I keep thinking that if there is a slight pause to catch my breath I will write about normal things – about the ins and outs of a small but worthwhile life, comfortable in its way. When you reach a certain age that kind of life seems more inviting than it did when you were young and full of fire, seeking to make a mark on the world and change it into something more to your liking. You discover, eventually, that the world changes in its own way and on its own schedule and you make your peace with that and having done so you discover that the best part of life is found in the ordinary things and the people you surround yourself with.
That’s why I started this blog after all, back in 2008. To record those things, and perhaps to look back on them when I might otherwise have forgotten them.
But we find ourselves in a time of crisis, one that was entirely predictable – indeed, one that I was clear was coming here in this very space, a bit of fortune-telling that I claim no particular credit for since it was obvious to anyone who cared to look. The United States of America is under attack by internal enemies, the figurehead leader sitting in the Oval Office itself while the minions, lackeys, cronies and slaves who are doing the actual planning and executing are busily tearing down a century of labor by better people than themselves.
I will bear witness.
I will take what opportunities arise to make a difference.
I expect that this will lead me to harm, as Fascists do not take dissent lightly and are not clever enough to have any response other than violence. But so it goes. You do what you can. I am old now and have reached the point where my primary concern is the world I leave my children.
“You cannot kill me in a way that matters,” as the old meme has it.
The current coup has progressed quickly, but American patriots are starting to get their feet back underneath them and fight back.
“We don’t have kings in America,” said Illinois Governor JB Pritzger the other day, “and I don’t intend to bend the knee to one. I am not speaking up in service to my ambitions but in deference to my obligations. If you think I’m overreacting and sounding the alarm too soon, consider this: It took the Nazis one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours and 40 minutes to dismantle a constitutional republic. All I’m saying is when the five-alarm fire starts to burn, every good person better be ready to man a post with a bucket of water if you want to stop it from raging out of control.”
Much damage has already been done, and more will come. Some of it is not recoverable. The United States will be fortunate to emerge out of this with the Constitution intact, with some allies who still trust us, with an economy worth mentioning and a society not utterly corrupted by hatred and bug-eyed insanity.
It will be the work of a generation of Americans to rebuild from this, if it can be done at all.
And we’d best start now.
Saturday, February 22, 2025
Saturday, February 15, 2025
Further Dispatches From the Coup
With the psychotic Gish Gallop of unconstitutional, catastrophically stupid, and morally leprous things cascading out of the joint administration of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk and their minions, lackeys, cronies and slaves these days it can be hard to keep track of it all. The last time this cancerous tumor on the American body politic was in office I posted running lists of things so they wouldn’t be forgotten – and to register the simple fact that I do not accept any of it – and it looks like I’m back to that again. MURCA!
My goal is to quarantine these things in these posts because they do need to be said but otherwise I will never write about anything else.
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1. Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk’s roving band of feral teenagers randomly fired almost 400 nuclear weapons specialists who worked for the National Nuclear Security Administration the other day and now the Department of Energy is frantically trying to get them to come back to work because nothing says making America great again like getting rid of all of the people who understand how nuclear weapons function.
2. The CDC and other public health agencies have been banned from speaking out on any of the current challenges facing the US, such as the tuberculosis outbreak in Michigan, the increasingly deadly wave of bird flu that is sweeping the nation, and the rapidly spreading measles outbreak in one of the most unvaccinated regions of Texas, so you’re on your own with that. Measles outbreaks are very difficult to contain once they get started and right now the one in Texas has a hospitalization rate of 27% – a shockingly high figure in the world of epidemiology. COVID hasn’t gone away and the regular flu seems to be more dangerous than usual. Every nurse, PA, EMT, and CNA that I know is in full panic mode right now because they can see the system overloading. But Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump knows that one of the many reasons he was unceremoniously tossed out on his ass back in 2020 was because he botched the COVID pandemic so badly that he was personally responsible for over a quarter million excess American deaths and the lesson he got out of that was not to do better next time but instead just to try to hide it more effectively. Your death will help him politically, and that’s all he cares about.
3. Meanwhile the supine GOP Congress just folded like a wet paper tent and installed a rabid antivaxxer nutjob as the nation’s top health and science officer, so good luck with that.
4. RFK Jr., the aforementioned nutjob, announced almost immediately that people “addicted” to antidepressants and anyone even prosecuted for drug crimes would be send to government-sponsored “wellness farms” to produce organic crops for up to four years. “We’re going to re-parent people and restore connection to community” he said. Forced collective farming just sounds like Maoism to me but what do I know.
5. Apparently so many people have complained to Google about their craven capitulation to Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s increasingly unhinged demand to rename the Gulf of Mexico that Google has had to turn off 1-star reviews and comments for it. Meanwhile the AP has been banned from press conferences because they actually have a backbone and have refused to bow down to the naked emperor on this matter.
6. 800 people were fired from the USDA and another 1000 from the NRCS which will cripple research and farm aid programs. Watching the rural areas that voted overwhelmingly for Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump get hammered like this provides some schadenfreude but not nearly enough to make up for the fact that this is hurting both them and the rest of us. The US will take decades to recover from this, if it can recover at all.
7. The ongoing destruction of USAID is also destroying American farmers, as well as halting a great deal of the AIDS prevention efforts that have succeeded in reducing the spread of that lethal plague, and foor and medical programs designed to keep children from dying across the globe. All so Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk can get a tax break. Welcome to the new Gilded Age, and if you study the social unrest of that period you know what’s coming next.
8. I hope you enjoyed having national parks because soon they won’t be there. Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk and his roving band of feral teenagers have slashed NPS staff, including rangers, firefighters, and EMTs, and taken down the reservation system people use for campsites. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump is looking to sell off the land to wealthy speculators. And what was once the envy of the world collapses into dust, a fitting metaphor for the United States under this regime.
9. Keep in mind that Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk was never elected to anything, heads a “department” that has no Constitutional legitimacy, and is ineligible for the office of president whose powers he is unilaterally exercising and exceeding.
10. The IRS is next on Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk’s hit list because we can’t have anything that impinges on his greed or power, now, can we. You can compile a pretty comprehensive list of the agencies that Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk’s roving band of feral teenagers have targeted just by looking for the ones that could conceivably stand in the way of that greed and power. Follow the money, folks.
11. Meanwhile the price of eggs is at near record highs and nothing that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump is doing is going to change that for the better. A lot of it is just going to make things worse. But MAGA will still blame Biden. Possibly Obama. The ones that have read a book in the last quarter century might try to blame Jimmy Carter, but I suspect that will be a very quiet part of the chorus. In any event, the Dear Leader can do no wrong by them, so take your pick.
12. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump has now officially installed himself as the head of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and even North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un thinks that’s a little excessive.
13. Junior Understudy JD Vance went to Germany and it did not go well for him. He met with neo-Nazi groups and then tried to lecture the German government about how they should obey his two bosses and then both the German Chancellor and the Defense Minister tore him a new asshole and began working on re-arranging European defense around the idea that the US is now a security threat. Well done, Junior! You’ve managed to upend three quarters of a century of hard work and concrete achievements by better people in just a couple of weeks.
14. Apparently we’re also abandoning Ukraine in particular and NATO in general. Defense Secretary Pete “One for the Road” Hegseth announced that the US does not consider the defense of an ally against naked aggression important and will not contribute further to its security, nor does the current regime regard NATO – the lynchpin of post-war security for the US and the West – to be of any value. So anyone out there thinking the US is a trustworthy ally, think again. I expect a future of isolation and pariah status for the US thanks to this crew of utter lunatics.
15. Don’t even get me started on the sheer mind-boggling evil of the proposals for ethnic cleansing in Gaza that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump has made repeatedly this month. We executed people for that sort of thing at Nuremberg.
16. Do you think Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump will ever stop yammering on about invading Canada? Seriously – what an asshole.
17. If you think the Republican Congress is doing anything to limit the damage done to the nation both here and abroad you should seek counseling because you know damn well they’re only pouring gasoline on these fires and roasting marshmallows while the republic burns, right? Let’s see some of the highlights of what they’ve got cooking there:
a. First, we have the intentionally misleadingly titled hellscape of the SAVE Act, a voter suppression tool that will accomplish two longstanding goals of the Republican Party by requiring all voters to produce birth certificates and passports in order to vote (how many Americans even own passports?) and denying the vote to anyone whose birth name does not match their current name. The main purpose of this is to deny the vote to trans people – cruelty to trans Americans being a foundational principle of the modern GOP – but it will also unofficially overturn most of the 19th Amendment by denying any married woman who has legally changed her name the right to vote as well. The GOP has been very clear that they don’t think women should vote at all – perhaps because women are smarter than men and do not vote for Republicans as a group – and this denial is a feature of the SAVE Act, not a bug.
b. There is also HR1161, introduced by Republican Representative Earl L. Carter (R-GA), which proposes that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump buy Greenland and rename it “Red, White, and Blueland.” Folks, I couldn’t make that shit up if I tried. How much antifreeze does someone have to drink in order for this idea to make sense, let alone to think that you should say it in public?
c. The GOP released its preliminary budget plan and it calls for a) zeroing out funding for Medicaid so poor people can’t get healthcare, adding $3,000,000,000,000 to the national debt, and giving billionaires a $4,500,000,000,000 tax cut. In case you weren’t aware of the priorities.
18. Junior Understudy JD Vance also publicly announced last week that he has never read the US Constitution and has no concept of the foundational principle of the separation of powers. Good for him for admitting his bone-deep ignorance, but man – the fact that this imbecile is a heartbeat away from becoming the second banana to Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk is unnerving. Yes, Junior – judges are in fact allowed to tell the executive branch what to do.
19. If you get the feeling that this administration is laying the groundwork for cutting out both the legislative and judicial branches and seizing all power for themselves, good for you for paying attention. I give them four months before they declare it openly. It’s going to be a long hot summer in the US.
20. Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk and his roving band of feral teenagers have now accessed all of your health care data, so I hope you didn’t think that little things like federal privacy laws were going to protect you when he uses that against you. They’ve also downloaded all of your identity information, including your banking information if you’ve ever gotten a tax refund through direct deposit. MURCA!
21. Also, this week Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk and his roving band of feral teenagers ransacked the National Park Service’s websites, and among other things they deleted all references to trans people from the site dedicated to the Stonewall uprising – a pivotal event in gay rights in this country and one where trans people played central roles. This is how genocides start, with small erasures like this, before they ramp up. You either catch it when it starts or your regret it when it proceeds.
22. They’ve also fired 10% of the staff of the National Cancer Institute, because cruelty and waste is pretty much the only strategy they have.
23. In other national security news, Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk and his roving band of feral teenagers forced the CIA to attempt to buy out its entire workforce, and if you’re wondering who would benefit from the crippling of American intelligence, honestly it’s not that hard to figure out.
24. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump has also purged the entire boards of all four service academies (Army, Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard) because apparently the US military is too “woke” or something like that. When a neo-Fascist starts purging the military and installing loyalists, it’s past time to worry.
25. The US imposed sanctions on South Africa for daring to undo decades of apartheid, which apparently counts as discrimination against rich white people. I wonder who benefited from that?
26. Office of Project Management Director Charles Ezell released a memo to all agency heads the other day claiming that “provisions of collective bargaining agreements that conflict with management rights are unlawful and unenforceable,” which is something that you’d expect to hear from someone who will likely be on the wrong end of the first labor unrest this country sees this year. Grab your popcorn!
27. We’re also no longer enforcing the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the law that prevents US companies from bribing foreign officials to secure or keep business deals. Given who the US government has devolved to these days, I suppose that’s not a surprise.
28. Did you notice that Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk and his roving band of feral teenagers have gutted the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and fired the previous director who was known for rigorously enforcing consumer protection laws? Strange how that happens just as Elmo enters into a deal to process payments.
29. The first wave of assaults on American scientific research culminated in an across the board slashing of federal grants from the NIH. Grants come with money allotted for “indirect expenses” but which universities call “keeping the lights on and the plumbing working.” This nation became a world power on the strength of its scientific research, most of which happens at universities. I wonder who has an interest in seeing that destroyed.
30. Finally (because I could go on but there are only so many hours in the day) there is the legal fiasco of the Eric Adams case. If you’ve not caught this one Adams is the Democratic mayor of New York City who has been enmeshed in a bribery and corruption scandal for a while now. The new imperial forces at the Justice Department ordered his charges dropped explicitly so they would have leverage over him to get him to enforce their anti-immigrant hysteria on one of the most immigrant-populated cities in the world. This is transparently illegal and in a normal political environment would have resulted in serious charges being filed against everyone involved, but in a cult dictatorship such as the one we seem to be living in now it’s just part of the background noise. The acting Attorney General for the Southern District of New York – a conservative Federalist Society member appointed by none other than Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump – told them that this was illegal and what Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove could do with his demands (hint: a lubricant would help) before resigning. Assistant US Attorney Hagen Scotten also resigned, but not after telling Bove that only a fool or a coward would consent to Bove’s demands. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s Attorney General – a disgraced lawyer named Pam Bondi – finally did get someone to do the deed, but the naked partisanship and illegal conduct is out there for anyone who wants to see it. We’ll see who cares.
My goal is to quarantine these things in these posts because they do need to be said but otherwise I will never write about anything else.
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1. Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk’s roving band of feral teenagers randomly fired almost 400 nuclear weapons specialists who worked for the National Nuclear Security Administration the other day and now the Department of Energy is frantically trying to get them to come back to work because nothing says making America great again like getting rid of all of the people who understand how nuclear weapons function.
2. The CDC and other public health agencies have been banned from speaking out on any of the current challenges facing the US, such as the tuberculosis outbreak in Michigan, the increasingly deadly wave of bird flu that is sweeping the nation, and the rapidly spreading measles outbreak in one of the most unvaccinated regions of Texas, so you’re on your own with that. Measles outbreaks are very difficult to contain once they get started and right now the one in Texas has a hospitalization rate of 27% – a shockingly high figure in the world of epidemiology. COVID hasn’t gone away and the regular flu seems to be more dangerous than usual. Every nurse, PA, EMT, and CNA that I know is in full panic mode right now because they can see the system overloading. But Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump knows that one of the many reasons he was unceremoniously tossed out on his ass back in 2020 was because he botched the COVID pandemic so badly that he was personally responsible for over a quarter million excess American deaths and the lesson he got out of that was not to do better next time but instead just to try to hide it more effectively. Your death will help him politically, and that’s all he cares about.
3. Meanwhile the supine GOP Congress just folded like a wet paper tent and installed a rabid antivaxxer nutjob as the nation’s top health and science officer, so good luck with that.
4. RFK Jr., the aforementioned nutjob, announced almost immediately that people “addicted” to antidepressants and anyone even prosecuted for drug crimes would be send to government-sponsored “wellness farms” to produce organic crops for up to four years. “We’re going to re-parent people and restore connection to community” he said. Forced collective farming just sounds like Maoism to me but what do I know.
5. Apparently so many people have complained to Google about their craven capitulation to Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s increasingly unhinged demand to rename the Gulf of Mexico that Google has had to turn off 1-star reviews and comments for it. Meanwhile the AP has been banned from press conferences because they actually have a backbone and have refused to bow down to the naked emperor on this matter.
6. 800 people were fired from the USDA and another 1000 from the NRCS which will cripple research and farm aid programs. Watching the rural areas that voted overwhelmingly for Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump get hammered like this provides some schadenfreude but not nearly enough to make up for the fact that this is hurting both them and the rest of us. The US will take decades to recover from this, if it can recover at all.
7. The ongoing destruction of USAID is also destroying American farmers, as well as halting a great deal of the AIDS prevention efforts that have succeeded in reducing the spread of that lethal plague, and foor and medical programs designed to keep children from dying across the globe. All so Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk can get a tax break. Welcome to the new Gilded Age, and if you study the social unrest of that period you know what’s coming next.
8. I hope you enjoyed having national parks because soon they won’t be there. Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk and his roving band of feral teenagers have slashed NPS staff, including rangers, firefighters, and EMTs, and taken down the reservation system people use for campsites. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump is looking to sell off the land to wealthy speculators. And what was once the envy of the world collapses into dust, a fitting metaphor for the United States under this regime.
9. Keep in mind that Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk was never elected to anything, heads a “department” that has no Constitutional legitimacy, and is ineligible for the office of president whose powers he is unilaterally exercising and exceeding.
10. The IRS is next on Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk’s hit list because we can’t have anything that impinges on his greed or power, now, can we. You can compile a pretty comprehensive list of the agencies that Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk’s roving band of feral teenagers have targeted just by looking for the ones that could conceivably stand in the way of that greed and power. Follow the money, folks.
11. Meanwhile the price of eggs is at near record highs and nothing that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump is doing is going to change that for the better. A lot of it is just going to make things worse. But MAGA will still blame Biden. Possibly Obama. The ones that have read a book in the last quarter century might try to blame Jimmy Carter, but I suspect that will be a very quiet part of the chorus. In any event, the Dear Leader can do no wrong by them, so take your pick.
12. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump has now officially installed himself as the head of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and even North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un thinks that’s a little excessive.
13. Junior Understudy JD Vance went to Germany and it did not go well for him. He met with neo-Nazi groups and then tried to lecture the German government about how they should obey his two bosses and then both the German Chancellor and the Defense Minister tore him a new asshole and began working on re-arranging European defense around the idea that the US is now a security threat. Well done, Junior! You’ve managed to upend three quarters of a century of hard work and concrete achievements by better people in just a couple of weeks.
14. Apparently we’re also abandoning Ukraine in particular and NATO in general. Defense Secretary Pete “One for the Road” Hegseth announced that the US does not consider the defense of an ally against naked aggression important and will not contribute further to its security, nor does the current regime regard NATO – the lynchpin of post-war security for the US and the West – to be of any value. So anyone out there thinking the US is a trustworthy ally, think again. I expect a future of isolation and pariah status for the US thanks to this crew of utter lunatics.
15. Don’t even get me started on the sheer mind-boggling evil of the proposals for ethnic cleansing in Gaza that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump has made repeatedly this month. We executed people for that sort of thing at Nuremberg.
16. Do you think Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump will ever stop yammering on about invading Canada? Seriously – what an asshole.
17. If you think the Republican Congress is doing anything to limit the damage done to the nation both here and abroad you should seek counseling because you know damn well they’re only pouring gasoline on these fires and roasting marshmallows while the republic burns, right? Let’s see some of the highlights of what they’ve got cooking there:
a. First, we have the intentionally misleadingly titled hellscape of the SAVE Act, a voter suppression tool that will accomplish two longstanding goals of the Republican Party by requiring all voters to produce birth certificates and passports in order to vote (how many Americans even own passports?) and denying the vote to anyone whose birth name does not match their current name. The main purpose of this is to deny the vote to trans people – cruelty to trans Americans being a foundational principle of the modern GOP – but it will also unofficially overturn most of the 19th Amendment by denying any married woman who has legally changed her name the right to vote as well. The GOP has been very clear that they don’t think women should vote at all – perhaps because women are smarter than men and do not vote for Republicans as a group – and this denial is a feature of the SAVE Act, not a bug.
b. There is also HR1161, introduced by Republican Representative Earl L. Carter (R-GA), which proposes that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump buy Greenland and rename it “Red, White, and Blueland.” Folks, I couldn’t make that shit up if I tried. How much antifreeze does someone have to drink in order for this idea to make sense, let alone to think that you should say it in public?
c. The GOP released its preliminary budget plan and it calls for a) zeroing out funding for Medicaid so poor people can’t get healthcare, adding $3,000,000,000,000 to the national debt, and giving billionaires a $4,500,000,000,000 tax cut. In case you weren’t aware of the priorities.
18. Junior Understudy JD Vance also publicly announced last week that he has never read the US Constitution and has no concept of the foundational principle of the separation of powers. Good for him for admitting his bone-deep ignorance, but man – the fact that this imbecile is a heartbeat away from becoming the second banana to Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk is unnerving. Yes, Junior – judges are in fact allowed to tell the executive branch what to do.
19. If you get the feeling that this administration is laying the groundwork for cutting out both the legislative and judicial branches and seizing all power for themselves, good for you for paying attention. I give them four months before they declare it openly. It’s going to be a long hot summer in the US.
20. Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk and his roving band of feral teenagers have now accessed all of your health care data, so I hope you didn’t think that little things like federal privacy laws were going to protect you when he uses that against you. They’ve also downloaded all of your identity information, including your banking information if you’ve ever gotten a tax refund through direct deposit. MURCA!
21. Also, this week Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk and his roving band of feral teenagers ransacked the National Park Service’s websites, and among other things they deleted all references to trans people from the site dedicated to the Stonewall uprising – a pivotal event in gay rights in this country and one where trans people played central roles. This is how genocides start, with small erasures like this, before they ramp up. You either catch it when it starts or your regret it when it proceeds.
22. They’ve also fired 10% of the staff of the National Cancer Institute, because cruelty and waste is pretty much the only strategy they have.
23. In other national security news, Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk and his roving band of feral teenagers forced the CIA to attempt to buy out its entire workforce, and if you’re wondering who would benefit from the crippling of American intelligence, honestly it’s not that hard to figure out.
24. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump has also purged the entire boards of all four service academies (Army, Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard) because apparently the US military is too “woke” or something like that. When a neo-Fascist starts purging the military and installing loyalists, it’s past time to worry.
25. The US imposed sanctions on South Africa for daring to undo decades of apartheid, which apparently counts as discrimination against rich white people. I wonder who benefited from that?
26. Office of Project Management Director Charles Ezell released a memo to all agency heads the other day claiming that “provisions of collective bargaining agreements that conflict with management rights are unlawful and unenforceable,” which is something that you’d expect to hear from someone who will likely be on the wrong end of the first labor unrest this country sees this year. Grab your popcorn!
27. We’re also no longer enforcing the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the law that prevents US companies from bribing foreign officials to secure or keep business deals. Given who the US government has devolved to these days, I suppose that’s not a surprise.
28. Did you notice that Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk and his roving band of feral teenagers have gutted the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and fired the previous director who was known for rigorously enforcing consumer protection laws? Strange how that happens just as Elmo enters into a deal to process payments.
29. The first wave of assaults on American scientific research culminated in an across the board slashing of federal grants from the NIH. Grants come with money allotted for “indirect expenses” but which universities call “keeping the lights on and the plumbing working.” This nation became a world power on the strength of its scientific research, most of which happens at universities. I wonder who has an interest in seeing that destroyed.
30. Finally (because I could go on but there are only so many hours in the day) there is the legal fiasco of the Eric Adams case. If you’ve not caught this one Adams is the Democratic mayor of New York City who has been enmeshed in a bribery and corruption scandal for a while now. The new imperial forces at the Justice Department ordered his charges dropped explicitly so they would have leverage over him to get him to enforce their anti-immigrant hysteria on one of the most immigrant-populated cities in the world. This is transparently illegal and in a normal political environment would have resulted in serious charges being filed against everyone involved, but in a cult dictatorship such as the one we seem to be living in now it’s just part of the background noise. The acting Attorney General for the Southern District of New York – a conservative Federalist Society member appointed by none other than Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump – told them that this was illegal and what Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove could do with his demands (hint: a lubricant would help) before resigning. Assistant US Attorney Hagen Scotten also resigned, but not after telling Bove that only a fool or a coward would consent to Bove’s demands. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s Attorney General – a disgraced lawyer named Pam Bondi – finally did get someone to do the deed, but the naked partisanship and illegal conduct is out there for anyone who wants to see it. We’ll see who cares.
Sunday, February 9, 2025
Fly, Eagles, Fly
Tonight I took a break from monitoring the ongoing destruction of the American republic to watch the Super Bowl, and I was richly rewarded for doing so.
My hometown Philadelphia Eagles, in a rematch from the game two years ago, thoroughly dominated the Kansas City Chiefs. The Eagles were up 24-0 at halftime, and went on to a fairly comfortable 40-22 victory despite a couple of meaningless late touchdowns by the Chiefs. It was nice to watch the game and not be worried in the last few minutes. I’ve been slowly losing interest in football for a long time now, but I’m enough of a hometown fan that when my Birds are in it, I’ll watch and cheer.
Philadelphia is, no doubt, hopping right now. It will likely do so for a while. There are professional sports franchises in Philadelphia representing all of the major leagues that play in the United States, but the Eagles own that town.
I hope they didn’t grease the light poles to try to keep people from climbing them. All that does is make the people at the top of the pole greasy.
We had a quiet night of it here in Our Little Town, just me and Kim and Oliver. Lauren was up at her campus where the main bar on the main street was having a $20 for all you can drink special and she said that by the end of the game there were only Eagles fans left and the vibes were immaculate. I should expect so. Eagles fans know how to celebrate. But here it was just us and about three times as many salty snacks as we could possibly eat because this is the one day where I don’t care about my diet and to be honest I may have gone a bit overboard. Oh well. You have to ignore the guidelines once in a while.
This one is for my dad, a diehard Eagles fan who never saw them win a Super Bowl though he did see them win a championship in 1960. It’s for the city of Philadelphia, the only city in the United States that hates Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump more than New York City does – he was at the game looking like someone stole his lollipop and I hope he has an utterly miserable flight home secure in the knowledge that there is no point to inviting the Eagles to the White House in honor of their victory because they will tell him point blank to fuck himself just like they did last time. It’s for all the sports knobs who overwhelmingly picked the Chiefs to win because they were the Chiefs and therefore entitled to win.
And it’s for me, because in this dark year it is nice to have a bright spot.
Fly, Eagles, fly.
My hometown Philadelphia Eagles, in a rematch from the game two years ago, thoroughly dominated the Kansas City Chiefs. The Eagles were up 24-0 at halftime, and went on to a fairly comfortable 40-22 victory despite a couple of meaningless late touchdowns by the Chiefs. It was nice to watch the game and not be worried in the last few minutes. I’ve been slowly losing interest in football for a long time now, but I’m enough of a hometown fan that when my Birds are in it, I’ll watch and cheer.
Philadelphia is, no doubt, hopping right now. It will likely do so for a while. There are professional sports franchises in Philadelphia representing all of the major leagues that play in the United States, but the Eagles own that town.
I hope they didn’t grease the light poles to try to keep people from climbing them. All that does is make the people at the top of the pole greasy.
We had a quiet night of it here in Our Little Town, just me and Kim and Oliver. Lauren was up at her campus where the main bar on the main street was having a $20 for all you can drink special and she said that by the end of the game there were only Eagles fans left and the vibes were immaculate. I should expect so. Eagles fans know how to celebrate. But here it was just us and about three times as many salty snacks as we could possibly eat because this is the one day where I don’t care about my diet and to be honest I may have gone a bit overboard. Oh well. You have to ignore the guidelines once in a while.
This one is for my dad, a diehard Eagles fan who never saw them win a Super Bowl though he did see them win a championship in 1960. It’s for the city of Philadelphia, the only city in the United States that hates Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump more than New York City does – he was at the game looking like someone stole his lollipop and I hope he has an utterly miserable flight home secure in the knowledge that there is no point to inviting the Eagles to the White House in honor of their victory because they will tell him point blank to fuck himself just like they did last time. It’s for all the sports knobs who overwhelmingly picked the Chiefs to win because they were the Chiefs and therefore entitled to win.
And it’s for me, because in this dark year it is nice to have a bright spot.
Fly, Eagles, fly.
Saturday, February 8, 2025
Dispatches from the Coup
The ongoing coup being staged by Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk is rolling along at a pretty good clip, it has to be said.
His minions are fanning out through any number of federal agencies, demanding access to legally protected data and throwing tantrums (as befits their tender ages) whenever anyone gets in their way. Apparently their next target is the Pentagon, which is staffed by highly trained, heavily armed, and very dedicated men and women who have sworn an oath to defend the US Constitution against all enemies domestic and foreign and I for one would pay money to see that happen.
Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk has taken to simply declaring things as if that made them so. Did you know there is no Department of Education anymore? He said so! This should come as a surprise to Congress, which is the only body that can make that call under the Constitution.
But then the Republicans in Congress seem pretty satisfied with their increasing irrelevance and unaware that they are the next obvious target for this coup, so we’ll see what happens.
This is all part of the “flood the zone with bullshit” strategy that you knew was coming, by the way.
The goal here is simply to demoralize, distract, and disturb. Few if any of the things that Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk is attempting are designed to last. They’re only designed to overawe.
Although given that Co-President Elon “Sieg Hiel” Musk now has the full identifying information and tax data for every single American (including Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump), there is the rather sad notion that he isn’t the Co-President anymore. I wonder if anyone has explained to Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump how irrelevant he has become.
That’s another thing I’d pay money to see.
It has been another horrifying week to be an American, the third such since Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump was installed into power, and the list of things that he and his minions, lackeys, cronies and slaves have done in that time is both long and unforgivable.
I would very much like to be thinking about other things. I have students to advise and classes to teach. The Super Bowl – the biggest secular holiday on the American calendar after all – is featuring my own hometown Eagles on Sunday for just the fifth time ever and I have had no time at all to revel in that fact. We have summer plans that we’d like to be making, and celebrations that we’d like to plan.
All of this is getting put on hold because a toddler of a man couldn’t deal with losing an election and his fanatical cult put him back into power, apparently to burn the country down.
I will stand and I will be heard, but it would be nice to sit for a while too.
His minions are fanning out through any number of federal agencies, demanding access to legally protected data and throwing tantrums (as befits their tender ages) whenever anyone gets in their way. Apparently their next target is the Pentagon, which is staffed by highly trained, heavily armed, and very dedicated men and women who have sworn an oath to defend the US Constitution against all enemies domestic and foreign and I for one would pay money to see that happen.
Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk has taken to simply declaring things as if that made them so. Did you know there is no Department of Education anymore? He said so! This should come as a surprise to Congress, which is the only body that can make that call under the Constitution.
But then the Republicans in Congress seem pretty satisfied with their increasing irrelevance and unaware that they are the next obvious target for this coup, so we’ll see what happens.
This is all part of the “flood the zone with bullshit” strategy that you knew was coming, by the way.
The goal here is simply to demoralize, distract, and disturb. Few if any of the things that Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk is attempting are designed to last. They’re only designed to overawe.
Although given that Co-President Elon “Sieg Hiel” Musk now has the full identifying information and tax data for every single American (including Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump), there is the rather sad notion that he isn’t the Co-President anymore. I wonder if anyone has explained to Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump how irrelevant he has become.
That’s another thing I’d pay money to see.
It has been another horrifying week to be an American, the third such since Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump was installed into power, and the list of things that he and his minions, lackeys, cronies and slaves have done in that time is both long and unforgivable.
I would very much like to be thinking about other things. I have students to advise and classes to teach. The Super Bowl – the biggest secular holiday on the American calendar after all – is featuring my own hometown Eagles on Sunday for just the fifth time ever and I have had no time at all to revel in that fact. We have summer plans that we’d like to be making, and celebrations that we’d like to plan.
All of this is getting put on hold because a toddler of a man couldn’t deal with losing an election and his fanatical cult put him back into power, apparently to burn the country down.
I will stand and I will be heard, but it would be nice to sit for a while too.
Sunday, February 2, 2025
It's What We Got
You know, folks, I really would like to be discussing pretty much anything but politics right now.
If there is one thing I will be forever grateful to Joe Biden for it is that he was boring. For four blessed years I didn’t have to wake up wondering what catastrophic nightmare the sitting president had pulled out of his ass in the wee hours and foisted off onto an unsuspecting world. I didn’t have to try to figure out ways to protect my loved ones and my communities from the militarized hatred of bigots, fanatics, and lowlifes. I didn’t fear for the survival of the American republic.
It was nice.
And now it’s gone and we’re back to all of that after a four year hiatus.
Just in the last forty-eight hours:
Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump has launched a catastrophically stupid and immoral trade war with our closest trading partners – Canada and Mexico – as well as our largest (China). Because nothing says “stable genius” than trying the same thing he tried last time when he got his ass handed to him, only on a grander scale. Folks, you have no idea what this is going to do to the American economy and, to cite the meme I saw float by a couple of hours ago, I’m not about to try to explain how tariffs work to people who think DEI causes planes to crash. That would be like trying to explain calculus to a dung beetle and all I’d get out of it is older. In both cases I’d probably get shit flung at me. Both Canada and Mexico are going to respond to this with their own tariffs, which Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump has already promised will simply escalate the trade war until the entire economy collapses.
Co-President Elon “Seig Heil” Musk, whom nobody actually voted for, has installed his minions into both the Treasury Department and the OPM, locking out the civil servants who actually work there and downloading all of their files and information onto portable hard drives. There isn’t anything in that sentence that is even remotely legal. When actual government employees have tried to stop these crimes they’ve been fired and slandered. Co-President Elon “Seig Heil” Musk has declared that the entire USAID – an agency that leads international development and humanitarian assistance efforts in allied countries – is a “criminal organization” for not doing exactly what his minions have ordered, and he’s declared the Evangelical Lutheran Church to be a money laundering organization. He’s also declared that he will unilaterally stop releasing funds to groups he dislikes, which alone should have had him arrested and jailed by now but these are the times we live in.
Federal employees are now being warned by their colleagues to document everything, say nothing, and generally behave in a manner consistent with self-defense in a Fascist regime. There is nothing unwarranted about that advice, either.
And so on. There’s more.
I’d really like to be talking about other things here. I have a life. I have observations that don’t necessarily have anything to do with the collapse of the American republic. I’d like to focus on better things.
And at some point I will do that, no matter how bad things get. You need a break now and then.
But for now it is important to use whatever platform I have to get the word out.
It’s not much, but it’s what I have right now. When there is more, there will be more.
Here I stand. I can do no other.
If there is one thing I will be forever grateful to Joe Biden for it is that he was boring. For four blessed years I didn’t have to wake up wondering what catastrophic nightmare the sitting president had pulled out of his ass in the wee hours and foisted off onto an unsuspecting world. I didn’t have to try to figure out ways to protect my loved ones and my communities from the militarized hatred of bigots, fanatics, and lowlifes. I didn’t fear for the survival of the American republic.
It was nice.
And now it’s gone and we’re back to all of that after a four year hiatus.
Just in the last forty-eight hours:
Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump has launched a catastrophically stupid and immoral trade war with our closest trading partners – Canada and Mexico – as well as our largest (China). Because nothing says “stable genius” than trying the same thing he tried last time when he got his ass handed to him, only on a grander scale. Folks, you have no idea what this is going to do to the American economy and, to cite the meme I saw float by a couple of hours ago, I’m not about to try to explain how tariffs work to people who think DEI causes planes to crash. That would be like trying to explain calculus to a dung beetle and all I’d get out of it is older. In both cases I’d probably get shit flung at me. Both Canada and Mexico are going to respond to this with their own tariffs, which Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump has already promised will simply escalate the trade war until the entire economy collapses.
Co-President Elon “Seig Heil” Musk, whom nobody actually voted for, has installed his minions into both the Treasury Department and the OPM, locking out the civil servants who actually work there and downloading all of their files and information onto portable hard drives. There isn’t anything in that sentence that is even remotely legal. When actual government employees have tried to stop these crimes they’ve been fired and slandered. Co-President Elon “Seig Heil” Musk has declared that the entire USAID – an agency that leads international development and humanitarian assistance efforts in allied countries – is a “criminal organization” for not doing exactly what his minions have ordered, and he’s declared the Evangelical Lutheran Church to be a money laundering organization. He’s also declared that he will unilaterally stop releasing funds to groups he dislikes, which alone should have had him arrested and jailed by now but these are the times we live in.
Federal employees are now being warned by their colleagues to document everything, say nothing, and generally behave in a manner consistent with self-defense in a Fascist regime. There is nothing unwarranted about that advice, either.
And so on. There’s more.
I’d really like to be talking about other things here. I have a life. I have observations that don’t necessarily have anything to do with the collapse of the American republic. I’d like to focus on better things.
And at some point I will do that, no matter how bad things get. You need a break now and then.
But for now it is important to use whatever platform I have to get the word out.
It’s not much, but it’s what I have right now. When there is more, there will be more.
Here I stand. I can do no other.
Friday, January 31, 2025
Remember and Resist
So let’s take a step back and consider what the long game here is.
Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, lackeys, cronies, and slaves have launched their Blitzkrieg against the American republic and are rapidly careening through the Fascist playbook toward absolute dictatorship. In the last week or so we’ve seen multiple assertions of power he does not legally possess, daring patriots to push back against him. We’ve seen purges, not only in the federal government in general but in law enforcement in particular. He’s nominated a bizarre slate of suck-ups, fuck-ups, incompetents, and assholes for key government positions, some of them Cabinet level and some of them not, creatures wholly dependent on his whim and possessing no other qualification than a deep and callous willingness to inflict cruelty on command. We’ve seen the deliberate targeting for extinction of entire groups of vulnerable Americans – and if you’ve ever wondered how the Holocaust happened, by the way, this is it. He’s antagonized our allies, launched utterly stupid trade wars that he’s already lost even though he’s claimed victory because he’s too stupid to see past the next fifteen minutes, threatened military invasions, exacted petty revenge against anyone who has ever crossed him, and generally demonstrated exactly why every thinking human being on the planet was screaming at the American electorate to shitcan this halfwit.
Yeah, the American electorate can be stupid. It’s a gift.
It can be hard to keep up with it all, as noted earlier in this space. But in a very real sense that’s the point of it.
Very little of what he’s done so far has been designed to stick. He’s simply testing to see what he can get away with.
Violating the Separation of Powers? Not yet. Maybe next time. The spineless lickspittles that make up the GOP majority in Congress don’t seem to mind being sidelined out of their Constitutional roles and certainly don’t have the gumption to impeach him as the Constitution already requires.
Installing a blind drunk loyalist at the top of the US military? Accomplished. The US military is trained to refuse unlawful orders, but when they come from the SecDef that distinction might be hard to make so it’s going to get interesting when (not if) Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump decides to unleash lethal force against American citizens for the crime of not being part of his minions, lackeys, cronies, and slaves.
And so on.
The point of a Gish Gallop is to overwhelm, demoralize, and distract.
Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump does not want you to see that he is systematically gutting the federal government, turning it into an instrument of his own aggrandizement and removing the guardrails that the Founding Fathers installed to protect the republic from tyranny.
Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump does not want you to see how he has handed over day-to-day policy decision-making to Co-President Elon “Seig Heil” Musk, who has already demanded that federal employees resign en masse and infiltrated the US Treasury’s payments system to shut off federal funds to anyone not subject to Co-President Elon “Seig Heil” Musk’s approval, which is pretty good for a guy who should have been deported decades ago.
Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump does not want you to see that once he’s finished destroying the people you hate he’s going to come after you because that’s just how Fascism works.
You’re supposed to be distracted. You’re supposed to be demoralized. You’re supposed to be overwhelmed.
But forewarned is forearmed, after all, and once you know what the magician knows it isn’t magic anymore. We know what his strategy is, and therefore we can take it into account and respond appropriately.
Do not obey in advance.
Do not forget that Fascism requires submission from more people than can be controlled.
We are Americans. We are perhaps the most stubborn, ungovernable bastards on earth. If we do not wish to be ruled by Fascists, we do not have to be ruled by Fascists.
Remember that in the coming chaos. Remember the larger picture amid the flurry of assaults on all that is worthwhile and sacred.
Remember, and resist.
Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, lackeys, cronies, and slaves have launched their Blitzkrieg against the American republic and are rapidly careening through the Fascist playbook toward absolute dictatorship. In the last week or so we’ve seen multiple assertions of power he does not legally possess, daring patriots to push back against him. We’ve seen purges, not only in the federal government in general but in law enforcement in particular. He’s nominated a bizarre slate of suck-ups, fuck-ups, incompetents, and assholes for key government positions, some of them Cabinet level and some of them not, creatures wholly dependent on his whim and possessing no other qualification than a deep and callous willingness to inflict cruelty on command. We’ve seen the deliberate targeting for extinction of entire groups of vulnerable Americans – and if you’ve ever wondered how the Holocaust happened, by the way, this is it. He’s antagonized our allies, launched utterly stupid trade wars that he’s already lost even though he’s claimed victory because he’s too stupid to see past the next fifteen minutes, threatened military invasions, exacted petty revenge against anyone who has ever crossed him, and generally demonstrated exactly why every thinking human being on the planet was screaming at the American electorate to shitcan this halfwit.
Yeah, the American electorate can be stupid. It’s a gift.
It can be hard to keep up with it all, as noted earlier in this space. But in a very real sense that’s the point of it.
Very little of what he’s done so far has been designed to stick. He’s simply testing to see what he can get away with.
Violating the Separation of Powers? Not yet. Maybe next time. The spineless lickspittles that make up the GOP majority in Congress don’t seem to mind being sidelined out of their Constitutional roles and certainly don’t have the gumption to impeach him as the Constitution already requires.
Installing a blind drunk loyalist at the top of the US military? Accomplished. The US military is trained to refuse unlawful orders, but when they come from the SecDef that distinction might be hard to make so it’s going to get interesting when (not if) Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump decides to unleash lethal force against American citizens for the crime of not being part of his minions, lackeys, cronies, and slaves.
And so on.
The point of a Gish Gallop is to overwhelm, demoralize, and distract.
Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump does not want you to see that he is systematically gutting the federal government, turning it into an instrument of his own aggrandizement and removing the guardrails that the Founding Fathers installed to protect the republic from tyranny.
Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump does not want you to see how he has handed over day-to-day policy decision-making to Co-President Elon “Seig Heil” Musk, who has already demanded that federal employees resign en masse and infiltrated the US Treasury’s payments system to shut off federal funds to anyone not subject to Co-President Elon “Seig Heil” Musk’s approval, which is pretty good for a guy who should have been deported decades ago.
Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump does not want you to see that once he’s finished destroying the people you hate he’s going to come after you because that’s just how Fascism works.
You’re supposed to be distracted. You’re supposed to be demoralized. You’re supposed to be overwhelmed.
But forewarned is forearmed, after all, and once you know what the magician knows it isn’t magic anymore. We know what his strategy is, and therefore we can take it into account and respond appropriately.
Do not obey in advance.
Do not forget that Fascism requires submission from more people than can be controlled.
We are Americans. We are perhaps the most stubborn, ungovernable bastards on earth. If we do not wish to be ruled by Fascists, we do not have to be ruled by Fascists.
Remember that in the coming chaos. Remember the larger picture amid the flurry of assaults on all that is worthwhile and sacred.
Remember, and resist.
Wednesday, January 29, 2025
On the Current Gish Gallop
Duane Gish was one of those right-wing morons who rode the idea of “creationism” to notoriety back in the 1970s. Because of the modern American belief that Truth must lie exactly halfway between any two opposing viewpoints, no matter how vacuous or toxic one of those viewpoints might be, he was often invited to “debate” actual scientists regarding evolution. His signature style in these confrontations was to start speaking and never stop, spewing a continuous rapid-fire stream of bullshit designed to overwhelm and discourage whoever had the misfortune to hear it. He’d vomit words with no particular regard for logic, common sense, provable fact, or connection with objective reality and while everything he said was nonsense he never gave anyone time or space to point this out – and even when someone would try, by the time they did Gish would be a dozen lies further down his road.
This is called a Gish Gallop.
The right wing lionized him for this tactic, which is what happens when a group recognizes they have empty and unpopular ideas and must rely on cheap tricks and overwhelming force to get their way.
Not surprisingly, therefore, this is what Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, cronies, lackeys, and slaves are doing to the American people right now. The firehose of catastrophic decisions, impeachable offenses, Fascist orders, and callous cruelty that has spewed out from the capital in the nine (NINE!) days since Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump was installed into power is specifically designed to disorient and demoralize any coherent opposition while at the same time cementing his authoritarian dismantling of the American republic.
Once you know this, you can protect yourself and others from it. And you can figure out effective responses, rather than spinning wildly after each new outrage.
Because there have been a lot of outrages perpetrated in a very short amount of time. These include:
Attempting to repeal a Constitutional amendment by fiat in order to deny the birthright citizenship that is clearly and explicitly outlined in the Fourteenth Amendment, an amendment ratified in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War to avoid having white supremacists and insurrectionists decide who gets to be an American. If you’ve ever wondered why the American right wing loves to cite the Dred Scott decision (universally regarded by as the worst Supreme Court decision ever made, which is saying something in the target-rich environment that is the Court’s history) it is because that was the decision the Fourteenth Amendment was specifically designed to overturn.
Declaring that he had fired more than a dozen independent Inspectors General – officials whose job it is to root out corruption, abuse, and criminality in federal agencies – in clear violation of the law governing how that process works.
Impounding all grants and loans given by the federal government, a brutally cynical violation of the Separation of Powers and as such a direct assault on the Constitution itself, because – as one observer pointed out – if the President can unilaterally decide how much of or even whether money designated by Congress can be spent then you don’t need a Congress and all you have left is tyranny. There is nothing in the Constitution that says the President has any say whatsoever in this matter or any role other than to do what Congress has told him to do. For Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump to attempt to arrogate this power to himself is therefore an astonishingly serious crime that should have already produced an impeachment vote. A court blocked the impoundment and then apparently some Real Lawyers explained to the Trump Lawyers exactly how much shit was about to hit the fan and magically the cryptic two-page memo purporting to undo the basic structure of American government was “rescinded,” but the offense was still committed and should still be punished.
I’m not even going to go into the long list of agencies and programs that this assault on America would have crippled except to note that most Americans have no idea how much they depend on those agencies and programs.
He has issued Executive Orders by the dozens – the weakest and least effective form of federal power – in large part because he recognizes that not even the spineless buffoons masquerading as Republican Senators and Representatives would consent to them, an avalanche of cruelty, illegality, counterproductive backsliding, and/or petty vengeance.
Some things these Executive Orders have accomplished so far include raising costs for medications for Americans (something Biden had capped); restricting voting access; cutting funding for public health; protecting workers safety; unleashing the jackbooted thugs of ICE on the population – including, apparently, American citizens who just happen to have brown skin, as news reports have repeatedly demonstrated; directing his administration to seek vengeance against any official or state or local government who dares to protest this; suspending American participation in the Global Tax Deal (an international agreement designed to prevent multinational corporations from evading taxes); declaring several specious “emergencies” allowing him to expand the use of executive power; eliminating policies designed to reduce fossil fuel dependence and climate change; eliminating the professional civil service and replacing it with more minions, cronies, lackeys, and slaves; canceling sanctions against right-wing Israeli groups; removing guardrails preventing the abuse of AI; forbidding any federal agency from making public comments unless approved in advance (did you know we are currently in the middle of the largest outbreak of tuberculosis in recent American history? No? Do you wonder why you don’t know?); and pardoning the treasonous insurrectionists who tried to overthrow the government the last time Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump was in power.
This is just a selection, by the way. There’s more.
He’s also more or less eliminated any mention of – let alone protections for – anyone who is not a straight white man. He has officially declared that – contrary to all understandings of biology – there are only two genders and anyone who says otherwise will be punished. Bottom line, anyone who is LGBTQ+, non-white (especially if they speak Spanish), or female is now a target for official persecution from their own government.
He’s pulled out the Paris Climate Agreement and the World Health Organization. He’s put tariffs of 25% on Mexico and Canada, two of our largest trading partners and the source of much of our food and energy. He’s threatened trade wars with countries that refused to do his bidding and threatened actual wars with countries whose land he’s decided he wants, some of whom are NATO allies. He’s interfered with the census in order to reshape the Electoral College. He’s declared he can give security clearances to anyone he wants for six months, a profoundly threatening move given the collection of rubes, foreign puppets, and security threats he’s assembled for his administration.
He even revoked the Equal Employment Opportunity order issued by Lyndon Johnson in 1965, freeing up the federal government to discriminate on the basis of race, religion, and gender.
So far, though, he has done nothing to reduce the price of eggs. We’re all waiting for that.
The bottom line of all of this is that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump is doing everything he can to turn the American republic into a tin-horn dictatorship with him at the center. Everything he has done so far has been to move power into his own hands. It’s a playbook we’ve seen before with dictatorships.
If the US Capitol mysteriously catches fire in the next few months, don’t say you weren’t warned.
The way to defeat a Gish Gallop is simply to wait it out until opportunities arise. Swat down the most obvious and harmful parts, but don’t run around madly trying to deal with it all at once. Soon enough it will run down. The wave of cruelty and sedition will crest, and there will be a period where Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, cronies, lackeys and slaves will try to consolidate their gains.
And this is when they will be vulnerable. This is when the counterattack in defense of the republic begins.
Stand firm. Do not be baited. Protect those who need to be protected and actively minimize harm whenever possible.
And then when the opportunity to respond effectively arises, take it.
This is called a Gish Gallop.
The right wing lionized him for this tactic, which is what happens when a group recognizes they have empty and unpopular ideas and must rely on cheap tricks and overwhelming force to get their way.
Not surprisingly, therefore, this is what Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, cronies, lackeys, and slaves are doing to the American people right now. The firehose of catastrophic decisions, impeachable offenses, Fascist orders, and callous cruelty that has spewed out from the capital in the nine (NINE!) days since Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump was installed into power is specifically designed to disorient and demoralize any coherent opposition while at the same time cementing his authoritarian dismantling of the American republic.
Once you know this, you can protect yourself and others from it. And you can figure out effective responses, rather than spinning wildly after each new outrage.
Because there have been a lot of outrages perpetrated in a very short amount of time. These include:
Attempting to repeal a Constitutional amendment by fiat in order to deny the birthright citizenship that is clearly and explicitly outlined in the Fourteenth Amendment, an amendment ratified in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War to avoid having white supremacists and insurrectionists decide who gets to be an American. If you’ve ever wondered why the American right wing loves to cite the Dred Scott decision (universally regarded by as the worst Supreme Court decision ever made, which is saying something in the target-rich environment that is the Court’s history) it is because that was the decision the Fourteenth Amendment was specifically designed to overturn.
Declaring that he had fired more than a dozen independent Inspectors General – officials whose job it is to root out corruption, abuse, and criminality in federal agencies – in clear violation of the law governing how that process works.
Impounding all grants and loans given by the federal government, a brutally cynical violation of the Separation of Powers and as such a direct assault on the Constitution itself, because – as one observer pointed out – if the President can unilaterally decide how much of or even whether money designated by Congress can be spent then you don’t need a Congress and all you have left is tyranny. There is nothing in the Constitution that says the President has any say whatsoever in this matter or any role other than to do what Congress has told him to do. For Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump to attempt to arrogate this power to himself is therefore an astonishingly serious crime that should have already produced an impeachment vote. A court blocked the impoundment and then apparently some Real Lawyers explained to the Trump Lawyers exactly how much shit was about to hit the fan and magically the cryptic two-page memo purporting to undo the basic structure of American government was “rescinded,” but the offense was still committed and should still be punished.
I’m not even going to go into the long list of agencies and programs that this assault on America would have crippled except to note that most Americans have no idea how much they depend on those agencies and programs.
He has issued Executive Orders by the dozens – the weakest and least effective form of federal power – in large part because he recognizes that not even the spineless buffoons masquerading as Republican Senators and Representatives would consent to them, an avalanche of cruelty, illegality, counterproductive backsliding, and/or petty vengeance.
Some things these Executive Orders have accomplished so far include raising costs for medications for Americans (something Biden had capped); restricting voting access; cutting funding for public health; protecting workers safety; unleashing the jackbooted thugs of ICE on the population – including, apparently, American citizens who just happen to have brown skin, as news reports have repeatedly demonstrated; directing his administration to seek vengeance against any official or state or local government who dares to protest this; suspending American participation in the Global Tax Deal (an international agreement designed to prevent multinational corporations from evading taxes); declaring several specious “emergencies” allowing him to expand the use of executive power; eliminating policies designed to reduce fossil fuel dependence and climate change; eliminating the professional civil service and replacing it with more minions, cronies, lackeys, and slaves; canceling sanctions against right-wing Israeli groups; removing guardrails preventing the abuse of AI; forbidding any federal agency from making public comments unless approved in advance (did you know we are currently in the middle of the largest outbreak of tuberculosis in recent American history? No? Do you wonder why you don’t know?); and pardoning the treasonous insurrectionists who tried to overthrow the government the last time Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump was in power.
This is just a selection, by the way. There’s more.
He’s also more or less eliminated any mention of – let alone protections for – anyone who is not a straight white man. He has officially declared that – contrary to all understandings of biology – there are only two genders and anyone who says otherwise will be punished. Bottom line, anyone who is LGBTQ+, non-white (especially if they speak Spanish), or female is now a target for official persecution from their own government.
He’s pulled out the Paris Climate Agreement and the World Health Organization. He’s put tariffs of 25% on Mexico and Canada, two of our largest trading partners and the source of much of our food and energy. He’s threatened trade wars with countries that refused to do his bidding and threatened actual wars with countries whose land he’s decided he wants, some of whom are NATO allies. He’s interfered with the census in order to reshape the Electoral College. He’s declared he can give security clearances to anyone he wants for six months, a profoundly threatening move given the collection of rubes, foreign puppets, and security threats he’s assembled for his administration.
He even revoked the Equal Employment Opportunity order issued by Lyndon Johnson in 1965, freeing up the federal government to discriminate on the basis of race, religion, and gender.
So far, though, he has done nothing to reduce the price of eggs. We’re all waiting for that.
The bottom line of all of this is that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump is doing everything he can to turn the American republic into a tin-horn dictatorship with him at the center. Everything he has done so far has been to move power into his own hands. It’s a playbook we’ve seen before with dictatorships.
If the US Capitol mysteriously catches fire in the next few months, don’t say you weren’t warned.
The way to defeat a Gish Gallop is simply to wait it out until opportunities arise. Swat down the most obvious and harmful parts, but don’t run around madly trying to deal with it all at once. Soon enough it will run down. The wave of cruelty and sedition will crest, and there will be a period where Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, cronies, lackeys and slaves will try to consolidate their gains.
And this is when they will be vulnerable. This is when the counterattack in defense of the republic begins.
Stand firm. Do not be baited. Protect those who need to be protected and actively minimize harm whenever possible.
And then when the opportunity to respond effectively arises, take it.
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