A grotesque amount of money for any one human to hold

I finished the book The Magic Fish by Trung Le Nguyen. I didn’t realize until after I bought it that it’s a graphic novel. And it’s a beautiful one. The author and artist is the child of Vietnamese immigrants. The story is about Tiȇn, who is 13, and his mother Helen. He speaks mostly English and she speaks mostly Vietnamese and her name is the Anglicized version of her birth name. To help his mother learn English he reads fairy tales to her. The boy is gay, but doesn’t know the Vietnamese words to explain it to her. The first fairy tale featured in the story is Cinderella as told by German sources (which explains the images of Neuschwanstein Castle (the original on which Disney castles are modeled). Images here. The story isn’t exact, but does feature a beautiful woman attending a dance, meeting the prince, and leaving before he can know who she is. The second is a Vietnamese version of Cinderella in which the Stepmother is a lot nastier. Instead of a fairy godmother the story features a talking fish. The third fairy tale in Anderson’s Little Mermaid. Again the ending is changed. In all three the artwork is beautiful. The girls in the center of the stories are shown in wonderful gowns. I highly enjoyed and recommend it. At the end of the book the author says he sees the Little Mermaid story as an immigrant story. A person of one place tries to live in another place and doesn’t seem to fit. My Sunday viewing wasn’t a movie and wasn’t on Sunday. On Saturday evening I went to the Fisher Theater in Detroit to see lesbian comic Fortune Feimster. Her opening act was a gay guy with the last name Tower. I didn’t catch the first name. Both were quite funny, though definitely not PG, and I needed the laugh. Since both are queer, and their queerness is a part of their act, the audience was also quite queer. I very much enjoyed the evening. I’ve mentioned this before and Emily Singer of Daily Kos reported on the full story. Elon Musk, because of the initial public offering for his company SpaceX, is now a trillionaire, the world’s first.

That’s a grotesque amount of money for any one human to hold—made worse by the fact that it’s Musk, who has proven that he won’t use his fortune for good.

Some of the reasons Musk makes it worse: He has been spending big on Republicans. Through DOGE he has made government worse – less able to do the things Congress budgeted for and harming children and seniors. He destroyed USAID (US Agency for International Development), worsening health and hunger around the world. And he didn’t save the government any money.

Musk is a menace to society, and the fact that he’s now the world’s first trillionaire is a disgusting failure of public policy. “Elon Musk just became the world’s first trillionaire,” Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts wrote on X Friday. “The typical American household would have to work more than 11 MILLION years to make Elon Musk’s level of wealth. We need a wealth tax.”

Vyan of the Kos community discussed recent reports documenting the damage from Musk’s destroying USAID. Vyan suggests “Google ‘Deaths due to DOGE Cuts.’” The results, which Vyan quoted, looks like output from AI, though it does include links to specific articles. The current death toll is between 300,000 and 750,000 and is projected to “lead to more than 14 million additional preventable deaths by 2030, including over 4.5 million children under the age of five. That implies Musk, according to Vyan, is a mass murderer. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) proposed that a one-time 5% tax on Musk’s wealth would bring in enough money to fund “universal child care for every family.” That brought on a feud of words between Khanna and Musk with Musk hurling insults and Khanna referencing research. Vyan described Musk as “a perfect example of predatory capitalism.” Then he quoted a tweet from DogeDesigner:

USAID was a criminal organization that funded bioweapons, censorship & global coups with your tax dollars. It was never about helping the poor. It was a viper’s nest of radical-left corruption, waste, and anti-America operations.

The tweet then listed some places where USAID money supposedly went. I have no trust that any of those statements are true and dispute USAID was never about helping the poor – if it prevented millions of deaths it was very much about helping the poor. Musk threatened to sue Khanna for lying. Vyan tweeted, “Go ahead and sue; discovery will be an absolute bitch.” Also ABC News has verified Khanna’s claim. Tim Henderson, in an article for Stateline posted on Kos, discussed the current state of American inequality.

The richest 1% of Americans held nearly a third of the country’s total wealth at the end of 2025, the largest percentage the Federal Reserve Board has recorded since it started monitoring the numbers in 1989. In 1990, the share was 22.5%. The latest percentage, 31.9%, is likely the largest since the end of World War II, possibly heralding a return to the extreme wealth inequality of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And it is likely to balloon further as a result of President Donald Trump’s tax cuts and other pro-business policies. Today’s top 1% consists of about 1.4 million households with at least $12 million in net worth, holding a total of $55.9 trillion in wealth. The bottom 50% consists of 67.7 million households with less than $264,000 in net worth.

Because of this inequality and the problems it brings a dozen states have passed or proposed new taxes on the wealthy. Californian has a one-time tax on billionaires on the November ballot. This year at least 12 billionaires have left the state and new wealth has created 23 more. Nationally,

The combined effects of the tariffs and the tax and spending law will help households with the top 10% of incomes most and hurt 70% of households between now and 2034, according to a June 1 report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a left-leaning think tank that drew on information from the Budget Lab at Yale University.

The divide also affects views on inflation. The lower classes are hurt by it and the rich are unaffected. Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos, included a tweet by millesini that includes a half-minute video:

Albanians have begun to push construction crates downhill, in protest of the Kushner and Trump families’ plans to take over and island. Well done.

Kos community member xaxnar quoted from Timothy Snyder’s Substack about his discussion of “Utopias of Violence.” The opening:

The war in Iran began with a dream of violence. The question now is whether the nightmare that followed returns to the United States. The use of force does not magically lead to the outcome you want. You can think that firing some missiles and dropping some bombs will end Iran’s nuclear program, overturn its government, and lead to a victory that makes you feel grand about yourself; and then you can find that you no longer have any leverage over the nuclear program, that you have strengthened the power of the regime, and that you are paying hundreds of billions of dollars of reparations as the world draws conclusions from your capitulation.

Big proponents of the idea that might makes right and that the US military can’t lose are the nasty guy, the vice nasty, and the war nasty. Will they turn their violence on Americans? They tried it in Minnesota and it didn’t produce the results they wanted.

Trump, Hegseth, and Vance have not thus far shown themselves to be people who recognize basic social realities; they do not question their own utopias of violence, but only the motives of anyone who notes their folly. Just as they were overcome by strong feelings that violence would change Iran the way that they wanted, they will likely have strong feelings that violence in America will change America the way they want. This is very unlikely to be true; the utopianism, the faith in feelings, puts the republic in danger. But Trump and Hegseth (and Vance) are unlikely to see matters that way.

In the pundit roundup for Kos for last Wednesday Greg Dworkin quoted the International Crisis Group:

The war’s ambiguous end carries a clear lesson: wars of choice, launched based on inflated threats and wishful thinking, are far more likely to deepen than to solve the problems they purport to address. The specific lesson regarding Iran is also difficult to escape. After years of deploying every available coercive tool, from suffocating sanctions to military force, diplomacy remains the only approach that has delivered positive results. That reality argues for taking it more seriously this time round, not less.

Dworkin included a tweet from Politics and Poll Tracker with results from a CNN poll. As of May 27% of those polled said they were a Democrat, 26% said they were a Republican. They are quite evenly matched, likely within the margin of error. And 47% said they were independent. That’s almost half and the highest in a decade. The accompanying chart shows Independents showing a steady rise from 35% and Democrats showing a steady drop also from 35% starting about 2021. Republicans started their decline about 2022. Voters are disgusted that both parties are beholden to the rich and aren’t doing anything about why they are getting screwed. In last Sunday’s pundit roundup, down in the comments is a variation of a meme posted by exlrrp. I’ve mentioned several other variations. The original shows a woman walking down the street towards us. A man walking the other way turns to look at her. A second woman, presumably the man’s wife or date looks at him with annoyance. Each of the three people is named or described in some way. In this new variation the woman walking towards us is replaced by the supreme leader of Iran. The man doing the looking is the nasty guy. The one annoyed at his gaze is Netanyahu. Last week Thursday Singer reported on the state of the Reflecting Pool between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial in the center of Washington. Barely a week after the pool was “repaired,” painted by a nasty guy crony, and refilled, it became green with algae. Hydrogen peroxide was poured in to get rid of the algae, though not enough to actually make a difference there, but it was enough to cause the new paint to peel in chunks and float to the surface. That disaster is bothering the nasty guy, who blamed the mess on vandals on the nasty guy. That line of attack was taken up by conservative commentators, such as Grant Stinchfield. That prompted Singer to respond:

Hey Grant, if Democrats were so powerful enough to cause the biggest algae bloom in years in the reflecting pool just hours after it was refilled, they wouldn’t have lost the 2024 election. The real reason the pool is once again green is science, as algae thrives in hot water. But I guess we shouldn’t expect a halfwit like you to understand that.

The water is hotter because the dark “American Flag blue” absorbs more heat than the bare concrete. Democrats are using this mess to say the nasty guy is spending all his time on disastrous vanity projects and not on the cost of living. Instead of draining the Washington swamp the nasty guy has made it worse. In the comments of today’s roundup David Michigan posted a tweet by Edwin Heathcote that shows the green water of the Reflecting Pool with the words, “I saw this referred to as the Strait of Warm Ooze. Very good.”

What to do with a Supreme Court of corrupt liars?

The NPR show The 1A had an episode last week that discussed what can be done with the Supreme Court. The current Court (or at least a good number of its members) appear to be corrupt liars – they have been influenced by outside money and have done the opposite of what they said under oath. They also act in a partisan manner, supporting Republicans and blocking Democrats. Too many of their rulings are through the shadow docket without arguments or explanations. They’ve lost the respect of a large number of people. So what should be done? Guests on the show are: Kate Shaw, professor at University of Pennsylvania and co-host of Strict Scrutiny. Alicia Bannon, the judiciary program director at the Brennan Center for Justice, and Daniel Epps, professor at Washington University School of Law. I am working from the transcript. At the top I’m told the transcript may contain errors. Right off I see the speakers are not identified by name and the method of identifying them by number isn’t consistent. So I may not be accurate in identify the speakers. The discussion began with opinions about the Calais case that gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act by declaring gerrymandering can proceed without regard to race. Bannon said that there is such a thing as the Purcell principle that says the court should avoid making election changes too close to an election. A map may be discriminatory, but it must be used for the imminent election. Epps added a reason for that is one of the parties may give reasons why the decision should be reconsidered. Overall the court should exercise caution. That wasn’t invoked in this case. The justices seemed eager to let legislatures revise their maps, leading to changing maps as an election is proceeding, causing chaos over the primaries. Also, issuing the ruling in April, rather than January or June, was the month to cause the most election chaos. Much of the show was host Jen White reading suggestions of Court reform from listeners and sometimes asking her guests to comment on them. I skipped most of the suggestions that didn’t get comment. Shaw said this Congress is unwilling to regulate the Court. The Court would not want Congress to regulate it. Alito told the Wall Street Journal in which he said Congress has no constitutional authority regulate the Court, which Shaw says is flat wrong and a stunning statement. Shaw said she thinks there are things Congress could do: Mandate a code of ethics. Limit when the shadow docket is used. Set the number of members (which had been done in the past). Shaw added we (most of us) want a Court that protect groups that are too small to protect themselves. But this Court is overprotecting the rich parts of the majority that don’t need protecting. Epps said the current system of selecting justices works to give us more extreme partisan views. Listener Matt proposes the idea that the Court be made up of a rotating body of one judge from each Court of Appeals, with a new panel every year. Shaw responded by saying it’s interesting and she doesn’t see a constitutional problem with it. The current Court chooses cases that allows them to give the answer they want to give. Perhaps outsourcing that function would be good. Listener Augustus proposed justices get an 18 year term that expires just after the presidential and midterm elections, giving a vote of confidence from the electorate and avoids making an appointment during an election year. Bannon added this idea would tighten the democratic link between the court and public while also respecting judicial independence. Over time the Court would more reflect public values. Historically, Carter had no Court appointments and the nasty guy had three. More regular terms would prevent that imbalance. Also, the Court wouldn’t be so high stakes. Shaw reviewed the way justices get on the Court. The current Senate hearings are politicized, choreographed, and not informative. Senators give speeches and the candidates evade questions. No one learns much. We don’t know anything about how a president picks a nominee, including whether they give assurances on how they will decide a given question. We do know when the nominee gets before the Senate such questions are evaded. Listener John suggested that a nominee should get approval from 75% of the Senate. Epps agrees that would give us a more moderate candidate. We used to have a filibuster on nominees, which required a 60% approval, but Republicans got rid of that in 2017, so requiring 75% approval isn’t going to happen. Shaw said even if reform of the Court doesn’t seem possible right now a public conversation still needs to happen so that perhaps in a decade reform can happen. Bannon added we need to create the political momentum and opportunity for reform. Emily Singer of Daily Kos wrote about the nasty guy’s $1.8 billion slush fund he wants to disburse to traitorous insurrectionists – people who attacked the Capitol, broke the law, and were correctly prosecuted. But there are people who actually deserve a payout from a weaponized Department of Justice. These are people who had to go to court to defend themselves from fraudulent charges brought by the nasty guy. They had to spend their own money to do it and suffered pain and anguish from being the focus of attack by the nasty guy and his minions. Singer lists some of these people and says the list is not exhaustive. In her list are: James Comey and his daughter Maureen. New York Attorney General Letitia James, the one who successfully prosecuted him for falsified business records. John Bolton, who wrote a book saying the nasty guy had abused power. Former Federal Reserve Board Chair Jerome Powell who refused to let the nasty guy dictate interest rates. Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, who the nasty guy tried to fire because she didn’t support lowering interest rates. Kilmar Abrego Garcia, wrongly deported and facing deportation again. ChongLy Thao, wrongly arrested by ICE in a dangerous manner. The DC sandwich thrower. The Broadview Six, who were arrested for protesting inhumane treatment at the Broadview detention center near Chicago. Last week Oliver Willis of Kos discussed the report by Judd Legum in his Popular Information newsletter that correlated the nasty guy’s financial disclosures with public statements showing that he praises companies while purchasing their stock. Willis wrote:

Legum wrote on X that he tracked the story’s coverage in mainstream media, with zero mentions by CBS, CNN, Fox News, NPR, PBS, Politico, Semafor, and Business Insider. Of course, Fox News is effectively right-wing propaganda, and CBS is now owned by the pro-MAGA Ellison family. NPR and PBS have been targeted by defunding legislation. But the other outlets present themselves as providers of critical, unbiased journalism, so their silence raises significant questions.

Even so, the general public is hearing about the nasty guy’s corruption. Lisa Needham of Kos wrote that the vice nasty is working hard to root out fraud. It’s strange because didn’t DOGE get rid of fraud last year? The cases he is on now (and loudly proclaiming how wonderful his efforts are) appear to be making claims of fraud where very little exists or where states have been already been aggressive in rooting it out. He also wants to make sure he takes these cases to red state judges because blue state judges are “corrupt.” Wrote Needham:

There’s no question that the anti-fraud initiative is about attacking blue states, but it’s also a pathetic attempt to recreate the DOGE era to get conservatives whipped into a froth about endless fraud without acknowledging that it was supposed to have been eradicated.

I’m sure his definition of fraud is that money is supporting the kinds of people he doesn’t like.

We’re not ready to live in space yet

I finished the book A City on Mars; Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? By Kelly and Zach Weinersmith a husband and wife team. With Elon Musk wearing an “Occupy Mars” shirt this is a timely look at how feasible putting humans on the moon, in a space habitat, or on Mars really is. From the title one could easily guess that the authors don’t agree with Musk. They tackle all the reasons why people say we should put people in habitats. Here’s some of their responses: The belief is that giving humanity a home off earth will allow the species to continue in case we destroy our current home. But earth at its global warming worst is still a zillion times better than life on the moon or Mars. Also, we’re not ready for life in space so let’s keep working to save earth. Putting industry in orbit to protect earth’s environment is too expensive. Consider cement – yeah, there is enough material in space for all the cement we use, but space is too cold for making it and getting all that mass back to earth is expensive. Space resources won’t make us all rich because mining what little there is would be too costly. Sending humans to space won’t end or reduce war and property disputes in space may get fought on earth. When astronauts come back to earth they frequently talk of the new feeling of how fragile earth is and we’re all in this together. But that hasn’t gone much past the wonderful sounding slogans. The authors talk about the things we don’t yet know about living off earth. Does a fetus need gravity to develop properly? Do children need gravity to grow properly? Is moon or Mars gravity enough? What does a livable biome require? No research has been done on the first few questions, not nearly enough on the last. The moon is not a great place to live and would require living underground. Do we really want that? There aren’t enough resources in the regolith to support trade with earth. Mars is not better, partly because there is a poisonous chemical in the soil. Space habitats are better but would take such a huge effort they aren’t feasible, especially at the scale needed for a viable population. The authors spend a quarter of the book discussing current space law and why it matters. The space treaty that exists was created in the 1960s when there were two space-faring nations. Now there are six plus a couple corporations. Things have been fine so far, but what if one of those corporations sets up a mining operation somewhere that is illegal under the current treaty? The authors explain what a company town is and why they have such a bad reputation. What if the company town is on Mars where the employee can’t simply leave and the boss can coerce the worker by reducing the amount of oxygen? We’re not ready to live in space yet. The benefits aren’t as great as is claimed. The size of a viable population is much bigger than most theorist suggests. But if we still want to go to space, there are important things to research. The biggest is in addition to creating a rocket that can go to Mars, Musk should also be putting billions into biome research and space pregnancy. And that space treaty needs a serious update. I enjoyed the book, though my interest flagged towards the end of the discussion on why space law matters. The authors explain their positions well to the non-science reader, using slang and humor. Author Zach is a cartoonist and has lots of drawings to illustrate the points. I recommend the book to science fiction fans and space nerds. I would enjoy reading science fiction stories based on the ideas in this book. I get emails from March for Our Lives, the group founded by survivors of the school shooting in Parkland Florida. Yeah, they include requests for money. They also explain what they’re doing, both the gains and losses. The email I got a few days ago essentially says discussing the emotional and psychological damage of gun violence hasn’t made any difference in lawmaker actions. Instead, this email talks about the economic cost, Lawmakers want to talk about economic things a lot.

Gun violence costs the United States an estimated $557 billion every year, equating to roughly 2.6% of the entire U.S. economy, or more than $1,600 per person annually. To put that into perspective, these costs exceed what the federal government spends on education each year. And yet this burden is rarely part of the national conversation about guns.

The costs show up in medical costs and higher insurance premiums. Survivors face chronic pain and disabilities affecting their ability to work. Their family’s finances become more unstable through the loss of an income and future earnings. The losses hit the communities already facing economic hardship. In this way gun violence is a hidden tax on the country. Lisa Needham of Daily Kos wrote:

President Donald Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission had its final meeting on Monday, and you’ll be hyped to find out that everything you ever learned about the Founding Fathers and religion is incorrect, you fools. Trump’s handpicked selection of zealots on the commission want you to know that the separation of church and state is a lie and has been all along.

Needham then quoted a few of those founding fathers to contradict that commission (whose name actually means Religious Liberty for me which includes permission to oppress you). First is Roger Williams, who founded Providence in what became Rhode Island: civic life must be separate from spiritual life with a “high wall” between them. Thomas Jefferson in a letter he wrote to Baptists:

I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church and State.

James Madison noted that if a government can establish Christianity over other religions it can also establish one Christian sect over others. Needham also noted that of the 12 members of the Commission all are members of Judeo-Christian religions. We know “exactly what church Trump doesn’t want separated from the state.” So the nasty guy having a spat with Pope Leo is rather curious. A lot of nasty guys supporters delight in claims and images that show him as a Christ figure. One of those images made the rounds recently. If not a Christ figure, the nasty guy is at least God’s Chosen President, as is preached to many Evangelical congregations. StanleyYelnats dotcom of the Kos community noted that some supporters have switched from calling him the Christ, to calling him the anti-Christ.

According to biblical prophecy and tradition, the Antichrist is a future, charismatic, and deceptive world leader who opposes Jesus Christ, sets himself up as God, and brings about a, “man of lawlessness” persona characterized by immense power, blasphemy, and the persecution of believers. He is empowered by Satan to perform fake wonders and establish a totalitarian global system.

Some characteristics of the anti-Christ are: He appears peaceful but is cunning. He opposes all things related to God (well, the nasty guy seems to bask in being compared to Jesus). He will control the world’s economic system. He will persecute followers of God (depends on whether one thinks Evangelicals actually follow God). He is focused on power. I will make no claim that the nasty guy is (or isn’t) the anti-Christ. Part of that requires the belief that the End Times are about to start and some Christians have been expecting the End Times for two thousand years. Instead, I will note some of the nasty guy’s Christian followers are turning on him and seeing him for who he is and as the opposite of what they had wanted. Oliver Willis, in his series of Explaining the Right column for Kos wonders, “Why conservatives think they own religion.” I can’t say he gets any closer to the answer than usual, which is not close. He does document Evangelicals think that. Willis goes all the way back to the rise of the Moral Majority and Jerry Falwell, who rose to national attention when Ronald Reagan was president. Much of that political energy was put to use in opposition to abortion that came along with the rise of feminism and women asserting bodily autonomy. But all that loud noise convinced the media and too many Democrats that only the right is the true religion. Willis then gives several examples of the left using religion to make its point. The prime example is Martin Luther King and his work in the Civil Rights movement. Currently, James Talarico is using religion in his campaign to be the Democratic senator from Texas.

But conservatives continue to suffer the mass delusion that only their brand of faith is legitimate, falsely arguing that the more inclusive liberal tradition—where other religions and nonbelievers are on equal footing with Christians—is somehow hostile. It wasn’t Biden, Obama, Clinton, or any other Democrats who picked a childish fight with the pope—or who sold personally branded Bibles to their supporters. And Democrats certainly haven’t openly blasphemed against Christianity by posting images depicting themselves as Jesus Christ. That has been the domain of the so-called “religious” right. But they don’t own religion—not at all.

In Thursday’s pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev quoted Mike Brock of the Notes From the Circus Substack.

You do not need intelligence services or insider access or political analysis to figure out what is going on in Donald Trump’s mind at any given moment. He is thinking zero steps ahead. As the philosopher Vlad Vexler has observed, Trump is floating through dispositional states inside very malignant pathologies. There is no strategy to decode. There is no chess game to map. There is a man moving from one psychological state to the next, driven by the same neurological machinery as any other organism in the grip of a compulsive disorder — seeking the next hit, escalating when the last one wore off, displaying dominance when the hierarchy feels threatened. That is all that is happening. That is all that has ever been happening. […] The commentariat keeps attributing chess to someone playing slot machines. I want to give credit to George Conway, and to the other clinicians and public intellectuals who have spent years trying to bring the public’s attention to this fact. Conway has been consistent and precise and largely ignored by the very establishment press that prefers the “distraction strategy” frame because that frame preserves the comforting fiction that someone competent is in control. The Duty to Warn coalition. The sixty thousand signatories. The people who were called alarmist and hysterical and politically motivated for saying, in clinical terms, what is plainly visible to anyone willing to look.

Daily Kos has upgraded to a new platform. Because of something between the new comment system and the browser I’m using, which is Vivaldi, I don’t have access to comments. And that means no access to the cartoons usually posted there. In Friday’s roundup Greg Dworkin included a tweet by Christopher Hale:

Speaker Mike Johnson, an evangelical with no theological training, says Pope Leo XIV doesn’t understand Catholic just war doctrine. Pope Leo XIV’s patron, St. Augustine, invented the Catholic just war doctrine.

Tennis player Martina Navratilova added:

Pretty soon Mike will start telling me how to hit a serve or something….

James Patterson of Providence Magazine

When Vice President JD Vance was campaigning for Viktor Orbán earlier this month, he was also campaigning to preserve the Hungarian funding for the New Right organizations that would support his own future political ambitions. With Orbán defeated, that money is gone. The Hungarians, in their own way, helped decide the future of American conservatism. How is that possible? How did this happen? The answer is the ‘Grand Budapest Cartel.’ Orbán has spent the past decade engaging in a concerted influence campaign on American conservatism. The purpose of his efforts is not merely to familiarize conservative policymakers and think-tankers with Hungarian interests. Orbán wanted to remake American conservatism from the top down into an ideological movement that moves it away from limited government, religious pluralism, and a robust foreign presence, and toward right-wing social engineering, postliberalism, and an American retreat from foreign affairs. Orbán’s ambition is not his alone but also that of Orbán’s close friends in Russia and China. In short, the meaning of the future of American conservatism was also on the ballot in the recent Hungarian elections.

A tweet by Mike Levin

It should be a much bigger story that JD Vance flew to Hungary, stood on a campaign stage, and told voters to return a head of government widely documented for human rights abuses and democratic backsliding. Then, after his candidate lost, Vance said what had happened during the Hungarian campaign was “one of the worst examples of foreign election interference that I’ve ever seen or ever even read about.” Was he describing himself? The Hungarian people rejected it all. Democracy held, despite America’s intervention, not because of American leadership. The United States has long argued that elections should be free from outside influence. That standard should apply to everyone, including us.

In the roundup from Saturday a week ago Dworkin quoted Lauren Egan of The Bulwark:

However understandable the downward trend in campus protests might be, the dynamic has become a point of frustration for some parts of the Democratic coalition who feel that anti-war and pro-Palestinian activists are tougher on Democratic officials than on Republicans. They note that even though Harris is out of office, she still gets interrupted at public events by pro-Palestinian protesters. “Every single speech that Kamala Harris gave in those 107 days, they found a way to protest her and call her a proponent of genocide. But they never did that throughout the campaign for Donald Trump, and then they never did it in 2025 when he was giving Benjamin Netanyahu a blank check to annihilate Gaza,” said a former Harris campaign official. “Now, when Donald Trump is threatening to do the thing that they accused Kamala Harris and Joe Biden of being complicit of, they’re silent.”

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.

They love the language of blood and gore

My Sunday movie was Glitter and Gold, Ice Dancing. This was released by Netflix a few days before the Winter Olympics to serve as a companion to the Ice Dancing competition. I didn’t have a chance to watch it then. It is a three episode documentary, 2:45 total length, as three top ice dancing couples prepare for their time in the Olympics. Two of the couples are: Madison Chock and Evan Bates, who had won gold medals at lesser competitions, but had not won an Olympic medal. Piper Gilles and Paul Poirier, who had also won a lot of medals and known for a more eccentric style. Poirier said he is gay and that it affects the choices he makes when designing a program. Laurence Fournier-Beaudry and Guillame Cizaron were the third couple. He had won Olympic gold in 2022 with a different partner. I don’t remember why his partner left. His new partner had lost her previous partner because he had been suspended for a sex assault accusation. That ruling was overturned and appealed, but not resolved in time to prepare for this year’s games. A year before the Games the ice dancing world was pretty confident that Chock and Bates would take gold and “Piper and Paul” would take silver. That calculus was upset when the Fournier-Beaudry and Cizaron paring was announced. In ice dancing, especially when the competitors are still in their teens, there is a lot of splitting and forming partners. There is even a website where one can fill in their stats in hopes of finding a partner. That can mean partners are from different countries, creating strange situations. An English woman was paired with a Spanish man and got a Spanish passport to qualify. That man left the sport and she paired with a German man. The German man could more easily get a Spanish passport than the English/Spanish woman could get a German passport, so they represented Spain though neither was Spanish. This was brought up because Fournier-Beaudry had to get a French passport and hope the paperwork went through before the Games. By the time a pair is Olympic quality they’ve usually been together for a decades, sometimes more than two. The French pair had to overcome a lot for being so recently paired. Ten months out the pairs create their short and long programs based on the types of things they do best and their own personal style. They choose music and work with choreographers. They talk to costume designers. They have to consider whether the programs are “Olympic enough.” Six months out they start to show their programs to judges to get feedback on what works (what pleases the judges) and what doesn’t. But each pair must decide if what the judges say conflicts with what they understand their personality to be. There are a few scenes of the woman putting on makeup before performing. Their male partners are beside them also putting on makeup. And Poirier showed how much stuff he puts in his hair so that it is as unmoving as a helmet. Then come the qualifying events in which they go to arenas around the world and perform before audiences. How well they place affects whether they get to the Olympics. Their performances may suggest whether parts of their program need to be reworked. Of course, their Olympic performances are not included in this documentary. Though I watched the competition I had forgotten how they finished and had to look it up. I finished the book The Bump, a novel by Sidney Karger. This is the story of Wyatt and Biz, a gay couple. Yes, Biz is a nickname – real name Massimo – gotten perhaps because he was a busy boy, he seemed to be bouncing off the walls (ADD?), or because as a teen he was in show business. Maybe both. They have been together about a dozen years. A baby is about to be born for them through surrogacy. But as the story opens their relationship is showing strain. So instead of flying from from their home in Brooklyn to California, where the surrogate is, they decide on a road trip. Wyatt plans for them to visit gay enclaves – Provincetown, Saugatuck, Palm Springs – before being responsible parents puts a stop to that. They get to Provincetown, but Wyatt’s mother soon calls him to come to Boston, where he begins to learn why his father left when he was a boy and his mother won’t talk about it. Saugatuck gets replaced with a visit with Biz’s huge and boisterous family near Chicago, where Biz begins to confront his fears that he won’t be a good enough father. He compares himself to his own father, who is a gem. This is an enjoyable and satisfying story. It’s a love story with a bit of maturity to it. Even so, it’s a bit of a lightweight. Thom Hartmann of the Daily Kos community and an independent pundit wrote that (though their cruelty was visible long before the first bombs dropped) the war with Iran demonstrates the nasty guy, the vice nasty, Pete Hegseth, Stephen Miller, Russel Vought, Karoline Leavitt, Elon Musk, and many more have a severe case of bloodlust.

Trump, Hegseth, Vance, Miller, Leavitt, et al think this sort of thing makes them seem “macho” and “tough.” Nearly 90% of Republican voters agree with them. What it really does is reveal them as psychopaths, the very human embodiment of evil. ... This isn’t the language of leaders reluctantly using force as a last resort; it’s the rhetoric of psychopaths who see the rest of humanity as disposable, as dots in a video game, as objects whose death is entertainment, so long as their own luxury and power are secure. ... They delight in death and destruction. They love the language of blood and gore. They’re monsters.

I haven’t looked at the work of Sarah Kendzior in a while. She had been co-host of Gaslit Nation and now runs her own newsletter on Substack. A post from the end of February is a Q&A with her subscribers. A top topic is the Epstein scandal. Here are a couple excerpts from close to the top of the post.

Will the Epstein files bring accountability? SK: Yes, some — but not necessarily in the US. We’ve seen predators face arrest in other countries. In the US, we’ve seen them resign from jobs. This gives me little hope since MeToo produced more backlash than justice, and many who lost power later regained it. I do think the release has forced politicians and pundits to finally address the massive criminal conspiracy that was in the public domain for two decades. What’s revealing is that they view redacted emails by predators as more credible than consistent statements by victims. There is something very wrong with the way Americans trust criminal elites to be more reliable sources than the people they hurt. ... Will the rest of the files be released? SK: As I’ve said before, I think they were waiting to release an Epstein trove once: 1) they felt they had consolidated power 2) AI was so ubiquitous that the veracity of the evidence would be questioned. That moment is now. We have seen a lot of emails, though one period of interest — the time around 9/11 — is largely absent. We have not seen much video. I believe the most damaging information is on video. We know Epstein had rooms wired with cameras to film pedophiles assaulting victims. I will not watch that if it comes out. But it may come out, and should that happen, the assaulter will claim it’s fake. This wouldn’t have been a convincing excuse a decade ago, but it will be now due to AI. I’ve wondered if Grok posting child pornography on demand shortly before the Epstein files were released was a trial run for this tactic.

Perhaps this is why many of the richest tech companies are investing so deeply in AI? I’ve accumulated a bunch of pundit roundups for Kos. Let’s see how many I get through in the time I have. In the roundup for Saturday at the end of February Greg Dworkin included a tweet by Sarah Fitzpatrick that included a link to an article in The Atlantic. Fitzpatrick’s comment:

At least 6 Trump Cabinet members or senior admin officials were in contact with Epstein. It’s unclear if these relationships w/ Epstein were raised in background checks or security clearances. Every agency involved declined to answer my questions.

The title and subtitle of the article:

The ‘Crazy’ Plot to Release the Epstein Files How an unlikely duo of lawmakers partnered with victims to try to hold the powerful accountable.

In the comments, a tweet (though it doesn’t show as a tweet) by Matthew Yglesias:

Trump warned me that if I voted for Kamala Harris we’d have higher prices and a government-run economy at home and new wars abroad, and I voted for Harris and that’s exactly what we got.

A cartoon posted by The Wolfpack and by John Darkow shows Musk (labeled “DOGE”) pushing an old lady in a wheelchair labeled “Social Security” towards the edge of a cliff. Musk says, “So, which one are you, Granny? Waste, Fraud, or Abuse?!” Another cartoon posted by The Wolfpack and by Daniel Boris, shows Hillary Clinton saying, “Donald Trump’s name is mentioned 38,000 times in the Epstein files, and I am the person Republicans ask to testify under oath. Makes perfect sense!” In the roundup for last Wednesday Dworkin quoted Shanaka Anslem Perera on X:

Satellite imagery shows an Iranian ballistic missile struck the AN/FPS-132 phased array radar at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar. If the damage is as severe as the imagery suggests, Iran just destroyed a $1.1 billion piece of equipment that took years to build and cannot be replaced on any timeline relevant to this war. The AN/FPS-132 is not an ordinary radar. It is one of a handful of early warning sensors in the entire US global missile defence architecture. It detects ballistic missile launches at ranges exceeding 5,000 kilometres. It provides the initial tracking data that allows Patriot, THAAD, and Aegis systems to calculate intercept solutions. Without it, every other layer of missile defence in the Gulf theatre is operating with compressed reaction times and degraded situational awareness.

David Schuster of Blue Amp:

We now know that a woman came forward in 2019 alleging that, as a minor, she was sexually assaulted by Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein. Investigators did not laugh her out of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. They interviewed her four times. Four. In the careful, plodding world of the FBI, that is not a courtesy; it is an acknowledgment of credibility. Agents summarized each session in the bureaucratic catechism known as an FBI 302 report. Three of those summary reports are now missing. Not delayed. Not misfiled. Missing.

In the comments is a tweet by Veterans Against Trump:

Reporter: What’s the worst case scenario that you have planned for in Iran? Trump: I don’t know of there’s a worst case... I guess the worst case would be we do this and then somebody takes over who’s as bad as the previous person., right? That could happen.

The Maine Wonk added:

Gee, I wonder why every administration for 50 years has avoided outright war with Iran and regime change. But sure, the Host of the Apprentice is the only person in history with a plan that will change everything in a matter of weeks. We live in the dumbest timeline ever.

In last Thursday’s roundup Chitown Kev quoted Michael Deck of Niemann Lab discussing the 3 million pages of Epstein documents with 180,000 images and 2,000 videos. Search of all that is a big problem. A solution: AI.

These types of AI-powered transparency projects have only become more important as trust in government institutions and the Trump administration’s handling of the files erodes. Last week, NPR reported that the DOJ intentionally withheld and removed documents in the Epstein Files that named Donald Trump, including an accusation by a woman that he had sexually abused her when she was a minor. [...] Since the first Epstein Files were released last year, newsrooms have been using machine learning and LLMs to parse documents and find story leads. Earlier this month, New York Times AI projects editor Dylan Freedman explained how he and his colleagues built “bespoke software applications” to help reporters search photos visually, identify document duplicates, and generate video and audio transcripts. The Times has also been using a proprietary search tool developed by its Interactive News desk to break news about the files and comb through the documents for investigative leads.

In the comments paulpro posted a cartoon by Sheneman showing the nasty guy saying:

People say my big, beautiful war has no clear objective, fake news! Since when is war profiteering not a clear objective?

Way down in the comments is a cartoon by Jesse Duquette in response to generals expecting the Iran war to usher in the End Times. It shows Jesus in a red cap talking to followers: “One day I will return but only once you bomb a bunch of kids because a pedophile told you to.” In the comments of Friday’s roundup paulpro posted a cartoon, author not mentioned. It shows two men talking, the second one in a red cap:

First: So, you’re now supporting a warmonger and pedophile protector. Second: Yeah, its’ tough to keep up with what I believe in... First: But still with Trump? Second: Sure, gas is still under $3. First: Ah... I’ve got some bad news...

If you try to stop us we will use our violence against you

Some of these posts are old, some are recent. Together they tell a developing story. Back on November 19 Lisa Needham of Daily Kos reported that ICE was about to hire bounty hunters to track down immigrants for them. The hunters would get $300 for each person and address they verify and pass to ICE. Yeah, there are professional bounty hunters, though the field doesn’t have oversight and is full of abuse. But a big problem is this offer could be expanded to anyone who wanted to surveil and betray neighbors. There don’t seem to be safeguards on whether the address is for an actual undocumented person. This seems modeled on the Texas law that allowed citizens to sue someone for getting an abortion and collect the fee. But this is a paltry sum for selling your soul. Needham has more details in a report from November 13. Bounty hunters are not government employees and do not have restrictions that ICE agents have. Nevada Department of Insurance has 459 pages of complains about bounty hunters for harassment, stalking, and excessive force – yeah, what ICE agents are already doing – today ICE doesn’t seem to have restrictions. Kos of Kos wrote on November 22 that ICE went into Charlotte, North Carolina and over a week managed only 250 arrests, or 35 a day. The cost of this is large. Charlotte is deliberate in impeding ICE’s operations.

Which gets to the heart of the whole project: Trump isn’t crafting a coherent immigration policy. He’s staging a political stunt—punishing the immigrants his base hates while quietly protecting the ones corporate America finds useful.

On November 25 Needham reported that so many Department of Homeland Security personnel have been reassigned to the immigrant crackdown that investigations of actual crimes aren’t getting much attention. These are such crimes as “drug and weapons smuggling, cyber and financial crime, illegal technology exports and intellectual property crime” as listed on the Homeland Security Investigation website. Feel safer? Also, most of those detained by ICE do not have a criminal background (as has been mentioned before). I didn’t save articles about ICE for a while after that. I think there was one about using facial recognition software to identify people. Yeah, that will only lead to problems. On January 13 Kos wrote that Americans are turning towards the idea of defunding ICE. A few years ago there were calls to “defund the police.” But that caused more problems and didn’t provide much help. What is causing the big change in opinion is Americans used to assume that ICE was going after serious criminals, not ordinary immigrants and not citizens. But we now see ICE as a real, visible, and brutal presence. An important reason for that change is the murder of Renee Good in Minneapolis. Now 40% of Americans have a favorable view of ICE and 51% view it unfavorably, according to a YouGov survey. Also, nearly 70% say agents must wear uniforms and 55% oppose agents hiding their identities behind masks. Support for protests against ICE is at 49% with opposition to protests at 41%. 45% don’t want to abolish ICE while 42% do. But trend lines show support for abolishing ICE may soon reach a majority. This morning A Martínez of NPR spoke to Liza Goitein of the Brennan Center for Justice about what’s involved if the nasty guy invokes the Insurrection Act against Minnesota as he’s been saying he has a right to do. The Posse Comitatus Act prohibits federal armed forces from being used against citizens. The Insurrection Act is the exception. It also means the president can take over the state National Guard without permission of the governor. There are restrictions to when the Act can be used. But this was a law passed in the early 1800s so now the language seems vague and archaic. Other restrictions have been there by tradition, which the nasty guy is very good at ignoring. There is also precedent that invoking the Insurrection Act cannot be reviewed by a court. So, of course, if it is invoked there will be court cases. Also this morning Michel Martin of NPR spoke to reporter Ximena Bustillo about the training ICE agents are getting. I’ll just say there are plenty of reasons to believe agents are not getting all the necessary training. This afternoon Sergio Martinez-Beltrán of NPR reported on how Minneapolis residents are working together to thwart what ICE is trying to do. Alas, at the time of this writing they have not posted a transcript. Thom Hartmann of the Kos community and an independent pundit analyzed the situation in Minneapolis. He first contrasted what ICE is doing compared to how deportations were done under Obama, where the rules were followed:

Nobody showed up to kick in the front door of their home. Nobody from the government was wearing a mask. No swearing, no threats, no guns, no tear gas, no pepper spray, no hitting his car with theirs or beating either of them to the ground. They merely told him he had to leave and served him with the appropriate paperwork, just like they do in most other democratic countries.

Immigration enforcement has been happening since the 1920s and we didn’t need a budget larger than for the Marine Corps to do it. Obama managed 3.1 deportations in 8 years, or an average of 387,500 a year, with 407,000 in 2012. The nasty guy did about 290,000 last year with a previous peak of 269,000 in 2019. Which means the nasty guy’s methods of deporting people are a lot less effective than Obama’s. But the nasty guy’s methods aren’t just about deportations. They aren’t about investigating fraud (Somali immigrants in Minnesota are accused of that). They’re about terrorizing a community. The nasty guy, vice nasty, and Stephen Miller have been clear their goal is not to run the country with “the consent of the governed” but with raw power, “authority without restrictions.” When autocrats want to seize power they begin by telling the people who they need to fear. And for the nasty guy that is brown and black people, particularly those born elsewhere.

Once the populace is sufficiently terrified of the “other,” they’ll accept increasing levels of repression in the name of stemming the danger to themselves and their families. Armed agents of the state begin to show up in public places to “enforce law and order,” but their real goal is to terrify people into submission. This is why Noem and Bondi are refusing to investigate Renee Good’s murder and instead demanding their federal prosecutors go after her grieving wife. They want not only ICE thugs but everybody in America who may think of challenging them to know that smashing windows, dragging people out of their cars, kicking in their doors, beating them to the ground, and even killing them — all without any legal basis, without a single warrant — are what we can all expect to happen to us if we defy their power.

Hartmann quoted the National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 the nasty guy signed two months ago. It defines domestic terrorism.

“[A]nti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, … extremism on migration, extremism on race, extremism on gender, hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on religion, and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on morality.”

We can guess his definition of “extremism” and “hostility” which means just about everyone but MAGA fits the description of domestic terrorist. And ICE is reminding us of the awesome power the nasty guy has in enforcing it. Do something against us and we’ll turn the full force of our violence on you. Hartmann quoted Stephen Miller’s instructions to ICE agents, that they have full immunity. Anyone who obstructs their work will face our justice. Yeah, that’s full of lies. But Hartmann says the message is clear: We have the power. We will use the power. There is nothing you can do about it. If you try to stop us we will use our power against you. The threat of the Insurrection Act is a threat to override state and local government, suppress dissent, and put federal violence above the rule of law. This is not a democracy. It is state sponsored terror. That got me thinking. Considering how involved Minneapolis residents are in protecting the vulnerable among them and how much the nasty guy wants to use violence to thwart that protection. I think the next few weeks in the city will be critical to democracy in the US. There will be significant bloodshed. I knew that would be coming sometime somewhere. Then we’ll see how willing the US military is to shooting fellow citizens or whether Congress or state level Republicans will grow a spine. I have no idea so won’t guess on whether democracy or the nasty guy wins. Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos quoted late night commentary:

"Right now there are over two-thousand federal immigration agents in Minnesota, and Trump is planning to send around a thousand more. So he's clearly invading Minnesota. Has anyone told him they don’t have oil? Because the best he's gonna get is 50-million barrels of cream of mushroom soup." —Stephen Colbert

In today’s pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted the New York Times. Here’s a bit of it:

Rather than encourage agents to de-escalate combustible encounters, as the agency guidelines emphasize, Mr. Trump and his lieutenants have provided tacit approval for more aggressive tactics.

Acyn tweeted a message from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez:

My position has always been clear that ICE funding should be cut. We’re seeing what they’re doing with this reckless explosion in funding, and I want everybody to understand that the cuts to your health care are what’s paying for this

David Shor added:

We recently tested ~ a dozen public statements from a diverse set of Democratic elected officials on the murder of Renee Good and this was the top testing one.

A tweet from Jonathan Cohn quoted @EggerDC:

"Minneapolis is overheating right now, not because protesters are running amok, but because federal immigration enforcement and its political leadership ... are comporting themselves with astonishing, outrageous deception and malice."

That came with a link to an article on The Bulwark, presumably written by @EggerDC, with this title and subtitle:

ICE started the fire Rather than trying to calm things down, the government is fanning the flames.

David Schuster of Blue Amp

But the real jewel in this crown of Trump administration insanity belongs to Vice President J. D. Vance. He announced with great solemnity that federal law-enforcement officers enjoy “absolute immunity.” Vance’s declaration is not merely wrong; it is ludicrous. There is no such doctrine in American law. None. It exists only in the fever dreams of fascist wannabes who mistake their own wishes for jurisprudence.

A tweet from the Omaha World-Herald:

Rep. Don Bacon tells The World-Herald that there would be GOP support for an impeachment of Donald Trump if the U.S. invaded Greenland.

Bacon added:

Bottom line: the WH talk of invading Greenland is WRONG & will backfire in worst way. America stands by our Allies. This is not the 1890s… today we lead free nations against totalitarian & imperialistic governments. We are better & won’t cave to outdated old thinking.

In the comments are a more cartoons about Greenland including a couple showing it defended by a Lego fortress. Medusa posted a cartoon by Rob Rogers showing two Iranian clerics wearing ICE vests. One says, “Wait... Why are we wearing these?” The other: “So we can engage in violent, bloody crackdowns with Trump’s full support!” PX Molina posted a meme showing a hand stopping a fist. The words say:

They want your silence. Don't give it to them. They want your fear. Don't give it to them. They want your violence. Don't give it to them. They want your misinformation. Don't give it to them. Deny them everything that feeds them.

The assumption of obedience to a corrupt court persists

Christopher Armitage of the Daily Kos community wrote about the Supreme Court and asks: “When should you stop following a court's rulings?” At least three justices have accepted bribes – those gifts from billionaires with cases before the court. They didn’t disclose – which is fraud. But no one will try to hold them accountable and even though they’ve lost legitimacy the assumption of obedience persists.

The Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder. That ruling made it easier to suppress votes in ways that benefit Republicans. The Court blessed partisan gerrymandering in Rucho v. Common Cause, making it easier to rig maps in ways that benefit Republicans. The Court unleashed unlimited dark money in Citizens United v. FEC, making it easier to buy elections in ways that benefit Republicans. The Court granted sweeping presidential immunity in Trump v. United States, shielding election interference that benefits Republicans. Call it what it is: a pattern. Every ruling expands the power of the faction that controls the Court while shrinking the ability of anyone else to challenge that control. ... So when someone says “just win the next election and expand the Court,” what they’re actually proposing is this: Win an election the Court has made easier to rig. Overcome maps the Court has made easier to gerrymander. Outspend dark money the Court has made unlimited. Then use that victory to reform an institution that will rule your reform unconstitutional the moment you try it.

A court is legitimate through two things: process and substance. Process legitimacy is when the members are properly appointed, it follows its own precedents, and acts neutrally. Substance legitimacy means rulings are grounded in law, and show sound reasoning instead of ideologically desired outcomes. Here are reasons to declare illegitimacy: The court doesn’t follow rules or changes the rules to protect its misconduct. It legalizes violations after they occur and when caught. The court is corrupt in that it receives benefits from those with cases before it. The court blocks ethics reform, rules in its own favor, and creates its own immunity. There can be no external accountability. Then it shields the corrupt person who helped capture the court. They discipline lower courts but not themselves. Because the Senate is also captured they are beyond democratic reform and replacements will continue the pattern. They sit beyond electoral reach (originally thought to be a good thing). So why do we insist compliance to their rulings remains the right choice? Of course, the people who benefit from their corrupt rulings declare compliance is best. But not for the rest of us. Those who insist on compliance say not complying is worse – we would get chaos, institutional breakdown, and Constitutional crisis. But what if compliance is causing those things?

Consider what continued compliance produces. Elections become progressively less fair as voter suppression and gerrymandering compound. Dark money becomes progressively more dominant as disclosure requirements weaken. Executive power becomes progressively less accountable as immunity doctrines expand. And the institution blessing all of this becomes progressively less reformable as it rules every reform unconstitutional. That trajectory produces crisis in slow motion. Rights erode, dark money floods in, executive power escapes accountability, and nobody panics because it happens gradually enough for the captors to consolidate. The people telling us to work within the system call this stability. Following the rulings of a captured Court doesn’t prevent the breakdown. It paces the breakdown in a way that benefits the people breaking it.

We can’t wait for this system to fix itself, because it is working exactly as intended. So what to do? The states can assert their own sovereignty. Pass laws to protect residents from federal corruption. Enforce laws in ways that don’t need federal cooperation. Establish their own financing to avoid federal restrictions. Work with like-minded states. Yes, this is legal. Yes, the courts will rule against it. Yes, it will force a Constitutional confrontation. But that’s coming anyway so states should act while they still have leverage in the face of rising autocracy. A court’s authority depends of people agreeing to be bound by its decisions, which is earned and not automatic. Courts earn authority by acting legitimately. This court is daring someone to do something about their corruption. At some point states will. We need to be ready. I thought a bit about states establishing their own financing. Many, perhaps most, states led by Democrats, send more to Washington in taxes than they receive back in government benefits. That’s definitely true of California. Most states, perhaps all, led by Republicans receive more in federal benefits than they pay in taxes. One obvious source of financing is for a state to say the federal government is corrupt so send all your federal taxes to the state treasury. That will definitely bring the confrontation Armitage describes. Which is why it might be worth trying. Well, look at that: A week ago an Associated Press article posted on Kos reported the Supremes refused to allow the nasty guy to deploy National Guard troops to Chicago. The decision was 6-3 with Alito, Thomas, and Gorsuch dissenting. This is not a final ruling. Yet, before it is finalized it can affect other lawsuits challenging attempts to deploy the Guard to other Democratic-led cities. Do not take this one ruling as a contradiction of all of Armitage’s discussion above. Another AP article on Kos discusses the “epidemic of loneliness” in America. We’re less likely to join groups, either civic, union, or church, less likely to hang out in bars and coffee shops. We have fewer friends and trust others less. So no surprise we feel lonely and isolated. Loneliness has health risks, including dementia, depression, and early death. It also increases political polarization. Destructive business schedules and excessive social media both cause loneliness and are an effect of loneliness. Those with lower education, usually meaning lower income, tend to be more lonely. Many people now mistrust the social organizations, the civic, union, and church groups, because they have been betrayed. These groups can be harsh on dissenters. Many people now prize personal autonomy, but that doesn’t make for happiness and creates lots of social problems. People and groups are starting to do something about it. Formal programs and less structured events like potluck suppers are appearing. The Weave: Social Fabric Project connects community builders and trains people in building skills. People in every community have decided to take this on. In today’s pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev quoted Amanda Marcotte of Salon:

But Trump’s most loyal voters, the MAGA base, have developed elaborate mythologies to deny the truth about the president. In their imaginations, he’s not a pathetic genital-grabbing predator but a knightly hero, sent by God to wage war on pedophiles and rapists. Not the real ones, of course, who Trump is more likely to defend; MAGA prefers to fear imaginary pedophiles and rapists. They project their own sins onto innocent people — often LGBTQ+ people or Democratic figures — and avoid thinking too hard about their lavish support for a man whose vile predilections haven’t been hidden. [...] The MAGA base convinced themselves the Epstein files would expose their opponents. But Trump knows that the Epstein files are a mirror that reflects what his supporters actually voted for: a world where men like Trump and his friends can get away with decades of sexual violence.

Thomas Edsall of the New York Times noted the nasty guy is getting away with corruption that would have been a disaster for any previous president, both Republican and Democrat. Then he gets into why.

The lack of guilt felt by Trump. Enforcement of and obedience to norms in a democracy require recognition of the importance of those norms. Trump shrugs those norms off. In most but not all of these cases, he is unapologetic and transparent about what he is doing, enabling him to avoid the trap that ensnared Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton, both of whom discovered that the cover-up is often worse than the crime. [...] Structural frailty. American democracy and the Constitution are not equipped to deal in an effective and timely manner with a president who aggressively and willfully tramples the law. [...]

In the comments exlrrp posted a meme with the author’s name redacted.

My uncle said he wouldn’t discuss Trump with me unless I said one good thing he’s done so I said he’s normalizing makeup for men and it didn’t go as I planned.

Afra Kroon posted a cartoon by Ivan Ehlers showing two men in MAGA caps. One says, “I don’t care what the Epstein files say... I’d rather have a pedophile rapist grifting the country than admit I was ever wrong.” A tweet from Brian Allen:

JD Vance just said the quiet part out loud. On camera, he admitted that Jared Kushner – Trump’s son-in-law, with no official government role – is the “investor” in the Middle East “peace” talks. Read that again. U.S. foreign policy outsourced to a family business deal.

Just below that is a meme:

The left says corrupt billionaires are the problem. The right says corrupt government is the problem. And I’m here like, you do realize corrupt billionaires are running the corrupt government, right?

Zero interest in refugees starving and dying

Detroit Film Theater is doing an end-of-year silent film festival with live music. Last evening I saw a couple Charlie Chaplin films. Today I skipped Mary Pickford’s Sparrows and I plan to see the end of the festival tomorrow afternoon. Last evening started with three short films with a Christmas theme. There wasn’t much to the first and second. The third was interesting because it was made in Russia. St. Nicholas, as a Christmas tree ornament, comes to life, goes out into the snow, and conjures to wake bugs and a frog to come to his Christmas party. The first of the Chaplin films was The Rink from 1916 where Chaplin as the Tramp is both a waiter at a restaurant and a skater at the adjacent roller skating ring. He’s not good at all at being a waiter, but on wheels he is quite good and can do a great comedic tumble (one wonders about the skill of the others he tumbled). The simple plot is to keep Mr. Stout away from the young Edna. I saw in the credits and confirmed in Wikipedia that Mrs. Stout was played by a man, Henry Bergman. Put a guy in the right costume and have no way to record the voice and only the credits will give him away. This film’s Wikipedia page includes the entire 25 minutes. The second Chaplin film was A Night in the Show from 1915. This time Chaplin didn’t play the Tramp. The movie is about all the things that go wrong in the audience during a vaudeville show – Chaplin is on the main floor as the gentleman Mr. Pest and also in the balcony with the common people as Mr. Rowdy. Again, Wikipedia includes the whole 24 minute film. I actually got tired of these two because the humor seems rather juvenile. That prompted me to look up Chaplin and his filmography. For 1914 it lists three dozen movies, about three a month. Chaplin’s famous movies are from the 1920s, when he successfully mixed comedy and pathos. Maybe for a Sunday movie sometime soon I should peruse this filmography page and watch some of the more famous movies. These will have the score that Chaplin composed for them. Nick Licata of the Daily Kos community discussed the nasty guy’s most serious illness. There has been lots of speculation about his health, mostly because he is obviously deteriorating and his released medical reports are not credible. However, the most serious is not physical, it’s mental. There are nine symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder. The only previous president accused of being a narcissist was Nixon and he exhibited only two: a willingness to exploit others and fantasies about deserving success. The nasty guy exhibits those two plus belief in superiority (“the most dangerous trait that the leader of a democratic republic could exhibit”), grandiose sense of self-importance as in exaggerating achievements, frequent envy as in belittling the achievements of others, entitlement as in anger when people don’t appease him, lack of empathy, arrogance, and a need for admiration as in cabinet meetings where each member gushes with adulation. Yup, that’s all nine. Licata is not the first to see the nasty guy suffers from NPS, though he post is the first time I’ve seen a list of symptoms. When a person has NPS they refuse treatment because they don’t believe they are ill. Friends must intervene (and I’ve heard elsewhere even that won’t lead to healing because the patient won’t cooperate with treatment). The only ones who can intervene are Republicans. And they aren’t. About all they are doing now is trying to distance themselves from him. What they should be doing is removing him from office. Republicans may like the nasty guy undermining the country’s democratic institutions. But he is also undermining the integrity and popularity of their party. That will affect future elections. Brett Murphy and Anna Maria Barry-Jester with photography by Brian Otieno, in an article for ProPublica posted on Kos, wrote about the effect of killing off USAID in the Kakuma Refugee Camp in northwest Kenya. The refugees are mostly people who fled the wars in Sudan. At the start of 2025 there were about 720,000 refugees in the camp and it is the third largest camp in the world. In 2024 USAID provided $112 million to feed the people there and had done so for many years. The 2025 assistance was canceled in January. The rest of the article is mostly about two things. The first is the cut in the food for the camp’s residents. An adult should get 2,100 calories a day according to humanitarians. But with the cut in aid about a fifth of the residents will receive 840 calories (about 40% of what is needed), another third will get 400 calories (less than 20% of what is need), and the rest, almost half, will get nothing.

[Dragica] Pajevic ended her presentation by relaying a truism that she said a government official in Liberia had once told her: The only difference between life and death during a famine is WFP [World Food Program] and the U.S. government, its largest donor. “The one who’s not hungry cannot understand the beastly pain of hunger,” Pajevic said, “and what a person is willing to do just to tame that beastly pain.”

That presentation involves the second thing. The presentation was made at a luxury hotel in Nairobi, Kenya’s capital in July. In attendance were American officials on a world tour “to conduct exit interviews with USAID’s top experts, who were being forced out of the agency amid the administration’s stated commitment to austerity.” They had a hefty expense account to travel first class. When the US embassy in Nairobi heard the tour would stop there they set up the face-to-face meeting with Pajevic. And here’s the second thing: WFP officials had been getting a runaround but at the meeting the US officials showed complete indifference to refugees starving and dying. “There was just zero interest in the subject matter,” said a USAID official.

This was something different: an American-made hunger crisis. So far this year, community health workers have referred almost 12,000 malnourished children for immediate medical attention. “What has come with Trump, I’ve never experienced anything like it,” said one aid worker who has been in Kakuma for decades. “It’s huge and brutal and traumatizing.”

Some of the refugees are trying to leave the camp. But they don’t have a good way to do that and don’t have a place to go. An American-made hunger crisis. In today’s pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin included a pair of tweets. The first was by Stephen Miller, the guy pushing the deportation of anyone not white.

Watched the Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra Family Christmas with my kids. Imagine watching that and thinking America needed infinity migrants from the third world.

Catherine Rampell responded:

Some people will commit human rights violations rather than go to therapy.

Others pointed out Martin and Sinatra were the sons of immigrants from Italy, a despised country at the time. Paul Waldman of The Cross Section discussed comments by the vice nasty at the annual Turning Point USA conference.

“I refuse to apologize for being white” has long been a mantra of segregationists and Klansmen, an outgrowth of the fear that any sort of equality for racial minorities — legal, economic, educational — by definition meant putting whites in a subservient position, forced to hang their heads and apologize. Equality is perceived to be a reversal of the racial hierarchy: If we’re not in a state of privilege, free to abuse our lessers, then it can only mean we are being abused. So who exactly has been demanding that JD Vance apologize for being white? Has that ever happened to him, a single time? Of course not. But this is a key element of Trumpism, of which Vance would like to be the heir: You have been humiliated, it says, but I will let you stand tall again. You, white people — and especially white men — have been hounded and oppressed, but those days are finally over.

Note the bit about equality and the reversal of the racial hierarchy. Those high in the hierarchy can’t conceive of a world without a hierarchy. So talk of improving the lives of one race implies the loss of status, being made subservient, of another race and they are convinced those they abused will then abuse them. Also this strange idea: Not being allowed to abuse is itself abuse. In the comments is a cartoon by Randy Bish. It says, “It’s a sad day when your government can afford to zip tie children... but can’t afford to feed them.” In response to renewed talk of acquiring Greenland, this time appointing some government official to go there Anne Applebaum tweeted:

They have never explained what they need Greenland FOR. There is no possible use of the territory that has not already been negotiated with the Danes. This can only be an attempt to align the US with Russia, China and other predator states

In response to a tweet by the nasty guy discussing the possibility of marble armrests for the Kennedy Center, which he sullied with his name, Turnbull tweeted:

Listen up, peasants, there is no affordability crisis and if you can’t afford healthcare, blame it on the Democrats. Now, congratulate me on the marble armrests I’m installing, at great expense to the taxpayers, in the cultural arts center that I’ve named after myself.

Brian Allen tweeted:

Trump is literally selling pardons. According to the WSJ, there’s an “official track” and a faster one where you corner him at Mar-a-Lago, say the magic words “unjust persecution,” and walk away clean. Lobbyists quote prices up to $6M. No process. No ethics. Just cash and proximity. This is raw corruption in plain sight.