mid-build
In its most aggressive attack against offshore wind yet, the Trump administration halted the $5 billion Empire Wind 1, already under construction off New York’s coast…
That’s fucked.
Seems everything the Trump mob does is fucked.
Michael V said:
Kingy said:
https://electrek.co/2025/04/17/trump-admin-ny-offshore-wind-mid-build/Trump admin halts $5 billion NY offshore wind project mid-build
In its most aggressive attack against offshore wind yet, the Trump administration halted the $5 billion Empire Wind 1, already under construction off New York’s coast…
That’s fucked.
Seems everything the Trump mob does is fucked.
His strategy is to fuck everything before the courts can come into effect. He’s stripping the shyte out of everything so that none of it works.
Big part of his strategy.
Michael V said:
Kingy said:
https://electrek.co/2025/04/17/trump-admin-ny-offshore-wind-mid-build/Trump admin halts $5 billion NY offshore wind project mid-build
In its most aggressive attack against offshore wind yet, the Trump administration halted the $5 billion Empire Wind 1, already under construction off New York’s coast…
That’s fucked.
Seems everything the Trump mob does is fucked.
not just fucked but fucking fucked. bunnings!
Michael V said:
Kingy said:
https://electrek.co/2025/04/17/trump-admin-ny-offshore-wind-mid-build/Trump admin halts $5 billion NY offshore wind project mid-build
In its most aggressive attack against offshore wind yet, the Trump administration halted the $5 billion Empire Wind 1, already under construction off New York’s coast…
That’s fucked.
Seems everything the Trump mob does is fucked.
There is some movement by conservatives here to block offshore wind projects in the Illawarra. Suddenly these arseholes care about the visual environment. care about
JudgeMental said:
Michael V said:
Kingy said:
https://electrek.co/2025/04/17/trump-admin-ny-offshore-wind-mid-build/Trump admin halts $5 billion NY offshore wind project mid-build
In its most aggressive attack against offshore wind yet, the Trump administration halted the $5 billion Empire Wind 1, already under construction off New York’s coast…
That’s fucked.
Seems everything the Trump mob does is fucked.
not just fucked but fucking fucked. bunnings!
It is all Trump. Bunnings has nothing to do with it.
roughbarked said:
Michael V said:
Kingy said:
https://electrek.co/2025/04/17/trump-admin-ny-offshore-wind-mid-build/Trump admin halts $5 billion NY offshore wind project mid-build
In its most aggressive attack against offshore wind yet, the Trump administration halted the $5 billion Empire Wind 1, already under construction off New York’s coast…
That’s fucked.
Seems everything the Trump mob does is fucked.
His strategy is to fuck everything before the courts can come into effect. He’s stripping the shyte out of everything so that none of it works.
Big part of his strategy.
I don’t think there is a strategy. Some people are trying to read into it that he is playing some cunning game of 4D chess. The alternative explanation is that he is a complete moron without a clue how the real world works outside of his privileged social bubble. I favour the latter explanation, it fits all the available evidence best.
roughbarked said:
Michael V said:
Kingy said:
https://electrek.co/2025/04/17/trump-admin-ny-offshore-wind-mid-build/Trump admin halts $5 billion NY offshore wind project mid-build
In its most aggressive attack against offshore wind yet, the Trump administration halted the $5 billion Empire Wind 1, already under construction off New York’s coast…
That’s fucked.
Seems everything the Trump mob does is fucked.
His strategy is to fuck everything before the courts can come into effect. He’s stripping the shyte out of everything so that none of it works.
Big part of his strategy.
Steve ‘The Unmade Bed’Bannon told him to do it. That, right from the start, he should ‘flood the scene with shit’.
Will Trump invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807 to enforce his rule, via a militia if need be?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1SjVCYUIwk
Commentary by Richard Murphy, Emeritus Professor of Accounting at Sheffield University Management School. Previously, he was Professor of Practice in International Political Economy at City, University of London.
He co-founded the tax justice movement and created the concept of country by country reporting to tackle multinational corporation tax abuse.
Occupy Democrats
BREAKING: A federal judge smashes the emergency glass by announcing a criminal contempt investigation into Trump administration officials for defying his order by deporting Venezuelan migrants without due process.
The legal rubber is finally meeting the road…
Chief U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg of Washington, D.C. stated the the administration’s decision to proceed with removal flights despite his order not to do so demonstrated “a willful disregard … sufficient for the Court to conclude that probable cause exists to find the Government in criminal contempt.”
The MAGA Justice Department removed 130 Venezuelans and forced them into a brutal mega-prison in El Salvador, denying them due process. The DOJ performed the blatantly illegal act just hours after Judge Boasberg forbade them.
The judge had also told them that any planes already in the air must be turned around and returned to the U.S. They were not.
Judge Boasberg wrote that the administration’s “willful disobedience of judicial orders” will make a “solemn mockery” of “the Constitution itself” if consequences are not enforced.
Trump officials have doubled down on their lawlessness by refusing to provide Boasberg with detailed explanations of the timing of the flights and have tried to argue that the order didn’t need to be enforced once the planes had left American airspace.
During the latest hearing, the judge accused the DOJ of acting in “bad faith” by rushing to load up the planes and fly them out of the country before the operation could be halted.
“Who made the decision either not to tell the pilots anything or to tell them to keep going?” asked the judge.
“Your honor, I don’t know that,” claimed Deputy Assistant Attorney General Drew Ensign.
Readers will recognize Ensign’s name, as he is also involved in the court proceedings around the deportation of innocent Maryland father Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Ensign is quickly carving out a place in the history books as a craven and willing enforcer of this fascist regime.
“The Constitution does not tolerate willful disobedience of judicial orders — especially by officials of a coordinate branch who have sworn an oath to uphold it,” wrote Boasberg. “To permit such officials to freely ‘annul the judgments of the courts of the United States’ would not just ‘destroy the rights acquired under those judgments’; it would make ‘a solemn mockery’ of ‘the constitution itself.’”
The judge added that the “most obvious way” for the administration to “purge” potential contempt findings would be for them to obey the original order by “asserting custody of the individuals who were removed in violation of the Court’s classwide TRO so that they might avail themselves of their right to challenge their removability through a habeas proceeding.”
Judge Boasberg went on to state that if the administration does not wish to purge the contempt finding, he will “identify” the individuals responsible for the “contumacious conduct.”
He will demand declarations from the administration and if that proves insufficient he will “proceed either to hearings with live witness testimony under oath or to depositions conducted by Plaintiffs.”
As a final step, Boasberg threatened to appoint an independent attorney to prosecute the administration.
AussieDJ said:
Will Trump invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807 to enforce his rule, via a militia if need be?
WOMAN: It’s an ice fishery, and it’s been around since the early 1900s
TRUMP: So it’s been around for millions of years
Spiny Norman said:
You’ve got to love the hubris of the narcissistic leader who goes beyond his abilities, who fancies that he is such a genius that he can get away with all sorts of behaviour.
And also hate the damage that is inflicted on people along the way.
I do hope that this is the period of ‘enough rope’
ruby said:
Spiny Norman said:
You’ve got to love the hubris of the narcissistic leader who goes beyond his abilities, who fancies that he is such a genius that he can get away with all sorts of behaviour.
And also hate the damage that is inflicted on people along the way.
I do hope that this is the period of ‘enough rope’
On the cruise, I watched a short documentary about the rise of tabloid TV in 1989. In the early 90s, Trump was already attacking the media, calling it “fake news” whenever it printed something negative about him. The doco itself was made during his first presidency.
Morning Pilgrims.
Another spiffing day in the Pearl, taking some old people out for lunch today.
Over.
Divine Angel said:
ruby said:
Spiny Norman said:
You’ve got to love the hubris of the narcissistic leader who goes beyond his abilities, who fancies that he is such a genius that he can get away with all sorts of behaviour.
And also hate the damage that is inflicted on people along the way.
I do hope that this is the period of ‘enough rope’
On the cruise, I watched a short documentary about the rise of tabloid TV in 1989. In the early 90s, Trump was already attacking the media, calling it “fake news” whenever it printed something negative about him. The doco itself was made during his first presidency.
Yeah, it’s a bit sad when you delve into the mindset. Part of them believes the story they weave about themselves. Another part thinks they are such clever people to be able to con people, or to cheat the system.
I’m not sure the American system is robust enough to stop Trump and his henchmen before he brings the country to its knees.
SCIENCE said:
I read some of the comments on a few posts about this.
LOLOLOLOL 😆
kii said:
SCIENCE said:
I read some of the comments on a few posts about this.
LOLOLOLOL 😆
Just checked the minimum wage in USA: https://www.minimum-wage.org/wage-by-state
Highest was Columbia on $18.00/hour, but plenty of states use the Federal minimum which is the princely sum of
$7.25/hour.
The Rev Dodgson said:
kii said:
SCIENCE said:
I read some of the comments on a few posts about this.
LOLOLOLOL 😆
Just checked the minimum wage in USA: https://www.minimum-wage.org/wage-by-state
Highest was Columbia on $18.00/hour, but plenty of states use the Federal minimum which is the princely sum of
$7.25/hour.
It’s been $7.25/hr since forever ago. When I started at the bookstore in 2007 I was earning that. I often pointed out that I was earning more money per hour babysitting in the 70s.
The Rev Dodgson said:
kii said:
SCIENCE said:
I read some of the comments on a few posts about this.
LOLOLOLOL 😆
Just checked the minimum wage in USA: https://www.minimum-wage.org/wage-by-state
Highest was Columbia on $18.00/hour, but plenty of states use the Federal minimum which is the princely sum of
$7.25/hour.
Reminder that in Australia, people with disabilities can legally be paid $3 an hour.
https://www.fairwork.gov.au/pay-and-wages/minimum-wages/employees-with-disability-pay-rates
They can’t be paid less than $106 a week, but can theoretically work an average 38 hr week, meaning a wage of just under $3 an hour. If a person has 70% of the average person’s working ability (as tested by an independent body), they get paid 70% of the wage.
Divine Angel said:
The Rev Dodgson said:
kii said:I read some of the comments on a few posts about this.
LOLOLOLOL 😆
Just checked the minimum wage in USA: https://www.minimum-wage.org/wage-by-state
Highest was Columbia on $18.00/hour, but plenty of states use the Federal minimum which is the princely sum of
$7.25/hour.
Reminder that in Australia, people with disabilities can legally be paid $3 an hour.
https://www.fairwork.gov.au/pay-and-wages/minimum-wages/employees-with-disability-pay-ratesThey can’t be paid less than $106 a week, but can theoretically work an average 38 hr week, meaning a wage of just under $3 an hour. If a person has 70% of the average person’s working ability (as tested by an independent body), they get paid 70% of the wage.
Just to clarify: That last paragraph refers to someone not covered by an award.
The Rev Dodgson said:
kii said:
SCIENCE said:
I read some of the comments on a few posts about this.
LOLOLOLOL 😆
Just checked the minimum wage in USA: https://www.minimum-wage.org/wage-by-state
Highest was Columbia on $18.00/hour, but plenty of states use the Federal minimum which is the princely sum of
$7.25/hour.
Oh well, it won’t be much longer before all these type jobs will be done by robots.
Normally this would be Happy News, but there’s a couple of eyebrow-raising comments within this, so it’s stuck in here instead.
“Maine endorses child marriage ban
The House passed the measure Tuesday in a 93-52 vote, with several Republicans joining Democrats to back it and all of the opposition otherwise coming from GOP members.
Maine could join other New England states in banning child marriage. Last year, New Hampshire became the 13th state to ban child marriage, though its lawmakers are currently considering an exception for active-duty military members.”
https://www.bangordailynews.com/2025/04/15/politics/state-politics/maine-house-endorses-marriage-ban-for-children/
SCIENCE said:
That’s good money for a 10yo.
kii said:
It’s not really a trade issue.
Divine Angel said:
Normally this would be Happy News, but there’s a couple of eyebrow-raising comments within this, so it’s stuck in here instead.
“Maine endorses child marriage ban
The House passed the measure Tuesday in a 93-52 vote, with several Republicans joining Democrats to back it and all of the opposition otherwise coming from GOP members.
Maine could join other New England states in banning child marriage. Last year, New Hampshire became the 13th state to ban child marriage, though its lawmakers are currently considering an exception for active-duty military members.”
ah well baby steps
wait better find another turn of phrase
party_pants said:
kii said:
It’s not really a trade issue.
but strategy boys, the strategy
Divine Angel said:
The Rev Dodgson said:
kii said:I read some of the comments on a few posts about this.
LOLOLOLOL 😆
Just checked the minimum wage in USA: https://www.minimum-wage.org/wage-by-state
Highest was Columbia on $18.00/hour, but plenty of states use the Federal minimum which is the princely sum of
$7.25/hour.
Reminder that in Australia, people with disabilities can legally be paid $3 an hour.
https://www.fairwork.gov.au/pay-and-wages/minimum-wages/employees-with-disability-pay-ratesThey can’t be paid less than $106 a week, but can theoretically work an average 38 hr week, meaning a wage of just under $3 an hour. If a person has 70% of the average person’s working ability (as tested by an independent body), they get paid 70% of the wage.
Ta. I didn’t know that.
dv said:
!!!
Divine Angel said:
Normally this would be Happy News, but there’s a couple of eyebrow-raising comments within this, so it’s stuck in here instead.“Maine endorses child marriage ban
The House passed the measure Tuesday in a 93-52 vote, with several Republicans joining Democrats to back it and all of the opposition otherwise coming from GOP members.
Maine could join other New England states in banning child marriage. Last year, New Hampshire became the 13th state to ban child marriage, though its lawmakers are currently considering an exception for active-duty military members.”
https://www.bangordailynews.com/2025/04/15/politics/state-politics/maine-house-endorses-marriage-ban-for-children/
Eyes pop.
sarahs mum said:
I know I shouldn’t, but I laughed.
FULL SPEECH: Bernie Sanders Tears Into Trump Administration At ‘Fighting Oligarchy’ Rally In Montana 2 days ago 40 min
FULL REMARKS: Bernie Sanders Delivers Fiery Speech At ‘Fighting Oligarchy’ Rally In Nampa, Idaho 4 days ago 30 min
kii said:
Fk the trade deal…
We made it, Comrades!
Michael V said:
Divine Angel said:
Normally this would be Happy News, but there’s a couple of eyebrow-raising comments within this, so it’s stuck in here instead.“Maine endorses child marriage ban
The House passed the measure Tuesday in a 93-52 vote, with several Republicans joining Democrats to back it and all of the opposition otherwise coming from GOP members.
Maine could join other New England states in banning child marriage. Last year, New Hampshire became the 13th state to ban child marriage, though its lawmakers are currently considering an exception for active-duty military members.”
https://www.bangordailynews.com/2025/04/15/politics/state-politics/maine-house-endorses-marriage-ban-for-children/
Eyes pop.
Huh. “If we can’t let them fuck kids why would they enlist?”
dv said:
Michael V said:
Divine Angel said:
Normally this would be Happy News, but there’s a couple of eyebrow-raising comments within this, so it’s stuck in here instead.“Maine endorses child marriage ban
The House passed the measure Tuesday in a 93-52 vote, with several Republicans joining Democrats to back it and all of the opposition otherwise coming from GOP members.
Maine could join other New England states in banning child marriage. Last year, New Hampshire became the 13th state to ban child marriage, though its lawmakers are currently considering an exception for active-duty military members.”
https://www.bangordailynews.com/2025/04/15/politics/state-politics/maine-house-endorses-marriage-ban-for-children/
Eyes pop.
Huh. “If we can’t let them fuck kids why would they enlist?”
It seems so obvious to me, yet there were still 52 of them who were unconvinced and voted NO.
party_pants said:
dv said:
Michael V said:Eyes pop.
Huh. “If we can’t let them fuck kids why would they enlist?”
It seems so obvious to me, yet there were still 52 of them who were unconvinced and voted NO.
What’s the bet they’re the ones who think Dems are pedos? Every one of those 52 people should have their computers searched.
Divine Angel said:
party_pants said:
dv said:Huh. “If we can’t let them fuck kids why would they enlist?”
It seems so obvious to me, yet there were still 52 of them who were unconvinced and voted NO.
What’s the bet they’re the ones who think Dems are pedos? Every one of those 52 people should have their computers searched.
They just live in a different philosophical worldview to me. So much so I can no longer sustain the illusion that we are part of the same culture. I think the idea of “The West” being unified based on shared culture and values is false. May be they are not “Western” anymore, maybe I’m not. I don’t care which is which, but I am as sure as hell that I don’t want to be a part of any shared culture with them.
party_pants said:
Divine Angel said:
party_pants said:It seems so obvious to me, yet there were still 52 of them who were unconvinced and voted NO.
What’s the bet they’re the ones who think Dems are pedos? Every one of those 52 people should have their computers searched.
They just live in a different philosophical worldview to me. So much so I can no longer sustain the illusion that we are part of the same culture. I think the idea of “The West” being unified based on shared culture and values is false. May be they are not “Western” anymore, maybe I’m not. I don’t care which is which, but I am as sure as hell that I don’t want to be a part of any shared culture with them.
It’s kind of been heading that way for a while, maybe since the 1980s, but it feels overwhelming now. The world is trying to move on and solve international problems cooperatively but they have to deal with a country where climate change, vaccination, evolution, even the shape of the earth are considered hot controversial topics.
party_pants said:
Divine Angel said:
party_pants said:It seems so obvious to me, yet there were still 52 of them who were unconvinced and voted NO.
What’s the bet they’re the ones who think Dems are pedos? Every one of those 52 people should have their computers searched.
They just live in a different philosophical worldview to me. So much so I can no longer sustain the illusion that we are part of the same culture. I think the idea of “The West” being unified based on shared culture and values is false. May be they are not “Western” anymore, maybe I’m not. I don’t care which is which, but I am as sure as hell that I don’t want to be a part of any shared culture with them.
Mini Me had a bit of an existential crisis a couple of weeks ago, ruminating on the fact not everyone holds the same values as she does. A bit deep for a 10yo but here we are.
dv said:
Michael V said:
Divine Angel said:
Normally this would be Happy News, but there’s a couple of eyebrow-raising comments within this, so it’s stuck in here instead.“Maine endorses child marriage ban
The House passed the measure Tuesday in a 93-52 vote, with several Republicans joining Democrats to back it and all of the opposition otherwise coming from GOP members.
Maine could join other New England states in banning child marriage. Last year, New Hampshire became the 13th state to ban child marriage, though its lawmakers are currently considering an exception for active-duty military members.”
https://www.bangordailynews.com/2025/04/15/politics/state-politics/maine-house-endorses-marriage-ban-for-children/
Eyes pop.
Huh. “If we can’t let them fuck kids why would they enlist?”
Bloody!
dv said:
party_pants said:
Divine Angel said:
What’s the bet they’re the ones who think Dems are pedos? Every one of those 52 people should have their computers searched.
They just live in a different philosophical worldview to me. So much so I can no longer sustain the illusion that we are part of the same culture. I think the idea of “The West” being unified based on shared culture and values is false. May be they are not “Western” anymore, maybe I’m not. I don’t care which is which, but I am as sure as hell that I don’t want to be a part of any shared culture with them.
It’s kind of been heading that way for a while, maybe since the 1980s, but it feels overwhelming now. The world is trying to move on and solve international problems cooperatively but they have to deal with a country where climate change, vaccination, evolution, even the shape of the earth are considered hot controversial topics.
well c’m‘on where did the enlightenment happen anyway why would proud strong alpha Americans want anything to do with European losers anyway
Divine Angel said:
party_pants said:
dv said:Huh. “If we can’t let them fuck kids why would they enlist?”
It seems so obvious to me, yet there were still 52 of them who were unconvinced and voted NO.
What’s the bet they’re the ones who think Dems are pedos? Every one of those 52 people should have their computers searched.
Great idea.
Now, who’s going to do that? I’m not.
dv said:
party_pants said:
Divine Angel said:What’s the bet they’re the ones who think Dems are pedos? Every one of those 52 people should have their computers searched.
They just live in a different philosophical worldview to me. So much so I can no longer sustain the illusion that we are part of the same culture. I think the idea of “The West” being unified based on shared culture and values is false. May be they are not “Western” anymore, maybe I’m not. I don’t care which is which, but I am as sure as hell that I don’t want to be a part of any shared culture with them.
It’s kind of been heading that way for a while, maybe since the 1980s, but it feels overwhelming now. The world is trying to move on and solve international problems cooperatively but they have to deal with a country where climate change, vaccination, evolution, even the shape of the earth are considered hot controversial topics.
Yeah. Drop them like a hot potato.
Heather Cox Richardson
2m ·
April 18, 2025 (Friday)
Tonight I had the extraordinary privilege of speaking at the anniversary of the lighting of the lanterns in Boston’s Old North Church, which happened 250 years ago tonight. Here’s what I said:
Two hundred and fifty years ago, in April 1775, Boston was on edge. Seven thousand residents of the town shared these streets with more than 13,000 British soldiers and their families. The two groups coexisted uneasily.
Two years before, the British government had closed the port of Boston and flooded the town with soldiers to try to put down what they saw as a rebellion amongst the townspeople. Ocean trade stopped, businesses failed, and work in the city got harder and harder to find. As soldiers stepped off ships from England onto the wharves, half of the civilian population moved away. Those who stayed resented the soldiers, some of whom quit the army and took badly needed jobs away from locals.
Boston became increasingly cut off from the surrounding towns, for it was almost an island, lying between the Charles River and Boston Harbor. And the townspeople were under occupation. Soldiers, dressed in the red coats that inspired locals to insult them by calling them “lobsterbacks,” monitored their movements and controlled traffic in and out of the town over Boston Neck, which was the only land bridge from Boston to the mainland and so narrow at high tide it could accommodate only four horses abreast.
Boston was a small town of wooden buildings crowded together under at least eight towering church steeples, for Boston was still a religious town. Most of the people who lived there knew each other at least by sight, and many had grown up together. And yet, in April 1775, tensions were high.
Boston was the heart of colonial resistance to the policies of the British government, but it was not united in that opposition. While the town had more of the people who called themselves Patriots than other colonies did—maybe 30 to 40 percent—at least 15% of the people in town were still fiercely loyal to the King and his government. Those who were neither Patriots nor Loyalists just kept their heads down, hoping the growing political crisis would go away and leave them unscathed.
It was hard for people to fathom that the country had come to such division. Only a dozen years before, at the end of the French and Indian War, Bostonians looked forward to a happy future in the British empire. British authorities had spent time and money protecting the colonies, and colonists saw themselves as valued members of the empire. They expected to prosper as they moved to the rich lands on the other side of the Appalachian Mountains and their ships plied the oceans to expand the colonies’ trade with other countries.
That euphoria faded fast.
Almost as soon as the French and Indian War was over, to prevent colonists from stirring up another expensive struggle with Indigenous Americans, King George III prohibited the colonists from crossing the Appalachian Mountains. Then, to pay for the war just past, the king’s ministers pushed through Parliament a number of revenue laws.
In 1765, Parliament passed the Stamp Act, requiring the payment of a tax on all printed material—from newspapers and legal documents to playing cards. It would hit virtually everyone in the North American colonies. Knowing that local juries would acquit their fellow colonists who violated the revenue acts, Parliament took away the right to civil trials and declared that suspects would be tried before admiralty courts overseen by British military officers. Then Parliament required colonials to pay the expenses for the room and board of British troops who would be stationed in the colonies, a law known as the Quartering Act.
But what Parliament saw as a way to raise money to pay for an expensive war—one that had benefited the colonists, after all—colonial leaders saw as an abuse of power. The British government had regulated trade in the empire for more than a century. But now, for the first time, the British government had placed a direct tax on the colonists without their consent. Then it had taken away the right to a trial by jury, and now it was forcing colonists to pay for a military to police them.
Far more than money was at stake. The fight over the Stamp Act tapped into a struggle that had been going on in England for more than a century over a profound question of human governance: Could the king be checked by the people?
This was a question the colonists were perhaps uniquely qualified to answer. While the North American colonies were governed officially by the British crown, the distance between England and the colonies meant that colonial assemblies often had to make rules on the ground. Those assemblies controlled the power of the purse, which gave them the upper hand over royal officials, who had to await orders from England that often took months to arrive. This chaotic system enabled the colonists to carve out a new approach to politics even while they were living in the British empire.
Colonists naturally began to grasp that the exercise of power was not the province of a divinely ordained leader, but something temporary that depended on local residents’ willingness to support the men who were exercising that power.
The Stamp Act threatened to overturn that longstanding system, replacing it with tyranny.
When news of the Stamp Act arrived in Boston, a group of dock hands, sailors, and workers took to the streets, calling themselves the Sons of Liberty. They warned colonists that their rights as Englishmen were under attack. One of the Sons of Liberty was a talented silversmith named Paul Revere. He turned the story of the colonists’ loss of their liberty into engravings. Distributed as posters, Revere’s images would help spread the idea that colonists were losing their liberties.
The Sons of Liberty was generally a catch-all title for those causing trouble over the new taxes, so that protesters could remain anonymous, but prominent colonists joined them and at least partly directed their actions. Lawyer John Adams recognized that the Sons of Liberty were changing the political equation. He wrote that gatherings of the Sons of Liberty “tinge the Minds of the People, they impregnate them with the sentiments of Liberty. They render the People fond of their Leaders in the Cause, and averse and bitter against all opposers.”
John Adams’s cousin Samuel Adams, who was deeply involved with the Sons of Liberty, recognized that building a coalition in defense of liberty within the British system required conversation and cooperation. As clerk of the Massachusetts legislature, he was responsible for corresponding with other colonial legislatures. Across the colonies, the Sons of Liberty began writing to like-minded friends, informing them about local events, asking after their circumstances, organizing.
They spurred people to action. By 1766, the Stamp Act was costing more to enforce than it was producing in revenue, and Parliament agreed to end it. But it explicitly claimed “full power and authority to make laws and statutes…to bind the colonies and people of America…in all cases whatsoever.” It imposed new revenue measures.
News of new taxes reached Boston in late 1767. The Massachusetts legislature promptly circulated a letter to the other colonies opposing taxation without representation and standing firm on the colonists’ right to equality in the British empire. The Sons of Liberty and their associates called for boycotts on taxed goods and broke into the warehouses of those they suspected weren’t complying, while women demonstrated their sympathy for the rights of colonists by producing their own cloth and drinking coffee rather than relying on tea.
British officials worried that colonists in Boston were on the edge of revolt, and they sent troops to restore order. But the troops’ presence did not calm the town. Instead, fights erupted between locals and the British regulars.
Finally, in March 1770, British soldiers fired into a crowd of angry men and boys harassing them. They wounded six and killed five, including Crispus Attucks, a Black man who became the first to die in the attack. Paul Revere turned the altercation into the “Boston Massacre.” His instantly famous engraving showed soldiers in red coats smiling as they shot at colonists, “Like fierce Barbarians grinning o’er their Prey; Approve the Carnage, and enjoy the Day.”
Parliament promptly removed the British troops to an island in Boston Harbor and got rid of all but one of the new taxes. They left the one on tea, keeping the issue of taxation without representation on the table. Then, in May 1773, Parliament gave the East India Tea Company a monopoly on tea sales in the colonies. By lowering the cost of tea in the colonies, it meant to convince people to buy the taxed tea, thus establishing Parliament’s right to impose a tax on the colonies.
In Boston, local leaders posted a citizen guard on Griffin’s Wharf at the harbor to make sure tea could not be unloaded. On December 16, 1773, men dressed as Indigenous Americans boarded three merchant ships. They broke open 342 chests of tea and dumped the valuable leaves overboard.
Parliament closed the port of Boston, stripped the colony of its charter, flooded soldiers back into the town, and demanded payment for the tea. Colonists promptly organized the Massachusetts Provincial Congress and took control of the colony. The provincial congress met in Concord, where it stockpiled supplies and weapons, and called for towns to create “minute men” who could fight at a moment’s notice.
British officials were determined to end what they saw as a rebellion. In April, they ordered military governor General Thomas Gage to arrest colonial leaders Samuel Adams and John Hancock, who had left Boston to take shelter with one of Hancock’s relatives in the nearby town of Lexington. From there, they could seize the military supplies at Concord. British officials hoped that seizing both the men and the munitions would end the crisis.
But about 30 of the Sons of Liberty, including Paul Revere, had been watching the soldiers and gathering intelligence. They met in secret at the Green Dragon Tavern to share what they knew, each of them swearing on the Bible that they would not give away the group’s secrets. They had been patrolling the streets at night and saw at midnight on Saturday night, April 15, the day before Easter Sunday, that the general was shifting his troops. They knew the soldiers were going to move. But they didn’t know if the soldiers would leave Boston by way of the narrow Boston Neck or row across the harbor to Charlestown. That mattered because if the townspeople in Lexington and Concord were going to be warned that the troops were on their way, messengers from Boston would have to be able to avoid the columns of soldiers.
The Sons of Liberty had a plan. Paul Revere knew Boston well—he had been born there. As a teenager, he had been among the first young men who had signed up to ring the bells in the steeple of the Old North Church. The team of bell-ringers operated from a small room in the tower, and from there, a person could climb sets of narrow stairs and then ladders into the steeple. Anyone who lived in Boston or the surrounding area knew well that the steeple towered over every other building in Boston.
On Easter Sunday, after the secret watchers had noticed the troop movement, Revere traveled to Lexington to visit Adams and Hancock. On the way home through Charlestown, he had told friends “that if the British went out by Water, we would shew two Lanthorns in the North Church Steeple; & if by Land, one, as a Signal.” Armed with that knowledge, messengers could avoid the troops and raise the alarm along the roads to Lexington and Concord.
The plan was dangerous. The Old North Church was Anglican, Church of England, and about a third of the people who worshipped there were Loyalists. General Thomas Gage himself worshiped there. But so did Revere’s childhood friend John Pulling Jr., who had become a wealthy sea captain and was a vestryman, responsible for the church’s finances. Like Revere, Pulling was a Son of Liberty. So was the church’s relatively poor caretaker, or sexton, Robert Newman. They would help.
Dr. Joseph Warren lived just up the hill from Revere. He was a Son of Liberty and a leader in the Massachusetts Provincial Congress. On the night of April 18, he dashed off a quick note to Revere urging him to set off for Lexington to warn Adams and Hancock that the troops were on the way. By the time Revere got Warren’s house, the doctor had already sent another man, William Dawes, to Lexington by way of Boston Neck. Warren told Revere the troops were leaving Boston by water. Revere left Warren’s house, found his friend John Pulling, and gave him the information that would enable him to raise the signal for those waiting in Charlestown. Then Revere rowed across the harbor to Charleston to ride to Lexington himself. The night was clear with a rising moon, and Revere muffled his oars and swung out of his way to avoid the British ship standing guard.
Back in Boston, Pulling made his way past the soldiers on the streets to find Newman. Newman lived in his family home, where the tightening economy after the British occupation had forced his mother to board British officers. Newman was waiting for Pulling, and quietly slipped out of the house to meet him.
The two men walked past the soldiers to the church. As caretaker, Newman had a key.
The two men crept through the dark church, climbed the stairs and then the ladders to the steeple holding lanterns—a tricky business, but one that a caretaker and a mariner could manage—very briefly flashed the lanterns they carried to send the signal, and then climbed back down.
Messengers in Charlestown saw the signal, but so did British soldiers. Legend has it that Newman escaped from the church by climbing out a window. He made his way back home, but since he was one of the few people in town who had keys to the church, soldiers arrested him the next day for participating in rebellious activities. He told them that he had given his keys to Pulling, who as a vestryman could give him orders. When soldiers went to find Pulling, he had skipped town, likely heading to Nantucket.
While Newman and Pulling made their way through the streets back to their homes, the race to beat the soldiers to Lexington and Concord was on. Dawes crossed the Boston Neck just before soldiers closed the city. Revere rowed to Charlestown, borrowed a horse, and headed out. Eluding waiting officers, he headed on the road through Medford and what is now Arlington.
Dawes and Revere, as well as the men from Charleston making the same ride after seeing the signal lanterns, told the houses along their different routes that the Regulars were coming. They converged in Lexington, warned Adams and Hancock, and then set out for Concord. As they rode, young doctor Samuel Prescott came up behind them. Prescott was courting a girl from Lexington and was headed back to his home in Concord. Like Dawes and Revere, he was a Son of Liberty, and joined them to alert the town, pointing out that his neighbors would pay more attention to a local man.
About halfway to Concord, British soldiers caught the men. They ordered Revere to dismount and, after questioning him, took his horse and turned him loose to walk back to Lexington. Dawes escaped, but his horse bucked him off and he, too, headed back to Lexington on foot. But Prescott jumped his horse over a stone wall and got away to Concord.
The riders from Boston had done their work. As they brought word the Regulars were coming, scores of other men spread the news through a system of “alarm and muster” the colonists had developed months before for just such an occasion. Rather than using signal fires, the colonists used sound, ringing bells and banging drums to alert the next house that there was an emergency. By the time Revere made it back to the house where Adams and Hancock were hiding, just before dawn on that chilly, dark April morning, militiamen had heard the news and were converging on Lexington Green.
So were the British soldiers.
When they marched onto the Lexington town green in the darkness just before dawn, the soldiers found several dozen minute men waiting for them. An officer ordered the men to leave, and they began to mill around, some of them leaving, others staying. And then, just as the sun was coming up, a gun went off. The soldiers opened fire. When the locals realized the soldiers were firing not just powder, but also lead musket balls, most ran. Eight locals were killed, and another dozen wounded.
The outnumbered militiamen fell back to tend their wounded, and about 300 Regulars marched on Concord to destroy the guns and powder there. But news of the arriving soldiers and the shooting on Lexington town green had spread through the colonists’ communication network, and militiamen from as far away as Worcester were either in Concord or on their way. By midmorning the Regulars were outnumbered and in battle with about 400 militiamen. They pulled back to the main body of British troops still in Lexington.
The Regulars headed back to Boston, but by then militiamen had converged on their route. The Regulars had been awake for almost two days with only a short rest, and they were tired. Militiamen fired at them not in organized lines, as soldiers were accustomed to, but in the style they had learned from Indigenous Americans, shooting from behind trees, houses, and the glacial boulders littered along the road. This way of war used the North American landscape to their advantage. They picked off British officers, dressed in distinct uniforms, first. By that evening, more than three hundred British soldiers and colonists lay dead or wounded.
By the next morning, more than 15,000 militiamen surrounded the town of Boston. The Revolutionary War had begun. Just over a year later, the fight that had started over the question of whether the king could be checked by the people would give the colonists an entirely new, radical answer to that question. On July 4, 1776, they declared the people had the right to be treated equally before the law, and they had the right to govern themselves.
Someone asked me once if the men who hung the lanterns in the tower knew what they were doing. She meant, did they know that by that act they would begin the steps to a war that would create a new nation and change the world.
The answer is no. None of us knows what the future will deliver.
Paul Revere and Robert Newman and John Pulling and William Dawes and Samuel Prescott, and all the other riders from Charlestown who set out for Lexington after they saw the signal lanterns in the steeple of Old North Church, were men from all walks of life who had families to support, businesses to manage. Some had been orphaned young, some lived with their parents. Some were wealthy, others would scrabble through life. Some, like Paul Revere, had recently buried one wife and married another. Samuel Prescott was looking to find just one.
But despite their differences and the hectic routine of their lives, they recognized the vital importance of the right to consent to the government under which they lived. They took time out of their daily lives to resist the new policies of the British government that would establish the right of a king to act without check by the people. They recognized that giving that sort of power to any man would open the way for a tyrant.
Paul Revere didn’t wake up on the morning of April 18, 1775, and decide to change the world. That morning began like many of the other tense days of the past year, and there was little reason to think the next two days would end as they did. Like his neighbors, Revere simply offered what he could to the cause: engraving skills, information, knowledge of a church steeple, longstanding friendships that helped to create a network. And on April 18, he and his friends set out to protect the men who were leading the fight to establish a representative government.
The work of Newman and Pulling to light the lanterns exactly 250 years ago tonight sounds even less heroic. They agreed to cross through town to light two lanterns in a church steeple. It sounds like such a very little thing to do, and yet by doing it, they risked imprisonment or even death. It was such a little thing…but it was everything. And what they did, as with so many of the little steps that lead to profound change, was largely forgotten until Henry Wadsworth Longfellow used their story to inspire a later generation to work to stop tyranny in his own time.
What Newman and Pulling did was simply to honor their friendships and their principles and to do the next right thing, even if it risked their lives, even if no one ever knew. And that is all anyone can do as we work to preserve the concept of human self-determination. In that heroic struggle, most of us will be lost to history, but we will, nonetheless, move the story forward, even if just a little bit.
And once in a great while, someone will light a lantern—or even two—that will shine forth for democratic principles that are under siege, and set the world ablaze.
dv said:
Michael V said:
Divine Angel said:
Normally this would be Happy News, but there’s a couple of eyebrow-raising comments within this, so it’s stuck in here instead.“Maine endorses child marriage ban
The House passed the measure Tuesday in a 93-52 vote, with several Republicans joining Democrats to back it and all of the opposition otherwise coming from GOP members.
Maine could join other New England states in banning child marriage. Last year, New Hampshire became the 13th state to ban child marriage, though its lawmakers are currently considering an exception for active-duty military members.”
https://www.bangordailynews.com/2025/04/15/politics/state-politics/maine-house-endorses-marriage-ban-for-children/
Eyes pop.
Huh. “If we can’t let them fuck kids why would they enlist?”
Just have to settle for shootin’ ‘em
Neophyte said:
dv said:
Michael V said:
Eyes pop.
Huh. “If we can’t let them fuck kids why would they enlist?”
Just have to settle for shootin’ ‘em
plenty of fish in the s.. uh sch… yeah that
dv said:
We made it, Comrades!
communists,eh?
party_pants said:
Divine Angel said:
party_pants said:It seems so obvious to me, yet there were still 52 of them who were unconvinced and voted NO.
What’s the bet they’re the ones who think Dems are pedos? Every one of those 52 people should have their computers searched.
They just live in a different philosophical worldview to me. So much so I can no longer sustain the illusion that we are part of the same culture. I think the idea of “The West” being unified based on shared culture and values is false. May be they are not “Western” anymore, maybe I’m not. I don’t care which is which, but I am as sure as hell that I don’t want to be a part of any shared culture with them.
This is really evident living here. The propaganda all Americans are marinated in is scary.
One young guy I knew has health issues, stemming from being born at 25ish weeks. He was saying how great the medical care is in the USA. Which I can understand as it saved his life, with his parents footing the bill.
As an adult he was no longer covered by his parent’s insurance, therefore living with no insurance, before the Affordable Care Act. When he told me how great America’s health care is, I responded with: if you can access it. He was a bit stunned by my comment.
She’s a rabble rouser, that Heather Cox Richardson woman…
:)
kii said:
party_pants said:
Divine Angel said:What’s the bet they’re the ones who think Dems are pedos? Every one of those 52 people should have their computers searched.
They just live in a different philosophical worldview to me. So much so I can no longer sustain the illusion that we are part of the same culture. I think the idea of “The West” being unified based on shared culture and values is false. May be they are not “Western” anymore, maybe I’m not. I don’t care which is which, but I am as sure as hell that I don’t want to be a part of any shared culture with them.
This is really evident living here. The propaganda all Americans are marinated in is scary.
One young guy I knew has health issues, stemming from being born at 25ish weeks. He was saying how great the medical care is in the USA. Which I can understand as it saved his life, with his parents footing the bill.As an adult he was no longer covered by his parent’s insurance, therefore living with no insurance, before the Affordable Care Act. When he told me how great America’s health care is, I responded with: if you can access it. He was a bit stunned by my comment.
I know an American woman, she lived in Florida. Her son got leukaemia and died aged 16, which bankrupted them. A few years later, her hubby, an Irish National, got tonsil cancer. He moved back to Ireland for treatment, she moved over about a year later. He died, she’s still there. She had a stroke about a year ago, which was covered by the Irish health care system even though she’s not yet a citizen.
Divine Angel said:
kii said:
party_pants said:They just live in a different philosophical worldview to me. So much so I can no longer sustain the illusion that we are part of the same culture. I think the idea of “The West” being unified based on shared culture and values is false. May be they are not “Western” anymore, maybe I’m not. I don’t care which is which, but I am as sure as hell that I don’t want to be a part of any shared culture with them.
This is really evident living here. The propaganda all Americans are marinated in is scary.
One young guy I knew has health issues, stemming from being born at 25ish weeks. He was saying how great the medical care is in the USA. Which I can understand as it saved his life, with his parents footing the bill.As an adult he was no longer covered by his parent’s insurance, therefore living with no insurance, before the Affordable Care Act. When he told me how great America’s health care is, I responded with: if you can access it. He was a bit stunned by my comment.
I know an American woman, she lived in Florida. Her son got leukaemia and died aged 16, which bankrupted them. A few years later, her hubby, an Irish National, got tonsil cancer. He moved back to Ireland for treatment, she moved over about a year later. He died, she’s still there. She had a stroke about a year ago, which was covered by the Irish health care system even though she’s not yet a citizen.
yeah but freeloading health care is nothing, those bastards have freeloaded military security for decades
buffy said:
She’s a rabble rouser, that Heather Cox Richardson woman…:)
i finished today’s post thinking i want to see that movie. the plot is different to one sold me in the past.
In a viral TikTok video posted by @coughbuddy, ChatGPT is shown analyzing Trump’s alleged physical stats—specifically, a 215-pound weight at 6’3“—and responding that such figures are “virtually impossible” for someone of his build and age.
That combination creates a bit of a biological paradox: a sedentary 78-year-old man with average age-related muscle loss and 4.8% body fat is virtually impossible,” ChatGPT’s response read.
The TikTok user was prompted to ask ChatGPT about his results after the AI program provided an image of a muscular man when asked to create a “physical image” based on Trump’s numbers.
https://www.latintimes.com/chatgpt-declares-trumps-physical-results-virtually-impossible-usually-only-seen-elite-581135
Divine Angel said:
In a viral TikTok video posted by @coughbuddy, ChatGPT is shown analyzing Trump’s alleged physical stats—specifically, a 215-pound weight at 6’3“—and responding that such figures are “virtually impossible” for someone of his build and age.That combination creates a bit of a biological paradox: a sedentary 78-year-old man with average age-related muscle loss and 4.8% body fat is virtually impossible,” ChatGPT’s response read.
The TikTok user was prompted to ask ChatGPT about his results after the AI program provided an image of a muscular man when asked to create a “physical image” based on Trump’s numbers.
https://www.latintimes.com/chatgpt-declares-trumps-physical-results-virtually-impossible-usually-only-seen-elite-581135
i saw an occupy democrats post that said his police record says 5’9’ and 283lb. how they got that i do not know.
CNN
—
A US-born man charged this week with being an “unauthorized alien” in Florida has been released after spending the night in jail on a 48-hour hold requested by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement amid the Trump administration’s broad deportation crackdown.
Juan Carlos Lopez-Gomez, 20, was arrested Wednesday by Florida Highway Patrol when the car he was riding in was pulled over for speeding, according to an arrest affidavit and his attorney, Mutaqee Akbar. The American citizen – born in Grady County, Georgia, where he lives in the city of Cairo – was crossing into Florida for his work in construction in Tallahassee, about 45 minutes from home.
- -
The state judge in Lopez-Gomez’s case this week verified his US birth certificate and found no probable cause for charging him with crossing into Florida illegally, court records show, but said she didn’t have jurisdiction to release him because of an ICE hold, said Akbar.
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/04/17/us/lopez-gomez-citizen-detained-ice-florida/index.html
sarahs mum said:
Ha!
dv said:
CNN —
A US-born man charged this week with being an “unauthorized alien” in Florida has been released after spending the night in jail on a 48-hour hold requested by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement amid the Trump administration’s broad deportation crackdown.Juan Carlos Lopez-Gomez, 20, was arrested Wednesday by Florida Highway Patrol when the car he was riding in was pulled over for speeding, according to an arrest affidavit and his attorney, Mutaqee Akbar. The American citizen – born in Grady County, Georgia, where he lives in the city of Cairo – was crossing into Florida for his work in construction in Tallahassee, about 45 minutes from home.
- -
The state judge in Lopez-Gomez’s case this week verified his US birth certificate and found no probable cause for charging him with crossing into Florida illegally, court records show, but said she didn’t have jurisdiction to release him because of an ICE hold, said Akbar.
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/04/17/us/lopez-gomez-citizen-detained-ice-florida/index.html
FMD
a good strong alpha man like Saloth Sâr would never stand for this
Kind of surprising that no one on DJT’s team has better photoahop skills. That’s terrible work.
dv said:
Kind of surprising that no one on DJT’s team has better photoahop skills. That’s terrible work.
But Barron knows how to open a laptop!
Divine Angel said:
dv said:
Kind of surprising that no one on DJT’s team has better photoahop skills. That’s terrible work.
But Barron knows how to open a laptop!
Divine Angel said:
dv said:
Kind of surprising that no one on DJT’s team has better photoahop skills. That’s terrible work.
But Barron knows how to open a laptop!
And JD Vance never feels lonely in a Harvey Norman showroom.
Anyone else noticed how MAGA/rightists in the US don’t talk so much lately about how dissenters in ‘left-wing’ countries like Australia are being forced into ‘internment camps’?
dv said:
Kind of surprising that no one on DJT’s team has better photoahop skills. That’s terrible work.
What is?
Michael V said:
dv said:
Kind of surprising that no one on DJT’s team has better photoahop skills. That’s terrible work.
What is?
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-kilmar-abrego-garcia-hand-b2735920.html
Trump held up a photoshopped picture of Garcia’s hand with M S 1 3 stuck on in Arial sans, despite the fact that Garcia’s hands without this tattoo have already been shown a few times.
Brian Tyler Cohen · Follow
8h ·
Spotted in Boston, Massachusetts.
captain_spalding said:
Anyone else noticed how MAGA/rightists in the US don’t talk so much lately about how dissenters in ‘left-wing’ countries like Australia are being forced into ‘internment camps’?
I don’t remember them ever talking about that.
Michael V said:
captain_spalding said:
Anyone else noticed how MAGA/rightists in the US don’t talk so much lately about how dissenters in ‘left-wing’ countries like Australia are being forced into ‘internment camps’?
I don’t remember them ever talking about that.
quite common on covid posts on FB.
dv said:
Michael V said:
dv said:
Kind of surprising that no one on DJT’s team has better photoahop skills. That’s terrible work.
What is?
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-kilmar-abrego-garcia-hand-b2735920.html
Trump held up a photoshopped picture of Garcia’s hand with M S 1 3 stuck on in Arial sans, despite the fact that Garcia’s hands without this tattoo have already been shown a few times.
Thanks.
‘ken eedjots.
sarahs mum said:
Brian Tyler Cohen · Follow
8h ·
Spotted in Boston, Massachusetts.
Love it!
:)
Michael V said:
captain_spalding said:
Anyone else noticed how MAGA/rightists in the US don’t talk so much lately about how dissenters in ‘left-wing’ countries like Australia are being forced into ‘internment camps’?
I don’t remember them ever talking about that.
They DO still talk about it.
It was a big storyline on Newsmax.
JudgeMental said:
Michael V said:
captain_spalding said:
Anyone else noticed how MAGA/rightists in the US don’t talk so much lately about how dissenters in ‘left-wing’ countries like Australia are being forced into ‘internment camps’?
I don’t remember them ever talking about that.
quite common on covid posts on FB.
Ah. Thanks.
dv said:
Michael V said:
dv said:
Kind of surprising that no one on DJT’s team has better photoahop skills. That’s terrible work.
What is?
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-kilmar-abrego-garcia-hand-b2735920.html
Trump held up a photoshopped picture of Garcia’s hand with M S 1 3 stuck on in Arial sans, despite the fact that Garcia’s hands without this tattoo have already been shown a few times.
I think the photoshopted M S 1 3 is an explanation of the symbols.
Marijuana = M, Smiley = S, the cross = 1, the skull = 3
JudgeMental said:
Michael V said:
captain_spalding said:
Anyone else noticed how MAGA/rightists in the US don’t talk so much lately about how dissenters in ‘left-wing’ countries like Australia are being forced into ‘internment camps’?
I don’t remember them ever talking about that.
quite common on covid posts on FB.
I know we’re not supposed to use the R word but people who comment shit like that on covid posts really are missing something in their DNA. More closely related to mushrooms than actual humans.
kii said:
dv said:
Michael V said:What is?
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-kilmar-abrego-garcia-hand-b2735920.html
Trump held up a photoshopped picture of Garcia’s hand with M S 1 3 stuck on in Arial sans, despite the fact that Garcia’s hands without this tattoo have already been shown a few times.
I think the photoshopted* M S 1 3 is an explanation of the symbols.
Marijuana = M, Smiley = S, the cross = 1, the skull = 3
*Bloody Tab 10 Samsung pos changing words as I type, I have no idea how to fix this gremlin.
Divine Angel said:
JudgeMental said:
Michael V said:I don’t remember them ever talking about that.
quite common on covid posts on FB.
I know we’re not supposed to use the R word but people who comment shit like that on covid posts really are missing something in their DNA. More closely related to mushrooms than actual humans.
Ha!
I agree.
Michael V said:
captain_spalding said:
Anyone else noticed how MAGA/rightists in the US don’t talk so much lately about how dissenters in ‘left-wing’ countries like Australia are being forced into ‘internment camps’?
I don’t remember them ever talking about that.
There was bullshit comments in various forums and on some ‘conservative news sites’ about how ‘good, God-fearing, conservative people’ were being held in camps in countries like Australia, like the quarantine centre at Wellcamp a few km down the road from me (it’s empty).
And when Gina went to the right-wing backslapping fest in the US a couple of months back, the MC joked about how Gina and Co. had ‘escaped the Australian prison camps’ to be there.
“Trump just posted a photo of himself holding up a piece of paper claiming to show tattoos on Kilmar Abrego Garcia that are related to MS-13. The paper he’s holding up has been digitally altered to add the characters MS-13.
The claim comes from neo-Nazis on X who say the tattoos cover up “MS-13.””
From Matt Novak on Bluesky
Images for those still confused.
kii said:
dv said:
Michael V said:What is?
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-kilmar-abrego-garcia-hand-b2735920.html
Trump held up a photoshopped picture of Garcia’s hand with M S 1 3 stuck on in Arial sans, despite the fact that Garcia’s hands without this tattoo have already been shown a few times.
I think the photoshopted M S 1 3 is an explanation of the symbols.
Marijuana = M, Smiley = S, the cross = 1, the skull = 3
How is a skull a 3? In any case the real Garcia does not appear to have tattooed knuckles
dv said:
kii said:
dv said:https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-kilmar-abrego-garcia-hand-b2735920.html
Trump held up a photoshopped picture of Garcia’s hand with M S 1 3 stuck on in Arial sans, despite the fact that Garcia’s hands without this tattoo have already been shown a few times.
I think the photoshopted M S 1 3 is an explanation of the symbols.
Marijuana = M, Smiley = S, the cross = 1, the skull = 3
How is a skull a 3? In any case the real Garcia does not appear to have tattooed knuckles
I posted the photos. Yes, he is tattoo free.
https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1HLeRwEbBk/
A modest proposal: Trump planet
dv said:
https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1HLeRwEbBk/A modest proposal: Trump planet
no.
captain_spalding said:
Michael V said:
captain_spalding said:
Anyone else noticed how MAGA/rightists in the US don’t talk so much lately about how dissenters in ‘left-wing’ countries like Australia are being forced into ‘internment camps’?
I don’t remember them ever talking about that.
There was bullshit comments in various forums and on some ‘conservative news sites’ about how ‘good, God-fearing, conservative people’ were being held in camps in countries like Australia, like the quarantine centre at Wellcamp a few km down the road from me (it’s empty).
And when Gina went to the right-wing backslapping fest in the US a couple of months back, the MC joked about how Gina and Co. had ‘escaped the Australian prison camps’ to be there.
‘ken arseholes.
kii said:
“Trump just posted a photo of himself holding up a piece of paper claiming to show tattoos on Kilmar Abrego Garcia that are related to MS-13. The paper he’s holding up has been digitally altered to add the characters MS-13.The claim comes from neo-Nazis on X who say the tattoos cover up “MS-13.””
From Matt Novak on Bluesky
Images for those still confused.
More ‘ken arses.
dv said:
https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1HLeRwEbBk/A modest proposal: Trump planet
didn’t read all the comments but…
David Kzoo
Um it’s a little thing called “the sun”. You never hear about it anymore, but it’s a neat thing, “the sun”. Some people are saying … people came up to me with tears in their eyes saying “Sir, sir .. lets name it the Trump”
Divine Angel said:
One of the most flawed persons on earth.
Tau.Neutrino said:
Divine Angel said:
One of the most flawed persons on earth.
In any sensible country with a functioning legal system his official title would be “inmate”.
Divine Angel said:
Fair.
Ah well at least Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s tats are real
?
Deus vult has been adopted as a slogan by a variety of Christian right and Christian nationalist groups, as well as alt-right and white supremacist groups. This usage was disseminated widely online, through hashtags and internet memes. Crusader memes (such as an image of a Knight Templar accompanied by the caption “I’ll see your jihad and raise you one crusade”) are popular on far-right internet pages. It is one of several pieces of Crusader imagery used by groups characterized in The Washington Post as far-right Christian nationalists and dominionists. One perspective is that racist movements co-opt the slogans and iconography of the European medieval period, to evoke a fantasy of a “pure” white European heritage, a nostalgic view that is historically inaccurate, and has been denounced by medievalist scholars as a gross distortion of history.The “Deus vult” slogan has been used by perpetrators of right-wing terrorism; it was repeatedly used by the perpetrator of the 2017 Quebec City mosque shooting and was one of the tattoos on the body of the perpetrator of the 2023 Allen, Texas outlet mall shooting. Deus Vult was among the slogans and symbols used during the violent far-right riot in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017.
The slogan, as well as other Knights Templar imagery, has also been associated with far-right subgroups in the U.S. that merge Christian nationalism with gun culture; a Florida gun manufacturer engraved the slogan on its “Crusader” model of AR-15-style rifle. The motto is also used by Christian nationalist groups in Europe; the phrase was portrayed on large banners carried by unspecified groups characterized by The Guardian as far-right marchers in 2017 in Warsaw, Poland.
Often white supremacists will use the Jerusalem Cross in association with the term “Deus Vult”. Tom Hill, president and executive director of the Center for Peace Diplomacy, said that the combination of these two symbols “when used in combination . . . are ‘an invocation of the claim that crusader violence and its atrocities (including the massacre of civilians) was legitimate.’” “It is this bloody, militant intent that comes first when seeking to understand its current usage as a symbol for those pledging their allegiances in contemporary politics — and this is why it has been appropriated by the so-called ‘alt right,’” Hill said.
dv said:
FMD.
dv said:
Ah well at least Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s tats are real
?
Deus vult has been adopted as a slogan by a variety of Christian right and Christian nationalist groups, as well as alt-right and white supremacist groups. This usage was disseminated widely online, through hashtags and internet memes. Crusader memes (such as an image of a Knight Templar accompanied by the caption “I’ll see your jihad and raise you one crusade”) are popular on far-right internet pages. It is one of several pieces of Crusader imagery used by groups characterized in The Washington Post as far-right Christian nationalists and dominionists. One perspective is that racist movements co-opt the slogans and iconography of the European medieval period, to evoke a fantasy of a “pure” white European heritage, a nostalgic view that is historically inaccurate, and has been denounced by medievalist scholars as a gross distortion of history.The “Deus vult” slogan has been used by perpetrators of right-wing terrorism; it was repeatedly used by the perpetrator of the 2017 Quebec City mosque shooting and was one of the tattoos on the body of the perpetrator of the 2023 Allen, Texas outlet mall shooting. Deus Vult was among the slogans and symbols used during the violent far-right riot in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017.
The slogan, as well as other Knights Templar imagery, has also been associated with far-right subgroups in the U.S. that merge Christian nationalism with gun culture; a Florida gun manufacturer engraved the slogan on its “Crusader” model of AR-15-style rifle. The motto is also used by Christian nationalist groups in Europe; the phrase was portrayed on large banners carried by unspecified groups characterized by The Guardian as far-right marchers in 2017 in Warsaw, Poland.
Often white supremacists will use the Jerusalem Cross in association with the term “Deus Vult”. Tom Hill, president and executive director of the Center for Peace Diplomacy, said that the combination of these two symbols “when used in combination . . . are ‘an invocation of the claim that crusader violence and its atrocities (including the massacre of civilians) was legitimate.’” “It is this bloody, militant intent that comes first when seeking to understand its current usage as a symbol for those pledging their allegiances in contemporary politics — and this is why it has been appropriated by the so-called ‘alt right,’” Hill said.
More FMD.
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/buick-finally-had-cars-americans-wanted-buy-then-came-tariffs-2025-04-19/
Michael V said:
dv said:
FMD.
nah we’re pretty sure by Fascist North American standards Pakistan are a bastion of liberal democracy and the term Islamist should be reserved only for countries where you can prove their leaders aren’t just sending their hearts out to the audience accidentally autistically
Heather Cox Richardson
4h ·
April 19, 2025 (Saturday)
Buddy and I are home together for the first time in a month. There is nothing in the world like that last quarter mile of the road to the house, which we hit tonight just as the sky turned pink with the sunset.
Going to take the night off.
I’ll see you tomorrow.
https://people.com/rfk-jr-claims-people-with-autism-will-never-work-find-love-or-pay-taxes-11717083
JudgeMental said:
dv said:
https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1HLeRwEbBk/
A modest proposal: Trump planet
didn’t read all the comments but…
David Kzoo
Um it’s a little thing called “the sun”. You never hear about it anymore, but it’s a neat thing, “the sun”. Some people are saying … people came up to me with tears in their eyes saying “Sir, sir .. lets name it the Trump”
wait why did they name it the golf of america when they should have just
whatever
Michael V said:
kii said:
“Trump just posted a photo of himself holding up a piece of paper claiming to show tattoos on Kilmar Abrego Garcia that are related to MS-13. The paper he’s holding up has been digitally altered to add the characters MS-13.
The claim comes from neo-Nazis on X who say the tattoos cover up “MS-13.””
From Matt Novak on Bluesky
Images for those still confused.
More ‘ken arses.
right but why even give a damn about evidence when you can just make up whatever the fuck you want and the clever voting majority of the great USSA will swallow it hook line sinker
Michael V said:
sarahs mum said:
Brian Tyler Cohen · Follow
8h ·
Spotted in Boston, Massachusetts.
Love it!
:)
bit late, that’s like saying oh hey those equines seem to be damn quiet for a few days let’s check if the stable door is unlocked
sarahs mum said:
Heather Cox Richardson
4h ·
April 19, 2025 (Saturday)
Buddy and I are home together for the first time in a month. There is nothing in the world like that last quarter mile of the road to the house, which we hit tonight just as the sky turned pink with the sunset.
Going to take the night off.
I’ll see you tomorrow.
:)
dv said:
https://people.com/rfk-jr-claims-people-with-autism-will-never-work-find-love-or-pay-taxes-11717083
Heh.
:)
Stupidity Enshrined
let’s make people embarrassed to be MAGA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7AlI0×3D6s
3min 29 sec
Puppies and kittens at the end!
captain_spalding said:
Stupidity Enshrinedlet’s make people embarrassed to be MAGA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7AlI0×3D6s
3min 29 sec
Puppies and kittens at the end!
Bit of a tangent but today I was pondering the MAGAs after their leader kicks the bucket. On his deathbed, he could go all Jim Jones and instruct them to meet him in the afterlife.
captain_spalding said:
Stupidity Enshrinedlet’s make people embarrassed to be MAGA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7AlI0×3D6s
3min 29 sec
Puppies and kittens at the end!
Good luck with that. I think some of them are so committed that Trump could sell their children as slaves and they’ll still go along with it.
party_pants said:
captain_spalding said:
Stupidity Enshrinedlet’s make people embarrassed to be MAGA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7AlI0×3D6s
3min 29 sec
Puppies and kittens at the end!
Good luck with that. I think some of them are so committed that Trump could sell their children as slaves and they’ll still go along with it.
I have zero doubt if they could literally “own the Libs”, they would.
Spiny Norman said:
*waits for pics of their tattoos
Spiny Norman said:
it only takes a handful of stories like this to circulate and people stop going there. Tourism is already crashing.
Divine Angel said:
captain_spalding said:
Stupidity Enshrinedlet’s make people embarrassed to be MAGA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7AlI0×3D6s
3min 29 sec
Puppies and kittens at the end!
Bit of a tangent but today I was pondering the MAGAs after their leader kicks the bucket. On his deathbed, he could go all Jim Jones and instruct them to meet him in the afterlife.
Now that’d be a bloody great thing!.
Divine Angel said:
party_pants said:
captain_spalding said:
Stupidity Enshrinedlet’s make people embarrassed to be MAGA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7AlI0×3D6s
3min 29 sec
Puppies and kittens at the end!
Good luck with that. I think some of them are so committed that Trump could sell their children as slaves and they’ll still go along with it.
I have zero doubt if they could literally “own the Libs”, they would.
I don’t think they’d be responsible slave owners.
Spiny Norman said:
FMD. What arses.
Divine Angel said:
captain_spalding said:
Stupidity Enshrinedlet’s make people embarrassed to be MAGA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7AlI0×3D6s
3min 29 sec
Puppies and kittens at the end!
Bit of a tangent but today I was pondering the MAGAs after their leader kicks the bucket. On his deathbed, he could go all Jim Jones and instruct them to meet him in the afterlife.
Oh wouldn’t that be luvverly.
party_pants said:
Spiny Norman said:
it only takes a handful of stories like this to circulate and people stop going there. Tourism is already crashing.
Nods.
Me? I’m not spending a lot of money to get somewhere only to be sent home again at the whim of some jumped-up, nasty, Trump empowered official.
Michael V said:
party_pants said:
Spiny Norman said:
it only takes a handful of stories like this to circulate and people stop going there. Tourism is already crashing.
Nods.
Me? I’m not spending a lot of money to get somewhere only to be sent home again at the whim of some jumped-up, nasty, Trump empowered official.
I’m sure a lot of sensile people are coming to the sane decision.
roughbarked said:
Michael V said:
party_pants said:it only takes a handful of stories like this to circulate and people stop going there. Tourism is already crashing.
Nods.
Me? I’m not spending a lot of money to get somewhere only to be sent home again at the whim of some jumped-up, nasty, Trump empowered official.
I’m sure a lot of sensile people are coming to the sane decision.
I think it’s really hard to make determinations about what is reasonable and what isn’t from a tweet – these cases are are decided by specific details and context is kinda important.
Spiny Norman said:
Similar thing happened to me when turning up in New York in 1981.
We had no accommodation booking or address. We got a real hard time.
We had a “rental car booking and were headed for Niagra Falls”, we said.
After considerable grilling about where we were from etc etc, and demands for a first night’s accommodation address, I repeated our objective.
“We are hiring a car and going for a holiday in Niagra Falls”.
That was met with “Why didn’t you say you were staying at the Holiday Inn, in Niagra Falls”
They stamped passports and we were allowed on our way.
Lesson learned. When entering the US, just tell them you are staying at the Holiday Inn. There’s one of those everywhere.
Woodie said:
Spiny Norman said:
Similar thing happened to me when turning up in New York in 1981.
We had no accommodation booking or address. We got a real hard time.
We had a “rental car booking and were headed for Niagra Falls”, we said.
After considerable grilling about where we were from etc etc, and demands for a first night’s accommodation address, I repeated our objective.
“We are hiring a car and going for a holiday in Niagra Falls”.
That was met with “Why didn’t you say you were staying at the Holiday Inn, in Niagra Falls”
They stamped passports and we were allowed on our way.
Lesson learned. When entering the US, just tell them you are staying at the Holiday Inn. There’s one of those everywhere.
Heh. Well named to suit the purpose.
If you tell us you are here for a holiday we won’t believe you until you say you are going to spend money here.
Michael V said:
Spiny Norman said:
FMD. What arses.
They could sell it as an adventure-themed holiday experience.
Woodie said:
Spiny Norman said:
Similar thing happened to me when turning up in New York in 1981.
We had no accommodation booking or address. We got a real hard time.
We had a “rental car booking and were headed for Niagra Falls”, we said.
After considerable grilling about where we were from etc etc, and demands for a first night’s accommodation address, I repeated our objective.
“We are hiring a car and going for a holiday in Niagra Falls”.
That was met with “Why didn’t you say you were staying at the Holiday Inn, in Niagra Falls”
They stamped passports and we were allowed on our way.
Lesson learned. When entering the US, just tell them you are staying at the Holiday Inn. There’s one of those everywhere.
I was sat on a flight a few years ago near a young couple that had been denied entry to the US for not having stated where they would be staying while there.
Woodie said:
Spiny Norman said:
Similar thing happened to me when turning up in New York in 1981.
We had no accommodation booking or address. We got a real hard time.
We had a “rental car booking and were headed for Niagra Falls”, we said.
After considerable grilling about where we were from etc etc, and demands for a first night’s accommodation address, I repeated our objective.
“We are hiring a car and going for a holiday in Niagra Falls”.
That was met with “Why didn’t you say you were staying at the Holiday Inn, in Niagra Falls”
They stamped passports and we were allowed on our way.
Lesson learned. When entering the US, just tell them you are staying at the Holiday Inn. There’s one of those everywhere.
Long story, but..
When I arrived here with mr kii my residential address in NM was no longer valid. He was fine, because he was a citizen, but one important criteria for me was an address.
We had a rental that was on all the paperwork, but his friend had sold the property from under him a few weeks before. mr kii had been living there for a year while we finalized the visa for me. He had come back to Australia to move me here.
So…we lied at the border check-in for me in Hawaii, where I entered the US officially.
We moved into a Motel 6 for a week, found a new rental and lived happily ever after.
Neophyte said:
Michael V said:
Spiny Norman said:
FMD. What arses.
They could sell it as an adventure-themed holiday experience.
…… and a reality TV series. “Survivor US”. Give ‘em nuffun, put ‘em on a plane to the US and “You’re on your own, baby!!” Wonder how many they’d get to apply???
Woodie said:
Spiny Norman said:
Similar thing happened to me when turning up in New York in 1981.
We had no accommodation booking or address. We got a real hard time.
We had a “rental car booking and were headed for Niagra Falls”, we said.
After considerable grilling about where we were from etc etc, and demands for a first night’s accommodation address, I repeated our objective.
“We are hiring a car and going for a holiday in Niagra Falls”.
That was met with “Why didn’t you say you were staying at the Holiday Inn, in Niagra Falls”
They stamped passports and we were allowed on our way.
Lesson learned. When entering the US, just tell them you are staying at the Holiday Inn. There’s one of those everywhere.
it appears as though the two tourists only had a few days of accommodation booked and when ask how they were going to fund their say they indicated they were going to work virtually while they were here. They also didn’t have a return flight booked.
JudgeMental said:
that was so last year
oh hey can we interest yous in a prime ministerial welding cosplay
https://www.instagram.com/p/DIgqCiAR_xu/
sarahs mum said:
https://www.instagram.com/p/DIgqCiAR_xu/
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/jessica-aber-former-us-attorney-found-dead-epilepsy-died-sleep-family-rcna198245
JudgeMental said:
sarahs mum said:
https://www.instagram.com/p/DIgqCiAR_xu/
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/jessica-aber-former-us-attorney-found-dead-epilepsy-died-sleep-family-rcna198245
thanks boris.
sarahs mum said:
JudgeMental said:
sarahs mum said:
https://www.instagram.com/p/DIgqCiAR_xu/
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/jessica-aber-former-us-attorney-found-dead-epilepsy-died-sleep-family-rcna198245
thanks boris.
Nothing to see here, move along.
sarahs mum said:
https://www.instagram.com/p/DIgqCiAR_xu/
Defenestrated?
JudgeMental said:
sarahs mum said:
https://www.instagram.com/p/DIgqCiAR_xu/
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/jessica-aber-former-us-attorney-found-dead-epilepsy-died-sleep-family-rcna198245
Ah.
Bummer.
JudgeMental said:
sarahs mum said:
https://www.instagram.com/p/DIgqCiAR_xu/
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/jessica-aber-former-us-attorney-found-dead-epilepsy-died-sleep-family-rcna198245
thank you… becuase, quite frankly, this is not the time for conspiracy theories to abound.
Arts said:
JudgeMental said:
sarahs mum said:
https://www.instagram.com/p/DIgqCiAR_xu/
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/jessica-aber-former-us-attorney-found-dead-epilepsy-died-sleep-family-rcna198245
thank you… becuase, quite frankly, this is not the time for conspiracy theories to abound.
exactly why after seeing a post on the Instagram link I went to find out.
JudgeMental said:
Arts said:
JudgeMental said:https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/jessica-aber-former-us-attorney-found-dead-epilepsy-died-sleep-family-rcna198245
thank you… becuase, quite frankly, this is not the time for conspiracy theories to abound.
exactly why after seeing a post on the Instagram link I went to find out.
thank you again.
sarahs mum said:
https://www.instagram.com/p/DIgqCiAR_xu/
She looks too young to be dead.
roughbarked said:
sarahs mum said:
https://www.instagram.com/p/DIgqCiAR_xu/
She looks too young to be dead.
What an odd thing to say.
Arts said:
JudgeMental said:
sarahs mum said:
https://www.instagram.com/p/DIgqCiAR_xu/
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/jessica-aber-former-us-attorney-found-dead-epilepsy-died-sleep-family-rcna198245
thank you… becuase, quite frankly, this is not the time for conspiracy theories to abound.
true.
Divine Angel said:
roughbarked said:
sarahs mum said:
https://www.instagram.com/p/DIgqCiAR_xu/
She looks too young to be dead.
What an odd thing to say.
Well generally most people die older.
roughbarked said:
Divine Angel said:
roughbarked said:She looks too young to be dead.
What an odd thing to say.
Well generally most people die older.
Most people will be the oldest they ever get when they die.
Woodie said:
roughbarked said:
Divine Angel said:What an odd thing to say.
Well generally most people die older.
Most people will be the oldest they ever get when they die.
By most, I presume you believe that some get ressurrected?
Heather Cox Richardson
4h ·
April 20, 2025 (Sunday)
Yesterday, on the 250th anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord at the beginning of the Revolutionary War, Americans across the country protested against President Donald J. Trump, his billionaire sidekick Elon Musk, and the administration in general. The decentralized 50501 movement, which stands for “50 protests in 50 states on 1 day,” was one of the organizers of the protests, planning more than 700 events. Spokesperson Hunter Dunn described 50501 as a “pro-democracy, pro-Constitution, anti-executive-overreach, nonviolent grassroots movement.” Notably, protests have spread to small towns all around the country, including towns in Republican-dominated areas.
One of the signs in Miami read, “I’m here fighting for your due process,” a right the Trump administration has abandoned with its rendition of men to CECOT, a notorious terrorist prison in El Salvador. Today, Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) appeared on a number of news programs explaining that his trip to El Salvador to make contact with his constituent Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whom the administration said it sent to CECOT through “administrative error,” was about defending the rule of law.
“I am not defending the man. I’m defending the rights of this man to due process,” Van Hollen told Jonathan Karl of ABC News. “And the Trump administration has admitted in court that he was wrongfully detained and wrongfully deported. My mission and my purpose is to make sure that we uphold the rule of law, because if we take it away from him, we…jeopardize it for everybody else.”
The right to due process is central to the rule of law in the United States, and the Trump administration has ignored it since at least March 15, when it spirited more than 250 men from the U.S. to CECOT. It claimed the men were all dangerous gang members who had committed crimes, but did not provide their names.
Once news outlets got a list of the men, their investigations found the administration had lied about the men’s criminal status. Bloomberg reported that 90% of the men sent to CECOT had no U.S. criminal record. Judge James Boasberg ordered the government not to deport the men and, if they were already in the air, to turn the planes around. But the administration went forward nonetheless and has appeared to taunt the courts ever since. After the men were landed and in CECOT, President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador posted on X, “Oopsie… Too late” with a laughing emoji, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio retweeted his post.Last Wednesday, April 16, Boasberg issued an opinion saying that the court concluded “that probable cause exists to find the Government in criminal contempt.” On April 4, Judge Paula Xinis ordered the administration to “facilitate and effectuate” Abrego Garcia’s return. Six days later, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously upheld Xinis’s order.
Last Monday, April 14, in a staged meeting between Trump and Bukele in the Oval Office, Trump made it clear he would ignore the Supreme Court. The administration has maintained that the U.S. has no power to order Bukele to release Abrego Garcia, and in the meeting, Bukele said he would not release the Maryland man.
The administration appears to have tried to create a fiction whereby the U.S. can spirit anyone out of the U.S. without due process, render them to prison in another country, and then declare it doesn’t have the power to get the person back. Vice President J.D. Vance, Attorney General Pam Bondi, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller were all present at the meeting. Miller mischaracterized the Supreme Court decision to say it had ruled unanimously in favor of the administration, the exact opposite of reality.
On Wednesday, Van Hollen traveled to El Salvador to try to meet with Abrego Garcia, finally securing a visit on Thursday. This appeared to infuriate the White House, which posted on social media an image of a New York Times headline “Senator Meets With Wrongly Deported Maryland Man in El Salvador” edited with red pen to read: “Senator Meets With Deported MS-13 ILLEGAL ALIEN in El Salvador WHO’S NEVER COMING BACK.” Over the image, it posted: “Fixed it for you, . Oh, and by the way —he’s NOT coming back.”
There is no evidence that Abrego Garcia is a member of MS-13; indeed, he has never been charged with a crime, and a court had ordered that he must not be deported to El Salvador out of concern for his life. But as control over the narrative of their renditions is slipping out of their hands—influential podcaster Joe Rogan has been defending due process on his show—administration officials appear determined to paint Abrego Garcia as a dangerous criminal.
Yesterday the White House posted on social media an image of a hand that has been very obviously altered by adding “M-S-1-3” over the knuckles. A social media post by Trump is superimposed on the image. It says: “This is the hand of the man that the Democrats feel should be brought back to the United States, because he is such ‘a fine and innocent person.’ They said he is not a member of MS-13, even though he’s got MS-13 tattooed onto his knuckles, and two Highly Respected Courts found that he was a member of MS-13, beat up his wife, etc. I was elected to take bad people out of the United States, among other things. I must be allowed to do my job. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN.” The White House account added: “If he tattoos like MS-13, beats women like MS-13, and tramples the law like MS-13—THEN HE’S PROBABLY MS-13.”
Except the image is clearly false, no courts found he was a member of MS-13, and scholar of MS-13 Óscar Martínez commented: “I covered MS-13 for over a decade: its history, crimes, symbolism, cruelty, pacts with Salvadoran governments. I wrote a book about it. Never, ever, did any of the hundreds of sources I spoke to say anything that would allow us to believe Trump’s strange interpretation of tattoos.”
Although Abrego Garcia’s wife did file a temporary civil protective order against him in 2021, she has said she did it out of an abundance of caution after a previous relationship that had been violent. She did not pursue the order, and says the two worked out their issues with counseling.
Perhaps more to the point was Chris Kluwe’s point that “a sitting US President is using falsified evidence to try and deny due process to a man who has committed no crime.” Also to the point is that the administration’s insistence that Abrego Garcia will never come back to the U.S. flies in the face of the Supreme Court’s 9–0 decision that it must work to get him back to the U.S.
Early Saturday morning, the Supreme Court ordered the administration not to deport another group of undocumented Venezuelans under the authority of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act. Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented, but the court was in such a hurry to prevent the rendition of the men—who had already been loaded onto buses to head to an airplane—that it issued its decision without waiting for them to finish writing.
In his One First newsletter, legal analyst Steve Vladeck noted that the court appears not to trust the government’s lawyers anymore. Vladeck saw the order as “a sign that a majority of the justices have lost their patience with the procedural games being played by the Trump administration.”
Trump did not take the order well. On Saturday night he posted: “TRUMP’S BEST POLL NUMBERS, EVER. THANK YOU!” After a religiously themed post this morning, he launched another attack on those he sees as his enemies—including judges—and blamed the country’s troubles on his predecessor, President Joe Biden. Then he posted: “We are, together, going to make America bigger, better, stronger, wealthier, healthier, and more religious, than it has ever been before!!! DONALD J. TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA!!!”
Trump went on to post about the economy, including a post that said: “THE BUSINESSMEN WHO CRITICIZE TARIFFS ARE BAD AT BUSINESS, BUT REALLY BAD AT POLITICS. THEY DON’T UNDERSTAND OR REALIZE THAT I AM THE GREATEST FRIEND THAT AMERICAN CAPITALISM HAS EVER HAD!” About an hour later, he posted that “many World Leaders and Business Executives have come to me asking for relief from Tariffs. It’s good to see that the World knows we are serious, because WE ARE!”
It’s hard not to read desperation in the last days of Trump’s posts as Americans seem increasingly concerned about the loss of the rule of law, as Trump’s tariffs upset the economy, and as Russia’s president Vladimir Putin seemed to taunt his U.S. counterpart— who badly wants to end Russia’s war against Ukraine, as he promised to do with a single phone call— by declaring a truce over Easter and then promptly violating it.
That the administration seems to be reeling showed also in the news on Friday that the State Department has been torn apart by Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s firing of Peter Marocco, the official who was dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID. Dasha Burns and Nahal Toosi of Politico report that Marocco is MAGA and was destroying the agency without advice from career officials. MAGA sees his firing as a sign Rubio is part of the establishment they want to destroy.
Also on Friday, Michael S. Schmidt and Michael C. Bender of the New York Times reported that the administration was suddenly claiming that the letter it sent to Harvard University on April 11 withholding federal grants until the university handed administration officials power over the school’s students and programs was “unauthorized.” Nonetheless, the White House was standing by the letter, which prompted Harvard to take a strong stand against the administration. Officials blamed Harvard for the standoff because, they said, university lawyers should have called when they got such a dramatic letter.
In a response, Harvard pointed out that the letter “was signed by three federal officials, placed on official letterhead, was sent from the email inbox of a senior federal official and was sent on April 11 as promised. Recipients of such correspondence from the U.S. government—even when it contains sweeping demands that are astonishing in their overreach—do not question its authenticity or seriousness.” It noted that it didn’t know which statements the government was claiming were “mistakes,” but in any case, the government’s actions had “real-life consequences.”
Today, Greg Jaffe, Eric Schmitt, and Maggie Haberman reported in the New York Times that on March 15, the same day he shared classified plans of a military strike against the Houthis in Yemen on an unsecure Signal chat on which journalist Jeffrey Goldberg had been included, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth shared similar detailed information on a different Signal chat. This one he began himself in January on his personal phone for strategizing with his closest allies, and it brought together about a dozen people, including his wife, his brother, and his personal lawyer.
Four people with knowledge of the second chat group spoke with Jaffe, Schmitt, and Haberman, suggesting that dissatisfaction with Hegseth in the department runs deep. Former Pentagon chief spokesperson John Ullyot resigned last week, and today he began an op-ed in Politico with the sentence, “It’s been a month of total chaos at the Pentagon.” On Friday, Hegseth fired three of his senior staffers, and an official announced that his chief of staff was leaving. Ullyot wrote it was “very likely” that “even bigger bombshell stories” would come this week.
Finally, today was the deadline by which Hegseth and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem were ordered to report to the president whether they recommended invoking the Insurrection Act to deal with conditions at the southern border. That law enables the president to use military troops as law enforcement officers inside the United States.
While the two did not file their report today, Natasha Bertrand, Haley Britzky, Jake Tapper, and Priscilla Alvarez of CNN reported Friday that when they do, they will not recommend the president invoke the act.
Stupid is as MAGA does – let’s make people embarassed to be MAGA
Stupidity Enshrined – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7AlI0×3D6s
& This is what happened to the American Dream – the maga resentment to federal workers is misguided.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/IX1vw0V2MY0
AussieDJ said:
Stupid is as MAGA does – let’s make people embarassed to be MAGAStupidity Enshrined – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7AlI0×3D6s
& This is what happened to the American Dream – the maga resentment to federal workers is misguided.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/IX1vw0V2MY0
The American Dream reel is so spot on,
Hours after Pope Francis’ death, Republican moron MTG posted on Twitter that the hand of God was defeating evil on Earth.
https://www.newsweek.com/marjorie-taylor-greene-says-evil-being-defeated-after-pope-francis-death-2062157
Hegseth is out.
kii said:
Hegseth is out.
Did Vance continue his reign of death by visiting him too?
Divine Angel said:
kii said:
Hegseth is out.
Did Vance continue his reign of death by visiting him too?
Looks like they are brawling in the playpen.
Can’t put my finger on it, but there’s something a bit unholy about this scenario.
Divine Angel said:
Can’t put my finger on it, but there’s something a bit unholy about this scenario.
kii said:
Hegseth is out.
Who is in? That fkn MyPillow guy?
dv said:
kii said:
Hegseth is out.
Who is in? That fkn MyPillow guy?
Probably Barron.
dv said:
seems unfair, they wanted an offer
dv said:
But he’s THE BEST THING THAT EVER HAPPENED TO AMERICAN CAPITALISM… (for his own fortune).
According to a letter addressed to the university staff, students and alumni, Harvard University is suing the Trump administration in a new escalation of the fight over federal funding, institutional oversight and independence.
diddly-squat said:
According to a letter addressed to the university staff, students and alumni, Harvard University is suing the Trump administration in a new escalation of the fight over federal funding, institutional oversight and independence.
Sings, This is America.
Pfft, as if Trump can spell Venezuela, let alone know what “stymied” means.
Divine Angel said:
Pfft, as if Trump can spell Venezuela, let alone know what “stymied” means.
Lying bastard. He has no respect for the Supreme court that he tried to stack.
Divine Angel said:
Pfft, as if Trump can spell Venezuela, let alone know what “stymied” means.
He got one thing correct.
“what a ridiculous situation we are in”.
When will he be woke and realise it is the situation he is creating?
roughbarked said:
Divine Angel said:
Pfft, as if Trump can spell Venezuela, let alone know what “stymied” means.
He got one thing correct.
“what a ridiculous situation we are in”.When will he be woke and realise it is the situation he is creating?
You expect too much.
Divine Angel said:
roughbarked said:
Divine Angel said:
Pfft, as if Trump can spell Venezuela, let alone know what “stymied” means.
He got one thing correct.
“what a ridiculous situation we are in”.When will he be woke and realise it is the situation he is creating?
You expect too much.
I am at heart an optomist.
roughbarked said:
Divine Angel said:
Pfft, as if Trump can spell Venezuela, let alone know what “stymied” means.
Lying bastard. He has no respect for the Supreme court that he tried to stack.
They have such a strange system
It’s like they thought up as many ways as possible for it to become corruptible and misused
Divine Angel said:
Pfft, as if Trump can spell Venezuela, let alone know what “stymied” means.
Has his account been hacked?
roughbarked said:
Divine Angel said:
Pfft, as if Trump can spell Venezuela, let alone know what “stymied” means.
Lying bastard. He has no respect for the Supreme court that he tried to stack.
tried LOL tried
Cymek said:
roughbarked said:
Divine Angel said:
Pfft, as if Trump can spell Venezuela, let alone know what “stymied” means.
Lying bastard. He has no respect for the Supreme court that he tried to stack.
They have such a strange system
It’s like they thought up as many ways as possible for it to become corruptible and misused
also if we just go and drop a gigaton worth of nuclear on major USSA cities then we will also be getting rid of their criminals
buffy said:
Divine Angel said:
Pfft, as if Trump can spell Venezuela, let alone know what “stymied” means.
Has his account been hacked?
I thought maybe he used speech-to-text, but the punctuation suggests no.
Divine Angel said:
buffy said:
Divine Angel said:
Pfft, as if Trump can spell Venezuela, let alone know what “stymied” means.
Has his account been hacked?
I thought maybe he used speech-to-text, but the punctuation suggests no.
It reads like someone taking the piss.
buffy said:
Divine Angel said:
buffy said:
Has his account been hacked?
I thought maybe he used speech-to-text, but the punctuation suggests no.
It reads like someone taking the piss.
so does the bible and likewise that has hundreds of millions of people following it
Political commentator, has been warned, as a naturalized US citizen, not to leave the country at this time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWuTdSGJHaU
7 min 27 sec
Heather Cox Richardson
57m ·
April 21, 2025 (Monday)
Yesterday, on Easter Sunday, Pope Francis performed his final public act when he waved to worshippers in St. Peter’s Square. He died today at 88. Born in Argentina, he was the first Pope to come from the Americas. He was also the first Jesuit to serve as Pope, bringing new perspectives to the Catholic Church and hoping to focus the church on the poor.
The stock market plunged again today after President Donald J. Trump continued to harass Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell. The threat of instability if Trump tries to fire Powell, added to the instability already created by Trump’s tariff policies, saw the Dow Jones Industrial Average fall 971.82 points, or 2.48%; the S&P 500 dropped 2.36%, and the Nasdaq Composite fell 2.55%. The dollar hit a three-year low, while the value of gold soared. Journalist Brian Tyler Cohen noted that since Trump took office, the Dow has fallen 13.8%, the S&P 500 is down 15.5%, and the Nasdaq is down 20.5%.
Hannah Erin Lang of the Wall Street Journal reported that “he Trump rout is taking on historic dimensions.” She noted that the Dow Jones Industrial Average “is headed for its worst April performance since 1932,” when the country was in the midst of the Great Depression. Scott Ladner, chief investment officer at Horizon Investments, told Lang: “It’s impossible to commit capital to an economy that is unstable and unknowable because of policy structure.”
The Trump administration announced on April 11 that it would withhold from Harvard University $2.2 billion in grants already awarded and a $60 million contract unless Harvard permitted the federal government to control the university’s admissions and intellectual content. Today, Harvard sued the government for violating the First Amendment and overstepping its legal authority under the guise of addressing antisemitism.
The complaint notes the “arbitrary and capricious nature” of the government’s demands, and says, “The government has not—and cannot—identify any rational connection between antisemitism concerns and the medical, scientific, technological, and other research it has frozen that aims to save American lives, foster American success, preserve American security, and maintain America’s position as a global leader in innovation.”
University president Alan Garber explained that the freeze would jeopardize research on “how cancer spreads throughout the body, to predict the spread of infectious disease outbreaks, and to ease the pain of soldiers wounded on the battlefield.” He continued: “As opportunities to reduce the risk of multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s disease, and Parkinson’s disease are on the horizon, the government is slamming on the brakes. The victims will be future patients and their loved ones who will suffer the heartbreak of illnesses that might have been prevented or treated more effectively. Indiscriminately slashing medical, scientific, and technological research undermines the nation’s ability to save American lives, foster American success, and maintain America’s position as a global leader in innovation.”
Harvard is suing the departments of Health and Human Services, Justice, Education, Energy, and Defense, the General Services Administration (GSA), the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, NASA, and the leaders of those agencies.
After news broke yesterday that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had disclosed classified information on a second unsecure Signal chat—this one on on his unsecure personal cell phone—and his former spokesperson told Politico the Pentagon was in “total chaos,” and he fired three of his top aides, media articles today wrote that officials were looking for a new Secretary of Defense.
But Hegseth blamed the media for the exposure of his Signal chats, and Trump stood by Hegseth.
According to Dasha Burns, Eli Stokols, and Jake Traylor of Politico, the president doesn’t want to validate the stories about disarray at the Pentagon by firing Hegseth. “He’s doing a great job,” the president told reporters. “It’s just fake news.”
While the visible side of the administration appears to be floundering, new stories suggest that the less visible side—the “Department of Government Efficiency”—has dug into U.S. data in alarming ways.
On April 15, Jenna McLaughlin of NPR reported on an official whistleblower disclosure that as soon as members of the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) arrived at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), they appeared to be hacking into secure data. While they claimed to be looking for places to cut costs, the behavior of the DOGE team suggested something else was going on. They demanded the highest level of access, tried to hide their activities in the system, turned off monitoring tools, and then manually deleted the record of their tracks, all behaviors that cybersecurity experts told McLaughlin sounded like “what criminal or state-sponsored hackers might do.”
Staffers noticed that an IP address in Russia was trying to log in to the system using a newly created DOGE account with correct username and password, and later saw that a large amount of sensitive data was leaving the agency. Cybersecurity experts identified that spike as a sign of a breach in the system, creating the potential for that data to be sold, stolen, or used to hurt companies, while the head of DOGE himself could use the information for his own businesses. “All of this is alarming,” Russ Handorf, who worked in cybersecurity for the FBI, told McLaughlin. “If this was a publicly traded company, I would have to report this to the Securities and Exchange Commission.” When the whistleblower brought his concerns to someone at NLRB, he received threats.
“If he didn’t know the backstory, any worth his salt would look at network activity like this and assume it’s a nation-state attack from China or Russia,” Jake Braun, former acting principal deputy national cyber director at the White House, told McLaughlin.
McLaughlin noted that the story of what happened at the NLRB is not uncommon. When challenged by judges, DOGE has offered conflicting and vague answers to the question of why it needs access to sensitive information, and has dismissed concerns about cybersecurity and privacy. The administration has slashed through the agencies that protect systems from attack and Trump has signed an executive order urging government departments to “eliminate…information silos” and to share their information.
Sharon Block, the executive director of Harvard Law School’s Center for Labor and a Just Economy and a former NLRB board member, told McLaughlin: “There is nothing that I can see about what DOGE is doing that follows any of the standard procedures for how you do an audit that has integrity and that’s meaningful and will actually produce results that serve the normal auditing function, which is to look for fraud, waste and abuse…. The mismatch between what they’re doing and the established, professional way to do what they say they’re doing…that just kind of gives away the store, that they are not actually about finding more efficient ways for the government to operate.”
On April 18, Makena Kelly and Vittoria Elliott of Wired reported that DOGE is building a master database that knits together information from U.S. Customs and Immigration Services, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the Social Security Administration, and voting data from Pennsylvania and Florida. This appears to be designed to find and pressure undocumented immigrants, Kelly and Elliott reported, but the effects of the consolidation of data are not limited to them.
On April 15 the top Democrat on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Gerald Connolly of Virginia, asked the acting inspector general at the Department of Labor and the inspector general at the NLRB to investigate “any and all attempts to exfiltrate data and any attempts to cover up their activities.” Two days later, he made a similar request to the acting inspector general for the Social Security Administration.
Connolly wrote: “I am concerned that DOGE is moving personal information across agencies without the notification required under the Privacy Act or related laws, such that the American people are wholly unaware their data is being manipulated in this way.”
On April 17, Christopher Bing and Avi Asher-Schapiro of ProPublica reported that the administration is looking to replace the federal government’s $700 billion internal expense card program, known as SmartPay, with a contract awarded to the private company Ramp. Ramp is backed by investment firms tied to Trump and Musk.
While administration officials insist that SmartPay is wasteful, both Republican and Democratic budget experts say that’s wrong, according to Bing and Asher-Schapiro. “SmartPay is the lifeblood of the government,” former General Services Administration commissioner Sonny Hashmi told the reporters. “It’s a well-run program that solves real world problems…with exceptional levels of oversight and fraud prevention already baked in.”
“There’s a lot of money to be made by a new company coming in here,” said Hashmi. “But you have to ask: What is the problem that’s being solved?”
sarahs mum said:
Heather Cox Richardson
57m ·
April 21, 2025 (Monday)———————————————————————CUT———————————————————————
Gosh this stuff is tiring.
The US will impose tariffs ranging from 40% to 3521% on solar panels from Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia and Vietnam.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/apr/22/us-huge-tariffs-south-east-asian-solar-panels-energy-summit
Larry David: My Dinner With Adolf
Imagine my surprise when in the spring of 1939 a letter arrived at my house inviting me to dinner at the Old Chancellery with the world’s most reviled man, Adolf Hitler. I had been a vocal critic of his on the radio from the beginning, pretty much predicting everything he was going to do on the road to dictatorship. No one I knew encouraged me to go. “He’s Hitler. He’s a monster.” But eventually I concluded that hate gets us nowhere. I knew I couldn’t change his views, but we need to talk to the other side — even if it has invaded and annexed other countries and committed unspeakable crimes against humanity.
Two weeks later, I found myself on the front steps of the Old Chancellery and was led into an opulent living room, where a few of the Führer’s most vocal supporters had gathered: Himmler, Göring, Leni Riefenstahl and the Duke of Windsor, formerly King Edward VIII. We talked about some of the beautiful art on the walls that had been taken from the homes of Jews. But our conversation ended abruptly when we heard loud footsteps coming down the hallway. Everyone stiffened as Hitler entered the room.
He was wearing a tan suit with a swastika armband and gave me an enthusiastic greeting that caught me off guard. Frankly, it was a warmer greeting than I normally get from my parents, and it was accompanied by a slap on my back. I found the whole thing quite disarming. I joked that I was surprised to see him in a tan suit because if he wore that out, it would be perceived as un-Führer-like. That amused him to no end, and I realized I’d never seen him laugh before. Suddenly he seemed so human. Here I was, prepared to meet Hitler, the one I’d seen and heard — the public Hitler. But this private Hitler was a completely different animal. And oddly enough, this one seemed more authentic, like this was the real Hitler. The whole thing had my head spinning.
He said he was starving and led us into the dining room, where he gestured for me to sit next to him. Göring immediately grabbed a slice of pumpernickel, whereupon Hitler turned to me, gave me an eye roll, then whispered, “Watch. He’ll be done with his entire meal before you’ve taken two bites.” That one really got me. Göring, with his mouth full, asked what was so funny, and Hitler said, “I was just telling him about the time my dog had diarrhea in the Reichstag.” Göring remembered. How could he forget? He loved that story, especially the part where Hitler shot the dog before it got back into the car. Then a beaming Hitler said, “Hey, if I can kill Jews, Gypsies and homosexuals, I can certainly kill a dog!” That perhaps got the biggest laugh of the night — and believe me, there were plenty.
But it wasn’t just a one-way street, with the Führer dominating the conversation. He was quite inquisitive and asked me a lot of questions about myself. I told him I had just gone through a brutal breakup with my girlfriend because every time I went someplace without her, she was always insistent that I tell her everything I talked about. I can’t stand having to remember every detail of every conversation. Hitler said he could relate — he hated that, too. “What am I, a secretary?” He advised me it was best not to have any more contact with her or else I’d be right back where I started and eventually I’d have to go through the whole thing all over again. I said it must be easy for a dictator to go through a breakup. He said, “You’d be surprised. There are still feelings.” Hmm … there are still feelings. That really resonated with me. We’re not that different, after all. I thought that if only the world could see this side of him, people might have a completely different opinion.
Two hours later, the dinner was over, and the Führer escorted me to the door. “I am so glad to have met you. I hope I’m no longer the monster you thought I was.” “I must say, mein Führer, I’m so thankful I came. Although we disagree on many issues, it doesn’t mean that we have to hate each other.” And with that, I gave him a Nazi salute and walked out into the night.
Larry David is a comedian, writer and actor who created “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and was a co-creator of “Seinfeld.”
•
dv said:
Larry David: My Dinner With AdolfImagine my surprise when in the spring of 1939 a letter arrived at my house inviting me to dinner at the Old Chancellery with the world’s most reviled man, Adolf Hitler. I had been a vocal critic of his on the radio from the beginning, pretty much predicting everything he was going to do on the road to dictatorship. No one I knew encouraged me to go. “He’s Hitler. He’s a monster.” But eventually I concluded that hate gets us nowhere. I knew I couldn’t change his views, but we need to talk to the other side — even if it has invaded and annexed other countries and committed unspeakable crimes against humanity.
Two weeks later, I found myself on the front steps of the Old Chancellery and was led into an opulent living room, where a few of the Führer’s most vocal supporters had gathered: Himmler, Göring, Leni Riefenstahl and the Duke of Windsor, formerly King Edward VIII. We talked about some of the beautiful art on the walls that had been taken from the homes of Jews. But our conversation ended abruptly when we heard loud footsteps coming down the hallway. Everyone stiffened as Hitler entered the room.
He was wearing a tan suit with a swastika armband and gave me an enthusiastic greeting that caught me off guard. Frankly, it was a warmer greeting than I normally get from my parents, and it was accompanied by a slap on my back. I found the whole thing quite disarming. I joked that I was surprised to see him in a tan suit because if he wore that out, it would be perceived as un-Führer-like. That amused him to no end, and I realized I’d never seen him laugh before. Suddenly he seemed so human. Here I was, prepared to meet Hitler, the one I’d seen and heard — the public Hitler. But this private Hitler was a completely different animal. And oddly enough, this one seemed more authentic, like this was the real Hitler. The whole thing had my head spinning.He said he was starving and led us into the dining room, where he gestured for me to sit next to him. Göring immediately grabbed a slice of pumpernickel, whereupon Hitler turned to me, gave me an eye roll, then whispered, “Watch. He’ll be done with his entire meal before you’ve taken two bites.” That one really got me. Göring, with his mouth full, asked what was so funny, and Hitler said, “I was just telling him about the time my dog had diarrhea in the Reichstag.” Göring remembered. How could he forget? He loved that story, especially the part where Hitler shot the dog before it got back into the car. Then a beaming Hitler said, “Hey, if I can kill Jews, Gypsies and homosexuals, I can certainly kill a dog!” That perhaps got the biggest laugh of the night — and believe me, there were plenty.
But it wasn’t just a one-way street, with the Führer dominating the conversation. He was quite inquisitive and asked me a lot of questions about myself. I told him I had just gone through a brutal breakup with my girlfriend because every time I went someplace without her, she was always insistent that I tell her everything I talked about. I can’t stand having to remember every detail of every conversation. Hitler said he could relate — he hated that, too. “What am I, a secretary?” He advised me it was best not to have any more contact with her or else I’d be right back where I started and eventually I’d have to go through the whole thing all over again. I said it must be easy for a dictator to go through a breakup. He said, “You’d be surprised. There are still feelings.” Hmm … there are still feelings. That really resonated with me. We’re not that different, after all. I thought that if only the world could see this side of him, people might have a completely different opinion.
Two hours later, the dinner was over, and the Führer escorted me to the door. “I am so glad to have met you. I hope I’m no longer the monster you thought I was.” “I must say, mein Führer, I’m so thankful I came. Although we disagree on many issues, it doesn’t mean that we have to hate each other.” And with that, I gave him a Nazi salute and walked out into the night.Larry David is a comedian, writer and actor who created “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and was a co-creator of “Seinfeld.”
•
Witty Rejoinder said:
dv said:
Larry David: My Dinner With AdolfImagine my surprise when in the spring of 1939 a letter arrived at my house inviting me to dinner at the Old Chancellery with the world’s most reviled man, Adolf Hitler. I had been a vocal critic of his on the radio from the beginning, pretty much predicting everything he was going to do on the road to dictatorship. No one I knew encouraged me to go. “He’s Hitler. He’s a monster.” But eventually I concluded that hate gets us nowhere. I knew I couldn’t change his views, but we need to talk to the other side — even if it has invaded and annexed other countries and committed unspeakable crimes against humanity.
Two weeks later, I found myself on the front steps of the Old Chancellery and was led into an opulent living room, where a few of the Führer’s most vocal supporters had gathered: Himmler, Göring, Leni Riefenstahl and the Duke of Windsor, formerly King Edward VIII. We talked about some of the beautiful art on the walls that had been taken from the homes of Jews. But our conversation ended abruptly when we heard loud footsteps coming down the hallway. Everyone stiffened as Hitler entered the room.
He was wearing a tan suit with a swastika armband and gave me an enthusiastic greeting that caught me off guard. Frankly, it was a warmer greeting than I normally get from my parents, and it was accompanied by a slap on my back. I found the whole thing quite disarming. I joked that I was surprised to see him in a tan suit because if he wore that out, it would be perceived as un-Führer-like. That amused him to no end, and I realized I’d never seen him laugh before. Suddenly he seemed so human. Here I was, prepared to meet Hitler, the one I’d seen and heard — the public Hitler. But this private Hitler was a completely different animal. And oddly enough, this one seemed more authentic, like this was the real Hitler. The whole thing had my head spinning.He said he was starving and led us into the dining room, where he gestured for me to sit next to him. Göring immediately grabbed a slice of pumpernickel, whereupon Hitler turned to me, gave me an eye roll, then whispered, “Watch. He’ll be done with his entire meal before you’ve taken two bites.” That one really got me. Göring, with his mouth full, asked what was so funny, and Hitler said, “I was just telling him about the time my dog had diarrhea in the Reichstag.” Göring remembered. How could he forget? He loved that story, especially the part where Hitler shot the dog before it got back into the car. Then a beaming Hitler said, “Hey, if I can kill Jews, Gypsies and homosexuals, I can certainly kill a dog!” That perhaps got the biggest laugh of the night — and believe me, there were plenty.
But it wasn’t just a one-way street, with the Führer dominating the conversation. He was quite inquisitive and asked me a lot of questions about myself. I told him I had just gone through a brutal breakup with my girlfriend because every time I went someplace without her, she was always insistent that I tell her everything I talked about. I can’t stand having to remember every detail of every conversation. Hitler said he could relate — he hated that, too. “What am I, a secretary?” He advised me it was best not to have any more contact with her or else I’d be right back where I started and eventually I’d have to go through the whole thing all over again. I said it must be easy for a dictator to go through a breakup. He said, “You’d be surprised. There are still feelings.” Hmm … there are still feelings. That really resonated with me. We’re not that different, after all. I thought that if only the world could see this side of him, people might have a completely different opinion.
Two hours later, the dinner was over, and the Führer escorted me to the door. “I am so glad to have met you. I hope I’m no longer the monster you thought I was.” “I must say, mein Führer, I’m so thankful I came. Although we disagree on many issues, it doesn’t mean that we have to hate each other.” And with that, I gave him a Nazi salute and walked out into the night.Larry David is a comedian, writer and actor who created “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and was a co-creator of “Seinfeld.”
•
Never much liked Bill Maher.
I was going to ask what this was all about, but I have now consulted the bingbot, so I don’t need to.
HHS Plans to Cut the National Suicide Hotline’s Program for LGBTQ Youth
In February, the program received an average of 2,100 contacts per day.
The federal government plans to eliminate services for LGBTQ youth who call 988, the national suicide and crisis hotline, according to a Health and Human Services budget draft leaked last week. The budget, first reported by the Washington Post, would go into effect in October if approved by Congress.
Since the hotline’s launch in 2022, callers have been able to speak with counselors trained to work with specific at-risk populations, including LGBTQ youth, who are four times more likely to attempt suicide than their peers.
The service for LGBTQ youth has received 1.3 million calls, texts, or chats since 2022. In February, the program received an average of 2,100 contacts per day.
“Here we are cutting off the nation’s lifeline to those in crisis,” says Paolo del Vecchio, former director of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration’s Office of Recovery. “Due to the discriminatory practices of the Trump administration, they’re pulling that life preserver away from thousands and thousands of people.”
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/04/national-suicide-hotline-lgbtq-youth-cuts-rfk-jr-hhs/
If Trump and his cronies had their way, all the leftie commies would be in concentration camps.
derek guy
@dieworkwear
Rumors are going around that Pete Hegseth might be on his way out. I don’t know if that’s true, but just in case, I want to do a thread on his style. To me, Hegseth’s wardrobe reflects a common pitfall guys fall into when they first start caring about clothes. 🧵
roughbarked said:
If Trump and his cronies had their way, all the leftie commies would be in concentration camps.
Hey this 1930s motion picture sounds familiar, what’s it called again¿
Spiny Norman said:
HHS Plans to Cut the National Suicide Hotline’s Program for LGBTQ Youth
In February, the program received an average of 2,100 contacts per day.The federal government plans to eliminate services for LGBTQ youth who call 988, the national suicide and crisis hotline, according to a Health and Human Services budget draft leaked last week. The budget, first reported by the Washington Post, would go into effect in October if approved by Congress.
Since the hotline’s launch in 2022, callers have been able to speak with counselors trained to work with specific at-risk populations, including LGBTQ youth, who are four times more likely to attempt suicide than their peers.
The service for LGBTQ youth has received 1.3 million calls, texts, or chats since 2022. In February, the program received an average of 2,100 contacts per day.
“Here we are cutting off the nation’s lifeline to those in crisis,” says Paolo del Vecchio, former director of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration’s Office of Recovery. “Due to the discriminatory practices of the Trump administration, they’re pulling that life preserver away from thousands and thousands of people.”
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/04/national-suicide-hotline-lgbtq-youth-cuts-rfk-jr-hhs/
‘ken arses.
Spiny Norman said:
HHS Plans to Cut the National Suicide Hotline’s Program for LGBTQ Youth
In February, the program received an average of 2,100 contacts per day.The federal government plans to eliminate services for LGBTQ youth who call 988, the national suicide and crisis hotline, according to a Health and Human Services budget draft leaked last week. The budget, first reported by the Washington Post, would go into effect in October if approved by Congress.
Since the hotline’s launch in 2022, callers have been able to speak with counselors trained to work with specific at-risk populations, including LGBTQ youth, who are four times more likely to attempt suicide than their peers.
The service for LGBTQ youth has received 1.3 million calls, texts, or chats since 2022. In February, the program received an average of 2,100 contacts per day.
“Here we are cutting off the nation’s lifeline to those in crisis,” says Paolo del Vecchio, former director of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration’s Office of Recovery. “Due to the discriminatory practices of the Trump administration, they’re pulling that life preserver away from thousands and thousands of people.”
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/04/national-suicide-hotline-lgbtq-youth-cuts-rfk-jr-hhs/
Those further tax cuts for the very very wealthy aren’t going to fund themselves.
‘Jeeves, fetch me my Wednesday ivory back scratcher, and be quick about it unless you want a quick trip to El Salvador’
Spiny Norman said:
HHS Plans to Cut the National Suicide Hotline’s Program for LGBTQ Youth
In February, the program received an average of 2,100 contacts per day.The federal government plans to eliminate services for LGBTQ youth who call 988, the national suicide and crisis hotline, according to a Health and Human Services budget draft leaked last week. The budget, first reported by the Washington Post, would go into effect in October if approved by Congress.
Since the hotline’s launch in 2022, callers have been able to speak with counselors trained to work with specific at-risk populations, including LGBTQ youth, who are four times more likely to attempt suicide than their peers.
The service for LGBTQ youth has received 1.3 million calls, texts, or chats since 2022. In February, the program received an average of 2,100 contacts per day.
“Here we are cutting off the nation’s lifeline to those in crisis,” says Paolo del Vecchio, former director of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration’s Office of Recovery. “Due to the discriminatory practices of the Trump administration, they’re pulling that life preserver away from thousands and thousands of people.”
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/04/national-suicide-hotline-lgbtq-youth-cuts-rfk-jr-hhs/
Fuck those bastards all the way to hell.
Hegseth’s sons are all of us….Link
Also note the differences in the lengths of his sideburns and the way his voice cracks when he says “former employees”. LOLOLOL…
https://www.jefftiedrich.com/p/convicted-felon-whines-about-having
LOL, jeff has the same clip of whatsisname (gary) as I do.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZFUVI6symA
kii said:
and should not be attempting to indoctrinate small children.
kii said:
and this, kids, is the day I killed a man, and all my followers said, ‘are you ok?’ and I replied ‘ye…. can you get my good side’
kii said:
Arse.
Baring teeth while talking to children? Not good. Intimidatory.
Michael V said:
kii said:
Arse.
Baring teeth while talking to children? Not good. Intimidatory.
He doesn’t care. He has to be bigger than everybody. He does the same stuff to anyone he can stand taller than.
The $10 million that Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration diverted to a state-created charity last year consisted of Medicaid dollars owed to state and federal taxpayers, contrary to what the governor and other officials have publicly asserted. Three years ago, lawyers working with the state drew up a settlement agreement that said Florida’s largest Medicaid contractor, Centene, overbilled taxpayers $67,048,611 for medications, according to a copy of a draft agreement obtained by the Herald/Times. That’s the exact amount DeSantis officials settled on with Centene last year. But instead of returning all $67 million to state and federal coffers, they sent $10 million of it to the Hope Florida Foundation, a charity overseen by first lady Casey DeSantis. The money was then sent to two nonprofit organizations that aren’t required to report how they spend their funds. Those “dark money” groups later gave $8.5 million to a political committee overseen by DeSantis’ chief of staff in a series of transactions that some Republican lawmakers believe was illegal. How Medicaid is allocated, which pays for healthcare services for the poor, is highly regulated. The document contradicts statements by DeSantis and state officials that the $10 million was a charitable contribution by Centene separate from what it owed to the state. DeSantis said earlier this month that the $10 million “was in addition to what they were getting.” “This is kind of like a cherry on top, where they agreed to make an additional contribution,” he said, in his only detailed remarks since the unusual settlement became the target of a House Republican investigation. DeSantis has primarily responded to the accusations by lashing out at reporters and lawmakers who have questioned aspects of the Hope Florida initiative, which is intended to move Floridians off of government services.
The February 2022 draft agreement was drawn up the same month that DeSantis’ then-chief of staff began settlement negotiations, calendar entries show. Florida officials first became aware that Centene owed the state money in 2021. At the time, Ohio, Mississippi and other states were reaching settlements with the Medicaid giant after it overbilled for prescription drugs. The overbilling was uncovered by politically connected Mississippi law firms, which helped states negotiate settlements with Centene in exchange for millions of dollars in contingency fees, the New York Times reported last year. The data the law firms used to calculate how much each state was owed is hidden from the public, the Times reported, making it impossible to know whether Centene paid its full share. Florida signed on with one of the firms, Liston & Deas, in December 2021. Months earlier, other lawyers working with the firm on the Centene settlements donated $100,000 to the Republican Party of Florida and $10,000 to then-Attorney General Ashley Moody’s political committee. DeSantis spokespeople and state officials have said that Centene was the first to notify the state it owed money. But that doesn’t align with what one of the original attorneys said.
“We approached states, including Florida, that were eligible to participate,” attorney Lawrence Deas said in a statement Monday. On Feb. 10, 2022, DeSantis’ chief of staff, James Uthmeier, had a “Centene Call” with some of those lawyers, according to calendar entries first unearthed by investigative reporter Jason Garcia from the newsletter Seeking Rents. The records were posted on the governor’s public records portal. On June 16 that year, Uthmeier had another meeting with a lobbyist representing the lawyers, records show. He was joined by top DeSantis administration officials, including Deputy Chief of Staff Katie Strickland. Strickland oversees the healthcare agencies carrying out DeSantis’ Hope Florida initiative, including the Agency for Health Care Administration. Though Casey DeSantis has no official chief of staff, Strickland functionally serves in that role, according to four people familiar with the administration’s operations. Uthmeier and Strickland had three more meetings that year about Centene, including one with the CEO of the company’s Florida subsidiary, records show. Where the negotiations with Centene went after 2022 is unclear. Last month, KFF Health News reported that Florida and Georgia were the final holdouts among more than 20 states that had reached settlements with Centene. Florida officials didn’t respond to the news outlet’s questions. (Nearly all the states announced their settlements in news releases.)
It wasn’t publicly disclosed by the state until this month, when reporters and state Rep. Alex Andrade, a Pensacola Republican, began inquiring about a mysterious $10 million donation the Hope Florida Foundation had received as a result of a “longstanding dispute” with the state. The law firm Liston & Deas wasn’t part of the final settlement. The state fired them in 2023 and never paid them for their services, records show. Deas told the Herald/Times on Monday that a donation to Hope Florida Foundation was not mentioned in the settlement talks, and the firm didn’t learn of it until its lawyers saw media reports. DeSantis this month said the settlement was a “good deal” for the state. “There was a potential you could have filed a lawsuit,” he said. “But I can tell you, you look at it, it was not a clear-cut case that we were guaranteed to win, and certainly not guaranteed to win that much money.” DeSantis spokesperson Bryan Griffin said the negotiations were handled by the Agency for Health Care Administration.
“Centene proactively made the state aware of a billing issue in 2021 and the state worked for years to ensure it was resolved,” Griffin said in a statement. “ settlement was a great benefit to the state,” he added. Uthmeier, whom DeSantis named attorney general this year, said in a news conference Tuesday that he “wasn’t part of securing the deal that was struck.” “My understanding is that there was a sweetener in there, that Centene’s estimated harms to the state was $56, $57 million,” he said. “If it’s a contribution to a 501©(3) entity, that is not state dollars, that is not Medicaid dollars,” Uthmeier added. Spokesperson Jeremy Redfern said in a statement that Uthmeier was not involved in the 2024 settlement. He said the settlement talks were referred to the Agency for Health Care Administration, “the proper agency to manage the issue.” The then-secretary for the Agency for Health Care Administration, which oversees Medicaid, attended none of the five Centene-related meetings in 2022, according to the records. The agency’s assistant deputy secretary for Medicaid attended one meeting. Andrade, who has been investigating the $10 million transfer to the Hope Florida Foundation, told the Herald/Times on Monday that DeSantis “is either misinformed by his shrinking circle, or he’s lying.”
“This was Medicaid money that was squandered, plain and simple,” he said. He said the meeting records raise new questions about why the state waited so long to finalize the agreement. “They were in no rush until suddenly they needed cash to fund their campaign” against Amendment 3, he said. The 2024 initiative, which failed, would have allowed recreational marijuana in Florida. DeSantis threw his political weight against it during the past election season. “Now, we’re just trying to drill down on whose bright idea it was to carve out the $10 million for Hope Florida,” Andrade said.
Read more at: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/state-politics/article304665166.html#storylink=cpy
roughbarked said:
Michael V said:
kii said:
Arse.
Baring teeth while talking to children? Not good. Intimidatory.
He doesn’t care. He has to be bigger than everybody. He does the same stuff to anyone he can stand taller than.
He can’t help it. He’s all intimidation. Nothing but.
He substitutes intimidation and bullying for intelligence, knowledge, understanding, and skill.
Bluff, bluster, pretence, illusion, disguise, distraction, and a facade of menace; if none of those work, he’s got nothing.
captain_spalding said:
roughbarked said:
Michael V said:Arse.
Baring teeth while talking to children? Not good. Intimidatory.
He doesn’t care. He has to be bigger than everybody. He does the same stuff to anyone he can stand taller than.
He can’t help it. He’s all intimidation. Nothing but.
He substitutes intimidation and bullying for intelligence, knowledge, understanding, and skill.
Bluff, bluster, pretence, illusion, disguise, distraction, and a facade of menace; if none of those work, he’s got nothing.
That’s about as correct as you can get. I’m sure Neutrino will find a lot more.
and Vance is trying to force India to buy F35’s.
roughbarked said:
“If we fail to work together successfully, the 21st century could be a very dark time for all of humanity,” he said.
and Vance is trying to force India to buy F35’s.
roughbarked said:
and Vance is trying to force India to buy F35’s.
Not a lot of trust the US will supply spare parts of use its kill switch if it deems fit.
Heather Cox Richardson
2h ·
April 22, 2025 (Tuesday)
Today is Earth Day, celebrated for the first time in 1970. The spark for the first Earth Day was the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. A marine biologist and best-selling author, Carson showed the devastating effects of people on nature by documenting the effect of modern pesticides on the natural world. She focused on the popular pesticide DDT, which had been developed in 1939 and used to clear islands in the South Pacific of malaria-carrying mosquitoes during World War II. Deployed as an insect killer in the U.S. after the war, DDT was poisoning the natural food chain in American waters.
DDT sprayed on vegetation washed into the oceans. It concentrated in fish, which were then eaten by birds of prey, especially ospreys. The DDT caused the birds to lay eggs with abnormally thin eggshells, so thin the eggs cracked in the nest when the parent birds tried to incubate them. And so the birds began to die off.
Carson was unable to interest any publishing company in the story of DDT. Finally, frustrated at the popular lack of interest in the story behind the devastation of birds, she decided to write the story anyway, turning out a highly readable book with 55 pages of footnotes to make her case.
When The New Yorker began to serialize Carson’s book in June 1962, chemical company leaders were scathing. “If man were to faithfully follow the teachings of Miss Carson,” an executive of the American Cyanamid Company said, “we would return to the Dark Ages, and the insects and diseases and vermin would once again inherit the earth.” Officers of Monsanto questioned Carson’s sanity.
But her portrait of the dangerous overuse of chemicals and their effect on living organisms caught readers’ attention. They were willing to listen. Carson’s book sold more than half a million copies in 24 countries.
Democratic president John F. Kennedy asked the President’s Science Advisory Committee to look into Carson’s argument, and the committee vindicated her. Before she died of breast cancer in 1964, Carson noted: “Man’s attitude toward nature is today critically important simply because we have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature. But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself? challenged as mankind has never been challenged before to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature, but of ourselves.”
Meanwhile, a number of scientists followed up on Carson’s argument and in 1967 organized the Environmental Defense Fund to protect the environment by lobbying for a ban on DDT. As they worked, Americans began to pay closer attention to human effects on the environment, especially after three crucial moments: First, on December 24, 1968, astronaut William Anders took a color picture of the Earth rising over the horizon of the moon from outer space during the Apollo 8 mission, powerfully illustrating the beauty and isolation of the globe on which we all live.
Then, over 10 days in January–February 1969, a massive oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara, California, poured between 80,000 and 100,000 barrels of oil into the Pacific, fouling 35 miles of California beaches and killing seabirds, dolphins, sea lions, and elephant seals. Public outrage ran so high that President Nixon himself, a Republican, went to Santa Barbara in March to see the cleanup efforts, telling the American public that “the Santa Barbara incident has frankly touched the conscience of the American people.”
And then, in June 1969, the chemical contaminants that had been dumped into Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River caught fire. A dumping ground for local heavy industry, the river had actually burned more than ten times in the previous century, but with increased focus on environmental damage, this time the burning river garnered national attention.
In February 1970, President Richard M. Nixon sent to Congress a special message “on environmental quality.” “e…have too casually and too long abused our natural environment,” he wrote. “The time has come when we can wait no longer to repair the damage already done, and to establish new criteria to guide us in the future.”
“The tasks that need doing require money, resolve and ingenuity,” Nixon said, “and they are too big to be done by government alone. They call for fundamentally new philosophies of land, air and water use, for stricter regulation, for expanded government action, for greater citizen involvement, and for new programs to ensure that government, industry and individuals all are called on to do their share of the job and to pay their share of the cost.”
Meanwhile, Gaylord Nelson, a Democratic senator from Wisconsin, visited the Santa Barbara oil spill and hoped to turn the same sort of enthusiasm people were bringing to protests against the Vietnam War to efforts to protect the environment. He announced a teach-in on college campuses, which soon grew into a wider movement across the country. Their “Earth Day,” held on April 22, 1970, brought 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. The movement included members of all political parties, rich Americans and their poorer neighbors, people who lived in the city and those in the country, labor leaders and their employers. Fifty-five years later, it is still one of the largest protests in American history.
Today the White House under President Donald J. Trump celebrated Earth Day by announcing that “we finally have a president who follows science,” with policies “rooted in the belief that Americans are the best stewards of our vast natural resources—no ‘Green New Scam’ required.” One of the policies the White House champions is “opening more federal lands and waters for oil, gas, and critical mineral extraction.”
Four days ago, on April 18, journalist Wes Siler noted in his Wes Siler’s Newsletter that the day before, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum had signed an extraordinary order. The order assigned to the assistant secretary for policy, management, and budget, or AS-PMB, control over the Department of the Interior, including its personnel and its budget.
Siler explains that “he person currently serving as AS-PMB (which in normal times would require Senate confirmation) is DOGE operative Tyler Hassen, the CEO of a Houston-based energy company.” Jennifer Rokala, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Western Priorities, said in a statement: “Elon Musk is now effectively in charge of America’s public lands.”
Siler notes that Burgum has handed power over the Department of the Interior to “a hitherto unknown political operative” who is holding his position in violation of the appointments clause of the Constitution.
He also notes that the Department of the Interior “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,” in addition to the National Park Service. “As such,” Siler writes, “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.”
Burgum’s order says that his order is designed “to effectuate the consolidation, unification and optimization of administrative functions within the Department of the Interior…in order to achieve effectiveness, accountability and cost savings for the American taxpayer.” In other words, he is falling back on the idea of further cuts to the U.S. government in order to save money.
In fact, the public lands already make billions of dollars a year for the United States through tourism, but since the 1970s, the right wing has come to see the public ownership of lands as an affront to the idea that individuals should be able to use the resources they believe God has put there for them to use. Developers have encouraged that ideology, for privatization of America’s western lands has always meant that they ended up in the hands of a few wealthy individuals.
That impulse shows in Project 2025. As Melinda Taylor, senior lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin Law School, told Bloomberg Law in November: “Project 2025 is a ‘wish list’ for the oil and gas and mining industries and private developers. It promotes opening up more of our federal land to energy development, rolling back protections on federal lands, and selling off more land to private developers.”
Burgum appears to be on board with that plan. On January 16, in his confirmation hearings, Burgum made it clear that he sees selling the public lands as a source of revenue, referring to them as “America’s balance sheet.” “e’ve got $36 trillion in debt,” he said, but “e never talk about the assets, and the assets are the land and minerals.” The Interior Department, he said, “has got close to 500 million acres of surface. It’s 700 million acres of subsurface and over 2 billion acres of offshore…. That’s the balance sheet of America…. I believe we ought to have a deep inventory of all the assets in America. We ought to understand…what is our assets, 100 trillion, 200 trillion? We could be in great shape as a country.”
sarahs mum said:
Heather Cox Richardson
2h ·
April 22, 2025 (Tuesday)……………………………………………………………….cut…………………………………………………………..
Sad.
Also, I want to thank the White House Historical Association and all of the people that work so hard with Melania, with everybody, to keep this incredible house or building, or whatever you want to call it — because there really is no name for it; it is special — and we keep it in tip-top shape. We call it sometimes tippy-top shape. And it’s a great, great place.
easter 2018
The surveillance footage of the incident at The Capital Burger restaurant in Washington, DC, showed the suspect purposefully moving close to Noem as he zeroed in on her Gucci bag near her feet, a law enforcement source said.
The thief, dressed in dark clothing, sat down at an empty table next to Noem with his back facing her and used his left foot to slide the bag away, the source said. He surveyed the restaurant before eventually picking up the bag, covering it with his jacket and leaving.
Only when Noem got up from the table did she realize her bag was missing, the source said.
Items inside the Gucci bag included a Louis Vuitton Clemence wallet, Noem’s driver’s license, medication, apartment keys, passport, DHS access badge, makeup bag, blank checks, and about $3,000 in cash.
nice and secure
The six men who battered and dragged Teresa Bohrenpohl out of the Town Hall meeting in Idaho have been charged with various offences.
https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/5260888-kootenai-county-republican-security-charges/
Paul Trouette, Russell Dunne, Christofer Berg and Jesse Jones were charged with misdemeanor battery, false imprisonment, and violations of security agent duties and uniform requirements, while Alex Trouette IV is charged with security agent duties and uniform violations, the Coeur d’Alene City Prosecutor’s office told The Hill.
Michael Keller, who was not hired by the security firm, is being charged with misdemeanor battery, the prosecutor’s office said.
Divine Angel said:
RFK Jr was born 2 years after mr kii. When mr kii was young, in backwoods Montana, he was hyperactive and disruptive. People from his peer group remember that he was a kind and thoughtful kid, never malicious.
The family doctor suggested that his mum give him a lot of quality time, one on one, to help him focus. His teachers found his behaviour challenging.
mr kii remembered special outings with his mum, and her patience sometimes being a bit thin, but she tried the undivided attention parenting technique. There were 4 other kids, one quite ill and a number of miscarriages including twins. My husband was definitely ADHD, there was no diagnosis or label at that time.
This was before vaccinations.
So RFK Jr can go fuck off about what he remembers. Also – THEY ARE NOT INJURIES YOU SICK MONSTER!!!
Mr kii’s mum sounds lovely.
Divine Angel said:
Mr kii’s mum sounds lovely.
Olivia was a character. When she was in the nursing home, with dementia, she climbed a fence to escape.
Divine Angel said:
poor rosemary kennedy.
sarahs mum said:
Divine Angel said:
poor rosemary kennedy.
Rosemary, the third child of Joseph P. Kennedy and Rose Fitzgerald’s nine children, was born mentally impaired and struggled with behavioral issues and rages in her younger years. By 18, she was still at the fourth-grade level in school while her other siblings were advancing in academia and politics.
When she was 23, her father scheduled a lobotomy without telling his wife. The procedure had disastrous consequences, leaving Rosemary with the mental capacity of a toddler.
Divine Angel said:
never heard of any of those as a kid either. i’m sure they existed though.
dv said:
The six men who battered and dragged Teresa Bohrenpohl out of the Town Hall meeting in Idaho have been charged with various offences.https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/5260888-kootenai-county-republican-security-charges/
Paul Trouette, Russell Dunne, Christofer Berg and Jesse Jones were charged with misdemeanor battery, false imprisonment, and violations of security agent duties and uniform requirements, while Alex Trouette IV is charged with security agent duties and uniform violations, the Coeur d’Alene City Prosecutor’s office told The Hill.
Michael Keller, who was not hired by the security firm, is being charged with misdemeanor battery, the prosecutor’s office said.
Good.
sarahs mum said:
sarahs mum said:
Divine Angel said:
poor rosemary kennedy.
Rosemary, the third child of Joseph P. Kennedy and Rose Fitzgerald’s nine children, was born mentally impaired and struggled with behavioral issues and rages in her younger years. By 18, she was still at the fourth-grade level in school while her other siblings were advancing in academia and politics.
When she was 23, her father scheduled a lobotomy without telling his wife. The procedure had disastrous consequences, leaving Rosemary with the mental capacity of a toddler.
Bloody!
:(
Michael V said:
kii said:
Trump May Soon Offer a Motherhood Medal, an Idea Popularized in Nazi Germany
Gosh!
well
France has issued a similar medal since 1920
kii said:
Divine Angel said:
RFK Jr was born 2 years after mr kii. When mr kii was young, in backwoods Montana, he was hyperactive and disruptive. People from his peer group remember that he was a kind and thoughtful kid, never malicious.
The family doctor suggested that his mum give him a lot of quality time, one on one, to help him focus. His teachers found his behaviour challenging.
mr kii remembered special outings with his mum, and her patience sometimes being a bit thin, but she tried the undivided attention parenting technique. There were 4 other kids, one quite ill and a number of miscarriages including twins. My husband was definitely ADHD, there was no diagnosis or label at that time.
This was before vaccinations.So RFK Jr can go fuck off about what he remembers. Also – THEY ARE NOT INJURIES YOU SICK MONSTER!!!
this
SCIENCE said:
Michael V said:
kii said:
Trump May Soon Offer a Motherhood Medal, an Idea Popularized in Nazi Germany
Gosh!
well
France has issued a similar medal since 1920
Other countries give their mothers medals, I only got stitches.
Divine Angel said:
SCIENCE said:Michael V said:
Gosh!
well
France has issued a similar medal since 1920
Other countries give their mothers medals, I only got stitches.
Tamb said:
Divine Angel said:
SCIENCE said:well
France has issued a similar medal since 1920
Other countries give their mothers medals, I only got stitches.
mz Tamb got child endowment payments for several years.
I also got child endowment for a few years.
Tamb said:
Divine Angel said:
SCIENCE said:well
France has issued a similar medal since 1920
Other countries give their mothers medals, I only got stitches.
mz Tamb got child endowment payments for several years.
I joke, but I did get PPL and several hours of free childcare which other countries don’t have.
Yesterday I was reading a thread on Reddit about these “mother medals” and baby bonus payments. The Americans were saying giving birth cost them tens of thousands of dollars even with insurance, while the rest of the world were like, “my baby was in NICU for three months and I only paid for parking”. The American healthcare “system” is completely insane.
Michael V said:
Tamb said:
Divine Angel said:Other countries give their mothers medals, I only got stitches.
mz Tamb got child endowment payments for several years.I also got child endowment for a few years.
Child Endowment was a non-means tested, universal allowance introduced by the Commonwealth government in 1941. The Child Endowment Act 1941 provided that a sum of 5 shillings per week, for each child after the first under the age of 16 years, be paid directly to the mother.
Michael V said:
Tamb said:
Divine Angel said:
Other countries give their mothers medals, I only got stitches.
mz Tamb got child endowment payments for several years.
I also got child endowment for a few years.
apparently it’s different now
https://www.servicesaustralia.gov.au/family-tax-benefit-part-payment-rates?context=22151
Ah well we’re old enough to remember when we were all meant to have one for female parent, one for male parent, and one for this gorgeous guy.
I got endowment payments when I worked as a gigolo…
JudgeMental said:
I got endowment payments when I worked as a gigolo…
Divine Angel said:
Tamb said:
Divine Angel said:Other countries give their mothers medals, I only got stitches.
mz Tamb got child endowment payments for several years.I joke, but I did get PPL and several hours of free childcare which other countries don’t have.
Yesterday I was reading a thread on Reddit about these “mother medals” and baby bonus payments. The Americans were saying giving birth cost them tens of thousands of dollars even with insurance, while the rest of the world were like, “my baby was in NICU for three months and I only paid for parking”. The American healthcare “system” is completely insane.
They consider systems like ours to be the work of Communist Marxists.
Michael V said:
Divine Angel said:
Tamb said:mz Tamb got child endowment payments for several years.
I joke, but I did get PPL and several hours of free childcare which other countries don’t have.
Yesterday I was reading a thread on Reddit about these “mother medals” and baby bonus payments. The Americans were saying giving birth cost them tens of thousands of dollars even with insurance, while the rest of the world were like, “my baby was in NICU for three months and I only paid for parking”. The American healthcare “system” is completely insane.
They consider systems like ours to be the work of Communist Marxists.
Liberal Communist Marxists, if you don’t mind.
Tamb said:
Michael V said:
Tamb said:mz Tamb got child endowment payments for several years.
I also got child endowment for a few years.
Child Endowment was a non-means tested, universal allowance introduced by the Commonwealth government in 1941. The Child Endowment Act 1941 provided that a sum of 5 shillings per week, for each child after the first under the age of 16 years, be paid directly to the mother.
I got a bonus for both my babies… apparently they wanted us to have them… so they paid us. Many people around that same time used the money to buy the flat screen TV babysitters… we put ours into accounts that we have been contributing to ever since… and now that the kids pay ‘rent’ ($50 per week) that money also goes into these accounts. we haven’t decided when they will get the money.. but it will probably be when they purchase a home, if they dont need it for something before that.
Arts said:
Tamb said:
Michael V said:I also got child endowment for a few years.
Child Endowment was a non-means tested, universal allowance introduced by the Commonwealth government in 1941. The Child Endowment Act 1941 provided that a sum of 5 shillings per week, for each child after the first under the age of 16 years, be paid directly to the mother.
I got a bonus for both my babies… apparently they wanted us to have them… so they paid us. Many people around that same time used the money to buy the flat screen TV babysitters… we put ours into accounts that we have been contributing to ever since… and now that the kids pay ‘rent’ ($50 per week) that money also goes into these accounts. we haven’t decided when they will get the money.. but it will probably be when they purchase a home, if they dont need it for something before that.
we missed the baby bonus… did get 50% childcare allowance though
The Rev Dodgson said:
Michael V said:
Divine Angel said:I joke, but I did get PPL and several hours of free childcare which other countries don’t have.
Yesterday I was reading a thread on Reddit about these “mother medals” and baby bonus payments. The Americans were saying giving birth cost them tens of thousands of dollars even with insurance, while the rest of the world were like, “my baby was in NICU for three months and I only paid for parking”. The American healthcare “system” is completely insane.
They consider systems like ours to be the work of Communist Marxists.
Liberal Communist Marxists, if you don’t mind.
Oh, OK.
JudgeMental said:
Divine Angel said:
never heard of any of those as a kid either. i’m sure they existed though.
I mean when he was a kid, plate tectonics wasn’t widely accepted. He can’t expect the state of learning to remain static for 70 years.
dv said:
JudgeMental said:
Divine Angel said:
never heard of any of those as a kid either. i’m sure they existed though.
I mean when he was a kid, plate tectonics wasn’t widely accepted. He can’t expect the state of learning to remain static for 70 years.
Especially his learnin’s.
I’m old enough to remember the Howard and Rudd eras when the baby bonus was several thousand dollars.
Michael V said:
The Rev Dodgson said:
Michael V said:They consider systems like ours to be the work of Communist Marxists.
Liberal Communist Marxists, if you don’t mind.
Oh, OK.
They bump up prices considerably as well
I remember reading about snake bite treatment in the USA
The antivenom cost in another country was $40 or so per shot and in the USA it was something like a $1000
The cost for the treatment in the USA in total was around $75,000.
dv said:
I’m old enough to remember the Howard and Rudd eras when the baby bonus was several thousand dollars.
Also known as ‘the plasma TV bonus’.
Cymek said:
Michael V said:
The Rev Dodgson said:Liberal Communist Marxists, if you don’t mind.
Oh, OK.
They bump up prices considerably as well
I remember reading about snake bite treatment in the USA
The antivenom cost in another country was $40 or so per shot and in the USA it was something like a $1000
The cost for the treatment in the USA in total was around $75,000.
That’s because of the way that American hospitals and health funds work out how much the funds will pay the hospital.
It’s a matter of negotiation, wrangling, and deal-making over every claim against the funds.
The hospital will price it high, like $1,000 for an injection. The health fund will say no, how about $40 instead, and the back-and-forth begins.
Eventually, they settle on a negotiated price, which applies to that treatment by that hospital for patients who belong to that fund.
If, however, you don’t belong to some health insurance fund, the hospital just presents you with their $1,000 price, and that’s your lot.
Cymek said:
Michael V said:
The Rev Dodgson said:Liberal Communist Marxists, if you don’t mind.
Oh, OK.
They bump up prices considerably as well
I remember reading about snake bite treatment in the USA
The antivenom cost in another country was $40 or so per shot and in the USA it was something like a $1000
The cost for the treatment in the USA in total was around $75,000.
Toddler’s backyard snakebite bills totaled more than a quarter million dollars
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/toddlers-backyard-snakebite-bills-totaled-more-than-a-quarter-million-dollars/
fsm said:
Cymek said:
Michael V said:Oh, OK.
They bump up prices considerably as well
I remember reading about snake bite treatment in the USA
The antivenom cost in another country was $40 or so per shot and in the USA it was something like a $1000
The cost for the treatment in the USA in total was around $75,000.Toddler’s backyard snakebite bills totaled more than a quarter million dollars
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/toddlers-backyard-snakebite-bills-totaled-more-than-a-quarter-million-dollars/
dv said:
I’m old enough to remember the Howard and Rudd eras when the baby bonus was several thousand dollars.
Um. Yes.
Tamb said:
fsm said:
Cymek said:
They bump up prices considerably as well
I remember reading about snake bite treatment in the USA
The antivenom cost in another country was $40 or so per shot and in the USA it was something like a $1000
The cost for the treatment in the USA in total was around $75,000.Toddler’s backyard snakebite bills totaled more than a quarter million dollars
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/toddlers-backyard-snakebite-bills-totaled-more-than-a-quarter-million-dollars/Wiki says
In Australia, treatment for a bite may cost around AUD$6,000, but this cost is covered by Medicare.
so they’re ripping off our poor unsuspecting tax paying good Aussie battlers
Arts said:
dv said:
I’m old enough to remember the Howard and Rudd eras when the baby bonus was several thousand dollars.Um. Yes.
Fraser was making life not meant to be easy when we started having babies.
dv said:
JudgeMental said:
Divine Angel said:
never heard of any of those as a kid either. i’m sure they existed though.
I mean when he was a kid, plate tectonics wasn’t widely accepted. He can’t expect the state of learning to remain static for 70 years.
they still go by that satirical novel in 2 parts
roughbarked said:
Arts said:
dv said:
I’m old enough to remember the Howard and Rudd eras when the baby bonus was several thousand dollars.Um. Yes.
Fraser was making life not meant to be easy when we started having babies.
And his brother Niles even worse
Cymek said:
roughbarked said:
Arts said:Um. Yes.
Fraser was making life not meant to be easy when we started having babies.
And his brother Niles even worse
And to think that scrawny bastard married Daphne, it’s not right.
SCIENCE said:
dv said:
JudgeMental said:
never heard of any of those as a kid either. i’m sure they existed though.
I mean when he was a kid, plate tectonics wasn’t widely accepted. He can’t expect the state of learning to remain static for 70 years.
they still go by that satirical novel in 2 parts
I remember at school these children had a separate classroom and didn’t interact outside of that classroom.
Nowadays they are part of mainstream schooling so are more noticeable.
roughbarked said:
Arts said:
dv said:
I’m old enough to remember the Howard and Rudd eras when the baby bonus was several thousand dollars.Um. Yes.
Fraser was making life not meant to be easy when we started having babies.
And then that fellow in walgett performed a civic duty and contributed to most of the young girls getting pregnant and ruined it all.
Heather Cox Richardson
2m ·
April 23, 2025 (Wednesday)
After previously suggesting that the U.S. would not involve European representatives in negotiations to end Russia’s war against Ukraine, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and presidential envoy Steve Witkoff met in Paris last week for talks with Ukrainian and European officials. The U.S. presented what it called “the outlines of a durable and lasting peace,” even as Russia continued to attack Ukrainian civilian areas.
A senior European official told Illia Novikov, Aamer Madhani, and Jill Lawless of the Associated Press that the Americans presented their plan as “just ideas” that could be changed. But Barak Ravid of Axios reported on Friday that Trump was frustrated that the negotiations weren’t productive and said he wanted a quick solution.
Talks were scheduled to resume today, in London, but yesterday Rubio pulled out of them. The U.S. plan is now “a final offer,” Ravid reported, and if the Ukrainians don’t accept it, the U.S. will “walk away.”
On a bipartisan basis, since 2014 the United States has supported Ukraine’s fight to push back Russia’s invasions. But Trump and his administration have rejected this position in favor of supporting Russia. This shift has been clear in the negotiations for a solution: Trump required repeated concessions from Ukraine even as Russia continued bombing Ukraine. Axios’s Ravid saw the proposed “final offer,” and it fits this pattern.
The plan would recognize Russia’s occupation of Ukraine’s Crimea and its occupation of almost all of Luhansk oblast and the portions of Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia oblasts Russia has occupied. This would essentially freeze the boundary of Ukraine at the battlefront.
Ukraine would promise not to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the post–World War II defensive alliance that first stood against the aggression of the Soviet Union and now stands against the aggression of Russia.
Sanctions imposed against Russia after its 2014 and 2022 invasions of Ukraine would be lifted, and the United States, in particular its energy and industrial sectors, will cooperate with Russia.
In essence, this gives the Russian president Vladimir Putin everything he wanted.
What the Ukrainians get out of this deal is significantly weaker. They get “a robust security guarantee,” but Ravid notes the document is vague and does not say the U.S. will participate. We have been here before. After the Soviet Union crumbled in 1991, Ukraine had the third-largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world. In exchange for Ukraine’s giving up those weapons, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Russia agreed to secure Ukraine’s borders. In the 1994 Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances, they agreed they would not use military force or economic coercion against Ukraine.
Russia violated that agreement with its 2014 invasion of Crimea, making it unlikely that Ukraine will trust any new promises of security.
Under the new plan, Ukraine would also get back a small part of Kharkiv oblast Russia has occupied. It would be able to use the Dnieper River. And it would get help and funds for rebuilding, although as Ravid notes, the document doesn’t say where the money will come from.
There is something else in the plan. The largest nuclear power plant in Europe is Ukrainian: the Zaporizhzhia plant. It will be considered Ukrainian territory, but the United States will operate it and supply the electricity it produces to both Ukraine and Russia, although the agreement apparently doesn’t say anything about how payments would work. The plan also refers to a deal between the U.S. and Ukraine for minerals, with Ukraine essentially repaying the U.S. for its past support.
Ravid notes that the U.S. drafted the plan after envoy Steve Witkoff met for more than four hours last week with Putin. But the plan has deeper roots.
This U.S.-backed plan echoes almost entirely the plan Russian operatives presented to Trump’s 2016 campaign manager Paul Manafort in exchange for helping Trump win the White House. Russia had invaded Ukraine in 2014 and was looking for a way to grab the land it wanted without continuing to fight.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s 2019 report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election explained that Manafort in summer 2016 “discussed a plan to resolve the ongoing political problems in Ukraine by creating an autonomous republic in its more industrialized eastern region of Donbas, and having Yanukovych, the Ukrainian President ousted in 2014, elected to head that republic.”
The Mueller Report continued: “That plan, Manafort later acknowledged, constituted a ‘backdoor’ means for Russia to control eastern Ukraine.” The region that Putin wanted was the country’s industrial heartland. He was offering a “peace” plan that carved off much of Ukraine and made it subservient to him. This was the dead opposite of U.S. policy for a free and united Ukraine, and there was no chance that former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who was running for the presidency against Trump, would stand for it. But if Trump were elected, the equation changed.
According to the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee, Manafort’s partner and Russian operative Konstantin Kilimnik wrote: “ll that is required to start the process is a very minor ‘wink’ (or slight push) from D T saying ‘he wants peace in Ukraine and Donbass back in Ukraine’ and a decision to be a ‘special representative’ and manage this process.” Following that, Kilimnik suggested that Manafort ‘could start the process and within 10 days visit Russia ( guarantees your reception at the very top level, cutting through all the bullsh*t and getting down to business), Ukraine, and key EU capitals.’ The email also suggested that once then–Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko understood this ‘message’ from the United States, the process ‘will go very fast and DT could have peace in Ukraine basically within a few months after inauguration.’”
According to the Senate Intelligence Committee, the men continued to work on what they called the “Mariupol Plan” at least until 2018.
After Russia invaded Ukraine again in 2022, Jim Rutenberg published a terrific and thorough review of this history in the New York Times Magazine. Once his troops were in Ukraine, Putin claimed he had annexed Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson, two of which were specifically named in the Mariupol Plan, and instituted martial law in them, claiming that the people there had voted to join Russia.
On June 14, 2024, as he was wrongly imprisoning American journalist Evan Gershkovich, Putin made a “peace proposal” to Ukraine that sounded much like the Mariupol Plan. He offered a ceasefire if Ukraine would give up Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson, including far more territory than Putin’s troops occupy, and abandon plans to join NATO. “If Kyiv and the Western capitals refuse it, as before,” Putin said, “then in the end, that’s their…political and moral responsibility for the continuation of bloodshed.”
On June 27, 2024, in a debate during which he insisted that he and he alone could get Gershkovich released, and then talked about Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Trump seemed to indicate he knew about the Mariupol Plan: “Putin saw that, he said, you know what, I think we’re going to go in and maybe take my—this was his dream. I talked to him about it, his dream.”
Now that plan is back on the table as official U.S. policy.
Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky has said that his country will not recognize the Russian occupation of Crimea. In this determination, he speaks for the global rules-based order the U.S. helped to create after World War II. Recognition of the right of a country to invade another and seize its territory undermines a key article of the United Nations, which says that members won’t threaten or attack any country’s “territorial integrity or political independence.” French president Emmanuel Macron and other European leaders are standing behind those principles, saying today in a statement from Macron’s office that they reject Russian territorial gains under the U.S. plan. “Ukraine’s territorial integrity and European aspirations are very strong requirements for Europeans,” the statement said.
But Trump himself seems eager to rewrite the world order. In addition to his own threats against Greenland, Canada, and Panama, in a post today on his social media site he echoed Putin’s 2024 statement blaming Ukraine for Russia’s bloody war because it would not agree to Putin’s terms. Today, Trump said Zelensky’s refusal to recognize the Russian occupation of Crimea was “inflammatory,” and he pressured Zelensky to accept the deal.
Curiously, he felt obliged to write that “I have nothing to do with Russia…”.
sarahs mum said:
Heather Cox Richardson
2m ·
April 23, 2025 (Wednesday)Curiously, he felt obliged to write that “I have nothing to do with Russia…”.
Puke.
Did you see that Ukraine is purchasing anti radiation meds from Israel.
Probably erring on the side of caution and hopefully not needed
Occupy Democrats
BREAKING: MAGA Governor Ron DeSantis is caught in a jaw-dropping scandal as it’s exposed that he funneled $10 million in taxpayer money to his wife’s charity, who gave it to dark money groups, who then donated $8.5 million to his minion’s PAC.
Even Republicans are calling this illegal. It’s the kind of corruption that ends up in history books…
The scandal originated with a settlement agreement between Florda and Centene, the state’s largest Medicaid contractor, after it was discovered that the company had over-billed taxpayers for medications by a staggering $67,048,611.
Instead of depositing that money in state and federal accounts like they were supposed to, DeSantis’s administration funneled $10 million of it to the Hope Florida Foundation, a charity overseen by his wife Casey DeSantis.
That money was then rerouted to two dark money organizations that are not legally required to report how they spend their funds. Those very same groups then turned around and gave $8.5 million to a PAC overseen by DeSantis’ then-chief of staff.
The stunning embezzlement scheme was exposed by a draft agreement obtained by The Miami Herald which directly contradicts claims made by DeSantis and his officials that the $10 million contribution from Centene was separate from the Medicaid settlement.
“This is kind of like a cherry on top, where they agreed to make an additional contribution,” DeSantis lied.
This is nothing short of a heist of public funds. DeSantis took money that belonged to the people of Florida and deposited it right into the pocket of his wife and his lackey’s political action committee.
If DeSantis and everyone involved in this crime don’t end up behind bars, it will be a grave miscarriage of justice. Republicans all across the country will see it as open season on the public coffers.
JudgeMental said:
Occupy DemocratsBREAKING: MAGA Governor Ron DeSantis is caught in a jaw-dropping scandal as it’s exposed that he funneled $10 million in taxpayer money to his wife’s charity, who gave it to dark money groups, who then donated $8.5 million to his minion’s PAC.
Even Republicans are calling this illegal. It’s the kind of corruption that ends up in history books…
The scandal originated with a settlement agreement between Florda and Centene, the state’s largest Medicaid contractor, after it was discovered that the company had over-billed taxpayers for medications by a staggering $67,048,611.Instead of depositing that money in state and federal accounts like they were supposed to, DeSantis’s administration funneled $10 million of it to the Hope Florida Foundation, a charity overseen by his wife Casey DeSantis.
That money was then rerouted to two dark money organizations that are not legally required to report how they spend their funds. Those very same groups then turned around and gave $8.5 million to a PAC overseen by DeSantis’ then-chief of staff.
The stunning embezzlement scheme was exposed by a draft agreement obtained by The Miami Herald which directly contradicts claims made by DeSantis and his officials that the $10 million contribution from Centene was separate from the Medicaid settlement.
“This is kind of like a cherry on top, where they agreed to make an additional contribution,” DeSantis lied.
This is nothing short of a heist of public funds. DeSantis took money that belonged to the people of Florida and deposited it right into the pocket of his wife and his lackey’s political action committee.If DeSantis and everyone involved in this crime don’t end up behind bars, it will be a grave miscarriage of justice. Republicans all across the country will see it as open season on the public coffers.
OK, so a PAC is a Political Action Committee.
But what exactly is a Political Action Committee?
The Rev Dodgson said:
JudgeMental said:
Occupy DemocratsBREAKING: MAGA Governor Ron DeSantis is caught in a jaw-dropping scandal as it’s exposed that he funneled $10 million in taxpayer money to his wife’s charity, who gave it to dark money groups, who then donated $8.5 million to his minion’s PAC.
Even Republicans are calling this illegal. It’s the kind of corruption that ends up in history books…
The scandal originated with a settlement agreement between Florda and Centene, the state’s largest Medicaid contractor, after it was discovered that the company had over-billed taxpayers for medications by a staggering $67,048,611.Instead of depositing that money in state and federal accounts like they were supposed to, DeSantis’s administration funneled $10 million of it to the Hope Florida Foundation, a charity overseen by his wife Casey DeSantis.
That money was then rerouted to two dark money organizations that are not legally required to report how they spend their funds. Those very same groups then turned around and gave $8.5 million to a PAC overseen by DeSantis’ then-chief of staff.
The stunning embezzlement scheme was exposed by a draft agreement obtained by The Miami Herald which directly contradicts claims made by DeSantis and his officials that the $10 million contribution from Centene was separate from the Medicaid settlement.
“This is kind of like a cherry on top, where they agreed to make an additional contribution,” DeSantis lied.
This is nothing short of a heist of public funds. DeSantis took money that belonged to the people of Florida and deposited it right into the pocket of his wife and his lackey’s political action committee.If DeSantis and everyone involved in this crime don’t end up behind bars, it will be a grave miscarriage of justice. Republicans all across the country will see it as open season on the public coffers.
OK, so a PAC is a Political Action Committee.
But what exactly is a Political Action Committee?
In the United States, a political action committee (PAC) is a tax-exempt 527 organization that pools campaign contributions from members and donates those funds to campaigns for or against candidates, ballot initiatives, or legislation. The legal term PAC was created in pursuit of campaign finance reform in the United States. Democracies of other countries use different terms for the units of campaign spending or spending on political competition (see political finance). At the U.S. federal level, an organization becomes a PAC when it receives or spends more than $1,000 for the purpose of influencing a federal election, and registers with the Federal Election Commission (FEC), according to the Federal Election Campaign Act as amended by the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (also known as the McCain–Feingold Act). At the state level, an organization becomes a PAC according to the state’s election laws.
JudgeMental said:
Occupy DemocratsBREAKING: MAGA Governor Ron DeSantis is caught in a jaw-dropping scandal as it’s exposed that he funneled $10 million in taxpayer money to his wife’s charity, who gave it to dark money groups, who then donated $8.5 million to his minion’s PAC.
Even Republicans are calling this illegal. It’s the kind of corruption that ends up in history books…
The scandal originated with a settlement agreement between Florda and Centene, the state’s largest Medicaid contractor, after it was discovered that the company had over-billed taxpayers for medications by a staggering $67,048,611.Instead of depositing that money in state and federal accounts like they were supposed to, DeSantis’s administration funneled $10 million of it to the Hope Florida Foundation, a charity overseen by his wife Casey DeSantis.
That money was then rerouted to two dark money organizations that are not legally required to report how they spend their funds. Those very same groups then turned around and gave $8.5 million to a PAC overseen by DeSantis’ then-chief of staff.
The stunning embezzlement scheme was exposed by a draft agreement obtained by The Miami Herald which directly contradicts claims made by DeSantis and his officials that the $10 million contribution from Centene was separate from the Medicaid settlement.
“This is kind of like a cherry on top, where they agreed to make an additional contribution,” DeSantis lied.
This is nothing short of a heist of public funds. DeSantis took money that belonged to the people of Florida and deposited it right into the pocket of his wife and his lackey’s political action committee.If DeSantis and everyone involved in this crime don’t end up behind bars, it will be a grave miscarriage of justice. Republicans all across the country will see it as open season on the public coffers.
sm posted an article about this, but I found the details of the embezzlement mechanism were difficult to follow.
Not entirely sure the Tesla board will be glad to have him back
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hegseth-orders-makeup-studio-installed-pentagon/
JudgeMental said:
FMD
Cruel parents.
Michael V said:
JudgeMental said:
FMD
Cruel parents.
Kiss-arses.
captain_spalding said:
Michael V said:
JudgeMental said:
FMD
Cruel parents.
Kiss-arses.
Kid might sue when old enough.
Thanks for the PAC details dv.
Cymek said:
Did you see that Ukraine is purchasing anti radiation meds from Israel.
Probably erring on the side of caution and hopefully not needed
Will they explode simultaneously on a signal from the mother ship¿
Michael V said:
JudgeMental said:
Occupy DemocratsBREAKING: MAGA Governor Ron DeSantis is caught in a jaw-dropping scandal as it’s exposed that he funneled $10 million in taxpayer money to his wife’s charity, who gave it to dark money groups, who then donated $8.5 million to his minion’s PAC.
Even Republicans are calling this illegal. It’s the kind of corruption that ends up in history books…
The scandal originated with a settlement agreement between Florda and Centene, the state’s largest Medicaid contractor, after it was discovered that the company had over-billed taxpayers for medications by a staggering $67,048,611.Instead of depositing that money in state and federal accounts like they were supposed to, DeSantis’s administration funneled $10 million of it to the Hope Florida Foundation, a charity overseen by his wife Casey DeSantis.
That money was then rerouted to two dark money organizations that are not legally required to report how they spend their funds. Those very same groups then turned around and gave $8.5 million to a PAC overseen by DeSantis’ then-chief of staff.
The stunning embezzlement scheme was exposed by a draft agreement obtained by The Miami Herald which directly contradicts claims made by DeSantis and his officials that the $10 million contribution from Centene was separate from the Medicaid settlement.
“This is kind of like a cherry on top, where they agreed to make an additional contribution,” DeSantis lied.
This is nothing short of a heist of public funds. DeSantis took money that belonged to the people of Florida and deposited it right into the pocket of his wife and his lackey’s political action committee.If DeSantis and everyone involved in this crime don’t end up behind bars, it will be a grave miscarriage of justice. Republicans all across the country will see it as open season on the public coffers.
sm posted an article about this, but I found the details of the embezzlement mechanism were difficult to follow.
so then the money is clean right
dv said:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hegseth-orders-makeup-studio-installed-pentagon/
seriously
Hegseth is doing his own makeup ahead of TV appearances, not paying for a makeup artist, a defense official told CBS News.
and all they can focus on is the few thousand this costs when it’s a drop in the ocean compared to their actual waste and corruption and market manipulation losses
SCIENCE said:
dv said:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hegseth-orders-makeup-studio-installed-pentagon/
seriously
Hegseth is doing his own makeup ahead of TV appearances, not paying for a makeup artist, a defense official told CBS News.
and all they can focus on is the few thousand this costs when it’s a drop in the ocean compared to their actual waste and corruption and market manipulation losses
“Hegseth orders makeup studio in installed at Pentagon”.
Yeah, right, a ‘makeup studio’ with a keg of Jack Daniels.
captain_spalding said:
SCIENCE said:dv said:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hegseth-orders-makeup-studio-installed-pentagon/
seriously
Hegseth is doing his own makeup ahead of TV appearances, not paying for a makeup artist, a defense official told CBS News.
and all they can focus on is the few thousand this costs when it’s a drop in the ocean compared to their actual waste and corruption and market manipulation losses
“Hegseth orders makeup studio in installed at Pentagon”.
Yeah, right, a ‘makeup studio’ with a keg of Jack Daniels.
No, that’s the “secure communications room” isn’t it?
(… according to Yes Prime Minister)
party_pants said:
captain_spalding said:
SCIENCE said:seriously
Hegseth is doing his own makeup ahead of TV appearances, not paying for a makeup artist, a defense official told CBS News.
and all they can focus on is the few thousand this costs when it’s a drop in the ocean compared to their actual waste and corruption and market manipulation losses
“Hegseth orders makeup studio in installed at Pentagon”.
Yeah, right, a ‘makeup studio’ with a keg of Jack Daniels.
No, that’s the “secure communications room” isn’t it?
(… according to Yes Prime Minister)
I remember.
:)
Bottom right. I’ve been seeing that guy in tons of memes today. Who is he?
Divine Angel said:
Bottom right. I’ve been seeing that guy in tons of memes today. Who is he?
A hairy headed gent who ran amok in Kent.
Divine Angel said:
Bottom right. I’ve been seeing that guy in tons of memes today. Who is he?
Looks like an altered JD Vance to me.
Peak Warming Man said:
Divine Angel said:
Bottom right. I’ve been seeing that guy in tons of memes today. Who is he?
A hairy headed gent who ran amok in Kent.
I assume PeterT Ministries has offered counseling and ministry to guide this poor sheep back to his flock.
Peak Warming Man said:
Divine Angel said:
Bottom right. I’ve been seeing that guy in tons of memes today. Who is he?
A hairy headed gent who ran amok in Kent.
I’d like to meet his tailor.
Divine Angel said:
Bottom right. I’ve been seeing that guy in tons of memes today. Who is he?
JD Vance, m’lud, a Vice President of some notoriety.
dv said:
Divine Angel said:
Bottom right. I’ve been seeing that guy in tons of memes today. Who is he?
JD Vance, m’lud, a Vice President of some notoriety.
obscure Rumpole reference?
party_pants said:
dv said:
Divine Angel said:
Bottom right. I’ve been seeing that guy in tons of memes today. Who is he?
JD Vance, m’lud, a Vice President of some notoriety.
obscure Rumpole reference?
Unlike DJT you have correct weight
JD? Dayum.
dv said:
Divine Angel said:
Bottom right. I’ve been seeing that guy in tons of memes today. Who is he?
JD Vance, m’lud, a Vice President of some notoriety.
Is it an old photo, perhaps from his awkward younger years or just some Dorian Gray thingee?
Witty Rejoinder said:
dv said:
Divine Angel said:
Bottom right. I’ve been seeing that guy in tons of memes today. Who is he?
JD Vance, m’lud, a Vice President of some notoriety.
Is it an old photo, perhaps from his awkward younger years or just some Dorian Gray thingee?
It appears to be an unflattering edit.
no way surely not
SCIENCE said:
no way surely not
I have worked for several companies owned by people who were unemployable and were sacked multiple times, to the point where the only way they could get work was to get their dad/mum/sponsor/etc to buy a business and install them as “owner/manager”.
All of them failed.
A federal judge temporarily halted her order requiring the Trump administration to provide information on its efforts so far, if any, to retrieve a man who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador.
The seven-day pause ordered by U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis on Wednesday came with the agreement of lawyers for Kilmar Abrego Garcia, Xinis said, and is the first sign of a possible change, either in tone or position, in the contentious legal fight that already has been to the Supreme Court and led the judge to accuse administration lawyers of acting in “bad faith.”
Drew Ensign, a deputy assistant attorney general, filed a sealed motion requesting the stay of the judge’s directive for the U.S. to provide testimony and documents that involve plans to retrieve Abrego Garcia. The administration is also seeking relief from having to file daily updates on its progress.
Xinis did not explain her legal reasoning in granting the stay until April 30. She also did not make any changes to the required daily status updates.
Lawyers for Abrego Garcia filed their own sealed document, styled as a response in opposition, but Xinis wrote that her order was made “with the agreement of the parties.”
The administration expelled Abrego Garcia to El Salvador last month, and officials later described the mistake as “an administrative error” — but insisted that Abrego Garcia was in fact a member of the MS-13 gang.
The Wednesday evening order came just one day after Xinis castigated the administration’s lawyers in a written filing Tuesday for ignoring her orders, obstructing the legal process and acting in “bad faith” by refusing to provide information.
The U.S. has claimed that much of the information is protected because it involves state secrets, government deliberations and attorney client privilege. But Xinis has rejected the argument and demanded that the Trump administration provide specific justifications for each claim of privileged information by 6 p.m. Wednesday.
Here’s what the judge wants — and what the administration wants
Tom Homan, the Trump administration’s border czar, did not directly address the judge’s comments from Tuesday when asked by reporters at the White House on Wednesday. But he reiterated the administration’s position that Abrego Garcia will be detained and deported again if he were to be returned to the U.S.
The U.S. Supreme Court ordered the Trump administration nearly two weeks ago to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return to the U.S., rejecting the White House’s claim that it couldn’t retrieve him after mistakenly deporting him.
Trump administration officials have pushed back, arguing that it is up to El Salvador — though the president of El Salvador has also said he lacks the power to return Abrego Garcia. The administration has also argued that information about any steps it has taken or could take to return Abrego Garcia is protected by attorney-client privilege laws, state secret laws, general “government privilege” or other secrecy rules.
But Xinis said those claims, without any facts to back them up, reflected a “willful and bad faith refusal to comply with discovery obligations.”
“For weeks, Defendants have sought refuge behind vague and unsubstantiated assertions of privilege, using them as a shield to obstruct discovery and evade compliance with this Court’s orders,” Xinis wrote in the order Tuesday. “Defendants have known, at least since last week, that this Court requires specific legal and factual showings to support any claim of privilege. Yet they have continued to rely on boilerplate assertions. That ends now.”
Abrego Garcia was expelled after living in the US for about 14 years
Abrego Garcia, 29, lived in the United States for roughly 14 years, during which he worked in construction, got married and was raising three children with disabilities, according to court records.
A U.S. immigration judge had shielded Abrego Garcia from deportation to El Salvador in 2019, ruling that he would likely face persecution there by local gangs that had terrorized his family. He also was given a federal permit to work in the United States, where he was a metal worker and union member, according to Abrego Garcia’s lawyers.
But the Trump administration expelled Abrego Garcia to El Salvador last month anyway.
Abrego Garcia was never charged with a crime and has denied the allegations. His attorneys have pointed out that the criminal informant claimed he was a member of MS-13 in Long Island, New York, where he has never lived.
It’s not the first time the Trump administration has faced a scathing order from a federal judge over its approach to deportation cases.
A three-judge panel on the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals scolded the administration last week, saying its claim that it can’t do anything to free Abrego Garcia “should be shocking.” That ruling came one day after a federal judge in Washington, D.C., found probable cause to hold the Trump administration in criminal contempt for violating his orders to turn around planes carrying deportees to El Salvador. That was a different legal case.
Democrats and legal scholars say Trump is provoking a constitutional crisis in part by ignoring court rulings; the White House has said it’s the judges who are the problem.
___
https://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/national-international/federal-judge-halts-order-details-efforts-abrego-garcia-return-us/4168176/
Jim Wright aka Stonekettle Station: “Somewhere right now in a grocery store facewash aisle Nancy Mace is crying bitter tears and saying to herself, “OH WHY COULDN’T IT HAVE BEEN MY PURSE THAT WAS STOLEN?! WHY CAN’T I BE THE VICTIM JUST ONCE? TO HELL WITH YOU, KRISTI NOEM!”
I swear no one want to be a victim more than Nancy Mace.”
From: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/s/YKh8gCBjZF
First 100 days so far…
Pardons all violent Jan 6th criminals
2 Israeli ceasefires collapse
Ukrainian ceasefire collapse/fail to launch
War with houthis/ signal gate 1.0 and 2.0
Lets houthis shoot down 10+ reaper drones
Threatens invasion of partner countries/alienates allies (Greenland, Canada, Mexico and Panama)
Threatens war with Iran
Threatens NATO alliance
Does Russia’s bidding against Ukraine/propaganda, pulling aid, intel, capitulation to land demands
Mark Fogal released for Russian cyber criminal
Dismantles foreign cyber crime defense
Multiple aviation accidents/blames DEI
DEI historical removals like Jackie Robinson/ Enola gay
Releases millions of gallons of water in CA to wrong place after fires
Addresses none of deadly tornadoes in central plains (busy winning his own golf tournament)
Markets down 10-20% / worse month since depression/market manipulation
Blows up his own trade deals and erases trillions from the market with dollar down 9%
Giant tariff tax / global trade war / *no tariffs on Russia
Crypto scams / Trump and Melania coins
Pardons Silk Road creator and crypto crooks
US boycotts/travel warnings/prolonged detainment
Froze NIH research grants and preventing federally funded scientists from travelling or talking about their work.
Gutted USAID wasting billions in aid and costing lives
Cuts funding to public media like npr + pbs
Took over Kennedy center
Hangs mug shot in White House
Let’s elons kid put a booger on resolute desk
Doge chainsaw to fed agencies with no DOD cuts and an actual increase in federal spending /mass “DEI firings”
Stops loans and programs like farm to school
Invites dictators to the White House
Loss of 1st and 5th amendment rights/deporting for opinions/due process/deporting homegrown criminals
El salvadorian detention camps/ Guantanamo bay failure
Threatens loss of 14th amendment – birthright citizenship
Threatens 16th amendment rights- congress setting tax rules
Threatens 19th amendment – save act/women’s voting rights
Threatens 22nd amendment – 3rd term
Weaponizes justice department/ Tesla vandalism = terrorism/ Jan 6 revenge
Measles + bird flu
Wasted 30k real eggs on Easter
F-47 jet and proposals for his image on currency, Rushmore, airport naming
Canceled Ebola prevention funding
Eliminates FDA regulations on food
Opens federal forests for logging and opens protected ocean space for fishing/drilling
White House = Tesla dealership
Golf trips EVERY weekend and some weekdays
Wastes millions attending Super Bowl, NASCAR, and ufc events
Trump Gaza /wants to create golden idols of himself
Attacks and sues private, state, and federal entities over constitutional rights/extortion
Attacks on trans including troops
Attacks the independence of the FED
Pro Child labor legislation
Gets rid of price caps on medicine like insulin
Reverses student loan forgiveness
Tries to reverse overdraft fee protection
Reverses climate legislation/guts epa
Violation of Separation of powers /criminal contempt
Mass Illegal Deportations
Masked secret police kidnapping people
Revoked citizenship for hundreds of thousands of refugees
Mass protests in all 50 states
Didn’t know about dead soldiers in Lithuania/golfed with Saudis instead of being there for dignified transfer of bodies
Didn’t release Epstein Files
Says “these things happen” after Florida school shooting
No “no tax on tips/overtime”
Brain worm autism theory/ persons list
Fruit loops made with real colors
SOH gets robbed and does glam shoot with foreign prisoners
DOI lies under oath
A1 sauce secretary of education
Trump GOLD card for Russian oligarchs
Announces military parade for his birthday
“Got rid” of PaPer straWs
Made shower heads Great Again
Baby bonus/mommy medals
100ft flag pole at the White House
GulF of AmEriCA
So I’m not feeling great. Get this guy OUT
dv said:
Democrats and legal scholars say Trump is provoking a constitutional crisis in part by ignoring court rulings; the White House has said it’s the judges who are the problem.
___
we do love a good both sidesing and mouthpiece reporting oh yes
kii said:
Hegseth is out.
Seems you jumped the gun on this one.
dv said:
kii said:
Hegseth is out.
Seems you jumped the gun on this one.
Damn it.
kii said:
dv said:
kii said:
Hegseth is out.
Seems you jumped the gun on this one.
Damn it.
The mail is that all the brass are furious and worried about operational safety but they don’t have any capacity to remove him. There are three means by which he goes: resignation, removal by the President, or impeachment by Congress.
Seems he has no shame so might not resign. The president is focused on his core duties of pounding Adderall and insider trading. Nothing in the behaviour of Congressional Republicans makes me think they will go against DJT’s wants.
I guess him might die in a drink drive accident so that’s four.
dv said:
kii said:
dv said:Seems you jumped the gun on this one.
Damn it.
The mail is that all the brass are furious and worried about operational safety but they don’t have any capacity to remove him. There are three means by which he goes: resignation, removal by the President, or impeachment by Congress.
Seems he has no shame so might not resign. The president is focused on his core duties of pounding Adderall and insider trading. Nothing in the behaviour of Congressional Republicans makes me think they will go against DJT’s wants.
I guess him might die in a drink drive accident so that’s four.
He might just fall out of a window…
dv said:
kii said:
dv said:Seems you jumped the gun on this one.
Damn it.
The mail is that all the brass are furious and worried about operational safety but they don’t have any capacity to remove him. There are three means by which he goes: resignation, removal by the President, or impeachment by Congress.
Seems he has no shame so might not resign. The president is focused on his core duties of pounding Adderall and insider trading. Nothing in the behaviour of Congressional Republicans makes me think they will go against DJT’s wants.
I guess him might die in a drink drive accident so that’s four.
kii said:
dv said:
kii said:Damn it.
The mail is that all the brass are furious and worried about operational safety but they don’t have any capacity to remove him. There are three means by which he goes: resignation, removal by the President, or impeachment by Congress.
Seems he has no shame so might not resign. The president is focused on his core duties of pounding Adderall and insider trading. Nothing in the behaviour of Congressional Republicans makes me think they will go against DJT’s wants.
I guess him might die in a drink drive accident so that’s four.
Heh. Seems like it and all very logical, but…
…it’s DJT. Nothing is logical with the KKK, so he’ll likely blame someone else. eg Melania.
AIleged.
SCIENCE said:
AIleged.
What are they going to do with all the (presumably) unwanted daughters then?
party_pants said:
SCIENCE said:AIleged.
What are they going to do with all the (presumably) unwanted daughters then?
preparing them for the breeding farms.
party_pants said:
SCIENCE said:AIleged.
What are they going to do with all the (presumably) unwanted daughters then?
The Handmaid’s Tale.
party_pants said:
SCIENCE said:AIleged.
What are they going to do with all the (presumably) unwanted daughters then?
They plan to use Musk’s method of IVF and choosing the appropriate features.
party_pants said:
SCIENCE said:
AIleged.
What are they going to do with all the (presumably) unwanted daughters then?
An Empty Womb Is A Wasted Womb ¡
party_pants said:
SCIENCE said:AIleged.
What are they going to do with all the (presumably) unwanted daughters then?
Abortions. Supreme Court yet to rule, but will agree anyway.
SCIENCE said:
(sings) Every sperm is sacred.party_pants said:
SCIENCE said:
AIleged.
What are they going to do with all the (presumably) unwanted daughters then?
An Empty Womb Is A Wasted Womb ¡
Divine Angel said:
party_pants said:
SCIENCE said:AIleged.
What are they going to do with all the (presumably) unwanted daughters then?
The Handmaid’s Tale.
Including the red…
buffy said:
Divine Angel said:
party_pants said:What are they going to do with all the (presumably) unwanted daughters then?
The Handmaid’s Tale.
Including the red…
I might add that I’ve read the book years ago, but chose not to watch the TV serieses.
SCIENCE said:
AIleged.
Umm…‘kingdom’?
buffy said:
buffy said:
Divine Angel said:The Handmaid’s Tale.
Including the red…
I might add that I’ve read the book years ago, but chose not to watch the TV serieses.
I confess to not having read or watched either of them.
The idea of only having sons seems a bit odd to me. Unless they are planning a war with millions of foot soldiers getting chewed up as cannon-fodder, it seems pointless having a surplus of men over women in your society. Not good for long term social stability. If anything, a slight overabundance of women seems preferable.
captain_spalding said:
SCIENCE said:AIleged.
Umm…‘kingdom’?
Oh, sorry. I thought you realised that Trump sees himself as “king”.
Tis true.
https://www.trumpstore.com/product/trump-2028-hat/
Divine Angel said:
Tis true.
https://www.trumpstore.com/product/trump-2028-hat/
Why. Won’t. He. Just. DIE?
captain_spalding said:
Divine Angel said:
Tis true.
https://www.trumpstore.com/product/trump-2028-hat/
Why. Won’t. He. Just. DIE?
captain_spalding said:
Divine Angel said:
Tis true.
https://www.trumpstore.com/product/trump-2028-hat/
Why. Won’t. He. Just. DIE?
Too much like hard work. He’s waiting for someone to do it for him.
Divine Angel said:
Tis true.
https://www.trumpstore.com/product/trump-2028-hat/
FMD
captain_spalding said:
Divine Angel said:
Tis true.
https://www.trumpstore.com/product/trump-2028-hat/
Why. Won’t. He. Just. DIE?
He is waiting for someone to stop him. If nobody stops him he will just keep going on and ignore the law, the courts, the Constitution and everything. His whole strategy is to just push the boundaries and see what happens.
So far the US institutions and politicians have been too timid.
party_pants said:
captain_spalding said:
Divine Angel said:
Tis true.
https://www.trumpstore.com/product/trump-2028-hat/
Why. Won’t. He. Just. DIE?
He is waiting for someone to stop him. If nobody stops him he will just keep going on and ignore the law, the courts, the Constitution and everything. His whole strategy is to just push the boundaries and see what happens.
So far the US institutions and politicians have been too timid.
Well, yeah. Dude should be serving time in prison, not running the fkn country.
captain_spalding said:
Divine Angel said:
Tis true.
https://www.trumpstore.com/product/trump-2028-hat/
Why. Won’t. He. Just. DIE?
Because the US of A en-masse thinks he is their rapturous saviour.
SCIENCE said:
AIleged.
I wonder if there is a market for the most deranged MAGA shit-fuckery deliberately created by Libs to paint the RWNJs in a poor light? Sort of like the inadvertent service that PWM provides here.
Witty Rejoinder said:
SCIENCE said:AIleged.
I wonder if there is a market for the most deranged MAGA shit-fuckery deliberately created by Libs to paint the RWNJs in a poor light? Sort of like the inadvertent service that PWM provides here.
I think they’re already beyond that tipping point is USA.
Witty Rejoinder said:
SCIENCE said:AIleged.
I wonder if there is a market for the most deranged MAGA shit-fuckery deliberately created by Libs to paint the RWNJs in a poor light? Sort of like the inadvertent service that PWM provides here.
That image looks awfully AI.
party_pants said:
Witty Rejoinder said:
SCIENCE said:AIleged.
I wonder if there is a market for the most deranged MAGA shit-fuckery deliberately created by Libs to paint the RWNJs in a poor light? Sort of like the inadvertent service that PWM provides here.
I think they’re already beyond that tipping point is USA.
Probably true. Who but some genuine MAGA nutcase could come up with Jewish space lasers?
party_pants said:
captain_spalding said:
Divine Angel said:
Tis true.
https://www.trumpstore.com/product/trump-2028-hat/
Why. Won’t. He. Just. DIE?
He is waiting for someone to stop him. If nobody stops him he will just keep going on and ignore the law, the courts, the Constitution and everything. His whole strategy is to just push the boundaries and see what happens.
So far the US institutions and politicians have been too timid.
I have a Shitler meme for all occasions.
Why is the shirt cheaper than the hat?
Divine Angel said:
Why is the shirt cheaper than the hat?
the hat makers have a better trade union
Divine Angel said:
Why is the shirt cheaper than the hat?
Because.
Divine Angel said:
Why is the shirt cheaper than the hat?
Lot more fucking around to sew and embroid a hat than a shirt that can be screen printed en masse.
party_pants said:
Divine Angel said:
Why is the shirt cheaper than the hat?
the hat makers have a better trade union
LOL, no unions in china, mate.
Divine Angel said:
Why is the shirt cheaper than the hat?
Made in China and got tariffs on it.
JudgeMental said:
party_pants said:
Divine Angel said:
Why is the shirt cheaper than the hat?
the hat makers have a better trade union
LOL, no unions in china, mate.
aren’t they communists just like the unions so it’s all good
party_pants said:
captain_spalding said:
Divine Angel said:
Tis true.
https://www.trumpstore.com/product/trump-2028-hat/
Why. Won’t. He. Just. DIE?
He is waiting for someone to stop him. If nobody stops him he will just keep going on and ignore the law, the courts, the Constitution and everything. His whole strategy is to just push the boundaries and see what happens.
So far the US institutions and politicians have been too timid.
pretty sure nobody could have foreseen this
sarahs mum said:
Heather Cox Richardson
2m ·
April 18, 2025 (Friday)Tonight I had the extraordinary privilege of speaking at the anniversary of the lighting of the lanterns in Boston’s Old North Church, which happened 250 years ago tonight. Here’s what I said:
Two hundred and fifty years ago, in April 1775, Boston was on edge. Seven thousand residents of the town shared these streets with more than 13,000 British soldiers and their families. The two groups coexisted uneasily.Two years before, the British government had closed the port of Boston and flooded the town with soldiers to try to put down what they saw as a rebellion amongst the townspeople. Ocean trade stopped, businesses failed, and work in the city got harder and harder to find. As soldiers stepped off ships from England onto the wharves, half of the civilian population moved away. Those who stayed resented the soldiers, some of whom quit the army and took badly needed jobs away from locals.
Boston became increasingly cut off from the surrounding towns, for it was almost an island, lying between the Charles River and Boston Harbor. And the townspeople were under occupation. Soldiers, dressed in the red coats that inspired locals to insult them by calling them “lobsterbacks,” monitored their movements and controlled traffic in and out of the town over Boston Neck, which was the only land bridge from Boston to the mainland and so narrow at high tide it could accommodate only four horses abreast.
Boston was a small town of wooden buildings crowded together under at least eight towering church steeples, for Boston was still a religious town. Most of the people who lived there knew each other at least by sight, and many had grown up together. And yet, in April 1775, tensions were high.
Boston was the heart of colonial resistance to the policies of the British government, but it was not united in that opposition. While the town had more of the people who called themselves Patriots than other colonies did—maybe 30 to 40 percent—at least 15% of the people in town were still fiercely loyal to the King and his government. Those who were neither Patriots nor Loyalists just kept their heads down, hoping the growing political crisis would go away and leave them unscathed.
It was hard for people to fathom that the country had come to such division. Only a dozen years before, at the end of the French and Indian War, Bostonians looked forward to a happy future in the British empire. British authorities had spent time and money protecting the colonies, and colonists saw themselves as valued members of the empire. They expected to prosper as they moved to the rich lands on the other side of the Appalachian Mountains and their ships plied the oceans to expand the colonies’ trade with other countries.
That euphoria faded fast.
Almost as soon as the French and Indian War was over, to prevent colonists from stirring up another expensive struggle with Indigenous Americans, King George III prohibited the colonists from crossing the Appalachian Mountains. Then, to pay for the war just past, the king’s ministers pushed through Parliament a number of revenue laws.
In 1765, Parliament passed the Stamp Act, requiring the payment of a tax on all printed material—from newspapers and legal documents to playing cards. It would hit virtually everyone in the North American colonies. Knowing that local juries would acquit their fellow colonists who violated the revenue acts, Parliament took away the right to civil trials and declared that suspects would be tried before admiralty courts overseen by British military officers. Then Parliament required colonials to pay the expenses for the room and board of British troops who would be stationed in the colonies, a law known as the Quartering Act.
But what Parliament saw as a way to raise money to pay for an expensive war—one that had benefited the colonists, after all—colonial leaders saw as an abuse of power. The British government had regulated trade in the empire for more than a century. But now, for the first time, the British government had placed a direct tax on the colonists without their consent. Then it had taken away the right to a trial by jury, and now it was forcing colonists to pay for a military to police them.
Far more than money was at stake. The fight over the Stamp Act tapped into a struggle that had been going on in England for more than a century over a profound question of human governance: Could the king be checked by the people?
This was a question the colonists were perhaps uniquely qualified to answer. While the North American colonies were governed officially by the British crown, the distance between England and the colonies meant that colonial assemblies often had to make rules on the ground. Those assemblies controlled the power of the purse, which gave them the upper hand over royal officials, who had to await orders from England that often took months to arrive. This chaotic system enabled the colonists to carve out a new approach to politics even while they were living in the British empire.
Colonists naturally began to grasp that the exercise of power was not the province of a divinely ordained leader, but something temporary that depended on local residents’ willingness to support the men who were exercising that power.
The Stamp Act threatened to overturn that longstanding system, replacing it with tyranny.
When news of the Stamp Act arrived in Boston, a group of dock hands, sailors, and workers took to the streets, calling themselves the Sons of Liberty. They warned colonists that their rights as Englishmen were under attack. One of the Sons of Liberty was a talented silversmith named Paul Revere. He turned the story of the colonists’ loss of their liberty into engravings. Distributed as posters, Revere’s images would help spread the idea that colonists were losing their liberties.
The Sons of Liberty was generally a catch-all title for those causing trouble over the new taxes, so that protesters could remain anonymous, but prominent colonists joined them and at least partly directed their actions. Lawyer John Adams recognized that the Sons of Liberty were changing the political equation. He wrote that gatherings of the Sons of Liberty “tinge the Minds of the People, they impregnate them with the sentiments of Liberty. They render the People fond of their Leaders in the Cause, and averse and bitter against all opposers.”
John Adams’s cousin Samuel Adams, who was deeply involved with the Sons of Liberty, recognized that building a coalition in defense of liberty within the British system required conversation and cooperation. As clerk of the Massachusetts legislature, he was responsible for corresponding with other colonial legislatures. Across the colonies, the Sons of Liberty began writing to like-minded friends, informing them about local events, asking after their circumstances, organizing.
They spurred people to action. By 1766, the Stamp Act was costing more to enforce than it was producing in revenue, and Parliament agreed to end it. But it explicitly claimed “full power and authority to make laws and statutes…to bind the colonies and people of America…in all cases whatsoever.” It imposed new revenue measures.
News of new taxes reached Boston in late 1767. The Massachusetts legislature promptly circulated a letter to the other colonies opposing taxation without representation and standing firm on the colonists’ right to equality in the British empire. The Sons of Liberty and their associates called for boycotts on taxed goods and broke into the warehouses of those they suspected weren’t complying, while women demonstrated their sympathy for the rights of colonists by producing their own cloth and drinking coffee rather than relying on tea.
British officials worried that colonists in Boston were on the edge of revolt, and they sent troops to restore order. But the troops’ presence did not calm the town. Instead, fights erupted between locals and the British regulars.
Finally, in March 1770, British soldiers fired into a crowd of angry men and boys harassing them. They wounded six and killed five, including Crispus Attucks, a Black man who became the first to die in the attack. Paul Revere turned the altercation into the “Boston Massacre.” His instantly famous engraving showed soldiers in red coats smiling as they shot at colonists, “Like fierce Barbarians grinning o’er their Prey; Approve the Carnage, and enjoy the Day.”
Parliament promptly removed the British troops to an island in Boston Harbor and got rid of all but one of the new taxes. They left the one on tea, keeping the issue of taxation without representation on the table. Then, in May 1773, Parliament gave the East India Tea Company a monopoly on tea sales in the colonies. By lowering the cost of tea in the colonies, it meant to convince people to buy the taxed tea, thus establishing Parliament’s right to impose a tax on the colonies.
In Boston, local leaders posted a citizen guard on Griffin’s Wharf at the harbor to make sure tea could not be unloaded. On December 16, 1773, men dressed as Indigenous Americans boarded three merchant ships. They broke open 342 chests of tea and dumped the valuable leaves overboard.
Parliament closed the port of Boston, stripped the colony of its charter, flooded soldiers back into the town, and demanded payment for the tea. Colonists promptly organized the Massachusetts Provincial Congress and took control of the colony. The provincial congress met in Concord, where it stockpiled supplies and weapons, and called for towns to create “minute men” who could fight at a moment’s notice.
British officials were determined to end what they saw as a rebellion. In April, they ordered military governor General Thomas Gage to arrest colonial leaders Samuel Adams and John Hancock, who had left Boston to take shelter with one of Hancock’s relatives in the nearby town of Lexington. From there, they could seize the military supplies at Concord. British officials hoped that seizing both the men and the munitions would end the crisis.
But about 30 of the Sons of Liberty, including Paul Revere, had been watching the soldiers and gathering intelligence. They met in secret at the Green Dragon Tavern to share what they knew, each of them swearing on the Bible that they would not give away the group’s secrets. They had been patrolling the streets at night and saw at midnight on Saturday night, April 15, the day before Easter Sunday, that the general was shifting his troops. They knew the soldiers were going to move. But they didn’t know if the soldiers would leave Boston by way of the narrow Boston Neck or row across the harbor to Charlestown. That mattered because if the townspeople in Lexington and Concord were going to be warned that the troops were on their way, messengers from Boston would have to be able to avoid the columns of soldiers.
The Sons of Liberty had a plan. Paul Revere knew Boston well—he had been born there. As a teenager, he had been among the first young men who had signed up to ring the bells in the steeple of the Old North Church. The team of bell-ringers operated from a small room in the tower, and from there, a person could climb sets of narrow stairs and then ladders into the steeple. Anyone who lived in Boston or the surrounding area knew well that the steeple towered over every other building in Boston.
On Easter Sunday, after the secret watchers had noticed the troop movement, Revere traveled to Lexington to visit Adams and Hancock. On the way home through Charlestown, he had told friends “that if the British went out by Water, we would shew two Lanthorns in the North Church Steeple; & if by Land, one, as a Signal.” Armed with that knowledge, messengers could avoid the troops and raise the alarm along the roads to Lexington and Concord.
The plan was dangerous. The Old North Church was Anglican, Church of England, and about a third of the people who worshipped there were Loyalists. General Thomas Gage himself worshiped there. But so did Revere’s childhood friend John Pulling Jr., who had become a wealthy sea captain and was a vestryman, responsible for the church’s finances. Like Revere, Pulling was a Son of Liberty. So was the church’s relatively poor caretaker, or sexton, Robert Newman. They would help.
Dr. Joseph Warren lived just up the hill from Revere. He was a Son of Liberty and a leader in the Massachusetts Provincial Congress. On the night of April 18, he dashed off a quick note to Revere urging him to set off for Lexington to warn Adams and Hancock that the troops were on the way. By the time Revere got Warren’s house, the doctor had already sent another man, William Dawes, to Lexington by way of Boston Neck. Warren told Revere the troops were leaving Boston by water. Revere left Warren’s house, found his friend John Pulling, and gave him the information that would enable him to raise the signal for those waiting in Charlestown. Then Revere rowed across the harbor to Charleston to ride to Lexington himself. The night was clear with a rising moon, and Revere muffled his oars and swung out of his way to avoid the British ship standing guard.
Back in Boston, Pulling made his way past the soldiers on the streets to find Newman. Newman lived in his family home, where the tightening economy after the British occupation had forced his mother to board British officers. Newman was waiting for Pulling, and quietly slipped out of the house to meet him.
The two men walked past the soldiers to the church. As caretaker, Newman had a key.The two men crept through the dark church, climbed the stairs and then the ladders to the steeple holding lanterns—a tricky business, but one that a caretaker and a mariner could manage—very briefly flashed the lanterns they carried to send the signal, and then climbed back down.
Messengers in Charlestown saw the signal, but so did British soldiers. Legend has it that Newman escaped from the church by climbing out a window. He made his way back home, but since he was one of the few people in town who had keys to the church, soldiers arrested him the next day for participating in rebellious activities. He told them that he had given his keys to Pulling, who as a vestryman could give him orders. When soldiers went to find Pulling, he had skipped town, likely heading to Nantucket.
While Newman and Pulling made their way through the streets back to their homes, the race to beat the soldiers to Lexington and Concord was on. Dawes crossed the Boston Neck just before soldiers closed the city. Revere rowed to Charlestown, borrowed a horse, and headed out. Eluding waiting officers, he headed on the road through Medford and what is now Arlington.
Dawes and Revere, as well as the men from Charleston making the same ride after seeing the signal lanterns, told the houses along their different routes that the Regulars were coming. They converged in Lexington, warned Adams and Hancock, and then set out for Concord. As they rode, young doctor Samuel Prescott came up behind them. Prescott was courting a girl from Lexington and was headed back to his home in Concord. Like Dawes and Revere, he was a Son of Liberty, and joined them to alert the town, pointing out that his neighbors would pay more attention to a local man.
About halfway to Concord, British soldiers caught the men. They ordered Revere to dismount and, after questioning him, took his horse and turned him loose to walk back to Lexington. Dawes escaped, but his horse bucked him off and he, too, headed back to Lexington on foot. But Prescott jumped his horse over a stone wall and got away to Concord.
The riders from Boston had done their work. As they brought word the Regulars were coming, scores of other men spread the news through a system of “alarm and muster” the colonists had developed months before for just such an occasion. Rather than using signal fires, the colonists used sound, ringing bells and banging drums to alert the next house that there was an emergency. By the time Revere made it back to the house where Adams and Hancock were hiding, just before dawn on that chilly, dark April morning, militiamen had heard the news and were converging on Lexington Green.
So were the British soldiers.
When they marched onto the Lexington town green in the darkness just before dawn, the soldiers found several dozen minute men waiting for them. An officer ordered the men to leave, and they began to mill around, some of them leaving, others staying. And then, just as the sun was coming up, a gun went off. The soldiers opened fire. When the locals realized the soldiers were firing not just powder, but also lead musket balls, most ran. Eight locals were killed, and another dozen wounded.
The outnumbered militiamen fell back to tend their wounded, and about 300 Regulars marched on Concord to destroy the guns and powder there. But news of the arriving soldiers and the shooting on Lexington town green had spread through the colonists’ communication network, and militiamen from as far away as Worcester were either in Concord or on their way. By midmorning the Regulars were outnumbered and in battle with about 400 militiamen. They pulled back to the main body of British troops still in Lexington.
The Regulars headed back to Boston, but by then militiamen had converged on their route. The Regulars had been awake for almost two days with only a short rest, and they were tired. Militiamen fired at them not in organized lines, as soldiers were accustomed to, but in the style they had learned from Indigenous Americans, shooting from behind trees, houses, and the glacial boulders littered along the road. This way of war used the North American landscape to their advantage. They picked off British officers, dressed in distinct uniforms, first. By that evening, more than three hundred British soldiers and colonists lay dead or wounded.
By the next morning, more than 15,000 militiamen surrounded the town of Boston. The Revolutionary War had begun. Just over a year later, the fight that had started over the question of whether the king could be checked by the people would give the colonists an entirely new, radical answer to that question. On July 4, 1776, they declared the people had the right to be treated equally before the law, and they had the right to govern themselves.
Someone asked me once if the men who hung the lanterns in the tower knew what they were doing. She meant, did they know that by that act they would begin the steps to a war that would create a new nation and change the world.
The answer is no. None of us knows what the future will deliver.
Paul Revere and Robert Newman and John Pulling and William Dawes and Samuel Prescott, and all the other riders from Charlestown who set out for Lexington after they saw the signal lanterns in the steeple of Old North Church, were men from all walks of life who had families to support, businesses to manage. Some had been orphaned young, some lived with their parents. Some were wealthy, others would scrabble through life. Some, like Paul Revere, had recently buried one wife and married another. Samuel Prescott was looking to find just one.
But despite their differences and the hectic routine of their lives, they recognized the vital importance of the right to consent to the government under which they lived. They took time out of their daily lives to resist the new policies of the British government that would establish the right of a king to act without check by the people. They recognized that giving that sort of power to any man would open the way for a tyrant.
Paul Revere didn’t wake up on the morning of April 18, 1775, and decide to change the world. That morning began like many of the other tense days of the past year, and there was little reason to think the next two days would end as they did. Like his neighbors, Revere simply offered what he could to the cause: engraving skills, information, knowledge of a church steeple, longstanding friendships that helped to create a network. And on April 18, he and his friends set out to protect the men who were leading the fight to establish a representative government.
The work of Newman and Pulling to light the lanterns exactly 250 years ago tonight sounds even less heroic. They agreed to cross through town to light two lanterns in a church steeple. It sounds like such a very little thing to do, and yet by doing it, they risked imprisonment or even death. It was such a little thing…but it was everything. And what they did, as with so many of the little steps that lead to profound change, was largely forgotten until Henry Wadsworth Longfellow used their story to inspire a later generation to work to stop tyranny in his own time.
What Newman and Pulling did was simply to honor their friendships and their principles and to do the next right thing, even if it risked their lives, even if no one ever knew. And that is all anyone can do as we work to preserve the concept of human self-determination. In that heroic struggle, most of us will be lost to history, but we will, nonetheless, move the story forward, even if just a little bit.
And once in a great while, someone will light a lantern—or even two—that will shine forth for democratic principles that are under siege, and set the world ablaze.
Thanks sm.
That was terrific read.
Heather Cox Richardson
3m ·
April 24, 2025 (Thursday)
“Vladimir, STOP!” wrote President Donald Trump on his social media site this morning. Yesterday Trump berated Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky for rejecting a peace deal that heavily favored Russia; hours later, Russia launched its deadliest assault on Kyiv since last July, killing at least eight people and wounding more than 70 others. “I am not happy with the Russian strikes on KYIV. Not necessary, and very bad timing,” Trump posted. “5000 soldiers a week are dying. Lets get the Peace Deal DONE!”
Trump won the presidency by assuring his base that he was a strong leader who could impose his will on the country and the world. Now he is bleating weakly at Putin.
Trump was the logical outcome of the myth of cowboy individualism embraced by the Republicans since President Ronald Reagan rose to the White House by celebrating it. In that myth, a true American is a man who operates on his own, outside the community. He needs nothing from the government, works hard to support himself, protects his wife and children, and asserts his will by dominating others. Government is his enemy, according to the myth, because it takes his money to help undeserving freeloaders and because it regulates how he can run his business. A society dominated by a cowboy individual is a strong one.
Leaders who pushed this ideology knew it attracted voters. Once they were in power, they could slash government programs and cut taxes and regulations that kept wealth and opportunity accessible to poorer Americans. They argued that a society works best if wealth and power are concentrated among a few elites, who can direct capital more efficiently than government bureaucrats can. Their rhetoric worked: from 1981 to 2021, $50 trillion moved from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%. But those same people talking about individualism to secure votes also knew that the world has never worked this way. In the twenty-first century, U.S. security and the economy depended more than ever on coalitions and government investment.
As the middle class hollowed out, Republicans hammered on the idea that government action was socialism and the government was a swamp of waste and corruption. Donald Trump rode that rhetoric to the White House in 2016 but was still restrained by establishment Republicans who understood that the modern state underpinned America’s strength. President Joe Biden’s rejection of the Republicans’ economic vision and reorientation of the economy around ordinary Americans made Republicans rally against another Democratic president. They turned back to Trump, backed as he was by the MAGA base marinated in the rhetoric that government is bad, even though their counties are more dependent than Democratic counties on government aid.
Now the dog has caught the car. In 2024, Americans reelected Donald Trump, but he is no longer restrained by those who understood the importance of alliances and government programs. Instead, he is surrounded by those who appear convinced that displays of dominance will make the U.S. even stronger than it was when Trump took office and that destroying the government will free up great men to reorder society.
This impulse showed as soon as Trump took office in the takeover of the U.S. government by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, a group of individuals without government experience or security clearances working in a group whose legal status is doubtful. They were overseen by billionaire Elon Musk, who was neither elected nor confirmed by the Senate. Musk vowed to cut $2 trillion from the federal budget.
In the early days of the administration, Musk dominated Trump’s press opportunities and at least one Cabinet meeting. He appeared to be in charge. But his support soured quickly. From the start, Musk and the DOGE staff slashed willy-nilly, firing vital employees that the government then had to rehire, creating mayhem.
Then, in February, Musk tried to muscle in on the prerogatives of actual Cabinet members by demanding all government employees send a weekly email listing five things they had accomplished that week. Then, earlier this month, Musk publicly disagreed with Trump and his trade advisor Peter Navarro over both tariffs and immigration. He has also fought with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy.
According to Hannah Natanson, Faiz Siddiqui, and Emily Davies of the Washington Post, it is not clear the emails Musk demanded were ever used for anything, and that initiative is quietly dying. But Musk’s fights with other members of the administration have escalated until, as Dan Diamond, Faiz Siddiqui, Trisha Thadani, and Jeff Stein of the Washington Post reported today, Musk and Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent got into a yelling match in the West Wing of the White House.
And Musk’s vow of $2 trillion in cuts has dwindled down to $150 billion, although that number is not yet verifiable. Elizabeth Williamson of the New York Times reported today that the cost of firing workers will be more than $135 billion this year, while cuts to the IRS will cost about $8.5 billion in revenue in 2026 alone. And then there is the cost of lawsuits over DOGE’s actions.
Rather than working with those government officials already in place to save government money, Musk appears to be trying to display his power over government employees. At the same time, he is scooping up data from various government agencies about individuals in the U.S., a treasure trove that he could use for shaping society, garnering government contracts, or raising money either by selling it or by blackmailing people with it. After today’s news that Tesla’s earnings plunged 71% in the first quarter of the year, Musk tried to reassure investors by saying he would focus more on the company.
Trump ally Steve Bannon warned about Musk’s true interests: “We have to have a full accounting that makes sure any government data—classified or not—and any personal financial data, people’s tax returns, and their health records, have not gone to any entity not controlled by the Trump administration or the U.S. government.”
Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. also promised to sweep through the government bureaucracy he hates and come up with a new, better plan for making Americans healthier. Kennedy has a history of opposition to vaccines and has refused to urge people to get vaccinated to stop the spread of measles. That outbreak is already the largest since the disease ceased to be consistently present in the U.S. population 25 years ago. Today scientists reported that, at current rates of vaccination, measles could become commonplace again.
Kennedy has also pledged to find the causes of autism by September, pushing aside the deep research already done on the subject and instead announcing that the cause is “environmental toxins.” Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Dr. Jay Bhattacharya told reporters on Tuesday that in order to conduct the study, the NIH is collecting Americans’ private medical records from federal and commercial databases, including from the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Indian Health Service, medication records from pharmacies, and data from smartwatches and fitness trackers. It is in talks with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to see if it can get access to that database, too.
The idea that the right sort of men can do a better job than the government officers who have spent decades learning how to do their jobs is on view as well in the appointment of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who previously worked as a Fox News Channel weekend host. Hegseth vowed to champion strong “warfighters” at the Pentagon, but he has had no experience running an entity as large and complicated as the Defense Department, with its annual budget of $850 billion and its almost 3.5 million employees.
The results of his appointment have been disastrous. Under Hegseth, department officials are openly feuding. Paul McLeary and Jack Detsch reported today in Politico that Hegseth is using just his wife, his lawyer, and two lower-level officials as advisors, meaning he is operating without anyone who has significant expertise in the department.
Tuesday, we learned that in the unsecure second Signal chat—the one with his wife and brother and other personal friends—Hegseth posted from his personal phone information he had just received from Army General Michael Erik Kurilla, who leads U.S. Central Command, the command responsible for operations in the Middle East.
That got even worse today when Tara Copp of the Associated Press reported that Hegseth directed staffers to install Signal on his desktop computer so he could use Signal in a secure area where his own cell phone was not allowed. The computer was connected to the internet on an unsecured commercial line, making it highly susceptible to hacking.
Trump’s own belief that he could—and should—force the world to bow to his tariff levies revealed his conviction that he could tear up mutual agreements and impose his will. He predicted that other countries would come begging to him to lift the tariffs. Instead, the reality is that he has maimed the country’s thriving economy. On Tuesday, with the stock market lurching wildly and investors dumping U.S. investments, Trump suggested that he was negotiating with China and the 145% tariff rates he imposed would soon come down “substantially.” Yesterday he said “everything’s active” in negotiations with China.
Today, a spokesperson for China’s foreign ministry said “China and the U.S. are not having any consultation or negotiation on tariffs, still less reaching a deal.” China’s commerce spokesperson agreed that “Any claims about the progress of China-U.S. trade negotiations are groundless as trying to catch the wind and have no factual basis.” He said that China was willing to talk, but only “on the basis of mutual respect and in an equal manner.”
When a reporter asked Trump about China’s denial, he said: “Well, they had a meeting this morning.” The reporter answered: “Who’s they?” Trump replied: “I can’t tell you. It doesn’t matter who ‘they’ is. We may reveal it later.”
Journalist Chris Hayes wrote: “It’s incredible that now the best case scenario is basically Trump engaging in a humiliating climb-down, but having already inflicted permanent damage and uncertainty that never be undone.”
The rate at which America’s government, health, defense, and economy is degrading shows that reality will not conform to the myth of the American cowboy. The cover of The Economist today shows a battered and heavily bandaged eagle under the caption: “Only 1,361 Days To Go.”
The American people seem to be realizing that the rhetoric of cowboy individualism is a very different thing than its reality. Trump’s poll numbers are dropping sharply. A Reuters poll found that just 37% of Americans approve of his handling of the economy, which was supposed to be his strong suit. An Economist/YouGov poll found Trump’s approval rating was –13, with 54% of Americans disapproving of the way he is handling the presidency and only 41% approving.
nchft
David A. Graham
Staff writer
After Donald Trump won in November, I sat down to read all 922 pages of Project 2025. As I write in my new book, what I discovered was more radical and more interesting than I’d expected. It predicted much of what we’ve seen in the first three months of the second Trump administration—and much of what’s to come, including the dismantling of federal climate research that’s started to take shape in recent weeks.
The Blueprint
The White House mapped onto a blueprint
Paul Dans was a true believer in Donald Trump from the start, and by 2020, he had finally clawed his way to a job as a White House staffer. When Trump left office, Dans returned to private life but remained ready if the MAGA movement needed him—like the Roman statesman Cincinnatus, he said. The call came in the spring of 2022, when Kevin D. Roberts, the president of the conservative Heritage Foundation, summoned him to Washington and asked him to convene policy thinkers from across the full sweep of the American right to write an aspirational agenda for the next Republican president.
The contributors Dans gathered believed that the Christian, right-wing nation they desired could come about only if Republicans stopped doing politics the way they always had and refused to accept the structure of the executive branch as it existed. They also understood that the faster a new president moved, the more he’d be able to achieve as the courts, Congress, and civil society struggled to keep up.
The blueprint they produced for achieving that was Project 2025. The agenda was endlessly dissected by the press and Democrats during the election, leading Trump to angrily distance himself from it. Heritage forced Dans out in July 2024 as a sacrificial gesture. Yet these ideas have been key to the head-spinning first three months of the Trump administration, and they offer the best indications of where Trump’s attention will land next.
The most important tactic laid out in the plan was to transform the federal bureaucracy by firing as many civil servants as possible, changing others into political appointees, and terrifying the rest into obeisance. We are already seeing the impact: Trump has bought out, driven off, or fired tens of thousands of federal employees, and although courts have ordered some of them reinstated, he has transformed—perhaps permanently—the federal bureaucracy.
The attack on the civil service was one of the best-known planks of the plan, but many of the most shocking moments of the Trump presidency so far have actually come from less prominent ideas buried across Project 2025’s 922 pages. It foretold the sacking of top generals (see, for example, C. Q. Brown, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), branding these officials as “Barack Obama’s general officer corps” (page 88), and it said military officers had “been advanced by prior Administrations for reasons other than their warfighting prowess” (page 104). The repeal of Temporary Protected Status for people from Venezuela, and the targeting of academia by slashing student visas? Those are in there, too (pages 145 and 141).
An obsessive focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs appears throughout Project 2025; that has become a recurring theme of the Trump presidency, leading to the removal of certain webpages about Black winners of combat medals and the purging of references to the Enola Gay, the atomic bomber whose name suddenly made it vulnerable to keyword-search deletion. Trump’s attempts to fire agency officials, in defiance of the law, reflect a conviction by Project 2025’s architects that any restrictions on the president’s hiring and firing powers inside the executive branch are unconstitutional, a position they hope to persuade the Supreme Court to bless (page 560).
Even the muddled approach to tariffs of Trump’s three months in office—now on, now off, now postponed—mirrors cleavages in the Republican Party that appear in Project 2025. Although Trump is a lifelong fan of protectionism, trade is one of the few areas where conservative wonks have not entirely surrendered to his view. Instead of taking a solid position, as Project 2025’s authors did on most topics, they instead offered a point and counterpoint between the Trump adviser Peter Navarro, who favors aggressive tariffs on China, and a pro-free-trade voice.
As for what comes next, the text suggests two major things to watch. One is an end to any policies that acknowledge climate change, and to any federal climate research. Already, the Defense Department has canceled climate work, NASA has fired its chief scientist, NOAA has laid off hundreds of workers, and the EPA has plans to fire hundreds more, but even these steep cuts are likely only the start. Earlier this month, Politico reported on an Office of Management and Budget memo proposing an evisceration of NOAA that closely mirrors Project 2025’s proposals. Unlike some on the right, Project 2025 doesn’t treat climate change as a hoax, but it does view these programs as an impediment to the unfettered exploitation of fossil fuels, especially on federal land, that they want.
The second is a more organized campaign to promote conservative gender norms, traditional families, and Christian morality. Trump has already moved to limit transgender rights, but the Project 2025 agenda is much wider, aiming to return the United States to a country of married families with male breadwinners and female caregivers. The authors also want to ban abortion nationally, though Trump has shown little enthusiasm for the idea. Though he’s content to let states strictly limit abortion, he’s attuned to how unpopular overturning Roe v. Wade was outside of his base.
Even if Trump won’t act, the authors of Project 2025 have ideas for how to chip away at abortion access. They want to revoke federal approval for abortion drugs and criminalize mailing them, and they envision wide-ranging federal surveillance of abortion at the state level. To bolster traditional families, they want to pay caregivers to remain at home, nudge single fathers toward marriage, and restructure welfare programs to reward married couples. Taken together, these moves will try to replicate an idealized vision of pre–Roe v. Wade America.
“We had hoped, those of us who worked putting together Project 2025, that the next conservative president would seize the day, but Trump is seizing every minute of every hour,” Dans told Politico last month. Though Dans has not joined the administration, many of the people involved in Project 2025 have landed top jobs, including Russ Vought, head of OMB; CIA Director John Ratcliffe; and Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr. If Dans’s ouster from Heritage last summer seemed like a defeat, it was only a temporary one. When Politico asked him to assess the administration’s progress in enacting Project 2025’s agenda, he was euphoric. “It’s actually way beyond my wildest dreams,” he said.
Thinking about Project 2025 as simply a laundry list of management tweaks and policy proposals is a mistake. The authors set out to turbocharge the Trump administration and reshape the executive branch, but their ambitions are much bigger. Their goal is to transform American society in their image. So far, everything is going according to plan.
‘The Atlantic ‘ Email Newsletter
It’s over Whitty.
The right wingers lost and the extreme right wingers won.
weird shit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqfs8r2B4RE
Witty Rejoinder said:
David A. Graham
Staff writerAfter Donald Trump won in November, I sat down to read all 922 pages of Project 2025. As I write in my new book, what I discovered was more radical and more interesting than I’d expected. It predicted much of what we’ve seen in the first three months of the second Trump administration—and much of what’s to come, including the dismantling of federal climate research that’s started to take shape in recent weeks.
The Blueprint
The White House mapped onto a blueprintPaul Dans was a true believer in Donald Trump from the start, and by 2020, he had finally clawed his way to a job as a White House staffer. When Trump left office, Dans returned to private life but remained ready if the MAGA movement needed him—like the Roman statesman Cincinnatus, he said. The call came in the spring of 2022, when Kevin D. Roberts, the president of the conservative Heritage Foundation, summoned him to Washington and asked him to convene policy thinkers from across the full sweep of the American right to write an aspirational agenda for the next Republican president.
The contributors Dans gathered believed that the Christian, right-wing nation they desired could come about only if Republicans stopped doing politics the way they always had and refused to accept the structure of the executive branch as it existed. They also understood that the faster a new president moved, the more he’d be able to achieve as the courts, Congress, and civil society struggled to keep up.
The blueprint they produced for achieving that was Project 2025. The agenda was endlessly dissected by the press and Democrats during the election, leading Trump to angrily distance himself from it. Heritage forced Dans out in July 2024 as a sacrificial gesture. Yet these ideas have been key to the head-spinning first three months of the Trump administration, and they offer the best indications of where Trump’s attention will land next.
The most important tactic laid out in the plan was to transform the federal bureaucracy by firing as many civil servants as possible, changing others into political appointees, and terrifying the rest into obeisance. We are already seeing the impact: Trump has bought out, driven off, or fired tens of thousands of federal employees, and although courts have ordered some of them reinstated, he has transformed—perhaps permanently—the federal bureaucracy.
The attack on the civil service was one of the best-known planks of the plan, but many of the most shocking moments of the Trump presidency so far have actually come from less prominent ideas buried across Project 2025’s 922 pages. It foretold the sacking of top generals (see, for example, C. Q. Brown, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), branding these officials as “Barack Obama’s general officer corps” (page 88), and it said military officers had “been advanced by prior Administrations for reasons other than their warfighting prowess” (page 104). The repeal of Temporary Protected Status for people from Venezuela, and the targeting of academia by slashing student visas? Those are in there, too (pages 145 and 141).
An obsessive focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs appears throughout Project 2025; that has become a recurring theme of the Trump presidency, leading to the removal of certain webpages about Black winners of combat medals and the purging of references to the Enola Gay, the atomic bomber whose name suddenly made it vulnerable to keyword-search deletion. Trump’s attempts to fire agency officials, in defiance of the law, reflect a conviction by Project 2025’s architects that any restrictions on the president’s hiring and firing powers inside the executive branch are unconstitutional, a position they hope to persuade the Supreme Court to bless (page 560).
Even the muddled approach to tariffs of Trump’s three months in office—now on, now off, now postponed—mirrors cleavages in the Republican Party that appear in Project 2025. Although Trump is a lifelong fan of protectionism, trade is one of the few areas where conservative wonks have not entirely surrendered to his view. Instead of taking a solid position, as Project 2025’s authors did on most topics, they instead offered a point and counterpoint between the Trump adviser Peter Navarro, who favors aggressive tariffs on China, and a pro-free-trade voice.
As for what comes next, the text suggests two major things to watch. One is an end to any policies that acknowledge climate change, and to any federal climate research. Already, the Defense Department has canceled climate work, NASA has fired its chief scientist, NOAA has laid off hundreds of workers, and the EPA has plans to fire hundreds more, but even these steep cuts are likely only the start. Earlier this month, Politico reported on an Office of Management and Budget memo proposing an evisceration of NOAA that closely mirrors Project 2025’s proposals. Unlike some on the right, Project 2025 doesn’t treat climate change as a hoax, but it does view these programs as an impediment to the unfettered exploitation of fossil fuels, especially on federal land, that they want.
The second is a more organized campaign to promote conservative gender norms, traditional families, and Christian morality. Trump has already moved to limit transgender rights, but the Project 2025 agenda is much wider, aiming to return the United States to a country of married families with male breadwinners and female caregivers. The authors also want to ban abortion nationally, though Trump has shown little enthusiasm for the idea. Though he’s content to let states strictly limit abortion, he’s attuned to how unpopular overturning Roe v. Wade was outside of his base.
Even if Trump won’t act, the authors of Project 2025 have ideas for how to chip away at abortion access. They want to revoke federal approval for abortion drugs and criminalize mailing them, and they envision wide-ranging federal surveillance of abortion at the state level. To bolster traditional families, they want to pay caregivers to remain at home, nudge single fathers toward marriage, and restructure welfare programs to reward married couples. Taken together, these moves will try to replicate an idealized vision of pre–Roe v. Wade America.
“We had hoped, those of us who worked putting together Project 2025, that the next conservative president would seize the day, but Trump is seizing every minute of every hour,” Dans told Politico last month. Though Dans has not joined the administration, many of the people involved in Project 2025 have landed top jobs, including Russ Vought, head of OMB; CIA Director John Ratcliffe; and Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr. If Dans’s ouster from Heritage last summer seemed like a defeat, it was only a temporary one. When Politico asked him to assess the administration’s progress in enacting Project 2025’s agenda, he was euphoric. “It’s actually way beyond my wildest dreams,” he said.
Thinking about Project 2025 as simply a laundry list of management tweaks and policy proposals is a mistake. The authors set out to turbocharge the Trump administration and reshape the executive branch, but their ambitions are much bigger. Their goal is to transform American society in their image. So far, everything is going according to plan.
‘The Atlantic ‘ Email Newsletter
Ta.
SCIENCE said:
and
https://www.newsweek.com/ice-arrest-virginia-albemarle-county-courthouse-2063521
A man who appeared in Albemarle County General District Court on April 22 to face assault charges had those charges dropped but was taken into custody shortly afterward by three plainclothes individuals. Video footage obtained by 29 News shows a man being approached and restrained in an unrestricted portion of the courthouse lobby by multiple individuals, one of whom is wearing a full-face balaclava. Though bystanders asked what was happening, the individuals did not present a warrant or official identification when requested. Despite the concerns raised by those present, the man was placed in handcuffs and escorted from the building, with the video ending as he was removed from the scene.
SCIENCE said:
SCIENCE said:
and
https://www.newsweek.com/ice-arrest-virginia-albemarle-county-courthouse-2063521
A man who appeared in Albemarle County General District Court on April 22 to face assault charges had those charges dropped but was taken into custody shortly afterward by three plainclothes individuals. Video footage obtained by 29 News shows a man being approached and restrained in an unrestricted portion of the courthouse lobby by multiple individuals, one of whom is wearing a full-face balaclava. Though bystanders asked what was happening, the individuals did not present a warrant or official identification when requested. Despite the concerns raised by those present, the man was placed in handcuffs and escorted from the building, with the video ending as he was removed from the scene.
LOL
How are the people in that room supposed to distinguish between this and a kidnapping?
WTF do yous mean “distinguish between” sheesh
SCIENCE said:
SCIENCE said:
SCIENCE said:
and
https://www.newsweek.com/ice-arrest-virginia-albemarle-county-courthouse-2063521
A man who appeared in Albemarle County General District Court on April 22 to face assault charges had those charges dropped but was taken into custody shortly afterward by three plainclothes individuals. Video footage obtained by 29 News shows a man being approached and restrained in an unrestricted portion of the courthouse lobby by multiple individuals, one of whom is wearing a full-face balaclava. Though bystanders asked what was happening, the individuals did not present a warrant or official identification when requested. Despite the concerns raised by those present, the man was placed in handcuffs and escorted from the building, with the video ending as he was removed from the scene.
LOL
How are the people in that room supposed to distinguish between this and a kidnapping?
WTF do yous mean “distinguish between” sheesh
I saw a video of a group, “agents”, trying to get access to a person in a house. Upmarket area, young woman at the door – not the target, she was fielding their questions. A passerby filmed the incident. The group consisted of a few athletic looking, tall, young men in casual clothes, and a small, young woman. It felt like the she was there to put the people in the house at ease or something. Intimidation, but with something else thrown in.
“Well, Crimea went to the Russians,” he said, “It was handed to them by Barack Hussein Obama, and not by me,” he said.
“It’s been with them long before Trump came along. Again, this is Obama’s war.
“This is a war that should have never happened. I call it the war that should have never happened.”
Luigi Mangione has pleaded not guilty to federal charges of gunning down health insurance executive Brian Thompson late last year. Mr Mangione’s lawyers have said Ms Bondi’s April 1 announcement was “unapologetically political” and breached government protocols for death penalty decisions.
SCIENCE said:
Luigi Mangione has pleaded not guilty to federal charges of gunning down health insurance executive Brian Thompson late last year. Mr Mangione’s lawyers have said Ms Bondi’s April 1 announcement was “unapologetically political” and breached government protocols for death penalty decisions.
I also think he’ll plead not guilty in state charges… let’s put on a show.
SCIENCE said:
Time to prep the attics with secret entrances.
Arts said:
SCIENCE said:
Time to prep the attics with secret entrances.
They smuggled slaves back in the day.
SCIENCE said:
Seems like a great lesson to get rid of laws that are no longer needed, or change them if they don’t work as expected.
Review time and sunset clause should be set with all legislation.
Michael V said:
SCIENCE said:
Seems like a great lesson to get rid of laws that are no longer needed, or change them if they don’t work as expected.
Review time and sunset clause should be set with all legislation.
but the constitution and the bible are timeless
SCIENCE said:
Michael V said:
SCIENCE said:
Seems like a great lesson to get rid of laws that are no longer needed, or change them if they don’t work as expected.
Review time and sunset clause should be set with all legislation.
but the constitution and the bible are timeless
…which has nothing to do with MV’s remarks.
captain_spalding said:
SCIENCE said:
Michael V said:Seems like a great lesson to get rid of laws that are no longer needed, or change them if they don’t work as expected.
Review time and sunset clause should be set with all legislation.
but the constitution and the bible are timeless
…which has nothing to do with MV’s remarks.
captain_spalding said:
SCIENCE said:
Michael V said:Seems like a great lesson to get rid of laws that are no longer needed, or change them if they don’t work as expected.
Review time and sunset clause should be set with all legislation.
but the constitution and the bible are timeless
…which has nothing to do with MV’s remarks.
captain_spalding said:
SCIENCE said:
Michael V said:Seems like a great lesson to get rid of laws that are no longer needed, or change them if they don’t work as expected.
Review time and sunset clause should be set with all legislation.
but the constitution and the bible are timeless
…which has nothing to do with MV’s remarks.
aren’t the bible and the constitution the source of all their god given foundational laws and orders
roughbarked said:
Arts said:
SCIENCE said:
Time to prep the attics with secret entrances.
They smuggled slaves back in the day.
maybe but it’s the slaves that are the criminals, not their poor innocent owners
SCIENCE said:
Now is a great time to start a kidnapping racket. Everyone will suspect ICE involvement and that the missing persons were probably secret illegal immigrants anyway so they don’t deserve attention or sympathy.
SCIENCE said:
captain_spalding said:
SCIENCE said:but the constitution and the bible are timeless
…which has nothing to do with MV’s remarks.
aren’t the bible and the constitution the source of all their god given foundational laws and orders
Tamb said:
SCIENCE said:
captain_spalding said:…which has nothing to do with MV’s remarks.
aren’t the bible and the constitution the source of all their god given foundational laws and orders
The Muslims don’t think so.
neither do I.
party_pants said:
Tamb said:
SCIENCE said:aren’t the bible and the constitution the source of all their god given foundational laws and orders
The Muslims don’t think so.neither do I.
I definitely never utter the words ‘under God’. Which US students have to do every day at school.
roughbarked said:
party_pants said:
Tamb said:The Muslims don’t think so.
neither do I.
I definitely never utter the words ‘under God’. Which US students have to do every day at school.
they are so primitive
points and laughs at USA
SCIENCE said:
captain_spalding said:
SCIENCE said:but the constitution and the bible are timeless
…which has nothing to do with MV’s remarks.
aren’t the bible and the constitution the source of all their god given foundational laws and orders
Some ratbag wrote to the local paper here a few years back, blathering that ‘the Christian Bible is the source of all of the essential laws that exist in our world’, or similar (it wasa while back).
I wrote (and they published) a reply, in which i queried what the Sumerians, Akkadins, Egyptians, Hittites etc. did for some code of law and order, as neither Christianity or the Bible existed in their civilisations? To say nothing of the ancient Chinese and Indian civilisations.
Did they just run about, cracking open each others’ skulls and feasting on the goo inside (quot. Kent Brockman), or did they just occasionally make lucky guesses at justice?
captain_spalding said:
SCIENCE said:
captain_spalding said:…which has nothing to do with MV’s remarks.
aren’t the bible and the constitution the source of all their god given foundational laws and orders
Some ratbag wrote to the local paper here a few years back, blathering that ‘the Christian Bible is the source of all of the essential laws that exist in our world’, or similar (it wasa while back).
I wrote (and they published) a reply, in which i queried what the Sumerians, Akkadins, Egyptians, Hittites etc. did for some code of law and order, as neither Christianity or the Bible existed in their civilisations? To say nothing of the ancient Chinese and Indian civilisations.
Did they just run about, cracking open each others’ skulls and feasting on the goo inside (quot. Kent Brockman), or did they just occasionally make lucky guesses at justice?
Well they guy is just wrong. The bible isn;t a moral code, it is a religious code.
Take the 10 commandments for example, the first 4 of them are religious instructions: don’t worship other gods, do make graven images, don’t take the name of god in vsain, observe the sabbath. There is nothing moral about these. So 0/4 so far.
I’ll pay don’t steal and don’t murder. I’ll give only half a point to don’t bear false witness against your neighbour because it doesn’t go far enough. So 2.5/7 so far.
The coveting stuff gets a zero because it lists the wife as a possession. The adultery stuff is meh, I’ll leave it up to each couple to make their own arrangements. The honouring your parents is problematic: what if your parents are dishonourable? So 2.5 / 10 for the “greatest devine moral code”.
party_pants said:
captain_spalding said:
SCIENCE said:aren’t the bible and the constitution the source of all their god given foundational laws and orders
Some ratbag wrote to the local paper here a few years back, blathering that ‘the Christian Bible is the source of all of the essential laws that exist in our world’, or similar (it wasa while back).
I wrote (and they published) a reply, in which i queried what the Sumerians, Akkadins, Egyptians, Hittites etc. did for some code of law and order, as neither Christianity or the Bible existed in their civilisations? To say nothing of the ancient Chinese and Indian civilisations.
Did they just run about, cracking open each others’ skulls and feasting on the goo inside (quot. Kent Brockman), or did they just occasionally make lucky guesses at justice?
Well they guy is just wrong. The bible isn;t a moral code, it is a religious code.
Take the 10 commandments for example, the first 4 of them are religious instructions: don’t worship other gods, do make graven images, don’t take the name of god in vsain, observe the sabbath. There is nothing moral about these. So 0/4 so far.
I’ll pay don’t steal and don’t murder. I’ll give only half a point to don’t bear false witness against your neighbour because it doesn’t go far enough. So 2.5/7 so far.
The coveting stuff gets a zero because it lists the wife as a possession. The adultery stuff is meh, I’ll leave it up to each couple to make their own arrangements. The honouring your parents is problematic: what if your parents are dishonourable? So 2.5 / 10 for the “greatest devine moral code”.
2.5/10
Could do much better. See me after class.
captain_spalding said:
SCIENCE said:
captain_spalding said:…which has nothing to do with MV’s remarks.
aren’t the bible and the constitution the source of all their god given foundational laws and orders
Some ratbag wrote to the local paper here a few years back, blathering that ‘the Christian Bible is the source of all of the essential laws that exist in our world’, or similar (it wasa while back).
I wrote (and they published) a reply, in which i queried what the Sumerians, Akkadins, Egyptians, Hittites etc. did for some code of law and order, as neither Christianity or the Bible existed in their civilisations? To say nothing of the ancient Chinese and Indian civilisations.
Did they just run about, cracking open each others’ skulls and feasting on the goo inside (quot. Kent Brockman), or did they just occasionally make lucky guesses at justice?
:)
captain_spalding said:
party_pants said:
captain_spalding said:Some ratbag wrote to the local paper here a few years back, blathering that ‘the Christian Bible is the source of all of the essential laws that exist in our world’, or similar (it wasa while back).
I wrote (and they published) a reply, in which i queried what the Sumerians, Akkadins, Egyptians, Hittites etc. did for some code of law and order, as neither Christianity or the Bible existed in their civilisations? To say nothing of the ancient Chinese and Indian civilisations.
Did they just run about, cracking open each others’ skulls and feasting on the goo inside (quot. Kent Brockman), or did they just occasionally make lucky guesses at justice?
Well they guy is just wrong. The bible isn;t a moral code, it is a religious code.
Take the 10 commandments for example, the first 4 of them are religious instructions: don’t worship other gods, do make graven images, don’t take the name of god in vsain, observe the sabbath. There is nothing moral about these. So 0/4 so far.
I’ll pay don’t steal and don’t murder. I’ll give only half a point to don’t bear false witness against your neighbour because it doesn’t go far enough. So 2.5/7 so far.
The coveting stuff gets a zero because it lists the wife as a possession. The adultery stuff is meh, I’ll leave it up to each couple to make their own arrangements. The honouring your parents is problematic: what if your parents are dishonourable? So 2.5 / 10 for the “greatest devine moral code”.
2.5/10
Could do much better. See me after class.
I like Aristotle’s list of virtues much better.
party_pants said:
captain_spalding said:
party_pants said:Well they guy is just wrong. The bible isn;t a moral code, it is a religious code.
Take the 10 commandments for example, the first 4 of them are religious instructions: don’t worship other gods, do make graven images, don’t take the name of god in vsain, observe the sabbath. There is nothing moral about these. So 0/4 so far.
I’ll pay don’t steal and don’t murder. I’ll give only half a point to don’t bear false witness against your neighbour because it doesn’t go far enough. So 2.5/7 so far.
The coveting stuff gets a zero because it lists the wife as a possession. The adultery stuff is meh, I’ll leave it up to each couple to make their own arrangements. The honouring your parents is problematic: what if your parents are dishonourable? So 2.5 / 10 for the “greatest devine moral code”.
2.5/10
Could do much better. See me after class.
I like Aristotle’s list of virtues much better.
Aristotle, there’s a bloke who had some good ideas, but also had some that were a bit wacky, possibly the result of eating the wrong kinds of mushroom, and which received w-a-a-a-y too much respect for w-a-a-a-y too long afterwards, hindering the development of science and knowledge for an awfully long time.
captain_spalding said:
party_pants said:
captain_spalding said:2.5/10
Could do much better. See me after class.
I like Aristotle’s list of virtues much better.
Aristotle, there’s a bloke who had some good ideas, but also had some that were a bit wacky, possibly the result of eating the wrong kinds of mushroom, and which received w-a-a-a-y too much respect for w-a-a-a-y too long afterwards, hindering the development of science and knowledge for an awfully long time.
maybe but is it his fault that there weren’t enough other geniuses around to provide competitive ideas to sustain that development
captain_spalding said:
party_pants said:
captain_spalding said:2.5/10
Could do much better. See me after class.
I like Aristotle’s list of virtues much better.
Aristotle, there’s a bloke who had some good ideas, but also had some that were a bit wacky, possibly the result of eating the wrong kinds of mushroom, and which received w-a-a-a-y too much respect for w-a-a-a-y too long afterwards, hindering the development of science and knowledge for an awfully long time.
Well he was a bugger for the bottle, as is well-known.
https://youtu.be/Fsnr9yNEh7c?si=dwALziwYwgAYJI6t
DOJ accidentally sends their internal strategy meme to the court, admitting their case is weak
Trump DOJ Ordered ICE to Invade Homes Without Search Warrant
The Justice Department quietly authorized immigration agents to seize power in arresting people under the Alien Enemies Act—no warrant required.
The Justice Department quietly invoked the Alien Enemies act last month to give Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents the power to conduct warrantless searches of people’s homes as long as they suspect them to be an “alien enemy.” USA Today obtained the memo that contained this order on Friday.
https://newrepublic.com/post/194442/trump-doj-memo-ice-arrest-search-warrant
dv said:
https://youtu.be/Fsnr9yNEh7c?si=dwALziwYwgAYJI6tDOJ accidentally sends their internal strategy meme to the court, admitting their case is weak
Oh, dear. That was unfortunate.
Fremdschämen. A new German word that I will try to remember.
Spiny Norman said:
Dai
sy
Dai
sy
Give me your an
swer
do
ruby said:
dv said:
https://youtu.be/Fsnr9yNEh7c?si=dwALziwYwgAYJI6tDOJ accidentally sends their internal strategy meme to the court, admitting their case is weak
Oh, dear. That was unfortunate.
Fremdschämen. A new German word that I will try to remember.
I didn’t watch the YouTube, but I skimmed the first few comments. I liked “Not all heroes wear capes’.
buffy said:
ruby said:
dv said:
https://youtu.be/Fsnr9yNEh7c?si=dwALziwYwgAYJI6tDOJ accidentally sends their internal strategy meme to the court, admitting their case is weak
Oh, dear. That was unfortunate.
Fremdschämen. A new German word that I will try to remember.
I didn’t watch the YouTube, but I skimmed the first few comments. I liked “Not all heroes wear capes’.
When he say that, as a lawyer, if he had commtted an error of this magnitude, he would feel obliged to commit ritual suicide,’‘i would stick a sword in my stomach, and pull ‘up’…”.
captain_spalding said:
buffy said:
ruby said:Oh, dear. That was unfortunate.
Fremdschämen. A new German word that I will try to remember.
I didn’t watch the YouTube, but I skimmed the first few comments. I liked “Not all heroes wear capes’.
When he say that, as a lawyer, if he had commtted an error of this magnitude, he would feel obliged to commit ritual suicide,’‘i would stick a sword in my stomach, and pull ‘up’…”.
Sounds like he is troubled.
Peak Warming Man said:
captain_spalding said:
buffy said:I didn’t watch the YouTube, but I skimmed the first few comments. I liked “Not all heroes wear capes’.
When he say that, as a lawyer, if he had commtted an error of this magnitude, he would feel obliged to commit ritual suicide,’‘i would stick a sword in my stomach, and pull ‘up’…”.
Sounds like he is troubled.
He certainly seems to consider the situation to be ‘regrettable’.
TLDR: OP orders wedding dress from local (US) designer. Designer charges OP an extra $1500 to cover tariffs as the dress is apparently being made in China. OP discovers what tariffs are, and doubles down on everything. Grab your popcorn for this one.
https://www.reddit.com/r/wedding/s/LkYOrqEEq2
Divine Angel said:
TLDR: OP orders wedding dress from local (US) designer. Designer charges OP an extra $1500 to cover tariffs as the dress is apparently being made in China. OP discovers what tariffs are, and doubles down on everything. Grab your popcorn for this one.
ah so this is only a problem for them because prices in USSA are quoted exclusive of taxes so you always cop a nice surprise when you buy
whereas here there seems to be a general tendency to quote GST inclusive prices
SCIENCE said:
Divine Angel said:
TLDR: OP orders wedding dress from local (US) designer. Designer charges OP an extra $1500 to cover tariffs as the dress is apparently being made in China. OP discovers what tariffs are, and doubles down on everything. Grab your popcorn for this one.
ah so this is only a problem for them because prices in USSA are quoted exclusive of taxes so you always cop a nice surprise when you buy
whereas here there seems to be a general tendency to quote GST inclusive prices
Because it is required by law, where the goods or services are sold retail.
Wholesale can be quoted ex-GST.
dv said:
Basterd!
Michael V said:
SCIENCE said:Divine Angel said:
TLDR: OP orders wedding dress from local (US) designer. Designer charges OP an extra $1500 to cover tariffs as the dress is apparently being made in China. OP discovers what tariffs are, and doubles down on everything. Grab your popcorn for this one.
ah so this is only a problem for them because prices in USSA are quoted exclusive of taxes so you always cop a nice surprise when you buy
whereas here there seems to be a general tendency to quote GST inclusive prices
Because it is required by law, where the goods or services are sold retail.
Wholesale can be quoted ex-GST.
This.
buffy said:
Michael V said:
SCIENCE said:ah so this is only a problem for them because prices in USSA are quoted exclusive of taxes so you always cop a nice surprise when you buy
whereas here there seems to be a general tendency to quote GST inclusive prices
Because it is required by law, where the goods or services are sold retail.
Wholesale can be quoted ex-GST.
This.
that was exactly the point they were making on Reddit oh yes
I see new movies, hundreds of them.
Titles like
REFUNDED.
TARRIFFED.
PAY MORE.
PAY MORE AGAIN.
TARRIFFED AGAIN
REFUNDED AGAIN.
SOARING COSTS.
MORE SOARING COSTS.
ETC…
Tau.Neutrino said:
I see new movies, hundreds of them.Titles like
REFUNDED.
TARRIFFED.
PAY MORE.
PAY MORE AGAIN.
TARRIFFED AGAIN
REFUNDED AGAIN.
SOARING COSTS.
MORE SOARING COSTS.
ETC…
Honey, I Had to Shut The Company Down.
sarahs mum said:
Heather Cox Richardson
3m ·
April 24, 2025 (Thursday)———————————————-CUT———————————————————
Thanks.
Tau.Neutrino said:
Tau.Neutrino said:
I see new movies, hundreds of them.Titles like
REFUNDED.
TARRIFFED.
PAY MORE.
PAY MORE AGAIN.
TARRIFFED AGAIN
REFUNDED AGAIN.
SOARING COSTS.
MORE SOARING COSTS.
ETC…
Honey, I Had to Shut The Company Down.
Honey I Had To Lay of All The Staff.
Tau.Neutrino said:
Tau.Neutrino said:
Tau.Neutrino said:
I see new movies, hundreds of them.Titles like
REFUNDED.
TARRIFFED.
PAY MORE.
PAY MORE AGAIN.
TARRIFFED AGAIN
REFUNDED AGAIN.
SOARING COSTS.
MORE SOARING COSTS.
ETC…
Honey, I Had to Shut The Company Down.
Honey I Had To Lay of All The Staff.
Honey, The Customers Have Gone.
George Santos sentenced to more than seven years in prison
Bye bye George.
Tau.Neutrino said:
Tau.Neutrino said:
Tau.Neutrino said:Honey, I Had to Shut The Company Down.
Honey I Had To Lay of All The Staff.
Honey, The Customers Have Gone.
Honey, The Really Cheap Labour Force Has All Been Forcibly Deported, So I’ll Have To Hire Americans, So We Won’t Be Able To Afford To Buy A New Holiday House This Year.
Was this posted? Article is more than two months old, but still relevant.
Tau.Neutrino said:
Was this posted? Article is more than two months old, but still relevant.
I rather like and admire Geoffrey, but he’s lived in the UK for about 50 years, so i think it’s a bit rich for him to say, hey, country on the other side of the world that i don’t really have much to do with; you should say something about this.
Is he also encouraging the British government to ‘speak up’?
captain_spalding said:
Tau.Neutrino said:
Tau.Neutrino said:Honey I Had To Lay of All The Staff.
Honey, The Customers Have Gone.
Honey, The Really Cheap Labour Force Has All Been Forcibly Deported, So I’ll Have To Hire Americans, So We Won’t Be Able To Afford To Buy A New Holiday House This Year.
Received 9 Academy award nominations.
Heather Cox Richardson
1h ·
April 25, 2025 (Friday)
Today’s major stories must be seen in the context of President Donald Trump’s dramatic losses in court and his plummeting poll numbers.
Yesterday, Trump told the Department of Justice to investigate ActBlue, the platform that handles the fundraising for almost all Democratic candidates and the issues Democrats support. This targeting of Democratic infrastructure would hobble the Democrats. It also plays to Trump’s base, which insists—without evidence—that ActBlue accepts straw and foreign donations, an accusation Trump repeated in his order about the investigation.
This morning, FBI director Kash Patel posted on social media, “Just NOW, the FBI arrested Judge Hannah Dugan out of Milwaukee, Wisconsin on charges of obstruction—after evidence of Judge Dugan obstructing an immigration arrest operation last week.” Patel quickly deleted the post, but the story had already gotten attention.
FBI agents arrested Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan at the courthouse this morning in what, as Josh Kovensky of Talking Points Memo notes, appeared to be an attempt to draw attention and to illustrate that judges “must cooperate with the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign or else face overbearing actions from federal law enforcement.”
The story appears to be that on April 18, while Dugan was about to hear a pre-trial conference in the case of an undocumented immigrant charged with misdemeanor battery, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents arrived to arrest the person. They had an administrative warrant rather than a judicial warrant and Judge Dugan asked them to produce a judicial warrant.
When courtroom discussions about the man’s case ended, Judge Dugan invited the man and his lawyer to leave by way of the jury door rather than the public exit, although both exits led back to the public hallway where ICE agents waited. The man appeared in the public hallway but got to an elevator before the agents did, enabling him to run down the street before the agents caught up and arrested him.
Federal prosecutors have charged Dugan with “bstructing or impeding a proceeding before a department or agency of the United States” and “oncealing an individual to prevent his discovery and arrest.”
Tellingly, Attorney General Pam Bondi immediately went on the Fox News Channel to talk about the arrest, attacking the judge. “What has happened to our judiciary is beyond me,” she said. “The are deranged is all I can think of. I think some of these judges think that they are beyond and above the law. They are not, and we are sending a very strong message today…if you are harboring a fugitive…we will come after you and we will prosecute you. We will find you.”
Later today, news broke that the administration appears to have deported a U.S. citizen. Chris Geidner of Lawdork reports that the administration deported a two-year-old born in the United States and thus a U.S. citizen, along with her mother and her sister, to Honduras, her mother’s country of origin, even as the child’s father tried frantically to keep her in the U.S. Judge Terry A. Doughty of the Federal District Court in the Western District of Louisiana, a Trump appointee, said that “it is illegal and unconstitutional to deport” a U.S. citizen, and set a hearing for May 16 because he has a “strong suspicion that the government just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process.”
These actions to seize power and to hammer into place extremist MAGA immigration policies are dramatic demonstrations of the Trump administration’s attempt to destroy democracy. Indeed, the attempt to attack the judges could well be a reaction to the major losses the administration took from the courts this week.
As Jacob Knutson of Democracy Docket wrote, Trump suffered at least 11 legal setbacks this week as judges blocked Trump from gutting the Voice of America media outlet, blocked the administration from removing people in Colorado and New York under the Alien Enemies Act, ordered the administration to comply with discovery requests from Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s lawyers, told the Department of Education not to implement anti-DEI measures, blocked Trump’s executive order about elections, stopped the administration from impounding money from cities that don’t comply with its mass deportation orders, and blocked the administration from ending collective bargaining rights for federal workers.
The dramatic actions against ActBlue and immigrants are also signs of weakness as administration officials attempt to distract supporters not only from the disastrous tariffs, but also from the growing evidence that Trump is not functioning as a president should.
As legal analyst Anna Bower noted about Bondi’s Fox News Channel performance: “If you’re a prosecutor who is serious about obtaining a conviction, you don’t go on Fox and talk about the (alleged) facts of the case like this.”
It seems likely these extreme actions are an attempt to throw some red meat to those base voters whose support for the president is wavering, and to grab power while it is still possible.
In an interview with Time magazine, published today, Trump did not seem at the top of his mental game. He reiterated that the country is about to become richer than ever and that the problems in his administration can all be blamed on his predecessor, President Joe Biden. He claimed that he has already made 200 trade deals, which could be possible if he is cutting private deals with corporations but not if he is talking to countries: there are only 195 countries in the world. He claimed China’s president Xi Jinping has called him to make a deal, although Chinese officials deny this.
In the interview, Trump repeatedly deferred to his lawyers to answer questions about Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man the administration says it sent to an infamous terrorist prison in El Salvador because of “administrative error.” He said that he did not personally approve payments to El Salvador to hold the men his administration sent there.
He said when he vowed to end Russia’s war against Ukraine on day one he was only speaking “figuratively, and I said that as an exaggeration, because to make a point, and you know, it gets, of course, by the fake news . Obviously, people know that when I said that, it was said in jest, but it was also said that it will be ended.”’
Finally, the Time interviewer asked him: “Mr. President, you were showing us the new paintings you have behind us. You put all these new portraits. One of them includes John Adams. John Adams said we’re a government ruled by laws, not by men. Do you agree with that?”
Trump replied: “John Adams said that? Where was the painting?”
When the interviewer pointed out the portrait, Trump said: “We’re a government ruled by laws, not by men? Well, I think we’re a government ruled by law, but you know, somebody has to administer the law. So therefore men, certainly, men and women, certainly play a role in it. I wouldn’t agree with it 100%. We are a government where men are involved in the process of law, and ideally, you’re going to have honest men like me.”
Tau.Neutrino said:
Tau.Neutrino said:
Tau.Neutrino said:
I see new movies, hundreds of them.Titles like
REFUNDED.
TARRIFFED.
PAY MORE.
PAY MORE AGAIN.
TARRIFFED AGAIN
REFUNDED AGAIN.
SOARING COSTS.
MORE SOARING COSTS.
ETC…
Honey, I Had to Shut The Company Down.
Honey I Had To Lay of All The Staff.
Nice Freudian Slip There
sarahs mum said:
Heather Cox Richardson
1h ·
April 25, 2025 (Friday)Today’s major stories must be seen in the context of President Donald Trump’s dramatic losses in court and his plummeting poll numbers.
Yesterday, Trump told the Department of Justice to investigate ActBlue, the platform that handles the fundraising for almost all Democratic candidates and the issues Democrats support. This targeting of Democratic infrastructure would hobble the Democrats. It also plays to Trump’s base, which insists—without evidence—that ActBlue accepts straw and foreign donations, an accusation Trump repeated in his order about the investigation.
This morning, FBI director Kash Patel posted on social media, “Just NOW, the FBI arrested Judge Hannah Dugan out of Milwaukee, Wisconsin on charges of obstruction—after evidence of Judge Dugan obstructing an immigration arrest operation last week.” Patel quickly deleted the post, but the story had already gotten attention.
FBI agents arrested Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan at the courthouse this morning in what, as Josh Kovensky of Talking Points Memo notes, appeared to be an attempt to draw attention and to illustrate that judges “must cooperate with the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign or else face overbearing actions from federal law enforcement.”
The story appears to be that on April 18, while Dugan was about to hear a pre-trial conference in the case of an undocumented immigrant charged with misdemeanor battery, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents arrived to arrest the person. They had an administrative warrant rather than a judicial warrant and Judge Dugan asked them to produce a judicial warrant.
When courtroom discussions about the man’s case ended, Judge Dugan invited the man and his lawyer to leave by way of the jury door rather than the public exit, although both exits led back to the public hallway where ICE agents waited. The man appeared in the public hallway but got to an elevator before the agents did, enabling him to run down the street before the agents caught up and arrested him.
Federal prosecutors have charged Dugan with “bstructing or impeding a proceeding before a department or agency of the United States” and “oncealing an individual to prevent his discovery and arrest.”
Tellingly, Attorney General Pam Bondi immediately went on the Fox News Channel to talk about the arrest, attacking the judge. “What has happened to our judiciary is beyond me,” she said. “The are deranged is all I can think of. I think some of these judges think that they are beyond and above the law. They are not, and we are sending a very strong message today…if you are harboring a fugitive…we will come after you and we will prosecute you. We will find you.”
Later today, news broke that the administration appears to have deported a U.S. citizen. Chris Geidner of Lawdork reports that the administration deported a two-year-old born in the United States and thus a U.S. citizen, along with her mother and her sister, to Honduras, her mother’s country of origin, even as the child’s father tried frantically to keep her in the U.S. Judge Terry A. Doughty of the Federal District Court in the Western District of Louisiana, a Trump appointee, said that “it is illegal and unconstitutional to deport” a U.S. citizen, and set a hearing for May 16 because he has a “strong suspicion that the government just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process.”
These actions to seize power and to hammer into place extremist MAGA immigration policies are dramatic demonstrations of the Trump administration’s attempt to destroy democracy. Indeed, the attempt to attack the judges could well be a reaction to the major losses the administration took from the courts this week.
As Jacob Knutson of Democracy Docket wrote, Trump suffered at least 11 legal setbacks this week as judges blocked Trump from gutting the Voice of America media outlet, blocked the administration from removing people in Colorado and New York under the Alien Enemies Act, ordered the administration to comply with discovery requests from Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s lawyers, told the Department of Education not to implement anti-DEI measures, blocked Trump’s executive order about elections, stopped the administration from impounding money from cities that don’t comply with its mass deportation orders, and blocked the administration from ending collective bargaining rights for federal workers.
The dramatic actions against ActBlue and immigrants are also signs of weakness as administration officials attempt to distract supporters not only from the disastrous tariffs, but also from the growing evidence that Trump is not functioning as a president should.
As legal analyst Anna Bower noted about Bondi’s Fox News Channel performance: “If you’re a prosecutor who is serious about obtaining a conviction, you don’t go on Fox and talk about the (alleged) facts of the case like this.”
It seems likely these extreme actions are an attempt to throw some red meat to those base voters whose support for the president is wavering, and to grab power while it is still possible.
In an interview with Time magazine, published today, Trump did not seem at the top of his mental game. He reiterated that the country is about to become richer than ever and that the problems in his administration can all be blamed on his predecessor, President Joe Biden. He claimed that he has already made 200 trade deals, which could be possible if he is cutting private deals with corporations but not if he is talking to countries: there are only 195 countries in the world. He claimed China’s president Xi Jinping has called him to make a deal, although Chinese officials deny this.
In the interview, Trump repeatedly deferred to his lawyers to answer questions about Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man the administration says it sent to an infamous terrorist prison in El Salvador because of “administrative error.” He said that he did not personally approve payments to El Salvador to hold the men his administration sent there.
He said when he vowed to end Russia’s war against Ukraine on day one he was only speaking “figuratively, and I said that as an exaggeration, because to make a point, and you know, it gets, of course, by the fake news . Obviously, people know that when I said that, it was said in jest, but it was also said that it will be ended.”’
Finally, the Time interviewer asked him: “Mr. President, you were showing us the new paintings you have behind us. You put all these new portraits. One of them includes John Adams. John Adams said we’re a government ruled by laws, not by men. Do you agree with that?”
Trump replied: “John Adams said that? Where was the painting?”
When the interviewer pointed out the portrait, Trump said: “We’re a government ruled by laws, not by men? Well, I think we’re a government ruled by law, but you know, somebody has to administer the law. So therefore men, certainly, men and women, certainly play a role in it. I wouldn’t agree with it 100%. We are a government where men are involved in the process of law, and ideally, you’re going to have honest men like me.”
Ta.
LOL
USDA rolls back plans to limit salmonella levels in raw chicken, turkey
The agency said the Biden-era proposal would have been a burden on businesses. Food-safety experts criticized the decision as an unwillingness to protect the public.
April 25, 2025 at 6:42 p.m. EDT46 minutes ago
SCIENCE said:
LOL
USDA rolls back plans to limit salmonella levels in raw chicken, turkey
The agency said the Biden-era proposal would have been a burden on businesses. Food-safety experts criticized the decision as an unwillingness to protect the public.
April 25, 2025 at 6:42 p.m. EDT46 minutes ago
Gourd.
Michael V said:
SCIENCE said:
LOL
USDA rolls back plans to limit salmonella levels in raw chicken, turkey
The agency said the Biden-era proposal would have been a burden on businesses. Food-safety experts criticized the decision as an unwillingness to protect the public.
April 25, 2025 at 6:42 p.m. EDT46 minutes ago
Gourd.
wait
so that’s why they canned it
The plan aimed to reduce an estimated 125,000 salmonella infections from chicken and 43,000 from turkey each year, according to USDA. Overall, salmonella causes 1.35 million infections a year, most through food, and about 420 deaths, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
wrong number of deaths
https://apnews.com/article/poultry-salmonella-food-poisoning-usda-081dafd3c8a75c3ef2203d260584a893
Analysts say it’s ‘highly unlikely’ Xi Jinping called Donald Trump over tariffs
I’m not an analyst. But I also think it’s unlikely.
buffy said:
Analysts say it’s ‘highly unlikely’ Xi Jinping called Donald Trump over tariffsI’m not an analyst. But I also think it’s unlikely.
He’s smarter than that. The Chinese are playing a game with Trump.
roughbarked said:
buffy said:
Analysts say it’s ‘highly unlikely’ Xi Jinping called Donald Trump over tariffs
I’m not an analyst. But I also think it’s unlikely.
He’s smarter than that. The Chinese are playing a game with Trump.
yeah but why think too hard about
King’s College London business lecturer Xin Sun said it was “highly unlikely” Mr Xi called Mr Trump because to call him without invitation would imply Mr Xi would make concessions under pressure.
dirty CHINA when the more obvious and simple reasoning is that the more the liar insists something is true, the less likely it seems to be
Hey we think that other
place called Saudi Arabia was doing something clever like this¡ How good are allies¡
SCIENCE said:
roughbarked said:
buffy said:
Analysts say it’s ‘highly unlikely’ Xi Jinping called Donald Trump over tariffs
I’m not an analyst. But I also think it’s unlikely.
He’s smarter than that. The Chinese are playing a game with Trump.
yeah but why think too hard about
King’s College London business lecturer Xin Sun said it was “highly unlikely” Mr Xi called Mr Trump because to call him without invitation would imply Mr Xi would make concessions under pressure.
dirty CHINA when the more obvious and simple reasoning is that the more the liar insists something is true, the less likely it seems to be
“…but i can tell you that the talks are with these Chinese guys, they’re real Chinese guys, from China and everything, and they have black hair, and these really long, thin moustaches, and they wear these long silk robes, and they live in a castle, and say stuff like ‘ah, so’ a lot, and they say that i’m the greatest President ever, and that i’m the best golfer they’ve ever heard of, and that my hands are perfectly nomal-sized, and…”
captain_spalding said:
and say stuff like ‘ah, so’ a lot,
if they’re talking to trump it is probably arsehole.
JudgeMental said:
captain_spalding said:and say stuff like ‘ah, so’ a lot,
if they’re talking to trump it is probably arsehole.
Pay that one.
captain_spalding said:
SCIENCE said:roughbarked said:
He’s smarter than that. The Chinese are playing a game with Trump.
yeah but why think too hard about
King’s College London business lecturer Xin Sun said it was “highly unlikely” Mr Xi called Mr Trump because to call him without invitation would imply Mr Xi would make concessions under pressure.
dirty CHINA when the more obvious and simple reasoning is that the more the liar insists something is true, the less likely it seems to be
“…but i can tell you that the talks are with these Chinese guys, they’re real Chinese guys, from China and everything, and they have black hair, and these really long, thin moustaches, and they wear these long silk robes, and they live in a castle, and say stuff like ‘ah, so’ a lot, and they say that i’m the greatest President ever, and that i’m the best golfer they’ve ever heard of, and that my hands are perfectly nomal-sized, and…”
Wont play.
Three citizens, ages 2, 4 and 7, swiftly deported from Louisiana
The cases have renewed concerns that the Trump administration’s expedited deportations are violating the rights of both citizens and noncitizens.
April 26, 2025 at 6:06 p.m.
By Emmanuel Felton and Maegan Vazquez
Three U.S. citizen children from two different families were deported with their mothers by Immigration and Customs Enforcement during the early hours of Friday morning. One of them is a 4-year-old with Stage 4 cancer who was deported without medication or the ability to contact their doctors, the family’s lawyer said.
According to their lawyers, both families were taken into custody while attending routine check-ins this week in New Orleans as part of the Intensive Supervision Appearance Program, which allows individuals to remain in their communities while undergoing immigration proceedings. Lawyers say the families were taken to Alexandria, Louisiana, a three-hour drive from New Orleans, where they were prevented from communicating with their family members and legal representatives and then put on a flight to Honduras.
The cases have renewed concerns that the Trump administration’s expedited deportations are violating the due process rights of both citizens and noncitizens.
“I don’t know how much more of a blatant or clear constitutional violation there can be than deporting U.S. citizens without due process,” said Alanah Odoms, executive director of the ACLU of Louisiana. “Especially with some of those citizens being the most vulnerable of all vulnerable, children, and not just any children, children with medical conditions that are dire.”
The U.S. government has never released data on how many U.S. citizens have been wrongfully detained or deported by ICE. But independent investigations have revealed that ICE has arrested, detained, deported and issued detainers — requests to local jails to hold a person in custody — for thousands of citizens since the agency’s creation in 2003.
Lawyers representing the father of the 2-year-old U.S. citizen who was deported, identified as V.M.L. in court documents, filed an emergency petition in the Western District of Louisiana on Thursday seeking her release. The child was put on a plane to Honduras the next morning before the court opened.
Hours after the deportation, U.S. District Judge Terry A. Doughty, a Trump appointee, issued an order expressing his concern that the girl had been deported against her father’s wishes while stressing it is “illegal and unconstitutional” to deport U.S. citizens.
“The government contends that this is all OK because the mother wishes that the child be deported with her,” wrote Doughty, who has been lauded for his conservative rulings in the past. “But the court doesn’t know that.”
Doughty set a May 16 court hearing to investigate his “strong suspicion that the government just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process.” The order did not call for the girl’s return or recommend any recourse for the family.
According to court filings, the girl had accompanied her mother and 11-year-old sister to the immigration appointment in New Orleans on Tuesday morning. About an hour later, her father, who had driven the family into New Orleans for the meeting, received a call informing him that the family had been taken into custody. That night, the girl’s father was allowed to speak with her mother for only a minute before an ICE agent ended the call, lawyers contend. Lawyers say the man did not get the chance to speak to his partner or child again until after they were released in Honduras.
“Both of these mothers were held without the ability to speak with their co-parents and the guardians of their children while making this incredibly personal and difficult assessment about what was best for their children,” said Gracie Willis, the lawyer for V.M.L.’s father.
Justice Department lawyers argued that “the man claiming to be V.M.L.‘s father” had failed to prove his identity to the government despite requests that he present himself to ICE agents, adding that he had also “demonstrated considerable hesitation” regarding the inquiries into his immigration status. The man’s lawyers included V.M.L.’s birth certificate in their fillings, which shows she was born in Baton Rouge and lists the names of both her mother and father.
The government is not disputing the immigration status of any of the three children. Instead, officials contend that the undocumented mothers opted to take their citizen children with them back to Honduras. In their court filing, Justice Department lawyers attached a note they say was written by V.M.L.’s mother saying that she was taking the child with her to Honduras.
“It is common that parents want to be removed with their children,” Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, told The Washington Post.
Willis says ICE’s refusal to allow the women to talk to their lawyers meant there was no way to verify whether that was true in these cases.
“We have absolutely no idea whether they ever actually did give consent for their children to come with them or if they did under what kind of duress and what other options were presented to them,” Willis said.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2025/04/26/us-citizen-children-deported-ice/
captain_spalding said:
SCIENCE said:roughbarked said:
He’s smarter than that. The Chinese are playing a game with Trump.
yeah but why think too hard about
King’s College London business lecturer Xin Sun said it was “highly unlikely” Mr Xi called Mr Trump because to call him without invitation would imply Mr Xi would make concessions under pressure.
dirty CHINA when the more obvious and simple reasoning is that the more the liar insists something is true, the less likely it seems to be
“…but i can tell you that the talks are with these Chinese guys, they’re real Chinese guys, from China and everything, and they have black hair, and these really long, thin moustaches, and they wear these long silk robes, and they live in a castle, and say stuff like ‘ah, so’ a lot, and they say that i’m the greatest President ever, and that i’m the best golfer they’ve ever heard of, and that my hands are perfectly nomal-sized, and…”
LOLOL
Witty Rejoinder said:
Three citizens, ages 2, 4 and 7, swiftly deported from LouisianaThe cases have renewed concerns that the Trump administration’s expedited deportations are violating the rights of both citizens and noncitizens.
April 26, 2025 at 6:06 p.m.
By Emmanuel Felton and Maegan Vazquez
Three U.S. citizen children from two different families were deported with their mothers by Immigration and Customs Enforcement during the early hours of Friday morning. One of them is a 4-year-old with Stage 4 cancer who was deported without medication or the ability to contact their doctors, the family’s lawyer said.
According to their lawyers, both families were taken into custody while attending routine check-ins this week in New Orleans as part of the Intensive Supervision Appearance Program, which allows individuals to remain in their communities while undergoing immigration proceedings. Lawyers say the families were taken to Alexandria, Louisiana, a three-hour drive from New Orleans, where they were prevented from communicating with their family members and legal representatives and then put on a flight to Honduras.
The cases have renewed concerns that the Trump administration’s expedited deportations are violating the due process rights of both citizens and noncitizens.
“I don’t know how much more of a blatant or clear constitutional violation there can be than deporting U.S. citizens without due process,” said Alanah Odoms, executive director of the ACLU of Louisiana. “Especially with some of those citizens being the most vulnerable of all vulnerable, children, and not just any children, children with medical conditions that are dire.”
The U.S. government has never released data on how many U.S. citizens have been wrongfully detained or deported by ICE. But independent investigations have revealed that ICE has arrested, detained, deported and issued detainers — requests to local jails to hold a person in custody — for thousands of citizens since the agency’s creation in 2003.
Lawyers representing the father of the 2-year-old U.S. citizen who was deported, identified as V.M.L. in court documents, filed an emergency petition in the Western District of Louisiana on Thursday seeking her release. The child was put on a plane to Honduras the next morning before the court opened.
Hours after the deportation, U.S. District Judge Terry A. Doughty, a Trump appointee, issued an order expressing his concern that the girl had been deported against her father’s wishes while stressing it is “illegal and unconstitutional” to deport U.S. citizens.
“The government contends that this is all OK because the mother wishes that the child be deported with her,” wrote Doughty, who has been lauded for his conservative rulings in the past. “But the court doesn’t know that.”
Doughty set a May 16 court hearing to investigate his “strong suspicion that the government just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process.” The order did not call for the girl’s return or recommend any recourse for the family.
According to court filings, the girl had accompanied her mother and 11-year-old sister to the immigration appointment in New Orleans on Tuesday morning. About an hour later, her father, who had driven the family into New Orleans for the meeting, received a call informing him that the family had been taken into custody. That night, the girl’s father was allowed to speak with her mother for only a minute before an ICE agent ended the call, lawyers contend. Lawyers say the man did not get the chance to speak to his partner or child again until after they were released in Honduras.
“Both of these mothers were held without the ability to speak with their co-parents and the guardians of their children while making this incredibly personal and difficult assessment about what was best for their children,” said Gracie Willis, the lawyer for V.M.L.’s father.
Justice Department lawyers argued that “the man claiming to be V.M.L.‘s father” had failed to prove his identity to the government despite requests that he present himself to ICE agents, adding that he had also “demonstrated considerable hesitation” regarding the inquiries into his immigration status. The man’s lawyers included V.M.L.’s birth certificate in their fillings, which shows she was born in Baton Rouge and lists the names of both her mother and father.
The government is not disputing the immigration status of any of the three children. Instead, officials contend that the undocumented mothers opted to take their citizen children with them back to Honduras. In their court filing, Justice Department lawyers attached a note they say was written by V.M.L.’s mother saying that she was taking the child with her to Honduras.
“It is common that parents want to be removed with their children,” Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, told The Washington Post.
Willis says ICE’s refusal to allow the women to talk to their lawyers meant there was no way to verify whether that was true in these cases.
“We have absolutely no idea whether they ever actually did give consent for their children to come with them or if they did under what kind of duress and what other options were presented to them,” Willis said.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2025/04/26/us-citizen-children-deported-ice/
More FMD stuff.
MAGA finds out the taxes she blames Obama for were actually Trump’s plan.
https://www.reddit.com/r/TikTokCringe/s/2o3NRDWrZl
“finally a president who follows science”
The Trump White House put out a press release to celebrate Earth day, touting what the administration was doing for the environment. Let’s dive in to what they’re saying, and how aligned it is with reality.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CeZqdZQBls
Yes it’s far canal time yet again.
Divine Angel said:
MAGA finds out the taxes she blames Obama for were actually Trump’s plan.https://www.reddit.com/r/TikTokCringe/s/2o3NRDWrZl
“Party over country every single day. You’re a member of a cult!”
Pwned.
dv said:
A federal judge temporarily halted her order requiring the Trump administration to provide information on its efforts so far, if any, to retrieve a man who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador.The seven-day pause ordered by U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis on Wednesday came with the agreement of lawyers for Kilmar Abrego Garcia, Xinis said, and is the first sign of a possible change, either in tone or position, in the contentious legal fight that already has been to the Supreme Court and led the judge to accuse administration lawyers of acting in “bad faith.”
Drew Ensign, a deputy assistant attorney general, filed a sealed motion requesting the stay of the judge’s directive for the U.S. to provide testimony and documents that involve plans to retrieve Abrego Garcia. The administration is also seeking relief from having to file daily updates on its progress.
Xinis did not explain her legal reasoning in granting the stay until April 30. She also did not make any changes to the required daily status updates.
Lawyers for Abrego Garcia filed their own sealed document, styled as a response in opposition, but Xinis wrote that her order was made “with the agreement of the parties.”
The administration expelled Abrego Garcia to El Salvador last month, and officials later described the mistake as “an administrative error” — but insisted that Abrego Garcia was in fact a member of the MS-13 gang.
The Wednesday evening order came just one day after Xinis castigated the administration’s lawyers in a written filing Tuesday for ignoring her orders, obstructing the legal process and acting in “bad faith” by refusing to provide information.
The U.S. has claimed that much of the information is protected because it involves state secrets, government deliberations and attorney client privilege. But Xinis has rejected the argument and demanded that the Trump administration provide specific justifications for each claim of privileged information by 6 p.m. Wednesday.
Here’s what the judge wants — and what the administration wants
Tom Homan, the Trump administration’s border czar, did not directly address the judge’s comments from Tuesday when asked by reporters at the White House on Wednesday. But he reiterated the administration’s position that Abrego Garcia will be detained and deported again if he were to be returned to the U.S.The U.S. Supreme Court ordered the Trump administration nearly two weeks ago to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return to the U.S., rejecting the White House’s claim that it couldn’t retrieve him after mistakenly deporting him.
Trump administration officials have pushed back, arguing that it is up to El Salvador — though the president of El Salvador has also said he lacks the power to return Abrego Garcia. The administration has also argued that information about any steps it has taken or could take to return Abrego Garcia is protected by attorney-client privilege laws, state secret laws, general “government privilege” or other secrecy rules.
But Xinis said those claims, without any facts to back them up, reflected a “willful and bad faith refusal to comply with discovery obligations.”
“For weeks, Defendants have sought refuge behind vague and unsubstantiated assertions of privilege, using them as a shield to obstruct discovery and evade compliance with this Court’s orders,” Xinis wrote in the order Tuesday. “Defendants have known, at least since last week, that this Court requires specific legal and factual showings to support any claim of privilege. Yet they have continued to rely on boilerplate assertions. That ends now.”
Abrego Garcia was expelled after living in the US for about 14 years
Abrego Garcia, 29, lived in the United States for roughly 14 years, during which he worked in construction, got married and was raising three children with disabilities, according to court records.A U.S. immigration judge had shielded Abrego Garcia from deportation to El Salvador in 2019, ruling that he would likely face persecution there by local gangs that had terrorized his family. He also was given a federal permit to work in the United States, where he was a metal worker and union member, according to Abrego Garcia’s lawyers.
But the Trump administration expelled Abrego Garcia to El Salvador last month anyway.
Abrego Garcia was never charged with a crime and has denied the allegations. His attorneys have pointed out that the criminal informant claimed he was a member of MS-13 in Long Island, New York, where he has never lived.
It’s not the first time the Trump administration has faced a scathing order from a federal judge over its approach to deportation cases.
A three-judge panel on the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals scolded the administration last week, saying its claim that it can’t do anything to free Abrego Garcia “should be shocking.” That ruling came one day after a federal judge in Washington, D.C., found probable cause to hold the Trump administration in criminal contempt for violating his orders to turn around planes carrying deportees to El Salvador. That was a different legal case.
Democrats and legal scholars say Trump is provoking a constitutional crisis in part by ignoring court rulings; the White House has said it’s the judges who are the problem.
___
https://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/national-international/federal-judge-halts-order-details-efforts-abrego-garcia-return-us/4168176/
Thanks.
Republicans don’t think Trump can ignore the Supreme Court — for now
A new poll indicates a GOP view that, crucially, hasn’t yet been put to the test.
April 25, 2025 at 2:13 p.m.
President Donald Trump has been puttering around in American politics long enough for us to guess why he was annoyed by Fox News’s latest national poll.
The generally Trump-allied outlet produces regular public opinion surveys conducted by bipartisan and well-respected pollsters — an unusual combination for Fox. So when the poll said that 55 percent of Americans expressed disapproval of Trump’s performance as president, it was a jarring break from the channel’s typical obsequiousness. As you’d expect, Trump then insulted the pollster on social media.
Buried further down in the poll was a bit of data that might prove more consequential than his approval numbers in the long run. The pollster asked Americans whether they believed Trump would be justified in ignoring a Supreme Court decision that he felt overstepped the court’s authority, an idea that two-thirds of respondents rejected.
So did most Republicans.
This is hardly reason to assume Republicans would side with the high court over their party’s president. It’s probably a reflection of the widely held belief that the Supreme Court is conservative and — with three Trump nominees — likely to side with the president.
Consider the response when Fox News asked whether district courts that had hindered or blocked Trump’s efforts were acting legitimately. Most Americans said they were. Most Republicans said they weren’t.
Never mind that many of these judges were appointed by Republican presidents, including by Trump himself. Trump and his allies have painted these rulings as the work of left-wing activists, and his base has accepted that idea. In fact, Republicans are three times more concerned about “the judicial branch going beyond its authority” than about “the president ignoring rulings from the judicial branch.
The best way to understand the Supreme Court question, then, is as a reflection of learned respect for the balance of power between the court and the president, one that hasn’t yet been put to the test in the eyes of Republican voters.
And, it seems, in the eyes of Trump. Speaking to Time magazine this week, the president said he was still committed to complying with Supreme Court rulings — but was unable to explain why he hadn’t complied with the court’s order to facilitate the return of Kilmar Abrego García from El Salvador. Demurring from the idea that he was ignoring the court, Trump told Time that his people had told him he’d won that dispute (he didn’t) and that he would “leave that to my lawyers.”
Should Trump actually engage in a battle with the Supreme Court, which seems all but inevitable, it’s difficult to imagine his base siding against him. When Justice Amy Coney Barrett dissented from a ruling that favored Trump, a segment of his base reacted with fury.
Another question from that Fox News poll helps explain an important dynamic undergirding support for Trump. Respondents were asked whether they viewed Trump’s escaping serious harm from assassination attempts this summer as an indicator of divine intervention. Most Americans said it wasn’t — but 6 in 10 Republicans said it was.
If you think God chose Trump to be president, are you really going to stick with the concept of checks and balances in a dispute between the Supreme Court and your divinely selected leader?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/04/25/fox-poll-trump-courts-supreme-republicans/
Spiny Norman said:
WOMAN: It’s an ice fishery, and it’s been around since the early 1900sTRUMP: So it’s been around for millions of years
Gosh.
Witty Rejoinder said:
Republicans don’t think Trump can ignore the Supreme Court — for nowA new poll indicates a GOP view that, crucially, hasn’t yet been put to the test.
April 25, 2025 at 2:13 p.m.
President Donald Trump has been puttering around in American politics long enough for us to guess why he was annoyed by Fox News’s latest national poll.
The generally Trump-allied outlet produces regular public opinion surveys conducted by bipartisan and well-respected pollsters — an unusual combination for Fox. So when the poll said that 55 percent of Americans expressed disapproval of Trump’s performance as president, it was a jarring break from the channel’s typical obsequiousness. As you’d expect, Trump then insulted the pollster on social media.
Buried further down in the poll was a bit of data that might prove more consequential than his approval numbers in the long run. The pollster asked Americans whether they believed Trump would be justified in ignoring a Supreme Court decision that he felt overstepped the court’s authority, an idea that two-thirds of respondents rejected.
So did most Republicans.
This is hardly reason to assume Republicans would side with the high court over their party’s president. It’s probably a reflection of the widely held belief that the Supreme Court is conservative and — with three Trump nominees — likely to side with the president.
Consider the response when Fox News asked whether district courts that had hindered or blocked Trump’s efforts were acting legitimately. Most Americans said they were. Most Republicans said they weren’t.
Never mind that many of these judges were appointed by Republican presidents, including by Trump himself. Trump and his allies have painted these rulings as the work of left-wing activists, and his base has accepted that idea. In fact, Republicans are three times more concerned about “the judicial branch going beyond its authority” than about “the president ignoring rulings from the judicial branch.
The best way to understand the Supreme Court question, then, is as a reflection of learned respect for the balance of power between the court and the president, one that hasn’t yet been put to the test in the eyes of Republican voters.
And, it seems, in the eyes of Trump. Speaking to Time magazine this week, the president said he was still committed to complying with Supreme Court rulings — but was unable to explain why he hadn’t complied with the court’s order to facilitate the return of Kilmar Abrego García from El Salvador. Demurring from the idea that he was ignoring the court, Trump told Time that his people had told him he’d won that dispute (he didn’t) and that he would “leave that to my lawyers.”
Should Trump actually engage in a battle with the Supreme Court, which seems all but inevitable, it’s difficult to imagine his base siding against him. When Justice Amy Coney Barrett dissented from a ruling that favored Trump, a segment of his base reacted with fury.
Another question from that Fox News poll helps explain an important dynamic undergirding support for Trump. Respondents were asked whether they viewed Trump’s escaping serious harm from assassination attempts this summer as an indicator of divine intervention. Most Americans said it wasn’t — but 6 in 10 Republicans said it was.
If you think God chose Trump to be president, are you really going to stick with the concept of checks and balances in a dispute between the Supreme Court and your divinely selected leader?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/04/25/fox-poll-trump-courts-supreme-republicans/
Huh!
Spiny Norman said:
“finally a president who follows science”The Trump White House put out a press release to celebrate Earth day, touting what the administration was doing for the environment. Let’s dive in to what they’re saying, and how aligned it is with reality.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CeZqdZQBls
Yes it’s far canal time yet again.
That’s the far-est canal ever.
Heather Cox Richardson
6h ·
April 26, 2025 (Saturday)
Early yesterday morning, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) sent three U.S. citizens aged 2, 4, and 7 from Louisiana, including one with Stage 4 cancer, to Honduras when they deported their mothers.
The three are children of two different mothers who were arrested while checking in with the government as part of their routine process for immigration proceedings. The women and their children were not permitted to speak to family or lawyers before being flown to Honduras. The cancer patient was sent out of the country without medication or consultation with doctors although, according to Charisma Madarang and Lorena O’Neil of Rolling Stone, ICE agents were told of the child’s medical needs.
The government says the mothers opted to take their U.S. citizen children to Honduras with them. But as Emmanuel Felton and Maegan Vazquez of the Washington Post noted, because ICE refused to let the women talk to their lawyers, there is only the agents’ word for how events transpired.
ICE also deported Heidy Sánchez, a Cuban-born mother of a one-year-old who is still breastfeeding, leaving the U.S.-born child in the U.S. with her father, who is a U.S. citizen. Like the women flown to Honduras, Sánchez was detained when she showed up at a scheduled check-in with ICE.
In March, ICE agents sent four U.S. citizens, including a 10-year-old with brain cancer, to Mexico when they deported their undocumented parents.
In May 2023, then–presidential candidate Donald J. Trump released a video promising that on “Day One” of a new presidential term, he would issue an executive order that would end birthright citizenship. He claimed that the understanding that anyone born in the United States is automatically a citizen is “based on a historical myth, and a willful misinterpretation of the law by the open borders advocates.” He promises to make “clear to federal agencies that under the correct interpretation of the law, going forward, the future children of illegal aliens will not receive automatic US citizenship.”
Reelected in 2024, on his first day in office, Trump signed an Executive Order titled “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship.” It announced a new U.S. policy, saying that the government would not issue documents recognizing U.S. citizenship to persons whose “mother was unlawfully present in the United States and the person’s father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth, or…when that person’s mother’s presence in the United States was lawful but temporary, and the person’s father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth.”
The order specified that it would not take effect for 30 days. If it had been in effect when Trump’s rival for the White House, Vice President Kamala Harris, was born, she would have fallen under it.
But an executive order is simply a directive to federal employees. It cannot override the Constitution. Trump’s attack on the idea of birthright citizenship as a “historical myth” is a perversion of our history.
In the nineteenth century, the United States enshrined in its fundamental law the idea that there would not be different levels of rights in this country. Although not honored in practice, that idea, and its place in the law, gave those excluded from it the language and the tools to fight for equality. Over time, Americans have increasingly expanded those included in it.
The Republican Party organized in the 1850s to fight the idea that there should be different classes of Americans based on race. In that era, not only Black Americans, but also Irish, Chinese, Mexican, and Indigenous Americans faced discriminatory state laws. Republicans stated explicitly in their 1860 platform that they were “opposed to any change in our naturalization laws or any state legislation by which the rights of citizens hitherto accorded to immigrants from foreign lands shall be abridged or impaired; and in favor of giving a full and efficient protection to the rights of all classes of citizens, whether native or naturalized, both at home and abroad.”
After the Civil War, in 1866, as former Confederates denied their Black neighbors basic rights, the Republican Congress passed a civil rights bill establishing “hat all persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians, not taxed, are hereby declared to be citizens of the United States; and such citizens of every race and color…shall have the same right in every State and Territory in the United States.”
But President Andrew Johnson vetoed the 1866 Civil Rights Bill. He objected that the proposed law “comprehends the Chinese of the Pacific States, Indians subject to taxation, the people called Gipsies, as well as the entire race designated as blacks,” as citizens, and noted that if “all persons who are native-born already are, by virtue of the Constitution, citizens of the United States, the passage of the pending bill cannot be necessary to make them such.” And if they weren’t already citizens, he wrote, Congress should not pass a law “to make our entire colored population and all other excepted classes citizens of the United States” when 11 southern states were not represented in Congress.
When Congress wrote the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, it took Johnson’s admonition to heart. It did not confer citizenship on the groups Johnson outlined; it simply acknowledged the Constitution had already established their citizenship. The first sentence of the Fourteenth Amendment reads: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
In the short term, Americans recognized that the Fourteenth Amendment overturned the 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision, in which the Supreme Court ruled that people of African descent “are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States.”
The Fourteenth Amendment established that Black men were citizens.
But the question of whether the amendment really did recognize the citizenship of the U.S.-born children of immigrants quickly became an issue in the American West, where prejudice against Chinese immigrants ran hot. In 1882, during a period of racist hysteria, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act declaring that Chinese immigrants could not become citizens. But what about their children who were born in the United States?
Wong Kim Ark was born around 1873, the child of Chinese parents who were merchants in San Francisco. In 1889 he traveled with his parents when they repatriated to China, where he married. He then returned to the U.S., leaving his wife behind, and was readmitted. After another trip to China in 1894, though, customs officials denied him reentry to the U.S. in 1895, claiming he was a Chinese subject because his parents were Chinese.
Wong sued, and his lawsuit was the first to climb all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, thanks to the government’s recognition that with the U.S. in the middle of an immigration boom, the question of birthright citizenship must be addressed. In the 1898 U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark decision, the court held by a vote of 6–2 that Wong was a citizen because he was born in the United States.
That decision has stood ever since, as a majority of Americans have recognized the principle behind the citizenship clause as the one central to the United States: “that all men are created equal” and that a nation based on that idea draws strength from all of its people.
On the last day of his presidency, in his last speech, President Ronald Reagan recalled what someone had once written to him: “You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.”
He continued: “We lead the world because, unique among nations, we draw our people—our strength—from every country and every corner of the world. And by doing so we continuously renew and enrich our nation. While other countries cling to the stale past, here in America we breathe life into dreams. We create the future, and the world follows us into tomorrow. Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we’re a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier. This quality is vital to our future as a nation. If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost.”
sarahs mum said:
Heather Cox Richardson
6h ·
April 26, 2025 (Saturday)——————————-cut——————————————
Thanks.
Via Jeff Tiedrich’s pages:
captain_spalding said:
Via Jeff Tiedrich’s pages:
Aha so it’s the second time ¡
Divine Angel said:
Pants on fire.
Divine Angel said:
My favourite part is how the focus is on people earning under $200k. Obviously they’re the ones most able to afford to pay tariffs, so they get to pay zero taxes in return. Thank you, Uncle Sam!
Divine Angel said:
My favourite part is how the focus is on people earning under $200k. Obviously they’re the ones most able to afford to pay tariffs, so they get to pay zero taxes in return. Thank you, Uncle Sam!
oh c’m‘on they’re trying to be progressive give them a break
SCIENCE said:
Divine Angel said:
My favourite part is how the focus is on people earning under $200k. Obviously they’re the ones most able to afford to pay tariffs, so they get to pay zero taxes in return. Thank you, Uncle Sam!
oh c’m‘on they’re trying to be progressive give them a break
lol omg I’m so freaking funny it hurts
Divine Angel said:
SCIENCE said:
Divine Angel said:
My favourite part is how the focus is on people earning under $200k. Obviously they’re the ones most able to afford to pay tariffs, so they get to pay zero taxes in return. Thank you, Uncle Sam!
oh c’m‘on they’re trying to be progressive give them a break
Yeah, a TAX BREAK
lol omg I’m so freaking funny it hurts
bit slow here today like tard comme d’habitude so maybe we should have said brake
A nice, informed sober, take on The Trump Doctrine here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDSz62i6F3Q
I was going to edit the entire transcript, removing fluff and making it readable for you’se all, but that is proving to be too much work, so below is some of it and you’ll need to watch the video or read the entire transcript if you want the rest.
Where the Doctrine Came From
Well, it is basically this, “The Prioritization Imperative.”…. The short version of the doctrine centers around the pivot to Asia that you are no doubt familiar with to some degree. However, there are some subtleties to the argument that are worth highlighting because, as it is designed, this is not supposed to be a wholesale abandonment of Europe. Rather, it is more of a recognition of the United States’ own weakness and a fundamental strategic problem with limiting World War III to a single theater.
The basic idea of the East Asia pivot is that China is now the super power competitor to the United States, there are inherent risks to the broader geopolitical order in the region, and U.S. allies in the region cannot handle those problems on their own.What is novel about the doctrine compared to previous administrations is how it thinks about the balance of threats in Europe versus Asia.
To summarize the frustration within Europe and a good part of the United States, there may be a common understanding that China is a threat, but that the better solution is to stick with Ukraine for longer and pursue a slower pivot to Asia. To that, the doctrine raises two concerns, one that we might call a practical problem in the present, and another that is a theoretical problem in the future.
Let’s start with the practical problem. The main concern that the United States foresees in East Asia is an invasion of Taiwan. This presents an immediate economic problem for the United States because it would pause all semiconductor production on the island for the duration of the invasion. If the PRC won, then production would never recover. And it would take a long time to rebuild the island even if Taiwan emerged victorious.
There is also a long-term security problem with a PRC takeover. You often hear about the “first island chain” that runs off the coast of China. It is strategically important because U.S. partners, plus a country historically hostile to the PRC, form a perimeter around the area. However, the continental shelf drops off just beyond Taiwan. As it stands now, the United States and its partners can contain the PRC around the first island chain, limiting the PRC to its coastal area. The shallow waters make it easy to monitor submarine activity there. But lose Taiwan, and suddenly the submarines can dive down. The United States then faces a much greater security threat.
Of course, to get to that, Beijing must first conclude that it a good idea to invade. Broadly speaking, the PRC’s ability to militarily succeed depends on two fronts:
a naval theater, where China tries to move as much as it can across the choppy waters of the Taiwan Strait and a land battle supposing that the PLAN can push invading soldiers to the shore. The plan to defeat the PLAN is to use U.S. naval assets to limit whatever can make it to shore, while relying on Taiwan to handle the land battle. The problem that arises is that whatever materiel Taiwan has at the start of a ground fight will be the bulk of what it has for the duration of the conflict.
For more than three years now, the West has resupplied Ukraine by flying materiel to Poland and driving it across the border. Russia simply does not have the reach strike that half of the country. In contrast, Taiwan is both literally and figuratively on an island here. Certainly the United States would try to replenish Taiwan’s stocks as the invasion progresses, but the task will be monumentally more difficult than what we have seen in Ukraine. As such, if the United States wants to sway the balance of power against China, it must do so proactively—as in, right now. Unfortunately for Ukraine, the types of things that Taiwan needs to win a potential land battle versus the PRC are the same things that Ukraine needs now.
It is like a greatest hits album from the last three years: the HIMARS launching systems that you see on your screen now, equipped with longer-range ATACMS missiles that could even hit staging grounds along the mainland’s coast, and shorter-range GMLRS missiles as well. Then you have National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile Systems, 155mm artillery shells, perhaps the thing that needs to be delivered in the greatest of quantities, Javelins, Stingers, and Patriots. Regarding that last one, a minor scandal erupted in the middle of April following Ukrainian offer to purchase Patriot systems. The Trump administration declined even though Kyiv was offering to buy them—as in send money to the United States in exchange for things that go boom. However, the deeper story here is that Patriots have a long backlog of orders. Thus, there is no surplus to send, even if the Trump administration did not prefer prioritizing Taiwan.
Trump does prefer prioritizing Taiwan, though. And what further exacerbates the problem there is that Taiwan spent a long time slacking off on defense spending. Sure, you hear a ton about European countries not meeting the defense spending target of two percent of GDP. And you can see here just how bad it got with this figure from the memo following the end of the Cold War. But imagine being a small island staring down the second strongest country in the world and only spending 1.72% of GDP on defense in 2018.
To be fair, the situation has improved as of late, going to 2.48% in 2024. However, that still puts Taiwan years behind on what should be accumulating on warehouse shelves. It is insufficient to deter an invasion the moment that someone in Beijing decides that the Silicon Shield is unimportant compared to the sanctity of the Chinese state. In that regard, the document prods Taiwan about going even further, and you may have heard stories about the United States lobbying for Taipei to increase defense spending to ten percent of GDP. Regardless of how we got here, though, that puts greater pressure on the United States to make up the shortfall. And that demand, in turn, runs into production capacity limitations. The United States simply does not have the factories to simultaneously resupply Ukraine and preemptively supply Taiwan. A tradeoff must be made here.
The second half is a theoretical problem about what a war would look like if it were to happen—namely, that the next world war will inevitably occur on two fronts. The underlying problem is something known as “opportunism” in crisis bargaining circles. Remember, it is easy to keep the peace when the balance of power is static, After all, the costs of fighting ensure that war will be worse than maintaining the status quo, assuming the current division was intelligently constructed. One of the ways that this can go wrong is when there is a fleeting shift in the balance of power. This opens up a window of opportunity for the temporarily strengthened state, where fighting now may be better than facing the situation when the military balance returns to normal.Let’s apply this theory to the situation at hand with the four key players. Imagine that Russia, actor number one, begins a war against NATO, actor number two. The Western coalition will then have the fight of the century on its hands. Every weapons factory will begin working ‘round the clock, and governments will begin examining which civilian industries could temporarily shift to arms production, just like what happened during World War II. This presents an opening for China, actor number three. If the PLA invades Taiwan, actor number four, then the West cannot easily double its production schedules to counter the second threat. Those countries will already have their factories operating at their peak capacity and will already be at the risk of overheating. As a result, China will be more likely to prevail conditional on Russia having started the war.
But the logic also works going the other way. If China takes the first step by invading Taiwan, then the West will also surge production. In turn, now Russia has the window of opportunity. Following our standard lines on maps theory of shifting power and war, this can compel Russia to fight in the moment. That is because what Moscow might expect to gain while the West is distracted in Asia, minus its costs of fighting, may be larger than the most it could hope to extract from the West once war in the Indo-Pacific has died down. Hence the Trump Doctrine pushes for the development of Europe’s defense base.
In some ways—and this is in the document itself—the call is admission of the United States’s own weakness. Once upon a time, Washington had a doctrine known as the “two-war construct.” It dictated that the United States ought to maintain sufficient military capacity to fight two wars at once. You can trace it back to World War II, when indeed the United States fought in both Europe and the Pacific simultaneously. During the Cold War, the construct shifted to the ability to fight the Soviet Union and one smaller opponent, say Vietnam.The whole point of the two-war construct was to mitigate the war of opportunism concern. If you can fight on two fronts, then getting involved in a single conflict does not leave you vulnerable on the second flank. Thus, there would be no window of opportunity for U.S. opponents and, in turn, no enhanced threat of war on the second front.
Moving a further up step, that gave the United States additional latitude to get involved the first war to begin with.The end of the Cold War also brought the sunset on the two-war construct, though. Washington still managed to carry on campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq at the same time, but that was more of a product of those both of those wars having relatively small footprints. Today, the doctrine concedes that the United States is no longer in a position to throw its hat into two fronts simultaneously, and American taxpayers are unwilling to raise military spending to the point where it will be feasible in the future. As a result, Europe cannot rely on the United States to help repel a Russian invasion—not for a lack of desire, but rather because the broader geopolitical situation is a mess.
Given that strategic constraint, the sensible solution is the division of labor that we have all heard so much about: Europe handles Russia as its primary responsibility, while the United States handles China as its primary responsibility. This makes sense because Europe is right on top of Russia, while the United States has the naval power to reach across the Pacific. And it is not just the United States that is thinking that way. NATO has started integrating its Indo-Pacific partners into its major meetings, and the last two Secretaries General have increased their diplomatic visits to the region to coordinate across the world.
Overview of Where Trump Doctrine Is Failing
I want to pivot to the various issues that come along with it and road map where we are going.We can divide the issues into three categories. First is the administration’s inability to communicate what the heck the Trump Doctrine is. And we can subdivide the causes of that into three categories.
1) The administration’s generally poor ability to communicate.
2) Internal divisions within the White House that are distorting the implementation of the doctrine and are inconsistent with the national security strategy.
3) Lingering concerns about European defense spending.
continues at the link.
Hey maybe instead of paying 5000 dollar baby bonuses they should just stop deporting US-born infants.
It boggles my mind that this guy is part of the senior leadership of the Democratic Party – you want to know why Trump was elected, this is your reason.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zh6DQMjKuDk
dv said:
Hey maybe instead of paying 5000 dollar baby bonuses they should just stop deporting US-born infants.
LOL
The baby bonus is how MAGAs who live in trailers make a living.
Michael V said:
dv said:
Hey maybe instead of paying 5000 dollar baby bonuses they should just stop deporting US-born infants.
LOL
The baby bonus is how MAGAs who live in trailers make a living.
The payment is only a proposal and isn’t in effect
diddly-squat said:
Michael V said:
dv said:
Hey maybe instead of paying 5000 dollar baby bonuses they should just stop deporting US-born infants.
LOL
The baby bonus is how MAGAs who live in trailers make a living.
The payment is only a proposal and isn’t in effect
I tried to continue the laugh. Will adding “want to” assist?
Michael V said:
diddly-squat said:
Michael V said:LOL
The baby bonus is how MAGAs who live in trailers make a living.
The payment is only a proposal and isn’t in effect
I tried to continue the laugh. Will adding “want to” assist?
Michael V said:
dv said:
Hey maybe instead of paying 5000 dollar baby bonuses they should just stop deporting US-born infants.
LOL
The baby bonus is how MAGAs who live in trailers make a living.
I’m not sure they’re allowed to sell children in the US, even in these strange times.
diddly-squat said:
It boggles my mind that this guy is part of the senior leadership of the Democratic Party – you want to know why Trump was elected, this is your reason.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zh6DQMjKuDk
Can you summarize your thoughts?
diddly-squat said:
It boggles my mind that this guy is part of the senior leadership of the Democratic Party – you want to know why Trump was elected, this is your reason.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zh6DQMjKuDk
Must be weird trying to get progressive people excited to vote for someone to the right of Peter Dutton but I’m not even sure what the solution is, given their political system. I’d be in a bad mood if our choice of PM was between Angus Taylor and Malcolm Roberts.
This conservative intellectual has a storied past:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corey_DeAngelis
Why was Kristi Noem carrying $3,000 in her purse?
Pretty sure it was 30 pieces of silver
You win the internet today.
SCIENCE said:
Why was Kristi Noem carrying $3,000 in her purse?
Pretty sure it was 30 pieces of silver
You win the internet today.
:)
Witty Rejoinder said:
diddly-squat said:It boggles my mind that this guy is part of the senior leadership of the Democratic Party – you want to know why Trump was elected, this is your reason.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zh6DQMjKuDk
Can you summarize your thoughts?
Chuck Schumer is an inarticulate and dithery old man that does nothing to offer any form of compelling argument that progresses the cause of the Democratic Party. Schumer is the sort of politician that is perfectly fine while in power, but he is terrible in opposition. The party needs to adapt to its new landscape.
diddly-squat said:
Witty Rejoinder said:
diddly-squat said:It boggles my mind that this guy is part of the senior leadership of the Democratic Party – you want to know why Trump was elected, this is your reason.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zh6DQMjKuDk
Can you summarize your thoughts?
Chuck Schumer is an inarticulate and dithery old man that does nothing to offer any form of compelling argument that progresses the cause of the Democratic Party. Schumer is the sort of politician that is perfectly fine while in power, but he is terrible in opposition. The party needs to adapt to its new landscape.
Would you prefer a moderate or a progressive to take his position?
Heather Cox Richardson
1h ·
April 27, 2025 (Sunday)
Last night a new club opened in the wealthy Georgetown neighborhood in Washington, D.C. It’s called “Executive Branch,” and it’s an invitation-only club backed by Donald Trump Jr. and megadonor Omeed Malik. Dasha Burns of Politico reported that it costs more than half a million dollars to join. The exclusive club is designed to allow top business executives to talk privately with Trump advisors and cabinet members. Burns reports that the club already has a waiting list.
When then-candidate Donald Trump celebrated the administration of President William McKinley, it was always clear he saw it as the triumphant marriage of the very rich to the U.S. government. It was the era of so-called robber barons, industrialists and financiers who flooded political campaigns with money to convince voters that those trying to rein them in were socialists or anarchists, then called upon the politicians they put into power to pass laws that benefited their businesses.
“Behind every one of half the portly well-dressed members of the Senate can be seen the outlines of some corporation interested in getting or preventing legislation,” the Chicago Tribune wrote in 1884, “or of some syndicate that has invaluable contracts or patents to defend or push.”
Last Sunday a new filing with the Federal Election Commission revealed that donors delivered an astounding $239 million for Trump’s inauguration. Theodore Schleifer of the New York Times notes that Trump’s 2017 inaugural committee raised $107 million. The $346 million raised by Trump’s two inaugural committees is more than the monies raised by all other inaugural committees since Richard Nixon’s committee raised $4 million in 1973. While Trump’s allies have said the money that wasn’t spent on festivities will go to other projects Trump is behind, including his presidential library, there is no oversight on how Trump uses that money.
Spending on the election was even more dramatic. Earlier this month, Americans for Tax Fairness analyzed spending in 2024 and discovered that just 100 billionaire families donated a record-breaking $2.6 billion to federal campaigns, up by 160 times from billionaire spending in elections before the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision. Seventy percent of that money went to Republican candidates or causes. In the three races that determined control of the Senate—Montana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania—outside money from billionaires made up 58.1%, 56.8%, and 44.5% of the outside money coming in. Elon Musk donated about $290 million, giving four times as much money to political campaigns in 2024 as he paid in income taxes between 2013 and 2018.
Those investments in a Trump administration are paying off. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is withdrawing a Biden-era rule requiring poultry companies to keep the levels of salmonella bacteria below a certain level in their meats to prevent illnesses commonly known as food poisoning. When the Biden administration proposed the rule, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention explained that salmonella causes 1.35 million infections a year and kills 420 people. The USDA said that about 125,000 of those infections came from chicken and another 43,000 from turkey. Officials estimated that the new rule would reduce salmonella illnesses by 25%.
The National Chicken Council celebrated the Trump administration’s reversal of the rule, saying it would have had “no meaningful impact on public health.” On Friday, Charisma Madarang of Rolling Stone pointed out that the poultry company Pilgrim’s Pride gave $5 million to Trump’s inaugural committee, making it the largest donor to that effort. Two of the company’s executives, chief executive officer Fabio Sandri and head of the company’s food safety and quality assurance Kendra Waldbusser, serve on the board of the National Chicken Council.
Last month, Rick Claypool of the consumer rights organization Public Citizen noted that the Trump administration has dropped federal investigations and lawsuits against 89 corporations, many of whose leaders donated heavily to Trump’s inaugural fund. Another of those who has benefited significantly from the new policies is Elon Musk. Lisa Gilbert, co-president of Public Citizen, told Laurence Darmiento of the Los Angeles Times: “I think the overall goals of Donald Trump and Elon Musk are to slash regulations, to slash budgets and to cut positions all with this claim they are going to increase efficiency and fight fraud.”
But corporate ties to the government are not just about avoiding oversight; they are also about snagging lucrative federal contracts. Gilbert noted: “I would say it’s a smoke screen and cover for personal profit and corporate power—and that’s where Musk’s personal conflicts of interest come into play, as well as the other corporate actors across this government.”
On Friday, Andrew Perez and Asawin Suebsaeng of Rolling Stone reported that staffers for billionaire Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” have been working on a multimillion-dollar communications project called “Project Lift” at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). The plan appears to be to insert Musk’s Starlink into the $2.4 billion contract Verizon currently holds to upgrade the FAA’s systems, but DOGE staff have made FAA employees sign nondisclosure agreements, so details are scarce. An FAA spokesperson told Perez and Suebsaeng: “The federal employees running Project Lift are exploring a variety of solutions to modernize the FAA’s telecommunications network. Current contractors are part of the discussion.”
In the Trump administration, the connections between the government and business include the president’s family members.
Zach Everson of Forbes has been following the story of the Trump family’s involvement in artificial intelligence company Dominari Holdings, Inc. In February, Everson reported that just weeks after Trump announced the administration’s push to loosen regulations and expand infrastructure for AI, his sons Donald Jr. and Eric invested in Dominari and joined its brand new advisory board, for which they received 750,000 shares each in the company although they had no official duties. The company then launched another company, American Data Center, Inc., in which the Trumps also invested. That company focused on the “high-performance computing infrastructure” to support AI, cloud computing, and cryptocurrency.
According to Amber Jackson of the U.K.’s Data Centre Magazine, Dominari stock leaped more than 1,000% after the Trump sons joined the advisory board. On Friday, Everson reported on a Securities and Exchange Commission filing revealing that Dominari has applied for conditions that would enable the shareholders, including Don and Eric Trump, to sell their stocks earlier than a normal timeline would allow. Each Trump brother now controls 1.2 million shares of Dominari, each holding now worth $5.8 million.
On Wednesday, Trump made the pay-to-play nature of his administration explicit when he announced that the top 220 holders of his $TRUMP cryptocurrency token would be invited to a dinner with Trump at his private club and that they would be offered a “VIP White House Tour” the next day. MacKenzie Sigalos and Kevin Collier of CNBC reported the meme coin jumped more than 50% on the news, netting Trump and his allies nearly $900,000 in trading fees.
Just before sunrise this morning, House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) and Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) began a live-streamed sit-in protest and discussion on the steps of the U.S. Capitol to call attention to the Republicans’ budget bill. On Friday, Alan Rappeport and Tony Romm of the New York Times reported that the Republicans’ proposed 2026 budget would slash federal support for “child care, health research, education, housing assistance, community development and the elderly,” and for foreign aid. Attacking “woke” programs, it appears to implement much of Project 2025. Russell Vought, who was director of the Office of Management and Budget during Trump’s first term and has returned to that position in his second, was a key author of that playbook.
Cuts to programs that protect ordinary Americans will help to fund the extension of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. Extending those tax cuts will cost at least $4 trillion over the next decade. Congress returns to session tomorrow, and it will take up the budget. In a statement, Jeffries and Booker said: “Republican leaders have made clear their intention to use the coming weeks to advance a reckless budget scheme to President Trump’s desk that seeks to gut Medicaid, food assistance and basic needs programs that help people, all to give tax breaks to billionaires.”
Throughout the day, Democratic lawmakers, activists, and passersby joined Jeffries and Booker’s twelve-hour sit-in.
An AP/NORC poll released yesterday showed that Trump’s approval rating has dropped to 39%. Today a Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll confirmed that number. Trump’s approval rating at almost 100 days in office is the lowest of any president in 80 years.
For his part, Trump announced today that he “is bringing Columbus Day back from the ashes!”
That first paragraph alone… wow
Divine Angel said:
That first paragraph alone… wow
And then you keep reading and start saying fark….
Heather Cox Richardson keeps on bringing good peeks behind the curtain. And it ain’t pretty.
Witty Rejoinder said:
diddly-squat said:
Witty Rejoinder said:Can you summarize your thoughts?
Chuck Schumer is an inarticulate and dithery old man that does nothing to offer any form of compelling argument that progresses the cause of the Democratic Party. Schumer is the sort of politician that is perfectly fine while in power, but he is terrible in opposition. The party needs to adapt to its new landscape.
Would you prefer a moderate or a progressive to take his position?
A social progressive. Jon Ossof would be good.
dv said:
I get that one :)
Disgruntled voters spam Harold Fong (candidate for Trumpet party who has lent his name to millions of text messages) after his phone number appeared online
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14654113/trumpet-text-message.html
diddly-squat said:
Witty Rejoinder said:
diddly-squat said:Chuck Schumer is an inarticulate and dithery old man that does nothing to offer any form of compelling argument that progresses the cause of the Democratic Party. Schumer is the sort of politician that is perfectly fine while in power, but he is terrible in opposition. The party needs to adapt to its new landscape.
Would you prefer a moderate or a progressive to take his position?
A social progressive. Jon Ossof would be good.
Bit of a newbie. Has he demonstrated the leadership skills required?
dv said:
I worry about my friend, The Rocket Scientist. He’s ND, brilliant and artistic, works for the DoD. Was “targeted” for that when at uni. Lives in a beautiful old apartment block with a bunch of other DoD employees.
kii said:
dv said:
I worry about my friend, The Rocket Scientist. He’s ND, brilliant and artistic, works for the DoD. Was “targeted” for that when at uni. Lives in a beautiful old apartment block with a bunch of other DoD employees.
yeah but didn’t they teach him about nerdsniping
On TikTok, there’s only one winner from Trump’s tariff death spiral with China
By Lisa Visentin
April 24, 2025 — 3.45pm
Singapore: Just as Beijing and Washington appeared to settle into their trade war trenches, as head-spinning tariff hikes gave way to a protracted stand-off, we saw the first signs this week of the Trump team’s retreat from the precipice.
The US president mused that the “very high” tariff on Chinese imports could “come down substantially” and suggested a “fair deal with China” was in the offing, while The Wall Street Journal reported an unnamed White House official saying the levies could be slashed to between 50 and 65 per cent.
But just as quickly as the potential off-ramp appeared, the Trump administration walked it back. US Treasury secretary Scott Bessent clarified that while the status quo – 145 per cent on Chinese products and 125 per cent on US products – was unsustainable for both sides, Donald Trump wasn’t offering to remove duties on Chinese imports on a unilateral basis.
And so the pathway to the negotiating table for a deal with Chinese President Xi Jinping remains as unclear as ever.
Meanwhile, in the other important theatre of any war – the campaign for the hearts and minds of people who will bear the economic brunt of the conflict – Beijing appears to have the edge.
The digitally savvy generations don’t much care if the trade war is televised. Over on Chinese-owned TikTok, where 40 per cent of Americans aged under 30 get their news, Trump’s tariff death spiral with China has been universally mocked and meme-ified for weeks. Trends have taken hold, tapping into American anxieties about the cost of sky-high tariffs to the average consumer.
The video platform has been so awash with trade war content – much of it broadly unfavourable to America and running counter to Washington’s narrative – it has gifted Beijing the kind of PR win that its traditionally clunky propaganda efforts could only hope to achieve.
For the China hawks in Washington already harbouring concerns about the potential for TikTok to be used as a propaganda tool to manipulate Western minds, the past few weeks have surely been a rough ride.
First came the AI-generated videos depicting Americans working in sweatshops, which went viral on Chinese social media sites before sweeping across the mainstream internet. Since then, it’s been open slather, with many US users joining in the jibes at their expense.
In one nine-second TikTok video that has had more than 25 million views, a young baseball cap-wearing Chinese man, seemingly sitting inside his home, speaks directly to an American audience.
“Hello from China,” he says, his modest kitchen visible in the background. “Let me show you the United States’ products in my home.
“Nothing,” he says, holding up his empty palms to the camera, before adding with a smirk: “Do you have something from China in your home?”
It’s possible that Beijing has nailed the art of an effective social media influence campaign masquerading as organic creator content. Or it was simply the handiwork of a patriotic Chinese netizen equipped with a camera phone and a VPN to overcome the firewall that otherwise blocks Chinese citizens from accessing TikTok.
Americans need only cast their gazes around their bedrooms, living rooms and kitchens to see the numerous Chinese-made appliances and gadgets that will be subject to a 145 per cent tariff.
In another viral trend that took off in the aftermath of Trump’s tariff barrage, Chinese factory workers and shopping agents flooded TikTok with videos spruiking cut-price handbags and fashion dupes that they claimed were made in the same factories as well-known Western brands such as lululemon, Nike and Hermes. The only thing missing was the label, or so the sales pitch went.
Their videos, which appealed to Americans to buy directly from Chinese manufacturers to cut out middlemen and avoid brand mark-ups to mitigate the tariff impact, quickly notched millions of views and left luxury brands scrambling to reject claims their goods were made in China.
The Trump administration’s message about bringing manufacturing jobs back to US soil and buying American-made was lost in the scramble for a bargain deal, however too-good-to-be-true it probably was.
At the same time, Beijing has been pumping out propaganda through its traditional avenue of state media mouthpieces, where editorials have boasted of China’s resolve in standing up to Trump. On Facebook and X, Chinese diplomats have shared archival footage of Mao Zedong speaking in 1953, when China and the US were on opposite sides of the Korean War.
“No matter how long this war is going to last, we’ll never yield. We’ll fight until we completely triumph,” the former leader says in one clip.
China’s system of ruthlessly controlled media and internet censorship makes it difficult to judge how effectively these patriotic appeals have resonated with the masses. But seasoned China analysts say Beijing has used the crisis to paper over its own policy missteps that have failed to lift the country out of an economic malaise that was dogging it before the trade war kicked off. Armed now with a victim narrative, Beijing has tapped into a nationalism that redirects blame towards the US.
“The mood has changed dramatically ,” Scott Kennedy, a China expert at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, says on a recent podcast.
“ seeing this as an existential crisis. The Chinese are actually pretty unified, and they are going to hold the line as long as they absolutely need to.”
Trump, on the other hand, must stare down not only China, but increasingly jumpy Wall Street investors, and an already deeply polarised society whose algorithms are dishing up relentless reminders of the financial hit coming to their pockets.
https://www.theage.com.au/world/asia/on-tiktok-there-s-only-one-winner-from-trump-s-tariff-death-spiral-with-china-20250422-p5ltdm.html
Congressman Shri Thanedar introduces bills of impeachment against Trump.
https://thanedar.house.gov/media/press-releases/congressman-shri-thanedar-introduces-articles-of-impeachment-against-president-donald-j-trump-for-high-crimes-and-misdemeanors
dv said:
:)
Heh!
This is funny…people are wondering what the plastic surgeon did.
“Trump has pardoned Nevada Republican Michele Fiore, a former Las Vegas councilwoman and state lawmaker convicted of diverting over $70,000 in donations meant for a slain police officer’s memorial statue to fund her cosmetic surgery, rent, and her daughter’s wedding.
Fiore was found guilty in October 2024 on six counts of wire fraud and one conspiracy charge, and faced decades in prison before Trump’s pardon.
The pardon — issued just days after her failed bid for a new trial — drew sharp criticism as ‘reckless’ and a ‘slap in the face’ to law enforcement.
Despite not having a law degree, Fiore plans to resume her judicial role in Nye County.”
sarahs mum said:
Uh-oh.
Witty Rejoinder said:
On TikTok, there’s only one winner from Trump’s tariff death spiral with ChinaBy Lisa Visentin
April 24, 2025 — 3.45pmSingapore: Just as Beijing and Washington appeared to settle into their trade war trenches, as head-spinning tariff hikes gave way to a protracted stand-off, we saw the first signs this week of the Trump team’s retreat from the precipice.
The US president mused that the “very high” tariff on Chinese imports could “come down substantially” and suggested a “fair deal with China” was in the offing, while The Wall Street Journal reported an unnamed White House official saying the levies could be slashed to between 50 and 65 per cent.
But just as quickly as the potential off-ramp appeared, the Trump administration walked it back. US Treasury secretary Scott Bessent clarified that while the status quo – 145 per cent on Chinese products and 125 per cent on US products – was unsustainable for both sides, Donald Trump wasn’t offering to remove duties on Chinese imports on a unilateral basis.
And so the pathway to the negotiating table for a deal with Chinese President Xi Jinping remains as unclear as ever.
Meanwhile, in the other important theatre of any war – the campaign for the hearts and minds of people who will bear the economic brunt of the conflict – Beijing appears to have the edge.
The digitally savvy generations don’t much care if the trade war is televised. Over on Chinese-owned TikTok, where 40 per cent of Americans aged under 30 get their news, Trump’s tariff death spiral with China has been universally mocked and meme-ified for weeks. Trends have taken hold, tapping into American anxieties about the cost of sky-high tariffs to the average consumer.
The video platform has been so awash with trade war content – much of it broadly unfavourable to America and running counter to Washington’s narrative – it has gifted Beijing the kind of PR win that its traditionally clunky propaganda efforts could only hope to achieve.
For the China hawks in Washington already harbouring concerns about the potential for TikTok to be used as a propaganda tool to manipulate Western minds, the past few weeks have surely been a rough ride.
First came the AI-generated videos depicting Americans working in sweatshops, which went viral on Chinese social media sites before sweeping across the mainstream internet. Since then, it’s been open slather, with many US users joining in the jibes at their expense.
In one nine-second TikTok video that has had more than 25 million views, a young baseball cap-wearing Chinese man, seemingly sitting inside his home, speaks directly to an American audience.
“Hello from China,” he says, his modest kitchen visible in the background. “Let me show you the United States’ products in my home.
“Nothing,” he says, holding up his empty palms to the camera, before adding with a smirk: “Do you have something from China in your home?”
It’s possible that Beijing has nailed the art of an effective social media influence campaign masquerading as organic creator content. Or it was simply the handiwork of a patriotic Chinese netizen equipped with a camera phone and a VPN to overcome the firewall that otherwise blocks Chinese citizens from accessing TikTok.
Americans need only cast their gazes around their bedrooms, living rooms and kitchens to see the numerous Chinese-made appliances and gadgets that will be subject to a 145 per cent tariff.
In another viral trend that took off in the aftermath of Trump’s tariff barrage, Chinese factory workers and shopping agents flooded TikTok with videos spruiking cut-price handbags and fashion dupes that they claimed were made in the same factories as well-known Western brands such as lululemon, Nike and Hermes. The only thing missing was the label, or so the sales pitch went.
Their videos, which appealed to Americans to buy directly from Chinese manufacturers to cut out middlemen and avoid brand mark-ups to mitigate the tariff impact, quickly notched millions of views and left luxury brands scrambling to reject claims their goods were made in China.
The Trump administration’s message about bringing manufacturing jobs back to US soil and buying American-made was lost in the scramble for a bargain deal, however too-good-to-be-true it probably was.
At the same time, Beijing has been pumping out propaganda through its traditional avenue of state media mouthpieces, where editorials have boasted of China’s resolve in standing up to Trump. On Facebook and X, Chinese diplomats have shared archival footage of Mao Zedong speaking in 1953, when China and the US were on opposite sides of the Korean War.
“No matter how long this war is going to last, we’ll never yield. We’ll fight until we completely triumph,” the former leader says in one clip.
China’s system of ruthlessly controlled media and internet censorship makes it difficult to judge how effectively these patriotic appeals have resonated with the masses. But seasoned China analysts say Beijing has used the crisis to paper over its own policy missteps that have failed to lift the country out of an economic malaise that was dogging it before the trade war kicked off. Armed now with a victim narrative, Beijing has tapped into a nationalism that redirects blame towards the US.
“The mood has changed dramatically ,” Scott Kennedy, a China expert at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, says on a recent podcast.
“ seeing this as an existential crisis. The Chinese are actually pretty unified, and they are going to hold the line as long as they absolutely need to.”
Trump, on the other hand, must stare down not only China, but increasingly jumpy Wall Street investors, and an already deeply polarised society whose algorithms are dishing up relentless reminders of the financial hit coming to their pockets.
https://www.theage.com.au/world/asia/on-tiktok-there-s-only-one-winner-from-trump-s-tariff-death-spiral-with-china-20250422-p5ltdm.html
Heh.
:)
Looks like another own-goal.
Divine Angel said:
Congressman Shri Thanedar introduces bills of impeachment against Trump.https://thanedar.house.gov/media/press-releases/congressman-shri-thanedar-introduces-articles-of-impeachment-against-president-donald-j-trump-for-high-crimes-and-misdemeanors
Trump’s men might be looking to send him to an overseas concentration camp, too.
Michael V said:
Divine Angel said:
Congressman Shri Thanedar introduces bills of impeachment against Trump.
Trump’s men might be looking to send him to an overseas concentration camp, too.
is he a South Korean President though
Michael V said:
dv said:
:)
Heh!
Those Who Don’t Learn From History By Repeating It Are Doomed To … Wait
https://youtu.be/VS-for7pUxU?si=xSiLVhNI9CXA0veM
Legal Eagles: legal ramifications of illegal removals of citizens and non-citizens
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1952_Texas_gubernatorial_election
Unusual case
dv said:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1952_Texas_gubernatorial_electionUnusual case
As they’re ‘gubernatorial’ contests, i think that the winner should thereafter be referred to as ‘the guber’ (goober).
SCIENCE said:
Arse.
Michael V said:
SCIENCE said:
Arse.
If that kid in Pennsylvania had just allowed a little tiny bit for the wind…
captain_spalding said:
Michael V said:
SCIENCE said:
Arse.
If that kid in Pennsylvania had just allowed a little tiny bit for the wind…
If only…
roughbarked said:
captain_spalding said:
Michael V said:Arse.
If that kid in Pennsylvania had just allowed a little tiny bit for the wind…
If only…
if ifs and ands were pots and pans there’d be no work for tinkers.
old jungle saying.
It is only political because to was deployed to the red sea.
F/A-18 Jet fighter lost at sea as it slips off deck of US aircraft carrier deployed to Middle East
Despite past use of heroin, and Narcan saving thousands of lives from overdose, RFK jr has decided all we need is love, announcing cuts to Narcan funding.
https://www.latintimes.com/rfk-jr-end-godsend-narcan-program-that-helped-reduce-overdose-deaths-despite-his-past-heroin-581846
JudgeMental said:
roughbarked said:
captain_spalding said:If that kid in Pennsylvania had just allowed a little tiny bit for the wind…
If only…
if ifs and ands were pots and pans there’d be no work for tinkers.
old jungle saying.
East Enders Jungle?
Divine Angel said:
Despite past use of heroin, and Narcan saving thousands of lives from overdose, RFK jr has decided all we need is love, announcing cuts to Narcan funding.https://www.latintimes.com/rfk-jr-end-godsend-narcan-program-that-helped-reduce-overdose-deaths-despite-his-past-heroin-581846
See, in his head, if all the junkies die, that will be the end of it.
roughbarked said:
It is only political because to was deployed to the red sea.
F/A-18 Jet fighter lost at sea as it slips off deck of US aircraft carrier deployed to Middle East
Nothing to see here. Move along. Just one of those aircraft carrier things.
The RAN lost of few planes over the side during movements around the flight deck, including one or two A-4 Skyhawks.
roughbarked said:
JudgeMental said:
roughbarked said:If only…
if ifs and ands were pots and pans there’d be no work for tinkers.
old jungle saying.
East Enders Jungle?
paddington.
roughbarked said:
Divine Angel said:
Despite past use of heroin, and Narcan saving thousands of lives from overdose, RFK jr has decided all we need is love, announcing cuts to Narcan funding.https://www.latintimes.com/rfk-jr-end-godsend-narcan-program-that-helped-reduce-overdose-deaths-despite-his-past-heroin-581846
See, in his head, if all the junkies die, that will be the end of it.
Saves all that money on rounding them up and deporting them/putting them into camps.
captain_spalding said:
roughbarked said:
It is only political because to was deployed to the red sea.
F/A-18 Jet fighter lost at sea as it slips off deck of US aircraft carrier deployed to Middle East
Nothing to see here. Move along. Just one of those aircraft carrier things.
The RAN lost of few planes over the side during movements around the flight deck, including one or two A-4 Skyhawks.
(sigh)
‘…lost a few…’
roughbarked said:
Divine Angel said:
Despite past use of heroin, and Narcan saving thousands of lives from overdose, RFK jr has decided all we need is love, announcing cuts to Narcan funding.https://www.latintimes.com/rfk-jr-end-godsend-narcan-program-that-helped-reduce-overdose-deaths-despite-his-past-heroin-581846
See, in his head, if all the junkies die, that will be the end of it.
No no no it gets rid of the autisms. Somehow…
captain_spalding said:
roughbarked said:
It is only political because to was deployed to the red sea.
F/A-18 Jet fighter lost at sea as it slips off deck of US aircraft carrier deployed to Middle East
Nothing to see here. Move along. Just one of those aircraft carrier things.
The RAN lost of few planes over the side during movements around the flight deck, including one or two A-4 Skyhawks.
Yeah. Shit happens.
Divine Angel said:
Despite past use of heroin, and Narcan saving thousands of lives from overdose, RFK jr has decided all we need is love, announcing cuts to Narcan funding.https://www.latintimes.com/rfk-jr-end-godsend-narcan-program-that-helped-reduce-overdose-deaths-despite-his-past-heroin-581846
Arse.
captain_spalding said:
captain_spalding said:
roughbarked said:
It is only political because to was deployed to the red sea.
F/A-18 Jet fighter lost at sea as it slips off deck of US aircraft carrier deployed to Middle East
Nothing to see here. Move along. Just one of those aircraft carrier things.
The RAN lost of few planes over the side during movements around the flight deck, including one or two A-4 Skyhawks.
(sigh)
‘…lost a few…’
So,.. more than two?
roughbarked said:
It is only political because to was deployed to the red sea.
F/A-18 Jet fighter lost at sea as it slips off deck of US aircraft carrier deployed to Middle East
The report says that the jet was being moved around on the hangar deck, which is the deck below the flight deck.
While it’s entirely possible that this was the case, as a lot of aircraft carriers, incluing the two new ones for the RN, use ‘deck-edge’ lifts to move aircraft between the decks. This was not the case on a lot of older carriers, as the lifts were on the ship’s centre line.
This means there’s a big opening in the side of the hangar deck where the lift operate, and that aircraft are outside of the ship’s hull when on the lift. So, opportunities to lose an aircraft out of the hangar deck do exist.
However, it’s also quite possible that the report confuses the ‘flight deck’ with the ‘hangar deck’, or vice versa, (it’s the media) so, who knows?
roughbarked said:
captain_spalding said:
captain_spalding said:Nothing to see here. Move along. Just one of those aircraft carrier things.
The RAN lost of few planes over the side during movements around the flight deck, including one or two A-4 Skyhawks.
(sigh)
‘…lost a few…’
So,.. more than two?
Oh, yeah, the RAN had carriers back in the Korean War, flying Sea Furies and Fairey Fireflies, so there was like 30 years of operatons in which to lose a few into the oggin.
JudgeMental said:
roughbarked said:
JudgeMental said:
if ifs and ands were pots and pans there’d be no work for tinkers.
old jungle saying.
East Enders Jungle?
paddington.
if ifs and ands were for flow control then elses would also play a role
new thinkers’ saying
Divine Angel said:
roughbarked said:
Divine Angel said:
Despite past use of heroin, and Narcan saving thousands of lives from overdose, RFK jr has decided all we need is love, announcing cuts to Narcan funding.https://www.latintimes.com/rfk-jr-end-godsend-narcan-program-that-helped-reduce-overdose-deaths-despite-his-past-heroin-581846
See, in his head, if all the junkies die, that will be the end of it.
No no no it gets rid of the autisms. Somehow…
Has he shown his workings?
captain_spalding said:
roughbarked said:
It is only political because to was deployed to the red sea.
F/A-18 Jet fighter lost at sea as it slips off deck of US aircraft carrier deployed to Middle East
The report says that the jet was being moved around on the hangar deck, which is the deck below the flight deck.
While it’s entirely possible that this was the case, as a lot of aircraft carriers, incluing the two new ones for the RN, use ‘deck-edge’ lifts to move aircraft between the decks. This was not the case on a lot of older carriers, as the lifts were on the ship’s centre line.
This means there’s a big opening in the side of the hangar deck where the lift operate, and that aircraft are outside of the ship’s hull when on the lift. So, opportunities to lose an aircraft out of the hangar deck do exist.
However, it’s also quite possible that the report confuses the ‘flight deck’ with the ‘hangar deck’, or vice versa, (it’s the media) so, who knows?
Take all news reports with a grain of salt and try to read between the lines.
roughbarked said:
captain_spalding said:
captain_spalding said:Nothing to see here. Move along. Just one of those aircraft carrier things.
The RAN lost of few planes over the side during movements around the flight deck, including one or two A-4 Skyhawks.
(sigh)
‘…lost a few…’
So,.. more than two?
More or less.
I see the Canadian Libs have won another term in office.
All thanks to Pres. Trump.
The Rev Dodgson said:
I see the Canadian Libs have won another term in office.All thanks to Pres. Trump.
It’s a new political force: ALTNT.
At Least They’re Not Trump.
captain_spalding said:
The Rev Dodgson said:
I see the Canadian Libs have won another term in office.
All thanks to Pres. Trump.
It’s a new political force: ALTNT.
At Least They’re Not Trump.
see what a good guy them kkk is, saving the world one 50+th state at a time
Port of Seattle, usually crammed full of cargo ships, is empty. Tariffs are blamed.
https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/s/le2ib92u0G
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/28/climate/national-climate-assessment-authors-dismissed.html
All Authors Working on Flagship U.S. Climate Report Are Dismissed
dv said:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/28/climate/national-climate-assessment-authors-dismissed.htmlAll Authors Working on Flagship U.S. Climate Report Are Dismissed
The climate doesn’t exist. We are living under God’s dome.
r/TemuThings is good for a laugh. Everyone is freaking out.
dv said:
r/TemuThings is good for a laugh. Everyone is freaking out.
$200 discount.. winning at life it seems
Still you’d think there’d be a pretty good business in shipping to Canada and then trucking across the border.
“Sir why is your Rav4 crammed with piss quality socket sets?”
“… personal use.”
gonna be interesting to see how much of this economic doom and gloom actually turns out to be real
diddly-squat said:
gonna be interesting to see how much of this economic doom and gloom actually turns out to be real
JP Morgan is still giving the US a 60% chance of recession. I thiught the forecasts might improve a bit once he wound back some of the other tariffs on non-China but it seems the capricious nature of his decisions is still a drag on business confidence.
There’s another universe where he got allies on side for a joint trade war against China but instead by going after everyone at once he’s made a world where other nations have come to accommodations with the PRC.
dv said:
r/TemuThings is good for a laugh. Everyone is freaking out.
Yeah but Trumponomics says they won’t have a tax bill.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep
But I have promises to keep
And miles to go before I sleep
And miles to go before I sleep
diddly-squat said:
gonna be interesting to see how much of this economic doom and gloom actually turns out to be real
This uncertainty is half the problem.
dv said:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/28/climate/national-climate-assessment-authors-dismissed.htmlAll Authors Working on Flagship U.S. Climate Report Are Dismissed
Fingers in ears, heads in sand. All’s good.
Stacey Patton
I’m catching a weekend segment on MSNBC with pundits talking about how the Trump administration could very well start snatching Black Americans off the streets and deporting us.
To where exactly? Not sure.
But do Y’all ever think about what America would look like if it managed to successfully deport all the non-white people?
Imagine all the empty cities. The dying industries. The boarded-up hospitals. All those fields rotting under a sun.
America would collapse because white America needs an OTHER to define itself against. It always has. Without someone to blame and abuse, it would cannibalize itself. It would turn on its own children, its poor, its women, its elders. Anybody who is vulnerable.
The cruelty wouldn’t end. It would just have nowhere left to hide because the rest of us would be gone. Right now, we are the stop gap that has keep white people from destroying each other..
If they want their white ethnostate . . . fine!
Just know that it would be a cold, sick, dying place full of crumbling strip malls, empty churches, and US flags waving over a wasteland nobody wants to inherit.
And don’t think for one second that it would stay “civilized.” White America would revert to its ancestral habits. You know, the ones it pretends to have left behind in Europe and outgrown.
Small towns would turn into medieval fiefdoms. Desperate people would carve each other up over scraps of power and land. Religious zealots would burn each other alive in church basements. We’d see witch trials and public executions staged in Walmart parking lots. Inbreeding would be off the chain. They’d bring back torture and blood sports as entertainment.
The same barbarism that once turned Europe into a slaughterhouse of plagues, crusades, inquisitions, infanticide, and peasant wars would bloom again because that violence was never left behind. It was only exported, outsourced, and projected onto other groups.
The cold hard truth is that for centuries, POC of color have forced white America to evolve and we have saved them from themselves. And without that pressure, it will rot into what it always was beneath the facade: An empire built on sadism and sustained by blood.
dv said:
r/TemuThings is good for a laugh. Everyone is freaking out.
so the libs got owned LOL nobody could have foreseen this
dv said:
diddly-squat said:gonna be interesting to see how much of this economic doom and gloom actually turns out to be real
JP Morgan is still giving the US a 60% chance of recession. I thiught the forecasts might improve a bit once he wound back some of the other tariffs on non-China but it seems the capricious nature of his decisions is still a drag on business confidence.
There’s another universe where he got allies on side for a joint trade war against China but instead by going after everyone at once he’s made a world where other nations have come to accommodations with the PRC.
we love how all the commentators are still saying everyone needs to harden their defences to stand up against those dirty ASIAN authoritarians when the reality is your friendly not friendly authoritarians are literally knocking
JudgeMental said:
Stacey Patton
I’m catching a weekend segment on MSNBC with pundits talking about how the Trump administration could very well start snatching Black Americans off the streets and deporting us.
To where exactly? Not sure.
But do Y’all ever think about what America would look like if it managed to successfully deport all the non-white people?
Imagine all the empty cities. The dying industries. The boarded-up hospitals. All those fields rotting under a sun.
America would collapse because white America needs an OTHER to define itself against. It always has. Without someone to blame and abuse, it would cannibalize itself. It would turn on its own children, its poor, its women, its elders. Anybody who is vulnerable.The cruelty wouldn’t end. It would just have nowhere left to hide because the rest of us would be gone. Right now, we are the stop gap that has keep white people from destroying each other..
If they want their white ethnostate . . . fine!Just know that it would be a cold, sick, dying place full of crumbling strip malls, empty churches, and US flags waving over a wasteland nobody wants to inherit.
And don’t think for one second that it would stay “civilized.” White America would revert to its ancestral habits. You know, the ones it pretends to have left behind in Europe and outgrown.
Small towns would turn into medieval fiefdoms. Desperate people would carve each other up over scraps of power and land. Religious zealots would burn each other alive in church basements. We’d see witch trials and public executions staged in Walmart parking lots. Inbreeding would be off the chain. They’d bring back torture and blood sports as entertainment.
The same barbarism that once turned Europe into a slaughterhouse of plagues, crusades, inquisitions, infanticide, and peasant wars would bloom again because that violence was never left behind. It was only exported, outsourced, and projected onto other groups.
The cold hard truth is that for centuries, POC of color have forced white America to evolve and we have saved them from themselves. And without that pressure, it will rot into what it always was beneath the facade: An empire built on sadism and sustained by blood.
so hero of the people kind kompassionate karing kkk is reversing the centuries old disruptive injustices of the slave trade too, kkk, is there any world he can’t save
alleged
It really is astounding that before they get all this fillers and other cosmetic procedures these people look at others and say “…yes I would like my face to look like a baboon’s arse too!”
agreed
SCIENCE said:
alleged
Actually look like AI makeovers.
alleged
Gus Lor Energy
sarahs mum said:
Heather Cox Richardson
1h ·
April 27, 2025 (Sunday)Last night a new club opened in the wealthy Georgetown neighborhood in Washington, D.C. It’s called “Executive Branch,” and it’s an invitation-only club backed by Donald Trump Jr. and megadonor Omeed Malik. Dasha Burns of Politico reported that it costs more than half a million dollars to join. The exclusive club is designed to allow top business executives to talk privately with Trump advisors and cabinet members. Burns reports that the club already has a waiting list.
When then-candidate Donald Trump celebrated the administration of President William McKinley, it was always clear he saw it as the triumphant marriage of the very rich to the U.S. government. It was the era of so-called robber barons, industrialists and financiers who flooded political campaigns with money to convince voters that those trying to rein them in were socialists or anarchists, then called upon the politicians they put into power to pass laws that benefited their businesses.
“Behind every one of half the portly well-dressed members of the Senate can be seen the outlines of some corporation interested in getting or preventing legislation,” the Chicago Tribune wrote in 1884, “or of some syndicate that has invaluable contracts or patents to defend or push.”
Last Sunday a new filing with the Federal Election Commission revealed that donors delivered an astounding $239 million for Trump’s inauguration. Theodore Schleifer of the New York Times notes that Trump’s 2017 inaugural committee raised $107 million. The $346 million raised by Trump’s two inaugural committees is more than the monies raised by all other inaugural committees since Richard Nixon’s committee raised $4 million in 1973. While Trump’s allies have said the money that wasn’t spent on festivities will go to other projects Trump is behind, including his presidential library, there is no oversight on how Trump uses that money.
Spending on the election was even more dramatic. Earlier this month, Americans for Tax Fairness analyzed spending in 2024 and discovered that just 100 billionaire families donated a record-breaking $2.6 billion to federal campaigns, up by 160 times from billionaire spending in elections before the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision. Seventy percent of that money went to Republican candidates or causes. In the three races that determined control of the Senate—Montana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania—outside money from billionaires made up 58.1%, 56.8%, and 44.5% of the outside money coming in. Elon Musk donated about $290 million, giving four times as much money to political campaigns in 2024 as he paid in income taxes between 2013 and 2018.
Those investments in a Trump administration are paying off. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is withdrawing a Biden-era rule requiring poultry companies to keep the levels of salmonella bacteria below a certain level in their meats to prevent illnesses commonly known as food poisoning. When the Biden administration proposed the rule, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention explained that salmonella causes 1.35 million infections a year and kills 420 people. The USDA said that about 125,000 of those infections came from chicken and another 43,000 from turkey. Officials estimated that the new rule would reduce salmonella illnesses by 25%.
The National Chicken Council celebrated the Trump administration’s reversal of the rule, saying it would have had “no meaningful impact on public health.” On Friday, Charisma Madarang of Rolling Stone pointed out that the poultry company Pilgrim’s Pride gave $5 million to Trump’s inaugural committee, making it the largest donor to that effort. Two of the company’s executives, chief executive officer Fabio Sandri and head of the company’s food safety and quality assurance Kendra Waldbusser, serve on the board of the National Chicken Council.
Last month, Rick Claypool of the consumer rights organization Public Citizen noted that the Trump administration has dropped federal investigations and lawsuits against 89 corporations, many of whose leaders donated heavily to Trump’s inaugural fund. Another of those who has benefited significantly from the new policies is Elon Musk. Lisa Gilbert, co-president of Public Citizen, told Laurence Darmiento of the Los Angeles Times: “I think the overall goals of Donald Trump and Elon Musk are to slash regulations, to slash budgets and to cut positions all with this claim they are going to increase efficiency and fight fraud.”
But corporate ties to the government are not just about avoiding oversight; they are also about snagging lucrative federal contracts. Gilbert noted: “I would say it’s a smoke screen and cover for personal profit and corporate power—and that’s where Musk’s personal conflicts of interest come into play, as well as the other corporate actors across this government.”
On Friday, Andrew Perez and Asawin Suebsaeng of Rolling Stone reported that staffers for billionaire Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” have been working on a multimillion-dollar communications project called “Project Lift” at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). The plan appears to be to insert Musk’s Starlink into the $2.4 billion contract Verizon currently holds to upgrade the FAA’s systems, but DOGE staff have made FAA employees sign nondisclosure agreements, so details are scarce. An FAA spokesperson told Perez and Suebsaeng: “The federal employees running Project Lift are exploring a variety of solutions to modernize the FAA’s telecommunications network. Current contractors are part of the discussion.”
In the Trump administration, the connections between the government and business include the president’s family members.
Zach Everson of Forbes has been following the story of the Trump family’s involvement in artificial intelligence company Dominari Holdings, Inc. In February, Everson reported that just weeks after Trump announced the administration’s push to loosen regulations and expand infrastructure for AI, his sons Donald Jr. and Eric invested in Dominari and joined its brand new advisory board, for which they received 750,000 shares each in the company although they had no official duties. The company then launched another company, American Data Center, Inc., in which the Trumps also invested. That company focused on the “high-performance computing infrastructure” to support AI, cloud computing, and cryptocurrency.
According to Amber Jackson of the U.K.’s Data Centre Magazine, Dominari stock leaped more than 1,000% after the Trump sons joined the advisory board. On Friday, Everson reported on a Securities and Exchange Commission filing revealing that Dominari has applied for conditions that would enable the shareholders, including Don and Eric Trump, to sell their stocks earlier than a normal timeline would allow. Each Trump brother now controls 1.2 million shares of Dominari, each holding now worth $5.8 million.
On Wednesday, Trump made the pay-to-play nature of his administration explicit when he announced that the top 220 holders of his $TRUMP cryptocurrency token would be invited to a dinner with Trump at his private club and that they would be offered a “VIP White House Tour” the next day. MacKenzie Sigalos and Kevin Collier of CNBC reported the meme coin jumped more than 50% on the news, netting Trump and his allies nearly $900,000 in trading fees.
Just before sunrise this morning, House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) and Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) began a live-streamed sit-in protest and discussion on the steps of the U.S. Capitol to call attention to the Republicans’ budget bill. On Friday, Alan Rappeport and Tony Romm of the New York Times reported that the Republicans’ proposed 2026 budget would slash federal support for “child care, health research, education, housing assistance, community development and the elderly,” and for foreign aid. Attacking “woke” programs, it appears to implement much of Project 2025. Russell Vought, who was director of the Office of Management and Budget during Trump’s first term and has returned to that position in his second, was a key author of that playbook.
Cuts to programs that protect ordinary Americans will help to fund the extension of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. Extending those tax cuts will cost at least $4 trillion over the next decade. Congress returns to session tomorrow, and it will take up the budget. In a statement, Jeffries and Booker said: “Republican leaders have made clear their intention to use the coming weeks to advance a reckless budget scheme to President Trump’s desk that seeks to gut Medicaid, food assistance and basic needs programs that help people, all to give tax breaks to billionaires.”
Throughout the day, Democratic lawmakers, activists, and passersby joined Jeffries and Booker’s twelve-hour sit-in.
An AP/NORC poll released yesterday showed that Trump’s approval rating has dropped to 39%. Today a Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll confirmed that number. Trump’s approval rating at almost 100 days in office is the lowest of any president in 80 years.
For his part, Trump announced today that he “is bringing Columbus Day back from the ashes!”
FMD.
FMD.
And again, just for good measure:
FMD.
Heather Cox Richardson
1h ·
April 28, 2025 (Monday)
There has been a change afoot in the Democratic Party for a while now as its leaders shift from trying to find common ground with Republicans to standing firmly against MAGAs and articulating their own vision for the United States.
That shift burst dramatically into the open last night when Democratic Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker gave a barn-burning speech to Democrats in New Hampshire. After walking out to the American Authors song “Go Big or Go Home,” Pritzker urged Democrats to stop listening to “do-nothing political types” who are calling for caution at a time when Americans are demanding urgent action, and to “fight—EVERYWHERE AND ALL AT ONCE.”
Pritzker highlighted three ordinary Americans who are opposing the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” by building communities to protest, hanging an upside-down flag on the face of Yosemite National Park’s famous cliff El Capitan, and welcoming Vice President J.D. Vance to Sugarbush Resort in Vermont with a snow report calling attention to the administration’s attacks on veterans, people with disabilities, LGBTQ+ Americans, immigrant workers, and people of color. He urged Democrats to lead with the same passion.
He listed the positions on which he wants Democrats to stand firm, beginning: “It’s wrong to snatch a person off the street and ship them to a foreign gulag with no chance to defend themselves in a court of law.” This is not about immigration, he said, but about the Constitution. “Standing for the idea that the government doesn’t have the right to kidnap you without due process is arguably the MOST EFFECTIVE CAMPAIGN SLOGAN IN HISTORY,” he said. “Today, it’s an immigrant with a tattoo. Tomorrow, it’s a citizen whose Facebook post annoys Trump.”
Pritzker tore into the MAGA myth that Democrats want rapists and murderers on the streets, saying that Democrats do not want undocumented immigrants who are convicted of violent crimes to stay in the country. He called for “real, sensible immigration reform.”
But, he said, “Immigration—with all its struggles and its complexities—is part of the secret sauce that makes America great, always. Immigrants strengthen our communities, enrich our neighborhoods, renew our passion for America’s greatness, enliven our music and our culture, enhance understanding of the world. The success of our economy depends upon immigrants. In fact, forty-six percent…of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or the children of immigrants.”
Trump’s attacks on immigrants, he said, are likely to make the U.S. economy fail.
Indeed, he suggested, making America fail is the point of the Trump administration’s actions. “We have a Secretary of Education who hates teachers and schools,” he said. “We have a Secretary of Transportation who hates public transit. We have an Attorney General who hates the Constitution. We have a Secretary of State, the son of naturalized citizens—a family of refugees—on a crusade to expel our country of both.
“We have a head of the Department of Government Efficiency— an immigrant granted the privilege of living and working here, a man who has made hundreds of billions of dollars after the government rescued his business for him—who is looking to destroy the American middle class to fund tax cuts for himself. And we have a President who claims to love America but who hates our military so much that he calls them ‘losers’ and ‘suckers’ and who can’t be bothered to delay his golf game to greet the bodies of four fallen US soldiers. And we have a Grand Old Party, founded by one of our nation’s bravest Presidents, Abraham Lincoln—who today would be a Democrat, I might add—… so afraid of the felon and the fraud that they put in the White House that they would sooner watch him destroy our country than lift a hand to save it.”
He called on Democrats to “stop wondering if you can trust the nuclear codes to people who don’t know how to organize a group chat. It’s time to stop ignoring the hypocrisy in wearing a big gold cross while announcing the defunding of children’s cancer research. And time to stop thinking we can reason or negotiate with a madman. Time to stop apologizing when we were NOT wrong. Time to stop surrendering, when we need to fight.
“Our small businesses don’t deserve to be bankrupted by unsustainable tariffs. Our retirees don’t deserve to be left destitute by a Social Security Administration decimated by Elon Musk. Our citizens don’t deserve to lose healthcare coverage because Republicans want to hand a tax cut to billionaires. Our federal workers don’t deserve to have, well, a 19-year-old DOGE bro called Big Balls destroy their careers.
“Autistic kids and adults who are loving contributors to our society don’t deserve to be stigmatized by a weird nepo baby who once stashed a dead bear in the backseat of his car.
“Our military servicemembers don’t deserve to be told by a washed up Fox TV commentator, who drank too much and committed sexual assault before being appointed Secretary of Defense, that they can’t serve this country simply because they’re Black or gay or a woman.
“And If it sounds like I’m becoming contemptuous of Donald Trump and the people that he has elevated, it’s because…I am. You should be too. They are an affront to every value this country was founded upon.”
Pritzker called on Democrats to be “bold and our ideas fearless…. And we must deliver on that agenda for working families and for the real people who truly make America great.”
“I understand the tendency to give in to despair right now,” he said, “But despair is an indulgence that we cannot afford in the times upon which history turns. Never before in my life have I called for mass protests, for mobilization, for disruption. But I am now.
“These Republicans cannot know a moment of peace. They have to understand that we will fight their cruelty with every megaphone and microphone that we have. We must castigate them on the soap box, and then punish them at the ballot box. They must feel in their bones that when we survive this shameful episode of American history with our democracy intact—because we have no alternative but to do just that—that we will relegate their portraits to the museum halls reserved for tyrants and traitors.”
“Cowardice can be contagious,” Pritzker said, “But so too can courage…. Just as the hope that we hold onto in the darkness, shines with its own…special light.
“Tonight, I’m telling you what I’m willing to do…is fight—for our democracy, for our liberty, for the opportunity for all our people to live lives that are meaningful and free. And I see around me tonight a roomful of people who are ready to do the same.”
“So I have one question for all of you,” Pritzker said. “Are you ready for the fight?”
AOC stonewall complete, Connolly announces retirement
The 74-year-old is retiring due, in part, to the esophageal cancer he was diagnosed with in 2024
Gerry Connolly announced his retirement on Monday, after more than a decade in the House of Representatives.
In a note shared to social media, Connolly, 74, cited his ongoing battle with esophageal cancer as the reason for his retirement.
“The sun is setting on my time in public service and this will be my last term in Congress,” Connolly wrote. “I will be stepping back from my role as Ranking Member of the Oversight Committee soon. With no rancor and a full heart, I move into this final chapter full of pride in what we’ve accomplished together.”
The Democrat from Virginia became a figurehead for the recalcitrant and aging wing of the party after leadership boosted his bid to serve as the party leader on the House Oversight Committee. Connolly successfully fended off a challenge from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., earlier this year, despite his already public diagnosis.
AOC’s bid was reportedly opposed by former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. House Democrats selected Connolly by. a vote of 131 to 84. Ocasio-Cortez has since left the committee.
At the time, an unnamed Democrat explained to Axios that the party was acting with stereotypical fear of a hypothetical conservative reaction and pre-emptively giving in.
“While AOC is young, talented and incredibly inspiring to the progressive base, there’s been much conversation about whether it’s wise to promote the GOP’s favorite foil to lead a high-profile committee sure to provide the very content Republicans will use during the midterms to effectively define Dems as woke, Trump-hating leftists,” they said.
https://www.salon.com/2025/04/28/aoc-stonewall-complete-connolly-announces-retirement/
dv said:
AOC stonewall complete, Connolly announces retirement
The 74-year-old is retiring due, in part, to the esophageal cancer he was diagnosed with in 2024Gerry Connolly announced his retirement on Monday, after more than a decade in the House of Representatives.
In a note shared to social media, Connolly, 74, cited his ongoing battle with esophageal cancer as the reason for his retirement.
“The sun is setting on my time in public service and this will be my last term in Congress,” Connolly wrote. “I will be stepping back from my role as Ranking Member of the Oversight Committee soon. With no rancor and a full heart, I move into this final chapter full of pride in what we’ve accomplished together.”
The Democrat from Virginia became a figurehead for the recalcitrant and aging wing of the party after leadership boosted his bid to serve as the party leader on the House Oversight Committee. Connolly successfully fended off a challenge from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., earlier this year, despite his already public diagnosis.
AOC’s bid was reportedly opposed by former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. House Democrats selected Connolly by. a vote of 131 to 84. Ocasio-Cortez has since left the committee.
At the time, an unnamed Democrat explained to Axios that the party was acting with stereotypical fear of a hypothetical conservative reaction and pre-emptively giving in.
“While AOC is young, talented and incredibly inspiring to the progressive base, there’s been much conversation about whether it’s wise to promote the GOP’s favorite foil to lead a high-profile committee sure to provide the very content Republicans will use during the midterms to effectively define Dems as woke, Trump-hating leftists,” they said.
https://www.salon.com/2025/04/28/aoc-stonewall-complete-connolly-announces-retirement/
“…woke, Trump-hating leftists…”
Gosh, the way they say it there, they make it sound like a bad thing.
100 days of destruction: Trump’s first three months are a sea of red ink
Stephen Bartholomeusz
Senior business columnist
April 29, 2025 — 12.08pm
Investors compiling a report card on the first 100 days of Donald Trump’s second term as US president would be using a lot of red ink.
Since his inauguration, the sharemarket has slumped 8.6 per cent, with the “Magnificent Seven” big tech stocks that have powered the US market over the past two years down nearly 17 per cent and energy stocks – an industry that was supposed to boom under Trump – tumbling more than 10 per cent.
The US dollar has fallen 9.5 per cent against a basket of America’s major trading partners’ currencies, raising the spectre of capital flight. Bond yields, amid wild volatility, have weakened by more than 40 basis points as fears of a recession in the world’s largest economy have grown.
Those movements in markets are outcomes, not causes. They reflect the massive disruption, some would say destruction, that Trump has wrought in just over three months in office.
He has upended, if not destroyed, the global trade and finance system that had been developed over the past three quarters of a century, with America at its centre. At the same time, he has neutered, if not yet demolished, the multilateral institutions that have supported it and helped disseminate American influence and power throughout the globe.
Trump has alienated allies and foes alike with his assault on global trade via his beloved tariffs in pursuit of an economically irrelevant goal – balanced trade – setting America and the world up for a new global supply chain shock.
The nearest comparison is the savage sell-off in markets at the start of Richard Nixon’s second term in the early 1970s.
He has created what his own Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has described as the equivalent of a trade embargo between the world’s two most powerful economies, with his 145 tariff on imports from China, which retaliated with 125 per cent tariffs of its own.
His attacks on Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve Board chairman, have politicised the US central bank and undermined the credibility of Powell’s successor – and the bank – when the chair’s term ends next year.
The combination of his trade policies and his threats against Powell (which he has backed away from) have not just caused a sell-off of the US dollar and US financial assets, but placed a significant question mark over the greenback’s continued dominance of global finance and trade.
Trump’s “America First” policies, by up-ending relationships with allies built over 80 years, have undermined trust in the US, made its allies wary of the dollar’s dominant role in the global economy and fearful that it could be weaponised against them – as it has been against Iran, Russia and China.
Meanwhile, Trump set Elon Musk and his chainsaw loose on the US government bureaucracy, letting him slash staff indiscriminately and without, it seems, any thought as to the longer-term consequences and, with his assaults on US aid agencies, doing untold damage to America’s “soft power” along with what is likely to be a substantial human toll in some of the world’s poorest countries.
Trump took a US economy that was performing far more strongly than any other developed economy, with solid growth, ultra-low unemployment and an inflation rate declining steadily from its post-pandemic spikes, and put it at significant risk of a stagflationary recession.
He has done all this without any Congressional authority – hardly a White House-sponsored bill has been passed by Congress – but via a seemingly endless series of executive orders, some of them arguably unconstitutional. He has broadly followed a script, Project 2025, written by the conservative Heritage Foundation.
There is, of course, a lot more that Trump has done. Immigration, the defence forces, universities, big law firms, the judiciary, education, health and even arts and science institutions have all been targeted for job cuts, “anti-wokeism” and Trump’s retribution against his perceived enemies.
And it has only taken 100 days!
The centrepiece of his agenda and the one that has most hit markets and the US economy in that time has been his trade policy: the 10 per cent universal tariff on all imports to the US, the “reciprocal” tariffs on about 90 countries that have been targeted because of the size of their trade surpluses with America, and the 145 per cent tariff on China.
Those tariffs, announced on “Liberation Day” (April 2), were announced with much fanfare. However, after a savage backlash from financial markets and warnings of chaos from key industry leaders, the reciprocal tariffs (based on a crude and nonsensical formula) were paused for 90 days. Exemptions for some goods have been announced and Trump has said he might unilaterally reduce the tariffs on China’s exports.
The tariffs almost caused the US bond market – the most important market in the world – to melt down, which caused Trump to back down and adopt a more conciliatory tone in references to China.
Even though there was a surge in imports before Liberation Day to get ahead of the tariffs, the earlier tariffs on aluminium and steel and the initial responses of exporters are already showing up in increased prices. Soon, there will be higher prices and empty shelves, which big US retailers warned Trump would occur.
Global supply chains that connect the US to the rest of the world are already being disrupted, with exporters – particularly Chinese exporters – delaying or cancelling shipments to the US while they wait to see what happens next. Bookings of containers, ships and aircraft are tumbling.
Manufacturing only accounts for about 10 per cent of the US economy, so a lot of products are not going to be available in the US when those ships and planes don’t arrive or cost far more if they eventually arrive.
Even for products made in America, the cost of imported raw materials and intermediate products they use in their processes will have risen and will be either absorbed in reduced corporate profit margins or, more likely, passed on to consumers.
While the chaos of tariffs, government cuts, court showdowns and the Russia-Ukraine war dominate global headlines, for most Americans, life goes on largely unchanged.
Trump says he has done 200 trade deals in less than three weeks since he paused the reciprocal tariffs only a week after announcing them.
Trade deals usually take years of line-by-line negotiations, so the assumption is that he’s referring to broad, heads-of-agreement-type deals, with the fine print to be ironed out over the next several years.
Even agreements in principle might appear a major victory for Trump’s use of tariffs as leverage, except many countries facing reciprocal tariffs have been asking for free trade deals with the US for years.
Indeed, Japan and Vietnam, key targets for Trump’s negotiators, were once (momentarily) free trade partners with the US (along with Canada, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, the UK and others) within the Obama-led Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade deal Trump withdrew the US from in the early days of his first term.
While Trump’s trade war on everyone continues, US business and consumer confidence is diving, inflationary expectations are rising and the perceived risk of a self-inflicted recession is now regarded as akin to the toss of a coin.
Trump’s poll numbers are crashing to 80-year lows for this period of a presidency. That wasn’t supposed to be the position after the first 100 days – usually something of a honeymoon period for incoming presidents.
Trump was supposed to deliver America’s tech, crypto, energy and Wall Street billionaires – who, between them, poured billions into his election campaign – lower taxes, less regulation and a simple, universal baseline 10 per cent tariff regime.
Instead, they’ve had nothing but chaos, disruption, volatility-inducing policy flip-flops and the worst first 100 days for markets in half a century. The nearest comparison – some would say an appropriate one – is the savage sell-off in markets at the start of Richard Nixon’s second term in the early 1970s.
https://www.theage.com.au/business/markets/100-days-of-destruction-trump-s-first-three-months-are-a-sea-of-red-ink-20250429-p5luz0.html?
More and more ads are mentioning tariffs. IIRC its mainly car ads. I might have to pay attention to which ads are doing this. I usually tune them out.
Someone should tell the President
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honesty_Day
No, thank you. I don’t want to appear on one of Trump’s ‘lists.’
The administration keeps coming up with ways to misuse federal data.
April 29, 2025 at 7:00 a.m.
It’s rarely comforting to appear on a government “list,” even (or perhaps especially) when compiled in the name of public safety.
It was alarming in the 1940s, when the U.S. government collected the names of Japanese Americans for internment. Likewise in the 1950s, when the House Un-American Activities Committee catalogued communists. And it’s just as troubling now, as the Trump administration assembles registries of Jewish academics and Americans with developmental disabilities.
Yes, these are real things that happened this past week, the latest examples of the White House’s abuse of confidential data.
Last week, faculty and staff at Barnard College received unsolicited texts asking them whether they were Jewish. Employees were stunned by the messages, which many initially dismissed as spam.
Turns out the messages came from the Trump administration. Barnard, which is affiliated with Columbia University, had agreed to share faculty members’ private contact info to aid in President Donald Trump’s pseudo-crusade against antisemitism.
Ah, yes, a far-right president asking Jews to register as Jewish, in the name of protecting the Jews, after he has repeatedly accused Jews of being “disloyal.” What could go wrong?
The same day, National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya announced a “disease registry” of people with autism, to be compiled from confidential private and government health records, apparently without its subjects’ awareness or consent. This is part of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s vendetta against vaccines, which he has said cause autism despite abundant research concluding otherwise.
This, too, is disturbing given authoritarian governments’ history of compiling lists of citizens branded mentally or physically deficient. If that historical analogue seems excessive, note that Bhattacharya’s announcement came just a week after Kennedy delivered inflammatory remarks lamenting that kids with autism will never lead productive lives. They “will never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job,” he said, adding they’ll never play baseball or go on a date, either.
This all happened during Autism Acceptance Month, established to counter exactly these kinds of stigmatizing stereotypes. Kennedy’s comments and the subsequent “registry” set off a wave of fear in the autism advocacy community and earned condemnation from scientists.
Obviously, advocates want more research and support for those with autism. They have been asking for more help at least since 1965 (when what is now called the Autism Society of America was founded in my grandparents’ living room). But few in this community trust political appointees hostile to scientific research — or a president who has publicly mocked people with disabilities — to use an autism “registry” responsibly.
(An unnamed HHS official later walked back Bhattacharya’s comments, saying the department was not creating a “registry,” per se, just a “real-world data platform” that “will link existing datasets to support research into causes of autism and insights into improved treatment strategies.” Okay.)
These are hardly the administration’s only abuses of federal data. It has been deleting reams of statistical records, including demographic data on transgender Americans. It has also been exploiting other private administrative records for political purposes.
For example, the Internal Revenue Service — in an effort to persuade people to pay their taxes — spent decades assuring people that their records are confidential, regardless of immigration status. The agency is in fact legally prohibited from sharing tax records, even with other government agencies, except under very limited circumstances specified by Congress. Lawmakers set these limits in response to Richard M. Nixon’s abuse of private tax data to target personal enemies.
Trump torched these precedents and promises. After a series of top IRS officials resigned, the agency has now agreed to turn over confidential records to help Immigration and Customs Enforcement locate and deport some 7 million undocumented immigrants.
The move, which also has troubling historical echoes, is being challenged in court. But, in the meantime, tax collections will likely fall. Undocumented immigrant workers had been paying an estimated $66 billion in federal taxes annually, but they now have even more reason to stay off the books.
This and other DOGE infiltrations of confidential records are likely to discourage public cooperation on other sensitive government data collection efforts. Think research on mental health issues or public safety assessments on domestic violence.
But that might be a feature, not a bug, for this administration. Chilling federal survey participation and degrading data quality were arguably deliberate objectives in Trump’s first term, when he tried to cram a question about citizenship into the 2020 Census. The question was expected to depress response rates and help Republicans game the congressional redistricting process.
Courts ultimately blocked Trump’s plans. That’s what it will take to stop ongoing White House abuses, too: not scrapping critical government records, but championing the rule of law.
Ultimately, the government must be able to collect and integrate high-quality data — to administer social programs efficiently, help the economy function and understand the reality we live in so voters can hold public officials accountable. None of this is possible if Americans fear ending up on some vindictive commissar’s “list.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/04/29/trump-lists-jews-autism-administrative-data/
One letter
“Who would you like to see as the next Pope?”
“The Pope? I’d like to be Pope. It’s my number one choice.”
https://www.reddit.com/r/Fauxmoi/s/4CPD0aVeiJ
“The lessons of Brexit are beginning to be applied to the United States. When you break off or substantially rupture trade relationships with your major trading partners… you end up with slower growth, higher inflation, higher interest rates, volatility, a weaker currency, and a weaker economy. We’re seeing the early stages of that in the United States.” – Mark Carney
dv said:
“The lessons of Brexit are beginning to be applied to the United States. When you break off or substantially rupture trade relationships with your major trading partners… you end up with slower growth, higher inflation, higher interest rates, volatility, a weaker currency, and a weaker economy. We’re seeing the early stages of that in the United States.” – Mark Carney
Pfft… What would he know?
“Fanta Menace” lol
dv said:
“The lessons of Brexit are beginning to be applied to the United States. When you break off or substantially rupture trade relationships with your major trading partners… you end up with slower growth, higher inflation, higher interest rates, volatility, a weaker currency, and a weaker economy. We’re seeing the early stages of that in the United States.” – Mark Carney
so then why did Canada break off from the USSA what
sarahs mum said:
Heather Cox Richardson
1h ·
April 28, 2025 (Monday)………………cut…………………..
Ta.
telling the truth is a hostile political act
SCIENCE said:
telling the truth is a hostile political act
I wonder if it’s only because Bezos is a Trump fanboi, because I don’t see the same backlash against other cheap importers such as Temu.
Divine Angel said:
SCIENCE said:
telling the truth is a hostile political act
I wonder if it’s only because Bezos is a Trump fanboi, because I don’t see the same backlash against other cheap importers such as Temu.
LOL treat your fans worse than your rivals what a charming guy
SCIENCE said:
telling the truth is a hostile political act
Seems so in Trumpland.
Michael V said:
SCIENCE said:telling the truth is a hostile political act
Seems so in Trumpland.
Well, it’s not a ‘hostile political act’ that appears anywhere in Trump’s personal history.
Heather Cox Richardson
3h ·
April 29, 2025 (Tuesday)
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt popularized the idea that the first 100 days of a presidency established an administration’s direction. As soon as he took office on March 4, 1933, he called Congress into special session to meet on March 9 to address the emergency of the Great Depression. Congress responded to the crisis by quickly passing 15 major bills and 77 other measures first to stabilize the economy and then to rebuild it. On July 24, 1933, FDR looked back at “the crowding events of the hundred days which had been devoted to the starting of the wheels of the New Deal.”
In a Fireside Chat broadcast over the radio, FDR explained that his administration had stabilized the nation’s banks and raised taxes to pay for millions in borrowing. That federal money was feeding starving people, as well as employing 300,000 young men to work in the Civilian Conservation Corps planting trees to prevent soil erosion, building levees and dams for flood control, and maintaining forest roads and trails. It was also funding a public works program for highways and inland navigation, as well as state-based municipal improvements. The government had also raised farm income and wages by regulating agriculture and abolishing child labor.
FDR was speaking on July 24 to urge Americans to get behind a program of shorter hours and higher wages to create purchasing power that would restart the economy. “It goes back to the basic idea of society and of the Nation itself that people acting in a group can accomplish things which no individual acting alone could even hope to bring about,” he said. “If I am asked whether the American people will pull themselves out of this depression, I answer, ‘They will if they want to.’”
Today is the 100th day of President Donald Trump’s second term in office. He marked it by delivering what amounted to a rally outside Detroit, Michigan, in which he claimed his had been “the most successful first 100 days of any administration in the history of our country, and that’s according to many, many people…. This is the best, they say, 100-day start of any president in history, and everyone is saying it. We’ve just gotten started. You haven’t even seen anything yet.”
In fact, Trump has signed just five measures into law: the Laken Riley Act, which Congress passed before he took office; a stopgap funding measure; and three resolutions overturning rules set by the Biden administration.
But Trump’s administration does parallel FDR’s in an odd way. Trump set out in his first hundred days to undo the government FDR established in HIS first hundred days. 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.
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.
Trump’s dismantling of the modern American state has been a disaster. Trump spoke tonight in Michigan to tout his hope that his new tariffs will center auto manufacturing back in the U.S., but the economic chaos his tariff policies have unleashed has turned what was a booming economy 100 days ago sharply downward.
That economic slump, along with Trump’s illegal renditions of men to El Salvador and the gutting of services Americans depend on, has given Trump the lowest job approval rating after 100 days of any president in 80 years.
And that suggests another way to look at the first 100 days of a presidential term. For all that the 100-days trope focuses on presidents, the first 100 days of Trump’s second term have shown Americans, sometimes encouraged by their allies abroad, pushing back against Trump to restore American democracy.
Democratic attorneys general began to plan for a possible Trump second term in February 2024, preparing for cases they might have to file if Trump followed through with his campaign promises or implemented Project 2025. California, with 5,600 staffers in its department of justice, and New York, with 2,400, carried much of the weight. They were able to file their first challenges to Trump’s January 20 executive orders on January 21. Their lawsuits, and those of others, have been so successful that they have sparked both Trump and MAGA Republicans to attack judges and even the judiciary.
Early observers of the movement to stop Trump’s destruction of the modern state argued that the opposition was too burned out to mount any meaningful pushback against a newly emboldened Trump. But, in fact, people were not in the streets because they were organizing over computer apps and at the local level, a reality that burst into the open at Republican town halls in late February as angry voters protested government cuts at the hands of Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency.”
On March 4, Representative Richard Hudson (R-NC), the head of the House Republicans’ campaign arm, told Republicans to stop holding town halls to stop the protests from gaining attention. So Democrats began holding their own packed town halls in the absent Republicans’ districts.
On March 20, 2025, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) launched their “Fighting Oligarchy” tour in Las Vegas. Unexpectedly huge crowds flocked to their rallies across the West, revealing a deep well of unhappiness at the current government even in areas that had voted for Trump.
At 7:00 on the evening of March 31, Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) launched a marathon speech attacking the Trump administration and imploring Republicans to defend democracy because, he said, he had “been hearing from people from all over my state and indeed all over the nation calling upon folks in Congress to do more, to do things that recognize the urgency—the crisis—of the moment. And so we all have a responsibility, I believe to do something different to cause, as John Lewis said, good trouble, and that includes me.” Before he finished twenty-five hours later on April 1, his speech—the longest in congressional history—had been liked on TikTok 400 million times.
The quiet organizing of the early months of the administration showed when the first call for a public “Hands Off!” protest on April 5 produced more than 1,400 rallies in all 50 states and turned out millions of people. Organizers called for “an end to the billionaire takeover and rampant corruption of the Trump administration; an end to slashing federal funds for Medicaid, Social Security, and other programs working people rely on; and an end to the attacks on immigrants, trans people, and other communities.”
On April 11, Harvard University rejected the administration’s demand to regulate the “intellectual and civil rights conditions” at Harvard, including its governance, admissions, programs, and extracurricular activities, in exchange for the continuation of $2.2 billion in multiyear grants and a $60 million contract.
Harvard’s lawyers wrote: “The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights. Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government. Accordingly, Harvard will not accept the government’s terms as an agreement in principle…. Harvard is not prepared to agree to demands that go beyond the lawful authority of this or any administration.”
Last Sunday, April 27, Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker gave a barn-burning speech to Democrats in New Hampshire, telling them to “fight—EVERYWHERE AND ALL AT ONCE.” “Never before in my life have I called for mass protests, for mobilization, for disruption. But I am now,” he said.
“These Republicans cannot know a moment of peace. They have to understand that we will fight their cruelty with every megaphone and microphone that we have. We must castigate them on the soap box, and then punish them at the ballot box. They must feel in their bones that when we survive this shameful episode of American history with our democracy intact— because we have no alternative but to do just that—that we will relegate their portraits to the museum halls reserved for tyrants and traitors.”’
And so, even as Trump tries to erase the government FDR pioneered, Americans are demonstrating their support for a government that defends ordinary people, and proving the truth of FDR’s words from 1933, that when people act together they “can accomplish things which no individual acting alone could even hope to bring about.”
sarahs mum said:
Heather Cox Richardson
3h ·
April 29, 2025 (Tuesday)when people act together they “can accomplish things which no individual acting alone could even hope to bring about.”
Thanks.
I seem to recall that Americans will risk their lives to go into another country to rescue one of their own.
Is this what they’ll have to do to get back their people from being jailed in another country for something they didn’t do in their own?
roughbarked said:
Trump’s 100 days speech fact-checked
Save me the time – was there even a single correct verifiable fact in amongst it ?
party_pants said:
roughbarked said:
Trump’s 100 days speech fact-checked
Save me the time – was there even a single correct verifiable fact in amongst it ?
One. There have been less border crossings.
roughbarked said:
party_pants said:
roughbarked said:
Trump’s 100 days speech fact-checked
Save me the time – was there even a single correct verifiable fact in amongst it ?
One. There have been less border crossings.
Well yeah. Who wants to go there now?
Is Heather still having her posts go missing?
party_pants said:
roughbarked said:
party_pants said:Save me the time – was there even a single correct verifiable fact in amongst it ?
One. There have been less border crossings.
Well yeah. Who wants to go there now?
LOL. Touche.
It seems the conservative intellectuals are a tad upset by Amazon separately detailing import duties so the customers can see exactly what it is costing them
diddly-squat said:
It seems the conservative intellectuals are a tad upset by Amazon separately detailing import duties so the customers can see exactly what it is costing them
I can see why they are doing it, otherwise they would be blamed for price-gouging. Nobody wants to take the blame for what is coming.
Divine Angel said:
Is Heather still having her posts go missing?
i don’t think so.
speaking of surprise faeces and surprised facies so the immigration is lower because nobody wants to stay in a shithole and the price of eggs is lower because nobody can afford to demand them well damn but hey he did what he promised
sarahs mum said:
Divine Angel said:
Is Heather still having her posts go missing?
i don’t think so.
seems it was only about the Yemen strikes meeting that the Atlantic reporter sat in on.
party_pants said:
diddly-squat said:
captain_spalding said:
Michael V said:
SCIENCE said:
telling the truth is a hostile political act
Seems so in Trumpland.
Well, it’s not a ‘hostile political act’ that appears anywhere in Trump’s personal history.
It seems the conservative intellectuals are a tad upset by Amazon separately detailing import duties so the customers can see exactly what it is costing them
I can see why they are doing it, otherwise they would be blamed for price-gouging. Nobody wants to take the blame for what is coming.
of course
did quite enjoy the captain’s observe though
sarahs mum said:
sarahs mum said:
Divine Angel said:
Is Heather still having her posts go missing?
i don’t think so.
seems it was only about the Yemen strikes meeting that the Atlantic reporter sat in on.
tauto said:
sarahs mum said:
sarahs mum said:
i don’t think so.
seems it was only about the Yemen strikes meeting that the Atlantic reporter sat in on.
Heather must be so tired after the last few months that she needs a breather to get through the next stage
or just 
https://tokyo3.org/forums/holiday/posts/2277348/ a snort of cocaine
Honestly that was faster than I expected.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/dereksaul/2025/04/30/us-economy-shrank-during-2025s-first-quarter-as-gdp-slipped-03/
U.S. Economy Shrank During 2025’s First Quarter As GDP Slipped 0.3%
Topline As recession fears reverberate from Washington to Wall Street, Wednesday brought the most comprehensive yardstick yet of the health of the U.S. economy yet as the government released the first estimate of the country’s gross domestic product over the first three months of 2025.
kii said:
Like pretty much everything else, I’m not sure he knows how stock markets work.
kii said:
Like pretty much everything else, I’m not sure he knows how stock markets work.
kii said:
I notice the first one is all caps and the second one has the caps emphasis thing. He’s a very odd “communicator”.
This guy…an utter lunatic.
Ryan Walters (born May 23, 1985) is an American politician who has served as the elected Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction since 2023 and who served as the appointed Oklahoma Secretary of Education between September 2020 and April 2023.
kii said:
This guy…an utter lunatic.Ryan Walters (born May 23, 1985) is an American politician who has served as the elected Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction since 2023 and who served as the appointed Oklahoma Secretary of Education between September 2020 and April 2023.
When you consider that more than half of Americans (54%) only have a sixth grade literacy level, you start to realise how these people get into positions of power.
LOL yous fucking idiots
US President Donald Trump has blamed his predecessor for an unexpected 0.3 per cent decline in US gross domestic product in the first three months of 2025.
unexpected
nobody could have foreseen this at all hell fucking no
Divine Angel said:
kii said:
Like pretty much everything else, I’m not sure he knows how stock markets work.
I don’t know if he understands that there is a objective reality outside the confines of his own head so understanding the stock markets might be stretch.
SCIENCE said:
LOL yous fucking idiots
US President Donald Trump has blamed his predecessor for an unexpected 0.3 per cent decline in US gross domestic product in the first three months of 2025.
unexpected
nobody could have foreseen this at all hell fucking no
Watch out you’ll trigger Poiky.
Witty Rejoinder said:
SCIENCE said:LOL yous fucking idiots
US President Donald Trump has blamed his predecessor for an unexpected 0.3 per cent decline in US gross domestic product in the first three months of 2025.
unexpected
nobody could have foreseen this at all hell fucking no
Watch out you’ll trigger Poiky.
I mean, none of you actually predicted it (by how much, when etc), now you apply that you already knew it would happen after it’s happened. if you were all so prescient, you’d be richer than Soros, alas…
poikilotherm said:
Witty Rejoinder said:
SCIENCE said:LOL yous fucking idiots
US President Donald Trump has blamed his predecessor for an unexpected 0.3 per cent decline in US gross domestic product in the first three months of 2025.
unexpected
nobody could have foreseen this at all hell fucking no
Watch out you’ll trigger Poiky.
Fair.I mean, none of you actually predicted it (by how much, when etc), now you apply that you already knew it would happen after it’s happened. if you were all so prescient, you’d be richer than Soros, alas…
I wasn’t aware you were privy to my finances…
Have you seen the film ‘The Big Short’s?
kii said:
This guy…an utter lunatic.Ryan Walters (born May 23, 1985) is an American politician who has served as the elected Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction since 2023 and who served as the appointed Oklahoma Secretary of Education between September 2020 and April 2023.
Seems like a complete f-wit. But, boy do you have them in the USA.
Witty Rejoinder said:
Have you seen the film ‘The Big Short’s?
Mr Mutant watched it. I zoned in and out.
Michael V said:
kii said:
This guy…an utter lunatic.Ryan Walters (born May 23, 1985) is an American politician who has served as the elected Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction since 2023 and who served as the appointed Oklahoma Secretary of Education between September 2020 and April 2023.
Seems like a complete f-wit. But, boy do you have them in the USA.
Not my country.
After the worst-ever year for disasters in Queensland, regional voters say climate change will not be their priority this election.
The state has endured 17 natural disasters since July, with the cost of rebuilding likely to top $2 billion.
Of course they are short of houses and the cost of living is rising but.. that’s nothing next to being short of a planet.
Occupy Democrats
BREAKING: Donald Trump’s ICE agents invade an innocent American family’s home, force a woman and her three daughters onto the lawn half naked, seize their phones, laptops, and life savings and then leave them like an “an abandoned dog.”
This is the most horrifying MAGA regime story yet..
According to local TV station KFOR, roughly 20 federal agents — including ICE officers, U.S. Marshals, and FBI agents — raided the wrong house in Oklahoma City and told the woman inside, identified as “Marisa,” that they had a search warrant.
In reality, the suspects named in the warrant didn’t live in the house. Not only that, but they weren’t connected to anyone in the family.
This is whats happens when you mix weaponized incompetency with ruthless fascism. Donald Trump and his minions are as stupid as they are cruel.
“We just moved here from Maryland. We’re citizens. That’s what I kept saying. We’re citizens,” said Marisa.
The feds barged into the house, ransacked it, and forced the family outside in their underwear, displaying the kind of callousness and inhumanity we have come to expect from this administration.
They seized the family’s belongings, calling it “evidence.” Since the warrant was invalid for the house, it really just amounted to governmental theft.
“I told them before they left, I said you took my phone. We have no money. I just moved here. I have to feed my children,” said Marissa. “I’m going to need gas money. I need to be able to get around. Like, how do you just leave me like this? Like an abandoned dog.”
“They were very dismissive, very rough, very careless,” she continued. “I kept pleading. I kept telling them we weren’t criminals. They were treating us like criminals. We were here by ourselves. We didn’t do anything.”
One agent dismissively told the family that it was a “little rough this morning,” a gross understatement. This is an authoritarian nightmare.
“It was so denigrating. That you do all of this to a family, to women, your fellow citizens. And it was ‘a little rough’? You literally traumatized me and my daughters for life. We’re going to have to go get help or get over this somehow,” said Marisa.
The agents told her that it might take days or even months for the family’s belongings to be returned. They refused to give her a business card.
Holy mother of god. In no universe is that ok.
JudgeMental said:
Occupy DemocratsBREAKING: Donald Trump’s ICE agents invade an innocent American family’s home, force a woman and her three daughters onto the lawn half naked, seize their phones, laptops, and life savings and then leave them like an “an abandoned dog.”
This is the most horrifying MAGA regime story yet..
According to local TV station KFOR, roughly 20 federal agents — including ICE officers, U.S. Marshals, and FBI agents — raided the wrong house in Oklahoma City and told the woman inside, identified as “Marisa,” that they had a search warrant.
In reality, the suspects named in the warrant didn’t live in the house. Not only that, but they weren’t connected to anyone in the family.
This is whats happens when you mix weaponized incompetency with ruthless fascism. Donald Trump and his minions are as stupid as they are cruel.
“We just moved here from Maryland. We’re citizens. That’s what I kept saying. We’re citizens,” said Marisa.
The feds barged into the house, ransacked it, and forced the family outside in their underwear, displaying the kind of callousness and inhumanity we have come to expect from this administration.They seized the family’s belongings, calling it “evidence.” Since the warrant was invalid for the house, it really just amounted to governmental theft.
“I told them before they left, I said you took my phone. We have no money. I just moved here. I have to feed my children,” said Marissa. “I’m going to need gas money. I need to be able to get around. Like, how do you just leave me like this? Like an abandoned dog.”
“They were very dismissive, very rough, very careless,” she continued. “I kept pleading. I kept telling them we weren’t criminals. They were treating us like criminals. We were here by ourselves. We didn’t do anything.”
One agent dismissively told the family that it was a “little rough this morning,” a gross understatement. This is an authoritarian nightmare.“It was so denigrating. That you do all of this to a family, to women, your fellow citizens. And it was ‘a little rough’? You literally traumatized me and my daughters for life. We’re going to have to go get help or get over this somehow,” said Marisa.
The agents told her that it might take days or even months for the family’s belongings to be returned. They refused to give her a business card.
Ack!
JudgeMental said:
Occupy DemocratsBREAKING: Donald Trump’s ICE agents invade an innocent American family’s home, force a woman and her three daughters onto the lawn half naked, seize their phones, laptops, and life savings and then leave them like an “an abandoned dog.”
This is the most horrifying MAGA regime story yet..
According to local TV station KFOR, roughly 20 federal agents — including ICE officers, U.S. Marshals, and FBI agents — raided the wrong house in Oklahoma City and told the woman inside, identified as “Marisa,” that they had a search warrant.
In reality, the suspects named in the warrant didn’t live in the house. Not only that, but they weren’t connected to anyone in the family.
This is whats happens when you mix weaponized incompetency with ruthless fascism. Donald Trump and his minions are as stupid as they are cruel.
“We just moved here from Maryland. We’re citizens. That’s what I kept saying. We’re citizens,” said Marisa.
The feds barged into the house, ransacked it, and forced the family outside in their underwear, displaying the kind of callousness and inhumanity we have come to expect from this administration.They seized the family’s belongings, calling it “evidence.” Since the warrant was invalid for the house, it really just amounted to governmental theft.
“I told them before they left, I said you took my phone. We have no money. I just moved here. I have to feed my children,” said Marissa. “I’m going to need gas money. I need to be able to get around. Like, how do you just leave me like this? Like an abandoned dog.”
“They were very dismissive, very rough, very careless,” she continued. “I kept pleading. I kept telling them we weren’t criminals. They were treating us like criminals. We were here by ourselves. We didn’t do anything.”
One agent dismissively told the family that it was a “little rough this morning,” a gross understatement. This is an authoritarian nightmare.“It was so denigrating. That you do all of this to a family, to women, your fellow citizens. And it was ‘a little rough’? You literally traumatized me and my daughters for life. We’re going to have to go get help or get over this somehow,” said Marisa.
The agents told her that it might take days or even months for the family’s belongings to be returned. They refused to give her a business card.
FMD.
Divine Angel said:
Holy mother of god. In no universe is that ok.
Nazi Germany…
JudgeMental said:
Occupy DemocratsBREAKING: Donald Trump’s ICE agents invade an innocent American family’s home, force a woman and her three daughters onto the lawn half naked, seize their phones, laptops, and life savings and then leave them like an “an abandoned dog.”
This is the most horrifying MAGA regime story yet..
According to local TV station KFOR, roughly 20 federal agents — including ICE officers, U.S. Marshals, and FBI agents — raided the wrong house in Oklahoma City and told the woman inside, identified as “Marisa,” that they had a search warrant.
In reality, the suspects named in the warrant didn’t live in the house. Not only that, but they weren’t connected to anyone in the family.
This is whats happens when you mix weaponized incompetency with ruthless fascism. Donald Trump and his minions are as stupid as they are cruel.
“We just moved here from Maryland. We’re citizens. That’s what I kept saying. We’re citizens,” said Marisa.
The feds barged into the house, ransacked it, and forced the family outside in their underwear, displaying the kind of callousness and inhumanity we have come to expect from this administration.They seized the family’s belongings, calling it “evidence.” Since the warrant was invalid for the house, it really just amounted to governmental theft.
“I told them before they left, I said you took my phone. We have no money. I just moved here. I have to feed my children,” said Marissa. “I’m going to need gas money. I need to be able to get around. Like, how do you just leave me like this? Like an abandoned dog.”
“They were very dismissive, very rough, very careless,” she continued. “I kept pleading. I kept telling them we weren’t criminals. They were treating us like criminals. We were here by ourselves. We didn’t do anything.”
One agent dismissively told the family that it was a “little rough this morning,” a gross understatement. This is an authoritarian nightmare.“It was so denigrating. That you do all of this to a family, to women, your fellow citizens. And it was ‘a little rough’? You literally traumatized me and my daughters for life. We’re going to have to go get help or get over this somehow,” said Marisa.
The agents told her that it might take days or even months for the family’s belongings to be returned. They refused to give her a business card.
in a few (or many) years time, when they are at trial.. they will just be ‘under orders’
Michael V said:
JudgeMental said:
Occupy DemocratsBREAKING: Donald Trump’s ICE agents invade an innocent American family’s home, force a woman and her three daughters onto the lawn half naked, seize their phones, laptops, and life savings and then leave them like an “an abandoned dog.”
FMD.
Things will get better.
Once the ICE-induced labour shortages start to really bite, people like these will be shipped off to labour camps, where they can be housed, fed, and usefully employed.
For as long as they can survive it.
Arts said:
JudgeMental said:
Occupy DemocratsBREAKING: Donald Trump’s ICE agents invade an innocent American family’s home, force a woman and her three daughters onto the lawn half naked, seize their phones, laptops, and life savings and then leave them like an “an abandoned dog.”
This is the most horrifying MAGA regime story yet..
According to local TV station KFOR, roughly 20 federal agents — including ICE officers, U.S. Marshals, and FBI agents — raided the wrong house in Oklahoma City and told the woman inside, identified as “Marisa,” that they had a search warrant.
In reality, the suspects named in the warrant didn’t live in the house. Not only that, but they weren’t connected to anyone in the family.
This is whats happens when you mix weaponized incompetency with ruthless fascism. Donald Trump and his minions are as stupid as they are cruel.
“We just moved here from Maryland. We’re citizens. That’s what I kept saying. We’re citizens,” said Marisa.
The feds barged into the house, ransacked it, and forced the family outside in their underwear, displaying the kind of callousness and inhumanity we have come to expect from this administration.They seized the family’s belongings, calling it “evidence.” Since the warrant was invalid for the house, it really just amounted to governmental theft.
“I told them before they left, I said you took my phone. We have no money. I just moved here. I have to feed my children,” said Marissa. “I’m going to need gas money. I need to be able to get around. Like, how do you just leave me like this? Like an abandoned dog.”
“They were very dismissive, very rough, very careless,” she continued. “I kept pleading. I kept telling them we weren’t criminals. They were treating us like criminals. We were here by ourselves. We didn’t do anything.”
One agent dismissively told the family that it was a “little rough this morning,” a gross understatement. This is an authoritarian nightmare.“It was so denigrating. That you do all of this to a family, to women, your fellow citizens. And it was ‘a little rough’? You literally traumatized me and my daughters for life. We’re going to have to go get help or get over this somehow,” said Marisa.
The agents told her that it might take days or even months for the family’s belongings to be returned. They refused to give her a business card.
in a few (or many) years time, when they are at trial.. they will just be ‘under orders’
Of course.
The “Nuremberg Defence” still holds to some extent, I guess.
captain_spalding said:
Michael V said:
JudgeMental said:
Occupy DemocratsBREAKING: Donald Trump’s ICE agents invade an innocent American family’s home, force a woman and her three daughters onto the lawn half naked, seize their phones, laptops, and life savings and then leave them like an “an abandoned dog.”
FMD.
Things will get better.
Once the ICE-induced labour shortages start to really bite, people like these will be shipped off to labour camps, where they can be housed, fed, and usefully employed.
For as long as they can survive it.
Slow motion train crash, but worse.
Michael V said:
Arts said:
JudgeMental said:
Occupy DemocratsBREAKING: Donald Trump’s ICE agents invade an innocent American family’s home, force a woman and her three daughters onto the lawn half naked, seize their phones, laptops, and life savings and then leave them like an “an abandoned dog.”
This is the most horrifying MAGA regime story yet..
According to local TV station KFOR, roughly 20 federal agents — including ICE officers, U.S. Marshals, and FBI agents — raided the wrong house in Oklahoma City and told the woman inside, identified as “Marisa,” that they had a search warrant.
In reality, the suspects named in the warrant didn’t live in the house. Not only that, but they weren’t connected to anyone in the family.
This is whats happens when you mix weaponized incompetency with ruthless fascism. Donald Trump and his minions are as stupid as they are cruel.
“We just moved here from Maryland. We’re citizens. That’s what I kept saying. We’re citizens,” said Marisa.
The feds barged into the house, ransacked it, and forced the family outside in their underwear, displaying the kind of callousness and inhumanity we have come to expect from this administration.They seized the family’s belongings, calling it “evidence.” Since the warrant was invalid for the house, it really just amounted to governmental theft.
“I told them before they left, I said you took my phone. We have no money. I just moved here. I have to feed my children,” said Marissa. “I’m going to need gas money. I need to be able to get around. Like, how do you just leave me like this? Like an abandoned dog.”
“They were very dismissive, very rough, very careless,” she continued. “I kept pleading. I kept telling them we weren’t criminals. They were treating us like criminals. We were here by ourselves. We didn’t do anything.”
One agent dismissively told the family that it was a “little rough this morning,” a gross understatement. This is an authoritarian nightmare.“It was so denigrating. That you do all of this to a family, to women, your fellow citizens. And it was ‘a little rough’? You literally traumatized me and my daughters for life. We’re going to have to go get help or get over this somehow,” said Marisa.
The agents told her that it might take days or even months for the family’s belongings to be returned. They refused to give her a business card.
in a few (or many) years time, when they are at trial.. they will just be ‘under orders’
Of course.
The “Nuremberg Defence” still holds to some extent, I guess.
Didn’t really stand up way back then.
Quite a number of defendants were awarded a ‘Tyburn neck-cloth’ despite trying that defence.
captain_spalding said:
Michael V said:
Arts said:in a few (or many) years time, when they are at trial.. they will just be ‘under orders’
Of course.
The “Nuremberg Defence” still holds to some extent, I guess.
Didn’t really stand up way back then.
Quite a number of defendants were awarded a ‘Tyburn neck-cloth’ despite trying that defence.
just say they were well hung
Michael V said:
captain_spalding said:
Michael V said:FMD.
Things will get better.
Once the ICE-induced labour shortages start to really bite, people like these will be shipped off to labour camps, where they can be housed, fed, and usefully employed.
For as long as they can survive it.
Slow motion train crash, but worse.
Arts said:
captain_spalding said:
Michael V said:Of course.
The “Nuremberg Defence” still holds to some extent, I guess.
Didn’t really stand up way back then.
Quite a number of defendants were awarded a ‘Tyburn neck-cloth’ despite trying that defence.
just say they were well hung
Now, you know that people are ‘hanged’.
Arts said:
JudgeMental said:
Occupy DemocratsBREAKING: Donald Trump’s ICE agents invade an innocent American family’s home, force a woman and her three daughters onto the lawn half naked, seize their phones, laptops, and life savings and then leave them like an “an abandoned dog.”
This is the most horrifying MAGA regime story yet..
According to local TV station KFOR, roughly 20 federal agents — including ICE officers, U.S. Marshals, and FBI agents — raided the wrong house in Oklahoma City and told the woman inside, identified as “Marisa,” that they had a search warrant.
In reality, the suspects named in the warrant didn’t live in the house. Not only that, but they weren’t connected to anyone in the family.
This is whats happens when you mix weaponized incompetency with ruthless fascism. Donald Trump and his minions are as stupid as they are cruel.
“We just moved here from Maryland. We’re citizens. That’s what I kept saying. We’re citizens,” said Marisa.
The feds barged into the house, ransacked it, and forced the family outside in their underwear, displaying the kind of callousness and inhumanity we have come to expect from this administration.They seized the family’s belongings, calling it “evidence.” Since the warrant was invalid for the house, it really just amounted to governmental theft.
“I told them before they left, I said you took my phone. We have no money. I just moved here. I have to feed my children,” said Marissa. “I’m going to need gas money. I need to be able to get around. Like, how do you just leave me like this? Like an abandoned dog.”
“They were very dismissive, very rough, very careless,” she continued. “I kept pleading. I kept telling them we weren’t criminals. They were treating us like criminals. We were here by ourselves. We didn’t do anything.”
One agent dismissively told the family that it was a “little rough this morning,” a gross understatement. This is an authoritarian nightmare.“It was so denigrating. That you do all of this to a family, to women, your fellow citizens. And it was ‘a little rough’? You literally traumatized me and my daughters for life. We’re going to have to go get help or get over this somehow,” said Marisa.
The agents told her that it might take days or even months for the family’s belongings to be returned. They refused to give her a business card.
in a few (or many) years time, when they are at trial.. they will just be ‘under orders’
didn’t work in 46/47.
captain_spalding said:
Michael V said:
Arts said:in a few (or many) years time, when they are at trial.. they will just be ‘under orders’
Of course.
The “Nuremberg Defence” still holds to some extent, I guess.
Didn’t really stand up way back then.
Quite a number of defendants were awarded a ‘Tyburn neck-cloth’ despite trying that defence.
curtesy of albert.
From Quora.
Hope it isn’t unduly optimistic.
“In some breaking news, the long-proposed mineral deal between the United States and Ukraine was signed today, April 30, 2025. The deal was significantly revised from the last reporting, we have to give props to whoever negotiated for Ukraine here because they turned it from something akin to Germany’s post-WWII “deal” into something actually useful.
Key points of the deal:
The agreement is an equal Partnership with 50/50% share. Worth noting: for the US, possible future military aid is counted as a contribution to the fund
Ukraine retains full control over all infrastructure, subsoil and resources itself, their contribution to the found comes exclusively from future mineral-licenses
No US aid provided prior to signing is counted as part of the fund, only new material
The fund must invest into reconstruction & infrastructure in Ukraine for 10 years
-relevant tarriffs between the US and Ukraine are reduced to zero, and the US pledges to attract further parties to invest into the Fund if possible
So, in other words, a deal was negotiated. The one presented to Zelensky in the White House was unfair, and a better deal was designed. This one puts American interests in Ukraine in a new perspective — Washington now has a tangible stake in seeing peace in Ukraine, and in getting Russia away from its own economic interests.
This may prove to be a pretty damn huge step. And this may be what Zelensky and Trump discussed and agreed upon when meeting briefly during Pope Francis’ funeral a few days prior. Historic, indeed, as Zelensky predicted. It may now prove to be more profitable to end the war on Ukraine’s terms rather than Putin’s…”
Well hope springs eternal
In a similar vein
https://edition.cnn.com/business/energy/iran-woos-trump-with-a-trillion-dollar-opportunity-will-a-nuclear-deal-make-america-rich-intl/index.html
President Trump on Wednesday said that children could have fewer toys while his administration puts high tariffs on trading partners, acknowledging that there may be shortages of goods because of his plan
He added, “You know, someone said, ‘Oh, the shelves, they’re going to be open.’ Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls, and maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more than they would normally. But we’re not talking about something that we have to go out of our way. They have ships that are loaded up with stuff, much of which — not all of it — but much of which we don’t need. And, we have to make a fair deal.”
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5275798-trump-says-children-could-have-two-dolls-instead-of-30-with-his-tariff-plan/
dv said:
President Trump on Wednesday said that children could have fewer toys while his administration puts high tariffs on trading partners, acknowledging that there may be shortages of goods because of his planHe added, “You know, someone said, ‘Oh, the shelves, they’re going to be open.’ Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls, and maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more than they would normally. But we’re not talking about something that we have to go out of our way. They have ships that are loaded up with stuff, much of which — not all of it — but much of which we don’t need. And, we have to make a fair deal.”
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5275798-trump-says-children-could-have-two-dolls-instead-of-30-with-his-tariff-plan/
if only his parents hugged him more as a child…
dv said:
President Trump on Wednesday said that children could have fewer toys while his administration puts high tariffs on trading partners, acknowledging that there may be shortages of goods because of his planHe added, “You know, someone said, ‘Oh, the shelves, they’re going to be open.’ Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls, and maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more than they would normally. But we’re not talking about something that we have to go out of our way. They have ships that are loaded up with stuff, much of which — not all of it — but much of which we don’t need. And, we have to make a fair deal.”
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5275798-trump-says-children-could-have-two-dolls-instead-of-30-with-his-tariff-plan/
I watched a video yesterday from an American guy with a gardening business. He showed his bill for his imported vegie seeds, $4000 for the seeds plus $3000 for the tariff cost. He was going on about food security, as a lot of seed is produced outside of the US these days.
Looks like the kiddies will get one turnip instead of two as well.
dv said:
President Trump on Wednesday said that children could have fewer toys while his administration puts high tariffs on trading partners, acknowledging that there may be shortages of goods because of his planHe added, “You know, someone said, ‘Oh, the shelves, they’re going to be open.’ Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls, and maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more than they would normally. But we’re not talking about something that we have to go out of our way. They have ships that are loaded up with stuff, much of which — not all of it — but much of which we don’t need. And, we have to make a fair deal.”
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5275798-trump-says-children-could-have-two-dolls-instead-of-30-with-his-tariff-plan/
He’s thinking of the environment, reducing waste.
…Which will be dumped into the Gulf of Trumperica.
dv said:
President Trump on Wednesday said that children could have fewer toys while his administration puts high tariffs on trading partners, acknowledging that there may be shortages of goods because of his planHe added, “You know, someone said, ‘Oh, the shelves, they’re going to be open.’ Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls, and maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more than they would normally. But we’re not talking about something that we have to go out of our way. They have ships that are loaded up with stuff, much of which — not all of it — but much of which we don’t need. And, we have to make a fair deal.”
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5275798-trump-says-children-could-have-two-dolls-instead-of-30-with-his-tariff-plan/
‘…and maybe there’ll be gunfights in the aisles of the stores over who gets those two dolls, or those two turnips, or whatever, but, people are saying it’ll be America’s greatest time, a lot of people are saying that…’.
The Rev Dodgson said:
From Quora.Hope it isn’t unduly optimistic.
“In some breaking news, the long-proposed mineral deal between the United States and Ukraine was signed today, April 30, 2025. The deal was significantly revised from the last reporting, we have to give props to whoever negotiated for Ukraine here because they turned it from something akin to Germany’s post-WWII “deal” into something actually useful.
Key points of the deal:
The agreement is an equal Partnership with 50/50% share. Worth noting: for the US, possible future military aid is counted as a contribution to the fund
Ukraine retains full control over all infrastructure, subsoil and resources itself, their contribution to the found comes exclusively from future mineral-licenses
No US aid provided prior to signing is counted as part of the fund, only new material
The fund must invest into reconstruction & infrastructure in Ukraine for 10 years
-relevant tarriffs between the US and Ukraine are reduced to zero, and the US pledges to attract further parties to invest into the Fund if possible
So, in other words, a deal was negotiated. The one presented to Zelensky in the White House was unfair, and a better deal was designed. This one puts American interests in Ukraine in a new perspective — Washington now has a tangible stake in seeing peace in Ukraine, and in getting Russia away from its own economic interests.This may prove to be a pretty damn huge step. And this may be what Zelensky and Trump discussed and agreed upon when meeting briefly during Pope Francis’ funeral a few days prior. Historic, indeed, as Zelensky predicted. It may now prove to be more profitable to end the war on Ukraine’s terms rather than Putin’s…”
Good.
Michael V said:
The Rev Dodgson said:
From Quora.Hope it isn’t unduly optimistic.
“In some breaking news, the long-proposed mineral deal between the United States and Ukraine was signed today, April 30, 2025. The deal was significantly revised from the last reporting, we have to give props to whoever negotiated for Ukraine here because they turned it from something akin to Germany’s post-WWII “deal” into something actually useful.
Key points of the deal:
The agreement is an equal Partnership with 50/50% share. Worth noting: for the US, possible future military aid is counted as a contribution to the fund
Ukraine retains full control over all infrastructure, subsoil and resources itself, their contribution to the found comes exclusively from future mineral-licenses
No US aid provided prior to signing is counted as part of the fund, only new material
The fund must invest into reconstruction & infrastructure in Ukraine for 10 years
-relevant tarriffs between the US and Ukraine are reduced to zero, and the US pledges to attract further parties to invest into the Fund if possible
So, in other words, a deal was negotiated. The one presented to Zelensky in the White House was unfair, and a better deal was designed. This one puts American interests in Ukraine in a new perspective — Washington now has a tangible stake in seeing peace in Ukraine, and in getting Russia away from its own economic interests.This may prove to be a pretty damn huge step. And this may be what Zelensky and Trump discussed and agreed upon when meeting briefly during Pope Francis’ funeral a few days prior. Historic, indeed, as Zelensky predicted. It may now prove to be more profitable to end the war on Ukraine’s terms rather than Putin’s…”
Good.
Any good sites for golf resorts in Ukraine?
captain_spalding said:
Michael V said:
The Rev Dodgson said:
From Quora.Hope it isn’t unduly optimistic.
“In some breaking news, the long-proposed mineral deal between the United States and Ukraine was signed today, April 30, 2025. The deal was significantly revised from the last reporting, we have to give props to whoever negotiated for Ukraine here because they turned it from something akin to Germany’s post-WWII “deal” into something actually useful.
Key points of the deal:
The agreement is an equal Partnership with 50/50% share. Worth noting: for the US, possible future military aid is counted as a contribution to the fund
Ukraine retains full control over all infrastructure, subsoil and resources itself, their contribution to the found comes exclusively from future mineral-licenses
No US aid provided prior to signing is counted as part of the fund, only new material
The fund must invest into reconstruction & infrastructure in Ukraine for 10 years
-relevant tarriffs between the US and Ukraine are reduced to zero, and the US pledges to attract further parties to invest into the Fund if possible
So, in other words, a deal was negotiated. The one presented to Zelensky in the White House was unfair, and a better deal was designed. This one puts American interests in Ukraine in a new perspective — Washington now has a tangible stake in seeing peace in Ukraine, and in getting Russia away from its own economic interests.This may prove to be a pretty damn huge step. And this may be what Zelensky and Trump discussed and agreed upon when meeting briefly during Pope Francis’ funeral a few days prior. Historic, indeed, as Zelensky predicted. It may now prove to be more profitable to end the war on Ukraine’s terms rather than Putin’s…”
Good.
Any good sites for golf resorts in Ukraine?
I guess so.
Vice President Vance casts tie-breaking Senate vote to kill bipartisan effort to rebuke Trump’s trade policy
CNN
—
Vice President JD Vance traveled to Capitol Hill late Wednesday to cast a tie-breaking vote in the Senate that killed a bipartisan effort to rebuke President Donald Trump’s trade policy.
Earlier in the evening, the Senate rejected the resolution that would have effectively blocked the Trump’s global tariffs by revoking the emergency order the president is using to enact them. Two senators who were set to vote for the resolution, GOP Sen. Mitch McConnell and Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, were absent, allowing the resolution to fail 49-49.
—-
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/04/30/politics/senate-republicans-democrats-trump-tariffs/index.html
NYT poll has DJT on 42 approval, 54 disapproval.
Marist has it at 42 – 53.
On one hand, he is never going to run for office again so he doesn’t need to care, directly.
OTOH if Congressional Republicans feel their own careers are threatened and thr President’s approval is in the toilet, they may be tempted towards impeachment.
Right now they are trailing Democrats by about 7% in the “Generic Congressional Ballot” polls but the midterms are 18 months away.
Heather Cox Richardson
4h ·
April 30, 2025 (Wednesday)
This morning the Bureau of Economic Analysis released a report showing an abrupt reversal in the U.S. economy. Gross domestic product (GDP), which measures the total market value of goods and services, shrank from a healthy 2.4% in the last quarter of 2024 to -0.3% in the first quarter of 2025. The shift is the first time in three years that the economy has contracted. The slump appears to have been fueled by a surge in buying overseas goods before Trump’s tariffs hit.
The stock market plunged on the news. Although it would recover later in the day, the stock market during President Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office has been the worst since the administration of Richard Nixon. Today Trump posted on his social media site: “This is Biden’s Stock Market, not Trump’s. I didn’t take over until January 20th. Tariffs will soon start kicking in, and companies are starting to move into the USA in record numbers. Our Country will boom, but we have to get rid of the Biden “Overhang.” This will take a while, has NOTHING TO DO WITH TARIFFS, only that he left us with bad numbers, but when the boom begins, it will be like no other. BE PATIENT!!!”
Observers noted that in January 2024, when the stock market was booming under Biden, Trump took credit for it, posting: “THIS IS THE TRUMP STOCK MARKET BECAUSE MY POLLS AGAINST BIDEN ARE SO GOOD THAT INVESTORS ARE PROJECTING THAT I WILL WIN, AND THAT WILL DRIVE THE MARKET UP.”
Trump held a televised two-hour Cabinet meeting today, at which administration officials sat behind red MAGA hats and praised him so extravagantly that right-wing commentator Ann Coulter posted: “Would it be possible to have a cabinet meeting without the Kim Jong il–style tributes?” He blamed Biden for the contracting economy and told reporters that “you could even say” that any downturn in the second quarter is Biden’s fault, too. The White House put out an official statement blaming former president Joe Biden for today’s report of the shrinking GDP and saying the country’s underlying economic numbers remain strong.
In fact, Biden left behind an economy that The Economist called “the envy of the world,” showing on the cover of the October special issue about the U.S. economy a roll of $100 bills blasting off into space. As Simon Rabinovitch and Henry Curr wrote in that issue, the U.S. had “left other rich countries in the dust.” “Expect that to continue,” the headline read. In Biden’s four years, the U.S. had added 16 million jobs, unemployment was at its lowest rate in 50 years, real wages for the bottom 80% of Americans were increasing, and inflation levels had come down almost to the Federal Reserve’s target from their highs during the post-shutdown shocks.
The pain from Trump’s tariffs has already hit agriculture as China has largely stopped buying American products, from pork and soybeans to lumber. Peter Friedmann, executive director of the Agriculture Transportation Coalition, a leading export trade group for farmers, told Lori Ann LaRocco of CNBC that the sector is already in “full-blown crisis” as farmers have sustained “massive” financial losses.
Economists expect the confusion and uncertainty of Trump’s tariffs to hurt growth more broadly in the second quarter of 2025 as container ships from China stop arriving in the U.S. in early to mid-May, about a month after Trump’s April 2 “Liberation Day” imposed a 145% tariff on goods from that country. Executive Director Gene Seroka of the Port of Los Angeles told CNBC’s Squawk Box yesterday that beginning next week, shipping volume at the port will drop over 35%. Executive Director of the Port of Oakland, California, Kristi McKenney noted that the lack of import trade will hurt exports as well, endangering the jobs of dockworkers, warehouse workers, and truck operators.
The East Coast ports will see similar drops a couple of weeks after the West Coast ports. United Parcel Service (UPS) has already announced that it is laying off about 20,000 employees and closing 73 of its buildings by the end of June. It says it anticipates lower volumes of shipping from its largest customer, Amazon, because of the tariffs.
Economists expect the lack of goods from around the globe, especially from China, to create shortages and higher prices. Notably, the tariffs will hit toys and Christmas items. China produces 80% of the toys sold in the U.S. and 90% of the Christmas goods. Ordering of inventory for the holidays is normally underway by now, Daisuke Wakabayashi of the New York Times reports, as it takes four to five months to make,
package, and ship products to the U.S. from China. But currently the tariffs have shut down that trade.
Trump seemed to acknowledge that today when he said: “Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls, you know? And maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more than they would normally. But we’re not talking about something that we have to go out of our way. They have ships that are loaded up with stuff. Much of which—not all of it—but much of which we don’t need.”
Ironically, the Republican Party made accusations that Biden was “ruining Christmas” a central theme of political attack in 2021, 2022, and 2023.
Chip Cutter, Bob Tita, and Stephen Wilmot of the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that more than 80% of senior executives are worried about Trump’s tariffs and his other economic policies, and many companies say they are unable to predict future earnings. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says that uncertainty is strategic, intended to give the administration a leg up in negotiations.
The Constitution gave to Congress, not the president, the power to set tariffs. Trump is taking that power to himself by using the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to enact his sweeping tariffs. This law authorizes a president to regulate international trade during a national emergency. On February 1, Trump declared such a national emergency to impose tariffs on China, Canada, and Mexico, and on April 2 he again invoked it for his new blanket tariffs.
Congress could end Trump’s power over tariffs by cancelling the national emergency, a step Democrats were willing to take. But Republicans in the House used a procedural rule to make sure that Democrats could not cancel that emergency. A challenge to the president’s declaration of a national emergency must come to the floor for a vote within 18 days of the challenge. The House defanged that rule by declaring that each day for the rest of the congressional session will not “constitute a day for purposes…of the National Emergencies Act.”
In the Senate this evening, Republican leaders killed a similar Democratic measure. Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) said: “Republicans are trying to give the administration…some space to figure out if they can get some good deals and awaiting the results of that.” Three Republican senators—Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and Rand Paul of Kentucky—voted with the Democrats.
Other observers are less hopeful of a good outcome for Trump’s tariffs. Washington Post legal and economic columnist Natasha Sarin said: “It’s just totally bonker bananas. Where are we going?! Are we near trading deals with India and Japan? That means less tariff revenue. But Stephen Miran, chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, says the tariffs are going to produce lots of revenue for deficit reduction. So that must mean they’re staying high? It’s a constant yo-yo that is impossible to plan around and is leading to investors being down on America, and with good reason.”
“Bonker bananas” is an apt description for an interview Trump did last night with Terry Moran of ABC News. In a discussion of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man the administration rendered to prison in El Salvador because of “administrative error,” Trump insisted that Abrego Garcia has “MS13” tattooed on his knuckles, for the gang Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13. But the photo Trump held up for the cameras as “proof” of MS-13 tattoos was obviously photoshopped with letters and numbers apparently intended to be labels for Abrego Garcia’s actual tattoos.
As Moran repeatedly told Trump that the tattoos had been photoshopped, Trump got visibly angry, first suggesting that it was thanks to Trump that Moran got the interview, and complaining that “you’re not being very nice.” Trump then continued to insist that Abrego Garcia has MS13 tattooed on his knuckles and said that Moran’s refusal to agree to that “is why people no longer believe the news…. It’s such a disservice,” the president said. “Why don’t you just say yes, he does”
Trump couldn’t let it go. He brought it up again later in the interview, calling Moran “dishonest” for saying the tattoos were photoshopped.
Abrego Garcia has no criminal record, and experts on MS-13 say his tattoos are not tied to the gang.
That was not the only astonishing moment in the interview.
Although the Supreme Court unanimously agreed with a lower court that the administration must work to get Abrego Garcia back from El Salvador, the White House has insisted that it cannot comply because only El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, can release Abrego Garcia. But when Moran said to Trump he could pick up the phone and get him back, Trump replied “I could…. And if he were the gentleman that you say he is, I would do that.” When Moran replied “But the court has ordered you to facilitate that,” Trump replied: “I’m not the one making this decision. We have lawyers who don’t want to do this.”
“You’re the president!” Moran replied.
MeidasTouch 15 min Video
“ Trump held a televised two-hour Cabinet meeting today, at which administration officials sat behind red MAGA hats and praised him so extravagantly that right-wing commentator Ann Coulter posted: “Would it be possible to have a cabinet meeting without the Kim Jong il–style tributes?””
Sometimes I wonder what time he has his nap.
dv said:
NYT poll has DJT on 42 approval, 54 disapproval.
Marist has it at 42 – 53.On one hand, he is never going to run for office again so
uh
Divine Angel said:
“ Trump held a televised two-hour Cabinet meeting today, at which administration officials sat behind red MAGA hats and praised him so extravagantly that right-wing commentator Ann Coulter posted: “Would it be possible to have a cabinet meeting without the Kim Jong il–style tributes?””Sometimes I wonder what time he has his nap.
For the life of me I don’t know why anyone would like to be in his cabinet.
SCIENCE said:
dv said:
NYT poll has DJT on 42 approval, 54 disapproval.
Marist has it at 42 – 53.On one hand, he is never going to run for office again so
uh
Oh right lol
JudgeMental said:
Arts said:
JudgeMental said:
Occupy DemocratsBREAKING: Donald Trump’s ICE agents invade an innocent American family’s home, force a woman and her three daughters onto the lawn half naked, seize their phones, laptops, and life savings and then leave them like an “an abandoned dog.”
This is the most horrifying MAGA regime story yet..
According to local TV station KFOR, roughly 20 federal agents — including ICE officers, U.S. Marshals, and FBI agents — raided the wrong house in Oklahoma City and told the woman inside, identified as “Marisa,” that they had a search warrant.
In reality, the suspects named in the warrant didn’t live in the house. Not only that, but they weren’t connected to anyone in the family.
This is whats happens when you mix weaponized incompetency with ruthless fascism. Donald Trump and his minions are as stupid as they are cruel.
“We just moved here from Maryland. We’re citizens. That’s what I kept saying. We’re citizens,” said Marisa.
The feds barged into the house, ransacked it, and forced the family outside in their underwear, displaying the kind of callousness and inhumanity we have come to expect from this administration.They seized the family’s belongings, calling it “evidence.” Since the warrant was invalid for the house, it really just amounted to governmental theft.
“I told them before they left, I said you took my phone. We have no money. I just moved here. I have to feed my children,” said Marissa. “I’m going to need gas money. I need to be able to get around. Like, how do you just leave me like this? Like an abandoned dog.”
“They were very dismissive, very rough, very careless,” she continued. “I kept pleading. I kept telling them we weren’t criminals. They were treating us like criminals. We were here by ourselves. We didn’t do anything.”
One agent dismissively told the family that it was a “little rough this morning,” a gross understatement. This is an authoritarian nightmare.“It was so denigrating. That you do all of this to a family, to women, your fellow citizens. And it was ‘a little rough’? You literally traumatized me and my daughters for life. We’re going to have to go get help or get over this somehow,” said Marisa.
The agents told her that it might take days or even months for the family’s belongings to be returned. They refused to give her a business card.
in a few (or many) years time, when they are at trial.. they will just be ‘under orders’
didn’t work in 46/47.
we thought superior orders defences have a mixed success rate perhaps about 0.5 so seems optimistic
dv said:
Divine Angel said:
“ Trump held a televised two-hour Cabinet meeting today, at which administration officials sat behind red MAGA hats and praised him so extravagantly that right-wing commentator Ann Coulter posted: “Would it be possible to have a cabinet meeting without the Kim Jong il–style tributes?””Sometimes I wonder what time he has his nap.
For the life of me I don’t know why anyone would like to be in his cabinet.
Maybe it’s a hierarchical system. They get rewarded with huge amounts of power and resources. Which they then take back to their offices and then they hold a “cabinet” with themselves as chief and everyone else as arse-kisser; and they distribute power and resources as reward to the best arse-kissers, who go back to their office … etc
party_pants said:
dv said:
Divine Angel said:
“ Trump held a televised two-hour Cabinet meeting today, at which administration officials sat behind red MAGA hats and praised him so extravagantly that right-wing commentator Ann Coulter posted: “Would it be possible to have a cabinet meeting without the Kim Jong il–style tributes?””Sometimes I wonder what time he has his nap.
For the life of me I don’t know why anyone would like to be in his cabinet.
Maybe it’s a hierarchical system. They get rewarded with huge amounts of power and resources. Which they then take back to their offices and then they hold a “cabinet” with themselves as chief and everyone else as arse-kisser; and they distribute power and resources as reward to the best arse-kissers, who go back to their office … etc
Divine Angel said:
party_pants said:
dv said:For the life of me I don’t know why anyone would like to be in his cabinet.
Maybe it’s a hierarchical system. They get rewarded with huge amounts of power and resources. Which they then take back to their offices and then they hold a “cabinet” with themselves as chief and everyone else as arse-kisser; and they distribute power and resources as reward to the best arse-kissers, who go back to their office … etc
People join cults for all sorts of reasons.
Oh yeah. An exclusive social or cultural identity is attractive to some people. Whether it be religious or political or other reason. People readily abandon reason and rational thinking to make some sacrifice for the sake of being accepted into the group. Being part of an in-group is more important.
all them americans are the same
ah well who isn’t old enough to remember when Russia were taking Ukrainian children
https://abcnews.go.com/US/el-salvador-venezuela-2-year-us/story?id=121296196
I sometimes check out the level of stupidity being posted on a few fb pages of people I once associated with.
I’ve mention this woman before, her husband drew a gun on her in a drunken argument and then she pulled her gun out of her dressing gown pocket.
Charming people.
Anyway…over the years she’s gone down the full MAGA cult rabbit hole. Frequent posts about how dangerous electric vehicles are etc. Quite a few of her posts recently have been about how wonderful Musk is. Her hatred for Dr Fauci is frightening.
Today’s meme….lololol.
kii said:
I sometimes check out the level of stupidity being posted on a few fb pages of people I once associated with.
I’ve mention this woman before, her husband drew a gun on her in a drunken argument and then she pulled her gun out of her dressing gown pocket.
Charming people.
Anyway…over the years she’s gone down the full MAGA cult rabbit hole. Frequent posts about how dangerous electric vehicles are etc. Quite a few of her posts recently have been about how wonderful Musk is. Her hatred for Dr Fauci is frightening.
Today’s meme….lololol.
we love that even if they manage to get through free and fair elections “next time” and reach a happy Democratic victory, this shit isn’t going away for decades
SCIENCE said:
kii said:
I sometimes check out the level of stupidity being posted on a few fb pages of people I once associated with.
I’ve mention this woman before, her husband drew a gun on her in a drunken argument and then she pulled her gun out of her dressing gown pocket.
Charming people.
Anyway…over the years she’s gone down the full MAGA cult rabbit hole. Frequent posts about how dangerous electric vehicles are etc. Quite a few of her posts recently have been about how wonderful Musk is. Her hatred for Dr Fauci is frightening.
Today’s meme….lololol.
we love that even if they manage to get through free and fair elections “next time” and reach a happy Democratic victory, this shit isn’t going away for decades
It hasn’t gone away for decades already despite all the concentrated efforts of educational institutions eveywhere.
Idiot president with dementia and racism mangling his brain.
LOL hey remember when Harlem and Harvard sorry we mean Israel and Iran both shot rockets at each other’s empty bases LOL
wait we thought those bastard authoritarian communist dirty ASIANS were rigid fools
He said the “mixed signalling”, which included “assertive and conciliatory messages” together allowed China’s centralised political system to be flexible.
nah choosing fascism makes the country greater
SCIENCE said:
Trump’s deep-sea mining executive order sparks condemnation by scientists and conservationists
https://youtu.be/TPQeZalnArY?si=LwUK7P-MaBWbK-dz
LegalEagles: breaks down the arrest of judges
captain_spalding said:
From Jeff Tiedrich’s pages:https://www.jefftiedrich.com/p/elderly-golfer-shits-pants-blames
It’s true! Fentanyl hasn’t killed me, yet.
kii said:
captain_spalding said:
From Jeff Tiedrich’s pages:https://www.jefftiedrich.com/p/elderly-golfer-shits-pants-blames
It’s true! Fentanyl hasn’t killed me, yet.
You’re not a ‘real’ American. Only ‘genuine’ Americans are entitled to die by Fentanyl in Trump’s America.
If American reporters had any guts, one of them would, at Pam Bondi’s next press conference, ask the question, ‘Ms Bondi, will this announcement also help the 258 million who’ve been saved from Fentanyl deaths?’.
captain_spalding said:
kii said:
captain_spalding said:
From Jeff Tiedrich’s pages:https://www.jefftiedrich.com/p/elderly-golfer-shits-pants-blames
It’s true! Fentanyl hasn’t killed me, yet.
You’re not a ‘real’ American. Only ‘genuine’ Americans are entitled to die by Fentanyl in Trump’s America.
Very true.
Waltz out as National Security Advisor… Can’t imagine Hegseth will last another 100 days
diddly-squat said:
Waltz out as National Security Advisor…
Oh I will.
Meanwhile
https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/us-health-secretary-kennedy-revives-misleading-claims-fetal-debris-measles-shots-2025-05-01/
diddly-squat said:
Waltz out as National Security Advisor… Can’t imagine Hegseth will last another 100 days
Strange way to exit, could they not just walk out
Cymek said:
diddly-squat said:Waltz out as National Security Advisor… Can’t imagine Hegseth will last another 100 days
Strange way to exit, could they not just walk out
Nuh uh, lemme see you strut. Work it baby, work it.
dv said:
diddly-squat said:Waltz out as National Security Advisor…
Oh I will.
Meanwhile
https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/us-health-secretary-kennedy-revives-misleading-claims-fetal-debris-measles-shots-2025-05-01/
Brain worm, heroine, dead bear, all home to roost.
sarahs mum said:
Heather Cox Richardson
4h ·
April 30, 2025 (Wednesday)———————————————————————————CUT————————————————————————
Ta.
ah well some good news at least the totally not fascist is
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-05-02/donald-trump-cuts-funding-for-pbs-npr/105244626
making sure that state broadcasters aren’t propaganda machines for the authoritarian governments that might be in power to abuse them
Ending Taxpayer Subsidization Of Biased Media, says the media landscape “is filled with abundant, diverse, and innovative news options”.
the freedom press will be far better for the people
Heather Cox Richardson
1h ·
May 1, 2025 (Thursday)
President Donald Trump waited until the 101st day of his administration to fire national security advisor Mike Waltz, the official responsible for including the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic on an unsecure Signal chat in which leaders shared classified information about a military strike on the Houthis in Yemen. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who uploaded the classified information in that chat and shared it in another unsecure chat with his wife, brother, and personal friends, is still in the Cabinet.
On April 28 the U.S. campaign against the Houthis cost a $60 million F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter jet. The plane fell overboard from the USS Harry S. Truman aircraft carrier when the vessel turned sharply to avoid fire from the Houthis while military personnel were moving the aircraft. Both the aircraft and the tow tractor moving it were lost, and one sailor suffered minor injuries.
The Signal scandal does not appear to have changed the Trump team’s communications habits. A Reuters photographer caught Waltz looking at his Signal messages during yesterday’s Cabinet meeting. The list of messages included Secretary of State Marco Rubio, special envoy Steve Witkoff, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and Vice President J.D. Vance, whose message began: “I have confirmation from my counterpart….” Although Signal messages appear to violate the Presidential Records Act that requires the preservation of documents from an administration, the Trump team apparently continues to use the app.
Trump announced that he will nominate Waltz to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, the position Representative Elise Stefanik (R-NY) expected but that Trump pulled from her because the Republicans’ majority in the House of Representatives is so slim. Secretary of State Rubio will assume the duties of national security advisor. Rubio is now serving as secretary of state, national security advisor, U.S. archivist, and head of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). All of these jobs are high-level, work-intense positions.
A spokesperson for the State Department learned about the change in Rubio’s portfolio from a reporter during a press briefing.
At 101 days, the “Department of Government Efficiency” and its leader, billionaire Elon Musk, are also running into trouble. Musk vowed to slash $2 trillion from government spending, but that number kept dropping until he said DOGE will save about $150 billion. As David A. Fahrenthold and Jeremy Singer-Vine noted in the New York Times, that number is largely unsubstantiated. The DOGE team’s list of cuts is riddled with errors. In addition, the nonpartisan nonprofit Partnership for Public Service estimates that DOGE cuts have actually cost taxpayers $135 billion this fiscal year, not including lawsuits.
Yesterday Musk told reporters that Congress will have to get to work to make the cuts he began permanent as he pulls back from government work to oversee Tesla. His foray into politics so badly hurt the company’s performance that it saw a 71% drop in profits in the first quarter of 2025. According to Emily Glazer, Becky Peterson, and Dana Mattioli of the Wall Street Journal, Tesla’s board has begun looking for a new chief executive. While both Musk and Tesla’s board deny the report, Musk will move back toward company business. When asked if he needed a successor in the White House, Musk answered: “Is Buddha needed for Buddhism? Was it not stronger after he passed away?”
It’s not clear that Congress will, in fact, embrace the cuts DOGE has made willy-nilly throughout the government. Three days ago, a Washington Post–ABC News–Ipsos poll found that only 35% of Americans approve “of the way Elon Musk is handling his job in the Trump administration,” while 57% disapprove. “The amazing thing is that they haven’t actually done anything constructive whatsoever. Literally all they’ve done is destroy things,” a current federal employee told Nick Robins-Early of The Guardian. “People are going to miss the federal government that they had.”
As the damage it has caused becomes clearer, DOGE seems unlikely ever to become more popular. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has turned control of the Interior Department over to a DOGE operative, and Wes Siler reports tonight that DOGE is preparing a “reduction in force” for the National Park Service, bringing total workforce losses there to about a quarter of all NPS staff. According to a group of NPS employees calling themselves the Resistance Rangers, the cuts are directed at regional and national offices that support park-based staff in order to make the cuts less visible to the public.
As Siler notes in his Wes Siler’s Newsletter, the National Park Service is an important public-facing part of the federal government. Parks are “highly visible, and serve as symbols of national pride.” He notes that hurting “the visitor experience, attraction closures, and general bad news around NPS may serve to embarrass the administration more than news of, say, reductions to Internal Revenue Service staffing.”
Problems at DOGE continue to emerge. Jake Pearson of ProPublica reported yesterday that the DOGE employee who is working to shrink the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), Gavin Kliger, owns stock in four companies the CFPB oversees. This conflict of interest potentially violates federal ethics laws.
Yesterday David Gilbert and Vittoria Elliott of Wired reported that the DOGE operative installed at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Christopher Sweet, is an undergraduate with no government experience. He is using artificial intelligence to comb through the agency’s rules and regulations, compare them with the laws authorizing them, identify rules that can be relaxed or removed, and rewrite them.
A source from HUD told Gilbert and Elliott that such work is redundant: officials created the rules only after “a multi-year multi-stakeholder meatgrinder.” Another source told the Wired reporters they were informed that Sweet is refining a model “to be used across the government.”
As Trump’s poll numbers have dropped, Trump’s team has doubled down on immigration to energize its base. Today Judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr., a federal judge Trump appointed to the Southern District of Texas, rejected the administration’s use of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to justify deporting Venezuelans from his district. This ruling may have implications for lawsuits elsewhere.
Rodriguez permanently prohibited the Trump administration from deporting Venezuelans from the Southern District of Texas under that law. He noted that the law authorizes such deporations only during wartime or a hostile invasion, and concluded that its “plain ordinary meaning” meant an invasion by military forces, not migration by alleged gang members.
Trump’s empowerment of heavy-handed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) tactics led last Thursday to a raid on a house in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, in which agents who said they were U.S. Marshals, ICE, and the FBI put a family outside in the rain in their underwear and then tore apart the house. They took the family’s phones, laptops, and life savings. But the people in the house were not the ones on the search warrant. They were all U.S. citizens, a mother and three girls recently arrived from Maryland.
“I told them before they left, I said you took my phone. We have no money. I just moved here,” the woman told KFOR news. “I have to feed my children. I’m going to need gas money. I need to be able to get around. Like, how do you just leave me like this? Like an abandoned dog.”
In his recent interview with Trump, Terry Moran of ABC News revealed that Trump has a problem with a disconnect between his actions and the country’s principles. Trump had a copy of the Declaration of Independence installed in the Oval Office, and Moran asked the president what it means to him. Trump’s answer made it clear he has never read the document. “Well, it means exactly what it says,” he answered. “It’s a declaration, it’s a declaration of unity, and love and respect and it means a lot. And it’s something very special to, to our country.”
Last night, former vice president Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate for president in 2024, gave her first major speech since losing the election. “Throughout my entire career…I have always believed in the ideals of our nation,” she began, “he ideals reflected in the Declaration of Independence, that all are created equal and endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights. Ideals advanced and affirmed by the service and sacrifice of generations of patriots, the ideals that ground the Constitution of the United States, that here in our country, power ultimately lies not with the wealthy or well connected, but with all of us, with ‘We the People.’”
After excoriating the Trump administration’s “narrow, self-serving vision of America where they punish truth tellers, favor loyalists, cash in on their power, and leave everyone to fend for themselves, all while abandoning allies and retreating from the world,” Harris noted that “this is not a vision that Americans want.” She urged the audience to “gear up for the hard work ahead, and please, always remember, this country is ours. It doesn’t belong to whoever is in the White House. It belongs to you. It belongs to us. It belongs to ‘We, the People.’”
LOL
https://gizmodo.com/rfk-jr-goes-full-tinfoil-pledges-to-stop-chemtrails-in-latest-dr-phil-interview-2000596357
SCIENCE said:
LOL
Hmm, I have an opinion.
Lololol…
Texas governor, Greg Abbott with Yam Tits. Chinga de madre….🤣😂
Texas is banning political cartoons.
kii said:
Texas is banning political cartoons.
why don’t they ban difficult questions as well
kii said:
Texas is banning political cartoons.
and this: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-05-02/donald-trump-cuts-funding-for-pbs-npr/105244626
sarahs mum said:
Heather Cox Richardson
1h ·
May 1, 2025 (Thursday)——————————————CUT—————————————
Ta.
CNN video shows decision to sack Mike Waltz may have been taken on Tuesday
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1YuMhTvFE0
National Security Advisor Mike Waltz finds out, at the foot of the stairs to Air Force One, that he’s not allowed to board i.e. he’s out of a job, taking the fall for the ‘Signalgate’ blunder.
“Let me see, Waltz, Waltz…no, sorry, no ‘Waltz’ on the list, i’m afraid, can’t let you board, sir, would you just step this way, so as to not block the access.”
sarahs mum said:
Heather Cox Richardson
3h ·
April 29, 2025 (Tuesday)—————————————————————————CUT———————————————————————
Ta.
dv said:
well that’s a bit unfair how do we know there wouldn’t otherwise have been 100000 shootings
and isn’t shooting up a school pretty violating routine behaviour for USSA kids
Does seem as though DJT still has a floor of about 40% even in these dire circumstances.
dv said:
Does seem as though DJT still has a floor of about 40% even in these dire circumstances.
Yeah. Humans don’t always act according to rational self-interest.
Every economist still gets that bit wrong.
party_pants said:
dv said:
Does seem as though DJT still has a floor of about 40% even in these dire circumstances.
Yeah. Humans don’t always act according to rational self-interest.
Every economist still gets that bit wrong.
Seems that about 40% of humans will act against rational self-interest, if it means that some group they don’t like at least appears to also suffer.
DJT has changed the day from Veterans Day to Victory Day, I wonder how the Vietnam Vets feel about that?
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-05-02/donald-trump-cuts-funding-for-pbs-npr/105244626
US President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Thursday to slash public subsidies to PBS and NPR.
The White House said the outlets received “millions from taxpayers to spread radical, woke propaganda disguised as ‘news’”.
The executive order further demands indirect sources of public financing for the news organisations are rooted out.
—-
Those are probably the two most unbiased news organisations in the US
captain_spalding said:
party_pants said:
dv said:
Does seem as though DJT still has a floor of about 40% even in these dire circumstances.
Yeah. Humans don’t always act according to rational self-interest.
Every economist still gets that bit wrong.
Seems that about 40% of humans will act against rational self-interest, if it means that some group they don’t like at least appears to also suffer.
Seems to be some sport of group identity thing happening. They want to feel included, part of the group, even if that means not always what is best for them individually. People readily make sacrifices for the sake of belonging and inclusion.
party_pants said:
dv said:
Does seem as though DJT still has a floor of about 40% even in these dire circumstances.
Yeah. Humans don’t always act according to rational self-interest.
Every economist still gets that bit wrong.
Don’t knock economists. They’ve predicted 14 of the last 2 recessions.
Peak Warming Man said:
DJT has changed the day from Veterans Day to Victory Day, I wonder how the Vietnam Vets feel about that?
or the Afghan vets. They lost too, the Taliban took over when the foreign troops left.
Peak Warming Man said:
DJT has changed the day from Veterans Day to Victory Day, I wonder how the Vietnam Vets feel about that?
I was going to ask whether the US had won a war since WW2 but then I remembered Grenada.
Those Grenadanadians didn’t know what hit them.
captain_spalding said:
party_pants said:
dv said:
Does seem as though DJT still has a floor of about 40% even in these dire circumstances.
Yeah. Humans don’t always act according to rational self-interest.
Every economist still gets that bit wrong.
Seems that about 40% of humans will act against rational self-interest, if it means that some group they don’t like at least appears to also suffer.
so since they have an interest in making others suffer, then actually they are acting in rational self interest
dv said:
roughbarked said:
SCIENCE said:
kii said:
SCIENCE said:
ah well some good news at least the totally not fascist is
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-05-02/donald-trump-cuts-funding-for-pbs-npr/105244626
making sure that state broadcasters aren’t propaganda machines for the authoritarian governments that might be in power to abuse them
Ending Taxpayer Subsidization Of Biased Media, says the media landscape “is filled with abundant, diverse, and innovative news options”.
the freedom press will be far better for the people
Texas is banning political cartoons.
why don’t they ban difficult questions as well
and this: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-05-02/donald-trump-cuts-funding-for-pbs-npr/105244626
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-05-02/donald-trump-cuts-funding-for-pbs-npr/105244626
US President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Thursday to slash public subsidies to PBS and NPR.
The White House said the outlets received “millions from taxpayers to spread radical, woke propaganda disguised as ‘news’”.
The executive order further demands indirect sources of public financing for the news organisations are rooted out.
——
Those are probably the two most unbiased news organisations in the US
well they should have drawn better cartoons then eh
Rubio goes into bat for far right extremists for some reason
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/02/marco-rubio-germany-afd-00324283
dv said:
Rubio goes into bat for far right extremists for some reasonhttps://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/02/marco-rubio-germany-afd-00324283
Rubio is shit-scared of Trump. He’ll do and say whatever he’s told to.
dv said:
Rubio goes into bat for far right extremists for some reasonhttps://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/02/marco-rubio-germany-afd-00324283
Because he’s a nazi?
Heather Cox Richardson
42m ·
May 2, 2025 (Friday)
Yesterday I identified incorrectly the messaging app newly fired national security advisor Michael Waltz was using at a Cabinet meeting on Wednesday as the unsecure Signal app. Joseph Cox of 404 Media identified the app as “an obscure and unofficial version of Signal” from “a company called TeleMessage which makes clones of popular messaging apps but adds an archiving capability to each of them.” As Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo notes, this third-party app introduces even more insecurity into those White House communications.
Today I spent time organizing the many tabs I had opened over the past six weeks. When they were grouped by topics, what emerged was the story of an administration that decided from the start to portray President Donald Trump as a king, creating an alternative social media ecosystem designed, as Drew Harwell and Sarah Ellison of the Washington Post noted in early March, “to sell the country on expansionist approach to presidential power.”
The team set out not just to confront critics, but to drown them out with a constant barrage of sound bites, interviews with loyalists, memes slamming Democrats, and attack lines. “We’re here. We’re in your face,” said Kaelan Dorr, a deputy assistant to the president who runs the digital team. “It’s irreverent. It’s unapologetic.” Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung said their goal was “FULL SPECTRUM DOMINANCE.”
They are engaged in a marketing campaign to establish Trump’s false version of reality as truth. The White House has also brought into the press pool right-wing influencers, who are asking questions that tee up opportunities for White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt to push administration talking points, which the influencers then amplify on social media.
Trump’s aspirations to authoritarianism are showing today in the announcement that there will be a military parade on Trump’s 79th birthday, June 14, which coincides with the 250th anniversary of the Second Continental Congress’s establishment of the Continental Army in 1775. About 6,600 soldiers, 150 vehicles, and 50 helicopters will proceed from near the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, to the National Mall at a cost of tens of millions of dollars.
Trump’s attempt to empower loyalists showed today in the news that the Trump administration has reached a settlement in principle with the family of Ashli Babbitt, the Trump loyalist who was shot by Capitol Police officer Michael Byrd as she tried to breach the House Speaker’s Lobby on January 6, 2021. The right-wing Judicial Watch organization had filed a $30 million civil suit on behalf of Babbitt’s estate. A 2021 internal review determined that Byrd saved lives.
The administration’s hunkering down in right-wing ideology showed as well in Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s public attack on U.S. ally Germany for declaring the German right-wing political party Alternative for Germany (AfD) as an extremist party that goes against Germany’s “free democratic order.” That designation is the result of a three-year investigation. It allows the government more leeway in monitoring the AfD.
Both Vice President J.D. Vance and billionaire White House advisor Elon Musk supported the AfD and backed it in a recent election. Rubio took AfD’s side today, writing on social media that that new designation was “tyranny in disguise.” He attacked the current government and urged Germany to “reverse course.”
The German Foreign Office responded publicly. “This is democracy. The decision is the result of a thorough & independent investigation to protect our Constitution & the rule of law. It is independent courts that will have the final say. We have learnt from our history that rightwing extremism needs to be stopped.”
It says something about the Trump administration that the German government is lecturing the U.S. government about the dangers of right-wing extremism.
Molly Beck of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan spoke to reporters yesterday, threatening Wisconsin governor Tony Evers with arrest after the governor issued a memo to state workers directing them to check with a lawyer before turning over documents or other items to officials from Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Evers said Republicans were mischaracterizing his memo, which did not direct anyone to break the law.
“We now have a federal government that will threaten or arrest an elected official, or even everyday American citizens who have broken no laws, committed no crimes and done nothing wrong,” Evers said. “And as disgusted as I am about the continued actions of the Trump administration, I’m not afraid.”
Yesterday, at an event for judges, jurists, and lawyers, Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson spoke out against the attacks on judges currently plaguing the country. Judge Esther Salas, whose son Daniel was murdered by a man who came to their house looking for her, has been calling out the recent tactic of sending pizzas to the homes of judges or their children, making the point that right-wing opponents know where they live. Furthering their attempt at intimidation, the perpetrators have been using the name of Judge Salas’s son.
Judge Jackson began her remarks yesterday by saying she wanted to address “the elephant in the room”: the attacks on our legal system. Such attacks are not just on individuals, she said, but undermine the system itself. “Attacks on judicial independence is how countries that are not free, not fair, and not rule of law oriented, operate,” she said, and she told her colleagues: “I urge you to keep going, keep doing what is right for our country, and I do believe that history will vindicate your service.” According to Laura N. Pérez Sánchez of the New York Times, the audience gave her a standing ovation.
At least some of the administration’s intimidation is an attempt to cow opponents. It does not appear to be working.
Yesterday, about 1,500 lawyers and their allies packed the plaza outside Manhattan’s federal courthouse to defend the rule of law. According to Santul Nerkar of the New York Times, they held up pocket Constitutions, reaffirmed their oath to support and defend the Constitution, and chanted: “The rule of law protects us all. Without it we will surely fall.”
Speaking in front of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., constitutional law scholar and U.S. representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) said, “The whole country needs a constitutional refresher.” He recited the Preamble of the Constitution: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
On March 6, Trump issued an executive order attacking the law firm Perkins Coie, which has represented high-profile Democratic individuals and causes, by barring the federal government from hiring the firm, suspending the security clearances of individuals working for it, barring its lawyers from entering federal office buildings, and preparing to end government contracts with any of its clients.
Rather than back down, as several other firms did, Perkins Coie sued the next day. Today, Judge Beryl Howell permanently barred any enforcement of Trump’s executive order, saying it “violates the Constitution and is thus null and void.” In her opinion, Howell noted that “disposing of lawyers is a step in the direction of a totalitarian form of government.” Trump’s executive order violated the First Amendment’s guarantee of the right to free speech, the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of due process, and the Sixth Amendment’s guarantee of right to counsel.
She pointed out that the fair and impartial administration of justice has been part of the U.S. since John Adams “made the singularly unpopular decision to represent eight British soldiers charged with murder for their roles in the Boston Massacre.” “I had no hesitation,” Adams wrote in his diary, because “the Bar ought…to be independent and impartial at all Times And in every Circumstance.”
Today, Riley Board and Dylan Tusinski of the Portland Press Herald reported that the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the state of Maine reached a settlement in the state’s lawsuit against the Trump
administration after it froze funding to Maine education. The administration claimed the state violates the law because it allows transgender girls to compete on girls’ sports teams. Governor Janet Mills said she was following state and federal law and that Trump could not change the law by fiat. Maine attorney general Aaron Frey said the state had no choice but to sue in order to force the USDA to follow the law. The settlement restores the funding and establishes that the administration will go through the legally required process to pursue its policy.
When Trump tried to bully Governor Mills over the issue at a White House meeting in February, she told him, “See you in court.” Today she commented: “It’s good to feel a victory like this. I stood in the White House and when confronted by the president of the United States, I told him I’d see him in court. Well, we did see him in court, and we won.”
Attorney General Pam Bondi has launched a different lawsuit against the Maine Department of Education that would pull funding primarily from poorer students and students with disabilities. “That’s a separate complaint they filed a few weeks ago, it’s only a one-page complaint that cites no authority, no case, no law,” Mills said. “We’ll see them in court on that one as well.”
Finally, tonight, Trump’s apparent determination to dominate the news and to project an image of leadership is overlapping with his increasingly erratic behavior. After suggesting on Tuesday that he’d like to be Pope, tonight the president of the United States posted on his social media site an AI-generated image of himself wearing papal robes and a miter.
sarahs mum said:
Heather Cox Richardson
42m ·
May 2, 2025 (Friday)————————————————-CUT——————————————————
Finally, tonight, Trump’s apparent determination to dominate the news and to project an image of leadership is overlapping with his increasingly erratic behavior. After suggesting on Tuesday that he’d like to be Pope, tonight the president of the United States posted on his social media site an AI-generated image of himself wearing papal robes and a miter.
Ta.
Confirmed this on the official White House account, not just the personal.
I want things to normalise.
dv said:
Confirmed this on the official White House account, not just the personal.
I want things to normalise.
I want the children sent to their room to chill, and for the adults to tidy everything up.
dv said:
Confirmed this on the official White House account, not just the personal.
I want things to normalise.
It’s the new normal.
dv said:
Confirmed this on the official White House account, not just the personal.
I want things to normalise.
OK, he’s a nut case, no doubt of it, but maybe, just maybe, he’s just taking the piss here.
dv said:
Confirmed this on the official White House account, not just the personal.
I want things to normalise.
roffle
dv said:
Confirmed this on the official White House account, not just the personal.
I want things to normalise.
About time we put an end to all these Pope’s and their sex scandals with porn stars and got a decent man of God on the Papal throne etc ….
(tic)
People say I’m the best pope, I’m the greatest pope who ever poped.
dv said:
Confirmed this on the official White House account, not just the personal.
I want things to normalise.
After listening to the The Rest Is History podcast about popes, ol’ Don would fit right in with a lot of the medieval-period papal (mob) bosses.
Tau.Neutrino said:
Trump’s 10 Most Corrupt Acts Yet – and How They Hurt You
Murphy: Six Weeks In, This White House Is On Its Way To Being The Most Corrupt In U.S. History 1 month ago
Murphy Slams Trump’s First 100 Days: This Is A Story Of Incompetence, Theft, Mind-Blowing Corruption 1 day ago
Tau.Neutrino said:
Tau.Neutrino said:
Murphy: Six Weeks In, This White House Is On Its Way To Being The Most Corrupt In U.S. History 1 month ago
Murphy Slams Trump’s First 100 Days: This Is A Story Of Incompetence, Theft, Mind-Blowing Corruption 1 day ago
nobody could have foreseen this
SCIENCE said:
Tau.Neutrino said:
Tau.Neutrino said:
Murphy: Six Weeks In, This White House Is On Its Way To Being The Most Corrupt In U.S. History 1 month ago
Murphy Slams Trump’s First 100 Days: This Is A Story Of Incompetence, Theft, Mind-Blowing Corruption 1 day ago
nobody could have foreseen this
The force was cloudy on this one.
dv said:
Confirmed this on the official White House account, not just the personal.
I want things to normalise.
That’s pretty off. Even for KKK.
Meanwhile in the USA:
Also – look at the chyron…that really was a despicable clown show.
From Fear and Loathing: Closer to the Edge
Stephen Miller—America’s most punchable fascist larva—is reportedly the top candidate to replace Mike Waltz as National Security Adviser. Waltz is heading off to the UN, presumably to learn what vowels are. In his place? The architect of family separation. The guy who gets nostalgic for 1798. The smirking gargoyle who once said:
“If you illegally invaded our country the only process you are entitled to is deportation.”— Stephen Miller, April 1, 2025
This is not a drill. The man who thinks the Statue of Liberty needs a dress code might soon have the launch codes.
NATIONAL SECURITY, DESIGNED BY A BEDBUG IN A BOWTIE
Miller isn’t just Trump’s loyal footstool. He’s the guy who trained the footstools. He’s been running point on the most deranged elements of Trumpworld’s second coming: militarizing ICE, reviving Civil War-era laws, and suing the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court because the courts keep telling him “no.”
He doesn’t dream of power to serve. He dreams of power to punish. And his Homeland Security roadmap looks like it was scribbled in blood and Red Bull on the back of a deportation order.
Plans already floated under Miller’s guidance include:
Invoking the Alien Enemies Act (a law from 1798, last seriously used during WWII)
Expanding 287(g) to deputize local cops as mini-ICE squads
Deploying the National Guard to hunt down undocumented immigrants
Litigating the judiciary into submission, including suing John Roberts to make the courts easier to override
This isn’t a conservative agenda. It’s fascism with a budget.
“INTELLIGENCE?” ONLY IF IT COMES FROM SEAN HANNITY’S MOUTH
Miller once demanded that Fox News fire its pollster—on live TV—because the numbers weren’t flattering enough to Trump. That’s who he is: a man who treats data like it just insulted his tie. Now imagine him with access to CIA briefings.
He doesn’t trust intelligence agencies. He trusts vibes and rage. He doesn’t read memos—he snorts grievance like it’s crushed-up Sudafed. And when he doesn’t like the facts, he changes the channel until Sean Hannity gives him a bedtime story.
If this guy is in charge of cybersecurity, expect him to launch an airstrike over a bad tweet.
FOREIGN POLICY BY A SCARED MAN IN A MIRROR
Miller’s worldview is binary: loyal or enemy. He doesn’t understand diplomacy, nuance, or restraint. He understands retribution. If Canada misgenders Ronald Reagan, expect trade sanctions.
His foreign policy strategy is basically a tantrum in a trench coat:
Pull out of alliances
Threaten war over minor insults
Use immigration as a bludgeon
Reward autocrats who flatter Trump
If you’re not a white nationalist dictator, you’re on thin ice. And even then, Miller might drone you if your haircut offends him.
A MAN WHO THINKS DUE PROCESS IS A DEEP STATE HOAX
Stephen Miller views the Constitution the way a termite views a front porch: delicious and in the way. He wants a government where executive orders override laws, ICE outranks Congress, and anyone with a hyphenated last name is a security threat.
His lawsuit against the Chief Justice? Real. His desire to purge federal agencies? Documented. His legal group, America First Legal, is actively trying to dismantle judicial review, gut civil liberties, and turn the DOJ into a MAGA sword.
This isn’t law and order. It’s law and obedience. And if you resist, he’ll try to have your citizenship revoked for not liking Kid Rock.
THE ENDGAME IS VENGEANCE, NOT SECURITY
Stephen Miller doesn’t want to defend America. He wants to remake it—in his own image: bitter, scared, and ash-white.
The empathy void. The policy ghoul. The guy who sneezes and three toddlers get deported. That’s who’s knocking on the door to national security power.
Letting him in isn’t a risk. It’s an extinction-level decision.
kii said:
Meanwhile in the USA:Also – look at the chyron…that really was a despicable clown show.
The US penny is like the Australian 1c piece, yeah?
Divine Angel said:
kii said:
Meanwhile in the USA:Also – look at the chyron…that really was a despicable clown show.
The US penny is like the Australian 1c piece, yeah?
Yep. It’s strange how they use what I see as an British term for it. I mean, they hate the British.
kii said:
From Fear and Loathing: Closer to the EdgeStephen Miller—America’s most punchable fascist larva—is reportedly the top candidate to replace Mike Waltz as National Security Adviser. Waltz is heading off to the UN, presumably to learn what vowels are. In his place? The architect of family separation. The guy who gets nostalgic for 1798. The smirking gargoyle who once said:
“If you illegally invaded our country the only process you are entitled to is deportation.”— Stephen Miller, April 1, 2025
This is not a drill. The man who thinks the Statue of Liberty needs a dress code might soon have the launch codes.
NATIONAL SECURITY, DESIGNED BY A BEDBUG IN A BOWTIE
Miller isn’t just Trump’s loyal footstool. He’s the guy who trained the footstools. He’s been running point on the most deranged elements of Trumpworld’s second coming: militarizing ICE, reviving Civil War-era laws, and suing the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court because the courts keep telling him “no.”
He doesn’t dream of power to serve. He dreams of power to punish. And his Homeland Security roadmap looks like it was scribbled in blood and Red Bull on the back of a deportation order.
Plans already floated under Miller’s guidance include:
Invoking the Alien Enemies Act (a law from 1798, last seriously used during WWII)
Expanding 287(g) to deputize local cops as mini-ICE squads
Deploying the National Guard to hunt down undocumented immigrants
Litigating the judiciary into submission, including suing John Roberts to make the courts easier to override
This isn’t a conservative agenda. It’s fascism with a budget.
“INTELLIGENCE?” ONLY IF IT COMES FROM SEAN HANNITY’S MOUTH
Miller once demanded that Fox News fire its pollster—on live TV—because the numbers weren’t flattering enough to Trump. That’s who he is: a man who treats data like it just insulted his tie. Now imagine him with access to CIA briefings.
He doesn’t trust intelligence agencies. He trusts vibes and rage. He doesn’t read memos—he snorts grievance like it’s crushed-up Sudafed. And when he doesn’t like the facts, he changes the channel until Sean Hannity gives him a bedtime story.
If this guy is in charge of cybersecurity, expect him to launch an airstrike over a bad tweet.
FOREIGN POLICY BY A SCARED MAN IN A MIRROR
Miller’s worldview is binary: loyal or enemy. He doesn’t understand diplomacy, nuance, or restraint. He understands retribution. If Canada misgenders Ronald Reagan, expect trade sanctions.
His foreign policy strategy is basically a tantrum in a trench coat:
Pull out of alliances
Threaten war over minor insults
Use immigration as a bludgeon
Reward autocrats who flatter Trump
If you’re not a white nationalist dictator, you’re on thin ice. And even then, Miller might drone you if your haircut offends him.
A MAN WHO THINKS DUE PROCESS IS A DEEP STATE HOAX
Stephen Miller views the Constitution the way a termite views a front porch: delicious and in the way. He wants a government where executive orders override laws, ICE outranks Congress, and anyone with a hyphenated last name is a security threat.
His lawsuit against the Chief Justice? Real. His desire to purge federal agencies? Documented. His legal group, America First Legal, is actively trying to dismantle judicial review, gut civil liberties, and turn the DOJ into a MAGA sword.
This isn’t law and order. It’s law and obedience. And if you resist, he’ll try to have your citizenship revoked for not liking Kid Rock.
THE ENDGAME IS VENGEANCE, NOT SECURITY
Stephen Miller doesn’t want to defend America. He wants to remake it—in his own image: bitter, scared, and ash-white.
The empathy void. The policy ghoul. The guy who sneezes and three toddlers get deported. That’s who’s knocking on the door to national security power.
Letting him in isn’t a risk. It’s an extinction-level decision.
Yuck.
Iraq War veteran Mike Prysner disrupted and confronts George W. Bush.
Savage, and true.
Trump: “had the election not been rigged I would’ve been outta here” admitted on national television
Deranged, a moron, or both.
Those are the choices.
The Rachel Maddow Show 4/30/2025 |
here’s my 100 day report
Divine Angel said:
Ha!
Michael V said:
Divine Angel said:
Ha!
Trumppentinence.
Meanwhile in the third world
dv said:
Meanwhile in the third world
Let me just say, and I cannot stress this enough, but what the actual fuck?
Divine Angel said:
dv said:Meanwhile in the third world
Let me just say, and I cannot stress this enough, but what the actual fuck?
FWIW
RFK Jr: Everything You Didn’t Know About His Sh*tty Past.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0iCMldBYgw
dv said:
Meanwhile in the third world
WTF? He is loonier than Trump. It would have seemed impossible until this dick got a job in Trump’s gang of criminal nutcases.
roughbarked said:
dv said:
Meanwhile in the third world
WTF? He is loonier than Trump. It would have seemed impossible until this dick got a job in Trump’s gang of criminal nutcases.
kkk isn’t really looni
Heather Cox Richardson
4h ·
May 3, 2025 (Saturday)
I had thought to post a picture tonight and then realized that today was the 151st running of the Kentucky Derby. The event was launched in 1875 as horse racing—with its famous Black jockeys, who won more than half of the first 28 derbies—was gaining an audience in the U.S.
A horse-based event gives me the opportunity to repost a piece my friend Michael S. Green and I wrote together a number of years ago on Ten Famous American Horses. While it has no deep meaning, it does illustrate that there is history all around us, a theme you’ll hear more about from me soon. And it was totally fun to research, too. I spent hours watching Mr. Ed shows and reading entertainment theory, but the insightful detail—and the inclusion of Khartoum—is all Michael. This piece remains one of my favorite things I ever had a hand in writing.
So tonight, let’s take the night off from the craziness of today’s America and recall past eras when horses could make history.
1) Traveller
General Robert E. Lee rode Traveller (spelled with two Ls, in the British style) from February 1862 until the general’s death in 1870. Traveller was a grey American Saddlebred of 16 hands. He had great endurance for long marches, and was generally unflappable in battle, although he once broke both of General Lee’s hands when he shied at enemy movements. Lee brought Traveller with him when he assumed the presidency of Washington and Lee University. Traveller died of tetanus in 1871. He is buried on campus, where the safe ride program still uses his name.
2) Comanche
Comanche was attached to General Custer’s detachment of the 7th Cavalry when it engaged the Lakota in 1876 at the Battle of Little Bighorn. The troops in the detachment were all killed in the engagement, but soldiers found Comanche, badly wounded, two days later. They nursed him back to health, and he became the 7th Cavalry’s mascot. The commanding officer decreed that the horse would never again be ridden and that he would always be paraded, draped in black, in all military ceremonies involving the 7th Cavalry. When Comanche died of colic in 1891, he was given a full military funeral (the only other horse so honored was Black Jack, who served in more than a thousand military funerals in the 1950s and 1960s). Comanche’s taxidermied body is preserved in the Natural History Museum at the University Of Kansas.
3) Beautiful Jim Key
Beautiful Jim Key was a performing horse trained by formerly enslaved veterinarian Dr. William Key. Key demonstrated how Beautiful Jim could read, write, do math, tell time, spell, sort mail, and recite the Bible. Beautiful Jim performed from 1897 to 1906 and became a legend. An estimated ten million Americans saw him perform, and others collected his memorabilia—buttons, photos, and postcards—or danced the Beautiful Jim Key two-step. Dr. Key insisted that he had taught Beautiful Jim using only kindness, and Beautiful Jim Key’s popularity was important in preventing cruelty to animals in America, with more than 2 million children signing the Jim Key Band of Mercy, in which they pledged: “I promise always to be kind to animals.”
4) Man o’ War
Named for his owner, August Belmont, Jr., who was overseas in World War I, Man o’ War is widely regarded as the top Thoroughbred racehorse of all time. He won 20 of his 21 races and almost a quarter of a million dollars in the early twentieth century. His one loss—to Upset—came after a bad start. Man o’ War sired many of America’s famous racehorses, including Hard Tack, which in turn sired Seabiscuit, the small horse that came to symbolize hope during the Great Depression.
5) Trigger
Entertainer Roy Rogers chose the palomino Trigger from five rented horses to be his mount in a Western film in the 1930s, changing his name from Golden Cloud to Trigger because of his quick mind and feet. Rogers rode Trigger in his 1950s television series, making the horse a household name. When Trigger died, Rogers had his skin draped over a Styrofoam mold and displayed it in the Roy Rogers and Dale Evans Museum in California. He also had a 24-foot statue of Trigger made from steel and fiberglass. One other copy of that mold was also made: it is “Bucky the Bronco,” which rears above the Denver Broncos stadium south scoreboard.
6) Sergeant Reckless
American Marines in Korea bought a mare in October 1952 from a Korean stable boy who needed the money to buy an artificial leg for his sister, who had stepped on a land mine. The marines named her Reckless after their unit’s nickname, the Reckless Rifles. They made a pet of her and trained her to carry supplies and to evacuate wounded. She learned to travel supply routes without a guide: on one notable day she made 51 solo trips. Wounded twice, she was given a battlefield rank of corporal in 1953 and promoted to sergeant after the war, when she was also awarded two Purple Hearts and a Marine Corps Good Conduct Medal.
7) Mr. Ed
Mr. Ed was a talking palomino in a 1960s television show by the same name. At a time when Westerns dominated American television, Mr. Ed was the anti-Western, with the main human character a klutzy architect and the hero a horse that was fond of his meals and his comfortable life, and spoke with the voice of Allan “Rocky” Lane, who made dozens of “B” westerns. But the show was a five-year hit as it married the past to the future. Mr. Ed offered a gentle, homely wisdom that enabled him to straighten out the troubles of the humans around him. The startling special effects that made it appear that the horse was talking melded modern technology with the comforting traditional community depicted in the show.
😎 Black Jack
Black Jack, named for John J. “Black Jack” Pershing, was the riderless black horse in the funerals of John F. Kennedy, Herbert Hoover, Lyndon Johnson, and Douglas MacArthur, as well as more than a thousand other funerals with full military honors. A riderless horse, with boots reversed in the stirrups, symbolized a fallen leader, while Black Jack’s brands—a U.S. brand and an army serial number—recalled the army’s history. Black Jack himself was buried with full military honors; the only other horse honored with a military funeral was Comanche.’
9) Khartoum
Khartoum was the prize stud horse of Jack Woltz, the fictional Hollywood mogul in Mario Puzo’s The Godfather. In one of the film version’s most famous scenes, after Woltz refuses requests from Don Vito Corleone to cast singer Johnny Fontane in a movie, Woltz wakes up to find Khartoum’s head in bed with him…and agrees to use Fontane in the film. In the novel, Fontane wins the Academy Award for his performance. According to old Hollywood rumor, the story referred to real events. The rumor was that mobsters persuaded Columbia Pictures executive Harry Cohn to cast Frank Sinatra in From Here to Eternity. As Maggio, Sinatra revived his sagging film career and won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor.
10) Secretariat
Secretariat was an American Thoroughbred that in 1973 became the first U.S. Triple Crown winner in 25 years. His records in the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness Stakes, and the Belmont Stakes still stand. After Secretariat was stricken with a painful infection and euthanized in 1989, an autopsy revealed that he had an unusually big heart. Sportswriter Red Smith once asked his trainer how Secretariat had run one morning; Charlie Hatton replied, “The trees swayed.”
AI done right..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8vH7WpctFA
diddly-squat said:
AI done right..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8vH7WpctFA
Yes, done well.
School Board elections in Texas are ousting ultra-conservative members.
buffy might be interested in the Houston area changes.
A Marine combat veteran whose supporters were seeking a pardon from the governor of California was suddenly deported to El Salvador this week, according to advocates and immigration authorities.
Jose Segovia Benitez, 38, who served in the U.S. Marine Corps from 1999-2004 and was deployed to Iraq, was deported to El Salvador on Wednesday, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
—-
Carlos Luna, president of Green Card Veterans and a supporter of Segovia Benitez, told NBC News on Thursday that the deportation was sudden and “unexpected” after the veteran had been granted a brief stay while his attorneys filed additional paperwork on his behalf.
“From my understanding, neither Jose’s attorneys nor the ICE counsel that was assigned to his case in Adelanto were informed that he was being deported,” Luna said, referring to the Adelanto ICE processing center in California. Segovia Benitez was being held in Adelanto before his deportation process began last week.
His deportation was stayed for a few days, his attorneys said, and he was taken to a detention center in Arizona from where he was then ultimately deported this week.
“So, right now it is unclear who actually ordered his deportation and that’s something we’re trying to find out,” Luna said.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/marine-combat-veteran-who-served-iraq-deported-el-salvador-n1071521
dv said:
A Marine combat veteran whose supporters were seeking a pardon from the governor of California was suddenly deported to El Salvador this week, according to advocates and immigration authorities.Jose Segovia Benitez, 38, who served in the U.S. Marine Corps from 1999-2004 and was deployed to Iraq, was deported to El Salvador on Wednesday, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
What?
kii said:
What?
Only took 3 months to get to rationing pencils but there they are
The incident with the woman calling a child a n*gger is so horrendous. The fact that she has a go fund me to relocate after people got pissed with her is insane. That this now stands at $500K is sickening.
This piece of shit woman and the people behind the fundraising group…GiveSendGo.
captain_spalding said:
diddly-squat said:AI done right..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8vH7WpctFA
Yes, done well.
Speaking of which … and in a similar vein:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Osjg0HywtbE
kii said:
What?
The part which sticks out most to me is, “beautiful baby girl that’s 11 years old”.
Divine Angel said:
kii said:
What?
The part which sticks out most to me is, “beautiful baby girl that’s 11 years old”.
Yep. he’s obsessed with prepubescent girls. His comments about Tiffany when she was a baby. Always the paedophile.
kii said:
School Board elections in Texas are ousting ultra-conservative members.
buffy might be interested in the Houston area changes.
Thanks. Good to see some sanity.
What in the extreme fark ????
Good retort though.
You know what would really hurt him?
No one talking about him.
Divine Angel said:
You know what would really hurt him?No one talking about him.
Yep. All this insane shit is attention-seeking crap.
Spiny Norman said:
What in the extreme fark ????
Good retort though.
It’s all distraction to upset ‘the lefty lunatics”. Just ignore it.
Divine Angel said:
You know what would really hurt him?No one talking about him.
Yet here we are.
Bogsnorkler said:
Divine Angel said:
You know what would really hurt him?No one talking about him.
Yet here we are.
Talk about the serious damage he’s doing, but ignore the trump trading card porn-fest.
buffy said:
kii said:
School Board elections in Texas are ousting ultra-conservative members.
buffy might be interested in the Houston area changes.
Thanks. Good to see some sanity.
They are schools. How can they function without books?
kii said:
Bogsnorkler said:
Divine Angel said:
You know what would really hurt him?No one talking about him.
Yet here we are.
Talk about the serious damage he’s doing, but ignore the trump trading card porn-fest.
lololol 😂😂
Divine Angel said:
You know what would really hurt him?No one talking about him.
He’s in the position of president doing things that cannot just not be talked about. He’s making sure his name is on everybodys lips.
roughbarked said:
Divine Angel said:
You know what would really hurt him?No one talking about him.
He’s in the position of president doing things that cannot just not be talked about. He’s making sure his name is on everybodys lips.
bullshit nobody talks about Mussolini never
Bogsnorkler said:
kii said:
Bogsnorkler said:
Yet here we are.
Talk about the serious damage he’s doing, but ignore the trump trading card porn-fest.
lololol 😂😂
Support CHINA and other credible resistances against DPRNA indiscretions¡
SCIENCE said:
roughbarked said:
Divine Angel said:
You know what would really hurt him?No one talking about him.
He’s in the position of president doing things that cannot just not be talked about. He’s making sure his name is on everybodys lips.
bullshit nobody talks about Mussolini never
That’s because they strung him up. Found that he wasn’t well hung at all.
SCIENCE said:
Bogsnorkler said:
kii said:
Talk about the serious damage he’s doing, but ignore the trump trading card porn-fest.
lololol 😂😂
Support CHINA and other credible resistances against DPRNA indiscretions¡
We already do. Since they arev our biggest trading partners.
But maybe we should buy Chinese tractors and jet fighters and submarines. I bet they could furnish us with submarines yesterday rather than in 30 years time.
kii said:
The incident with the woman calling a child a n*gger is so horrendous. The fact that she has a go fund me to relocate after people got pissed with her is insane. That this now stands at $500K is sickening.
wait we thought they wouldn’t run again
Bogsnorkler said:
kii said:
Bogsnorkler said:Yet here we are.
Talk about the serious damage he’s doing, but ignore the trump trading card porn-fest.
lololol 😂😂
Idiot.
kii said:
What?
He thinks kids toys are the major imports from China. And that kids all have too many toys.
Michael V said:
kii said:
What?
He thinks kids toys are the major imports from China. And that kids all have too many toys.
Life in Trump’s USA. Even dolls and pencils will be rationed.
captain_spalding said:
Michael V said:
kii said:
What?
He thinks kids toys are the major imports from China. And that kids all have too many toys.
Life in Trump’s USA. Even dolls and pencils will be rationed.
well the only toy they need is a gun or 3 or 4 so yeah
kii said:
Bogsnorkler said:
kii said:Talk about the serious damage he’s doing, but ignore the trump trading card porn-fest.
lololol 😂😂
Idiot.
ahahaha
I used to dream of having five pencils.
Bogsnorkler said:
I used to dream of having five pencils.
Even five Staedtler ones, didn’t even have to be Derwents…
Trump’s plan for 100% tariffs on movies not filmed in America. I guess he’s trying to revive his acting career after a stellar performance in Home Alone 2.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-05-05/donald-trump-foreign-movies-tariff/105253020
As it happens, Owen Wilson is currently filming in and around Brisbane.
dv said:
Excellent notions.
Michael V said:
dv said:
Excellent notions.
not knowing things doesn’t make ignorance look weak, it makes the knowledge appear to be beneath the importance relevant to the emperor
I think my Houston sister might be feeling the vibe in the US a bit much. The most recent posts on her Facebook page.
buffy said:
I think my Houston sister might be feeling the vibe in the US a bit much. The most recent posts on her Facebook page.
Fair.
Heather Cox Richardson
5h ·
May 4, 2025 (Sunday)
In an interview aired today on NBC News’s “Meet the Press,” reporter Kristen Welker asked President Donald J. Trump if he agreed that every person in the United States is entitled to due process.
“I don’t know. I’m not, I’m not a lawyer. I don’t know,” Trump answered.
The U.S. Constitution guarantees that “no person shall…be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” Judges across the political spectrum agree that the amendment does not limit due process to citizens. In his decision in the 1993 case Reno v. Flores, conservative icon Justice Antonin Scalia wrote: “it is well established that the Fifth Amendment entitles aliens to due process of law in deportation proceedings.”
In his oath of office, Trump vowed to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
When Welker pointed out that the Constitution guarantees due process, Trump suggested he could ignore it because honoring due process was too slow. “I don’t know,” he said. “It seems—it might say that, but if you’re talking about that, then we’d have to have a million or 2 million or 3 million trials,” he said. “We have thousands of people that are—some murderers and some drug dealers and some of the worst people on Earth.”
“I was elected to get them the hell out of here, and the courts are holding me from doing it,” he added.
Welker tried again. “on’t you need to uphold the Constitution of the United States?”
Trump replied: “I don’t know. I have to respond by saying, again, I have brilliant lawyers that work for me, and they are going to obviously follow what the Supreme Court said.”
Conservative judge J. Michael Luttig explained to MSNBC’s Ali Velshi that far-right scholars have argued that the president does not have to follow the Supreme Court if he doesn’t agree with its decisons: he can interpret the Constitution for himself. Luttig called this “constitutional denialism.” He added that “he American people deserve to know if the President does not intend to uphold the Constitution of the United States or if he intends to uphold it only when he agrees with the Supreme Court.”
Mark Berman and Jeremy Roebuck of the Washington Post reported today that federal judges are becoming increasingly impatient with the incompetence of the Department of Justice lawyers who are defending more than 200 cases against the administration in court. Judges have accused DOJ lawyers of providing inadequate answers and flimsy evidence, defying court orders, and even behaving like toddlers.
Trump has said the justice system is a “rigged system” run by “radical left lunatics,” but former federal judge John E. Jones III, whom President George W. Bush appointed to the bench, agreed that DOJ lawyers have “lost a fair measure of their credibility.”
Authoritarian governments are based on the idea that some people are better than others. This translates into the idea that some people have special insight based only upon their superiority. They don’t have to listen to experts, who just muddle the clear picture the leader can see. When reality intrudes on that vision, the problem is not the ideology of the leader, it is obstruction by political opponents.
As Trump told Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer of The Atlantic about his presidencies: “The first time, I had two things to do—run the country and survive; I had all these crooked guys,” he said. “And the second time, I run the country and the world.”
Trump himself illustrated this ideology again in the interview with Kristen Welker when he explained his trade war. “Look,” he said. “We were losing hundreds of billions of dollars with China. Now we’re essentially not doing business with China. Therefore, we’re saving hundreds of billions of dollars. Very simple.”
It is not, in fact, that simple.
This impulse to downplay expertise and concentrate power in a strongman shows in Trump’s tapping of Secretary of State Marco Rubio as acting national security advisor, as well as acting head of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and acting administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Clearly, Trump doesn’t think he needs experts in at least three of those four senior posts. Perhaps it also shows there are few experts still willing to work in a Trump White House.
The results of this disdain for expertise shows these days most immediately in the policies of Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. As measles continues to spread across the U.S., a spokesperson for Health and Human Services said Friday that Kennedy will turn the country’s health agencies away from promoting vaccination, which is 97% effective in preventing the disease, and toward exploring new treatments for it, including vitamins.
“It’s not that there’s been a lack of studies,” Dr. Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, told Teddy Rosenbluth of the New York Times. Decades of research have not discovered dramatic treatments, while vaccinations have proven safe and effective at preventing the life-threatening disease.
Rosenbluth noted that “ublic health experts are baffled by Mr. Kennedy’s decision to hunt for new treatments, rather than endorse shots that have decades of safety and efficacy data.” This stance seems to contradict Kennedy’s longstanding focus on preventing disease.
Kennedy has also falsely claimed that the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine (MMR) contains “aborted fetus debris,” that parents should “do their own research,” and that he will institute testing for new vaccines with placebo-controlled trials, a practice medical experts warn could be unethical as subjects believe they are protected from disease when they are not.
Infectious disease expert Paul Offit told Jessica Glenza of The Guardian: “It’s his goal to even further lessen trust in vaccines and make it onerous enough for manufacturers that they will abandon it.”
At the end of March, Kennedy also vowed to study possible links between vaccines and autism, although repeated scholarly studies have shown no link. Kennedy has tapped David Geier, who does not have a medical degree and was disciplined in Maryland for practicing medicine without a license, to perform the study.
On Thursday, former New York Times global health reporter Donald G. McNeil Jr. noted that both Geier and Kennedy have made significant money thanks to their anti-vax stands as they monetize alleged treatments and sue pharmaceutical companies.
In Ars Technica on April 30, microbiologist and senior health reporter Beth Mole explored another angle to understand Kennedy’s policies. She noted that Kennedy, who is neither a doctor nor a public health expert, does not believe in the foundational principle of modern medicine: germ theory.
In a 2021 book, Kennedy argued the idea that microscopic viruses, bacteria, parasites, and fungi cause disease serves the pharmaceutical industry and the healthcare industry that grew around it by “emphasiz targeting particular germs with specific drugs rather than fortifying the immune system through healthy living, clean water, and good nutrition.” He accused those supporting this system, including Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who was a proponent of the Covid vaccine, of misleading the American public.
While Kennedy appears to believe germs exist, he also claims to believe in the older theory of disease called “miasma theory,” although as Mole points out, he misunderstands that theory—the idea that diseases are caused by poisonous vapors—and really appears to believe in another old idea: “terrain theory.” Terrain theory maintains that diseases are signs that the internal “terrain” of the body is out of whack.
This would explain Kennedy’s assertion—refuted by doctors—that the children who died of measles were malnourished. As medical blogger Kristen Panthagani, MD/PhD, explains: Kennedy’s way of thinking is “the belief that infections don’t pose a risk to healthy people who have optimized their immune system.”
While underlying medical conditions certainly affect people’s health, Mole notes that “the evidence against terrain theory is obvious and all around us.” But if you think germs are less important than overall health, things like the pasteurization of milk to kill E. coli, salmonella, and Listeria bacteria—which Kennedy opposes—are unnecessary.
In 1876, German microbiologist Robert Koch discovered that the cause of anthrax was a bacterium. Germ theory challenged established practices In the U.S., where doctors in the 1860s during the Civil War believed the best demonstration of their skill was their bloody aprons and instruments, instruments they kept in a velvet-lined case.
In 1881 the doctor overseeing President James Garfield’s recovery from a gunshot wound repeatedly probed the president’s wound with dirty instruments and his fingers, prompting assassin Charles Guiteau to plead not guilty of the murder by claiming, “The doctors killed Garfield, I just shot him.”
But just four years later, germ theory was so widely accepted that the U.S. Army required medical officers to inspect their posts every month and report the results to the administration, and by 1886, disease rates were dropping. By 1889, the U.S. Army had written manuals for sanitary field hospitals, and the need to combat germs was so commonplace medical officers rarely mentioned it.
And now, in 2025, the top health official in the United States, a man without degrees in either medicine or public health, appears to be rejecting germ theory and reshaping the nation’s medical system around his own dedication to a theory that was outdated well over a century ago.
sarahs mum said:
Heather Cox Richardson
5h ·
May 4, 2025 (Sunday)In an interview aired today on NBC News’s “Meet the Press,” reporter Kristen Welker asked President Donald J. Trump if he agreed that every person in the United States is entitled to due process.
“I don’t know. I’m not, I’m not a lawyer. I don’t know,” Trump answered.———-
The results of this disdain for expertise shows these days most immediately in the policies of Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. As measles continues to spread across the U.S., a spokesperson for Health and Human Services said Friday that Kennedy will turn the country’s health agencies away from promoting vaccination, which is 97% effective in preventing the disease, and toward exploring new treatments for it, including vitamins.
“It’s not that there’s been a lack of studies,” Dr. Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, told Teddy Rosenbluth of the New York Times. Decades of research have not discovered dramatic treatments, while vaccinations have proven safe and effective at preventing the life-threatening disease.
Rosenbluth noted that “ublic health experts are baffled by Mr. Kennedy’s decision to hunt for new treatments, rather than endorse shots that have decades of safety and efficacy data.” This stance seems to contradict Kennedy’s longstanding focus on preventing disease.
Kennedy has also falsely claimed that the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine (MMR) contains “aborted fetus debris,” that parents should “do their own research,” and that he will institute testing for new vaccines with placebo-controlled trials, a practice medical experts warn could be unethical as subjects believe they are protected from disease when they are not.
Infectious disease expert Paul Offit told Jessica Glenza of The Guardian: “It’s his goal to even further lessen trust in vaccines and make it onerous enough for manufacturers that they will abandon it.”
—————-
Thanks sm. I reckon the rest of the world could probably start promoting vaccination tourism soon.
buffy said:
sarahs mum said:
Heather Cox Richardson
5h ·
May 4, 2025 (Sunday)In an interview aired today on NBC News’s “Meet the Press,” reporter Kristen Welker asked President Donald J. Trump if he agreed that every person in the United States is entitled to due process.
“I don’t know. I’m not, I’m not a lawyer. I don’t know,” Trump answered.———-
The results of this disdain for expertise shows these days most immediately in the policies of Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. As measles continues to spread across the U.S., a spokesperson for Health and Human Services said Friday that Kennedy will turn the country’s health agencies away from promoting vaccination, which is 97% effective in preventing the disease, and toward exploring new treatments for it, including vitamins.
“It’s not that there’s been a lack of studies,” Dr. Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, told Teddy Rosenbluth of the New York Times. Decades of research have not discovered dramatic treatments, while vaccinations have proven safe and effective at preventing the life-threatening disease.
Rosenbluth noted that “ublic health experts are baffled by Mr. Kennedy’s decision to hunt for new treatments, rather than endorse shots that have decades of safety and efficacy data.” This stance seems to contradict Kennedy’s longstanding focus on preventing disease.
Kennedy has also falsely claimed that the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine (MMR) contains “aborted fetus debris,” that parents should “do their own research,” and that he will institute testing for new vaccines with placebo-controlled trials, a practice medical experts warn could be unethical as subjects believe they are protected from disease when they are not.
Infectious disease expert Paul Offit told Jessica Glenza of The Guardian: “It’s his goal to even further lessen trust in vaccines and make it onerous enough for manufacturers that they will abandon it.”
—————-
Thanks sm. I reckon the rest of the world could probably start promoting vaccination tourism soon.
Hmm, messed that up slightly. But you get my drift.
buffy said:
buffy said:
sarahs mum said:
Heather Cox Richardson
5h ·
May 4, 2025 (Sunday)In an interview aired today on NBC News’s “Meet the Press,” reporter Kristen Welker asked President Donald J. Trump if he agreed that every person in the United States is entitled to due process.
“I don’t know. I’m not, I’m not a lawyer. I don’t know,” Trump answered.———-
The results of this disdain for expertise shows these days most immediately in the policies of Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. As measles continues to spread across the U.S., a spokesperson for Health and Human Services said Friday that Kennedy will turn the country’s health agencies away from promoting vaccination, which is 97% effective in preventing the disease, and toward exploring new treatments for it, including vitamins.
“It’s not that there’s been a lack of studies,” Dr. Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, told Teddy Rosenbluth of the New York Times. Decades of research have not discovered dramatic treatments, while vaccinations have proven safe and effective at preventing the life-threatening disease.
Rosenbluth noted that “ublic health experts are baffled by Mr. Kennedy’s decision to hunt for new treatments, rather than endorse shots that have decades of safety and efficacy data.” This stance seems to contradict Kennedy’s longstanding focus on preventing disease.
Kennedy has also falsely claimed that the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine (MMR) contains “aborted fetus debris,” that parents should “do their own research,” and that he will institute testing for new vaccines with placebo-controlled trials, a practice medical experts warn could be unethical as subjects believe they are protected from disease when they are not.
Infectious disease expert Paul Offit told Jessica Glenza of The Guardian: “It’s his goal to even further lessen trust in vaccines and make it onerous enough for manufacturers that they will abandon it.”
—————-
Thanks sm. I reckon the rest of the world could probably start promoting vaccination tourism soon.
Hmm, messed that up slightly. But you get my drift.
Did get your drift
Is it too late to put that worm back in Booby’s brain?
captain_spalding said:
Is it too late to put that worm back in Booby’s brain?
The whole republican thing should be put back in the box it came in and then burned at some incredibly high temperature in a furnace.
roughbarked said:
captain_spalding said:
Is it too late to put that worm back in Booby’s brain?
The whole republican thing should be put back in the box it came in and then burned at some incredibly high temperature in a furnace.
oh calm down they’ve got this we
The next time you hear RFK Jr talk about how he wants to “make America healthy” and end the chronic illness epidemic … remember that he just chose to cut the entire NIOSH department. A group of people whose sole purpose is to help prevent sickness, death and disability.
mean, everyone knows that
A chronic condition (also known as chronic disease or chronic illness) is a health condition or disease that is persistent or otherwise long-lasting in its effects or a disease that comes with time. The term chronic is often applied when the course of the disease lasts for more than three months.
so it’s pretty easy to “end the chronic illness epidemic”, just make sure they don’t survive more than 3 months duh
LOL
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/may/04/maga-soft-eugenics
too predictable
Maga’s era of ‘soft eugenics’: let the weak get sick, help the clever breed
Derek Beres
At the heart of all Trump administration policies is ‘soft eugenics’ thinking – the idea that if you take away life-saving services, then only the strong will survive
we mean it’s obvious and much simpler than that isn’t it
just get ahead and then kill everyone behind you
rinse and repeat
SCIENCE said:
LOL
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/may/04/maga-soft-eugenics
too predictable
Maga’s era of ‘soft eugenics’: let the weak get sick, help the clever breed
Derek Beres
At the heart of all Trump administration policies is ‘soft eugenics’ thinking – the idea that if you take away life-saving services, then only the strong will survivewe mean it’s obvious and much simpler than that isn’t it
just get ahead and then kill everyone behind you
rinse and repeat
sorry maybe not obvious enough what aspect we emphasise
just use unfair means to get ahead
then allow a fair process to kill everyone behind
then wash your hands say it wasn’t us
yes yes no shit yes yes
SCIENCE said:
LOL
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/may/04/maga-soft-eugenics
too predictable
Maga’s era of ‘soft eugenics’: let the weak get sick, help the clever breed
Derek Beres
At the heart of all Trump administration policies is ‘soft eugenics’ thinking – the idea that if you take away life-saving services, then only the strong will survivewe mean it’s obvious and much simpler than that isn’t it
just get ahead and then kill everyone behind you
rinse and repeat
I’ve been saying this since 2016. Part of the trauma I feel is watching the disabled, the older women, the women with daughters, the people who served in the armed services, the Christians who just rolled over and accepted this horror. How many ways could he show them that he doesn’t give a shit about your lives?
captain_spalding said:
https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3lodzfa75wf2r
As Jeff Tiedrich put it:
Because she didn’t want to look like she was as big a baby as Trump?
roughbarked said:
captain_spalding said:
https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3lodzfa75wf2r
As Jeff Tiedrich put it:
Because she didn’t want to look like she was as big a baby as Trump?
She would have been a national hero.
A world-wide hero.
captain_spalding said:
A world-wide hero.
‘twould be a bigger hero if she kicked the chair from under him on the way out.
roughbarked said:
captain_spalding said:
A world-wide hero.
‘twould be a bigger hero if she kicked the chair from under him on the way out.
https://www.threads.com/@therealgxldsociety/post/DJR3YnyJVPd?xmt=AQGzRMgQ8LckidfbM_nu8qqx7AMrWNUrrxBzr6UYnWLWSQ
To heck with RP but he’s right here.
dv said:
To heck with RP but he’s right here.
ah well they call everyone else retarded but not at all a bit late eh
SCIENCE said:
dv said:
To heck with RP but he’s right here.
ah well they call everyone else retarded but not at all a bit late eh
By the midterms they’ll all be looking to keep their jobs.
dv said:
https://www.threads.com/@therealgxldsociety/post/DJR3YnyJVPd?xmt=AQGzRMgQ8LckidfbM_nu8qqx7AMrWNUrrxBzr6UYnWLWSQTo heck with RP but he’s right here.
He is correct, yes.
Heather Cox Richardson
4m ·
May 5, 2025 (Monday)
On his social media feed yesterday evening, President Donald J. Trump announced he was “directing the Bureau of Prisons, together with the Department of Justice, FBI, and Homeland Security, to reopen a substantially enlarged and rebuilt ALCATRAZ, to house America’s most ruthless and violent Offenders…. The reopening of ALCATRAZ will serve as a symbol of Law, Order, and JUSTICE. We will, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
No one is reopening the island of Alcatraz as a federal prison. Officials closed it in 1963, after 29 years of operation, because it was too expensive to operate: more than three times as expensive as any other federal prison. Since then, it has become one of the most popular sites of the National Park Service, located as it is in San Francisco Bay, easily accessible by ferry.
It feels rather as if Trump is throwing any strong words he can at the wall to distract from a series of news stories that are not going his way.
One of those stories is that Trump’s popularity is falling in rural areas, which make up his base. That popularity is unlikely to rebound quickly, as rural areas are being hardest hit by the administration’s cuts. It’s possible Trump hopes that throwing the word “Alcatraz” in all caps at those voters will remind them that he is supposed to be the president who will crack down on the immigrants he insists are dangerous criminals.
But seven journalists from the Washington Post reported yesterday that many of the men rendered from the U.S. to El Salvador were in the U.S. legally and were complying with U.S. immigration rules. Furthermore, although the Trump administration said it had to send the men to El Salvador because Venezuela would not take them back, the journalists reported that Venezuela refused the transfer only after Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act. Trump’s proclamation said that property belonging to those he deems enemies is subject to “seizure and forfeiture,” and Venezuela was not willing to send planes under those circumstances.
Since then, the Washington Post journalists report, Venezuela has accepted at least two deportation flights a week.
When asked about the initial flights to El Salvador, the White House fell back on the argument that rendering the migrants to El Salvador was Trump’s prerogative under the president’s power to manage foreign affairs, a prerogative the Supreme Court protected in its 2024 Donald J. Trump v. United States decision saying that the president cannot be prosecuted for crimes committed as part of his official acts. White House spokesperson Anna Kelly told the Washington Post journalists the administration would not “detail counterterrorism operations and foreign policy negotiations with foreign countries for the press.”
Also commanding attention these days is the corruption in the Trump administration, centering around Trump and the Trump family. In The Times yesterday, Dominic Lawson recalled that Trump’s former fixer, Michael Cohen, wrote that Trump admired Russian president Vladimir Putin primarily for his ability “to take over an entire nation and run it like it was his personal company—like the Trump Organisation, in fact.”
Lawson observed that Trump was not able fully to realize that dream in his first term, but “now he is indeed running the U.S. government as an extended arm of the Trump Organisation.”
There is the easy-to-understand corruption, like Trump’s exempting the products of his big-oil donors from tariffs, slashing the division of the Internal Revenue Service that audits high-earning individuals and corporations, or offering businessmen a one-on-one meeting with him at Mar-a-Lago for $5 million, or a group dinner for $1 million.
Then there is the more complicated corruption involving business deals with foreign governments. The Constitution spells out that “no person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept…any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.” An emolument is a profit, fee, salary, or advantage.
On January 10, 2025, shortly before the start of his second term, Judd Legum of Popular Information explains today, Trump simply released an “ethics agreement” that prohibited the Trump Organization from making deals with foreign governments. Already, Legum reports, the Trump Organization has violated that agreement. Last Thursday it cut a deal with Qatari Diar, a company established by Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund in 2005 to “coordinate the country’s real estate development priorities.” Together with Saudi Arabian company Dar Global, which has close ties to the Saudi government, the Qatari company will build a $5.5 billion Trump International Golf Club in Qatar.
And then there is the massive corruption of the Trump family’s involvement in cryptocurrency. As Lawson points out, the Trumps control World Liberty Financial, which has its own cryptocurrency, $WLFI. Foreign nationals who are barred from donations to American political campaigns have invested in that coin. One of them is China-born billionaire Justin Sun, who was under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission when Trump took office, bought $75 million in the coins, and then successfully lobbied for a pause in the SEC case to negotiate a settlement.
World Liberty Financial also produces a different cryptocurrency: USD1, which is known as a “stablecoin” because it is pegged to the dollar. Last Thursday, May 1, a founder of World Liberty Financial announced that an investment firm backed by the government of the United Arab Emirates would use USD1 to complete a $2 billion deal with Binance.
Binance is the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange. It is monitored by the U.S. government because in 2023 it admitted to money laundering. Binance’s founder, Changpeng Zhao, has asked Trump for a presidential pardon.
As David Yaffe-Bellany reported in the New York Times, investors deposit money in stablecoins because their value is pegged to a state-backed currency and thus fluctuates very little. The stablecoin owner makes money by using that deposit to invest for returns that the stablecoin owner then keeps. Yaffe-Bellany notes that although the details of the UAE–World Liberty Financial deal are opaque, “it appears that…World Liberty now has $2 billion in deposits to invest. Those funds alone could generate tens of millions of dollars a year in revenue for the Trump family and its partners at World Liberty.”
Yaffe-Bellany also notes that the partnership signals to investors around the world that working with the Trump-associated company can pay off.
The $WLFI and USD1 coins are separate from the $TRUMP memecoin that the president launched on January 17, 2025, just before he took office, and which the Financial Times estimates had netted about $350 million by early March. By late April it had fallen 88% from its high. Trump then offered the top 220 holders of the coin an “intimate private dinner” with the president, bumping up sales and making an estimated $900,000 in trading fees.
Trump is also getting hammered on his tariffs, and his frustration is showing. The president appears to like monkeying with tariffs because, unless Republicans take back Congress’s power to manage tariffs, he can just make a decree and watch the world jump. But the economic effects have shocked Americans. That shock is encapsulated in the news beginning to sink in that toys are highly dependent on trade with China: 80% of the toys sold in the U.S. come from there. Ninety-six percent of U.S. toy manufacturers are small businesses, highly dependent on supply chains from other countries.
Christmas orders should already be underway, but because of the tariffs, they are not. Trump has taken to arguing that girls need fewer dolls. Representative David Joyce (R-OH) acknowledged this morning on CNN that Christmas trade is already slowing down, but added: “I think American people will understand that because American people understand shared sacrifice.”
Americans who didn’t realize they were going to be asked to sacrifice—Trump promised that foreign countries would pay for tariffs, after all—have been pushing back against the tariffs. Apparently angry at being asked how trade negotiations are going, Trump last night told reporters on Air Force One: “At the end of this, I’ll set my own deals because I set the deal. They don’t set the deal. I set the deal. They’ve been ripping us off for years. I set the deal…. I’m going to be setting the deal. I’ll be setting the tariff.”
Last night, in a social media post, Trump announced that foreign-made films are a national security threat and said he would institute “a 100% Tariff on any and all Movies coming into our Country that are produced in Foreign Lands.” Today the White House walked the announcement back.
And then there is the Signal scandal, which got even worse yesterday when Joseph Cox and Micah Lee of 404 Media reported that a hacker was able to breach the TeleMessage app administration officials have been using in about 15–20 minutes. TeleMessage is a clone of Signal that has the additional ability to archive messages. The hacker retrieved messages, usernames and passwords, and data related to Customs and Border Protection and banking institutions. The hacker did not retrieve all it was possible to see, but could have done so, making the point that the system is not secure. This afternoon the company that owns TeleMessage announced it was suspending service.
Today, likely reacting to voter sentiment and looking to 2028, Georgia governor Brian Kemp announced he would not challenge Democratic senator Jon Ossoff for Ossoff’s seat in 2026.
Also today, at a meeting to announce that Washington, D.C., will host the 2027 National Football League draft, Trump confirmed that he suddenly decided to announce he was reopening Alcatraz because the word sounded strong. “It represents something very strong, very powerful in terms of law and order. Our country needs law and order. Alcatraz is uh, I would say the ultimate, right? Alcatraz. Sing Sing and Alcatraz, the movies…. Nobody’s ever escaped from Alcatraz and just represented something, uh, strong having to do with law and order. We need law and order in this country. And so we’re going to look at it. Some of the people up here are going to be working very hard on that, and, uh, we had a little conversation. I think it’s gonna be very interesting. We’ll see if we can bring it back. In large form, add a lot. But I think it represents something. Right now, it’s a big hulk that’s sitting there rusting and rotting, uh, very, uh, you look at it, it’s sort of, you saw that picture that was put out. It’s sort of amazing, but it sort of represents something that’s both horrible and beautiful and strong and miserable, weak. And it’s got a lot of it’s got a lot of qualities that are interesting. And I think they make a point.”
Can’t see Snake Plissken rescuing Trump when Air force one crashes on Alcatraz and all those dangerous criminals kidnap him.
sarahs mum said:
Heather Cox Richardson
4m ·
May 5, 2025 (Monday)It feels rather as if Trump is throwing any strong words he can at the wall to distract from a series of news stories that are not going his way.
… “We need law and order in this country. And so we’re going to look at it. Some of the people up here are going to be working very hard on that, and, uh, we had a little conversation. I think it’s gonna be very interesting. We’ll see if we can bring it back. In large form, add a lot. But I think it represents something. Right now, it’s a big hulk that’s sitting there rusting and rotting, uh, very, uh, you look at it, it’s sort of, you saw that picture that was put out. It’s sort of amazing, but it sort of represents something that’s both horrible and beautiful and strong and miserable, weak. And it’s got a lot of it’s got a lot of qualities that are interesting. And I think they make a point.”
Thanks.
roughbarked said:
sarahs mum said:
Heather Cox Richardson
4m ·
May 5, 2025 (Monday)It feels rather as if Trump is throwing any strong words he can at the wall to distract from a series of news stories that are not going his way.
… “We need law and order in this country. And so we’re going to look at it. Some of the people up here are going to be working very hard on that, and, uh, we had a little conversation. I think it’s gonna be very interesting. We’ll see if we can bring it back. In large form, add a lot. But I think it represents something. Right now, it’s a big hulk that’s sitting there rusting and rotting, uh, very, uh, you look at it, it’s sort of, you saw that picture that was put out. It’s sort of amazing, but it sort of represents something that’s both horrible and beautiful and strong and miserable, weak. And it’s got a lot of it’s got a lot of qualities that are interesting. And I think they make a point.”
dv said:
That’s appeared here beforehand.
roughbarked said:
dv said:
That’s appeared here beforehand.
Ah well what would you prefer they write, SNHS ¿
SCIENCE said:
roughbarked said:
dv said:
That’s appeared here beforehand.
Ah well what would you prefer they write, SNHS ¿
Romani ite domum…
dv said:
Shouldn’t HAVE stayed. Get ya grammar right, darling.
Woodie said:
dv said:
Shouldn’t HAVE stayed. Get ya grammar right, darling.
I’ll accept ““should’ve” (should have) but will not accept “should of”.
Woodie said:
Woodie said:
dv said:
Shouldn’t HAVE stayed. Get ya grammar right, darling.
I’ll accept ““should’ve” (should have) but will not accept “should of”.
Agree.
Woodie said:
Woodie said:
dv said:
Shouldn’t HAVE stayed. Get ya grammar right, darling.
I’ll accept ““should’ve” (should have) but will not accept “should of”.
Tamb said:
Woodie said:
Woodie said:Shouldn’t HAVE stayed. Get ya grammar right, darling.
I’ll accept ““should’ve” (should have) but will not accept “should of”.
How about “shooda”
….and cooda and wooda.
Tamb said:
Woodie said:
Woodie said:Shouldn’t HAVE stayed. Get ya grammar right, darling.
I’ll accept ““should’ve” (should have) but will not accept “should of”.
How about “shooda”
As Aussie as owareyagoin’ mate? Wannacuppa?
Woodie said:
Tamb said:
Woodie said:I’ll accept ““should’ve” (should have) but will not accept “should of”.
How about “shooda”….and cooda and wooda.
roughbarked said:
Tamb said:
Woodie said:I’ll accept ““should’ve” (should have) but will not accept “should of”.
How about “shooda”As Aussie as owareyagoin’ mate? Wannacuppa?
This tariff on films not made in Australia…surely that hurts the American industry quite hard, as they keep coming here to make their films and would therefore be tariffed on those films?
Ah well I’m not a forum completist
dv said:
What would be the appeal of Texas do you reckon
Woodie said:
Woodie said:
dv said:
Shouldn’t HAVE stayed. Get ya grammar right, darling.
I’ll accept ““should’ve” (should have) but will not accept “should of”.
You two are clashing
buffy said:
This tariff on films not made in Australia…surely that hurts the American industry quite hard, as they keep coming here to make their films and would therefore be tariffed on those films?
Yes. Australia is a good place to film (at the moment) because they get tax breaks and cheaper production costs. If those savings are offset by tariffs, it’s not a good deal.
Hollywood is renown for “creative accounting” so I presume they could, if they want to, find a suitable workaround.
Divine Angel said:
buffy said:
This tariff on films not made in Australia…surely that hurts the American industry quite hard, as they keep coming here to make their films and would therefore be tariffed on those films?
Yes. Australia is a good place to film (at the moment) because they get tax breaks and cheaper production costs. If those savings are offset by tariffs, it’s not a good deal.
Hollywood is renown for “creative accounting” so I presume they could, if they want to, find a suitable workaround.
Isn’t the tariff on films not made in America?
btm said:
Divine Angel said:
buffy said:
This tariff on films not made in Australia…surely that hurts the American industry quite hard, as they keep coming here to make their films and would therefore be tariffed on those films?
Yes. Australia is a good place to film (at the moment) because they get tax breaks and cheaper production costs. If those savings are offset by tariffs, it’s not a good deal.
Hollywood is renown for “creative accounting” so I presume they could, if they want to, find a suitable workaround.
Isn’t the tariff on films not made in America?
I thought buffy made a typo
Woodie said:
Woodie said:
dv said:
Shouldn’t HAVE stayed. Get ya grammar right, darling.
I’ll accept ““should’ve” (should have) but will not accept “should of”.
There, there, woodie.
She’s American. Doesn’t know any better. Thinks that the implement is an ‘ax’.
btm said:
Divine Angel said:
buffy said:
This tariff on films not made in Australia…surely that hurts the American industry quite hard, as they keep coming here to make their films and would therefore be tariffed on those films?
Yes. Australia is a good place to film (at the moment) because they get tax breaks and cheaper production costs. If those savings are offset by tariffs, it’s not a good deal.
Hollywood is renown for “creative accounting” so I presume they could, if they want to, find a suitable workaround.
Isn’t the tariff on films not made in America?
Sorry, I didn’t proof read properly…
Divine Angel said:
buffy said:
This tariff on films not made in Australia…surely that hurts the American industry quite hard, as they keep coming here to make their films and would therefore be tariffed on those films?
Yes. Australia is a good place to film (at the moment) because they get tax breaks and cheaper production costs. If those savings are offset by tariffs, it’s not a good deal.
Hollywood is renown for “creative accounting” so I presume they could, if they want to, find a suitable workaround.
Twin 1 works in film production and is currently working on a big budget studio production and was in outrage mode this morning after the announcement. Australia is great place to make movies for the reason you note above, but we also have a (comparatively) lower cost, yet highly skilled workforce.
diddly-squat said:
Divine Angel said:
buffy said:
This tariff on films not made in Australia…surely that hurts the American industry quite hard, as they keep coming here to make their films and would therefore be tariffed on those films?
Yes. Australia is a good place to film (at the moment) because they get tax breaks and cheaper production costs. If those savings are offset by tariffs, it’s not a good deal.
Hollywood is renown for “creative accounting” so I presume they could, if they want to, find a suitable workaround.
Twin 1 works in film production and is currently working on a big budget studio production and was in outrage mode this morning after the announcement. Australia is great place to make movies for the reason you note above, but we also have a (comparatively) lower cost, yet highly skilled workforce.
The Owen Wilson movie?
Divine Angel said:
diddly-squat said:
Divine Angel said:Yes. Australia is a good place to film (at the moment) because they get tax breaks and cheaper production costs. If those savings are offset by tariffs, it’s not a good deal.
Hollywood is renown for “creative accounting” so I presume they could, if they want to, find a suitable workaround.
Twin 1 works in film production and is currently working on a big budget studio production and was in outrage mode this morning after the announcement. Australia is great place to make movies for the reason you note above, but we also have a (comparatively) lower cost, yet highly skilled workforce.
The Owen Wilson movie?
no.. he is working on Kong v Godzilla 2
diddly-squat said:
Twin 1 works in film production and is currently working on a big budget studio production and was in outrage mode this morning after the announcement. Australia is great place to make movies for the reason you note above, but we also have a (comparatively) lower cost, yet highly skilled workforce.
I have heard that ‘overseas’ productions like to have Australian crews, because Australians are more adaptable, co-operative, and innovative than similar crews in other places.
captain_spalding said:
diddly-squat said:
Twin 1 works in film production and is currently working on a big budget studio production and was in outrage mode this morning after the announcement. Australia is great place to make movies for the reason you note above, but we also have a (comparatively) lower cost, yet highly skilled workforce.
I have heard that ‘overseas’ productions like to have Australian crews, because Australians are more adaptable, co-operative, and innovative than similar crews in other places.
shrug who got the soccer team out, some pedo guy Australian with a good team or some totally not fascist South African cum American billionaire and his mini submarine
We all need to boycott American films and TV shows; and also be unreasonably rude to big name American actors.
That’ll learn ‘em.
party_pants said:
We all need to boycott American films and TV shows; and also be unreasonably rude to big name American actors.
That’ll learn ‘em.
we find them too full of pretentious nonsense already to be honest
https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/05/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-achieves-improved-safety-and-security-of-biological-research/
comment from
For the Greater Glory of Science
There are many things wrong with this terrible antiscience order but three that stand out showing that whoever actually wrote it has never paid attention in biology classes are the prohibition on “research using infectious pathogens and toxins in the United States that may pose a danger to American citizens”, “Researchers have not acknowledged the legitimate potential for societal harms that this kind of research poses”, and “This Order protects Americans from dangerous gain-of-function research that manipulates viruses and other biological agents and toxins”.
We will do a breakdown of each in the comments but the short version is as follows:
1) This blocks all medical research into infectious disease. This especially blocks research into the nastier diseases like anthrax or ebola which is very important for national security purposes and public health.
2) Researchers have entire sections of their papers dedicated to the risk of the research and even have papers specifically on the potential risks of research. The original horsepox study using gain of function which caused a panic in the US noted the dangers if someone were to use the research for harm.
3) Doing this to diseases has been standard molecular biology since at least the 1970s. That is over 50 years. Adding genes for antiobitic resistance to bacteria as a selection method is a standard technique that would not be banned. This is done to make sure you are only growing the bacteria you want and to make sure it has the gene you want. This is used for biomanufacturing of vital drugs such as insulin.
Bogsnorkler said:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/05/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-achieves-improved-safety-and-security-of-biological-research/comment from
For the Greater Glory of Science
There are many things wrong with this terrible antiscience order but three that stand out showing that whoever actually wrote it has never paid attention in biology classes are the prohibition on “research using infectious pathogens and toxins in the United States that may pose a danger to American citizens”, “Researchers have not acknowledged the legitimate potential for societal harms that this kind of research poses”, and “This Order protects Americans from dangerous gain-of-function research that manipulates viruses and other biological agents and toxins”.
We will do a breakdown of each in the comments but the short version is as follows:
1) This blocks all medical research into infectious disease. This especially blocks research into the nastier diseases like anthrax or ebola which is very important for national security purposes and public health.
2) Researchers have entire sections of their papers dedicated to the risk of the research and even have papers specifically on the potential risks of research. The original horsepox study using gain of function which caused a panic in the US noted the dangers if someone were to use the research for harm.
3) Doing this to diseases has been standard molecular biology since at least the 1970s. That is over 50 years. Adding genes for antiobitic resistance to bacteria as a selection method is a standard technique that would not be banned. This is done to make sure you are only growing the bacteria you want and to make sure it has the gene you want. This is used for biomanufacturing of vital drugs such as insulin.
Head physician Trump now?
Bogsnorkler said:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/05/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-achieves-improved-safety-and-security-of-biological-research/comment from
For the Greater Glory of Science
There are many things wrong with this terrible antiscience order but three that stand out showing that whoever actually wrote it has never paid attention in biology classes are the prohibition on “research using infectious pathogens and toxins in the United States that may pose a danger to American citizens”, “Researchers have not acknowledged the legitimate potential for societal harms that this kind of research poses”, and “This Order protects Americans from dangerous gain-of-function research that manipulates viruses and other biological agents and toxins”.
We will do a breakdown of each in the comments but the short version is as follows:
1) This blocks all medical research into infectious disease. This especially blocks research into the nastier diseases like anthrax or ebola which is very important for national security purposes and public health.
2) Researchers have entire sections of their papers dedicated to the risk of the research and even have papers specifically on the potential risks of research. The original horsepox study using gain of function which caused a panic in the US noted the dangers if someone were to use the research for harm.
3) Doing this to diseases has been standard molecular biology since at least the 1970s. That is over 50 years. Adding genes for antiobitic resistance to bacteria as a selection method is a standard technique that would not be banned. This is done to make sure you are only growing the bacteria you want and to make sure it has the gene you want. This is used for biomanufacturing of vital drugs such as insulin.
For the Greater Glory of Science
For the slightly longer versions because some admins have done some fo this work for years.
Banning the use of potentially harmful pathogens means banning all pathogens. There is no such thing as a harmless disease. E.coli, one of the staples of modern biotechnology because it is so easy to grow and manipulate, is a potenially harmful pathogen. So much so that one of its versions, one producing shiga toxin, has caused many deaths on top of being really uncomfortable on the bowels. Banning the use of it in labs basically sets biological research of all kinds back almost a century at best. E.coli is also one fo the most common bacteria used in manufacturing because of how easy it is to maintain and have produce absurd ammounts of biological materials like pharmaceuticals. One of the more famous versions of it produces insulin and was used to move away from pig insulin. A list of many of the drugs, from cancer to diabetes medications, made by E.coli.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/List-of-biopharmaceuticals-produced-in-E-coli_tbl2_281027153
Banning of research on political purity grounds and out of fear is a common antiscience tactic. One that is painfully obvious and puts the US at many disadvantages. To name a few (nonexhaustive) areas this research is vital to are the following: biomanufacturing, public health, military medicine and countering biological weapons, anticipating of new disease outbreaks, better material science, creation of new drugs or more tailored drugs, civil planning, and the fuel industry. Biology touches virtually every aspect of our lives and this is why China has stated it is such a vital thing to encorporate into every aspect of their society. The US will fall behind because it lets luddites set policy.
As noted earlier researchers routinely include impact statments both good and bad for research. It is not something that is not done and anyone claiming it has obviously never looked. Whatever incompetent intern wrote this obviously has no idea what they are doing.
Stand for science not whatever this antiscience drek is.
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/pro-palestinian-activists-gave-trump-boost-no-2024-regrets-biden-harris-gaza-israel
In short:
President Donald Trump has announced the US will stop bombing the Houthis in Yemen “effective immediately”.
Oman says it has mediated a ceasefire deal between the Houthis and the US.
What’s next?
The statement from Oman did not mention whether the Houthis had agreed to stop attacks on Israel.
The head of Yemen’s Houthi Supreme Political Council, Mahdi al-Mashat, said the group would continue to support Gaza and that such attacks would continue.
“To all Zionists from now on, stay in shelters or leave to your countries immediately as your failed government will not be able to protect you after today,” Houthi-run Al Masirah TV cited him as saying.
Separately, in a social media post on X, the head of Yemen’s Houthi supreme revolutionary committee, Mohammed Ali al-Houthi, said the US’ halt of “aggression” against Yemen would be evaluated.
“They said, please don’t bomb us any more, and we’re not going to attack your ships,” Mr Trump said of the Houthis during an Oval Office meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney.
“And I will accept their word, and we are going to stop the bombing of the Houthis effective immediately.”I think Trump is lying. My money is on the Houthi not saying it the way Trump puts it.
dv said:
Try not to swear in polite company.
Peak Warming Man said:
dv said:
Try not to swear in polite company.
and always use the correct fork.
Bogsnorkler said:
Peak Warming Man said:
dv said:
Try not to swear in polite company.
and always use the correct fork.
And the correct forken knife.
The Oopma-Loompa’s are jealous.
Fark he looks ridiculous.
Peak Warming Man said:
dv said:
Try not to swear in polite company.
sarahs mum said:
Heather Cox Richardson
5h ·
May 4, 2025 (Sunday)In an interview aired today on NBC News’s “Meet the Press,” reporter Kristen Welker asked President Donald J. Trump if he agreed that every person in the United States is entitled to due process.
“I don’t know. I’m not, I’m not a lawyer. I don’t know,” Trump answered.The U.S. Constitution guarantees that “no person shall…be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” Judges across the political spectrum agree that the amendment does not limit due process to citizens. In his decision in the 1993 case Reno v. Flores, conservative icon Justice Antonin Scalia wrote: “it is well established that the Fifth Amendment entitles aliens to due process of law in deportation proceedings.”
In his oath of office, Trump vowed to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
When Welker pointed out that the Constitution guarantees due process, Trump suggested he could ignore it because honoring due process was too slow. “I don’t know,” he said. “It seems—it might say that, but if you’re talking about that, then we’d have to have a million or 2 million or 3 million trials,” he said. “We have thousands of people that are—some murderers and some drug dealers and some of the worst people on Earth.”“I was elected to get them the hell out of here, and the courts are holding me from doing it,” he added.
Welker tried again. “on’t you need to uphold the Constitution of the United States?”Trump replied: “I don’t know. I have to respond by saying, again, I have brilliant lawyers that work for me, and they are going to obviously follow what the Supreme Court said.”
Conservative judge J. Michael Luttig explained to MSNBC’s Ali Velshi that far-right scholars have argued that the president does not have to follow the Supreme Court if he doesn’t agree with its decisons: he can interpret the Constitution for himself. Luttig called this “constitutional denialism.” He added that “he American people deserve to know if the President does not intend to uphold the Constitution of the United States or if he intends to uphold it only when he agrees with the Supreme Court.”
Mark Berman and Jeremy Roebuck of the Washington Post reported today that federal judges are becoming increasingly impatient with the incompetence of the Department of Justice lawyers who are defending more than 200 cases against the administration in court. Judges have accused DOJ lawyers of providing inadequate answers and flimsy evidence, defying court orders, and even behaving like toddlers.
Trump has said the justice system is a “rigged system” run by “radical left lunatics,” but former federal judge John E. Jones III, whom President George W. Bush appointed to the bench, agreed that DOJ lawyers have “lost a fair measure of their credibility.”
Authoritarian governments are based on the idea that some people are better than others. This translates into the idea that some people have special insight based only upon their superiority. They don’t have to listen to experts, who just muddle the clear picture the leader can see. When reality intrudes on that vision, the problem is not the ideology of the leader, it is obstruction by political opponents.
As Trump told Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer of The Atlantic about his presidencies: “The first time, I had two things to do—run the country and survive; I had all these crooked guys,” he said. “And the second time, I run the country and the world.”
Trump himself illustrated this ideology again in the interview with Kristen Welker when he explained his trade war. “Look,” he said. “We were losing hundreds of billions of dollars with China. Now we’re essentially not doing business with China. Therefore, we’re saving hundreds of billions of dollars. Very simple.”
It is not, in fact, that simple.This impulse to downplay expertise and concentrate power in a strongman shows in Trump’s tapping of Secretary of State Marco Rubio as acting national security advisor, as well as acting head of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and acting administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Clearly, Trump doesn’t think he needs experts in at least three of those four senior posts. Perhaps it also shows there are few experts still willing to work in a Trump White House.
The results of this disdain for expertise shows these days most immediately in the policies of Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. As measles continues to spread across the U.S., a spokesperson for Health and Human Services said Friday that Kennedy will turn the country’s health agencies away from promoting vaccination, which is 97% effective in preventing the disease, and toward exploring new treatments for it, including vitamins.
“It’s not that there’s been a lack of studies,” Dr. Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, told Teddy Rosenbluth of the New York Times. Decades of research have not discovered dramatic treatments, while vaccinations have proven safe and effective at preventing the life-threatening disease.
Rosenbluth noted that “ublic health experts are baffled by Mr. Kennedy’s decision to hunt for new treatments, rather than endorse shots that have decades of safety and efficacy data.” This stance seems to contradict Kennedy’s longstanding focus on preventing disease.
Kennedy has also falsely claimed that the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine (MMR) contains “aborted fetus debris,” that parents should “do their own research,” and that he will institute testing for new vaccines with placebo-controlled trials, a practice medical experts warn could be unethical as subjects believe they are protected from disease when they are not.
Infectious disease expert Paul Offit told Jessica Glenza of The Guardian: “It’s his goal to even further lessen trust in vaccines and make it onerous enough for manufacturers that they will abandon it.”
At the end of March, Kennedy also vowed to study possible links between vaccines and autism, although repeated scholarly studies have shown no link. Kennedy has tapped David Geier, who does not have a medical degree and was disciplined in Maryland for practicing medicine without a license, to perform the study.
On Thursday, former New York Times global health reporter Donald G. McNeil Jr. noted that both Geier and Kennedy have made significant money thanks to their anti-vax stands as they monetize alleged treatments and sue pharmaceutical companies.
In Ars Technica on April 30, microbiologist and senior health reporter Beth Mole explored another angle to understand Kennedy’s policies. She noted that Kennedy, who is neither a doctor nor a public health expert, does not believe in the foundational principle of modern medicine: germ theory.
In a 2021 book, Kennedy argued the idea that microscopic viruses, bacteria, parasites, and fungi cause disease serves the pharmaceutical industry and the healthcare industry that grew around it by “emphasiz targeting particular germs with specific drugs rather than fortifying the immune system through healthy living, clean water, and good nutrition.” He accused those supporting this system, including Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who was a proponent of the Covid vaccine, of misleading the American public.
While Kennedy appears to believe germs exist, he also claims to believe in the older theory of disease called “miasma theory,” although as Mole points out, he misunderstands that theory—the idea that diseases are caused by poisonous vapors—and really appears to believe in another old idea: “terrain theory.” Terrain theory maintains that diseases are signs that the internal “terrain” of the body is out of whack.
This would explain Kennedy’s assertion—refuted by doctors—that the children who died of measles were malnourished. As medical blogger Kristen Panthagani, MD/PhD, explains: Kennedy’s way of thinking is “the belief that infections don’t pose a risk to healthy people who have optimized their immune system.”
While underlying medical conditions certainly affect people’s health, Mole notes that “the evidence against terrain theory is obvious and all around us.” But if you think germs are less important than overall health, things like the pasteurization of milk to kill E. coli, salmonella, and Listeria bacteria—which Kennedy opposes—are unnecessary.
In 1876, German microbiologist Robert Koch discovered that the cause of anthrax was a bacterium. Germ theory challenged established practices In the U.S., where doctors in the 1860s during the Civil War believed the best demonstration of their skill was their bloody aprons and instruments, instruments they kept in a velvet-lined case.
In 1881 the doctor overseeing President James Garfield’s recovery from a gunshot wound repeatedly probed the president’s wound with dirty instruments and his fingers, prompting assassin Charles Guiteau to plead not guilty of the murder by claiming, “The doctors killed Garfield, I just shot him.”
But just four years later, germ theory was so widely accepted that the U.S. Army required medical officers to inspect their posts every month and report the results to the administration, and by 1886, disease rates were dropping. By 1889, the U.S. Army had written manuals for sanitary field hospitals, and the need to combat germs was so commonplace medical officers rarely mentioned it.
And now, in 2025, the top health official in the United States, a man without degrees in either medicine or public health, appears to be rejecting germ theory and reshaping the nation’s medical system around his own dedication to a theory that was outdated well over a century ago.
FMD.
The brain-worm really has eaten RFK’s brain so it doesn’t work properly.
Witty Rejoinder said:
No, thank you. I don’t want to appear on one of Trump’s ‘lists.’The administration keeps coming up with ways to misuse federal data.
April 29, 2025 at 7:00 a.m.
It’s rarely comforting to appear on a government “list,” even (or perhaps especially) when compiled in the name of public safety.
It was alarming in the 1940s, when the U.S. government collected the names of Japanese Americans for internment. Likewise in the 1950s, when the House Un-American Activities Committee catalogued communists. And it’s just as troubling now, as the Trump administration assembles registries of Jewish academics and Americans with developmental disabilities.
Yes, these are real things that happened this past week, the latest examples of the White House’s abuse of confidential data.
Last week, faculty and staff at Barnard College received unsolicited texts asking them whether they were Jewish. Employees were stunned by the messages, which many initially dismissed as spam.
Turns out the messages came from the Trump administration. Barnard, which is affiliated with Columbia University, had agreed to share faculty members’ private contact info to aid in President Donald Trump’s pseudo-crusade against antisemitism.
Ah, yes, a far-right president asking Jews to register as Jewish, in the name of protecting the Jews, after he has repeatedly accused Jews of being “disloyal.” What could go wrong?
The same day, National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya announced a “disease registry” of people with autism, to be compiled from confidential private and government health records, apparently without its subjects’ awareness or consent. This is part of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s vendetta against vaccines, which he has said cause autism despite abundant research concluding otherwise.
This, too, is disturbing given authoritarian governments’ history of compiling lists of citizens branded mentally or physically deficient. If that historical analogue seems excessive, note that Bhattacharya’s announcement came just a week after Kennedy delivered inflammatory remarks lamenting that kids with autism will never lead productive lives. They “will never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job,” he said, adding they’ll never play baseball or go on a date, either.
This all happened during Autism Acceptance Month, established to counter exactly these kinds of stigmatizing stereotypes. Kennedy’s comments and the subsequent “registry” set off a wave of fear in the autism advocacy community and earned condemnation from scientists.
Obviously, advocates want more research and support for those with autism. They have been asking for more help at least since 1965 (when what is now called the Autism Society of America was founded in my grandparents’ living room). But few in this community trust political appointees hostile to scientific research — or a president who has publicly mocked people with disabilities — to use an autism “registry” responsibly.
(An unnamed HHS official later walked back Bhattacharya’s comments, saying the department was not creating a “registry,” per se, just a “real-world data platform” that “will link existing datasets to support research into causes of autism and insights into improved treatment strategies.” Okay.)
These are hardly the administration’s only abuses of federal data. It has been deleting reams of statistical records, including demographic data on transgender Americans. It has also been exploiting other private administrative records for political purposes.
For example, the Internal Revenue Service — in an effort to persuade people to pay their taxes — spent decades assuring people that their records are confidential, regardless of immigration status. The agency is in fact legally prohibited from sharing tax records, even with other government agencies, except under very limited circumstances specified by Congress. Lawmakers set these limits in response to Richard M. Nixon’s abuse of private tax data to target personal enemies.
Trump torched these precedents and promises. After a series of top IRS officials resigned, the agency has now agreed to turn over confidential records to help Immigration and Customs Enforcement locate and deport some 7 million undocumented immigrants.
The move, which also has troubling historical echoes, is being challenged in court. But, in the meantime, tax collections will likely fall. Undocumented immigrant workers had been paying an estimated $66 billion in federal taxes annually, but they now have even more reason to stay off the books.
This and other DOGE infiltrations of confidential records are likely to discourage public cooperation on other sensitive government data collection efforts. Think research on mental health issues or public safety assessments on domestic violence.
But that might be a feature, not a bug, for this administration. Chilling federal survey participation and degrading data quality were arguably deliberate objectives in Trump’s first term, when he tried to cram a question about citizenship into the 2020 Census. The question was expected to depress response rates and help Republicans game the congressional redistricting process.
Courts ultimately blocked Trump’s plans. That’s what it will take to stop ongoing White House abuses, too: not scrapping critical government records, but championing the rule of law.
Ultimately, the government must be able to collect and integrate high-quality data — to administer social programs efficiently, help the economy function and understand the reality we live in so voters can hold public officials accountable. None of this is possible if Americans fear ending up on some vindictive commissar’s “list.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/04/29/trump-lists-jews-autism-administrative-data/
Seems the US is fked.
Michael V said:
Seems the US is fked.
Seems? I think it is looking more like it is forked and knived.
https://youtu.be/G2i8-K2OsTk?si=dRpFjypBwJ41JpMw
LegalEagles: the most corrupt Presidential act in history
Lord’a‘mercy. I saw this before but didn’t notice it was on the official WH account.
At least they got the saber colour right.
captain_spalding said:
Would Lucy be a collaborator do you reckon ?
captain_spalding said:
Oh, so true…
Heather Cox Richardson
2h ·
May 6, 2025 (Tuesday)
In a follow-up story to last night’s information about the Trump family’s cryptocurrency corruption, MacKenzie Sigalos of CNBC reported today that 58 crypto wallets have made more than $10 million each on Trump’s meme coin, gathering a total of $1.1 billion in profits. But 764,000 wallets, mostly owned by small holders, have lost money. Meanwhile, since January the meme’s creators have pocketed more than $324 million in trading fees.
In other news today, reality is crashing into the ideology of the Trump administration.
MAGA ideology was on full display in a meeting of the House Committee on Appropriations Homeland Security Subcommittee, when Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem refused to answer a question from the ranking member—that is, the highest-ranking Democrat—of the committee, Representative Lauren Underwood (D-IL), about whether she believes that “the Constitution gives everyone in our country the right to due process.” The right to due process is clearly established in that foundational document, but Trump refused to acknowledge it in an interview that aired Sunday. Now Noem, too, is refusing to acknowledge it.
Later, at a meeting of a task force overseeing the Fédération Internationale de Football Association, or FIFA, 2026 World Cup, Noem said to Trump: “Thank you, Mr. President. Thank you so much for dreaming big dreams and doing unprecedented things. Your entire life you have stood for doing things that other people thought they couldn’t do and accomplishing unprecedented events and achievements.” Trump announced today that Andrew Giuliani, the son of former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, will head the task force.
But MAGA’s adherence to Trump and MAGA ideology is running up against reality. Charlie Savage and Julian E. Barnes of the New York Times reported today that U.S. intelligence agencies did not believe that the administration of Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro was colluding with the criminal gang Tren de Aragua (TDA) when the Trump administration used that claim to justify invoking the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to render Venezuelan migrants to a terrorist prison in El Salvador. A newly declassified memo from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence states: “While Venezuela’s permissive environment enables TDA to operate, the Maduro regime probably does not have a policy of cooperating with TDA and is not directing TDA movement to and operations in the United States.”
Savage and Barnes note that when the New York Times made a similar report in March, the Department of Justice under Trump called that reporting misleading and harmful, and opened a criminal investigation. A month later, when the Washington Post published similar coverage, the department redoubled its focus on stopping leaks. Attorney General Pam Bondi used the coverage in the New York Times and the Washington Post as justification to roll back protections for the press in investigations of leaks.
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard replied to the New York Times story: “It is outrageous that as President Trump and his administration work hard every day to make America safe by deporting these violent criminals, some in the media remain intent on twisting and manipulating intelligence assessments to undermine the president’s agenda to keep the American people safe.”
At a hearing before the House Appropriations Committee today, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent hemmed and hawed his way through an answer to a question from Representative Mark Pocan (D-WI), “Who pays tariffs?” clearly trying to avoid the increasingly obvious answer: consumers.
Trump also blustered his way through tariffs at a meeting today with Canada’s new prime minister, Mark Carney. After Carney told Trump to his face that Canada is not for sale, the president answered, “never say never.” Over tariffs, Trump changed his previous claims. When Trump announced his new high-tariff regime in April, the administration said it would negotiate new trade deals with the rest of the world, initially claiming it would make 90 deals in 90 days.
Yesterday Treasury Secretary Bessent told the House that the administration could announce deals as early as this week, but today Trump told reporters:
“We don’t have to sign deals. We could sign 25 deals right now…if we wanted. We don’t have to sign deals. They have to sign deals with us. They want a piece of our market. We don’t want a piece of their market. We don’t care about their market. They want a piece of our market. So we can just sit down, and I’ll do this at some point over the next two weeks, and I’ll sit with Howard and Scott and with our great vice president…and Marco , and we’re going to sit down, and we’re going to put very fair numbers down, and we’re going to say, here’s what this country, what we want, and congratulations, we have a deal. And they’ll either say, great, and they’ll start shopping, or they’ll say, ‘Not good, we’re not going to do it.’ I said, “That’s okay, you don’t have to shop.” Now, we may think, well, they have a right, you know, that maybe we were a little bit wrong, so we’ll adjust it. And then you people will say, ‘Oh, it’s so chaotic.’ No, we’re flexible. But we’ll sit down and we’ll, at some point in some cases, we’ll sign some deals. It’s much less important than what I’m talking about. For the most part, we’re just going to put down a number and say, this is what you’re going to pay to shop. And it’s going to be a very fair number. It’ll be a low number. We’re not looking to hurt countries. We want to help countries.”
In contrast to Trump’s insistence he can simply dictate terms to other nations, after three years of negotiations India and the United Kingdom have agreed to a “landmark” trade deal that will lower tariffs on clothing and footwear, cars, food, and jewelry and gems coming from India and lower tariffs on gin and whisky, cosmetics, electricals and medical devices, and cars coming from the U.K. India’s prime minister Narendra Modi described the deal as “ambitious and mutually beneficial.” The business secretary for the U.K., Jonathan Reynolds, said the benefits for the U.K. would be “massive.”
Also today, president Xi Jinping of China said his country would work to forge closer ties with the European Union. Although Xi did not mention Trump by name, at a meeting in Beijing with Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez of Spain, he said: “China and the EU must fulfill their international responsibilities, jointly safeguard the trend of economic globalization and a fair international trade environment, and jointly resist unilateral and intimidating practices.” Sánchez did not mention Trump either, but the U.S. president was clearly on his mind when he agreed that “he complex global landscape makes it necessary for us to bet on more dialogue, cooperation, and a strengthening of our relations with other countries and regional blocs.”
On Sunday, Trump’s trade advisor Peter Navarro, who apparently was the brains behind the tariff walls, called Britain a “compliant servant of communist China” and warned it would have its “blood sucked” dry. Political editor David Maddox of The Independent reported that after the story broke, a White House advisor told him: “Navarro is crazy and most people in the White House see him as a dangerous influence on the president.”
Trump is still standing behind scandal-plagued Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, perhaps because Hegseth both believes in MAGA ideology and, with his emphasis on fighting, appears to embody it. Yesterday, Haley Britzky and Natasha Bertrand of CNN obtained a memo from Hegseth ordering cuts of at least 20% to the number of four-star generals and admirals in the senior ranks of the military. Hegseth says he wants “less generals, more GIs.” In a podcast earlier this year, Hegseth claimed that senior officers will “do any social justice, gender, climate, extremism crap because it gets them checked to the next level.” In February, Hegseth fired the chairs of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Navy, as well as the Judge Advocates General, or JAGs, for the Army, Navy, and Air Force.
Meanwhile, a second $60 million Navy jet was lost today off the USS Harry S. Truman aircraft carrier. The circumstances are unclear.
Reuters reported today that earlier this year Hegseth ordered a pause in military aid to Ukraine without an order from Trump and without telling officials in the State Department or the Pentagon. The White House reversed the pause and hushed the matter up, although resuming the flights cost an additional $2.2 million.
Also today, Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy told Fox News Channel host Martha MacCallum that the Pentagon is not responding to his questions about why an Army helicopter was flying above Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport last week, forcing two commercial passenger jets to reroute.
Finally, perhaps the day’s biggest news is that India launched strikes against Pakistan in what it said was retaliation for a militant attack last month in which gunmen killed 26 people at a popular tourist destination in Indian-administered Kashmir. Pakistan condemned the strikes, which killed eight people, and vowed to answer accordingly. Later, Pakistan said it had shot down two Indian jets.
This kind of a crisis between two nations with nuclear capabilities is one that, in the past, U.S. diplomacy has been key to defusing. When asked about the conflict today, Trump responded: “It’s a shame. We just heard about it, just as we were walking in the doors of the Oval. I just heard about it. I guess people knew something was going to happen, based on a little bit of the past. They’ve been fighting for a long time. You know, they’ve been fighting for many, many decades—and centuries, actually, if you really think about it. No, I just hope it ends very quickly.”
Secretary of State Rubio posted on X that he was monitoring the situation closely and echoed Trump’s hope that the conflict would end quickly. He said he would engage the leadership of both countries to press for a peaceful resolution.
Katherine Long and Alexander Ward of the Wall Street Journal reported today that high-ranking officials who work under Director of National Intelligence Gabbard have ordered intelligence-agency heads to gather intelligence about Greenland. In a statement after the story appeared, Gabbard said: “The Wall Street Journal should be ashamed of aiding deep state actors who seek to undermine the President by politicizing and leaking classified information. They are breaking the law and undermining our nation’s security and democracy.”
Trump shut down program to end human waste backing into Alabama homes, calling it ‘illegal DEI’
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/trump-canceled-dei-program-raw-sewage-alabaman-homes-rcna201164
dv said:
Trump shut down program to end human waste backing into Alabama homes, calling it ‘illegal DEI’https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/trump-canceled-dei-program-raw-sewage-alabaman-homes-rcna201164
Very, very unkind.
dv said:
Trump shut down program to end human waste backing into Alabama homes, calling it ‘illegal DEI’https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/trump-canceled-dei-program-raw-sewage-alabaman-homes-rcna201164
Trump is more and more a piece of excrement.
¿¿¿
An F/A-18 fighter jet landing on the USS Harry S Truman aircraft carrier in the Red Sea went overboard after it failed to come to a proper halt. Both members of the crew ejected before the jet plunged into the water and were recovered by a rescue helicopter, according to a US defence official. It is the second jet in a matter of weeks to fall into the sea of the same US aircraft carrier.
LegalEagles: Judge smacks down Trump’s use of Executive orders to punish law companies
https://youtu.be/DV76sIhZrdM?si=sqCvTPRPBhUP7-db
Via Jeff Tiedrich’s column:
Also via Jeff’s column:
https://youtu.be/INuwqHzBFC0?si=NiN4_a1YS-zvboar
BBC interview with Biden
captain_spalding said:
Also via Jeff’s column:
Equating Canada to the void inside Trumps head is unkind and totally unjustified.
The Rev Dodgson said:
captain_spalding said:
Also via Jeff’s column:
Equating Canada to the void inside Trumps head is unkind and totally unjustified.
I dunno. Canada has a lot of vacant wilderness, too.
The Rev Dodgson said:
captain_spalding said:
Also via Jeff’s column:
Equating Canada to the void inside Trumps head is unkind and totally unjustified.
My thought exactly.
captain_spalding said:
The Rev Dodgson said:
captain_spalding said:
Also via Jeff’s column:
Equating Canada to the void inside Trumps head is unkind and totally unjustified.
I dunno. Canada has a lot of vacant wilderness, too.
Empty space covered with snow?
roughbarked said:
captain_spalding said:
The Rev Dodgson said:
Equating Canada to the void inside Trumps head is unkind and totally unjustified.
I dunno. Canada has a lot of vacant wilderness, too.
Empty space covered with snow?
them climate policies should fix this
https://www.nj.com/politics/2024/05/gop-official-argues-in-favor-of-child-marriage-girls-are-ripe-and-fertile.html
dv said:
https://www.nj.com/politics/2024/05/gop-official-argues-in-favor-of-child-marriage-girls-are-ripe-and-fertile.html
174 people voted against it.
One hundred and seventy four.
The gasps were probably not from those people, they’re probably thinking the same thing.
Divine Angel said:
dv said:
https://www.nj.com/politics/2024/05/gop-official-argues-in-favor-of-child-marriage-girls-are-ripe-and-fertile.html
174 people voted against it.
One hundred and seventy four.
The gasps were probably not from those people, they’re probably thinking the same thing.
Yair. Nearly half (47.5%).
Says something…
dv said:
https://www.nj.com/politics/2024/05/gop-official-argues-in-favor-of-child-marriage-girls-are-ripe-and-fertile.html
Gasp!
Heather Cox Richardson
2h ·
May 7, 2025 (Wednesday)
Alarm appears to be rising about how the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) is consolidating data about Americans. Hannah Natanson, Joseph Menn, Lisa Rein, and Rachel Siegel wrote in the Washington Post today that DOGE is “racing to build a single centralized database with vast troves of personal information about millions of U.S. citizens and residents.” In the past, that information has been carefully siloed, and there are strict laws about accessing it. But under billionaire Elon Musk, who appears to direct DOGE although the White House has said he does not, operatives who may not have appropriate security clearances are removing protections and linking data.
There are currently at least eleven lawsuits underway claiming that DOGE has violated the 1974 Privacy Act regulating who can access information about American citizens stored by the federal government.
Musk and President Donald Trump, as well as other administration officials, claim that such consolidation of data is important to combat “waste, fraud, and abuse,” although so far they have not been able to confirm any such savings and their cuts are stripping ordinary Americans of programs they depend on. White House spokesperson Harrison Fields told the Washington Post reporters that DOGE’s processes are protected by “some of the brightest cybersecurity minds in the nation” and that “every action taken is fully compliant with the law.”
Cybersecurity experts outside the administration disagree that a master database is secure or safe, as DOGE is bypassing normal safeguards, including neglecting to record who has accessed or changed database information. The Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard’s Kennedy School explains that data can be altered or manipulated to redirect funds, for example, and that there is substantial risk that data can be hacked or leaked. It can be used to commit fraud or retaliate against individuals.
The Ash Center also explains that U.S. government data is an extraordinarily valuable treasure trove for anyone trying to train artificial intelligence systems. Most of the data currently available is from the internet and is thus messy and unreliable. Government databases are “comprehensive, verified records about the most critical areas of Americans’ lives.” Access to that data gives a company “significant advantages” in training systems and setting business strategies. Americans have not given consent for their data to be used in this way, and it leaves them open to “loss of services, harassment, discrimination, or manipulation by the government, private entities, or foreign powers.”
Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo suggests Musk’s faith in his AI company is at least part of what’s behind the administration’s devastating cuts to biomedical research. Those who believe in a future centered around AI believe that it will be far more effective than human research scientists, so cutting actual research is efficient. At the same time, Marshall suggests, tech oligarchs find the years-long timelines of actual research and the demands of scientists on peer reviews and careful study frustrating, as they want to put their ideas into practice quickly.
If the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is an example of what it looks like when a tech oligarch tries to run a government agency, it’s a cautionary tale. Under Trump the FAA has become entangled with Musk’s SpaceX space technology company and its subsidiary Starlink satellite company, and it appears that the American people are being used to make Musk’s dream come true.
Musk believes that humans must colonize Mars in order to become a multiplanetary species as insurance against the end of life on Earth. On Monday he explained to Jesse Watters of the Fox News Channel that eventually the Earth will be incinerated by an expanding sun, so humans must move to other planets to survive. In 2016, Musk predicted that humans would start landing on Mars in 2025, but in the Watters interview he revised his prediction to possibly 2029 but more likely 2031.
Critics note that while it is true the sun is expanding, the change is not expected to affect the Earth for another 5 billion years. As a frame of reference, humans evolved from their predecessors about 300,000 years ago.
But getting to Mars requires lots of leeway to experiment, and Musk turned against the head of the FAA under President Joe Biden, Mike Whitaker, after Whitaker called for Musk’s SpaceX company to be fined $633,009 over safety and environmental violations. Musk complained that the FAA’s environmental and safety requirements were “unreasonable and exasperating” and that they “undercut American industry’s ability to innovate.” Musk continued: “The fundamental problem is that humanity will forever be confined to Earth unless there is radical reform at the FAA!”
Musk endorsed an employee’s complaint on social media that Whitaker required SpaceX “to consult on minor paperwork updates relating to previously approved non-safety issues that have already been determined to have zero environmental impact,” reposting it with the comment: “He needs to resign.” Musk spent almost $300 million to get Trump elected, and Whitaker resigned the day Trump took office.
That same day, the administration froze the hiring of all federal employees, including air traffic controllers, although the U.S. Department of Transportation warned in June 2023 that 77% of air traffic control facilities critical to daily operations of the airline industry were short staffed. The next day, January 21, Trump fired Transportation Security Administration (TSA) chief David Pekoske, and administration officials removed all the members of the Aviation Security Advisory Committee, which Congress created after the 1988 PanAm 103 bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland. The Trump administration vacated the positions with an eye to “eliminating the misuse of resources.”
Today Lori Aratani of the Washington Post reported that in February, shortly after the deadly collision of an American Airlines jet and a U.S. Army helicopter in the airspace over Washington, D.C., administration officials also stopped the work of an outside panel of experts examining the country’s air traffic control system.
After President Trump blamed the crash on diversity, equity, and inclusion hiring practices, career officials quit in disgust, according to Isaac Stanley-Becker of The Atlantic. As they left, an engineer from Musk’s SpaceX satellite company arrived. He had instructions from Musk to insert equipment from Starlink, a subsidiary of SpaceX, into the FAA’s communications network. On the social media platform X, Musk warned that the existing communications system for the FAA “is breaking down very rapidly” and was “putting air traveler safety at risk.” In fact, the government had awarded a 15-year, $2.4 billion contract to Verizon in 2023 to make the necessary upgrades.
Starlink ties into Musk’s plans for Mars. In November 2024, SpaceX pitched NASA on creating Marslink, a version of Starlink that would link to Mars, and Starlink’s current terms of service specify that disputes over service on or around the planet Earth or the Moon will be governed by the laws of Texas but that “or Services provided on Mars, or in transit to Mars via Starship or other spacecraft, the parties recognize Mars as a free planet and that no Earth-based government has authority or sovereignty over Martian activities. Accordingly, Disputes will be settled through self-governing principles, established in good faith, at the time of Martian settlement.”
In early March, debris from the explosion of one of Musk’s SpaceX starships disrupted 240 flights. On April 28, air traffic controllers lost both radio and radar contact with the pilots who were flying planes into Newark, New Jersey, Liberty International Airport, for about 90 seconds. In the aftermath of the incident, aircraft traffic in and out of Newark was halted, and four experienced controllers and one trainee took medical leave for trauma.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, a former Fox Business host, suggested the Biden administration was to blame for the decaying system. His predecessor as transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, dismissed the accusation as “just politics,” noting that he had launched the modernization of the systems and reversed decades of declining numbers of air traffic controllers.
On Monday the White House fired Alvin Brown, the Black vice chair of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), the agency that investigates civilian aviation accidents. Former FAA and NTSB investigator Jeff Guzzetti told Christopher Wiggins of The Advocate: “This is the first time in modern history that the White House has removed a board member.”
Musk has the power of the United States government behind him. In December, Trump nominated Musk associate and billionaire Jared Isaacman to become the next head of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The Senate has not yet confirmed Isaacman, but the Republican-dominated Senate Commerce Committee advanced his nomination last week. The president’s proposed budget, released Friday, calls for cutting about 25% of NASA’s funding—about $6 billion—and giving $1 billion of the money remaining to initiatives focused on Mars.
Yesterday the FAA granted permission for SpaceX to increase the number of rocket launches it attempts from Boca Chica, Texas, from 5 to 25 per year after concluding that additional launches would have “no significant impact” on the environment near the launchpad. The first test of a SpaceX rocket launch there in 2023 caused the launchpad to explode, and the spaceship itself blew up, sending chunks of concrete into the nesting and migration site of an endangered species and starting a 3.5-acre fire. In their hurry to rebuild, SpaceX officials ignored permitting processes. According to Texas and the Environmental Protection Agency, the company then violated environmental regulations by releasing pollutants into bodies of water.
Musk is trying to make Starlink dominate the Earth’s communications, a dominance that would give him enormous power, as he suggested last month when he noted that Ukraine’s “entire front line would collapse if I turned it off.” In April, Trump delayed the rural broadband program in what appeared to be an attempt to shift the program toward Starlink, and today Tom Perkins of The Guardian reported that the administration is going to end federal research into space pollution, which is building up alarmingly in the stratosphere owing in part to Musk’s satellites.
Today Jeff Stein and Hannah Natanson of the Washington Post reported that the administration has been telling nations that want to talk about trade that it will consider “licensing Starlink” as a demonstration of “goodwill and intent to welcome U.S. businesses.” India, among other nations, has rushed through approvals of the satellite company. Just 1% of India’s consumer broadband market could produce almost $1 billion a year, the authors report.
In a statement, the State Department told Stein and Natanson: “Starlink is an American-made product that has been game-changing in helping remote areas around the world gain internet connectivity. Any patriotic American should want to see an American company’s success on the global stage, especially over compromised Chinese competitors.”
The attempt to gain control over artificial intelligence and human communication networks regardless of the cost to ordinary Americans might have a larger theme. As technology forecaster Paul Saffo points out, tech oligarchs led by technology guru Curtis Yarvin have called for a new world order that rejects the nation states around which humans have organized their societies for almost 400 years. They call instead for “network states” organized around technology that permits individuals to group around a leader in cyberspace without reference to real-world boundaries, a position Starlink’s terms of service appear to reflect.
Mastering artificial intelligence while dominating global communications would go a long way toward breaking down existing nations and setting up the conditions for a brave new world, dominated by tech oligarchs.
Various
DJT placed the following ad in the NYT in Sep 1987, a few weeks after a trip to the USSR.
https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/s/KXEIJ6aroA
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-foreign-policy-ad/
dv said:
Various
The first Carney quote doesn’t really work, because as has often been pointed out, nearly everyone in the foxholes is an atheist.
People who genuinely believe in God, and that he’s on their side, don’t believe they need the protection of a foxhole.
(There are of course very few such people, because most theists are not genuine believers).
Bubblecar said:
dv said:
Various
The first Carney quote doesn’t really work, because as has often been pointed out, nearly everyone in the foxholes is an atheist.
People who genuinely believe in God, and that he’s on their side, don’t believe they need the protection of a foxhole.
(There are of course very few such people, because most theists are not genuine believers).
what if they believe that kkk is god
Every Trump Business That Failed or Went Bankrupt.
Digital World Acquisition Corp
Trump Airlines
Trump beverages
Trump’s Travel Site
Trump Tower Tampa
Trump Magazine
Trump Mattres
Trump University
Trump Casinos
Trump Mortgage
Truth Social
Trump Entertainment Resorts
Trump Steaks
The Trump Network
Trump Vodka
Trump Shuttle
GoTrump.com
Trump Ice
Trump Taj Mahal
Trump Home
Trump Fragrances
Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts
Trump: The Game
Trump Communications (Trumpet)
Trump Castle and Trump Plaza
Tau.Neutrino said:
Every Trump Business That Failed or Went Bankrupt.
Digital World Acquisition Corp
Trump Airlines
Trump beverages
Trump’s Travel Site
Trump Tower Tampa
Trump Magazine
Trump Mattres
Trump University
Trump Casinos
Trump Mortgage
Truth Social
Trump Entertainment Resorts
Trump Steaks
The Trump Network
Trump Vodka
Trump Shuttle
GoTrump.com
Trump Ice
Trump Taj Mahal
Trump Home
Trump Fragrances
Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts
Trump: The Game
Trump Communications (Trumpet)
Trump Castle and Trump Plaza
you forgot the ussa itself
Ad Fontes Media
Sources in the green box (top middle) of the chart are recommended by our team to provide
minimally biased and reliable, fact-based information. Here’s a list of all 43 websites/newspapers
that fall within the green box on this May version of the Media Bias Chart® (many more websites
fall within the green box; they will be included in monthly charts in the future).
ABC News (website)
AP
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Boston Herald
Breaking Defense
Christianity Today
CNBC (website)
CNN (website)
Deseret News
Eco Watch
Erie Times-News
FOX 5 New York WNYW
FOX 8 Cleveland WJW
Fox Business (website)
Grist
Newsweek
NPR (website)
Oil City News
Patch
Pew Research Center
ProPublica
Puck News
Quillette
RealClearWorld
Reason
Straight Arrow News
The American Leader
The Atlantic
The Center Square
The Dispatch
The Guardian
The Hill
The New Atlantis
The New York Times
The Reload
The War Horse
TheGrio
Univision News
USAFacts
Wall Street Journal
Washington Post
WIRED
Yahoo News
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/fda-names-oncologist-vinay-prasad-new-vaccine-chief-rcna205145
The Vaccination Station
I regret to inform you that some fresh stupidness has occurred.
🙄
—The Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday named Dr. Vinay Prasad — a hematologist-oncologist who has been accused of spreading misinformation about Covid vaccines and was an outspoken critic of the agency’s decision to approve Covid shots in children — as its new vaccine chief.
The FDA commissioner, Dr. Marty Makary, announced Prasad would lead the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research to agency employees earlier Tuesday and later on X.
Makary called the appointment “a significant step forward,” saying Prasad would bring “scientific rigor, independence, and transparency.”
Prasad comes from the University of California, San Francisco, where he most recently was a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics. He is a practicing physician, according to his website.
He spent much of the pandemic criticizing the FDA’s and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s response to the virus.
In a 2021 blog post and an accompanying video, Prasad suggested the national response to Covid might bring on the collapse of democracy, invoking the rise of Hitler and the Third Reich in Germany.
On the blog that year, Prasad downplayed the anti-vaccine activism of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — now the secretary of health and human services — specifically his role in a 2019 measles outbreak in Samoa.
On Bari Weiss’ contrarian website, The Free Press, Prasad seemed to defend Kennedy’s most controversial positions on vaccines, raw milk and fluoride by listing other countries that have policies that align with Kennedy’s views.
Bogsnorkler said:
Ad Fontes Media
Sources in the green box (top middle) of the chart are recommended by our team to provide
minimally biased and reliable, fact-based information. Here’s a list of all 43 websites/newspapers
that fall within the green box on this May version of the Media Bias Chart® (many more websites
fall within the green box; they will be included in monthly charts in the future).ABC News (website)
AP
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Boston Herald
Breaking Defense
Christianity Today
CNBC (website)
CNN (website)
Deseret News
Eco Watch
Erie Times-News
FOX 5 New York WNYW
FOX 8 Cleveland WJW
Fox Business (website)
Grist
Newsweek
NPR (website)
Oil City News
Patch
Pew Research Center
ProPublica
Puck News
Quillette
RealClearWorld
Reason
Straight Arrow News
The American Leader
The Atlantic
The Center Square
The Dispatch
The Guardian
The Hill
The New Atlantis
The New York Times
The Reload
The War Horse
TheGrio
Univision News
USAFacts
Wall Street Journal
Washington Post
WIRED
Yahoo News
What are these Fox 5 and Fox 8 things that are centrist and reliable?
Don’t they get the Grauniad in the USA?
The Rev Dodgson said:
Bogsnorkler said:
…
What are these Fox 5 and Fox 8 things that are centrist and reliable?
Don’t they get the Grauniad in the USA?
Ignore the 2nd bit. Seems I can’t read a list these days.
Bogsnorkler said:
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/fda-names-oncologist-vinay-prasad-new-vaccine-chief-rcna205145The Vaccination Station
I regret to inform you that some fresh stupidness has occurred.
🙄—The Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday named Dr. Vinay Prasad — a hematologist-oncologist who has been accused of spreading misinformation about Covid vaccines and was an outspoken critic of the agency’s decision to approve Covid shots in children — as its new vaccine chief.
The FDA commissioner, Dr. Marty Makary, announced Prasad would lead the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research to agency employees earlier Tuesday and later on X.
Makary called the appointment “a significant step forward,” saying Prasad would bring “scientific rigor, independence, and transparency.”
Prasad comes from the University of California, San Francisco, where he most recently was a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics. He is a practicing physician, according to his website.
He spent much of the pandemic criticizing the FDA’s and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s response to the virus.
In a 2021 blog post and an accompanying video, Prasad suggested the national response to Covid might bring on the collapse of democracy, invoking the rise of Hitler and the Third Reich in Germany.
On the blog that year, Prasad downplayed the anti-vaccine activism of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — now the secretary of health and human services — specifically his role in a 2019 measles outbreak in Samoa.
On Bari Weiss’ contrarian website, The Free Press, Prasad seemed to defend Kennedy’s most controversial positions on vaccines, raw milk and fluoride by listing other countries that have policies that align with Kennedy’s views.
Yawn.
Par for the course.
The Rev Dodgson said:
Bogsnorkler said:
Ad Fontes Media
Sources in the green box (top middle) of the chart are recommended by our team to provide
minimally biased and reliable, fact-based information. Here’s a list of all 43 websites/newspapers
that fall within the green box on this May version of the Media Bias Chart® (many more websites
fall within the green box; they will be included in monthly charts in the future).ABC News (website)
AP
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Boston Herald
Breaking Defense
Christianity Today
CNBC (website)
CNN (website)
Deseret News
Eco Watch
Erie Times-News
FOX 5 New York WNYW
FOX 8 Cleveland WJW
Fox Business (website)
Grist
Newsweek
NPR (website)
Oil City News
Patch
Pew Research Center
ProPublica
Puck News
Quillette
RealClearWorld
Reason
Straight Arrow News
The American Leader
The Atlantic
The Center Square
The Dispatch
The Guardian
The Hill
The New Atlantis
The New York Times
The Reload
The War Horse
TheGrio
Univision News
USAFacts
Wall Street Journal
Washington Post
WIRED
Yahoo NewsWhat are these Fox 5 and Fox 8 things that are centrist and reliable?
Don’t they get the Grauniad in the USA?
No. Check spelling.
Bogsnorkler said:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/07/trump-surgeon-general-nominee-casey-means
Golf: Par.
SCIENCE said:
Tau.Neutrino said:
Every Trump Business That Failed or Went Bankrupt.
Digital World Acquisition Corp
Trump Airlines
Trump beverages
Trump’s Travel Site
Trump Tower Tampa
Trump Magazine
Trump Mattres
Trump University
Trump Casinos
Trump Mortgage
Truth Social
Trump Entertainment Resorts
Trump Steaks
The Trump Network
Trump Vodka
Trump Shuttle
GoTrump.com
Trump Ice
Trump Taj Mahal
Trump Home
Trump Fragrances
Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts
Trump: The Game
Trump Communications (Trumpet)
Trump Castle and Trump Plazayou forgot the ussa itself
Notice that the first word is Trump.
That might be a clue.
The Rev Dodgson said:
The Rev Dodgson said:
Bogsnorkler said:
…
What are these Fox 5 and Fox 8 things that are centrist and reliable?
Don’t they get the Grauniad in the USA?
Ignore the 2nd bit. Seems I can’t read a list these days.
“we’re telling you that these are sources to trust”
Heather Cox Richardson
4h ·
May 8, 2025 (Thursday)
Today, on the second day of the papal conclave, the cardinal electors—133 members of the College of Cardinals who were under the age of 80 when Pope Francis died on April 21—elected a new pope. They chose 69-year-old Cardinal Robert Prevost, who was born in Chicago, thus making him the first pope chosen from the United States. But he spent much of his ministry in Peru and became a citizen of Peru in 2015, making him the first pope from Peru, as well.
New popes choose a papal name to signify the direction of their papacy, and Prevost has chosen to be known as Pope Leo XIV. This is an important nod to Pope Leo XIII, who led the church from 1878 to 1903 and was the father of modern Catholic social teaching. He called for the church to address social and economic issues, and emphasized the dignity of individuals, the common good, community, and taking care of marginalized individuals.
In the midst of the Gilded Age, Leo XIII defended the rights of workers and said that the church had not just the duty to speak about justice and fairness, but also the responsibility to make sure that such equities were accomplished. In his famous 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, translated as “Of New Things,” Leo XIII rejected both socialism and unregulated capitalism, and called for the state to protect the rights of individuals.
Prevost’s choice of the name Leo invokes the principles of both Leo XIII and his own predecessor, Pope Francis. In his lifetime he has aligned himself with many of Francis’s social reforms, and his election appears to be a rejection of hard-line right-wing Catholics in the U.S. and elsewhere who have used their religion to support far-right politics.
In the U.S., Vice-President J.D. Vance is one of those hard-line right-wing Catholics. Shortly after taking office in January, Vance began to talk of the concept of ordo amoris, or “order of love,” articulated by Catholic St. Augustine, claiming it justified the MAGA emphasis on family and tribalism and suggesting it justified the mass expulsion of migrants.
Vance told Sean Hannity of the Fox News Channel, “ou love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then, after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world. A lot of the far left has completely inverted that.” When right-wing influencer Jack Posobiec, who is Catholic, posted Vance’s interview approvingly, Vance added: “Just google ‘ordo amoris.’ Aside from that, the idea that there isn’t a hierarchy of obligations violates basic common sense.”
On February 10, Pope Francis responded in a letter to American bishops. He corrected Vance’s assertion as a false interpretation of Catholic theology. “Christians know very well that it is only by affirming the infinite dignity of all that our own identity as persons and as communities reaches its maturity,” he wrote. “Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups…. The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by…meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.”
“orrying about personal, community or national identity, apart from these considerations, easily introduces an ideological criterion that distorts social life and imposes the will of the strongest as the criterion of truth,” Pope Francis wrote. He acknowledged “the right of a nation to defend itself and keep communities safe from those who have committed violent or serious crimes while in the country or prior to arrival,” but defended the fundamental dignity of every human being and the fundamental rights of migrants,
noting that the “rightly formed conscience” would disagree with any program that “identifies the illegal status of some migrants with criminality.” He continued: “I exhort all the faithful of the Catholic Church, and all men and women of good will, not to give in to narratives that discriminate against and cause unnecessary suffering to our migrant and refugee brothers and sisters.”
The next day, Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, who said he was “a lifelong Catholic,” told reporters at the White House, “I’ve got harsh words for the Pope…. He ought to fix the Catholic Church and concentrate on his work and leave border enforcement to us.”
Cardinal Prevost was close to Pope Francis, and during this controversy he posted on X after Vance’s assertion but before Pope Francis’s answer: “JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others.” After the pope published his letter, Prevost reposted it with the comment: “Pope Francis’ letter, JD Vance’s ‘ordo amoris’ and what the Gospel asks of all of us on immigration.”
On April 14, Prevost reposted: “As Trump & Bukele use Oval to Feds’ illicit deportation of a US resident , once an undoced Salvadorean himself, asks, ‘Do you not see the suffering? Is your conscience not disturbed? How can you stay quiet?’”
The new Pope Leo XIV greeted the world today in Italian and Spanish as he thanked Pope Francis and the other cardinals, and called for the church to “be a missionary Church, building bridges, dialogue, always open to receiving with open arms for everyone…, open to all, to all who need our charity, our presence, dialogue, love…, especially to those who are suffering.”
As an American-born pope in the model of Pope Francis, Pope Leo XIV might be able to appeal to American far-right Catholics and bring them back into the fold. But today, MAGAs responded to the new pope with fury. Right-wing influencer Laura Loomer, who is close to Trump, called Pope Leo “another Marxist puppet in the Vatican.” Influencer Charlie Kirk suggested he was an “pen borders globalist installed to counter Trump.”
In the U.S., President Donald Trump, who said he would like to be pope and then posted a picture of himself dressed as a pope on May 2, prompting an angry backlash by those who thought it was disrespectful, posted on social media that the election of the first pope from the United States was “a Great Honor for our Country” and that he looks forward to meeting him. ‘It will be a very meaningful moment!” he added.
sarahs mum said:
Heather Cox Richardson
4h ·
May 8, 2025 (Thursday)*snip….As an American-born pope in the model of Pope Francis, Pope Leo XIV might be able to appeal to American far-right Catholics and bring them back into the fold. But today, MAGAs responded to the new pope with fury. Right-wing influencer Laura Loomer, who is close to Trump, called Pope Leo “another Marxist puppet in the Vatican.” Influencer Charlie Kirk suggested he was an “pen borders globalist installed to counter Trump.”
In the U.S., President Donald Trump, who said he would like to be pope and then posted a picture of himself dressed as a pope on May 2, prompting an angry backlash by those who thought it was disrespectful, posted on social media that the election of the first pope from the United States was “a Great Honor for our Country” and that he looks forward to meeting him. ‘It will be a very meaningful moment!” he added…..snip*
Thanks for another good Heather Cox Richardson piece sarahs mum.
I was a bit conflicted over an American pope, but seeing the MAGAs losing their tiny minds makes me think it might be a good choice.
ruby said:
sarahs mum said:
Heather Cox Richardson
4h ·
May 8, 2025 (Thursday)*snip….As an American-born pope in the model of Pope Francis, Pope Leo XIV might be able to appeal to American far-right Catholics and bring them back into the fold. But today, MAGAs responded to the new pope with fury. Right-wing influencer Laura Loomer, who is close to Trump, called Pope Leo “another Marxist puppet in the Vatican.” Influencer Charlie Kirk suggested he was an “pen borders globalist installed to counter Trump.”
In the U.S., President Donald Trump, who said he would like to be pope and then posted a picture of himself dressed as a pope on May 2, prompting an angry backlash by those who thought it was disrespectful, posted on social media that the election of the first pope from the United States was “a Great Honor for our Country” and that he looks forward to meeting him. ‘It will be a very meaningful moment!” he added…..snip*
Thanks for another good Heather Cox Richardson piece sarahs mum.
I was a bit conflicted over an American pope, but seeing the MAGAs losing their tiny minds makes me think it might be a good choice.
If the Pope can have a lend of Trump’s marker pen he can change borders at will.
Tau.Neutrino said:
ruby said:
sarahs mum said:
Heather Cox Richardson
4h ·
May 8, 2025 (Thursday)*snip….As an American-born pope in the model of Pope Francis, Pope Leo XIV might be able to appeal to American far-right Catholics and bring them back into the fold. But today, MAGAs responded to the new pope with fury. Right-wing influencer Laura Loomer, who is close to Trump, called Pope Leo “another Marxist puppet in the Vatican.” Influencer Charlie Kirk suggested he was an “pen borders globalist installed to counter Trump.”
In the U.S., President Donald Trump, who said he would like to be pope and then posted a picture of himself dressed as a pope on May 2, prompting an angry backlash by those who thought it was disrespectful, posted on social media that the election of the first pope from the United States was “a Great Honor for our Country” and that he looks forward to meeting him. ‘It will be a very meaningful moment!” he added…..snip*
Thanks for another good Heather Cox Richardson piece sarahs mum.
I was a bit conflicted over an American pope, but seeing the MAGAs losing their tiny minds makes me think it might be a good choice.
If the Pope can have a lend of Trump’s marker pen he can change borders at will.
Trump should lend his marker pen to Zelensky.
Fixed.
Tau.Neutrino said:
Tau.Neutrino said:
ruby said:Thanks for another good Heather Cox Richardson piece sarahs mum.
I was a bit conflicted over an American pope, but seeing the MAGAs losing their tiny minds makes me think it might be a good choice.
If the Pope can have a lend of Trump’s marker pen he can change borders at will.
Trump should
lend his marker pen to Zelensky.
Fixed
.. fuck off and die quietly
party_pants said:
Tau.Neutrino said:
Tau.Neutrino said:If the Pope can have a lend of Trump’s marker pen he can change borders at will.
Trump should
lend his marker pen to Zelensky.
Fixed.. fuck off and die quietly
Absolutely.
ASIAN migrants
LOL
SCIENCE said:
LOL
She has as much chance of convincing Americns to give up sugar as she has of convincing them to give up their guns.
captain_spalding said:
SCIENCE said:LOL
She has as much chance of convincing Americns to give up sugar as she has of convincing them to give up their guns.
The RFK Jr factor…
Heather Cox Richardson
22m ·
May 9, 2025 (Friday)
Yesterday afternoon, President Donald Trump withdrew his nomination for interim U.S. attorney Ed Martin to become U.S. attorney in Washington D.C., the top federal prosecutor in the nation’s capital. A Missouri political operative with no experience as a prosecutor, Martin defended the January 6 rioters and fired the prosecutors who had worked on their cases, threatened to investigate Democrats and critics, and hosted a notorious antisemite on his podcast. His nomination proved too much for Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC), who joined all the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee to oppose his confirmation, deadlocking the committee and blocking the nomination.
Trump announced he was moving Martin into three roles that do not require Senate confirmation. He will become the new director of the Weaponization Working Group at the Department of Justice, an associate deputy attorney general, and a pardon attorney. “In these highly important roles, Ed will make sure we finally investigate the Weaponization of our Government under the Biden Regime, and provide much needed Justice for its victims,” Trump posted on social media.
To replace Martin, Trump has tapped Fox News Channel host Jeanine Pirro, who is passionately loyal to him. He noted among her qualifications that she “hosted her own Fox News Show, Justice with Judge Jeanine, for ten years, and is currently Co-Host of The Five, one of the Highest Rated Shows on Television.”
Matt Gertz of Media Matters for America recalls that the Fox News Channel took Pirro off the air after the 2020 election because of her conspiracy-theory-filled rants. In emails turned up in the defamation suit against the Fox News Channel for pushing the lie that voting machines had tainted the election results, her executive producer called her “nuts” and a “reckless maniac,” who “should never be on live television.” That lawsuit cost the Fox News Channel $787 million.
A similar scenario played out earlier this week when Trump withdrew his nomination of former Fox News Channel contributor Dr. Janette Nesheiwat for surgeon general, the officer who oversees the nation’s public health professionals. Nesheiwat is the sister-in-law of former national security advisor Mike Waltz, let go after he admitted a journalist to a group chat about a military strike on the Houthis in Yemen. As Anthony Clark reported in The Last Campaign, she had falsely represented her “medical education, board certifications, and military service.”
Trump’s replacement pick for surgeon general, Casey Means, did not finish her residency and is not currently licensed as a doctor but has embraced the anti-vax positions of Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., including his thoroughly debunked claim that vaccines cause autism. Still, she is not extreme enough for some of Kennedy’s followers, who are unhappy with the nomination.
When asked yesterday why he had nominated her, Trump answered: “Because Bobby thought she was fantastic…. I don’t know her. I listened to the recommendation of Bobby.” Today, Casey Means’s brother Calley, a White House advisor, went after Trump ally Laura Loomer for opposing the nomination, posting on social media that he had “ust received information that Laura Loomer is taking money from industry to scuttle President Trump’s agenda.” Loomer responded: “You’re so full of sh*t.”
The administration appears not to be able to attract the caliber of federal officials to which Americans have become accustomed.
Federal Bureau of Investigation director Kash Patel, who did not have experience in law enforcement when he took the job, has drawn criticism from current and former officials in the FBI and the Department of Justice, which oversees the FBI, for reducing FBI briefings, traveling frequently on personal matters, and appearing repeatedly at pro sporting events.
Yesterday Patel showed up at a hearing for the Senate Appropriations Commerce, Justice, and Science Subcommittee on the FBI’s spending plan for 2025, but he had not produced the plan, which by law was supposed to have been turned over more than a week ago. When Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) called the absence of the plan “absurd” and asked Patel when they could expect the plan, he answered he did not have a timeline.
Stacey Young, a former DOJ lawyer who co-founded Justice Connection, which supports current and former DOJ employees under pressure from the administration, told NBC’s Ken Dilanian: “There’s a growing sense among the ranks that there’s a leadership void. And that the highest echelons of the bureau are more concerned about currying favor with the president, retribution, and leaks than the actual work.”
Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) took Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem even more fully to task. At a meeting of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security yesterday, Murphy told Noem: “our department is out of control. You are spending like you don’t have a budget,” he said. “You are on the verge of running out of money for the fiscal year…. You’re on track to trigger the Anti-Deficiency Act.
That means you are going to spend more money than you have been allocated by Congress. This is a rare occurrence, and it is wildly illegal. Your agency will be broke by July, over two months before the end of the fiscal year.”
The obsession with the border, he continued, “has left the country unprotected elsewhere…. To fund the border, you have illegally gutted spending for cybersecurity. As we speak, Russian and Chinese hackers are having a field day attacking our nation. You have withdrawn funds for disaster prevention. Storms are going to kill more people in this country because of your illegal withholding of these funds.”
On Wednesday, Customs and Border Patrol confirmed that it had been using the communication app TeleMessage, which was a clone of Signal and which was hacked earlier this week. On Tuesday, Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) asked Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate “the government’s use of TeleMessage Archiver,” which “seriously threatens U.S. national security.”
Last night, New Jersey’s Newark Liberty International Airport suffered another 90-second radar blackout at 3:55 am. On May 6, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy took to social media to blame his predecessor in the Biden administration for the troubles in the airline system.
Hugo Lowell of The Guardian reported today that the White House is so fed up with the turmoil around Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth it will not permit him to name his own new chief of staff after his first one resigned last month.
Tim Marchman of Wired reported yesterday that Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard failed to follow basic cybersecurity protocol, reusing “the same weak password on multiple accounts for years.”
The administration appears chaotic, but far from taking the chaos in hand, President Trump appears happy to let others take the reins. As his tariffs are beginning to bite, today he suggested his worry about the economic fallout by posting “CHINA SHOULD OPEN UP ITS MARKET TO USA—WOULD BE SO GOOD FOR THEM!!! CLOSED MARKETS DON’T WORK ANYMORE!!!” Five minutes later, he posted: “80% Tariff on China seems right! Up to Scott B.”
The Constitution gives Congress alone the power to set tariffs. Trump seized that power for himself by declaring an emergency. Now he appears to be handing that power to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, likely so that he can blame Bessent when things go poorly.
Today, in the latest legal setback for the Trump regime on immigration, a federal judge in Vermont ordered the government to release Tufts University graduate student Rümeysa Öztürk from custody. Agents arrested Öztürk, a Turkish national, on March 25, claiming that she had been engaged with associations that “may undermine U.S. foreign policy by creating a hostile environment for Jewish students.” U.S. District Judge William Sessions III noted that the government provided no evidence for that assertion aside from a 2024 op-ed Öztürk wrote for the school newspaper criticizing the university’s response to the crisis in Gaza. She was freed this evening and will have to pursue her case before an immigration judge.
As the administration has lost repeatedly in court, officials appear to be upping the ante in their attempts to traumatize migrants and increase its power, but it remains unclear who is calling the shots. Amy McKinnon of Politico reported today that Trump has sat for only 12 “daily” intelligence briefing sessions since he took office, and does not read his written daily intelligence report.
On Tuesday, Reuters reported that the U.S. was preparing to send migrants to prison in Libya. On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy issued an order stopping the removal, saying such renditions would clearly violate a court order. Migrants from Asia sat on a military plane on the tarmac in Texas for hours before being taken off the plane and bussed back to detention.
When a reporter asked Trump if his administration was sending migrants to Libya, he answered: “I don’t know. You’ll have to ask, uh, Homeland Security, please.”
Today, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested Newark, New Jersey, mayor Ras Baraka when he and three members of New Jersey’s congressional delegation stood outside a private ICE detention facility in Newark called Delaney Hall. New Jersey’s interim U.S. attorney, Trump loyalist Alina Habba, posted on social media that Baraka had “ignored multiple warnings from Homeland Security Investigations to remove himself from the ICE detention center…. He has willingly chosen to disregard the law.” But, as Tracey Tully, Luis Ferré-Sadurní, and Alyce McFadden of the New York Times reported, videos show him being arrested in a public area outside the facility.
Tully, Ferré-Sadurní, and McFadden report that in February, the administration signed a 15-year, $1 billion contract with GEO Group, which operates private prisons, to expand the Delaney Hall facility dramatically as an ICE prison. New Jersey officials have argued in federal court that GEO Group does not have the required permits to operate the expanded facility.
White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller told reporters today that voters elected Trump to “deport the illegals” and that “Marxist” judges frustrating that effort are attacking democracy. In fact, Trump convinced many voters that he would deport only violent criminals, and they are now aghast at the scenes unfolding as masked agents grab women and children from their cars and sweep up U.S. citizens.
In The Bulwark today, Adrian Carrasquillo explained how podcasters, sports YouTubers, and comedians, including Joe Rogan, have brought the rendition of Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador onto the radar screen of Trump voters. Americans now disapprove of Trump’s immigration policies by 53% to 46%.
Miller made an even bigger power grab when he said “we’re actively looking at” suspending the writ of habeas corpus, a legal change that essentially establishes martial law by permitting the government to arrest people and hold them without charges or a trial. Legal analyst Steve Vladeck explains that Miller’s justification for such a suspension is dead wrong, and suggests Miller’s threat appears to be designed to put more pressure on the courts.
But in this chaotic administration, it seems worth asking who the “we” is in Miller’s statement. In the group chat about striking the Houthis, when administration officials were discussing—without the presence of either the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or the president himself—what was the best course of action, it was Miller who ultimately decided to launch a strike simply by announcing what he claimed were Trump’s wishes.
Thanks sm.
JD Vance has some sort of ‘brown smelly substance’ Midas-touch:
(via Jeff Tiedrich’s page):
Also from Jeff’s pages:
White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller says US President Donald Trump is looking for ways to expand the administration’s legal power to deport migrants who are in the United States illegally.
To achieve that, he says the administration is “actively looking at” suspending habeas corpus, the constitutional right for people to legally challenge their detention by the government.
Such a move would be aimed at migrants as part of the Republican president’s broader crackdown at the US-Mexico border.
“The constitution is clear, and that of course is the supreme law of the land, that the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus can be suspended in a time of invasion,” Mr Miller told reporters outside the White House on Friday.
roughbarked said:
White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller says US President Donald Trump is looking for ways to expand the administration’s legal power to deport migrants who are in the United States illegally.To achieve that, he says the administration is “actively looking at” suspending habeas corpus, the constitutional right for people to legally challenge their detention by the government.
Such a move would be aimed at migrants as part of the Republican president’s broader crackdown at the US-Mexico border.
“The constitution is clear, and that of course is the supreme law of the land, that the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus can be suspended in a time of invasion,” Mr Miller told reporters outside the White House on Friday.
Their crops are going to rot in the fields because there will be nobody to pick them. There will be shortages and empty shelves. Supermarket giants who can will arrange imported fruits and veggies and sell them at vastly increased prices. Consumers will pay more, or just miss out. meanwhile the farmers will go out of business, and once they are gone it will be a very slow process to reopen them.
Tau.Neutrino said:
OBAMA QUESTIONS TRUMP’S MENTAL ACUITY – FULL BARACK OBAMA SPEECH ON LEADERSHIP & DEMOCRATIC VALUES
what, again
party_pants said:
roughbarked said:
White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller says US President Donald Trump is looking for ways to expand the administration’s legal power to deport migrants who are in the United States illegally.
To achieve that, he says the administration is “actively looking at” suspending habeas corpus, the constitutional right for people to legally challenge their detention by the government.
Such a move would be aimed at migrants as part of the Republican president’s broader crackdown at the US-Mexico border.
“The constitution is clear, and that of course is the supreme law of the land, that the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus can be suspended in a time of invasion,” Mr Miller told reporters outside the White House on Friday.
Their crops are going to rot in the fields because there will be nobody to pick them. There will be shortages and empty shelves. Supermarket giants who can will arrange imported fruits and veggies and sell them at vastly increased prices. Consumers will pay more, or just miss out. meanwhile the farmers will go out of business, and once they are gone it will be a very slow process to reopen them.
MAGflation Is Better Than Stagflation ¡
SCIENCE said:
Tau.Neutrino said:
OBAMA QUESTIONS TRUMP’S MENTAL ACUITY – FULL BARACK OBAMA SPEECH ON LEADERSHIP & DEMOCRATIC VALUES
what, again
LOL
party_pants said:
roughbarked said:
White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller says US President Donald Trump is looking for ways to expand the administration’s legal power to deport migrants who are in the United States illegally.To achieve that, he says the administration is “actively looking at” suspending habeas corpus, the constitutional right for people to legally challenge their detention by the government.
Such a move would be aimed at migrants as part of the Republican president’s broader crackdown at the US-Mexico border.
“The constitution is clear, and that of course is the supreme law of the land, that the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus can be suspended in a time of invasion,” Mr Miller told reporters outside the White House on Friday.
Their crops are going to rot in the fields because there will be nobody to pick them. There will be shortages and empty shelves. Supermarket giants who can will arrange imported fruits and veggies and sell them at vastly increased prices. Consumers will pay more, or just miss out. meanwhile the farmers will go out of business, and once they are gone it will be a very slow process to reopen them.
It is chaos descending over all.
Tau.Neutrino said:
OBAMA QUESTIONS TRUMP’S MENTAL ACUITY – FULL BARACK OBAMA SPEECH ON LEADERSHIP & DEMOCRATIC VALUES
I posted that yesterday.
Nobody commented.
roughbarked said:
Tau.Neutrino said:
OBAMA QUESTIONS TRUMP’S MENTAL ACUITY – FULL BARACK OBAMA SPEECH ON LEADERSHIP & DEMOCRATIC VALUES
I posted that yesterday.
Nobody commented.
I watched it twice.
I now have to update the Trump list, again.
Tau.Neutrino said:
roughbarked said:
Tau.Neutrino said:
OBAMA QUESTIONS TRUMP’S MENTAL ACUITY – FULL BARACK OBAMA SPEECH ON LEADERSHIP & DEMOCRATIC VALUES
I posted that yesterday.
Nobody commented.
I watched it twice.
I now have to update the Trump list, again.
Obama used some new descriptions?
roughbarked said:
Tau.Neutrino said:
OBAMA QUESTIONS TRUMP’S MENTAL ACUITY – FULL BARACK OBAMA SPEECH ON LEADERSHIP & DEMOCRATIC VALUES
I posted that yesterday.
Nobody commented.
I don’t read your posts.
Witty Rejoinder said:
roughbarked said:
Tau.Neutrino said:
OBAMA QUESTIONS TRUMP’S MENTAL ACUITY – FULL BARACK OBAMA SPEECH ON LEADERSHIP & DEMOCRATIC VALUES
I posted that yesterday.
Nobody commented.
I don’t read your posts.
I know. ;)
roughbarked said:
Tau.Neutrino said:
OBAMA QUESTIONS TRUMP’S MENTAL ACUITY – FULL BARACK OBAMA SPEECH ON LEADERSHIP & DEMOCRATIC VALUES
I posted that yesterday.
Nobody commented.
I had already seen it, popped up on my YouTube feed too. I suspect this is the case for a lot of videos now, the algorithm sends us all the same suggestions. I listen to the first few minutes of it, but it was too long and just audio only so I got bored.
party_pants said:
roughbarked said:
Tau.Neutrino said:
OBAMA QUESTIONS TRUMP’S MENTAL ACUITY – FULL BARACK OBAMA SPEECH ON LEADERSHIP & DEMOCRATIC VALUES
I posted that yesterday.
Nobody commented.
I had already seen it, popped up on my YouTube feed too. I suspect this is the case for a lot of videos now, the algorithm sends us all the same suggestions. I listen to the first few minutes of it, but it was too long and just audio only so I got bored.
Yes. I listened to it in dribs and drabs.
roughbarked said:
Tau.Neutrino said:
OBAMA QUESTIONS TRUMP’S MENTAL ACUITY – FULL BARACK OBAMA SPEECH ON LEADERSHIP & DEMOCRATIC VALUES
I posted that yesterday.
Nobody commented.
what, again
SCIENCE said:
roughbarked said:
Tau.Neutrino said:
OBAMA QUESTIONS TRUMP’S MENTAL ACUITY – FULL BARACK OBAMA SPEECH ON LEADERSHIP & DEMOCRATIC VALUES
I posted that yesterday.
Nobody commented.
what, again
How many times is that you’ve said that now?
roughbarked said:
Tau.Neutrino said:
OBAMA QUESTIONS TRUMP’S MENTAL ACUITY – FULL BARACK OBAMA SPEECH ON LEADERSHIP & DEMOCRATIC VALUES
I posted that yesterday.
Nobody commented.
Didums.
roughbarked said:
SCIENCE said:
roughbarked said:I posted that yesterday.
Nobody commented.
what, again
How many times is that you’ve said that now?
It’s recursive comments all the way down.
kii said:
roughbarked said:
Tau.Neutrino said:
OBAMA QUESTIONS TRUMP’S MENTAL ACUITY – FULL BARACK OBAMA SPEECH ON LEADERSHIP & DEMOCRATIC VALUES
I posted that yesterday.
Nobody commented.
Didums.
water gain
Tau.Neutrino said:
roughbarked said:
Tau.Neutrino said:
OBAMA QUESTIONS TRUMP’S MENTAL ACUITY – FULL BARACK OBAMA SPEECH ON LEADERSHIP & DEMOCRATIC VALUES
I posted that yesterday.
Nobody commented.
I watched it twice.
I now have to update the Trump list, again.
seeks influence beyond and outside what a well-rounded moral person would
probably envies the sun
From Jeff Tiedrich’s pages:
World Goes To Hell, While US President Is Afraid Of EXploding Straws
I mean, we’ve all suffered the serious consequences of a straw-explosion at some time, haven’t we?
(I’ve been trying to think of hot liquids that you drink through a straw. Only one i can think of is the Argentinian tea ‘mate’. But, they use metal straws.)
KK switched to paper straws years before it was cool. One regular customer called me every name under the sun because we no longer stocked plastic straws. One day, he brought a mate and showed off to mate by calling me a fat c- etc before storming off to Maccas to get a plastic straw. His mate apologised for him, to which I replied, “it’s not your place to apologise in his stead, but maybe check why you want to be friends with him” or something to that effect. Next day, customer came back, apologised for his behaviour over the past few weeks, and was never mean to me again.
captain_spalding said:
From Jeff Tiedrich’s pages:
World Goes To Hell, While US President Is Afraid Of EXploding Straws
I mean, we’ve all suffered the serious consequences of a straw-explosion at some time, haven’t we?
(I’ve been trying to think of hot liquids that you drink through a straw. Only one i can think of is the Argentinian tea ‘mate’. But, they use metal straws.)
For Fucks Sake. When are they going to have him certified?
Fascinated by the recent oversight and budget hearings involving Kash Patel – out and out belligerence against any and all oversight
LOL
alleged
SCIENCE said:
LOL
alleged
If she gets in the way of Dunny getting his hands on some money, she just may get her chance to ‘take a bullet’.
There’s only one thing that Dunny loves more than ‘loyalty’, or himself…
SCIENCE said:
LOL
alleged
there are sooooooo many things wrong with accepting a plane from another country for your HoS to travel around in.. it’s actually mind boggling.
diddly-squat said:
SCIENCE said:LOL
alleged
there are sooooooo many things wrong with accepting a plane from another country for your HoS to travel around in.. it’s actually mind boggling.
Hey, the Dunny knows more about gift horses than anyone.
If the Qataris say that there’s no listening devices, or hidden cameras, or kill-switches, or any stuff like that on the plane, then that’s good enough for the dunny.
Those guys have loads of money, and, as the Dunny well knows, rich folks don’t lie to each other, right?
captain_spalding said:
diddly-squat said:
SCIENCE said:LOL
alleged
there are sooooooo many things wrong with accepting a plane from another country for your HoS to travel around in.. it’s actually mind boggling.
Hey, the Dunny knows more about gift horses than anyone.
If the Qataris say that there’s no listening devices, or hidden cameras, or kill-switches, or any stuff like that on the plane, then that’s good enough for the dunny.
Those guys have loads of money, and, as the Dunny well knows, rich folks don’t lie to each other, right?
Probably steers to the left and into those tall buildings
Lemme get this straight.
There’s a $90m parade for his birthday.
He’s gifted a $400m jet.
“Beautiful baby 11yo girls” get two dolls and five pencils.
Divine Angel said:
Lemme get this straight.There’s a $90m parade for his birthday.
He’s gifted a $400m jet.
“Beautiful baby 11yo girls” get two dolls and five pencils.
seems you have the general gist of it…
diddly-squat said:
Divine Angel said:
Lemme get this straight.There’s a $90m parade for his birthday.
He’s gifted a $400m jet.
“Beautiful baby 11yo girls” get two dolls and five pencils.
seems you have the general gist of it…
Goodo. I thought I may’ve missed something.
Divine Angel said:
diddly-squat said:
Divine Angel said:
Lemme get this straight.There’s a $90m parade for his birthday.
He’s gifted a $400m jet.
“Beautiful baby 11yo girls” get two dolls and five pencils.
seems you have the general gist of it…
Goodo. I thought I may’ve missed something.
democracy good
Divine Angel said:
Lemme get this straight.There’s a $90m parade for his birthday.
He’s gifted a $400m jet.
“Beautiful baby 11yo girls” get two dolls and five pencils.
Seems like a good summary.
Michael V said:
Divine Angel said:
Lemme get this straight.
There’s a $90m parade for his birthday.
He’s gifted a $400m jet.
“Beautiful baby 11yo girls” get two dolls and five pencils.
Seems like a good summary.
LOL
wait why has
The top federal prosecutor in Manhattan has been recused from Luigi Mangione’s case. “The Government also writes to inform the Court that United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Jay Clayton, is recused from this matter,” attorneys from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York said in a letter to Judge Margaret Garnett on Wednesday.
¿ WTF ?
Donald Trump has made an announcement that he will sign an Executive Order that will force pharmaceutical companies to reduce the price of prescription medication by up to 80%. He has also indicated his support for increasing taxes on individuals earning more that’s $2M/yr.
diddly-squat said:
Donald Trump has made an announcement that he will sign an Executive Order that will force pharmaceutical companies to reduce the price of prescription medication by up to 80%. He has also indicated his support for increasing taxes on individuals earning more that’s $2M/yr.
what a legend
First group of white South Africans flying to the US under Trump refugee plan
I hadn’t noticed this was going on.
He’s having a dummy spit over criticisms about being gifted a jet from Qatar.
Just imagine the tantrum if Biden had accepted such a gift.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-loses-his-mind-over-pushback-to-his-qatar-jet-deal/
buffy said:
First group of white South Africans flying to the US under Trump refugee planI hadn’t noticed this was going on.
You weren’t meant to.
Quite possibly these are some of the first beneficiaries of Trump’s plan to sell American residence/citizenship to the affluent.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01462-9
How political attacks could crush the mRNA vaccine revolution
Drug makers are scrambling to navigate an ‘existential threat’ to a once-celebrated technology.
Divine Angel said:
He’s having a dummy spit over criticisms about being gifted a jet from Qatar.Just imagine the tantrum if Biden had accepted such a gift.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-loses-his-mind-over-pushback-to-his-qatar-jet-deal/
https://www.cyber.gov.au/protect-yourself/staying-secure-online/secure-your-wifi-and-router
Bogsnorkler said:
https://www.cyber.gov.au/protect-yourself/staying-secure-online/secure-your-wifi-and-router
are the USSA implanting explosives in Australian telecommunications services now
Bogsnorkler said:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01462-9How political attacks could crush the mRNA vaccine revolution
Drug makers are scrambling to navigate an ‘existential threat’ to a once-celebrated technology.
good we need strong selection pressures to make evolution move in the proper direction
captain_spalding said:
buffy said:
First group of white South Africans flying to the US under Trump refugee planI hadn’t noticed this was going on.
You weren’t meant to.
Quite possibly these are some of the first beneficiaries of Trump’s plan to sell American residence/citizenship to the affluent.
and concentrate fascism in the fascist central motherland
captain_spalding said:
Divine Angel said:
He’s having a dummy spit over criticisms about being gifted a jet from Qatar.Just imagine the tantrum if Biden had accepted such a gift.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-loses-his-mind-over-pushback-to-his-qatar-jet-deal/
Nothing about that mob surprises me any more.
Michael V said:
captain_spalding said:
Divine Angel said:
He’s having a dummy spit over criticisms about being gifted a jet from Qatar.Just imagine the tantrum if Biden had accepted such a gift.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-loses-his-mind-over-pushback-to-his-qatar-jet-deal/
Nothing about that mob surprises me any more.
What would be a surprise is if even a cursory search of news, records, etc. didn’t turn up evidence of suspicious/illegal/reprehensible/lunatic associations by a Trump government figure, or of some other less-than-savoury reason as to why they got their job.
captain_spalding said:
Michael V said:
captain_spalding said:
Nothing about that mob surprises me any more.
What would be a surprise is if even a cursory search of news, records, etc. didn’t turn up evidence of suspicious/illegal/reprehensible/lunatic associations by a Trump government figure, or of some other less-than-savoury reason as to why they got their job.
Yes. Absolutely.
Michael V said:
captain_spalding said:
Michael V said:Nothing about that mob surprises me any more.
What would be a surprise is if even a cursory search of news, records, etc. didn’t turn up evidence of suspicious/illegal/reprehensible/lunatic associations by a Trump government figure, or of some other less-than-savoury reason as to why they got their job.
Yes. Absolutely.
No problem, Trump would just claim he doesn’t know them, and had nothing to do with their appointment.
Neophyte said:
Michael V said:
captain_spalding said:What would be a surprise is if even a cursory search of news, records, etc. didn’t turn up evidence of suspicious/illegal/reprehensible/lunatic associations by a Trump government figure, or of some other less-than-savoury reason as to why they got their job.
Yes. Absolutely.
No problem, Trump would just claim he doesn’t know them, and had nothing to do with their appointment.
Do you ever get that feeling like the US isn’t just getting dumber? It’s actually working on it. The death of intelligence
roughbarked said:
Neophyte said:
Michael V said:Yes. Absolutely.
No problem, Trump would just claim he doesn’t know them, and had nothing to do with their appointment.
Do you ever get that feeling like the US isn’t just getting dumber? It’s actually working on it. The death of intelligence
Get a lot of comments from US people on science articles that have anything at all to possibly do with bible stories, aliens or ancient civilisations.
Its like comments by rote, brainwashed almost
captain_spalding said:
Peak Warming Man said:
roughbarked said:
Neophyte said:
Michael V said:
Yes. Absolutely.
No problem, Trump would just claim he doesn’t know them, and had nothing to do with their appointment.
Do you ever get that feeling like the US isn’t just getting dumber? It’s actually working on it. The death of intelligence
Blimey, he must have been rehabilitated like Bill Clinton.
Bill’s rehabilitation began to take effect when the incumbency of Geo. W. Bush showed that Bill might have been a philanderer (and, blimey, he wasn’t the first Prez on either side to be that), but at least he wasn’t a dumb-arse President.
Then along came Trump, and people began to wish for a President like Bill.
so it really is a race hate to the bottom
SCIENCE said:
captain_spalding said:
Peak Warming Man said:
Blimey, he must have been rehabilitated like Bill Clinton.
Bill’s rehabilitation began to take effect when the incumbency of Geo. W. Bush showed that Bill might have been a philanderer (and, blimey, he wasn’t the first Prez on either side to be that), but at least he wasn’t a dumb-arse President.
Then along came Trump, and people began to wish for a President like Bill.
so it really is a race hate to the bottom
Any truth do you reckon to people get the leader they deserve.
Trump reflects that hidden nastiness a significant number of North Americans have
The intolerance for anyone not a US born white person
Cymek said:
SCIENCE said:
captain_spalding said:
Bill’s rehabilitation began to take effect when the incumbency of Geo. W. Bush showed that Bill might have been a philanderer (and, blimey, he wasn’t the first Prez on either side to be that), but at least he wasn’t a dumb-arse President.
Then along came Trump, and people began to wish for a President like Bill.
so it really is a race hate to the bottom
Any truth do you reckon to people get the leader they deserve.
Trump reflects that hidden nastiness a significant number of North Americans have
The intolerance for anyone not a US born white person
uh it’s supposedly a democracy, they are not merely getting the leader they deserve, they are literally getting what they chose what they wanted what they asked for
any way separate angle
“The meeting is being held at the request of the US side,” declared Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lin Jian.
“We can all play games — who made the first call, who didn’t make them. Doesn’t matter,” Trump said.
hey that sounds like arse getting kissed oh yes it does
Keeping track of Project 2025.
Read at your own risk.
https://www.project2025.observer/
After sorting out world trade he is currently in the middle east sorting them out.
So much to do, so little time.
(Posting a few of these that appear to be missing)
May 10, 2025
Heather Cox Richardson
May 11 (Sunday)
Those of us who are truly lucky have more than one mother. They are the cool aunts, the elderly ladies, the family friends, even the mentors who whip us into shape. By my count, I’ve had at least eight mothers. One of the most important was Sally Adams Bascom Augenstern.
Mrs. A., a widow who had played cutthroat bridge with my grandmother in the 1950s, lived near my family in Maine in the summer. I began vacuuming and weeding and painting for her when I was about 12, but it wasn’t long before my time at her house stopped being a job. She was bossy, demanding, sharp as a tack…and funny and thoughtful, and she remembered most of the century. She would sit in her rocking chair by the sunny window in the kitchen, shelling peas and telling me stories while I washed the floor with a hand sponge to spin out the time.
Sally (not Sarah) Bascom was born on December 25, 1903. (For folks in Maine keeping score, that made her almost a full year older than Millard Robinson, a fact she loathed.) She was the oldest of six children and spent her youth taking care of the younger ones. When I once asked her what was the most important historical event in her lifetime, this woman who had lived through the Depression and both world wars answered without hesitation: “the washing machine.” It had freed her and her mother from constant laundry. She could finally have some leisure time, which she spent listening to the radio and driving in cars with boys. Because her mother always needed her at home, it was not she, but all her younger siblings, who went to college. By the time Mrs. A. was an adult, she was certain she wanted no part of motherhood.
Mrs. A. never forgave her sister for driving her Model T through a field. She saved aluminum foil not because of WWII, but because of WWI. She supported herself and refused to marry until she met an older man who offered to take her traveling; they had a quick wedding and set off for Banff, where they looked at mountains and watched the bears pilfer trash.
She destroyed her knees playing tennis, so she would weed the garden by staggering to a lawn chair set up there. She loved snapdragons and nicotiana, veronica and irises and wild roses. After Mr. Augenstern died, she drove herself to and from Florida once a year in a giant old Cadillac with “Arrive Alive” on the license plate holder; she drove like a bat out of hell. She played bridge with terrifying intensity. And she always refused to be seen in public unless she was in a dress with her hair pinned up and her pearls on.
Mrs. A. laughed at me when I fell in love with history and tried to tell her that people changed the world because of their beliefs. “Follow the money, Heather,” said the woman whose income depended on her knowledge of the stock market. “Don’t pay attention to what they say; pay attention to who’s getting the money.” I listened. And then I learned as I watched her lose my grandmother’s generation and then work to make friends with my mother’s generation. And when they, too, died, she set out, in her eighties, to make friends with my generation. Every day was a new day.
Mrs. A. left me her linens, her gardening coat, and this photo of her and her siblings: Frances (who died young), Phyllis, Carlton, Guy, and Nathan. She also left me ideas about how to approach both history and life. I’ve never met a woman more determined never to be a mother, but I’m pretty sure that plan was one of the few things at which she failed.
Thinking of her, and all the wonderful women like her who mother without the title, on Mother’s Day 2025.
May 11, 2025
Heather Cox Richardson
May 12 (Monday)
And just like that, it’s Spring, and the lobstermen are getting ready to set their gear.
I took it easy today, but will be back at it tomorrow.
May 1, 2025
Heather Cox Richardson
May 13 (Tuesday)
The biggest news over the weekend was silence: the silence of Republicans. They refused to disavow White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller’s statement that the administration is looking at suspending the writ of habeas corpus, that is, essentially declaring martial law. They have also stayed quiet after the administration announced it was planning to accept a gift of a $400 million luxury Boeing 747-8 plane from the Qatari royal family. President Donald J. Trump would use the plane as Air Force One during the rest of his presidency and take it with him when he leaves office.
This is in keeping with the refusal of 53 Republican senators to answer questions from Rolling Stone’s Ryan Bort after NBC’s Kristen Welker asked Trump, “Don’t you need to uphold the Constitution of the United States, as president?” and he answered: “I don’t know.” Only Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) went on the record, posting on social media: “Following the Constitution is not a suggestion. It is a guiding force for all of us who work on behalf of the American people. Do you agree?”
It seems as if Republicans who are not on board the MAGA train are hoping the courts or reality will stop Trump’s authoritarian overreach. As Steve Vladeck noted on Friday in One First, there is “near-universal consensus…that only Congress can suspend habeas corpus—and that unilateral suspensions by the President are per se unconstitutional.” In addition, Miller’s insistence that it would be appropriate to suspend the writ of habeas corpus because the United States is under attack—a position Trump echoed yesterday when he posted, “Our Country has been INVADED by 21,000,000 Illegal Aliens, many of whom are Murderers and Criminals of the Highest Order”—has failed repeatedly in court.
Reality will trip up Trump’s plan to take possession of the Qatari gift. As David Kurtz noted this morning in Talking Points Memo, retrofitting the luxury plane with the defense capabilities and security protections necessary for Air Force One will take years, not months. (Air Force One is not a specific airplane; it is the call sign given to any Air Force aircraft carrying the president of the United States).
Still, the Republicans’ silence matters. Whether Trump’s plans are all possible is not the point: he and the members of his administration are deliberately attacking the fundamental principles of our democratic republic. That lawmakers who swore an oath to uphold those principles are choosing to remain silent makes them complicit in that attack.
The framers of the U.S. Constitution recognized that democratic government was a new departure from a world in which the world’s monarchs made deals amongst themselves. They placed strong guardrails around the behavior of future chief executives to make sure they would not sell the American people out to foreign leaders. “o Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under , shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State,” they wrote in the Constitution. An emolument is a payment.
Until the Trump administration, the expectation was that presidents would not accept foreign gifts, let alone bribes. As Jonathan Yerushalmy of The Guardian explained today, U.S. law prohibits presidents from accepting gifts worth more than $480. Gifts worth more than that are considered a gift to the American people and are transferred to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), the same agency that oversees presidential libraries. President George W. Bush gave up a puppy that was a gift from the leader of Bulgaria. When he left office after his first term, experts estimate, Trump retained more than $250,000 worth of gifts.
Trump loyalist Attorney General Pam Bondi and Trump’s top White House lawyer, David Warrington, signed off on Trump’s acceptance of the Qatari jet. They concluded it was an acceptable gift because while it will be exclusively for Trump’s use, the “flying palace” will be transferred from the Qataris to the U.S. Air Force and then to Trump’s presidential library, and that it is not tied to a specific presidential act. In 2019, Bondi was a registered lobbyist for Qatar, earning $115,000 a month.
In defending his planned acceptance of the plane, Trump turned the emoluments clause on its head. That, in turn, turned on its head the idea of a democratic republic in which the government rejects the idea of foreign leaders colluding for their own profit and reached back to that world the framers of the U.S. Constitution rejected.
He posted: “So the fact that the Defense Department is getting a GIFT, FREE OF CHARGE, of a 747 aircraft to replace the 40 year old Air Force One, temporarily, in a very public and transparent transaction, so bothers the Crooked Democrats that they insist we pay, TOP DOLLAR, for the plane. Anybody can do that! The Dems are World Class Losers!!! MAGA”
In The Bulwark, William Kristol observed: This is the voice of old-world autocracy…. Those who care that our republican government not be dependent on foreign states, that our elected leaders not take favors from foreign princes, they are losers.”
This is corruption, and not just in the sense that a government official is getting a payoff. It is corruption in the old-fashioned meaning of the term, that the body politic is being corrupted—poisoned—by a sickness that must be cured or it will be fatal. That corruption is the old-world system the framers tried to safeguard against, and it is visible anew in the relationship of the Trumps with Qatar.
The Trump family’s connections to Qatar are longstanding. In 2022 the chair of the Senate Committee on Finance, Ron Wyden (D-OR), and the chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, Carolyn B. Maloney (D-NY), wrote to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin III, asking for information in their “ongoing investigations into whether former Senior White House Adviser Jared Kushner’s financial conflicts of interest may have led him to improperly influence U.S. tax, trade, and national security policies for his own financial gain.”
Kushner is married to Trump’s daughter and was a key presidential advisor in Trump’s first term. The letter explained that Qatar had repeatedly refused to bail out the badly leveraged Kushner property at 666 Fifth Avenue (now known as 660 Fifth Avenue) in 2018. But after Kushner talked to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and the two states imposed a blockade on Qatar, Qatar suddenly threw in the necessary cash. Shortly after, the Saudi and UAE governments lifted the blockade, with Kushner taking credit for brokering the agreement.
Wyden and Maloney noted that “he economic blockade of Qatar may have been used as leverage for the 666 Fifth Avenue bailout and was not supported by other officials, including the Secretaries of State and Defense.” They warned that Kushner “may have prioritized his own financial interests over the national interest. The pursuit of personal financial gain should not dictate U.S. tax, trade, and national security policies.”
In this administration the corruption is even more direct. On May 1, 2025, the Trump Organization cut a deal with Qatari Diar, a company established by Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund in 2005 to “coordinate the country’s real estate development priorities.” Together with Saudi Arabian company Dar Global, which has close ties to the Saudi government, the Qatari company will build a $5.5 billion Trump International Golf Club in Qatar.
Trump heads to the Middle East tomorrow to visit Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates—three of the world’s wealthiest nations—in search of business deals.
Republicans spent the four years of Democratic president Joe Biden’s term calling to impeach him for allegedly accepting a $5 million payment from Ukraine. The source for that story later admitted to making it up and pleaded guilty of lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. And yet the Republicans are silent now.
After the weekend, Monday started with the administration’s announcement that it has agreed to a 90-day pause in the 145% tariffs Trump imposed on Chinese goods and on the 125% tariffs China imposed in retaliation. Both nations will cut tariffs 115% during that period, bringing the U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods to 30% and the Chinese counter tariffs to 10%. The stock market rose at the news.
While the administration hailed this as a breakthrough agreement, as economist Paul Krugman pointed out, this wasn’t a case of China backing down. China’s tariffs were a response to Trump’s, which threw the U.S. economy into a tailspin. When Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent indicated Trump wanted a way out, China agreed. Quietly scraped into the memory hole is Trump’s insistence that his high tariffs would bring old-fashioned manufacturing back to the United States.
Still, Krugman notes, a tariff of 30% on goods from China is still “really, really high.” Combined with the 10% across-the-board tariffs Trump has imposed on goods from other countries, Krugman estimates that the average tariff is up about 10% since Trump took office, from about 3% to about 13%. Krugman also notes that the tariffs have only been paused, making economic uncertainty worse. Trump appears to relish uncertainty because it keeps attention glued on him. Such uncertainty is good for television ratings but terrible for the economy, as executives cannot plan for the future.
Today Helene Cooper, Greg Jaffe, Jonathan Swan, Eric Schmitt, and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times reported that Trump followed a similar pattern in his bombing campaign against the Houthis in Yemen. He thought he could stop Houthi attacks on shipping in the Red Sea by bombing the Houthis, and he expected results within 30 days.
After 31 days, the journalists report, the U.S. didn’t even have air superiority over the Houthis, who shot down seven U.S. drones—each of which cost about $30 million—and continued to fire at U.S. ships. In the first month, the U.S. campaign cost about $1 billion and lost two $67 million aircraft. Eager to get out, Trump agreed to stop the bombing campaign in return for the Houthis’ leaving U.S. ships alone, but without any promises from the Houthis to stop the more general attacks that had led Trump to start the U.S. strikes in the first place. On May 5, Trump ended the operations and declared victory.
For their part, the Houthis posted on social media: “Yemen defeats America.”
—
Missed copying over a digit.
The first line of the last post should read May 12, 2025.
In a striking move that ends a nearly four-decades-old relationship between the federal government and the Episcopal Church, the denomination announced on Monday that it is terminating its partnership with the government to resettle refugees, citing moral opposition to resettling white Afrikaners from South Africa who have been classified as refugees by President Trump’s administration. In a letter sent to members of the church, the Most Rev. Sean W. Rowe — the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church — said that two weeks ago, the government “informed Episcopal Migration Ministries that under the terms of our federal grant, we are expected to resettle white Afrikaners from South Africa whom the U.S. government has classified as refugees.” The request, Rowe said, crossed a moral line for the Episcopal Church, which is part of the global Anglican Communion, which boasts among its leaders the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a celebrated and vocal opponent of apartheid in South Africa.
SCIENCE said:
In a striking move that ends a nearly four-decades-old relationship between the federal government and the Episcopal Church, the denomination announced on Monday that it is terminating its partnership with the government to resettle refugees, citing moral opposition to resettling white Afrikaners from South Africa who have been classified as refugees by President Trump’s administration. In a letter sent to members of the church, the Most Rev. Sean W. Rowe — the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church — said that two weeks ago, the government “informed Episcopal Migration Ministries that under the terms of our federal grant, we are expected to resettle white Afrikaners from South Africa whom the U.S. government has classified as refugees.” The request, Rowe said, crossed a moral line for the Episcopal Church, which is part of the global Anglican Communion, which boasts among its leaders the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a celebrated and vocal opponent of apartheid in South Africa.
That whole thing reads like an April Fools Day joke
AussieDJ said:
(Posting a few of these that appear to be missing)May 10, 2025
Heather Cox Richardson
May 11 (Sunday)Those of us who are truly lucky have more than one mother. They are the cool aunts, the elderly ladies, the family friends, even the mentors who whip us into shape. By my count, I’ve had at least eight mothers. One of the most important was Sally Adams Bascom Augenstern.
Mrs. A., a widow who had played cutthroat bridge with my grandmother in the 1950s, lived near my family in Maine in the summer. I began vacuuming and weeding and painting for her when I was about 12, but it wasn’t long before my time at her house stopped being a job. She was bossy, demanding, sharp as a tack…and funny and thoughtful, and she remembered most of the century. She would sit in her rocking chair by the sunny window in the kitchen, shelling peas and telling me stories while I washed the floor with a hand sponge to spin out the time.
Sally (not Sarah) Bascom was born on December 25, 1903. (For folks in Maine keeping score, that made her almost a full year older than Millard Robinson, a fact she loathed.) She was the oldest of six children and spent her youth taking care of the younger ones. When I once asked her what was the most important historical event in her lifetime, this woman who had lived through the Depression and both world wars answered without hesitation: “the washing machine.” It had freed her and her mother from constant laundry. She could finally have some leisure time, which she spent listening to the radio and driving in cars with boys. Because her mother always needed her at home, it was not she, but all her younger siblings, who went to college. By the time Mrs. A. was an adult, she was certain she wanted no part of motherhood.
Mrs. A. never forgave her sister for driving her Model T through a field. She saved aluminum foil not because of WWII, but because of WWI. She supported herself and refused to marry until she met an older man who offered to take her traveling; they had a quick wedding and set off for Banff, where they looked at mountains and watched the bears pilfer trash.
She destroyed her knees playing tennis, so she would weed the garden by staggering to a lawn chair set up there. She loved snapdragons and nicotiana, veronica and irises and wild roses. After Mr. Augenstern died, she drove herself to and from Florida once a year in a giant old Cadillac with “Arrive Alive” on the license plate holder; she drove like a bat out of hell. She played bridge with terrifying intensity. And she always refused to be seen in public unless she was in a dress with her hair pinned up and her pearls on.
Mrs. A. laughed at me when I fell in love with history and tried to tell her that people changed the world because of their beliefs. “Follow the money, Heather,” said the woman whose income depended on her knowledge of the stock market. “Don’t pay attention to what they say; pay attention to who’s getting the money.” I listened. And then I learned as I watched her lose my grandmother’s generation and then work to make friends with my mother’s generation. And when they, too, died, she set out, in her eighties, to make friends with my generation. Every day was a new day.
Mrs. A. left me her linens, her gardening coat, and this photo of her and her siblings: Frances (who died young), Phyllis, Carlton, Guy, and Nathan. She also left me ideas about how to approach both history and life. I’ve never met a woman more determined never to be a mother, but I’m pretty sure that plan was one of the few things at which she failed.
Thinking of her, and all the wonderful women like her who mother without the title, on Mother’s Day 2025.
Awww.
Thanks for posting.
:)
I agree with her about “the washing machine” and might also add, “ and to a lesser extent the refrigerator”.
AussieDJ said:
May 11, 2025Heather Cox Richardson
May 12 (Monday)And just like that, it’s Spring, and the lobstermen are getting ready to set their gear.
I took it easy today, but will be back at it tomorrow.
Ta.
AussieDJ said:
May 12, 2025Heather Cox Richardson
May 13 (Tuesday)The biggest news over the weekend was silence: the silence of Republicans. They refused to disavow White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller’s statement that the administration is looking at suspending the writ of habeas corpus, that is, essentially declaring martial law. They have also stayed quiet after the administration announced it was planning to accept a gift of a $400 million luxury Boeing 747-8 plane from the Qatari royal family. President Donald J. Trump would use the plane as Air Force One during the rest of his presidency and take it with him when he leaves office.
This is in keeping with the refusal of 53 Republican senators to answer questions from Rolling Stone’s Ryan Bort after NBC’s Kristen Welker asked Trump, “Don’t you need to uphold the Constitution of the United States, as president?” and he answered: “I don’t know.” Only Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) went on the record, posting on social media: “Following the Constitution is not a suggestion. It is a guiding force for all of us who work on behalf of the American people. Do you agree?”
It seems as if Republicans who are not on board the MAGA train are hoping the courts or reality will stop Trump’s authoritarian overreach. As Steve Vladeck noted on Friday in One First, there is “near-universal consensus…that only Congress can suspend habeas corpus—and that unilateral suspensions by the President are per se unconstitutional.” In addition, Miller’s insistence that it would be appropriate to suspend the writ of habeas corpus because the United States is under attack—a position Trump echoed yesterday when he posted, “Our Country has been INVADED by 21,000,000 Illegal Aliens, many of whom are Murderers and Criminals of the Highest Order”—has failed repeatedly in court.
Reality will trip up Trump’s plan to take possession of the Qatari gift. As David Kurtz noted this morning in Talking Points Memo, retrofitting the luxury plane with the defense capabilities and security protections necessary for Air Force One will take years, not months. (Air Force One is not a specific airplane; it is the call sign given to any Air Force aircraft carrying the president of the United States).
Still, the Republicans’ silence matters. Whether Trump’s plans are all possible is not the point: he and the members of his administration are deliberately attacking the fundamental principles of our democratic republic. That lawmakers who swore an oath to uphold those principles are choosing to remain silent makes them complicit in that attack.
The framers of the U.S. Constitution recognized that democratic government was a new departure from a world in which the world’s monarchs made deals amongst themselves. They placed strong guardrails around the behavior of future chief executives to make sure they would not sell the American people out to foreign leaders. “o Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under , shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State,” they wrote in the Constitution. An emolument is a payment.
Until the Trump administration, the expectation was that presidents would not accept foreign gifts, let alone bribes. As Jonathan Yerushalmy of The Guardian explained today, U.S. law prohibits presidents from accepting gifts worth more than $480. Gifts worth more than that are considered a gift to the American people and are transferred to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), the same agency that oversees presidential libraries. President George W. Bush gave up a puppy that was a gift from the leader of Bulgaria. When he left office after his first term, experts estimate, Trump retained more than $250,000 worth of gifts.
Trump loyalist Attorney General Pam Bondi and Trump’s top White House lawyer, David Warrington, signed off on Trump’s acceptance of the Qatari jet. They concluded it was an acceptable gift because while it will be exclusively for Trump’s use, the “flying palace” will be transferred from the Qataris to the U.S. Air Force and then to Trump’s presidential library, and that it is not tied to a specific presidential act. In 2019, Bondi was a registered lobbyist for Qatar, earning $115,000 a month.
In defending his planned acceptance of the plane, Trump turned the emoluments clause on its head. That, in turn, turned on its head the idea of a democratic republic in which the government rejects the idea of foreign leaders colluding for their own profit and reached back to that world the framers of the U.S. Constitution rejected.
He posted: “So the fact that the Defense Department is getting a GIFT, FREE OF CHARGE, of a 747 aircraft to replace the 40 year old Air Force One, temporarily, in a very public and transparent transaction, so bothers the Crooked Democrats that they insist we pay, TOP DOLLAR, for the plane. Anybody can do that! The Dems are World Class Losers!!! MAGA”
In The Bulwark, William Kristol observed: This is the voice of old-world autocracy…. Those who care that our republican government not be dependent on foreign states, that our elected leaders not take favors from foreign princes, they are losers.”
This is corruption, and not just in the sense that a government official is getting a payoff. It is corruption in the old-fashioned meaning of the term, that the body politic is being corrupted—poisoned—by a sickness that must be cured or it will be fatal. That corruption is the old-world system the framers tried to safeguard against, and it is visible anew in the relationship of the Trumps with Qatar.
The Trump family’s connections to Qatar are longstanding. In 2022 the chair of the Senate Committee on Finance, Ron Wyden (D-OR), and the chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, Carolyn B. Maloney (D-NY), wrote to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin III, asking for information in their “ongoing investigations into whether former Senior White House Adviser Jared Kushner’s financial conflicts of interest may have led him to improperly influence U.S. tax, trade, and national security policies for his own financial gain.”
Kushner is married to Trump’s daughter and was a key presidential advisor in Trump’s first term. The letter explained that Qatar had repeatedly refused to bail out the badly leveraged Kushner property at 666 Fifth Avenue (now known as 660 Fifth Avenue) in 2018. But after Kushner talked to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and the two states imposed a blockade on Qatar, Qatar suddenly threw in the necessary cash. Shortly after, the Saudi and UAE governments lifted the blockade, with Kushner taking credit for brokering the agreement.
Wyden and Maloney noted that “he economic blockade of Qatar may have been used as leverage for the 666 Fifth Avenue bailout and was not supported by other officials, including the Secretaries of State and Defense.” They warned that Kushner “may have prioritized his own financial interests over the national interest. The pursuit of personal financial gain should not dictate U.S. tax, trade, and national security policies.”
In this administration the corruption is even more direct. On May 1, 2025, the Trump Organization cut a deal with Qatari Diar, a company established by Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund in 2005 to “coordinate the country’s real estate development priorities.” Together with Saudi Arabian company Dar Global, which has close ties to the Saudi government, the Qatari company will build a $5.5 billion Trump International Golf Club in Qatar.
Trump heads to the Middle East tomorrow to visit Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates—three of the world’s wealthiest nations—in search of business deals.
Republicans spent the four years of Democratic president Joe Biden’s term calling to impeach him for allegedly accepting a $5 million payment from Ukraine. The source for that story later admitted to making it up and pleaded guilty of lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. And yet the Republicans are silent now.
After the weekend, Monday started with the administration’s announcement that it has agreed to a 90-day pause in the 145% tariffs Trump imposed on Chinese goods and on the 125% tariffs China imposed in retaliation. Both nations will cut tariffs 115% during that period, bringing the U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods to 30% and the Chinese counter tariffs to 10%. The stock market rose at the news.
While the administration hailed this as a breakthrough agreement, as economist Paul Krugman pointed out, this wasn’t a case of China backing down. China’s tariffs were a response to Trump’s, which threw the U.S. economy into a tailspin. When Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent indicated Trump wanted a way out, China agreed. Quietly scraped into the memory hole is Trump’s insistence that his high tariffs would bring old-fashioned manufacturing back to the United States.
Still, Krugman notes, a tariff of 30% on goods from China is still “really, really high.” Combined with the 10% across-the-board tariffs Trump has imposed on goods from other countries, Krugman estimates that the average tariff is up about 10% since Trump took office, from about 3% to about 13%. Krugman also notes that the tariffs have only been paused, making economic uncertainty worse. Trump appears to relish uncertainty because it keeps attention glued on him. Such uncertainty is good for television ratings but terrible for the economy, as executives cannot plan for the future.
Today Helene Cooper, Greg Jaffe, Jonathan Swan, Eric Schmitt, and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times reported that Trump followed a similar pattern in his bombing campaign against the Houthis in Yemen. He thought he could stop Houthi attacks on shipping in the Red Sea by bombing the Houthis, and he expected results within 30 days.
After 31 days, the journalists report, the U.S. didn’t even have air superiority over the Houthis, who shot down seven U.S. drones—each of which cost about $30 million—and continued to fire at U.S. ships. In the first month, the U.S. campaign cost about $1 billion and lost two $67 million aircraft. Eager to get out, Trump agreed to stop the bombing campaign in return for the Houthis’ leaving U.S. ships alone, but without any promises from the Houthis to stop the more general attacks that had led Trump to start the U.S. strikes in the first place. On May 5, Trump ended the operations and declared victory.
For their part, the Houthis posted on social media: “Yemen defeats America.”
—
Thanks.
ruby said:
Ha!
:)
Michael V said:
ruby said:
Ha!
:)
giggleworthy.
ruby said:
Switch on automatic pilot and it flies into The Pentagon
Cymek said:
ruby said:
Switch on automatic pilot and it flies into The Pentagon
Pentasus
SCIENCE said:
Cymek said:
ruby said:
Switch on automatic pilot and it flies into The Pentagon
Pentasus
Why does anyone need a 747 these days?
This new book on Biden (Original Sin) is by all accounts pretty scathing on both Biden and his administration. It suggests that his aides knowingly hid knowledge of Biden’s mental and physical decline towards the end of his presidency and how his family, his aides and he, himself, all pushed forward with his re-election campaign despite these concerns.
diddly-squat said:
This new book on Biden (Original Sin) is by all accounts pretty scathing on both Biden and his administration. It suggests that his aides knowingly hid knowledge of Biden’s mental and physical decline towards the end of his presidency and how his family, his aides and he, himself, all pushed forward with his re-election campaign despite these concerns.
It was like he hung on for grim death?
roughbarked said:
diddly-squat said:This new book on Biden (Original Sin) is by all accounts pretty scathing on both Biden and his administration. It suggests that his aides knowingly hid knowledge of Biden’s mental and physical decline towards the end of his presidency and how his family, his aides and he, himself, all pushed forward with his re-election campaign despite these concerns.
It was like he hung on for grim death?
Is the author now working on a similar book about Trump?
The Rev Dodgson said:
roughbarked said:
diddly-squat said:This new book on Biden (Original Sin) is by all accounts pretty scathing on both Biden and his administration. It suggests that his aides knowingly hid knowledge of Biden’s mental and physical decline towards the end of his presidency and how his family, his aides and he, himself, all pushed forward with his re-election campaign despite these concerns.
It was like he hung on for grim death?
Is the author now working on a similar book about Trump?
Unlikely. There’s no evidence of anyone trying to hide Trump’s mental and physical decline.
captain_spalding said:
The Rev Dodgson said:
roughbarked said:It was like he hung on for grim death?
Is the author now working on a similar book about Trump?
Unlikely. There’s no evidence of anyone trying to hide Trump’s mental and physical decline.
…cept Trump himself. And AI.
The Rev Dodgson said:
roughbarked said:
diddly-squat said:This new book on Biden (Original Sin) is by all accounts pretty scathing on both Biden and his administration. It suggests that his aides knowingly hid knowledge of Biden’s mental and physical decline towards the end of his presidency and how his family, his aides and he, himself, all pushed forward with his re-election campaign despite these concerns.
It was like he hung on for grim death?
Is the author now working on a similar book about Trump?
the book was written by journalists Jake Tapper (of CNN) and Alex Thompson (of Axios) and involved over 200 interviews with WH staff and political aides. I’m sure there will be many similar books written about this term of government.
Um, duh.
Nikki Haley says, if Biden accepted a plane from Qatar, America would be furious.
https://www.latintimes.com/former-trump-cabinet-member-if-biden-accepted-plane-qatar-we-would-furious-582969
Divine Angel said:
captain_spalding said:
The Rev Dodgson said:Is the author now working on a similar book about Trump?
Unlikely. There’s no evidence of anyone trying to hide Trump’s mental and physical decline.
…cept Trump himself. And AI.
how can one decline from negative extremum
Divine Angel said:
Um, duh.
Nikki Haley says, if Biden accepted a plane from Qatar, America would be furious.
well he should have done it
SCIENCE said:
Divine Angel said:
captain_spalding said:Unlikely. There’s no evidence of anyone trying to hide Trump’s mental and physical decline.
…cept Trump himself. And AI.
how can one decline from negative extremum
Fall into a black hole?
The Rev Dodgson said:
roughbarked said:
diddly-squat said:This new book on Biden (Original Sin) is by all accounts pretty scathing on both Biden and his administration. It suggests that his aides knowingly hid knowledge of Biden’s mental and physical decline towards the end of his presidency and how his family, his aides and he, himself, all pushed forward with his re-election campaign despite these concerns.
It was like he hung on for grim death?
Is the author now working on a similar book about Trump?
Good question.
In honour of SM
……………………..
May 13, 2025.
Heather Cox Richardson
May 14 (Wednesday).
While President Donald Trump’s billionaire sidekick Elon Musk has said he is pulling back from his work with the “Department of Government Efficiency,” he is with Trump today in Saudi Arabia, along with representatives from leaders from some of the biggest companies in the United States. The business executives are looking for Saudi investments.
Jason Karaian of the New York Times notes that the Saudis are looking to diversify their oil-dependent economy and are now the world’s largest investors in artificial intelligence, or AI. In addition to Musk, the AI entrepreneurs in today’s entourage include, as Karaian reports, “Sam Altman, the chief executive of ChatGPT parent OpenAI; Jensen Huang, the leader of the advanced chipmaker Nvidia; Ruth Porat, the chief investment officer of Alphabet, Google’s parent company; and Andy Jassy, the chief of Amazon, which is a major provider of cloud-computing services.” Cyber experts note that DOGE’s mining of Americans’ personal data under Musk has given him access to a treasure trove of verified information for his own company xAI. Karaian notes that xAI is in the process of raising money that could bring the value of the firm to $120 billion.
After the promise of $600 billion in Saudi investment in the U.S., including a $20 billion investment in AI and energy infrastructure to support it, Trump today promised Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, known as MBS, $142 billion in state-of-the-art defense and security equipment from dozens of U.S. defense firms.
Musk’s turn from DOGE back to AI is revealing not just in providing evidence that his primary interest all along was not in “waste, fraud, and abuse” but in collecting government data about the American people. It is not likely a coincidence that the administration fired Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden last Thursday and Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter on Saturday. Both Hayden and Perlmutter have questioned the unauthorized use of copyrighted material to train AI.
White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt explained Hayden’s firing by saying “here were quite concerning things that she had done at the Library of Congress in the pursuit of and putting inappropriate books in the library for children,” but the Library of Congress collects according to a list of principles to enable it to perform research for members of Congress and to keep a record of the American people. It is not a lending library. In order to conduct research at the Library of Congress, researchers must be at least 16 years old.
Musk powers his AI from a massive supercomputer in Memphis, Tennessee. As Dara Kerr of The Guardian reported last month, the Southern Environmental Law Center discovered that Musk had quietly moved at least 35 methane-powered generators—enough to power a city—to the plant to help power the supercomputer he calls “Colossus,” which powers his chatbot “Grok.” Those generators are unpermitted and are major producers of carcinogens and other toxins. After the company assured Memphis mayor Paul Young that only 15 of the generators were on, thermal imaging showed at least 33 running.
The supercomputer is in a historically Black neighborhood with a history of industrial pollution and higher rates of cancer and asthma than other Memphis neighborhoods. When residents spoke out against the supercomputer, a group calling itself “Facts Over Fiction” but without any other identifying information spread flyers claiming the turbines are “specially designed to protect the air we all breathe.” They also claimed that the Environmental Protection Agency and the county health department regulate the generators, but both agencies told Kerr that they had not issued permits for their use at the Memphis plant.
In March, Musk bought another property in Memphis to expand the plant by a million square feet.
With Musk turning back to his business interests, the task of cementing DOGE’s cuts into law is falling to Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought. Vought is a Christian nationalist who was a key author of Project 2025, the blueprint for a second Trump presidency. Project 2025 called for slashing the federal government that Christian nationalists think is undermining Christianity.
It said the federal government must “decentralize and privatize as much as possible” and leave “the great majority of domestic activities to state, local, and private governance.” That destruction could be accomplished by an extraordinarily strong president, who would refuse to accept the law that Congress had the final say in appropriations and programs and would “impound” congressionally appropriated funds in order to slash programs he didn’t want.
This plan was so unpopular that only four percent of Americans who had heard of Project 2025 before the 2024 presidential election wanted to see it enacted. Opposition to it was so strong that, as a candidate, Trump ran away from it, claiming he had nothing to do with it. But Ken Thomas, Scott Patterson, and Lindsay Wise of the Wall Street Journal report that Vought “has served as Musk’s lower-profile partner on DOGE” and has been putting the plans in Project 2025 into place. The sweeping cuts to public services and to government agencies are straight out of the Project 2025 playbook.
If anything, those plans are even less popular now than they were last summer when they were only hypothetical. In the past three months, Americans have discovered that cuts to the government invariably affect programs they like as well as those they think are superfluous.
And yet cuts are on the menu in the House, where Republicans have been pulling together a measure to enact Trump’s agenda in what he calls “one big, beautiful bill.” Lisa Mascaro of the Associated Press reported that at least 11 committees have been working on their pieces of the bill, but the pieces produced by the Ways and Means, Energy and Commerce, and Agriculture committees have been the most closely watched.
Those committees released their plans over the past few days, beginning with the Committee on Energy and Commerce late Sunday night. Together, they call for extending the 2017 Trump tax cuts that benefit primarily the wealthy and corporations. This has been Trump’s top priority. According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, extending those cuts will add at least 4.6 trillion to the national debt over the next ten years. Such increased spending makes it imperative to increase the debt ceiling, which caps how much money the Treasury can borrow. The Committee on Ways and Means calls for raising that ceiling by $4 trillion.
At the same time that it funnels money upward, the proposed bill also cuts programs that benefit ordinary Americans. It cuts funding for climate initiatives passed by Congress in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. It cuts the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) that 42 million Americans rely on. And, despite Trump’s repeated promises not to touch Medicaid, the program that provides healthcare for poorer Americans, the plan calls for cuts to Medicaid. The CBO estimates that the cuts will take away healthcare from at least 10.3 million Americans over the next decade.
As Mike Lillis and Emily Brooks of The Hill note, Republicans are taking a mighty gamble by pairing tax cuts for the richest Americans with cuts to Medicaid, SNAP, and clean-energy tax credits. Each of those programs is popular among Republican voters, Lillis and Brooks note; a KFF poll from March found that 77% of Americans, including 64% of Republicans, have a positive view of Medicaid. Ninety-seven percent of Americans believe that Medicaid is important in their community. Republican lawmakers are gambling that voters will be willing to lose services in exchange for putting Trump’s agenda into law.
But it will not be an easy sell. When the House Energy and Commerce Committee began the process of debating and amending their section of the bill today—the section of the bill that outlines the cuts to Medicaid—committee chair Brett Guthrie (R-KY) explained that the proposed cuts were designed to “stop the billions of dollars of waste, fraud, and abuse in the Medicaid program” and are “all commonsense policies that will return taxpayer dollars to middle-class families.”
Attendees who hoped to protect Medicaid, many of them in wheelchairs, disagreed. They began to chant “no cuts to Medicaid” and “waste, fraud, and abuse, my ass.” Activist Julie Farrar told Ben Leonard and Hailey Fuchs of Politico that there were about 90 people there from the disability rights organization ADAPT. They were, she said, “fighting literally for our survival right now.”
It is against the law to protest inside congressional buildings. U.S. Capitol Police arrested 25 people and removed others.
—
Notes:
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5297426-trump-saudi-investment-deal/
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/13/us/politics/trump-saudi-business-lunch-musk-altman.html
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/apr/24/elon-musk-xai-memphis
https://www.tallahassee.com/story/news/politics/2025/05/12/trump-fired-librarian-congress-carla-hayden-why/83576711007/
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/10/trump-u-s-copyright-official-00340306
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-s-budget-hawk-takes-over-the-doge-agenda-first-up-the-military/ar-AA1Ez59f
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/poll-project-2025-broadly-known-severely-unpopular-voters-rcna172660
https://www.loc.gov/acq/devpol/cps.html
https://guides.loc.gov/local-history-genealogy-research-guides/using-the-library
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/christian-nationalism-is-the-driving-force-behind-the-trump-administration-s-actions/ar-AA1EbI0v
https://apnews.com/article/trump-big-bill-tax-cuts-medicaid-1c893945b416419d806dacb6d24b895a
https://www.budget.senate.gov/chairman/newsroom/press/extending-trump-tax-cuts-would-add-46-trillion-to-the-deficit-cbo-finds#:~:text=The%20report%2C%20written%20at%20the,trillion%20more%20than%20previously%20estimated.
https://thehill.com/business/budget/5296087-house-gop-debt-limit-increase/
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24088042-project-2025s-mandate-for-leadership-the-conservative-promise/
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/house-republicans-unveil-medicaid-cuts-democrats-warn-leave-121701684
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-medicaid-republican-bill-cut-benefits/story?id=121756481
https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/5295623-house-republicans-budget-bill-green-funds-fossil-fuels-epa/
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/5297278-house-republicans-agriculture-snap/
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/5298712-republicans-risk-political-backlash-over-medicaid-cuts/
https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2025/05/13/congress/medicaid-cut-protestors-disrupt-gop-megabill-markup-00345841
https://energycommerce.house.gov/posts/chairman-guthrie-delivers-opening-statement-at-full-committee-markup-of-budget-reconciliation-text
https://www.kff.org/medicaid/poll-finding/7-charts-about-public-opinion-on-medicaid/
…………….
Impeachment proceedings launched against Trump, likely to be quashed as even Democrats say “it’s a waste of time”
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-impeachment-vote-house-shir-thanedar-b2750651.html
RFK Jr admits “people shouldn’t take medical advice from me”
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/05/14/robert-f-kennedy-jr-vaccine-question-congressional-hearing/83624022007/
Divine Angel said:
Impeachment proceedings launched against Trump, likely to be quashed as even Democrats say “it’s a waste of time”
RFK Jr admits “people shouldn’t take medical advice from me”
what a fucking place
AussieDJ said:
In honour of SM
……………………..May 13, 2025.
Heather Cox Richardson
May 14 (Wednesday).—————————————————CUT————————————————
Thanks.
:)
Michael V said:
AussieDJ said:
In honour of SM
……………………..May 13, 2025.
Heather Cox Richardson
May 14 (Wednesday).—————————————————CUT————————————————
Thanks.
:)
Thank you for reminding me … Another coming in a few minutes.
May 14, 2025
Heather Cox Richardson
May 15 (Thursday)
On May 8, political scientists Steven Levitsky, Lucan Way, and Daniel Ziblatt published an op-ed in the New York Times reminding readers that most modern authoritarian leaders are elected. They maintain their power by using the power of the government—arrests, tax audits, defamation suits, politically targeted investigations, and so on—to punish and silence their opponents. They either buy or bully the media and civil society until opposing voices cave to their power.
Levitsky, Way, and Ziblatt call this system “competitive authoritarianism.” A country that has fallen to it still holds elections, but the party in power has so weighted the system in its favor that it’s virtually impossible for it to lose.
The way to tell if the United States has crossed the line from democracy to competitive authoritarianism, the political scientists explain, is to see if people feel safe opposing those in power. Can they safely protest? Publish criticism of the government? Support opposition candidates? Or does taking a stand against those in power lead to punishment either by the government or by government supporters?
Looking at the many ways the Trump administration has been harassing critics, law firms, universities, judges, and media stations, they conclude that “America has crossed the line into competitive authoritarianism.”
Since they made that observation less than a week ago, there has been more evidence of the administration’s attempt to consolidate power.
After the National Intelligence Council (NIC), the nation’s top body for analyzing intelligence, produced a report that contradicted President Donald J. Trump’s assertion that the Venezuelan government was directing the actions of the Tren de Aragua (TdA) gang, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard fired acting NIC chair Michael Collins and his deputy, Maria Langan-Reikhof. The administration used the claim that Venezuela was working with TdA as justification for invoking the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to render migrants from Venezuela to El Salvador.
A spokesperson for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said: “The Director is working alongside President Trump to end the weaponization and politicization of the Intelligence Community.”
Department of Justice leaders are also consolidating power under the claim of ending weaponization. In a dramatic reversal of Department of Justice policies, Trump loyalist Ed Martin said yesterday that when the department finds it does not have the grounds to charge political opponents with a crime, it will “name” and “shame” them, attempting to convict them in the court of public opinion rather than a court of law. Trump initially nominated Martin to be the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, but Martin’s extremism convinced Senate Republican Thom Tillis to vote with Democrats on the Judiciary Committee to stop his nomination.
So Trump put him at the head of the Justice Department’s “Weaponization Working Group,” allegedly designed to ferret out the weaponization of former president Joe Biden’s Department of Justice, but clearly intended to use the Justice Department to advance Trump’s interests.
A federal grand jury in Wisconsin yesterday indicted Milwaukee County Judge Hannah Dugan, charging that she tried to help a man evade agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Dugan permitted an undocumented immigrant to leave her courtroom and enter the public hallway by the jury door rather than the public door. A week later, federal officials arrested her at the courthouse, photographed her in handcuffs, and spread the news of her arrest on social media, and Attorney General Pam Bondi told reporters that Dugan’s arrest was a warning to others. A bipartisan group of 150 former federal and state judges wrote to Bondi to protest both Dugan’s arrest and the administration’s threats against the judiciary.
Today, U.S. Circuit Judge Amy St. Eve and Judge Robert Conrad, both of whom were appointed by Republican presidents, asked the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Financial Services and General Government to increase funding for judges’ security. David Gilbert of Wired reported today that calls for impeachment and violent threats against U.S. judges on social media have gone up by 327% since last year.
In a piece in The Atlantic today, respected conservative judge J. Michael Luttig noted that for all of Trump’s insistence that he is the victim of the “weaponization” of the federal government against him, “t is Trump who is actually weaponizing the federal government against both his political enemies and countless other American citizens today.”
Luttig warned that Trump is trying to end the rule of law in the United States, recreating the sort of monarchy against which the nation’s founders rebelled. He lists Trump’s pardoning of the convicted January 6 rioters (which he did with the collusion of Ed Martin), the arrest of Judge Dugan, which Luttig calls “appalling,” the deportation of a U.S. citizen with the child’s mother, and the “investigation” of private citizen Christopher Krebs.
“For not one of his signature initiatives during his first 100 days in office does Trump have the authority under the Constitution and laws of the United States that he claims,” Judge Luttig writes. Not for tariffs, not for unlawful deportations, not for attacks on colleges and law firms, not for his attacks on birthright citizenship, not for handing power to billionaire Elon Musk and the “Department of Government Efficiency,” not for trying to end due process, not for his attempts to starve government agencies by impounding their funding, not for his vow to regulate federal elections, not for his attacks on the media.
The courts are holding, Judge Luttig writes, and will continue to hold, but Trump “will continue his assault on America, its democracy, and rule of law until the American people finally rise up and say, “No more.”
And rising up they are.
The chaotic cuts of the Department of Government Efficiency soured people on billionaire Elon Musk and on government cuts. Yesterday, Representative Jared Moskowitz (D-FL) told Ben Johansen of Politico that while Republicans claim the House DOGE caucus, created to work with Musk to audit the government, is “just getting started,” Moskowitz says it is “dead…defunct…. We only had two total meetings in five months.”
Currently, Newark Liberty International Airport is serving as an illustration of the effects of DOGE’s cuts. On Monday the airport was supposed to be staffed with 14 air traffic controllers but was down to just three, causing delays of up to seven hours. As Ed Pilkington of The Guardian reported, Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy assured the public on Sunday that it was safe to fly out of the Newark airport, but on Monday told a podcaster that his wife was supposed to fly out of Newark but he had switched the flight to one out of New York’s La Guardia.
Recent polling shows that Trump is underwater in polling—meaning that more people disapprove than approve of his actions—even on his core issues of immigration and the economy. Many Trump voters apparently believed he would deport only violent criminals and are now shocked to see masked officers breaking car windows to arrest mothers with children. The rendition of Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the notorious CECOT terrorist prison in El Salvador without due process and through what the administration initially called “administrative error” has caused such an uproar that, as Adrian Carrasquillo of The Bulwark noted today, the White House is working aggressively to try to recover control of the narrative by smearing the Maryland father as a member of the MS-13 gang, a human trafficker, and a terrorist with no evidence.
The administration has also lost credibility on the economy. Jeff Stein, Natalie Allison, and David J. Lynch of the Washington Post reported today that since he took office, Trump has changed his tariff policies at least 50 times. Some didn’t last a day. After insisting that his high tariffs would bring manufacturing to the United States, Trump’s administration on Monday announced it would reduce Trump’s 145% tariff on goods from China to 30%. China said it would correspondingly lower the tariff it had put on U.S. goods in retaliation for Trump’s tariff.
“It’s been completely insane,” economist Michael Strain, from the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute think tank, told the Washington Post reporters. “When I step back from the euphoria over easing tariffs with China, what I see is the tariff rate is five times as high as when Trump took office. And we seem to have gotten nothing out of it at all.”
Evidently concerned that Trump’s economic agenda is so unpopular it will fail in Congress, Trump’s political operators have spent in the “high seven figures,” Alex Isenstadt of Axios says, to run ads in more than 20 targeted congressional districts to push lawmakers to get behind it. “Tell Congress this is a good deal for America,” the ad says. “Support President Trump’s agenda to get our economy back on track.”
As the American people have turned on Trump, Democrats have been standing against him and members of his administration. Yesterday’s discussion of the “One Big Beautiful Bill” the Republicans are trying to get through Congress sparked dramatic pushback. The measure cuts taxes for the wealthy and corporations and helps to offset those financial benefits at the top of society with cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which used to be known as food stamps, as well as a bevy of other programs that help ordinary Americans.
When the House Committee on Energy and Commerce began to debate their piece of the bill yesterday, there were protests within the hearing room and in the hallway outside. After ten hours, the committee still had not gotten to the Medicaid cuts, which Democrats suggested was intentional. Representative Troy A. Carter Sr. (D-LA) recorded a video at 1:00 this morning noting that “Republicans want to do this in the dead of night…and not let the American people see.” He continued: “Shame on you…. The people deserve to see the actions that you’re doing to them by cutting Medicaid in favor of the richest rich for tax breaks. Hashtag, WeWontLetYou.”
The fireworks in two other hearings today rivaled the fights in the hearing over cuts to Medicaid. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem testified today before the House Homeland Security Committee. But she refused to answer Democrats’ questions about the deportation of U.S. citizens, the reality that the “MS13” on a photograph of Abrego Garcia’s hand was photoshopped, or that the Supreme Court has unanimously ordered the administration to return Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the United States. Instead, she simply kept talking over the members of Congress, reiterating administration talking points.
“Your department has been sloppy,” Representative Seth Magaziner (D-RI) said. “And instead of focusing on real criminals, you have allowed innocent children to be deported while you fly around the country playing dress-up for the cameras. Instead of enforcing the laws, you have repeatedly broken them. You need to change course immediately before more innocent people are hurt on your watch.”
Democrats also challenged Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. when he testified for the first time today before both the House Appropriations Committee and the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee to promote Trump’s budget. Kennedy seemed angry at being questioned and, like Noem, repeated debunked lies. He angrily claimed he had “not fired any working scientists” and was “not withholding money for lifesaving research,” although during his tenure, 20,000 people—one quarter of the health workforce—have lost their jobs and the administration has cut $2.7 billion in research funding for the National Institutes of Health.
Memorably, Kennedy told Representative Mark Pocan (D-WI): “I don’t think people should be taking medical advice from me.”
Judge Hannah Dugan herself pushed back against the administration today when she moved for an order to dismiss her indictment. Her motion called the government’s prosecution “virtually unprecedented and entirely unconstitutional.” The government cannot prosecute her, she argued, because she “is entitled to judicial immunity for her official acts.” As precedent she cited Trump v. United States, the July 2024 Supreme Court decision protecting Trump from prosecution for crimes committed as part of his official acts.
Voters in Omaha, Nebraska, last night dramatically rejected Trumpism when they elected Democrat John Ewing as their new mayor over Republican incumbent Jean Stothert. Ewing served in the Omaha Police Department for almost 25 years before becoming Douglas County treasurer for 17 years. He will be Omaha’s first Black mayor.
—
AussieDJ said:
May 14, 2025
Heather Cox Richardson
Trump put him at the head of the Justice Department’s “Weaponization Working Group,” allegedly designed to ferret out the weaponization of former president Joe Biden’s Department of Justice, but clearly intended to use the Justice Department to advance Trump’s interests. … J. Michael Luttig noted that for all of Trump’s insistence that he is the victim of the “weaponization” of the federal government against him, “t is Trump who is actually weaponizing the federal government against both his political enemies and countless other American citizens today.”
May 15 (Thursday)Luttig warned that Trump is trying to end the rule of law in the United States, recreating the sort of monarchy against which the nation’s founders rebelled. He lists Trump’s pardoning of the convicted January 6 rioters (which he did with the collusion of Ed Martin), the arrest of Judge Dugan, which Luttig calls “appalling,” the deportation of a U.S. citizen with the child’s mother, and the “investigation” of private citizen Christopher Krebs.
Totally No DARVO Here, Nobody Could Have Foreseen This
Before anyone asks, DARVO = deny, attack, reverse victim & offender
It’s what abusers do.
Divine Angel said:
Before anyone asks, DARVO = deny, attack, reverse victim & offenderIt’s what abusers do.
We have a few DARVOs here.
>>Judge Hannah Dugan herself pushed back against the administration today when she moved for an order to dismiss her indictment. Her motion called the government’s prosecution “virtually unprecedented and entirely unconstitutional.” The government cannot prosecute her, she argued, because she “is entitled to judicial immunity for her official acts.” As precedent she cited Trump v. United States, the July 2024 Supreme Court decision protecting Trump from prosecution for crimes committed as part of his official acts.<<
From the Heather Cox Richardson piece Aussie DJ put up in the small hours of the morning. It’s nor fair when the legal eagles use the small print…
Occupy Democrats
BREAKING: Donald Trump unleashes a deeply bizarre rant during his trip to Qatar and rambles about lumberjacks, digging ditches, his MAGA Transportation Secretary climbing “up and down” trees, and Pete Buttigieg riding a bicycle.
The cognitive decline has never been more apparent. This man belongs in a psychiatric facility not the White House…
“When you look at what’s happening with Russia and Ukraine the drone is killing tremendous numbers of people,” Trump said during a press conference in Doha, Qatar. “You hide behind a tree and the drone comes down and it circles you with fire. You don’t have a chance and the tree comes down also by the way.”
“It’s so intense the— I mean you see these trees being knocked down like…” he continued. “Like they’re being sawed down by a top of the line, uhh, timberman like… Like… You know who? Sean… Duffy.”
“Do you know that Sean Duffy, the head of the Transportation Department, who’s working right now on the airports and getting a system because Biden didn’t do a thing for four years and Pete Buttigieg was the head and he goes bicycling to work,” said Trump.
“He takes a bicycle to work, can you believe it? He’s head— He’s running the biggest air system in the world and he takes a bicycle to work. What a— And they say he’s going to run for president, I don’t see it.” Trump went on. “Who knows right? But I don’t see it.”
“But, uh, when I look at what they’ve done uh, it’s so horrible what they’ve done and the work they did do they wasted billions of dollars,” Trump went on. “They tried to hook up air systems to… To copper. They tried to hook up copper to glass and the glass doesn’t work with the copper and…”
“Uh they had 30,000 different contractors doing 30,000 jobs and when they put it all together they spent billions of dollars. It didn’t even come close to working and we’re going to be giving out a brand new system,” said Trump.
“It’s very important. We’ll have the best system. And we think we know who that system is but we have a lot of bidding,” he went on.
“But we want one check,” he continued. “We want a unified system. We don’t have, uh, 5,000 contractors and all different places, some digging ditches and some not doing ditches because they want to go by satellite. Satellite seems to be the way to go. We’re going to be giving that out pretty soon.”
“But what people don’t know about Sean cause I mentioned lumberjacks that Sean — you probably didn’t know this that uh — I’m not talking about this Sean, this Sean no, not, this is not… This is a different Sean,” Trump said.
“Sean Duffy, the head of Transportation. He’s a great Sean though, I have to tell you but Sean Duffy was the world champion for five years climbing trees and down, up and down, world champion!” Trump said, struggling to string together his thoughts. “So that’s what you call a serious a lumberjack.”
“And he’s doing a fantastic job too, a really respected guy and terrific guy and I mentioned the champion because when somebody’s the champion — he’s the world champion for a long time — he came down, when you come down those trees, coming down at a rapid… He said that started getting your back. You will often break your back! You… You miss… You miss a shot and you’re coming down a lot faster than the human body was meant to come down. But he’s doing a fantastic job at Transportation. But this has been a very, uh, historic trip.”
Imagine for a second if President Biden had delivered a speech as confused, nonsensical, and downright strange as this during a trip to a foreign country. Every news outlet would be questioning his mental health. Donald Trump is clearly in a state of profound psychological deterioration and Congress should take immediate action to remove him from office.
kii said:
Divine Angel said:
Before anyone asks, DARVO = deny, attack, reverse victim & offender
It’s what abusers do.
We have a few DARVOs here.
exactly they’re the worst
wait
buffy said:
>>Judge Hannah Dugan herself pushed back against the administration today when she moved for an order to dismiss her indictment. Her motion called the government’s prosecution “virtually unprecedented and entirely unconstitutional.” The government cannot prosecute her, she argued, because she “is entitled to judicial immunity for her official acts.” As precedent she cited Trump v. United States, the July 2024 Supreme Court decision protecting Trump from prosecution for crimes committed as part of his official acts.<<From the Heather Cox Richardson piece Aussie DJ put up in the small hours of the morning. It’s nor fair when the legal eagles use the small print…
That is very amusing that Judge Hannah Dugan cited Trump v. United States, the July 2024 Supreme Court decision protecting Trump from prosecution for crimes committed as part of his official acts. Do you think they were laughing as they typed that out?
Bogsnorkler said:
Occupy DemocratsBREAKING: Donald Trump unleashes a deeply bizarre rant during his trip to Qatar and rambles about lumberjacks, digging ditches, his MAGA Transportation Secretary climbing “up and down” trees, and Pete Buttigieg riding a bicycle.
The cognitive decline has never been more apparent. This man belongs in a psychiatric facility not the White House…
“When you look at what’s happening with Russia and Ukraine the drone is killing tremendous numbers of people,” Trump said during a press conference in Doha, Qatar. “You hide behind a tree and the drone comes down and it circles you with fire. You don’t have a chance and the tree comes down also by the way.”
“It’s so intense the— I mean you see these trees being knocked down like…” he continued. “Like they’re being sawed down by a top of the line, uhh, timberman like… Like… You know who? Sean… Duffy.”
“Do you know that Sean Duffy, the head of the Transportation Department, who’s working right now on the airports and getting a system because Biden didn’t do a thing for four years and Pete Buttigieg was the head and he goes bicycling to work,” said Trump.
“He takes a bicycle to work, can you believe it? He’s head— He’s running the biggest air system in the world and he takes a bicycle to work. What a— And they say he’s going to run for president, I don’t see it.” Trump went on. “Who knows right? But I don’t see it.”
“But, uh, when I look at what they’ve done uh, it’s so horrible what they’ve done and the work they did do they wasted billions of dollars,” Trump went on. “They tried to hook up air systems to… To copper. They tried to hook up copper to glass and the glass doesn’t work with the copper and…”
“Uh they had 30,000 different contractors doing 30,000 jobs and when they put it all together they spent billions of dollars. It didn’t even come close to working and we’re going to be giving out a brand new system,” said Trump.
“It’s very important. We’ll have the best system. And we think we know who that system is but we have a lot of bidding,” he went on.“But we want one check,” he continued. “We want a unified system. We don’t have, uh, 5,000 contractors and all different places, some digging ditches and some not doing ditches because they want to go by satellite. Satellite seems to be the way to go. We’re going to be giving that out pretty soon.”
“But what people don’t know about Sean cause I mentioned lumberjacks that Sean — you probably didn’t know this that uh — I’m not talking about this Sean, this Sean no, not, this is not… This is a different Sean,” Trump said.
“Sean Duffy, the head of Transportation. He’s a great Sean though, I have to tell you but Sean Duffy was the world champion for five years climbing trees and down, up and down, world champion!” Trump said, struggling to string together his thoughts. “So that’s what you call a serious a lumberjack.”
“And he’s doing a fantastic job too, a really respected guy and terrific guy and I mentioned the champion because when somebody’s the champion — he’s the world champion for a long time — he came down, when you come down those trees, coming down at a rapid… He said that started getting your back. You will often break your back! You… You miss… You miss a shot and you’re coming down a lot faster than the human body was meant to come down. But he’s doing a fantastic job at Transportation. But this has been a very, uh, historic trip.”
Imagine for a second if President Biden had delivered a speech as confused, nonsensical, and downright strange as this during a trip to a foreign country. Every news outlet would be questioning his mental health. Donald Trump is clearly in a state of profound psychological deterioration and Congress should take immediate action to remove him from office.
The western white corporate media have a lot to answer for. They have sanewashed Trump’s comments so they appear coherent to low information voters. Folks who live paycheck to paycheck, work 2-3 jobs over 6-7 days and skip meals for their kids to eat don’t have time to sift through the insanity. So a lot of their news consumption comes for seeing news titles.
Bogsnorkler said:
Occupy DemocratsBREAKING: Donald Trump unleashes a deeply bizarre rant during his trip to Qatar and rambles about lumberjacks, digging ditches, his MAGA Transportation Secretary climbing “up and down” trees, and Pete Buttigieg riding a bicycle.
The cognitive decline has never been more apparent. This man belongs in a psychiatric facility not the White House…
“When you look at what’s happening with Russia and Ukraine the drone is killing tremendous numbers of people,” Trump said during a press conference in Doha, Qatar. “You hide behind a tree and the drone comes down and it circles you with fire. You don’t have a chance and the tree comes down also by the way.”
“It’s so intense the— I mean you see these trees being knocked down like…” he continued. “Like they’re being sawed down by a top of the line, uhh, timberman like… Like… You know who? Sean… Duffy.”
“Do you know that Sean Duffy, the head of the Transportation Department, who’s working right now on the airports and getting a system because Biden didn’t do a thing for four years and Pete Buttigieg was the head and he goes bicycling to work,” said Trump.
“He takes a bicycle to work, can you believe it? He’s head— He’s running the biggest air system in the world and he takes a bicycle to work. What a— And they say he’s going to run for president, I don’t see it.” Trump went on. “Who knows right? But I don’t see it.”
“But, uh, when I look at what they’ve done uh, it’s so horrible what they’ve done and the work they did do they wasted billions of dollars,” Trump went on. “They tried to hook up air systems to… To copper. They tried to hook up copper to glass and the glass doesn’t work with the copper and…”
“Uh they had 30,000 different contractors doing 30,000 jobs and when they put it all together they spent billions of dollars. It didn’t even come close to working and we’re going to be giving out a brand new system,” said Trump.
“It’s very important. We’ll have the best system. And we think we know who that system is but we have a lot of bidding,” he went on.“But we want one check,” he continued. “We want a unified system. We don’t have, uh, 5,000 contractors and all different places, some digging ditches and some not doing ditches because they want to go by satellite. Satellite seems to be the way to go. We’re going to be giving that out pretty soon.”
“But what people don’t know about Sean cause I mentioned lumberjacks that Sean — you probably didn’t know this that uh — I’m not talking about this Sean, this Sean no, not, this is not… This is a different Sean,” Trump said.
“Sean Duffy, the head of Transportation. He’s a great Sean though, I have to tell you but Sean Duffy was the world champion for five years climbing trees and down, up and down, world champion!” Trump said, struggling to string together his thoughts. “So that’s what you call a serious a lumberjack.”
“And he’s doing a fantastic job too, a really respected guy and terrific guy and I mentioned the champion because when somebody’s the champion — he’s the world champion for a long time — he came down, when you come down those trees, coming down at a rapid… He said that started getting your back. You will often break your back! You… You miss… You miss a shot and you’re coming down a lot faster than the human body was meant to come down. But he’s doing a fantastic job at Transportation. But this has been a very, uh, historic trip.”
Imagine for a second if President Biden had delivered a speech as confused, nonsensical, and downright strange as this during a trip to a foreign country. Every news outlet would be questioning his mental health. Donald Trump is clearly in a state of profound psychological deterioration and Congress should take immediate action to remove him from office.
Probably, but they won’t.
Michael V said:
Bogsnorkler said:Imagine for a second if President Biden had delivered a speech as confused, nonsensical, and downright strange as this during a trip to a foreign country. Every news outlet would be questioning his mental health. Donald Trump is clearly in a state of profound psychological deterioration and Congress should take immediate action to remove him from office.
Probably, but they won’t.
Mostly because it really is, on one level, absolutely hilarious.
captain_spalding said:
Michael V said:
Bogsnorkler said:Imagine for a second if President Biden had delivered a speech as confused, nonsensical, and downright strange as this during a trip to a foreign country. Every news outlet would be questioning his mental health. Donald Trump is clearly in a state of profound psychological deterioration and Congress should take immediate action to remove him from office.
Probably, but they won’t.
Mostly because it really is, on one level, absolutely hilarious.
^ ^^ ^^^
Meanwhile:
Kristi Noem has been working with the producer of “Duck Dynasty” to pitch a reality TV show—titled “The American”—where immigrants will compete in a string of challenges across the country “for the honor of fast-tracking their way to U.S. citizenship,” according to a new report.
kii said:
Meanwhile:Kristi Noem has been working with the producer of “Duck Dynasty” to pitch a reality TV show—titled “The American”—where immigrants will compete in a string of challenges across the country “for the honor of fast-tracking their way to U.S. citizenship,” according to a new report.
FMD, it’s like real life Hunger Games over there
Divine Angel said:
kii said:
Meanwhile:Kristi Noem has been working with the producer of “Duck Dynasty” to pitch a reality TV show—titled “The American”—where immigrants will compete in a string of challenges across the country “for the honor of fast-tracking their way to U.S. citizenship,” according to a new report.
FMD, it’s like real life Hunger Games over there
Imagine the hole you must have come from to want to live there.
Cymek said:
Divine Angel said:
kii said:
Meanwhile:Kristi Noem has been working with the producer of “Duck Dynasty” to pitch a reality TV show—titled “The American”—where immigrants will compete in a string of challenges across the country “for the honor of fast-tracking their way to U.S. citizenship,” according to a new report.
FMD, it’s like real life Hunger Games over there
Imagine the hole you must have come from to want to live there.
Something that i noticed with some Americans that i’ve met/worked with (not all of them) is that they simply cannot conceive that there are people in the world who are not living every day with the dream of living in the US, or of making their own country into an exact copy of US society.
Cymek said:
Divine Angel said:
kii said:
Meanwhile:Kristi Noem has been working with the producer of “Duck Dynasty” to pitch a reality TV show—titled “The American”—where immigrants will compete in a string of challenges across the country “for the honor of fast-tracking their way to U.S. citizenship,” according to a new report.
FMD, it’s like real life Hunger Games over there
Imagine the hole you must have come from to want to live there.
I never wanted to come here, except to see the Grand Canyon.
Then I fell in love with mr kii.
He had to return here after 3 years living in Australia, because his brother needed a kidney, mr kii needed easy access to some medical help via the VA, and their mother was dying.
Le sigh…
kii said:
Cymek said:
Divine Angel said:FMD, it’s like real life Hunger Games over there
Imagine the hole you must have come from to want to live there.
I never wanted to come here, except to see the Grand Canyon.
Then I fell in love with mr kii.
He had to return here after 3 years living in Australia, because his brother needed a kidney, mr kii needed easy access to some medical help via the VA, and their mother was dying.
Le sigh…
Are you still returning to Australia
kii said:
Cymek said:
Divine Angel said:FMD, it’s like real life Hunger Games over there
Imagine the hole you must have come from to want to live there.
I never wanted to come here, except to see the Grand Canyon.
Then I fell in love with mr kii.
He had to return here after 3 years living in Australia, because his brother needed a kidney, mr kii needed easy access to some medical help via the VA, and their mother was dying.
Le sigh…
I visited the USA about 7 years ago, glad I saw the Grand Canyon, no desire to go back
Cymek said:
kii said:
Cymek said:Imagine the hole you must have come from to want to live there.
I never wanted to come here, except to see the Grand Canyon.
Then I fell in love with mr kii.
He had to return here after 3 years living in Australia, because his brother needed a kidney, mr kii needed easy access to some medical help via the VA, and their mother was dying.
Le sigh…Are you still returning to Australia
Definitely. Progress has slowed down, I’ve been unwell. Importing a son to get me over the finish line.
I hate this fucking shithole country, but I love my house.
kii said:
Cymek said:
kii said:I never wanted to come here, except to see the Grand Canyon.
Then I fell in love with mr kii.
He had to return here after 3 years living in Australia, because his brother needed a kidney, mr kii needed easy access to some medical help via the VA, and their mother was dying.
Le sigh…Are you still returning to Australia
Definitely. Progress has slowed down, I’ve been unwell. Importing a son to get me over the finish line.
I hate this fucking shithole country, but I love my house.
Hope they dont impose a tariff on the imported son.
captain_spalding said:
Cymek said:
Divine Angel said:FMD, it’s like real life Hunger Games over there
Imagine the hole you must have come from to want to live there.
Something that i noticed with some Americans that i’ve met/worked with (not all of them) is that they simply cannot conceive that there are people in the world who are not living every day with the dream of living in the US, or of making their own country into an exact copy of US society.
Welcome to Reddit.
It’s funny watching Americans go, “but why wouldn’t Canada want to be the 51st state?” and Canadians going, “I broke my leg last year, paid nothing”.
My friend’s still going to the US next month for a 4 week trip. At this point she’s already $30k so gotta get her money’s worth!
Before she leaves she’s scrubbing her phone of social media and message apps. We have a mutual friend who escaped from the US a decade ago, extremely critical of Trump, so friend can’t risk having her pop up if authorities do check her phone.
There are people who advise scrubbing one’s phone, there are people who say it’s an overreaction, it’s never happened (it has), and there are people who don’t do anything and hope for the best…
My friend and her family are white, they’ll be fine.
Divine Angel said:
My friend’s still going to the US next month for a 4 week trip. At this point she’s already $30k so gotta get her money’s worth!Before she leaves she’s scrubbing her phone of social media and message apps. We have a mutual friend who escaped from the US a decade ago, extremely critical of Trump, so friend can’t risk having her pop up if authorities do check her phone.
There are people who advise scrubbing one’s phone, there are people who say it’s an overreaction, it’s never happened (it has), and there are people who don’t do anything and hope for the best…
My friend and her family are white, they’ll be fine.
There are people who advise buying a whole new phone to take to America, so that it’s entirely clean, blank, inoffensive, nothing on it, and you make sure that you put on it only the minimal, guaranteed-‘inoffensive’ things that you need.
captain_spalding said:
Divine Angel said:
My friend’s still going to the US next month for a 4 week trip. At this point she’s already $30k so gotta get her money’s worth!Before she leaves she’s scrubbing her phone of social media and message apps. We have a mutual friend who escaped from the US a decade ago, extremely critical of Trump, so friend can’t risk having her pop up if authorities do check her phone.
There are people who advise scrubbing one’s phone, there are people who say it’s an overreaction, it’s never happened (it has), and there are people who don’t do anything and hope for the best…
My friend and her family are white, they’ll be fine.
There are people who advise buying a whole new phone to take to America, so that it’s entirely clean, blank, inoffensive, nothing on it, and you make sure that you put on it only the minimal, guaranteed-‘inoffensive’ things that you need.
I’d probably do this.
Brindabellas said:
kii said:
Cymek said:Are you still returning to Australia
Definitely. Progress has slowed down, I’ve been unwell. Importing a son to get me over the finish line.
I hate this fucking shithole country, but I love my house.
Hope they dont impose a tariff on the imported son.
I’m hoping they don’t stop him at the border. He says..“Mother, I’m a straight, white*, cis-gendered 6’ 3” man. Stop worrying.”
*except his paternal gma was a Stolen Child.
Michael V said:
captain_spalding said:
Divine Angel said:
My friend’s still going to the US next month for a 4 week trip. At this point she’s already $30k so gotta get her money’s worth!Before she leaves she’s scrubbing her phone of social media and message apps. We have a mutual friend who escaped from the US a decade ago, extremely critical of Trump, so friend can’t risk having her pop up if authorities do check her phone.
There are people who advise scrubbing one’s phone, there are people who say it’s an overreaction, it’s never happened (it has), and there are people who don’t do anything and hope for the best…
My friend and her family are white, they’ll be fine.
There are people who advise buying a whole new phone to take to America, so that it’s entirely clean, blank, inoffensive, nothing on it, and you make sure that you put on it only the minimal, guaranteed-‘inoffensive’ things that you need.
I’d probably do this.
One source suggested that you take proof of the purchase date of your new phone with you, too, so that if anything ‘naughty’ is somehow already on it before you get it, you can prove that it wasn’t your doing.
kii said:
Brindabellas said:
kii said:Definitely. Progress has slowed down, I’ve been unwell. Importing a son to get me over the finish line.
I hate this fucking shithole country, but I love my house.
Hope they dont impose a tariff on the imported son.
I’m hoping they don’t stop him at the border. He says..“Mother, I’m a straight, white*, cis-gendered 6’ 3” man. Stop worrying.”
*except his paternal gma was a Stolen Child.
ICD official: ‘you ever said ‘boo’ to a goose, son?’.
captain_spalding said:
kii said:
Brindabellas said:Hope they dont impose a tariff on the imported son.
I’m hoping they don’t stop him at the border. He says..“Mother, I’m a straight, white*, cis-gendered 6’ 3” man. Stop worrying.”
*except his paternal gma was a Stolen Child.
ICD official: ‘you ever said ‘boo’ to a goose, son?’.
ICE, that is.
Divine Angel said:
My friend’s still going to the US next month for a 4 week trip. At this point she’s already $30k so gotta get her money’s worth!Before she leaves she’s scrubbing her phone of social media and message apps. We have a mutual friend who escaped from the US a decade ago, extremely critical of Trump, so friend can’t risk having her pop up if authorities do check her phone.
There are people who advise scrubbing one’s phone, there are people who say it’s an overreaction, it’s never happened (it has), and there are people who don’t do anything and hope for the best…
My friend and her family are white, they’ll be fine.
It feels a bit like an overreaction but hey, some people wrap their suitcases in gladwrap. I think if you have clear holiday plans in that you have accommodation booked and have return flights the authorities aren’t going to give you too much of a hard time.
I really love the States, it’s beautiful and there are tones of really great people and things to do and see. A driving holiday from LA to NYC (via the south and then up through the Appalachia is still on my bucket list.
I worked in the states in the early seventies, the community welcoming lady and came around bearing gifts, it was a nice touch, it was the deep south, plenty of good old boys in the bars though, some pretty rough bars.
Divine Angel said:
kii said:
Meanwhile:Kristi Noem has been working with the producer of “Duck Dynasty” to pitch a reality TV show—titled “The American”—where immigrants will compete in a string of challenges across the country “for the honor of fast-tracking their way to U.S. citizenship,” according to a new report.
FMD, it’s like real life Hunger Games over there
Kristi might have been watching “Punishment Park” on Youtube – a 1971 feature written and directed by Peter Watkins, previously known for “Culloden” and “The War Game”
diddly-squat said:
Divine Angel said:
My friend’s still going to the US next month for a 4 week trip. At this point she’s already $30k so gotta get her money’s worth!Before she leaves she’s scrubbing her phone of social media and message apps. We have a mutual friend who escaped from the US a decade ago, extremely critical of Trump, so friend can’t risk having her pop up if authorities do check her phone.
There are people who advise scrubbing one’s phone, there are people who say it’s an overreaction, it’s never happened (it has), and there are people who don’t do anything and hope for the best…
My friend and her family are white, they’ll be fine.
It feels a bit like an overreaction but hey, some people wrap their suitcases in gladwrap. I think if you have clear holiday plans in that you have accommodation booked and have return flights the authorities aren’t going to give you too much of a hard time.
I really love the States, it’s beautiful and there are tones of really great people and things to do and see. A driving holiday from LA to NYC (via the south and then up through the Appalachia is still on my bucket list.
Lolol…what a sheltered life you lead!!
Are your in-laws Trump supporters?Neophyte said:
Divine Angel said:
kii said:
Meanwhile:Kristi Noem has been working with the producer of “Duck Dynasty” to pitch a reality TV show—titled “The American”—where immigrants will compete in a string of challenges across the country “for the honor of fast-tracking their way to U.S. citizenship,” according to a new report.
FMD, it’s like real life Hunger Games over there
Kristi might have been watching “Punishment Park” on Youtube – a 1971 feature written and directed by Peter Watkins, previously known for “Culloden” and “The War Game”
I wonder if the challenges would include ‘shooting cute little dogs because you stink at dog-training’?
Michael V said:
captain_spalding said:
Divine Angel said:
My friend’s still going to the US next month for a 4 week trip. At this point she’s already $30k so gotta get her money’s worth!
Before she leaves she’s scrubbing her phone of social media and message apps. We have a mutual friend who escaped from the US a decade ago, extremely critical of Trump, so friend can’t risk having her pop up if authorities do check her phone.
There are people who advise scrubbing one’s phone, there are people who say it’s an overreaction, it’s never happened (it has), and there are people who don’t do anything and hope for the best…
My friend and her family are white, they’ll be fine.
There are people who advise buying a whole new phone to take to America, so that it’s entirely clean, blank, inoffensive, nothing on it, and you make sure that you put on it only the minimal, guaranteed-‘inoffensive’ things that you need.
I’d probably do this.
oh c’m‘on yous gutless chickens yous probably wear seatbelts as well like good little sheep
Peak Warming Man said:
I worked in the states in the early seventies, the community welcoming lady and came around bearing gifts, it was a nice touch, it was the deep south, plenty of good old boys in the bars though, some pretty rough bars.
A few years ago Mr Mutant was offered a plumb job in Seattle. Fk me am I ever glad he didn’t take it.
Brindabellas said:
kii said:
Cymek said:
Imagine the hole you must have come from to want to live there.
I never wanted to come here, except to see the Grand Canyon.
Then I fell in love with mr kii.
He had to return here after 3 years living in Australia, because his brother needed a kidney, mr kii needed easy access to some medical help via the VA, and their mother was dying.
Le sigh…I visited the USA about 7 years ago, glad I saw the Grand Canyon, no desire to go back
ah well we’re quite happy to vicariously experience them there green auroras on Mars through the eyes of a remote controlled heartless mechanical piece of scrap without the need to go there either
Divine Angel said:
Peak Warming Man said:
I worked in the states in the early seventies, the community welcoming lady and came around bearing gifts, it was a nice touch, it was the deep south, plenty of good old boys in the bars though, some pretty rough bars.
A few years ago Mr Mutant was offered a plumb job in Seattle. Fk me am I ever glad he didn’t take it.
LOL probably similar job our associate was offered and instead they went to Brexit Plague Island instead fucking LOL
Michael V said:
captain_spalding said:
There are people who advise buying a whole new phone to take to America, so that it’s entirely clean, blank, inoffensive, nothing on it, and you make sure that you put on it only the minimal, guaranteed-‘inoffensive’ things that you need.
I’d probably do this.
As long as people understand that having a “scrubbed” (what ever that is supposed to mean), or new phone, doesn’t actually change people’s social media footprints. If the USA government was intent on identifying foreign tourists that were critical of Trump on social media, the last thing they would need to do is go through a person’s phone..
anyway the conclusion is that CHINA are clearly much more friendly andor incompetent than we give them credit for because their social credit system should have already owned everyone the world over decades before those fascists from South Africa in North America even dreamt of it
Trump explains what groceries are, and how everyone can afford eggs now.
https://www.reddit.com/r/democrats/s/8k3P3IN9om
diddly-squat said:
Michael V said:captain_spalding said:
There are people who advise buying a whole new phone to take to America, so that it’s entirely clean, blank, inoffensive, nothing on it, and you make sure that you put on it only the minimal, guaranteed-‘inoffensive’ things that you need.
I’d probably do this.
As long as people understand that having a “scrubbed” (what ever that is supposed to mean), or new phone, doesn’t actually change people’s social media footprints. If the USA government was intent on identifying foreign tourists that were critical of Trump on social media, the last thing they would need to do is go through a person’s phone..
Except ICE officials going through phones at the border is documented.
look everyone just calm down already remember it’sn’t technically genocide until they’re all actually already dead
Michael V said:
diddly-squat said:
Michael V said:I’d probably do this.
As long as people understand that having a “scrubbed” (what ever that is supposed to mean), or new phone, doesn’t actually change people’s social media footprints. If the USA government was intent on identifying foreign tourists that were critical of Trump on social media, the last thing they would need to do is go through a person’s phone..
Except ICE officials going through phones at the border is documented.
Now watch him walk it back.
SCIENCE said:
look everyone just calm down already remember it’sn’t technically genocide until they’re all actually already dead
Trump has also imported 17 family members of a Mexican drug cartel recently.
kii said:
Michael V said:
diddly-squat said:As long as people understand that having a “scrubbed” (what ever that is supposed to mean), or new phone, doesn’t actually change people’s social media footprints. If the USA government was intent on identifying foreign tourists that were critical of Trump on social media, the last thing they would need to do is go through a person’s phone..
Except ICE officials going through phones at the border is documented.
Now watch him walk it back.
Authority figures in the USA (police usually) come across as antagonistic when seen on tv or those cops shows.
I imagine some is portraying that tough guy imagine, they seem to deliberately bait people to react badly though.
Michael V said:
diddly-squat said:
Michael V said:I’d probably do this.
As long as people understand that having a “scrubbed” (what ever that is supposed to mean), or new phone, doesn’t actually change people’s social media footprints. If the USA government was intent on identifying foreign tourists that were critical of Trump on social media, the last thing they would need to do is go through a person’s phone..
Except ICE officials going through phones at the border is documented.
I didn’t say don’t do that; if that makes you feel safer then knock yourself out; but any examination of a phone is cursory at best and don’t think for a second that all first world countries real don’t run time scans of digital footprint of persons that enter at borders.
Cymek said:
kii said:
Michael V said:Except ICE officials going through phones at the border is documented.
Now watch him walk it back.
Authority figures in the USA (police usually) come across as antagonistic when seen on tv or those cops shows.
I imagine some is portraying that tough guy imagine, they seem to deliberately bait people to react badly though.
Isn’t searching of phones a pretty standard thing at borders?
Australian Border Force searched phones of 10,000 travellers in past two years, data shows
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/jun/11/australian-border-force-abf-searching-phones-travellers-data
Key Takeaways for Travellers into Australia
https://www.caldicottlawyers.com.au/border-force-customs-phone-search
Can Australian Border Patrol Make You Unlock Your Phone?
No, but refusing access can lead to your phone being seized for inspection.
Can AFP Make You Unlock Your Phone?
Yes, but only if they hold a valid warrant to do so. Otherwise you are not obliged to open your phone.
Can Border Force Search Your Phone?
Yes, ABF officers have the right to search your phone if they suspect it holds evidence related to a crime as part of their authority to examine goods under the Customs Act 1901.
Can You Wipe Your Phone Before Crossing the Border?
Although some travellers consider wiping their devices before traveling into Australia, intentionally hiding information can lead to further suspicion and examination.
diddly-squat said:
Michael V said:captain_spalding said:
There are people who advise buying a whole new phone to take to America, so that it’s entirely clean, blank, inoffensive, nothing on it, and you make sure that you put on it only the minimal, guaranteed-‘inoffensive’ things that you need.
I’d probably do this.
As long as people understand that having a “scrubbed” (what ever that is supposed to mean), or new phone, doesn’t actually change people’s social media footprints. If the USA government was intent on identifying foreign tourists that were critical of Trump on social media, the last thing they would need to do is go through a person’s phone..
I think that i’s mostly meant for the immigration officials you’d find at airports, who, in the US, would probably be not-so-smart types on minimum wages (like their Transport Safety Authority people), bored out of their tiny minds, and just looking for some easy-pickings crap to wield a bit of swagger over.
esselte said:
Can You Wipe Your Phone Before Crossing the Border?
Although some travellers consider wiping their devices before traveling into Australia, intentionally hiding information can lead to further suspicion and examination.
That’s where buying a new phone can be an advantage.
‘No, officer, i haven’t ‘wiped’ my phone. It just so happens that my old one got damaged last week, and i bought a new one. That’s why it’s not got very much of anything on it.’
esselte said:
Cymek said:
kii said:Now watch him walk it back.
Authority figures in the USA (police usually) come across as antagonistic when seen on tv or those cops shows.
I imagine some is portraying that tough guy imagine, they seem to deliberately bait people to react badly though.
Isn’t searching of phones a pretty standard thing at borders?
Australian Border Force searched phones of 10,000 travellers in past two years, data shows
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/jun/11/australian-border-force-abf-searching-phones-travellers-dataKey Takeaways for Travellers into Australia
https://www.caldicottlawyers.com.au/border-force-customs-phone-searchCan Australian Border Patrol Make You Unlock Your Phone?
No, but refusing access can lead to your phone being seized for inspection.
Can AFP Make You Unlock Your Phone?
Yes, but only if they hold a valid warrant to do so. Otherwise you are not obliged to open your phone.
Can Border Force Search Your Phone?
Yes, ABF officers have the right to search your phone if they suspect it holds evidence related to a crime as part of their authority to examine goods under the Customs Act 1901.
Can You Wipe Your Phone Before Crossing the Border?
Although some travellers consider wiping their devices before traveling into Australia, intentionally hiding information can lead to further suspicion and examination.
It is an offence to not allow authorities access to your phone
We get them through the courts.
They are drug dealers and refuse access to the phone to protect customers and/or suppliers and mostly themselves.
You cop a charge instead say of being hurt or killed.
Brindabellas said:
kii said:
Cymek said:Imagine the hole you must have come from to want to live there.
I never wanted to come here, except to see the Grand Canyon.
Then I fell in love with mr kii.
He had to return here after 3 years living in Australia, because his brother needed a kidney, mr kii needed easy access to some medical help via the VA, and their mother was dying.
Le sigh…I visited the USA about 7 years ago, glad I saw the Grand Canyon, no desire to go back
I spent just over a year in the USA in 2001/2002.. I had a great time, even though the country went through, arguably, one of its most challenging times during that period. I think there are still lovely people in the USA, but maybe the not so nice people (who always existed) have more confidence to voice themselves outside of their own social circle.
I probably have other places that I would choose to go these days, but I would go back there if I was asked to present at a conference or something..
kii said:
Meanwhile:Kristi Noem has been working with the producer of “Duck Dynasty” to pitch a reality TV show—titled “The American”—where immigrants will compete in a string of challenges across the country “for the honor of fast-tracking their way to U.S. citizenship,” according to a new report.
Greetings kii!
It is so absolutely disgusting.
Cymek said:
Divine Angel said:
kii said:
Meanwhile:Kristi Noem has been working with the producer of “Duck Dynasty” to pitch a reality TV show—titled “The American”—where immigrants will compete in a string of challenges across the country “for the honor of fast-tracking their way to U.S. citizenship,” according to a new report.
FMD, it’s like real life Hunger Games over there
Imagine the hole you must have come from to want to live there.
That’s the heartbreaking thing though, isn’t it?
Divine Angel said:
My friend’s still going to the US next month for a 4 week trip. At this point she’s already $30k so gotta get her money’s worth!Before she leaves she’s scrubbing her phone of social media and message apps. We have a mutual friend who escaped from the US a decade ago, extremely critical of Trump, so friend can’t risk having her pop up if authorities do check her phone.
There are people who advise scrubbing one’s phone, there are people who say it’s an overreaction, it’s never happened (it has), and there are people who don’t do anything and hope for the best…
My friend and her family are white, they’ll be fine.
Wouldn’t it be worth buying a new phone, that has never been used? They detained a white Canadian woman and a white German woman.
https://www.pressreader.com/australia/the-guardian-australia/20250320/282016153112085
captain_spalding said:
esselte said:Can You Wipe Your Phone Before Crossing the Border?
Although some travellers consider wiping their devices before traveling into Australia, intentionally hiding information can lead to further suspicion and examination.
That’s where buying a new phone can be an advantage.
‘No, officer, i haven’t ‘wiped’ my phone. It just so happens that my old one got damaged last week, and i bought a new one. That’s why it’s not got very much of anything on it.’
+1
Harris cheated out of 3,650,000 votes by these Jim Crow tricks.
4.7 million voters purged.
3.2 million registrations rejected.
2.1 million mail-in ballots tossed.
AussieDJ said:
May 14, 2025Heather Cox Richardson
May 15 (Thursday)——————————————————cut—————————————————————
Thanks.
alleged
alleged
Adriana Smith, a 30-year-old mother and nurse, was declared brain-dead — meaning she is legally dead — in February, her mother, April Newkirk, told Atlanta TV station WXIA. Newkirk said her daughter had intense headaches more than three months ago and went to Atlanta’s Northside Hospital, where she received medication and was released. The next morning, her boyfriend woke to her gasping for air and called 911. Emory University Hospital determined she had blood clots in her brain and she was declared brain-dead. Newkirk said Smith is now 21 weeks pregnant. Removing breathing tubes and other life-saving devices would likely kill the fetus. Smith’s family says Emory doctors have told them they are not allowed to stop or remove the devices that are keeping her breathing because state law bans abortion after cardiac activity can be detected — generally around six weeks into pregnancy.
Thaddeus Pope, a bioethicist and lawyer at Mitchell Hamline School of Law in St. Paul, Minnesota, said while a few states have laws that specifically limit removing treatment from a pregnant woman who is alive but incapacitated, or brain dead, Georgia isn’t one of them. “Removing the woman’s mechanical ventilation or other support would not constitute an abortion,” he said. “Continued treatment is not legally required.” Lois Shepherd, a bioethicist and law professor at the University of Virginia, also said she does not believe life support is legally required in this case. The situation echoes a case in Texas more than a decade ago when a brain-dead woman was kept on life support for about two months because she was pregnant. A judge eventually ruled that the hospital was misapplying state law, and life support was removed.
(Once again, in honour of SM
………………………..
May 15, 2025
Heather Cox Richardson
May 16 (Friday)
Perhaps in frustration, this season’s writers of the saga of American history are making their symbolism increasingly obvious.
Today the story broke that a long-neglected document held by Harvard University Law School, believed to be a cheap copy of the Magna Carta, is in fact the real document. More than 700 years ago, the Magna Carta, or Great Charter, established the concept that kings must answer to the law.
King John of England and a group of rebel barons agreed to the terms of the document on June 15, 1215, at Runnymede, a meadow a little less than an hour from London near the River Thames. After the king had raised taxes, barons rebelled, insisting that he was violating established custom. There were rumors of a plot to murder the king, and the barons armed themselves.
Those two armed camps met at Runnymede, where negotiators for the king and the barons hammered out a document with 63 clauses, mostly relating to feudal customs and the way the justice system would operate. But the document also began to articulate the principles central to modern democracies. The Magna Carta established the writ of habeas corpus—a prohibition on unlawful imprisonment—and the concept of the right to trial by jury.
Famously, it put into writing that: “No free man shall be seized, imprisoned, dispossessed, outlawed, exiled or ruined in any way, nor in any way proceeded against, except by the lawful judgement of his peers and the law of the land.” It also provided that “To no one will we sell, to no one will we deny or delay right or justice.”
The Magna Carta placed limits on the king’s ability to tax his subjects and established the law as an authority apart from the king. Anticipating the idea of checks and balances, it set up a council of barons to make sure the king obeyed the charter. If he did not, they could seize his lands and castles until he made amends.
The original charter did not last. King John convinced the pope to declare the document illegal because it circumscribed the power of the monarch, and in reaction, barons fought for the rights outlined in the Magna Carta. After the death of King John in 1216, the Magna Carta was confirmed and reissued, becoming an accepted part of the understanding of British rights. In 1297, and then again in 1300, King Edward I reissued the Magna Carta and confirmed that it was part of England’s law.
The copy in Harvard’s possession is from 1300. Harvard bought the document after World War II for $27.50, about $500 today. It is one of seven original copies of the 1300 Magna Carta, and in the United States of America in 2025, it is priceless.
In the early 1600s, King James I and King Charles I both reasserted the power of the king. Jurist Sir Edward Coke used the Magna Carta to insist that longstanding English customs guaranteed liberties to British subjects and required the king to comply with the law. There were limits to a king’s power to tax his subjects and his power to punish them.
This legal struggle was unfolding just as British subjects were colonizing the North American continent, and the charters of the new colonies echoed Coke’s arguments. The 1629 charter of the Massachusetts Bay Company, for example, established that colonists and, crucially, the children they might have in the colony, “shall have and enjoy all liberties and Immunities of free and naturall Subjects.”
As constitutional scholar Mary S. Bilder notes, lawyers and political figures put into the documents of the early British settlement of North America the belief that liberties were the birthright of English subjects. That belief informed colonists’ opposition to the 1765 Stamp Act, which imposed a new tax to which they had not given their consent and called for those who violated the law to be tried not by a jury of their peers but rather in admiralty courts. The Massachusetts Assembly declared the Stamp Act to be “against the Magna Carta and the natural rights of Englishmen, and therefore, according to Lord Coke, null and void.” British politician William Pitt told Parliament: “The Americans are the sons not the bastards of England.”
In September 1774, as tensions between the king and the colonists intensified, the first Continental Congress met in Philadelphia and wrote a declaration of rights and grievances, claiming the liberties guaranteed by “the principles of the English constitution, and the several charters or compacts.” Showing the unity of the colonies, the Congress published an image of 12 arms holding a column crowned by a liberty cap and resting on the words “Magna Carta.”
In 1776 the colonists threw off the monarchy to establish a government based on the idea that all people must answer to the law. As Thomas Paine wrote in Common Sense: “in America the law is king. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other.” In 1776 the new states were writing their own constitutions that defended their liberties, including their protection from loss of life, liberty, or property without due process of the law.
That concept went directly into the first ten amendments to the Constitution, known collectively as the Bill of Rights. The Fifth Amendment provided that no “person shall be…deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law,” and in 1868 the Fourteenth Amendment applied that principle to the states as well as the federal government, saying: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
The Harvard document is not the only Magna Carta in the U.S. In 2007, philanthropist David Rubenstein bought a 1297 copy of the Magna Carta from former presidential candidate Ross Perot. It was the only copy in the U.S., and Perot had permitted the National Archives to display it. Rubenstein bought the document for $21.3 million, hoping to keep it in the U.S. “to ensure that Americans could continue to see it, and to thereby be continuously reminded of its importance to our country.” He promptly lent it to the National Archives for public display, “as modest repayment of my debt to this country for my good fortune in being an American.”
And yet the fundamental principles on which the government of the United States is based are under attack. In an interview that aired on Sunday, May 4, President Donald J. Trump told NBC’s Kristen Welker that he “didn’t know” if persons in the United States had a right to due process. When Welker reminded him that the right to due process is written into the Fifth Amendment, he said: “I don’t know. It seems—it might say that, but if you’re talking about that, then we’d have to have a million or two million or three million trials.”
Musician Bruce Springsteen has no doubts about those rights, embedded as they are in the country’s DNA. At a concert in Manchester, England, yesterday, he warned: “In America, the richest men… … abandoning our great allies and siding with dictators against those struggling for their freedom. They’re defunding American universities that won’t bow down to their ideological demands. They’re removing residents off American streets and, without due process of law, are deporting them to foreign detention centers and prisons. This is all happening now.” He criticized lawmakers who have “no…idea of what it means to be deeply American.”
And yet, Springsteen told the crowd: “The America that I’ve sung to you about for 50 years is real and, regardless of its faults, is a great country with a great people, so will survive this moment.”
—————
Notes:
https://apnews.com/article/harvard-magna-carta-rare-copy-97754aee08aaab65a36e49bedebd5992
https://www.parliament.uk/magnacarta/
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-surrey-32828251
https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2010/winter/magna-carta.html
https://avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century/mass03.asp
Mary Sarah Bilder, Charter Constitutionalism: The Myth of Edward Coke and the Virginia Charter,” North Carolina Law Review 94 (June 2016): 1545–1592, at https://scholarship.law.unc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi
https://www.archives.gov/exhibits/featured-documents/magna-carta/legacy.html
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/magna_carta
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/04/us/politics/trump-meet-the-press-interview-due-process.html
https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/magna-carta-muse-and-mentor/magna-carta-and-the-us-constitution.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/15/world/europe/harvard-magna-carta-original.html
https://www.forbes.com/sites/abrambrown/2014/03/31/the-man-who-owns-a-magna-carta/
https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/15/entertainment/bruce-springsteen-trump-criticism-scli-intl
https://archive.org/details/commonsense50pain
……………….
AussieDJ said:
(Once again, in honour of SM
………………………..May 15, 2025
Heather Cox Richardson
May 16 (Friday)Perhaps in frustration, this season’s writers of the saga of American history are making their symbolism increasingly obvious.
Today the story broke that a long-neglected document held by Harvard University Law School, believed to be a cheap copy of the Magna Carta, is in fact the real document. More than 700 years ago, the Magna Carta, or Great Charter, established the concept that kings must answer to the law.
—————————————————————-CUT————————————————————
Thanks.
dv said:
Hmmmmm.
LOLOLOL…..hiccup…….LOLOLOL
I needed a good laugh.
Trump lawyers tell Supreme Court that the Constitution doesn’t apply to the President
https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/trump-lawyers-tell-supreme-court-that-constitution-doesnt-apply-to-the-president/
They’ve buried the lede here, but the gist of it is the 14th Amendment, the one about birthright citizenship. The lawyers are arguing that POTUS has the right to issue EOs and expect them to be carried out regardless of the Constitution.
(Many presidents, from both parties, have complained about the courts holding up various bills.)
kii said:
LOLOLOL…..hiccup…….LOLOLOLI needed a good laugh.
Too well written. Whichever lackey wrote that one tried hard, but no stars from me.
buffy said:
kii said:
LOLOLOL…..hiccup…….LOLOLOLI needed a good laugh.
Too well written. Whichever lackey wrote that one tried hard, but no stars from me.
True…but it’s comedy gold.
I can see trump ranting incoherently and some lackey running it through a program to get this brain fart message.
LOLOL…creative disposal strategy…..LOLOL
Moody’s strips US of top-notch triple-A credit rating
https://www.ft.com/content/e456ea34-c6ad-43fe-abe9-d4ce781c07b4
Michael V said:
dv said:
Hmmmmm.
nobody could have foreseen this
SCIENCE said:
Moody’s strips US of top-notch triple-A credit rating
https://www.ft.com/content/e456ea34-c6ad-43fe-abe9-d4ce781c07b4
The same Moodys that gave Enron and various other blowups, aaa ratings? How could you go wrong.
poikilotherm said:
SCIENCE said:
Moody’s strips US of top-notch triple-A credit rating
https://www.ft.com/content/e456ea34-c6ad-43fe-abe9-d4ce781c07b4
The same Moodys that gave Enron and various other blowups, aaa ratings? How could you go wrong.
wait so credit ratings are ¿ just a bunch of bullshit
SCIENCE said:
alleged
Adriana Smith, a 30-year-old mother and nurse, was declared brain-dead — meaning she is legally dead — in February, her mother, April Newkirk, told Atlanta TV station WXIA. Newkirk said her daughter had intense headaches more than three months ago and went to Atlanta’s Northside Hospital, where she received medication and was released. The next morning, her boyfriend woke to her gasping for air and called 911. Emory University Hospital determined she had blood clots in her brain and she was declared brain-dead. Newkirk said Smith is now 21 weeks pregnant. Removing breathing tubes and other life-saving devices would likely kill the fetus. Smith’s family says Emory doctors have told them they are not allowed to stop or remove the devices that are keeping her breathing because state law bans abortion after cardiac activity can be detected — generally around six weeks into pregnancy.
Thaddeus Pope, a bioethicist and lawyer at Mitchell Hamline School of Law in St. Paul, Minnesota, said while a few states have laws that specifically limit removing treatment from a pregnant woman who is alive but incapacitated, or brain dead, Georgia isn’t one of them. “Removing the woman’s mechanical ventilation or other support would not constitute an abortion,” he said. “Continued treatment is not legally required.” Lois Shepherd, a bioethicist and law professor at the University of Virginia, also said she does not believe life support is legally required in this case. The situation echoes a case in Texas more than a decade ago when a brain-dead woman was kept on life support for about two months because she was pregnant. A judge eventually ruled that the hospital was misapplying state law, and life support was removed.
I saw an interview with the mother of this woman on The Seneca Project. It was most disturbing.
I saw an interesting video of an obstetrician who showed that in the instruction manual of the ultra sound that the sound from the ultrasound machine was from the ultrasound machine and not the heartbeat of the foetus. I really should find that again. It was an interesting video.
kii said:
LOLOLOL…..hiccup…….LOLOLOLI needed a good laugh.
Reads like a threat after the nasty stuff.
kii said:
LOLOLOL…..hiccup…….LOLOLOLI needed a good laugh.
“…never liked his music…”
Didn’t stop him using ‘Born In The USA’ (in a way that completely misunderstands the meaning of the song) without authorisation at his rallies in 2016.
Until Springsteen objected, and became a declared supporter of Hilary Clinton.
I don’t know if folks have seen Sabby Sabs? I am a fan of hers.
EVIDENCE: The Democratic Party Is UNDEMOCRATIC
She worked for Bernie in 2016 and 2020. Some interesting insights.
Jay Kuo
Good on Sen. Kim. Shame them into fixing what they don’t even realize they broke!
ms spock said:
I don’t know if folks have seen Sabby Sabs? I am a fan of hers.
EVIDENCE: The Democratic Party Is UNDEMOCRATIC
She worked for Bernie in 2016 and 2020. Some interesting insights.
Link doesn’t work.
The Rev Dodgson said:
ms spock said:I don’t know if folks have seen Sabby Sabs? I am a fan of hers.
EVIDENCE: The Democratic Party Is UNDEMOCRATIC
She worked for Bernie in 2016 and 2020. Some interesting insights.
Link doesn’t work.
No, it doesn’t.
The Rev Dodgson said:
ms spock said:I don’t know if folks have seen Sabby Sabs? I am a fan of hers.
EVIDENCE: The Democratic Party Is UNDEMOCRATIC
She worked for Bernie in 2016 and 2020. Some interesting insights.
Link doesn’t work.
My apologies
EVIDENCE: The Democratic Party Is UNDEMOCRATIC
I hope that works now.
ms spock said:
The Rev Dodgson said:
ms spock said:
I don’t know if folks have seen Sabby Sabs? I am a fan of hers.
EVIDENCE: The Democratic Party Is UNDEMOCRATIC
She worked for Bernie in 2016 and 2020. Some interesting insights.
Link doesn’t work.
My apologies
EVIDENCE: The Democratic Party Is UNDEMOCRATIC
I hope that works now.
Transcript
now uh David Hog who is the vice
president of the
DNC uh came forward and said that he
wanted to basically change the
Democratic party he said some of these
incumbents they got to
go i think a lot of people outside of
that DC elite bubble can agree with that
that some of those people got to go
right
but the Democratic
Party the
leadership and the DNC don’t agree with
that and they do not like what David has
been trying to
do now what does this have to do in
connection with Jasmine Crockett’s
reveal about what the Democratic Party
is planning for 2028
so let’s start with this appearance of
David Hog and Donna Brazil of all people
we’ll get to her in just a second on
Bill Maher’s show now I want you to hear
what he said about how things need to
change in the Democratic
Party and Donna Brazelle Miss Cheater
herself of all people chimes in listen
to this there’s one thing I wanted to
talk about too which is what a little
bit of what you just talked about which
is there was there have been a few
members that have come out that have
said well you know if I retire my life
is effectively over and what I would say
is get over yourself this isn’t about
you this is about our country and it’s
about your constituents nobody is in I
don’t care if you’ve been there for
decades or just one term that seat is
not yours it is your constituents that
is who you’re there to serve and if they
choose to serve somebody else so be it
that’s all what all we’re trying to do
with leaders we deserve is give people
the option to vote for somebody that
isn’t necessarily the same person and
Bill let me just and let me just pause
back here and go back to David okay
because David came in you know he came
in kind of
hot david came in kind of hot and David
said “I don’t care get over yourself
i mean I don’t have a problem with
that
but David did what I think squad members
and Bernie Sanders weren’t willing to do
they weren’t willing to go that
far they weren’t willing to go that far
and say “Get over yourself.” Right
so that’s important because now the DNC
is trying to remove David Hog as vice
chair so you have two options david had
two options coming into this one option
was to get in line and keep his
position don’t rock that boat the other
option was to try to change or reform
the Democratic party and lose that
position and David chose the latter now
he probably didn’t realize that they
would try to get rid of him but we
did we did i’ve been through this before
i I We went through this i went through
this with Bernie 2016 Bernie 2020 we
have actively seen the DNC
cheat to push out the people that they
don’t want whether they got the votes or
not we watched them take votes from
Bernie Sanders in 2016 and give them to
Hillary Clinton we watched them collude
in 2020 and get all the other candidates
to drop out at a certain time barack
Obama was part of this as well
everyone’s beloved Barack Obama he was a
part of this as well to get people to
drop out to help Joe Biden win like the
Democratic party is not Democratic
they’re
undemocratic and poor David david’s very
young
energetic wanting to make a
change walked right into an alligator
pit with no
shoes and they are basically eating him
up
what makes it crazier is you have Donna
Brazil Miss Cheater Chief herself who
was a part of keeping the people there
that the establishment wanted instead of
what the voters wanted listen to what
she says like this just baffled me that
her of all people this woman shouldn’t
be doing any interviews number
one but listen and and Bill let me just
let me applaud one thing i’m I’m glad
that David is at the table you know I’ve
been at the table a long time and I love
being at the table because it took me a
hell of a long time to get in and to get
a seat and once I got a seat and got my
folding chair I was ready i was set and
I I
I there comes a day when you can’t stir
every pot and you’re going to have to
get the out and I’m glad that David is
throwing a rock inside the party all I
would like to advise David is my
25-year-old March on Washington King
holiday free Nelson Mandela self call me
what the hell you please but I know what
I did when I was his age i wanted to
have a role in American politics i want
to care about my country i want to love
my country and I want to give back what
my country gave to me and if David takes
that spirit on the DNC I’ll vote for his
ass again
um so this woman Donna
Brazelle no one cares about the march
that you did on Washington no one car
none of that matters none of that
matters when you sat there and you
cheated to help Hillary Clinton who
ended up losing
anyway so all those things that you did
people kill me with this they want to
come forward with what they did a long
time ago marched on Washington my young
activist self none of that
matters because what we remember you for
is being a cheater
that’s what we remember when the time
came for you to choose what the people
wanted and what the establishment wanted
you weren’t trying to be activists in
that you went with what the
establishment wanted you went against
the will of the voters you went against
the will of the people so that march you
did on Washington I don’t really give a
about okay i don’t care about that
now none of that
matters people have to understand that
Donna Brazil in particular and I’ll I’ll
show you because you know we we gonna go
there this is what she did for Hillary
Clinton cnn parts ways with Donna Brazil
a Hillary Clinton
supporter see people remember this
people
forget cuz I
don’t cnn has severed ties with
Democratic strategist Donna Brazil after
hacked emails from Wikileaks showed that
she shared questions for CNN sponsored
candidate events in advance with friends
on Hillary Clinton’s
campaign so Miss Miss Donna Miss March
on Washington
okay when push came to shove you went a
win you went against the will of the
people and you leaked questions to
Hillary Clinton’s team to help her in
advance
okay you are a cheater you are a
cheater and she was on the
DNC so what you see happening right now
what they’re doing to David Hog this is
a new the DNC been corrupt we’re going
to go through it honey we’re going to go
through all of it so you can see the
corruption in real time and she has the
nerve to be on Bill Mar showing David
you know what i appreciate your energy
and da da da girl
bye
bye now to show you some of this
corruption they are already doing it
what we tell
you dnc panel recommends redo of vote
that elevated David Hog to vice chair
after procedural concerns so now they’re
going to say “Oh my god we’re going to
have to do a redo vote because maybe you
didn’t follow proper
procedure.” That’s their way of getting
around it
right one fair and square let’s see how
we can change that and that’s supposed
to be democratic
maryanne Williamson you have some things
to answer for because you were on Bad
Faith podcast trying to convince
everybody that the guy that you voted
for Mr ken was going to do the right
thing by the
people and now this Mr ken is trying to
overturn this they don’t want change the
party cannot be changed so listen to
this dnc subcommittee on Monday
recommended that the organization
invalidate one of its February vicechair
votes over claims that it was unfairly
disadvantage that it unfairly
disadvantaged female
candidates like I’m I’m not even making
this up folks i’m not making this up so
when everything fails let’s go
with it was unfair to women that’s how
we’ll get them out of there the
Democratic Party didn’t learn anything
from the lost in 2024 they are really
trying to do this i’m not
exaggerating goes on to say the move
which won’t be official unless the
entire DNC votes to approve it could
open up new races for positions held by
David Hog Florida activist and Malcolm
Kenyatta a Pennsylvania state
legislature
is it this the challenge by Oklahoma
Democratic Committee woman Kayn Free who
unsuccessfully ran against Hog and
Kenyatta in February race for vice chair
is not related to the ongoing tension
between Hog and the National Party over
his push to support primary challenges
against incumbent Democrats yeah right
instead it was based off a Freeze claim
that the handling of the vice chair vote
gave the two men an unfair advantage
amid the National Party’s requirements
that its executive committee achieve
gender balance you
cannot make this up
so now they’re going to try to say that
he can’t have that seat or shouldn’t
have that seat because there’s no gender
balance because you have Ken who’s the
DNC chair and so the vice chair should
be a woman people voted for
David so there’s no there’s no true
democracy in this country the Democratic
party is undemocratic and this is why I
continue to say and I I warn people
about this and I’m tired of saying I
told you so damn it but I warned people
about this there is no reforming the
Democratic
Party i used to believe it was possible
i believed it in Bernie 2016 hell I even
believed it in Bernie 2020
but after all that I realize money talks
billionaires talk Wall Street talks the
MIC talks all of those things matter
more than what the voter actually wants
when it comes to the Democratic party
and when it comes to the DNC because the
DNC is corporate
so they want David
out
now this is important when we get to
Jasmine
Crockett because Jasmine Crockett let
the cat out the
bag jasmine Crockett is letting
everybody know what the Democrat
leadership has already planned for 2028
and I want you to think about what she
says here i want you to think about what
AOC and Bernie are doing right now which
I told you is just an effort to sheep
purge you back into the Democratic party
they’re not trying to start a third
party which Bernie has already said on
record they’re not trying to move you
outside of the two-party system it’s to
get the voters back that did not turn
out in 2024 six million people that
voted for Biden in 2020 didn’t show up
to vote for Kamla in 2024 so they send
out people like Bernie and AOC to get
the progressives and you know the young
the young people back in line to get
them to come back into the fold those
people that helped
Biden cuz they lost the youth vote they
also lost the African-American vote the
black vote when you look at it folks
Kamla received less black votes than
Hillary Biden and of course Obama
right so after all
that listen to what Jasmine Crockett
says the plan is it is it is this fear
that the people within the party within
the primary system will have about
voting for a woman because every time we
voted for a woman we’ve lost so far and
I think that that’s a natural fear
because we just want to win so there’s a
lot of people that are like “You know
what like let’s go find the safest white
boy we can find.” I mean I’m just saying
those are the callers that we’re hearing
we’re hearing people No for real a white
man’s got to be getting those callers
for real and to be clear when we talk
about them I can tell you that there is
one specific candidate i had a donor on
the phones with me telling me that all
the donors are lining up behind that
candidate so I can tell and I can tell
you it’s not a black person nor woman
okay so like it is they let’s go back
everybody hear
this listen to this a candidate i had a
donor on the phones with me telling me
that all the donors are lining up behind
that candidate so I can tell and I can
tell you it’s not a black person nor
woman okay
it’s not a black person and it’s not a
woman that means if you wanted to know
if AOC was going to be that nominee
which I told you I don’t think the
Democratic Party would let her be the
nominee that is a
no because she said it’s not a woman and
she also said it’s not a black person so
that pushes out Wes Moore that pushes
out Corey Booker all these people that
have been
named guys what Jasmine Crockett is
telling you is that the donors have
already told the Democratic Party who
they want the nominee to be for
2028 the donors have already chosen the
person so what you see AOC and Bernie
doing right now that’s just to get you
energized and and revved up for 2028 to
usher you right back into the Democratic
party to vote for this said person who
is going to be the nominee that Jasmine
is warning everybody about
so think about that when you think about
the DNC wanting to remove David
Hog they don’t want change they’re not
going to change the Democratic Party
cannot be
reformed you are wasting your time and
your money donating money to AOC and
Bernie and all of them i went through
all this i did all this i did
it and I’m telling you you’re wasting
your money and you’re wasting your
time they’ve already selected the
nominee it is
2025 just like Hillary was selected
years prior to
2016 you think we picked the nominee the
donors picked the
nominee if we were picking the nominee
Bernie Sanders would have been the
nominee in
2026 not Hillary Clinton
let me let her
finish so like it is they have quote
unquote they have chosen and when I say
they it’s the same donors that most
likely had they opinions about Joe Biden
and move so like that would be the they
that I would talk about here’s what I
want people to understand is I do
absolutely agree with Malcolm when he
talks about not seating your power at
the end of the day don’t give up your
power people fail to recognize how
unique Trump is they continue to say
“Well we lost.” Well they both lost to
Trump trump who is a misogynist trump
who is going to ramp up the misogynist
in the first place because that’s what
he does he is disrespectful like right
now he still doesn’t know how to deal
with me because if you punch me I’m
punching back okay so like here’s the
here’s the deal now I know he think he
running again but that ain’t happening i
don’t care what all is going on in this
country and I don’t care how many uh uh
things we won’t say we are absolutely
going to do i am telling y’all with all
confidence he is not running for a third
term that is not a
thing it is so this video has been
making the rounds on social media
because people are calling this out and
people are saying like “Oh my god
they’ve already chosen that person.” I
also noticed there was a some people are
saying Gavin Newsome i noticed there was
a town hall in Iowa today with Pete
Budajage pete
Buddhaj Pete Budajage couldn’t get the
black vote when he ran in 2020 black
people not really feeling Pete like that
this is something the Democratic party
doesn’t want to say and watch this if
Pete Budajage becomes the nominee and he
loses they’re gonna say “Oh my god
people didn’t vote for him because he’s
LGBTQ.”
Watch just like people didn’t vote for
Coma because she’s a woman woman of
color and D and there’s always going to
be some of
that but that’s not everybody
i mean you mean to tell me they didn’t
realize Kamla wasn’t doomed from the
get-go she couldn’t get a delegate when
she ran in
2020 and now they’re trying to make Pete
a thing they’re trying to make booty a
thing this guy once he got to South
Carolina first of all he didn’t win Iowa
he jumped the gun and said that he did
when you look at the numbers Bernie
Sanders actually won Iowa in the
Democrat primary in 2020 then he gets to
South Carolina and he’s all the way at
the bottom because black people did not
want him pete Buddha Judge and I don’t
give a damn how many black kids you
adopt pete Buddha Judge does not
farewell in the black community and some
of that comes from his interactions with
black people in South Bin Indiana when
he was mayor
talk to the black community in South Bin
Indiana about how he ignored a black kid
who was found hanged from a tree talk to
him about that you can still find those
videos online by the
way of the black community approaching
him at the town hall and him just
sitting there not wanting to say
anything black people not feeling him
like that
but they’ve already
decided and I’ll show you just how
corrupt this all is people are wasting
their time they’re wasting their
freaking time do you know who this guy
is are you familiar with Bruce Spiva you
know why Bruce Bea is important bruce
Biva this dude he is the one that
represented the
DNC during the DNC fraud lawsuit
now apparently now he is a
part of the CLC advancing democracy
through law right bruce Briea is an
attorney and a community leader who
spent over 30-year career fighting for
civil rights and civil liberties voting
rights consumer protection and antitrust
enforcement
this is very hilarious voting rights
because you see I interviewed the
lawyers that represented the Bernie side
for the DNC fraud lawsuit and they said
they would never go through this again
they weren’t even asking they were
asking for the people to get their money
back this is after Bernie 2016 yes there
was a DNC fraud lawsuit nico House was a
part of this as well
and the argument was that the DNC
cheated Bernie Sanders which they
did but let me tell you what Bruce Spiva
argued in
court and what the judge
said shout out to
Kissf in 2016 primary the DNC cheated
Bernie Sanders many Sanders supporters
sued the DNC which argued the case
should be thrown out because the party
is a private entity n1 this is very
important ladies and gentlemen the
Democratic Party is a private entity it
is a corporation now wait till you hear
what the judge actually declared this is
wild peep this fam dnc attorney Bruce
Spiva again the DNC won this there is no
such thing as a Democrat the DNC just
encourages people to vote for the
Democratic
Party mark one mark two no one has any
right to an expectation of a fair
election hold up no one has any right to
an expectation of a fair election
everybody get
that because it’s a private entity they
don’t owe you a fair
election wait till you hear more it gets
crazier if the DNC wishes to select a
candidate in the primaries instead of a
free election process that is their
right that’s exactly what they did
you see they’re doing it right now three
donating money to Bernie Sanders doesn’t
mean you thought that money was going to
assist him to win the primary you have
no right to think that the DNC was
obligated to follow their own charter
and internal policies about elections so
they even ruled that the DNC can go
against their own charter
that’s how deep this goes it goes on to
say here four discussion of and any
disputes with the DNC do not belong in a
transparent process in a court of law
that goes back to they can pick
candidates in a smoke-filled room
the DNC is a private
association which should never be asked
to engage in the discovery process or
have to reveal any of its internal
workings or strategies should they
decide to select a candidate rather than
allow a fair election of a candidate
the judge ruled in favor of the
DNC so this is why I say you’re wasting
your money this is why I say donate your
money to mutual aid organizations hell
donate your money to starting your own
mutual aid organizations i do a mutual
aid workshop i started one last month
i’ll be doing the next one again in June
i’ll announce it on the show and I’ll
send it through my newsletter you can
join that workshop i’ll show you how to
start mutual aid where you live donate
your money to your community donate your
money to organizing your people and your
community and getting things done on a
local level you are not going to change
the Democratic party what I am telling
you here everybody else that is a part
of that Bernie sphere in independent
media knows this this isn’t
new and they’re choosing to ignore it
and still sit up there and tell you to
try to fight within the Democratic party
meanwhile they continue to get richer
and you’re giving your money to these
candidates that they know damn well will
not be allowed to be the nominee it is a
waste of your money it is a waste of
your
time people will say that third parties
are a waste of time too you have your
right to your opinion about that i vote
third party but when people ask me what
they should donate their money to
ms spock said:
The Rev Dodgson said:
ms spock said:I don’t know if folks have seen Sabby Sabs? I am a fan of hers.
EVIDENCE: The Democratic Party Is UNDEMOCRATIC
She worked for Bernie in 2016 and 2020. Some interesting insights.
Link doesn’t work.
My apologies
EVIDENCE: The Democratic Party Is UNDEMOCRATIC
I hope that works now.
Yes, now works, and thanks for transcript SCIENCE.
Seems the Democrats need to do some work.
The trouble is, in the US system, a vote for Greens or anyone other than Democrats really is a vote for Republicans.
https://www.newsweek.com/moodys-us-credit-rating-negative-2073510
US Completely Loses Perfect Credit Rating for First Time in Over a Century
It’s so Alice in Wonderland…
What is 8647? Secret Service investigates former FBI director James Comey over seashells photo
buffy said:
It’s so Alice in Wonderland…What is 8647? Secret Service investigates former FBI director James Comey over seashells photo
Oh I read about those cryptic numbers… lol
Divine Angel said:
buffy said:
It’s so Alice in Wonderland…What is 8647? Secret Service investigates former FBI director James Comey over seashells photo
Oh I read about those cryptic numbers… lol
agree LOL
Divine Angel said:
buffy said:
It’s so Alice in Wonderland…What is 8647? Secret Service investigates former FBI director James Comey over seashells photo
Oh I read about those cryptic numbers… lol
Not cyptic.
86..get rid of
47…47th president
The Rev Dodgson said:
ms spock said:
The Rev Dodgson said:Link doesn’t work.
My apologies
EVIDENCE: The Democratic Party Is UNDEMOCRATIC
I hope that works now.
Yes, now works, and thanks for transcript SCIENCE.
Seems the Democrats need to do some work.
The trouble is, in the US system, a vote for Greens or anyone other than Democrats really is a vote for Republicans.
but isn’t the point that a vote for Democrats is also a vote for Republicans
kii said:
Divine Angel said:
buffy said:
It’s so Alice in Wonderland…What is 8647? Secret Service investigates former FBI director James Comey over seashells photo
Oh I read about those cryptic numbers… lol
Not cyptic.
86..get rid of
47…47th president
so the reason they think it’s a call to assassinate the fascist is because they know he’s not going to go when his term is up
SCIENCE said:
kii said:
Divine Angel said:Oh I read about those cryptic numbers… lol
Not cyptic.
86..get rid of
47…47th president
so the reason they think it’s a call to assassinate the fascist is because they know he’s not going to go when his term is up
I have never heard of the expression 86 in that context. And I have lived as a native English speaker for over 50 years.
Is this why Maxwell Smart was Agent 86?
captain_spalding said:
oh c’m‘on these things don’t really happen they’re just stories mothers tell their unwanted children to scare them and make sure they behave
party_pants said:
SCIENCE said:
kii said:Not cyptic.
86..get rid of
47…47th president
so the reason they think it’s a call to assassinate the fascist is because they know he’s not going to go when his term is up
I have never heard of the expression 86 in that context. And I have lived as a native English speaker for over 50 years.
Is this why Maxwell Smart was Agent 86?
from wikipedia:
Brooks decided on Smart’s code number, 86, as a reference to the slang term, meaning to forcibly eject someone, such as a patron from a bar or casino.
party_pants said:
SCIENCE said:
kii said:Not cyptic.
86..get rid of
47…47th president
so the reason they think it’s a call to assassinate the fascist is because they know he’s not going to go when his term is up
I have never heard of the expression 86 in that context. And I have lived as a native English speaker for over 50 years.
Is this why Maxwell Smart was Agent 86?
No idea about Maxwell, but the 8645 was commonly used back in the 1st dictatorship.
party_pants said:
SCIENCE said:
kii said:Not cyptic.
86..get rid of
47…47th president
so the reason they think it’s a call to assassinate the fascist is because they know he’s not going to go when his term is up
I have never heard of the expression 86 in that context. And I have lived as a native English speaker for over 50 years.
Is this why Maxwell Smart was Agent 86?
It’s strictly a US thing.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeremybogaisky/2025/05/14/qatar-747-trump/
The royal family of Qatar, owner of one of the largest private jet fleets in the world, has been quietly getting rid of some of its biggest planes. It may have found the perfect taker for one of its Boeing 747 jumbo jets in President Donald Trump, who has been frustrated with the multi-year delays in replacing Air Force One.
While many have speculated that the Qataris have offered Trump the luxurious plane to curry favor with the famously transactional president, there may be a simpler rationale: they just don’t want it anymore.
The royals have failed to sell the plane, which was put on the market in 2020, according to an archived listing. Giving it away could save Qatar’s rulers a big chunk of change on maintenance and storage costs, aviation experts told Forbes. Making Trump happy would be an added bonus.
a sucker born every minute.
So, four digits on a beach, which might suggest that Trump ought to be removed from the Presidency (impeached, 25th Amendment, whatever, nomention of violence) is utterly reprehensible.
This, however, was considered quite ok by Trump:
Here’s the image in more detail:
Bogsnorkler said:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeremybogaisky/2025/05/14/qatar-747-trump/The royal family of Qatar, owner of one of the largest private jet fleets in the world, has been quietly getting rid of some of its biggest planes. It may have found the perfect taker for one of its Boeing 747 jumbo jets in President Donald Trump, who has been frustrated with the multi-year delays in replacing Air Force One.
While many have speculated that the Qataris have offered Trump the luxurious plane to curry favor with the famously transactional president, there may be a simpler rationale: they just don’t want it anymore.
The royals have failed to sell the plane, which was put on the market in 2020, according to an archived listing. Giving it away could save Qatar’s rulers a big chunk of change on maintenance and storage costs, aviation experts told Forbes. Making Trump happy would be an added bonus.
a sucker born every minute.
It’s the ‘white elephant’ story, updated.
Bogsnorkler said:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeremybogaisky/2025/05/14/qatar-747-trump/The royal family of Qatar, owner of one of the largest private jet fleets in the world, has been quietly getting rid of some of its biggest planes. It may have found the perfect taker for one of its Boeing 747 jumbo jets in President Donald Trump, who has been frustrated with the multi-year delays in replacing Air Force One.
While many have speculated that the Qataris have offered Trump the luxurious plane to curry favor with the famously transactional president, there may be a simpler rationale: they just don’t want it anymore.
The royals have failed to sell the plane, which was put on the market in 2020, according to an archived listing. Giving it away could save Qatar’s rulers a big chunk of change on maintenance and storage costs, aviation experts told Forbes. Making Trump happy would be an added bonus.
a sucker born every minute.
don’t check the brakes
captain_spalding said:
Seems like that.
Divine Angel said:
party_pants said:
SCIENCE said:so the reason they think it’s a call to assassinate the fascist is because they know he’s not going to go when his term is up
I have never heard of the expression 86 in that context. And I have lived as a native English speaker for over 50 years.
Is this why Maxwell Smart was Agent 86?
from wikipedia:
Brooks decided on Smart’s code number, 86, as a reference to the slang term, meaning to forcibly eject someone, such as a patron from a bar or casino.
Ha!
Bogsnorkler said:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeremybogaisky/2025/05/14/qatar-747-trump/The royal family of Qatar, owner of one of the largest private jet fleets in the world, has been quietly getting rid of some of its biggest planes. It may have found the perfect taker for one of its Boeing 747 jumbo jets in President Donald Trump, who has been frustrated with the multi-year delays in replacing Air Force One.
While many have speculated that the Qataris have offered Trump the luxurious plane to curry favor with the famously transactional president, there may be a simpler rationale: they just don’t want it anymore.
The royals have failed to sell the plane, which was put on the market in 2020, according to an archived listing. Giving it away could save Qatar’s rulers a big chunk of change on maintenance and storage costs, aviation experts told Forbes. Making Trump happy would be an added bonus.
a sucker born every minute.
LOL
This doesn’t surprise me. Not one bit.
captain_spalding said:
Bogsnorkler said:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeremybogaisky/2025/05/14/qatar-747-trump/The royal family of Qatar, owner of one of the largest private jet fleets in the world, has been quietly getting rid of some of its biggest planes. It may have found the perfect taker for one of its Boeing 747 jumbo jets in President Donald Trump, who has been frustrated with the multi-year delays in replacing Air Force One.
While many have speculated that the Qataris have offered Trump the luxurious plane to curry favor with the famously transactional president, there may be a simpler rationale: they just don’t want it anymore.
The royals have failed to sell the plane, which was put on the market in 2020, according to an archived listing. Giving it away could save Qatar’s rulers a big chunk of change on maintenance and storage costs, aviation experts told Forbes. Making Trump happy would be an added bonus.
a sucker born every minute.
It’s the ‘white elephant’ story, updated.
Good analogy.
They are frightfully expensive. Also, a big 747 is fairly limited in terms of needing airports with long runways, so there’s a whole load of destinations they can’t get to.
Mini Me is watching The Simpsons. S6E5, where Sideshow Bob becomes mayor.
I’m gonna keep this one for later uses.
dv said:
party_pants said:
SCIENCE said:so the reason they think it’s a call to assassinate the fascist is because they know he’s not going to go when his term is up
I have never heard of the expression 86 in that context. And I have lived as a native English speaker for over 50 years.
Is this why Maxwell Smart was Agent 86?
It’s strictly a US thing.
Is it? I’ve known about it since forever.
kii said:
dv said:
party_pants said:I have never heard of the expression 86 in that context. And I have lived as a native English speaker for over 50 years.
Is this why Maxwell Smart was Agent 86?
It’s strictly a US thing.
Is it? I’ve known about it since forever.
replace the word “strictly” with “predominantly” perhaps?
party_pants said:
captain_spalding said:
Bogsnorkler said:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeremybogaisky/2025/05/14/qatar-747-trump/The royal family of Qatar, owner of one of the largest private jet fleets in the world, has been quietly getting rid of some of its biggest planes. It may have found the perfect taker for one of its Boeing 747 jumbo jets in President Donald Trump, who has been frustrated with the multi-year delays in replacing Air Force One.
While many have speculated that the Qataris have offered Trump the luxurious plane to curry favor with the famously transactional president, there may be a simpler rationale: they just don’t want it anymore.
The royals have failed to sell the plane, which was put on the market in 2020, according to an archived listing. Giving it away could save Qatar’s rulers a big chunk of change on maintenance and storage costs, aviation experts told Forbes. Making Trump happy would be an added bonus.
a sucker born every minute.
It’s the ‘white elephant’ story, updated.
Good analogy.
They are frightfully expensive. Also, a big 747 is fairly limited in terms of needing airports with long runways, so there’s a whole load of destinations they can’t get to.
A 3,000 metre runway is enough for medium weights. There’s plenty of those around the world.
If you’re light, even 2,000 metres is enough.
Divine Angel said:
Mini Me is watching The Simpsons. S6E5, where Sideshow Bob becomes mayor.I’m gonna keep this one for later uses.
:)
kii said:
dv said:
party_pants said:I have never heard of the expression 86 in that context. And I have lived as a native English speaker for over 50 years.
Is this why Maxwell Smart was Agent 86?
It’s strictly a US thing.
Is it? I’ve known about it since forever.
I’ve not heard of it before.
Michael V said:
kii said:
dv said:It’s strictly a US thing.
Is it? I’ve known about it since forever.
I’ve not heard of it before.
Me neither. But I’ve led a sheltered life.
party_pants said:
kii said:
dv said:
It’s strictly a US thing.
Is it? I’ve known about it since forever.
replace the word “strictly” with “predominantly” perhaps?
SCIENCE said:
Maybe this is a good thing. It shows up the students who used the AI shitbot to write their assignments.
Spiny Norman said:
party_pants said:
captain_spalding said:It’s the ‘white elephant’ story, updated.
Good analogy.
They are frightfully expensive. Also, a big 747 is fairly limited in terms of needing airports with long runways, so there’s a whole load of destinations they can’t get to.
A 3,000 metre runway is enough for medium weights. There’s plenty of those around the world.
If you’re light, even 2,000 metres is enough.
I was thinking more about getting to private resorts, ranches, tropical islands … that sort of thing. Most capital cities would be well served by airports of course. If I had a private jet I’d be using it to get away from the city to those types of remote places.
party_pants said:
SCIENCE said:
Maybe this is a good thing. It shows up the students who used the AI shitbot to write their assignments.
And in particular, those who didn’t read and edit their assignments.
party_pants said:
SCIENCE said:
Maybe this is a good thing. It shows up the students who used the AI shitbot to write their assignments.
We used to go into an exam armed with nothing more than a slide rule.
Peak Warming Man said:
party_pants said:
SCIENCE said:
Maybe this is a good thing. It shows up the students who used the AI shitbot to write their assignments.
We used to go into an exam armed with nothing more than a slide rule.
You were lucky to have a slide rule.
…
The Rev Dodgson said:
Peak Warming Man said:
party_pants said:Maybe this is a good thing. It shows up the students who used the AI shitbot to write their assignments.
We used to go into an exam armed with nothing more than a slide rule.
You were lucky to have a slide rule.
…
Aye.
Elephants died so my father could have a slide rule.
Mine is plastic.
Peak Warming Man said:
The Rev Dodgson said:
Peak Warming Man said:We used to go into an exam armed with nothing more than a slide rule.
You were lucky to have a slide rule.
…Aye.
…nowt but a piece o’ tree bark, and a charred stick to make marks wi’.
Peak Warming Man said:
party_pants said:
SCIENCE said:
Maybe this is a good thing. It shows up the students who used the AI shitbot to write their assignments.
We used to go into an exam armed with nothing more than a slide rule.
And a log book…
Tau.Neutrino said:
So they got ripped off buying cheap tacky overpriced trump memorabilia.
This is what happens when you vote a convicted felon into office. Cry me a fucking river, losers.
captain_spalding said:
Peak Warming Man said:
The Rev Dodgson said:
You were lucky to have a slide rule.
…Aye.
…nowt but a piece o’ tree bark, and a charred stick to make marks wi’.
yeah back in our day we had nothing but our bare birthday costumes, had to slash our own wrists with our fingernails to write our answers in blood, if they didn’t give us paper we had to bite off our fibula to use as a carving tool
party_pants said:
Tau.Neutrino said:
So they got ripped off buying cheap tacky overpriced trump memorabilia.
This is what happens when you vote a convicted felon into office. Cry me a fucking river, losers.
I think Trump’s election was predicted by Stan Freberg in 1952 with Abe Snake for President.
Peak Warming Man said:
party_pants said:
SCIENCE said:
Maybe this is a good thing. It shows up the students who used the AI shitbot to write their assignments.
We used to go into an exam armed with nothing more than a slide rule.
Looooxury. of course we had it tough, we had one hand tied behind our back so we could only count up to five!
Bogsnorkler said:
Peak Warming Man said:
party_pants said:
Maybe this is a good thing. It shows up the students who used the AI shitbot to write their assignments.
We used to go into an exam armed with nothing more than a slide rule.
Looooxury. of course we had it tough, we had one hand tied behind our back so we could only count up to five!
yeah our final examination was a sensory deprivation vat all you had to do was figure out how to escape
SCIENCE said:
Bogsnorkler said:
Peak Warming Man said:
We used to go into an exam armed with nothing more than a slide rule.
Looooxury. of course we had it tough, we had one hand tied behind our back so we could only count up to five!
yeah our final examination was a sensory deprivation vat all you had to do was figure out how to escape
I tried telling some kids of today that, but they didn’t believe me.
Bogsnorkler said:
SCIENCE said:
Bogsnorkler said:
Looooxury. of course we had it tough, we had one hand tied behind our back so we could only count up to five!
yeah our final examination was a sensory deprivation vat all you had to do was figure out how to escape
I tried telling some kids of today that, but they didn’t believe me.
you mean these days they have their work cut out for them
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/05/14/el-chapo-family-enter-united-states/83619614007/
https://www.wjhl.com/news/national/florida-serial-killer-cheers-trump-in-his-final-words-at-execution/
dv said:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/05/14/el-chapo-family-enter-united-states/83619614007/
https://www.wjhl.com/news/national/florida-serial-killer-cheers-trump-in-his-final-words-at-execution/
It won’t be long till he starts accepting bribes from foreign countries for his deportees.
Well you can jump up and down and yell and scream all you want but barring assassination the clown is going to be with us for the next three and a half years.
He’s in pretty good mental and physical health so you better get used to it.
Peak Warming Man said:
Well you can jump up and down and yell and scream all you want but barring assassination the clown is going to be with us for the next three and a half years.
He’s in pretty good mental and physical health so you better get used to it.
His bloodstream is 95% saturated fats.
SCIENCE said:
Bogsnorkler said:
SCIENCE said:
yeah our final examination was a sensory deprivation vat all you had to do was figure out how to escape
I tried telling some kids of today that, but they didn’t believe me.
you mean these days they have their work cut out for them
Nah, they aren’t as gullible as we were.
SCIENCE said:
Bogsnorkler said:
SCIENCE said:
yeah our final examination was a sensory deprivation vat all you had to do was figure out how to escape
I tried telling some kids of today that, but they didn’t believe me.
you mean these days they have their work cut out for them
In my day, we had to cut out our own work, with the blunt end of a rusty spoon.
dv said:
Peak Warming Man said:
Well you can jump up and down and yell and scream all you want but barring assassination the clown is going to be with us for the next three and a half years.
He’s in pretty good mental and physical health so you better get used to it.
His bloodstream is 95% saturated fats.
5% Coke
Schiff Takes To Senate Floor to Lay Out Trump’s 10 Most Corrupt Acts So FarUpdated 2 days ago, 27 minutes, could be shorter.
Peak Warming Man said:
Well you can jump up and down and yell and scream all you want but barring assassination the clown is going to be with us for the next three and a half years.
He’s in pretty good mental and physical health so you better get used to it.
No, i think that, if his mental decline proceeds apace, he’ll likely stick his dick in a power socket some time around late 2026.
Peak Warming Man said:
Well you can jump up and down and yell and scream all you want but barring assassination the clown is going to be with us for the next three and a half years.
He’s in pretty good mental and physical health so you better get used to it.
Wot he sed.
Anyone else notice an absence of Elon Musk from the ‘crazy news’ lately?
(Disclaimer: I know, it’s all ‘crazy news’.)
captain_spalding said:
Anyone else notice an absence of Elon Musk from the ‘crazy news’ lately?
(Disclaimer: I know, it’s all ‘crazy news’.)
what about the Twitter Grok Boer Genocide thing
captain_spalding said:
Anyone else notice an absence of Elon Musk from the ‘crazy news’ lately?(Disclaimer: I know, it’s all ‘crazy news’.)
The Rev Dodgson said:
ms spock said:
The Rev Dodgson said:Link doesn’t work.
My apologies
EVIDENCE: The Democratic Party Is UNDEMOCRATIC
I hope that works now.
Yes, now works, and thanks for transcript SCIENCE.
Seems the Democrats need to do some work.
The trouble is, in the US system, a vote for Greens or anyone other than Democrats really is a vote for Republicans.
The Democrats are really weird.
Harris won except for voter suppression. Roland S Martin did interviews with people like Nathan Taylor who found Russian Tails in the Nevada vote count. (I can get the video if you want me to)
There was a collective “Why aren’t the Dems asking for recounts?”
Greg Palast’s documentary “Vigilantes Inc” goes through voter suppression & how Harris actually won, but the Dems didn’t fight about it. The documentary is free on YouTube.
Harris cheated out of 3,650,000 votes by these Jim Crow tricks.
4.7 million voters purged.
3.2 million registrations rejected.
2.1 million mail-in ballots tossed.
Palast offered to assist Harris and she said she would watch the documentary after the election. So it is all rather weird.
Divine Angel said:
dv said:
Peak Warming Man said:
Well you can jump up and down and yell and scream all you want but barring assassination the clown is going to be with us for the next three and a half years.
He’s in pretty good mental and physical health so you better get used to it.
His bloodstream is 95% saturated fats.
5% Coke
or coke
party_pants said:
dv said:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/05/14/el-chapo-family-enter-united-states/83619614007/
https://www.wjhl.com/news/national/florida-serial-killer-cheers-trump-in-his-final-words-at-execution/
It won’t be long till he starts accepting bribes from foreign countries for his deportees.
wait so was it a federal execution, why didn’t he just pardon the sycophant on hearing these words of love
also it’s not a new thing for the USSA to be a protection racket for criminals
captain_spalding said:
Anyone else notice an absence of Elon Musk from the ‘crazy news’ lately?(Disclaimer: I know, it’s all ‘crazy news’.)
Yes, and I commented a couple of days ago.
captain_spalding said:
Ha!
SCIENCE said:
captain_spalding said:
Anyone else notice an absence of Elon Musk from the ‘crazy news’ lately?
(Disclaimer: I know, it’s all ‘crazy news’.)
what about the Twitter Grok Boer Genocide thing
Hmmm.
Michael V said:
captain_spalding said:
Anyone else notice an absence of Elon Musk from the ‘crazy news’ lately?(Disclaimer: I know, it’s all ‘crazy news’.)
Yes, and I commented a couple of days ago.
Apologies, missed that, must have been elsewhere.
captain_spalding said:
Michael V said:
captain_spalding said:
Anyone else notice an absence of Elon Musk from the ‘crazy news’ lately?(Disclaimer: I know, it’s all ‘crazy news’.)
Yes, and I commented a couple of days ago.
Apologies, missed that, must have been elsewhere.
No problems.
captain_spalding said:
Anyone else notice an absence of Elon Musk from the ‘crazy news’ lately?(Disclaimer: I know, it’s all ‘crazy news’.)
I heard he was in rehab.
Tau.Neutrino said:
captain_spalding said:
Anyone else notice an absence of Elon Musk from the ‘crazy news’ lately?(Disclaimer: I know, it’s all ‘crazy news’.)
I heard he was in rehab.
Really?
Once again, in honour of SM’s memory.
…………………………………………………..
May 16, 2025
Heather Cox Richardson
May 17 (Saturday)
MAGA world is performing over-the-top outrage over a photo former Federal Bureau of Investigation director James Comey posted on Instagram, where he has been teasing a new novel. The image shows shells on a beach arranged in a popular slogan for opposing President Donald J. Trump: “86”—slang for tossing something away—followed by “47”, a reference to Trump’s presidency.
Using “eighty-six” as either a noun or a verb appears to have started in the restaurant industry in the 1930s to indicate that something was out of stock. It is a common term, used by MAGA itself to refer to getting rid of somebody…until now.
MAGA voices are insisting that this image was Comey’s threat to assassinate the president. Trump got into the game, telling Brett Baier of the Fox News Channel: “that meant assassination. And it says it loud and clear…. e’s calling for the assassination of the president…that’s gonna be up to Pam and all of the great people…. He’s a dirty cop.” Trump’s reference to Attorney General Pam Bondi and law enforcement paid off: yesterday, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said that the Department of Homeland Security and the Secret Service are investigating Comey. He showed up voluntarily at the FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., today for an interview.
In the past day, Trump’s social media account has also attacked wildly popular musical icons Bruce Springsteen and, somewhat out of the blue, Taylor Swift. Dutifully, media outlets have taken up a lot of oxygen reporting on “shellgate” and Trump’s posts about Springsteen and Swift, pushing other stories out of the news.
In his newsletter today, retired entrepreneur Bill Southworth tallied the times Trump has grabbed headlines to distract people from larger stories, starting the tally with how Trump’s posts about Peanut the Squirrel the day before the election swept like a brushfire across the right-wing media ecosystem and then into the mainstream. In early 2025, Southworth notes, as the media began to dig into the dramatic restructuring of the federal government, Trump posted outrageously about Gaza, and that story took over. When cuts to PEPFAR (the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) and the U.S. Agency for International Development threatened lives across Africa, Trump turned the conversation to white South Africans he lied were fleeing “anti-white genocide.”
Southworth calls this “narrative warfare,” and while it is true that Republican leaders have seeded a particular false narrative for decades now, this technique is also known as “political technology” or “virtual politics.” This system, pioneered in Russia under Russian president Vladimir Putin, is designed to get people to vote an authoritarian into office by creating a fake world of outrage. For those who do not buy the lies, there is another tool: flooding the zone so that people stop being able to figure out what is real and tune out.
The administration has clearly adopted this plan. As Drew Harwell and Sarah Ellison of the Washington Post noted in early March, the administration set out to portray Trump as a king in order “to sell the country on expansionist approach to presidential power.”
The team set out not just to confront critics, but to drown them out with a constant barrage of sound bites, interviews with loyalists, memes slamming Democrats, and attack lines.
“We’re here. We’re in your face,” said Kaelan Dorr, a deputy assistant to the president who runs the digital team. “It’s irreverent. It’s unapologetic.” The White House brought right-wing influencers into the press pool, including at least one who before the election was exposed as being on the Russian payroll. Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung, who before he began to work for Trump was a spokesperson for the Ultimate Fighting Championship, said their goal was “FULL SPECTRUM DOMINANCE.”
Dominating means controlling the narrative. That starts with perceptions of the president himself. Trump’s appearances have been deeply concerning as he cannot follow a coherent thread, frequently falls asleep, repeatedly veers into nonsense, and says he doesn’t know about the operations of his government. Yesterday, after journalist S.V. Date noted that the administration has posted online only about 20% of Trump’s words, Cheung told Date “You must be truly f*cking stupid if you think we’re not transparent.”
The White House also pushed back dramatically against a story that appeared in Business Insider Monday, comparing Donald Trump Jr. to former president Joe Biden’s son Hunter. The White House suggested it would take legal action against Business Insider’s German parent company.
Controlling the narrative also appears to mean manipulating the media, as Russians prescribed. Last month, Jeremy Kohler and Andy Kroll of ProPublica reported that Trump loyalist and political operative Ed Martin, now in charge of the “Weaponization Working Group,” in the Department of Justice, secretly seeded stories attacking a judge in a legal case that was not going his way. Martin has appeared more than 150 times on the Russia Today television channel and on Russian state radio, media outlets the State Department said were “critical elements in Russia’s disinformation and propaganda ecosystem,” where he claimed the Democrats were weaponizing the court system. Now he is vowing to investigate Democrats and anyone who criticizes the administration.
As Trump’s popularity falls, Trump’s political operators have spent in the “high seven figures,” Alex Isenstadt of Axios says, to run ads in more than 20 targeted congressional districts to push lawmakers to get behind Trump’s economic program. “Tell Congress this is a good deal for America,” the ad says. “Support President Trump’s agenda to get our economy back on track.”
In their advertising efforts, Musk’s mining of U.S. government records is deeply concerning, for the treasure trove of information he appears to have mined would enable political operatives to target political ads with laser precision in an even tighter operation than the Cambridge Analytica program of 2016.
The stories the administration appears to be trying to cover up show a nation hobbled since January 20, 2025, as MAGA slashes the modern government that works for ordinary Americans and abandons democracy in order to put the power of the United States government into the hands of the extremely wealthy.
Trump vowed that high tariffs on goods from other countries would launch a new golden era in the United States, enabling the U.S. to extend his 2017 tax cuts on the wealthy and corporations, some of which expire at the end of this year. But his high tariffs, especially those on goods from China, dramatically contracted the economy and raised the chances of a recession.
His constant monkeying with tariff rates has created deep uncertainty in the economy, as well as raising concerns that at least some of his pronouncements are designed to manipulate the market. Today, Walmart announced it would have no choice but to raise prices, and the Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index dropped to its second lowest reading on record.
Trump insisted earlier that other countries would come begging to negotiate, but now appears to have given up on the idea. “It’s not possible to meet the number of people that want to see us,” he said, announcing today that he will simply set new rates himself. During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump argued that other countries would pay high tariff duties, helping the U.S. Treasury to address its high deficits at the same time the wealthy got further tax cuts.
Over the course of this week, Republicans tried to push through Congress a measure that they have dubbed “One, Big, Beautiful Bill,” a reference to Trump’s term for it. The measure extended Trump’s tax cuts at a cost to the nation of about $4.6 trillion over ten years and raised the debt ceiling by $4 trillion. At the same time, it cut Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and a slew of other programs.
The Republicans failed to advance that bill out of the House Budget Committee Friday afternoon. Far-right Republicans complained not that it cut too much from programs Americans rely on, but that it cut too little. Citing the dysfunction in Washington, D.C. and the uncertain outlook for the American economy, Moody’s downgraded the credit rating of the country today from AAA to AA1.
Since Trump took office, the “Department of Government Efficiency” also claimed to be slashing “waste, fraud, and abuse” from government programs, although actual financial savings have yet to materialize. Instead, the cuts are to programs that help ordinary Americans and move money upward to the wealthy. News broke today that cuts of 31% to the enforcement wing of the Internal Revenue Service will cost money: tax evasion among the top 10% of earners costs about $700 billion a year.
The cuts were driven at least in part by the ideological extremism of Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget. Vought was a key author of Project 2025, which calls for decimating the federal government.
Vought talked about traumatizing federal workers, and has done so, but the cuts have also traumatized Americans who depend on the programs that DOGE tried to cut. Cuts to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) meant about $2 billion less in contracts for American farmers, while close to $100 million worth of food that could feed 3.5 million people rots in government warehouses.
Cuts to the Federal Aviation Administration have left airports without adequate numbers of air traffic controllers. After two 90-second blackouts at Newark Liberty International Airport when air traffic controllers lost control with airplanes, yesterday the air traffic controllers at Denver International Airport lost contact with planes for 2 minutes.
Cuts to a program that funds the healthcare of first responders and survivors of the September 11 World Trade Center terror attacks are leaving thousands of patients unclear whether their cancer treatments, for example, will be covered. Yesterday, acting administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) David Richardson told staff that FEMA is not prepared for hurricane season, which starts on June 1, and will work to return responsibility for the response to emergencies to the states. A document prepared for Richardson and obtained by Luke Barr of ABC News said: “As FEMA transforms to a smaller footprint, the intent for this hurricane season is not well understood, thus FEMA is not ready.”
Yesterday, news broke that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has been in talks with the producers of the reality show Duck Dynasty for a new reality show in which immigrants compete against each other in cultural contests to win the chance to move their U.S. citizenship applications ahead faster. It is made-for-TV, just like so many of the performances this administration uses to distract Americans from the unpopular policies that are stripping the government of benefits for ordinary Americans and moving wealth upward.
Such a show might appeal to confirmed MAGA. But it is a profound perversion of the American dream.
____________________
The Heather Cox Richardson articles can be found here
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/
Trump rambling about drones, Russia, Ukraine, lumberjacks, and Pete Buttigieg on a bicycle.
🥱
Ah, hapless. A word used as an insult about my sons.
Divine Angel said:
🥱
Another one that he didn’t write himself. Again, good try but still too well written. No gold star.
buffy said:
Divine Angel said:
🥱
Another one that he didn’t write himself. Again, good try but still too well written. No gold star.
Perhaps it’s the correct use of commas that gives it away.
buffy said:
buffy said:
Divine Angel said:
🥱
Another one that he didn’t write himself. Again, good try but still too well written. No gold star.
Perhaps it’s the correct use of commas that gives it away.
I’m suspecting voice-to-text with autocorrect for the grammar and punctuation. Probably written while he was on the loo.
Divine Angel said:
buffy said:
buffy said:Another one that he didn’t write himself. Again, good try but still too well written. No gold star.
Perhaps it’s the correct use of commas that gives it away.
I’m suspecting voice-to-text with autocorrect for the grammar and punctuation. Probably written while he was on the loo.
How does it know which bits to capitalize?
It seems that a car bomb has killed 1 person outside a reproductive care centre in Florida.
kii said:
It seems that a car bomb has killed 1 person outside a reproductive care centre in Florida.
I just don’t understand these murderous acts.
Michael V said:
kii said:
It seems that a car bomb has killed 1 person outside a reproductive care centre in Florida.I just don’t understand these murderous acts.
Cults.
Divine Angel said:
buffy said:
buffy said:Another one that he didn’t write himself. Again, good try but still too well written. No gold star.
Perhaps it’s the correct use of commas that gives it away.
I’m suspecting voice-to-text with autocorrect for the grammar and punctuation. Probably written while he was on the loo.
buffy, listen to this rambling shit…
Link
Voice-to-text etc is exactly what is happening.
DA – he doesn’t even need to be on the loo. This is how he is on the world stage.
kii said:
Michael V said:
kii said:
It seems that a car bomb has killed 1 person outside a reproductive care centre in Florida.I just don’t understand these murderous acts.
Cults.
it’s pro life
SCIENCE said:
kii said:
Michael V said:I just don’t understand these murderous acts.
Cults.
it’s pro life
Toxic males, the patriarchy and their pathetic crumb maidens.
kii said:
Michael V said:
kii said:
It seems that a car bomb has killed 1 person outside a reproductive care centre in Florida.I just don’t understand these murderous acts.
Cults.
It’s OK, God told them to do it.
kii said:
Michael V said:
kii said:
It seems that a car bomb has killed 1 person outside a reproductive care centre in Florida.I just don’t understand these murderous acts.
Cults.
Ah.
Not much into those.
Michael V said:
kii said:
Michael V said:I just don’t understand these murderous acts.
Cults.
Ah.
Not much into those.
George Orwell called it doublethink; it’s the disconnect that allows them to support capital punishment while opposing (often violently, and sometimes even murderously) abortion. The same disconnect that allows people like Senator Orin Hatch to say, without the slightest hint of irony, that “Capital punishment is our society’s
recognition of the sanctity of human life.”
kii said:
Divine Angel said:
buffy said:Perhaps it’s the correct use of commas that gives it away.
I’m suspecting voice-to-text with autocorrect for the grammar and punctuation. Probably written while he was on the loo.
buffy, listen to this rambling shit…
LinkVoice-to-text etc is exactly what is happening.
DA – he doesn’t even need to be on the loo. This is how he is on the world stage.
Yes, the Planet America guys showed that one last week. And I think I might have read a transcript of it somewhere too. That’s why I think someone else is writing the posts. It’s garbage, but mostly in proper English with some capital letters thrown in for “authenticity”.
btm said:
Michael V said:
kii said:Cults.
Ah.
Not much into those.
George Orwell called it doublethink; it’s the disconnect that allows them to support capital punishment while opposing (often violently, and sometimes even murderously) abortion. The same disconnect that allows people like Senator Orin Hatch to say, without the slightest hint of irony, that “Capital punishment is our society’s
recognition of the sanctity of human life.”
Interesting btm.
I didn’t understand it in this way. That works in my brain. The disconnect between Blue MAGA and Red MAGA about the genocide in Gaza. It wasn’t a problem under Biden but was suddenly catastrophic under Trump. If 40 members of your family are killed under Biden how can it be worse? The attacks on Muslims, Palestinians, those who withheld their vote were viciously attacked with well you chose this for your people despite Biden roughly sending new weapons every 36 hours during his term.
SCIENCE said:
The Rev Dodgson said:
ms spock said:My apologies
EVIDENCE: The Democratic Party Is UNDEMOCRATIC
I hope that works now.
Yes, now works, and thanks for transcript SCIENCE.
Seems the Democrats need to do some work.
The trouble is, in the US system, a vote for Greens or anyone other than Democrats really is a vote for Republicans.
but isn’t the point that a vote for Democrats is also a vote for Republicans
That is the real problem. Sabby Sabs talks about this as she worked for the Bernie in 2016 and 2020.
Both Dems and Reps have used the neoliberalist “Poverty as a Policy Choice” for the last 40 years. 66% (or 56% depending on the research) work 2-3 jobs over 6-7 days per week. They pay rent and skip meals to feed their kids. It’s why 90 million stayed home. It doesn’t matter who they vote for, nothing changes. The Dems give lip service but no real changes.
There was the Child Tax Credit that raised 50% of children out of poverty but Biden didn’t renew it after Covid.
If skipping a shift means you family could become homeless then voting is a not possible with the wait lines in minority and gerrymandered communities.
ms spock said:
SCIENCE said:
The Rev Dodgson said:Yes, now works, and thanks for transcript SCIENCE.
Seems the Democrats need to do some work.
The trouble is, in the US system, a vote for Greens or anyone other than Democrats really is a vote for Republicans.
but isn’t the point that a vote for Democrats is also a vote for Republicans
That is the real problem. Sabby Sabs talks about this as she worked for the Bernie in 2016 and 2020.
Both Dems and Reps have used the neoliberalist “Poverty as a Policy Choice” for the last 40 years. 66% (or 56% depending on the research) work 2-3 jobs over 6-7 days per week. They pay rent and skip meals to feed their kids. It’s why 90 million stayed home. It doesn’t matter who they vote for, nothing changes. The Dems give lip service but no real changes.
There was the Child Tax Credit that raised 50% of children out of poverty but Biden didn’t renew it after Covid.
If skipping a shift means you family could become homeless then voting is a not possible with the wait lines in minority and gerrymandered communities.
OK, there is plenty to complain about with the Democrats, but to suggest they are just the same as the current Republicans is just ridiculous.
Aus Greens have the same problem, but at least they are not one of the two major parties and Australia has preferential voting.
The Rev Dodgson said:
ms spock said:
SCIENCE said:
but isn’t the point that a vote for Democrats is also a vote for Republicans
That is the real problem. Sabby Sabs talks about this as she worked for the Bernie in 2016 and 2020.
Both Dems and Reps have used the neoliberalist “Poverty as a Policy Choice” for the last 40 years. 66% (or 56% depending on the research) work 2-3 jobs over 6-7 days per week. They pay rent and skip meals to feed their kids. It’s why 90 million stayed home. It doesn’t matter who they vote for, nothing changes. The Dems give lip service but no real changes.
There was the Child Tax Credit that raised 50% of children out of poverty but Biden didn’t renew it after Covid.
If skipping a shift means you family could become homeless then voting is a not possible with the wait lines in minority and gerrymandered communities.
OK, there is plenty to complain about with the Democrats, but to suggest they are just the same as the current Republicans is just ridiculous.
Aus Greens have the same problem, but at least they are not one of the two major parties and Australia has preferential voting.
luckily what is suggested is that they are fronts for the same grift and not that they are the same front
The Rev Dodgson said:
ms spock said:
SCIENCE said:but isn’t the point that a vote for Democrats is also a vote for Republicans
That is the real problem. Sabby Sabs talks about this as she worked for the Bernie in 2016 and 2020.
Both Dems and Reps have used the neoliberalist “Poverty as a Policy Choice” for the last 40 years. 66% (or 56% depending on the research) work 2-3 jobs over 6-7 days per week. They pay rent and skip meals to feed their kids. It’s why 90 million stayed home. It doesn’t matter who they vote for, nothing changes. The Dems give lip service but no real changes.
There was the Child Tax Credit that raised 50% of children out of poverty but Biden didn’t renew it after Covid.
If skipping a shift means you family could become homeless then voting is a not possible with the wait lines in minority and gerrymandered communities.
OK, there is plenty to complain about with the Democrats, but to suggest they are just the same as the current Republicans is just ridiculous.
Aus Greens have the same problem, but at least they are not one of the two major parties and Australia has preferential voting.
Dems are packaged differently to Reps. But they are funded by the same donors as the Republicans. Pelosi recently made 3 times what she earns in a year in a week in her stock portfolio. Pelosi chose Connolly (4,000 followers, 74 with throat cancer) over AOC (20 million followers) and Pelosi chose Dingell over Jasmine Crockett. I had to look Dingell up. The Dems aren’t even pretending to fight back against what the Reps are doing. Except for a few performative acts.
AOC & Jasmine Crockett have spoken at length at the gatekeeping. I think the average age is 76 among their politicians.
The Democrats won a court case saying as they were a public company, that they don’t guarantee anyone an actual vote, or the ability to send their money to the candidate of their choice. As a company they don’t owe their own Democractic members any form of democracy.
So I respectfully disagree. If the Dems has brought in a living wage there wouldn’t have been a rise of Trumpism. The Dems had plenty of times of having power in the last 40 years but they chose not to do it.
SCIENCE said:
The Rev Dodgson said:
ms spock said:
That is the real problem. Sabby Sabs talks about this as she worked for the Bernie in 2016 and 2020.
Both Dems and Reps have used the neoliberalist “Poverty as a Policy Choice” for the last 40 years. 66% (or 56% depending on the research) work 2-3 jobs over 6-7 days per week. They pay rent and skip meals to feed their kids. It’s why 90 million stayed home. It doesn’t matter who they vote for, nothing changes. The Dems give lip service but no real changes.
There was the Child Tax Credit that raised 50% of children out of poverty but Biden didn’t renew it after Covid.
If skipping a shift means you family could become homeless then voting is a not possible with the wait lines in minority and gerrymandered communities.
OK, there is plenty to complain about with the Democrats, but to suggest they are just the same as the current Republicans is just ridiculous.
Aus Greens have the same problem, but at least they are not one of the two major parties and Australia has preferential voting.
luckily what is suggested is that they are fronts for the same grift and not that they are the same front
You/they can word it how you/they like, to suggest that the Democrats are no different to the Republicans is just ridiculous, and is one of the reasons they now have Trump as Pres.
PMSL
https://www.reddit.com/r/democrats/s/dIkWZpDBYA
The Rev Dodgson said:
SCIENCE said:The Rev Dodgson said:
OK, there is plenty to complain about with the Democrats, but to suggest they are just the same as the current Republicans is just ridiculous.
Aus Greens have the same problem, but at least they are not one of the two major parties and Australia has preferential voting.
luckily what is suggested is that they are fronts for the same grift and not that they are the same front
You/they can word it how you/they like, to suggest that the Democrats are no different to the Republicans is just ridiculous, and is one of the reasons they now have Trump as Pres.
You are right. It is one of the reasons that they now have Trump as Pres, that is true. One third said the reason that they didn’t get off the couch and vote was because of Gaza. There was going to be no difference between what Biden did and what Trump did in Gaza. And Trump using one of Biden’s failed policies got intense criticism from Blue MAGA, but they had been silent when that policy was one of Biden’s policies.
Trump’s Plan for ‘Cleaning Out’ Gaza Didn’t Emerge in a Vacuum. The Biden administration armed, financed, and facilitated Gaza’s destruction at every stage and refused to place serious constraints on Israel.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/02/06/trump-gaza-destruction-nakba-israel/
Joe Biden Is Shipping Weapons to Israel Every 36 Hours By Stephen Semler
https://jacobin.com/2024/03/biden-weapons-israel-gaza-palestine
I did a tremendous amount online to get the vote out for Kamala Harris during the campaign. But the Dems didn’t cater to their base and highlight what they had to offer. The opinion that prevailed was that there is no difference. I did argue against that at the time. For as dumb as rocks and evil Trump is he always feeds his base, every day, even if it is with more and more bizarre lies.
The Rev Dodgson said:
SCIENCE said:
The Rev Dodgson said:
OK, there is plenty to complain about with the Democrats, but to suggest they are just the same as the current Republicans is just ridiculous.
Aus Greens have the same problem, but at least they are not one of the two major parties and Australia has preferential voting.
luckily what is suggested is that they are fronts for the same grift and not that they are the same front
You/they can word it how you/they like, to suggest that the Democrats are no different to the Republicans is just ridiculous, and is one of the reasons they now have Trump as Pres.
we agree that’s why we suggested that the Democrats are yes different fronts to the Republican front for underlying rich powerful interests and hence they now have kkk as president or otherwise they would have effectively had as good as kkk for president
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/elon-musk-x-grok-white-genocide-holocaust-1235341267/
Grok spends too much time online. Needs to touch grass.
The Rev Dodgson said:
SCIENCE said:The Rev Dodgson said:
OK, there is plenty to complain about with the Democrats, but to suggest they are just the same as the current Republicans is just ridiculous.
Aus Greens have the same problem, but at least they are not one of the two major parties and Australia has preferential voting.
luckily what is suggested is that they are fronts for the same grift and not that they are the same front
You/they can word it how you/they like, to suggest that the Democrats are no different to the Republicans is just ridiculous, and is one of the reasons they now have Trump as Pres.
You are quite correct in your assertion that the perception that the Democrats are no different to the Republicans is one of the reasons they now have Trump as Pres.
Biden voters passed on Kamala Harris because of Gaza, new poll shows. Survey found that Harris lost ‘because of the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s genocide of Palestinians’.
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/biden-voters-passed-kamala-harris-because-gaza-new-poll-shows
Nearly a third of US voters who cast their ballots for former President Joe Biden in 2020 decided against voting for Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential elections because Biden supported Israel’s war on Gaza, a new poll has shown.
The poll, conducted by the Institute of Middle East Understanding and YouGov, attempts to provide a possible answer to the question of why Harris received six million fewer votes than Biden received in 2020.
New Poll Shows Gaza Was A Top Issue For Biden 2020 Voters Who Cast A Ballot For Someone Besides Harris
https://www.imeupolicyproject.org/postelection-polling
29% of voters nationally who voted for Biden in 2020 and cast a ballot for someone besides Kamala Harris in 2024 say “ending Israel’s violence in Gaza” was the top issue affecting their vote choice, with the economy a close second at 24%.
Divine Angel said:
PMSLhttps://www.reddit.com/r/democrats/s/dIkWZpDBYA
FMD
(Snigger.)
Michael V said:
Divine Angel said:
PMSLhttps://www.reddit.com/r/democrats/s/dIkWZpDBYA
FMD
(Snigger.)
LOL, whoever did that AI clip is good.
ms spock said:
The Rev Dodgson said:
SCIENCE said:luckily what is suggested is that they are fronts for the same grift and not that they are the same front
You/they can word it how you/they like, to suggest that the Democrats are no different to the Republicans is just ridiculous, and is one of the reasons they now have Trump as Pres.
You are quite correct in your assertion that the perception that the Democrats are no different to the Republicans is one of the reasons they now have Trump as Pres.
Biden voters passed on Kamala Harris because of Gaza, new poll shows. Survey found that Harris lost ‘because of the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s genocide of Palestinians’.
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/biden-voters-passed-kamala-harris-because-gaza-new-poll-showsNearly a third of US voters who cast their ballots for former President Joe Biden in 2020 decided against voting for Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential elections because Biden supported Israel’s war on Gaza, a new poll has shown.
The poll, conducted by the Institute of Middle East Understanding and YouGov, attempts to provide a possible answer to the question of why Harris received six million fewer votes than Biden received in 2020.
New Poll Shows Gaza Was A Top Issue For Biden 2020 Voters Who Cast A Ballot For Someone Besides Harris
https://www.imeupolicyproject.org/postelection-polling29% of voters nationally who voted for Biden in 2020 and cast a ballot for someone besides Kamala Harris in 2024 say “ending Israel’s violence in Gaza” was the top issue affecting their vote choice, with the economy a close second at 24%.
I am very skeptical about a survey conducted by this institute, they are a pro-Palestinian lobby group and I think they are probably overstating their importance in US domestic politics.
Michael V said:
Divine Angel said:
PMSLhttps://www.reddit.com/r/democrats/s/dIkWZpDBYA
FMD
(Snigger.)
That is a rather strange way to deal with his fight with Springfield and Swift.
party_pants said:
ms spock said:
The Rev Dodgson said:
You/they can word it how you/they like, to suggest that the Democrats are no different to the Republicans is just ridiculous, and is one of the reasons they now have Trump as Pres.
You are quite correct in your assertion that the perception that the Democrats are no different to the Republicans is one of the reasons they now have Trump as Pres.
Biden voters passed on Kamala Harris because of Gaza, new poll shows. Survey found that Harris lost ‘because of the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s genocide of Palestinians’.
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/biden-voters-passed-kamala-harris-because-gaza-new-poll-showsNearly a third of US voters who cast their ballots for former President Joe Biden in 2020 decided against voting for Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential elections because Biden supported Israel’s war on Gaza, a new poll has shown.
The poll, conducted by the Institute of Middle East Understanding and YouGov, attempts to provide a possible answer to the question of why Harris received six million fewer votes than Biden received in 2020.
New Poll Shows Gaza Was A Top Issue For Biden 2020 Voters Who Cast A Ballot For Someone Besides Harris
https://www.imeupolicyproject.org/postelection-polling29% of voters nationally who voted for Biden in 2020 and cast a ballot for someone besides Kamala Harris in 2024 say “ending Israel’s violence in Gaza” was the top issue affecting their vote choice, with the economy a close second at 24%.
I am very skeptical about a survey conducted by this institute, they are a pro-Palestinian lobby group and I think they are probably overstating their importance in US domestic politics.
especially given that in contrast the failure of Greens here was blamed on exactly the opposite as in their campaigning against genocide
(In memory of SM)
……………………………
May 17, 2025
Heather Cox Richardson
May 18 (Sunday).
This weekend there are two major anniversaries for the history of civil rights in the United States. Seventy-one years ago today, on May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. That landmark decision declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional. It overturned the Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson decision handed down 129 years ago tomorrow. On that day, May 18, 1896, the Supreme Court declared that the Fourteenth Amendment allowed segregation within states so long as accommodations were “equal.”
The journey from Plessy to Brown was the story of ordinary people creating change with the tools they had at hand.
Recently, scholars have shown how, after the Plessy decision, Black Americans in the South used state civil law to advance their civil rights. Insisting on their rights in the South’s complicated system of credits and debts, they hammered out a legal identity. Denied justice under criminal law, they sued companies, primarily railroad companies, for denying them equal protection against harassment. And, according to historian Myisha S. Eatmon, they often won these civil suits, even at the hands of all-white juries.
It was on these grounds that Black lawyers won discrimination suits over public schools early in the twentieth century. They relied on the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision that allowed “separate” accommodations for Black and white Americans so long as they were “equal.” They would point out how much poorer the conditions in Black schools were than those in white schools, proving those conditions violated the “separate but equal” requirement in the decision condoning racial segregation.
Legal challenges to segregation were only one tool in the workshop of those trying to dismantle the system. After the organizers of the Pan-American Exposition of 1901 caricatured Black Americans, Black educator and suffragist Mary Burnett Talbert reached out to sociologist and writer W.E.B. DuBois to call for a movement to advance equal treatment.
In 1905, thirty-two Black leaders met in Fort Erie, Ontario, and launched the Niagara Movement to call for equal justice before the law and economic opportunities, including the right to an education, equal to those enjoyed by white men. A year later, journalist William English Walling joined the group. Walling was a well-educated descendant of a wealthy enslaving family from Kentucky who had become a social reformer. Another well-educated social reformer, Mary White Ovington, also joined. And so did their friend Henry Moskowitz, a Jewish immigrant from Romania who was well connected in New York Democratic politics.
A race riot in Springfield, Illinois, on August 14 and 15, 1908, sparked a wider organization. The violence broke out after the sheriff transferred two Black prisoners, one accused of murder and another of rape, to a different town out of concern for their safety.
Furious that they had been prevented from vengeance against the accused, a mob of white townspeople looted businesses and burned homes in Springfield’s Black neighborhood. They lynched two Black men and ran most of the Black population out of town. At least eight people died, more than 70 were injured, and at least $3 million of damage in today’s money was done before 3,700 state militia troops quelled the riot.
Walling and his wife visited Springfield days later. He was horrified to find white citizens complaining that their Black neighbors had forgotten “their place.”
Walling reached back to the principles on which the nation was founded. He warned that either the North must revive the spirit of Lincoln—who, after all, was associated with Springfield—and commit to “absolute political and social equality” or the white supremacist violence of the South would spread across the whole nation. “The day these methods become general in the North,” he wrote, “every hope of political democracy will be dead, other weaker races and classes will be persecuted in the North as in the South, public education will undergo an eclipse, and American civilization will await either a rapid degeneration or another profounder and more revolutionary civil war….”
In January 1909, leaders from the Niagara Movement met in the Wallings’ apartment in New York City to create a new civil rights organization. Sixty prominent reformers, Black and white, signed their call, and the next year an interracial group of 300 men and women met to create a permanent organization. After a second meeting in May 1910, they adopted a formal name, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was born, although they settled on the centennial of Lincoln’s birth as their actual beginning.
It was no accident that supporters of the project included muckraking journalists Ray Stannard Baker and Ida B. Wells, as well as Du Bois, for a vibrant Black newspaper culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was central to spreading knowledge of the atrocities committed against Black Americans, especially in the South, and of how to sue over them. In 1910, Du Bois would choose to leave his professorship at Atlanta University to become the NAACP’s director of publicity and research. For the next 14 years, he would edit the organization’s flagship journal The Crisis.
While The Crisis was a newspaper, a literary magazine, and a cultural showcase, its key function reflected the journalistic sensibilities of those like Baker, Wells, and especially Du Bois: it constantly called attention to atrocities, discrimination, and the ways in which the United States was not living up to its stated principles. At a time when violence and suppression were mounting against Black Americans, Wells, Du Bois, and their colleagues relentlessly spread knowledge of what was happening and demanded that officials treat all people equally before the law.
That use of information to rally people to the cause of equality became a hallmark of the NAACP. It took advantage of the skills of women like Rosa Parks, who after 1944 was the secretary of the NAACP’s Montgomery, Alabama, chapter. Parks investigated sexual violence against Black women and compiled statistics about those assaults, making a record of the reality of Black Americans’ lives.
It was NAACP leader Walter Francis White who in 1946 brought the story of World War II veteran Isaac Woodard, blinded by a police officer and his deputy in South Carolina after talking back to a bus driver, to President Harry S. Truman.
Truman had been a racist southern Democrat, but after hearing about Woodard, he convened the President’s Committee on Civil Rights, directly asking its members to find ways to use the federal government to strengthen the civil rights of racial and religious minorities in the country. Truman later said, “When a Mayor and City Marshal can take a…Sergeant off a bus in South Carolina, beat him up and put out…his eyes, and nothing is done about it by the State authorities, something is radically wrong with the system.”
The committee’s final report, written in the wake of a world war against the hierarchical societies of fascism, recommended new federal laws to address police brutality, end lynching, protect voting—including for Indigenous Americans—and promote equal rights, accounting for the internment of Japanese Americans as well as discrimination against Black Americans. It called for “he elimination of segregation, based on race, color, creed, or national origin, from American life” and for a public campaign to explain to white Americans why ending segregation was important.
The NAACP had highlighted that the inequalities in American society were systemic rather than the work of a few bad apples, bearing witness until “the believers in democracy” could no longer remain silent.
Meanwhile, in South Carolina, an all-white jury acquitted the police officers who blinded Woodward. Presiding judge Julius Waties Waring, the son of a Confederate veteran, was disgusted at the jury’s decision and at the crowd that cheered when it heard the verdict. He began to stew on how to challenge racial discrimination legally when white juries at the state level could simply decide to nullify the law.
In 1940, Black NAACP lawyer Thurgood Marshall had founded the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., in New York City. Six years later, civil rights lawyer Constance Baker Motley joined him. He would go on to become the first Black justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. She would become the first Black woman to argue before the Supreme Court and the first Black woman to become a federal judge. They were a powerhouse team.
In 1952, with the support of Judge Waring, Marshall and Motley and their collaborators took a new tack to oppose segregation in public schools. Rather than resting on the idea that poorly funded Black schools were not equal to white schools as Plessy required, they argued outright that racial segregation violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, the same argument the Supreme Court had rejected in Plessy. This formula would enable the federal government to restrain white juries at the state level.
Truman had desegregated the military but had not been able to move civil rights through Congress because of the segregationist southern Democrats. After he took office in 1953, Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower took up the cause. He appointed former California governor Earl Warren, a Republican known as a consensus builder, as chief justice of the Supreme Court. Warren took his seat in October 1953, as Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, a group of cases from Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, and Delaware, was before the court.
The court’s decision, handed down on May 17, 1954, explicitly overturned Plessy, saying that segregated schools denied Black children “the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.”
The decision was a long time coming, even though Justice John Marshall Harlan had anticipated it almost 60 years before. Harlan wrote a dissenting opinion in Plessy harking back to the infamous 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision in which the Supreme Court denied that Black Americans could be citizens and said they had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” The American people had emphatically overruled that decision by adding the Fourteenth Amendment—on which Brown v. Board was based—to the U.S. Constitution.
“In my opinion,” Harlan wrote in 1896, “the judgment this day rendered will, in time, prove to be quite as pernicious as the decision made by this tribunal in the Dred Scott case.”
—
Notes:
Myisha S. Eatmon, “Wielding an Unlikely Weapon: Black Americans, White Violence, and Damage Suits during the Early Days of Jim Crow,” Journal of American History, 111 (September 2024): 267–289.
Dylan Penningroth, “How Civil Rights Were Made—and Remade—by Black Communities in the Jim Crow South,” Time, at: https://time.com/6317203/civil-rights-jim-crow-south-credit-essay/
https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/usrep/usrep347/usrep347483/usrep347483.pdf
https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/usrep/usrep163/usrep163537/usrep163537.pdf
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2018/07/26/how-harry-s-truman-went-from-being-a-racist-to-desegregating-the-military/
https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/library/to-secure-these-rights
……………………
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-05-19/joe-biden-diagnosed-with-prostate-cancer/105308100
Former US president Joe Biden has been diagnosed with an “aggressive form” of prostate cancer that has metastasised to the bone, his office said in a statement on Sunday.
Mr Biden was diagnosed on Friday after having experienced urinary symptoms, the statement said.
“While this represents a more aggressive form of the disease, the cancer appears to be hormone-sensitive, which allows for effective management,” his office said.
The former president and his family were reviewing treatment options with doctors, it added.
Former US president Joe Biden has been diagnosed with an “aggressive form” of prostate cancer that has metastasised to the bone, his office said in a statement on Sunday.
Mr Biden was seen last week by doctors after experiencing urinary symptoms, and a prostate nodule was found.
He was diagnosed with prostate cancer on Friday, with the cancer cells having spread to the bone.
“While this represents a more aggressive form of the disease, the cancer appears to be hormone-sensitive, which allows for effective management,” his office said.
“The President and his family are reviewing treatment options with his physicians.”
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-05-19/joe-biden-diagnosed-with-prostate-cancer/105308100
Divine Angel said:
SCIENCE said:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-05-19/joe-biden-diagnosed-with-prostate-cancer/105308100
Former US president Joe Biden has been diagnosed with an “aggressive form” of prostate cancer that has metastasised to the bone, his office said in a statement on Sunday.
Mr Biden was diagnosed on Friday after having experienced urinary symptoms, the statement said.
“While this represents a more aggressive form of the disease, the cancer appears to be hormone-sensitive, which allows for effective management,” his office said.
The former president and his family were reviewing treatment options with doctors, it added.
Former US president Joe Biden has been diagnosed with an “aggressive form” of prostate cancer that has metastasised to the bone, his office said in a statement on Sunday.
Mr Biden was seen last week by doctors after experiencing urinary symptoms, and a prostate nodule was found.
He was diagnosed with prostate cancer on Friday, with the cancer cells having spread to the bone.
“While this represents a more aggressive form of the disease, the cancer appears to be hormone-sensitive, which allows for effective management,” his office said.
“The President and his family are reviewing treatment options with his physicians.”
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-05-19/joe-biden-diagnosed-with-prostate-cancer/105308100
so the sleepy cognitive decline was brain metastasis let’s go
In today’s edition of “He Didn’t Write That”
dv said:
A pox on Trump jr.
dv said:
lol.
Bogsnorkler said:
dv said:
lol.
not that sort of Dr?
Bogsnorkler said:
dv said:
lol.
for those that may not get the humour. Jill Biden is not a MD type doctor.
Biden has a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Delaware and master’s degrees in education and English from West Chester University and Villanova University. She returned to the University of Delaware and received a doctoral degree in education. She taught English and reading in high schools for thirteen years and instructed adolescents with emotional disabilities at a psychiatric hospital. Following this, she was an English and writing instructor for fifteen years at Delaware Technical & Community College.wiki.
dv said:
FMD
There is no end to this stupidity.
Arts said:
Bogsnorkler said:
dv said:
lol.
not that sort of Dr?
If Chevy Chase and Dan Akryoyd can be doctors, then anyone can
Bogsnorkler said:
Bogsnorkler said:
dv said:
lol.
for those that may not get the humour. Jill Biden is not a MD type doctor.
Biden has a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Delaware and master’s degrees in education and English from West Chester University and Villanova University. She returned to the University of Delaware and received a doctoral degree in education. She taught English and reading in high schools for thirteen years and instructed adolescents with emotional disabilities at a psychiatric hospital. Following this, she was an English and writing instructor for fifteen years at Delaware Technical & Community College.wiki.
Whereas Donald Trump Jr. was the kid in the class who would make himself sick eating Perkins Paste.
And that was in university.
captain_spalding said:
Bogsnorkler said:
Bogsnorkler said:lol.
for those that may not get the humour. Jill Biden is not a MD type doctor.
Biden has a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Delaware and master’s degrees in education and English from West Chester University and Villanova University. She returned to the University of Delaware and received a doctoral degree in education. She taught English and reading in high schools for thirteen years and instructed adolescents with emotional disabilities at a psychiatric hospital. Following this, she was an English and writing instructor for fifteen years at Delaware Technical & Community College.wiki.
Whereas Donald Trump Jr. was the kid in the class who would make himself sick eating Perkins Paste.
And that was in university.
wow he’s university educated
SCIENCE said:
captain_spalding said:
Bogsnorkler said:for those that may not get the humour. Jill Biden is not a MD type doctor.
Biden has a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Delaware and master’s degrees in education and English from West Chester University and Villanova University. She returned to the University of Delaware and received a doctoral degree in education. She taught English and reading in high schools for thirteen years and instructed adolescents with emotional disabilities at a psychiatric hospital. Following this, she was an English and writing instructor for fifteen years at Delaware Technical & Community College.wiki.
Whereas Donald Trump Jr. was the kid in the class who would make himself sick eating Perkins Paste.
And that was in university.
wow he’s university educated
Trump University.
Michael V said:
dv said:
FMD
There is no end to this stupidity.
What’s “stage five” cancer? A quick check suggests stage four is the last (metastatic) stage.
Trump described Bruce Springsteen as ‘atrophied’, ‘dried out’, and a ‘prune’.
Trump, D. – age: 78
Springsteen, B. – age: 75
!
!
btm said:
Michael V said:
dv said:
FMD
There is no end to this stupidity.
What’s “stage five” cancer? A quick check suggests stage four is the last (metastatic) stage.
well we suppose it can only get worse in one way so maybe this kkk fuckwit is threatening homicide as well
captain_spalding said:
Trump described Bruce Springsteen as ‘atrophied’, ‘dried out’, and a ‘prune’.Trump, D. – age: 78
Springsteen, B. – age: 75
!
When one is jealous, one tends to sling nasty words at another.
…then create AI clips to show one’s self doing the thing he’s jealous, and incapable, of doing.
If you have time there was a really interesting interview with Beto O’Rourke in last week episode of Pod Save America. The interview starts at 49:30
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VntODDPGrVc&list=PLOOwEPgFWm_NHcQd9aCi5JXWASHO_n5uR&index=2
He talks a lot about why he feels people have lost support for the Democratic Party – of course with an emphasis on his state of Texas.
Democrats lead by about 3% in the Congressional polls, which would be enough for them to win back the House in 2026.
Probably not enough to get them to 51 in the Senate (remembering that 50 won’t get them control as the deciding vote is the president of the Senate which is the vice-president of the United States).
A lot could happen betwen now and Nov26 of course.
I wonder whether there is any pressure on Supreme Court Justices Alito and Thomas to retire in this term.
dv said:
Democrats lead by about 3% in the Congressional polls, which would be enough for them to win back the House in 2026.
Probably not enough to get them to 51 in the Senate (remembering that 50 won’t get them control as the deciding vote is the president of the Senate which is the vice-president of the United States).
A lot could happen betwen now and Nov26 of course.
I wonder whether there is any pressure on Supreme Court Justices Alito and Thomas to retire in this term.
I reckon there will be massive pressure will be on Alito and Thomas to pull the plug in the next two years – the only hope is that they are too belligerent to cave.
SCIENCE said:
btm said:
Michael V said:
FMD
There is no end to this stupidity.
What’s “stage five” cancer? A quick check suggests stage four is the last (metastatic) stage.
well we suppose it can only get worse in one way so maybe this kkk fuckwit is threatening homicide as well
He was the baby the KKK took away ?
captain_spalding said:
Trump described Bruce Springsteen as ‘atrophied’, ‘dried out’, and a ‘prune’.Trump, D. – age: 78
Springsteen, B. – age: 75
!
Heh!
Divine Angel said:
captain_spalding said:
Trump described Bruce Springsteen as ‘atrophied’, ‘dried out’, and a ‘prune’.Trump, D. – age: 78
Springsteen, B. – age: 75
!
When one is jealous, one tends to sling nasty words at another.
…then create AI clips to show one’s self doing the thing he’s jealous, and incapable, of doing.
Seems so.
(In honour, and memory of, SM)
………………………………..
May 18, 2025
Heather Cox Richardson
May 19 (Monday)
Tonight, late on a Sunday night, the House Budget Committee passed what Republicans are calling their “Big, Beautiful Bill” to enact Trump’s agenda although it had failed on Friday when far-right Republicans voted against it, complaining it did not make deep enough cuts to social programs.
The vote tonight was a strict party line vote, with 16 Democrats voting against the measure, 17 Republicans voting for it, and 4 far right Republicans voting “present.” House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said there would be “minor modifications” to the measure; Representative Chip Roy (R-TX) wrote on X that those changes include new work requirements for Medicaid and cuts to green energy subsidies.
And so the bill moves forward.
In The Bulwark today, Jonathan Cohn noted that Republicans are in a tearing hurry to push that Big, Beautiful Bill through Congress before most of us can get a handle on what’s in it. Just a week ago, Cohn notes, there was still no specific language in the measure. Republican leaders didn’t release the piece of the massive bill that would cut Medicaid until last Sunday night and then announced the Committee on Energy and Commerce would take it up not even a full two days later, on Tuesday, before the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office could produce a detailed analysis of the cost of the proposals. The committee markup happened in a 26-hour marathon in which the parts about Medicaid happened in the middle of the night. And now, the bill moves forward in an unusual meeting late on a Sunday night.
Cohn recalls that in 2009, when the Democrats were pushing the Affordable Care Act, more popularly known as Obamacare, that measure had months of public debate before it went to the Committee on Energy and Commerce. That committee held eight separate hearings about healthcare reform, and it was just one of three committees working on the issue. The ACA markup took a full two weeks.
Cohn explains that Medicaid cuts are extremely unpopular, and the Republicans hope to jam those cuts through by claiming they are cutting “waste, fraud, and abuse” without leaving enough time for scrutiny. Cohn points out that if they are truly interested in savings, they could turn instead to the privatized part of Medicare, Medicare Advantage The Congressional Budget Office estimates that cutting overpayments to Medicare Advantage when private insurers “upcode” care to place patients in a higher risk bracket, could save more than $1 trillion over the next decade.
Instead of saving money, the Big, Beautiful Bill actually blows the budget deficit wide open by extending the 2017 tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that those extensions would cost at least $4.6 trillion over the next ten years. And while the tax cuts would go into effect immediately, the cuts to Medicaid are currently scheduled not to hit until 2029, enabling the Republicans to avoid voter fury over them in the midterms and the 2028 election.
The prospect of that debt explosion led Moody’s on Friday to downgrade U.S. credit for the first time since 1917, following Fitch, which downgraded the U.S. rating in 2023, and Standard & Poor’s, which did so back in 2011. “If the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is extended, which is our base case,” Moody’s explained, “it will add around $4 trillion to the federal fiscal primary (excluding interest payments) deficit over the next decade. As a result, we expect federal deficits to widen, reaching nearly 9% of GDP by 2035, up from 6.4% in 2024, driven mainly by increased interest payments on debt, rising entitlement spending and relatively low revenue generation.”
On the Sunday talk shows this morning, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent dismissed the downgrade, saying it reflected conditions already in the market (although Moody’s explicitly said it was concerned about the potential passage of the Republicans’ Big, Beautiful Bill). House speaker Mike Johnson said that the credit downgrade just proved the need for the measure with its “historic spending cuts” to pass (although Moody’s named that bill as its reason for the downgrade).
The continuing Republican insistence that spending is out of control does not reflect reality. In fact, discretionary spending has fallen more than 40% in the past 50 years as a percentage of gross domestic product, from 11% to 6.3%. What has driven rising deficits are the George W. Bush and Donald Trump tax cuts, which had added $8 trillion and $1.7 trillion, respectively, to the debt by the end of the 2023 fiscal year.
But rather than permit those tax cuts to expire— or even to roll them back— the Republicans continue to insist Americans are overtaxed. In fact, the U.S. is far below the average of the 37 other nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, an intergovernmental forum of democracies with market economies, in its tax levies. According to a report by the Center for American Progress in 2023, if the U.S. taxed at the average OECD level, over ten years it would have an additional $26 trillion in revenue. If the U.S. taxed at the average of European Union nations, it would have an additional $36 trillion.
But instead of considering taxes to address the deficit, in the 2024 campaign, Trump insisted that foreign countries would pay for further tax cuts through tariffs, no matter how often economists said that tariffs are passed on to consumers.
In October 2024, when editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News John Micklethwait corrected Trump’s misunderstanding of the way tariffs work in an interview at the Economic Club of Chicago, Trump replied: “It must be hard for you to, you know, spend 25 years talking about tariffs as being negative and then have somebody explain to you that you’re totally wrong.” Referring to analysis that his plans would explode the national debt, including analysis by the Wall Street Journal—hardly a left-wing outlet, as Mickelthwait pointed out—Trump replied: “What does the Wall Street Journal know?… They’ve been wrong about everything. So have you, by the way. You’ve been wrong about everything…. You’ve been wrong all your life on this stuff.”
Walmart’s suggestion that it will have to raise prices because of tariffs is forcing the administration to try to manage reality. “We’re wired for everyday low prices, but the magnitude of these increases is more than any retailer can absorb,” Walmart’s chief financial officer John David Rainey during an interview with CNBC on Thursday. Rainey predicted higher prices by June.
In response Trump appeared to agree that tariffs are paid by consumers, posting that Walmart should “‘EAT THE TARIFFS,’ and not charge valued customers ANYTHING. I’ll be watching, and so will your customers!!!” Today, Bessent reassured Americans that he had spoken to the CEO of Walmart, Doug McMillon, who had agreed that Walmart would, in fact, eat some of the tariffs.
So with the current Big, Beautiful Bill, we are looking at a massive transfer of wealth from ordinary Americans to those at the top of American society. The Democratic Women’s Caucus has dubbed the measure the “Big Bad Billionaire Bill.”
Lest there be any confusion about who will benefit from this Big, Beautiful Bill, one of the many pieces tucked into it is a prohibition on any state laws to regulate artificial intelligence for the next ten years.
Despite its gargantuan energy demands, harm to the environment, and threats to privacy, the administration is pushing AI hard, and the country’s leading AI entrepreneurs, including Elon Musk, Sam Altman of OpenAI, Jensen Huang of Nvidia, Ruth Porat of Google’s parent company Alphabet, and Andy Jassy of Amazon all traveled with Trump to Saudi Arabia last week. The Saudis are looking to diversify their oil-dependent economy and are now the world’s largest investors in artificial intelligence.
Speaker Johnson hopes to pass the bill through the House of Representatives by this Friday, before Memorial Day weekend.
In other news today, the office of former president Joe Biden announced he is battling an aggressive form of prostate cancer. As vice president and president, Biden was a fierce advocate for cancer research, with the goal of reducing the death rate from cancer by at least 50 percent by 2047, preventing more than 4 million deaths from cancer, and improving the experience of individuals and families living with and surviving cancer.
And in international news, Romanian voters today rejected a far-right nationalist who deliberately styled his behavior after Trump and whose victory, until recently, was being treated as a foregone conclusion. Instead, voters elected the centrist mayor of Bucharest, Nicușor Dan. Even before the election, Dan’s opponent insisted the election was illegitimate, claimed that he was the new leader, and called for his supporters to protest in favor of his election. But in the end, Dan’s 8-point victory was too much to overcome and he conceded.
“This is your victory,” Dan told his supporters. “It’s the victory of thousands and thousands of people who campaigned believed that Romania can change in the correct direction.”
—
It’s kinda extraordinary to me that the current Congress has been historically unproductive having produced only five pieces of legislation.
diddly-squat said:
It’s kinda extraordinary to me that the current Congress has been historically unproductive having produced only five pieces of legislation.
Who needs legislation when you have Trump and his magic signature?
diddly-squat said:
It’s kinda extraordinary to me that the current Congress has been historically unproductive having produced only five pieces of legislation.
Legislation is old hat, these days the President just calls everything an emergency and governs by executive order
dv said:
diddly-squat said:It’s kinda extraordinary to me that the current Congress has been historically unproductive having produced only five pieces of legislation.
Legislation is old hat, these days the President just calls everything an emergency and governs by executive order
I mean this could just be the new normal.. I suppose the GOP won’t complain about executive overreach when the next Dem president come in and wipes all these current orders away.
The madman theory is a political theory commonly associated with the foreign policy of U.S. president Richard Nixon and his administration, who tried to make the leaders of hostile communist bloc countries think Nixon was irrational and volatile so that they would avoid provoking the U.S. in fear of an unpredictable response.
AussieDJ said:
(In honour, and memory of, SM)
………………………………..May 18, 2025
Heather Cox RichardsonMay 19 (Monday)
———————————————————————-CUT—————————————————————-
Thanks for posting this.
It’s all quite saddening, really.
diddly-squat said:
dv said:
diddly-squat said:It’s kinda extraordinary to me that the current Congress has been historically unproductive having produced only five pieces of legislation.
Legislation is old hat, these days the President just calls everything an emergency and governs by executive order
I mean this could just be the new normal.. I suppose the GOP won’t complain about executive overreach when the next Dem president come in and wipes all these current orders away.
Surely you jest.
Michael V said:
AussieDJ said:
(In honour, and memory of, SM)
………………………………..May 18, 2025
Heather Cox RichardsonMay 19 (Monday)
———————————————————————-CUT—————————————————————-
Thanks for posting this.
It’s all quite saddening, really.
It is.
Michael V said:
diddly-squat said:
dv said:Legislation is old hat, these days the President just calls everything an emergency and governs by executive order
I mean this could just be the new normal.. I suppose the GOP won’t complain about executive overreach when the next Dem president come in and wipes all these current orders away.
Surely you jest.
yes, I jest.. they will of course bitch and moan, but in fairness to the GOP, they are far more ruthless than the Dems and that makes them better at the game of politics.
diddly-squat said:
Michael V said:
diddly-squat said:I mean this could just be the new normal.. I suppose the GOP won’t complain about executive overreach when the next Dem president come in and wipes all these current orders away.
Surely you jest.
yes, I jest.. they will of course bitch and moan, but in fairness to the GOP, they are far more ruthless than the Dems and that makes them better at the game of politics.
The GOP severely restricted Obama.
Played by Vladimir Putin, a ‘weary’ Donald Trump could walk away from Ukraine
By Americas editor John Lyons and Brad Ryan in Washington DC
roughbarked said:
diddly-squat said:
Michael V said:Surely you jest.
yes, I jest.. they will of course bitch and moan, but in fairness to the GOP, they are far more ruthless than the Dems and that makes them better at the game of politics.
The GOP severely restricted Obama.
Protecting the free world from commies that’s why
dv said:
diddly-squat said:
It’s kinda extraordinary to me that the current Congress has been historically unproductive having produced only five pieces of legislation.
Legislation is old hat, these days the President just calls everything an emergency and governs by executive order
wait we thought there was a word for that kind of thing
oh wait that’s only for shit hole countries
wait
oh right
Court rules Trump does not have immunity from 2020 election subversion prosecution
On again, off again….
Tau.Neutrino said:
Court rules Trump does not have immunity from 2020 election subversion prosecutionOn again, off again….
Danny Glover is being called out of retirement to revoke it.
Liberal National party now smaller.
roughbarked said:
Played by Vladimir Putin, a ‘weary’ Donald Trump could walk away from Ukraine
By Americas editor John Lyons and Brad Ryan in Washington DC Topic:Unrest, Conflict and War
But….but…how’s he going to get that Nobel Peace Prize if he can’t do this?
great Jon Stewart monologue this week…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFeUo-nOxQU
The Voting Lawsuits to Watch This Week | Marc Elias
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amm3GrjZrUU
Michael V said:
AussieDJ said:
(In honour, and memory of, SM)
………………………………..May 18, 2025
Heather Cox RichardsonMay 19 (Monday)
———————————————————————-CUT—————————————————————-
Thanks for posting this.
It’s all quite saddening, really.
:(((
(In honour, and memory, of sarahs mum)
……………………………………….
May 19, 2025
Heather Cox Richardson
May 20 (Tuesday)
The House Rules Committee will take up the Republicans’ omnibus bill this week. Illustrating their confidence that the American people support this 1,116-page measure enacting much of MAGA’s wish list, the committee has set its meeting for Wednesday, May 21, 2025…at 1:00 in the morning (not a typo). The Republicans are trying to advance Trump’s entire agenda—from massive logging on public lands to slashing Medicaid—in one giant bill under a process known as “budget reconciliation,” which means it cannot be filibustered in the Senate. That means it needs only Republican votes to pass.
But even Republicans are deeply divided over the measure. While far-right Republicans insist cuts to the social safety net are not deep enough because of the massive deficits the measure’s tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations will create, other Republicans recognize that Medicaid cuts are hugely unpopular: according to a KFF poll released May 1, more than 75% of Americans oppose such cuts.
Catie Edmondson of the New York Times counts 12 swing-state Republicans who don’t want drastic Medicaid cuts, and 31 hardliners who do. House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) can afford to lose only three Republican votes on the measure. Nicole Lafond of Talking Points Memo reported today that Trump will go to Capitol Hill tomorrow to talk Republicans into voting for the measure.
Right on cue, the administration served up another issue to draw attention. Trump lawyer Alina Habba, who is now serving as the interim U.S. attorney for New Jersey, announced that Representative LaMonica McIver (D-NJ) will be charged with assaulting, resisting, and impeding law enforcement officers. On May 19, McIver was one of three Democratic representatives from New Jersey who, along with Newark’s Democratic mayor Ras Baraka, went to the Delaney Hall Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Newark, New Jersey, for an oversight visit. Such visits are permitted by law as part of a congress member’s oversight responsibility.
As a mayor, Baraka was not covered by the law permitting congressional oversight. He waited outside the facility’s gates in a public area. Masked agents tried to arrest him there, and as Perry Stein, Jeremy Roebuck, and Liz Goodwin of the Washington Post reported, video released by the Department of Homeland Security showed McIver rushing after the agents and shouting to protesters outside to “surround the mayor.” The video shows a crowd of people jostling, and McIver’s elbows possibly making contact with a masked officer in the crush of the crowd, but no one breaks stride. McIver says she was the one assaulted by ICE officers. In a statement about charging McIver, Habba said “it is my Constitutional obligation to ensure that our federal law enforcement is protected when executing their duties.”
Charging a congressional representative after an event in which no one was injured is a dramatic move indeed, but the Washington Post reporters noted that: “s of 10 p.m., no charging documents were posted in federal court, and a spokesperson for McIver’s legal team said neither she nor her lawyers had seen any charging documents.”
In a statement, McIver said she and her colleagues “were fulfilling our lawful oversight responsibilities, as members of Congress have done many times before, and our visit should have been peaceful and short. Instead, ICE agents created an unnecessary and unsafe confrontation when they chose to arrest Mayor Baraka. The charges against me are purely political—they mischaracterize and distort my actions, and are meant to criminalize and deter legislative oversight…. I look forward to the truth being laid out clearly in court.”
Congressional Democrats are condemning this attack on their colleague. House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York, Whip Katherine Clark of Massachusetts, Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar of California, Vice Chair Ted Lieu of California, and Assistant Leader Joe Neguse of Colorado issued a statement saying, “The criminal charge against Congresswoman McIver is extreme, morally bankrupt and lacks any basis in law or fact.” Habba’s statement “is a blatant attempt by the Trump administration to intimidate Congress and interfere with our ability to serve as a check and balance on an out-of-control executive branch. House Democrats will not be intimidated by the Trump administration. Not today. Not ever.”
And they pushed back, warning: “Everyone responsible for this illegitimate abuse of power is going to be held accountable for their actions.”
At the same time, the Department of Justice announced it was dropping all charges against Baraka stemming from the attempt to examine the ICE facility. Ten days ago, Habba broke the Department of Justice rule that it would not comment on ongoing investigations by posting that Baraka had “committed trespass and ignored multiple warnings from Homeland Security Investigations to remove himself from the ICE detention center in Newark, New Jersey this afternoon. He has willingly chosen to disregard the law. That will not stand in this state. He has been taken into custody. NO ONE IS ABOVE THE LAW.”
Except, apparently, those who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Alan Feuer, Devlin Barrett, and Glenn Thrush of the New York Times reported today that the Department of Justice is considering settling a wrongful death lawsuit with the family of Ashli Babbitt, whom a law enforcement officer shot and killed as she tried to break into the Speaker’s Lobby outside the House floor. The amount they are considering, the journalists report, is $5 million.
Reports that Walmart will raise prices because of the tariffs have Trump officials panicking. Walmart is the largest retailer in the United States, with a 2023 retail revenue of $534 billion. Higher prices there will hurt poorer Americans, particularly those in rural areas, the demographic most likely to have supported Trump in the past.
This, just as cuts to funding for food programs by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in March—programs started during Trump’s first term—have slashed the amount of food available to food banks. A USDA spokesperson said in a statement: “There is no need for new programs, but perhaps more efficient and effective use of current.”
So Republicans today continued their campaign to pressure Walmart into, as Trump put it “eating” the tariff costs. On CNBC today, Senator Bill Hagerty (R-TN) suggested that Walmart leaders “need to think hard” about raising prices. “I think they’re going to be very careful about how they do this. I know they’ve received some criticism from the president,” he said, adding: “They should know the president has been working very hard with China to make sure we get this thing addressed as quickly as possible.”
Nora Eckert and David Shepardson of Reuters reported that Subaru of America said today it will also be raising prices by between $750 and $2,055 on several models because of “current market conditions.” Executives recently told investors that the tariffs are expected to amount to $5 billion. Eckert and Shepardson reported that Ford raised prices on three models produced in Mexico by as much as $2,000.
Finally, today—because I actually planned to take tonight off, and so am not prepared to cover some very important legal developments and am putting them off until tomorrow so I get them right—Eric Lipton, Maggie Haberman, Adam Rasgon, and Eric Schmitt of the New York Times reported the backstory to the Qatari offer to give a 747 to Trump.
The planes serving as Air Force One are over 30 years old, and Boeing has a contract to build two new jets by 2024, a deadline far in the rear view with no new planes in sight. Apparently, Trump was angling for a new plane and put officials up to buying one. They identified eight options, one of which was the Qatari plane, which Qatar had been trying to sell for at least five years in part because of the enormous cost of operating such a plane. Qatar sent the jet to Florida at a cost the reporters estimate to be as much as $1 million on February 15 for Trump to see, and he loved it.
At that point, discussions turned from purchasing the plane to accepting it as a gift, although it was apparently not the Qataris who changed the terms—they were still expecting to sell it to the United States. A Qatari government official told the New York Times reporters that no decision had yet been made about a transfer rather than a sale. And Pentagon officials estimate that getting the plane repaired and ready for a president would cost at least $1 billion.
And yet, administration officials lined up to say that a $400 million gift from a foreign government to a U.S. president was just fine, despite its explicit prohibition in the Constitution. On Sunday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told CNN’s Jake Tapper that Qatar giving a plane to Trump was like France giving the Statue of Liberty to the U.S., or England giving the country the Resolute Desk.
These comparisons are not only wrong, but an offensive skewing of the real history of those gifts, which were intended to reinforce democracy, freedom, and the international cooperation of nations that value those principles.
It was the people of France who raised the money to send the Statue of Liberty, whose official name is “Liberty Enlightening the World,” to the United States to honor political democracy and freedom at the nation’s 100th anniversary. The people of the United States, in turn, raised the money for the statue’s pedestal. There was never any question about it being a personal gift to President Grover Cleveland. He would have refused it if such a thing were suggested, and Congress would have impeached him if he had not.
If the story of the Statue of Liberty is the story of the universal principles of democracy and freedom, the story of the Resolute Desk is one of diplomacy. After a famous British expedition to discover the Northwest Passage disappeared in the 1850s, a rescue expedition of five ships, including the HMS Resolute, set sail to find survivors. The Resolute became trapped in Arctic ice in April 1854 and her captain and crew abandoned the ship. When the ice thawed, the Resolute broke free and drifted south, where an American whaling ship found it in 1855. The captain, James Buddington, claimed it under the right of salvage.
At the time, tensions between the U.S. and England were high, and Congress decided to purchase the Resolute from Buddington, fix it up, and send it back to England as a gesture of goodwill and friendship from the American people. After the work was done, a U.S. naval officer and crew sailed the Resolute to England, where Queen Victoria and Prince Albert accepted it on behalf of all of Great Britain. The Royal Navy used the Resolute as a supply vessel for the next 23 years.
When the ship was decommissioned in 1879, the British government launched a public competition to design a piece of furniture that could be made of its timbers to give back to the United States. The winning design was a desk, and it arrived in the United States as a gift for President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1880, bearing a plaque that recounted the history of the Resolute.
The plaque noted: “The ship was purchased, fitted out and sent to England, as a gift to Her Majesty Queen Victoria by the President and People of the United States, as a token of goodwill & friendship. This table was made from her timbers when she was broken up, and is presented by the Queen of Great Britain & Ireland, to the President of the United States, as a memorial of the courtesy and loving kindness which dictated the offer of the gift of the ‘Resolute’.”
—
Notes:
https://capitaloneshopping.com/research/largest-retailers/
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/subaru-america-increases-vehicle-prices-citing-market-conditions-2025-05-19/
https://rules.house.gov/media/announcement/meeting-announcement-may-21-2025
https://www.msnbc.com/top-stories/latest/walmart-raise-prices-trump-tariffs-rcna207351
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/05/19/dc-food-bank-cuts/
https://www.kff.org/health-costs/poll-finding/kff-health-tracking-poll-april-2025-publics-view-on-major-cuts-to-federal-health-agencies/
https://rules.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/rules.house.gov/files/documents/2025_budget_rec_rh_xml.pdf
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/19/us/politics/ashli-babbitt-jan-6-settlement-trump.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/19/us/politics/republican-tax-bill-factions.html?searchResultPosition=1
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/where-things-stand/trump-hasnt-yet-been-whipping-votes-and-the-house-cant-function-without-him
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/05/19/rep-lamonica-mciver-charged-doj-ice/
https://www.axios.com/2025/05/20/lamonica-mciver-justice-department-trump-jeffries
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/19/us/politics/trump-air-force-one-qatar-jet.html
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/bessent-trump-qatar-statue-of-liberty-1235342112/
https://www.nps.gov/museum/exhibits/statue_liberty/index.html
https://www.whitehousehistory.org/photos/treasures-of-the-white-house-resolute-desk
https://bipartisanpolicy.org/explainer/budget-reconciliation-simplified/
Bluesky:
atrupar.com/post/3lpjrvqvkvj2c
annabower.bsky.social/post/3lpkwgk47ws2i
thetnholler.bsky.social/post/3lorcjzip422o
replamonica.bsky.social/post/3lpks65f6ck2q
reptedlieu.bsky.social/post/3lpkw4wyhns2n
………………….
AussieDJ said:
Thanks to sarah’s mum and AussieDJ.
(In honour, and memory, of sarahs mum)
……………………………………….May 19, 2025
Heather Cox Richardson
May 20 (Tuesday)………………….
https://www.npr.org/2025/05/20/nx-s1-5405144/habeas-corpus-noem-dhs-senate
Homeland Security Director Kristi Noem, under sharp questioning from Democratic senators during a Tuesday hearing, incorrectly described habeas corpus as a presidential authority to deport individuals.
Noem was on Capitol Hill to testify before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on the Department of Homeland Security’s budget for fiscal year 2026. She was asked by Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., to define “habeas corpus.”
The secretary responded: “Habeas corpus is a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country.”
In reality, habeas corpus is a bedrock constitutional legal principle that safeguards individuals from unlawful imprisonment by enabling them to petition the court to review the legality of their detention.
—-
dv said:
https://www.npr.org/2025/05/20/nx-s1-5405144/habeas-corpus-noem-dhs-senate
Homeland Security Director Kristi Noem, under sharp questioning from Democratic senators during a Tuesday hearing, incorrectly described habeas corpus as a presidential authority to deport individuals.
Noem was on Capitol Hill to testify before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on the Department of Homeland Security’s budget for fiscal year 2026. She was asked by Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., to define “habeas corpus.”
The secretary responded: “Habeas corpus is a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country.”
In reality, habeas corpus is a bedrock constitutional legal principle that safeguards individuals from unlawful imprisonment by enabling them to petition the court to review the legality of their detention.
——
These Intellectuals Have Never Redefined Words To Suit Their Agenda Everybody Knows That Nobody Knows That War Is Peace Freedom Is Slavery Ignorance Is Strength
SCIENCE said:
dv said:
https://www.npr.org/2025/05/20/nx-s1-5405144/habeas-corpus-noem-dhs-senate
Homeland Security Director Kristi Noem, under sharp questioning from Democratic senators during a Tuesday hearing, incorrectly described habeas corpus as a presidential authority to deport individuals.
Noem was on Capitol Hill to testify before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on the Department of Homeland Security’s budget for fiscal year 2026. She was asked by Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., to define “habeas corpus.”
The secretary responded: “Habeas corpus is a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country.”
In reality, habeas corpus is a bedrock constitutional legal principle that safeguards individuals from unlawful imprisonment by enabling them to petition the court to review the legality of their detention.
——
These Intellectuals Have Never Redefined Words To Suit Their Agenda Everybody Knows That Nobody Knows That War Is Peace Freedom Is Slavery Ignorance Is Strength
Whilst the same dumbells are working to destroy educational institutions and expunging records so as to achieve their aims.
dv said:
https://www.npr.org/2025/05/20/nx-s1-5405144/habeas-corpus-noem-dhs-senateHomeland Security Director Kristi Noem, under sharp questioning from Democratic senators during a Tuesday hearing, incorrectly described habeas corpus as a presidential authority to deport individuals.
Noem was on Capitol Hill to testify before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on the Department of Homeland Security’s budget for fiscal year 2026. She was asked by Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., to define “habeas corpus.”
The secretary responded: “Habeas corpus is a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country.”
In reality, habeas corpus is a bedrock constitutional legal principle that safeguards individuals from unlawful imprisonment by enabling them to petition the court to review the legality of their detention.
—-
Marc Elias has commenting on how dumb she was. It seems she didn’t even prepare for her appearance.
It’s interesting to me, but not overly surprising, how quickly Elon Musk’s involvement in the broader general politic has faded. Losing lots of money for people has consequences it seems.
A story of note today is the settlement by the Justice Department with the estate of Ashli Babbit (the person shot and killed during the Jan 6 riot on the Capitol Building) for the sum of $5M. Her estate was originally suing the government for wrongful death and filing for $30M in compensation along with a formal apology from the US govt.
This is all especially interesting because the police officer that shot her has been cleared of any negligence.
diddly-squat said:
A story of note today is the settlement by the Justice Department with the estate of Ashli Babbit (the person shot and killed during the Jan 6 riot on the Capitol Building) for the sum of $5M. Her estate was originally suing the government for wrongful death and filing for $30M in compensation along with a formal apology from the US govt.
This is all especially interesting because the police officer that shot her has been cleared of any negligence.
Trump’s mob probably chucked that evidence iin the bin?
diddly-squat said:
A story of note today is the settlement by the Justice Department with the estate of Ashli Babbit (the person shot and killed during the Jan 6 riot on the Capitol Building) for the sum of $5M. Her estate was originally suing the government for wrongful death and filing for $30M in compensation along with a formal apology from the US govt.
This is all especially interesting because the police officer that shot her has been cleared of any negligence.
OJ was sued personally after being acquitted wasn’t he, similar perhaps
Cymek said:
diddly-squat said:A story of note today is the settlement by the Justice Department with the estate of Ashli Babbit (the person shot and killed during the Jan 6 riot on the Capitol Building) for the sum of $5M. Her estate was originally suing the government for wrongful death and filing for $30M in compensation along with a formal apology from the US govt.
This is all especially interesting because the police officer that shot her has been cleared of any negligence.
OJ was sued personally after being acquitted wasn’t he, similar perhaps
Maybe for damages rather than wrongful death.
roughbarked said:
Cymek said:
diddly-squat said:A story of note today is the settlement by the Justice Department with the estate of Ashli Babbit (the person shot and killed during the Jan 6 riot on the Capitol Building) for the sum of $5M. Her estate was originally suing the government for wrongful death and filing for $30M in compensation along with a formal apology from the US govt.
This is all especially interesting because the police officer that shot her has been cleared of any negligence.
OJ was sued personally after being acquitted wasn’t he, similar perhaps
Maybe for damages rather than wrongful death.
Yeah same sort of thing
roughbarked said:
Cymek said:
diddly-squat said:A story of note today is the settlement by the Justice Department with the estate of Ashli Babbit (the person shot and killed during the Jan 6 riot on the Capitol Building) for the sum of $5M. Her estate was originally suing the government for wrongful death and filing for $30M in compensation along with a formal apology from the US govt.
This is all especially interesting because the police officer that shot her has been cleared of any negligence.
OJ was sued personally after being acquitted wasn’t he, similar perhaps
Maybe for damages rather than wrongful death.
IIRC he was sued in a civic case, not a criminal case after he was acquitted.
roughbarked said:
SCIENCE said:dv said:
https://www.npr.org/2025/05/20/nx-s1-5405144/habeas-corpus-noem-dhs-senate
Homeland Security Director Kristi Noem, under sharp questioning from Democratic senators during a Tuesday hearing, incorrectly described habeas corpus as a presidential authority to deport individuals.
Noem was on Capitol Hill to testify before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on the Department of Homeland Security’s budget for fiscal year 2026. She was asked by Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., to define “habeas corpus.”
The secretary responded: “Habeas corpus is a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country.”
In reality, habeas corpus is a bedrock constitutional legal principle that safeguards individuals from unlawful imprisonment by enabling them to petition the court to review the legality of their detention.
——
These Intellectuals Have Never Redefined Words To Suit Their Agenda Everybody Knows That Nobody Knows That War Is Peace Freedom Is Slavery Ignorance Is Strength
Whilst the same dumbells are working to destroy educational institutions and expunging records so as to achieve their aims.
Reagan cut the education budget by 65% and now 60% of Americans are reading & writing at a 5th Grade level. 1 in 3 of these are reading and writing at an 8 year old level. So they don’t have critical thinking skills.
diddly-squat said:
A story of note today is the settlement by the Justice Department with the estate of Ashli Babbit (the person shot and killed during the Jan 6 riot on the Capitol Building) for the sum of $5M. Her estate was originally suing the government for wrongful death and filing for $30M in compensation along with a formal apology from the US govt.
This is all especially interesting because the police officer that shot her has been cleared of any negligence.
It’s as disgusting as Trump pardoning all the Jan6thers in jail.
ms spock said:
roughbarked said:
SCIENCE said:These Intellectuals Have Never Redefined Words To Suit Their Agenda Everybody Knows That Nobody Knows That War Is Peace Freedom Is Slavery Ignorance Is Strength
Whilst the same dumbells are working to destroy educational institutions and expunging records so as to achieve their aims.
Reagan cut the education budget by 65% and now 60% of Americans are reading & writing at a 5th Grade level. 1 in 3 of these are reading and writing at an 8 year old level. So they don’t have critical thinking skills.
Did he?
The only source I could find said 18.6%, and every other president before and since raised it far more than that.
ms spock said:
diddly-squat said:A story of note today is the settlement by the Justice Department with the estate of Ashli Babbit (the person shot and killed during the Jan 6 riot on the Capitol Building) for the sum of $5M. Her estate was originally suing the government for wrongful death and filing for $30M in compensation along with a formal apology from the US govt.
This is all especially interesting because the police officer that shot her has been cleared of any negligence.
It’s as disgusting as Trump pardoning all the Jan6thers in jail.
It’s a tragic story and unfortunately lots of the details are not clear – maybe the justice department settled because they felt there was a chance that if it went to court they would have lost.. IDK.
kii said:
The Rev Dodgson said:
ms spock said:
roughbarked said:
Whilst the same dumbells are working to destroy educational institutions and expunging records so as to achieve their aims.
Reagan cut the education budget by 65% and now 60% of Americans are reading & writing at a 5th Grade level. 1 in 3 of these are reading and writing at an 8 year old level. So they don’t have critical thinking skills.
Did he?
The only source I could find said 18.6%, and every other president before and since raised it far more than that.
is this the
America’s economic recovery from covid was stronger — and happened faster — than any other country on the planet.
percentage up percentage down thing that The Rev Dodgson is talking about again
diddly-squat said:
ms spock said:
diddly-squat said:A story of note today is the settlement by the Justice Department with the estate of Ashli Babbit (the person shot and killed during the Jan 6 riot on the Capitol Building) for the sum of $5M. Her estate was originally suing the government for wrongful death and filing for $30M in compensation along with a formal apology from the US govt.
This is all especially interesting because the police officer that shot her has been cleared of any negligence.
It’s as disgusting as Trump pardoning all the Jan6thers in jail.
It’s a tragic story and unfortunately lots of the details are not clear – maybe the justice department settled because they felt there was a chance that if it went to court they would have lost.. IDK.
It’s not tragic. Babbit was part of an insurrection. Her family need to HTFU.
Posting in memory of our dear friend, sarahs mum.
……………………………………….
May 20, 2025
Heather Cox Richardson
May 21 (Wednesday)
Today was a rough day for administration officials on Capitol Hill as Senate committees held hearings on the 2026 budget requests for the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Department of State. The Senate Finance Committee also held a hearing for Trump’s nominee to be Commissioner of Internal Revenue, former Missouri representative William “Billy” Long. Democrats came prepared and demanded answers that the department secretaries and nominee were either unable or unwilling to give.
Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem was testifying before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee about the Department of Homeland Security’s budget for fiscal year 2026. When Senator Maggie Hassan (D-NH) asked her to define “habeas corpus,” Noem’s response indicated she has no understanding of the nation’s fundamental law.
“Habeas corpus is a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country,” Noem said. Hassan corrected her: “Habeas corpus is the legal principle that requires that the government provide a public reason for detaining and imprisoning people. If not for that protection, the government could simply arrest people, including American citizens, and hold them indefinitely for no reason. Habeas corpus is the foundational right that separates free societies like America from police states like North Korea.”
Noem’s habit in these hearings is simply to ignore questions and to attack, and she tried that with Hassan, suggesting that the president has the right to suspend habeas corpus if circumstances require it. Her position echoes that of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, with whom she appears to be working to render immigrants to prisons in third countries, but it is dead wrong. The Constitution permits Congress to suspend habeas corpus; not the president.
While Republicans were generally supportive of the Republican officials in the hearings, Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) used his time to beg Noem for help for Missouri. The state has suffered a number of natural disasters, including a deadly tornado last Friday, but the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has not shown up.
“The state has pending three requests for major disaster declarations from earlier storms,” Hawley told Noem. “e’ve lost almost 20 people now in major storms just in the last two months in Missouri.” The Department of Homeland Security oversees FEMA, and Hawley asked Noem to expedite the requests and get them in front of Trump. “We are desperate for… assistance in Missouri,” he said.
When Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) asked Noem how she planned to meet the needs of American people when the administration is cutting 20% of FEMA employees and the agency has lost most of its leadership, Noem talked over him and said the problem was that the Biden administration had failed the American people.
Over in the Appropriations Subcommittee on Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, and Related Agencies, things didn’t go much better.
Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. exploded when Senator Patti Murray (D-WA) asked him whose decision it was to withhold childcare and development block grant funding. Kennedy immediately pivoted to former president Biden’s 2021 budget. When she tried to get him back on track, he continued to talk over her, accusing her of “presiding over the destruction of the health of the American people” and of not doing her job. Murray repeatedly tried to recall him to appropriate behavior, finally appealing to the Republican chair of the committee, who asked Kennedy to stop.
When Murray repeated her question, he simply said the decision was made “by my department.” While he refused to take responsibility for the cuts himself, Murray did get him to admit that the department has blocked billions of dollars in federal child care funding.
Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) spelled out for Kennedy his concern about cuts to research funding for the neurodegenerative disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), sometimes called Lou Gehrig’s disease. “On April 1, ten laboratory heads at National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Strokes received their layoff notices,” he said. “They were all PhDs and senior investigators. They’re not administrators, whatever that might be. They were running intramural labs at NIH. If you have your way, they’ll all be gone on June 2nd. Science magazine reported 25 of 320 physician researchers at NIH’s Internal Clinical Center are leaving, and the number of patients treated in the hospital has been reduced by 30%. Three grants involving ALS and dementia work at Northwestern University Illinois have been paused…. Just last week, an ALS researcher at Harvard had his grant cut.” Durbin asked: “How can we possibly…give hope to people across the country who are suffering from so many diseases when our government is cutting back on that research?”
Kennedy replied: “I do not know about any cuts to ALS research.” When Durbin responded, “I just read them to you,” Kennedy reiterated that he didn’t “know about them until you told…me about them at this moment.”
Brenda Goodman of CNN noted that when Senator Jack Reed (D-RI) asked Kennedy about ending the childhood lead poisoning prevention program of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Kennedy assured Reed that “e are continuing to fund the program.” Goodman notes that CNN reported in April that officials in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, had asked the CDC for help addressing lead hazards in Milwaukee Public Schools after the agency’s lead experts were fired. The CDC refused, possibly because Kennedy has said lead poisoning prevention would be moving from the CDC to his new “Administration for a Healthy America.”
Kennedy told Reed the federal government has “a team in Milwaukee, and we’re giving laboratory support to that, to the analytics in Milwaukee, and we’re working with the health department in Milwaukee.”
Officials in Milwaukee said that was untrue. “The City of Milwaukee Health Department is not receiving any federal epidemiological or analytical support related to the MPS lead hazard crisis. Our formal Epi Aid request was denied by the CDC,” spokesperson for the City of Milwaukee Health Department Caroline Reinwald told CNN. Earlier this month, Milwaukee’s health commissioner expressed dismay that the CDC’s entire team working on childhood lead exposure had been laid off. “These are the best and brightest minds in these areas around lead poisoning, and now they’re gone,” he said.
At the end of today’s hearing, Senator Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) corrected the record, saying to Kennedy: “There are no staff on the ground deployed to Milwaukee to address the lead exposure of children in schools, and there are no staff left in that office at CDC, because they have all been fired.”
Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee took Secretary of State Marco Rubio to task for abandoning the principles they believed he held when they voted to confirm him.
The administration rendered Maryland senator Chris Van Hollen’s constituent Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the notorious CECOT terrorist prison in El Salvador through what the administration said was “administrative error,” and yet officials are refusing to bring him back despite court orders to do so. Van Hollen reminded Rubio that they had served together in Congress for 15 years and that while they didn’t always agree, “I believe we shared some common values: a belief in defending democracy and human rights abroad and honoring the Constitution at home. That’s why I voted to confirm you. I believed you would stand up for those principles. You haven’t. You’ve done the opposite.”
Senator Jacky Rosen (D-NV) spoke to him “as a mother, a senator, and a fellow human being,” saying, “I’m not even mad anymore about your complicity in this administration’s destruction of U.S. global leadership. I’m simply disappointed. And I wonder if you’re proud of yourself in this moment when you go home to your family?” She noted how he appeared to have abandoned all his past principles, and said she no longer recognized him.
When Van Hollen told Rubio he regretted voting to confirm him as secretary of state, Rubio retorted: “Your regret for voting for me confirms I’m doing a good job.”
Billy Long had his own problems. In an opening statement, Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) pointed out that Long was neither “an independent tax professional or somebody with extensive management experience.” He was simply a fierce Trump loyalist who would help Trump “use the IRS as a cudgel to beat his adversaries into submission.” Wyden also noted serious accusations against Long’s involvement with fraudulent tax schemes.
In his questioning, Wyden asked, “Did you promise any tax promoter you would help them if you got confirmed?” Long said no. Wyden followed up, asking if he had met with anyone when he was in Washington, D.C., for the inauguration and promised to help them. Long again said no, that he had been in his room for “about 50 hours” with food poisoning.
Wyden noted that staff investigators had tapes of a tax promoter saying he had met with Long at the inauguration and that Long had promised him favorable treatment. They also have another tape of a chief financial officer who had donated to Long after he was nominated for the IRS post, also saying he expected favorable treatment. Senators Wyden, Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts are currently investigating these tapes.
Warren took up Trump’s misuse of the IRS to hurt his opponents. Trump has threatened to revoke Harvard University’s tax-exempt status, although federal law expressly prohibits any official from using the IRS to punish any individual taxpayers. Warren tried to get Long to say it would be illegal for the president to direct the IRS to revoke a taxpayer’s nonprofit status, but he refused to. Warren concluded: “he fact that you want to sit there and dance around about this tells me that you shouldn’t be within 1,000 miles of the directorship of the IRS.”
The House was also a troubled place today, as Representative Nancy Mace (R-SC) used a hearing of the House Cybersecurity, Information Technology, and Government Innovation Subcommittee, which she chairs, to accuse her ex-fiancé and other men of sexual abuse. She showed what she claimed were naked photos of herself and other women, taken without their consent. These accusations echo those she made in a speech in the House on February 10th. The men deny the allegations, and one is suing her for defamation. She is taking the position that her attacks on them in Congress are legally protected by the Constitution’s speech and debate clause.
If Republican lawmakers didn’t seem up to their jobs today, neither did the president. He announced a “Golden Dome” missile shield defense system—a U.S. version of Israel’s “Iron Dome”—that he claims will be operational in 3 years and cost $175 billion. Experts say it is not yet possible to construct such a defense system for intercontinental ballistic missiles and that such a project could cost as much as $542 billion.
When a reporter asked Trump about the cost, Trump claimed “we can afford to do it…we took in $5.1 trillion in the last four days in the Middle East,” a wildly made-up number. Such a system would likely benefit at least one person: it would depend on thousands of satellites, a requirement that seems likely to benefit billionaire Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
Administration officials today seemed to illustrate their utter disregard for the work their jobs require and their refusal to govern for Americans. Instead, they seem to see their offices as ways to get access to large amounts of money and power they can use to impose their will on the country.
—
CNN:
For ‘modified’, read ‘dismantled down to the last rivet, thoroughly inspected, all listening/surveillance devices removed, and then re-built from the ground up, incorporating a vast array of specialised US equipment’.
If Donny thinks he’s going to be getting aboard this plane anytime soon…
He’ll be lucky to live long enough to see it in one piece again.
captain_spalding said:
CNN:
For ‘modified’, read ‘dismantled down to the last rivet, thoroughly inspected, all listening/surveillance devices removed, and then re-built from the ground up, incorporating a vast array of specialised US equipment’.
If Donny thinks he’s going to be getting aboard this plane anytime soon…
He’ll be lucky to live long enough to see it in one piece again.
I don’t know why they make such a big deal about this.
They just need to install a cone of silence or two.
The Rev Dodgson said:
captain_spalding said:
CNN:
For ‘modified’, read ‘dismantled down to the last rivet, thoroughly inspected, all listening/surveillance devices removed, and then re-built from the ground up, incorporating a vast array of specialised US equipment’.
If Donny thinks he’s going to be getting aboard this plane anytime soon…
He’ll be lucky to live long enough to see it in one piece again.
I don’t know why they make such a big deal about this.
They just need to install a cone of silence or two.
Good thinking 99.
Trump pushes the narrative that white South Africans are targets of genocide. When Ramaphosa asks for evidence or even a specific location, Trump rants about nothing, offering zero proof.
“Wish I had a plane to give you,” Ramaphosa says in exasperation.
“I would accept it,” replies Trump. (I interpret this to mean, “I can be bought”.)
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-ramaphosa-south-africa-white-farmer-genocide-1235345116/
captain_spalding said:
CNN:
For ‘modified’, read ‘dismantled down to the last rivet, thoroughly inspected, all listening/surveillance devices removed, and then re-built from the ground up, incorporating a vast array of specialised US equipment’.
If Donny thinks he’s going to be getting aboard this plane anytime soon…
He’ll be lucky to live long enough to see it in one piece again.
This be the facts that Donny ignores.
roughbarked said:
captain_spalding said:
CNN:
For ‘modified’, read ‘dismantled down to the last rivet, thoroughly inspected, all listening/surveillance devices removed, and then re-built from the ground up, incorporating a vast array of specialised US equipment’.
If Donny thinks he’s going to be getting aboard this plane anytime soon…
He’ll be lucky to live long enough to see it in one piece again.
This be the facts that Donny ignores.
imagine what damage a few pagers could do
The Rev Dodgson said:
captain_spalding said:
CNN:
For ‘modified’, read ‘dismantled down to the last rivet, thoroughly inspected, all listening/surveillance devices removed, and then re-built from the ground up, incorporating a vast array of specialised US equipment’.
If Donny thinks he’s going to be getting aboard this plane anytime soon…
He’ll be lucky to live long enough to see it in one piece again.
I don’t know why they make such a big deal about this.
They just need to install a cone of silence or two.
Tau.Neutrino said:
The Rev Dodgson said:
captain_spalding said:
CNN:
For ‘modified’, read ‘dismantled down to the last rivet, thoroughly inspected, all listening/surveillance devices removed, and then re-built from the ground up, incorporating a vast array of specialised US equipment’.
If Donny thinks he’s going to be getting aboard this plane anytime soon…
He’ll be lucky to live long enough to see it in one piece again.
I don’t know why they make such a big deal about this.
They just need to install a cone of silence or two.
He wouldn’t fit in it.
roughbarked said:
Tau.Neutrino said:
The Rev Dodgson said:I don’t know why they make such a big deal about this.
They just need to install a cone of silence or two.
He wouldn’t fit in it.
:)
It will be remembered as one of the great ambushes in the White House.
Beware a president with props. All he had to do was to order the lights be turned down.
But before that happened, for 20 minutes or so, Cyril Ramaphosa’s visit to the Oval Office was going well……. Link
>>Two Israeli embassy staff shot dead near Jewish museum in Washington DC
https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cy9vr10n732t
Peak Warming Man said:
>>Two Israeli embassy staff shot dead near Jewish museum in Washington DC
where are the parentheses
SCIENCE said:
Peak Warming Man said:
>>Two Israeli embassy staff shot dead near Jewish museum in Washington DC
where are the parentheses
I don’t think he could afford them as well.
The Biden cover-up demands deep soul-searching
Democrats and journalists can’t allow sympathy for his cancer diagnosis to delay a reckoning.
May 20, 2025 at 1:52 p.m.
Those who colluded in the cover-up of Joe Biden’s cognitive decline are eager to put it behind them. The election is over, so why dwell on the past? Why not focus on more immediate problems, such as President Donald Trump’s continuing offenses against the civic order?
You can’t blame them for hoping, I suppose. But we can’t simply ignore such a shocking institutional failure. Nor can we put off the reckoning in sympathetic deference to Sunday’s announcement that the former president has aggressive metastatic prostate cancer.
I am sympathetic, terribly so, having watched my grandfather die after a decade-plus battle with the same disease. Biden and his family have my best wishes as they embark on a challenging fight. And oh, how I wish this announcement hadn’t come just before the release of Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s new book, “Original Sin,” which offers a devastating account of Biden’s decline and the extent of the White House cover-up.
Having read it over the weekend, I’m convinced that deep institutional soul-searching is due in many quarters, and that this conversation is too important to delay, even at the risk of adding to the Biden family’s distress. It is impossible to read “Original Sin” — especially in concert with “Fight,” a book released last month by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes — without reaching a horrifying conclusion: The most powerful nation in the world and its nuclear arsenal were left in the hands of a man who could not reliably recognize people he’d known for years, maintain his train of thought or speak in coherent sentences.
He could do those things some of the time, even most of the time, especially in the earlier years of his presidency. But not always. Unfortunately, the most important office in the world demands that its occupant always be ready to handle a crisis, every minute, for a full four years. The fate of humanity might depend on it.
Biden’s staff knew he wasn’t up to those demands, because they didn’t even trust him to handle a small fundraiser without a teleprompter. Yet instead of persuading him to step aside, or going public about this dangerous situation, they hid his condition from the nation. It was a near-treasonous dereliction of duty to their country.
There’s plenty of blame to go around, however, and no one should offer the excuse that the cover-up was too thorough for anyone to know. The signs were there, from the president’s curiously sparse public appearances to the videos of him acting confused. The gaslighting worked only because they had cooperation from within the Democratic Party, and I’m sorry to say, from my own profession.
Not everyone in my profession, to be sure. My colleague David Ignatius in 2023 urged Biden not to run again in part because of his age. Thompson was also early on this story, and in June last year, Annie Linskey and Siobhan Hughes of the Wall Street Journal published a devastating investigative report into Biden’s condition. But as a group, we didn’t just drop the ball. We flung it down with great vigor, even as video evidence of the president’s incapacity kept handing it back to us. As the president stumbled in public, we quoted aging experts who downplayed Biden’s increasingly worrying slips, credulously repeated implausible White House spin about “cheap fakes,” and treated the president’s condition as something voters were worried about rather than something the country should be worried about.
Though I aired concerns as early as 2022, I include myself in this condemnation. I noticed a few odd moments on the campaign trail in 2019 and 2020, along with a general air of frailty. As a second Biden term began looking more likely, I raised the issue in a column, asking whether the feeble man I’d seen on the stump was really up to a full campaign. But I didn’t ask the question that was already forming in my mind: If Biden couldn’t run a full campaign, should he really be running the United States of America?
I can offer no good excuse for this kid-glove treatment. In my case, it wasn’t partisan, as many conservatives have suggested to me; though I voted for him, I did so reluctantly and rarely had anything good to say about his administration. But my reasons for taking a soft line weren’t much better. I was stupidly afraid to say anything that smacked of too much ageism, even though age obviously matters in such a pitilessly demanding job. Even less to my credit, I was afraid to say something truly harsh while other journalists were still treading gingerly around the subject.
Well, now it’s time for all of us to grapple with those decisions because, as Thompson pointed out in a speech at the White House correspondents’ dinner, owning up to our collective mistakes is the only way to regain the public’s trust. Unfortunately, I fear that as a profession, we, too, are giving in to the temptation to memory-hole our unpardonable lapse.
Just over a week after Thompson spoke, the Pulitzer Prizes were announced. Linskey and Hughes were not among the winners. They didn’t even make the list of finalists.
This omission smacks of my profession circling the wagons, creating yet another impenetrable bubble where we can reassure one another that what happened was fine, a perfectly understandable mistake — pretty much the excuses we made for Joe Biden himself. All that did was set him up for a bigger disaster on the debate stage, and now we’re doing the same thing to ourselves. The only way out is to face the truth. The president was not fine, was not even within shouting distance of fine — and until we examine our own failure to report that fact, neither are we.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/05/20/joe-biden-tapper-original-sin-media/
AussieDJ said:
Posting in memory of our dear friend, sarahs mum.
……………………………………….May 20, 2025
Heather Cox Richardson
May 21 (Wednesday)————————————————————————————CUT———————————————————————————————-
Thanks for that.
:)
Peak Warming Man said:
Michael V said:
SCIENCE said:
Peak Warming Man said:
>>Two Israeli embassy staff shot dead near Jewish museum in Washington DC
where are the parentheses
I don’t think he could afford them as well.
“Mexico City Mayor Clara Brugada’s personal secretary Ximena Guzmán and adviser José Muñoz were assassinated as they travelled to work on Tuesday morning, the country’s authorities have said.”
Blimey.
so what’s the connection
Posting, once again, in memory of sarahs mum
………………………….
May 21, 2025
Heather Cox Richardson
May 22 (Thursday)
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 bill 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. “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.”
—
AussieDJ said:
Posting, once again, in memory of sarahs mum
………………………….May 21, 2025
Heather Cox Richardson
May 22 (Thursday)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 bill 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. “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.”
—
Thanks.
American citizen detained for 8 hours in Bulgaria, questioned about political beliefs.
https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/s/7lcezHgCYJ
Divine Angel said:
American citizen detained for 8 hours in Bulgaria, questioned about political beliefs.
https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/s/7lcezHgCYJ
detained in Bulgaria¿ Did we misread
SCIENCE said:
Divine Angel said:
American citizen detained for 8 hours in Bulgaria, questioned about political beliefs.
https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/s/7lcezHgCYJdetained in Bulgaria¿ Did we misread
Sigh… I just woke up. He studies in Bulgaria, flew home to Washington DC. Detained at airport.
Divine Angel said:
SCIENCE said:
Divine Angel said:
American citizen detained for 8 hours in Bulgaria, questioned about political beliefs.
https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/s/7lcezHgCYJdetained in Bulgaria¿ Did we misread
Sigh… I just woke up. He studies in Bulgaria, flew home to Washington DC. Detained at airport.
Yeah we thought the other way around wouldn’t be such big news, not great but not surprising though.
Once again, posting in memory of SM
…………………
May 22, 2025
Heather Cox Richardson
May 23 (Friday)
Just before 7:00 this morning, the House of Representatives passed the Republicans’ megabill by a vote of 215 to 214. All Democrats voted no. Two Republicans, Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Warren Davidson of Ohio, joined the Democrats in voting no. Chair of the far-right House Freedom Caucus Andy Harris of Maryland voted “present.” The measure now advances to the Senate.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office says the bill cuts at least $715 billion in healthcare spending, mostly from Medicaid, and $300 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, causing more than 2.7 million American households to lose benefits. Because the massive debt increase in the measure triggers a 2010 law requiring offsets, it will cut Medicare, as well, by an estimated $500 billion.
Economist Robert Reich points out that Americans making between about $17,000 and $51,000 will lose about $700 a year. On average, Americans with incomes of less than $17,000 will lose more than $1,000 a year. But if you are among the top 0.1% of earners, you’re in luck: you’ll gain nearly $390,000 a year.
The measure roughly doubles the current annual budgets of Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in what Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council notes is “the single biggest increase in funding to immigration enforcement in the history of the United States.” It increases ICE’s detention budget from $3.4 billion a year to $45 billion through September 2029, a staggering 365% increase on an annual basis that would permit ICE to detain at least 100,000 people at a time.
It increases ICE’s budget for transportation and removal operations by 500%, from the current $721 million to $14.4 billion. It also calls for $46.5 billion for construction of barriers at the border, including completing 701 miles of wall, 900 miles of river barriers, and 629 miles of secondary barriers, and replacement of 141 miles of vehicle and pedestrian barriers.” It calls for $45 billion for adult and family detention, enough to detain at least 100,000 people at a time.
This bill highlights a truism: In the United States, racism has always gone hand in hand with the concentration of wealth among the very richest people.
By driving white fear of a darker-skinned other, elite southern enslavers convinced the poor white farmers who lost their land in the cotton boom of the 1850s to vote for politicians who insisted that the primary responsibility of the federal government was to protect human enslavement.
In an extraordinary meeting with South African president Cyril Ramaphosa at the Oval Office yesterday, President Donald J. Trump echoed the language of enslavers in 1859 almost explicitly when he insisted—falsely—that white South Africans are facing white genocide. As Tim Cocks and Nellie Peyton of Reuters explain, the conspiracy theory of white genocide in South Africa has circulated among fringe groups of white South Africans since the end of apartheid in 1994. It claims white deaths in a country with a high murder rate are deliberate ethnic cleansing, although data collected by white farmers themselves shows that since 1990, murders of white people make up only 1% of the total number of murders.
But Trump sidekick Elon Musk has embraced the theory, and Trump is pushing it, offering a fast track for asylum to white South African “refugees.” Yesterday, with Musk in the Oval Office, Trump showed to the cameras a picture of people moving body bags, and said “hese are all white farmers that are being buried.” In fact, it was a picture from Goma in the Democratic Republic of Congo, showing humanitarian workers burying bodies in a war zone.
The administration’s immigration policies exacerbate racism, using it to undermine the rule of law on which the Constitution rests. Notably, the administration has ignored the concept of due process guaranteed by the Constitution, with rendition of migrants to prison in El Salvador based not on a review of their cases but simply on the claim—without evidence—that individuals are gang members.
Stories of immigrants arrested by ICE without any criminal history continue to surface, even as administration officials insist those individuals are dangerous criminals. Fewer than half of those swept up outside of Nashville last week had criminal records, although U.S. Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin called them “violent criminal illegal aliens” and attacked Nashville’s Democratic mayor Freddie O’Connell as being “pro-open borders.”
Yesterday Judge Brian Murphy of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts ruled that the administration “unquestionably” violated a court order when it rendered eight men convicted of violent crimes to South Sudan. The court had ordered the administration to give the men due process before taking them to a country other than their own. McLaughlin called the judge’s ruling “deranged.”
Taking down the rule of law would permit MAGA officials to persecute their political opponents, indicting congressional representatives, for example, as it has recently done to Representative LaMonica McIver (D-NJ). It would also permit the concentration of wealth and power without fear of breaking the law.
There is the open corruption, as when the Trump administration officially accepted a 747 as a gift from the Qatari government yesterday, despite the constitutional prohibition against taking gifts from foreign governments. Trump currently says he will not use it after he leaves office, but since Air Force officials say it will take years and up to a billion in taxpayer money to secure it for use by a president, it seems unlikely that he accepted the plane simply to become an exhibit in an as-yet-unstarted Trump presidential library.
And then there is the more hidden corruption.
Last week, David Yaffe-Bellany and Eric Lipton of the New York Times called attention to the announcement by a struggling technology company with ties to China that it had secured funding to buy $300 million of Trump’s cryptocurrency $TRUMP. It appears the company is hoping to curry favor with the president.
Zach Everson of Forbes noted that the Trump family controls about 60% of World Liberty Financial, a decentralized financial platform that produces the USD1 stablecoin, a kind of cryptocurrency that fluctuates less than most cryptocurrencies because it’s pegged to the dollar. World Liberty Financial’s USD1 stablecoin began trading yesterday on KuCoin, an exchange headquartered in the Seychelles and banned in the United States after it admitted to violating laws against money laundering and agreed to pay a $300 million fine. A spokesperson for KuCoin told Everson that it had reached out about carrying USD1 after the coin “demonstrated strong demand in certain regions.”
The racism and the corruption are coming together tonight as the top 220 holders of the $TRUMP coin join the president at a private dinner. A Bloomberg analysis of the top 25 wallets shows that 19 are owned by individuals from outside the United States, and many of the winners are companies looking for access to the president. Many of them dumped their $TRUMP coins as soon as they made the cut for the dinner.
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington reported today that 50 of the people attending Trump’s dinner tonight hold crypto assets with names from the alt-right, including Pepe the Frog and swastikas, or that have names that are racist or antisemitic, including the n-word and “F*CK THE JEWS.”
Their language echoes that of the elite enslavers of the 1850s—and for that matter, the Ku Klux Klan members of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the American Nazis of the 1920s and 1930s, and the segregationists of the years after World War II. And just like the elite enslavers in the 1850s, MAGA leaders want to get rid of laws that make it harder for them to monopolize the nation’s wealth and power and are using racism to get voters to support them.
Also like their predecessors, MAGA leaders are getting a significant boost from the United States Supreme Court. In a decision made today on the so-called “shadow docket”—the emergency docket in which the court makes decisions without arguments or briefs and which previously wasn’t used for major rulings—the court made it clear it is willing to abandon the idea of independent agencies. Since 1935, the court has upheld Congress’s right to appoint the heads of independent agencies and has said that the president cannot fire them without cause. Today, in an unsigned two-page order, the court paused orders by federal judges allowing board members at two independent agencies to stay even after Trump tried to fire them.
This is an extraordinary step toward the idea of the “unitary executive,” a theory Republicans began to embrace in the 1980s that because the president is the head of one of the three unique branches of government, any oversight of that office by Congress or the courts is unconstitutional, although in fact presidents since George Washington have accepted congressional oversight. It gives Trump control over the independent agencies that currently run much of the government, agencies like the National Labor Relations Board, the Merit Systems Protection Board—both part of this case—and also the Federal Communications Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, and so on.
The six justices who handed down today’s order tried to say that the Federal Reserve Board is different from other agencies because it has a “distinct historical tradition,” so Trump can’t just fire its head, Jerome Powell. Trump has made it clear he wants to fire Powell, but that removal would make financial markets even more precarious than they already are.
The dissent, written by Justice Elena Kagan and joined by Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor, notes that “the majority’s order…is nothing short of extraordinary” and “favors the President over our precedent.” The court has abandoned 90 years of precedent under the emergency docket, and misrepresents the case as one about the interests of two employees in keeping their job.
In fact, the liberal justices say, “the interest at stake is in maintaining Congress’s idea of independent agencies: bodies of specialists balanced along partisan lines, which will make sound judgments precisely because not fully controlled by the White House.”
—
https://www.newsbreak.com/indy100-1276868/4020516904007-trump-s-rambling-drug-company-rant-makes-absolutely-no-sense
Seen so many headlines this week about JRB’s cognitive decline…
dv said:
https://www.newsbreak.com/indy100-1276868/4020516904007-trump-s-rambling-drug-company-rant-makes-absolutely-no-sense
Seen so many headlines this week about JRB’s cognitive decline…
Jake Tapper’s book was just released.
AussieDJ said:
Once again, posting in memory of SM
…………………May 22, 2025
Heather Cox Richardson
May 23 (Friday)————————————————————-CUT——————————————————————
Thank you.
dv said:
Seen so many headlines this week about JRB’s cognitive decline…
delay distract divert darvo
Wait Is This The
In 2014, the electric vehicle company carved out a deal with the state government to be the only car maker that could sell directly to customers and bypass franchise dealerships — unlike other car makers that must go through a dealer. They were given an unfair advantage, actually a monopoly on direct sales,” Democratic state senator Patricia Fahy told the ABC. “But, at the time, I was supportive.”
Famous USSA Free Market Then
kii said:
Chinese College Gives Harvard International Students ‘Unconditional Offers’
‘Unconditional’?
Like, no ‘difficulties’ if the students make some public comment that might be interpreted as critical of China’s government, policies, or actions?
That kind of ‘unconditional’?
captain_spalding said:
kii said:
Chinese College Gives Harvard International Students ‘Unconditional Offers’
‘Unconditional’?
Like, no ‘difficulties’ if the students make some public comment that might be interpreted as critical of China’s government, policies, or actions?
That kind of ‘unconditional’?
Trump’s incapacity has led to this type of debacle.
US 10-year Treasury bonds have long been considered “risk-free” — until now.
That’s put the usually circumspect Reserve Bank of Australia “on alert” for a potentially “cataclysmic” economic event.
Up until now, if you gave the US government money over a 10-year period, you were, essentially, certain to get your money back with interest, on average, 4.25 per cent.
That’s known as the yield or interest rate.
The return on this debt security is so stable and secure, many other securities are priced off it, including US mortgage securities.
So, what happens if US bonds, or debt, become riskier, and investors demand a higher return?
The answer is that the global financial system fundamentally changes, and that affects every Australian.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-05-24/reserve-bank-alert-economic-event-us-bond/105330200
roughbarked said:
captain_spalding said:
kii said:
Chinese College Gives Harvard International Students ‘Unconditional Offers’
‘Unconditional’?
Like, no ‘difficulties’ if the students make some public comment that might be interpreted as critical of China’s government, policies, or actions?
That kind of ‘unconditional’?
Trump’s incapacity has led to this type of debacle.
It’s not just Trump. No-one in his administration has any concept of governance beyond ‘punishing’ anyone or anything that they consider to be in opposition to them.
Essentially, the beatings will continue until morale improves.
captain_spalding said:
Like, no ‘difficulties’ if the students make some public comment that might be interpreted as critical of China’s government, policies, or actions?
Nah, that is the USA.
Spiny Norman said:
Trouble with that one is that this occurs after his empire is rubble and the people starving.
I wonder if they’ll give the lettuce the right of reply:
…
Liz Truss: Elites killed my pro-growth agenda. Trump can’t let them stop his.
The White House’s proposed tax cuts, tariffs and spending reforms are showing the West the way forward.
May 22, 2025 at 6:45 a.m.
By Liz Truss
Liz Truss was prime minister of Britain.
President Donald Trump and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent have a herculean task ahead of them in turning around the U.S. economy and gripping the deep state that has promoted managed decline. But it is vital that they succeed.
If they were not taking the actions they now are on tariffs, the U.S. economy would remain on course to be eclipsed by China, with other Western economies also dwindling in its wake — and our security with it.
Allowing China to join the World Trade Organization in 2001, and then break all the rules, was a massive mistake. Only drastic action can remedy this. It is also important that the U.S. take appropriate action on other nations — otherwise, China will simply be able to circumvent the tariffs.
Trump and Bessent must also stay the course on squeezing the government, cutting taxes and getting rid of all the regulations holding America back. In doing this, they hold in their hands not just the future of the U.S. — but also that of its Western allies that are waiting to see how the Trump administration’s policies work out. For this should also be the opportunity for Western Europe to break free.
Over recent decades — in particular after the Great Recession and the covid pandemic — America and other Western nations built up huge amounts of debt. In the U.S. and Britain, general government debt as a proportion of gross domestic product has more than doubled since the turn of the millennium, passing 100 percent in both countries.
Yet, the modern Keynesian economic orthodoxy that has been in vogue since the 1990s and promoted by institutions such as the World Economic Forum and the European Union had no way of dealing with this. Instead, its advocates resorted to money printing, more government intervention — claiming that diversity, equity and inclusion programs and reducing fossil fuel use were going to generate growth — and stimulus policies such as the Inflation Reduction Act.
When these actions inevitably reduced growth and created inflation, their advocates looked to raise taxes to make up the difference. If you want to know what the future holds for nations pursuing these terrible policies, check out Western Europe, which has been stagnant for more than a decade. Extraordinarily, Britain’s leftist government and the E.U. have just done a deal tightening this death grip.
Bessent is right that the only way out of this sort of doom loop, which the United States was also in danger of entering, is to grow the economy — and, in particular, to grow the economy faster than the size of state. This is how you bring down the ratio of debt to GDP over time — it’s basic math.
This is achieved by liberating the supply side of the economy: “Drill, baby, drill,” cut taxes, get rid of regulations, embrace bitcoin and unleash a spirit of enterprise. Securing trade deals will also help. It’s what made our countries great, and it’s what will make them great again.
Of course, public spending also has to be reined in. The work of the U.S. DOGE Service is important in reducing waste and increasing accountability, and President Joe Biden’s excesses, such as the Inflation Reduction Act, must be taken on. But public spending changes are not that fast if they are to be effective. For example, successfully reforming welfare to get more people into work takes time; an expanding private sector helps this.
I know that what Trump is attempting to do won’t be easy. Back in 2022 — when I became British prime minister — I sought to go for growth by taking on the economic orthodoxy that had presided over the United Kingdom’s stagnation. I planned to rein in public spending by limiting rises in welfare while cutting the top rate of income tax and halting proposed rises in corporation tax. I reversed Britain’s ban on fracking as a way of increasing our energy independence and reducing household energy bills (since U.K. energy prices are now four times higher than those enjoyed by our American cousins).
Yet, I faced a barrage of criticism from establishment economists who claimed that these actions would stoke inflation and increase the deficit. They overlooked the fact that inflation is a monetary phenomenon and had been created by too much money printing by the Bank of England. I also was blamed for the fallout of the Bank of England’s failure to ensure financial stability in the pension market — even as subsequent research by its own analysts found that two-thirds of the market spike we saw was down to them.
I wasn’t targeted just by the usual British suspects, such as our Office for Budget Responsibility and the Financial Times, but by the entire Davos elite, from the International Monetary Fund to Biden himself. And just as they’ve tried to do with Trump, the naysayers pointed to short-term market reactions to bully policymakers out of securing long-term economic prosperity.
It’s notable how silent my critics were when previous — and subsequent — administrations in the U.K., U.S. and elsewhere pursued profligate spending programs. Their default setting is to applaud spending hikes, however unaffordable, but to lambast tax cuts, even when they raise more revenue and foster growth. It comes as no surprise that all their economic models have since proved to have been fundamentally wrong. And since they forced a reversal of my policies, the debt has gotten worse and the rates for U.K. government bonds have soared to even higher peaks.
The other factor hindering me was the fact that a significant element of the Conservative Party did not believe in conservative economic policy. They wanted net-zero emission targets, higher taxes and more money printing. They had already got rid of Boris Johnson with a view to installing the former Goldman Sachs banker Rishi Sunak. I got in the way of their plans. So, they stoked the narrative to depose me — and having done so, and after failing to implement conservative policies, last year the party went down to its worst election defeat in modern history. Their losses were instructive: The White House should not be swayed by “allies” warning of political disaster if they make meaningful reform to benefits, remove climate giveaways and cut down on spending.
What I learned from my experience is the sheer power of the globalist economic establishment and its allies in the political arena. They will try to create divisions and promote a false narrative.
But Trump comes with a strong mandate to push his agenda through. He must be given maximum support in Congress. He must dismantle as much of the permanent bureaucracy as possible. And he must also act to take on the globalist economic establishment through alternative networks and forums to those employed by the very elite who have brought about so much ruin.
It will take a lot to defeat them, but they must be defeated to save the West.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/05/22/liz-truss-trump-growth-agenda/
…says the woman who killed Queen Liz.
Divine Angel said:
…says the woman who killed Queen Liz.
It is not how the west was won.
Witty Rejoinder said:
I wonder if they’ll give the lettuce the right of reply:…
Liz Truss: Elites killed my pro-growth agenda. Trump can’t let them stop his.
The White House’s proposed tax cuts, tariffs and spending reforms are showing the West the way forward.
May 22, 2025 at 6:45 a.m.
By Liz Truss…
Liz Truss was (and probably still is) an idiot too stupid to understand how the economy works, and in particular the finance sector and bond markets. She legitimately crashed it because she didn’t know what she was doing. These people she describes as her enemies are most definitely not the wokeratti, they are investment professionals acting in hard-nosed, callous and brutal self interest. They are not out to change the world for reasons of ideology.
For as long as she doesn’t understand that, it is not worth listening to anything she has to say.
party_pants said:
Witty Rejoinder said:
I wonder if they’ll give the lettuce the right of reply:…
Liz Truss: Elites killed my pro-growth agenda. Trump can’t let them stop his.
The White House’s proposed tax cuts, tariffs and spending reforms are showing the West the way forward.
May 22, 2025 at 6:45 a.m.
By Liz Truss…
Liz Truss was (and probably still is) an idiot too stupid to understand how the economy works, and in particular the finance sector and bond markets. She legitimately crashed it because she didn’t know what she was doing. These people she describes as her enemies are most definitely not the wokeratti, they are investment professionals acting in hard-nosed, callous and brutal self interest. They are not out to change the world for reasons of ideology.
For as long as she doesn’t understand that, it is not worth listening to anything she has to say.
She’s certainly a prize silly-billy, and bitter with it.
Bubblecar said:
party_pants said:
Witty Rejoinder said:
I wonder if they’ll give the lettuce the right of reply:
…
Liz Truss: Elites killed my pro-growth agenda. Trump can’t let them stop his.
The White House’s proposed tax cuts, tariffs and spending reforms are showing the West the way forward.
May 22, 2025 at 6:45 a.m.
By Liz Truss…
Liz Truss was (and probably still is) an idiot too stupid to understand how the economy works, and in particular the finance sector and bond markets. She legitimately crashed it because she didn’t know what she was doing. These people she describes as her enemies are most definitely not the wokeratti, they are investment professionals acting in hard-nosed, callous and brutal self interest. They are not out to change the world for reasons of ideology.
For as long as she doesn’t understand that, it is not worth listening to anything she has to say.
She’s certainly a prize silly-billy, and bitter with it.
what no they profit handsomely from this they’re probably paid by CHINA and all those other dirty ASIANS to lead The West to economic suicide
Witty Rejoinder said:
I wonder if they’ll give the lettuce the right of reply:…
Liz Truss: Elites killed my pro-growth agenda. Trump can’t let them stop his.
The White House’s proposed tax cuts, tariffs and spending reforms are showing the West the way forward.
May 22, 2025 at 6:45 a.m.
By Liz Truss
Liz Truss was prime minister of Britain.President Donald Trump and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent have a herculean task ahead of them in turning around the U.S. economy and gripping the deep state that has promoted managed decline. But it is vital that they succeed.
If they were not taking the actions they now are on tariffs, the U.S. economy would remain on course to be eclipsed by China, with other Western economies also dwindling in its wake — and our security with it.
Allowing China to join the World Trade Organization in 2001, and then break all the rules, was a massive mistake. Only drastic action can remedy this. It is also important that the U.S. take appropriate action on other nations — otherwise, China will simply be able to circumvent the tariffs.
Trump and Bessent must also stay the course on squeezing the government, cutting taxes and getting rid of all the regulations holding America back. In doing this, they hold in their hands not just the future of the U.S. — but also that of its Western allies that are waiting to see how the Trump administration’s policies work out. For this should also be the opportunity for Western Europe to break free.
Over recent decades — in particular after the Great Recession and the covid pandemic — America and other Western nations built up huge amounts of debt. In the U.S. and Britain, general government debt as a proportion of gross domestic product has more than doubled since the turn of the millennium, passing 100 percent in both countries.
Yet, the modern Keynesian economic orthodoxy that has been in vogue since the 1990s and promoted by institutions such as the World Economic Forum and the European Union had no way of dealing with this. Instead, its advocates resorted to money printing, more government intervention — claiming that diversity, equity and inclusion programs and reducing fossil fuel use were going to generate growth — and stimulus policies such as the Inflation Reduction Act.
When these actions inevitably reduced growth and created inflation, their advocates looked to raise taxes to make up the difference. If you want to know what the future holds for nations pursuing these terrible policies, check out Western Europe, which has been stagnant for more than a decade. Extraordinarily, Britain’s leftist government and the E.U. have just done a deal tightening this death grip.
Bessent is right that the only way out of this sort of doom loop, which the United States was also in danger of entering, is to grow the economy — and, in particular, to grow the economy faster than the size of state. This is how you bring down the ratio of debt to GDP over time — it’s basic math.
This is achieved by liberating the supply side of the economy: “Drill, baby, drill,” cut taxes, get rid of regulations, embrace bitcoin and unleash a spirit of enterprise. Securing trade deals will also help. It’s what made our countries great, and it’s what will make them great again.
Of course, public spending also has to be reined in. The work of the U.S. DOGE Service is important in reducing waste and increasing accountability, and President Joe Biden’s excesses, such as the Inflation Reduction Act, must be taken on. But public spending changes are not that fast if they are to be effective. For example, successfully reforming welfare to get more people into work takes time; an expanding private sector helps this.
I know that what Trump is attempting to do won’t be easy. Back in 2022 — when I became British prime minister — I sought to go for growth by taking on the economic orthodoxy that had presided over the United Kingdom’s stagnation. I planned to rein in public spending by limiting rises in welfare while cutting the top rate of income tax and halting proposed rises in corporation tax. I reversed Britain’s ban on fracking as a way of increasing our energy independence and reducing household energy bills (since U.K. energy prices are now four times higher than those enjoyed by our American cousins).
Yet, I faced a barrage of criticism from establishment economists who claimed that these actions would stoke inflation and increase the deficit. They overlooked the fact that inflation is a monetary phenomenon and had been created by too much money printing by the Bank of England. I also was blamed for the fallout of the Bank of England’s failure to ensure financial stability in the pension market — even as subsequent research by its own analysts found that two-thirds of the market spike we saw was down to them.
I wasn’t targeted just by the usual British suspects, such as our Office for Budget Responsibility and the Financial Times, but by the entire Davos elite, from the International Monetary Fund to Biden himself. And just as they’ve tried to do with Trump, the naysayers pointed to short-term market reactions to bully policymakers out of securing long-term economic prosperity.
It’s notable how silent my critics were when previous — and subsequent — administrations in the U.K., U.S. and elsewhere pursued profligate spending programs. Their default setting is to applaud spending hikes, however unaffordable, but to lambast tax cuts, even when they raise more revenue and foster growth. It comes as no surprise that all their economic models have since proved to have been fundamentally wrong. And since they forced a reversal of my policies, the debt has gotten worse and the rates for U.K. government bonds have soared to even higher peaks.
The other factor hindering me was the fact that a significant element of the Conservative Party did not believe in conservative economic policy. They wanted net-zero emission targets, higher taxes and more money printing. They had already got rid of Boris Johnson with a view to installing the former Goldman Sachs banker Rishi Sunak. I got in the way of their plans. So, they stoked the narrative to depose me — and having done so, and after failing to implement conservative policies, last year the party went down to its worst election defeat in modern history. Their losses were instructive: The White House should not be swayed by “allies” warning of political disaster if they make meaningful reform to benefits, remove climate giveaways and cut down on spending.
What I learned from my experience is the sheer power of the globalist economic establishment and its allies in the political arena. They will try to create divisions and promote a false narrative.
But Trump comes with a strong mandate to push his agenda through. He must be given maximum support in Congress. He must dismantle as much of the permanent bureaucracy as possible. And he must also act to take on the globalist economic establishment through alternative networks and forums to those employed by the very elite who have brought about so much ruin.
It will take a lot to defeat them, but they must be defeated to save the West.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/05/22/liz-truss-trump-growth-agenda/
Lettuce? I don’t get your reference.
———————-
False narrative? Who’s doing that Liz? Oh, I see – it’s you, parroting Trump and the MAGA liars.
Lettuce? I don’t get your reference.
———————-
False narrative? Who’s doing that Liz? Oh, I see – it’s you, parroting Trump and the MAGA liars.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liz_Truss_lettuce
Michael V said:
Witty Rejoinder said:
I wonder if they’ll give the lettuce the right of reply:…
Liz Truss: Elites killed my pro-growth agenda. Trump can’t let them stop his.
The White House’s proposed tax cuts, tariffs and spending reforms are showing the West the way forward.
May 22, 2025 at 6:45 a.m.
By Liz Truss
Liz Truss was prime minister of Britain.President Donald Trump and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent have a herculean task ahead of them in turning around the U.S. economy and gripping the deep state that has promoted managed decline. But it is vital that they succeed.
If they were not taking the actions they now are on tariffs, the U.S. economy would remain on course to be eclipsed by China, with other Western economies also dwindling in its wake — and our security with it.
Allowing China to join the World Trade Organization in 2001, and then break all the rules, was a massive mistake. Only drastic action can remedy this. It is also important that the U.S. take appropriate action on other nations — otherwise, China will simply be able to circumvent the tariffs.
Trump and Bessent must also stay the course on squeezing the government, cutting taxes and getting rid of all the regulations holding America back. In doing this, they hold in their hands not just the future of the U.S. — but also that of its Western allies that are waiting to see how the Trump administration’s policies work out. For this should also be the opportunity for Western Europe to break free.
Over recent decades — in particular after the Great Recession and the covid pandemic — America and other Western nations built up huge amounts of debt. In the U.S. and Britain, general government debt as a proportion of gross domestic product has more than doubled since the turn of the millennium, passing 100 percent in both countries.
Yet, the modern Keynesian economic orthodoxy that has been in vogue since the 1990s and promoted by institutions such as the World Economic Forum and the European Union had no way of dealing with this. Instead, its advocates resorted to money printing, more government intervention — claiming that diversity, equity and inclusion programs and reducing fossil fuel use were going to generate growth — and stimulus policies such as the Inflation Reduction Act.
When these actions inevitably reduced growth and created inflation, their advocates looked to raise taxes to make up the difference. If you want to know what the future holds for nations pursuing these terrible policies, check out Western Europe, which has been stagnant for more than a decade. Extraordinarily, Britain’s leftist government and the E.U. have just done a deal tightening this death grip.
Bessent is right that the only way out of this sort of doom loop, which the United States was also in danger of entering, is to grow the economy — and, in particular, to grow the economy faster than the size of state. This is how you bring down the ratio of debt to GDP over time — it’s basic math.
This is achieved by liberating the supply side of the economy: “Drill, baby, drill,” cut taxes, get rid of regulations, embrace bitcoin and unleash a spirit of enterprise. Securing trade deals will also help. It’s what made our countries great, and it’s what will make them great again.
Of course, public spending also has to be reined in. The work of the U.S. DOGE Service is important in reducing waste and increasing accountability, and President Joe Biden’s excesses, such as the Inflation Reduction Act, must be taken on. But public spending changes are not that fast if they are to be effective. For example, successfully reforming welfare to get more people into work takes time; an expanding private sector helps this.
I know that what Trump is attempting to do won’t be easy. Back in 2022 — when I became British prime minister — I sought to go for growth by taking on the economic orthodoxy that had presided over the United Kingdom’s stagnation. I planned to rein in public spending by limiting rises in welfare while cutting the top rate of income tax and halting proposed rises in corporation tax. I reversed Britain’s ban on fracking as a way of increasing our energy independence and reducing household energy bills (since U.K. energy prices are now four times higher than those enjoyed by our American cousins).
Yet, I faced a barrage of criticism from establishment economists who claimed that these actions would stoke inflation and increase the deficit. They overlooked the fact that inflation is a monetary phenomenon and had been created by too much money printing by the Bank of England. I also was blamed for the fallout of the Bank of England’s failure to ensure financial stability in the pension market — even as subsequent research by its own analysts found that two-thirds of the market spike we saw was down to them.
I wasn’t targeted just by the usual British suspects, such as our Office for Budget Responsibility and the Financial Times, but by the entire Davos elite, from the International Monetary Fund to Biden himself. And just as they’ve tried to do with Trump, the naysayers pointed to short-term market reactions to bully policymakers out of securing long-term economic prosperity.
It’s notable how silent my critics were when previous — and subsequent — administrations in the U.K., U.S. and elsewhere pursued profligate spending programs. Their default setting is to applaud spending hikes, however unaffordable, but to lambast tax cuts, even when they raise more revenue and foster growth. It comes as no surprise that all their economic models have since proved to have been fundamentally wrong. And since they forced a reversal of my policies, the debt has gotten worse and the rates for U.K. government bonds have soared to even higher peaks.
The other factor hindering me was the fact that a significant element of the Conservative Party did not believe in conservative economic policy. They wanted net-zero emission targets, higher taxes and more money printing. They had already got rid of Boris Johnson with a view to installing the former Goldman Sachs banker Rishi Sunak. I got in the way of their plans. So, they stoked the narrative to depose me — and having done so, and after failing to implement conservative policies, last year the party went down to its worst election defeat in modern history. Their losses were instructive: The White House should not be swayed by “allies” warning of political disaster if they make meaningful reform to benefits, remove climate giveaways and cut down on spending.
What I learned from my experience is the sheer power of the globalist economic establishment and its allies in the political arena. They will try to create divisions and promote a false narrative.
But Trump comes with a strong mandate to push his agenda through. He must be given maximum support in Congress. He must dismantle as much of the permanent bureaucracy as possible. And he must also act to take on the globalist economic establishment through alternative networks and forums to those employed by the very elite who have brought about so much ruin.
It will take a lot to defeat them, but they must be defeated to save the West.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/05/22/liz-truss-trump-growth-agenda/
Lettuce? I don’t get your reference.
———————-
False narrative? Who’s doing that Liz? Oh, I see – it’s you, parroting Trump and the MAGA liars.
Once she crashed the UK bond markets, it was inevitable that she was going to be voted out by her party and replaced with someone else. A UK newspaper set up a sort of competition, who will last longer – Lis Truss or this fresh lettuce that they bought. They posted daily updates of the lettuce on their website. The lettuce won, Lis Truss was dumped by her party caucus and replaced as leader before the lettuce went mouldy.
Witty Rejoinder said:
———————-
False narrative? Who’s doing that Liz? Oh, I see – it’s you, parroting Trump and the MAGA liars.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liz_Truss_lettuce
Ta.
:)
:)
party_pants said:
Michael V said:
Witty Rejoinder said:
I wonder if they’ll give the lettuce the right of reply:…
Liz Truss: Elites killed my pro-growth agenda. Trump can’t let them stop his.
The White House’s proposed tax cuts, tariffs and spending reforms are showing the West the way forward.
May 22, 2025 at 6:45 a.m.
By Liz Truss
Liz Truss was prime minister of Britain.President Donald Trump and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent have a herculean task ahead of them in turning around the U.S. economy and gripping the deep state that has promoted managed decline. But it is vital that they succeed.
If they were not taking the actions they now are on tariffs, the U.S. economy would remain on course to be eclipsed by China, with other Western economies also dwindling in its wake — and our security with it.
Allowing China to join the World Trade Organization in 2001, and then break all the rules, was a massive mistake. Only drastic action can remedy this. It is also important that the U.S. take appropriate action on other nations — otherwise, China will simply be able to circumvent the tariffs.
Trump and Bessent must also stay the course on squeezing the government, cutting taxes and getting rid of all the regulations holding America back. In doing this, they hold in their hands not just the future of the U.S. — but also that of its Western allies that are waiting to see how the Trump administration’s policies work out. For this should also be the opportunity for Western Europe to break free.
Over recent decades — in particular after the Great Recession and the covid pandemic — America and other Western nations built up huge amounts of debt. In the U.S. and Britain, general government debt as a proportion of gross domestic product has more than doubled since the turn of the millennium, passing 100 percent in both countries.
Yet, the modern Keynesian economic orthodoxy that has been in vogue since the 1990s and promoted by institutions such as the World Economic Forum and the European Union had no way of dealing with this. Instead, its advocates resorted to money printing, more government intervention — claiming that diversity, equity and inclusion programs and reducing fossil fuel use were going to generate growth — and stimulus policies such as the Inflation Reduction Act.
When these actions inevitably reduced growth and created inflation, their advocates looked to raise taxes to make up the difference. If you want to know what the future holds for nations pursuing these terrible policies, check out Western Europe, which has been stagnant for more than a decade. Extraordinarily, Britain’s leftist government and the E.U. have just done a deal tightening this death grip.
Bessent is right that the only way out of this sort of doom loop, which the United States was also in danger of entering, is to grow the economy — and, in particular, to grow the economy faster than the size of state. This is how you bring down the ratio of debt to GDP over time — it’s basic math.
This is achieved by liberating the supply side of the economy: “Drill, baby, drill,” cut taxes, get rid of regulations, embrace bitcoin and unleash a spirit of enterprise. Securing trade deals will also help. It’s what made our countries great, and it’s what will make them great again.
Of course, public spending also has to be reined in. The work of the U.S. DOGE Service is important in reducing waste and increasing accountability, and President Joe Biden’s excesses, such as the Inflation Reduction Act, must be taken on. But public spending changes are not that fast if they are to be effective. For example, successfully reforming welfare to get more people into work takes time; an expanding private sector helps this.
I know that what Trump is attempting to do won’t be easy. Back in 2022 — when I became British prime minister — I sought to go for growth by taking on the economic orthodoxy that had presided over the United Kingdom’s stagnation. I planned to rein in public spending by limiting rises in welfare while cutting the top rate of income tax and halting proposed rises in corporation tax. I reversed Britain’s ban on fracking as a way of increasing our energy independence and reducing household energy bills (since U.K. energy prices are now four times higher than those enjoyed by our American cousins).
Yet, I faced a barrage of criticism from establishment economists who claimed that these actions would stoke inflation and increase the deficit. They overlooked the fact that inflation is a monetary phenomenon and had been created by too much money printing by the Bank of England. I also was blamed for the fallout of the Bank of England’s failure to ensure financial stability in the pension market — even as subsequent research by its own analysts found that two-thirds of the market spike we saw was down to them.
I wasn’t targeted just by the usual British suspects, such as our Office for Budget Responsibility and the Financial Times, but by the entire Davos elite, from the International Monetary Fund to Biden himself. And just as they’ve tried to do with Trump, the naysayers pointed to short-term market reactions to bully policymakers out of securing long-term economic prosperity.
It’s notable how silent my critics were when previous — and subsequent — administrations in the U.K., U.S. and elsewhere pursued profligate spending programs. Their default setting is to applaud spending hikes, however unaffordable, but to lambast tax cuts, even when they raise more revenue and foster growth. It comes as no surprise that all their economic models have since proved to have been fundamentally wrong. And since they forced a reversal of my policies, the debt has gotten worse and the rates for U.K. government bonds have soared to even higher peaks.
The other factor hindering me was the fact that a significant element of the Conservative Party did not believe in conservative economic policy. They wanted net-zero emission targets, higher taxes and more money printing. They had already got rid of Boris Johnson with a view to installing the former Goldman Sachs banker Rishi Sunak. I got in the way of their plans. So, they stoked the narrative to depose me — and having done so, and after failing to implement conservative policies, last year the party went down to its worst election defeat in modern history. Their losses were instructive: The White House should not be swayed by “allies” warning of political disaster if they make meaningful reform to benefits, remove climate giveaways and cut down on spending.
What I learned from my experience is the sheer power of the globalist economic establishment and its allies in the political arena. They will try to create divisions and promote a false narrative.
But Trump comes with a strong mandate to push his agenda through. He must be given maximum support in Congress. He must dismantle as much of the permanent bureaucracy as possible. And he must also act to take on the globalist economic establishment through alternative networks and forums to those employed by the very elite who have brought about so much ruin.
It will take a lot to defeat them, but they must be defeated to save the West.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/05/22/liz-truss-trump-growth-agenda/
Lettuce? I don’t get your reference.
———————-
False narrative? Who’s doing that Liz? Oh, I see – it’s you, parroting Trump and the MAGA liars.
Once she crashed the UK bond markets, it was inevitable that she was going to be voted out by her party and replaced with someone else. A UK newspaper set up a sort of competition, who will last longer – Lis Truss or this fresh lettuce that they bought. They posted daily updates of the lettuce on their website. The lettuce won, Lis Truss was dumped by her party caucus and replaced as leader before the lettuce went mouldy.
:)
roughbarked said:
Spiny Norman said:
Trouble with that one is that this occurs after his empire is rubble and the people starving.
well hurry up
Bogsnorkler said:
captain_spalding said:
Like, no ‘difficulties’ if the students make some public comment that might be interpreted as critical of China’s government, policies, or actions?
Nah, that is the USA.
The offer is unconditional…
Anyway don’t worry only dirty ASIANS abuse human rights¡
Bubblecar said:
party_pants said:
Witty Rejoinder said:
I wonder if they’ll give the lettuce the right of reply:…
Liz Truss: Elites killed my pro-growth agenda. Trump can’t let them stop his.
The White House’s proposed tax cuts, tariffs and spending reforms are showing the West the way forward.
May 22, 2025 at 6:45 a.m.
By Liz Truss…
Liz Truss was (and probably still is) an idiot too stupid to understand how the economy works, and in particular the finance sector and bond markets. She legitimately crashed it because she didn’t know what she was doing. These people she describes as her enemies are most definitely not the wokeratti, they are investment professionals acting in hard-nosed, callous and brutal self interest. They are not out to change the world for reasons of ideology.
For as long as she doesn’t understand that, it is not worth listening to anything she has to say.
She’s certainly a prize silly-billy, and bitter with it.
Bitter with failure and holding onto it. Better to let it go.
alleged
same thing
As always, posting in honour and memory of sarahs mum.
…………………………………….
May 23, 2025
Heather Cox Richardson
May 24 (Saturday)
I’m going to take an early night tonight, but I want to record three things that jumped out at me today because they seem to tell a story.
After S.V. Date of HuffPost noted last week that the White House had published fewer than 20% of Trump’s speeches, the White House has stopped publishing a database of official transcripts of President Donald J. Trump’s announcements, appearances, and speeches altogether and has taken down those it had published. Instead it will just post videos. And yet it is publishing just a few of the videos of the president’s term: so far, fewer than 50 videos of the first 120 days of his term, according to Brian Stelter of CNN.
A presidential administration traditionally publishes the president’s words promptly to establish a record. The Trump White House, in contrast, says removing the transcripts will enable people to get a better sense of Trump by watching his videos. But it’s likely closer to the truth that Trump’s appearances since he took office have been erratic, and removing the transcripts will make it harder for people to read his nonsensical rambles.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said, “The Trump White House is the most transparent in history,” but of course, it’s objectively not. White House officials have made it impossible to tell who is making decisions at the Department of Government Efficiency, for example, or who gave the order to render migrants to El Salvador. Now the president’s words, too, will be hidden.
Trump’s erratic behavior was on full display this morning when he announced that he will impose a 50% tariff on goods from the European Union on June 1, suggesting he is frustrated because his promises of a new trade deal have failed to materialize. Trump had threatened to stop negotiating and simply dictate terms, and that is apparently the direction he’s moving. “I’m not looking for a deal,” he said this afternoon. “We’ve set the deal—it’s at 50%.” Trump also threatened a 25% tariff on Apple products unless the company begins to make the iPhone in the U.S.
Elisabeth Buchwald of CNN reported that three major European stock market indexes fell after Trump’s threat. U.S. stock market indexes fell for the fourth day. They rose from their lowest point after the White House said Trump’s tariff comments were not a formal statement of policy.
So the president of the United States can tank world markets, only to have his own staff inform the media that his comments should not be taken seriously.
The third story is that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has denied North Carolina’s request that it honor a commitment made by President Joe Biden to pay for 100% of the costs for removal of debris after Hurricane Helene devastated the western part of the state in September 2024. That storm killed 107 people in western North Carolina and destroyed or damaged 75,000 homes, as well as destroying roads and leaving mounds of debris.
As Zack Colman of Politico reported yesterday, the storm hit in the last weeks of the 2024 presidential campaign, and Trump undermined FEMA’s response, lying that it was not present and telling North Carolinians that the Biden administration could not help them because it had taken money from FEMA for undocumented immigrants. None of what he was saying was true, but MAGA mouthpieces picked up his criticisms and exaggerated them, claiming that the federal government intended to steal people’s land, that Biden had directed the storm to western North Carolina, and that 28 babies had frozen to death in FEMA tents—all lies, but lies that slowed recovery as riled-up people who believed them refused assistance, threatened officials, and demanded investigations.
Trump suggested he would respond more effectively to voters in North Carolina, and two of the hardest-hit counties there, Avery and Haywood, backed him in 2024 by margins of 75.7% and 61.8%, respectively, similar to those it had given him in 2016 and 2020.
Once in office, though, Trump began to talk of eliminating FEMA. Now the White House has told North Carolina residents they’re on their own as they try to dig out from Hurricane Helene.
Taken together, these stories from today seem to provide a snapshot of this moment in American history. They show an erratic president whose own officials discount his orders even as power is concentrating in the executive office and who won election through lies that are now being exposed as his policies disproportionately hurt the very people who backed him most enthusiastically.
—
Notes:
https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/22/media/donald-trump-media-white-house-transcript-purge
https://www.niemanlab.org/2025/05/no-more-transcripts-of-trump-remarks-on-the-white-house-website-and-the-old-ones-are-gone-too/
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/white-house-purges-transcripts-trump-remarks-website-rcna208059
https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/23/economy/trump-eu-tariffs
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/22/stock-market-today-live-updates.html
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/22/trump-fema-north-carolina-hurricane-helene-00352614
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/fema-denies-north-carolina-request-hurricane-helene-aid-1235347521/
——————————
AussieDJ said:
As always, posting in honour and memory of sarahs mum.
…………………………………….May 23, 2025
Heather Cox Richardson
May 24 (Saturday)I’m going to take an early night tonight, but I want to record three things that jumped out at me today because they seem to tell a story.
After S.V. Date of HuffPost noted last week that the White House had published fewer than 20% of Trump’s speeches, the White House has stopped publishing a database of official transcripts of President Donald J. Trump’s announcements, appearances, and speeches altogether and has taken down those it had published. Instead it will just post videos. And yet it is publishing just a few of the videos of the president’s term: so far, fewer than 50 videos of the first 120 days of his term, according to Brian Stelter of CNN.
A presidential administration traditionally publishes the president’s words promptly to establish a record. The Trump White House, in contrast, says removing the transcripts will enable people to get a better sense of Trump by watching his videos. But it’s likely closer to the truth that Trump’s appearances since he took office have been erratic, and removing the transcripts will make it harder for people to read his nonsensical rambles.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said, “The Trump White House is the most transparent in history,” but of course, it’s objectively not. White House officials have made it impossible to tell who is making decisions at the Department of Government Efficiency, for example, or who gave the order to render migrants to El Salvador. Now the president’s words, too, will be hidden.
Trump’s erratic behavior was on full display this morning when he announced that he will impose a 50% tariff on goods from the European Union on June 1, suggesting he is frustrated because his promises of a new trade deal have failed to materialize. Trump had threatened to stop negotiating and simply dictate terms, and that is apparently the direction he’s moving. “I’m not looking for a deal,” he said this afternoon. “We’ve set the deal—it’s at 50%.” Trump also threatened a 25% tariff on Apple products unless the company begins to make the iPhone in the U.S.
Elisabeth Buchwald of CNN reported that three major European stock market indexes fell after Trump’s threat. U.S. stock market indexes fell for the fourth day. They rose from their lowest point after the White House said Trump’s tariff comments were not a formal statement of policy.
So the president of the United States can tank world markets, only to have his own staff inform the media that his comments should not be taken seriously.
The third story is that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has denied North Carolina’s request that it honor a commitment made by President Joe Biden to pay for 100% of the costs for removal of debris after Hurricane Helene devastated the western part of the state in September 2024. That storm killed 107 people in western North Carolina and destroyed or damaged 75,000 homes, as well as destroying roads and leaving mounds of debris.
As Zack Colman of Politico reported yesterday, the storm hit in the last weeks of the 2024 presidential campaign, and Trump undermined FEMA’s response, lying that it was not present and telling North Carolinians that the Biden administration could not help them because it had taken money from FEMA for undocumented immigrants. None of what he was saying was true, but MAGA mouthpieces picked up his criticisms and exaggerated them, claiming that the federal government intended to steal people’s land, that Biden had directed the storm to western North Carolina, and that 28 babies had frozen to death in FEMA tents—all lies, but lies that slowed recovery as riled-up people who believed them refused assistance, threatened officials, and demanded investigations.
Trump suggested he would respond more effectively to voters in North Carolina, and two of the hardest-hit counties there, Avery and Haywood, backed him in 2024 by margins of 75.7% and 61.8%, respectively, similar to those it had given him in 2016 and 2020.
Once in office, though, Trump began to talk of eliminating FEMA. Now the White House has told North Carolina residents they’re on their own as they try to dig out from Hurricane Helene.
Taken together, these stories from today seem to provide a snapshot of this moment in American history. They show an erratic president whose own officials discount his orders even as power is concentrating in the executive office and who won election through lies that are now being exposed as his policies disproportionately hurt the very people who backed him most enthusiastically.
—
Notes:https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/22/media/donald-trump-media-white-house-transcript-purge
https://www.niemanlab.org/2025/05/no-more-transcripts-of-trump-remarks-on-the-white-house-website-and-the-old-ones-are-gone-too/
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/white-house-purges-transcripts-trump-remarks-website-rcna208059
https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/23/economy/trump-eu-tariffs
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/22/stock-market-today-live-updates.html
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/22/trump-fema-north-carolina-hurricane-helene-00352614
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/fema-denies-north-carolina-request-hurricane-helene-aid-1235347521/
——————————
FMD. What a shit-show.
Thanks for posting this Mr DJ.
Michael V said:
AussieDJ said:
As always, posting in honour and memory of sarahs mum.FMD. What a shit-show.
Thanks for posting this Mr DJ.
Doing what I can to honour Ros. memory.
AussieDJ said:
Michael V said:
AussieDJ said:
As always, posting in honour and memory of sarahs mum.FMD. What a shit-show.
Thanks for posting this Mr DJ.
Doing what I can to honour Ros’ memory.
Corrected.
AussieDJ said:
Michael V said:
AussieDJ said:
As always, posting in honour and memory of sarahs mum.FMD. What a shit-show.
Thanks for posting this Mr DJ.
Doing what I can to honour Ros. memory.
Is it all behind a paywall?
roughbarked said:
AussieDJ said:
Michael V said:FMD. What a shit-show.
Thanks for posting this Mr DJ.
Doing what I can to honour Ros. memory.
Is it all behind a paywall?
No it’s not … but you have to subscribe to it … on Substack.
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/
roughbarked said:
AussieDJ said:
Michael V said:FMD. What a shit-show.
Thanks for posting this Mr DJ.
Doing what I can to honour Ros. memory.
Is it all behind a paywall?
usually a FB post but she probably also has a blog somewhere.
The next installment:
May 24, 2025
Heather Cox Richardson
May 25 (Sunday)
On Thursday the Trump administration told Harvard University that because it had not handed over information on foreign students’ protest activities, violent activity, and coursework, the university had “lost privilege” of enrolling foreign students. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem said this decision was based on the administration’s determination to “enforce the law and root out the evils of anti-Americanism and antisemitism in society and campuses.”
This argument has always been a thinly veiled way to use actual antisemitism to destroy universities, a reality illustrated by Trump’s hosting last night of cryptocurrency investors whose coins are literally named things like “F*CK THE JEWS.”
Harvard promptly sued, noting that the administration has engaged in an “unprecedented and retaliatory attack on academic freedom at Harvard” and calling the attack “a blatant violation of the First Amendment, the Due Process Clause, and the Administrative Procedure Act.” “With the stroke of a pen,” the lawsuit reads, “the government has sought to erase a quarter of Harvard’s student body, international students who contribute significantly to the University and its mission.”
Hours later, Judge Allison Burroughs of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts granted Harvard’s request for a temporary restraining order barring the administration’s change from taking effect. She wrote that the new policy would cause “immediate and irreparable injury” to Harvard.
While President Donald J. Trump might well have his own reasons for hating a university famous for its brain power, the anti-intellectual impulse behind Trump’s attacks on higher education has a long history in the United States.
That history reaches at least as far back as the 1740s, when European-American settlers in the western districts of the colonies complained that men in the eastern districts, who monopolized wealth and political power, were ignoring the needs of westerners. This opposition often took the form of a religious revolt as westerners turned against the carefully reasoned sermons of the deeply educated and politically powerful ministers in the East and followed preachers who claimed their lack of formal education enabled them to speak directly from God’s inspiration.
One hundred years ago tomorrow, that cultural impulse surfaced in a national spectacle that would feed directly into today’s attacks on education.
On May 25, 1925, a grand jury in Tennessee indicted 24-year-old football coach and science teacher John T. Scopes for violating Tennessee’s law, passed in March of that year, that made it “unlawful…to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.” In other words, Tennessee had banned the teaching of human evolution.
The law, known as the Butler Act, was sponsored by John Washington Butler, a farmer and head of the new World Christian Fundamentals Association, which sought to establish the word of God as revealed in the Bible at the heart of American life. Butler later said he didn’t know anything about evolution but had heard “that boys and girls were coming home from school and telling their fathers and mothers that the Bible was all nonsense.” Tennessee governor Austin Peay signed the law to please rural Tennesseans and their representatives, but he allegedly did not think the law would ever be enforced.
The American Civil Liberties Union recruited Scopes to test the law just as a local man from Dayton, Tennessee, thought a trial there would give the town welcome publicity. The resulting Scopes trial became a national referendum on modernism and education versus a fundamentalist religious urge to move the country backward. Scopes ultimately was found guilty, but the trial showed religious fundamentalists as incompatible with the modern world.
While some fundamentalists backed away from the public sphere after the trial, others began to try to transform American business, just as Bruce Barton suggested could be done in his 1925 bestseller The Man Nobody Knows, which showed Jesus as “the founder of modern business.” In his 2016 The Blessings of Business, historian Darren Grem traces how fundamentalist leaders began to work with big business, especially as Democratic president Franklin Delano Roosevelt challenged traditional racial and gender lines.
The New Deal seemed to undermine the influence of the church by providing federal welfare policies. The Church League of America made common cause with the businessmen who opposed the business regulation in the New Deal, arguing that Christianity “elevates and dignifies human personality in contrast to the so-called ‘Collectivist’ or Marxian doctrines.” “Free Religion–Free Enterprise are Inseparable,” it said, “One Cannot Exist Without the Other.”
William F. Buckley Jr. applied this line of thinking to higher education in his 1951 God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of Academic Freedom. In it, Buckley argued that Yale University was corrupted by “atheism” and “collectivism” not because its faculty actually called for atheism and collectivism, but because their embrace of fact-based argument supported the government that had grown out of the New Deal.
Modern universities embraced the Enlightenment tradition of a free search for knowledge in the belief that informed discussion fed by a wide range of ideas was the best way to reach toward truth. As ideas were tested in public debate, people would be able to choose the best of them. This was the basis of academic freedom.
Buckley denied this “superstition.” Truth would not win out in a free contest of ideas, he said; students would simply be led astray. For proof, he offered the fact that most Americans had chosen the New Deal and continued to support its extension. He called for Yale to replace faculty that believed in academic freedom with those who would advance the causes of Christianity and free enterprise.
Government analyst McGeorge Bundy called the book “dishonest in its use of facts, false in its theory, and a discredit to its author.” He recognized it as “clearly an attempt to start an assault on the freedom of one of America’s greatest and most conservative universities.”
America’s post–World War II university system was the envy of the world, driving innovation and medical and scientific research that made the U.S. economy boom and raised standards of living around the world. But the idea that the modern government imposed the will of what Ronald Reagan called “a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital” on the laws of God and the natural laws of the United States was a powerful tool to undermine the modern government.
In a 1971 memorandum for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, lawyer Lewis F. Powell Jr. wrote that “the American economic system,” which he defined as the “free enterprise system,” “capitalism,” and “the profit system,” “is under broad attack.”
Powell identified college campuses as the center of this attack and called for setting up right-wing think tanks and speakers’ series to advance the interests of business, restoring what he called “balance” to textbooks, and for pressure on colleges to appoint right-wing faculty members, all in the name of “strengthening of both academic freedom on the campus and of the values which have made America the most productive of all societies.”
As Republicans embraced economic individualism and religion, they also embraced anti-intellectualism. Their version was not unlike that of the early colonists, in which rural Americans, especially those in the West, claimed their evangelical religion made them more worthy than the urban Americans in the East who far outnumbered them. When Republican presidential candidate John McCain tapped evangelical Alaska governor Sarah Palin to be his running mate in 2008, he acknowledged the growing power of that demographic.
Increasingly, far-right activists insisted that all of the pillars of society, including universities, had been corrupted by the liberal ideas behind the modern government and that those pillars must be destroyed. In 2012, college dropout Charlie Kirk and Tea Party activist Bill Montgomery formed Turning Point USA to purge college campuses of those faculty members they saw as purveyors of dangerous ideas. After Trump’s election in 2016, the organization launched the “Professor Watchlist,” which listed faculty members it claimed—without evidence—“discriminate against conservative students, promote anti-American values and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.” (I was one of the first on the list.)
That impulse to purge society of the institutions that support modern liberal government became a full-throated attack on universities. In a 2021 interview, then Senate candidate J.D. Vance said that the American right has “lost every major powerful institution in the country, except for maybe churches and religious institutions, which of course are weaker now than they’ve ever been. We’ve lost big business. We’ve lost finance. We’ve lost the culture. We’ve lost the academy. And if we’re going to actually really effect real change in the country, it will require us completely replacing the existing ruling class with another ruling class…. I don’t think there’s sort of a compromise that we’re going to come with the people who currently actually control the country. Unless we overthrow them in some way, we’re going to keep losing.” “We really need to be really ruthless when it comes to the exercise of power,” he said.
The same year, Vance told the National Conservatism Conference that “we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.” “We live in a world that has been made effectively by university knowledge” and to rebuild the nation along the lines of white Christian nationalism, the universities must be destroyed. Vance told the audience, “the professors are the enemy.”
On July 1, 2024, the Supreme Court decided that an American president could not be prosecuted for crimes committed as part of his official duties, and the next day, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, the key organizer of Project 2025, went on Steve Bannon’s podcast War Room to tell supporters that America’s radical white Christian nationalists were “going to win. We’re in the process of taking this country back.” He said the country needed a strong leader because “the radical left…has taken over our institutions.”
And now the Trump administration is dismantling higher education. As Harvard said in its lawsuit: “There is no lawful justification for the government’s unprecedented revocation of Harvard’s , and the government has not offered any.”
“e are in the process of the second American Revolution,” Roberts said last July, “which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
—
Notes:
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-administration-bars-harvard-enrolling-international-students/story?id=122084417
https://www.citizensforethics.org/reports-investigations/crew-investigations/50-trump-crypto-dinner-invitees-hold-tokens-linked-to-alt-right-symbols-and-racist-language/
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/05/23/us/harvard-trump-lawsuit.html
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/05/23/harvard-lawsuit-international-students/83813633007/
https://www.npr.org/2005/07/05/4723956/timeline-remembering-the-scopes-monkey-trial
https://web.archive.org/web/20090520091924/http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/scopes/tennstat.htm#
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1951/11/the-attack-on-yale/306724/
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/assets/usa-courts-secrecy-lobbyist/powell-memo.pdf
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-behalf-senator-barry-goldwater-time-for-choosing
https://www.mediamatters.org/project-2025/heritage-foundation-president-celebrates-supreme-court-immunity-decision-we-are
https://billmoyers.com/story/the-watchlist/
https://teva.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/scopes/id/168
Darren E. Grem, The Blessings of Business: How Corporations Shaped Conservative Christianity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).
https://www.thecenterforruleoflaw.org/rule-of-law-blog/july-10-1925-scopes-trial-in-dayton-tennessee-the-so-called-monkey-trial-begins-of-john-t-scopes-a-young-high-school-science-teacher-accused-of-teaching-evolution-in-violation-of-the-butler-act
X:
AccountableGOP/status/1814047103892738480
YouTube:
watch?v=0FR65Cifnhw
Bogsnorkler said:
roughbarked said:
AussieDJ said:Doing what I can to honour Ros. memory.
Is it all behind a paywall?
usually a FB post but she probably also has a blog somewhere.
I receive it on email
AussieDJ said:
roughbarked said:
AussieDJ said:Doing what I can to honour Ros. memory.
Is it all behind a paywall?
No it’s not … but you have to subscribe to it … on Substack.
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/
Ta.
AussieDJ said:
The next installment:May 24, 2025
Heather Cox Richardson
May 25 (Sunday)Darren E. Grem, The Blessings of Business: How Corporations Shaped Conservative Christianity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).
https://www.thecenterforruleoflaw.org/rule-of-law-blog/july-10-1925-scopes-trial-in-dayton-tennessee-the-so-called-monkey-trial-begins-of-john-t-scopes-a-young-high-school-science-teacher-accused-of-teaching-evolution-in-violation-of-the-butler-act
X:
AccountableGOP/status/1814047103892738480
YouTube:
watch?v=0FR65Cifnhw
Accused of teaching evoloution? Aew rget still doing thta over there?
roughbarked said:
AussieDJ said:
roughbarked said:Is it all behind a paywall?
No it’s not … but you have to subscribe to it … on Substack.
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/
Ta.
Click on the No Thanks link if you want to read without subscribing
AussieDJ said:
roughbarked said:
AussieDJ said:No it’s not … but you have to subscribe to it … on Substack.
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/
Ta.
Click on the No Thanks link if you want to read without subscribing
Ta again.
roughbarked said:
AussieDJ said:
Michael V said:FMD. What a shit-show.
Thanks for posting this Mr DJ.
Doing what I can to honour Ros. memory.
Is it all behind a paywall?
A couple of months ago I posted all the ways that people can access HCR’s letters. IIRC Ros also posted this information.
Maybe some bright spark can make a dedicated HCR thread? AussieDJ?
kii said:
roughbarked said:
AussieDJ said:Doing what I can to honour Ros. memory.
Is it all behind a paywall?
A couple of months ago I posted all the ways that people can access HCR’s letters. IIRC Ros also posted this information.
Maybe some bright spark can make a dedicated HCR thread? AussieDJ?
I reckon a dedicated thread would be a good idea.
Today’s HCR is good. Now that’s how a weave is done. Not like Trump’s me-me-me rambling.
alleged
alleged
Let’s try this one …
:)
……………..
Speaking of other writers on substack.com …
https://robertreich.substack.com/ is also worth a read.
His most-recent post:
Sunday thought
A new phase of Trump neofascism
Robert Reich
May 25, 2025
Friends,
I thought I couldn’t be more shocked and sickened than I already was, but what’s happened this week is truly horrifying.
In the Oval Office, before cameras and journalists, Trump openly lied to the president of South Africa about alleged violence against white South Africans. The Trump regime has also granted refuge to white South Africans while continuing to bar or deport people of color who desperately need refuge.
The regime told Harvard it can no longer enroll foreign students and that its existing foreign students must transfer to another university or lose their legal status in the United States.
Trump auctioned off a personal dinner to foreigners who poured money into his own crypto business. He has also accepted Qatar’s gift of a $400 million “flying palace” (it’s also just for him — no other president in future years can use it).
At Trump’s insistence, House Republicans have passed a giant bill that would, if enacted, be the largest redistribution of income and wealth in American history — from the poor and working class to the rich and super-rich. The bill includes a poison pill that eliminates the power of courts to hold officials in contempt for disregarding court orders.
In recent days, according to Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent of The New York Times, Trump or his team have charged, investigated, or threatened with investigation New York Attorney General Letitia James, Andrew Cuomo, Kamala Harris, Bruce Springsteen, Beyonce, Bono, Oprah Winfrey, James Comey, unnamed “treasonous” Biden aides, the city of Chicago, and the Kennedy Center.
Trump seems to have entered into a new and wilder stage of authoritarian neofascism. No holds barred. Nothing out of bounds. Rapacious, racist, nativist, vindictive, corrupt.
If you’re also horrified by all this, know that most other Americans are, too (if polls are to be believed).
Resistance is more important than ever.
I feel enormous gratitude to the judges who are trying to stop this. Most have shown themselves to be principled, steadfast, and courageous.
We should also be grateful to the public servants still in their jobs who are standing up to this.
And to everyone else who is pushing back.
Grateful to all communities that are protecting their residents and neighbors from Trump’s vicious dragnet.
Thankful to all the people fighting his attacks on Medicare and Medicaid. Teachers, public employees, workers, and grassroots groups fighting his attacks on the poor.
To the professors, administrators, and students joining together to fight his attacks on higher education.
Appreciative of all who are planning to protest on June 14. It’s Trump’s birthday, on which he’s trying to justify a huge military parade using the pretext of the 250th anniversary of the start of the Continental Army that fought against King George III.
On that day we will join together to tell the world and affirm for ourselves that we do not abide kings.
The more Trump’s tyranny is exposed, the stronger the resistance. The worse it gets, the larger the backlash. The crueler and more vicious his regime becomes, the more powerful the alliances being formed at every level of society to stop him.
We will sweep vulnerable Republican lawmakers out of office in 2026 or before.
We will support groups like the ACLU that are taking Trump to court.
We will spread the truth.
Tyrants cannot succeed where people refuse to submit to them. We will not submit. We will emerge from this stronger than we were before, and more committed to the common good.
Be safe. Be strong. Hug your loved ones.
roughbarked said:
Trump calls program to boost internet access and proficiency ‘racist and illegal’
“It is insane — absolutely nuts — that Trump is blocking resources to help make sure kids in rural school districts can get hot spots or laptops, all because he doesn’t like the word equity.”
roughbarked said:
Trump calls program to boost internet access and proficiency ‘racist and illegal’
The man is a buffoon.
Brindabellas said:
roughbarked said:
Trump calls program to boost internet access and proficiency ‘racist and illegal’
The man is a buffoon.
Orange shitgibbon.
roughbarked said:
roughbarked said:
Trump calls program to boost internet access and proficiency ‘racist and illegal’
“It is insane — absolutely nuts — that Trump is blocking resources to help make sure kids in rural school districts can get hot spots or laptops, all because he doesn’t like the word equity.”
They should tell him that it’s a programme to provide groceries to those areas. He likes the word ‘groceries’.
captain_spalding said:
roughbarked said:
roughbarked said:
Trump calls program to boost internet access and proficiency ‘racist and illegal’
“It is insane — absolutely nuts — that Trump is blocking resources to help make sure kids in rural school districts can get hot spots or laptops, all because he doesn’t like the word equity.”
They should tell him that it’s a programme to provide groceries to those areas. He likes the word ‘groceries’.
A hand up, not a hand out doesn’t sound too commie I’d had thought.
Cymek said:
captain_spalding said:
roughbarked said:
“It is insane — absolutely nuts — that Trump is blocking resources to help make sure kids in rural school districts can get hot spots or laptops, all because he doesn’t like the word equity.”
They should tell him that it’s a programme to provide groceries to those areas. He likes the word ‘groceries’.
A hand up, not a hand out doesn’t sound too commie I’d had thought.
What, a chance for someone below yous to get up onto an equal footing¿ N’t sound too commie¿ Are yous kidding¿
captain_spalding said:
roughbarked said:
roughbarked said:
Trump calls program to boost internet access and proficiency ‘racist and illegal’
“It is insane — absolutely nuts — that Trump is blocking resources to help make sure kids in rural school districts can get hot spots or laptops, all because he doesn’t like the word equity.”
They should tell him that it’s a programme to provide groceries to those areas. He likes the word ‘groceries’.
Eggs.
The US system is being stress tested.
It’s not a destructive test.
Peak Warming Man said:
The US system is being stress tested.
It’s not a destructive test.
Stress tests are usually taken to breaking point to see how deep your weld penetration goes.
Kamala Harris is in Australia, she’s speaking at a unreal estate convention.
She would have cost a bomb what with air fares, accommodation, security etc, not to mention her speaking fees.
Still the unreal estate has got plenty.
what a strong decisive gutsy response from a military ally
United States President Donald Trump has launched a fresh tirade against Russian President Vladimir Putin over Russia’s massive drone and missile attack on the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, saying he “has gone absolutely crazy” and is “needlessly killing a lot of people”.
the land of free speech and cheap talk
SCIENCE said:
what a strong decisive gutsy response from a military ally
United States President Donald Trump has launched a fresh tirade against Russian President Vladimir Putin over Russia’s massive drone and missile attack on the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, saying he “has gone absolutely crazy” and is “needlessly killing a lot of people”.
the land of free speech and cheap talk
Maybe trump is trying to prove he is not Komrad Krasnov. Or, sowing doubt. (Or should that be “sewing”?)
roughbarked said:
roughbarked said:
Trump calls program to boost internet access and proficiency ‘racist and illegal’
“It is insane — absolutely nuts — that Trump is blocking resources to help make sure kids in rural school districts can get hot spots or laptops, all because he doesn’t like the word equity.”
Didn’t he invent the word “equalise” a week or two back?
This is worse than my trip to the Bamboozle Hornswoggle.
dv said:
This is worse than my trip to the Bamboozle Hornswoggle.
Ha!
:)
communism bad
A screenshot of what AI said about Trump’s America.
I asked AI hoe to stop Trump and here is what it said.
The whole video
SCIENCE said:
Trump again?
Want to see someone who <ireally< i=""> knows how to debate?</ireally<>
Wtach the first 4 minutes or so of this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxjglx5PTsw
Jon Stewart BREAKS THE INTERNET demolishing Republican TO HIS FACE
captain_spalding said:
Want to see someone who <ireally< i=""> knows how to debate?Wtach the first 4 minutes or so of this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxjglx5PTsw
Jon Stewart BREAKS THE INTERNET demolishing Republican TO HIS FACE
</ireally<>
Mucked that up, proper.
Interesting and maybe another chink of light in this hellscape.
Bit of insight into the insanity of some Americans. The ones who seriously believe that Michelle Obama is a man..
“The Left’s Limp-Wristed Loser of the Day”
Because Reality’s Too Offensive for the Woke—So Let’s Kick It Right in the Feelings.
Episode: Barry & Big Mike – The First Couple of Delusion, Deception, and Designer Deceit
Ladies and gentlemen, and whatever else the alphabet crowd’s identifying as this week—buckle the hell up. Today’s episode ain’t just a roast, it’s a five-alarm cultural arson job. We’re talkin’ about the dynamic duo of deceit: Barack Hussein Obama and his linebacker-turned-lady, Big Mike.
Now Barry—this guy strutted into the White House with a Harvard degree, a smug grin, and the kinda arrogance you usually only see in failed poets and trust fund babies. His whole shtick was “hope and change,” but by the end, we were just hopin’ we’d survive the next apology tour. The man could talk, sure—but so can a car alarm. Doesn’t mean it’s sayin’ anything worth listenin’ to.
But let’s talk about the real power behind the teleprompter: Big Mike. Michelle “I Hate This Country Unless I’m In a Mansion” Obama. The media sold her like she was the second coming of Jackie O—if Jackie bench pressed Volvos and scolded your kids over carrot sticks while flyin’ in on a private jet. She told the rest of us to eat twigs and kale while she dined like royalty. Hypocrisy? Nah—that’s just Tuesday in Obamaland.
And oh, the mystery. Big Mike with arms like she just walked off the WWE roster and a voice deeper than Biden’s comprehension of basic economics. You say “Michelle,” I hear “Michael.” Just sayin’—that closet door’s been rattlin’ for years, and it ain’t the hinges, folks.
Barry and Big Mike were the woke prototype. The OGs of “do as I say, not as I do.” Preachin’ unity while throwin’ gas on every cultural fire. Pushin’ division wrapped in designer speeches, and God forbid you question a single thing without gettin’ labeled a “conspiracy theorist” by a soy-sipping fact checker with a gender studies degree and a cat named Karl Marx.
They left office richer, smugger, and somehow still claimin’ victimhood while vacationin’ on private islands guarded by guys with guns they say you shouldn’t have. They didn’t serve the people—they served up identity politics on a silver tray with a side of Marxist garnish.
So here’s your glittery, gender-fluid trophy, Barry & Big Mike: a his-and-hers set of mirrors so you can keep admirin’ yourselves while the rest of us try to fix the mess you left behind. Hope and change? Please. We’re still tryin’ to change back from the hope you shattered.
Because someone’s gotta say it—and I brought a shovel, a spotlight, and zero interest in playin’ pretend.
#BigMikeMystery #BarryFromBehind #HopeChangeAndHypocrisy #FirstCoupleOfFiction #EatYourKalePeasant #BenchPressingBarack #SmoothLiesRoughTruth #TeleprompterRoyalty #WokeAndWealthy #ClosetsAndCorruption
https://www.facebook.com/reel/1705242670386393
Sgt Scholar
Are students identifying as furries in public schools and are using litterboxes in the classroom? No. This isn’t happening. Yet, polishitans use this to waste time and discredit the education system. We have several reasons to improve our public school systems, but a threat of furries shifting in sand isn’t one of them. This timeline is absurd, and we must call out the absurdities like how this legislator did.
At debt’s door: US superpower is waning and Trump’s part of the problem
Peter Hartcher
Political and international editor
May 27, 2025 — 5.00am
In short order, Donald Trump has inflicted deep damage to three of the unique sources of American superpower. And he’s on the very brink of shattering a fourth.
The United States enjoyed the unique advantage of an alliance network of more than 40 countries. But an alliance is meaningless to Trump’s America. The US uniquely created and built the world trading system as a source of growth and prosperity. Trump is dismembering it.
The US uniquely held in check war between great powers through its military might and strategic credibility. Its might remains. But American credibility started to slide under Barack Obama and today approaches the point of extinction.
Trump’s threats and promises are worth nil. Russia ignores his threats to stop the war in Ukraine. China successfully called his bluff over tariffs. Trump claims to have stopped an escalating war between India and Pakistan, but they say he had nothing to do with it.
Two newborn acronyms, both coined in the finance world, tell the story. One, coined by Financial Times columnist Robert Armstrong this month, is TACO – Trump always chickens out. The other, first reported by The Wall Street Journal last week, conveys investor sentiment about where to put money. It’s ABUSA – anywhere but USA.
Now Trump is on the cusp of surrendering a fourth unique source of US superpower, and perhaps the single most important – America’s “full faith and credit”. That is, the ability to borrow cheaply, to spend lavishly and to enjoy the “exorbitant privilege” of issuing the global reserve currency.
China’s foreign ministry last month described Trump’s America as a “paper tiger”. Now even its paper – in the form of its Treasury bonds – is under challenge.
It’s no secret that the US has been building a vast national debt for years. Indeed, it’s literally up in lights in the form of debt clocks at multiple bus shelters around Washington, DC, courtesy of the Peterson Foundation. The clocks show US government debt at $US36 trillion and ticking higher by the minute. That’s about $US106,000 for every man, woman and child in that nation. Before the pandemic, US debt stood at the equivalent of about 100 per cent of America’s GDP. Today, it’s 122 per cent.
Some investors are starting to doubt that the US ever will repay it. The doubters include Trump himself. In 2023, he was asked about the risk of a US sovereign default. He replied: “You might as well do it now because you’ll do it later.”
The worry is that “later” has arrived. Eleven days ago, the credit rating agency Moody’s cut the US government’s creditworthiness – for the first time since 1919 – to second-tier.
Of the 200 countries in the world, only 10, plus the European Union, are rated as risk-free by all three major credit agencies. The US is not among them. The AAA sovereigns are Australia, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Singapore, Sweden and Switzerland.
There are signs of growing anxiety in the markets. The US dollar has been sold off in the past week and bond interest rates bid up. And now comes the fiscal vandalism that Trump likes to call his “big beautiful” bill.
He’s half-right. It’s big, but it’d be ugly. The domestic politics of the bill are ugly enough. The poor get poorer through cuts to food stamps and Medicaid. The rich get richer; Trump’s tax cuts for high incomes and corporations get extended.
But that’s their country, their business. Where it gets ugly for the world is its effect on the federal debt. The technocrats of the Congressional Budget Office calculate that it would add about $US4 trillion to the debt over a decade.
The bill was passed narrowly by the House of Representatives and now goes to the Senate. If this is passed into law, market reaction will be critical. A sudden sell-off of US bonds would create a financial crisis with unpredictable consequences.
Peter Orszag, head of the US investment bank, Lazard, and previously director of the Congressional Budget Office, said this month that, in the past, he had ignored “all the Chicken Little, kind of ‘the sky is falling’ fiscal stuff because all the dire predictions were not happening. But if you compare where we are now to where we were a decade ago, it’s a lot different. The deficit is twice as high. Interest rates are dramatically higher. I think it’s time to worry again about this trajectory”.
So does historian Niall Ferguson. In February, he proposed something he calls “Ferguson’s law”. It posits that “any great power that spends more on debt servicing than on defence risks ceasing to be a great power”.
He describes his proposed threshold as timely “as the US began violating Ferguson’s Law for the first time in nearly a century in 2024”. The Congressional Budget Office says that US net interest payments hit 3.1 per cent as a share of GDP last year, overtaking defence spending at 2.9 per cent.
Different agencies have slightly different estimates, but the broad point is that the US is now in Ferguson’s danger zone, which he calls “a useful predictor of the decline of a great power”.
How does this hurt a great power? Because there is less butter and fewer guns: “The debt burden draws scarce resources towards itself, reducing the amount available for national security and leaving the power increasingly vulnerable to military challenge.”
He also finds the “Ferguson limit” signals the internal fragility of a great power, as well as its external vulnerability. His paper for the Hoover Institution studies empires from Habsburg to British to support his thesis.
Ferguson doesn’t claim that US collapse is inevitable at this point. But if its political system plunges ahead into ever-deeper debt, the risk of a market panic rises. And a chaotic sell-off could indeed seal the fate of empire. There’s an old market adage: “Deficits don’t matter. Until the day they do.”
https://www.theage.com.au/world/north-america/at-debt-s-door-america-s-superpower-is-waning-and-trump-s-part-of-the-problem-20250526-p5m2a7.html
From NMDOJ Facebook page: A federal judge has rejected the Trump Administration’s attempt to dismiss a groundbreaking lawsuit led by #NMAG Raúl Torrez—joined by the Attorneys General of Arizona, Michigan, and 13 other states.
Together this coalition continues their litigation against Elon Musk and the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE), alleging that Musk has been unlawfully wielding sweeping executive power without constitutional authority.
The #NMDOJ stands unwavering in its commitment to protect the rights of #NewMexicans and defend the foundational principles of our democracy.
kii said:
From NMDOJ Facebook page: A federal judge has rejected the Trump Administration’s attempt to dismiss a groundbreaking lawsuit led by #NMAG Raúl Torrez—joined by the Attorneys General of Arizona, Michigan, and 13 other states.
Together this coalition continues their litigation against Elon Musk and the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE), alleging that Musk has been unlawfully wielding sweeping executive power without constitutional authority.
The #NMDOJ stands unwavering in its commitment to protect the rights of #NewMexicans and defend the foundational principles of our democracy.
Good start.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/28/rfk-jr-medical-journals
RFK Jr threatens ban on federal scientists publishing in top journals
US health secretary calls leading medical journals such as Lancet ‘corrupt’ and pushes to create state-run alternatives
Bogsnorkler said:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/28/rfk-jr-medical-journalsRFK Jr threatens ban on federal scientists publishing in top journals
US health secretary calls leading medical journals such as Lancet ‘corrupt’ and pushes to create state-run alternatives
I’ve a suggestion for the name of a ‘state-run alternative’: Völkischer Beobachter.
captain_spalding said:
Bogsnorkler said:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/28/rfk-jr-medical-journalsRFK Jr threatens ban on federal scientists publishing in top journals
US health secretary calls leading medical journals such as Lancet ‘corrupt’ and pushes to create state-run alternatives
I’ve a suggestion for the name of a ‘state-run alternative’: Völkischer Beobachter.
Nah. Too German.
;)
Michael V said:
captain_spalding said:
Bogsnorkler said:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/28/rfk-jr-medical-journals
RFK Jr threatens ban on federal scientists publishing in top journals
US health secretary calls leading medical journals such as Lancet ‘corrupt’ and pushes to create state-run alternatives
I’ve a suggestion for the name of a ‘state-run alternative’: Völkischer Beobachter.
Nah. Too German.
;)
though their attempts to consolidate power seem completely unforeseeable by anyone
So a federal court has blocked all of the tariffs that DJT imposed on “Liberation Day” essentially saying that the executive doesn’t have unilateral authority to impose tariffs.
AussieDJ said:
The next installment:May 24, 2025
Heather Cox Richardson
May 25 (Sunday)On Thursday the Trump administration told Harvard University that because it had not handed over information on foreign students’ protest activities, violent activity, and coursework, the university had “lost privilege” of enrolling foreign students. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem said this decision was based on the administration’s determination to “enforce the law and root out the evils of anti-Americanism and antisemitism in society and campuses.”
—————————————-snip———————————————
Thanks for posting.
FMD.
Such gross, irresponsible, thoughtless and harmful stuff. Awful.
DJT is pretty unusual on international relations and immigration and has stacked the cabinet with bozos who can’t even minimally function in their roles, but in some ways he is just a regular Republican president: a single bill that cuts tax for the rich, adds 4 trillion to the deficits, cuts vital services, pops defence spending by 13% to 1.01 trillion.
TACO…..lololol 🤣😆
“Wall Street analysts have coined a new term called the ‘TACO trade.’ they’re saying Trump always chickens out on tariff threats, and that’s why markets are higher this week. what’s your response to that?”
Donny: “I kick out?”
reporter: “chicken out.”
Donny then launches into a two-minute-long whiny tirade during which he brags about all of his imaginary accomplishments, insists that changing his mind every other day is actually a strength, and culminates in—
“but don’t ever say what you said. that’s a nasty question. to me, that’s the nastiest question.”
This is a good, powerful, speech. He’s an anchor/presenter on the American 60 Minutes program.
The MAGAts are going off at him because he’s criticised Trump
https://commencement.news.wfu.edu/2020s/c2025/2025-scott-pelley/
LOL
appeals court has paused a trade court decision that found many of the Trump administration’s tariffs were illegal. It comes a day after the Court of International Trade ruled Donald Trump had overstepped his authority
AussieDJ said:
This is a good, powerful, speech. He’s an anchor/presenter on the American 60 Minutes program.The MAGAts are going off at him because he’s criticised Trump
https://commencement.news.wfu.edu/2020s/c2025/2025-scott-pelley/
It is a good read. A great speech.
and Trump can bugger off.
roughbarked said:
AussieDJ said:
This is a good, powerful, speech. He’s an anchor/presenter on the American 60 Minutes program.
The MAGAts are going off at him because he’s criticised Trump
https://commencement.news.wfu.edu/2020s/c2025/2025-scott-pelley/
It is a good read. A great speech.
and Trump can bugger off.
oh readable
thanks
Jessica Knurick, PhD, RD
We’d like to think we’ve learned from history. But what’s happening right now in the United States, quietly and strategically, should alarm every one of us.
Just like the rise of Lysenkoism, this didn’t happen all at once. It started with mistrust, then discrediting scientists and scientific consensus. Then came the purges, the closures, the funding stripped from legitimate research and redirected toward ideological projects. But it also gained momentum because the science being elevated, no matter how flawed, served a political purpose. It told the public what leaders wanted them to believe and helped increase morale and build support. It promised simple answers to complex problems. And it cast anyone who questioned it as disloyal, dangerous, or not wanting what is best for the country.
Lysenkoism was not an isolated historical example. It follows a playbook used by authoritarian regimes throughout history. First, undermine the legitimacy of science, then censor the language, defund the institutions and replace researchers with ideologues. And finally, use state-backed pseudoscience to justify your agenda while silencing dissent.
Science ceases to be a method for understanding the world. It becomes a tool of the state. And truth only counts if it serves the regime.
https://drjessicaknurick.substack.com/p/the-authoritarian-war-on-science
Bogsnorkler said:
Jessica Knurick, PhD, RDWe’d like to think we’ve learned from history. But what’s happening right now in the United States, quietly and strategically, should alarm every one of us.
Just like the rise of Lysenkoism, this didn’t happen all at once. It started with mistrust, then discrediting scientists and scientific consensus. Then came the purges, the closures, the funding stripped from legitimate research and redirected toward ideological projects. But it also gained momentum because the science being elevated, no matter how flawed, served a political purpose. It told the public what leaders wanted them to believe and helped increase morale and build support. It promised simple answers to complex problems. And it cast anyone who questioned it as disloyal, dangerous, or not wanting what is best for the country.
Lysenkoism was not an isolated historical example. It follows a playbook used by authoritarian regimes throughout history. First, undermine the legitimacy of science, then censor the language, defund the institutions and replace researchers with ideologues. And finally, use state-backed pseudoscience to justify your agenda while silencing dissent.
Science ceases to be a method for understanding the world. It becomes a tool of the state. And truth only counts if it serves the regime.
https://drjessicaknurick.substack.com/p/the-authoritarian-war-on-science
So Trump did learn from the Ruskies and used Cohn’s attack attack attack mode.
roughbarked said:
Bogsnorkler said:
Jessica Knurick, PhD, RDWe’d like to think we’ve learned from history. But what’s happening right now in the United States, quietly and strategically, should alarm every one of us.
Just like the rise of Lysenkoism, this didn’t happen all at once. It started with mistrust, then discrediting scientists and scientific consensus. Then came the purges, the closures, the funding stripped from legitimate research and redirected toward ideological projects. But it also gained momentum because the science being elevated, no matter how flawed, served a political purpose. It told the public what leaders wanted them to believe and helped increase morale and build support. It promised simple answers to complex problems. And it cast anyone who questioned it as disloyal, dangerous, or not wanting what is best for the country.
Lysenkoism was not an isolated historical example. It follows a playbook used by authoritarian regimes throughout history. First, undermine the legitimacy of science, then censor the language, defund the institutions and replace researchers with ideologues. And finally, use state-backed pseudoscience to justify your agenda while silencing dissent.
Science ceases to be a method for understanding the world. It becomes a tool of the state. And truth only counts if it serves the regime.
https://drjessicaknurick.substack.com/p/the-authoritarian-war-on-science
So Trump did learn from the Ruskies and used Cohn’s attack attack attack mode.
hate this shit
captain_spalding said:
Imagine if that was the choice between living or starving to death
Cymek said:
captain_spalding said:
Imagine if that was the choice between living or starving to death
they’d be much worse off under communism
captain_spalding said:
it always makes me laugh that of all the things the US gets upset about and has to censor it’s words like “ass”
roughbarked said:
Good god!
Victor Davis Hanson on how big it is Trump’s presidency
The ad I got before that one seems quite appropriate:
I did a quick scan of the first few comments, and left feeling somewhat dismayed.
The Rev Dodgson said:
roughbarked said:
Good god!
Victor Davis Hanson on how big it is Trump’s presidency
The ad I got before that one seems quite appropriate:
I did a quick scan of the first few comments, and left feeling somewhat dismayed.
Yes and Yes. There was a lot of poop in that.
Bogsnorkler said:
Memers will be investigated by the gestaco
The president picked Paul Ingrassia, the current White House liaison to the Department of Homeland Security, to lead the Office of Special Counsel, which examines public corruption
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/29/us/politics/ingrassia-office-special-counsel.html
dv said:
The president picked Paul Ingrassia, the current White House liaison to the Department of Homeland Security, to lead the Office of Special Counsel, which examines public corruptionhttps://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/29/us/politics/ingrassia-office-special-counsel.html
The only properly qualified person Trump ever hired was Stormy Daniels.
dv said:
The president picked Paul Ingrassia, the current White House liaison to the Department of Homeland Security, to lead the Office of Special Counsel, which examines public corruptionhttps://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/29/us/politics/ingrassia-office-special-counsel.html
Its usually used in racist type situations, except perhaps in the Dukes of Hazzard
dv said:
The president picked Paul Ingrassia, the current White House liaison to the Department of Homeland Security, to lead the Office of Special Counsel, which examines public corruptionhttps://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/29/us/politics/ingrassia-office-special-counsel.html
Righty-oh.
Shitler can’t miss this one, right over his gaudy house.
Spiny Norman said:
Shitler can’t miss this one, right over his gaudy house.
It does look fake though.
Spiny Norman said:
Shitler can’t miss this one, right over his gaudy house.
What does this TACO thing stand for?
Michael V said:
Spiny Norman said:
Shitler can’t miss this one, right over his gaudy house.What does this TACO thing stand for?
Trump Always Chickens Out
Michael V said:
Spiny Norman said:
Shitler can’t miss this one, right over his gaudy house.What does this TACO thing stand for?
Trump Always Chickens Out
Divine Angel said:
Michael V said:
Spiny Norman said:
Shitler can’t miss this one, right over his gaudy house.What does this TACO thing stand for?
Trump Always Chickens Out
Thanks.
In a way, maybe that’s a good thing.
party_pants said:
Michael V said:
Spiny Norman said:
Shitler can’t miss this one, right over his gaudy house.What does this TACO thing stand for?
Trump Always Chickens Out
Ta.
Michael V said:
Divine Angel said:
Michael V said:What does this TACO thing stand for?
Trump Always Chickens Out
Thanks.
In a way, maybe that’s a good thing.
Except I reckon his mates are probably making a killing on the stock market…get it down, buy, get it up again, sell.
Spiny Norman said:
Shitler can’t miss this one, right over his gaudy house.
Could have written TURD.
Trump Unfailingly Reverses Decisions.
captain_spalding said:
Spiny Norman said:
Shitler can’t miss this one, right over his gaudy house.Could have written TURD.
Trump Unfailingly Reverses Decisions.
Teehee
Carrick Ryan
The USA has been threatening to shut down TikTok for years because of the disinformation on its platform.
In March 2024, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act” (PAFACA) with a decisive bipartisan vote of 352–65. The bill required TikTok’s Chinese owned parent company to divest from the company within 270 days, or it would be banned within the USA.
Both Republicans and Democrats noted the multiple examples of how demonstrable lies had been amplified by the Chinese owned platform, constituting a genuine existential threat to US democracy.
During his first term, Trump promised to shut down the social media giant. But immediately after taking office, he back flipped, noting that it had been discovered that the majority of content on TikTok war pro-Trump.
He issued a 75 day extension to TikTok’s deadline in January, and again in April. No one really knows what he intends to do with it.
Now… the Trump Administration is threatening to impose sanctions on any foreign politician looking to regulate how US social media companies operate in their country. This is regulation intending to combat the exact same disinformation that Trump and most of US Congress agrees is a national security threat.
The sheer shamelessness of the hypocrisy is mind blowing.
Why are they doing this?
Well… these are some of America’s most influential and powerful companies, and they’ve just agreed to play nice with Trump so long as he ensures attempts by Europe and Australia to regulate how they operate are stopped.
Additionally, research shows consistently that the bulk of the disinformation and “hate speech” that so many countries want to curtail… is pro-Trump. Trump doesn’t care if social media is full of lies, so long as those lies help him. He’s said so himself when he reversed his ban on TikTok.
This is shameless, and it is a threat to our sovereignty and democracy. This is substantially more concerning than any of the sanctions he has imposed on us. He is threatening to go after the individual politicians we have elected to represent us in an attempt to intimidate them into standing down.
This needs to be a bigger issue.
Bogsnorkler said:
Carrick RyanThe USA has been threatening to shut down TikTok for years because of the disinformation on its platform.
In March 2024, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act” (PAFACA) with a decisive bipartisan vote of 352–65. The bill required TikTok’s Chinese owned parent company to divest from the company within 270 days, or it would be banned within the USA.Both Republicans and Democrats noted the multiple examples of how demonstrable lies had been amplified by the Chinese owned platform, constituting a genuine existential threat to US democracy.
During his first term, Trump promised to shut down the social media giant. But immediately after taking office, he back flipped, noting that it had been discovered that the majority of content on TikTok war pro-Trump.
He issued a 75 day extension to TikTok’s deadline in January, and again in April. No one really knows what he intends to do with it.
Now… the Trump Administration is threatening to impose sanctions on any foreign politician looking to regulate how US social media companies operate in their country. This is regulation intending to combat the exact same disinformation that Trump and most of US Congress agrees is a national security threat.
The sheer shamelessness of the hypocrisy is mind blowing.
Why are they doing this?
Well… these are some of America’s most influential and powerful companies, and they’ve just agreed to play nice with Trump so long as he ensures attempts by Europe and Australia to regulate how they operate are stopped.
Additionally, research shows consistently that the bulk of the disinformation and “hate speech” that so many countries want to curtail… is pro-Trump. Trump doesn’t care if social media is full of lies, so long as those lies help him. He’s said so himself when he reversed his ban on TikTok.This is shameless, and it is a threat to our sovereignty and democracy. This is substantially more concerning than any of the sanctions he has imposed on us. He is threatening to go after the individual politicians we have elected to represent us in an attempt to intimidate them into standing down.
This needs to be a bigger issue.
bullshit the USSA never engaged in disinformation campaigns and information warfare before kkk
Puppy murderer and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is in Poland campaigning for Karol Nawrocki.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/noem-blasts-weak-european-leaders-stumps-conservative-candidate/story?id=122244872
dv said:
Puppy murderer and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is in Poland campaigning for Karol Nawrocki.https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/noem-blasts-weak-european-leaders-stumps-conservative-candidate/story?id=122244872
It would be so funny if she was shot.
From Facebook:
Robert Reich
Friends,
This week marked the end of Part 1 of the second Trump regime.
First, Elon Musk has departed the Trump White House, not altogether happily.
He signed off via X after 128 wild days of mayhem and havoc, but the damage Musk did to our government and its capacities to serve the people will be felt for years — although many of his cuts were swiftly reversed by the courts. His slash-and-burn tactics, his raids on government (and personal) data, and his almost cruel delight in firing government employees and closing entire agencies leave a horrific legacy.
The irony is Musk came nowhere near his initial target of $2 trillion in savings. He kept moving the goal posts — from $2 trillion to $1 trillion, then to $150 billion. I doubt the final savings will be more than $20 billion, although we may never know because his method of accounting for and claiming the savings was opaque.
Musk’s havoc reveals the difference between budgetary effect (on which Musk had very little) and human effect (on which Musk’s treatment of the federal workers and of many Americans dependent on them caused extraordinary harm).
Musk did terrible damage to tens of thousands of civil servants, entire agencies such as USAID, and many government programs the public relies on, from FEMA to air traffic controllers to veterans benefits to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
A large portion of the American public came to despise him, and his own Tesla business tanked.
Good riddance.
Second, the court in charge of international trade has just struck down almost all of Trump’s tariffs.
The United States Constitution’s Article I (dealing with Congress), Section 8 (dealing with its specific duties and responsibilities), says, “The Congress shall have the power to … regulate Commerce with foreign nations.”
Seems pretty clear. But a law enacted by Congress in 1977 — the International Emergency Economic Powers Act — authorizes a president to impose tariffs, embargoes, and sanctions in response to national emergencies.
This is the thin reed on which Trump based his tariff rampage. He declared “national emergencies” because of fentanyl trafficking and the threat of persistent trade deficits. Trump also imposed retaliatory tariffs on countries that responded in kind.
But last night, three judges — appointed by Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama, and Trump himself — unanimously agreed that Trump exceeded his authority by claiming America’s long-standing trade deficit was a “national emergency” and struck down the vast majority of Trump’s tariffs issued since January 20. They said cash must be repaid to those firms that have already paid.
The ruling, by the U.S. Court of International Trade, nullifies Trump’s executive orders imposing 25-percent duties on Canadian and Mexican products and a 20-percent tariff on Chinese products in response to a purported national emergency on drug trafficking.
It also strikes down a 10-percent tariff imposed on all U.S. trading partners to address trade deficits, as well as Trump’s paused “reciprocal” tariffs of between 20 and 50 percent on 60-odd trading partners, which are now scheduled to go into effect on July 9 if foreign governments can’t reach a deal with the White House before then.
The court did this in the middle of tense negotiations with the EU, China, and other key trading partners who had only been forced to the negotiating table by the tariff threat. These talks may not even continue.
Yesterday, a second federal court ruled against Trump’s tariff authority. D.C. District Court Judge Rudolph Contreras found, like the U.S. Court of International Trade, that Trump does not have the power he claims.
Trump retains the power to impose a 15-percent tariff on nations with which America has a significant trade deficit. And some of Trump’s tariffs — the 25-percent levies on metal and automobile imports — were issued under different legislation and will not be affected.
Obviously, the Trump regime will appeal. But chances for Trump to prevail on appeal appear dim.
Finally, Trump’s “big beautiful bill” — his effort to slash taxes, mostly on the wealthy — is stymied in the Senate.
Senate Republicans are deeply divided, setting up a battle in the upper chamber that’s likely to drag on well into July.
GOP senators are vowing to rewrite the bill, but they’re still weeks away from putting together a package that can muster the 51 votes it needs to pass.
The more senators change the legislation, the more difficult it will be to pass again through the House — where Republicans control a slim 220-212 majority. (Identical legislation must be approved by both chambers before it can go to Trump for his signature.)
The Medicaid cuts divide conservatives, with Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) warning they could be bad policy and politically suicidal. Maine’s Susan Collins is also concerned about them.
North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis warns that an abrupt termination of renewable energy incentives will hit domestic companies like a bomb blast. He’s keeping close track of the billions of dollars of low-carbon energy investments in North Carolina.
Collins and Tillis are top Democratic targets for 2026. If they’re defeated, Republicans might lose control of the Senate for years to come. With their reelections potentially riding on how the bill affects their constituents, Collins and Tillis are likely to drive a hard bargain, whether on Medicaid reforms or green energy incentives.
Treasury Department Secretary Scott Bessent has also warned Congress it will need to raise the debt ceiling in July if the government is to meet its fiduciary obligations.
What does all this mean?
That the first phase of Trump’s second term — the “flood-the-zone,” shock-and-awe blitzkrieg — is over. Without Musk, the power to unilaterally levy tariffs willy-nilly, or the momentum to enact his “big beautiful bill,” Trump is left only with his vindictive rage — and his money-making schemes to enrich himself and his family.
But Trump II Part 2 may not be easy for America. I expect Russell Vought to take over the reins at Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency. Vought, the author of Project 2025 and Trump’s budget director in both his first and second terms, is an inside player who — unlike Musk — knows how to get things done without causing widespread backlash. He’s likely to work quietly but effectively.
Meanwhile, Trump will continue to push American isolationism. I expect Stephen Miller’s vicious anti-immigrant policies to continue, even though the courts have slowed them down. The regime may now shift its focus to a more comprehensive dragnet targeting undocumented people inside the United States. And Trump’s belligerence toward America’s traditional neighbors and allies will continue.
Trump is not giving up on any of this. In fact, I expect that in Trump II Part 2, he’ll grandstand even more. He’ll rage against judges and take whatever he can to the Supreme Court. And his giant budget-busting tax cut will continue to be a focus of his demands on Congress.
But the frenzy of Part 1 is now over. There will still be bonkers executive orders and many headlines, and we must continue to resist however we can. But much of the damage so far seems to have been somewhat contained.
What are your thoughts?”
kii said:
It must be nice to feel no empathy.
Michael V said:
kii said:
It must be nice to feel no empathy.
but the words she is saying is true
SCIENCE said:
Michael V said:
kii said:
It must be nice to feel no empathy.
but the words she is saying is true
Except that she is saving hers for after the others.
roughbarked said:
SCIENCE said:Michael V said:
It must be nice to feel no empathy.
but the words she is saying is true
Except that she is saving hers for after the others.
As usual, a nonsense comment.
Do you ever think before you post?
Carrick Ryan
One of the most confounding aspects of Trump’s foreign policy actually provides a revealing insight into why he has such a committed cult like following.
I’m not talking about every Trump voter, I’m talking about the MAGA believers.The devoted disciples.
You’ve probably noticed, Trump doesn’t care how much the rest of the world hates the USA. That’s because he’s never cared if people hated him; So long as he thought he was respected.
Trump doesn’t understand the virtues of being a country others might look up to, rather than a country everyone tries to avoid eye contact with. If you’re as powerful as the USA, why waste time and money trying to be liked? He has never understood the virtues of friendship.
Ask yourself:
How many lifelong friends does he have?
How many “friends” has he turned on in an instant?
How many in his inner circle are terrified of him?
How many of his adversaries does he humiliate by forcing them to participate in public proclamations of admiration… knowing full well they hate him inside?
Trump has never wanted anyone to love him, in fact he never cared if he was despised. His reality TV persona was exactly how he wanted to be seen… so long as he was so powerful that even those that despised him had to bend at the knee.
But it’s this very characteristic that has made him a messiah to tens of millions of Americans. They love him because he says whatever he wants and feels no shame… and they want to be able to do that too.
They want to be able to say out loud thoughts they know they should be ashamed of. They want to reassure each other that being a little bit racist, or bigoted, or sexist, or dishonest, isn’t actually immoral after all. In fact, now they want to go after all the people that called them a horrible person just for “saying what everyone’s thinking”.
…and along came a President that didn’t care if most the world hated him. He said all those things out loud and felt no consequence. He liberated them from their shame.
Trump has taken their hatred, their prejudice, their mistrust of experts, and their conspiracy theories, and given them the legitimacy of the Presidential Seal. Millions of Americans who felt aggrieved at being chastised for their ignorance now believe they are truly represented by their democracy for the first time.
Trump knows that his base is his power. He’s seen them storm the Capital Building for him, they exonerate him from every crime, and they will unleash on any Republican who even begins to second guess his infallibility.
He will defend his supporters no matter what they say or do, because they show the same loyalty to him. It’s a codependent relationship in its truest form.
They can be rude, they could use their power to bully others, and they can treat immigrants like rats – because that’s what they are to them. They want them gone, they want them off of their streets… and Trump doesn’t care what the law says, or what the “elitist liberal intellectuals” say. He doesn’t even care what the Supreme Court says. He will get those immigrants out because he hates them just as much.
He knows tens of millions are scared of him, he knows that even journalists have to be brave to question him, and he knows that the whole world is afraid he might be dictator. He loves it.
He likes the fact he breeds fear in almost everyone that speaks to him because like all bullies, he mistakes fear for respect…
His supporters know he’s a bully. But he’s their bully. Which means they think they’re finally in charge… and if they ever fear they’ll lose that power, they’ll fight to keep it.
roughbarked said:
SCIENCE said:Michael V said:
It must be nice to feel no empathy.
but the words she is saying is true
Except that she is saving hers for after the others.
yes, because she can afford good healthcare.
kii said:
Good image from Jeff Tiedrich’s column today:
Also via Jeff’s column:
President Trump Takes Questions From Reporters
(16 sec)
