Hurt some and offer their pain as a spectacle to everyone else

My Sunday movie was Tales from the Script, documentary about movie screenwriters. More than 40 writers talk about their work. Some of the famous ones are John Carpenter, Frank Darabont, Antwone Fisher, and William Goldman. They talk a bit about the writing process and needing to be willing to rewrite it 40 or more times. They talk more about: How competitive the business is and no one cares how good your previous script was, until you are a proven moneymaker. How hard it is to get an agent. How hard it is to pitch your story to a movie executive who loses nothing if he says no and might cause himself and his company a great deal of worry if he says yes. Costs are so high studios are very cautious. Or the producer says it’s a great idea but I want another writer to do it. Or they want changes – and if they want to add a chase scene it’s an indication there is a structural flaw elsewhere in the story. One must try to look lesser than the producer. What happens when the director and actors get ahold of it. They’ll say the character isn’t quite real and should say this instead. You must let them do it. This movie is divided in to chapters – talking about agents, producers, directors, actors – and at the start of each one is a scene from a movie about making a movie. And if you do end up with a hit the success can scare you so badly your writing freezes. So become a screenwriter only if your personality won’t let you do anything else. I enjoyed the film. Many of the stories are amusing or interesting. An example is Antwone Fisher working with Sidney Poitier. Fisher is so in awe in meeting his idol he can’t get coherent sentences out. I had previously written about documentaries about film composers and casting directors. I finished the book Packing for Mars, the Curious Science of Life in the Void by Mary Roach. One might think this is about what to throw in a suitcase and a rebuttal to the book City on Mars by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith that is highly critical of the efforts to get to Mars and that the fundamentally difficult problems in getting there seriously question the benefits of going. I reviewed that one back in April. But this book is more of a companion piece. I think a more accurate title would be Packing a Body for Mars. Getting a robot to Mars now seems easy. We’ve done it many times. Getting a human body to Mars is significantly harder. Roach, with a humorous touch, explores the history of getting a body into space and to the moon, covering several of the issues: Can someone live in a can for the many months flying there would take? Can someone live with someone else in that same small can without going outside for a break? (The International Space Station shows we can, though an escape to earth is never far away.) What can the forces of liftoff do to a body? Of landing? Of the weightlessness between those two points? How to deal with the weightless equivalent of motion sickness? Why we need to bathe and can one adequately bathe in space? The main purpose of Gemini VII was to spend two weeks testing that. I learned a lot more than I wanted to about space toilets. I think the first two paragraphs explain the book well:

To the rocket scientist, you are a problem. You are the most irritating piece of machinery he or she will ever have to deal with. You and your fluctuating metabolism, your puny memory, your frame that comes in a million different configurations. You are unpredictable. You’re inconstant. You take weeks to fix. The engineer must worry about the water and oxygen and food you’ll need in space, about how much extra fuel it will take to launch your shrimp cocktail and irradiated beef tacos. A solar cell or a thruster nozzle is stable and undemanding. It does not excrete or panic or fall in love with the mission commander. It has no ego. It’s structural elements don’t start to break down without gravity, and it works just fine without sleep. To me, you are the best thing to happen to rocket science. The human being is the machine that makes the whole endeavor so endlessly intriguing. To take an organism whose every feature has evolved to keep it alive and thriving in a world with oxygen, gravity, and water, to suspend that organism in the wasteland of space for a month or a year is a preposterous but captivating undertaking. Everything one takes of granted on Earth must be rethought, relearned, rehearsed – full grown men and women toilet-trained, a chimpanzee dressed in a flight suit and launched into orbit. An entire odd universe of mock outer space has grown up here on earth. Capsules that never blast off; hospital wards where healthy people spend months on their backs, masquerading zero gravity; crash labs where cadavers drop to Earth in simulated splash-downs.

This is a fun and enjoyable read, and a great book for those into space exploration. On Monday Homeland Security obtained a warrant and raided the house of Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota. Even NPR saw that the raid was politically motivated. The reason for the raid was to look for evidence of illegal immigration – she came to the US from Somalia as a child, though is now a US citizen. The raid was to look for evidence that her father did something wrong on the immigration papers. Of course, the real reason for the raid is because Omar is Muslim and also an outspoken critic of the nasty guy. He’s trying to silence his critics. David Michigan of the Daily Kos community says there is another reason behind the raid. In the midterm elections (results should be known in three weeks!) Republicans will quite likely lose control of the House and could lose control of the Senate. Once in office Democrats will open (they’d better open – it’s one reason why we’re sending them there) investigations into the corruption of the nasty guy, his cabinet, and the other big people in his administration.

Given all this, what does trump want to do, more than anything else? De-legitimize the very notion of accountability for public figures. Opening a blatantly corrupt investigation of a political figure may seem like a curious way of achieving this end, but work through the logic: Democrats and even neutral observers immediately picked up on the political implications of the Omar raid and denounced it as politically motivated. If an investigation of a Democrat is widely seen illegitimate because of the political motivation, then how could an investigation of trump or his minions by a political body be anything other than illegitimate? That’s the question they are working to plant in the minds of Americans, and especially in the minds of reporters and editors. Surely we must both-sides everything. Three months now, if (knock on wood) the Congress opens investigations into administration malfeasance, the media will be under intense pressure to compare the hearings to the blatantly illegitimate raid on Ilhan Omar. ... Yes, the Omar raid was blatantly corrupt. Such a clear violation of every norm that the norm-breaking itself made the front pages. That was the point.

Thom Hartmann of the Kos community has a different and complementary take on the raid. It is the same terrifying tactic used by every dictator:

As every dictator on Earth can tell you, you don’t have to silence the entire country; all you have to do is shut up a few strategically-selected people visibly and publicly enough and the rest of the country will get the message and back away.

The tactic costs the tyrant little and can have enormous impact on public behavior. Hartmann explored some of the history of this tactic. King George II executed Admiral John Byng because he lost a battle. Voltaire included that in his novella Candide. Hitler threw a few thousand liberal commentators into newly opened Dachau. Stalin used it. Putin used against one billionaire oligarch, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and all the rest immediately fell into line. Joe McCarthy never sent anyone to prison but his hearings prompted thousands of people in the movie industry and elsewhere to shut up. Hartmann also lists the people the nasty guy has attacked in this or similar manner: James Comey, Letitia James, Lisa Cook, Adam Schiff, Jan. 6 testifier Cassidy Hutchinson, former CIA Director John Brennan, Olympian Davey Hearn who touched the Reflecting Pool paint, black journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort, George Stephanopoulos and Jimmy Kimmel of ABC, reporters banned from the White House, and many more.

As former Homeland Security Chief of Staff Miles Taylor told me on my radio/TV program when Trump went after him, Comey, and others, the raid itself is the punishment. To destroy a person financially, to traumatize them emotionally, and to scare the hell out of their colleagues in a way that will make them shut up you don’t need a conviction. Hell, you don’t even need a trial. Just a subpoena, a lawyer letter filled with threats, or a raid can lead to hundreds of thousands in lawyer bills and months of sleepless nights.

Right now judges are the only force capable of stopping the nasty guy. So, of course, he or his minions are attacking them too. If the legislature and the press are cowed the courts will eventually crack too.

Trump’s goal is a quiet country. A country where the prosecutor doesn’t bring the case against the powerful donor, the reporter doesn’t file the story, the professor doesn’t sign the letter, the grand juror doesn’t want the hassle, and the judge wonders about her family before she rules.

Another group that has a chance of stopping the nasty guy is Democrats in Congress. Vote to make sure they gain a majority in both chambers. In the comments of the pundit roundup for Kos from Wednesday a week ago exlrrp posted a meme of a message by Jon Stewart:

I just want to say this to Trump’s defenders. You don’t have to bend over backwards trying to make Trump’s authoritarian power grabs seem like the rule of law. He does not give a f--- anymore. He’s saying it straight up. Trump is saying the people like dictators. Trump is saying I hate my opponents and I want them punished. And Trump is saying I’ll use all the levers of government at my disposal to accomplish that goal. So you can get on board with that and say I’m with that or you can join the rest of us and fight like hell for this constitutional republic.

Another meme posted by exlrrp:

The liberal plot to make Republicans look stupid, also known as “Operation Just Let Them Speak,” is working splendidly.

In Sunday’s roundup Chitown Kev quoted Timothy Snyder writing for his own Substack about Hegesth saying the firing squad execution of Nidal Hasan will be livestreamed. Hegseth says it will deter terrorism.

To livestream an execution will not deter terrorism. It will invite terrorism, as Mr. Hegseth no doubt understands. The deeper political consequence, however, is domestic. The basis of politics in the Trump regime is sado-populism. Rather than offer policy that benefits Americans, Trump uses the government to hurt some, and offer their pain as a spectacle to everyone else. To livestream a public execution is to take that politics to its logical extreme. The federal government would be instructing us to observe, and thus participate in, a public killing. This invitation to us is a major step towards seeing politics only as the pain of others. While execution by firing squad is the endpoint of a judicial proceeding, broadcasting it is to advertise killing is a political transformation. If Americans view, clip, share, and permanently enshrine an American public killing in a million ways on the internet, we will move towards fascist rituals of violence.”

In the comments darthstar included a tweet by News Eye that says, “This is how you write a headline.” The headline appeared in The Telegraph for an article about Trump making a deal with Putin to buy diesel fuel. The headline and subhead:

Trump backstabs Zelensky for five minutes of midterm relief. Deal with Putin for Russian’s oil might soften the markets but Ukraine will pay the price.

And a tweet by the James Talarico campaign, running against Ken Paxton for the Senate. It’s a spoof of the easily debunked claim that Talarico wasn’t seen for several days, not because he was home with the flu, but in a mental hospital in Ohio.

I challenged Ken Paxton to a debate 85 days ago, but no one has heard from him. People are getting worried. I’ve received credible reports he’s suffering from a rare condition that causes clinical levels of cowardice. @KenPaxtonTx: I’m asking for proof of ability to debate.

Sacred places profaned by the blasphemy of war

My Sunday movie was Sasquatch Sunset from 2024. It is the story of four sasquatch (also known as yeti or bigfoot) – two adults males, and adult female, and a juvenile male. They are perhaps the last of their kind. They live in a forest and we see them deal with the world around them. They encounter the other animals, decide what they can eat, groom each other, signal one another, have sex, all without language. Though one tries to count. It is billed as a comedy with plenty of hijinks. My reaction wasn’t so much laughter, but boredom. I thought we might get somewhere when they began to encounter evidence of humans, such as a road. But not much. Only at the end do we see they sense they are losing their habitat. I will give it credit for unique and bizarre. I rarely bother to see a movie with a Metacritic rating of 60 or less. This one got 42 reviews with a rating all the way from 100 to 25 with an average of 66. So I thought this would be decent. Alas, I agree more with the review that gave it a 50 – it would have been brilliant at 15 minutes, but this was 90. IMDb gave it 5.4 out of 10. I think that’s more accurate. Thankfully, I’ve watched very few duds. I had mentioned that Pope Leo has been criticizing the nasty guy and his wars. Emily Singer of Daily Kos has details. He’s been doing this for quite a while. Here are a few of his pronouncements.

God does not bless any conflict. Anyone who is a disciple of Christ, the Prince of Peace, is never on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs. ... Absurd and inhuman violence is spreading ferociously through the sacred places of the Christian East, profaned by the blasphemy of war and the brutality of business, with no regard for people’s lives, which are considered at most collateral damage of self-interest. But no gain can be worth the life of the weakest, children, or families. No cause can justify the shedding of innocent blood. ... I would like to invite everyone to truly think in their hearts about the many innocent people, so many children, so many elderly, completely innocent, who would also become victims of this escalation of a war that began from the very first days

Kos of Kos discussed the current national conversation. After the firing of Kristi Noem and Pam Bondi the focus is back on the nasty guy. He’s crossed into more dangerous mental territory, to the point that even Tucker Carlson said he should not have nuclear codes. Others on the right have called for invoking the 25th Amendment. Yet, mainstream media has returned to sanewashing, filtering his comments and protecting him. Democrats aren’t much better:

Democrats push war powers resolutions that, even if passed, would spend years tied up in courts before a friendly Supreme Court neuters them. Everyone is still operating within boundaries Trump has already blown past, reacting to events instead of confronting the reality driving them.

And Republicans, who know they are in deep trouble in the midterm elections, have chosen complicity. On Sunday, the news out of Hungary was pretty sweet. Yeah, this is another story that got wide notice before I had a chance to write about it. Maybe I can share a view not widely reported. Viktor Orbán, the prime minister, who has been quite the dictator over his 16 years in office was defeated in Saturday’s national election. Even better, he conceded. The winner was Péter Magyar. Prime Minister is not a position voters elect directly. To be elected prime minister he had to create a political party, which he named Tisza, and recruit candidates to run for each seat. Then he had to convince the public to vote for them. And he did it – in an environment that Orbán made quite difficult, including extensive gerrymandering and public media in his pocket. TheCriticalMind of the Kos community reported Magyar won 138 seats of 199. That gives him enough of a majority he can undo the constitutional changes Orbán had made. Voter turnout was an impressive 78%. This means citizens soundly rejected autocracy and want democracy. They want to end Orbán’s veto of aid to Ukraine and resist Russia. The far right parties across Europe are taking note. AKALib of the Kos community has a bit on the night before the election. The photo of the nighttime rally with small torches is impressive. On Sunday afternoon Kos wrote about Magyar’s win. His party got 53% of the vote and Orbán’s party got 37%. Orbán had been following and promoting the autocrat’s playbook for quite a while. He spoke the language of MAGA (or they spoke his). He knew how to target scapegoats. He served as a model for and incubator of conservative power. And the people said no. Just a week before America’s vice nasty went to Hungary to campaign for Orbán. A tweet shows a Polymarket prediction of the winner moved sharply against Orbán after the vice nasty spoke. The nasty guy has lost a strongman ally. We’d like to lose him too. An open question is who is Magyar? He used to be a member of Orbán’s party. How much of that party platform is he keeping and how much is he rejecting? Where is he on the political spectrum? Probably more accurately, how far right is he? We don’t know yet. Rob Schmitz of NPR reported on the election. Citizens partied when the results were announced because they had doubts Orbán could lose. But with Orbán gone Magyar has aid he will rebuild ties with NATO and the EU. The EU had blocked aid to Hungary because of Orbáns anti democracy policies. Because the EU works on consensus Orbán, the leader of a small country, had enormous power through the use of vetoes, and could direct investment towards other authoritarian regimes, such as Russia, China, and Turkey. And members of Orbán’s government were caught handing EU memos about Ukraine to Russia. NPR host Michel Martin spoke to David Pressman, who had been ambassador to Hungary under Biden and is now a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. He said Orbán’s attacks on the EU and on Soros and Zelenskyy and his conspiracy theories could not explain failing schools, crumbling hospitals, and why Hungary was the poorest country in the EU. His great propaganda system couldn’t hide the disparity between the common man’s poverty and the prime minister’s palatial estate. Hungarians voted for change because they “were seeing the cost of corruption in their daily lives.” Magyar countered that by focusing on corruption. With that focus he was able to reach the conservative rural voters. He was prepared to fight and go places that he was told were off limits, places where people used government talking points to ask questions. Pressman said the vice nasty’s visit didn’t help Orbán because it was all about the nasty guy’s interest in rewarding loyalists – it was about the nasty guy himself. In Sunday’s pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted a pair of tweets, first from Garry Kasparov:

Apologists trying to credit Orbán for conceding are intentionally missing the point. He would’ve done anything to stay in power had he thought it possible. Hungarians made it impossible. Trying & failing to destroy democracy receives no credit. He didn't stop; he was stopped.

Michael Weiss added:

It was an overwhelming result and impossible to fudge without risking a protest movement that would have been Euromaidan on steroids. Also don’t discount the fear of the ignominious Ceaușescu exit.

I remember the news of the execution of Ceaușescu, president of communist Romania. If you really want to know more his Wikipedia page is here. I looked for it to remember which country he had led. Isaac Stanley-Becker of The Atlantic

The prime minister’s loss is a crushing defeat for Donald Trump and his vice president, J.D. Vance, who modeled their agenda in part on Orbán’s governance and staffed their movement with activists trained at his think tanks. As Trump alienated traditional U.S. partners, Washington looked to the like-minded leader in Budapest to represent its interests inside the European Union. The bond was so meaningful to Vance personally that he traveled to Budapest last week to campaign alongside Orbán as if they were running-mates.

A tweet from Jonathan Martin:

Orban's overwhelming defeat will, among other things, only prompt Trump to further question Vance's political utility. Perhaps tis not fair, the margin appears decisive enough that it woulda been same whether Trump or nobody from the U.S. showed, but Trump is who he is.

And a tweet from Harry Enten:

Vance's unsuccessful efforts to help Orban in Hungary are part of a larger problem. Vance's net approval has tumbled by over 20 pts since early 2025. He's the least popular VP at this point in a vice presidency. And most say the Trump admin is too focused on foreign matters.

Josh Keefe of the Maine Monitor discussing the race to be the Democratic nominee for US Senate between Gov. Janet Mills and Graham Platner. Mills says she will go toe to toe with the nasty guy, but is a part of the Democratic establishment.

Platner is up to something different. He isn’t running a campaign so much as seeking to build a mass movement against the status quo. He’s not trying to woo the working class to the Democratic Party; he’s trying to mobilize the working class to take over the Democratic Party and use it to fundamentally change the relationship between government and citizens. To him, Trump is a symptom of a larger rot, a fundamentally broken system, and the old rules of American politics are already beside the point. The Democratic establishment is “still existing in this world where they think that if you know the rules the best, you’re going to win,” he told me. “When the other side is just beating you over the head with the rule book, it doesn’t matter.”

Andy Kim, senator from New Jersey, commented on the single day effort by the vice nasty to try to get a deal with Iran.

Did Vance think he was going to solve decades of disputes with Iran in 1 day? He spent 5 days in Feb hanging out at the Winter Olympics. Iran got highest level negotiations with America ever and still controls the Strait of Hormuz, while Vance appears to be giving up. Diplomacy takes enormous planning, technical expertise, and persistent engagement, especially in war time. Our servicemembers in harm's way and Americans struggling with gas prices deserve serious negotiations, not the performance we just saw.

Another pair of tweets, first from Sami Gold:

Who’s gonna take over as world patron of the illiberal right now that Orban is gone? Trump clearly isn’t that concerned, Meloni’s too tactical, Bolsonaro’s in jail, Milei’s a libertarian, and Putin’s in a fortress mindset. Netanyahu? Fico? Modi?

Benjy Sarlin added:

Similar to Orban, Netanyahu also has high odds of being ousted by a somewhat less illiberal unity coalition in a few months.

Meteor Blades, Kos staff emeritus, posted without commentary a quote from an editorial board opinion from Israel’s left-leaning newspaper Haaretz. This is the entire quote:

Without a shred of shame, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu once again asked the Jerusalem District Court to postpone for at least two weeks his testimony in his corruption trial. In a letter to the judges, the prime minister’s lawyer claimed that “classified security and political reasons” related to the war justified the request. It is difficult to ignore the fact that the “dramatic events” due to which the request was submitted are the handiwork of none other than the person making the request. If Netanyahu uses the war as a pretext to postpone his trial, he should not be surprised when it is said that his military and diplomatic moves are driven by ulterior motives. This is how he manipulates the court time and again: With one hand he creates “dramatic events,” and with the other he points to them as a force majeure that prevents him from testifying in his trial and “proving his innocence.” But even if these are circumstances beyond Netanyahu’s control, the repeated delays in his trial in the wake of his requests confirm the logic of the petitions to the High Court of Justice demanding that he be barred from running in the next election precisely on account of the trial: There is an inherent conflict of interest between being prime minister and being a criminal defendant. […] Netanyahu and his lawyers behave like actors in a farce meant to ridicule the court and the principle of equality before the law. But those responsible for this farce are first and foremost the judges, who are letting the defendant play them as if they are the ones on trial, not Netanyahu.

A decision maker seduced by previous military successes

My Sunday movie was A Nice Indian Boy. The story centers on Naveen, a young gay man who is a doctor. He’s rather timid. He’s also annoyed that at his sister’s wedding everyone tells him, “You’re next.” A few years later Naveen meets Jay (played by Jonathan Groff). He’s white though adopted by Indian parents so knows the culture – somewhat. They seem to fall in love quickly. This is a romance story and follows the formula. The difficulty here is when Naveen finally gets the courage to take Jay to meet his sister and parents things don’t go well, more from misunderstanding than homophobia. The second difficulty was how to fit a gay couple into a traditional Indian wedding. I enjoyed it. Nearly all of the threads of the story conclude in the way one would want. The movie has a bunch of award nominations and a few wins. Zarna Garg plays Naveen’s mother. She is an Indian American comedian. Back in mid February she was interviewed for Pridesource by Chris Azzopardi. She talked about being an ally and working to tell other parents they need to support their queer kids, well, queer people in general. As part of the interview Garg said that her friends who are gay have the highest EQ of the people she knows. I had to verify what that means – Emotional Quotient or Emotional Intelligence, the ability to recognize the emotions in themselves and others to guide thinking and behavior. Garg says she’s used to the “brown guys” who avoid emotional friction and was startled when the gays around her are so empathetic. She also tells the story of her sister, who became an ally because of the movie. The family lived in Ohio after they came from India. The sister booked theaters across Ohio, telling Indians they have an obligation to see the movie. There is no excuse, it’s all paid for. I finished the book My Government Means to Kill Me, a novel by Rasheed Newson. The story isn’t as dire as the title might sound. The phrase comes from something many LGBTQ people, especially black gay men, figure out about their interactions with the government. The story is about Trey, called that because his full name includes “III” and he’s trying to distance himself from his family. He’s black and gay. He grew up in Indianapolis in a house big enough his parents named it. In 1986 at 17 he flees to New York City, rejecting the family wealth. At first, this reads like a biography instead of a novel. But then one notices the little differences between the story and history. Trey is mentored by Bayard Rustin, the gay assistant to Martin Luther King who did a lot of work to organize the 1963 March on Washington. They meet and do most of their talking at a gay bath house and a footnote tells us there is no evidence that Rustin ever visited a bath house. That bath house is where Trey finds his community (and a whole lot of sex). Through the rest of the book there are another 80 footnotes explaining the gay cultural significance of historical people, places, and songs that Trey and others meet or mention. This is Trey’s coming of age story, including how he becomes an activist. He becomes a volunteer for Gay Men’s Health Crisis (this is the AIDS era) an early member of ACT UP, founded by Larry Kramer. One of his early actions is to tangle with Fred Trump (yes, that Fred Trump), the racist slumlord who hid behind interlocking corporations. Each chapter’s title is a lesson he as an activist needs to learn, such as: “Devils Have a Weakness.” “Allies Don’t Always Harmonize.” “The Best Spontaneous Moments are Planned,” which is about the work that was done before Larry Kramer’s famous “last minute” speech that prompted the creation of ACT UP. I enjoyed the story and recommend it as a look into the history of gay activism in the AIDS era in NYC. Though there was a lot of the story I already knew there were a few things I didn’t. Reading about a participant in this era, even if a fictional one, leads to a greater understanding of what they went through. Yes, Trey spends a lot of time in a bath house engaging in sex during the AIDS era. He speculates the reason why it was allowed to stay open is because the clientele was mostly black. The news this morning was that there is a two week ceasefire between US/Israel and Iran and that the Strait of Hormuz is open. The news this evening was the Strait was closed again and Israel is still firing on Lebanon, because Israel claimed that Hezbollah wasn’t part of the deal. Check news again in the morning. Ilan Goldenberg tweeted:

I am thankful that we have a ceasefire. It happened much faster than I expected and it was the right move. But let’s be clear that this war ends (if the ceasefire holds) as a total strategic disaster. The scorecard: Nukes: Iran still has the HEU [Highly Enriched Uranium] Proxies: no change or impact Missile and drones: Iran demonstrated its arsenal is sustainable and survivable under massive US and Israeli pressure. Strait of Hormuz: Iran’s leverage to use it as a bargaining chip has dramatically increased.

There is more, some of which I’ll summarize: + The son of the Supreme Leader has the job and is likely stronger. + US Gulf allies screwed, relations with Europe strained. + Israel is more isolated and no more secure. + Global economy: major damage. In a previous post I mentioned that the nasty guy fired Pam Bondi as Attorney General. If you still need a news article or two about it here’s one by Oliver Willis of Daily Kos and one by Lisa Needham of Kos. The second one adds that Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche will take the top job until a replacement can be confirmed so Needham reviews why the nasty guy likes him and why we won’t. I had also previously mentioned that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had fired – asked to take early retirement – Gen. Randy George, the Army chief of staff, a very strange thing to do in the middle of a war. An Associated Press article posted on Kos explains who George is. Jeremy Lindenfeld, in an article for Capital & Main posted on Kos, discussed the Imperial Valley, the region in California between the Salton Sea and the Mexican border. This is a fertile area for both white and Native farmers, but only because of water from the Colorado River. Because of global warming (I hear March set a record in heat) and a drought in the West the water level in the Colorado River has dropped. A lot of farmers have adopted methods to use less water, but they may need to reduce more. Now also snooping around the valley are companies that want to mine lithium from the enormous underground reservoir of geothermal brine and to set up data centers. Both need lots of water with the Colorado River being the only source. That loss of water could drive a lot of farmers out of business. In Monday’s pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted Heath Mayo commenting on the search and rescue effort for the downed Air Force pilot.

One emerging theme of the war effort is that (1) our military is extremely competent and extremely good at war fighting and doing its job even as (2) our political leadership that sets the strategic ends and objectives for military action has absolutely no clue what it’s doing.

David Baer of The Bulwark discussed the election in Hungary, which is this weekend. Baer’s title (from a week ago) says it well, “Orbán Will Lose Hungary’s Election in Two Weeks—If It’s Clean.” Baer then lists all the levers of power that dictator Orbán has seized or crafted for himself, enough for observers to think he can’t be removed. Then Baer describes Orbán’s opponent, Péter Magyar. So, back to that bit in the title, “If It’s Clean.” Idrees Kahloon of The Atlantic:

The Hormuz crisis has some beneficiaries: America’s adversaries. To prevent even higher oil prices, the Trump administration has lifted sanctions on Russian exports and even some of Iran’s. “Things that Iran and Russia had sought to achieve through negotiations with the United States, they’ve managed to achieve without having to negotiate,” Michael Froman, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, told me. “This is bailing out the Russian economy, which had been on the ropes, and, at least temporarily, it is giving a windfall to Iran.” Russia could recoup an additional $40 billion or more in oil exports this year, which it can plow into its war effort against Ukraine. Iranian oil production may be as high as before the war.

A tweet by Gandalv, which includes a video (which I did not listen to):

Retired Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling is not mincing words. The former Commanding General of US Army Europe says these generals were purged because they stood up against Pete Hegseth’s push to turn the US military into a Christian nationalist crusade. Retired Army Maj. Gen. Randy Manner says dozens of chaplains who don’t share Hegseth’s views are being marginalized and excluded from staff meetings. The chaplain corps exists to serve all service members regardless of faith. That apparently made Green’s position untenable. The Pope has now weighed in. Hegseth’s prayer for battlefield violence prompted a response from Rome: God does not listen to those who wage war in his name. Hertling has seen enough. So have the troops.

On Tuesday Willis reported the nasty guy had tweeted Iran should concede and do so quickly or “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” Yeah, that’s a vile thing for an Oval Office Occupant to say. Experts said the particulars would likely be war crimes. Willis reminds us that back in November Democrats warned us of such things. That’s when several members of Congress released a video saying military personnel have a duty to not follow illegal orders. Of course, the nasty guy and his minions tried to make life hard for the creators of the video, especially Sen. Mark Kelly. But prosecutors weren’t able to find an actual crime that had been committed. In Tuesday’s roundup Chitown Kev quoted Shane Harris of The Atlantic:

If a...panel of experts scrutinized the run-up to the current war in Iran, their assessment might go something like this: The intelligence community was accurate and consistent in its prewar judgments about Iran’s capabilities and intentions to attack the United States and its allies. Contrary to what President Trump has said to justify his decision, the intelligence showed that the Iranian regime was not preparing to use a nuclear weapon; it did not have ballistic missiles capable of reaching the United States; and in response to a U.S. military attack, Iran was likely to strike at neighboring countries in the Persian Gulf and try to close the Strait of Hormuz, precipitating a global economic crisis. All of this was known before the war and presented to President Trump. This was an intelligence success. […] The failures of the intelligence community on Iraq’s WMDs produced systemic changes meant to keep botched calls like that one from recurring. In many respects, those reforms have worked. But they couldn’t account for a decision maker who had been seduced by previous military successes into thinking that the U.S. armed forces, under his inspired and perhaps divinely endowed command, could never stumble.

In Wednesday’s roundup Dworkin included a tweet by Aaron Blake discussing the firing of AG Pam Bondi and Todd Blanche as her interim replacement.

Even in her confirmation hearing, Bondi assured cases would be judged on their merits -- "No one will be prosecuted, investigated because they are a political opponent." Here, Blanche conveys a more relaxed standard where the president just gets to order stuff.

That “here” is a tweet from Acyn:

Blanche: We have thousands of ongoing investigations going on and it is true that some of them involve men, women, and entities that the president believes should be investigated. That is his right and it is his duty to do that—meaning to lead this country.

In the comments is a tweet by David Shiffman. The image is a reworking of a meme I’ve seen before in which a rich man with a plate mounded with cookies sits between a white worker with a plate with one cookie and an immigrant worker with nothing in front of him. The rich man says to the white worker, “Careful mate... that immigrant wants your cookie!” Shiffman reworked the meme in response to the nasty guy issuing a proposed 2027 budget that increased the military budget by 40% to $1.4 trillion and saying the budget had no room for the social safety net. Over the rich guy’s face he put “ICE, War in Iran.” Over the white worker’s face he put, “Medicaid, Medicare, and daycare.” Over the immigrant he put the emblems of NASA, NOAA, EPA, NSF, NIH, and the Fish and Wildlife Service. The rich guy says, “Careful mate... that science wants your cookie!” Shiffman added:

Science is not why you and your family are struggling, friends. President Trump and Congressional Republicans are the reason why you and your family are struggling.

Tweets by Max Burns:

You guys don’t get Trump’s 4D chess. He had to attack Iran in order to open the Strait of Hormuz which was open before he attacked Iran. So Donald Trump fought this disastrous war with Iran and the end result is a deal in which Iran gets: – Control of the Strait of Hormuz – Unlimited uranium enrichment – All U.S. sanctions lifted – All U.N. resolutions against it lifted – Cash compensation from the US Who won again?

And just for fun, Fergi Jo Lisa posted a 15 second video of a bird (I think a parrot) and six dogs.

No country would believe an offer of peace

Last night I went to the grand Fisher Theater to see the musical The Outsiders. I was interested because last year it won a Tony Award for Best Musical along with Best Direction of a Musical, Best Lighting in a Musical (projections on part of the scenery helped that), and Best Sound Design in a Musical, plus eight other nominations, including Best Actor and Best Featured Actor. All fine recommendations. I hadn’t read the book or seen the earlier movie or play (before the musical was created) because I thought it might be quite violent. And it is. When I, without knowing much of the story, described the show to my friend and debate partner he suggested it might be similar to West Side Story and its source material Romeo and Juliet. Turns out he was right, though there are notable differences. The story is set in Tulsa in 1967. Ponyboy is the main character. He is 14 and lives with his brothers Darrel and Sodapop. Their parents had recently died. The first song Ponyboy sings notes that he knows nobody who has moved away from Tulsa. Darrel, maybe as old as 20, was good enough in football he thought he had a chance of escaping but now feels burdened with trying to be both brother and father. Yes, there are two rival groups of teens. Ponyboy is a Greaser, kids from families whose work involves (automobile) grease. His best friends are Johnny and Two-Bit. Also prominent in the group is Dallas, the only black member and the only one to be in jail, well, county lock-up. The other group is the Socs (spelled that way in the program but pronounced “soshes”), the kids of socialites. As in WSS there are turf battles that go too far. At the drive in theater Ponyboy meets Cherry, a Socs girl. She is claimed by Bob, the leader of the Socs boys. She senses that Ponyboy is different from the other boys that strive for status. Ponyboy is reading Great Expectations by Dickens and identifies with orphaned Pip, though has a few things to say to Dickens. He can also recite a Robert Frost poem. This might be a spoiler: A big difference between WSS and this story is while Cherry and Ponyboy become friends, they do not fall in love. Even so, she’s the one recognizes the battles between the Greasers and Socs. two groups of boys that don’t know what to do with their testosterone, is a “Hopeless War.” This is an excellent show, deserving of its awards. Ponyboy, Johnny, Dallas, and all the others are shown as both good and bad, though they are caught in a bad situation (mostly based on poverty). The songs are good and touching, though I don’t remember any of them. I rate it highly perhaps for the same reasons I consider WSS a favorite musical (though Jonathan Clay, Zach Chance, and Justin Levine are not at the level of Leonard Bernstein). I do have one complaint. There is an overuse on strobe lights in key scenes. As WSS has the Rumble, there is a big fight between the two groups. They way it was staged I got lost in who was doing what to who with not clear winner until one side rejoices in their victory later. This fight takes place in a rainstorm. At first I thought the rain was projected on to the scenery, but at times the actors looked wet, as did the stage, though that was hard to tell from the front of the balcony, where I was sitting. Then the stage looked dry in the next scene. But when the show was done a large tire full of water (important for a key scene) was dumped onto the stage and a bunch of industrial blowers were brought out to presumably dry the stage. The book is by S. E. Hinton, which I was surprised to learn is Susan Eloise. The Outsiders is her first novel and she wrote it while in high school in Tulsa. Her reason for writing was that she was dissatisfied with the stories written about youth, saying in a quote in the program that teens want it real and too many books talked down to them. Thom Hartmann of the Daily Kos community and an independent pundit described a disturbing look into the start of the Iran war. He cautions this is not proven but certainly demands investigation and hearings under oath before Congress. A major player in this scenario is Jared Kushner, a top representative in several of his father-in-law’s attempts at diplomacy. He’s also the guy I’ve been calling the Pandemic Prince for his attempts to profit from the pandemic during the first nasty guy term. He also knows Netanyahu well. His partner is Steve Witkoff, a guy with credible evidence of having financial ties to Russia and who had just been to Israel. Here’s my summary of the scenario. Round 3 of nuclear talks between the US and Iran concluded in Geneva on February 27. The Omani foreign minister, the mediator, said a deal was within reach and Iran had fully agreed to the US demands to not make a nuclear bomb. Round 4 had been scheduled to work out the details. On the morning of February 28 members of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council were in their offices. They’re the ones to make the big nuclear decisions. In their offices is where they were naturally expected to be to discuss the outline of the agreement made the day before. That expected location is where the first bombs struck. Here’s the speculation: Were the negotiations a ruse? A deliberate double-cross? Were they designed to keep Iran from expecting strikes? Were they structured to give the Council something they need to discuss in a known place so they could be targeted?

The man who briefed Kushner’s partner (Witkoff) before those talks — Netanyahu — is the same man who said on the night the bombs fell that “this coalition of forces allows us to do what I have yearned to do for 40 years.” He wasn’t even remotely subdued or reluctant about the possibility of the Middle East going up in flames, perhaps even igniting World War III. He was, instead, triumphant that he finally got an American president to do something he’d been unsuccessfully pushing for decades.

If Iran was “negotiated” into a kill box, no government would ever again assume American good faith. American credibility would be damaged, long after the nasty guy and his minions leave the scene. The negotiation process would be poisoned. No country would believe an offer of peace, no matter how genuine it is.

Congress has the constitutional power and the institutional obligation to call Kushner and Witkoff before investigative committees and ask them directly: What did you know about Israeli targeting plans during the Geneva talks? When did you know it? What were you instructed to accomplish or delay? Did you communicate with Netanyahu’s government during the negotiations themselves?

We can’t assume Kushner and Witkoff are guilty. We can “demand answers, loudly, now, before the war makes the asking impossible.” Dan K of the Kos community asks an important question: Why have billionaires put “a man with no understanding of economics in charge of our economy?” To attempt an answer Dan K quoted an article Paul Krugman wrote for his Substack. Krugman wrote:

There is, however, something that is still puzzling me: To a large extent billionaires bought themselves a government friendly to their interests. Trump and company have granted many items on the tech broligarchy wish list, from tax breaks to deregulation to promotion of crypto and unregulated AI. But why the abject incompetence? Couldn’t billionaires find political allies who wouldn’t plunge the country into a potentially disastrous and historically unpopular war without considering the risks?

Krugman supplied two answers:

One is that no competent allies weren’t available. Money buys a lot of influence, but to actually take over the U.S. government requires more than money — it requires politicians who are utterly corrupt... and corruption and incompetence go hand in hand.

In the nasty guy’s first term competent people kept him from doing his worst. To prevent that from happening in his second term he surrounded himself with incompetent loyalists.

My second answer is that the vast wealth of tech billionaires has made many of them unconcerned with the little people’s lives — and deeply unpatriotic.

Dan K brought up the concept of noblesse oblige, that with great wealth and power comes great responsibility. The robber barons of the US gilded age may have been nasty to workers, but they knew they had to live in the society they were making and keeping it secure was worthwhile. The current tech bros reject that understanding. They feel they can isolate themselves from the world and their wealth will provide all they need. So if they get the tax breaks and other goodies to keep making tons of money they don’t care what else the nasty guy does. Krugman again:

So if you want to understand how this country has degenerated to such a state, how we can be spending nearly $2 billion a day attacking Iran without a clear endgame in sight, while children go without healthcare, nursing homes are understaffed because their workers have been deported, home electricity bills skyrocket due to data centers, consider who benefits and who isn’t hurt. This is a billionaire’s war, waged at everyone else’s expense.

More from my backlog of pundit roundups for Kos... From Saturday a week ago, Greg Dworkin quoted Catherine Rampell of The Bulwark discussing a lot of commodities that are affected by the nasty guy’s attack on Iran and their response of closing the Strait of Hormuz. At the top of the list is oil and the petroleum products made from it. There is also liquefied natural gas, aluminum, and fertilizer, the last in demand as the northern hemisphere spring planting season begins. That will lead to higher food prices over the year. Many producers of these commodities are having to shut down because they have no place to put their output. Restarting these facilities could take up to a year. Nick Judin tweeted:

Unlike every evil, craven, idiotic decision Trump's made in office, the Iran War is finally the act he can't immediately retreat from. Every one of his catastrophic failures (DOGE, liberation day, siege of Minneapolis, regime change in Venezuela, etc.) he survived by abandoning.

Ishaan Tharoor of the New Yorker explained why the Strait of Hormuz was closed:

For the remnants of the Iranian regime—and, especially, the hard-line members of the Revolutionary Guard, who control much of the state’s weaponry—the strategy is clear. They hope to raise the stakes of the war so much that U.S. allies pressure President Donald Trump to change course. “We had no choice but to escalate and start a big fire so everyone would see,” an Iranian regime insider told the Financial Times. “When our red lines were crossed in violation of all international laws, we could no longer adhere to the rules of the game.”

Another way to put it: We may be going down, but we’re going to inflict as much pain on the rest of the world as we can in the meantime. Conspiratorial Templates tweeted:

What level of chess is it when you neglect to fill up your strategic oil reserves before starting a war that shuts down oil production worldwide, so you have to buy oil at an inflated price from your enemy who then uses those funds to back the enemy you just needlessly attacked?

Way down in the comments is a cartoon by Bishtoons. A man says:

So, you’re telling me that more than 100 children were killed in a school in Iran when it was bombed ... by two nations of the Board of Peace?

In the comments of Monday’s roundup is one by rugbymom:

What's unbelievable to me: We refer back continuously to major attacks *on* the US, from Pearl Harbor to 9/11. Yet we somehow imagine that other countries will just absorb our attacks on them, forgive and forget, and cozy up to the US. (Sure, Japan and Germany did after WWII -- but only because the US poured in relief and reconstruction money, and those countries took responsibility for their actions and their leaders were soundly punished.) Not only Iran, but the Gulf monarchies that were Trump’s most loyal allies, will never ever forget this -- and that's assuming that somehow it stops before the planet is utterly destroyed. So far, no signs of any off-ramp or stopping point, a President who is eager to pour in ground troops and/or use nuclear weapons, an Israeli President intent on genocide, and no way to stop either of them.

In Tuesday’s roundup Chitown Kev quoted Adam Serwer of The Atlantic described an epidemic of “gullicism” – gullibility and cynicism – in America.

The philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism that “a mixture of gullibility and cynicism is prevalent in all ranks of totalitarian movements.” She argued that “the whole hierarchical structure of totalitarian movements, from naïve fellow-travelers to party members, elite formations, the intimate circle around the Leader, and the Leader himself, could be described in terms of a curiously varying mixture of gullibility and cynicism.” All are ruled by “the central unchanging ideological fiction of the movement.” The naive fellow travelers need to be gullible enough to believe these fictions and cynical enough to refuse correction. The inner circle need only be cynical enough to sell them.

In the comments Dr. Art Garfunky tweeted the front page of the Tehran Times (English edition) that shows portraits of all of the students killed in the Iran school that was bombed. In Wednesday’s roundup Dworkin quoted Dana Dubois of Blue Amp. My summary: Dubois is breaking up with ChatGPT because they can’t tolerate to keep paying the oligarchs that created it. Aaron Rupar tweeted a quote from Sen. Chris Murphy:

I Just came from a two hour, closed door classified briefing on the war. It just confirmed to me it's totally incoherent. We are not gonna be able to achieve any of our stated objectives ... this is a disaster of epic proportions, a 10 day debacle

In the comments Political Cartoon Gallery posted a cartoon by Matt, who is from England. A man has come back from a gas station mini-mart and tells his wife, “It’s worse than I feared. Their tins of travel mints are stuck in the Strait of Hormuz.” In Thursday’s roundup Kev quoted Perry Bacon of The New Republic on three reasons why this military action is worse than nearly all others. The important parts:

There is no clear reason for the U.S. to be attacking Iran right now. This war not only didn’t have the approval of Congress or the American public, but it happened despite explicit opposition from them. This is not a minor skirmish.

In the comments is one by Rambler797 with a link to the article:

Jonathan Lamire, Atlantic. Trump Isn’t Even Trying to Sell This War. Why sell? He got in his quick hit. Mission accomplished, right? An object lesson in why it is better to have someone with impulse control as president.

The Wolfpack posted a meme of the Republican Agenda. I’m giving just the main points. Each has a few to a lot of subpoints for implementation.

Keep ’em poor Keep ’em sick Keep ’em stupid Control the women

Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos quoted late night commentary:

"We are now on day eleven of Jabba the Pizza Hutt's war on Iran. Trump said yesterday that the war could end 'very soon,' which would be encouraging had he not told us he'd end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours. Ironically, the war he started to distract us could be more damaging to him than the Trump-Epstein files. And that would mean he'd have to come up with another distraction from the war. And if you do need that, Mr. President, I’ve got a good one: release the unreleased Trump-Epstein files." —Jimmy Kimmel "President Trump said yesterday that, while he is spending the day at his Miami golf club, there are 'many important meetings and phone calls taking place.' Hey, man, we're totally fine if you just play golf. Every time you 'have a meeting' we have to change something on a map." —Seth Meyers

Bill also reminds us that tomorrow, March 14, is Pi Day, best celebrated at 1:59. It’s our most irrational holiday.

The big divide isn’t left v right, it’s top v bottom

There is a thing called the Streisand effect. Photographer Kenneth Adelman photographed the coastline of California from a helicopter and posted them online. One of the photos was of Barbra Streisand’s home. She sued to have it taken down. Before she filed the suit the photo had been viewed six times and two of those were her own lawyers. After the suit, which was highly publicized, the photo was viewed more than 400,000 times and can still be found online. This follows a Chinese saying that translates to, “Trying to cover things up only makes them more evident.” The same effect happened when, last week at the Olympics, the Committee demanded a Ukrainian skeleton athlete remove photos of Ukrainian soldiers from his helmet. He refused. They blocked him from competing. The story got a lot more exposure than if they had let the guy wear the helmet without comment. And another example. Emily Singer of Daily Kos wrote about CBS telling Stephen Colbert he could not interview Democratic Texas state Rep. James Talarico who is running for US Senate. The claim is that the interview would violate the Federal Communications Commission’s “Equal-time” rule, though the rule has an exception for talks shows and comedy shows. Colbert discussed the situation on the show (even though CBS didn’t want him to). Then after the regular show ended, he recorded an interview with Talarico and posted it to the show’s YouTube channel. Where it quickly got more than 2.6 million views. Google searches for Talarico from across the US jumped up 20 times and from just Texas they jumped about 7 times. Singer included both Colbert’s rant on why he couldn’t interview Talarico during the regular show (about 8 minutes) and the actual interview (about 15 minutes). FCC chair Brendan Carr pressured CBS because Republicans want their Senate candidate to face Talarico’s primary rival Jasmine Crockett. This interview happened after early voting had already started. Which means Republicans just boosted interest in the guy they want to lose in the primary. In that second video I see that Talarico is definitely a candidate I could vote for. I can’t say whether I would prefer him to Crockett, who is in the US House and quite fierce in calling out the nonsense from the nasty guy and Republicans. But I don’t live in Texas. Talarico is a student at a seminary of the Baptist Church, though he doesn’t sound like the Southern Baptist Convention. He and Colbert talked about Christian Nationalism, which he described as wanting to take over the government in the name of Jesus, though Jesus never would have approved of using his name that way. Talarico also referred to Matthew chapter 25 in the Bible, which includes the criteria for separating the sheep from the goats, a way of saying the criteria for who gets to heaven and who doesn’t. The criteria includes such things as feed others, welcome strangers, and visit the sick and those in prison. He also noted the things not in the list – something I’ve also been talking about lately – things that have nothing to do with getting to heaven. Something not in the list is how you vote. Talarico was very much opposed to a bill in the Texas Legislature that would require schools to display the Ten Commandments. He said Jesus commands us to love and shoving your religion down other people’s throats is not love. The separation of Church and State is also important to the Church because one of the things they should do is to speak truth to power, difficult to do if the Church is the power. Also, as Colbert pointed out, if you say that Jesus is aligned with one political party and that party loses, what does that say about Jesus? Talarico closed by saying the culture wars are a smokescreen. The big divide isn’t left v. right, it’s top v. bottom. Kos community member A Bleeding God wrote that when the right began screaming about trans women in sports, trans folk tried to sound the alarm. Trans folk were told they were overreacting. The same thing happened when the right screamed about bathrooms and then banned care for trans minors. Now that the right is moving to block all trans care, even for adults – which is trans genocide – will the rest of the liberals now listen?

We are not overreacting, we never were, what we have been, what we have always been, is the canary in the coal mine. They come for our rights first because we're a tiny minority that most folks don't understand and many, even those on the left, find "icky".

In the comments was a mention of the famous Martin Niemöller poem that has a refrain, “I did not speak out because I was not a ___.” A Bleeding God replied:

Funny thing about that poem, it did the same s--- They didn't come for the communists first. They came for the trans people first. Germany in the 30s went after trans people as their very first target.

Another commenter noted one of the first Nazi attacks was on the Institute for Sexual Science. Its books were burned in the street. One thing that Institute did was trans health care. Nathaniel Rakich, in an article for Votebeat posted on Kos discussed the SAVE America Act, which passed the US House. It now goes before the Senate where a filibuster will likely prevent its passage. The act gives the federal government more oversight in voting with the goal to prevent illegal voting, which is already quite rare. This act would require people to provide proof of US citizenship and a photo ID when they register to vote. Its provisions would go into effect immediately on the nasty guy’s signature. It is essentially a way to stop people from voting. Perhaps 9% of citizens can’t produce their birth certificate and only about half have a passport. Also, remember when TSA rolled out Real ID requirements? They had to keep postponing the date where such an ID would be required to fly because handling the paperwork took so long to work out, both by citizens and the driver’s license offices. Proof of citizenship requirements were tried in Kansas back in 2013. 12% of those who tried to register couldn’t prove their citizenship. The state could identify only 39 noncitizens who voted in the previous 14 years. A court struck down the law in 2018. Secretary of State offices say implementing citizenship verification simply can’t be done by the midterms. They are already doing a lot (such as protecting against election interference) and would get no additional money to make it happen. Verifying documents would take about ten minutes for each person. Doing so for hundreds of thousands people means a lot more staff would be needed.

Ultimately, as long as the filibuster remains in place in the Senate, the SAVE America Act has little chance of becoming law before the midterms. But that may be the point: The bill wasn’t introduced with the goal of making elections run more smoothly; it was introduced to make the point that elections aren’t as secure as they could be. If, as expected, the bill fails and voters don’t have to prove their citizenship or show photo ID in 2026, it could make it easier for Trump and his allies to claim that the results are tainted by fraud. That could be a different type of nightmare scenario.

In today’s pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin included a tweet from Blue Georgia discussing the FCC and Colbert.

David Frum: One of the ways that authoritarian regimes get themselves in trouble is they cut themselves off from knowing bad news in time because they demand endless flattery of the leader. The leader does not know that there aren't sausages in the shops. That what Brendan Carr is doing here.

In the comments Bill Bramhall posted a cartoon of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor being hauled away by police. King Charles says, “No one is above the law.” The nasty guy retorts, “Some king you are.”

The failure of democracies to rein in corporations

To commemorate the death of Jesse Jackson Bishtoons highlighted a phrase of Jackson. Love the saying, not so much the caricature. Jackson said:

Never look down on anybody unless you’re helping them up.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York went to the Munich Security Conference and told the crowd:

I think one of the connections and relationships that is underdiscussed, particularly in the security space, is the fact that I believe we're seeing an economy … around the world—including in the United States—that extreme levels of income inequality lead to social instability and drives in a sense in authoritarianism, right-wing populism, and very dangerous domestic internal politics. And that is a direct outcome of not just income inequality, but the failure of democracies over decades to deliver. The failure to deliver higher wages, the failure to rein in corporations. There is a level of market concentration and corporate consolidation where a massive company can get so big that its consolidated power can rival that of nation states. Massive corporations that then begin to consume the public sector gobble up the spending. They start to call the shots, and we're starting to see this with some of the billionaire class throwing their weight around in domestic politics and in global politics as well.

Alix Breeden of Daily Kos reported that federal judge James Boasberg, who has been tussling with the nasty guy’s administration for many months ordered them to return some Venezuelan men who were wrongfully sent to prison in El Salvador without due process. However three of the men told Kos that they refuse to step foot in the US while the nasty guy is in office. They say they have no guarantees of being free while their cases are being heard. The risk of returning isn’t worth it. Two of the three said they would consider returning to the US when there is a change in president. The third said he would still be too afraid to come back. Robert Reich, former Labor Secretary, wrote in his Substack that according to the New York Times the Department of Homeland Security sent subpoenas to big tech companies demanding the names on accounts the criticize ICE to identify those who oppose what ICE and DHS are doing. Reich responded:

Hello? Kristi Noem? Robert Reich here. I hear you’re trying to find the names of people who are making negative comments on social media about ICE enforcement. Look no further. I’ve done it frequently. I’m still doing it. This note to you, which I’m posting on Substack, is another example.

Reich then listed several things ICE is doing – arrests without due process, inadequate care in detention camps, and much more – that are unconstitutional. Noem is defying court orders, also unconstitutional, as are those subpoenas. Noem seems to have forgotten that she is given power and being paid by the people of the United States and she swore an oath to uphold the Constitution. As was true for Reich. He did his duty. What the hell is she doing? In Monday’s pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted Jacqueline Alemany of MS Now

For now, Democrats are in the minority — limited to issuing strongly worded letters and exercising a mostly toothless investigative authority to rein in a president who has applied a maximalist approach to executive authority. But with increasingly rosy prospects for the party to win back the House in 2026, Democratic lawmakers are laying the groundwork for a sweeping expansion of oversight targeting the companies and CEOs who have done business with the Trump family, or sought favorable regulatory treatment, merger approval, or policy changes from the administration — from Paramount to Palantir. It is a strategy that Democrats believe could reshape corporate America’s relationship with Trump: By threatening future investigations into companies that curry favor with the administration, they hope to make CEOs think twice before opening their wallets or bending to presidential pressure.

In Tuesday’s roundup Chitown Kev quoted Heather Cox Richardson from her Letters from an American Substack discussing the latest potential nasty guy grift.

On February 13 and 14, President Donald J. Trump’s representatives filed three applications with the United States Patent and Trademark Office to trademark his name for future use on an airport. As trademark lawyer Josh Gerben of Gerben IP noted, the application also covers merchandise branded “President Donald J. Trump International Airport,” “Donald J. Trump International Airport,” and “DJT,” including “clothing, handbags, luggage, jewelry, watches, and tie clips.” Because of the trademark filing, Gerben notes, any airport adopting the Trump name would have to get a license to use the name, potentially paying a licensing fee. Gerben emphasizes that while it is common for public officials to have landmarks named after them, “never in the history of the United States” has “a sitting president’s private company…sought trademark rights” before such a naming.

In the comments paulpro posted a cartoon by Pedro Molina showing a man facing down ICE agents referring to what AG Pam Bondi said before Congress:

Papers? Oh, Bro! Haven’t you heard? We should all be focused on the Dow!

Parker Molloy tweeted a link to Sports Illustrated and wrote:

Sign of the times that there are multiple members of the Chicago Cubs who haven't been able to enter the U.S. because Trump's immigration crackdown has made getting visas impossible.

Herbilly posted a meme:

Let’s have illegal immigrants hunt down sex offenders for a chance at citizenship. We’ll call it “Aliens VS Predators.”

Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos quoted Shawn Ryan, a podcaster on the right, after Bondi sat in front of a House Committee and made that comment about the Dow. Bill has a very good reason for quoting someone on the right. Ryan said:

What you should be talking about is how you are going to investigate and prosecute any pedophiles that are running around on Epstein Island that you’re affiliated with. But we didn’t talk about that, did we? Oh, and what’s the excuse? What was the excuse? “If we prosecute everybody the whole system would go down.” Well, you know what that sounds like? That sounds like how Trump ran his campaign: “Let’s drain the swamp.” Doesn’t that sound a lot like draining the swamp? It actually is drain the swamps served up to you on a f---ing silver platter but you’re not gonna take it, are you? You’re gonna protect pedophiles! You’re going to protect pedophiles rather than go after them and hope that everybody’s happy that the Dow hit 50,000. Are you f---ing out of your mind?!”

The whole system would go down? The system of men who think they’re so far above the rules that they can abuse girls? Sounds like a goal worth working toward. In an LGBTQ Update for Kos Clio2 wrote of many topics. Here are a few of them:

If I have this right, the proposed federal "SAVE Act" (Republicans have a way with Newspeak!) currently before Congress would require proof of citizenship and ID matching one's birth certificate to register to vote, disqualifying not only trans people who have changed their documents, but a great many others--such as adoptees, and married women who took their husband's name. Voter fraud is, of course, minuscule, and this would amount to theft of people's votes. Reportedly Sen. Collins, however, has gotten over her usual fit of the vapors, making this a squeaker. :-/

Then Clio2 got into discussing bans on transgender care, both in the US and in Britain. And in Britain the efforts include closing a clinic treating trans children, and requiring schools ban social transition, including “using a different name, pronoun or haircut” and outing trans youth. There is also a book urging parents not to support their trans kids. And a tweet from Sara Hummingbird:

Policies based on lies is killing kids. "Good Law Project can confirm that in 2021-2022 suicides of trans children in England surged to 22, a marked increase from 5 and 4 the previous two years" It takes years for this data to be available there will be more. All these kids had the right to life.

A series of tweets by Toby Buckle (I’m not sure of the order):

one of the things i got from diving into the weeds of this debate for my reporting on it was just how small the core 'gender critical' team is almost all (anti-trans) reporting cites/ quotes the same half-dozen people the idea that this was a popular backlash to a socially dominant 'woke' worldview, pushing pronouns down all of our thoughts is absurd a decade ago most brits did not hold well defined views on this, there was a bi-partisan consensus for tolerance basically, we've utterly erased the rights & healthcare access of a vulnerable minority because a very small group (of apparently very well-connected) of people became fanatical about it & the (also very small) group who decide press coverage decided they needed relentless coverage a stat i always cite is the number of anti-trans articles in the press went from 60 in a year, to 7,500

DixTheory added, based on data from Parliament Committees.

Chart showing the frequency of trans-related articles by month in the UK press from 2012 to 2022. The count remains below 50 per 30 days until 2015, rising to 400 per 30 days by 2021, then peaking over 1,000 in 2022.

Clio2 tweeted a link to an article in The Pink News with the title and subtitle:

Publicly funded gender-affirming care is great for the economy A new study in Australia has found that increasing public funding gender-affirming care could save the government millions.

On a different topic Kat Tenbarge tweeted:

When a sitting representative refers to the Super Bowl halftime show as “pornography,” people should use that to reflect on how they and other representatives are simultaneously working to ban, censor, and restrict “pornography” and what that actually means And we don’t have to guess what they mean, because we can read Project 2025 ourselves and see that “pornography” is shorthand for LGBTQ people existing publicly. That’s what they’re working to ban, censor, and restrict online under the guise of “protecting” kids from porn And we also already know that these efforts have been in motion for years, and that sex workers, LGBTQ people, feminists, educators, and anyone who talks about bodies, women, and gender/sexuality is already being censored online and offline

TC added:

Yes, they've signalled using "pornography" the way Putin's Russia uses the term "hooligan"

They are neighbors, whether born in Minneapolis or Mogadishu

I finished the book American Scholar by Patrick E. Horrigan. The story is about James in 2016 reflecting back on his life when he started his PhD program in 1987, when he was known as Jimmy. That PhD dissertation starts out being about author F. O. Matthiessen and how his writing was affected by falling in love with Russel Cheney in 1924. Also at the time Jimmy is dating Gregory, though Jimmy can seem to annoy Gregory easily. In 2016 James has published a novel, also called American Scholar, a fictionalized telling of the lives and love of Matthiessen and Cheney, who were real people. He gives a public reading from the book, has dinner with friends, then stalls going home to his husband Fran. Yeah, not a lot happens. This is a low-key book. The relationship with Gregory is interesting, but to me it gets bogged down with comparisons to Matthiessen and Cheney. The relationship with Fran, of which little is said until the last chapter, sounds like it would have been much more interesting. Another annoyance is there are characters named Jimmy, Jerry, and Jay. I had to work to keep them separate. In the author notes at the end Horrigan reveals this novel is a fictional version of his own life, same sort of love when working on his PhD, same sort of long-term relationship afterward. In the chapters on life in 1987 he describes Gregory living with friends in a “farmhouse” with a courtyard on Manhattan. From the location and description I think I found it here. Turn the image towards the northeast. A brief addition to my love of the opera The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay discussed yesterday. At the bottom of the Met Opera webpage for this opera are several videos of scenes from the opera. One is for the duet “Imagine” in which Joe and Rosa sing about America being the place where the oppressed of the world can come. It’s a strong contrast to how the administration is treating those not born here. Another video is “Top of the Empire State Building” where Sam realizes he’s in love with Tracy. In the comments of Tuesday’s pundit roundup for Daily Kos is a 13 minute video by Caolan Robertson. He says at the recent Davos meeting Europe changed forever, there is no going back. He explains a bit of what Davos is – countries and big corporations come in and essentially take over the main shops for the week, rebranding them with names such as Russia House or Ukraine House. The big events that week were the official speeches by Canadian PM Mark Carney, the nasty guy (big on complaints and threats but everyone wanted to witness it), then Zelenskyy of Ukraine. In between those the Ukraine House held a breakfast session that was interrupted so that Steve Witkoff, the lead US negotiator on Ukraine, could say a few words, and those words were pro Russia, an insult to the Ukrainians whose microphone he co-opted. Robertson was the only reporter to follow Witkoff out of the room to ask about his investments in Russia. Witkoff did not respond, which is an answer. Yes, the chief US negotiator in Ukraine does better when Russia does better – a direct conflict of interest. Robertson says that too many reporters at Davos want to keep coming back to hobnob with the rich and get the free canapes and champagne, so don’t want to upset the rich with embarrassing questions. This is also a conflict of interest. Robertson was told he won’t be invited back. The way Europe was changed forever was that its leaders had to actually confront its problems. I hadn’t heard about Robertson before. Wikipedia says his name is Irish (pronounced “KAY-lan”), he’s 29, works and a journalist and influencer, and has been based in Ukraine since after the war started. He also recounts that for about 3 years starting about age 20 he was involved in far-right politics. He has said recovering from that is like leaving a cult. He’s also gay and knew that from “a very young age.” On Instagram he announced he has found love. The nasty guy’s Board of Peace was created a week ago, but I haven’t had time to write about it until now. NPR host A Martínez talked to diplomatic correspondent Michele Kelemen. The Board was supposed to be an international body overseeing the rebuilding of Gaza. But the founding document doesn’t mention Gaza at all and sounds like a substitute to the United Nations or at least its Security Council. Back when the Board was explicitly about Gaza the UN endorsed its creation. The nasty guy invited many countries to join (and didn’t invite others). Those invited include the leaders of Turkey, Qatar, Argentina, Hungary, Egypt, United Arab Emirates, Belarus, Russia, and Israel. Some have already accepted. Do you see the common element of those countries? All of them have an authoritarian leader. Carney of Canada has reservations about joining. He will write checks directly to Palestinians. When Macron of France declined to join the nasty guy threatened a 200% tariff on French wine. The Board has two levels of membership. A country can join for free for a three-year term. Or they can pay $1 billion for a permanent seat – with the nasty guy as chair for as long as he wants, even after he leaves the Oval Office. That was followed with Leila Fadel talking to Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland and a founding member of The Elders, a group of world leaders who advocate for peace and first convened by Nelson Mandela. Robinson said:

I don't call it the Board of Peace. I call it the board of the power of one person. It is totally bizarre. And countries should not support it at all. It is not a peacemaking organization.

Her complaints: The nasty guy controls all. He’s the chairman and chooses his successor. He invites countries and bullies those that refuse. Only rich countries can be permanent members. He is the only one who can create, modify, or dissolve subsidiary bodies. It’s an outrageous way to replace the UM Security Council. It’s only purpose is to empower the nasty guy. Countries should not join. Carney was right when at Davos he described a rupture of the international system. The nasty guy is largely responsible for that. But a rupture isn’t the end of a rules-based order, which now must be reaffirmed and supported by other countries. Yes, there are problems with the UN Security Council. It is based on world power as of 1945 and the world has changed a lot since then. The UN can be reformed and should be. It needs to engage and protect the smaller countries and the multipolar power of today. Maybe the veto should be eliminated.

It's hard to see [the Board of Peace] getting legitimacy when the power is the power of President Trump alone. That is not legitimacy for any global order. And we see that he - you know, he loses interest after a while. I think he's lost interest in Gaza.

In a pundit roundup for Kos for Thursday a week ago Chitown Kev quoted Iker Seisdedos of El País in English who reported invitations went to 60 countries. The world has about 200 countries.

A dozen capitals, in a list that grows by the hour, have already announced their participation. These include countries ranging from Albania to Israel — despite the latter’s discomfort with the participation of Egypt and Qatar — and Morocco, Argentina, and Hungary. Some are long-standing allies of the United States. Others depend too heavily on U.S. support to defy Washington. The rest have leaders close to Trump. While the motivations of its initial partners seem clear, the merits required for an invitation beyond Washington’s discretion, its final composition, and the extent of its mission beyond its primary objective — advancing the peace plan imposed by the United States on Israel and Hamas to end the Gaza war — are less so. Its founding document doesn’t even mention the Gaza Strip. It is also a mystery which of its members will be willing to pay the $1 billion that a permanent seat will cost. Washington maintains that this money will be used for the reconstruction of Gaza, although its plans have not yet been made public.

We’ve seen the nasty guy’s plans for Gaza and the Pandemic Prince recently touted them again to turn Gaza into a resort. So we know what he means by “reconstruction” – he means without Palestinians. And are there any procedures and watchdogs to keep those billions from falling into the nasty guy’s own pockets? In the comments Michael Harriot tweeted:

BlackCheck: Trump says Civil Rights Act led to whites being “very badly treated.” Did the Civil Rights Act oppress the people who are overrepresented in homeownership, legislatures, the judicial branch, wealth, income, school funding, college admission, executive leadership & white tears distribution?

There is a link to Harriot’s Contraband Camp for a full explanation. A tweet from Rep. Thomas Massie discussing oil from seized Venezuelan ships.

Selling stolen oil and putting billions of dollars in a bank in Qatar to be spent without Congressional approval is not Constitutional. Only Congress can appropriate money. The President can’t legally create a second Treasury overseas for his own piggy bank. Wake up Congress.

A tweet from The Atlantic with a link to the full article (behind a paywall). After the tweet is the article heading and subheading.

The Christian fundamentalists and evangelicals aligning with ICE are "prying Christianity further and further away from the ethic and teachings of Jesus," @Peter_Wehner argues. MAGA Jesus is Not the Real Jesus. Trump is causing incalculable damage to the Christian faith, yet most evangelicals will never break with him.

The reason is simple. They’ve redefined Christianity to be about power and not about the love Jesus taught. In today’s pundit roundup Kov quoted Adam Serwer of The Atlantic:

If the Minnesota resistance has an overarching ideology, you could call it “neighborism”—a commitment to protecting the people around you, no matter who they are or where they came from. The contrast with the philosophy guiding the Trump administration couldn’t be more extreme. Vice President Vance has said that “it is totally reasonable and acceptable for American citizens to look at their next-door neighbors and say, ‘I want to live next to people who I have something in common with. I don’t want to live next to four families of strangers.’” Minnesotans are insisting that their neighbors are their neighbors whether they were born in Minneapolis or Mogadishu. That is, arguably, a deeply Christian philosophy, one apparently loathed by some of the most powerful Christians in America.

Paul Krugman, writing for his own Substack:

We’re fortunate that Trump is too impatient, too addicted to violence, to pursue the salami tactics Viktor Orban used in Hungary — slicing the institutions of democracy away gradually and insidiously until there was nothing left. Trump, instead, is trying to speedrun the process, shocking and aweing the nation into submission. The siege of Minneapolis was clearly meant as a show of force that would intimidate not just undocumented immigrants, but blue states as a whole and opponents in general. It was entirely predictable that innocent people would be dragged from their cars, beaten, pepper-sprayed in the eyes, and killed... However, MAGA has clearly been shocked by the way the people of Minnesota responded. Rather than rolling over in submission, ordinary citizens quickly organized highly effective resistance. Although they haven’t stopped ICE’s reign of terror, they have thrown a lot of sand in its gears.

Jennifer Rubin of The Contrarian Substack discussing the ICE murder in Minneapolis:

The notion that only some victims are truly deserving, or can be relatable to many Americans, is the unsettling but undeniable conclusion after years of ignoring Black victims of police abuse or of disregarding the cruel, violent deportation of Hispanics. Enumerable studies have provided evidence that a victim’s race significantly affects the level of coverage and public reaction to the tragedy...Even white killers receive more public sympathy than do non-white killers. Then along comes Alex Pretti: white, a VA ICU nurse, a young man of unassailable character — and a responsible gun owner to boot! His unprovoked death and his baseless smearing jarred a great many people not previously disturbed by violence against Hispanics, Blacks, Asians, or women. For seemingly the first time, many Americans could not look away and say, “Well, that would never happen to me.”

In the comments Fiona Webster posted a cartoon by Dr. MacLeod. It shows a clergyman kneeling and praying while approached by police with handcuffs. The caption says:

My administration will not tolerate anti-Christian weaponization of government or unlawful conduct targeting Christians. -- Donald Trump, Feb 2025

Will Stancil tweeted a photo of a Minnesota protest and the crowd is huge. The photo is from the New York Times. Joni Askola tweeted:

American tech billionaires are making a calculated bet on fascism. They believe they can control a dictator in exchange for deregulation and total market dominance. They don’t care about your right or the constitution. They only care about securing their own power.

They’re also wrong in their bet: They can’t control a dictator. He will do things they don’t like. Their praise of him must be constantly renewed and one misstep and he’ll turn on them.

All that Minnesota protesting worked

I had a wonderful afternoon watching the opera The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay shown in a movie theater. The opera is based on a book of the same name by Michael Chabon, published in 2000. I read the book shortly after it came out (so at least 20 years ago) and enjoyed it. So when I heard there was an opera based on the book I very much wanted to see it. I had originally heard it would be on the radio in early January, a broadcast of a performance at the Metropolitan Opera last October. But in late December I heard I would be able to see it on screen in movie theaters, today being one of the days. Alas, the closer theater showing it sold out, so I had to go almost to Ann Arbor (in a theater definitely not sold out). The story is about Joe Kavalier, who is Jewish and at the start of the opera is escaping from Prague of 1939. He leaves behind parents and a sister. He gets to Brooklyn, where is cousin Sam Clay lives. Sam is enamored with comic books at a time when Superman is becoming a thing. He convinces Joe to join his effort – Sam would do the writing and Joe would do the artwork. Their character, The Escapist, is a hit, soon on the radio, voiced by Tracy, and there is talk of a movie. Along the way Joe falls in love with Rosa and Sam falls in love with Tracy – I had forgotten about this gay part of the story. But real Nazis are still out there and comic book battles aren’t removing the threat. Joe wants to bring his parents and sister to America and it’s not going well. The story is a lot deeper than the super hero angle might suggest. It is relevant to today both in The Escapist battling fascism and in a strong support of America being a place where the oppressed of other countries can come to be free. This was an overall excellent production, as one expects from Met Opera. The singers were in fine voice and did a great job in their acting. The music is by Mason Bates and the program included a clip of him describing his combination of orchestra with electronic sounds. The result was tuneful, dramatic, and beautiful, definitely not the avant garde of other operas written in the last half century. Each of the lead characters had moments to shine (what the opera world calls “arias”). The sets were innovative and appropriate to the story. There was also a lot of images projected on to the scenery or backdrop, a great way to show what Joe is drawing and to show the comics Tracy is portraying for the radio. The success of the fall run prompted Met Opera to show the opera in theaters, originally not on their in-theater schedule. The success also prompted the opera be brought back to the Met stage for a few more performances in February. At the bottom of the Met’s page for the opera are videos of some of those arias. I’m pretty sure this opera will become part of the standard repertoire rather quickly. The murder of Alex Pretti by ICE agents in Minneapolis last Saturday has been in the news quite a bit. But if you still need a news article here is one by the Associated Press posted on Daily Kos. Also on Saturday Kos of Kos wrote about some of the details of the killing to demonstrate that what comes out of the mouths of the nasty guy administration is lies. On Sunday Kos reported that a spending bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security, the parent of ICE, is now before the Senate. Funding for several other departments is in the same bill. Several Democratic senators, including Minority Leader Chuck Schumer have declared they will vote no unless the bill is revised to restore the guardrails for ICE. That story is still playing out with a partial government shutdown possibly happening Saturday morning. Since the House is on recess (again) until Monday the chance of a shutdown is quite high. An AP article from Sunday afternoon includes more details of Pretti’s murder. It also includes comments by gun rights groups, that Pretti having a legal gun with permit with him at a protest is legal.

“Every peaceable Minnesotan has the right to keep and bear arms — including while attending protests, acting as observers, or exercising their First Amendment rights,” the Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus said in a statement. “These rights do not disappear when someone is lawfully armed.”

A day that I side with a gun rights group is rare. Another AP article posted on Sunday reports that several Republicans are calling for a deeper investigation into the shooting and the tactics of the ICE agents. This is needed because, as before, DHS and ICE say they will investigate and are blocking Minnesota police from doing a separate (and more honest) investigation. I’m pleased to see that this murder is rousing some Republicans say something. That’s while, as Emily Singer of Kos reports, other Republicans are defending the killing. On Monday Walter Einenkel of Kos reported that Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said that protesters should not have guns. So Pretti brought this on himself. Also on Monday Kos wrote about the comments various administration officials, especially Noem, have been making. He wrote:

This isn’t spin. It isn’t confusion. It’s the secretary of Homeland Security knowingly lying to justify lethal force by her department, as part of an agencywide collapse so complete that it’s doubtful anyone at DHS is even capable of telling the truth anymore. And the absurdity doesn’t stop there. While Noem repeatedly refers to Pretti as an “attacker,” U.S. Homeland Security adviser Stephen Miller escalated the lie even further, calling Pretti an “assassin.” This press conference alone should be grounds for impeachment. A Cabinet secretary does not get to hide behind “it’s under investigation” to block accountability while simultaneously fabricating a false narrative to excuse a killing carried out by her own agency.

A third Monday article is by Lisa Needham of Kos who reported on conservatives saying the real issue was that Pretti attended a protest with a gun. Let’s ignore that Pretti had been disarmed by the agents before being shot. The NRA talked about those conservative comments – a bit – but then blamed Democrats. Rob Doar of the Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus had to explain things to Kash Patel of the FBI.

There is no prohibition on a permit holder carrying a firearm, loaded, with multiple magazines at a protest or rally in Minnesota

Needham then contrasted Pretti with Kyle Rittenhouse who several years ago took a gun to a protest, killed two people, and was praised by conservatives. Conservatives are praised while liberal gun owners get a death sentence. In a Monday evening post Kos discussed the reasons why the nasty guy is “waving a white flag.” He talked to Gov. Tim Walz and described the call as “very good” and Walz as “respectful.” That’s quite a change from the words he’s been using over the last few weeks. The nasty guy doesn’t use “respectful” when describing Democrats without a reason. And the reason is the politics around the Pretti murder have “gone south fast.” There’s the murder itself. There’s also Republicans’ defense of the murder – of a white gun owner. Public support then dropped by quite a bit. And other Republicans support controls on ICE. No policy has changed yet. But sending border czar Tom Homan to Minnesota looks like the beginning of cooperation rather than occupation. On Tuesday morning Kos reported that Border Patrol chief Greg Bovino, one of the administration attack dogs and a prominent face of ICE, had been pulled from Minnesota, been demoted, and his social media operation dismantled. Some of Bovino’s backers in DHS may also be on their way out. Kos also reported that some of the new ICE hires, especially the retirees that were rehired, are looking at what’s going on and leaving. And it isn’t just the Minnesota weather. On Tuesday evening Kos listed several reasons why the nasty guy should be impeached: His mental state and growing dementia. The refusal to release the Epstein files. His terrorizing of American cities. The blowing up of the federal deficit. The botched way he’s dealing with Venezuela. His obsession with the Kennedy Center. His obsession with Greenland for not getting the Peace Prize. His damage to NATO and other foreign alliances, burning the credibility of the US. And Republicans are either silent or muttering quietly. “At this point, silence isn’t loyalty. It’s complicity.” Oliver Willis of Kos, in his series on Explaining the Right, he discussed why conservatives think anti-ICE – well, any – protesters are being paid. Of course, there are a lot of examples when they have said that or something similar. The opposite of a paid protester is one that is out there because they actually oppose what they’re protesting against.

What conservatives don’t want to contend with is the reality that Trump’s policies and the ideas put into place by congressional Republicans are unpopular. Anti-immigration violence and cost-increasing tariffs generate genuine opposition. Republicans would love a world where they can disregard protesters as a paid distraction. But they are very real, no matter how furiously the right tries to spin the reality being witnessed by millions.

In the pundit roundup for Kos for Sunday, the day after Pretti was murdered, Chitown Kev quoted Mike McIntyre of The New York Times discussing “fringe” researchers. I wondered are we doing this still? Or is it again?

A group of fringe researchers thwarted safeguards at the National Institutes of Health and gained access to data from thousands of children. The researchers have used it to produce at least 16 papers purporting to find biological evidence for differences in intelligence between races, ranking ethnicities by I.Q. scores and suggesting Black people earn less because they are not very smart. ... Their papers have provided fodder for racist posts on social media and white nationalist message boards that have been viewed millions of times. Some of the papers are cited by A.I. bots like ChatGPT and Grok in response to queries about race and intelligence. On the social media platform X, Grok has referred users to the research more than two dozen times this month alone.

Symone D Sanders Townsend of MSNOW discussed special counsel Jack Smith’s testimony before Congress. He’s the one who was prosecuting the nasty guy until his regaining the Oval Office put a stop to the efforts.

But while Democrats on the committee focused on the past, Republicans looked to change the subject. Instead of sincerely grappling with the violence or the attempt to overturn the election, Republicans focused on process. They questioned procedures, attacked the special counsel and debated legal technicalities. They did not try to argue, as some have, that Jan. 6 was a hoax or a false flag operation or just a friendly group of tourists. Instead, they did everything they could to make it feel less consequential. That distinction matters. When a violent attack on democracy is treated as just another political disagreement, something dangerous is happening. At times, the hearing felt less like an effort to hold people accountable and more like an attempt to wear the public down until it grew tired of attempting to hold people accountable. [...] Smith made a simple but critical point in his testimony. When serious crimes are not punished, it sends a message. It tells future actors that they can try again. Accountability is not about payback. It is about preventing the next attempt. Right now, the message of accountability has been lost.

In the comments is a tweet by Tim Miller:

The 2nd Amendment protects us from government tyranny crowd changes their tune right quick when their preferred jack booted thugs kill a dude with a gun. The government's stated rationale for this killing is that the victim was carrying a legal firearm. The very people that told us we need to accept mass child slaughter for the right to protect ourselves from scary Obama, now say the govt can kill you if you possess a weapon.

A tweet by Matt McDermott, which includes an image of the letter.

As insane as this sounds, it’s true: Pam Bondi sent Minnesota officials a letter today saying ICE would leave the state if Minnesota turns over its voter files to the Trump Administration. They’re openly using state violence as a bargaining chip to seize election infrastructure.

Sen. Chris Murphy added:

Guess what? This has never been about safety or immigration. It’s a pretext for Trump to take over elections in swing states.

A tweet from Brian Allen:

A German soccer federation executive committee member says it’s time to consider a WORLD CUP BOYCOTT because of Donald Trump. Let that sink in. Trump is turning the United States into such a global embarrassment that our allies are now discussing boycotting the biggest sporting event on Earth.

Bill Kristol tweeted with a link to an article in The Bulwark:

“The federal government is no longer bound by law. If agents of the state may kill people in public without being investigated; if they have—again, per VP Vance—“absolute immunity” from prosecution then we are living in an authoritarian regime.”

The Wolfpack takes a riff on the Brokeback Mountain movie. The GOP says to the nasty guy, “I don’t know how to quit you.” Jack Smith says, “Maybe this will help!” as he hands over handcuffs. Lalo Alcaraz riffs on a line conservatives have been saying to immigrants. A Pilgrim man says, “We are fleeing persecution in our homeland, so we are seeking a new place to live.” A native man says, “Why don’t you people just stay home and fix your own failing country?” In the comments of Tuesday’s roundup paulpro posted a cartoon by Pat Harrington:

Donkey: Wow! You guys are losing the narrative... Elephant: They’re domestic terrorists and paid assassins! Doneky: No, they’re VA nurses and helpless moms. Elephant: But, I still want to own the libtards. Donkey: It’s so bad I can use the NRA against you... Elephant: Oh, No!! What if we lose Jesus next?!!

In today’s roundup Greg Dworkin included a tweet from Sonny Bunch:

The amount of coping and seething I am seeing from conservatives who simply *cannot believe* they couldn’t win the discourse/public opinion fight by mindlessly championing a disarmed dude getting shot in the back ten times is kind of fascinating.

A cartoon by Naked Pastor showing a pastor thinking, “I warned my church that if they weren’t careful, they could start looking like Nazi collaborators, only to discover... that’s what they’ve always wanted.”