Calling for disagreeing judges to be impeached

For my Sunday movie I though I’d take a chance on Cutie Pie. It is a Thailand Boys Love series. The main lads are Lian, son of a rich family and already well established as someone important in the family business, and Kuea, who is learning auto repair in engineering school and plays drums as Kirin. Yeah, a bit mismatched. I lasted two segments, one of 20 minutes the other 16, about half of episode 1. I think the segments posted on YouTube are what comes between the commercials. The main problem I have with the story is that Kuea can’t stand up for himself. He can’t tell Lian who he really is and swallows every slight Lian might accidentally dish out. I also feel like I came into the middle of a story, though this is marked as episode 1. Kuea thinks they are well into a relationship and Lian doesn’t agree. Was their “engagement” only a childhood friendship thing? I don’t know and I’m not interested enough to find out. I thought the series would be about them falling in love, though love could develop from a childhood “engagement” friendship to the love Kuea thinks it is. The actors mostly speak Thai, of course, and one must read the subtitles quickly. I took a chance on it because I read the Boys Love article on Daily Kos on all that is wrong with the movie Brokeback Mountain, including how Hollywood sex scenes tend to be aggressive rather than tender and had Cutie Pie as an example of a tender scene. I didn’t watch that excerpt, thinking I would watch the whole series. So I found it again and watched. It’s the first segment of episode 8. Yeah, the lads are both ready to declare their love and the scene is quite tender. And we see no skin below the belt. Now that I’ve seen how it ends I’ve saved myself about six and a half hours of viewing from the start to here and three and a half hours from here to the end of the series. I finished the book Ask a Historian, 50 Surprising Answers to Things You Always Wanted to Know by Greg Jenner. First of all, I dispute the last part of that title. I didn’t always want to know these things, mostly because I hadn’t encountered the question to be considered. I also wasn’t curious about what women did before feminine products were invented. Jenner is indeed a historian and has worked on shows produced by the BBC (yes, he’s British) and has served as a historical consultant on movies. As the pandemic hit the promotional tour for a previous book was canceled. He was going to use those appearances to ask his audience to ask him anything. But without the tour he had to ask online. This book was his pandemic project. He discusses curry, explaining us that a great deal of what we know about Indian food is actually a British interpretation of Indian food. He tells us about many of the extremely rich people through history and all of them are quite nasty people (yes, Musk was mentioned). He ponders when “history” began. He reviews beauty treatments that were quite harmful. In a question about favorite historical what-ifs he explains why he doesn’t like the topic, which is quite similar to why I don’t like alternate history stories. He uncovers why Italy has that name rather than something like Romania. And he finishes off with the question, “Which people from history would you hire for an Ocean’s Eleven-style heist?" He proposes the getaway driver would be Diocles, a Roman charioteer who entered 4,257 races and won 1,462 of them in a sport when most drivers are crushed to death long before they get anywhere near that many races. All fifty of the answers are fun, entertaining, and enlightening, a delightful combination. Even for things I didn’t always want to know I’m glad I read the answers. An Associated Press article posted on Kos reported that the nasty guy transferred hundreds of immigrants to a notorious prison in El Salvador. While the planes were in the air US District Judge James Boasberg issued an order blocking the deportations. Boasberg verbally ordered the planes to turn around, but since that part wasn’t written it was ignored. As for the rest of the order the nasty guy will appeal it. The nasty guy claimed his justification for the deportations was the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. But it is to be used in the time of war and no war was declared. Even so the nasty guy is claiming immigrants are an “invasion” – a war term. As for these deportees, there were no judicial review of the deportations. The nasty guy claimed they were very bad men. But there was no proof they were guilty of any crime. There was no chance of defense. Alas, once they were in El Salvador there was nothing US courts could do. Boasberg has since banned all deportations for up to 14 days, giving time to hear the nasty guy’s justifications. Deportees will remain in federal custody in that time. In a pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted an article on Rolling Stone:

On Friday, hours after Trump said it “should be illegal” to criticize judges, the Trump administration flew several planes with hundreds of Venezuelan migrants to deport them, apparently without due process, to a mega prison in El Salvador — despite a federal judge ordering them not to do so, and to turn around any planes en route if necessary. Trump officials ignored the judge’s order before trying to get him removed from the case. They refused to answer any of the judge’s questions on Monday, while asserting that his court had no jurisdiction once the planes were over international waters. By Monday evening, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was on Fox News arguing that judges cannot be allowed to “determine the way in which the president handles foreign relations.” Attorney General Pam Bondi accused the judge of “attempting to meddle in national security and foreign affairs,” adding: “This one federal judge thinks he can control foreign policy for the entire country, and he cannot.” Bondi confirmed the administration “absolutely” could keep deporting Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador using the same justification.

And from an article on Politico:

Trump’s call to remove U.S. District Judge James Boasberg — the chief judge of the federal district court in Washington, D.C. — is the first time since taking office for his second term that he’s asked Congress to seek a judge’s removal, joining increasingly pointed calls by his top donor and adviser Elon Musk and a segment of his MAGA base. Trump also suggested that “many” of the judges who have ruled against him in other cases should be impeached as well. It’s a significant incursion on the judiciary that comes as Trump has asserted unprecedented unilateral power over federal spending — despite Congress’ constitutional power of the purse — and sweeping authority to remove executive branch officials that previous presidents believed were protected by law. Although the call represents a significant escalation, any impeachment effort is all but certain to be doomed in Congress, where narrow Republican majorities would lack the votes to remove a judge along party lines. Congress has been loath to entertain impeachment efforts for judges based purely on rulings they disagree with and has typically invoked the extraordinary procedures in cases of clear corruption or misconduct.

That got me wondering. If the nasty guy’s calls to impeach judges because they thwart his efforts somehow get before the Supreme Court will those justices want to give the nasty guy all the powers he asks for or are they going to want to preserve their own power. If the nasty guy can impeach lower court judges he can certainly impeach them. Lisa Needham of Kos discusses the nasty guy’s strategy. If he wants to fire all the Inspectors General he could provide evidence of wrongdoing to Congress and go through the waiting period. He didn’t. He fired heads of independent agencies, even though the law says they can be fired only for cause.

The failure to justify these removals isn’t sloppiness. It isn’t that Trump doesn’t understand the law. Instead, he doesn’t believe in the underlying principle that Congress has the authority to create independent agencies. Providing an explanation consistent with the law would be acknowledging that authority. So Trump’s approach of explicitly refusing to give that explanation is a declaration that he has no intention of following the law or recognizing Congress’s authority.

He could have asked Congress to eliminate the CFPB – there are enough Republicans in Congress who also want it gone that such a request likely would have given him what he wanted. Same with USAID and the Department of Education.

Going that route, however, would require Trump to acknowledge that Congress, not the president, has the sole authority to shutter agencies. Instead, Trump appears to be intentionally exceeding his authority, showing that he can usurp Congress’ role whenever he wants. ... For Trump, he’s the only law that matters, and he wants to make sure we all know it.

Leila Fadel of NPR talked to reporter Franco Ordoñez about those deportation flights to El Salvador. Ordoñez spoke to Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University, who said of the nasty guy’s administration:

So what I see them doing so far is playing footsie with the notion of defying a court order rather than actually defying a court order. They're getting cute. They're getting up to the line.

Ordoñez concluded:

I mean, this is a case that should not be looked at in a vacuum. The question at hand is not whether or not these people are dangerous and should be in the country but the process of their removal. Is it legal? And specifically, did the administration knowingly ignore this order? This is just another example, though, of how the White House is working to stretch its powers. And we have seen this with the legislative branch, and we're now seeing it in the judicial branch.

A Martínez of NPR spoke to Michael Waldman, a constitutional lawyer and the president of the Brennan Center for Justice. Waldman discussed what a court can do when its orders are ignored.

Judges do have options. They can hold any litigant, including government officials, in contempt. That is something where it can be civil contempt with fines and other things like that. It could even be criminal contempt, where sometimes people go to prison. If a - if someone refuses to cooperate, there are tools. One of the complications here is the U.S. Marshals, who actually enforce some of this stuff, work for the Justice Department. But the law says they have to follow the rulings of judges. And in fact, sometimes judges appoint private lawyers to prosecute cases if they can't get the government itself to do it. Judges have some tools, but ultimately what will be the main tool is the recognition by this president and all presidents that the Constitution requires us to all follow the rule of law. Public opinion and the demands of history ultimately will be the most important and most effective remedy here.

March for Our Lives was started by the student survivors of the Parkland school shooting. They’re now a decent political force with several wins over the years. They are, of course, horrified at the efforts by the nasty guy to overturn some of their gains. I’m on their mailing list and thought their plan for 2025 is pretty good. Here’s my summary. What we want: + Reasonable limits to access to guns and violence intervention programs. This focus is on the states. + To Fight voter suppression and elect gun safety champions leading to reforming democracy. + Gun violence is a part of addressing inequality and reimagining public safety. What fuels gun violence: + Gun glorification. + Political apathy and corruption that destroys democracy. + Armed supremacy. + Poverty. + The national mental health crisis. What we’re fighting for: + Curtailing gun access through background checks, safe storage, and banning ghost guns. + Democracy that works for the people because a true democracy would have enacted gun safely legislation by now. + Addressing social and economic inequality, reimagining public safety, and eliminating state-sanctioned violence. Bishtoons posted a cartoon drawn by Dr. Seuss more than 80 years ago. It shows a carnival barker saying, “And on this platform, folks, those most perplexing of people... the Lads with the Siamese Beard! Unrelated by blood, they are joined in a manner that mystifies the mightiest minds in the land!” On the stage are two men whose beards are joined. One is in formal wear and is labeled “America First.” The other has a vest with a big swastika.

Once we take power, we are going to go absolutely berserk

Alisa Chang of NPR talked to Matt Slaughter, dean and economist at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, about the nasty guy describing the big stock market drop as a period of transition or a detox before a much better economy will come. This will be short term pain. Slaughter says the tariffs being imposed mean there will also be long-term pain. This economic pain will not be temporary.

I think a fundamental reason that President Trump was elected and then reelected was his astute understanding that globalization has not benefited every single worker and company and community. But what is being missed is that for decades, all those connections to the global economy through trade and investment and immigration have really spurred gains for scores of millions of Americans.

The nasty guy has said that tariffs will rebuild US manufacturing. Slaughter doubts tariffs will accomplish that. The strongest companies tend to be globally connected, more productive, and more innovative. They pay higher wages for better jobs. Yes, some companies and their workers will benefit from higher tariffs that limit competition. But tariffs cause greater harm to the economy than the few companies they help. A recession is looking more likely. Tariffs mean American companies will have lower profits. They’ll be less productive. Jobs will be lost. Consumers see the likelihood that prices will go up. I heard elsewhere this week in response to the claim of a temporary transition, a detox, that the stock market doesn’t believe him. The stock market tends to look out a long way. They don’t see the current situation improving in just a couple quarters or just a couple years. In a pundit roundup for Daily Kos Chitown Kev quoted Paul Krugman writing in his own Stubstack:

So the Trumpers are responding in their usual fashion: blaming other people. Yesterday I wrote about the proliferation of conspiracy theories, with a special focus on “globalists,” which, let’s face it, usually ends up meaning Jews. The Trump economic team seems, however, to be pushing a different kind of excuse: The claim that Biden left behind a terrible economy, and that we’ll need to go through a painful period of “detox.” Now, you may wonder how anyone could characterize the economy when Trump took office, with 2.5 percent growth, low unemployment and inflation only slightly above the Fed’s 2 percent target, as terrible. But the Trumpist position, coming from multiple officials, seems to be that the prosperity was fake, that the numbers were exaggerated by bloated government spending and employment. Hence the need for a costly transition to an economy where workers are doing useful things. As usual, one has to ask: Are they ignorant or are they lying? And as usual, the answer is: Why not both?

Sam Gustin of The Nation discussed how the nasty guy wants to manipulate economic data. The Gross Domestic Product, or GDP, is a main calculation of US economic output. Changes in the GDP mark economic growth or decline. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick announced plans to strip out all government spending from the GDP.

By excluding government spending from the official GDP estimates issued by the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Trump administration could downplay the economic damage of firing hundreds of thousands of federal workers and slashing billions from the federal budget. In other words, they could gaslight the public into believing that the economy is doing better than it actually is, which could come in handy if economic conditions continue to deteriorate.

In a second roundup Greg Dworkin quoted the Wall Street Journal which voiced fears the nasty guy will wreck the soft landing:

“On Friday, I would have said I thought the administration was worried about their policies really slowing down the economy, and they were trying to lay the groundwork for the narrative that they inherited a weakening economy,” said Michael Strain, head of economic-policy studies at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute. More recent comments seem to have gone beyond that. “Now, there’s almost a sense that if something goes wrong in the economy, then that’s fine,” said Perkins. “That’s making people quite nervous because if you get to the point where you are pushing the economy into a recession, there is no guarantee that that’s just going to pass quickly.”

Brian Beutler from Off Message wrote that public opinion won’t necessary follow a sabotaged economy.

We’re going to test the power of MAGA propaganda techniques. Can concerted lying convince enough people to deny the existence of economic hardship, or celebrate it, or blame it on Democrats, such that it doesn’t become a political drag on Trump? For all the brain poison MAGA propagandists pump into our information environment, these early signs of discomfort suggest they know the truth of the matter. Which means they’re conscious of the coming deception: they’ll blame Biden and foreigners and liberals and Jews for causing economic pain, and circle their wagons around Trump, fully aware of their own lies.

Down in the comments is a cartoon by Joe Heller showing a wife watching the nasty guy on TV. She says, “He wants us to stop talking about egg prices.” Her husband looking at their retirement account says, “Chicken eggs or nest eggs?” In a third roundup Dworkin quoted Paul Waldman of The Cross Section who wrote that Democrats need to start Project 2029 now. He noted Project 2025 didn’t hurt Republicans much.

Project 2025 is doing exactly what it was intended to do. The process of creating it helped conservatives clarify their goals, and as important as its specific recommendations was the tone it set. The implicit but unmistakable theme of the document was this: Once we take power, we are going to go absolutely berserk. No right-wing fantasy will be off the table. There is no limit to the glorious destruction we will inflict upon the federal government and everything it does.

A tweet from Ken Dilanian:

The president just rattled off a series of grossly inaccurate statistics suggesting violent crime, including murder, went up over the last four years. No serious criminologist believes that and the data doesn’t support it. And every murder is counted.

In the comments exlrrp posted a meme by DarrigoMelanie showing:

Trump fired... 80K VA workers 50K IRS workers 10K USAID workers 7K Social Security workers 2K Dept. of Education workers 1100 CFPB workers 1K NOAA workers 17 Inspectors general 1 ethics watchdog lead Trump isn’t dismantling the “deep state.” He’s crippling the country.

The list is not (or no longer) complete. I easily noticed something about these cuts: + If they help people who are not rich, they’re cut. + If they prevent rich people from criming, they’re cut. + If the rich want to make money from what the agencies do for free, they’re cut. The agencies that help the rich get richer haven’t been touched. Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos quoted late night commentary. A sample:

“Over the past few weeks, the billionaires who attended Trump’s inauguration have lost a combined 209 billion dollars. Yeah—it’s been a wild time. Elon Musk lost $150 billion. Jeff Bezos lost $29 billion. And Mark Zuckerberg lost his mind.” —Jimmy Fallon

“Oh, gosh, what a shame!” said the 99% of Americans that don’t even have $1 billion.

Wreck the government this way or wreck it that way?

Last evening I went to the Fisher Theater for Broadway in Detroit’s presentation of the musical Kimberly Akimbo. It was featured in the 2023 Tony Awards where it was nominated in eight categories and won five, including Best Musical. The featured scene and basic story intrigued me. Kimberly has a rare (one in 5 million?) disorder that causes her to age four to five times faster than normal. So she’s in high school, about to turn 16, and looks about 70. I’m pretty sure Victoria Clark, who played the part on Broadway and won the Tony for Best Actress in a Musical, got it because she really is in her 60s and acted like she was 16. Clark is not in the touring production and I was too far away to tell how old this actress looked. Kim becomes friends with fellow student Seth, one of the nerdier kids in the school. He likes making anagrams, which is where “Akimbo” comes from. Also at school are Martin, Aaron, Delia, and Teresa, members of the show choir. At times they also serve as a Greek Chorus. At home Kim is dealing with parents Buddy and Pattie, who have many issues of their own. Then Aunt Debra shows up. She has a shady past and wants accomplices for her next scheme while staying on the good side of her parole officer. In terms of the story I through Buddy and Pattie had too many of these side issues to fit in this story. I felt Aunt Debra and her scheme were not necessary to the story at all. As for the songs, they were OK, as in not memorable. The show does a good job of exploring Kim’s situation of having a teenager mind with a body in decline and not long to live. Because of that I enjoyed the show. The current federal budget runs out at midnight tonight. Signs strongly suggest continued funding will be passed in time. Avoiding a government shutdown is normally great news. Whether that is true this time is debatable. Usually, a CR continues the funding levels of the last budget and this one proposes to keep those funding levels until the fiscal year ends in September 2025. Which means the levels are essentially from when the last budget was passed (theoretically October 2023 but I’m sure it was actually signed much later). So the nasty guy would have to follow a budget signed by Biden? Sounds good! But... Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Daily Kos has a few reasons why this CR gets a jeer. One of them is that Congress would relinquish oversight of tariffs to the nasty guy. Emily Singer of Kos reported on Wednesday about the tariff oversight and another nasty thing: It cuts $1 billion from the District of Columbia budget, forcing cuts to police and teachers. One Republican voted against it, so it passed. Also one Democrat voted for it.

All but one Democrat (Rep. Jared Golden of Maine) voted against the funding bill for that very reason, saying the levels in the funding bill don’t even matter because Trump and Musk will ignore what Congress put in the bill and cut from it what they want. In fact, GOP leaders were selling the bill to Republican lawmakers by making that very point. “This Congress must decide: do we have the authority to control spending, as we were granted and is laid out in Article I of the Constitution? Why would we want to relinquish this to give this administration, which is already doing massive harm, dismantling agencies, firing people, telling them today they are no longer needed, the chaos and confusion caused by Elon Musk and President Trump—why would we want to turn over our authority to appropriate bills?” Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT), ranking member of the House Appropriations Committee, wrote in a statement explaining why she voted against the funding bill.

On Thursday, with the bill heading to the Senate, Republicans were already priming to blame Democrats if a shutdown comes. In a pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted a tweet from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez written in response to Republican threat of blame:

Republicans run the House, the Senate, and the White House. You run the government. If you have the votes, then go ahead. If you need Democrats, then you need to negotiate with Democrats. Those are your two options. Blaming someone else because your shoes are untied isn’t one.

Dan Pfeiffer of The Message Box wrote:

A few weeks ago, I argued that Democrats could not — and should not — vote for anything that didn’t prohibit Musk from unilaterally shutting down government agencies. Last week, after interviewing several Senate Democrats on the night of Trump’s joint address, I softened my stance. Some Senate Democrats are scared of the fight and would prefer to roll over and play dead. But many others want a strategy and are considering whether a shutdown would actually help Musk accomplish his goals of gutting the federal government. A shutdown only works as a point of leverage if Trump et al feel pressure to reopen the government. If they plan to destroy the government or are content to let the government stay closed for as long as possible, the plan is useless.

In the comments Robert Petersen included a tweet by Sam Brody.

Old Soviet joke for our times: Guy stops by the newsstand every day, scans the front page, doesn’t buy the paper. One day the vendor asks what he’s up to. Guy says: “Looking for an obituary.” Vendor says: “Those are towards the back of the paper.” Guy says: “Not the one I’m looking for.”

In this morning’s roundup Chitown Kev quoted Laura Fox and Sarah Ferris of CNN:

The Democratic leader’s decision privately disappointed many in his caucus, and stunned his House colleagues across the US Capitol — leaving the party deeply divided on the path ahead at a moment when their base is clamoring for a strong response against Trump and Elon Musk’s actions to radically reshape the federal government. “We are in a perverse, bizarro land where we’re having to decide between letting Donald Trump wreck the government this way or wreck the government that way,” New Jersey Democratic Sen. Cory Booker said of Democrats’ predicament. It’s a moment that has been months in the making. Still, top Democrats in Congress struggled to find a cohesive message and strategy that would allow them room to fight without the potential risk of what it would mean if thousands of government workers were suddenly thrust into more uncertainty with a shutdown. Perhaps the clearest sign of the dilemma: Their top two leaders took opposite paths, with Schumer deciding to vote for the GOP plan that top House Democrat Hakeem Jeffries has spent a full week bashing.

Down in the comments exlrrp posted a tweet from Bryan Tyler Cohen showing a graph (source of data not given) showing the S&P 500 stock index scaled to show a value of 100 on four inauguration says and what happens for two hundred days after. Three of the lines – Obama in 2013, nasty guy in 2017, and Biden in 2021 – rise to some degree in that time. The fourth, nasty guy in 2025, rises for about 30 days, that drops sharply to day 50. Further down in the comments exlrrp posted a meme showing Marie Antoinette, though her face has been replaced by Musk and the words are now, “Let them buy Teslas.” Last week I included the little bit that the Defense Department removed from the Pentagon’s website and database photos of the bomber that released the first atomic bomb because the plane’s name was “Enola Gay.” Just after I mentioned that Alex Samuels of Kos posted a more complete account. The purge also include photos of U.S. Marine Corps Sgt. Maj. A.C. Gay; of the Tuskegee Airmen, the first black squadron to fight in the US military; of an all female crew taken during Women’s History Month; and of Air Force Maj. Laura Perry before her gender reassignment surgery. D’Anne Witkowski, in her Creep of the Week column for Pridesource, wrote:

“Today, I signed into law a bill that safeguards the rights of women and girls,” Gov. Kim Reynolds (R-Iowa) said in a video posted to X. Sounds good to me! What’s in the bill? Reproductive freedom with abortion and birth control that is accessible to everyone who needs it? Strengthened domestic violence protections? Gun safety measures to keep kids from being murdered in school? Better access to mental health treatment? Better oversight of children in the foster care system in order to ensure that children are not placed in abusive environments? Sadly, the answer is none of the above. Gov. Reynolds did not, in fact, do anything to protect the rights of women and girls. What she did was intentionally and maliciously hurt transgender people in the state. With the stroke of her pen, Gov. Reynolds ended “18 years of protection against discrimination based on gender identity in Iowa's civil rights law," the Des Moines Register reports. “The signing makes Iowa the first state in the country to take away civil rights from a group it has previously protected in law.”

One of my church friends told me that her sister (who refuses to be put in the box marked “female”) was instrumental in getting those protections passed 18 years ago and is now quite upset at their demise. Bonnie Jean Feldkamp of Pridesource discussed how she refuses to teach her children gender stereotypes. Her son loves to help her cook and haters object. That son likes his mom to braid his hair. His peers said that makes him “look like a girl.” But she resolved even more to make sure she describes things in gender neutral terms. That includes describing future lovers as “spouse” or “partner.”

Social media will bring out the angry, bitter people who don’t know unconditional love. Home should be a space where you absolutely know you are loved. It should be your refuge when the world is cold. The best tool I have to counter outside hate is to work on dismantling the proverbial closets in my own home. I will challenge assumptions and give my children the freedom to learn who they are and the security to be the allies our communities deserve. They are the future and I plan to fill the future with love.

Watch straight love with your child? Watch gay love too.

My Sunday viewing was the comedy show Fortune Feimster, Sweet and Salty. I first noticed her when I watched a couple LGBTQ comedy specials (Tig Notaro, Hannah Gadsby) on Netflix and she started showing up in my suggestions lists. I wasn’t sure I wanted to take a chance with her until PrideSource did a feature article on her. The article discussed this show and another one, Crushing It, and talked about how the two shows made some people feel safe to come out and give others a better sense of the difficulties LGBTQ people face. This one was released near the start of the pandemic, when many people were looking for streaming entertainment. Even straight people thought it funny. This one, an hour long, is about growing up and discovering she’s lesbian. She grew up in the South – Belmont, North Carolina – and this was filmed in Charlotte, quite close to home. She talks about joining the Girl Scouts (for the cookies), what goes into becoming a debutante, having Sunday lunch at Hooters (a little dissonance there), going to an all women’s college, and coming out to herself and family. I quite enjoyed this one. Feimster is a good storyteller, using her face expressively and keeping the pose as the audience laughs. The other show is now on my list of things to watch. I found the following discussion interesting enough to share. The ideas undergird Christian conservatism, which has a hold over national politics. However, this gets into Christian theology, which may not be of general interest. So you might want to skip this section. The post was written by wilderness voice of the Daily Kos community. Most of the ideas are from a video by Melissa, not otherwise identified in the post, though the video may identify her further. I didn’t watch the video, mostly because the portion discussed here is 19 minutes in. The post and video look at a few beliefs about Jesus and God: God is too holy to look upon sin. God requires a blood sacrifice that Jesus fulfills. To be saved we must have faith in the sacrifice that Jesus made. I’ve heard from other sources that having God require a blood sacrifice and that Jesus fulfilled it puts a barbaric practice at the core of the theology. So I’m interested in discussions that say the core of the theology is actually something else, actually love, compassion, and community. The post notes that Jesus said nothing about those few beliefs. One might think that if Jesus was the fulfillment of a sacrifice he would have said something about it. But he didn’t. Those few beliefs come from the letters of Paul. Now Paul never met Jesus in person and it took a while for Jesus’ direct disciples to accept Paul. He was a Jewish leader who had a dramatic conversion experience. He spread the teachings of Jesus around the Roman world and wrote a series of letters to the congregations he founded explaining the theology of Jesus. Or what Paul assumed the theology of Jesus to be. I see a lot of what goes on in the world according to whether a person supports and enforces a social hierarchy or whether they try to subvert the hierarchy or try to live outside it. I’ve concluded that all evil in the world comes from enforcing the hierarchy. Republicans are all about the hierarchy and making the gap between those at the highest and lowest levels as wide as possible. Back to the discussion at hand, the basic message of Jesus is to call us to subvert, abolish, or live outside the hierarchy. In contrast, there are things in Paul’s letters that support the hierarchy (and many things that don’t). So I’m wary of religious people who use Paul’s letters as proof of their point. This post notes those beliefs about sacrifice are from Paul, not Jesus. So why do conservatives apply them to Jesus? That comes from the modern belief that the Bible is inerrant, that it was all inspired by God, all of it has equal value, and the words of one voice must be reconciled with other voices. Though Jesus said very different things than Paul the two are supposed to make sense together. And that clouds the meaning of what Jesus said and did. The post lists four important pieces of the message of Jesus. One, God is love who views all of us as his children. Two, the forgiveness of God is free. It does not require payment, certainly not vengeance. All we need to do is recognize things we have done that are wrong, that get in the way of love and community. Three, to receive forgiveness we must forgive others. If we refuse to offer forgiveness to others we’re refusing to forgive ourselves. Four, love God and love your neighbor as yourself. Do this for now, not for what may come after death. Many Christians are so obsessed with the afterlife that they see no need to take care of this life, this community, this world. Conservatives, who enforce the hierarchy, like the teachings of Paul that talk about the hierarchy. They’re not so into the teachings of Jesus, who asks us to abolish the hierarchy. Now to a completely different topic. I turn to a post by Krotor of the Kos community and his Boys Love column. This is the series of posts that looks at movies and video series of two young men who fall in love. The better films are made in Asia and a defining feature is there is little to no homophobia. The lads do have obstacles to overcome, just like in straight romances. In this particular post of the series Krotor speaks to our straight allies. You too should be watching boys love shows. Especially if you have a child in the house. If your child is gay they need to see gay people falling in love. Goodness, they see plenty of stories of straight people falling in love. They need to see gay relationships on equal footing. If your child is straight they need to see gay people falling in love. They need to see gay love is equally natural to straight love. Seeing that will help them become a stronger ally. If your child hasn’t yet disclosed their orientation they especially need to see gay people falling in love. They need to know that you as their parent will continue to love them and support their relationships no matter who they bring home as a possible partner. And when you turn on the screen and cue up the streaming service don’t announce that you’re inviting the family to watch a gay love story. You wouldn’t invite them to see a straight love story, would you? And when the show starts, watch it with them. Or start watching by yourself and let their curiosity draw them in. Be wary of, even avoid, Western depictions of boy’s love. Most of them have to work through way too much homophobia. Definitely do not include Brokeback Mountain. While it was pivotal and important in its time its main message is homophobia. Krotor’s righteous rant against that movie and everything Hollywood has released depicting male-male love is here. Yeah, this column series is Boys Love and features how to find good shows about young men falling in love. However, there are shows that feature young women falling in love. Watch some of those too.

Top advisers became worried about the political fallout

I finished the book A Song Everlasting by Ha Jin. This story of Tian opens with him as the lead tenor in a Chinese cultural exchange choir on tour in New York. One of Tian’s friends who had already established himself in the US invites Tian to sing at a cultural event. At Tian’s insistence the tour director lets him stay in the US a couple extra days. But the event is culturally Taiwanese, not Chinese. So when Tian gets back to Beijing he condemned for his foolishness. He is asked to turn in his passport. Instead, he uses it to flee back to New York, leaving behind wife Shuna and teenage daughter TingTing. That’s all in the first ten percent of the book. The rest of the story is Tian trying to establish a singing career in the US, mostly among the Chinese diaspora. There are also numerous efforts by the Chinese government to get him to return to the motherland or at least stop singing songs not part of the required propaganda canon. There are attempts to discredit him when he refuses. Along the way Tian wrestles (a bit) with whether he would be better in a life of comparable ease in China singing propaganda or not singing at all or be a struggling artist in America able to sing what he wants. He laments the growing figurative distance with his wife brought on by his literal distance from her. There is even a comparison of Chinese and American health systems. The story is enjoyable, though I wondered how to characterize the writing. Plain might work. Simplistic seems too simple. It seems rather emotionally bland and at times there seems to be a lot of explaining. Oliver Willis of Daily Kos reported on the details of the on again, off again tariffs imposed on Mexico and Canada. Part of the reversal appears to be Mexican and Canadian leaders pushing back, part of it is reports on what tariffs will do to the auto industry and agriculture, and part of it is a big drop in the stock market. Kos of Kos wrote that one should not underestimate Canada. They may be small in population, but the nasty guy is turning on their own patriotism. What looked like a landslide for the Conservative Party in October’s election is now close to an even match with the Liberals. Canada also has some Americans on its side. The Wall Street Journal editorial board, who had disparaged Kamala Harris, calls the tariffs the “dumbest” in history. Rural Americans and their newspapers and senators are complaining about what tariffs would do to the agriculture economy of red states. In his first time in the Oval Office the nasty guy imposed tariffs and had to bail out farmers. This time there may not be enough money in the federal budget for a farmer bailout. I had written a while back that Republicans and Project 2025 called for privatizing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration – the department that runs the National Weather Service and issues weather warnings – and giving two reasons for it. One, NOAA funds research into climate change which they want to stop and two, they wan a company to make money off what the government is giving away for free. Last week Walter Einenkel of Kos reported that Musk and DOGE have started firing workers at NOAA, aiming to cut 10% of 11,758 workers. Democrats condemned the move.

While Musk and DOGE have been unable to prove they have found any fraud or provided taxpayers with any meaningful savings, the San Francisco Chronicle points out that while the National Weather Service’s budget is around $1.4 billion, which averages to around $4 per tax payer, it is estimated to provide Americans with $102.1 billion in benefits. That's a lot of bang for the buck, according to any metric. You could even call it a model of “efficiency.”

Are you rich enough to pay for your daily weather report? Lisa Needham of Kos said a week ago we should celebrate the small wins. There are buffer zones around abortion clinics that limit how close anti-choice protesters can get, a space that is rather small. The zones are more important since the Supreme Court overturned the right to an abortion. Yet, this same court declined to hear a case that would have allowed them to declare buffer zones unconstitutional. Anti-choice demonstrators hate buffer zones.

They argue they have a First Amendment right to “counsel” people who are going to abortion clinics, framing their efforts as gentle, persuasive conversations. Instead, what the record in Turco showed actually happened was that anti-choice protestors blocked access to the clinic, assaulted patient escorts, screamed directly into patients’ faces, and videotaped them. Additionally, a meager eight-foot gap doesn’t prevent clinic patients from hearing protestors or seeing their signs. So, in terms of a First Amendment right to express oneself, all the buffer zones prevent is getting in the face of a patient and making them feel physically threatened. Protestors can still scream and wave their pictures of bloody fetuses—they just have to do it a few feet away. According to Justice Clarence Thomas, the court’s failure to take up these cases and throw out buffer zones entirely was an “abdication of our judicial duty.” Yes, Thomas is big mad that only he and Justice Samuel Alito would have agreed to hear the cases. As Mark Joseph Stern pointed out over at Slate, it isn’t unexpected that Thomas thought his conservative colleagues would join him in overruling Hill and ending buffer zones.

The nasty guy has no interest in stopping anti-choice protesters from being violent. He showed it by granting clemency to protesters who had blockaded clinics. Also, Republicans are working to pass a national abortion ban. So this small step by the Supremes is welcome. In a pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted Jonathan Lemire of The Atlantic:

Jesse Watters, a co-host of the Fox News hit show The Five, is usually a slick deliverer of MAGA talking points. But on February 19, Watters told a surprisingly emotional story about a friend working at the Pentagon who was poised to lose his job as part of the Trump administration’s sweeping cuts to the federal workforce. “I finally found one person I knew who got DOGE’d, and it hit me in the heart,” said Watters, who urged his Fox colleagues to “be a little bit less callous.” Although Watters soon resumed championing DOGE, the moment went viral. Trump watched the clip and asked advisers if it was resonating with his base of supporters, according to one of three White House officials I spoke with for this story (they requested anonymity so they could discuss private conversations). Over the ensuing weeks, the president grew unhappy with the television coverage of cuts affecting his voters, according to two of those officials, while the White House fielded calls from Cabinet members and Republican lawmakers frustrated by Elon Musk, the billionaire tech mogul empowered to slash the federal government. Some of Trump’s top advisers became worried about the political fallout from DOGE’s sweeping cuts, especially after seeing scenes of angry constituents yelling at GOP members of Congress in town halls.

Way down in the comments Jesse Duquette posted a cartoon with the caption, “When standing up to fascists, it’s important to always maintain a sense of decorum - Democratic Party proverb.” The cartoon shows a landing craft approaching the D-Day beach and one soldier says, “What if we tried wearing pink and holding little signs instead?” A meme posted by exlrrp and written by Brian Tyler Cohen says:

The US military has removed photos of the B-29 bomber “Enola Gay” – which dropped the first atomic bomb on Japan – apparently because it contains the word “gay,” which violates their new anti-DEI rules.

And way down in the comments is a cartoon by Jonesy for Private Eye Magazine showing a field with a scarecrow wearing a large dress and a young man sewing frills along the bottom. His parents are watching. His mother says, “I think our son is trying to tell us his future isn’t in farming.” In the comments of a roundup from a week ago is a meme posted by Annie:

Believing a small group of billionaires are suddenly working tirelessly for the benefit of the working class requires a spectacular level of stupidity.

A cartoon by Toonerman shows this exchange:

Red hat man: I didn’t think it was MY federal job they was gonna cut. A dog: But if other folks lose their jobs that’s okay? ... you’re a selfish prick.

Your government has chosen to do this to you

A win for the good guys from this conservative Supreme Court. Emily Singer of Daily Kos reported that in a 5-4 order the high court let stand a ruling from a lower court saying the administration must pay the nearly $2 billion for work done by USAID. Yeah, that means there were four justices who thought the government should not pay for work apparently already done. The only one identified was Alito. Alas, this order says nothing about whether DOGE is allowed to close USAID. Under this squatter in the Oval Office news can change quickly. For example, on Tuesday Oliver Willis of Kos reported that tariffs on goods from Canada and Mexico were a go. On Wednesday Walter Einenkel of Kos reported those tariffs had been paused. Maybe tumbling stocks prompted the nasty guy to rethink things. Or maybe not – the tariffs are only paused for a month. Then there was that big speech on Tuesday. I didn’t listen. On Tuesday before the speech Morgan Stephens of Kos wrote about what some Democrats will be doing instead of attending. Several said they would sit with constituents as they provided real-time commentary. Others planned to attend so they could make a show of walking out. If you really need it (and why would you?) Einenkel gathered together the worst moments of the speech. Willis discussed mainstream media saying everything is normal, the nasty guy (not their words) was great. In a pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted a tweet by Catherine Rampell:

This is exactly what Trump did last month too, on the same tariff issue. But to be clear we're actually worse off than the prior status quo -- tariffs are off again, but we've now alienated important allies.

A quote from Sarah Longwell of The Atlantic:

In his first term, a significant number of voters felt that Trump was a bad person who was good at managing the economy, which gave them a mixed view of him. But the past decade has functioned like exposure therapy for Trump: Many people have become desensitized to his character defects, so that what remains is the vague sense that “Trump = good economy.” These voters no longer look at his social-media posts, and they don’t read past headlines as they scroll. So his bad character—which hasn’t gone away—no longer registers. But voters in this group are noticing that the job they elected him to do—fix the economy—is not getting done.

I could say that fixing the economy can take a while. But I’m sure these voters see the nasty guy isn’t even trying. A tweet by Andy Craig:

One of the reasons to have laws and taxes set by a legislature is it provides relative stability and predictability, rather than the economically destructive regime uncertainty of switches being flipped on and off day to day based on one man's erratic whim. Nobody can plan anything like this.

And from Charlie Sykes of To The Contrary:

Let’s not pretend that the speech was presidential. Despite the trappings, Trump did not give a speech that any other president would have given to an anxious nation. What we got instead was the MAGA id, a fetid stew of culture war, name calling, cock-splaining, Fox News cliches, insults, threats, and… oh for chrissakes you’ve heard all this before… It was, quipped Anne Applebaum, “90-plus minutes of bad moments — a typical Trump medley of fabrications, provocations and insults.” And we are all dumber for it.

In a second roundup Chitown Kev quoted Mike Masonic of Techdirt

One of the craziest bits about covering the systematic dismantling of democracy is this: the people doing the dismantling frequently tell you exactly what they’re going to do. They’re almost proud of it. They just wrap it in language that makes it sound like the opposite. (Remember when Musk said he was buying Twitter to protect free speech? And then banned journalists and sued researchers for calling out his nonsense? Same playbook.) Good reporters can parse that. Bad reporters fail at it time and time again. But what’s happening now is even more extreme and more terrifying. Something that even experts in democratic collapse didn’t see coming. Normally when democracies fall apart, there’s also a playbook. A series of predictable steps involving the military, or the courts, or sometimes both. [...] The destruction is far more systematic and dangerous than many seem to realize. Even Steven Levitsky, the author of How Democracies Die — who has literally written the book on how democracies collapse — admits the speed and scope of America’s institutional collapse has exceeded his worst predictions. And his analysis points to something we’ve been specifically warning about: the unprecedented concentration of political, economic, and technological power in the hands of Elon Musk and his circle of loyal hatchet men as they dismantle democratic guardrails.

Way down in the comments exlrrp posted a meme of Musk holding a sign that says:

My businesses have received $40 billion in government subsidies, but I’m gutting the Veteran’s Suicide Hotline at the VA because we can’t afford it.

In a third roundup Dworkin included a tweet by Thomas Zimmer:

We need to trust our eyes. Nazi salutes, racist purges, an ambush on the Ukrainian president by a far-right regime. If what we see aligns with what we know and is also in line with an established track record, our default assumption should be that what is happening is actually what it looks like.

And a thread by Cliston Brown:

2026: Voters, upset by the Trump recession, vote blue in the midterms. 2028: Angry at the economic collapse, voters give Democrats the White House and Congress and swear they’ll never vote GOP again. 2030: Voters put Republicans back in charge in Congress. Wash, rinse, repeat. This, if you’re wondering, is why Republicans never course-correct. They don’t have to. They pull the same s--- every time, voters punish them for a midterm and maybe the next presidential election. Then, like an amnesiac, they hand the keys right back to them two years later.

Politico writing about and quoting Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau:

“Canadians are reasonable and we are polite, but we will not back down from a fight, not when our country and the well being of everyone in it is at stake.” Trudeau pledged relief to Canadian workers caught in the trade war’s crosshairs, and told the American people that his quarrel was not with them. “We don’t want this. We want to work with you as a friend and ally, and we don’t want to see you hurt either, but your government has chosen to do this to you,” he said.

In the comments Rambler797 included a tweet from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene with a response from Kareen Rifai. First, Greene:

Have you ever noticed how for decades now Hollywood always made Russia the bad guy in their movies? It’s like Americans have been programmed to believe Russia must be the enemy at all times.

And Rifai:

I think it’s because Russia has been the actual bad guy in real life for several centuries, Marge.

A meme by Sen. Chris Murphy posted by exlrrp:

Donald Trump’s abandonment of Ukraine and affection for Russia is part of the bigger story. Trump is trying to end the rule of law in America so that the billionaire ruling class can get away with stealing from us. And normalizing dictatorships like Russia helps him get there.

Singer reported:

President Donald Trump on Monday once again came to the aid of murderous Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, cutting off over $1 billion in military aid the United States was set to provide Ukraine to help the country beat back Russia's violent invasion. Trump halted the aid even though the money had been appropriated by Congress—adding to the trend of him ignoring Congress' power of the purse.

I also heard the nasty guy has stopped sharing intelligence with Ukraine. Kos of Kos wrote that CEOs are getting a bad return on investment for their donations to the nasty guy. He has damaged relations with trading partners and appears he will send the American economy into recession. I’ve seen several articles similar to the next two. A week ago Singer reported that because of the angry voters showing up at constituent meetings of Republican members of Congress Republican leadership is now advising their caucus to not hold such meetings. Meaning: hide. A few days later Singer reported another Republican tactic is to spin (lie) about who those angry constituents are. Some of the claims: Democrats came early and filled the seats. They’re paid agitators. They’re people happy with bloated government. In a fourth roundup, Dworkin quoted a tweet from Tom Malinowski:

Whoops, I accidentally cancelled Ebola prevention! Doh, I fired the bird flu experts! Oops-a-daisy, I stopped the Lutheran Charities foster care and adoption services! My bad, I sacked the nuclear weapons workers! Now can I have access to your tax returns?

Down in the comments Fiona Webster posted a cartoon by Ann Telnaes, who had left the Washington Post because it refused to run one one of her cartoons. This cartoon is from 2019.

So if you see a country without editorial cartoonists or one where they are not creating tough, pointed satire against politicians and policies, be aware. A silenced cartoonist is an indicator of an unhealthy environment for freedom of expression. Editorial cartoonists are democracy’s canary in a coal mine.

It exposed the pro-Putin commitments of the president

Brother’s visit was a good one. Our time together included an afternoon in a restaurant in East Lansing joined by Sister and Niece plus another niece and wife from Grand Rapids. My Sunday viewing was the Oscars. I enjoy this type of show (and may need to check out Anora). Brother politely put up with it, finding things to do on his computer. While Brother was here I didn’t keep up with reading the news. I’m still a couple days behind. Even so I saved several articles to write about. We’ll see how many I get to before I decide they’re out of date. The Carnival parades in the German cities of Dusseldorf and Cologne feature floats that are politically pointed. Some are not safe for work, as this collection of photos from HuffPost says right in the post title. Beyond that there are floats about the nasty guy’s denial of climate change, about Putin and the nasty guy squeezing Zelenskyy, and about Napo-Elon running loose. There are also photos of the way the nasty guy was depicted in previous years, including one from 2018 getting fresh exposure elsewhere showing a Russian bear mounting the nasty guy (also not safe for work). The Telegraph also posted several photos, some not in the HuffPost collection. The big news since my last post was President Zelenskyy of Ukraine visiting the Oval Office last Friday. Walter Einenkel of Daily Kos posted a short article (other news outlets discussed it at length) calling what was supposed to be a diplomatic press conference an “ambush” with rants supplied by both the nasty guy and vice nasty. Zelenskyy remained as cool as one can be when being berated by two idiots spouting lies. Zelenskyy even remained diplomatic in tweets afterward. Einenkel included videos of the ambush, though I didn’t watch. Morgan Stephens of Kos wrote about the reactions by Democrats. Stephens includes quite a few. Many of the comments mention that the nasty and vice nasty are doing Putin’s dirty work. In a pundit roundup from Tuesday Chitown Kev of Kos has a quote from Paul Krugman writing for his own Substack saying Europe is capable defending Ukraine without the nasty guy’s help. Europe has enough resources – it has long exceeded American aid and can easily replace America’s share. There are systems America may stop supplying that Europe can’t quickly replace. But we’ve been hearing predictions of Ukraine’s imminent collapse for at least a year. That gives Europe time. “So it really comes down to political will.” The nasty guy could try to pressure Europe into abandoning Ukraine, but Ukraine is more important to Europe than America is. Frank Gardner of BBC News looked at the manpower that might be required of Europe. Zelenskyy said he would need a peacekeeping force of up to 200,000 troops along the 600 mile line of contact. Europe would struggle to supply a third of that. Stephanie Kelton, writing for The Lens on Substack, says the “Social Security is running out of money” debate isn’t the one we should have but it’s the only one getting serious consideration. I read Kelton’s full article and much of it gets rather wonky. However, her last few paragraphs explain much. The 1983 projection on Social Security solvency was accurate in projected life expectancy and the decline in birth rates. So they’re not the reason for current difficulties. There is one thing the 1983 projection didn’t anticipate – the rise of extreme wealth, personified by Musk in this article. In particular, the payroll tax, which fund Social Security, is capped at an income of $176,100 in 2025. Make more than that and the rich pay no more into Social Security. Down in the comments of the pundit roundup Fiona Webster posted a cartoon by Garth German showing a couple in bed. She’s on her phone and says, “How many times do we get to say, ‘This isn’t America, we’re better than this’ before we have to admit that we’re not?” The Naked Pastor posted a cartoon showing 100 figures, all of them white except the one in the corner colored as transgender. The one in the opposite corner says, “Hey everybody, let’s persecute that one on the bottom right.” The Pastor included a quote from Pedro Pascal:

I can’t think of anything more vile and small and pathetic than terrorizing the smallest, most vulnerable community of people who want nothing from you, except the right to exist.

In Saturday’s roundup Greg Dworkin quoted Jonathan Chait of The Atlantic discussing Zelenskyy’s visit:

Might Zelensky have gotten a different outcome by taking Trump’s abuse and stream of lies with more self-abasement? Sure, it’s possible; if you reason backwards from a bad outcome, any different strategy is almost axiomatically smarter. Zelensky had no good options at the White House. He walked into an ambush with a president who empathizes with the dictator who wants to seize Ukraine’s territory. Everyone who spent years warning about Trump’s unseemly affinity for Putin had exactly this kind of disastrous outcome in mind.

A tweet from David Frum:

No, the meeting did not go badly for Ukraine. It exposed in the most undeniable, unequivocal way possible the pro-Putin commitments of the president and vice president. That was information Americans and allies needed to have clear before them.

Down in the comments are several cartoons about Zelenskyy’s visit. Monday’s roundup has more cartoons about the Oval Office ambush.

If they had the votes they would be voting

Brother is coming for a visit, arriving tomorrow and staying the weekend. I won’t post in the meantime. Some weirdness out of Michigan. In December the state House ended the session in confusion. In a not-quite evenly divided House Republicans refused to show up. Then a Democrat also refused to show up. House leadership saw a stalemate and canceled the rest of the session. In the chaos nine bills, which had been approved by both House and Senate, were not forwarded to the governor for signature or veto, in spite of that demand being spelled out in the state constitution. With the New Year the House switched from Democrat to Republican. New House Speaker Matt Hall has kept the bills on the House clerk’s desk. Rick Pluta of Michigan Public reported that Democrats filed a lawsuit to get Republicans to act. That case was before the Michigan Court of Claims early this week There is no ruling yet, with plenty of space to appeal. Senate Democrats say that bills must be forwarded to the governor. While the constitution does not give a deadline there is and understanding (at least by Democrats) the implied intent is to do so with all possible haste. Failure to do so means “every bill then can be held hostage,” as Dem attorney Mark Brewer said. Speaker Hall said a “previous legislature cannot dictate the actions of the current legislature.” He also said this is a legislature issue and courts should not be come involved. But if the two chambers are locked in their position (as they are now) who has the right or ability to to get the other chamber to act as they should? Overall, who can compel a recalcitrant Republic Party to act like grownups? Whatever the ruling it will be appealed to the state Supreme Court. Back in 2004 Michigan was one of a dozen states to add a ban of same-sex marriage to the state constitution. I suppose I should be glad the amendment passed by a smaller margin than most other states. That amendment became void when, in 2015, the federal Supreme Court ruled the ban unconstitutional and couples could enjoy marriage equality. That amendment is void, but it it still there. Pluta also reported that on Tuesday state Rep Josh Schriver called on the US Supreme court to reinstate the national ban on same-sex marriage. Justices Alito and Thomas have been calling for the right case to come to them. If the Supreme do overturn same-sex marriage this Michigan amendment immediately becomes valid again. As part of his rebuttal, Sen. Jeremy Ross, who is gay and has sponsored bills to add LGBTQ rights, said of the new bill, “This was just as buffoonish as I expected it to be.” Schriver had a handful of cosponsors, which stuck around only until they had to face the cameras. His bill will go to the Government Operations Committee. It’s reputation is known as the graveyard for disfavored legislation and Hall has said he will never bring the legislation to the floor. If the Supremes do withdraw federal recognition of marriage equality Michigan will have to put an appeal amendment on the ballot and explain why voters need to vote for it. Kos of Daily Kos discussed the reports that the nasty guy and Ukrainian President Zelenskyy have agreed to a mineral rights deal. Other sources say Zelenskyy will be in Washington tomorrow to sign it. The nasty guy is well known for his extortions. Even so, Kos thinks this is “Ukraine’s best bet to win the war.” It’s good because giving up $0.5 trillion of mineral rights, out of estimated $15 trillion, is a worthwhile price – so long as it produces significant military aid. The vast majority of the wealth is in areas occupied by Russia. And future US administrations will have no problem ripping it up if they feel it gets in the way of Ukraine’s development.

As for the mineral rights deal, we don’t know many of the details. Apparently, Trump dropped his $500 billion asking price, and Ukraine didn’t get the security guarantees they wanted (i.e., NATO membership). Also, there doesn’t appear to be a specific promise of new American weapons and aid. But if Trump wants some of those minerals, those Russian-occupied lands need to be liberated, and Trump said that the deal would give Ukraine “the right to fight on.” Also, when asked if American supplies to Ukraine would continue, Trump said, "Maybe until we have a deal with Russia. ... We need to have a deal. Otherwise, it's going to continue."

A problem with Ukraine aid is it is being seen more as charity and a harder political sale in donor countries. But with this deal aid is now can be seen as a transaction. That will sell better with conservatives. Peter Olandt of the Kos community found the full text of the agreement on the Kyiv Independent and read through it. And he concluded:

This isn’t a deal. This is a deal to make a deal. And this deal to make that deal has absolutely no measurables attached to it. No timelines, numbers, or anything approaching something to hold either party accountable if the “Fund Agreement” never gets completed.

Yet, Olandt considers this brilliant:

Ukraine and the US have been seen to make a deal together. Both sides can point to this deal and say “Hey, we made a deal!” Trump gets to pretend he did something. Zelensky gets precious time for Russia to collapse while hopefully keeping at least some US benefits going. If the deal wasn’t made, Trump could get all huffy, make a deal with Russia, and blame Ukraine for not making a deal first. But since Trump has “made a deal with Ukraine” he will hopefully tone down his man-crush on Putin for a bit and continue to both let previously agreed upon arms go to Ukraine while letting Ukraine (with European help if needed) buy the more essential US goods. Any time Trump drifts towards Russia, Ukraine can privately or publicly point to this deal and ask “Hey, didn’t we have a deal?” How much of an effect this will have on Trump, who knows.

That Fund Agreement shouldn’t actually appear. As long as it is unfinished the nasty guy at least needs to pretend to uphold his side. Emily Singer of Kos reported House Republicans passed a budget blueprint. It directs House committees to cut expenses by $2 trillion to partly offset the $4.8 trillion in proposed tax cuts with each committee getting a target to meet. Cuts of this size will affect popular programs. For example, the House Energy and Commerce Committee is to cut $880 billion, expected to come from Medicaid. Various Republicans say the word Medicaid isn’t in the bill and accuse Democrats of lying. Democrats counter that the entire rest of the committee’s budget is only about half of $880 billion. So, yeah, the plan is for Medicaid to be cut by a lot.

“The quick math on the House budget shows a stark equation: The cost of extending tax cuts for households with incomes in the top 1%—$1.1 trillion through 2034—equals roughly the same amount as the proposed potential cuts for health coverage under Medicaid and food assistance under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program,” Sharon Parrot, president of the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, wrote in a blog post. “Under what set of values does a budget target those who struggle to pay their bills for severe cuts, while giving an annual tax cut averaging $62,000 for those who make $743,000 or more a year?” she continued. “The tax cut for these wealthy households is greater than the annual family incomes for most of the 72 million people—1 in 5 people in the U.S.—who have health coverage through Medicaid.”

Even with cutting the budget by $2 trillion the proposed tax cuts would add $24 trillion to the federal debt over 10 years – pushing it to $60 trillion. In response to Musk searching for waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal budget Jon Stewart does a minute long segment where he is able to find a great deal of what Musk is looking for and he did it in just seconds. All that is in the form of subsidies to oil and gas companies that make big profits, tax deductions only the rich can take, and the F-35, an aircraft that can never meet all its requirements when the next war will be fought by drones. Morgan Stephens of Kos reported:

On Tuesday, 21 engineers, data scientists, and product managers who worked for what was once known as the United States Digital Service submitted a mass resignation letter in response to Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency interloping in federal jobs and agencies. In the joint letter, obtained by the Associated Press, staffers from the USDS wrote, “We will not use our skills as technologists to compromise core government systems, jeopardize Americans’ sensitive data, or dismantle critical public services. We will not lend our expertise to carry out or legitimize DOGE’s actions.” They also alluded to nameless DOGE bros wearing White House visitor badges infiltrating their office and grilling the nonpartisan staffers. The staffers told reporters these young men were rife with technological inefficiency, fandom for Musk, and ideological partisanship. ... “We swore to serve the American people and uphold our oath to the Constitution across presidential administrations,” the USDS employees wrote. “However, it has become clear that we can no longer honor those commitments.”

Singer reported:

More and more Republican lawmakers are being confronted by angry constituents at town hall meetings across the country. The opposition continues to grow to the chaos President Donald Trump and co-President Elon Musk have unleashed on the federal government with the so-called Department of Government Efficiency.

Constituents have basic questions: Are you going to vote to restore funding? When are you going to wrest control back? When are you going to put Musk under oath and demand he explain what he’s doing? The House had a nine-day break. Democrats met with constituents. Republicans mostly hid. When they did see constituents they claimed the anger was a campaign from the left. Oliver Willis of Kos reported that the “savings” reported by Musk and DOGE is lies.

DOGE’s falsehoods are one of the most visible products of the Trump and Musk co-presidency, and the public is beginning to sour on it. Recent opinion polling shows that much of the public holds DOGE, Musk, and their actions in low esteem. But so far, Trump shows that he has no intention of stopping his assault.

Mark Sumner, a Kos emeritus, wrote about Musk’s assault on science and research. He listed about $100 million reduction on each of biotech, life science, and social science research. There are also studies he halted that have already been paid for. That means zero savings and considerable damage. Sumner asks the important question: Why is Musk destroying science? He lists some reasons. + Fascists love the ignorant so they can dominate public knowledge and obliterate shared understanding so people don’t know how to improve their lives. + Musk wants to be seen as the only source of miracles. Sam Altman of The New Yorker wrote:

Elon desperately wants the world to be saved. But only if he can be the one to save it.

+ Musk is an accelerationist. He believes society will collapse and the best thing for the ruling class is to hasten the fall. Sumner also wrote that Musk warns of “temporary hardships” on the way to his paradise, though he and his cohort won’t feel any pinch. The rest of us will feel mild discomfort to death by firing squad. Walter Einenkel of Kos reported that DOGE’s focus on probationary employees is hitting military families hard. A military spouse has to move every 2-3 years, as the military member does. Frequently the only job the spouse can get is a government job. Each change of job means the new one has a 1-2 year probationary period, so much of their time is as a probationary worker. And Musk is targeting them because they have fewer rights than regular employees. About three weeks ago Steven Dennis tweeted:

One way to think about the DOGE effort is it's an outgrowth of 20 years of hardliner conservatives frustrated by their inability to get the votes in Congress to do what they want to do. Deleting the Department of Education is not a new idea, but they don't have the votes to do that. Same with CFPB, USAID, food stamps, Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act, and on and on. Steven Dennis' maxim: If they had the votes, *they would be voting.* ... Sending in Elon Musk & 'Big Balls' to do what they can't get Congress to do becomes far more appealing to hardliners.

Because Congress has been so tied in knots Obama and Biden turned to using executive orders to make progress. So now governing is about what SCOTUS let the executive get away with. Lately, they’ve been allowing getting away with a lot. A few days ago I wrote about a cartoon in which the person on stage took being pelted by eggs as a compliment. Clay Jones saw the opposite. His cartoon posted on Kos shows a Republican member of Congress being pelted by eggs. He says, “Yikes! They’re mad enough to throw $8 eggs!”

He truly believes his actions are best for everyone

My Sunday movies were the two films by Netflix nominated for Oscars in the short film categories. The awards are handed out next week and only the Netflix movies are streamed now. The first one was the short documentary The Only Girl in the Orchestra. It is about string bass player Orin O’Brien and when she joined the New York Philharmonic somewhere about 1965 she was indeed the only woman. Leonard Bernstein was the one to hire her and he thought her playing was wonderful. The film was created by her niece Molly O’Brien, though Orin didn’t think she was special enough to have a movie made about her. Filming included her retirement from the NYP after 55 years, then moving from the apartment she had been in as long. O’Brien is the daughter of actors and while they sought the spotlight she avoided it. She chose string bass because the school orchestra had instruments and no players. Plus, playing string bass meant she was in the back of the orchestra. She and a friend read through some of the newspaper articles from when she got the NYP job and cringed at the sexist language. She noted the men had a changing room. There wasn’t one for women. Even as she retired from the NYP she has kept up her teaching schedule, so we meet a lot of her students. The second film is the short live action Anuja, which takes place in New Delhi slums. Anuja says she is fourteen, but she is clearly younger. She works with an older sister in a garment sweatshop. A school official wants her to take a test to see if she qualifies for a boarding school – he’s heard of her math skills. Part of the film is about coming up with the money to pay for the exam and part of it is about the factors that work to keep her in poverty. These include the sweatshop owner wanting her math skills for himself, and Anuja recognizing that her sister would not go to the boarding school with her. The Detroit Film Theater screens all of the short animation, live action, and documentary films during February. For several years I would attend the marathon viewings of the animation and live action. I stopped when I got tired of the violence in some of the live action shows. I see some of this year’s nominations were for violent films. Alas, most of the other short films don’t get to a streaming service. In an article for Capital and Main posted on Daily Kos Gabriel Thompson discussed the latest difficulty in resolving labor disputes. These disputes include such things as workers voting in union representation yet the corporation continues to refuse to recognize the union. The reason is that the National Labor Relations Board can no longer meet because the nasty guy fired a board member and it no longer has enough members to meet quorum requirements. An agency that’s supposed to be independent from politics can no longer function. This comes after a long period of being underfunded and understaffed and recently hit with a funding freeze.

The freeze at the National Labor Relations Board comes while attorneys for Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Amazon, which are both facing labor complaints, argue in federal court that the NLRB is unconstitutional, in part because it impedes executive power.

The nasty guy also fired enough commissioners from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to leave it without a functioning quorum. The NLRB can accept cases and probably begin work on preparing data and arguments. But any cases that need board action are now on hold, which may last a good long time. This will mean that workers, recognizing they can’t depend on a government agency will take matters into their own hands. The Republican threat to significantly cut Medicaid prompted Renuka Rayasam and Sam Whitehead of KFF Health News to write an explainer on Medicaid, posted on Kos.

In January, during a congressional hearing on his way to becoming secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. got basic details wrong about Medicaid — a program he now oversees. He said that Medicaid is fully funded by the federal government (it’s not) and that many enrollees are unsatisfied with high out-of-pocket costs (enrollees pay limited, if any, out-of-pocket costs).

Read the article and you’ll know more than RFK. Kos of Kos wrote another article about people who voted for the nasty guy and are now harmed by that decision. The introduction says:

As we sample the latest batch of regretful Trump voters, just note the theme: “I didn’t know it would impact me!” This is a core difference between us and them. They happily voted for President Donald Trump hoping he would hurt other people. We voted against him because he would hurt other people. So the question becomes, how do we build a society in which we are all in this thing together and vote for candidates who uplift rather than destroy? In the short term, sure, let’s pick up people who have been burned. Their votes matter. But as long as peoples’ motivation to vote is to hurt “the other,” we’re going to have a hard time building the caring, supportive, and progressive society we all deserve.

In a pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev quoted Adam Serwer of The Atlantic discussing the “Great Resegregation”

If the Great Resegregation proves successful, it will restore an America past where racial and ethnic minorities were the occasional token presence in an otherwise white-dominated landscape. It would repeal the gains of the civil-rights era in their entirety. What its advocates want is not a restoration of explicit Jim Crow segregation—that would shatter the illusion that their own achievements are based in a color-blind meritocracy. They want an arrangement that perpetuates racial inequality indefinitely while retaining some plausible deniability, a rigged system that maintains a mirage of equal opportunity while maintaining an unofficial racial hierarchy. Like elections in authoritarian countries where the autocrat is always reelected in a landslide, they want a system in which they never risk losing but can still pretend they won fairly. The battles of the Great Resegregation are now taking place in at least three overlapping arenas. The first is politics, where right-wing legal organizations have succeeded in rolling back many civil-rights-era voting protections; they want to now fully destroy the remaining shreds. The second is education and employment, particularly at elite institutions, such as the media and academia; right-wing legal strategies have been similarly fruitful here in attacking diversity, thanks to the conservative capture of the Supreme Court. The third is popular culture, where conservatives have sought to leverage anger and nostalgia against movies, television, books, and other creative media brought to life by artists of color. [...] As the Trump State Department official Darren Beattie wrote, “Competent white men must be put in charge if you want things to work. Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities, and demoralizing competent white men.” This analysis is perceptive in the sense that the exact reverse is true—we are now in the second decade of a years-long temper tantrum sparked by the election of Barack Obama—not to mention the failed attempts to elect a woman to succeed him—and the effect it had on the fragile self-esteem of people like Beattie.

Kev also quoted Paul Krugman from his Substack talking about the congestion pricing for Midtown Manhattan that the nasty guy reversed.

This behavior may in part reflect the right-wing insistence, going back to Reagan, that government can never be a force for good, a doctrine right-wingers try to validate when they’re in power. Part of it may reflect jealousy: Trump, and only Trump, is allowed to have policy successes. But it’s also surely part of the effort to flood the zone — to do so many bad things at the same time that it’s hard to focus on any one outrage. And I’m sorry to say that this strategy often works.

In a second roundup Greg Dworkin quoted Heather Cox Richardson of her Letters from an American on Substack who quoted Timothy Snyder, scholar of authoritarianism. Snyder has noticed a shift:

People are starting to realize that there is no truth here beyond the desire for personal wealth and power.

Dworkin also included a tweet by Jennifer Schulze that was also a link to an article on Substack.

I think local news is doing a helluva job covering the doge fallout. Reporters are connecting the dots from DC to main street, going beyond acronyms to explain what government agencies do & giving voice to concerns of regular people.

With the tweet is a photo of some sort of citizen gathering that is standing room only. The people look angry. Yeah, that kind of DOGE fallout. A tweet by Carol Leonning:

Here's one creative way @SecretService managers told agents to respond to Elon Musk's surprise email demanding that fed employees list their 5 accomplishments last week. Sources said it was designed to avoid agents sharing sensitive and classified details of their work protecting @POTUS, the White House and more.

This week I accomplished: + 100% of the tasks and duties required of me by my position description. + 100% of the work product that my manager and I have agreed to. + 100% of the duties and performance elements that are used to evaluate my performance. + 100% of the deliverables requested of me by my direct supervisor. + I exceeded expectations in the delivery of the above.

In the comments is a cartoon by Jonesy showing the nasty guy talking to a firefighter. The nasty guy says, “Keep up the good work – you’ll need to” as between them the nasty guy sets fire to the Paris Climate Agreement. A meme posted by exlrrp has the caption “They never started by taking guns.” The image shows Nazi officials walking away with stacks of books. A tweet by Josh Marshall includes a quote from Vanity Fair that explains Musk’s goals. The Vanity Fair author isn’t named.

“Elon believes he should be emperor of the world, and this is his way of showing people what he’s capable of as emperor,” a close associated of Musk’s, who has worked with him for years and still speaks to him regularly, tells me. “He truly believes his way of handling the world is the best possible outcome for everyone in it.” In Musk’s mind, this person says, everything he’s done in his career to date has proven that thesis to be true – from Tesla’s electric cars reducing emissions and accelerating the transition to sustainable energy, to Neuralink’s efforts to help people with neuralogical disorders regain lost functions, to his belief that he single-handedly saved Twitter from collapse and turned it into a bastion of free speech, rescuing it from what he saw as the censorial grip of Jack Dorsey’s leadership.

He may believe what he does benefits all. But it clearly doesn’t. Or maybe “everyone in it” means only himself. Zez Vaz posted a cartoon of a singer with a guitar onstage being pelted by eggs. He says, “Eggs? In this economy? I’m flattered!”

Congress can’t do anything except complain

I finished the novel Growing Up Weightless by John M. Ford. One viewpoint character is Matt Ronay, who grew up in the settlement on Luna. His age is given in hours – 115,000 of them. Computing his age isn’t quite the same as dividing the number of hours in a day and then by the number of days in a year, because on Luna there are 25 hours in a day and the hour before midnight is 72 minutes. What other measuring unit should they use? Luna’s revolution is 28 earth days. I figure Matt is about 13 years and 3 months. Which on Luna means he’s at the age to consider getting a job. One job open to him is joining the youth theater group. However, the job he really wants is to join the crew of a starship. He thinks about decorating his bedroom to look like the interior of a starship, but he figures that is too obvious. Matt knows many places in the Luna settlement that are “cold” – places where his father can’t use the colony surveillance system to keep track of him. So like a young teen. The other viewpoint character is his father Albin Ronay. One of his jobs is to chair the water board, making sure the Luna cities have enough water. We also learn that Albin is a composer and sometimes leads the Luna Orchestra. Matt has friends Ruby, Cissa, Tani, Jack, and Raf, all about his age. They like to play a roleplaying game and are planning to take the trains to explore other Luna cities, even to the one on the far side, and do it without parental knowledge. Very little of importance happens during the story, which is typical of kids that age. Just little scenes of growing up. Since the Luna colonies were founded through a joint effort of American, British, Russian, Japanese teams their speaking is full of Russian and Japanese phrases. They’re not translated and most of the time that doesn’t matter. Overall I enjoyed the story. Lisa Needham of Daily Kos reported:

It was part of a weirdly low-energy afternoon affair where Trump stood by while [White House staff secretary Will] Scharf plowed his way through a prepared statement that the executive order Trump was signing “reestablishes the longstanding norm that only the president or the attorney general can speak for the United States when stating an opinion as to what the law is.”

Yeah, that is indeed saying the nasty guy, his AG, and no one else gets to define what a law means. There is no such thing as judicial review. And that is saying he isn’t above the law, he is the law. And that mean’s he has declared himself king. No, that is not a “longstanding norm.” Scharf’s statement was part of the nasty guy’s assertion there are no independent agencies, such as the FTC, SEC, and the rest, that all of them report to and can be politically influenced by him. Emily Singer of Kos reported that the nasty guy has pulled his approval for New York City’s congestion pricing. This has been in place for about six weeks and has made a big difference in the congestion in Midtown Manhattan, improving travel times. Earlier this month a poll found 59% of New Yorkers want to keep the system. The nasty guy praised his pulling of congestion pricing and included the phrase, “Long Live the King!” Soon after that the White House tweeted an image of the nasty guy with a big grin and with a crown on his head. Mayor Eric Adams doesn’t care one way or the other. Democratic Rep. Jerry Nadler of Manhattan said the nasty guy’s reasons “are utterly baseless and frankly, laughable.” Gov. Kathy Hocul said:

We are a nation of laws, not ruled by a king. The MTA has initiated legal proceedings in the Southern District of New York to preserve this federal program. We’ll see you in court.

Singer concluded:

Republicans love to talk about states’ rights and letting states make their own policy decisions. But this decision is just more proof that Republicans only care about states’ rights when it benefits them, no matter how unpopular their actions are or how much damage they inflict.

Singer also reported that the personnel cutting done by Musk and DOGE doesn’t consider how valuable those employees are. One batch cut were the employees working the government’s response to bird flu, the reason why egg prices are so high and which the nasty guy promised to bring down. Also affected are national parks and the JFK Presidential Library and Museum in Boston. Some Republicans are getting annoyed. Singer concluded:

But these same Republican lawmakers are doing nothing to stop DOGE’s destruction. In fact, Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa said there is nothing Congress can do, even though Congress makes the laws that the executive has to abide by. “Congress can’t do anything except complain about it," Grassley said, according to a report from RadioIowa, “but I think we have to have sympathy and understanding for people that are laid off.” Cowards.

Singer reported that the nasty guy said he would not touch Medicare or Medicaid during an interview with Sean Hannity on Fox News. Hours later he endorsed a bill from the House that includes massive cuts to Medicaid. Passing the bill in the House will be quite tight and in the Senate Josh Hawley said he doesn’t like cuts so deep. Alix Breeden of Kos listed 17 nightmarish things the nasty guy has done in his first month. I won’t list them all. + Pardoned those who stormed the Capitol + Tried to end birthright citizenship + Relaunched his Muslim travel ban + Attacked federal aid + Launched a personal vendetta against DEI + When a plane and helicopter collided he offered blame and gutted the aviation safety committee + He made enemies of Canada and Mexico, formerly our besties. + He issued a slew of anti-trans executive orders. + He opened the doors on Guantanamo Bay to house deportees. + He called to seize Gaza and remove its Palestinians. + He declared himself King + He kissed Putin’s ring again. Singer reported that the nasty guy is sucking up to Putin. Yeah, that’s been in the news a lot over the last three days. So I’ll include a bit I hadn’t heard elsewhere. It’s in response to the nasty guy saying Ukrainian president is a fraud because he hasn’t allowed recent elections. Yeah, Russia has destroyed lots of the country and many have fled, making elections impossible.

Even Republicans who usually kneel before Trump are against the idea of forcing Ukraine to have elections. Trump toady Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas said Russia wants Ukraine to have elections “because they want to meddle in them."

Ruben Bolling, in his Tom the Dancing Bug cartoon posted on Kos, shows what Luke Skywalker see if he went to the Rebel Alliance in 2025. Instead of the rebels showing resolve and creating plans they are making sure they don’t annoy Vader. The final frame shows:

Skywalker: Darth Vader is allowed in here?! Rebel Leader: We have to try to work with him! If we appear too extreme, we could lose the midterm elections! Vader: “Midterm ‘elections.’ (chuckle)”

Finally! Moscow Mitch has decided he would not seek another term in the Senate in 2026. He is in his seventh term and, if my math is right, would be about 90 at the end of an eighth term. The announcement gave Singer a chance to list some of the worst things he’s done in his tenure. + He weaponized the filibuster to keep legislation from passing. + He stole two Supreme Court seats from Democratic presidents. He blocked Obama’s pick to replace Scalia, then reversed his reasoning to approve a replacement for Ruth Bader Ginsberg before Biden could nominate someone. + He blocked dozens of Obama’s lower court nominees so the nasty guy could fill them. Yet when judges unretired last November to avoid the nasty guy appointing their replacement he said they were playing politics with the judiciary. + He blocked many of Obama’s initiatives. + Though he thought the nasty guy “stupid” and “narcissist” he gave the nasty guy his vote in 2024. + And, worst: In the second nasty guy impeachment he voted to acquit. In a pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin included a tweet from Andrew Perez:

Among those Trump and Musk fired at the FAA: - Lawyers who help keep drunk or reckless pilots out of the skies - Air traffic control support staff - Employees who track potential new flying hazards like cranes - Staffers who medically clear pilots to fly

Maybe I can drive across the river to Windsor, take the train to Toronto, and fly to Europe from there... In the comments TweetLD tweeted:

What a legacy for Mitch McConnell; having achieved his lifelong goal of a corrupt SCOTUS, he's slinking out of the office without even the respect or loyalty of the corrupt party he served.

That was with a cartoon by Mike Luckovich showing Mitch at a podium saying, “My work is done here…” as behind him the Capitol is crumbling and in flames. Another cartoon (I think the artist is Crampton) was first drawn after the school shooting in Parkland, Florida. It shows Mitch outside the gates of Heaven, where the guardian says, “Thank you for all the ‘hopes and prayers’, Majority Leader McConnell, but we’re sending you to burn in Hell. For all eternity.” In the comments of a second roundup Michael de Adder shows Putin and the nasty guy playing poker. In front of Putin are tall stacks of chips and the nasty guy’s clothes. In front of the naked nasty guy is a lone American flag. The nasty guy thinks, “Nobody makes deals like me.” Much further down is a cartoon by Ellis Rosen showing a couple at a restaurant as their robot server says, “And with your meal tonight, might I suggest a strong password?”