anuary 31, 2026 (Saturday)

White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller posted on social media this morning:

“Plenty of countries in history have experimented with importing a foreign labor class. The West is the first and only civilization to import a foreign labor class that is granted full political rights, including welfare & the right to vote. All visas are a bridge to citizenship. In America, for generations now, the policy has been that anyone who would economically benefit from moving to the US can do so, exercise the franchise in the US and their children, the moment they are born, will be full American citizens with all the rights and benefits therein.”

After his call for a “labor class” excluded from citizenship and a voice in government, Miller went on to reject the idea that Haitians living and working legally in Ohio should be described as part of Ohio communities. Calling out Democratic former senator Sherrod Brown, who is running for the Senate again this year, for including them, Miller posted: “Democrats just flatly reject any concept of nationhood that has ever existed in human history.”

History is doing that rhyming thing again.

In 1858, Senator James Henry Hammond (D-SC), a wealthy enslaver, rose to explain to his northern colleagues why their objection to human enslavement was so badly misguided. “In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life,” he said. Such workers needed few brains and little skill; they just had to be strong, docile, and loyal to their betters, who would organize their labor and then collect the profits from it, concentrating that wealth into their own hands to move society forward efficiently.

Hammond called such workers “the mud-sill of society and political government.” Much like the beams driven into the ground to support a stately home above, the mudsill supported “that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement.” The South had pushed Black Americans into that mudsill role. “We use them for our purpose, and call them slaves,” he said. The North also had a mudsill class, he added: “the man who lives by daily labor…in short, your whole hireling class of manual laborers and ‘operatives,’ as you call them, are essentially slaves.”

But Hammond warned that the North was making a terrible mistake. “Our slaves do not vote,” he said. “We give them no political power. Yours do vote, and, being the majority, they are the depositories of all your political power. If they knew the tremendous secret, that the ballot-box is stronger than ‘an army with banners,’ and could combine, where would you be? Your society would be reconstructed, your government overthrown, your property divided…by the quiet process of the ballot-box.”

Hammond was very clear about what he believed the world should look like. Black Americans should always be subordinate to white men, of course, but white women, too, were subordinate. They were made “to breed,” as “toy for recreation,” or to bring men “wealth and position,” he had explained to his son in 1852. Hammond’s promising early political career had been nearly derailed when he admitted that for two years he had sexually assaulted his four young nieces, the daughters of the powerful Wade Hampton II (although he insisted he was being wronged because he should get credit for showing any restraint at all when faced with four such “lovely creatures”).

If women and Black people were at the bottom of society, southern white men were an “aristocracy” by virtue of their descent from “the ancient cavaliers of Virginia…a race of men without fear and without reproach,” “alike incapable of servility and selfishness.” By definition, whatever such leaders did was what was good for society, and any man who had not achieved that status was excluded because of his own failings or criminal inclinations.

The southern system, Hammond told the Senate, was “the best in the world…such as no other people ever enjoyed upon the face of the earth,” and spreading it would benefit everyone.

The next year, rising politician Abraham Lincoln told an audience at the Wisconsin state fair in Milwaukee that he rejected Hammond’s mudsill theory. Lincoln explained that Hammond’s “mud-sill theory” divided the world into permanent castes, arguing that men with money drove the economy and workers were stuck permanently at the bottom.

For his part, Lincoln embraced a different theory: It was workers, not wealthy men, who drove the economy. While men of wealth had little incentive to experiment and throw themselves into their work, men on the make were innovative and hardworking. Such men could—and should—rise. This “free labor” theory articulated the true meaning of American democracy for northerners and for the non-slave-holding southerners, who, as Lincoln reminded his listeners, made up a majority in the South. “The prudent, penniless beginner in the world, labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land, for himself; then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him,” he explained.

In the election of 1860, southern Democrats tried to get voters to back their worldview by promising they were reflecting God’s will and by using virulent racism, warning that Black Americans must be kept in their place or they would destroy American society.

But, in a nation of immigrants and men who had worked their way up from day laborers to become prominent men, Lincoln stood firm on the Declaration of Independence. He warned that if people started to make exceptions to the idea that all men are created equal, they would not stop. They would “transform this Government into a government of some other form.” “If that declaration is not the truth,” Lincoln said, “let us get the Statute book, in which we find it and tear it out!” To cries of “No! No!” he responded: “et us stand firmly by it then.”

Miller’s white nationalism is not the concept on which this nation was built. The United States of America was built on the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the sweat and blood of almost 250 years of Americans, often those from marginalized communities, working to make those principles a reality.

The hierarchical system Miller embraces echoes the system championed by those like Hammond, who imagined themselves the nation’s true leaders who had the right to rule. They were not bound by the law, and they rejected the idea that those unwilling to recognize their superiority should have either economic or political power.

The horrors of the Epstein files show a group of powerful and wealthy men and women who sexually assaulted children and showed no concern either for their crimes or that they might have to answer to the law. The public still does not know the extent of the horrors or the human-trafficking business in which Epstein and others were engaged. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche told reporters yesterday that the Department of Justice was not releasing any item from the Epstein files that showed “death, physical abuse, or injury.”

“You the biggest problem with being friends with you?” Dr. Peter Attia wrote in an email to Epstein in response to an email with the subject line “Got a fresh shipment.” Attia answered his own question: “The life you lead is so outrageous, and yet I can’t tell a soul.”

Trump echoed Hammond in a different way tonight on Air Force One as he traveled to Florida. Asked by a reporter how he would handle being on both sides of his $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS, he suggested that taking the money of the American people into his own hands would enable him to use it for the public good. “I’m supposed to work out a settlement with myself,” he said. “We could make it a substantial amount, nobody would care because it’s gonna go to numerous, very good charities.”

Another story tonight indicated the degree to which the president sees himself as part of a wealthy caste that is above the law. Sam Kessler, Rebecca Ballhous, Eliot Brown, and Angus Berwick of the Wall Street Journal published a blockbuster report showing that four days before Trump’s 2025 inauguration, men working for an Abu Dhabi royal signed a secret deal with the Trump family to buy 49% of their brand-new cryptocurrency venture World Liberty Financial. The investors would pay half immediately, sending $187 million to entities held by the Trump family and at least $31 million to entities held by Steve Witkoff, a co-founder of World Liberty Financial whom Trump had named U.S. envoy to the Middle East weeks earlier.

The deal was backed by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who is the brother of the president of the United Arab Emirates and oversees more than $1.3 trillion that includes the country’s largest wealth fund. Tahnoon has wanted access to U.S. AI technology, but the Biden administration blocked access out of concern it could end up in Chinese hands. The Trump administration, in striking contrast, has committed to allowing the United Arab Emirates to buy about half a million of the most advanced AI chips a year.

Federal agents acting for the Trump administration are trying to enforce the authority of those like Miller, tear-gassing, arresting, and killing American citizens. Thousands marched peacefully in Portland, Oregon, today but, as Alex Baumhardt of the Oregon Capital Chronicle recorded, “federal officers outside the ICE facility in Portland…indiscriminately threw loads of gas and flash bangs” at marchers, including children. Portland, Oregon, city councillor Mitch Green reported: “I just got tear gassed along with thousands of union members, many of whom had their families with them. Federal agents at the ICE facility tear gassed children. We must abolish ICE, DHS, and we must have prosecutions.”

Tim Dickinson of The Contrarian wrote: “Today I saw ICE gas little white kids in the streets of Portland with chemical weapons. Imagine what they’re doing to brown and black kids in the detention camps.”

And yet, in another echo of the 1850s, MAGA Republicans are reversing victim and offender, blaming the people under assault for the violence. Trump officials insist that community watch groups and protesters are engaging in “domestic terrorism.” Greg Jaffe and Thomas Gibbons-Neff of the New York Times flagged that Representative Eli Crane (R-AZ) told right-wing podcaster Benny Johnson on Monday that those people protecting their neighbors from the violence of federal agents want “revolution.” “They want to fundamentally remake and tear down the institutions and the culture of this country.”

In an order requiring the release of five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his father, asylum seeker Adrian Conejo Arias, from detention, U.S. District Judge Fred Biery noted that in their crusade against undocumented immigrants, U.S. officials are ignoring the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. “or some among us,” the judge wrote, “the perfidious lust for unbridled power and the imposition of cruelty in its quest know no bounds and are bereft of human decency. And the rule of law be damned.”

Judge Biery signed the order after saying he was putting “ a judicial finger in the constitutional dike.” Under his signature, he posted the now-famous image of the little boy detained in his blue bunny hat and Spiderman backpack, along with the notations for two biblical passages: “Jesus said, ‘Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these,’” and “Jesus wept.”

Tonight, voters flipped a seat in the Texas Senate from Republican to Democratic in a special election. Democrat Taylor Rehmet, an Air Force veteran and machinist, defeated right-wing Republican Leigh Wambsganss for a seat that Republicans have held since the early 1990s. Robert Downen of Texas Monthly noted that in the final days of the campaign, the Wambsganss campaign spent $310,000 while Rehmet spent nothing, and Daniel Nichanian of BoltsMag posted that overall, Wambsganss spent nearly $2.2 million more than Rehmet in the campaign. Both Texas governor Greg Abbott and Trump himself publicly supported Wambsganss.

And yet, as G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers noted, voters flipped a district that Trump won in 2024 by 17 points to Rehmet, electing him by a 14.4-point margin. After removing the minor-party candidates in the vote, the swing from the Republican in 2024 was 32 points toward the Democrats. In Texas.

so let us get this straight, they tell us that 爱 will do all the shitty grind work so that humans won’t have to slave away like, well, slaves

and here they tell us that they need foreign sourced labour without associated rights, to do all the grind work

so either they’re talking a bunch of bullshit about 爱 and it can’t won’t never was intended to do the shitty work for the greater good

or it’s not really about needing the labour at all and it’s just about domination and subordination and supremacy and violence

or, actually, most likely, Old El Paso

fuck them

February 1, 2026 (Sunday)

On February 1, 1862, in the early days of the Civil War, the Atlantic Monthly published Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” summing up the cause of freedom for which the United States troops would soon be fighting. “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord,” it began.
“He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;

He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:

His truth is marching on.”

Howe had written the poem on a visit to Washington, D.C., with her husband. Approaching the city, she had reflected sadly that there was little she could do for the United States. She couldn’t send her menfolk to war: her husband was too old to fight, her sons too young. And with a toddler, she didn’t even have enough time to volunteer to pack stores for the field hospitals. “I thought of the women of my acquaintance whose sons or husbands were fighting our great battle; the women themselves serving in the hospitals, or busying themselves with the work of the Sanitary Commission,” she recalled, and she worried there was nothing she could give to the cause.

One day she, her husband, and friends, toured the troop encampments surrounding the city. To amuse themselves on the way back to the hotel, they sang a song popular with the troops as they marched. It ended: “John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave; his soul is marching on.” A friend challenged Howe to write more uplifting words for the soldiers’ song.

That night, Howe slept soundly. She woke before dawn and, lying in bed, began thinking about the tune she had heard the day before. She recalled: “s I lay waiting for the dawn, the long lines of the desired poem began to twine themselves in my mind…. With a sudden effort, I sprang out of bed, and found in the dimness an old stump of a pen…. I scrawled the verses almost without looking at the paper.”

Howe’s hymn captured the tension of Washington, D.C., during the war, and the soldiers’ camps strung in circles around the city to keep invaders from the U.S. capital.

“I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps,
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps:
His day is marching on.”

Howe’s Battle Hymn of the Republic went on to define the Civil War as a holy war for human freedom:

“In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me.
As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
While God is marching on.”

The Battle Hymn became the anthem of the Union during the Civil War, and exactly three years after it appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, on February 1, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Joint Resolution of Congress passing the Thirteenth Amendment and sending it off to the states for ratification. The amendment provided that “either slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” It gave Congress power to enforce that amendment. This was the first amendment that gave power to the federal government rather than taking it away.

When the measure had passed the House the day before, the lawmakers and spectators had gone wild. “The members on the floor huzzaed in chorus with deafening and equally emphatic cheers of the throng in the galleries,” the New York Times reported. “The ladies in the dense assemblage waved their handkerchiefs, and again and again the applause was repeated, intermingled with clapping of hands and exclamations of ‘Hurrah for freedom,’ ‘Glory enough for one day,’ &c.

The audience were wildly excited, and the friends of the measure were jubilant.” Indiana congressman George Julian later recalled, “It seemed to me I had been born into a new life, and that the world was overflowing with beauty and joy, while I was inexpressibly thankful for the privilege of recording my name on so glorious a page of the nation’s history.”

But the hopes of that moment had crumbled within a decade. Almost a century later, students from Bennett College, a women’s college in Greensboro, North Carolina, set out to bring them back to life. They organized to protest the F.W. Woolworth Company’s willingness to sell products to Black people but refusal to serve them food. On February 1, 1960, their male colleagues from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University sat down on stools at Woolworth’s department store lunch counter in Greensboro. David Richmond, Franklin McCain, Ezell A. Blair Jr., and Joseph McNeil were first-year students who wanted to find a way to combat the segregation under which Black Americans had lived since the 1880s.

So the men forced the issue by sitting down and ordering coffee and doughnuts. They sat quietly as the white waitress refused to serve them and the store manager ignored them. They came back the next day with a larger group. This time, television cameras covered the story. By February 3 there were 60 men and women sitting. By February 5 there were 50 white male counterprotesters.

By March the sit-in movement had spread across the South, to bus routes, museums, art galleries, and swimming pools. In July, after profits had dropped dramatically, the store manager of the Greensboro Woolworth’s asked four Black employees to put on street clothes and order food at the counter. They did, and they were served. Desegregation in public spaces had begun.

In 1976, President Gerald Ford officially recognized February 1 as the first day of Black History Month, asking the public to “seize the opportunity to honor the too-often neglected accomplishments of Black Americans in every area of endeavor throughout our history.”

On February 1, 2023, the family of Tyre Nichols laid their 29-year-old son to rest in Memphis, Tennessee. He was so severely beaten by police officers on January 7, allegedly for a traffic violation, that he died three days later.

On February 1, 2026, as the fiftieth observance of Black History Month begins, government officials under the administration of Donald J. Trump have just removed an exhibit on enslavement from Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia. The exhibit acknowledged nine people enslaved at the President’s House Site when President George Washington lived there. Curators intended the exhibit to examine “the paradox between slavery and freedom in the founding of the nation,” but it conflicted with Trump’s March 2025 order that national historic sites should “focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people.” In his order, Trump called out Independence National Historical Park for promoting “corrosive ideology,” teaching visitors that “America is purportedly racist.”

The administration is openly working to replace American multiculturalism with white nationalism, launching raids by federal agents to terrorize Brown and Black Americans as well as white Americans who reject MAGA ideology.

On Saturday, in Minneapolis, where federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol are attacking immigrants and those marching to end the violence of the federal agents, people entered a Target store to protest the retail chain’s cooperation with federal agents. In unison, they sang: “We the people stand together, we the people stand together….”

The words were set to the tune of The Battle Hymn of the Republic.

Thanks.

:)

February 2, 2026 (Monday)

It has been a very long time since we took the night off.

I hate to do it because there is so much to record, but it appears that if we wait for a slow day to take a rest there will be no days off at all.

So let’s take a breather and come back to it fresh tomorrow.

Thanks.

buffy said:

February 2, 2026 (Monday)

It has been a very long time since we took the night off.

I hate to do it because there is so much to record, but it appears that if we wait for a slow day to take a rest there will be no days off at all.

So let’s take a breather and come back to it fresh tomorrow.

Absolutely.
I’m knackered. I has been a big day.

February 3, 2026 (Tuesday)

Yesterday, the day before Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s termination of Haiti’s Temporary Protected Status (TPS) designation, U.S. District Court Judge Ana C. Reyes stopped that termination until a pending court case worked its way through the courts.

At stake first of all were the lives of about 353,000 Haitians living legally in the United States since the catastrophic Haitian earthquake of 2010, whom the termination of that status would render undocumented overnight. The impact on their lives would also affect their families, friends, and employers. Also at stake, though, is Trump administration officials’ rejection of both facts and the rule of law on which the United States was founded in order to advance their white nationalist ideology.

As Judge Reyes explains, Congress established Temporary Protective Status in 1990 to change previously haphazard executive decisions about whether to receive immigrants from disaster-stricken countries that left recipients unclear about their immigration status. In its place, Congress created “a system of temporary status that was predictable, dependable, and insulated from electoral politics.” It established criteria and a process for designating a country under TPS, accepting applications for immigration under TPS, and reviewing that designation periodically to determine if that designation should be extended. The system leaves to the Secretary of Homeland Security the power to evaluate those extensions.

And yet, the judge explains, Secretary Noem ignored the process and the criteria, instead relying on ideology. On December 1, 2025, Noem posted: “I just met with the President. I am recommending a full travel ban on every damn country that’s been flooding our nation with killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies. Our forefathers built this nation on blood, sweat, and the unyielding love of freedom—not for foreign invaders to slaughter our heroes, suck dry our hard-earned tax dollars, or snatch the benefits owed to AMERICANS. WE DON’T WANT THEM. NOT ONE.”

Noem’s statements echo those of President Donald J. Trump, who referred to Haiti as a “sh*thole” country and tried to end TPS for people from Haiti beginning in 2017. During the 2024 campaign, Trump falsely accused Haitian immigrants of “eating the dogs,” “eating the cats,” and “eating the pets” of people who live in Springfield, Ohio. He insisted he would revoke Haiti’s TPS designation and send immigrants “back to their country.”

Five Haitian TPS holders sued to stop the administration from ending their protected status, claiming Noem ignored the legal procedures because of her “hostility to nonwhite immigrants.” Reyes says Noem did indeed ignore the law and that it “seems substantially likely” she did so because of her white nationalist ideology, noting that Noem has terminated all twelve TPS designations that have reached her desk.

But, as Reyes points out, the facts simply don’t match their ideology. TPS holders participate in the workforce at the exceptionally high rate of 94.6%. Far from being “killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies,” the plaintiffs in the case challenging Noem’s decision are a neuroscientist researching Alzheimer’s disease, a software engineer at a national bank, a toxicology lab assistant, a college economics major, and a registered nurse.

When Noem claimed that it was “contrary to the national interest” to permit about 350,000 Haitian immigrants to stay in the country until it is safe to go back to Haiti, Reyes noted, she characterized them as criminals without any actual evidence. She also ignored the public’s interest in the fact that Haitian TPS holders pay $1.3 billion a year in taxes, and that through their work in sectors that are desperate for laborers, they add about $3.4 billion to the U.S. economy annually. They are deeply embedded in their communities, and tearing them out would shatter families and worksites.

“There is an old adage among lawyers,” Reyes wrote as she decided against the Trump administration. “If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. If you have the law on your side, pound the law. If you have neither, pound the table. Secretary Noem, the record to-date shows, does not have the facts on her side—or at least has ignored them. Does not have the law on her side—or at least has ignored it. Having neither…, she pounds X ( Twitter). Kristi Noem has a First Amendment right to call immigrants killers, leeches, entitlement junkies, and any other inapt name she wants. Secretary Noem, however, is constrained by both our Constitution and the to apply faithfully the facts to the law in implementing the TPS program. The record to-date shows she has yet to do that.”

In the conflict between reality and white nationalist ideology, reality appears to be gaining ground. Americans do not like federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol terrorizing their streets, detaining children, and shooting American citizens. As G. Elliott Morris noted in Strength in Numbers on Sunday, a new Fox News poll shows that Americans support Democrats over Republicans on a generic ballot at higher percentages than they have since the survey began: 52% of the vote for Democrats to 46% for Republicans. That 52% for Democrats is the highest support recorded for either party; Democrats hit the poll’s previous high in October 2017 at 50%. Morris notes Democrats are “firmly in ‘wave’ territory” for November’s elections.

Republicans are trying to regain support by seeming to back off their extremism, although they are not backing far: not a single Republican showed up for a public forum held today in Washington, D.C., by Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Representative Robert Garcia (D-CA) and other Democrats on ICE violence. At the hearing, Marimar Martinez, a U.S. citizen shot five times by federal agents, told her story; so did Aliya Rahman, another U.S. citizen detained by ICE; and so did the brothers of U.S. citizen Renee Good, killed by federal agents.

Representative Garcia showed a picture of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, who is a key instigator of the ICE attacks, and said: “There’s probably no single person in this government has done more damage…and more harm to people across this country, immigrants and U.S. citizens…than this man right here, and it’s our job…to hold him responsible for the crimes that are happening to United States citizens.” A new Data For Progress poll shows that 51% of American voters think Miller should be removed, while only 33% think he should not.

But lawmakers have at least had to adjust their actions to acknowledge the fury of American voters at the behavior of federal agents.

Today the House passed the budget to fund the government except for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which was funded only for two more weeks to give Congress time to hash out terms for funding the department that Democrats will accept. Republicans had been clear they did not want to separate out DHS funding. Ultimately, Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) had to accept the separation in order to prevent a long-term shutdown, and House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) got enough Republicans to go along that the measure, without DHS funding, passed. Trump signed it later in the day.

As of yesterday, the head of the “Weaponization Working Group,” created in the Department of Justice on Attorney General Pam Bondi’s first day in office to punish the people Trump insisted had weaponized the legal system against him, has been removed. Right-wing lawyer Ed Martin had been a leader in Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election and had claimed those convicted for crimes relating to that attempt had been unfairly prosecuted. Once in power, he had turned the department’s resources toward prosecuting those Trump perceived to be enemies, including former Federal Bureau of Investigation director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James.

So unpopular has it become to be associated with Trump that an attempt to distract from plummeting ticket sales and artists’ boycotts after he took over the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and put his name on it may be behind Trump’s Sunday night announcement he is closing the venue, claiming it needs two years of renovations.

As voters turn against the administration, Trump is openly working to rig the 2026 election to guarantee Republicans win.

On Wednesday, January 28, FBI agents raided an election office in Fulton County, Georgia, walking away with 700 boxes of ballots, tabulation tapes, and other election-related material from the 2020 election. Marc Elias of Democracy Docket noted that the warrant came from Thomas Albus, whom Trump appointed U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri. Albus should not have had anything to do with a raid in Georgia, but Bloomberg reported that Attorney General Bondi appears to have appointed Albus a special assistant to the attorney general, giving him the ability to operate across the nation. Elias points out that this gives Albus dramatic power over future elections.

The raid was significant not just because the FBI took the ballots Trump has complained about for years—ballots that have been counted three times—but also because Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was there. The DNI has no law enforcement role in our system; she is supposed to coordinate and oversee the agencies in the U.S. intelligence community. At first, officials tried to suggest she was there by chance, but yesterday William K. Rashbaum, Devlin Barrett, and Julian E. Barnes of the New York Times reported that she met with some of the FBI agents who had conducted the raid. During the meeting, she reached Trump on her cell phone and he spoke to the agents himself.

David Laufman, who served in the Justice Department in both Democratic and Republican administrations, told the New York Times reporters: “It is extremely dangerous to our democracy and a shocking abandonment of years of sound policy for the president to be directly involved in the conduct of domestic criminal investigations, especially one that seeks to redress his personal grievances and to make the director of national intelligence an instrument of his political will.”

Then, yesterday, Trump told former deputy FBI director Dan Bongino, who has gone back to podcasting, that he loses elections only because Democrats import undocumented immigrants to vote. This is bonkers. Voting by undocumented immigrants, or any noncitizens, is both illegal and incredibly rare, but Trump has made it part of his standard rhetoric since 2016.

He said to Bongino: “These people were brought to our country to vote, and they vote illegally, and the, you know, amazing that the Republicans aren’t tougher on it. The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over, we should take over the voting, the voting in at least many, 15 places.’ The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting. We have states that are so crooked and the county votes, we have states that I won that show I didn’t win. Now you going to see something in Georgia where they were able to get with a court order, the ballots? You’re going to see some interesting things come in. But, you know, like the 2020 election. I won that election by so much.”

Although the Constitution gives control of elections exclusively to the states, at a bill signing in the Oval Office today, Trump doubled down on his call for Republicans to “nationalize” elections.

Neophyte said:

February 3, 2026 (Tuesday)

Yesterday, the day before Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s termination of Haiti’s Temporary Protected Status (TPS) designation, U.S. District Court Judge Ana C. Reyes stopped that termination until a pending court case worked its way through the courts.

At stake first of all were the lives of about 353,000 Haitians living legally in the United States since the catastrophic Haitian earthquake of 2010, whom the termination of that status would render undocumented overnight. The impact on their lives would also affect their families, friends, and employers. Also at stake, though, is Trump administration officials’ rejection of both facts and the rule of law on which the United States was founded in order to advance their white nationalist ideology.

As Judge Reyes explains, Congress established Temporary Protective Status in 1990 to change previously haphazard executive decisions about whether to receive immigrants from disaster-stricken countries that left recipients unclear about their immigration status. In its place, Congress created “a system of temporary status that was predictable, dependable, and insulated from electoral politics.” It established criteria and a process for designating a country under TPS, accepting applications for immigration under TPS, and reviewing that designation periodically to determine if that designation should be extended. The system leaves to the Secretary of Homeland Security the power to evaluate those extensions.

And yet, the judge explains, Secretary Noem ignored the process and the criteria, instead relying on ideology. On December 1, 2025, Noem posted: “I just met with the President. I am recommending a full travel ban on every damn country that’s been flooding our nation with killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies. Our forefathers built this nation on blood, sweat, and the unyielding love of freedom—not for foreign invaders to slaughter our heroes, suck dry our hard-earned tax dollars, or snatch the benefits owed to AMERICANS. WE DON’T WANT THEM. NOT ONE.”

Noem’s statements echo those of President Donald J. Trump, who referred to Haiti as a “sh*thole” country and tried to end TPS for people from Haiti beginning in 2017. During the 2024 campaign, Trump falsely accused Haitian immigrants of “eating the dogs,” “eating the cats,” and “eating the pets” of people who live in Springfield, Ohio. He insisted he would revoke Haiti’s TPS designation and send immigrants “back to their country.”

Five Haitian TPS holders sued to stop the administration from ending their protected status, claiming Noem ignored the legal procedures because of her “hostility to nonwhite immigrants.” Reyes says Noem did indeed ignore the law and that it “seems substantially likely” she did so because of her white nationalist ideology, noting that Noem has terminated all twelve TPS designations that have reached her desk.

But, as Reyes points out, the facts simply don’t match their ideology. TPS holders participate in the workforce at the exceptionally high rate of 94.6%. Far from being “killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies,” the plaintiffs in the case challenging Noem’s decision are a neuroscientist researching Alzheimer’s disease, a software engineer at a national bank, a toxicology lab assistant, a college economics major, and a registered nurse.

When Noem claimed that it was “contrary to the national interest” to permit about 350,000 Haitian immigrants to stay in the country until it is safe to go back to Haiti, Reyes noted, she characterized them as criminals without any actual evidence. She also ignored the public’s interest in the fact that Haitian TPS holders pay $1.3 billion a year in taxes, and that through their work in sectors that are desperate for laborers, they add about $3.4 billion to the U.S. economy annually. They are deeply embedded in their communities, and tearing them out would shatter families and worksites.

“There is an old adage among lawyers,” Reyes wrote as she decided against the Trump administration. “If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. If you have the law on your side, pound the law. If you have neither, pound the table. Secretary Noem, the record to-date shows, does not have the facts on her side—or at least has ignored them. Does not have the law on her side—or at least has ignored it. Having neither…, she pounds X ( Twitter). Kristi Noem has a First Amendment right to call immigrants killers, leeches, entitlement junkies, and any other inapt name she wants. Secretary Noem, however, is constrained by both our Constitution and the to apply faithfully the facts to the law in implementing the TPS program. The record to-date shows she has yet to do that.”

In the conflict between reality and white nationalist ideology, reality appears to be gaining ground. Americans do not like federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol terrorizing their streets, detaining children, and shooting American citizens. As G. Elliott Morris noted in Strength in Numbers on Sunday, a new Fox News poll shows that Americans support Democrats over Republicans on a generic ballot at higher percentages than they have since the survey began: 52% of the vote for Democrats to 46% for Republicans. That 52% for Democrats is the highest support recorded for either party; Democrats hit the poll’s previous high in October 2017 at 50%. Morris notes Democrats are “firmly in ‘wave’ territory” for November’s elections.

Republicans are trying to regain support by seeming to back off their extremism, although they are not backing far: not a single Republican showed up for a public forum held today in Washington, D.C., by Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Representative Robert Garcia (D-CA) and other Democrats on ICE violence. At the hearing, Marimar Martinez, a U.S. citizen shot five times by federal agents, told her story; so did Aliya Rahman, another U.S. citizen detained by ICE; and so did the brothers of U.S. citizen Renee Good, killed by federal agents.

Representative Garcia showed a picture of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, who is a key instigator of the ICE attacks, and said: “There’s probably no single person in this government has done more damage…and more harm to people across this country, immigrants and U.S. citizens…than this man right here, and it’s our job…to hold him responsible for the crimes that are happening to United States citizens.” A new Data For Progress poll shows that 51% of American voters think Miller should be removed, while only 33% think he should not.

But lawmakers have at least had to adjust their actions to acknowledge the fury of American voters at the behavior of federal agents.

Today the House passed the budget to fund the government except for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which was funded only for two more weeks to give Congress time to hash out terms for funding the department that Democrats will accept. Republicans had been clear they did not want to separate out DHS funding. Ultimately, Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) had to accept the separation in order to prevent a long-term shutdown, and House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) got enough Republicans to go along that the measure, without DHS funding, passed. Trump signed it later in the day.

As of yesterday, the head of the “Weaponization Working Group,” created in the Department of Justice on Attorney General Pam Bondi’s first day in office to punish the people Trump insisted had weaponized the legal system against him, has been removed. Right-wing lawyer Ed Martin had been a leader in Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election and had claimed those convicted for crimes relating to that attempt had been unfairly prosecuted. Once in power, he had turned the department’s resources toward prosecuting those Trump perceived to be enemies, including former Federal Bureau of Investigation director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James.

So unpopular has it become to be associated with Trump that an attempt to distract from plummeting ticket sales and artists’ boycotts after he took over the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and put his name on it may be behind Trump’s Sunday night announcement he is closing the venue, claiming it needs two years of renovations.

As voters turn against the administration, Trump is openly working to rig the 2026 election to guarantee Republicans win.

On Wednesday, January 28, FBI agents raided an election office in Fulton County, Georgia, walking away with 700 boxes of ballots, tabulation tapes, and other election-related material from the 2020 election. Marc Elias of Democracy Docket noted that the warrant came from Thomas Albus, whom Trump appointed U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri. Albus should not have had anything to do with a raid in Georgia, but Bloomberg reported that Attorney General Bondi appears to have appointed Albus a special assistant to the attorney general, giving him the ability to operate across the nation. Elias points out that this gives Albus dramatic power over future elections.

The raid was significant not just because the FBI took the ballots Trump has complained about for years—ballots that have been counted three times—but also because Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was there. The DNI has no law enforcement role in our system; she is supposed to coordinate and oversee the agencies in the U.S. intelligence community. At first, officials tried to suggest she was there by chance, but yesterday William K. Rashbaum, Devlin Barrett, and Julian E. Barnes of the New York Times reported that she met with some of the FBI agents who had conducted the raid. During the meeting, she reached Trump on her cell phone and he spoke to the agents himself.

David Laufman, who served in the Justice Department in both Democratic and Republican administrations, told the New York Times reporters: “It is extremely dangerous to our democracy and a shocking abandonment of years of sound policy for the president to be directly involved in the conduct of domestic criminal investigations, especially one that seeks to redress his personal grievances and to make the director of national intelligence an instrument of his political will.”

Then, yesterday, Trump told former deputy FBI director Dan Bongino, who has gone back to podcasting, that he loses elections only because Democrats import undocumented immigrants to vote. This is bonkers. Voting by undocumented immigrants, or any noncitizens, is both illegal and incredibly rare, but Trump has made it part of his standard rhetoric since 2016.

He said to Bongino: “These people were brought to our country to vote, and they vote illegally, and the, you know, amazing that the Republicans aren’t tougher on it. The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over, we should take over the voting, the voting in at least many, 15 places.’ The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting. We have states that are so crooked and the county votes, we have states that I won that show I didn’t win. Now you going to see something in Georgia where they were able to get with a court order, the ballots? You’re going to see some interesting things come in. But, you know, like the 2020 election. I won that election by so much.”

Although the Constitution gives control of elections exclusively to the states, at a bill signing in the Oval Office today, Trump doubled down on his call for Republicans to “nationalize” elections.

And yet, the jud Our forefathers built this nation on blood, sweat, and the unyielding love of freedom—not for foreign invaders to slaughter our heroes, suck dry our hard-earned tax dollars, or snatch the benefits owed to AMERICANS. WE DON’T WANT THEM. NOT ONE.

Slaves and murdering the natives seems forgotten

February 4, 2026 (Wednesday)

On the heels of last weekend’s special election in Texas, President Donald J. Trump has called for his administration to take over the polls before the 2026 midterm elections. On Saturday, Democrat Taylor Rehmet flipped a state Senate seat in Texas that had been held by a Republican since the early 1990s, and he did so by a margin of 14.4 points in a district Trump won in 2024 by 17 points. The 32-point flip has Republicans “in full-out panic mode,” as reporter Liz Crampton put it in Politico yesterday.

Trump ally Steve Bannon said yesterday on his podcast: “You’re damn right, we’re going to have ICE surround the polls come November. We’re not going to sit here and allow you to steal the country again. And you can whine and cry and throw your toys out of the pram all you want, but we will never again allow an election to be stolen.”

Last week’s release of some of the Epstein files has shown just how thoroughly Bannon plays his audience for power. Even while he was portraying himself to his audience as a populist defender, he was working closely with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein to launder his image and craft political messages.

On Tuesday, Bannon echoed Trump’s lie that undocumented immigrants corrupt the polls, saying that only about 20% of real voters select Democrats. This lie about undocumented immigrants voting has been part of the Republicans’ rhetoric since 1994, the year after Democrats under President Bill Clinton passed the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, the so-called Motor Voter Act, which made it easier to register to vote at certain state offices. In 1994, Republicans accused Democrats of winning elections by turning to “illegal,” usually immigrant, voters.

Republican candidates who lost in the 1994 midterm elections claimed that Democrats had won only through “voter fraud.” In 1996, Republicans in both the House and the Senate launched yearlong investigations into what they insisted were problematic elections, one in Louisiana and one in California. Ultimately, they turned up nothing, but keeping the cases in front of the media for a year helped to convince Americans that Democratic voter fraud was a serious issue.

Trump and his allies have put this political myth into hyperdrive. Political operative Roger Stone launched a “Stop the Steal” website during the 2016 Republican primaries to argue that a “Bush-Cruz-Kasich-Romney-Ryan-McConnell faction” intended to steal the Republican nomination from Trump. After Trump got the nomination, the Trump camp wheeled out the “Stop the Steal” idea for the 2016 race against Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and have used it ever since to spread the idea that Trump, and other Republicans, can lose only if Democrats cheat.

House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is in on the game. In 2024 he told reporters, “We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections.” Yesterday, defending Trump’s demand for federal control of elections, he went further: “We had three House Republican candidates who were ahead on Election Day in the last election cycle, and every time a new tranche of ballots came in, they just magically whittled away until their leads were lost…. It looks on its face to be fraudulent.” Then he added the same caveat Republicans have used since 1996: “Can I prove that? No.”

And there’s the rub: there is never any proof of such claims. In 2016, fact-checkers established that, for all of Trump’s insistence that the 2016 election was marred by voter fraud—he claimed “millions” of undocumented immigrants voted illegally—there was virtually no voting by undocumented immigrants in that election. Douglas Keith, Myrna Pérez, and Christopher Famighetti of the Brennan Center reached out to 42 jurisdictions across the nation with the highest population share of noncitizens in the states Trump claimed had returned fraudulent numbers.

Election officials in 40 of those jurisdictions told the journalists that they had had no instances of noncitizen voting. Two said they referred only about 30 incidents of suspected noncitizen voting. If all of those were, in fact, illegitimate votes, it means that out of 23.5 million votes cast in their jurisdictions in the 2016 general election, about 30—or 0.0001 percent—of those votes were problematic.

The MAGA furor over undocumented voting reflects something different than a genuine concern that undocumented immigrants are flooding into U.S. polling booths. It shows that MAGA leaders realize that the white nationalism they use to turn out their supporters is increasingly unpopular across the nation and that the only way to stay in power is to define those who vote for the other party as illegitimate voters.

For decades now, Republican politicians have used racism and sexism to turn out voters, claiming that the growing economic divisions in society were the fault of Democrats who wanted to redistribute the tax dollars of hardworking white Americans to undeserving Black Americans, people of color, and women. Once in power, those leaders rigged the economy to move money not downward but upward, moving nearly $80 trillion from the bottom 90% to the top 1% from 1975 to 2023.

But now the extremes of the racism that are driving raids by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol are horrifying most Americans, while the open looting of the system by a few very wealthy individuals, led by the president, at the same time Republican lawmakers are killing public programs has proved too much for all but the firmest MAGA supporters.

MAGA leaders’ solution is to reject the results of any election that doesn’t put them in charge.

In North Carolina in the 1890s, a fusion movement brought together members of the Populist Party, who tended to be white, and Republicans who, in that post–Civil War era, tended to be Black. While the two groups didn’t agree on everything, they did agree on economic reforms to address a growing concentration of wealth, investments in education, and protection of voting rights. In response, the Democrats in charge of the North Carolina legislature in that era tried to kill the movement by cracking down on voting rights and passing a law that gave the legislature more authority over local governments.

It didn’t work. In 1896 the Fusionists won control of the state legislature, the governorship, and statewide offices. Out of 120 House members, only 26 were Democrats. Out of 50 members of the state Senate, only 7 were Democrats.

In the 1898 elections, the Democrats ran a full-throated white supremacy campaign. “It is time for the oft quoted shotgun to play a part, and an active one,” one woman wrote, “in the elections.” They threatened Black voters to keep them away from the polls, and when even that wasn’t enough, they tampered with the election results.

Blocking Fusion voters from the polls and threatening them with guns gave the Democrats a victory, but in Wilmington the biracial city government had not been up for reelection and so remained in power. There, about two thousand armed white Democrats overthrew the Fusion government. They agreed that the town officials had been elected fairly, but they rejected the outcome of the election nonetheless, insisting that the men voters had put in charge had no idea how to run a government.

In a “White Declaration of Independence,” they announced that they would “never again be ruled, by men of African origin.” It was time, they said, “for the intelligent citizens of this community owning 95 percent of the property and paying taxes in proportion, to end the rule by .” They accused the white men who had worked with the Black Republicans of exploiting black voters “so they can dominate the intelligent and thrifty element in the community.” Indeed, the Democrats later maintained, they had not had to force the officials to leave their posts; the officials recognized that they were not up to the task and left of their own accord. As many as three hundred Black Americans were killed in this “reform” of the city government.

This coup made its way into American culture. Three years after it, North Carolina writer and Southern Baptist minister Thomas Dixon popularized this revision of the past with his book The Leopard’s Spots: A Romance of the White Man’s Burden, which portrayed Black voters as tyrants out to redistribute all the wealth and power in the South from white landowners to themselves.

At the climax of the novel, a gathering of leading white men echoed the Wilmington coup when they issued “a second Declaration of Independence from the infamy of corrupt and degraded government. The day of domination over the Anglo-Saxon race shall close, now, once and forever.” The book sold more than 100,000 copies in its first few months. In 1905, Dixon published The Clansman, which was even more popular than its predecessor.

In 1915, film director D.W. Griffith turned The Clansman into The Birth of a Nation, and the recasting of a white nationalist coup as a heroic defense of the people of the United States was underway.

When Bannon says “we will never again allow an election to be stolen,” the echoes from the past are unmistakable. But it seems significant that the coup leaders in 1898 issued their declaration after they had already won. Issuing it ahead of time in 2026 seems more like an attempt to rally flagging supporters while terrorizing opponents to keep them from turning out to vote. It is one thing to overthrow a town government in a time before modern communications could organize resistance; it is quite another to overthrow a nation of 348 million people who are forewarned.

Today the Supreme Court ruled that California may use the new congressional maps voters adopted as a response to the Texas legislature’s partisan gerrymandering of that state to favor Republicans. The Trump administration pushed the Texas redistricting but opposed California’s. Now, based on the 2024 election results, the two states could cancel each other out, although the Republicans’ Texas gerrymander assumed that Latino voters who swung to Trump in 2024 would stay there.

Latino support fueled Rehmet’s win on Saturday, bringing that assumption into question.

Thanks.

Neophyte said:

February 4, 2026 (Wednesday)

On the heels of last weekend’s special election in Texas, President Donald J. Trump has called for his administration to take over the polls before the 2026 midterm elections. On Saturday, Democrat Taylor Rehmet flipped a state Senate seat in Texas that had been held by a Republican since the early 1990s, and he did so by a margin of 14.4 points in a district Trump won in 2024 by 17 points. The 32-point flip has Republicans “in full-out panic mode,” as reporter Liz Crampton put it in Politico yesterday.

Trump ally Steve Bannon said yesterday on his podcast: “You’re damn right, we’re going to have ICE surround the polls come November. We’re not going to sit here and allow you to steal the country again. And you can whine and cry and throw your toys out of the pram all you want, but we will never again allow an election to be stolen.”

Last week’s release of some of the Epstein files has shown just how thoroughly Bannon plays his audience for power. Even while he was portraying himself to his audience as a populist defender, he was working closely with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein to launder his image and craft political messages.

On Tuesday, Bannon echoed Trump’s lie that undocumented immigrants corrupt the polls, saying that only about 20% of real voters select Democrats. This lie about undocumented immigrants voting has been part of the Republicans’ rhetoric since 1994, the year after Democrats under President Bill Clinton passed the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, the so-called Motor Voter Act, which made it easier to register to vote at certain state offices. In 1994, Republicans accused Democrats of winning elections by turning to “illegal,” usually immigrant, voters.

Republican candidates who lost in the 1994 midterm elections claimed that Democrats had won only through “voter fraud.” In 1996, Republicans in both the House and the Senate launched yearlong investigations into what they insisted were problematic elections, one in Louisiana and one in California. Ultimately, they turned up nothing, but keeping the cases in front of the media for a year helped to convince Americans that Democratic voter fraud was a serious issue.

Trump and his allies have put this political myth into hyperdrive. Political operative Roger Stone launched a “Stop the Steal” website during the 2016 Republican primaries to argue that a “Bush-Cruz-Kasich-Romney-Ryan-McConnell faction” intended to steal the Republican nomination from Trump. After Trump got the nomination, the Trump camp wheeled out the “Stop the Steal” idea for the 2016 race against Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and have used it ever since to spread the idea that Trump, and other Republicans, can lose only if Democrats cheat.

House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is in on the game. In 2024 he told reporters, “We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections.” Yesterday, defending Trump’s demand for federal control of elections, he went further: “We had three House Republican candidates who were ahead on Election Day in the last election cycle, and every time a new tranche of ballots came in, they just magically whittled away until their leads were lost…. It looks on its face to be fraudulent.” Then he added the same caveat Republicans have used since 1996: “Can I prove that? No.”

And there’s the rub: there is never any proof of such claims. In 2016, fact-checkers established that, for all of Trump’s insistence that the 2016 election was marred by voter fraud—he claimed “millions” of undocumented immigrants voted illegally—there was virtually no voting by undocumented immigrants in that election. Douglas Keith, Myrna Pérez, and Christopher Famighetti of the Brennan Center reached out to 42 jurisdictions across the nation with the highest population share of noncitizens in the states Trump claimed had returned fraudulent numbers.

Election officials in 40 of those jurisdictions told the journalists that they had had no instances of noncitizen voting. Two said they referred only about 30 incidents of suspected noncitizen voting. If all of those were, in fact, illegitimate votes, it means that out of 23.5 million votes cast in their jurisdictions in the 2016 general election, about 30—or 0.0001 percent—of those votes were problematic.

The MAGA furor over undocumented voting reflects something different than a genuine concern that undocumented immigrants are flooding into U.S. polling booths. It shows that MAGA leaders realize that the white nationalism they use to turn out their supporters is increasingly unpopular across the nation and that the only way to stay in power is to define those who vote for the other party as illegitimate voters.

For decades now, Republican politicians have used racism and sexism to turn out voters, claiming that the growing economic divisions in society were the fault of Democrats who wanted to redistribute the tax dollars of hardworking white Americans to undeserving Black Americans, people of color, and women. Once in power, those leaders rigged the economy to move money not downward but upward, moving nearly $80 trillion from the bottom 90% to the top 1% from 1975 to 2023.

But now the extremes of the racism that are driving raids by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol are horrifying most Americans, while the open looting of the system by a few very wealthy individuals, led by the president, at the same time Republican lawmakers are killing public programs has proved too much for all but the firmest MAGA supporters.

MAGA leaders’ solution is to reject the results of any election that doesn’t put them in charge.

In North Carolina in the 1890s, a fusion movement brought together members of the Populist Party, who tended to be white, and Republicans who, in that post–Civil War era, tended to be Black. While the two groups didn’t agree on everything, they did agree on economic reforms to address a growing concentration of wealth, investments in education, and protection of voting rights. In response, the Democrats in charge of the North Carolina legislature in that era tried to kill the movement by cracking down on voting rights and passing a law that gave the legislature more authority over local governments.

It didn’t work. In 1896 the Fusionists won control of the state legislature, the governorship, and statewide offices. Out of 120 House members, only 26 were Democrats. Out of 50 members of the state Senate, only 7 were Democrats.

In the 1898 elections, the Democrats ran a full-throated white supremacy campaign. “It is time for the oft quoted shotgun to play a part, and an active one,” one woman wrote, “in the elections.” They threatened Black voters to keep them away from the polls, and when even that wasn’t enough, they tampered with the election results.

Blocking Fusion voters from the polls and threatening them with guns gave the Democrats a victory, but in Wilmington the biracial city government had not been up for reelection and so remained in power. There, about two thousand armed white Democrats overthrew the Fusion government. They agreed that the town officials had been elected fairly, but they rejected the outcome of the election nonetheless, insisting that the men voters had put in charge had no idea how to run a government.

In a “White Declaration of Independence,” they announced that they would “never again be ruled, by men of African origin.” It was time, they said, “for the intelligent citizens of this community owning 95 percent of the property and paying taxes in proportion, to end the rule by .” They accused the white men who had worked with the Black Republicans of exploiting black voters “so they can dominate the intelligent and thrifty element in the community.” Indeed, the Democrats later maintained, they had not had to force the officials to leave their posts; the officials recognized that they were not up to the task and left of their own accord. As many as three hundred Black Americans were killed in this “reform” of the city government.

This coup made its way into American culture. Three years after it, North Carolina writer and Southern Baptist minister Thomas Dixon popularized this revision of the past with his book The Leopard’s Spots: A Romance of the White Man’s Burden, which portrayed Black voters as tyrants out to redistribute all the wealth and power in the South from white landowners to themselves.

At the climax of the novel, a gathering of leading white men echoed the Wilmington coup when they issued “a second Declaration of Independence from the infamy of corrupt and degraded government. The day of domination over the Anglo-Saxon race shall close, now, once and forever.” The book sold more than 100,000 copies in its first few months. In 1905, Dixon published The Clansman, which was even more popular than its predecessor.

In 1915, film director D.W. Griffith turned The Clansman into The Birth of a Nation, and the recasting of a white nationalist coup as a heroic defense of the people of the United States was underway.

When Bannon says “we will never again allow an election to be stolen,” the echoes from the past are unmistakable. But it seems significant that the coup leaders in 1898 issued their declaration after they had already won. Issuing it ahead of time in 2026 seems more like an attempt to rally flagging supporters while terrorizing opponents to keep them from turning out to vote. It is one thing to overthrow a town government in a time before modern communications could organize resistance; it is quite another to overthrow a nation of 348 million people who are forewarned.

Today the Supreme Court ruled that California may use the new congressional maps voters adopted as a response to the Texas legislature’s partisan gerrymandering of that state to favor Republicans. The Trump administration pushed the Texas redistricting but opposed California’s. Now, based on the 2024 election results, the two states could cancel each other out, although the Republicans’ Texas gerrymander assumed that Latino voters who swung to Trump in 2024 would stay there.

Latino support fueled Rehmet’s win on Saturday, bringing that assumption into question.

Shouldn’t a first world nation with massive resources be able to run elections properly and prevent most fraud.
You’d have to have a massive organised effort that would be easily noticeable to have millions ? of fake votes
The USA seems to delight in having weird versions of normal processes that do the exact opposite of what they want.

Cymek said:

Neophyte said:

February 4, 2026 (Wednesday)

On the heels of last weekend’s special election in Texas, President Donald J. Trump has called for his administration to take over the polls before the 2026 midterm elections. On Saturday, Democrat Taylor Rehmet flipped a state Senate seat in Texas that had been held by a Republican since the early 1990s, and he did so by a margin of 14.4 points in a district Trump won in 2024 by 17 points. The 32-point flip has Republicans “in full-out panic mode,” as reporter Liz Crampton put it in Politico yesterday.

Trump ally Steve Bannon said yesterday on his podcast: “You’re damn right, we’re going to have ICE surround the polls come November. We’re not going to sit here and allow you to steal the country again. And you can whine and cry and throw your toys out of the pram all you want, but we will never again allow an election to be stolen.”

Last week’s release of some of the Epstein files has shown just how thoroughly Bannon plays his audience for power. Even while he was portraying himself to his audience as a populist defender, he was working closely with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein to launder his image and craft political messages.

On Tuesday, Bannon echoed Trump’s lie that undocumented immigrants corrupt the polls, saying that only about 20% of real voters select Democrats. This lie about undocumented immigrants voting has been part of the Republicans’ rhetoric since 1994, the year after Democrats under President Bill Clinton passed the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, the so-called Motor Voter Act, which made it easier to register to vote at certain state offices. In 1994, Republicans accused Democrats of winning elections by turning to “illegal,” usually immigrant, voters.

Republican candidates who lost in the 1994 midterm elections claimed that Democrats had won only through “voter fraud.” In 1996, Republicans in both the House and the Senate launched yearlong investigations into what they insisted were problematic elections, one in Louisiana and one in California. Ultimately, they turned up nothing, but keeping the cases in front of the media for a year helped to convince Americans that Democratic voter fraud was a serious issue.

Trump and his allies have put this political myth into hyperdrive. Political operative Roger Stone launched a “Stop the Steal” website during the 2016 Republican primaries to argue that a “Bush-Cruz-Kasich-Romney-Ryan-McConnell faction” intended to steal the Republican nomination from Trump. After Trump got the nomination, the Trump camp wheeled out the “Stop the Steal” idea for the 2016 race against Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and have used it ever since to spread the idea that Trump, and other Republicans, can lose only if Democrats cheat.

House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is in on the game. In 2024 he told reporters, “We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections.” Yesterday, defending Trump’s demand for federal control of elections, he went further: “We had three House Republican candidates who were ahead on Election Day in the last election cycle, and every time a new tranche of ballots came in, they just magically whittled away until their leads were lost…. It looks on its face to be fraudulent.” Then he added the same caveat Republicans have used since 1996: “Can I prove that? No.”

And there’s the rub: there is never any proof of such claims. In 2016, fact-checkers established that, for all of Trump’s insistence that the 2016 election was marred by voter fraud—he claimed “millions” of undocumented immigrants voted illegally—there was virtually no voting by undocumented immigrants in that election. Douglas Keith, Myrna Pérez, and Christopher Famighetti of the Brennan Center reached out to 42 jurisdictions across the nation with the highest population share of noncitizens in the states Trump claimed had returned fraudulent numbers.

Election officials in 40 of those jurisdictions told the journalists that they had had no instances of noncitizen voting. Two said they referred only about 30 incidents of suspected noncitizen voting. If all of those were, in fact, illegitimate votes, it means that out of 23.5 million votes cast in their jurisdictions in the 2016 general election, about 30—or 0.0001 percent—of those votes were problematic.

The MAGA furor over undocumented voting reflects something different than a genuine concern that undocumented immigrants are flooding into U.S. polling booths. It shows that MAGA leaders realize that the white nationalism they use to turn out their supporters is increasingly unpopular across the nation and that the only way to stay in power is to define those who vote for the other party as illegitimate voters.

For decades now, Republican politicians have used racism and sexism to turn out voters, claiming that the growing economic divisions in society were the fault of Democrats who wanted to redistribute the tax dollars of hardworking white Americans to undeserving Black Americans, people of color, and women. Once in power, those leaders rigged the economy to move money not downward but upward, moving nearly $80 trillion from the bottom 90% to the top 1% from 1975 to 2023.

But now the extremes of the racism that are driving raids by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol are horrifying most Americans, while the open looting of the system by a few very wealthy individuals, led by the president, at the same time Republican lawmakers are killing public programs has proved too much for all but the firmest MAGA supporters.

MAGA leaders’ solution is to reject the results of any election that doesn’t put them in charge.

In North Carolina in the 1890s, a fusion movement brought together members of the Populist Party, who tended to be white, and Republicans who, in that post–Civil War era, tended to be Black. While the two groups didn’t agree on everything, they did agree on economic reforms to address a growing concentration of wealth, investments in education, and protection of voting rights. In response, the Democrats in charge of the North Carolina legislature in that era tried to kill the movement by cracking down on voting rights and passing a law that gave the legislature more authority over local governments.

It didn’t work. In 1896 the Fusionists won control of the state legislature, the governorship, and statewide offices. Out of 120 House members, only 26 were Democrats. Out of 50 members of the state Senate, only 7 were Democrats.

In the 1898 elections, the Democrats ran a full-throated white supremacy campaign. “It is time for the oft quoted shotgun to play a part, and an active one,” one woman wrote, “in the elections.” They threatened Black voters to keep them away from the polls, and when even that wasn’t enough, they tampered with the election results.

Blocking Fusion voters from the polls and threatening them with guns gave the Democrats a victory, but in Wilmington the biracial city government had not been up for reelection and so remained in power. There, about two thousand armed white Democrats overthrew the Fusion government. They agreed that the town officials had been elected fairly, but they rejected the outcome of the election nonetheless, insisting that the men voters had put in charge had no idea how to run a government.

In a “White Declaration of Independence,” they announced that they would “never again be ruled, by men of African origin.” It was time, they said, “for the intelligent citizens of this community owning 95 percent of the property and paying taxes in proportion, to end the rule by .” They accused the white men who had worked with the Black Republicans of exploiting black voters “so they can dominate the intelligent and thrifty element in the community.” Indeed, the Democrats later maintained, they had not had to force the officials to leave their posts; the officials recognized that they were not up to the task and left of their own accord. As many as three hundred Black Americans were killed in this “reform” of the city government.

This coup made its way into American culture. Three years after it, North Carolina writer and Southern Baptist minister Thomas Dixon popularized this revision of the past with his book The Leopard’s Spots: A Romance of the White Man’s Burden, which portrayed Black voters as tyrants out to redistribute all the wealth and power in the South from white landowners to themselves.

At the climax of the novel, a gathering of leading white men echoed the Wilmington coup when they issued “a second Declaration of Independence from the infamy of corrupt and degraded government. The day of domination over the Anglo-Saxon race shall close, now, once and forever.” The book sold more than 100,000 copies in its first few months. In 1905, Dixon published The Clansman, which was even more popular than its predecessor.

In 1915, film director D.W. Griffith turned The Clansman into The Birth of a Nation, and the recasting of a white nationalist coup as a heroic defense of the people of the United States was underway.

When Bannon says “we will never again allow an election to be stolen,” the echoes from the past are unmistakable. But it seems significant that the coup leaders in 1898 issued their declaration after they had already won. Issuing it ahead of time in 2026 seems more like an attempt to rally flagging supporters while terrorizing opponents to keep them from turning out to vote. It is one thing to overthrow a town government in a time before modern communications could organize resistance; it is quite another to overthrow a nation of 348 million people who are forewarned.

Today the Supreme Court ruled that California may use the new congressional maps voters adopted as a response to the Texas legislature’s partisan gerrymandering of that state to favor Republicans. The Trump administration pushed the Texas redistricting but opposed California’s. Now, based on the 2024 election results, the two states could cancel each other out, although the Republicans’ Texas gerrymander assumed that Latino voters who swung to Trump in 2024 would stay there.

Latino support fueled Rehmet’s win on Saturday, bringing that assumption into question.

Shouldn’t a first world nation with massive resources be able to run elections properly and prevent most fraud.
You’d have to have a massive organised effort that would be easily noticeable to have millions ? of fake votes
The USA seems to delight in having weird versions of normal processes that do the exact opposite of what they want.

In the context of: A Chrsitian is to be judged on how he greets the foreigner

Cymek said:

Shouldn’t a first world nation with massive resources be able to run elections properly and prevent most fraud.
You’d have to have a massive organised effort that would be easily noticeable to have millions ? of fake votes
The USA seems to delight in having weird versions of normal processes that do the exact opposite of what they want.

sorry we don’t understand, those first worlds and massive resources belong to the 0.01% ownership class, the elections are just team sports shows to share figurehead time between them, it’s not fraud if it’s the natural order of things by design

SCIENCE said:

Cymek said:

Shouldn’t a first world nation with massive resources be able to run elections properly and prevent most fraud.
You’d have to have a massive organised effort that would be easily noticeable to have millions ? of fake votes
The USA seems to delight in having weird versions of normal processes that do the exact opposite of what they want.

sorry we don’t understand, those first worlds and massive resources belong to the 0.01% ownership class, the elections are just team sports shows to share figurehead time between them, it’s not fraud if it’s the natural order of things by design

It would seem so

Neophyte said:

February 4, 2026 (Wednesday)

Trump ally Steve Bannon said yesterday on his podcast: “You’re damn right, we’re going to have ICE surround the polls come November. We’re not going to sit here and allow you to steal the country again. And you can whine and cry and throw your toys out of the pram all you want, but we will never again allow an election to be stolen.”

OK so those identifying to be democrat voters will be dragged off to internment camps and if they refuse they’ll be shot on the spot?

February 5, 2026 (Thursday)

The past two days have seen a growing struggle between Democrats, who are demanding accountability from the Trump administration, and Republicans trying to hide what the administration is up to.

Last night, Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) published a letter he sent to Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) John Ratcliffe. Wyden is the longest-serving member of the Senate Intelligence Committee and is a careful, hardworking, and dogged member of Congress. When Wyden speaks, people listen. Ratcliffe was an attack dog for Trump during his first impeachment trial and had no experience with intelligence before Trump forced his nomination to become director of national intelligence through the Senate. Now he is Trump’s appointee to the directorship of the CIA.

Wyden’s letter to Ratcliffe said: “I write to alert you to a classified letter I sent you earlier today in which I express deep concerns about CIA activities. Thank you for your attention to this important matter.” When Wired senior reporter Dell Cameron, who covers different forms of surveillance, commented, “I don’t like this,” Wyden reposted the comment.
Wyden has a long history of alerting the public in whatever way he can when something bad is going on that he cannot reveal because of its classified nature. This letter appears to be a way to alert the public while also notifying Ratcliffe that the CIA director will not be able in the future to deny that he received Wyden’s letter.

Also last night, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) sent Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SC) and House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) a letter outlining demands Democrats want incorporated into a measure that will appropriate more funds for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). DHS is the department that contains Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol. Democrats insisted on stripping DHS funding out of the bills to fund the government for 2026 after ICE and Border Patrol agents began raining terror on the country.

Those demands are pretty straightforward, but if written into law as required for the release of funds, they would change behavior. The Democrats want federal agents to enter private homes only with a judicial warrant (as was policy until the administration produced a secret memo saying that DHS officials themselves could sign off on raids). They want agents to stop wearing masks and to have their names, agencies, and unique ID numbers visible on their uniforms, as law enforcement officers do. They want an end to racial profiling—that is, agents detaining individuals on the basis of their skin color, place of employment, or language—and to raids of so-called sensitive sites: medical facilities, schools, childcare facilities, churches, polling places, and courts.

They want agents to be required to have a reasonable use of force policy and to be removed during an investigation if they violate it. They want federal agents to coordinate with local and state governments, and for those governments to have jurisdiction over federal agents who break the law. They want DHS detention facilities to have the same standards of any detention facility and for detainees to have access to their lawyers. They want states to be able to sue if those conditions are not met, and they want Congress members to have unscheduled access to the centers to oversee them.

They want body cameras to be used for accountability but prohibited for gathering and storing information about protesters. And they want federal agents to have standardized uniforms like those of regular law enforcement, not paramilitaries.

As Schumer and Jeffries wrote, these are commonsense measures that protect Americans’ constitutional rights and ensure responsible law enforcement, and should apply to all federal activity even without Democrats demanding them.

Thune has said the demands are “very unrealistic and unserious,” and Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming, the second-ranking Senate Republican, called them “radical and extreme” and a “far-left wish list.” But Representative Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA) agreed that agents “need body cameras. They need to remove masks. They need proper training. They need to be conducting operations that are consistent with their mission.”

Trump’s determination to prove that he actually won the 2020 election continues to drive the administration. This morning, in a rambling and often crazed speech at the National Prayer Breakfast, Trump told attendees: “They rigged the second election. I had to win it. I had to win it. I needed it for my own ego. I would’ve had a bad ego for the rest of my life. Now I really have a big ego, though. Beating these lunatics was incredible, right? What a great feeling, winning every swing state, winning the popular vote. The first time, you know, they said I didn’t win the popular vote. I did.”

The reality that former secretary of state Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in 2016 by about 2.9 million votes explains Trump’s lie that undocumented immigrants voted in the election.

Trump also offered yet another explanation for the presence of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard at the FBI raid on a warehouse holding ballots and other election-related materials in Fulton County, Georgia, saying that Attorney General Pam Bondi wanted Gabbard there.

Phil Stewart, Erin Banco, and Jonathan Landay of Reuters reported yesterday that a team working for Gabbard seized voting machines and data in Puerto Rico in what sources told the Reuters reporters was an attempt to prove that Venezuela had hacked the voting machines there. The reporters say that Gabbard’s team was looking at whether the government of Venezuela’s president Nicolas Maduro hacked the election.

There is no evidence for this theory, but it has strong adherents among Trump’s followers. Legal and political analysts, including Asha Rangappa, Norm Ornstein, and Allison Gill, have noted that administration officials might force Maduro, who is currently in prison in the U.S. after a raid in which U.S. forces took him and his wife into custody, to “cooperate” on this lie. In The Breakdown, Gill notes that while Trump has no role in elections, the Supreme Court has said that he must be given deference in the conduct of foreign affairs. He has relied on that deference to justify tariffs, immigration sweeps, attacks on small boats, and so on. It is not a stretch to think he is now trying to interfere with the 2026 election by claiming elections are part of foreign affairs.

Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, told the Reuters reporters: “What’s most alarming here is that Director Gabbard’s own team acknowledges there was no evidence of foreign interference, yet they seized voting machines and election data anyway. Absent a foreign nexus, intelligence agencies have absolutely no lawful role in domestic election administration. This is exactly the kind of overreach Congress wrote the law to prevent, and it raises profound questions about whether our intelligence tools are being abused.”

Tonight, Matt Berg of Crooked Media reported that the FBI has “summoned state election officials from across the country for an unusual briefing on ‘preparations’ for the midterms” on February 25. A top election official from one state told Berg that it’s the “strangest thing in the world.” The FBI official who sent the email, Kellie Hardiman, used the title “FBI Election Executive.” When Berg asked the FBI for an explanation, the spokesperson wrote: “Thank you for reaching out. The FBI has no comment.”

On Monday, Dustin Volz and C. Ryan Barber of the Wall Street Journal reported that Gabbard had bottled up a May 2025 whistleblower complaint without transmitting it to congressional intelligence committees as required by law. Congress members learned about the complaint in November, but the government maintained it was too highly classified to be shared. This was deliberate obfuscation: the Gang of Eight, which is made up of the leaders from both parties in the House and Senate, and the leaders of the intelligence committees from both parties, was set up precisely so that Congress could always be informed of classified information.

Today Gabbard handed over the complaint, after heavily redacting it under claims of executive privilege—which means the president is involved.

The administration’s determination to hide the actions of its own members while exposing opponents has shown dramatically in the redactions in the Epstein files that have been released to date. Officials neglected to redact identifying information about survivors and even sexually explicit photographs of them, while blacking out the names of apparent friends and co-conspirators of the sex offender.

Trump’s name appears throughout the files, and in an attempt to center former president Bill Clinton, rather than Trump, in public discussion of the Epstein files, House Oversight Committee chair James Comer (R-KY) has subpoenaed Clinton and former first lady and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton to testify under oath. He says he doesn’t have to do the same for Trump about his relationship with Epstein because Trump is answering questions for reporters.

Yesterday the Clintons agreed to testify. Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton posted on social media: “For six months, we engaged Republicans on the Oversight Committee in good faith. We told them what we know, under oath. They ignored all of it. They moved the goalposts and turned accountability into an exercise in distraction. So let’s stop the games. If you want this fight, , let’s have it—in public. You love to talk about transparency. There’s nothing more transparent than a public hearing, cameras on. We will be there.”

Forcing a former president to testify under threat of contempt establishes the precedent that Congress can force past presidents and their spouses and families to testify under threat of criminal charges. Scott Wong, Melanie Zanona, Sahil Kapur, and Ryan Nobles of NBC News reported that Democrats are taking note. Representative Ted Lieu (D-CA) told them: “We are absolutely going to have Donald Trump testify under oath.” Maxwell Frost (D-FL), who sits on the Oversight Committee, said that forcing Clinton to testify does indeed set a precedent. “nd we will follow it,” he said. “Donald Trump, all of his kids. Everybody.”

Representative Jared Moskowitz (D-FL)—who flusters Comer so badly Comer once cracked and told him he looked like a Smurf, a childish insult Moskowitz needled him over for months—said that after Democrats regain control of the House, Republicans will blame Comer for what comes next:

“The folks here are going to run with it everywhere. It will be crypto. It will be their business. It will be all the investments in the Middle East. It’ll be the Qatari plane…. It’s going to be the latest thing with the UAE. It’s going to be all of it…. They are giving a license to these new chairmen in January and that will be Comer’s legacy. So when Junior and Eric and their children… all here, they can thank James Comer for that.”

It seems likely Trump has already figured out that forcing Clinton to testify opens up some avenues he would rather leave closed. When asked about the Clintons’ testimony at the end of the month, he answered: “I think it’s a shame, to be honest. I always liked him.” Hillary was “a very capable woman.” “I hate to see it in many ways.”

Another court case might tear away some of the administration’s obfuscation, as well. Zoe Tillman of Bloomberg reported today that U.S. District Judge Theodore Chuang of the District of Maryland has denied the government’s request to block depositions of Elon Musk and two other former officials from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in a lawsuit charging Musk with unlawfully dismantling the agency.

Because Musk and the other two “likely have personal, first-hand knowledge of the facts relevant and essential to the resolution of this case,” Chuang said the testimony could go forward. While courts have generally said that “high-ranking government officials may not be deposed or called to testify about their reasons for taking official actions absent ‘extraordinary circumstances,’” Chuang said it was not clear that Musk and the other two were, in fact, high-ranking government officials.

At the same time, the case appeared to meet the criteria for extraordinary circumstances. The government employees who brought the case argue that Musk personally dismantled USAID when he had no authority to do so. The judge noted that the government’s failure to produce documents that explained the decisions killing the agency, as required, suggested that the decisions had been made orally, so the testimony of Musk and the other two men is crucial to the case.

Finally, the last existing arms treaty between the U.S. and Russia expired today. The New START treaty of 2011 capped the number of nuclear warheads each country could maintain. Trump’s account on social media posted that instead of extending the terms of the existing treaty, “we should have our Nuclear Experts work on a new, improved, and modernized Treaty that can last long into the future.” Until that time, though, there is no longer a cap on nuclear weapons for the U.S. or Russia.

Gosh, that last paragraph is a real doozy innit 😕

Divine Angel said:

Gosh, that last paragraph is a real doozy innit 😕

it shows his intentions.

Like with bring back the bih block motors for the American car industry, drill baby drill and that climate chage and winmills are hoaxes.

He wants a new nuclear arms race too.

roughbarked said:

Divine Angel said:

Gosh, that last paragraph is a real doozy innit 😕

it shows his intentions.

Like with bring back the bih block motors for the American car industry, drill baby drill and that climate chage and winmills are hoaxes.

He wants a new nuclear arms race too.

how else can you ensure The Economy Must Grow and convince the slaves you need to build industrial capacity

SCIENCE said:

roughbarked said:

Divine Angel said:

Gosh, that last paragraph is a real doozy innit 😕

it shows his intentions.

Like with bring back the bih block motors for the American car industry, drill baby drill and that climate chage and winmills are hoaxes.

He wants a new nuclear arms race too.

how else can you ensure The Economy Must Grow and convince the slaves you need to build industrial capacity

By being creative and accepting windmills.

Thanks.

Heather Cox Richardson

February 7, 2026 (Saturday)

Yesterday two right-wing circuit judges signed off on the Trump administration’s new mass detention policy: the extraordinary assertion that vast numbers of noncitizens throughout the country can be arrested and held in detention centers without the right to release until they are deported.

As Steve Vladeck explained in December in One First, this new policy dramatically expanded the number of immigrants suddenly subject to arrest and long-term detention. U.S. judges overwhelmingly rejected the new policy; Vladeck quoted Politico’s Kyle Cheney, who reported that in more than 700 cases, at least 225 judges appointed by all modern presidents—including 23 appointed by Trump—have ruled that the new policy likely violates both the law and the right to due process.

But the administration handpicked a right-wing circuit to rule on the policy, and last night, as Vladeck explained today in One First, Judge Edith Jones and Judge Kyle Duncan of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit okayed the Trump administration’s new rule denying detained immigrants the right to release on bond. That includes, as Vladeck wrote, “millions of non-citizens who have been here for generations; who have never committed a crime; and who pose neither a risk of flight nor any threat to public safety.”

This policy has dramatically increased detention of immigrants. Before it, the U.S. held about 40,000 people on any given day. Now, according to Laura Strickler and Julia Ainsley of NBC News, the United States is currently holding more than 70,000 immigrants in 224 facilities across the nation, 104 more facilities than it had before Trump took office. Those detainees include children.

Private prison companies under contract with the U.S. government operate these detention facilities, including the $1.2 billion Camp East Montana located at Fort Bliss Army base in Texas, where a medical examiner recently ruled the death of detainee Geraldo Lunas Campos a homicide. The cause of the January death of Victor Manuel Díaz there remains unclear, although officials claim it was “presumed suicide.” A third man, Francisco Gaspar Andrés, died in December after being transported from the camp to an El Paso hospital for treatment for a serious medical condition.

On January 20, Judd Legum of Popular Information reported that ICE stopped paying third-party providers for medical care for detainees on October 3, 2025, and that it would not start even to process claims again until at least April 30, 2026. It told medical providers to “hold all claims submissions” until then. A source in the administration told Legum that some medical providers are now denying detainees medical care.

From 2002 to 2023, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) helped to make sure detainees had medical care if an ICE facility couldn’t provide it, with ICE paying the VA for the coverage. But in 2023, Alabama Republican senator Tommy Tuberville lied that President Joe Biden was “robbing veterans to pay off illegals,” and on September 30, 2025, a small right-wing nonprofit sued to get documents from the Trump administration about the VA’s role in detainee care. On October 3, Legum discovered, “the VA ‘abruptly and instantly terminated’ its agreement with ICE,” leaving it with no way to provide prescribed medication or access off-site care.

According to Legum, ICE said it could not provide “dialysis, prenatal care, oncology, chemotherapy.” ICE officials described the loss of care as an “absolute emergency” that needed an immediate solution to “prevent any further medical complications or loss of life.” But it did not get solved.

Douglas MacMillan, Samuel Oakford, N. Kirkpatrick, and Aaron Schaffer of the Washington Post reported that according to ICE’s own oversight unit, Camp East Montana at Fort Bliss, Texas, has violated at least 60 federal standards for immigrant detention. The contract for the $1.24 billion project was awarded to a small business that operates out of a residential address and has, as Lyndon German of VPM News reported, “little to no publicly available record of managing immigration facilities.”

Last April, at the Border Security Expo in Phoenix, Arizona, acting director of ICE Todd Lyons told attendees: “We need to get better at treating this like a business.” He called for a deportation process “like Prime, but with human beings.” In the Republicans’ July 2025 budget reconciliation bill—which they call the One Big Beautiful Bill Act—they put $45 billion into additional funding for ICE detention.

In November and December, NBC News and Bloomberg reported that the Trump administration was considering “mega centers” for detaining people. Fola Akinnibi, Sophie Alexander, Alicia A. Caldwell, and Rachel Adams-Heard of Bloomberg reported that in November, ICE issued a $29.9 million contract—just below the threshold of $30 million that would require open bidding—to KpbServices LLC for “due diligence services and concept design for processing centers and mega centers throughout the United States.”

In December, Douglas MacMillan and Jonathan O’Connell of the Washington Post reported that the administration was working to put in place a national detention system that would book newly arrested detainees into processing sites before sending them to one of seven warehouses that would hold 5,000 to 10,000 people each. MacMillan and O’Connell reported that “sixteen smaller warehouses would hold up to 1,500 people each.” From there, people would be deported.

“These will not be warehouses—they will be very well-structured detention facilities meeting our regular detention standards,” a DHS spokesperson wrote to Angela Kocherga and Dianne Solis of KERA News in Texas. “It should not come as news that ICE will be making arrests in states across the U.S. and is actively working to expand detention space.”

Strickler and Ainsley reported Thursday that the Department of Homeland Security has already secured at least three facilities. It paid $87.4 million for one outside Philadelphia and $37 million for another outside San Antonio, a warehouse of nearly 640,000 square feet. ICE bought a building the size of seven football fields in Surprise, Arizona, outside Phoenix, for $70 million.

But there is increasing criticism of the new warehouses as Americans mobilize against the violence and abuse of ICE and Border Patrol.

Officials from Surprise answered concerns about the federal facility with a statement saying: “The City was not aware that there were efforts underway to purchase the building, was not notified of the transaction by any of the parties involved and has not been contacted by DHS or any federal agency about the intended use of the building. It’s important to note, Federal projects are not subject to local regulations, such as zoning.”

On Tuesday, February 3, more than a thousand people turned out for the Surprise City Council meeting to oppose the establishment of the federal detention center. One of the speakers reminded the council of Ohrdruf, the first Nazi camp liberated by U.S. troops, on April 4, 1945. He said:

“The U.S. Army brought the leading citizens of Ohrdruf to tour the facility, which turned out to be part of the Buchenwald network of concentration camps. A U.S. Army colonel told the German civilians who viewed the scenes without muttering a word that they were to blame. One of the Germans replied that what happened in the camp was ‘done by a few people,’ and ‘you cannot blame us all.’ And the American, who could have been any one of our grandfathers, said: ‘This was done by those that the German people chose to lead them, and all are responsible.’

“The morning after the tour, the mayor of Ohrdruf killed himself. And maybe he did not know the full extent of the outrages that were committed in his community, but he knew enough. And we don’t know exactly how ICE will use this warehouse. But we know enough. I ask you to consider what the mayor of Ohrdruf might have thought before he died. Maybe he felt like a victim. He might have thought, ‘How is this my fault? I had no jurisdiction over this.’ Maybe he would have said, ‘This site was not subject to local zoning, what could I do?’ But I think, when he reflected on the suffering that occurred at this camp, just outside of town, that those words would have sounded hollow even to him.

Because in his heart he knew, as we do, that we are all responsible for what happens in our community.”

Thanks for posting.

February 8, 2026 (Sunday)

On February 9, 1950, Senator Joe McCarthy (R-WI) stood up in front of the Republican Women’s Club of Wheeling, West Virginia, at a gathering to celebrate President Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. The senator waved a piece of paper and later recalled telling the audience: “I have here in my hand a list of 205—a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department.” He said he didn’t have time to share the names of all those individuals, but he assured the audience that the Democratic administration of President Harry S. Truman was refusing to investigate “traitors in the government.”

Secretary of State Dean Acheson, who was busy trying to hammer together the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Marshall Plan to provide aid to European countries rebuilding after World War II, later said McCarthy’s Wheeling speech was a good representation of the senator’s work. It was “the rambling, ill-prepared result of his slovenly, lazy, and undisciplined habits.”

McCarthy was an undistinguished junior senator running for reelection and needed an issue. With his dramatic statement, he found it in attacks on the postwar rules-based international order those like Acheson were trying to build. The staunchly Republican Chicago Tribune, whose editor hated the idea of using American resources to help foreign governments, trumpeted the story and threw its weight behind the idea that Democrats were trying to destroy the United States.

The next day, McCarthy pledged to share the names of “57 card-carrying Communists” in the State Department with Acheson, so long as the secretary would let Congress investigate the loyalty records of the people in his department. Then McCarthy telegraphed Truman, charging him with protecting communists in government. The Chicago Tribune put the accusations on the front page, and McCarthy’s office sent out copies of his missive. “Failure on your part will label the Democratic party as being the bedfellow of international Communism,” McCarthy wrote.

McCarthy’s critics pointed out that he never produced any evidence of his wild claims, but their outrage gained far less attention than the claims themselves. He yelled, he made crazy accusations, he leaked fragments of truth that misrepresented reality, he hectored and badgered. He perfected the art of grabbing headlines and then staying ahead of the fact-checkers. By the time reporters called out his lies, they were already old news, and the fact checking got buried deep in the papers. The front page would have McCarthy’s newest accusation.

The outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950, when communist North Korea, backed by the Soviet Union and Communist China, invaded South Korea, stoked anticommunism, and McCarthy’s warning that there was a secret plot among Democrats to make America communist gained traction. He spoke widely across the country that summer, and in the midterm elections in fall 1950, every candidate he endorsed won. Using his lies to gain power, McCarthy rampaged across the next years, ruining lives through lies and innuendo.

McCarthy’s star fell abruptly in May 1954, when Americans watched him lie and berate witnesses in televised hearings. But in that same month, the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, opened up a different avenue for far-right extremists to argue that Democrats were undermining American society by trying to usher in communism. Reaching back to the racist tropes of Reconstruction, they claimed that federal protection of Black equality before the law was socialism because enforcing civil rights required government personnel who could be paid only through taxes. Those calling for equality before the law were, in this formulation, redistributing money from taxes levied on hardworking white taxpayers to undeserving Black people.

The idea that a secret group was undermining America to make it socialist continued into the 1980s, when films like Red Dawn—in 1984 the bloodiest movie ever made—told the story of a group of everyday Americans fighting communists who were taking over their town with the collaboration of the government. In the film, the Wolverines, an embattled group of high school football players in Colorado, fight off a communist invasion of Soviets, Cubans, and Nicaraguans. The mayor and his son cooperate with the communists, making the heroic Wolverines the underdogs fighting both world communism and their own government.

The idea that everyday Americans had to fight their government to protect the nation so inspired a group of young men that in 2003, when leaders in the George W. Bush administration decided to search for Saddam Hussein, they named the effort Operation Red Dawn. The soldiers began by looking in two sites they dubbed Wolverine 1 and Wolverine 2.

With the U.S. economy so obviously weighted toward the wealthy in the past decades, garnering power by warning that Democrats are trying to usher in socialism has been a hard sell. But that idea has evolved among far-right thinkers to underpin another conspiracy theory that fits snugly in the space previously occupied by the idea that Black and Brown Americans and their allies are destroying the country through socialism.

The Great Replacement theory says that elites—often a code word for Jews—are deliberately replacing white European populations with nonwhite immigrants using mass migration and white birth rates that are lower than those of migrants. Those indebted peoples will, the theory goes, keep the elites in power in exchange for social welfare programs.

Like the conspiracy theory about socialism, the Great Replacement theory has roots in the nation’s past. In 1916, lawyer Madison Grant wrote The Passing of the Great Race: Or, The Racial Basis of European History. Grant’s book drew from similar European works to argue that the “Nordic race,” which had settled England, Scotland, and the Netherlands, was superior to other races and accounted for the best of human civilization. In the U.S., he claimed, that race was being overwhelmed by immigrants from “inferior” white races who were bringing poverty, crime, and corruption. To strengthen the Nordic race, Grant advocated, on the one hand, for an end to immigration and for “selection through the elimination of those who are weak or unfit” through sterilization, and on the other hand, for “fforts to increase the birth rate of the genius producing classes.”

Grant’s ideas were instrumental in justifying state eugenics laws as well as the 1924 Immigration Act establishing quotas for immigration from different countries. But his ideas fell out of favor in the 1930s, especially after Germany’s Adolf Hitler quoted often from Grant’s book in his speeches and wrote to Grant, describing the book as “my bible.”

A 1973 French dystopian novel anticipated the modern Great Replacement theory by showing immigrants from third-world countries destroying European society, but observers tend to date the emergence of this theory from the 2011 publication of Le Grand Remplacement, or The Great Replacement, by Renaud Camus, a French writer who claims that Muslims in France are destroying French culture and civilization. The theory has become influential among the far right in Europe and Canada. But it moves in a straight line from the Republican insistence that Black voters and their allies would destroy the U.S. with socialism.

Trump nodded to the Great Replacement theory in his 2016 run for the presidency, saying when he announced his candidacy in 2015 that Mexico was “sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
On August 11, 2017, the influence of the Great Replacement theory on Americans burst into public awareness when racists, antisemites, white nationalists, Ku Klux Klan members, neo-Nazis, and other alt-right groups met in Charlottesville, Virginia, to “Unite the Right.” They chanted “you will not replace us,” “Jews will not replace us,” and “blood and soil.” In addition to that Nazi slogan, they gave Nazi salutes and carried Nazi insignia.

Rather than denouncing them, President Trump refused to condemn them, telling a reporter that there were “very fine people, on both sides.” That statement marked Trump’s open embrace of the far right that backed the Great Replacement theory, snaking it into public discourse through lies like the claims that former president Joe Biden had created “open borders” and that countries were sending “migrant criminals” to the U.S., and by repeating terms like “illegal monster,” “killers,” “gang members,” “poisoning our country,” “taking your jobs,” and a dead giveaway: “the largest invasion in the history of our country.”

At the urging of then-candidate Trump in January 2024, Republicans refused to pass a bipartisan immigration reform measure hammered out by Senate negotiators over months. The bill appropriated $20.3 billion for border security, increased the number of immigration judges to end case backlogs, sped up asylum processes, and closed the border during high-traffic periods. It did not include a path to citizenship for those brought to the U.S. as children, the so-called Dreamers, making the measure skew toward Republican demands rather than Democratic priorities.

Nonetheless, Trump urged his supporters to kill it, and they did, teeing up a campaign in which he and his running mate, Ohio senator J.D. Vance, emulated Senator Joe McCarthy as they hammered on immigration fears, lying about open borders and migrant crime, claiming that a Venezuelan gang had taken over and was terrorizing Aurora, Colorado, and insisting—falsely—that Haitian immigrants were eating white neighbors’ pets in Springfield, Ohio.

While many Trump voters appeared to cling to the belief that a Trump administration would deport only “criminal” immigrants, which they thought meant those who had committed violent crimes, Trump’s team appeared to embrace the Great Replacement theory that defined all non-white Americans as a threat to the nation. Now, along with Vice President J.D. Vance, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, and others, they are making the idea of purging Brown and Black people from the United States central to federal policy both at home and abroad.

In September, Trump told European nations at the United Nations General Assembly that “the unmitigated immigration disaster” is “destroying your heritage.” “If you don’t stop people that you’ve never seen before, that you have nothing in common with, your country is going to fail,” Trump told them. “It’s time to end the failed experiment of open borders. You have to end it now. I can tell you, I’m really good at this stuff. Your countries are going to hell,” he said.

McCarthy’s supporters in the 1950s claimed that his lies were necessary for keeping Republicans in power: the ends justified the means. Neither journalists nor politicians could figure out how to counter McCarthy’s tactics. It was the American people who finally destroyed his career, turning against him when they realized he was hurting decent people and lying to them to gain power.

Suddenly reporters ignored him, the Senate “condemned” him, and he died only two and a half years later, likely from complications relating to alcoholism. Wisconsin voters elected Democrat William Proxmire to replace him. Proxmire told voters that McCarthy was “a disgrace to Wisconsin, to the Senate, and to America.”

Ta.

An excellent history lesson.

February 9, 2026 (Monday)

Last night’s thirteen-minute Super Bowl half-time show featuring Bad Bunny had more watchers than any other halftime show in history: an estimated 135 million watched live, while millions more have streamed it since. Rapper, singer, and record producer Bad Bunny, whose given name is ​​Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, is from Puerto Rico, and rocketed to prominence with the release of his first hit single on January 25, 2016. On February 1, 2026, just a week before the halftime show, Bad Bunny made history by being the first artist to win Album of the Year at the Grammys for an album recorded in Spanish.

Right-wing critics complained about the NFL’s invitation for Bad Bunny to do the halftime show, saying he was “not an American artist.”

In fact, people born in Puerto Rico are American citizens. But Puerto Rico has an odd relationship with the United States government, a relationship born of the combination of late-nineteenth-century economics and U.S. racism.

In the 1880s, large companies in various industries gobbled up their competitors to create giant “trusts” that monopolized their sector of the economy. The most powerful trust in the United States was the Sugar Trust, officially known as the American Sugar Refining Company, which by 1895 controlled about 95% of the U.S. sugar market. Thanks to pressure from the Sugar Trust, in 1890, Congress passed the McKinley Tariff, which ended sugar tariffs and tried to increase domestic production by offering a bounty on domestic sugar.

This privileged domestic producers, and in 1893, sugar growers in Hawaii staged a coup to overthrow the Hawaiian queen and asked Congress to admit the islands as an American state. President Benjamin Harrison, a friend and confidant of tariff namesake William McKinley, cheerfully backed annexation, but before the treaty could be approved, an 1894 law reinstated the duties on sugar and ended the bounties. Voters elected President Grover Cleveland later that year, and with Hawaiians furiously protesting against the machinations of an American business ring, Cleveland insisted on an investigation, and Hawaiian statehood stalled.

When the Spanish-American War broke out in 1898, the Senate still did not have enough votes to admit Hawaii, so Congress annexed it by a joint resolution and McKinley, now president, signed the measure. As the popular magazine Harper’s Weekly put it in a cartoon with a little boy dressed in the symbols of the American flag eating candy, America was swallowing “sugar plums.”

The acquisition of the territory of Hawaii had begun the question of annexing islands. Then the 1899 Treaty of Paris that ended the war transferred from the control of Spain to the control of the United States the islands of Cuba, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico, as well as a number of smaller islands including Guam, all of which either were sugar producers or had the potential to become sugar producers.

Since the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, adopted under the Articles of Confederation that made up the basis of the nation’s law before the Constitution, the U.S. had rejected colonies and had instead established a system for incorporating new territories into the country on terms of equality to older states. But in the era of Jim Crow, annexing the newly acquired islands under the terms established a century before presented a political problem for lawmakers. Although sugar growers wanted the islands to be domestic land for purposes of tariffs, most Americans did not want to include the Black and Brown inhabitants of those lands in the United States on terms of equality to white people.

Congress’s 1898 resolution of war against Spain in Cuba had contained the Teller Amendment, which required the U.S. government to support Cuban political independence once the war was over and Spanish troops gone, providing a quick answer to American political annexation of Cuba (although it left room for economic domination). But there was no such amendment for the rest of the islands the U.S. acquired in 1899.

A fiercely pro-business Supreme Court provided a solution for Puerto Rico in what became known as the Insular Cases. In May 1901, in Downes v. Bidwell, the court concluded of the newly acquired island that although “in an international sense was not a foreign country, since it was subject to the sovereignty of and was owned by the United States, it was foreign to the United States in a domestic sense, because the island had not been incorporated into the United States.” This new concept of “unincorporated territories” that were “foreign…in a domestic sense” allowed the U.S. government to legislate over the new lands without having to treat them like other parts of the Union, while also preventing the inclusion of their people in the U.S. body politic.

Two months after the court’s decision, on July 25, McKinley issued a proclamation removing tariff duties for products from Puerto Rico, and the sugar industry boomed.

But what did this system mean for the people in Puerto Rico? In 1902, a pregnant twenty- year-old Puerto Rican woman named Isabel González arrived in New York City to join her fiancé, but the immigration commissioner turned her away on the grounds that she was an “alien” who would require public support. González sued.

When her case reached the Supreme Court, it concluded in the 1904 Gonzalez v. Williams case that González was not an alien, and indeed that she should not have been denied entry to the United States. The justices went on to create a new category of personhood for the island’s inhabitants. They were not aliens, but they were not citizens either. Instead, they were “noncitizen nationals.” As such, they had some constitutional protections but not all. They could travel to the American mainland without being considered immigrants, but they had no voting rights in the U.S.

U.S. citizenship for Puerto Ricans was established in the 1917 Puerto Rico Federal Relations Act, also known as the Jones-Shafroth Act.

Today, Puerto Rico is a self-governing commonwealth of about 3.2 million people. Puerto Ricans do not pay federal taxes or vote in presidential elections, although a resident commissioner serves in Congress and can sit on committees and debate, but not vote on legislation. Puerto Ricans do pay U.S. Social Security taxes and receive certain federal benefits.

Last night, Bad Bunny highlighted Puerto Rican history, beginning with the workers at the heart of colonial sugar production and moving through to those same cane workers hanging from electric poles in an evocation of the recent blackouts in the country’s inadequate electric grid, poorly addressed by the U.S. government after Hurricane Maria wiped out the system in 2017. He carried the flag of the island from before the U.S. takeover—an independence flag banned from 1948 to 1957— its light blue triangle picked up in various fabrics throughout the performance.

He ended by shouting “God Bless America” in English, echoing the United States mantra in an answer to right-wing critics. And then he rejected the idea animating the current U.S. administration’s deportation of Black and Brown people with the claim they are not Americans and their culture will undermine American culture.

After saying “God Bless America, Bad Bunny listed in Spanish: “Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Haiti, Antilles, United States—not Estados Unidos—Canada, and Puerto Rico.”

“Together,” the football he carried said, “we are America.”

Another history lesson. Thanks.

I keep singing “America” from West Side Story now. Probably the references to Puerto Rico in the news at the moment.

February 10, 2026 (Tuesday)

As of yesterday, members of Congress who sit on the House or Senate Judiciary Committees can see unredacted versions of the Epstein files the Department of Justice (DOJ) has already released. As Herb Scribner of Axios explained, the documents are available from 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM on computers in the DOJ building in Washington, D.C. The lawmakers cannot bring electronic devices into the room with them, but they are allowed to take notes. They must give the DOJ 24 hours notice before they access the files.

The Epstein Files Transparency Act required the DOJ to release all the Epstein files by December 19. Only about half of them have been released to date, and many of them are so heavily redacted they convey little information. After members of Congress complained, on Friday, January 30, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said they could see the unredacted documents if they asked.

In a letter dated the next day, Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) immediately asked for access on behalf of the Democratic members of the House Judiciary Committee, saying they would be ready to view the files the following day, Sunday, February 1.

After viewing the files briefly yesterday, Raskin told Andrew Solender of Axios that when he searched the files for President Donald Trump’s name, it came up “more than a million times.” Raskin suggested that limiting members’ access to the files is part of a cover-up to hide Trump’s relationship with the convicted sex offender, a cover-up that includes the three million files the DOJ has yet to release despite the requirements of the Epstein Files Transparency Act. One of the files he did see referred to a child of 9.

Raskin called it “gruesome and grim.”

Representative Ro Khanna (D-CA) added: “There’s still a lot that’s redacted—even in what we’re seeing, we’re seeing redacted versions. I thought we were supposed to see the unredacted versions.”

Material that has come out has already shown members of the administration and their allies are lying about their connections to Epstein. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who lived next door to Epstein for more than ten years, said in October that he had cut ties with Epstein in 2005 after visiting his home and being disgusted. The files show that in fact, Lutnick not only maintained ties with Epstein but also was in business with him until at least 2018, long after Epstein was a convicted sex offender. Members of both parties have called for Lutnick to resign.

Testifying today before the Senate Appropriations Committee, where members took the opportunity to ask him about his ties to Epstein. Lutnick acknowledged that he had had more contact with Epstein than he had previously admitted, but maintained: “I did not have any relationship with him. I barely had anything to do with him.” But even Republicans expressed discomfort with Lutnick’s visit with his family to Epstein’s private island.

Khanna called for Lutnick to resign. “In this country, we have to make a decision,” he said. “Are we going to allow rich and powerful people who were friends and had no problem doing business and showing up with a pedophile who is raping underage girls, are we just going to allow them to skate? Or, like other countries, are we going to have…accountability for the people who did that?”

In the U.S. there has been little fallout so far for those in the files except the resignation of Wall Street lawyer Brad Karp, senior partner for Paul Weiss—the first law firm to cave to Trump’s demands last March. Material from the files shows that Karp plotted with Epstein to get a woman they disliked charged with a crime and deported.

In Europe the revelation that a leader had ties to Epstein has abruptly ended careers. The former British ambassador to Washington, Peter Mandelson, was fired and has created a crisis for Prime Minister Keir Starmer for appointing him. Two senior Norwegian diplomats are under investigation for gross corruption from their ties to Epstein; one of them, Mona Juul, resigned Sunday from her position as ambassador to Jordan and Iraq. Slovakia’s national security advisor Miroslav Lajčák resigned after messages between him and Epstein showed them talking about women while also discussing Lajčák’s meetings with Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov.

Poland announced it was launching an investigation into whether Epstein was tied to Russian intelligence. “More and more leads, more and more information, and more and more commentary in the global press all relate to the suspicion that this unprecedented paedophilia scandal was co-organised by Russian intelligence services,” Polish prime minister Donald Tusk said. “I don’t need to tell you how serious the increasingly likely possibility that Russian intelligence services co-organised this operation is for the security of the Polish state. This can only mean that they also possess compromising materials against many leaders still active today.”

Yesterday, Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving 20 years in prison for sex trafficking, testified by video before the House Oversight Committee. She refused to answer any questions, invoking her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. Her lawyer said she is “prepared to speak fully and honestly” if Trump grants her clemency.

Todd Lyons, the acting head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement; Rodney Scott, the commissioner of Customs and Border Protection; and Joseph Edlow, the director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, all part of the Department of Homeland Security, testified today before the House Committee on Homeland Security. As Eric Bazail-Eimil of Politico reported, Lyons defended the actions of ICE agents, saying they are properly enforcing immigration laws and that they are the real victims of the encounters that have left protesters dead or injured because the protests put agents in danger. Most Republicans backed them up, saying the Democrats are trying to stop the removal of criminals.

Democrats asked the men about federal arrests of U.S. citizens and the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti and demanded changes at ICE and Border Patrol. Funding for the Department of Homeland Security will run out on February 13, and the administration officials warned members of Congress that a shutdown would disrupt their operations and thus endanger national security. Representative James Walkinshaw (D-VA) later told a reporter: “Look, all of this comes from Stephen Miller’s sick and twisted, deranged Great Replacement theory. Whether these folks here…know it or not, they’re…just pawns in Stephen Miller’s sick and twisted scheme.”

Daniel Klaidman, Michael Kaplan, and Matt Gutman of CBS News reported that the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has filed a federal civil rights lawsuit after a federal raid on a popular horse racing venue in Wilder, Idaho, led to the detention of 105 undocumented immigrants as well as the temporary detention of 375 U.S. citizens or lawful residents. Only five arrests ended in criminal charges, all for unlicensed gambling.

Answering allegations that agents had used zip ties on children, both the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) field office in Boise and Homeland Security spokesperson Trisha McLaughlin flatly denied the allegations. “ICE didn’t zip tie, restrain, or arrest any children,” she said. “ICE does not zip tie or handcuff children. This is the kind of garbage rhetoric contributing to our officers facing a 1,300% increase in assaults against them and an 8,000% increase in death threats.” But after photographic evidence of zip-tie bruises on a 14-year-old female U.S. citizen as well as personal testimony, the FBI changed their assertion to say no “young” children were zip-tied.

Court documents unsealed today show that the FBI raid on the warehouse in Fulton County, Georgia, that led to the seizure of 700 boxes of ballots and other election related items was based on debunked claims of fraud from 2020 election deniers. As Ashley Cleaves and Matt Cohen of Democracy Docket explained, the affidavit that informed the search warrant came from Kurt Olsen, one of the lawyers who worked with Trump to overturn the 2020 election and whom Trump has recently appointed director of election security and integrity. In the affidavit, Olsen recycled a number of debunked theories.

Legal analyst Joyce White Vance notes that, aside from the merits of the case, it appears that the statute of limitations has run out on any potential election crimes stemming from 2020. She goes on to expose the weakness of the case itself and, finally, to point out that both the General Assembly and the Georgia State Election Board that said there was no intentional fraud or misconduct in the counting of the Fulton County ballots in 2020 were Republican led. White suggests the raid was “less about bringing a meritorious criminal prosecution against specific individuals and more about casting suspicion over Fulton County’s voting system and ability to conduct a fair election.”

Today the National Governors Association cancelled its annual bipartisan meeting with the president that usually involves a business meeting and a dinner. Trump had disinvited two Democratic governors, Jared Polis of Colorado and Wes Moore of Maryland, prompting the rest of the Democratic governors to refuse to attend. “Democratic governors have a long record of working across the aisle to deliver results and we remain committed to this effort. But it’s disappointing this administration doesn’t seem to share the same goal. At every turn, President Trump is creating chaos and division, and it is the American people who are hurting as a result,” the Democratic governors wrote. “If the reports are true that not all governors are invited to these events, which have historically been productive and bipartisan opportunities for collaboration, we will not be attending the White House dinner this year. Democratic governors remain united and will never stop fighting to protect and make life better for people in our states.”

Moore is the vice-chair of the NGA. Yesterday its chair, Oklahoma’s Republican governor Kevin Stitt, wrote: “Because NGA’s mission is to represent all 55 governors, the Association is no longer serving as the facilitator for that event, and it is no longer included in our official program.”

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters: “I just spoke with the president about this. It is a dinner at the White House. It’s the ‘People’s House.’ It’s also the president’s home, and he can invite whomever he wants to dinners and events here at the White House.”

In Washington today, a grand jury refused to indict six Democratic members of Congress for breaking a law that makes it a crime to “interfere with, impair, or influence the loyalty, morale, or discipline of the military or naval forces of the United States.” Senators Mark Kelly of Arizona, a retired Navy captain and astronaut; Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, a former CIA analyst; and Representatives Jason Crow of Colorado, a former Army Ranger; Chris Deluzio of Pennsylvania, a former Navy officer; Maggie Goodlander of New Hampshire, a Navy veteran; and Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania, a former Air Force officer, recorded a video last November reminding service members that they must refuse illegal orders.

Trump called it “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!”

Although the bar for an indictment is so low that grand juries almost always return one, the Trump administration’s attempts to harass those he perceives as opponents have been so outrageous that grand juries have repeatedly refused to go along. The New York Times called today’s refusal “a remarkable rebuke.”

Thanks.

:)

February 11, 2026 (Wednesday)

On February 12, 1809, Nancy Hanks Lincoln gave birth to her second child, a son: Abraham.

Abraham Lincoln grew up to become the nation’s sixteenth president, leading the country from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865, a little over a month into his second term. He piloted the country through the Civil War, preserving the concept of American democracy. It was a system that had never been fully realized but that he still saw as “the last, best hope of earth” to prove that people could govern themselves.

“Four score and seven years ago,” he told an audience at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in November 1863, “our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

Lincoln dated the founding of the nation from the Declaration of Independence rather than the Constitution, the document enslavers preferred because of that document’s protection of property. In the Declaration, the Founders wrote that they held certain “truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed….”

But in Lincoln’s day, fabulously wealthy enslavers had gained control over the government and had begun to argue that the Founders had gotten their worldview terribly wrong. They insisted that their system of human enslavement, which had enabled them to amass fortunes previously unimaginable, was the right one. Most men were dull drudges who must be led by their betters for their own good, southern leaders said. As South Carolina senator and enslaver James Henry Hammond put it, “I repudiate, as ridiculously absurd, that much-lauded but nowhere accredited dogma of Mr. Jefferson, that ‘all men are born equal.’”

In 1858, Abraham Lincoln, then a candidate for the Senate, warned that arguments limiting American equality to white men were the same arguments “that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world…. Turn in whatever way you will—whether it come from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent.” Either people—men, in his day—were equal, or they were not. Lincoln went on, “I should like to know if taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle and making exceptions to it…where will it stop?”

Lincoln had thought deeply about the logic of equality. In his 1860 campaign biography, he permitted the biographer to identify six books that had influenced him. One was a book published in 1817 and wildly popular in the Midwest in the 1830s: Capt. Riley’s Narrative. The book was written by James Riley, and the full title of the book was “An Authentic Narrative of the Loss of the American Brig Commerce, Wrecked on the Western Coast of Africa, in the Month of August, 1815, With the Sufferings of Her Surviving Officers and Crew, Who Were Enslaved by the Wandering Arabs on the Great African Desart , or Zahahrah.” The story was exactly what the title indicated: the tale of white men enslaved in Africa.

In the 1850s, on a fragment of paper, Lincoln figured out the logic of a world that permitted the law to sort people into different places in a hierarchy, applying the reasoning he heard around him. “If A. can prove, however conclusively, that he may, of right, enslave B.—why may not B. snatch the same argument, and prove equally, that he may enslave A?”

Lincoln wrote. “You say A. is white, and B. is black. It is color, then; the lighter, having the right to enslave the darker? Take care. By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with a fairer skin than your own. You do not mean color exactly?—You mean the whites are intellectually the superiors of the blacks, and, therefore have the right to enslave them? Take care again. By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with an intellect superior to your own. But, say you, it is a question of interest; and, if you can make it your interest, you have the right to enslave another. Very well. And if he can make it his interest, he has the right to enslave you.”

Lincoln saw clearly that if we give up the principle of equality before the law, we have given up the whole game. We have admitted the principle that people are unequal and that some people are better than others. Once we have replaced the principle of equality with the idea that humans are unequal, we have granted approval to the idea of rulers and ruled. At that point, all any of us can do is to hope that no one in power decides that we belong in one of the lesser groups.

In 1863, Lincoln reminded his audience at Gettysburg that the Founders had created a nation “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” but it was no longer clear whether “any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.” During the Civil War, the people of the United States were defending that principle against those who were trying to create a new nation based, as the Confederacy’s vice president Alexander Stephens said, “upon the great truth” that men were not, in fact, created equal, that the “great physical, philosophical, and moral truth” was that there was a “superior race.”

In the midst of the Civil War, Lincoln called for Americans to understand what was at stake, and to “highly resolve…that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

I like how Lincoln thought equality =/= aspirational poetry, rather a structural necessity. It’s what set him apart from his opponents. Stop thinking about “all men are created equal” (thanks, Jefferson), you’ll see a hierarchy form. Once hierarchy is established, everyone’s at the mercy of someone perceived stronger.

Subtle, HCR, subtle.

Neophyte said:

February 11, 2026 (Wednesday)

On February 12, 1809, Nancy Hanks Lincoln gave birth to her second child, a son: Abraham.

Abraham Lincoln grew up to become the nation’s sixteenth president, leading the country from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865, a little over a month into his second term. He piloted the country through the Civil War, preserving the concept of American democracy. It was a system that had never been fully realized but that he still saw as “the last, best hope of earth” to prove that people could govern themselves.

“Four score and seven years ago,” he told an audience at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in November 1863, “our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

Lincoln dated the founding of the nation from the Declaration of Independence rather than the Constitution, the document enslavers preferred because of that document’s protection of property. In the Declaration, the Founders wrote that they held certain “truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed….”

But in Lincoln’s day, fabulously wealthy enslavers had gained control over the government and had begun to argue that the Founders had gotten their worldview terribly wrong. They insisted that their system of human enslavement, which had enabled them to amass fortunes previously unimaginable, was the right one. Most men were dull drudges who must be led by their betters for their own good, southern leaders said. As South Carolina senator and enslaver James Henry Hammond put it, “I repudiate, as ridiculously absurd, that much-lauded but nowhere accredited dogma of Mr. Jefferson, that ‘all men are born equal.’”

In 1858, Abraham Lincoln, then a candidate for the Senate, warned that arguments limiting American equality to white men were the same arguments “that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world…. Turn in whatever way you will—whether it come from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent.” Either people—men, in his day—were equal, or they were not. Lincoln went on, “I should like to know if taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle and making exceptions to it…where will it stop?”

Lincoln had thought deeply about the logic of equality. In his 1860 campaign biography, he permitted the biographer to identify six books that had influenced him. One was a book published in 1817 and wildly popular in the Midwest in the 1830s: Capt. Riley’s Narrative. The book was written by James Riley, and the full title of the book was “An Authentic Narrative of the Loss of the American Brig Commerce, Wrecked on the Western Coast of Africa, in the Month of August, 1815, With the Sufferings of Her Surviving Officers and Crew, Who Were Enslaved by the Wandering Arabs on the Great African Desart , or Zahahrah.” The story was exactly what the title indicated: the tale of white men enslaved in Africa.

In the 1850s, on a fragment of paper, Lincoln figured out the logic of a world that permitted the law to sort people into different places in a hierarchy, applying the reasoning he heard around him. “If A. can prove, however conclusively, that he may, of right, enslave B.—why may not B. snatch the same argument, and prove equally, that he may enslave A?”

Lincoln wrote. “You say A. is white, and B. is black. It is color, then; the lighter, having the right to enslave the darker? Take care. By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with a fairer skin than your own. You do not mean color exactly?—You mean the whites are intellectually the superiors of the blacks, and, therefore have the right to enslave them? Take care again. By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with an intellect superior to your own. But, say you, it is a question of interest; and, if you can make it your interest, you have the right to enslave another. Very well. And if he can make it his interest, he has the right to enslave you.”

Lincoln saw clearly that if we give up the principle of equality before the law, we have given up the whole game. We have admitted the principle that people are unequal and that some people are better than others. Once we have replaced the principle of equality with the idea that humans are unequal, we have granted approval to the idea of rulers and ruled. At that point, all any of us can do is to hope that no one in power decides that we belong in one of the lesser groups.

In 1863, Lincoln reminded his audience at Gettysburg that the Founders had created a nation “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” but it was no longer clear whether “any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.” During the Civil War, the people of the United States were defending that principle against those who were trying to create a new nation based, as the Confederacy’s vice president Alexander Stephens said, “upon the great truth” that men were not, in fact, created equal, that the “great physical, philosophical, and moral truth” was that there was a “superior race.”

In the midst of the Civil War, Lincoln called for Americans to understand what was at stake, and to “highly resolve…that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Its interesting in that if by superior you mean long lasting cultures then tribal society without outside interference seems be superior.
City states all seems to have limited lifespans as they all collapse in similar fashions.
Often one race dominates another as it happens to be at the right place at the right time

Cymek said:

Its interesting in that if by superior you mean long lasting cultures then tribal society without outside interference seems be superior.
City states all seems to have limited lifespans as they all collapse in similar fashions.
Often one race dominates another as it happens to be at the right place at the right time

You ever play Civilization?

Divine Angel said:

Cymek said:

Its interesting in that if by superior you mean long lasting cultures then tribal society without outside interference seems be superior.
City states all seems to have limited lifespans as they all collapse in similar fashions.
Often one race dominates another as it happens to be at the right place at the right time

You ever play Civilization?

Similar type games.

Ta.

February 12, 2026 (Thursday)

In a ceremony at the White House yesterday, surrounded by coal industry leaders, lawmakers, and miners, President Donald J. Trump was presented with a trophy that calls him “the undisputed champion of beautiful, clean coal.” At the event, Trump signed an executive order directing the Defense Department to buy billions of dollars of power produced by coal and decried “the Radical Left’s war on the industry.” Anna Betts of The Guardian noted that Trump also announced the Department of Energy will spend $175 million to “modernize, retrofit, and extend” the life of coal-fired power plants in West Virginia, Ohio, North Carolina, and Kentucky.

As Lisa Friedman pointed out in the New York Times last month, the United States has been the largest polluter since the start of the industrial era, but emissions of carbon dioxide, a key greenhouse gas, have been declining since 2007. Trump maintains that climate change is a “hoax” and has withdrawn the U.S. from the main global climate treaty. Since he took office in January 2025, U.S. emissions have increased 1.9% largely because of the renewed use of coal, the dirtiest of the fossil fuels.

Today, the Environmental Protection Agency revoked the scientific finding that has been the basis for regulating emissions from cars and power plants since 2009. That finding, called the endangerment finding, reflects the consensus of scientists that greenhouse gases produced by burning fossil fuels like coal, oil, and natural gas endanger the health and general welfare of the American people.

The Trump administration says scientists are wrong about the dangers of climate change and that the regulations hurt industry and slow the economy. It claims ending the rule will save Americans $1.3 trillion, primarily through cheaper cars and trucks, but it did not factor in the costs of extreme weather caused by climate change or the costs of pollution-related health issues.

Last year, Josh Dawsey and Maxine Joselow of the Washington Post reported that at a campaign event at Mar-a-Lago in April 2024, then-candidate Trump told oil executives they should raise $1 billion for his campaign. In exchange, Trump promised he would get rid of Biden-era regulations and make sure no more such regulations went into effect, in addition to lowering lower taxes. Trump told them $1 billion would be a “deal,” considering how much money they would make if he were in the White House.

Tyler Pager and Matina Stevis-Gridneff of the New York Times reported on Tuesday that Trump’s threats to stop the opening of the Gordie Howe International Bridge between Detroit, Michigan, and Windsor, Ontario, came just hours after billionaire Matthew Moroun, whose family operates a competing bridge, called Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. Moroun has tried to stop the construction of the new bridge for decades.

The $4.7 billion construction cost of the Gordie Howe bridge has been fully funded by Canada although the bridge is partly owned by Michigan and will be operated jointly by Canada and Michigan. The new bridge will compete with the Ambassador Bridge—the one the Moroun family operates—for about $300 million in trade crossing the border daily.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that “This is just another example of President Trump putting America’s interest first.”

This afternoon, Dustin Volz, Josh Dawsey, and C. Ryan Barber of the Wall Street Journal reported that the whistleblower complaint of last May involved another country’s interception of a conversation between two foreign nationals who were discussing Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, issues related to Iran, and perhaps other issues. Kushner runs Affinity Partners, an investment fund that has taken billions of dollars in funds from Arab monarchies. He does not have an official role in the U.S. government but appears to be acting in foreign affairs as a volunteer.

The Wall Street Journal reported on the existence of the whistleblower complaint on February 2, 2026, reporting that Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard had bottled it up for political reasons, taking it not to Congress but to White House chief of staff Susie Wiles. On February 3, Gabbard released a highly redacted version of the complaint to the Gang of Eight, the top member of each party in the House and Senate and the top member of each party on the House and Senate intelligence committees.

It may or not be related that in early April 2025, the administration abruptly fired National Security Agency director General Timothy Haugh and his deputy, hours after dismissing several staffers at the National Security Council. At the time, conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer, who is close to Trump, posted on social media that Haugh and his deputy “have been disloyal to President Trump. That is why they have been fired.”

In Talking Points Memo, editor Josh Marshall has been exploring the contours of what he calls the Authoritarian International, which he identifies as “a host of authoritarian governments around the world, the princelings of the Gulf monarchies, the sprinkling of European right-ravanchist governments, the rightward portion of Silicon Valley (which accounts for a larger and larger percentage of the top owners if not the larger community), the Israeli private intel sector, various post-Soviet oligarchs and, increasingly, the world’s billionaire class.”

Marshall notes that those in this world are not just antidemocratic. They are constructing a private world in which deals are done secretly without any democratic accountability, mixing national interest with individual financial interest. The model operates in part by maintaining control over key figures thanks to compromising material on them. Marshall points out that the system can be oddly stable if everyone has something on everyone else.

Marshall’s description dovetails neatly with former Federal Bureau of Investigation director Robert Mueller’s 2011 explanation of the evolving organized crime threat. Organized crime had become multinational, he said, “making billions of dollars from human trafficking, health care fraud, computer intrusions, and copyright infringement cornering the market on natural gas, oil, and precious metals, and selling to the highest bidder.” He explained: “These groups may infiltrate our businesses. They may provide logistical support to hostile foreign powers. They may try to manipulate those at the highest levels of government. Indeed, these so-called ‘iron triangles’ of organized criminals, corrupt government officials, and business leaders pose a significant national security threat.”

To protect this system, transparency must be prevented at all costs.

The administration seems to be illustrating this principle as it denies the right and duty of Congress to conduct oversight of the government. The Department of Justice (DOJ) has refused to release all the Epstein files to the public as Congress required when it passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act. Yesterday Attorney General Pam Bondi appeared before the House Judiciary Committee, but it was clear she was not there to answer lawmakers’ questions or explain why she had not released the files.

Nor did she acknowledge the survivors of Epstein’s sexual assaults and sex trafficking, many of whom were in the audience and noted that she had not met with them. When Representative Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) urged her to apologize to the survivors for the sloppiness of the release that had left many survivors’s names, identifying information, and even sexually explicit photos unredacted while covering the names of perpetrators, Bondi accused Jayapal of theatrics and, as Glenn Thrush of the New York Times reported, of dragging the hearing “into the gutter.”

Instead, she came prepared with a book of insults to aim at Democrats and met questions with attacks on the questioners and praise for Trump. Republican Thomas Massie (R-KY), who has been instrumental in pressuring the White House over the Epstein files, posted on social media: “A funny thing about Bondi’s insults to members of Congress who had serious questions: Staff literally gave her flash cards with individualized insults, but she couldn’t memorize them, so you can see her shuffle through them to find the flash-cards-insult that matches the member.”

Bondi was not only stonewalling but also demonstrating the tactics of authoritarian power, turning her own shortcomings into an attack on those trying to enforce rules. Even more ominously, Kent Nishimura of Reuters captured a photograph of a page of the book with a printout titled: “Jayapal Pramila Search History.” It appeared to be the files Representative Jayapal accessed after the DOJ made some of the Epstein files available at DOJ offices earlier this week.

This is a shocking intrusion of the executive branch into surveilling members of the legislative branch and weaponizing that information. The top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD), said he will ask for an investigation of this “outrageous abuse of power.”

Bondi’s performance drew widespread condemnation from outside the administration, and even Republicans seemed to realize she was toxic: Scott MacFarlane of CBS News noted that in the committee hearing, Republicans didn’t use all their time to question her but simply yielded their time allotted to ask questions back to the committee.

But Bondi appeared to be playing to Trump, as she made clear when she veered into the bizarre claim that what the committee should be talking about was not the Epstein files but rather the booming stock market. Last month, Josh Dawsey, Sadie Gurman, and C. Ryan Barber of the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump was complaining to aides that Bondi is weak and ineffective. Yesterday’s performance pleased him.

This morning, Trump’s social media account posted: “AG Pam Bondi, under intense fire from the Trump Deranged Radical Left Lunatics, was fantastic at yesterday’s Hearing on the never ending saga of Jeffrey Epstein, where the one thing that has been proven conclusively, much to their chagrin, was that President Donald J. Trump has been 100% exonerated of their ridiculous Russia, Russia, Russia type charges…. Nobody cared about Epstein when he was alive, they only cared about him when they thought he could create Political Harm to a very popular President who has brought our Country back from the brink of extinction, and very quickly, at that!”

An Economist/YouGov poll released Tuesday shows that 85% of U.S. adults agree with the statement “There are powerful elites who helped Epstein target and abuse young girls. They protected him and need to be investigated.” Only 3% of American adults disagree. Fifty percent of American adults think Trump “was involved in crimes allegedly committed by Jeffrey Epstein,” while only 29% think he wasn’t.

Thanks.

Marshall notes that those in this world are not just antidemocratic. They are constructing a private world in which deals are done secretly without any democratic accountability, mixing national interest with individual financial interest. The model operates in part by maintaining control over key figures thanks to compromising material on them. Marshall points out that the system can be oddly stable if everyone has something on everyone else.

Sounds a lot like the Epstein files model.

roughbarked said:

Marshall notes that those in this world are not just antidemocratic. They are constructing a private world in which deals are done secretly without any democratic accountability, mixing national interest with individual financial interest. The model operates in part by maintaining control over key figures thanks to compromising material on them. Marshall points out that the system can be oddly stable if everyone has something on everyone else.

Sounds a lot like the Epstein files model.

“constructing”

February 13, 2026 (Friday)

At midnight tonight, most of the agencies and services in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) will run out of funding, as popular fury over the violence and lawlessness of federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the U.S. Border Patrol made Senate Democrats refuse to agree to fund DHS without reforms. And yet, because the Republicans lavished money on ICE and Border Patrol in their July 2025 budget reconciliation bill—the one they call the One Big Beautiful Bill Act—those agencies will continue to operate. The 260,000 federal employees affected by the partial shutdown will come from other agencies in DHS, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the Transportation Security Agency (TSA), and the Coast Guard.

A measure to fund DHS passed the House by a majority vote, but in the Senate, the filibuster allows the Democrats, who are in the minority, to make demands before the measure can pass. On February 4, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) sent Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) and House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) a letter outlining demands Democrats want incorporated into a measure to appropriate more funds for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

Those demands are pretty straightforward. The Democrats want federal agents to enter private homes only with a judicial warrant (as was policy until the administration produced a secret memo saying that DHS officials themselves could sign off on raids, a decision that runs afoul of legal interpretations of the Fourth Amendment). They want agents to stop wearing masks and to have their names, agencies, and unique ID numbers visible on their uniforms, as law enforcement officers do. They want an end to racial profiling—that is, agents detaining individuals on the basis of their skin color, place of employment, or language—and to raids of so-called sensitive sites: medical facilities, schools, childcare facilities, churches, polling places, and courts.

They want agents to be required to have a reasonable policy for use of force and to be removed during an investigation if they violate it. They want federal agents to coordinate with local and state governments and for those governments to have jurisdiction over federal agents who break the law. They want DHS detention facilities to have the same standards as any detention facility and for detainees to have access to their lawyers. They want states to be able to sue if those conditions are not met, and they want Congress members to have unscheduled access to the centers to oversee them.

They want body cameras to be used for accountability but prohibited for gathering and storing information about protesters. And they want federal agents to have standardized uniforms like those of regular law enforcement, not paramilitaries.

As Schumer and Jeffries wrote, these are commonsense measures that protect Americans’ constitutional rights and ensure responsible law enforcement, and should apply to all federal activity even without Democrats demanding them. Democrats said White House offers were insufficient to address their concerns, although the White House did not make its position public. Before they left Washington yesterday for a ten-day break, senators refused to fund DHS in its current state.

Before the vote, administration officials appeared to try to soften the image of the federal agents who have terrorized Americans, arrested citizens and legal immigrants as well as undocumented immigrants, and shot people. Trump’s immigration advisor Tom Homan, who took over in Minneapolis after Border Patrol agents acting under the leadership of then-commander Greg Bovino shot and killed a second American citizen in that city, told reporters yesterday that that administration will end its surge of federal agents into Minneapolis, saying it had achieved “successful results” including 4,000 people arrested. Agents will remain in the city, he said, but the surge of thousands of agents will end. Torey Van Oot of Axios adds that more than a dozen federal prosecutors resigned after the Department of Justice declined to investigate the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, and support for Trump’s handling of deportations cratered as Americans saw children tear-gassed and citizens shot.

Acting director of ICE Todd Lyons told the House Homeland Security Committee on Tuesday that the agency is training agents adequately before they go into the field and that once there, they are properly enforcing U.S. immigration laws. “And,” he added, “we are only getting started.”

But Lyons’s claim that federal agents are adequately trained was belied on Wednesday when the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) abruptly closed the airspace over El Paso, Texas, for what it initially said would be ten days. Such a closure would shut down all flights below 18,000 feet, including medical helicopters, and is rare enough that the comparison media used was to the closure of airspace after 9/11. Confusion reigned, since no one had notified even the mayor of El Paso, a city of 700,000 people. Shortly afterward, the FAA reopened the airspace.

Administration officials immediately said the problem was drones flown into the area by drug cartels, though such drone flights are common. Then the media reported that the Defense Department had been testing out a new antidrone defense system without signoff from the FAA on danger to civilian planes. Then it turned out that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had permitted U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the parent agency of Border Patrol, to use an antidrone laser near Fort Bliss, where detainees are housed at Camp East Montana. Someone then used the laser without informing the FAA. And then it turned out that the “drones” agents used the laser to shoot down were actually party balloons.

That the Defense Department is loaning a military weapon to CBP is itself concerning, but that a weapon powerful enough to cause the closure of El Paso’s airspace was in the hands of someone who mistook balloons for cartel drones is also a problem. So, too, of course, is that the administration’s initial impulse was to lie about what happened.

In his testimony, Lyons maintained that ICE is indeed prioritizing the removal of undocumented immigrants with records of violent crime, enabling Republicans to claim that Democrats who want to rein ICE in are deliberately endangering public safety. Camilo Montoya-Galvez of CBS News reported this week that documents from DHS itself show that fewer than 14% of the nearly 400,000 immigrants arrested in Trump’s first year had either convictions or charges for violent crimes, with fewer than 2% either charged with or convicted of homicide or sexual assault.

Leah Feiger of Wired reported today that ICE has been quietly and aggressively expanding across the United States in the past months. It has bought or leased new facilities in nearly every state, many of them outside of the country’s largest cities, although they are concentrated in Texas. Feiger reports that DHS asked the General Services Administration (GSA), which manages government properties, to ignore competitive bidding rules and hide lease listings out of “national security concerns.”

Douglas MacMillan and Jonathan O’Connell of the Washington Post reported today that ICE officials are planning to spend $38.3 billion to buy warehouses across the country. ICE will retrofit sixteen of them to become processing centers that can hold 1,000 to 1,500 detainees at a time before funneling them into eight megacenters that can hold up to 10,000 detainees each.

The administration has dramatically changed ICE policy to assert the right to imprison noncitizens until they are deported, even if they are applicants for asylum. Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) made an unannounced oversight visit to the ICE field facility in Baltimore, Maryland, yesterday. He saw “60 men packed into a room shoulder-to-shoulder, 24-hours-a-day, with a single toilet in the room and no shower facilities. They sleep like sardines with aluminum foil blankets.” Mike Hixenbaugh at NBC News today narrated the life of a Russian family in the U.S. seeking asylum. For four months, they have been incarcerated at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Texas, where there is little medical care and the food is often spoiled with mold or worms.

In a statement, a spokesperson for DHS accused the media of “peddling hoaxes” about poor conditions in detention centers.

But DHS has lied about so many things that no one should take their words seriously. In January, when an ICE agent shot Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis in Minneapolis, DHS claimed that he had driven away from a “targeted traffic stop,” crashed into a parked car, and run. When an ICE agent caught up with him and Alfredo Alejandro Aljorna, DHS said, the men had attacked the agent with a snow shovel and a broom handle. DHS said an agent had then fired on the men “to defend his life.” The men escaped but were later captured and charged with assault.

Yesterday, the Justice Department dropped the charges, saying “newly discovered evidence” suggested the allegations were false. Aljorna’s lawyer explained: “It is my understanding that the video surveillance evidence that captured the incident was materially inconsistent with the federal agent’s claims of what happened.”

Last night, in a deep expose of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and her advisor Corey Lewandowski, Wall Street Journal reporters Michelle Hackman, Josh Dawsey, and Tarini Parti described a department in chaos. Noem and Lewandowski—who the authors say are having an affair and essentially run the department together—are using DHS for their own aggrandizement with an eye to elevating Noem to the presidency. The reporters detailed the focus on image, the decimation of ICE by firing or demoting 80% of the career field leadership that was in place when they arrived, the apparent steering of contracts to allies, and Noem and Lewandowski’s excessive demands, including “a luxury 737 MAX jet, with a private cabin in back, for their travel around the country.” DHS is currently leasing the $70 million plane but is in the process of buying it.

DHS and the violence of federal agents have exacerbated rather than silenced opposition to the Trump administration, causing a crisis for it as the American people increasingly turn against it. Trump is adamant that Republicans must win the 2026 elections and so is calling for new election laws, claiming that Democrats can win elections only through the illegal votes of undocumented immigrants.

This ties DHS and American elections together. Today Noem told reporters in Arizona that Congress must pass the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility, or SAVE America, measure to secure U.S. elections, lying that noncitizens are voting for Democrats and thus enabling them to win elections. This is an old saw Republicans have used since 1994, the year after the Democrats passed the Motor Voter Act, and it has been repeatedly debunked. Indeed, when reporters asked for an example of noncitizen voting, she said she couldn’t point to a case but assumed it happened. The bill not only would require voters to show either a passport or a birth certificate with the name matching theirs in order to register, but would also require states to purge their voting rolls every month. The measure passed the House Wednesday but must overcome a filibuster to pass the Senate.

Jen Fifield of ProPublica and Zach Despart of ProPublica and the Texas Tribune reported today that DHS has been using an electronic tool called Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE), previously used to check eligibility for public benefits, to find noncitizen voters in a database made up of confidential data from different government agencies. That information includes confidential data from the Social Security Administration, accessed by the Department of Government Efficiency. Republican secretaries of state in twenty-seven states have agreed to use SAVE to check their voter rolls.

But Fifield and Despart report that the system makes “persistent mistakes,” frequently assessing naturalized citizens as noncitizens. The system automatically refers those individuals to DHS for possible criminal investigation, and in certain states, individuals have had to prove their citizenship to be reinstated as voters. “This is not ready for prime time,” county clerk Brianna Lennon of Boone County, Missouri, told the reporters. “And I’m not going to risk the security and the constitutional rights of my voters for bad data.”

And so Trump clearly thinks he must take matters into his own hands. Although the Constitution is quite clear that it is Congress, and Congress alone, that can make laws, today his social media account announced he intends to change the nation’s voting laws all by himself. The account posted: “The Democrats refuse to vote for Voter I.D., or Citizenship. The reason is very simple—They want to continue to cheat in Elections. This was not what our Founders desired. I have searched the depths of Legal Arguments not yet articulated or vetted on this subject, and will be presenting an irrefutable one in the very near future. There will be Voter I.D. for the Midterm Elections, whether approved by Congress or not! Also, the People of our Country are insisting on Citizenship, and No Mail-In Ballots, with exceptions for Military, Disability, Illness, or Travel. Thank you for your attention to this matter! PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP”

Today, ICE protesters carried a giant U.S. Constitution through the streets of Minneapolis, demanding that federal agents honor the rights the Framers established with that foundational document.

Thanks.

:)

February 14, 2026 (Saturday)

On Valentine’s Day in 1884, Theodore Roosevelt lost both his wife and his mother.

Four years before, Roosevelt could not have imagined the tragedy that would stun him in 1884. February 14, 1880, marked one of the happiest days of his life. He and the woman he had courted for more than a year, Alice Hathaway Lee, had just announced their engagement. Roosevelt was over the moon: “I can scarcely realize that I can hold her in my arms and kiss her and caress her and love her as much as I choose,” he recorded in his diary. What followed were, according to Roosevelt, “three years of happiness greater and more unalloyed than I have ever known fall to the lot of others.”

After they married in fall 1880, the Roosevelts moved into the home of Theodore’s mother, Martha Bulloch Roosevelt, in New York City. There they lived the life of wealthy young socialites, going to fancy parties and the opera and traveling to Europe. When Roosevelt was elected to the New York State Assembly in 1881, they moved to the bustling town of Albany, where the state’s political wire-pullers worked their magic. Roosevelt’s machine politician colleagues derided the rich, Harvard-educated young man as a “dude,” and they tried to ignore his irritating interest in reforming society.

In the summer of 1883, Alice discovered that she was pregnant, and that fall she moved back to New York City to live with her mother-in-law. There she awaited the birth of the child who Theodore was certain would arrive on February 14.

As headstrong as her father, Roosevelt’s daughter beat her father’s prediction by two days. On February 12, Alice gave birth to the couple’s first child, who would be named after her. Roosevelt was at work in Albany and learned the happy news by telegram. But Alice was only “fairly well,” Roosevelt noted. She soon began sliding downhill. She did not recover from the birth; she was suffering from something at the time called “Bright’s Disease,” an unspecified kidney illness.

Roosevelt rushed back to New York City, but by the time he got there at midnight on February 13, Alice was slipping into a coma. Distraught, he held her until he received word that his mother was dangerously ill downstairs. For more than a week, “Mittie” Roosevelt had been sick with typhoid. Roosevelt ran down to her room, where she died shortly after her son reached her bedside. With his mother gone, Roosevelt hurried back to Alice. Only hours later she, too, died.

On February 14, 1884, Roosevelt slashed a heavy black X in his diary and wrote “The light has gone out of my life.” He refused ever to mention Alice again.

Roosevelt’s profound personal tragedy turned out to have national significance. The diseases that killed his wife and mother were diseases of filth and crowding—the hallmarks of the growing Gilded Age American cities. Mittie contracted typhoid from either food or water that had been contaminated by sewage, since New York City did not yet treat or manage either sewage or drinking water. Alice’s disease was probably caused by a strep infection, which incubated in the teeming city’s tenements, where immigrants, whose wages barely kept food on the table, crowded together.

Roosevelt had been interested in urban reform because he worried that incessant work and unhealthy living conditions threatened the ability of young workers to become good citizens. Now, though, it was clear that he, and other rich New Yorkers, had a personal stake in cleaning up the cities and making sure employers paid workers a living wage.

The tragedy gave him a new political identity that enabled him to do just that. Ridiculed as a “dude” in his early career, Roosevelt changed his image in the wake of the events of February 1884. Desperate to bury his feelings for Alice along with her, Roosevelt escaped to Dakota Territory, to a ranch in which he had invested the previous year. There he rode horses, roped cattle, and toyed with the idea of spending the rest of his life as a western rancher. The brutal winter of 1886–1887 changed his mind. Months of blizzards and temperatures as low as –41 degrees killed off 80% of the Dakota cattle herds. More than half of Roosevelt’s cattle died.

Roosevelt decided to go back to eastern politics, but this time, no one would be able to make fun of him as a dude. In an era when the independent American cowboy dominated the popular imagination, Roosevelt now had credentials as a westerner. He ran for political office as a western cowboy taking on corruption in the East. And, with that cowboy image, he overtook his eastern rivals.

Eventually, Roosevelt’s successes made establishment politicians so nervous they tried to bury him in what was then seen as the graveyard of the vice presidency. Then, in 1901, an unemployed steelworker assassinated President William McKinley and put Roosevelt—“that damned cowboy,” as one of McKinley’s advisers called him—into the White House.
Once there, he worked to clean up the cities and stop the exploitation of workers, backing the urban reforms that were the hallmark of the Progressive Era.

Oh that is sad. But those deaths seem to have set off a chain reaction to bring forth change in the form of worker reforms and he got the presidency so…

Neophyte said:

February 14, 2026 (Saturday)

On Valentine’s Day in 1884, Theodore Roosevelt lost both his wife and his mother.

Four years before, Roosevelt could not have imagined the tragedy that would stun him in 1884. February 14, 1880, marked one of the happiest days of his life. He and the woman he had courted for more than a year, Alice Hathaway Lee, had just announced their engagement. Roosevelt was over the moon: “I can scarcely realize that I can hold her in my arms and kiss her and caress her and love her as much as I choose,” he recorded in his diary. What followed were, according to Roosevelt, “three years of happiness greater and more unalloyed than I have ever known fall to the lot of others.”

After they married in fall 1880, the Roosevelts moved into the home of Theodore’s mother, Martha Bulloch Roosevelt, in New York City. There they lived the life of wealthy young socialites, going to fancy parties and the opera and traveling to Europe. When Roosevelt was elected to the New York State Assembly in 1881, they moved to the bustling town of Albany, where the state’s political wire-pullers worked their magic. Roosevelt’s machine politician colleagues derided the rich, Harvard-educated young man as a “dude,” and they tried to ignore his irritating interest in reforming society.

In the summer of 1883, Alice discovered that she was pregnant, and that fall she moved back to New York City to live with her mother-in-law. There she awaited the birth of the child who Theodore was certain would arrive on February 14.

As headstrong as her father, Roosevelt’s daughter beat her father’s prediction by two days. On February 12, Alice gave birth to the couple’s first child, who would be named after her. Roosevelt was at work in Albany and learned the happy news by telegram. But Alice was only “fairly well,” Roosevelt noted. She soon began sliding downhill. She did not recover from the birth; she was suffering from something at the time called “Bright’s Disease,” an unspecified kidney illness.

Roosevelt rushed back to New York City, but by the time he got there at midnight on February 13, Alice was slipping into a coma. Distraught, he held her until he received word that his mother was dangerously ill downstairs. For more than a week, “Mittie” Roosevelt had been sick with typhoid. Roosevelt ran down to her room, where she died shortly after her son reached her bedside. With his mother gone, Roosevelt hurried back to Alice. Only hours later she, too, died.

On February 14, 1884, Roosevelt slashed a heavy black X in his diary and wrote “The light has gone out of my life.” He refused ever to mention Alice again.

Roosevelt’s profound personal tragedy turned out to have national significance. The diseases that killed his wife and mother were diseases of filth and crowding—the hallmarks of the growing Gilded Age American cities. Mittie contracted typhoid from either food or water that had been contaminated by sewage, since New York City did not yet treat or manage either sewage or drinking water. Alice’s disease was probably caused by a strep infection, which incubated in the teeming city’s tenements, where immigrants, whose wages barely kept food on the table, crowded together.

Roosevelt had been interested in urban reform because he worried that incessant work and unhealthy living conditions threatened the ability of young workers to become good citizens. Now, though, it was clear that he, and other rich New Yorkers, had a personal stake in cleaning up the cities and making sure employers paid workers a living wage.

The tragedy gave him a new political identity that enabled him to do just that. Ridiculed as a “dude” in his early career, Roosevelt changed his image in the wake of the events of February 1884. Desperate to bury his feelings for Alice along with her, Roosevelt escaped to Dakota Territory, to a ranch in which he had invested the previous year. There he rode horses, roped cattle, and toyed with the idea of spending the rest of his life as a western rancher. The brutal winter of 1886–1887 changed his mind. Months of blizzards and temperatures as low as –41 degrees killed off 80% of the Dakota cattle herds. More than half of Roosevelt’s cattle died.

Roosevelt decided to go back to eastern politics, but this time, no one would be able to make fun of him as a dude. In an era when the independent American cowboy dominated the popular imagination, Roosevelt now had credentials as a westerner. He ran for political office as a western cowboy taking on corruption in the East. And, with that cowboy image, he overtook his eastern rivals.

Eventually, Roosevelt’s successes made establishment politicians so nervous they tried to bury him in what was then seen as the graveyard of the vice presidency. Then, in 1901, an unemployed steelworker assassinated President William McKinley and put Roosevelt—“that damned cowboy,” as one of McKinley’s advisers called him—into the White House.
Once there, he worked to clean up the cities and stop the exploitation of workers, backing the urban reforms that were the hallmark of the Progressive Era.

An interesting history lesson, thanks.

February 15, 2026 (Sunday)

The Trump administration’s white nationalist project was on full display this weekend at the 62nd Munich Security Conference that took place from February 13 to 15, 2026. The Munich Security Conference is the leading international forum for discussions of security policy. It was begun in 1963, at the height of the Cold War, to be an independent venue for experts and policymakers to discuss the most pressing security issues around the globe.

While the USSR absorbed neighboring countries as satellites, the U.S. and its allies and partners embraced a theory that international relations could achieve permanent peace so long as they emphasized representative democracy, economic interdependence, and international organizations. The equality, shared norms, and costs for wars that this system built, the theory went, along with new mechanisms for negotiation, would prevent global military conflict like those the world had suffered twice in the early twentieth century.

Since World War II, those values have reinforced civil rights and created opportunities for women and people of color, created dramatically higher standards of living around the globe, and prevented global wars. But the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 changed global calculations. Rather than defending the tenets of democracy, American leaders focused on spreading capitalism into the newly accessible states, arguing that democracy and capitalism went hand in hand.

At home, the end of the Cold War meant that the extremist Republicans who hoped to destroy business regulations and slash taxes, as well as halt infrastructure projects and end civil rights protections, no longer had to work with Democrats to stand against the USSR. They focused on getting rid of those they called the American “left,” a term that for them included not just Democrats but also Independents and traditional Republicans in the mold of President George H.W. Bush, who believed the government had a role to play in regulating business, providing a basic social safety net, promoting infrastructure, and protecting civil rights.

Extremist Republicans attacked their opponents as socialists even as their tax cuts and deregulation were moving money dramatically upward: at least $50 trillion moved upward from the bottom 90% to the top 1% between 1975 and 2020. Republican leaders and media figures fed their audiences the story that the middle class was imploding not because of Republican policies but because undeserving Black people, people of color, and feminist women demanded government handouts. This narrative fueled Trump’s political rise. He promised to fix the economic dispossession of those the modern economy left behind, by “draining the swamp,” restoring white men to control, and rebuilding the American middle class.

Once in office, though, Trump continued Republican policies of tax cuts and deregulation, maintaining his hold over his supporters by increasing attacks on racial and gender minorities and on women. As he distanced himself from democratic principles, he cozied up to Arab monarchs and Russia’s president Vladimir Putin. Like right-wing media leaders, he championed Hungarian prime minister Victor Orbán, who had destroyed democracy in Hungary in favor of establishing autocracy.

At the Munich Security Conference last year, just after Trump had taken office for the second time, Vice President J.D. Vance announced the U.S. was switching sides in global affairs. Henceforth, it would work to destroy the values of representative democracy and the global systems of trade and security that the U.S. and partners constructed after World War II.

In their place, officials in the Trump administration and their media allies have embraced the Great Replacement theory that says Brown and Black migration to Europe and the U.S. is destroying “western civilization.” Such migration must be stopped, they argue, and Brown and Black people purged from the U.S. and Europe. The end of equal rights for migrants will enable white Christian men to dominate society and pass laws that reinforce traditional religious and patriarchal hierarchies.

A report the organizers of the Munich Security Conference released before this year’s event named the elephant in the room: “the changing role of the United States in the international system.”

The report looked back to the statement of U.S. secretary of state Dean Acheson, who oversaw the development of the post–World War II global order, that he was “present at the creation.” Now, the report said, we may be present at its destruction. “The world has entered a period of wrecking-ball politics. Sweeping destruction—rather than careful reforms and policy corrections—is the order of the day. The most prominent of those who promise to free their countries from the existing order’s constraints and rebuild stronger, more prosperous nations is the current US administration. As a result, more than 80 years after construction began, the US-led post-1945 international order is now under destruction.”

Trump is leading that destruction, the report says, but it’s not clear that he is clearing the ground for new policies that will secure Americans’ safety, prosperity, or freedom. It warns that Trump is building a world based on private transactions that privilege a global elite and replace international cooperation with a few powerful countries. “Ironically,” it says, “this would be a world that privileges the rich and powerful, not those who have placed their hopes in wrecking-ball politics.”

When he opened this year’s conference, German chancellor Friedrich Merz warned the Trump administration that “he leadership claim of the U.S. is being challenged, perhaps already lost,” and that the world of great-power rivalry the U.S. is trying to set up will leave the U.S. alone and weakened. “We Germans know a world in which might makes right would be a dark place,” he said. “Our country has gone down this path in the 20th century until the bitter and dreadful end.”

“The culture war of the MAGA movement is not ours,” Merz said. “Freedom of speech ends here with us when that speech is turned against human dignity and the constitution. And we don’t believe in tariffs and protectionism, but in free trade. We stand by climate agreements and the World Health Organization.”

In his speech to the conference yesterday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio was less confrontational than Vance was last year, but the message was the same. He attacked all three of the pillars on which the U.S. has previously stood in foreign affairs. Global trade has ruined the U.S. economy, he said, while international institutions have undermined sovereignty, and “a climate cult” has imposed energy policies that are “impoverishing our people.”

He focused, though, on “mass migration,” which he claimed “threatens the cohesion of our societies, the continuity of our culture, and the future of our people.” He called for Europe to join with the U.S. in rejecting the tenets of the post–World War II vision, claiming that “e are part of one civilization—Western civilization. We are bound to one another by the deepest bonds that nations could share, forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry, and the sacrifices our forefathers made together for the common civilization to which we have fallen heir.”
His description of that shared heritage reflected the Trump administration’s fantasy past. It was all white and Christian, quite weirdly erasing the Indigenous Americans who were central to the development of a peculiarly “American” identity in the eastern colonies of North America and the reality that the vast majority of the American West was Indigenous, Spanish, and Mexican for hundreds of years before it became part of the United States in 1848.

Rubio’s version of the U.S. did not include Black Americans at all, even though they were among the first inhabitants of the colonies that became the U.S., and even though he called out the Rolling Stones, who built their body of work on that of Black American blues musicians like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, as part of “western civilization.” Rubio even ignored his own family’s arrival in the U.S. from Cuba in 1956, rooting his own heritage not in the modern migration from Latin America to the U.S. that the administration is criminalizing, but in eighteenth-century Spain.

Entirely ignoring the threat of autocratic Russia against Europe, Rubio pushed Europe to abandon the values of democracy in favor of imperialism. He said the U.S. had “no interest in being polite and orderly caretakers of the West’s managed decline” and urged Europe to work with the U.S. for a return to western “dominance.”

From Munich, Rubio will travel to Hungary to visit with Orbán, who is facing an election on April 12, following a stop in Slovakia, whose leader is also a Trump ally.

Rubio’s version of history echoes that of the Nazis during World War II and ignores the strength of the real multicultural history of the United States. European leaders wanted no part of it.

European Union foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas rejected the ideology behind Rubio’s speech. “Contrary to what some may say, woke, decadent Europe is not facing civilizational erasure,” she said. She noted that other nations want to join the E.U. and those that are already members want the E.U. “to take a stronger role in the world: To defend our values. To take care of our people. To push humanity forwards.”

Kallas disputed the argument that the postwar order is economically backward compared to autocracy, noting that since the fall of the Soviet Union, nations that have joined the E.U. have grown economically more than twice as fast as Russia. She reiterated the value of international trade and security partnerships, and she reminded the audience that “the vast majority of countries also want the same thing: stability, growth, and prosperity for their people. The best way to get there is to go together.”

As Merz had done, Kallas called for Europeans to assert their own agency to protect “not only our excellent living standards, health and happiness, but the lessons we have learnt from our own history.”

Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton said in Munich that Trump “has betrayed the West, he’s betrayed human values, he’s betrayed the NATO charter, the Atlantic Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” and warned he is modeling himself after Putin.

The Trump administration’s attempt to replace the postwar international order with a great-power system driven by autocracy has opened the door for Democrats to suggest a different kind of U.S. foreign policy. A number of elected Democrats traveled to Munich, where they tried to counter administration officials’ message. California governor Gavin Newsom touted his state’s climate policies and signed a memorandum of understanding with Deputy Governor Oleksandr Kulepin of Lviv, Ukraine, to strengthen trade and commercial ties with Lviv Oblast, California’s sister-state.

Representatives Jason Crow (D-CO) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) cut more closely to the heart of the crisis that led to Trump’s rise by calling for a U.S. foreign policy rooted in the working class. “We can’t fall into right-wing populism’s lie that the most vulnerable in society are to blame for wealth inequality in our countries,” Ocasio-Cortez later summarized her argument. “We need to build movements that tell the truth: the story of wealth inequality is not a cultural one, but a class one.” At Munich, she said: “We want to make sure that we dive deeply into shared innovation, investment, strategic priorities, and trade policies that ensure the benefits of that trade actually benefit working-class people and that we restrain ourselves from the military interventions of our past.”

“Our foreign policy is being turned into an extortion ring for Big Oil, for the Trump family, for elites,” Crow said. ‘They’re bullying our partners and allies.… We want strength and peace, but we don’t want to be extorting and bullying our friends. We want to be a force for good.” “We need a national security and foreign policy that looks like America and has the experiences of the American people partnerships that are rooted in fairness and that deliver for working-class folks everywhere.”

Ta.

February 16, 2026 (Monday)

On February 13 and 14, President Donald J. Trump’s representatives filed three applications with the United States Patent and Trademark Office to trademark his name for future use on an airport. As trademark lawyer Josh Gerben of Gerben IP noted, the application also covers merchandise branded “President Donald J. Trump International Airport,” “Donald J. Trump International Airport,” and “DJT,” including “clothing, handbags, luggage, jewelry, watches, and tie clips.”

Because of the trademark filing, Gerben notes, any airport adopting the Trump name would have to get a license to use the name, potentially paying a licensing fee. Gerben emphasizes that while it is common for public officials to have landmarks named after them, “never in the history of the United States” has “a sitting president’s private company…sought trademark rights” before such a naming.

In October, Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought withheld billions of dollars Congress appropriated for a tunnel between New York and New Jersey under the Hudson River, saying he wanted “to ensure funding is not flowing based on unconstitutional DEI principles.” Trump told Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) that he would release the funds if Schumer would agree to name Dulles Airport outside Washington, D.C., and New York City’s Penn Station after him.

After a Florida state lawmaker proposed putting Trump’s name on the Palm Beach International Airport, Jason Garcia of Seeking Rents today reported that the Florida legislature is currently pushing through measures to change the name of that airport to the “Donald J. Trump International Airport.” The amount of money proposed in Florida’s budget to make the change is $2,750,000, but Garcia notes this is likely a placeholder: the budget request is for $5.5 million.

The Trump grab for an airport named after him is just the latest grift in a presidential term that experts so far estimate has enriched the Trump family by at least $4 billion. That windfall includes merch, political contributions, and multiple cryptocurrency deals that have led, for example, to Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who manages the United Arab Emirates’ sovereign wealth fund, buying a 49% stake in the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial crypto company for $500 million days before Trump took office. This deal put $187 million immediately into Trump family entities and at least $31 million into entities owned by the family of Steve Witkoff, whom Trump had just named his Middle East envoy.

“President Trump only acts in the best interests of the American public—which is why they overwhelmingly re-elected him to this office, despite years of lies and false accusations against him and his businesses from the fake news media,” White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said of the UAE deal. “President Trump’s assets are in a trust managed by his children. There are no conflicts of interest.”

Earlier this month, Trump, his sons Don Jr. and Eric, and the Trump Organization sued the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the Treasury Department for $10 billion in damages after an IRS contractor during Trump’s own first term was convicted of leaking their tax information, along with that of thousands of other Americans who are not suing, to news outlets. Trump has control over the IRS, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says he will write whatever check he is told to cut. This move advances Trump’s use of the presidency to enrich himself into the realm of autocratic rulers who move their country’s money to their own accounts.

In 1789, when George Washington took the oath of office as the first president of the United States of America, no one knew what to expect of leaders in a democratic republic. Washington understood that anything he did would become the standard for anyone who came after him. “I walk on untrodden ground,” he wrote in 1790, the year after he assumed the office of the presidency. “There is scarcely any part of my conduct wch may not hereafter be drawn into precedent.”

After watching colonial lawmakers under royal rule demand payoffs before they would approve popular measures, Washington rejected the idea of profiting from the presidency. In his short Inaugural Address, he took the time to state explicitly that he would not accept any payments while in the presidency except for an official salary appropriated by Congress.

Washington noted that the support of the American people for the new government was key to its survival. He hailed the pledges of the new nation’s lawmakers to rule for the good of the whole nation, not for specific regions or partisan groups. He also predicted that the power of the government would come not from military might but from its determination to serve the needs of the public. He promised “that the foundations of our National policy will be laid in the pure and immutable principles of private morality; and the pre-eminence of a free Government, be exemplified by all the attributes which can win the affections of its Citizens, and command the respect of the world.”

Washington put a hopeful spin on human nature to launch the institution of the presidency, but the Framers had no illusions. They constructed the Constitution to pit men’s ambitions against each other so no individual could gain enough power to become a tyrant. Later, the rise of formal political parties in the 1830s guaranteed hawkish oversight of those in power by those out of it, exposing corruption or personal vices before those exhibiting them made it to the height of the government.

As recently as the 1970s, those systems held strongly enough that Republican senators warned Republican president Richard M. Nixon that the House was about to impeach him for obstruction of justice, abuse of power, and contempt of Congress for his actions during and after the Watergate break-in during which operatives tried to bug the headquarters of the Democratic National Convention. And, they told him, when the House impeached, the Senate—including Senate Republicans—would convict. They urged him to resign, which he did on August 8, 1974, the only president so far to resign the office of the presidency.

Since then, Republicans have fallen into the trap Washington warned against in his Farewell Address, putting party over country. Such partisanship, he said, would “distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration,” agitate “the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms,” kindle “the animosity of one part against another,” foment “occasionally riot and insurrection,” and open “the door to foreign influence and corruption, which find a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passion. Thus the policy and the will of one country are subjected to the policy and will of another.”

Fierce partisanship would lead partisans to seek absolute power through an individual who “turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation on the ruins of public liberty,” Washington warned. And as Washington predicted, today’s Republicans have replaced the prerogatives of Congress with loyalty to Trump.

They have also ignored the vices of Trump and his loyalists. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. explained to a podcaster on February 12 why he doesn’t worry about Covid. “I’m not scared of a germ,” he said. “I used to snort cocaine off of toilet seats.”

Jonathan Landay and Douglas Gillison of Reuters reported yesterday that Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought took $15 million in unlawfully impounded money that Congress had appropriated for the U.S. Agency for International Development, which fed starving children, for his own security detail. Michelle Hackman, Josh Dawsey, and Tarini Parti of the Wall Street Journal reported that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and her affair partner Corey Lewandowski travel in a $70 million luxury 737 MAX jet with a private cabin in the back.

Over all are the horrors of the Epstein files, in which Trump’s name appears so often observers have suggested it is the one place that could legitimately be rebranded with Trump’s name as the Trump-Epstein files.

And so, Washington’s dire warnings have come true.

Profiting off his name is only part of why Trump appears to want to splash it anywhere he can: so far, the U.S. Institute of Peace, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, a new class of battleships, and perhaps “The President Donald J. Trump Ballroom” where the East Wing of the White House used to be.

It’s also about his legacy. In a tour of George Washington’s Virginia home, Mount Vernon, in April 2019, Trump expressed surprise that the first president hadn’t named any of his property after himself. “If he was smart, he would’ve put his name on it,” Trump said. “You’ve got to put your name on stuff or no one remembers you.”

In fact, Americans remember and revere Washington because of his reluctance to promote himself, not in spite of it. John Trumbull’s portrait of him resigning his wartime commission after negotiators had signed the Treaty of Paris ending the Revolutionary War hangs in the U.S. Capitol as a moment that defined the United States: a leader voluntarily giving up power rather than becoming a dictator. Then, when voters made him president of the new United States in 1789, he refused a second time to become a king, emphasizing that he was the servant of the people and then, after two terms, voluntarily handing power to a successor chosen not by him but by the people.

As Washington predicted, the presidents Americans revere despite their faults—George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt—are those who used the enormous power of the U.S. government not for their own aggrandizement but to secure and expand the rights and the prosperity of the American people.

Trump has made no secret of wanting his image carved onto Mount Rushmore in South Dakota, where sculptor Gutzon Borglum carved the busts of Presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln in the Black Hills of the Lakotas. Beginning his sculpture in 1927, Borglum chose President Washington because he had founded the nation, Jefferson because he had launched westward expansion, Lincoln because he had saved the United States from destruction, and Roosevelt because he had protected working men and helped fit democracy to industrial development.

But Trump’s interest in being added to Mount Rushmore does not appear to be related to a desire to advance the interests of the American people. In September 2025 the IRS granted tax-exempt status to the Donald Trump Mount Rushmore Memorial Legacy, making it a charity that can accept tax-free donations.

Happy Presidents Day 2026.

FMD.

Neophyte said:

February 16, 2026 (Monday)

On February 13 and 14, President Donald J. Trump’s representatives filed three applications with the United States Patent and Trademark Office to trademark his name for future use on an airport. As trademark lawyer Josh Gerben of Gerben IP noted, the application also covers merchandise branded “President Donald J. Trump International Airport,” “Donald J. Trump International Airport,” and “DJT,” including “clothing, handbags, luggage, jewelry, watches, and tie clips.”

Because of the trademark filing, Gerben notes, any airport adopting the Trump name would have to get a license to use the name, potentially paying a licensing fee. Gerben emphasizes that while it is common for public officials to have landmarks named after them, “never in the history of the United States” has “a sitting president’s private company…sought trademark rights” before such a naming.

In October, Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought withheld billions of dollars Congress appropriated for a tunnel between New York and New Jersey under the Hudson River, saying he wanted “to ensure funding is not flowing based on unconstitutional DEI principles.” Trump told Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) that he would release the funds if Schumer would agree to name Dulles Airport outside Washington, D.C., and New York City’s Penn Station after him.

After a Florida state lawmaker proposed putting Trump’s name on the Palm Beach International Airport, Jason Garcia of Seeking Rents today reported that the Florida legislature is currently pushing through measures to change the name of that airport to the “Donald J. Trump International Airport.” The amount of money proposed in Florida’s budget to make the change is $2,750,000, but Garcia notes this is likely a placeholder: the budget request is for $5.5 million.

The Trump grab for an airport named after him is just the latest grift in a presidential term that experts so far estimate has enriched the Trump family by at least $4 billion. That windfall includes merch, political contributions, and multiple cryptocurrency deals that have led, for example, to Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who manages the United Arab Emirates’ sovereign wealth fund, buying a 49% stake in the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial crypto company for $500 million days before Trump took office. This deal put $187 million immediately into Trump family entities and at least $31 million into entities owned by the family of Steve Witkoff, whom Trump had just named his Middle East envoy.

“President Trump only acts in the best interests of the American public—which is why they overwhelmingly re-elected him to this office, despite years of lies and false accusations against him and his businesses from the fake news media,” White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said of the UAE deal. “President Trump’s assets are in a trust managed by his children. There are no conflicts of interest.”

Earlier this month, Trump, his sons Don Jr. and Eric, and the Trump Organization sued the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the Treasury Department for $10 billion in damages after an IRS contractor during Trump’s own first term was convicted of leaking their tax information, along with that of thousands of other Americans who are not suing, to news outlets. Trump has control over the IRS, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says he will write whatever check he is told to cut. This move advances Trump’s use of the presidency to enrich himself into the realm of autocratic rulers who move their country’s money to their own accounts.

In 1789, when George Washington took the oath of office as the first president of the United States of America, no one knew what to expect of leaders in a democratic republic. Washington understood that anything he did would become the standard for anyone who came after him. “I walk on untrodden ground,” he wrote in 1790, the year after he assumed the office of the presidency. “There is scarcely any part of my conduct wch may not hereafter be drawn into precedent.”

After watching colonial lawmakers under royal rule demand payoffs before they would approve popular measures, Washington rejected the idea of profiting from the presidency. In his short Inaugural Address, he took the time to state explicitly that he would not accept any payments while in the presidency except for an official salary appropriated by Congress.

Washington noted that the support of the American people for the new government was key to its survival. He hailed the pledges of the new nation’s lawmakers to rule for the good of the whole nation, not for specific regions or partisan groups. He also predicted that the power of the government would come not from military might but from its determination to serve the needs of the public. He promised “that the foundations of our National policy will be laid in the pure and immutable principles of private morality; and the pre-eminence of a free Government, be exemplified by all the attributes which can win the affections of its Citizens, and command the respect of the world.”

Washington put a hopeful spin on human nature to launch the institution of the presidency, but the Framers had no illusions. They constructed the Constitution to pit men’s ambitions against each other so no individual could gain enough power to become a tyrant. Later, the rise of formal political parties in the 1830s guaranteed hawkish oversight of those in power by those out of it, exposing corruption or personal vices before those exhibiting them made it to the height of the government.

As recently as the 1970s, those systems held strongly enough that Republican senators warned Republican president Richard M. Nixon that the House was about to impeach him for obstruction of justice, abuse of power, and contempt of Congress for his actions during and after the Watergate break-in during which operatives tried to bug the headquarters of the Democratic National Convention. And, they told him, when the House impeached, the Senate—including Senate Republicans—would convict. They urged him to resign, which he did on August 8, 1974, the only president so far to resign the office of the presidency.

Since then, Republicans have fallen into the trap Washington warned against in his Farewell Address, putting party over country. Such partisanship, he said, would “distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration,” agitate “the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms,” kindle “the animosity of one part against another,” foment “occasionally riot and insurrection,” and open “the door to foreign influence and corruption, which find a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passion. Thus the policy and the will of one country are subjected to the policy and will of another.”

Fierce partisanship would lead partisans to seek absolute power through an individual who “turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation on the ruins of public liberty,” Washington warned. And as Washington predicted, today’s Republicans have replaced the prerogatives of Congress with loyalty to Trump.

They have also ignored the vices of Trump and his loyalists. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. explained to a podcaster on February 12 why he doesn’t worry about Covid. “I’m not scared of a germ,” he said. “I used to snort cocaine off of toilet seats.”

Jonathan Landay and Douglas Gillison of Reuters reported yesterday that Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought took $15 million in unlawfully impounded money that Congress had appropriated for the U.S. Agency for International Development, which fed starving children, for his own security detail. Michelle Hackman, Josh Dawsey, and Tarini Parti of the Wall Street Journal reported that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and her affair partner Corey Lewandowski travel in a $70 million luxury 737 MAX jet with a private cabin in the back.

Over all are the horrors of the Epstein files, in which Trump’s name appears so often observers have suggested it is the one place that could legitimately be rebranded with Trump’s name as the Trump-Epstein files.

And so, Washington’s dire warnings have come true.

Profiting off his name is only part of why Trump appears to want to splash it anywhere he can: so far, the U.S. Institute of Peace, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, a new class of battleships, and perhaps “The President Donald J. Trump Ballroom” where the East Wing of the White House used to be.

It’s also about his legacy. In a tour of George Washington’s Virginia home, Mount Vernon, in April 2019, Trump expressed surprise that the first president hadn’t named any of his property after himself. “If he was smart, he would’ve put his name on it,” Trump said. “You’ve got to put your name on stuff or no one remembers you.”

In fact, Americans remember and revere Washington because of his reluctance to promote himself, not in spite of it. John Trumbull’s portrait of him resigning his wartime commission after negotiators had signed the Treaty of Paris ending the Revolutionary War hangs in the U.S. Capitol as a moment that defined the United States: a leader voluntarily giving up power rather than becoming a dictator. Then, when voters made him president of the new United States in 1789, he refused a second time to become a king, emphasizing that he was the servant of the people and then, after two terms, voluntarily handing power to a successor chosen not by him but by the people.

As Washington predicted, the presidents Americans revere despite their faults—George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt—are those who used the enormous power of the U.S. government not for their own aggrandizement but to secure and expand the rights and the prosperity of the American people.

Trump has made no secret of wanting his image carved onto Mount Rushmore in South Dakota, where sculptor Gutzon Borglum carved the busts of Presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln in the Black Hills of the Lakotas. Beginning his sculpture in 1927, Borglum chose President Washington because he had founded the nation, Jefferson because he had launched westward expansion, Lincoln because he had saved the United States from destruction, and Roosevelt because he had protected working men and helped fit democracy to industrial development.

But Trump’s interest in being added to Mount Rushmore does not appear to be related to a desire to advance the interests of the American people. In September 2025 the IRS granted tax-exempt status to the Donald Trump Mount Rushmore Memorial Legacy, making it a charity that can accept tax-free donations.

Happy Presidents Day 2026.

What about a Donald Trump poop scooper

I’d be ok with DJT Memorial Airport.

Divine Angel said:

I’d be ok with DJT Memorial Airport.

A pity that we can’t backdate it somehow.

February 17, 2026 (Tuesday)

Trump’s White House website welcomes visitors with a pop-up that reads: “WELCOME TO THE GOLDEN AGE!” But on this heavy news day a year into Trump’s second term, it is increasingly clear that as his regime focuses on committing the United States to white Christian nationalism, the country is becoming increasingly isolated from the rest of the world, and its own economy is weakening.

At the Munich Security Conference over the weekend, Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s endorsement of white Christian nationalism does not appear to have swayed European countries to abandon their defense of democracy and join the U.S.’s slide toward authoritarianism. Instead, as retired lieutenant general and former commander of U.S. Army Europe Mark Hertling wrote, it squandered the strategic advantage its partnership with Europe has given the U.S.

Foreign affairs journalist Anne Applebaum noted that the word in Munich was that “Europe needs to emancipate itself from the U.S. as fast as possible.” In Germany, Der Spiegel reports plans to bring Ukrainian veterans to teach German armed forces drone use and counter-drone practices the Ukrainians are perfecting in their war against Russian occupation. Canada’s prime minister Mark Carney is working to reduce Canada’s defense dependence on the U.S., ramping up domestic defense production.

Carney has advanced a foreign policy that centers “middle powers” and operates without the U.S. That global reorientation has profound consequences for the U.S. economy, as well. Canada is leading discussions between the European Union and a 12-nation Indo-Pacific bloc to form one of the globe’s largest economic alliances. A new agreement would enable the countries to share supply chains and to share a low-tariff system. Canada also announced it is renewing its partnership with China. As of this week, Canadians can travel to China without a visa.

Today France’s president Emmanuel Macron and India’s prime minister Narendra Modi upgraded Indian-French relations to a “Special Strategic Partnership” during a three-day visit of Macron to Mumbai. They have promised to increase cooperation between the two countries in defense, trade, and critical materials.

Trump insisted that abandoning the free trade principles under which the U.S. economy had boomed since World War II would enable the U.S. to leverage its extraordinary economic might through tariffs, but it appears, as economist Scott Lincicome of the Cato Institute wrote today for Bloomberg, that the rest of the world is simply moving on without the U.S.
While Trump boasts about the U.S. stock market, which is indeed up, U.S. markets have underperformed markets in other countries. Today, Carl Quintanilla of CNBC reported that the S&P 500, which measures 500 of the largest publicly traded companies in the U.S., is off to its worst year of performance since 1995 when compared to the All Country World Index (ACWI), an index that measures global stocks.

In May 2023 the Florida legislature passed a law requiring employers with 25 or more employees to confirm that their workers are in the U.S. legally. The new law prompted foreign farmworkers and construction workers to leave the state. Now, the Wall Street Journal reported in a February 6 editorial, employers “are struggling to find workers they can employ legally.”

The newspaper continued: “There’s little evidence that undocumented migrants are taking jobs from Americans. The reality is that employers can’t find enough Americans willing to work in the fields or hang drywall, even at attractive wages. Farm hands in Florida who work year-round earn roughly $47,000, which is more than what some young college graduates earn.” “The lesson for President Trump is that businesses can’t grow if government takes away their workers,” the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board concluded.

Today Florida attorney general James Uthmeier reacted to the Wall Street Journal editorial, explaining on Fox Business that the Republican Party expects to replace undocumented workers with young Americans: “We need to focus on our state college program, our trade schools, getting people into the workforce even earlier. We passed legislation last year to help high school students get their hands dirty and get on job sites more quickly. So I think there’s a lot more we can do with apprenticeships, rolling out, beefing up our workforce, and trying to address the demand that is undoubtedly here in the state.”

Steve Kopack of NBC News reported on February 11 that while the U.S. added 1.46 million jobs in 2024, the last year of former president Joe Biden’s administration, it added just 181,000 jobs in 2025. That makes 2025 the worst year for hiring since 2003, aside from the worst year of the coronavirus pandemic. Manufacturing lost 108,000 jobs in 2025.

Peter Grant of the Wall Street Journal reported today that banks that have loaned money to finance the purchase of commercial real estate are requiring borrowers to pay back tens of billions of dollars as the delinquency rate for such loans has climbed to a high not seen since just after the 2008 financial crisis. About $100 billion in commercial real estate loans that have been packaged into securities will come due this year and probably won’t repay when they should. More than half of the loans are likely headed for foreclosure or liquidation.

Trump vowed that he would cut “waste, fraud, and abuse” out of the country’s government programs, but cuts to social programs have been overwhelmed by spending on federal arrest, detention, and deportation programs, as well as Trump’s expansion of military strikes and threats against other countries. In his first year back in office, Trump launched at least 658 air and drone strikes against Iraq, Somalia, Iran, Yemen, Syria, Nigeria, and Venezuela.

Just today, U.S. Southern Command announced it struck three boats in the eastern Pacific and the Caribbean yesterday and killed 11 people it claims were smuggling drugs, bringing the total of such strikes to more than 40 and the number of dead to more than 130. Now Trump is moving American forces toward Iran, threatening to target the regime there.
The administration is simply tacking the cost of these military adventures onto government expenditures, apparently still maintaining that the tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations Republicans extended in their July “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” and tariffs will address the growing deficit and national debt by increasing economic growth.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) last week projected that the deficit for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2026, will be $1.85 trillion. Richard Rubin of the Wall Street Journal notes that for every dollar the U.S. collects this year, it will spend $1.33. The CBO explained that the Republican tax cuts will increase budget deficits by $4.7 trillion through 2035.

If the American people have suffered from Trump’s reign, the Trump family continues to cash in. Today Trump’s chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Michael Selig, announced he will try to block states from regulating prediction markets, saying they “provide useful functions for society by allowing everyday Americans to hedge commercial risks like increases in temperature and energy price spikes.”

Republicans insist that prediction markets are more like stock trading than like betting, but a group of over 20 Democratic senators warned last week in a letter to Selig that prediction market platforms, where hundreds of millions of dollars are wagered every week, “are offering contracts that mirror sportsbook wagers and, in some cases, contracts tied to war and armed conflict.” They added that the platforms “evade state and tribal consumer protections, generate no public revenue, and undermine sovereign regulatory regimes,” and urged Selig to support regulations Congress has already put into law.

Prediction markets also cover the actions of President Trump, whose son Don Jr. is both an advisor to and an investor in Polymarket and a paid advisor to Kalshi. Polymarket and Kalshi are the two biggest prediction markets, and both are less regulated than betting sites. The Trump family has announced it is starting its own “Truth Predict.”

David Uberti of the Wall Street Journal reported that Eric Trump is investing heavily in drones, particularly in Israeli drone maker Xtend, which has a $1.5 billion deal to merge with a small Florida construction company to take the company public. The Defense Department has invited Xtend to be part of its drone expansion program.

And yet it is clear the administration fears the American people. The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA), a statewide program that specializes in police shootings, said yesterday that it has received formal notice that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) will not allow it any “access to information or evidence that it has collected” related to the shooting death of Minneapolis intensive care nurse Alex Pretti. The BCA says it will continue to investigate and to pursue legal avenues to get access to the FBI files.

Fury at ICE continues to mount, with voices from inside the government complaining about Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. Gordon Lubold, Courtney Kube, Jonathan Allen, and Julia Ainsley of NBC News reported today on her alienation of senior officials at the Coast Guard as she has shifted their primary mission of search and rescue to flying deportation flights. Noem’s abrupt removal of Coast Guard commandant Linda Fagan only to move into her vacated housing at Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling herself also rankled, along with Noem’s lavish use of expensive Coast Guard planes.

Daniel Lippman and Adam Wren of Politico reported today that Noem’s spokesperson, Tricia McLaughlin, is resigning.

Marissa Payne of the Des Moines Register reported today that in Iowa, Republican state lawmakers are working to rein in the power of the state governor before the 2026 elections, a sure sign that they are worried that a Democrat is going to win the election.

That fear appears to be part of a larger concern that the American people have turned against the Republicans more generally. Last night, late-night talk show host Stephen Colbert told viewers he had been unable to air an interview he did with a Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate from Texas, James Talarico. “I was told…that not only could I not have him on, I could not mention me not having him on,” Colbert said. “And because my network clearly doesn’t want us to talk about this, let’s talk about this.”

Talarico is a Texas state lawmaker studying to be a minister, who criticizes the Republican use of Christianity as a political weapon. Such politicization of Christianity both distorts politics and cheapens faith, he says. The true way to practice Christianity is simple but not easy, he says: it is to love your neighbor. Political positions should grow out of that to feed the hungry, welcome the stranger, and heal the sick. “here is nothing Christian about Christian nationalism,” he told Colbert. “It is the worship of power in the name of Christ, and it is a betrayal of Jesus of Nazareth.”

Although Talarico is locked in a tight primary battle with Representative Jasmine Crockett, his message offers a powerful off-ramp for evangelicals uncomfortable with the administration, especially its cover-up of the Epstein files. Without evangelical support, MAGA Republicans cannot win elections.

Talarico has the administration nervous enough that Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chair Brendan Carr opened an investigation of the morning talk show The View after Talarico appeared on the show earlier this month. Lawyer Adam Bonin explained that Carr changed the FCC’s enforcement of the Equal Time Rule (which is not the Fairness Doctrine). It says that when broadcast networks (not cable) give air time to someone running for office, they have to give the same time to any other candidate for that office. The obvious exception is when a candidate does something newsworthy outside the race, in which case a network can interview that person without interviewing everyone else.

For 20 years, that rule has applied to talk shows, but Carr announced last month that if a non-news talk show seems to be “motivated by partisan purposes,” then it will not be exempt. For Colbert’s show, it would have meant that after interviewing Talarico, the network would have had to give equal time to all other Democrats and Republicans running for the Senate seat. CBS could have challenged the rule but chose not to.

Why is the administration worried about Talarico in a state Trump won in 2024 by 14%? “I think that Donald Trump is worried that we’re about to flip Texas,” Talarico said. “Across the state there is a backlash growing to the extremism and the corruption in our politics…. It’s a people-powered movement to take back our state and take back our country.”
As of 10:00 tonight, Colbert’s 15-minute interview with Talarico has been viewed on YouTube 3.8 million times. Forbes says it is Colbert’s most watched interview in months.

February 18, 2026 (Wednesday)

Today Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker delivered the State of the State address. The underlying purpose of the address is to explain the state budget, but Pritzker, a Democrat, used the occasion to talk far more broadly about the state of Illinois and the nation.

Pritzker anchored his speech by reaching back to the days of John Peter Altgeld, a German-born American who helped to lead the Progressive movement and served as governor of Illinois from 1893 to 1897. Altgeld oversaw passage of some of the strongest laws in the country for workplace safety and protection of child workers, invested heavily in education, and appointed women to important positions in state government despite the fact that women could not yet vote.

Pritzker noted that in his State of the State speech in January 1895, Altgeld talked about “the need to ensure that science would govern the practice of medicine in Illinois; the high cost of insurance; the condition of Illinois prisons; the funding of state universities; a needed revision of election laws; the concentration of wealth in large businesses.” Altgeld expressed pride for appointing women to office and his statement that “ustice requires that the same rewards and honors that encourage and incite men should be equally in reach of women in every field and activity.”

Pritzker said he brought up Altgeld’s defense of equal rights “to highlight one enduring human truth—injustice can become a genetic condition we bequeath on future generations if we fail to face it forthrightly.”

Pritzker then turned to the year that has passed since President Donald J. Trump took office. “To be perfectly candid,” Pritzker said, “as Illinois is one of the states whose taxpayers send more dollars to the federal government than we receive back in services, I was hoping that his threats to gut programs that support working families the kind of unrealistic hyperbole that fuels a presidential campaign but then is abandoned when cooler heads prevail.” But, he said, “Unfortunately, there are no cooler heads at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue these days.”

The Trump administration has cost Illinois $8.4 billion, Pritzker said, “illegally confiscating money that has already been promised and appropriated by the Congress to the people of Illinois.” Pritzker was clear that this money is not handouts but “dollars that real Illinoisans paid in federal taxes and that have been constitutionally approved by our elected Democratic and Republican representatives in Washington.”

Unlike the federal government, states must balance their budgets every year. Trump’s billions in illegally withheld funds inflict a cost on the state’s residents, while Illinois has been “forced to spend enormous time and taxpayer money going to court and fighting to get what is rightfully ours.” Pritzker said: “It is impossible to tally the hours, days, and weeks our state government has spent chasing news of Presidential executive orders, letters, and edicts that read like proclamations from the Lollipop Guild.”

Pritzker noted that Trump is making life harder for everyday Americans with tariffs that raise costs for working families and small businesses; trade wars that are devastating farmers; cuts to healthcare, nutritional assistance, and education; increased bureaucratic demands on states; and low job creation. The good news, Pritzker said, is that Illinois had managed such crises before and had found a way forward.

He noted the growth of Illinois’s economy and economic stability over the past eight years even as the state had balanced its budget every year and made historic investments in education, child welfare, disability services, and job creation in the private sector. In the past year, Illinois’s gross domestic product was more than $1.2 trillion, up from $881 billion when Pritzker took office.

Looking forward, Pritzker outlined plans to address the top three economic issues on the mind of most Americans: the cost of housing, electricity, and healthcare. He promised to reduce the cost of housing by cutting local regulations and providing more options for financing. He promised to address the skyrocketing cost of electricity first by pausing the authorization of new data center tax credits and then by investing in renewable energy and nuclear power. Finally, he announced that, as of this week, the state had eliminated $1 billion in medical debt for more than 500,000 people in the state by purchasing and erasing it for pennies on the dollar.

Pritzker warned that the benefits of our changing world are increasingly “reaped by a smaller and smaller group of people while middle and working class Americans pay for it. Special interests and large corporations seem to delight in finding ever more insidious ways to extract money from everyday people. Those same companies then react with a mixture of surprise and outrage when they’re asked to rein in their worst abuses.”

“I’m committed to doing everything government can to rein in the worst of the price gouging and profiteering we are seeing,” Pritzker said. “But I implore the titans of industry who regularly ask government to make their lives easier—what are you doing to make your employers’ and your customers’ lives easier?”

Then Pritzker turned to the crisis federal agents created on the streets of Chicago. “A year ago, I stood before you and asked a provocative question: After we have discriminated against, disparaged, and deported all our immigrant neighbors—and the problems we started with still remained—what comes next?” Pritzker said. He recalled that when he asked that question, some people walked out.

“But a year later, we have an answer—don’t we?” he said. “Masked, unaccountable federal agents—with little training—occupied our streets, brutalized our people, tear-gassed kids and cops, kidnapped parents in front of their children, detained and arrested and at times attempted to deport U.S. citizens, and killed innocent Americans in the streets.”

Pritzker identified Trump and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller as the architects of that plan to “drip authoritarianism…into our veins.”

But, he noted, people in Illinois did not accept that authoritarianism.

Pritzker reminded the audience that President Grover Cleveland had similarly tried to “subdue the Illinois population with hired thugs” during the 1894 Pullman strike after the Pullman Company, which made railroad cars, cut workers’ wages by about 25%. When workers struck, Cleveland deputized U.S. Marshals to end the strike. They fired into crowds of bystanders and, according to a Chicago paper, “seemed to be hunting trouble.” Twenty-five people died and more were wounded before the strike ended.

Altgeld had opposed the arrival of federal troops, and his fury at their intrusion still smoldered when he gave his State of the State speech almost six months later. “If the President can, at his pleasure, send troops into any city, town, or hamlet…whenever and wherever he pleases, under pretense of enforcing some law,” Altgeld wrote, “his judgment, which means his pleasure being the sole criterion—then there can be no difference whatever in this respect between the powers of the President and those of…the Czar of Russia.”

Pritzker joked that he wished he “could spend just one year of my governorship presiding over precedented times. I yearn for normal problems,” he said. But these are not normal times.

“I’ve been thinking a lot lately about love—about loving people and loving your country and the power involved in both,” the governor said. “I know, right now, there are a lot of people out there who love their country and feel like their country is not loving them back. I know that.” But he told those people that “your country is loving you back—just not in the way you are used to hearing.”

“It’s not speaking in anthems or flags or ostentatious displays of patriotism. It will never come from the people who say the only way to love America is to hate Americans. Love is found in every act of courage—large and small—taken to preserve the country we once knew. You will find it in homes and schools and churches and art. It is there; it has not been squashed.”

Pritzker called out the love shown by “the bicyclers who showed up in Little Village every day during Operation Midway Blitz to buy out tamale carts so the vendors could return to the safety of their homes,” “the parishioners who formed human chains around churches so that immigrants could worship,” and “the moms in the school pickup line who whipped out their cameras and their whistles,” and in “the face of every Midwesterner who put on their heaviest coat and protested outside on the coldest day.”

That love for one’s neighbor, he suggested, is the country’s most powerful tool against the rise of authoritarianism.

“I am begging my fellow politicians, my fellow Illinoisans, my fellow Americans to realize that right now in this country we are not fighting over policy or political party,” Pritzker said. “We are fighting over whether we are going to be a civilization rooted in empathy and kindness—or one rooted in cruelty and rage.”

“I love my country,” Pritzker said. “I refuse to stop. The hope I have found in a very difficult year is that love is the light that gets you through a long night.”

February 19, 2026 (Thursday)

In the United Kingdom this morning, Thames Valley Police arrested Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, formerly Prince Andrew, on suspicion that he committed misconduct in public office. Mountbatten-Windsor was stripped of his royal titles last October because of his ties to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Documents released by the U.S. Department of Justice suggest that when Mountbatten-Windsor represented the United Kingdom as a trade envoy, he gave confidential government documents to Epstein.

Mountbatten-Windsor’s arrest is the first arrest of a senior royal since 1647, when supporters of Parliament arrested King Charles I during the English Civil War. Today is Mountbatten-Windsor’s 66th birthday.

King Charles III said the investigations into his brother have his “wholehearted” support and that Buckingham Palace will cooperate. He said that “the law must take its course.”

In South Korea, Seoul Central District Court Judge Jee Kui-youn sentenced former president of South Korea Yoon Suk Yeol to life in prison after he was found guilty of leading an insurrection against the government. With his approval rating plummeting as his administration was engulfed by scandals, on December 3, 2024, Yoon declared martial law and tried to paralyze the parliament by using troops to blockade the National Assembly building and arrest opposition politicians. As Lim Hui Jie reported for CNBC, five other conspirators have also received prison sentences of up to 30 years.

During the trial, prosecutors told the court that Yoon had declared martial law “with the purpose of remaining in power for a long time by seizing the judiciary and legislature.” Yoon claimed that he was within his constitutional authority to declare martial law and that he did so to “safeguard freedom and sovereignty.”

After Yoon declared martial law, 190 of the 300 lawmakers in the National Assembly fought their way into the chamber and overturned his edict, forcing Yoon to back down about six hours after his martial law announcement. Lawmakers impeached him 11 days later and removed him from office. Prosecutors had asked for the death penalty for Yoon. The judge said that in sentencing Yoon, he had taken into consideration that Yoon is 65 and that he did not order his troops to use lethal force during the period in which he declared martial law.

In Washington, D.C., today, President Donald J. Trump held the first meeting of his so-called Board of Peace at the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP), newly renamed the “Donald J. Trump U.S. Institute of Peace,” a change being legally challenged. Last year, officials from the Trump administration seized the USIP building, which housed an independent entity created by Congress in 1984, and fired nearly all the employees.

Trump has made it clear he wants his new board to replace the United Nations. Twenty-seven countries have said they will participate, but so far none appear to have tossed in the $1 billion that would give them permanent status. The countries participating include Albania, Argentina, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Belarus, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Egypt, El Salvador, Hungary, Indonesia, Israel, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Kosovo, Mongolia, Morocco, Pakistan, Paraguay, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam. Trump extended invitations to Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, both of whom have been indicted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes.

Trump withdrew an invitation to the board from Canada after Prime Minister Mark Carney denounced Trump’s foreign policy at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, so Canada is out. Rejecting Trump’s invitation are Austria, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Slovenia, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Ukraine, and the Vatican. They cite their continuing support for the United Nations, concerns about Russian influence in Trump’s board, and concerns about the board’s organization, which gives Trump final say in all decisions, including how to spend the board’s money.

Today, Trump announced that the U.S. will put $10 billion into the Board of Peace, although since Congress is the only body that can legally appropriate money in our system, it’s unclear how he intends to do this.

The event at the board appeared to be the Trump Show. Representatives from the countries who had accepted Trump’s invitation stood awkwardly on stage waiting for him while his favorite songs blared. Once he arrived, he rambled for an hour and then appeared to fall asleep at points in the meeting as dignitaries spoke.

Lena Sun and Jacob Bogage of the Washington Post reported today that having pulled out of the World Health Organization (WHO), the Trump administration has called for creating an alternative run by the U.S. that would recreate WHO systems. The cost would be $2 billion a year funded through the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), up from the $680 million the U.S. provided to the WHO. The secretary of HHS is Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Public health experts told the journalists it was unlikely that any new U.S.-based system could match the reach of the WHO. Director Tom Inglesby of the Center for Health Security at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health said: “Spending two to three times the cost to create what we already had access to makes absolutely no sense in terms of fiscal stewardship. We’re not going to get the same quality or breadth of information we would have by being in the WHO, or have anywhere the influence we had.”

Only sovereign nations can join the WHO, but California, Illinois, New York, and Wisconsin, as well as New York City, have joined the WHO’s Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network.

Today Trump’s Commission of Fine Arts swore in two new members, including Chamberlain Harris, Trump’s 26-year-old executive assistant, who has no experience in the arts. Then the commission, now entirely made up of Trump appointees, approved Trump’s plans for a ballroom where the East Wing of the White House used to stand, although the chair did note that public comments about the project were over 99% negative.

According to CNN’s Sunlen Serfaty, Harris said the White House is the “greatest house in world. We want this to be the greatest ballroom in the world.” Trump says the ballroom is being funded by private donations through the Trust for the National Mall, which is not required to disclose its donors.
Today workers hung a banner with a giant portrait of Trump on the Department of Justice building.

On Air Force One as Trump traveled to Georgia this afternoon for a speech on the economy, Peter Doocy of the Fox News Channel asked Trump about the arrest of Mountbatten-Windsor. “Do you think people in this country at some point, associates of Jeffrey Epstein, will wind up in handcuffs, too?”

Trump answered: “Well, you know I’m the expert in a way, because I’ve been totally exonerated. It’s very nice, I can actually speak about it very nicely. I think it’s a shame. I think it’s very sad. I think it’s so bad for the royal family. It’s very, very sad to me. It’s a very sad thing. When I see that, it’s a very sad thing. To see it, and to see what’s going on with his brother, who’s obviously coming to our country very soon and he’s a fantastic man. King. So I think it’s a very sad thing. It’s really interesting ‘cause nobody used to speak about Epstein when he was alive, but now they speak. But I’m the one that can talk about it because I’ve been totally exonerated. I did nothing. In fact, the opposite—he was against me. He was fighting me in the election, which I just found out from the last three million pages of documents.”

In fact, Trump has not been exonerated.

When he got to Georgia, Trump’s economic message was that “I’ve won affordability.” More to the point was his focus on his Big Lie that he won the 2020 election and that Congress must pass the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) America Act to secure elections. In fact, in solving a nonexistent problem, the law dramatically restricts voting. Republicans in the House have already passed it. If the Senate passes it, Trump told an audience in Rome, Georgia, “We’ll never lose a race. For 50 years, we won’t lose a race.”

Thank you, I was just about to check if it was up.

:)

Who gives a shit whether his arrest was on his birthday or not

Divine Angel said:

Who gives a shit whether his arrest was on his birthday or not

It may turn out to be a gift he’ll use every day

Divine Angel said:

Who gives a shit whether his arrest was on his birthday or not

I’ve seen people in court on their birthdays
No one cares

Cymek said:

Divine Angel said:

Who gives a shit whether his arrest was on his birthday or not

I’ve seen people in court on their birthdays
No one cares

I think we are supposed to have some extra glee that the knife gets twisted a little bit more…

furious said:

Cymek said:

Divine Angel said:

Who gives a shit whether his arrest was on his birthday or not

I’ve seen people in court on their birthdays
No one cares

I think we are supposed to have some extra glee that the knife gets twisted a little bit more…

Yes

February 20, 2026 (Friday)

Today, in a 6–3 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court found that President Donald J. Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs were unconstitutional.

Shortly after he took office, Trump declared that two things—the influx of illegal drugs from Canada, Mexico, and China, and the country’s “large and persistent” trade deficits—constituted national emergencies. Under these emergency declarations, he claimed the authority to raise tariffs under the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA).

The U.S. Constitution is clear that Congress, and Congress alone, has the authority to tax the American people, and tariffs are taxes. But with the IEEPA, Congress gave the president the power to respond quickly to an “unusual and extraordinary threat…to the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States” that originates “in whole or substantial part outside the United States.” The law specifies that any authority granted to the president “may only be exercised to deal with an unusual and extraordinary threat with respect to which a national emergency has been declared for purposes of this chapter and may not be exercised for any other purpose.”

Although the law does not mention tariffs, Trump claimed the authority under IEEPA to impose a sweeping new tariff system that upended the free trade principles that have underpinned the economy of the United States and its allies and partners since World War II.

Trump promised his supporters that foreign countries would pay the tariffs, but in fact, studies have reinforced what economists always maintained: the cost of tariffs falls on businesses and consumers in the U.S. Similarly, Trump promised his tariffs would make the economy boom and bring back manufacturing jobs, but the latest report on U.S. economic growth in the fourth quarter of last year, released just this morning, shows that tariffs and the government shutdown slowed growth to 1.4%, bringing overall growth down from 2.8% in 2024 to 2.2% in 2025.

While the U.S. added 1.46 million jobs in 2024, it added only 181,000 in 2025. Manufacturing lost about 108,000 jobs in 2025.

Trump also used tariffs to justify his extension of the 2017 tax cuts on the wealthy and corporations, insisting that fees on foreign countries would fund the U.S. government and cut the deficit.

It was always clear, though, that Trump’s reliance on tariffs was mostly about seizing power. Trump’s advisors appear to be using the strategy of Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt, who opposed liberal democracy, in which the state enables individuals to determine their own fate. Instead, he argued that true democracy erases individual self-determination by making the mass of people one with the state and exercising their will through state power. That uniformity requires getting rid of opposition. Schmitt theorized that politics is simply about dividing people into friends and enemies and using the power of the state to crush enemies.

Much of Schmitt’s philosophy centered around the idea that in a nation that is based in a constitution and the rule of law, power belongs to the man who can exploit emergencies that create exceptions to the constitutional order, enabling him to exercise power without regard to the law. Trump—who almost certainly has not read Schmitt himself—asserted this view on August 26, 2025: “I have the right to do anything I want to do. I’m the president of the United States. If I think our country’s in danger—and it is in danger in the cities—I can do it.”

Trump should be able to get his agenda passed according to the normal constitutional order, since the Republicans have control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate. Instead, he has operated under emergency powers. Since he took office thirteen months ago, Trump has declared at least nine national emergencies and one “crime emergency” in Washington, D.C. Since 1981, presidents have declared on average about seven national emergencies per four-year term.

Having declared his power to do whatever he wished with tariffs, Trump used them for his own ends in both foreign policy and economics, punishing countries for enforcing the law against his allies—like Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, jailed after trying to overthrow the elected government—or strong-arming countries like Vietnam into giving real estate deals to his family.

Trump changed tariff rates apparently on his own whim. As Chief Justice John Roberts noted, a month after imposing a 10% additional tariff on Chinese goods, he increased the rate to 20%. A month later, he removed the legal exemption for Chinese goods under $800. Less than a week after imposing reciprocal tariffs, he increased the rate on Chinese goods from 34% to 84%. The very next day, he jacked them up to 125%. That meant the total tariff rate on Chinese goods was 145%.

Trump’s tariffs destabilized the global economy, while the wild instability made it impossible for U.S. companies to plan. Increasingly, other countries have simply cut the U.S. out of their trade deals, while U.S. growth has slowed. The Tax Foundation estimated that Trump’s tariffs cost the average American household about $1,000 in 2025. They projected that cost to be $1,300 in 2026. Congress’s Joint Economic Committee–Minority, made up of Democrats, estimates that number to be low. They say the actual cost has been $1,700 per household.

It was a huge tax increase on the American people, imposed without reference at all to Congress, which is the only government body with the power to raise taxes. Now the Supreme Court has said that the chaos and cost of Trump’s tariffs was for nothing. Trump’s claim of authority to levy tariffs under IEEPA was unconstitutional all along.

Simon Rosenberg of the Hopium Chronicles wrote of the decision: “ll this reinforces that the tariffs were arguably both the most reckless act and the greatest abuse of power by a President in American history.” He added: “In most democracies Trump’s reckless and wild abuse of power through his tariffs would cause the government to fall or the leader to be removed. The imposition of these tariffs against the will of Congress, the courts, our allies, and the American people. It’s clear grounds for removal.”

As Ryan Goodman of Just Security pointed out, the justices in the majority expressed “deep skepticism of claims to open-ended emergency powers,” although it is not clear that they will recognize the same problem in other contexts.

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo noted that “today’s decision is…an indictment of the Court.” In August 2025, almost six months ago, the Supreme Court stayed a lower court decision striking down the tariffs as illegal. Now “hese tariffs have been in effect for almost a year. They have upended whole sectors of the U.S. and global economies. The fact that a president can illegally exercise such powers for so long and with such great consequences for almost a year means we’re not living in a functional constitutional system. If the Constitution allows untrammeled and dictatorial powers for almost one year, massive dictator mulligans, then there is no Constitution.” Marshall said there is no future for the American republic without thoroughly reforming the court of its current corruption.

Trump did not take news of the court’s decision calmly. Trump was at a private breakfast with governors at the White House when an aide handed him a note about the decision. A source told Reuters White House reporter Jarrett Renshaw that Trump was “visibly frustrated” and said he “had to do something about the courts.” Then he left the room.

Three hours later, Trump delivered a public response in which he lambasted the justices in the majority, including two of the three on the court he nominated. He said the justices appointed by Democrats are “against anything that makes America, strong, healthy and great again. They also are a, frankly, disgrace to our nation, those justices.” The Republicans in the majority are “just being fools and lapdogs for the RINOs and the radical left Democrats and, not that this should have anything at all to do with it, they’re very unpatriotic and disloyal to our Constitution.” As a whole, he claimed, “the court has been swayed by foreign interests and a political movement that is far smaller than people would ever think.” He asserted that “obnoxious, ignorant and loud” people were frightening the justices to keep them from doing what was right.

Trump heaped praise on his appointee Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who joined Justice Samuel Alito and Justice Clarence Thomas in the minority.

Trump continued in this vein for forty-five minutes, ranting that he had created a booming economy that “all of the Nobel Prize winners in economics” had said was impossible. He returned to his fantasy identity as peacemaker, reiterating that he had “settled eight wars, whether you like it or not,” saving 35 million lives, and claimed tariffs had made that possible. He claimed that he “was very modest in my ask of other countries and businesses” because he didn’t want to sway the court. He said: “I want to be a good boy.”

He told reporters that there were other ways to impose tariffs and that he intended to do so. Indeed, he said, “the Supreme Court’s decision today made a president’s ability to both regulate trade and impose tariffs more powerful and more crystal clear, rather than less. I don’t think they meant that. I’m sure they didn’t. It’s terrible…. There will no longer be any doubt, and the income coming in and the protection of our companies and country will actually increase because of this decision. I don’t think the court meant that, but it’s the way it is.”

Trump’s tariffs are unpopular enough that he could have interpreted the Supreme Court decision outlawing them as providential, but instead he vowed to sign an order imposing 10% global tariffs under a law that permits him to do so for 150 days. When a reporter asked him why he couldn’t “just work with Congress to come up with a plan to push tariffs,” Trump answered: “I don’t have to. I have the right to do tariffs, and I’ve always had the right to do tariffs. And it’s all been approved by Congress, so there’s no reason to do it.”

Tonight Trump posted on social media that he had signed an order to impose “a Global 10% Tariff on all Countries, which will be effective almost immediately.” Economist Justin Wolfers asked: “What problem is Trump’s new global 10% tariff meant to solve? If it’s about leverage, ask: How much leverage do you get from a tariff that disappears in 150 days? If it’s onshoring: Who builds new factories based on tariff that disappear before the factory is built? It’s a tax. That’s all it is.”

The court did not say anything about how the government should remedy the economic dislocation the tariffs caused or, for that matter, return the billions of dollars it took illegally. Simon Rosenberg wrote that “Democrats can now credibly call for the repeal of the Trump tax cuts and the clawing back of the additional ICE funding as a way of offsetting the revenue loss from the ending of the illegal tariffs.”

But Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told an interviewer: “I got a feeling the American people won’t see” refunds. Nonetheless, Representatives Steven Horsford (D-NV) and Janelle Bynum (D-OR) immediately introduced a bill to require the Trump administration to refund tariff revenue to U.S. businesses within 90 days.

This afternoon, Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker sent an invoice to Trump, charging him $8,679,261,600, or $1,700 for every family in Illinois, as “reimbursement owed to the Illinois families for illegally imposed tariffs.” It said: “Illinois families paid the price for illegal tariffs—at the grocery store, at the hardware store, and around the kitchen table. Tariffs are taxes and working families were the ones who paid them. Illinois families paid the bill. Time for Trump to pay us back.”

In a cover letter, Pritzker said: “Your tariff taxes wreaked havoc on farmers, enraged our allies, and sent grocery prices through the roof. This morning, your hand-picked Supreme Court Justices notified you that they are unconstitutional…. This letter and the attached invoice stand as an official notice that compensation is owed to the people of Illinois, and if you do not comply we will pursue further action.”

Thank you. I forgot to look for this today.

buffy said:

Thank you. I forgot to look for this today.

I was out – the Adelaide Arts Festival/Fringe is on :-)

Neophyte said:

buffy said:

Thank you. I forgot to look for this today.

I was out – the Adelaide Arts Festival/Fringe is on :-)

HCR is important, but so is life. I admit that I had a nap during the hottest part of the day, and then forgot because I was watering and getting tea ready.

:)

Thanks for posting.

February 21, 2026 (Saturday)

On February 22, 1889, outgoing Democratic president Grover Cleveland signed an omnibus bill that divided the Territory of Dakota in half and enabled the people in the new Territories of North Dakota and South Dakota, as well as the older Territories of Montana and Washington, to write state constitutions and elect state governments. The four new states would be admitted to the Union in nine months.

Republicans and Democrats had fought for years over admitting new western states, with members of each party blocking the admission of states thought to favor the other. Republicans counted on Dakota and Washington Territories, while the Democrats felt pretty confident about Montana and New Mexico Territories.

In early 1888, Congress had considered a compromise by which all four states would come into the Union together. But in the 1888 election, voters had put the Republicans in charge of both chambers of Congress, and while the popular vote had gone to Cleveland, the Electoral College had put Republican Benjamin Harrison into the White House.

Democrats had to cut a deal quickly or the Republicans would simply admit their own states and no others. The plan they ended up with cut Democratic New Mexico out of statehood but admitted Montana, split the Republican Territory of Dakota into two new Republican states, and admitted Republican-leaning Washington.

Harrison’s men were eager to admit new western states to the Union. In the eastern cities, the Democrats had been garnering more and more votes as popular opinion was swinging against the industrialists who increasingly seemed to control politics as well as the economy.

Democrats promised to lower the tariffs that drove up prices for consumers, while Republican leaders agreed with industrialists that they needed the tariffs that protected their products from foreign competition. Republicans assumed that the upcoming 1890 census would prove that the West was becoming the driving force in American politics, and admitting new states full of Republican voters would dramatically increase the strength of the Republican Party in Congress. The one new representative each new state would send to the House would be nice, but two new Republican senators per state would guarantee the Republicans would hold the Senate for the foreseeable future.

Then, too, the new states would change the number of electors in the Electoral College, where each state gets a number of electors equal to the number of the state’s U.S. senators and representatives. Harrison’s men were only too aware that Harrison had lost the popular vote and won only in the Electoral College, and they were keen to skew the Electoral College more heavily toward the Republicans before the 1892 election.

In Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, the administration’s mouthpiece, Harrison’s people boasted that Republicans could take Montana, and gleefully anticipated that the new western states would send eight new Republican senators to Washington, D.C., making the count in the Senate forty-seven Republicans to thirty-seven Democrats. The newspaper also pointed out that changing the balance of the Electoral College would stop the Democratic-leaning state of New York from determining the next president.

In May 1889, elections for members of the constitutional conventions in North Dakota, South Dakota, and Washington Territory went Republican. Montana went Democratic, but Republicans blamed the result on Democratic gerrymandering. In October 1889, congressional elections in North Dakota, South Dakota, and Washington confirmed that those territories would come into the Union as Republican states. Frank Leslie’s counted the numbers: Republicans had garnered 169 seats to the Democrats’ 161. Republican legislatures would also give six new Republicans to the Senate, putting the count in that body at forty-five Republicans and thirty-nine Democrats. Frank Leslie’s reported the numbers, then explained what they meant: Republican control of Congress was pretty much guaranteed.

As for Montana, when it appeared the legislature would be dominated by Democrats, Republicans simply threw out the Democratic votes, charging fraud. They did have to admit that a Democrat had won the governorship, but they insisted he had done so by fewer than three hundred votes. The governor, Joseph K. Toole, was so popular that he was reelected twice, but the Republicans tried to weaken him by harping on what Frank Leslie’s called his “arbitrary, partisan, we might almost say indecent official conduct.”

In a little over a week in November 1889, four new states entered the Union. On Saturday, November 2, President Harrison signed the documents admitting North Dakota and South Dakota. On Friday, November 8, he welcomed Montana to the Union. The following Monday, November 11, he declared Washington a state.

Just as they had planned in February, Republicans had added three Republican states to the Union and had come close to capturing a fourth. The West seemed to be the key to maintaining national political power, and it looked as if Harrison’s men had managed to claim the region for themselves. Republican dominance in the new western states, Frank Leslie’s wrote, would tip the scale that had balanced the parties for more than a decade. The votes of the new states would virtually assure the Republicans the presidency in 1892, and the tariffs would be safe.

But by summer 1890 it was no longer clear that the Republicans would keep their majority. The economy was faltering, and Americans blamed the tariffs. They were looking favorably on former president Cleveland, who, after all, had won the popular vote in 1888. The Harrison administration seemed out of touch with the American people. Mrs. Harrison had drawn up plans for a $700,000 addition to the White House with conservatories, winter gardens, and a statuary hall, “so as to make it a fit home for a Presidential family.” The Harrisons’ ne’er-do-well son Russell insisted it was “shameful” for the head of the nation to be forced to live in cramped quarters, although observers noted that the cramping came from the fact that Russell Harrison and his wife and child had moved into the White House with the president and the first lady. And then President Harrison accepted a handsome plate of solid gold from supporters from California on his birthday in August.

Republicans turned again to the idea of protecting their majority by adding more states. They looked toward Wyoming and Idaho. Since Wyoming had boasted a non-Indigenous population of fewer than 21,000 people in 1880 and the Northwest Ordinance had established 60,000 as the necessary population for admission to statehood, it was a stretch to argue that it was ready, but the Republicans were adamant that it should join the Union.

They also wanted to add Idaho, which had a population of fewer than 33,000 in 1880. They were in such a hurry to admit Idaho that they bypassed the usual procedures of state admission, permitting the territorial governor to call for volunteers to write a state constitution, which voters approved only months later.

Democrats pointed out that there was no argument for Wyoming and Idaho statehood that did not apply to Democratic New Mexico and Arizona. “The picking out of the two Territories and plucking them into the Union by the ears looked like an operation that was not to be justified by any sound principle of statesmanship or of public necessity, and that only found justification in the minds of its promoters by the fact that they were thus increasing their political influence in the next presidential election,” a Democratic representative charged.

Republicans countered that Democrats were opposing the admission of new states out of partisanship, saying they would not add a new state unless it pledged allegiance to the Democratic Party.

On July 3, 1890, after a vote that fell along party lines, Wyoming and Idaho were admitted to the Union. The Republicans had added six new states to the Union in less than a year. Administration loyalists were elated, but Democrats and moderate Republicans were not enthusiastic. The Democratic Boston Globe pointed out that the two new states together had a population of “a fair sized congressional district in Massachusetts” but would be represented in Congress by four senators and two representatives.

The moderate Republican Harper’s Weekly was also concerned. It pointed out that the admission of the new states badly skewed congressional representation. The estimated 105,000 people of Wyoming and Idaho, it complained, would have four senators and two representatives. The 200,000 people in the First Congressional District of New York, in contrast, had only one representative. Harper’s Weekly pointed out there were fifteen wards in New York City that each had a population as large as the population of Wyoming and Idaho put together. To get their additional Republican senators, the magazine noted, the Harrison administration had badly undercut the political power of voters from much more populous regions, a maneuver that did not seem to serve the fundamental principle of equal representation in the republic.

Administration men did not stop at redrawing the map to ensure the success of their party. They manipulated the 1890 census to favor Republican districts, projecting their count would give fifteen more Republican congressmen while only seven for the Democrats. They erected statues of Civil War heroes and passed the Dependent Pension Act, which put money in the pockets of disabled veterans, their wives, and their children. And all the while, they blamed their opponents for partisanship. Frank Leslie’s lectured: “It behooves the citizen, regardless of party affiliations to think of the calamities that must in the end result from the intensifying of party feeling and the subordination of right and justice to the desire to advance party success.”

And yet the public mood continued to swing away from the Republicans, who continued to insist that the workers and farmers suffering under the Republicans’ policies were ungrateful and were themselves to blame for their own worsening conditions. In turn, opponents accused Republicans of stealing the 1888 election and believing they didn’t have to answer to voters so long as they had moneyed men behind them so they could buy elections.

In the 1890 midterms, voters took away the Republicans’ slim majority in the House and handed their opponents a majority of more than two to one. A new “Alliance” movement of farmers and workers had swept through the West “like a wave of fire,” Harper’s Weekly wrote, calling for business regulations and income taxes and working quietly through new, local newspapers that old party operatives had largely ignored. Republicans held power in the Senate only thanks to the admission of the new states, but even those did not deliver as expected: Republicans held a majority of only four senators, but three of them opposed tariffs.

In the presidential election of 1892, Harrison won four electoral votes from South Dakota, three from Montana, four from Washington, and three from Wyoming. Idaho’s three electoral votes went to the Populist candidate for president, James B. Weaver. North Dakota split its three votes among the three candidates. It was not enough. Grover Cleveland returned to the White House for a second term, and Democrats took charge of Congress for the first time since before the Civil War.

February 22, 2026 (Sunday)

On February 6, four direct descendants of President Theodore Roosevelt wrote to United States senators to ask them to vote against a measure that opens up the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW) in Minnesota to the Chilean mining giant Antofagasta Plc and its subsidiary Twin Metals Minnesota. Antofagasta wants to build a copper-nickel mine just outside the BWCAW on national forest land.

The BWCAW is made up of more than a million acres, or over 4,000 square kilometers, of pristine forests, glacial lakes, marshes, and streams in the Superior National Forest in the northeast of Minnesota. It runs along 150 miles (about 240 kilometers) of the border with Canada, linking with the slightly larger Quetico Provincial Park on the other side of the border. The BWCAW is the most visited wilderness in the U.S., with about 250,000 visitors annually. The Interior Department estimates that it contributes more than $17 million annually to the economy in northeastern Minnesota by supporting industries in the outdoor recreation business.

In 1909, President Theodore Roosevelt dedicated the lands that include the BWCAW as the Superior National Forest. Since then, presidents of both parties have protected the region, and in 1964 the BWCAW became part of the National Wilderness Preservation System. In 1978, after logging threatened to destroy the area, Congress passed the BWCAW Act, ending logging and snowmobiling in the wilderness area and restricting mining.

But in the early 2000s, mining companies proposed new copper mines in the national forest near the wilderness, and according to Luke Goldstein of The Lever, the owner of Antofagasta, Chilean billionaire Andrónico Luksic, began to try to get leases from the U.S. government for exclusive mining rights to the lands near the BWCAW in 2012. In 2013, conservationists began a campaign to ban mining there, and in 2016 the Obama administration blocked Luksic’s plans. Shortly after Trump was elected in 2016, Luksic bought a mansion in Washington, D.C., that he then rented to Trump’s daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner.

In 2023, then–interior secretary Deb Haaland issued Public Land Order 7917 closing more than 350 square miles (900 square kilometers) of the Superior National Forest, upstream from the BWCAW, to mineral and geothermal leasing for 20 years after a comprehensive review by the U.S. Forest Service found sulfide-ore copper mining could cause irreparable damage.

Minnesota has a long history of iron mining, but the state has never had a copper-sulfide mine. Such mines are usually located in the Southwest, where there is little rain and not a lot of transfer between groundwater and the surface, for the simple reason that water compounds the dangers of sulfide mining. Copper-sulfide mining blasts rock from underground to claim the rock that has metal-bearing ore: less than 1% of it. Once exposed to the air, the sulfide minerals in the rock oxidize and combine with water to create toxic materials, including sulfuric acid. That toxic waste picks up heavy metals as it runs into watersheds or pits.

“Protecting a place like Boundary Waters is key to supporting the health of the watershed and its surrounding wildlife, upholding our Tribal trust and treaty responsibilities, and boosting the local recreation economy,” Haaland said in a statement. “With an eye toward protecting this special place for future generations, I have made this decision using the best available science and extensive public input.”

In response, Twin Metals said it has a mining design that would enable it to mine without generating acid mine drainage. It claimed it could limit the exposure of the sulfide-bearing ore to air and water. People who want to protect the BWCAW called for the state legislature to pass a “Prove It First” law that would require mining companies to prove their methods have worked safely elsewhere before they are imported into Minnesota.

Trump has pushed for mining to reopen in the area, and Republican Minnesota representative Pete Stauber called the moratorium on mining near the BWCAW “an attack on our way of life” and “a dangerous, purely political decision.” On January 21, 2026, Republicans in Congress pushed through House Joint Resolution 140, a resolution introduced by Stauber to end the moratorium on mining.

Crucially, Stauber based his resolution on the 1996 Congressional Review Act (CRA), which established a way for Congress to overturn a rule by a federal agency, so long as the procedure was begun within 60 days of the agency submitting the rule to Congress for review. CRA resolutions are generally passed in the Senate as “expedited procedure,” which means they cannot be filibustered and can pass with a simple majority. Once Congress rejects a rule, it cannot be reinstated without an act of Congress.

In its first 20 years, the CRA was used only once, but after Trump took office the first time, Republicans in Congress invalidated 16 rules that had been issued by the Obama administration. The Democratic-dominated Congress under Biden used the CRA 3 times. But once Trump got back into the White House, congressional Republicans dramatically expanded the authority of the CRA to include agency actions far beyond rules and the ability to claw back authority far beyond 60 days.

Stauber’s Joint Resolution 140 would overturn a Public Land Order, something that has never before been considered a “rule.” And it targets a Public Land Order that was issued a full three years ago. Jack Jones and Richard L. Revesz of The Regulatory Review said the Republicans’ expanded use of the law “violates the law, threatens to disrupt countless long-settled agency actions moving forward, and imperils the stability of agency action and the reliance interests of regulated entities.”

The authors noted that Congressional Republicans have been using the CRA primarily to overturn environmental regulations. If this measure, with its expanded parameters of time and scope, passes, those who want to protect the environment from industrial development worry that Congress can target virtually any action to protect the public lands, retroactively.

The Senate is set to vote this week on the measure to reopen the lands above the BWCAW to copper-sulfide mining. Senator Tina Smith (D-MN) is leading the charge against its passage. “We appreciate that mining is crucial to our economy and our national security and our way of life, but that is not what this mine is about. This mine is about a very well-connected, foreign mining conglomerate, Antofagasta,” she said outside the Minnesota State Capitol on Wednesday. “It wants to develop this mine, dig up the copper, leave us with the mess, then send the metal most likely to China, and then sell it back to us or whoever is willing to pay the highest price.”

It will take four Republicans joining the Democrats to block the measure from moving forward.
In their February 6 letter, descendants of three of Roosevelt’s sons—a fourth, Quentin, died in combat in World War I and left no children—stated that its purpose was “to strongly recommend all Senators vote against H.J. Res. 140, to ask you to work with President Trump to seek ways to permanently protect the Boundary Waters, and to send a unified message that America is still a land that relentlessly protects its greatest wilderness terrain.”

The Roosevelts noted that the proposed mining is “the opposite of America First.” “The mining company in question is foreign owned, will use Chinese state-owned smelters, and will then sell the extracted metals on the open market.” Opening the area to mining “removes the American public from public land decision making,” as hundreds of thousands of Americans have made it clear they overwhelmingly want the BWCAW protected forever.

Opening up the land for mining “disregards sound science,” they wrote, noting that a detailed scientific review had “documented the substantial risk copper mining poses to this highly valued ecosystem.” Copper mining near the BWCAW “would deal a crushing blow to a great rural American economy—it would kill jobs, dampen growth, decrease affordability, and erase any meaningful prospects for future economic prosperity in the region.”

Overturning the Public Land Order “sets a very bad precedent for other public lands.” “Using the CRA in this fashion, which has never been done before, would put at risk other public land withdrawals across America to similarly irresponsible actions.”

“Finally,” the Roosevelts wrote, “the proposed resolution is diametrically at odds with the conservation legacy of President Theodore Roosevelt (TR),” who protected around 230 million acres of land during his presidency. TR protected the Superior National Forest in 1909, and “there’s no doubt TR wanted Minnesota’s greatest natural resource, its most beloved Boundary Waters ecosystem, protected in perpetuity for all future generations to enjoy.”

They “strongly” asked senators of both parties to “vote no on this resolution and any other similar legislation proposed in the future.” Theodore Roosevelt IV, Tweed Roosevelt, Kermit Roosevelt III, and Mark Roosevelt concluded their message: “The four of us…have never collectively co-signed a letter together, which should give an indication of how strongly we support voting no on this resolution—and then voting yes on permanent Boundary Waters protection.”

Those Roosevelts sure had glorious names… Kermit Roosevelt III, for example.

Divine Angel said:

Those Roosevelts sure had glorious names… Kermit Roosevelt III, for example.

Imagine him clearing his throat

buffy said:

February 22, 2026 (Sunday)

On February 6, four direct descendants of President Theodore Roosevelt wrote to United States senators to ask them to vote against a measure that opens up the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW) in Minnesota to the Chilean mining giant Antofagasta Plc and its subsidiary Twin Metals Minnesota. Antofagasta wants to build a copper-nickel mine just outside the BWCAW on national forest land.

The BWCAW is made up of more than a million acres, or over 4,000 square kilometers, of pristine forests, glacial lakes, marshes, and streams in the Superior National Forest in the northeast of Minnesota. It runs along 150 miles (about 240 kilometers) of the border with Canada, linking with the slightly larger Quetico Provincial Park on the other side of the border. The BWCAW is the most visited wilderness in the U.S., with about 250,000 visitors annually. The Interior Department estimates that it contributes more than $17 million annually to the economy in northeastern Minnesota by supporting industries in the outdoor recreation business.

In 1909, President Theodore Roosevelt dedicated the lands that include the BWCAW as the Superior National Forest. Since then, presidents of both parties have protected the region, and in 1964 the BWCAW became part of the National Wilderness Preservation System. In 1978, after logging threatened to destroy the area, Congress passed the BWCAW Act, ending logging and snowmobiling in the wilderness area and restricting mining.

But in the early 2000s, mining companies proposed new copper mines in the national forest near the wilderness, and according to Luke Goldstein of The Lever, the owner of Antofagasta, Chilean billionaire Andrónico Luksic, began to try to get leases from the U.S. government for exclusive mining rights to the lands near the BWCAW in 2012. In 2013, conservationists began a campaign to ban mining there, and in 2016 the Obama administration blocked Luksic’s plans. Shortly after Trump was elected in 2016, Luksic bought a mansion in Washington, D.C., that he then rented to Trump’s daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner.

In 2023, then–interior secretary Deb Haaland issued Public Land Order 7917 closing more than 350 square miles (900 square kilometers) of the Superior National Forest, upstream from the BWCAW, to mineral and geothermal leasing for 20 years after a comprehensive review by the U.S. Forest Service found sulfide-ore copper mining could cause irreparable damage.

Minnesota has a long history of iron mining, but the state has never had a copper-sulfide mine. Such mines are usually located in the Southwest, where there is little rain and not a lot of transfer between groundwater and the surface, for the simple reason that water compounds the dangers of sulfide mining. Copper-sulfide mining blasts rock from underground to claim the rock that has metal-bearing ore: less than 1% of it. Once exposed to the air, the sulfide minerals in the rock oxidize and combine with water to create toxic materials, including sulfuric acid. That toxic waste picks up heavy metals as it runs into watersheds or pits.

“Protecting a place like Boundary Waters is key to supporting the health of the watershed and its surrounding wildlife, upholding our Tribal trust and treaty responsibilities, and boosting the local recreation economy,” Haaland said in a statement. “With an eye toward protecting this special place for future generations, I have made this decision using the best available science and extensive public input.”

In response, Twin Metals said it has a mining design that would enable it to mine without generating acid mine drainage. It claimed it could limit the exposure of the sulfide-bearing ore to air and water. People who want to protect the BWCAW called for the state legislature to pass a “Prove It First” law that would require mining companies to prove their methods have worked safely elsewhere before they are imported into Minnesota.

Trump has pushed for mining to reopen in the area, and Republican Minnesota representative Pete Stauber called the moratorium on mining near the BWCAW “an attack on our way of life” and “a dangerous, purely political decision.” On January 21, 2026, Republicans in Congress pushed through House Joint Resolution 140, a resolution introduced by Stauber to end the moratorium on mining.

Crucially, Stauber based his resolution on the 1996 Congressional Review Act (CRA), which established a way for Congress to overturn a rule by a federal agency, so long as the procedure was begun within 60 days of the agency submitting the rule to Congress for review. CRA resolutions are generally passed in the Senate as “expedited procedure,” which means they cannot be filibustered and can pass with a simple majority. Once Congress rejects a rule, it cannot be reinstated without an act of Congress.

In its first 20 years, the CRA was used only once, but after Trump took office the first time, Republicans in Congress invalidated 16 rules that had been issued by the Obama administration. The Democratic-dominated Congress under Biden used the CRA 3 times. But once Trump got back into the White House, congressional Republicans dramatically expanded the authority of the CRA to include agency actions far beyond rules and the ability to claw back authority far beyond 60 days.

Stauber’s Joint Resolution 140 would overturn a Public Land Order, something that has never before been considered a “rule.” And it targets a Public Land Order that was issued a full three years ago. Jack Jones and Richard L. Revesz of The Regulatory Review said the Republicans’ expanded use of the law “violates the law, threatens to disrupt countless long-settled agency actions moving forward, and imperils the stability of agency action and the reliance interests of regulated entities.”

The authors noted that Congressional Republicans have been using the CRA primarily to overturn environmental regulations. If this measure, with its expanded parameters of time and scope, passes, those who want to protect the environment from industrial development worry that Congress can target virtually any action to protect the public lands, retroactively.

The Senate is set to vote this week on the measure to reopen the lands above the BWCAW to copper-sulfide mining. Senator Tina Smith (D-MN) is leading the charge against its passage. “We appreciate that mining is crucial to our economy and our national security and our way of life, but that is not what this mine is about. This mine is about a very well-connected, foreign mining conglomerate, Antofagasta,” she said outside the Minnesota State Capitol on Wednesday. “It wants to develop this mine, dig up the copper, leave us with the mess, then send the metal most likely to China, and then sell it back to us or whoever is willing to pay the highest price.”

It will take four Republicans joining the Democrats to block the measure from moving forward.
In their February 6 letter, descendants of three of Roosevelt’s sons—a fourth, Quentin, died in combat in World War I and left no children—stated that its purpose was “to strongly recommend all Senators vote against H.J. Res. 140, to ask you to work with President Trump to seek ways to permanently protect the Boundary Waters, and to send a unified message that America is still a land that relentlessly protects its greatest wilderness terrain.”

The Roosevelts noted that the proposed mining is “the opposite of America First.” “The mining company in question is foreign owned, will use Chinese state-owned smelters, and will then sell the extracted metals on the open market.” Opening the area to mining “removes the American public from public land decision making,” as hundreds of thousands of Americans have made it clear they overwhelmingly want the BWCAW protected forever.

Opening up the land for mining “disregards sound science,” they wrote, noting that a detailed scientific review had “documented the substantial risk copper mining poses to this highly valued ecosystem.” Copper mining near the BWCAW “would deal a crushing blow to a great rural American economy—it would kill jobs, dampen growth, decrease affordability, and erase any meaningful prospects for future economic prosperity in the region.”

Overturning the Public Land Order “sets a very bad precedent for other public lands.” “Using the CRA in this fashion, which has never been done before, would put at risk other public land withdrawals across America to similarly irresponsible actions.”

“Finally,” the Roosevelts wrote, “the proposed resolution is diametrically at odds with the conservation legacy of President Theodore Roosevelt (TR),” who protected around 230 million acres of land during his presidency. TR protected the Superior National Forest in 1909, and “there’s no doubt TR wanted Minnesota’s greatest natural resource, its most beloved Boundary Waters ecosystem, protected in perpetuity for all future generations to enjoy.”

They “strongly” asked senators of both parties to “vote no on this resolution and any other similar legislation proposed in the future.” Theodore Roosevelt IV, Tweed Roosevelt, Kermit Roosevelt III, and Mark Roosevelt concluded their message: “The four of us…have never collectively co-signed a letter together, which should give an indication of how strongly we support voting no on this resolution—and then voting yes on permanent Boundary Waters protection.”

People don’t need pristine land when they can have richer mining companies.

Divine Angel said:

Those Roosevelts sure had glorious names… Kermit Roosevelt III, for example.

Otherwise know as “Frenchie”.

February 23, 2026 (Monday)

Since the U.S. Supreme Court found that the tariffs Trump levied under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) are unconstitutional, Trump has attacked the court and continued to insist he has the power to issue the tariffs that give him economic leverage over other countries and companies.

After the decision was announced on Friday, Trump announced he was putting a 10% tariff on foreign imports. Then, on Saturday, he posted that his social media announcement would “serve to represent that I, as President of the United States of America, will be, effective immediately, raising the 10% Worldwide Tariff on Countries, many of which have been ‘ripping’ the U.S. off for decades, without retribution (until I came along!), to the fully allowed, and legally tested, 15% level.”

At 7:06 this morning, Trump tried to reaffirm his unchecked power when he posted on social media: “The supreme court (will be using lower case letters for a while based on a complete lack of respect!) of the United States accidentally and unwittingly gave me, as President of the United States, far more powers and strength than I had prior to their ridiculous, dumb, and very internationally divisive ruling.” He claimed that he could “do absolutely ‘terrible’ things to foreign countries” and that the court has approved other tariffs that “can all be used in a much more powerful and obnoxious way, with legal certainty, than the Tariffs as initially used.”

On Sunday the head of the international trade committee in the European Parliament, Bernd Lange, posted: “Pure tariff chaos on the part of the US government. No one can make any sense of it anymore—just open questions and growing uncertainty for the and other US trading partners.” Lange noted that it is unclear if the United States will adhere to its trade deals, “or even be able to at all.” He proposed pausing the process of approving the E.U.’s trade deal with the U.S. “until we have a comprehensive legal assessment & clear commitments from the US side.” This morning, the European Parliament agreed.

After the decision, officials from India postponed a trip to the U.S. to finalize a trade deal. Late last month, India and the E.U. completed a trade agreement that creates the largest free trade zone in the world. Experts say the deal will support economic growth in the E.U. and India.

At 9:34 this morning, Trump threatened: “Any Country that wants to ‘play games’ with the ridiculous supreme court decision, especially those that have ‘Ripped Off’ the U.S.A. for years, and even decades, will be met with a much higher Tariff, and worse, than that which they just recently agreed to. BUYER BEWARE!!! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP”

Fifteen minutes later, he posted: “As President, I do not have to go back to Congress to get approval of Tariffs. It has already been gotten, in many forms, a long time ago! They were also just reaffirmed by the ridiculous and poorly crafted supreme court decision! President DJT”

Trump’s tariffs are enormously unpopular. As G. Elliott Morris noted in Strength in Numbers yesterday, an ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll taken before the Supreme Court decision found that 64% of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of tariffs. He had tried to shore up support for them by promising Americans a $2,000 check as a “dividend” from the tariffs, but as financial planner Stephen Kates told Jessica Dickler of CNBC today, “Tariff dividends were a long shot from the beginning.” Now, he said, the odds of their moving forward are “effectively zero.”

Eighty-two percent of Americans, including 76% of Republicans, say the president must obey rulings of the Supreme Court. Morris adds that 50% of Americans think Trump’s policy decisions have hurt the economy while only 26% say they have helped. And the Washington Post reported yesterday that 60% of Americans disapprove of Trump’s job performance, the lowest number since shortly after the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

This morning, in remarks to so-called “Angel Families”—a right-wing name for the families of Americans killed by undocumented immigrants—Trump spoke in a slow monotone as he complained about the “fake polls” that show his popularity falling. “We actually have a silent support,” he said.

Today Jason Beeferman of Politico reported that the “silent support” to which right-wing figures point as evidence of their popularity is not necessarily authentic. An examination of social media accounts that pushed Nicki Minaj’s new right-wing persona showed that 18,784 of the profiles boosting her content, or about 33% of them, are fake. The report “assesses with high confidence that a coordinated fake campaign was actively amplifying political content on Nicki Minaj’s X account during the period reviewed.”

The report found that “hen the conversation is limited to toxic content, a substantially stronger amplification effect emerges. These accounts predominantly amplify content produced by Nicki Minaj and Turning Point USA, indicating a notable overlap between the two within this discourse.”

In his speech this morning, Trump returned again to his complaints about the 2020 election, which he continues to insist the Democrats rigged against him. As for the 2024 vote, in which Trump got about 77.3 million votes, he claimed: “I won, I got probably 85 million votes, they say 78 million, 79 million, they cheated in this election too, it was just too big to rig. But they cheated like hell.” Nonsensically, he claimed that Republicans don’t receive their mail-in ballots, while Democratic voters are showered with them. “Republicans don’t get theirs and they’re calling frantically to get their ballot. A Democrat will get three, four, five, six, and even seven ballots,” Trump said. “And then we’re supposed to win? That’s what they’re good at, they’re professional cheaters.”

The stock market fell sharply today as investors worried about the uncertainty of Trump’s tariff threats and about the implications of AI.

The New York City Bar Association issued a statement condemning Trump’s attacks on the Supreme Court, saying they “constitute a calculated and dangerous assault on the independence of the judiciary and on our constitutional system of separated powers.”

Today House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) acknowledged that Congress has no appetite for levying the tariffs Trump and his MAGA supporters in Congress want. Johnson told reporters: “It’s going to be, I think, a challenge to find consensus on any path forward on the tariffs, on the legislative side. And so that is why, I think, you see so much of the attention on the executive side, the executive branch, and what they’re doing and how they’re reacting to the ruling.”

Meanwhile, prominent federal officials aren’t helping the popular image of the administration.

After the U.S. men’s hockey team won the gold at the Olympics yesterday, video and images circulated of Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director Kash Patel wearing a USA jersey, screaming and chugging a beer in the team’s locker room rather as if he were at a frat party. MS NOW reporters Ken Dilanian and Carol Leonnig said eight former officials from the FBI and the Department of Justice (DOJ) sent them the video, which they said was infuriating FBI and DOJ officials.

When Dilanian questioned the trip, spokesperson Ben Williamson insisted on Saturday that Patel, who is a big fan of hockey, flew to Milan on the FBI’s private jet for official events. Williamson even demanded that Dilanian “correct” his “false” theory that Patel “went to hang out at the Olympics on the taxpayer dime.” Williamson did not respond after Dilanian and Leonnig asked him to comment on the video.

From Italy, Patel posted yesterday that the “FBI is dedicating all necessary resources in the investigation of this morning’s incident at President Trump’s Mar-A-Lago—where an armed individual was shot and killed after unlawfully entering the perimeter.” He was referring to the fact that the Secret Service shot and killed 21-year-old Austin Tucker Martin outside Mar-a-Lago on Sunday. Reporters say Martin is from a family of Trump supporters and lately had become fixated on the “evil” in the Epstein files.

Today Reuters reported that U.S. ambassador to France and Monaco Charles Kushner has been banned from contact with members of the French government. Kushner is the father of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. Trump pardoned the elder Kushner in December 2020 after he pleaded guilty to tax evasion, lying to the Federal Election Commission, and retaliating against a federal witness. Kushner has twice refused to meet with French foreign ministry officials after interfering with French politics and being summoned, a breach of diplomatic protocol. Max Rego and Laura Kelly of The Hill reported a French official’s explanation: “t’s a question of the basic expectations attached to the mission of an ambassador.”

Representative Tony Gonzales (R-TX) is facing calls to resign after allegations that he pressured a staff member into a sexual relationship. Gonzales, who is married and has six children, has denied the allegations, but published text messages are explicit and show the staffer warning him he was “going too far.” The woman later died by suicide. House speaker Johnson has endorsed Gonzales for reelection and cannot lose another Republican from the House, but pressure is mounting for Gonzales’s resignation.

Judge Aileen Cannon today blocked the release of Jack Smith’s report about his investigation of Trump’s retention of classified documents after he left office in 2021. It is usual procedure for a special counsel’s report to be made public, but Cannon is a Trump appointee who has, as legal analyst Joyce White Vance of Civil Discourse noted, done everything she can to bottle up Smith’s report. Vance notes that few people initially thought there would be much new in the report, but Trump’s fierce fight to keep it under wraps has led to speculation that there might be something surprising in it.

“t’s hard to miss the glaring similarity to the Epstein Files,” Vance wrote, “where it increasingly appears attempts to avoid disclosure were meant to protect wealthy, powerful people. Why not just release Volume II if Trump, as he says, is innocent? You’d think that might help him prove his ‘case’ and set the matter aside for once and for all.”

U.S. Southern Command posted today that it struck another small vessel, killing three people. This brings the total killed in these small-boat attacks to at least 137 people. U.S. Southern Command claimed that those operating it were “engaged in narco-trafficking operations,” although there remains no proof of the government’s allegations.

Tomorrow Trump will deliver the State of the Union address. “It’s going to be a long speech,” he said today, “because we have so much to talk about.” But in a sign of his slipping control, many Democrats are skipping the speech to attend the “State of the Swamp” event at the National Press Club or the “People’s State of the Union” rally on the National Mall.

“Ever since taking office a year ago, the President has shown no respect for the principles upon which this country is based—the Constitutional separation of powers, the rule of law, and the rights guaranteed to every person under the Constitution. His actions have done tremendous harm to the American people, to our standing among nations, and to our institutions of government,” Senator Angus King (I-ME) said in a statement. “For this reason, I cannot in good conscience participate in a function with this President at its center. To do so would require me to ignore all that has gone before and to pay him a measure of respect which he has not earned. I will not be attending the State of the Union address.”

Thanks Neophyte. That’s not really a reassuring read, is it.

February 24, 2026 (Tuesday)

Four years ago today, Russia’s president Vladimir Putin launched a “special military operation” involving dozens of missile strikes on Ukrainian cities before dawn. In 1994, in the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances, Russia, along with the United States and the United Kingdom, agreed not to use military force or economic coercion against Ukraine, in exchange for Ukraine’s giving up the Soviet stockpile of nuclear weapons left in Ukraine after the Soviet Union crumbled in 1991. At the time, Ukraine had the third-largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world. Russia violated that agreement when it invaded in 2014 after Ukrainians threw out Russia-backed oligarch Viktor Yanukovych.

Putin had been eyeing Ukraine’s industrialized region since at least summer 2016, when Russian operatives told then-candidate Donald J. Trump that they would help Trump win the White House if he would look the other way when Russia installed Yanukovych to govern a new “autonomous” republic there. Two days before he invaded in 2022, Putin recognized “new republics” in Ukraine and then, in his announcement of his invasion, claimed he had to protect the people there from “persecution and genocide by the Kyiv regime.” He called for “demilitarization” of Ukraine, demanding that soldiers lay down their weapons and saying that any bloodshed would be on their hands.

Putin called for the murder of Ukrainian leaders in the executive branch and parliament and intended to seize or kill those involved in the 2014 Maidan Revolution, which sought to turn the country away from Russia and toward a democratic government within Europe, and which itself prompted a Russian invasion. Putin planned for his troops to seize Ukraine’s electric, heating, and financial systems so the people would have to do as he wished. The operation was intended to be lightning fast.

But rather than collapsing, Ukrainians held firm. The day after Russia invaded, Zelensky and his cabinet recorded a video in Kyiv. “We are all here,” he said. “Our soldiers are here. The citizens are here, and we are here. We will defend our independence…. Glory to Ukraine!” When the United States offered the next day to transport Zelensky outside the country, where he could lead a government in exile, he responded:

“The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride.”

During his first term, Trump had weakened the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) that stood against Russian aggression, but once President Joe Biden took office, he and Secretary of State Antony Blinken worked quietly to strengthen NATO and ties with other allies and partners. They rallied the G7 (the world’s seven wealthiest liberal democracies), the European Union, and others to supply Ukraine with weapons and humanitarian assistance. Under Biden, the U.S. led the international response, providing about $50 billion in military aid and about $53 billion in humanitarian aid, as well as coordinating aid from allies and partners.

The U.S. and allies and partners also united behind extraordinary economic sanctions, including, on February 26, 2022, the exclusion of Russian banks from SWIFT, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication. SWIFT is a Belgian-based network that enables banks to transfer payments across international borders, and its ban on Russian banks isolated Russia’s economy.

Over the next three years, Ukraine’s stand against Russia boosted the morale of those defending their own countries against invaders and, in turn, captured the imagination of people around the world hoping to stem the rise of authoritarianism. Ukraine’s society transformed to bring the power of civilians as well as soldiers behind the war effort. The Ukraine army grew to be the largest in Europe, with a million people, even as Russian attacks killed civilians as well as soldiers and destroyed hospitals, infrastructure, and the energy sector. Ukraine became the global leader in drone technology, while Russia’s economy faltered and its front lines dug in.

Last year, foreign affairs journalist Anne Applebaum wrote: “The only way Putin wins now is by persuading Ukraine’s allies to be sick of the war…by persuading Trump to cut off Ukraine…and by convincing Europeans that they can’t win either.”

Indeed, while Americans supported Ukraine, Trump never wavered from his support for Russia. Although a bipartisan majority in Congress would have passed more funding for Ukraine, after Republicans took control of the House of Representatives, Trump loyalist House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) refused to bring Ukraine funding to the floor for a vote.

Then, in December 2023, MAGA Republican lawmakers said they would not pass a new measure to fund Ukraine’s assistance without measures strengthening the border between the U.S. and Mexico. Senators wrote the measure they demanded, only to have Trump urge his congressional supporters to kill it in order to keep the issue of immigration alive for the 2024 election.

By the time Congress finally passed a measure appropriating $60 billion in aid for Ukraine in April 2024, the lack of funding for six months had helped shift the war in Russia’s favor.

Once Trump was back in the White House, the U.S. position changed dramatically. As a team from the Wall Street Journal later explained, even before Trump took the oath of office, Putin was reaching out to Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, a billionaire real-estate developer with no experience in diplomacy, to negotiate over Ukraine. In February, Witkoff went to Moscow to meet with Putin without a translator and without being briefed by the CIA.

On February 12, 2025, the day after Witkoff returned, Trump talked to Putin for nearly an hour and a half and came out from the “highly productive” call parroting Putin’s justification for invading Ukraine. Two days later, Vice President J.D. Vance used the Munich Security Conference to attack Europe and its democratic values while declining to acknowledge the threat of Russian aggression, indicating that the U.S. would no longer stand with Ukraine. Days later, a readout of a call between Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov suggested that Russia was in dire need of relief from economic sanctions.

Then, on February 28, 2025, Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance ambushed Ukraine president Zelensky in an Oval Office meeting that seemed designed to give the White House an excuse for siding with Russia. The American leaders spouted Russian propaganda, trying to bully Zelensky into accepting a ceasefire on Russia’s terms and signing over rights to Ukraine’s rare-earth minerals, while accusing him of being “ungrateful” for U.S. support. Zelensky didn’t take the bait, and Trump ended up furiously defending Putin before walking out. Shortly after, Zelensky and his team were asked to leave the White House.

In August, Trump met Putin, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes, on U.S. soil, greeting him in Alaska on a literal red carpet and clapping as Putin walked to greet him, before taking him alone into the presidential limousine to drive to the meeting site. Trump has placed a photograph from that meeting on display in the White House.

Putin’s attacks on civilian targets in Ukraine have increased dramatically since Trump took office, even as Witkoff has been negotiating officially for an end to the war and quietly over deals on oil, gas, and perhaps minerals. In April the U.S. appeared to back a plan that essentially gave Russia all it wanted, including the Ukrainian land it had invaded. Since then, the administration’s ongoing “negotiations” with Russia resulted in demands of major concessions from Ukraine but none from Russia. Those talks are ongoing, now with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner involved, although as recently as last week, Russia had not wavered from its demands for Ukraine’s territory.

Today, landmark buildings across the world that were lit up in blue and yellow to show support for Ukraine included the Council of the European Union and European Commission buildings in Brussels, Belgium; Canada’s Parliament and the Office of the Prime Minister in Ottawa; the Freedom Monument in Riga, Latvia; The Colosseum in Rome, Italy; the Eiffel Tower in Paris, France; the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, Germany; the Tower of Christiansborg Palace in Copenhagen, Denmark; Sebitseom in Seoul, South Korea; and the Empire State Building in New York City, New York. European leaders vowed to “stand firm” with Ukraine, and the United Nations General Assembly voiced support for Ukraine, passing a resolution saying it was committed to ““the sovereignty, independence, unity and territorial integrity of Ukraine within its internationally recognized borders.” The U.S. abstained.

The sudden switch of the U.S. away from its traditional allies in favor of Russia has dramatically reordered the globe. With the U.S. stepping back, Russia has provoked European countries by sabotaging their infrastructure and sending drones over their airspace. Applebaum recently told Il Foglio that Trump’s stance has shocked Europeans into a determination to shed its former reliance on the U.S. and to be self-sufficient in terms of defense, to develop its own technology companies, to build a stronger industrial sector, and to integrate financial markets more fully. As U.S. funding for Ukraine has all but disappeared, Europe is stepping up, although as Nick Paton Walsh of CNN noted today, not as fast as it needs to in order to stop Russia’s aggression.

At the end of its fourth year of war, Russia is weakened enough that the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) assesses today that “Putin’s mismanagement of the war and Ukraine’s resistance now confront Putin with challenging, uncomfortable, and unpopular decisions about the war’s force generation requirements and the Russian economy.” The need for more money and more men to fight will be unpopular in the midst of an unpopular war in which Russia has recently been losing territory, and the ISW assesses that Kremlin officials are already trying to mitigate domestic backlash.

In her interview with Applebaum in Il Foglio, Paola Peduzzi noted that “he Ukrainians have suffered the most from America’s distortion, because we measure the transatlantic divorce in money and they in black bags: since Donald Trump returned to the White House, Ukrainian civilian deaths have increased by 31 percent compared to 2024, and by 70 percent compared to 2023.”

Applebaum told Peduzzi that Russia is not winning the war, but said the war “won’t end until the Russians agree to stop fighting, and they haven’t yet, nor have they ever said they want to. So the war can’t end: the Ukrainians are defending their land and can’t stop, even if they wanted to.”

“Ukrainians have changed the way they wage war; they no longer ask when it will end, but only how,” Peduzzi wrote. She concluded: “Ukrainians are saving us all, and unlike us, they don’t even ask us to say thank you.”

Neophyte said:

February 24, 2026 (Tuesday)

Four years ago today, Russia’s president Vladimir Putin launched a “special military operation” involving dozens of missile strikes on Ukrainian cities before dawn. In 1994, in the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances, Russia, along with the United States and the United Kingdom, agreed not to use military force or economic coercion against Ukraine, in exchange for Ukraine’s giving up the Soviet stockpile of nuclear weapons left in Ukraine after the Soviet Union crumbled in 1991. At the time, Ukraine had the third-largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world. Russia violated that agreement when it invaded in 2014 after Ukrainians threw out Russia-backed oligarch Viktor Yanukovych.

Putin had been eyeing Ukraine’s industrialized region since at least summer 2016, when Russian operatives told then-candidate Donald J. Trump that they would help Trump win the White House if he would look the other way when Russia installed Yanukovych to govern a new “autonomous” republic there. Two days before he invaded in 2022, Putin recognized “new republics” in Ukraine and then, in his announcement of his invasion, claimed he had to protect the people there from “persecution and genocide by the Kyiv regime.” He called for “demilitarization” of Ukraine, demanding that soldiers lay down their weapons and saying that any bloodshed would be on their hands.

Putin called for the murder of Ukrainian leaders in the executive branch and parliament and intended to seize or kill those involved in the 2014 Maidan Revolution, which sought to turn the country away from Russia and toward a democratic government within Europe, and which itself prompted a Russian invasion. Putin planned for his troops to seize Ukraine’s electric, heating, and financial systems so the people would have to do as he wished. The operation was intended to be lightning fast.

But rather than collapsing, Ukrainians held firm. The day after Russia invaded, Zelensky and his cabinet recorded a video in Kyiv. “We are all here,” he said. “Our soldiers are here. The citizens are here, and we are here. We will defend our independence…. Glory to Ukraine!” When the United States offered the next day to transport Zelensky outside the country, where he could lead a government in exile, he responded:

“The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride.”

During his first term, Trump had weakened the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) that stood against Russian aggression, but once President Joe Biden took office, he and Secretary of State Antony Blinken worked quietly to strengthen NATO and ties with other allies and partners. They rallied the G7 (the world’s seven wealthiest liberal democracies), the European Union, and others to supply Ukraine with weapons and humanitarian assistance. Under Biden, the U.S. led the international response, providing about $50 billion in military aid and about $53 billion in humanitarian aid, as well as coordinating aid from allies and partners.

The U.S. and allies and partners also united behind extraordinary economic sanctions, including, on February 26, 2022, the exclusion of Russian banks from SWIFT, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication. SWIFT is a Belgian-based network that enables banks to transfer payments across international borders, and its ban on Russian banks isolated Russia’s economy.

Over the next three years, Ukraine’s stand against Russia boosted the morale of those defending their own countries against invaders and, in turn, captured the imagination of people around the world hoping to stem the rise of authoritarianism. Ukraine’s society transformed to bring the power of civilians as well as soldiers behind the war effort. The Ukraine army grew to be the largest in Europe, with a million people, even as Russian attacks killed civilians as well as soldiers and destroyed hospitals, infrastructure, and the energy sector. Ukraine became the global leader in drone technology, while Russia’s economy faltered and its front lines dug in.

Last year, foreign affairs journalist Anne Applebaum wrote: “The only way Putin wins now is by persuading Ukraine’s allies to be sick of the war…by persuading Trump to cut off Ukraine…and by convincing Europeans that they can’t win either.”

Indeed, while Americans supported Ukraine, Trump never wavered from his support for Russia. Although a bipartisan majority in Congress would have passed more funding for Ukraine, after Republicans took control of the House of Representatives, Trump loyalist House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) refused to bring Ukraine funding to the floor for a vote.

Then, in December 2023, MAGA Republican lawmakers said they would not pass a new measure to fund Ukraine’s assistance without measures strengthening the border between the U.S. and Mexico. Senators wrote the measure they demanded, only to have Trump urge his congressional supporters to kill it in order to keep the issue of immigration alive for the 2024 election.

By the time Congress finally passed a measure appropriating $60 billion in aid for Ukraine in April 2024, the lack of funding for six months had helped shift the war in Russia’s favor.

Once Trump was back in the White House, the U.S. position changed dramatically. As a team from the Wall Street Journal later explained, even before Trump took the oath of office, Putin was reaching out to Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, a billionaire real-estate developer with no experience in diplomacy, to negotiate over Ukraine. In February, Witkoff went to Moscow to meet with Putin without a translator and without being briefed by the CIA.

On February 12, 2025, the day after Witkoff returned, Trump talked to Putin for nearly an hour and a half and came out from the “highly productive” call parroting Putin’s justification for invading Ukraine. Two days later, Vice President J.D. Vance used the Munich Security Conference to attack Europe and its democratic values while declining to acknowledge the threat of Russian aggression, indicating that the U.S. would no longer stand with Ukraine. Days later, a readout of a call between Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov suggested that Russia was in dire need of relief from economic sanctions.

Then, on February 28, 2025, Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance ambushed Ukraine president Zelensky in an Oval Office meeting that seemed designed to give the White House an excuse for siding with Russia. The American leaders spouted Russian propaganda, trying to bully Zelensky into accepting a ceasefire on Russia’s terms and signing over rights to Ukraine’s rare-earth minerals, while accusing him of being “ungrateful” for U.S. support. Zelensky didn’t take the bait, and Trump ended up furiously defending Putin before walking out. Shortly after, Zelensky and his team were asked to leave the White House.

In August, Trump met Putin, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes, on U.S. soil, greeting him in Alaska on a literal red carpet and clapping as Putin walked to greet him, before taking him alone into the presidential limousine to drive to the meeting site. Trump has placed a photograph from that meeting on display in the White House.

Putin’s attacks on civilian targets in Ukraine have increased dramatically since Trump took office, even as Witkoff has been negotiating officially for an end to the war and quietly over deals on oil, gas, and perhaps minerals. In April the U.S. appeared to back a plan that essentially gave Russia all it wanted, including the Ukrainian land it had invaded. Since then, the administration’s ongoing “negotiations” with Russia resulted in demands of major concessions from Ukraine but none from Russia. Those talks are ongoing, now with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner involved, although as recently as last week, Russia had not wavered from its demands for Ukraine’s territory.

Today, landmark buildings across the world that were lit up in blue and yellow to show support for Ukraine included the Council of the European Union and European Commission buildings in Brussels, Belgium; Canada’s Parliament and the Office of the Prime Minister in Ottawa; the Freedom Monument in Riga, Latvia; The Colosseum in Rome, Italy; the Eiffel Tower in Paris, France; the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, Germany; the Tower of Christiansborg Palace in Copenhagen, Denmark; Sebitseom in Seoul, South Korea; and the Empire State Building in New York City, New York. European leaders vowed to “stand firm” with Ukraine, and the United Nations General Assembly voiced support for Ukraine, passing a resolution saying it was committed to ““the sovereignty, independence, unity and territorial integrity of Ukraine within its internationally recognized borders.” The U.S. abstained.

The sudden switch of the U.S. away from its traditional allies in favor of Russia has dramatically reordered the globe. With the U.S. stepping back, Russia has provoked European countries by sabotaging their infrastructure and sending drones over their airspace. Applebaum recently told Il Foglio that Trump’s stance has shocked Europeans into a determination to shed its former reliance on the U.S. and to be self-sufficient in terms of defense, to develop its own technology companies, to build a stronger industrial sector, and to integrate financial markets more fully. As U.S. funding for Ukraine has all but disappeared, Europe is stepping up, although as Nick Paton Walsh of CNN noted today, not as fast as it needs to in order to stop Russia’s aggression.

At the end of its fourth year of war, Russia is weakened enough that the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) assesses today that “Putin’s mismanagement of the war and Ukraine’s resistance now confront Putin with challenging, uncomfortable, and unpopular decisions about the war’s force generation requirements and the Russian economy.” The need for more money and more men to fight will be unpopular in the midst of an unpopular war in which Russia has recently been losing territory, and the ISW assesses that Kremlin officials are already trying to mitigate domestic backlash.

In her interview with Applebaum in Il Foglio, Paola Peduzzi noted that “he Ukrainians have suffered the most from America’s distortion, because we measure the transatlantic divorce in money and they in black bags: since Donald Trump returned to the White House, Ukrainian civilian deaths have increased by 31 percent compared to 2024, and by 70 percent compared to 2023.”

Applebaum told Peduzzi that Russia is not winning the war, but said the war “won’t end until the Russians agree to stop fighting, and they haven’t yet, nor have they ever said they want to. So the war can’t end: the Ukrainians are defending their land and can’t stop, even if they wanted to.”

“Ukrainians have changed the way they wage war; they no longer ask when it will end, but only how,” Peduzzi wrote. She concluded: “Ukrainians are saving us all, and unlike us, they don’t even ask us to say thank you.”

I wonder if US military industries pressure Trump to send more aid.
They are making profit from the war

February 25, 2026 (Wednesday)

At last night’s State of the Union address, President Donald Trump went on offense, seeming to try to set the terms for the upcoming midterm elections. Although the State of the Union in the past was an opportunity for the president to tell the American people where the country stood with regard to foreign affairs, finances, the economy, the public lands, and so on, it has, over the years, become more about messaging and future plans rather than a summing up of the past year.

With his approval ratings under 40%, administration officials mired in corruption scandals, and every one of his policies underwater, Trump delivered a campaign rally. To answer Americans’ concerns about his economic policies, the slowing of economic growth, and rising inflation, he insisted that he had “inherited a nation in crisis” but had “achieved a transformation like no one has ever seen before.” He proceeded to claim that the economy is booming, using statistics that were either made up or staggeringly misleading, like his boast that “in one year we have lifted 2.4 million Americans—a record—off of food stamps.” In fact, Republicans cut food assistance from those people, so they are indeed off the rolls, but “lifted” is doing a lot of work in that sentence..

In between his celebrations of what he assured the audience was a “golden age,” Trump turned the event into what appeared to be an awards show. “Our country is winning again,” he claimed. “In fact, we’re winning so much that we really don’t know what to do about it. People are asking me, please, please, please, Mr. President, we’re winning too much. We can’t take it anymore. We’re not used to winning in our country until you came along, we’re just always losing. But now we’re winning too much. And I say, no, no, no, you’re going to win again. You’re going to win big. You’re going to win bigger than ever. And to prove that point, to prove that point, here with us tonight is a group of winners who just made the entire nation proud. The men’s gold medal Olympic hockey team. Come on in!”

Trump said he would be awarding the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, to the goalie of that team, which had just won the gold medal at the Olympics.

He also presented two recipients with Purple Hearts, a military decoration awarded to service members killed or wounded in action; and one with the Legion of Merit award for exceptionally meritorious conduct in the performance of an outstanding service or achievement. Trump awarded two recipients the Medal of Honor, the U.S. military’s highest decoration for valor in action. After awarding one, Trump mused: “I’ve always wanted the Congressional Medal of Honor, but I was informed I’m not allowed to give it to myself, and I wouldn’t know why I’d be taking it. But if they ever opened up that law I will be there with you someday.”
Trump did not serve in the military.

But the party atmosphere was selective. Trump did not acknowledge the Epstein survivors in the audience, invited by Democratic representatives. Representative Al Green (D-TX) was escorted out after holding up a sign that referred to the president’s posting of an image of former president Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama as apes, reading: “BLACK PEOPLE AREN’T APES.” And Trump’s descriptions of murders committed by undocumented immigrants—with apparent relish and with the victims’ family members in the audience—seemed to glorify cruelty and violence.

It seemed clear that Trump intends to try to persuade Americans who have soured on his economy and hate his immigration policies that they are wrong, and that both are, in fact, triumphs. He also appeared to try to answer concerns about the skyrocketing deficit on his watch by blaming immigrants for it, claiming that they are committing fraud that is “plundering” the country. He announced a “war on fraud to be led by our great Vice President J.D. Vance,” saying, “And we’re able to find enough of that fraud, we will actually have a balanced budget overnight.”

Trump’s tax cuts primarily benefited the wealthy and corporations, and pinning their effects on immigrants illustrates how Trump’s strongest calls were to his base. Not only did he portray immigrants as violent criminals, in a moment scripted for television, he then turned on Democrats in the chamber, setting them up to force them to back off their insistence on reforms to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol by demanding that they stand to show their support for the statement: “The first duty of the American government is to protect American citizens, not illegal aliens.”

It was a deliberate division of the country into “us” and “them,” a classic authoritarian move, that he followed up by calling the Democrats “crazy” and claiming that “Democrats are destroying our country.” Facing a midterm election in which voters appear strongly to favor Democrats, Trump went out of his way to try to define them, rather than his own administration, as dangerous extremists.

Shawn McCreesh of the New York Times noted that deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller, an adherent of the Great Replacement theory who is the key figure driving the administration’s crusade against migrants, made it “clear that the night’s performance had been built around this moment.” Miller posted: “0 democrats stood for the foundational principle of all government that leaders must serve citizens before invaders. Never has there been a more stunning moment in Congress.”

And he was right, in a way, because it was indeed stunning that Republican members of Congress cheered and applauded at the attacks on their colleagues. In his 1951 The True Believer: Notes on the Nature of Mass Movements, philosopher Eric Hoffer noted that once people are wedded to a strongman, they will cling to him ever more tightly as his behavior becomes more and more erratic. This loyalty is in part to demonstrate their own devotion to the cause, and in part to justify their own attacks on those the strongman has given them permission to hurt.

The behavior of the Republican representatives was really the only memorable part of the evening. Trump’s almost two-hour State of the Union—the longest State of the Union address in history—felt pretty much like a Trump rally, full of outrageous exaggerations, lies, game show promises, and attacks, and those are old hat by now.
In contrast, the response to the State of the Union—which is usually deadly—was a breath of fresh air. Delivered by Virginia governor Abigail Spanberger, the response was short and clean, and in a refreshing change from Trump’s constant focus on himself, it centered the American people.

Spanberger noted that she was speaking from the Virginia House of Burgesses, where “efore there was a Declaration of Independence, a Constitution, or a Bill of Rights—there were people in this very room” who “dreamed of what a new nation…could be.” She continued: “The United States was founded on the idea that ordinary people could reject the unacceptable excesses of poor leadership, band together to demand better of their government, and create a nation that would be an example for the world.”

“Tonight,” she said, “we did not hear the truth from our President.” She asked, is the president “working to make life more affordable for you and your family,” is he “working to keep Americans safe—both at home and abroad,” and is he “working for YOU?”

She noted that the rising costs of housing, healthcare, energy, and childcare are pressing everyone. Trump’s trade policies, especially tariffs, have hurt small businesses, farmers, and everyday Americans, while the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” is forcing rural health clinics to close, stripping healthcare from millions of Americans, and cutting food programs for children.

Turning to the excesses of federal agents from ICE and Border Patrol, Spanberger highlighted her own career as a law enforcement officer working money-laundering and narcotics cases alongside local and state police to note that law enforcement requires “an abiding sense of duty and commitment to community.” “And yet,” she said, “our President has sent poorly trained federal agents into our cities, where they have arrested and detained American citizens and people who aspire to be Americans—and they have done it without a warrant.

“They have ripped nursing mothers away from their babies, they have sent children—a little boy in a blue bunny hat—to far-off detention centers, and they have killed American citizens on our streets. And they have done it all with their faces masked from accountability. Every minute spent sowing fear is a minute not spent investigating murders, crimes against children, or the criminals defrauding seniors of their life savings.”

“Our President told us tonight that we are safer because these agents arrest mothers and detain children,” she said. “Think about that. Our broken immigration system is something to be fixed—not an excuse for unaccountable agents to terrorize our communities.”

At the same time, she said, the president “continues to cede economic power and technological strength to China, bow down to a Russian dictator, and make plans for war with Iran.” “hrough that , mass firings, and the appointment of deeply unserious people to our nation’s most serious positions, our President has endangered the long and storied history of the United States of America being a force for good.”

“In his speech tonight,” she said, “the President did what he always does: he lied, he scapegoated, and he distracted. He also offered no real solutions to our nation’s pressing challenges—so many of which he is actively making worse.” Who is benefitting from “his rhetoric, his policies, his actions, and the short list of laws he’s pushed through this Republican Congress?” she asked.

“He’s enriching himself, his family, his friends,” she said. “The scale of the corruption is unprecedented. There’s the cover-up of the Epstein files, the crypto scams, cozying up to foreign princes for airplanes and billionaires for ballrooms, putting his name and face on buildings all over our nation’s capital. This is not what our founders envisioned. So, I’ll ask again: Is the President working for you?”

“We all know the answer is no.”

“But here is the special thing about America,” she said. “e know better than any nation what is possible when ordinary citizens—like those who once dreamed right here in this room—reject the unacceptable and demand more of their government.” She noted the power of the Americans taking action across the country to protest the government and to vote. “With their votes,” she said, “they are writing a new story.”

In November, Spanberger said, she won her election by 15 points, earning votes “from Democrats, Republicans, Independents, and everyone in-between; because they knew as citizens, they could demand more. That they could vote for what they believe matters, and they didn’t need to be constrained by a party or political affiliation.” In that election, Democrats flipped legislative seats in Georgia, Iowa, Mississippi, and Texas. Now “rdinary Americans are stepping up to run…to demand more and do more for their neighbors and communities.”

“Those who are stepping up now to run will win in November because Americans know you can demand more, and that we are working to lower costs, we are working to keep our communities and country safe, and we are working for you,” she said.

“In his Farewell Address,” she concluded, “George Washington warned us about the possibility of ‘cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men’ rising to power. But he also encouraged us—all Americans—to unite in ‘a common cause’ to move this nation forward. That is our charge once more. And that is what we are seeing across the country.

“It is deeply American and patriotic to do so, and it is how we ensure that the State of our Union remains strong, not just this year but for the next 250 years as well.”

Ta.

February 26, 2026 (Thursday)

It appears the State of the Union was the marker for the White House to launch directly into campaign mode. Much of that mode centers on trying to defang Trump’s weaknesses with attacks on Democrats. And since the 2024 campaign brought us the insistence from the Trump campaign, including Trump and then–vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance, that “they’re eating the dogs…they’re eating the cats,” it’s reasonable to assume the next several months are going to be a morass of lies and disinformation.

Trump announced in his State of the Union that he was declaring a “war on fraud to be led by our great Vice President J.D. Vance” and said that “members of the Somali community have pillaged an estimated $19 billion from the American taxpayer…in actuality, the number is much higher than that. And California, Massachusetts, Maine and many other states are even worse.” He added: “And we’re able to find enough of that fraud, we will actually have a balanced budget overnight.”

This, in part, seemed designed to reverse victim and offender by suggesting that rather than Trump’s being the perpetrator of extraordinary frauds and corruption in cryptocurrency, for example—he was, after all, found guilty on 34 charges of business fraud in 2024—immigrants are to blame for fraud.

As Kirsten Swanson and Ryan Raiche of KSTP in Minneapolis explain, members of Minnesota’s Somali community, 95% of whom are U.S. citizens, pay about $67 million in taxes annually and have an estimated $8 billion impact on the community. While some have indeed been charged and convicted of fraud over the past five years, the accusation of $19 billion in fraud is just a number thrown out without evidence by “then-Assistant U.S. Attorney Joe Thompson,” who estimated in December 2025 that “‘half or more’ of $18 billion in Medicaid reimbursements from 14 high-risk programs could be fraudulent.”

Yesterday Vance and Dr. Mehmet Oz, who oversees Medicaid, the federal healthcare program for low-income households, announced the administration is withholding $259 million in Medicaid funds from Minnesota, claiming the state has not done enough to protect taxpayers from fraud. It is illegal for the executive branch to withhold funds appropriated by Congress, and a federal judge has blocked a similar freeze on $10 billion in childcare funding for Illinois, California, Colorado, Minnesota, and New York while the case is in court. Nonetheless, Minnesota representative Tom Emmer, who is part of the Republican leadership in the House, approved the attack on his constituents, posting: “The war on fraud has begun. And Somali fraudsters in my home state are about to find out.”

Minnesota governor Tim Walz, a Democrat, posted: “This has nothing to do with fraud…. This is a campaign of retribution. Trump is weaponizing the entirety of the federal government to punish blue states like Minnesota. These cuts will be devastating for veterans, families with young kids, folks with disabilities, and working people across our state.”

While Walz is almost certainly correct that this is a campaign of retribution, the administration is also salting into the media an explanation for the sudden depletion of the trust funds that are used to pay Medicare and Social Security.

In March 2025, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated the trust fund that pays for Medicare A would be solvent until 2052. On Monday, it updated its projections, saying the funds will run out in 2040. The CBO also expects the Social Security trust fund to run dry a year earlier than previously expected, by the end of 2031. As Nick Lichtenberg of Fortune wrote, policy changes by the Republicans under Trump, especially the tax cuts in the budget reconciliation bill the Republicans call the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” have “drastically shortened the financial life spans of both Medicare and Social Security, accelerating their paths toward insolvency.”

Between Trump’s statement that if the administration finds enough fraud it can balance the budget overnight, and the subsequent insistence that cuts to Medicaid are necessary because of that fraud, it sure looks like the administration is trying to distract attention from the CBO’s report that Trump’s tax cuts have cut the solvency of Medicare by more than a decade and Social Security by a year. Instead, they are hoping to convince voters that immigrants are at fault.

Similarly, in an oldie but a goodie, Republicans today hauled former secretary of state Hillary Clinton before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee to testify by video about her knowledge of the investigations into sex traffickers Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. In a scathing opening statement, Clinton noted that while committee chair James Comer (R-KY) subpoenaed eight law enforcement officials who were directly involved in that investigation, only one appeared before the committee. The rest simply submitted brief statements saying they had no information. Clinton also noted that the committee has held no public hearings and refused media coverage of hearings—including today’s—and has made little effort to hear from the people whose names are prominent in the files. When the committee heard from billionaire businessman Les Wexner last week, she observed, “not a single Republican Member showed up.”

And yet Clinton was before them, despite her sworn declaration on January 13 that “I had no idea about their criminal activities. I do not recall ever encountering Mr. Epstein. I never flew on his plane or visited his island, homes or offices. I have nothing else to add to that.”

She did, though, note that she has advocated tirelessly for women and girls, including advocacy for the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, which her husband, President Bill Clinton, signed into law. The Trump administration has fired more than 70% of the career civil servants at the State Department’s Trafficking in Persons Office.

Secretary Clinton called out the committee for compelling her “to testify, fully aware that I have no knowledge that would assist your investigation, in order to distract attention from President Trump’s actions and to cover them up despite legitimate calls for answers.” Representative Lauren Boebert (R-CO) confirmed Clinton’s accusation when she shared a photo from the closed deposition with right-wing podcaster Benny Johnson, who posted it on social media with the caption: “This is the first time Hillary has had to answer real questions about Epstein. Clinton does not look happy.”

Yesterday, a spokesperson for Harvard said former Treasury secretary and former president of Harvard University Lawrence Summers has resigned from Harvard effective at the end of the semester because of his ties to Epstein. Today, the president and chief executive officer of the World Economic Forum, Børge Brende, stepped down after the organization reviewed his connections with Epstein. Brende was a former Norwegian minister of foreign affairs.

On Tuesday morning, Stephen Fowler of NPR built on earlier reporting by independent journalist Roger Sollenberger to report that the Department of Justice (DOJ) appears to have illegally withheld material from the Epstein files. That material is related to allegations that Trump sexually assaulted two girls when they were about thirteen years old. The DOJ also removed from the files they did publish documents that mention Trump among allegations against convicted sexual abuser Epstein.

When Fowler asked the White House about the missing documents, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson told him that Trump “has done more for Epstein’s victims than anyone before him.”

Fowler notes that on February 14, Attorney General Pam Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche told Congress that they had not withheld or redacted any records “on the basis of embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity, including to any government official, public figure, or foreign dignitary.” The Epstein Files Transparency Act, which required the DOJ to release all the files no later than December 19, 2025, prohibits that type of redactions, permitting them only to protect Epstein’s victims and survivors.

After NPR reported the story, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, Robert Garcia of California, released a statement, saying: “Yesterday, I reviewed unredacted evidence logs at the Department of Justice. Oversight Democrats can confirm that the DOJ appears to have illegally withheld FBI interviews with this survivor who accused President Trump of heinous crimes.”

Scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder wrote yesterday that Trump is “failing at fascism” because “he needs a bloody, popular, victorious war” as an opportunity to “to kill one’s own people and thereby generate a reservoir of meaning that could be used to justify indefinite rule and further oppression, to make the world seem like an endless and submission to hierarchy as the only kind of life.”

On this morning’s cable news shows, Aaron Rupar of Public Notice pointed out, Republicans were “uddenly talking again about the need to ‘take’ Greenland,” “yping importance of ‘strangling’ the Cuban government,” and “ncouraging Trump to ‘topple’ Iranian regime.”

But there, too, ginning up a war would give foreign affairs coverage to another scandal: On Monday, Steve Holland and Alexandra Alper of Reuters reported that China’s AI startup DeepSeek has been trained on Nvidia’s most advanced chip. Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) noted that an official from the United Arab Emirates invested $500,000 to buy 49% of the stock of the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial cryptocurrency company shortly before Trump took office, putting $187 million directly into the pockets of the Trump family. Under Biden, U.S. officials had refused to sell Nvidia chips to the UAE out of concerns they would end up in the hands of China for use in munitions.

Hannah Knowles and Natalie Allison of the Washington Post reported today that Republicans were hoping to trap the Democrats at the State of the Union by demanding they stand to demonstrate their agreement that “the first duty of the American government is to protect American citizens, not illegal aliens.” Democrats, who are demanding reforms to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol, did not take the bait and stayed in their seats. White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller has tried to pump up the story, and the Trump War Room wrote: “Remember this when you head to the polls in 2026, 2028, and beyond.”

But the timing of the Republicans’ story coincided with the horrific story that on February 19, Border Patrol agents had dropped Nurul Amin Shah Alam, a nearly blind legal refugee from genocide in Myanmar who spoke no English and could not read, write, or use electronic devices, miles from his home in Buffalo, New York. They did not notify either his lawyer or his family that he had been dropped off, and when his family filed a missing persons case, the police believed Shah Alam was with Border Patrol and closed the file. He was found dead on the street on February 24.

A spokesperson for Customs and Border Protection, the parent agency of Border Patrol, said: “Border Patrol agents offered him a courtesy ride, which he chose to accept to a coffee shop, determined to be a warm, safe location near his last known address, rather than be released directly from the Border Patrol station. He showed no signs of distress, mobility issues or disabilities requiring special assistance.”

In his State of the Union address, Trump also turned back to his attacks on the rights of transgender Americans, and right on cue, a new law went into effect today in Kansas that invalidates the driver’s licenses of transgender residents by requiring that identification must match the holder’s “sex at birth.” The bill, SB 244, also requires transgender people to use bathrooms and locker rooms that correspond to their sex at birth, making any governmental entity that violates that law liable for penalties of $125,000 per violation, and allows citizens to sue any transgender people they encounter in bathrooms for $1,000 in damages.

Erin Reed of Erin in the Morning explains that the legislature passed the law without its vetting by a committee. When the Democratic governor, Laura Kelly, vetoed the measure, the legislature overrode her veto to make the bill a law. The legislators left no grace period before licenses became invalid, and a letter sent to those affected reminded them that “you may be subject to additional penalties if you are operating a vehicle without a valid credential.” Reed notes that in Kansas, driving without a license is punishable by a $1,000 fine and six months in jail, although first offenders typically are cited and fined. Reed notes that the Trump administration is leading a campaign to strip transgender Americans of accurate identification documents.

Today, Isaac Arnsdorf of the Washington Post reported that right-wing activists are circulating a draft of an executive order that declares a national emergency to give Trump control over voting. The activists say that they are working with the White House. The order reiterates a debunked claim that China interfered in the 2020 presidential election and says the president can ban mail-in ballots and voting machines.

Matt Cohen of Democracy Docket called the plan “blatantly illegal” and unconstitutional. The U.S. Constitution gives sole control of elections to the states, not the president.

The top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mark R. Warner of Virginia, refuted the idea that there is a national emergency. “We’ve been raising the alarm for weeks about President Trump’s attacks on our elections and now we’re seeing reports that outline how they may be planning to do it. This is a plot to interfere with the will of voters and undermine both the rule of law and public confidence in our elections.”

And so, election season is underway.

Neophyte said:

February 26, 2026 (Thursday)

It appears the State of the Union was the marker for the White House to launch directly into campaign mode. Much of that mode centers on trying to defang Trump’s weaknesses with attacks on Democrats. And since the 2024 campaign brought us the insistence from the Trump campaign, including Trump and then–vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance, that “they’re eating the dogs…they’re eating the cats,” it’s reasonable to assume the next several months are going to be a morass of lies and disinformation.

Trump announced in his State of the Union that he was declaring a “war on fraud to be led by our great Vice President J.D. Vance” and said that “members of the Somali community have pillaged an estimated $19 billion from the American taxpayer…in actuality, the number is much higher than that. And California, Massachusetts, Maine and many other states are even worse.” He added: “And we’re able to find enough of that fraud, we will actually have a balanced budget overnight.”

This, in part, seemed designed to reverse victim and offender by suggesting that rather than Trump’s being the perpetrator of extraordinary frauds and corruption in cryptocurrency, for example—he was, after all, found guilty on 34 charges of business fraud in 2024—immigrants are to blame for fraud.

As Kirsten Swanson and Ryan Raiche of KSTP in Minneapolis explain, members of Minnesota’s Somali community, 95% of whom are U.S. citizens, pay about $67 million in taxes annually and have an estimated $8 billion impact on the community. While some have indeed been charged and convicted of fraud over the past five years, the accusation of $19 billion in fraud is just a number thrown out without evidence by “then-Assistant U.S. Attorney Joe Thompson,” who estimated in December 2025 that “‘half or more’ of $18 billion in Medicaid reimbursements from 14 high-risk programs could be fraudulent.”

Yesterday Vance and Dr. Mehmet Oz, who oversees Medicaid, the federal healthcare program for low-income households, announced the administration is withholding $259 million in Medicaid funds from Minnesota, claiming the state has not done enough to protect taxpayers from fraud. It is illegal for the executive branch to withhold funds appropriated by Congress, and a federal judge has blocked a similar freeze on $10 billion in childcare funding for Illinois, California, Colorado, Minnesota, and New York while the case is in court. Nonetheless, Minnesota representative Tom Emmer, who is part of the Republican leadership in the House, approved the attack on his constituents, posting: “The war on fraud has begun. And Somali fraudsters in my home state are about to find out.”

Minnesota governor Tim Walz, a Democrat, posted: “This has nothing to do with fraud…. This is a campaign of retribution. Trump is weaponizing the entirety of the federal government to punish blue states like Minnesota. These cuts will be devastating for veterans, families with young kids, folks with disabilities, and working people across our state.”

While Walz is almost certainly correct that this is a campaign of retribution, the administration is also salting into the media an explanation for the sudden depletion of the trust funds that are used to pay Medicare and Social Security.

In March 2025, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated the trust fund that pays for Medicare A would be solvent until 2052. On Monday, it updated its projections, saying the funds will run out in 2040. The CBO also expects the Social Security trust fund to run dry a year earlier than previously expected, by the end of 2031. As Nick Lichtenberg of Fortune wrote, policy changes by the Republicans under Trump, especially the tax cuts in the budget reconciliation bill the Republicans call the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” have “drastically shortened the financial life spans of both Medicare and Social Security, accelerating their paths toward insolvency.”

Between Trump’s statement that if the administration finds enough fraud it can balance the budget overnight, and the subsequent insistence that cuts to Medicaid are necessary because of that fraud, it sure looks like the administration is trying to distract attention from the CBO’s report that Trump’s tax cuts have cut the solvency of Medicare by more than a decade and Social Security by a year. Instead, they are hoping to convince voters that immigrants are at fault.

Similarly, in an oldie but a goodie, Republicans today hauled former secretary of state Hillary Clinton before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee to testify by video about her knowledge of the investigations into sex traffickers Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. In a scathing opening statement, Clinton noted that while committee chair James Comer (R-KY) subpoenaed eight law enforcement officials who were directly involved in that investigation, only one appeared before the committee. The rest simply submitted brief statements saying they had no information. Clinton also noted that the committee has held no public hearings and refused media coverage of hearings—including today’s—and has made little effort to hear from the people whose names are prominent in the files. When the committee heard from billionaire businessman Les Wexner last week, she observed, “not a single Republican Member showed up.”

And yet Clinton was before them, despite her sworn declaration on January 13 that “I had no idea about their criminal activities. I do not recall ever encountering Mr. Epstein. I never flew on his plane or visited his island, homes or offices. I have nothing else to add to that.”

She did, though, note that she has advocated tirelessly for women and girls, including advocacy for the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, which her husband, President Bill Clinton, signed into law. The Trump administration has fired more than 70% of the career civil servants at the State Department’s Trafficking in Persons Office.

Secretary Clinton called out the committee for compelling her “to testify, fully aware that I have no knowledge that would assist your investigation, in order to distract attention from President Trump’s actions and to cover them up despite legitimate calls for answers.” Representative Lauren Boebert (R-CO) confirmed Clinton’s accusation when she shared a photo from the closed deposition with right-wing podcaster Benny Johnson, who posted it on social media with the caption: “This is the first time Hillary has had to answer real questions about Epstein. Clinton does not look happy.”

Yesterday, a spokesperson for Harvard said former Treasury secretary and former president of Harvard University Lawrence Summers has resigned from Harvard effective at the end of the semester because of his ties to Epstein. Today, the president and chief executive officer of the World Economic Forum, Børge Brende, stepped down after the organization reviewed his connections with Epstein. Brende was a former Norwegian minister of foreign affairs.

On Tuesday morning, Stephen Fowler of NPR built on earlier reporting by independent journalist Roger Sollenberger to report that the Department of Justice (DOJ) appears to have illegally withheld material from the Epstein files. That material is related to allegations that Trump sexually assaulted two girls when they were about thirteen years old. The DOJ also removed from the files they did publish documents that mention Trump among allegations against convicted sexual abuser Epstein.

When Fowler asked the White House about the missing documents, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson told him that Trump “has done more for Epstein’s victims than anyone before him.”

Fowler notes that on February 14, Attorney General Pam Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche told Congress that they had not withheld or redacted any records “on the basis of embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity, including to any government official, public figure, or foreign dignitary.” The Epstein Files Transparency Act, which required the DOJ to release all the files no later than December 19, 2025, prohibits that type of redactions, permitting them only to protect Epstein’s victims and survivors.

After NPR reported the story, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, Robert Garcia of California, released a statement, saying: “Yesterday, I reviewed unredacted evidence logs at the Department of Justice. Oversight Democrats can confirm that the DOJ appears to have illegally withheld FBI interviews with this survivor who accused President Trump of heinous crimes.”

Scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder wrote yesterday that Trump is “failing at fascism” because “he needs a bloody, popular, victorious war” as an opportunity to “to kill one’s own people and thereby generate a reservoir of meaning that could be used to justify indefinite rule and further oppression, to make the world seem like an endless and submission to hierarchy as the only kind of life.”

On this morning’s cable news shows, Aaron Rupar of Public Notice pointed out, Republicans were “uddenly talking again about the need to ‘take’ Greenland,” “yping importance of ‘strangling’ the Cuban government,” and “ncouraging Trump to ‘topple’ Iranian regime.”

But there, too, ginning up a war would give foreign affairs coverage to another scandal: On Monday, Steve Holland and Alexandra Alper of Reuters reported that China’s AI startup DeepSeek has been trained on Nvidia’s most advanced chip. Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) noted that an official from the United Arab Emirates invested $500,000 to buy 49% of the stock of the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial cryptocurrency company shortly before Trump took office, putting $187 million directly into the pockets of the Trump family. Under Biden, U.S. officials had refused to sell Nvidia chips to the UAE out of concerns they would end up in the hands of China for use in munitions.

Hannah Knowles and Natalie Allison of the Washington Post reported today that Republicans were hoping to trap the Democrats at the State of the Union by demanding they stand to demonstrate their agreement that “the first duty of the American government is to protect American citizens, not illegal aliens.” Democrats, who are demanding reforms to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol, did not take the bait and stayed in their seats. White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller has tried to pump up the story, and the Trump War Room wrote: “Remember this when you head to the polls in 2026, 2028, and beyond.”

But the timing of the Republicans’ story coincided with the horrific story that on February 19, Border Patrol agents had dropped Nurul Amin Shah Alam, a nearly blind legal refugee from genocide in Myanmar who spoke no English and could not read, write, or use electronic devices, miles from his home in Buffalo, New York. They did not notify either his lawyer or his family that he had been dropped off, and when his family filed a missing persons case, the police believed Shah Alam was with Border Patrol and closed the file. He was found dead on the street on February 24.

A spokesperson for Customs and Border Protection, the parent agency of Border Patrol, said: “Border Patrol agents offered him a courtesy ride, which he chose to accept to a coffee shop, determined to be a warm, safe location near his last known address, rather than be released directly from the Border Patrol station. He showed no signs of distress, mobility issues or disabilities requiring special assistance.”

In his State of the Union address, Trump also turned back to his attacks on the rights of transgender Americans, and right on cue, a new law went into effect today in Kansas that invalidates the driver’s licenses of transgender residents by requiring that identification must match the holder’s “sex at birth.” The bill, SB 244, also requires transgender people to use bathrooms and locker rooms that correspond to their sex at birth, making any governmental entity that violates that law liable for penalties of $125,000 per violation, and allows citizens to sue any transgender people they encounter in bathrooms for $1,000 in damages.

Erin Reed of Erin in the Morning explains that the legislature passed the law without its vetting by a committee. When the Democratic governor, Laura Kelly, vetoed the measure, the legislature overrode her veto to make the bill a law. The legislators left no grace period before licenses became invalid, and a letter sent to those affected reminded them that “you may be subject to additional penalties if you are operating a vehicle without a valid credential.” Reed notes that in Kansas, driving without a license is punishable by a $1,000 fine and six months in jail, although first offenders typically are cited and fined. Reed notes that the Trump administration is leading a campaign to strip transgender Americans of accurate identification documents.

Today, Isaac Arnsdorf of the Washington Post reported that right-wing activists are circulating a draft of an executive order that declares a national emergency to give Trump control over voting. The activists say that they are working with the White House. The order reiterates a debunked claim that China interfered in the 2020 presidential election and says the president can ban mail-in ballots and voting machines.

Matt Cohen of Democracy Docket called the plan “blatantly illegal” and unconstitutional. The U.S. Constitution gives sole control of elections to the states, not the president.

The top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mark R. Warner of Virginia, refuted the idea that there is a national emergency. “We’ve been raising the alarm for weeks about President Trump’s attacks on our elections and now we’re seeing reports that outline how they may be planning to do it. This is a plot to interfere with the will of voters and undermine both the rule of law and public confidence in our elections.”

And so, election season is underway.

February 27, 2026 (Friday)

On Monday, February 23, Daniel Ruetenik, Pat Milton, and Cara Tabachnick of CBS News reported a newly uncovered document in the Epstein files shows that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) was running an investigation of Jeffrey Epstein and fourteen other people for drug trafficking, prostitution, and money laundering.

This investigation—which is different from the sex trafficking case underway when he died—began on December 17, 2010, under the Obama administration and was still operating in 2015. A heavily redacted document in the Epstein files from the director of the DEA’s Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces (OCDETF) said “DEA reporting indicates the above individuals are involved in illegitimate wire transfers which are tied to illicit drug and/or prostitution activities occurring in the U.S. Virgin Islands and New York City.” The investigation was named “Chain Reaction.”

Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, described OCDETF as “a premier task force set up to identify, disrupt and dismantle major organized crime and drug trafficking operations.” It “worked with partners across federal agencies to conduct sophisticated investigations into transnational organized crime and money laundering. OCDETF frequently targeted dangerous drug cartels, the Russian mafia, and violent gangs moving fentanyl and weapons.” The Trump administration dismantled OCDETF.

The document is 69 pages long and is heavily redacted. It comes from a request by the DEA to an Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces Fusion Center in Virginia for information from other agencies related to Epstein and the other targets. A law enforcement source told the reporters that a request to the Fusion Center is not routine, which suggests the investigation was a “significant” one.

Wyden has been investigating the finances behind Epstein’s criminal sex trafficking organization. His investigation has turned up the information that JPMorgan Chase neglected to report more than $4 billion in suspicious financial transactions linked to Epstein. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has refused to produce the records to the Senate Finance Committee, and in September, Wyden introduced the Produce Epstein Treasury Records Act (PETRA) to get access to them. In November, Congress passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act, but it did not cover Treasury financial records.
“The basic question here is whether a bunch of rich pedophiles and Epstein accomplices are going to face any consequences for their crimes,” Wyden said, “and Scott Bessent is doing his best to make sure they won’t. My head just about exploded when I heard Bessent say it wasn’t his department’s job to investigate these Epstein bank records…. From the beginning, my view has been that following the money is the key to identifying Epstein’s clients as well as the henchmen and banks that enabled his sex trafficking network. It’s past time for Bessent to quit running interference for pedophiles and give us the Epstein files he’s sitting on.”

When the CBS News reporters broke the story about the DEA investigation, Wyden said: “It appears Epstein was involved in criminal activity that went way beyond pedophilia and sex trafficking, which makes it even more outrageous that Pam Bondi is sitting on several million unreleased files.”

On Wednesday, February 23, Wyden wrote to Terrance C. Cole, administrator of the DEA, noting that “he fact that Epstein was under investigation by the DOJ’s OCDETF task force suggests that there was ample evidence indicating that Epstein was engaged in heavy drug trafficking and prostitution as part of cross-border criminal conspiracy. This is incredibly disturbing and raises serious questions as to how this investigation by the DEA was handled.”

He noted that Epstein and the fourteen co-conspirators were never charged for drug trafficking or financial crimes, and wrote: “I am concerned that the DEA and DOJ during the first Trump Administration moved to terminate this investigation in order to protect pedophiles.” He also noted that the heavy redactions in the document appear to go far beyond anything authorized by the Epstein Files Transparency Act, and since the document was not classified, “there is no reason to withhold an unredacted version of this document from the U.S. Congress.

Wyden asked Cole to produce a number of documents by March 13, 2026, two weeks away. Wyden asked for an unredacted copy of the memo in the files, information about what triggered the investigation, what types of drugs Epstein and his fourteen associates were buying or selling, when operation “Chain Reaction” concluded and what was its result, why no one was charged, and why the names of the fourteen co-conspirators were redacted.

Asked by a reporter about Epstein today, Trump said: “I don’t know anything about the Epstein files. I’ve been fully exonerated.”

Trump’s name is, in fact, all through the Epstein files, and the DOJ’s clumsy attempt to hide files that discuss him has only called attention to them. The recent news that the DOJ withheld files about allegations that Trump raped a 13-year-old girl has raised suggestions of an illegal coverup, whether the allegations are true or not. Representative Robert Garcia of California, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, says he will open an investigation.
Now the DOJ says it will review whether the files about Trump were improperly withheld, although the fact that the administration has hung a giant image of Trump’s face on the outside of its building undermines confidence that the DOJ is, in fact, following the law impartially.

Led by chair James Comer (R-KY), the Republican majority on the House Oversight Committee required former first lady Hillary Clinton to testify before it yesterday, despite her testimony under oath that she had never met Epstein and knew Maxwell only as an acquaintance and despite the fact that she is not mentioned in the Epstein files.

As Kaivan Shroff noted in the Daily Beast, the Republicans are working to “revive as much Hillary hate as they can,” but they are likely going to regret dragging Clinton back into the spotlight. She is embracing her role as a public figure who can stand up to Trump, appearing both in the U.S. and internationally to engage on a range of issues. As Shroff notes, Clinton has been “one of the Democratic Party’s most battle-tested figures, and she is speaking up once again—not for a campaign, not for validation, but with the clarity that comes from having nothing left to lose.”

By going after Clinton, Republicans have also opened the way for the Democrats to demand that the Trumps testify. On MS NOW’s “Morning Joe,” panelists noted that while Clinton didn’t know Epstein, there are many photos of First Lady Melania Trump with him, along with her husband and Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell. Host Joe Scarborough said “Comer got the wrong first lady.” And, he added, “today he’s got the wrong president.”
T
oday former president Bill Clinton testified for more than six hours under oath before the committee at the Chappaqua Performing Arts Center in Chappaqua, New York. He is the first president to be compelled to testify before Congress under threat of criminal contempt charges. In his opening statement, Clinton appeared to be referencing Trump when he said: “I’m here today for two reasons. The first is that I love my country. And America was built upon the idea that no person is above the law, even Presidents—especially Presidents.” In contrast to Trump and Bondi, both of whom have refused to acknowledge Epstein’s victims—now survivors—Clinton highlighted them: “The second reason I’m here is that the girls and women whose lives Jeffrey Epstein destroyed deserve not only justice, but healing. They’ve been waiting too long for both.”

In calling out the committee for forcing his wife to testify, Clinton alluded to the Republicans’ attempt to spin the testimony for political points. Clinton noted that even though he was the only one sworn in that morning, “everyone has a responsibility to be honest with those they represent. Whether you raised your right hand or not, each and every one of us owes nothing less than truth and accuracy to the American people.”

Clinton told the committee he “had no idea of the crimes Epstein was committing…. I saw nothing, and I did nothing wrong. As someone who grew up in a home with domestic abuse, not only would I not have flown on his plane if I had any inkling of what he was doing—I would have turned him in myself and led the call for justice for his crimes, not sweetheart deals.”
Clinton also told the committee he would often tell it he didn’t recall. “This was all a long time ago. And I am bound by my oath not to speculate, or to guess.”

Like Trump, Clinton is named in the Epstein files; unlike Trump, he is not accused of crimes in any public files. But Clinton had a relationship with both Epstein and Maxwell, and as part of his work with the Clinton Global Initiative after he left office, he traveled on Epstein’s plane about two dozen times, to Europe, Africa, Asia, Russia, Miami, and New York. Clinton reiterated today that he never traveled to Epstein’s island in the Caribbean, where much of the sexual abuse of children took place. Although Trump has repeatedly accused Clinton of visiting the island, Trump’s own White House chief of staff Susie Wiles says Trump is wrong about that, and has confirmed that Clinton was never there.

Kayla Epstein of the BBC recalled that in his memoir, Clinton wrote: “The bottom line is, even though it allowed me to visit the work of my foundation, traveling on Epstein’s plane was not worth the years of questioning afterward. I wish I had never met him.”

Tonight, former president Clinton posted a video message reiterating the main points of his opening statement and concluding: “When the video of my testimony today is released, I hope it will motivate everyone to go in front of Congress to say what they know. I hope it will motivate the Justice Department to finally release all the files and to ensure that this never happens again. The survivors deserve that.”

During a break in Clinton’s deposition, Comer told reporters that “the president went on to say that has never said anything to me to make me think he was involved. And he meant with Epstein.” Comer has used closed-door hearings to salt the media with unfounded stories for years now, and as he undoubtedly intended, the media has run with this characterization as an accurate description of what Clinton said.

But Garcia, the top Democrat on the committee, later told reporters that Comer’s comment didn’t accurately reflect Clinton’s answer. “I think the best response to that would be to view the complete record of what actually he said,” Garcia suggested. “We’re not going to disclose what was said because that’s not in the rules. The Republicans keep breaking the rules…. Let’s release the full transcript, so you can all get a full record of what was actually said.”

Thanks.