20250315

Drugs arrives to speak next to a pile of fake drugs yesterday at the DOJ

Kevin Kruse on why Trump 2.0 is worse than he expected

“I didn’t think they would take this bold of a leap into deeply unconstitutional waters, but they have.”

“I want to stress how far off the rails this is in terms of not just our norms and our expectations but our laws,” Kruse said. “There’s a lot that’s deeply unconstitutional here. I get that they’re trying to flood the zone and overwhelm the opposition, but the opposition shouldn’t let itself be overwhelmed. It shouldn’t accept this as the new normal, which is what the administration wants us to do.

“What we see from Musk and the rest of Trump’s crew is that they are making financial gains off this,” Kruse said. “Musk just wrestled an FAA program away from Verizon and gave it to his own company. They’re doing all they can to profit from this. The tax cut alone is a good example. Those people in the cabinet are the ones who are going to benefit from more tax cuts for the wealthy.”

Heather Cox Richardson – Letters from an American – March 14, 2025

Today the Senate passed a stopgap measure from the House of Representatives to fund the government for six months through September 30. … The new measure is not a so-called clean CR that simply extends previous funding. Instead, the Republican majority passed it without input from Democrats and with a number of poison pills added. … It forces Washington, D.C., to cut $1 billion from its budget, protects President Donald Trump’s ability to raise or lower tariffs as he wishes, and gives him considerable leeway in deciding where money goes.
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The struggle within the Democratic Party over how to proceed says a lot about the larger political struggle in the United States.
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Representative Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), the former speaker of the House, backed Ocasio-Cortez, issuing a statement calling the choice between a shutdown and the proposed bill a “false choice.” She called instead for fighting the Republican bill and praised the House Democrats who had voted against the measure. “Democratic senators should listen to the women,” she wrote, who have called for a short-term extension and a negotiated bipartisan agreement. “America has experienced a Trump shutdown before—but this damaging legislation only makes matters worse. Democrats must not buy into this false choice. We must fight back for a better way. Listen to the women, For The People.”
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In a similar moment in 1856, newly elected representative from Massachusetts Anson Burlingame catapulted to popularity by standing up to the elite southern enslavers who had dominated the government for years.
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Forgotten now, Burlingame’s speech was once widely considered one of the most important speeches in American history. It marked the moment when northerners shocked southerners by standing up to them and vowing that the North would fight for democracy. Northerners rallied to Burlingame’s call and, in so doing, reshaped politics.

What Does Collaboration Look Like?

On June 22, 1940, France signed an armistice with Hitler’s Germany and soon abandoned its liberal government. This surrender followed the German invasion of France the previous month on May 10. The French parliament voted in Marshal Philippe Pétain to lead the collaboration with the Nazis. Conducting his business from the French town of Vichy, Pétain carried out the fascist, murderous, antisemitic desires of the Nazis and indeed many of France’s own people. It wasn’t until 1995 that a French president fully acknowledged this collaboration when Jacques Chirac admitted that “the French government had given support to the criminal madness of the occupiers.”

Heartbreak, New York

How blue state Dems are betraying the people they’re supposed to represent
Social Distance

On the five-year anniversary of Covid, a look at the ways we vowed our lives and relationships would change afterward — and how they still might.
Elon Musk Thinks He’s an Ayn Rand Hero. Nope: He’s One of Her Villains.

Recent years have revealed the Silicon Valley venture capitalists and tech entrepreneurs who worship Rand to be racists, fraudsters, and looters.

MANY AMONG THE SILICON VALLEY ULTRA-RICH dominating the news think of themselves as heroes out of an Ayn Rand novel. Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen prate on about how we are living in Atlas Shrugged now. Peter Thiel has spoken at the annual gala of the Randian Atlas Society. These figures and their peers are discussed in the popular press with frequent reference to Rand. Meanwhile, many (though by no means all) devotees of Rand’s writings idolize Musk.

It makes sense. Rand—self-professed “radical for capitalism”—glamorized the heroic industrialist who struggled to produce, invent, and achieve against the countervailing resentment of the mediocre masses and big government oppression. Members of the Silicon Valley venture-capital set like to think they are building—literally building—the future, something very much in line with Rand’s romantic vision of human triumph.

But a deeper examination reveals these oligarchs resemble Rand’s heroes far less than her villains. Elon Musk in particular is a grab-bag of Randian vices.
Bombshell

A 7,600-pound nuclear weapon has been languishing off the coast of Georgia since 1958, when it was lost by the U.S. Air Force during a Cold War training exercise. What could possibly go wrong?
A Meta tell-all memoir is soaring on Amazon’s best-sellers rankings after legal efforts to quash it

‘Careless People,’ which contains unflattering portrayals of Meta executives, is getting a sales boost despite attempts to stop its promotion.
The Cowards at Arlington: Trump, Hegseth, and the Erasure of America’s Forgotten Heroes

We could start this with a whisper — something gentle and reverent, a somber reflection on the quiet rows of white headstones that stretch across Arlington National Cemetery like the pages of a history book too painful for some men to read. But there’s no time for quiet reflection when the vandals have already shown up with erasers.

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Those stories, too, were treated like clutter — discarded because they dared to challenge the cheap, plastic version of military pride that Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump are peddling like street corner hustlers.

All of it — gone. Deleted like embarrassing browser history by a teenager who knows his parents are about to check the computer.
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This wasn’t about cleaning up the website. This was about re-writing history — turning Arlington into a shrine for the whitewashed version of America that Trump keeps shoving down his supporters’ throats. A place where Black soldiers only appear in grainy black-and-white photos if they’re standing quietly behind a white officer. Where women’s sacrifices are reduced to a footnote. Where LGBTQ+ soldiers — men and women who fought two battles — one for their country and one for the right to exist — are written out altogether.

Army Major General Charles Calvin Rogers “DEI’d” from defense.gov

[Thanks WayBack Machine, there is an archived version at Medal of Honor Monday: Army Maj. Gen. Charles Calvin Rogers]
The redeem team

Collectively, they spent 155 years in prison. Now they counsel other people facing their own long sentences. A conversation with five “peer advocates” at the New Orleans public defender’s office.
Why Elon Musk and Ben Shapiro want Trump to pardon George Floyd’s murderer

The video depicting Floyd’s murder hasn’t changed in five years. But the Republican Party has.
Federal judge temporarily blocks Trump admin from deporting several Venezuelans

The ACLU and Democracy Forward filed suit early Saturday in advance of Trump’s expected effort to invoke the Alien Enemies Act. DOJ is appealing the TRO.
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A fight over the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 entered the federal courts early Saturday, after President Donald Trump suggested — and reporting followed — that he was planning to invoke the law to deport immigrants quickly and with no process.
Trump tells Justice Department his win gives ‘mandate’ for ‘far reaching investigation’ into Democrats and news organizations

Trump called for prosecutors to investigate multiple news organizations in a rabidly partisan speech at the justice department’s headquarters

President Donald Trump urged a Department of Justice crowd to launch investigations into Democrats, prominent nonprofits filing lawsuits against his administration and multiple news organizations.
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Almost immediately after beginning his speech, Trump leveled an attack on America’s courts for having allowed prosecutors to charge him with multiple crimes committed during and after his first term.
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His remarks, delivered in the department’s cavernous great hall, came following an introduction by Attorney General Pam Bondi, who described Trump as “the greatest president in the history of our country” and said she and the rest of her department were “proud to work at the directive of Donald Trump.”

Bondi’s statement represented a break from decades of work by attorneys general under both parties to make clear that the Department of Justice is independent from the White House and does not operate based on political considerations.

But Trump, who described himself — not Bondi — as “the chief law enforcement officer in our country,” has been intent on erasing any such niceties about the nation’s law enforcement apparatus as he has sought to implement what he has described as “retribution” against the Democratic Party and the “deep state” of nonpartisan civil servants who staff the justice system.
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“It’s very sad what they do to the Supreme Court and all of a lot of the judges that I had, if you look at them, they take tremendous abuse in the New York Times and The Washington Post, all of the different networks. They take such abuse. And honestly, they’re very simply, they’re afraid of bad publicity. They don’t want bad publicity. And it’s truly interference in my opinion, and it should be illegal, and it probably is illegal in some form,” he said.

“It’s a campaign, and it’s by the same scum that you have been dealing with for years, like guys like Andrew Weissman, deranged Jack Smith. There’s a guy named Norm Eisen. I don’t even know what he looks like. His name is Norm Eisen of [Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility ]. He’s been after me for nine years now. CREW is a charitable organization and and the reason I’m saying this … is I’m only going to get one chance to say this, but these are bad people.”

Why Donald Trump Is Attacking Me—and You
Trump slashes Voice of America with executive order, employees put on leave
- President Trump signed an executive order on Friday, outlining seven federal agencies to be reduced in size, including the U.S. Agency for Global Media which is the parent company of Voice of America.
- Agency employees received an email this week informing them that they are placed on administrative leave, until further notice.
- Funded by Congress, the Agency for Global Media oversees six networks that provide non-military, international broadcasting.
Trump ordena el cierre de la Voz de América y elimina fondos al Wilson Center y otros medios financiados por EE. UU.
A DOGE staffer broke Treasury policy by emailing unencrypted personal data

A court filing shows the staffer emailed personal information to Trump administration officials.

Court documents filed Friday in an ongoing lawsuit against the US Treasury Department reveal that a 25-year-old staffer for the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) violated Treasury policy by sending a spreadsheet that had personal information to two other members of the Trump administration, reports Bloomberg.

The staffer, a former employee at Elon Musk’s X and SpaceX companies named Marko Elez, had been tasked with combing through the Treasury’s payments system, but resigned in early February over racist social media posts that were linked to him. DOGE has since rehired him to work at the Social Security Administration.
Here’s a ‘dead’ person on Social Security in Seattle, with plenty to say

“DOGE Has 10 Staffers at Social Security in Hunt for Dead People,” the headlines read this past week.

I found a dead person on Social Security. Right here in Seattle, on Capitol Hill.

Of course the circumstances of Ned Johnson’s death were completely the opposite of what Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency had claimed was rampant.

“You wake up one day and discover you’re dead,” Johnson told me. “It’s been truly surreal.”

That’s the biggest difference — my deceased guy turns out to be very much alive. Musk is contending that hordes of dead people are listed as alive in the Social Security databases, and are fraudulently still drawing benefits (which the Social Security director disputes).

Johnson is 82 and still kicking. Yet sometime last month, someone or something led Social Security to both tag him as dead and start clawing back his benefits.
‘He Has to Shrink Away From Greatness’: The Poignant Surrender of a Republican Under Trump

Few Republican senators give a better floor speech than Thom Tillis of North Carolina does. He’s the Daniel Day-Lewis of moral outrage. He delivered a doozy last month, challenging President Trump’s revisionist history of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and calling Vladimir Putin “a liar, a murderer” and “the greatest threat to democracy in my lifetime.”

But Tulsi Gabbard is apparently no threat at all. Although she has been something of a Putin apologist, Tillis fell in line with 51 of his Republican colleagues in the Senate and voted to confirm her as director of national intelligence. Afterward, on Facebook, he proclaimed his pride in supporting her.

He made impassioned remarks in the Senate about his disagreement with Trump’s pardons of Jan. 6 rioters who bloodied law enforcement officers.

But the following month, he voted to confirm Kash Patel, who has peddled the kinds of fictions that fueled that violence, as director of the F.B.I.

Courage, capitulation — Tillis pinballs dizzyingly between the two.
Brown Medicine doctor deported despite federal court order. What we know.
- A federal court order required a 48-hour notice before a Rhode Island doctor could be deported.
- Dr. Rasha Alawieh was prevented from reentering the United States on Thursday after she returned from a visit with family in Lebanon.
A federal court order that would have halted the immediate deportation of a Rhode Island doctor was issued Friday evening while the doctor’s departing plane sat on the tarmac at Boston Logan International Airport, said a family friend and colleague.

But the plane ultimately took off, carrying Dr. Rasha Alawieh out of the country for reasons still unclear to her family, her lawyer and Brown Medicine colleagues such as Dr. Basma Merhi.

Trump’s Immigration Machine: Turning Legal Residents into Targets

Fabian Schmidt walked off a plane at Logan Airport expecting a routine trip home. Instead, he found himself stripped naked, interrogated for hours, and dumped into a cold shower — not because he’d committed a crime, but because the immigration system under Donald Trump’s second term is no longer just about catching criminals. It’s about breaking people — legal residents, green card holders, people who once believed they were safe.

Schmidt’s detention wasn’t some rogue act by an overzealous ICE agent. It’s part of a calculated effort to expand immigration enforcement beyond the undocumented population and into a new class of targets: lawful residents who, under the right circumstances, can be just as vulnerable.
Ian Boothby – You’re in Season 21 of The Apprentice.