Dangerous Subservience 😱✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️😱

Three Times the Charm: Trump said the quiet part out loud on Sunday. He’s not joking about running for a third term, he’s serious about it because despite the 22^nd Amendment prohibition against a two-term president running for a third term, he thinks there are “ways” that he can. All the legitimate legal pundits and even some questionable ones say otherwise, there’s no way he can run again, but those are largely the same lawyers who insisted that even the current Supreme Court wouldn’t grant him broad immunity and we know how that turned out.  Besides, Hungary’s Viktor Orban has been in power for 15 years and Vladimir Putin even longer. Nauseous yet 🤮? Even if Trump can’t legitimately run again, he does have the ability to muck up the election process, that’s the point of his executive actions, the ones that make it more difficult for people to vote by “targeting” non-existent voter fraud, insisting on difficult to obtain IDs, and making vote by mail options more difficult.  While those changes wouldn’t make his coveted third term legal, they would enshrine rules that heavily favor the MAGA crowd.  Still, the biggest worry is that he’ll just declare martial law and cancel the elections, and you know he’s going to try. In addition to musing about his third term, Trump also repeated his love for tariffs, saying that he really doesn’t care if his newest ones on foreign made cars which are due to go into effect imminently, raise prices by around $10,000.  That kind of thinking explains why inflation is trending up again while the equity markets continue to decline. He remains stuck in the past, those good old days when Black people and women knew their place. 

Make America Red and Blotchy Again:  Speaking of the past, that’s where we are heading on the infectious disease front as well.  There are now more than 400 reported cases of measles and that’s likely an undercount given how many cases go unreported. ProPublica reports that leaders at the CDC, or what’s left of it because RFK is firing tens of thousands of people including a bunch responsible for vaccines, ordered staff not to release their experts’ assessment that found the risk of catching measles is high in areas near outbreaks where vaccinations are lagging. The agency planned to emphasize the importance of getting vaccinated, but since RFK disdains vaccines, they weren’t allowed to because telling parents to give their unvaccinated children Vitamin A is still RFK’s preferred advice so what if it doesn’t prevent or cure measles but in large doses damages the liver. On Friday, the FDA’s top vaccine official, Dr. Peter Marks, resigned under pressure but didn’t go out quietly.  He said that RFK’s aggressive anti vaccine stance was irresponsible and posed a danger to the public, adding “It has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies…..This man doesn’t care about the truth. He cares about what is making him followers.”  That next pandemic, and there will be one, is going to be a doozy.  

Only the Best?  Usha and JD went to Greenland to push Trump’s Make Greenland American campaign.  Neither they nor their message were received well.  In fact, no one wanted to be seen with them, so they went only to the very icy US base.  Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth now has his brother working as a “liaison” and chief Pentagon advisor, no appropriate experience but then again Hegseth has little to none either.  Also, Hegseth has been bringing his wife to top secret meetings, again he shouldn’t but who’s going to tell him?  Maybe both family members are his designated sober buddies. National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, who like Hegseth still has his job even though he really shouldn’t, has no idea how journalist Jeffrey Goldberg’s contact information made it into his address book.  He admits he made a mistake by adding Goldberg to the infamous Signalgate chat but asserts that Goldberg space lasered that contact information into his address book because he never ever met the guy, ever. Goldberg’s response was terse, he’s says that they’ve spoken, they’ve met, and that’s how Waltz had his contact details. Trump pardoned car industry scammer Trevor Milton, acknowledging he did so because Milton is a supporter who wrote him checks.  Also, AG Pam Bondi’s brother Brad represents Milton.  It was fairly clear from Trump’s statement that he has no idea what Milton did but since Pam told him to issue the pardon, he did.  Elon Musk’s doge dogs plan to rewrite all of the Social Security Administration’s code in a few months.  Updating the code is a good idea but their timetable isn’t just unrealistic, it’s insane and irresponsible.  We’re talking a multi-year project that should require lots and lots of testing before the new code is incorporated into the system.  Remember what happened to Twitter/X when he took over, it crashed a lot but since it’s comparatively small and isn’t the backbone of a payment system that supports 72 million Americans it was fun to mock but didn’t matter.  Law firm, Skadden Arps has joined Paul Weiss on the dark side, but Wilmer Hale and Jenner & Block have joined Perkins Coie in pushing back against Trump’s retribution and at least so far judges are ruling in their favor.  And who knew that an autism tattoo would be grounds for deportation to an El Salvador hell hole?  It shouldn’t be but apparently it was and now there’s a young man, who loves and supports his autistic brother who is stuck in hell as a result but not to worry because Kristi Noem and her $50,000 Rolex got a good photo op.  On the subject of photo ops, there have been far too many videos of the INS scooping up visa and Green card holders for speaking their minds.  Like or hate their messages, we’re all better off when officials follow legal procedures.         

April Fools’ Day:  Keep an eye on the Wisconsin court election where liberal candidate Susan Crawford is up against MAGA-conservative Brad Schimel.  Schimel has gotten boatloads of money from Elon Musk who has also promised to write $1 million checks to two of the people who show up at his weekend rally.  Musk walked back the terms of his “bribe” to evade state legal prohibitions but he still offered the money.  Also, keep an eye on the special House elections in Florida.  Odds are the Republican candidates will win, but the margin of their victories will tell us a lot about how people feel about more measles, costlier cars, less health care, watching their friends lose their jobs, and Social Security uncertainty.

#BringThemAllHomeNow           

 

  

Sticking it to Stefanik  🇮🇱🇺🇦😱😱💩💩

Tea Leaves:  Yesterday, Trump pulled Elise Stefanik’s nomination to serve as the US Ambassador to the UN, not because he thought she wouldn’t be confirmed by the Senate, but because he needs her vote in the House. It appears that the Republicans’ recent loss of a Pennsylvania state senate seat in a district that Trump won by 15 points has Republican leadership running scared. They are particularly concerned about the outcome of Florida’s April first special election for the seats vacated by Signalgate’s Mike Waltz and Panhandle Putz Matt Gaetz.  Both seats are located in heavily Republican districts where Trump won by more than 30 points but the Democratic challengers have raised significantly more money than their Republican opponents. While money doesn’t necessarily mean that the Democrats will win, if polls are to be believed, Josh Weil, the Democrat running against Republican Randy Fine for the 6th District seat vacated by Waltz appears to have closed most, if not all, of what should have been an insurmountable gap. Guy Valimont, the Democrat running for Matt Gaetz’s old seat also appears to be doing better than expected against his Republican opponent Jimmy Patronis though he’s not expected to close the wider gap in the district that repeatedly elected Gaetz. Nevertheless, Republicans are nervous and Trump was concerned enough to pull Stefanik’s nomination. Worth noting, while Stefanik’s upstate district is red and went for Trump by 20 points, it’s not as red as the two Florida district so while a Republican would likely have replaced her, there were no guarantees one would. Though she’s putting on a good face about having her UN dream job pulled out from under her, Stefanik has got to be steaming. She was already participating in foreign policy meetings, had let go of her House staff, and had given up her House leadership role. Trump has promised her something bigly in the future and who knows, after the budget vote, maybe there will be some openings at the Pentagon or in National Security. She’s not qualified but then again neither are Hegseth or Waltz who in addition to including Atlantic journalist Goldberg on the Signalgate chat, appears to have outed an on the ground Israeli intelligence source when he boasted about the “target walking into his girlfriend’s building,” as it was bombed to smithereens.

Legal Quagmire:  Judge Boasberg, who Trump continues to attack and wants removed, has ordered all the participants in the Signalgate chat to preserve their records which is a disappointment to them because one of the reasons for using Signal is to violate document retention rules. By the way AG Pam Bondi who has no interest in even pretending to do her job but loves appearing on Fox, has no plans to investigate Signalgate and  sees nothing wrong with using the app despite warnings that it’s not really as secure as advertised. Another District court judge has slammed Trump’s ban of transgender soldiers saying that the government has no credible evidence that their presence in the military is bad for morale or anything else. The judge seemed particularly upset about a requirement that soldiers provide annual notice of any feelings of body dysmorphia. What’s next asking women soldiers to report those days when they feel fat? The ninth circuit court of appeals refused to pause an earlier ruling which requires the administration to reinstate 17,000 probationary workers.  And, in another hugely concerning, as in kill all the lawyers move, Trump is now targeting Robert Mueller’s former firm WilmerHale. So far they are holding strong and refusing to be intimidated or extorted but Skadden Arps not so much. They appear close to following Paul Weiss into a sink hole of complicity. 

More Awful: Trump is now targeting the Smithsonian and federal unions. Apparently the Smithsonian has gotten too woke and he wants everything not white banned from their corridors. And federal unions, he wants them cancelled asap.

#BringThemAllHomeNow

 

Smoke Signals 😱😱🇮🇱🇺🇦

Liars Lying: Yesterday morning The Atlantic published the parts of the now infamous Signal group chat that Jeffrey Goldberg had originally held back. They did that to prove that the chat he’d been accidentally invited into really did include top secret attack plan information despite the repeated denials of all of its other participants. We also learned that the NSA, a division of Pete Hegseth’s Defense Department, had earlier warned that Signal was vulnerable, the target of Russian and other nefarious hackers. Nevertheless, Trump’s team of broken toys thought it was okay to use it for top secret battle plans because those concerns obviously didn’t pertain to them? Even worse, the chat group, some of whom used even more vulnerable personal devices,  joined in from all over the globe, with Real Estate Buddy/special envoy Witkoff who says Putin is a nice guy in Moscow, Tulsi Gabbard who remembers nothing not even where she was in Tokyo, and Marco Rubio who is blaming Hegseth for everything in Riyadh. Naturally, no one remembers what was said, they all deny that the details provided on the chat were top secret, and they blame Goldberg who obviously used one of his bar mitzvah space lasers to access the chat. Will anyone’s head roll, who knows. Trump will only kick someone to the curb if he feels that it’s in his best interest to do so. Waltz and Hegseth could soon be downgraded to coffee boys, or not. Starbucks anyone?

Legalities: Speaker Johnson has rejected calls to impeach one or more of the judges ruling against Trump because he doesn’t have the votes but he does have another plan. He now wants to eliminate federal district judges, especially the ones Trump doesn’t like. So much for those three equal branches of government. In the mean time, the judges are still issuing rulings and getting new cases. Yesterday the DC Appeals court upheld Judge Boasberg’s temporary restraining order against use of the Alien Act and Judge Boasberg also got a new assignment. He was assigned to preside over a new lawsuit, alleging that the use of Signal, with its delete text function, for the military strike discussion violated federal record keeping rules.  None of this is stopping Trump from his war against law firms. Emboldened by his success neutering Paul Weiss, he’s now targeted Jenner & Block, the white shoe law firm’s “crime,“ Trump nemesis Andrew Weissmann was previously a member. The INS is also continuing to target pro Palestinian students, cancelling visas and sweeping them away. Regardless of what you think about their views, nonviolent protest isn’t a crime and while the issue concerns Gaza today, who knows what will offend Trump and Noem, who really did got to El Salvador for a disgusting photo op, next? 

Voting Rights: Back during the relatively halcyon days of Trump 1.0, the orange one had Mike Pence look into voter fraud. Turns out there wasn’t much there and that non citizens do not vote. Not satisfied with that assessment, Trump is now trying to make it difficult for everyone to vote. His new thing is to require that all voters prove their citizenship with birth certificates or passports. Only 45 to 50% of US citizens have passports and since most women change their names when they get married their birth certificates will be deemed inadequate proof. Clearly, this is about voter suppression.

More Tariffs: That foreign car 🚗 you wanted, it’s about to become 25% more expensive. And cars using foreign made parts, they will cost more too. Would it surprise you to learn that Teslas sold in the US will be minimally affected by these new tariffs? As Jethro Leroy Gibbs would say, there are no coincidences. 

#BringThemAllHomeNow

Bombs and Bombshells 😱✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️😱

#ButHerEmails: Hillary Clinton was pilloried by Trump and his Republican echo chamber for using her home server.  As a result of that infraction, she lost a close election, and we learned that government communication was to be restricted to government servers.  Then during Trump 1.0, we learned all about Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities (SCIFs) and how they were the only places where top secret conversations should be held, with cell phones turned off and left outside. What no one told us is that those rules pertain only to Democrats, that Republicans, particularly those working for Trump who got away with storing his document stash in a Mar a Lago bathroom, don’t have to worry about following rules. Still, yesterday’s bombshell story, written by the Atlantic’s highly respected Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg was a shocker.  Goldberg details that earlier this month he was invited into a Signal group-chat by Trump’s National Security Advisor Michael Waltz.  He thought the invitation was odd, even thought that someone might be punking him, but accepted thinking that there was a chance that Waltz had something juicy to disclose. When he saw that JD Vance, Marco Rubio,  Pete Hegseth, Scott Bessent, John Ratcliffe, Tulsi Gabbard, Steve Witkoff, Susie Wiles, Stephen Miller, and national security staffer Brian McCormack were also in the chatroom, he still wasn’t convinced that he wasn’t being punked but figured he’d listen in to be sure. It turns out that Goldberg, had inadvertently been invited to an all hands “chat” concerning the Pentagon’s March 15 plan to bomb the Houthis’ Yemen stronghold. He was privy to all, including VP Vance’s reservations about going forward with the bombing to deal with what he saw as just a European problem and who cares about them anyway.  Once the plans were set, Goldberg was in on the targets, the coordinates, timing, and the types of weapons to be used.  He also learned the name of a CIA officer involved in the planning and execution. The chat ended with an assurance from Pentagon head Pete Hegseth, the guy whose chief qualification for his job was his inebriated Fox appearances, assure the other members of the chat that plans for the attack were totally secure.  More convinced that the chat was for real but still not sure, on March 15 Goldberg waited in a parking lot for news that the bombs were actual being dropped. Once they were he knew he had a story to tell and so yesterday he told it, leaving out some specifics, including the name of the CIA operative, to protect US security.  So nice that a member of the press is more concerned about US security than all those moronic members of Trump’s team who had to know that their chat should have been held in a secure SCIF, rather than over leaky cell phones.  Given that they work for the Mar a Lago bathroom man, why should they worry about that?  Mar a Lago man’s reaction to the Goldberg article was to proclaim ignorance while attacking the Atlantic.  Pete Hegseth, he called Goldberg a “deceitful and highly discredit 'journalist' who's made a profession of peddling hoaxes time and time again," while denying that war plans had been texted even after a Pentagon spokesman acknowledged they had been. Michael Waltz who seems to be taking the most heat for setting up the chat was called in for a meeting with Trump last night.  Afterwards Trump said he still had his full confidence but who knows because Waltz, rather than Hegseth, or any of the others who should have known better, could end up being the fall guy for the idiocy if there even is a fall guy.  The Russians and Chinese are thrilled.  The other members of the Five Eyes Security alliance a lot less so.  The FBI should investigate but they won’t because its more important to target law firms, judges, and Tesla protesters.  House leadership, they could care less because they’re in Trump’s pocket.  Similarly, a few Republicans in the Senate know that the Goldberg article was scary as 💩 but they too will probably only whine, mostly behind closed doors and Democrats, they’re rightfully outraged but with little to no power to do anything about it.  Hillary Clinton’s response to yesterday’s report: You’ve got to be kidding me.”  Welcome to Trump 2.0.  Scarier by the day.

 

Human Resources:  Alina Habba who made a fool of herself representing Trump on his EJ Caroll case but who always looked good while saying and doing all the stupid things Trump told her to do was appointed yesterday to serve as the interim US Attorney for New Jersey. She immediately said that she would clean up Cory Booker’s dirty crime ridden state.  Is it a coincidence that she immediately targeted the state’s Black Senator, probably not.  Louis DeJoy who seemed like he would be the worst Postmaster General ever when Trump appointed him during his first term but who turned out to be reasonably responsible quit yesterday, effective immediately. It’s thought that he left quickly because despite being a Trumpy kind of guy, he didn’t want to have anything to do with Musk and Trump’s slash and burn “privatization” plans.  Trump nominated Susan Monarez, currently the acting head of the CDC, to be the permanent head.  There’s not a lot to read about Monarez so far.  The good news is that she’s thought to be more rational when it comes to vaccines than Trump’s first RFK approved nominee.  The not so good news is that as acting head she’s made herself scarce, abetting some of the cuts that have been made so far in some very crucial CDC functions.  DHS head Kristin Noem who, if reports are true, plans to visit the El Salvador prison/hell hole where deportees are being held announced yesterday that FEMA is being disbanded because really, who needs FEMA when hurricanes and other national disasters are on an upswing?   And Appeals court Judge Millet, hardly a fan of the Alien Act said that Nazis were treated better than the way we are currently treating deported Venezuelans.

 

#BringThemAllHomeNow       

     

 

 
Pause Buttons 😱✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️😱

Financial Follies:  The United Kingdom, Germany, Denmark, and Finland have issued advisories warning their citizens about the risk of traveling to the US while our neighbor Canada who Trump continues to insist should become our 51^st state has informally asked its citizens to reconsider their trips.  All of these countries are concerned about the breakdown in the rule of law and the risk that one or more of their citizens will end up held in an INS facility for an imaginary or minor infraction or for having a snarky comment about Trump in a text chain on their phone.  Those concerns are real because an increasing number of travelers have gotten caught up in immigration hell and three members of UK Subs, a UK based punk band enroute to a California punk festival report that they were detained and denied entry to the US not because they were found carrying drugs or were aligned with a terrorist organization but because of their open disdain for the orange one.  In 2023, the US travel and tourism industry contributed approximately $2.36 trillion to the US GDP, and international visitors spent $155 billion, with the sector supporting 9.5 million jobs so maybe discouraging travelers from coming to the US isn’t such a good idea?  Along similar lines, cutting IRS staffing is another one of those things that’s negatively impacts the bottom line. Treasury Department and IRS officials are now predicting a decrease of more than 10 percent in tax receipts by the April 15 deadline compared with 2024. That would amount to more than $500 billion in lost federal revenue; the IRS collected $5.1 trillion last year. That shouldn’t surprise anyone because when the IRS is well staffed revenues increase, when its understaffed revenues go down. Further complicating tax collection,  the IRS is likely to start giving immigration officials tax data to allow them to confirm the names and addresses of people suspected of being in the US illegally.  Undocumented immigrants paid just under $100 billion in taxes last year, more than a third of those tax dollars go toward payroll taxes dedicated to funding Social Security and Medicare, programs they are barred from accessing.  So, like making the country less welcoming to tourists and cutting IRS staffing, discouraging tax paying by the undocumented might not be such a good idea.  Who could have guessed that Trump who has declared bankruptcy four times and who believes that tariffs will eliminate the need for taxes doesn’t understand all that but then again, his co-president Musk generates most of his income from government funding and managed to slash the value of his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter over night not to mention those plummeting Tesla sales. 

Blame Game: We still don’t know how the courts, most importantly SCOTUS, will rule on Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act to justify his extreme extra-judicial deportations but maybe Trump, despite his anti-migrant rhetoric is concerned, either that or he’s experiencing dementia because on Friday when asked a question about the Alien Act he said “I don’t know when it was signed, because I didn’t sign it. Other people handled it.” Trump then went on to imply that the decision to invoke the Act was all Secretary of State Rubio’s idea, throwing Marco, his Cabinet punching bag under the bus. There’s no doubt that Trump is the one who signed the order invoking the Act,  probably using one of the autopens that he earlier insisted made all of Biden’s pardons invalid,  but still he signed it and autopen signatures count.  Moreover, despite his mental frailty, he knows he signed it.  Why else would he be raging against Judge Boasberg who though he hasn’t yet ruled on the legality of invoking the Alien Act, called the policy ramifications of it “incredibly troublesome and problematic and concerning.” Trump has called for the judge’s impeachment and labeled him a “troublemaker and an agitator.”  It’s just more double speak from a guy who is frighteningly good at it and knows that keeping the country focused on his deporting of violent gang members, allows him to also deport those who are neither violent nor gang members.  That’s the same approach he’s taking with his targeted defunding of universities.  The transgender swimmer that’s serving as his justification for “pausing” funds to the University of Pennsylvania, she graduated in 2022. Going after Maine for refusing to agree to transgender prohibitions that violate state law, plays to the fear of parents and mollifies the religious right.  The problems at Columbia University, they’re real, but cutting financial grants under the guise of targeting anti-Semitism, that’s a way to get those who ordinarily would be horrified by his attack on higher education into the fold.  All of this is another reminder that Trump maybe a financial dodo but he’s sharp as a tack when it comes to zeroing in on people’s worst fears. And sadly, judging by Paul Weiss’ decision to acquiesce to Trump’s demands fewer law firms are likely to be willing to take on clients who put them in the target zone.  

Foot and Mouth Disease:  Last week’s tie for the foot in the mouth prize goes to Acting Social Security Administration head Leland Dudek and Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick.  First, Dudek, the former midlevel geek who shouldn’t be running anything but is running the most crucial government payment system, said that in response to federal Judge Hollander’s temporary restraining order banning DOGE workers from mucking around in the Social Security System, he would be forced to “pause” Social Security payments. His false argument: that Judge Hollander’s order was so broad that it banned everyone on the Social Security staff from typing any keys.  His threat was then amplified by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick who actually asserted that his 94-year-old mother-in-law wouldn’t be at all concerned if her payment didn’t show up next month. We don’t know if that lack of concern is because his mother-in-law is no longer compos mentis or because she, like her son-in-law, is a billionaire, but Lutnick’s comment was tone deaf as was his add on that the only people who’d complain about not receiving their payments would be fraudsters. Seventy-three million people receive Social Security payments and a significant portion of them rely on those payments to pay rent and eat but sure, only the fraudsters would complain.  Clearly, someone in the White House heard both Dudek and Lutnick and understood that their comments, which will likely serve as fodder for lots of Democratic ads, assuming the Democrats ever get their act together and the pundit class moves on from targeting Chuck Schumer, were bigly problematic.  Dudek backed down, Social Security payments will continue.  Hearings are being held this week for the confirmation of Frank Bisignano who is Trump’s nominee to serve as Commissioner of Social Security.  Bisignano, the former CEO of FISERV and a former JP Morgan and Citibank executive should be prepared to answer lots of questions about whether or not he thinks putting Social Security payments on pause is a good idea on top of those questions about the motives behind eliminating offices and phone sign-ups while making seniors without internet access show up in person to far away offices. Could it be that someone like the guy who runs DOGE, but claims he doesn’t, wants to free up cash for his increasing number of government contracts because someone has to pay for those SpaceX and Starlink’s contracts and subsidies, an amount that has totaled at least $38 billion to date and is on a steep upswing.     

#BringThemAllHomeNow

 

 

Thought Control? 😱✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️😱

Just Another Day? Yesterday, Judge Ellen Hollander of the US District Court of Maryland issued a temporary restraining order blocking Musk and his team of Doge-bags from accessing sensitive data and systems at the Social Security Administration.  The Dogies were also barred from holding on to sensitive data they had already taken.  Essentially the judge said that people have a reasonable expectation that their personal information including their Social Security Numbers, medical information, and financial information be kept private and that in addition to Musk and the Dogies not needing to know individuals’ information, they’re not exactly among the trustworthy few who should be allowed into the data trove.  Ironically, Judge Hollander issued her order on the same day that it was revealed that the JFK assassination material that Trump rushed out earlier this week, one of those shiny objects deployed to distract from the awful things he’s been doing, included almost nothing new about the assassination but did include the Social Security Numbers of 400 people who had worked on the investigations.  Many of those people are still alive and as one of them, 80-year-old Joe diGenova, whose name may sound familiar because he served as one of Trump’s impeachment lawyers, noted their release exposes them to identity theft and threats because “there are dangerous nuts out there.” Given his most prominent client diGenova knows a lot about dangerous nuts.  The people whose information was “inadvertently” released in the rush to satisfy Trump’s whim are now being offered free credit monitoring services and may also receive new SSNs, a pain for anyone, but particularly challenging for the elderly to deal with under any circumstances but particularly when Social Security offices are being closed down.  Last night, the NY Times revealed that Musk, who shouldn’t be trusted with our Social Security data, is scheduled to sit down today with officials at the Pentagon to be briefed on the US’s military plans for any possible future war with China. Musk who is an admitted ketamine user, something that would ordinarily limit his access to super top-secret information, also has more conflicts than you can shake a stick at, or launch a rocket against, given his business with Chinese entities, including the Chinese government, is being given access to secret war plans, #WTF.  Naturally, Musk’s response to the story, which has been confirmed by other media sources, was to scream about all those traitorous leakers at the Pentagon.  A Pentagon spokesman is now asserting that the meeting with Musk which is being held in a super secure room will only involve public information.  Really? Anyway, maybe Musk’s screaming reaction to the China story was because he had a rough day yesterday since nearly all of Tesla’s Cybertrucks were recalled, something to do with the inadequacy of the glue used to affix cosmetic appliques. Apparently when the glue fails, parts of the cars fall off causing “road hazards,” what the rest of us call crashes. So, the guy whose ugly trucks are put together with faulty glue, whose Doge-bag team has been mucking around in our SSNs, and who has been responsible for the cutting of a slew of important government services, is now also going to be privy to secret war plans.  Everything will not be okay.  

Other Illegalities:  Judge Boasberg, the federal district judge who is not happy about being given a runaround by Trump administration officials and the INS about those flights that transported around 200 or so Venezuelan migrants to the squalid, dangerous prison in El Salvador appears to be losing his patience. He’s called the information, or really the lack of information, provided by the government woefully inadequate.  Moreover, he’s not buying the excuse that because his initial order to turnaround the migrant planes was oral rather than written it wasn’t binding at the time it was issued. It’s also becoming increasingly obvious that some of the alleged gang members included on the flights were not actually gang members but were asylum seekers with scheduled court dates.  One of them was a Venezuelan soccer player, whose “implicating” tattoo didn’t signify membership in the Tren de Aragua gang but was instead an emblem indicative of his affinity for the Real Madrid soccer team. Soccer fans, maybe it’s time to cover your arms, especially if you have foreign accents. In any case, if you are here on a legal visa, and want to stay, it’s probably not a good time to go on any overseas trips because more and more stories keep emerging about those being held in INS facilities and/or deported for having compromising information on their phones, not just texts and photos that show affinity for terrorist groups but snide comments about the Orange King.   By the way, whether the transporting of migrants to El Salvador is legal or not, it’s worth noting that the Trump administration is paying the El Salvadoran government to hold the prisoners for a year or longer.  Would it be surprising if it turns out that the invocation of the Alien Act, something that in and of itself is sketchy and possibly illegal, the expensive flights and the “jail rent” are expensive solutions to the migrant problem?  On the subject of expensive and possibly depressing solutions, it appears that the Paul Weiss law firm has resolved its problem with Trump.  According to the White House Paul Weiss has agreed to “take on a wide range of pro bono matters that represent the full spectrum of political viewpoints of our society”. The firm reportedly agreed to disavow the use of diversity, equity and inclusion considerations in its hiring and promotion decisions and to dedicate the equivalent of $40m in free legal services to support Trump administration policies on issues including assistance for veterans and countering antisemitism.  It’s not entirely clear what that means, particularly the part about supporting Trump policies,  but it’s depressing that Trump appears to be wielding such power over prominent legal professionals.  

We Don’t Need No Education:  Republicans have long hated the Department of Education.  Project 2025 called for it to be eliminated, and though one-time Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry suffered brain fog when he infamously couldn’t remember his target list, the Education Department was one of those on his delete list.  For those reasons it’s not surprising that Trump announced his anticipated plan to shutter Education.  Since the department was created by Congress, he can’t get rid of it on his own, but he can cut lots of its functions and shift others elsewhere and that’s apparently his plan. It’s more than fair to assume that important functions, like programs for the disabled and disadvantaged and student loans will suffer both because of his plan and because of all the staff being cut but that’s the objective. Since one of those functions expected to fall by the wayside, is the measuring of educational outcomes, we won’t be able to document just how much the elimination of most of the department’s functions end up impacting students.  Similarly, Trump is waging battles against universities, stripping them of research funding to get them to stop being “woke,” so now it’s not just Columbia University that’s been targeted but also the University of Pennsylvania.  To be fair, as pointed out in a disturbing article in March 17’s Atlantic, Columbia, like Trump, has long had an anti-Semitism problem, at one point in the past when university officials grew concerned about having “too many” Jewish students, they actually opened a “special” campus for Jews in Brooklyn, but putting medical and scientific research at risk hardly seems like a solution, especially because of a transgender athlete, the stated reason that got U of Penn dinged.  

Economic Indicators:  Though he tried to say it gently so as not to enrage Trump or further spook the markets, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell mentioned “mounting growth concerns and the price hits” that could be on the way from Trump's aggressive trade war.  Get used to hearing about fears of stagflation, the scary thing that happens when the economy gets caught up in a pattern of low growth combined with inflation. That remarkable economy that Biden left Trump; it’s struggling.            

#BringThemAllHomeNow

 

 

Autopens Are Not the Problem 😱✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️😱

Shiny Objects:  Don’t be distracted by Trump’s claim that because Biden used an autopen to sign them his pardons aren’t legitimate, presidents have been using mechanical signing devices since Jefferson.  That claim, like Trump’s assertion that he won another golf tournament at his club last weekend is bogus, although unlike his false golf braggadocio, the pardon claim could result in legal expenses for the people affected.  Also, don’t be distracted by Trump’s Kennedy Arts Center shenanigans, they’re egregious and like his promise to host some, if not all of the center’s future performances, are another indication of his damaged mind, but while they’re bad, they are low down on the list of bad things he’s doing and probably the most reversable.  Be more concerned by Trump’s unrelenting attacks on the judges standing in the way of his likely illegal actions, his extrajudicial deportations, his dismantling of environmental protections, his kowtowing to Putin at the expense of Ukraine, his continued attacks on our northern neighbor, his cavalier statement that a recession would be worth the pain, his MAGA abetted efforts to cut Medicaid and Social Security, and the myriad other programs and safeguards, like the ones that prevent disease and keep nuclear weapons safe,  that he and his DOGE master Elon are engineering. Also don’t ignore that he’s had his Defense Secretary, the one with a history of excessive drinking and abusing of women, eliminate references to minority heroes from the Pentagon’s website, an effort that in addition to erasing the contributions of the Navajo Code Talkers, the elite Marines, who devised an unbreakable code during World War II as well as a number of Black war heroes and medal recipients including Jackie Robinson (yes that Jackie Robinson) has deleted references to the Enola Gay plane that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima as well, not because of the nuke part, but because a plane with Gay in its name celebrates an “unacceptable” life style. Makes you wonder what group be targeted next, because more will be.    

Illegalities: As to the judges, Trump’s bigly mad because a series of them have issued temporary restraining orders against a lot of his actions.  This week’s biggest target is on James Boasberg, the chief judge of the US District Court for the District of Columbia. Trump posted on social media that Boasberg, was a “Radical Left Lunatic of a Judge,” adding “This judge, like many of the Crooked Judges’ I am forced to appear before, should be IMPEACHED!!!”  And naturally, some of Trump’s House MAGA’s did as they were told, introducing an impeachment measure. It’s not easy to impeach judges and Boasberg won’t be impeached but the call and the MAGA response are not good things. Judge Boasberg’s crime, questioning Trump’s use of the Alien and Sedition Act to do an end run around due process to deport somewhere around 200 mostly Venezuelan migrants, some but not all violent gang members, to a particularly heinous prison in El Salvador. Judge Boasberg has further infuriated Trump by engaging in fact finding, asking questions about the INS’s deportation timeline to discern if they, with Trump’s blessing, flagrantly ignored his order to turn around the planes flying the migrants to El Salvador. As to the concerns that some of the migrants flown to El Salvador have no criminal records, INS officials actually told Boasberg that the lack of information about each individuals crimes should be ignored because they might be dangerous even if their danger can’t be shown. To put it mildly, Boasberg wasn’t impressed with that argument.  Judge Boasberg isn’t the only one getting under Trump and his MAGA followers’ skin. Yesterday, US District Judge Ana Reyes, also of the DC Court, blocked Trump’s ban on transgender service members, writing that the ban “is soaked in animus and dripping with pretext….it’s unabashedly demeaning, its policy stigmatizes transgender persons as inherently unfit, and its conclusions bear no relation to fact.” District Court Judge Tonya Chutkan, DC Court again, blocked for now the termination of $14 billion in grants awarded to three climate groups by the Biden Administration, saying the Trump administration’s allegations of fraud were “vague and unsubstantiated” likely because there is no fraud, just an effort to address climate change, an issue that the coal loving Trump prefers to ignore.  Also yesterday, Judge Theodore Chuang of the US District Court of Maryland ruled that efforts by Elon Musk and his team to permanently shutter US AID likely violated the Constitution and robbed Congress of its authority to oversee the dissolution of an agency it created because Musk despite being Trump’s bagman is not a properly appointed US officer. In response to Trump’s call to impeach judges he doesn’t like, Chief Justice John Roberts issued a rare statement “rebuking” Trump and his MAGA allies for calling to impeach judges who have ruled against the administration saying “For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision. The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose." That’s nice but pretty meaningless coming from the guy who empowered Trump with last year’s immunity decision and donors like Musk with his 2010 Citizens United decision that made it possible for rich guys to buy politicians including presidents. Roberts’ statement doesn’t mean that he together with the rest of the Court’s conservative majority won’t ultimately rule in favor of Trump’s policies when the cases make it to SCOTUS. Worth noting, despite Trump’s whining about all those radical judges appointed by “Barack HUSSEIN Obama,” judges across ideological lines have been ruling against his policies at similar rates with 84% of them liberal, 86% centrist and 82% conservative because upholding the Constitution isn’t supposed to be ideological.       

More:  The Trump administration has cut a clause from federal contracting rules that had been on the books since the 1960s so companies will no longer be explicitly prohibited from having segregated facilities. How long before “Colored” people and “Jews” (yes, there used to be such signs) are directed to their own washrooms the way they used to be before the Civil Rights Act?  The Wall Street Journal reports that the administration is considering making major cuts to funding for domestic HIV prevention, not surprising when you consider that RFK Jr doesn’t believe that AIDs is caused by a virus and anyway why shouldn’t we want to see more AIDs cases and even more virulent strains. Maybe more raw milk and vitamin A will help?  And in probably the least surprising stories of the day, Minnesota state Senator Justic Eichorn, the Republican who recently introduced legislation seeking to name “Trump derangement syndrome” as an official mental illness, was arrested for soliciting a teenage girl for sex while Trump’s one-time spiritual advisor, Megachurch pastor Robert Morris turned himself into Oklahoma authorities on child sexual abuses charges.

Fog:  With Trump’s blessing, Israel is back to bombing Gaza and Hamas is back to reporting what are likely inflated causality statistics which doesn’t meant that there aren’t casualties and that casualties aren’t bad, however, one way to stop them would be for Hamas to release more, maybe all of the hostages but that doesn’t appear to be in the cards, at least right now.  Despite Trump’s “bigly” successful call with Putin, bombs are flying there as well and somehow or other the US is no longer helping to track Ukrainian children kidnapped by Russia.       

#BringThemAllHomeNow       

 

 
Alien Acts 😱✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️😱

Democrats in Disarray: On Friday, as predicted, the six-month continuing funding resolution already passed by the House, passed in the Senate by a vote of 62 to 38. Democratic Leader/NY Senator Chuck Schumer, together with Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman, Nevada’s Catherine Cortez Masto, Illinois’ Dick Durbin, Hawaii’s Brian Schatz, Michigan’s Gary Peters, New Hampshire’s Maggie Hassan and Jeanne Shaheen, New York’s other Senator Kirsten Gillibrand and Maine Independent Angus King voted for it. Kentucky Republican Rand Paul joined the 37 Democrats who voted against the resolution, not because he didn’t support most of it but because it didn’t codify military spending cuts. Schumer and the Democrats who voted for the package did so over real concerns that throwing the government into a shutdown was a worse option, one that would give Trump and his crony MAGAs more power to act in destructive ways while also cutting the funding of the Judiciary, the one branch of government he hasn’t managed to control so far.  Nevertheless, their decision, most notably Schumer’s, was met with lots of outrage by many Democrats who, instead of spending the weekend attacking Trump and his awful policies, called for Schumer’s head.  Punchbowl News reported this morning that quite a few of the Democratic Senators who voted against the resolution, did so because they knew it would pass without their support, so while Schumer’s decision was publicly unpopular, quite a few of his colleagues were quite happy that his vote, together with the vote of the others who joined him, provided them cover. Politics is messy, and right now it’s downright deadly. Democrats would be wise to air their grievances more privately because only Trump benefited from their public wailing this weekend and there are lots more things to be freaked out about right now.

Constitutional Crisis:  On Friday,  Trump visited the Department of Justice.  While there he delivered a deranged speech calling all his opponents “scum,” judges who ruled against him ”corrupt” and the prosecutors who investigated him “deranged.”  He also called his political opponents, lawbreakers, suggesting that many of them should be sent to prison. Although the exact timing is unclear, sometime on Friday Trump invoked the rarely applied Alien Enemies Act of 1778 (the “Alien Act”).  The law which until now has been invoked only three times, during the War of 1812, and World Wars I and II, is supposed to only be used to protect the nation from potential spies and saboteurs at home during an actual overseas war.  However, Trump invoked it to justify the immediate deportation of members of Tren de Aqua, a mostly Venezuela based gang. While it’s widely accepted that the Tren de Aqua guys are violent thugs, Trump’s invocation of the Alien Act to deport them without following any of the legal procedures required for such removals was anything but kosher because we are not in a declared war and we have not been invaded by a foreign nation, two requirements of the Alien Act. Moreover, it’s not even clear that all of the more than 200 Venezuelans who he subsequently deported are even members of the gang, at least one of them was deported due to his questionable tattoos.  You know who else has controversial tattoos?  Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and he’s running the Pentagon. On Saturday after five of the alleged Tren de Acqua migrants sued, US District Judge James Boasberg ordered the Trump administration to immediately halt its removal activities until he had more time to consider the legality of Trump’s use of the Alien Act. However, the planes were already in the air enroute to an El Salvador detention facility and though the facts are fuzzy, the Trump administration asserted that the five affected by the judge’s ruling which was subsequently expanded to cover all of those affected by the invocation of the Alien Act were not among the deported while more ominously stating that during wars Trump is above the law so Judicial rulings, especially those by radical Democratic communist judges, don’t pertain to his actions anyway. Though some are trying to soft pedal Trump’s actions, none of us should be fooled, he’s doing an end run around the courts and it’s not just those nasty Tren de Acqua guys who he’s deporting.  Over the weekend, Lebanese kidney transplant specialist and Brown University professor Rasha Alawieh who had a valid visa, was expelled in apparent defiance of a court order from another US District Judge, Leo Sorokin. Dr. Alawieh’s “crime,” she had left the US to visit her family in Lebanon and then had the audacity to legally return to her duties saving kidney patients in the US. 

First Kill the Lawyers: It’s not just judges’ rulings that Trump is ignoring, over the weekend, despite an earlier order by Judge Beryl Howell  that said his banning of another law firm was an “extreme and dangerous effort” that appeared to violate core constitutional principles, including the ability of clients to obtain adequate legal representation he added Paul Weiss, the country’s third largest law firm to the government’s list of banned law firms.  He ordered the administration to strip Paul Weiss employees of any government security clearances, limit the firm’s access to federal buildings, and take steps to rescind government contracts from the firm and its clients. His justification: that Paul Weiss and a few more law firms he probably plans to add to his enemies list have “played an outsized role in undermining the judicial process and in the destruction of bedrock American principles.” He pointed in particular to the work such firms provide without charge, which he said gives some Americans preferential access to the country’s top legal talent that they couldn’t otherwise afford. That assertion was in reference to pro bono work provided to Washington DC in relation to the prosecution of the January 6^th rioters.  Trump also cited Paul Weiss’ association with Mark Pomerantz, who worked for the Manhattan district attorney’s office on its investigation into Trump and his business even though Pomerantz has not been affiliated with Paul Weiss for years.  So basically, Trump who has managed to fully exploit the long and winding legal process for years, stretching out his cases while successfully avoiding almost all legal consequences for his “alleged” illegal acts is thoroughly pissed that law firms represent the people he wants thrown to the wolves. To be clear, judges that rule against him and his administration should be impeached or worse and lawyers who represent his “enemies” should be bigly punished.

Fog:  The US bombed the Yemen based Houthis over the weekend. The Houthis, another one of Iran’s surrogates, are hard to eliminate because they have little worth protecting and don’t care much about their own civilian casualties so while attacking their so-called “strongholds” might feel gratifying, to date, it hasn’t stopped them from launching retaliatory strikes on shipping lanes and on Israel. However, attacking the Houthis makes for great press and provides “wag the dog” coverage when you are dismantling the US government, firing federal employees, and ignoring court rulings.  To that end, on Friday night Trump issued an executive order slashing funding to seven federal agencies: the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, US Agency for Global Media, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in the Smithsonian Institution, Institute of Museum and Library Services, US Interagency Council on Homelessness, Community Development Financial Institutions Fund and Minority Business Development Agency. Don’t ignore the attack on the press and anything to do with minorities because that’s what Trump does over and over again.  On the Ukraine-Russia front, Putin is still attacking ruthlessly, Ukraine has lost much of the land that it had gained, and Putin is doing what he does, pretending to be interested in peace even though all he wants is Ukrainian territory.

#BringThemAllHomeNow  

 

 

Atomic Number 33 😱✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️😱

Charge! In Arsenic and Old Lace, a delightful, screwball black comedy, Mortimer, the lead character has two brothers, one, named Jonathan, is a murderer who looks like and was actually played by Boris Karloff in the show that predated the classic movie. Mortimer’s other brother. Teddy is crazy but otherwise harmless; he believes he’s Teddy Roosevelt and in a running gag, periodically issues military commands before running up the stairs yelling “charge.”  Mortimer also has two aunts who kill lonely old men to “put them out of their misery.” We’re now living through Arsenic and Old Lace, but mostly we’re getting the arsenic with very little lace, nothing delightful and no one has yet shown up to put us out of our misery.  Yesterday, acting like crazy brother Teddy but with the evil intent of the Boris Karloff looking Jonathan, Trump dissed the European Europe; said making Canada the 51^st state would solve the economically destructive tariff crisis that he’s created; talked about annexing Greenland; once again discussed seizing the Panama Canal, something that he reportedly has directed the Pentagon to make plans to do; and justified Putin’s continued attack of Ukraine, the same Putin who wants his land grabbing demands met before he agrees to any “peace.” Trump said all these insane things in front of Michael Martin, the Prime Minister of Ireland, who was in the states for a traditional pre-Saint Patrick’s Day visit but probably wished he was anywhere but the White House. At the end of Arsenic and Old Lace, evil brother Jonathan is arrested and crazy Teddy along with his superficially sweet murderous aunts are taking off to a mental institution. It’s increasingly clear that Trump belongs in one too, but unfortunately for us, the proverbial men in white coats with their straightjackets are nowhere in sight, and if they were they’d probably be coming for us and those judges who keep ruling against his destructive policies rather than for him and his ketamine infused Boris-bro Elon. Worse still, Trump, who not too long ago asserted that four years of Kamala Harris would tank the stock markets is doing just that while claiming we should thank him for taking the “froth” out of our 401k and IRA balances, a sentiment shared by the wacked out Commerce Secretary Lutnick and the not so “normie” Treasury Secretary Bessent who makes Steve Mnuchin look like a saint. The country has gone bizarro, there’s little delightful to report and it’s growing increasingly obvious that Trump isn’t just acting crazy, he is.   

Judicial Push Back:  The only good news to emerge is coming from the courts, at least so far.  On Wednesday,  Washington DC District Court Judge Beryl Howell made it clear that she was disgusted with Trump’s executive order targeting the Perkins Cole law firm. Trump’s order seeks to eviscerate Perkins’s practice by limiting its 1,200 lawyers’ access to federal buildings and federal employees, ending security clearances for its employees, all while also forbidding government agencies from hiring any of them. Judge Howell issued a temporary restraining order against the executive order pending a fuller hearing saying that she believed that at the very least it likely violated the First Amendment, Due Process, and the Sixth Amendment right to counsel.  Then yesterday,  Wiliam Alsup, a District Court Judge in San Francisco, ordered the reinstatement of thousands of federal employees fired by the Trump administration. He called the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) memo that was used as the template to fire thousands of probationary federal employees a gimmick and a sham employed to avoid statutory dismissal requirements, adding “It is a sad day when our government would fire some good employee and say it was based on performance when they know good and well that is a lie.” Alsup’s order covers those who were fired from Agriculture, Defense, Energy, Interior, Treasury and Veterans Affairs.  Hours later a second judge, US District Judge James Bredar of Maryland issued a similar order, expanding the list of affected departments to include Commerce, Education, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development,  Labor, Transportation, US AID, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the EPA, the FDIC, the General Service Administration, and the Small Business Administration.  Naturally, the Trump administration is appealing. It’s not clear what all these federal employees will do when they’re rehired since their new bosses keep paring back the functions of their departments.  Yesterday, one of those bosses, Lee Zeldin the former Long Island Congressman and Republican candidate for NYS Governor but now the head of the EPA, rolled back a bunch of environmental protections because basically, polluting and poisoning should no longer be impediments to businesses throughout the country. In other legal news, as expected the Trump administration is now appealing all of the rulings that said he couldn’t get rid of birth right citizenship to the Supreme Court and another District court judge, Tanya Chutkan, has ordered Musk to produce documents related to DOGE’s activities in response to a lawsuit by 14 Democratic state attorneys general that alleges Musk violated the constitution by wielding powers that only Senate-confirmed officials should possess. Lastly, in reports are that Trump is planning to invoke the wartime Enemies Alien Act to speed up mass deportations maybe so he can deport more US born children of undocumented migrants who are here being treated for brain cancer as if deporting just one affected child isn’t enough.     

Rock and a Hard Place: Unless things change, following a contentious meeting with his caucus, Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer announced last night that he, together with a sufficient number of other Democratic Senators, will vote for the Republican’s continuing funding resolution, ensuring its passage.  Schumer made it clear that he hates the provisions included in the resolution as well as those who crafted it so much so that last night on Chris Hayes’ MSNBC show he slipped and called those Republicans bastards. However, he went on to say that he fears that pushing the country into a shutdown, would legitimize and expand the questionably illegal funding actions that Trump and Office of Management and Budget (OMB) head Russell Vought have already taken because during shutdowns the president and OMB are the arbiters of what gets funded. Despite the efforts of many Democrats to make it clear that any shutdown would belong to Trump and his MAGA party, Schumer clearly fears that MAGA world would convince the public that the shutdown was the Democrats fault. Given how Musk amplifies Trump’s messages on X, whether you like Schumer’s decision or not, it’s hard to disagree with that assessment.  #Sigh

People:  Pete Buttigieg announced that he will not be running for Michigan’s soon to be open Senate seat. Former Florida Congressman David Weldon will not be the next head of the CDC. The White House pulled his nomination, not because they don’t want him to further damage our health and put us at risk for contracting new and old viruses but because a critical number of Republican Senators made it clear that they wouldn’t support his confirmation.  Count Weldon, a crony of RFK Jr, who shares his anti-vax positions, as another measles victim.  He doesn’t have a rash and hasn’t contracted encephalitis, but apparently pushing cod liver oil isn’t a good thing when measles cases are rising. Sadly, Arizona Congressman Raul Grijalva who was suffering from cancer died yesterday.  He is the second Democratic Congressman to pass away this month.   

Reproductive Health:  With all the attention focused on the insane man’s tariffs, the tanking market, annexation plans, and government funding it would be easy to miss that the Republicans are continuing to wage a war on reproductive rights.  The DOJ has dropped the Biden era lawsuit seeking to require Idaho providers to offer emergency abortion care and Martin Makary, the pick to head the FDA, said that he would review a Biden-era rule that allowed patients to get mifepristone without seeing a health care provider in person. And RFK plans to review mifepristone “safety” so Makary’s plans could be moot.  

#BringThemAllHomeNow

 

 
Trump Slump 😱✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️😱

TrumpCession:  Last October the Wall Street Journal’s Editorial Board noted that whoever wins the White House will take office with “at least one huge asset: an economy that is putting its peers to shame.  It is outrunning every other major developed economy, not to mention its own historical growth rate.”  Then Trump proved political commentator Rick Wilson’s oft made observation that “everything Trump touches dies” correct.  So now, as predicted by almost everyone other than Trump, tariffs fueled by their erratic application, are killing the US’s once envied economy. And it certainly doesn’t help that those tariffs are on top of mass firings and threatened mass deportations of many in the labor force.  We’ve heard many times that the stock markets aren’t the economy, but their performance reflects expectations about earnings and right now the expectations are that corporate earnings will be down because of the tariffs and belt tightening by freaked out consumers watching their retirement account balances shrivel and fearful that their Social Security payments and health insurance will soon follow suit.  As the WSJ pointed out yesterday afternoon, the trouble with trade wars is that once they begin, they can quickly escalate and get out of control. All the more so when the guy imposing them “behaves as if his manhood is implicated because a foreign nation won’t take his nasty border taxes lying down.” As bad as things are, you do have to love that the WSJ is questioning the orange maniac’s manhood 😂. Ketchup flying at Mar a Lago? The WSJ went on to say that the North American trade war is the dumbest in history, and that’s being kind. For good measure they pretty much called Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick an idiot, pointing out that his illogical comments about how tariffs affect prices make it clear that he doesn’t understand commerce. As to concerns about impending cuts in Medicare and Social Security, the programs that Trump promised to leave completely intact, those fears are valid because Elon Musk has woken up to the reality that while slashing and burning soft diplomacy programs like US AID gives him joy and makes Putin and Xi happy, cutting Medicare and Social Security, as well as Medicaid, is the way to go when your objective is cutting taxes for the very, very rich and that’s what both he and Trump desperately want to do. By the way despite Trump and Elon’s assertions there are no 200- year-olds on the Social Security rolls but those folks over 100 receiving Social Security payments that’s because they’re alive and they earned those payments. Similarly, the children getting benefits, those are the survivor benefits eligible minors receive when they lose a parent.  With the markets tanking, Elon, like all those other billionaires who paid bigly to attend Trump’s inauguration, has seen his net worth drop but unlike them, he now has Trump doing infomercials for him.  Yesterday, while the rest of us did our best to avoid checking our IRA and 401K balances, Trump played QVC salesperson, hawking Tesla cars and trucks from the White House lawn, threatening to arrest anyone protesting outside of Tesla facilities for domestic terrorism.

People:  Senator Mark Kelly went on a solidarity trip to Ukraine and posted about it, so Musk called him a traitor. Musk fled South Africa to avoid military service. Mark Kelly is a former US Navy pilot who flew combat missions during the Gulf War, who then went on to be an astronaut and shuttle pilot, and whose character is further exemplified by his dedication and support for his disabled wife, former Congressperson Gabby Gifford, a victim of gun violence.  Sickening name calling but totally in character for bully Musk and something we saw Trump do to John McCain. On the subject of characters, Elizabeth Oyer, the DOJ’s pardon attorney was fired after refusing to recommend that Mel Gibson, be allowed to own guns again.  Gibson lost that right because of his domestic violence sentence but the right-wing actor who has been known to publicly express his anti-Semitic views while inebriated but maybe also when sober is a friend of the Orange guy so if he wants a gun, he gets a gun.  Worth noting, Gibson is also disdainful of Pope Francis who he finds to be too liberal for his liking.  Education Secretary Linda McMahon has been in her new job for just a few days but she’s already fulfilling Trump’s mandate to shrink her department into oblivion.  Yesterday she fired half of her work force, saying that she plans to fire more and eliminate the department as soon as she can. In theory, only Congress can eliminate the Education Department which was separated out of the Department of Health Education and Welfare back in 1980.  Legislative efforts by Republicans to disband the department have failed several times, even when the Republicans were in control of Congress.  For the record, the Education doesn’t run local schools, its functions include distributing federal funds to public schools, administering college financial aid, and managing federal student loans.  It also supports programs for students with disabilities and enforces Civil Rights laws and we know how this administration feels about Civil Rights and how Trump likes to mock people with disabilities.  RFK who would presumably pick up some of the responsibilities that now fall to Education continues to promote cod liver oil and vitamin A as well as steroids for the treatment of measles which he attributes to poor lifestyle choices rather than to a highly contagious virus.  Lastly, kudos to the Williams & Connolly law firm for stepping up to represent Perkins Cole, the law firm targeted by Trump for defending Hillary Clinton and others he doesn’t like.  

FundMe:  Yesterday by a vote of 217 to 213 with all Republicans except Kentucky’s Thomas Massie on board and with all Democrats except for Maine’s Jared Golden, who barely eked out a victory in his equally divided district, opposed the House passed a continuing funding resolution that will keep spending levels flat while it continues to work on a real budget.  The resolution increases defense spending by $6 billion, taking the money from other programs including slashing Washington DC’s budget by $1 billion.  At the last minute, Republicans slipped in a provision legitimizing Trump’s tariffs even though they know they are off the wall crazy and illegal because like 1930’s Germans they do what they’re ordered to do. The bill is now in the hands of the Republican controlled Senate where it will need 60 votes to pass. The question is whether seven Democrats will support it over fears that they’ll get blamed for a government shut down if a resolution isn’t passed, or whether they’ll stand strong and extract some changes before signing on.

Fog:  After meeting with US officials in Saudi Arabia where they were hosted by a bone saw killer, Ukraine announced that it has agreed to implement a 30-day ceasefire with Russia.  In exchange Trump is lifting the pause on intelligence sharing he had imposed and also resuming security assistance.  However, and it’s a big however, Russia hasn‘t agreed to anything yet so while this could be a good thing it could also be a nothing burger or worse because it appears that Trump expects Ukraine to agree to give up territory, Russia not so much. Still, it’s a start. In other news, as predicted the Trump administration has turned former Columbia University graduate student Mohamed Khalil into a martyr of sorts because it turns out that it’s not so easy to take a Green Card away from a “permanent” US resident.  There’s a legal process involved, and whether we like Khalil or not, we should all want that legal process to be followed because not following it sets a precedent that could be very bad for others. Ernesto Miranda wasn’t a nice guy, but the “Miranda warning” speech advising of the right to be silent is delivered because of him.  By the way, regardless of your country of origin, if you are here on a Green Card, now would be a good time to take your citizenship test because it’s unlikely that Trump will stop at Khalil.  

 

 
Flying Debris 😱✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️😱

Rocket Play:  I was partially off the grid for much of last week in Florida, the state of many red hats and the Mar a Lago home of the erratic Orange Wannabe King.  While I was there a number of the state’s airports experienced dangerous disruptions to their airspace, the result of a ketamine fueled multi billionaire shooting a bigly unstable, exploding rocket into the air without having to worry about penalties or pushback from the agencies that are supposed to prevent that kind of thing. Fortunately, no planes were taken out by any of the rocket debris though a number of them did spend an hour or more in the not so safe skies dodging debris.  The rocket explosion could be a preview of what Floridians and many others are likely to experience during next year’s hurricane season when they learn what it like to deal with incoming storms in the absence of any warnings or path predictions from the National Weather Service, one of those agencies that Musk and Trump are currently in the process of dismembering in a rush to “government efficiency.” Nothing says own the libs better than putting Trump voting states into the path of hellish storms. Last week’s storm clouds were more figurative than literal, the result of Trump’s on again, off again tariffs.  Few experts believe that the willy nilly imposition of tariffs make sense, and even fewer believe that turning them on and off erratically is a good thing but Trump loves them, promised them, and is hardly a stable genius, so here we are, watching the stable economy that Biden left him implode.  Even Trump is now saying that a recession is possible. That’s what he told Fox’s Maria Bartiromo this weekend while also telling her that he knows his actions are causing pain to many but so what, they’ll just have to deal with it.  He's talked about the money brought in by those tariffs funding his crypto currency reserve, the dicey, scammy investment pool that many of his allies with inside information are likely front running while Americans incur higher prices for tariffed goods, including food, appliances, and cars.  As to Elon, a view articles and opinion pieces want us to believe that Trump’s honeymoon period with his billionaire donor is coming to an end.  Via Trump whisperers Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, the NY Times reported that during a contentious cabinet meeting Trump announced that Elon was only there to consult with and advise the various secretaries, that he wasn’t making firing decisions but who are we kidding, wresting power back from Elon won’t be easy because he paid bigly bucks for his position and anyway, it’s not clear that Trump is at all dissatisfied with what he is doing. In another NY Times piece, Harvard Business School professor Mihir Desai argues that free market forces will rein Elon in because his business empire is starting to “wobble,” that’s great if true but again, unlikely, at least in the near term. Regarding the near term, Congress needs to pass another continuing funding resolution by midnight Friday because without one the government closes down. Don’t confuse the continuing resolution with the House’s slash and burn budget, Congress has a hard time passing actual budgets, what was passed recently was a framework, not a real budget.  The continuing resolution proposed by Speaker Johnson and Trump pretty much holds funding levels where Biden had them with a few tweaks.  The problem is that Trump has been “eliminating” projects and departments, essentially refusing to spend money despite Congressional mandates.  Democrats want the continuing resolution to say that the money has to be spent.  The question is whether Johnson can garner the Republican votes he needs to pass a continuing resolution without the language that the Democrats want and, if he can’t, whether the Democrats will hold out in force until that language is incorporated.  By the way, the Democrats lost one of their members last week after Texas Democrat Sylvester Turner suffered a dire medical emergency following Trump’s speech to Congress. The real surprise is that more people didn’t suffer similar attacks.   

Legalities: Paul Clement, the outside lawyer that District Judge Dale Ho hired to advise him on NYC Mayor Eric Adams’ case said that the court had no feasible option to continue the prosecution if Trump’s DOJ no longer supported it, but he said the case should not be dismissed “without prejudice.” Assuming Judge Ho follows Clement’s advice, Adams will get off scot-free, but Trump will lose his cudgel because Adams won’t face future indictment on the charges, so a win for the Mayor, but not for Trump. It’s fair to assume that Trump is not a Shakesperean scholar, but he does understand the concept of “first killing the lawyers” or at least the lawyers that don’t support him, have prosecuted him, and/or have represented those who have prosecuted him so he’s now threatening the livelihood of two prominent law firms: Covington and Perkins Cole.  Among their “crimes”: providing legal advice to former Special Counsel Jack Smith and Hillary Clinton. Trump’s actions make Sullivan & Cromwell’s decision to represent him that much more despicable. 

Fog:  Trump is doing what ever he can do to advantage Putin in his war against Ukraine.  In addition to halting arms shipments and financial aid to Ukraine, he’s now stopped sharing intelligence and has cut access to crucial satellite imaging.  Trump wants us to believe that he’s doing all this to force Ukraine to “negotiate” with Putin but who is he kidding.  There will be talks but Putin isn’t interested in real negotiation; he just wants to keep the land he has seized while seizing some more, maybe even parts of Europe, because he wants to Make Russia Great Again. To that end, Putin has ramped up his attacks because why not?  On the Israel-Hamas front, the Trump administration has been trying to get the one remaining live US hostage out of Hamas captivity, that’s good for him but not so good for the others who remain and without another agreement of some sort, there is a good chance that the war picks up again, putting those hostages in further jeopardy.  Here at home, the Trump administration has cancelled $400 million in grants and contracts to Columbia University in response to its “failure to squelch anti-Semitism on campus.” The Trump administration has a point, Columbia and most recently Barnard have been unable to control the masked demonstrators who have disrupted classes, taken over buildings and targeted Jewish students.  All that’s bad but targeting universities is bad too, especially since it’s likely that Trump’s motives aren’t pure, after all, he’s been known to hang out with prominent anti-Semites and has at least one, conspiracy and hate tweeter, Kingsley Wilson,  working as a spokesperson for the Department of Defense.  Over the weekend the INS arrested Mahmoud Kalil, a Palestinian activist who helped lead some of the Columbia protests.  The INS appears to be holding Kalil somewhere in Louisiana and says that they are revoking his visa, however Kalil is a permanent resident with a Green Card which is supposed to give him additional legal protections.  I am no fan of Kalil and find the situation at my B- school alma mater to be beyond awful but I fear that the INS’s likely illegal actions will make things worse, turning Kalil into a martyr, while feeding more hate. We shouldn’t be surprised that Trump’s INS is flouting the rule of law, because he’s a King, right?

And:  This is your daily reminder that neither vitamin A nor cod liver oil will protect you from getting the measles or do much if you are suffering through a case.  While nepo RFK was posting pictures of himself out hiking, the case count continued to climb.  And no, the MMR vaccine doesn’t cause autism but despite the push for more government efficiency RFK is now going to spend more money studying the debunked connection rather than working on treatments and cures.  Remember how RFK promised Louisiana’s Doctor Senator Bill Cassidy that he wouldn’t disrupt vaccination schedules, he was lying.     

#BringThemAllHomeNow