1May2025
Good news! Republican Judge Jefferson Griffin has been trying since the November election to overturn the clearly-expressed will of the people of North Carolina! The North Carolina Supreme Court has ruled that no, you can’t change the law after the election to disqualify an election that you didn’t win! “The federal court has now ruled that changing the rules after the election was unconstitutional.”
Also, two judges in a row decided that no, the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 doesn’t apply to Venezuelan migrants. They are not engaged in an “act of war” against the US. Like any other criminal suspects, they have rights that must be respected.
And best of all, law firms that “bent the knee” to the Trump Administration are continuing to lose legal work to more principle firms that didn’t surrender!
There’s been a suspicion for a while, and now we appear to have confirmation (Gift article link to WaPo story). “The U.S. DOGE Service is racing to build a single centralized database with vast troves of personal information about millions of U.S. citizens and residents…”
This would of course violate any notion of privacy and would be highly vulnerable to hackers who have all sorts of evil motives to access this data. One of the announced objectives is to eliminate “information silos.” A democracy simply doesn’t need a single, centralized database. A tyrannical oligarchy of course, does. DOGE has the goal of “joining all data across government.” You can’t keep track of political dissidents without being able to look up data that would ordinarily be spread across many government departments.
This writer traces the problem to “Techno-Libertarianism,” the feeling that democracy is obsolete and must be replaced with a technocratic elite. Ehh, I have very serious doubts that there’s any elite that knows better than people in general, especially when they’re all from the same demographic group. Groupthink is a very real problem that leads societies down bad paths.
Recently on Xitter, a Trump fan listed a whole series of (highly questionable) “accomplishments” in the field of diplomacy. The first two were “Russia – Ukraine” I regularly follow developments there
and can assure readers that Trump has accomplished absolutely zippo concerning peace between those two. The second was “Israel – Hamas.” First off, it should read “Israel – Gaza” because the fighting in Gaza has killed and wounded many, many Palestinian civilians. The news in that case is quite disturbing and Israel’s objectives appear to be just plain genocidal. World Central Kitchen (WCK) has been performing heroic work in many locations around the world where they are needed, including in Gaza, but…
WCK trucks loaded with food and cooking fuel have been ready at the Gaza border since early March. Additional food and equipment are ready to be shipped to the border from Jordan and Egypt. Our vital work cannot continue without permission from Israel for this aid to enter.
But WCK kitchens are out of food to cook and distribute to Palestinians in Gaza. A this point, it just looks like Israel is intent on ethnic cleansing and the indefinite occupation of Gaza.
Heh! Plenty of groups marked with different-colored t-shirts.
Just frickin’ amazingly wild waste of time and resources! Back in February, Musk and DOGE began asking government workers to list their accomplishments
for the past week. After essentially diverting government employees from doing useful work, CDC employees found out that their emails with their list of accomplishments weren’t even being opened, let alone read! Also, people at HHS were offered, no dissent allowed and absolutely no alternatives, “…job transfers to faraway Indian Health Service locations…” where there was no infrastructure prepared to make any use of their skills and talents. See my comment about technocratic elites above.
I’m deeply concerned about the last point the blogger makes. Trump wants to be a dictator without any guardrails, checks or balances. He doesn’t know what his own administration is up to or what his own people are doing. Why would anyone want a government that’s just flying on autopilot? Also, it’s disturbing when the President of the United States doesn’t appear to know the Constitution.
I’m used to seeing photos of presidents standing next to candidates they’re endorsing for office, so it was a shock to read President Trump’s endorsement of Casey Means. President Donald Trump said at a news conference that he had nominated Means,
“Because Bobby thought she was fantastic. She’s a brilliant woman who went through Stanford, and as I understand it, she basically wanted to be an academic as opposed to a surgeon. … I don’t know her. I listen to the recommendation of Bobby.” He was responding to a reporter who reminded him that she had “never finished her residency and is not a practicing physician.”
Missing, of course, is any mention of Trump personally meeting with Means and getting to know her. What does Trump do all day that he doesn’t have time to meet with candidates for important offices?
Heh! From the same article, right-wing Trump adviser Laura “Loomer wrote on X that Means ‘prays to inanimate objects, communicates with spirit mediums, uses shrooms as plant medicine and talks to trees.’”
In order to extend the 2017 Trump tax break, Republicans have decided they have to find $880 billion in spending cuts. DOGE has failed to find much of anything; the idea from the House is that they can save money on Medicaid by:
imposing work requirements and stricter, more frequent eligibility checks and tightening rules to ensure that undocumented immigrants, who are already not eligible for the program, cannot receive any of its services.
None of this is likely to produce significant savings as Medicaid recipients are frequently either working in any event or taking care of young, old or disabled people. It’s very unlikely that imposing work requirements is going to produce anything financially meaningful. The piece goes on to show that many members of MAGA are fully aware that deep cuts to Medicaid are likely to be highly unpopular.
The founder of Daily Kos has been publishing a series on Trump supporters who have now changed their minds, or at least have seen that Trump is less than a good president.
The basic lesson in this latest round-up of stories is that democracy works best when people get together to improve everybody’s lives. When we use democracy to punish groups that we disapprove of the government frequently does what it’s allegedly “not supposed to do” and punishes people who thought they were immune and thought the government wouldn’t punish them! It’s called FAFO and it stands for (eff) Around and Find Out
FBI Director Kash Patel was a concerning pick for the position well before he was chosen. With his budget a week overdue, Patel gave highly unsatisfactory answers as to when it would be turned in. Part of the reason could be:
…hockey games, soccer matches and UFC fights. Flight records show he appears to have made trips to Nashville, where his girlfriend lives, and to Las Vegas, where he owns property. He’s also been seen hanging out with celebrities including actor Mel Gibson and hockey great Wayne Gretzky.
In other words, he treats his Directorship as kind of a side gig as opposed to being his primary job.
Archived Photoessays 
Leave a comment