Sunday, February 16, 2025

Stoopid Doormat Quotes

 

Dan Crenshaw (R)

"There is absolutely no way that Donald Trump will be seen -- he will not let himself go down in history as having sold out to Putin. He will not let that happen."

--Texas Congressman Dan Crenshaw, this morning, on CBS's "Face the Nation"

Footnote
"Doormat" is meant to refer to the Republicans who say these things, not to the mat you wipe your feet on (though I see the similarity).







Saturday, February 15, 2025

Some Good News (For a Change) About the Canton Paper Mill Closing

 


Thanks to Michael McElroy, reporting for Cardinal & Pine:


Pactiv Evergreen closed the Canton paper mill in 2023, a year and a half earlier than the company had agreed to under an economic development deal with the state that included millions of dollars in incentives.

The closure laid off more than 1,000 employees, causing economic ripples in Canton and Haywood County.

Then attorney-general Josh Stein sued the company in 2024 for $12 million, accusing it of breaching the terms of the deal. Under the terms of the settlement announced this week by Stein, now the governor, and current Attorney General Jeff Jackson, Pactiv will repay $5.75 million from its incentives to Canton and Haywood County.


Friday, February 14, 2025

Big Trumpist Sheriff Will Primary Phil Berger Next Year

 

Sheriff Sam Page


Rockingham County High Sheriff Sam Page, who previously led Sheriffs for Trump in 2016 and has participated in multiple law enforcement round tables with the president, has announced that he will challenge the unchallengeable president pro tem of the NC Senate, Phil Berger, the boss of bosses in the General Assembly, in the Republican primary next year.

Multiple people had tried to talk Page, who's been sheriff in Rockingham since 1998, to run against Berger last year over Berger's`apparent corrupt pushing of new gambling casinos, one of which was planned for Rockingham.

Page is as self-righteous as Berger is complacently unethical, so it might prove to be an interesting contest.


The Public Corruption Is So ... Public

 

quid pro quo -- Latin, literally, "something for something"; in English, noun, a favor or advantage granted or expected in return for something.

 

Danielle Sassoon, an honest lawyer
who resisted Trump's corruption of justice


Eric Adams, the current mayor of New York City, was indicted last year on five counts, including bribery, fraud, and soliciting illegal foreign campaign donations, stemming from an investigation that began in 2021. Adams had pleaded not guilty and was scheduled for trial in April. Turns out that Danielle Sassoon, the interim US attorney for the Southern District of New York, was planning to add another charge of conspiracy to obstruct justice against Adams, “based on evidence that Adams destroyed and instructed others to destroy evidence and provide false information to the FBI.” (New York Times)

As previously noted here, Eric Adams has been sucking up to Trump like a groveling underling who knows he's destined for prison. In pre-trial conferences, according to Sassoon, the mayor’s lawyers had “repeatedly urged what amounted to a quid pro quo, indicating that Adams would be in a position to assist with the [DOJ’s] enforcement priorities only if the indictment were dismissed.” Those "enforcement priorities" primarily apply to the capture and deportation of undocumented immigrants. New York City has laws that make it a so-called "sanctuary city," which simply means that it demands due process: The New York Police Department can only work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) when it comes to a criminal detainer, which is ordered by a judge. Adams, to please the man who has control over the Justice Department, had decided to allow ICE agents into the city's jail on Riker's Island to arrest and deport anyone with a funny name.

Emil Bove III


"I'll let ICE run rampant if you drop the corruption charges against me." That's clearly the deal that went down. But rather than dismiss the charges against Adams, which the Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove III (very recently one of Trump's defense lawyers) ordered Sassoon to do, she resigned and wrote a blistering letter which laid out the corruption she was observing at first-hand: “I have always considered it my obligation to pursue justice impartially, without favor to the wealthy or those who occupy important public office, or harsher treatment for the less powerful,” Sassoon wrote to Bove. She also addressed words to Pam Bondi, the new Attorney General, that Bove’s order to dismiss the case was “inconsistent with my ability and duty to prosecute federal crimes without fear or favor and to advance good-faith arguments before the courts.”

When Sassoon, a very conservative lawyer in good standing with the Federalist Society, wouldn't perform the corrupt dismissal of charges against Adams, Bove moved the indictment to the Public Corruption section of the Department of Justice and demanded that the ranking officials there dismiss the charges. Five more lawyers (at last count) also resigned rather than carry out the corruption. It was a Thursday night massacre.

As far as I can tell neither Bove nor Bondi has been able to find a chump lawyer to dismiss the charges against Adams, and the knowledge of Trump's outrageous corruption of the DOJ is blossoming beyond his ability to contain it.

UPDATE

When Emil Bove couldn't brow-beat any career prosecutors to sign the motion to dismiss the charges against Eric Adams, he was forced to sign the motion himself (according to the NYTimes). The motion for dismissal still has to go to the judge overseeing the Adams case in Manhattan.


Thursday, February 13, 2025

Sen. Ted Budd Defends the "New and Awful Reality" and Its Effect on the State's Flagship Institutions

 

Irony is dead


Democrats see an opening to use Trump’s spending cuts as attack lines about coward Republicans in Congress, "especially those from competitive districts" -- damned for living on their knees and swallowing every bleb of Trump's ego, even the actions that actually harm their constituents.

Instead of standing up to Trump, they play utter hypocrites and ask for "carve outs" for their districts only. Two reporters from the NYTimes uncovered a bunch of attempted evasions/bypasses/exceptions to the Trump wrecking ball and program cuts -- promulgated by Republican members from red states. For example, Senator Katie Britt of Alabama got defensive right quick after the Trump administration directed the National Institutes of Health to slash $4 billion in overhead costs for medical research (one of Trump's ExecOrders that has since been paused by a federal judge). Alabama's received more than $518 million in NIH grants for projects currently active there, a great number of them headquartered at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. The senator made weak excuses to the local press and claimed that she would press Trump officials to take a “smart, targeted approach” to cuts -- whatever the hell that means -- so as to “not hinder lifesaving, groundbreaking research at high-achieving institutions.” Elitist.

Cut someone else's money, not ours! What's fair for everyone else is not fair for me. Nor convenient at this present time.

So these cowed men and women in House and Senate stay mouselike in paralyzed fear of being noticed and devoured. Some of them, like Sen. Britt, if you take her at her word, are doing what they can to mitigate the damage to their own constituents. For example, Rep. Tracey Mann (R-Kansas) has made himself the lead sponsor of a House bill that aims to salvage a foreign aid program targeted for extinction by Trump as part of his effort to wipe out the US Agency for International Development (USAID). Mann's bill, cosponsored by several other Republicans from farm states, would transfer oversight of the Food for Peace program, which purchases crops at market price from American farmers and distributes them to hungry people abroad, from USAID to the Agriculture Department.

They're justifiably nervous about the blunderbuss Trump is taking to all the walls of shelter and the roof too over many a marginal rural family trying to hold it together. And hence those R reps are possible sitting ducks politically, if folks get good and tired of the one-size-fits-all programming of Trump 2.0. House Majority PAC, the House Democrats’ main political action group, sent out a message this week titled, “Vulnerable House Republicans Hang Farmers Out To Dry,” which noted how the funding freeze was hitting farmers around the country. The message singled out several Republican lawmakers by name, including Representatives David Valadao of California, Zach Nunn of Iowa and Don Bacon of Nebraska.

Senator Ted Budd of North Carolina, like Sen. Briff of Alabama, represents a state with two of the largest recipients of NIH grants -- Duke and UNC-Chapel Hill. Budd looked totally caught off-guard and unprepared when the Times reporters asked what he was planning to do about the cuts. Budd said he agreed with the Trump administration’s move to limit the amount of taxpayer money used for overhead costs, but, uh, obviously the universities -- which are swell institutions doing valuable research -- "those guys are gonna need time to adjust to their new financial reality." Too bad, so sad. “I think the White House wants to protect them,” Budd added forlornly, flying in the face to all evidence to the contrary. Trump doesn't actually care about much but his own loot.

Tuesday, February 11, 2025

Trump's Guru of Wasted Youth


Okay, the mandate for today: Understand everything possible about Charlie Kirk.

The King's Touch


Charlie Kirk, widely acknowledged now as "a Christian nationalist culture warrior," is the head of Turning Point USA, "the nation’s pre-eminent conservative youth organization," which he started when he was 18. It has chapters at more than 850 colleges. They register students to vote, bring conservative speakers to campus, and in 2016 launched their own "Professor Watchlist." It didn't take much in the way of a "woke" understanding of history to get yourself blackballed on that list. According to Robert Draper's in-depth profile of Kirk in the NYTimes Magazine, "Turning Point’s half dozen or so annual events, featuring the biggest names on the right from Trump on down, are slick productions that draw enormous crowds."

Kirk. 31. is married with two young children and lives most of the time in Scottsdale, Arizona. The arrival on the national political scene of Trump, for Kirk was like going through the juicing-up of puberty all over again, only this time without the acne but with certain skills for talk and persuasion. Rich older women find him very pettable. Plus he has the Spartan mentality of a warrior who looks forward to pain. Robert Draper: "Kirk does not drink, avoids gluten and lactose and carries a bottle of olive oil and his own branded hot sauce with him to impart flavor to otherwise austere meals."

During Trump’s first presidency, Kirk told Draper, he visited the White House “a hundred-plus” times. When Trump lost in 2020, Kirk offered solace, obeisance, loyalty at Mar-a-Lago, showing up in early February 2021, bending the knee and offering himself as footman, councillor, hitman. He had plans to pursue a crusade through colleges and universities, trolling the waters for bright young things who would buy "The MAGA Doctrine," the title to Kirk's 2020 bestseller. 

Kirk grew up in the affluent professional middle-class of a Chicago suburb. He was an Eagle Scout, and he got involved as a high school student in a Republican senatorial campaign. "Kirk was smitten with the astringent libertarian worldview of Ron Paul," and he attained his first taste of stardom speaking at local Tea Party rallies in 2010. Bit by the political bug, and turned on by Rush Limbaugh, he wrote an essay for Breitbart News alleging liberal bias in high school textbooks, which led to an appearance on Fox Business. He was on his way to campaign usefulness and great success as a fund-raiser.

In October 2020, Kirk began hosting a daily 3-hour podcast, "The Charlie Kirk Show." He had J.D. Vance on his podcast, during which Vance suggested that people without children should pay higher taxes than parents. According to Wikipedia, Kirk's podcast is downloaded between a hair-raising 500,000 and 750,000 times each day. It is currently ranked No. 13 on Apple Podcasts. His 2020 best seller “The MAGA Doctrine,” helped him become a millionaire -- and definitely one of Trump's bosom crowd of rich flatterers. Actually, now a member of the inner circle. Kirk had a big hand in persuading Trump that J.D. Vance was his best bet for vice president.

Within days of Trump’s victory last November, Draper says that Kirk was front and center at Mar-a-Lago among "an intimate group of advisers" and that he was actually in on the vetting of prospective Trump 2.0 appointees. Kirk had an instinct for sniffing out candidates who might prove weak in their loyalty. "On more than one occasion, according to two sources with knowledge of the events, Kirk was in the room with the president-elect to discuss potential cabinet nominees."

Immediately after the November election, Kirk uprooted his family and installed them for a two-month stay in a condo in Palm Beach, Fla., so he could be super-handy to Trump. And for 10 days in January, as the Trump administration took power, he uprooted his wife and two young children again and took them for a lengthy stay at the Salamander hotel in Washington. That's how ubiquitous Kirk has been in this new kingdom. 

Kirk traveled to Greenland on Jan. 7 with his new BFF Don Trump Jr., to help publicize Trump’s proclaimed intent to acquire the place for himself. And...

Kirk was among a select group at Trump’s private party two days before the inauguration at the Trump National Golf Club in Virginia. The night before Trump was sworn in, Turning Point hosted a black-tie gala at which some 1,500 attendees paid from $5,000 to $15,000 (with some V.I.P.s paying more) to be in the company of Trump luminaries including Vance; Trump’s nominee for director of the F.B.I., Kash Patel; and Don Jr., who described Kirk onstage as “one of the true rock stars of this movement.” The following evening, an S.U.V. ferried Kirk from one inaugural ball to the next. Two days later, he was visiting the 47th president in the White House — and again the day after that.

According to Draper, Kirk has assigned himself the project of making life miserable for any Republican who deviates from the path. He played a big part in getting rid of "loser" Ronna McDaniel, the former chair of the Republican Nat'l Committee. But he's especially hard on "weak" Republican senators. He bullied Senator Joni Ernst into voting for Pete Hegseth. He particularly despises Republicans in safely red states who “have taken advantage of Republican primary voters far too long .... They’re not in line with what those voters want. They’re sending money to Ukraine. They’re not strong on immigration. So this is not a veiled threat. I see no good reason not to go after [Sen. Mike] Crapo [of Idaho] or [Senator Mike] Rounds [of South Dakota].” As Kirk saw it, “The behavioral and voting patterns of Senate Republicans would change with one successful primary.”

So he's a bully in the Trump mold. How does that fit with Eager Scout?

Perhaps Kirk has a bit of a chip on his shoulder. With his magnified confidence in his own opinion, he perhaps came to expect easy pavement and open doors everywhere in his future. But while in high school, his application to attend West Point was turned down, and that negative appraisal of his abilities seems to have made him bitter and a kind of cliche of MAGA resentfulness: He told the Liberty Forum of Silicon Valley in a 2015 speech that "his" West Point slot went to "a far less-qualified candidate of a different gender and a different persuasion" (meaning, apparently, a lesbian." According to the Wikipedia article, Kirk mocked her test scores, which he claimed he knew. That, apparently, was a lie manufactured to save face. 

Flattery Will Corrupt the King Every Damn Time! And Attaint the State

 

New York Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat, had been charged by Federal prosecutors with bribery, fraud, and the solicitation of illegal foreign campaign donations. The case was set to go to trial in the spring. But hold on, Snoopy, because Trump's Justice Department just ordered New York prosecutors to drop the cases against Adams.

Boy howdy! How flattery of Trump seems always to pay off for some of the worst people in the nation.

Adams began sucking up to Trump immediately after the November elections, clearly angling for a presidential pardon for his money-grubbing in forbidden places and the fraud that went with it. Adams got himself to Mar-a-Lago even before the Inauguration, Jan. 17th, to kiss ass and heap appalling praise on the man who could -- and as it turns out, did -- save his ass from prosecution for crimes against civic integrity.

Yesterday, Trump's Justice Department ordered the prosecutors in Manhattan to drop their charges against Adams, who had, incidentally, stepped up his ass-kissing campaign substantially, meekly meeting with Trump's border czar, apparently promising to help deliver on demand his quota of illegal brown people into the gentle hands of ICE. And just yesterday, before Trump's DOJ demanded the charges be dropped, Adams was telling other high officials of NYCity not to criticize the king -- whatever the hell you do!

Does public corruption ever get more ... uh, public? Flatter the effing king, and he might just kill a fat goose for you.


Monday, February 10, 2025

Elon's "Muskrats," Trump's Time Bomb





Presidents Trump and Musk have merged their cult followings, attention addictions, conspiratorial mind-sets, disinformation artistry, disdain for the Constitution, talent for apocalyptic marketing and jumping-from-thing-to-thing styles.

--Maureen Dowd, "Musk’s Lost Boys and Trump’s Mean Girls," NYTimes


On some weeks, Maureen Dowd's column in the New York Times is worth dipping in bronze:

Trump loves to be admired by the elites, and he adores money. Musk has gotten the keys to the American kingdom so he can attack “the woke mind virus,” which Musk says “killed” his “son,” who transitioned as a teenager. Both men are driven by revenge to smash up the government.

Musk has employed his flying wedge of 20-something hipster lords of the new universe. “Muskrats,” career bureaucrats call them, who are themselves referred to as the “dinosaurs” by the Muskrats in their campaign to rifle every government computer system. Some of the Muskrats have become infamous: "A 19-year-old with the internet pseudonym 'Big Balls' lost an earlier internship for leaking company secrets; a 25-year-old was ousted over racist posts. He wrote on X, 'I was racist before it was cool,' and 'You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity,' and 'Normalize Indian hate.' Even though he is married to an Indian American, Vice President J.D. Vance rescued the 'kid,' as he called him, and helped him get his job back."

I realize the MAGA crowd loves all the crudest comments and cruelest decisions coming out of Trump 2.0 (now "squared by Musk," sez Maureen), but what about the sane middle? There is clearly no limit to the Trump wrecking ball, but when will it tear down something essential to the low-information voters? Surely that's happening already, the creeping realization that maybe total annihilation was not what they had in mind. And closer comes the mid-term elections of 2026 -- perhaps our last chance to keep the Republic against the madness of the king.

Legal Armoring RE Donald Jethro Trump, Day 22

 

More than 40 lawsuits seeking to stop Donald J. Trump's ExecOrder fantasies have been filed since January 20th by state attorneys general, unions, and nonprofits. As a result, judicial orders in nine Federal court cases will, for a time, partially bind the administration’s hands -- at least on paper. Those things Trump sought illegally to do include ending automatic citizenship for babies born to undocumented immigrants on U.S. soil; transferring transgender female inmates to male-only prisons; potentially exposing the identities of FBI personnel who investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol; coaxing federal workers to accept “deferred resignation” under a tight deadline; and freezing as much as $3 trillion in domestic spending -- all those ExecOrders are now enjoined by judges.

On Friday afternoon, Judge Carl Nichols, a district judge nominated by Trump. said he would issue a temporary restraining order halting the administrative leave of 2,200 employees at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the looming withdrawal of nearly all of the agency’s workers from overseas.

Also, late on Friday night, in the first victory for Trump’s new administration in Federal court, Judge John D. Bates, appointed to the bench by President George W. Bush, rejected a request by a coalition of unions for an emergency order blocking Elon Musk’s team from accessing Labor Department data. 

The NYTimes reported that while the executive branch is entrusted with the capacity for swift, decisive action, "the judiciary is slow by design, and the legal opposition to Mr. Trump’s opening moves may struggle to keep up with his fire hose of disruption."

Sunday, February 09, 2025

The Table Manners of a Billionaire Pig

 

Last December, before Earth went wobbly on its spindle, the US Department of the Treasury wrote a letter to Congress informing it that a Chinese intelligence group had broken into its systems and stolen unclassified material. "A full assessment of that damage has not been made public. But it was a reminder that the Treasury Department — as much as the Pentagon and its contractors, the C.I.A. and the White House — is high on Beijing’s target list" (David E. Sanger, NYTimes).

So here come Elon Musk's band of Silicon Valley hotshot bandits and misfits (at least one as young as 19), with a whole lot more access to Treasury's databases than just "READ ONLY." "Across the federal government, civil servants have witnessed the sudden intrusion in the last two weeks of these young members of the billionaire’s team, labeled the Department of Government Efficiency. As Mr. Musk traipses through Washington, bent on disruption, these aides have emerged as his enforcers, sweeping into agency headquarters with black backpacks and ambitious marching orders" (NYTimes).

They were opening a lot more than their backpacks, and that was precisely the source of Federal Judge Paul A. Engelmayer's order on Saturday to stop these rodents from boring into secrets about every American and his/her money, at least until a trial can be held. Judge Engelmayer cited the risk specifically of the ever-present threat of hacks by foreign adversaries, “the disclosure of sensitive and confidential information.” The Musk Squad's Easter egg hunt looked sloppy and dangerous.

The request for Judge Engelmayer's temporary restraining order came after some 19 attorneys general (North Carolina's Jeff Jackson among them) filed suit on Friday. It took Engelmayer less than 24 hours to (theoretically) shut down Musk Squad's fishing. ("Theoretically," because Trump's appointments are also now occupying the department and have full access to everything, and who the hell knows who they'll share it with.)

Outside experts have described, in detail, what could happen when an outsider gains sudden access to a locked-down system: Personal data could leak, payments could be diverted and information about political rivals could be collected.

Bruce Schneier, a cybersecurity expert at Harvard and the author of a series of books on security vulnerabilities, including “Click Here to Kill Everybody,” called the entry of Mr. Musk’s force “the most consequential security breach” in American history.

Mr. Schneier noted that the intrusion came “not through a sophisticated cyberattack or an act of foreign espionage, but through official orders by a billionaire with a poorly defined government role.” ...

Hostile intelligence services are likely already at work trying to assess which Musk team members might be sloppy with their digital devices or vulnerable to entrapment or coercion.” (NYTimes)

Wired magazine named six of Musk's "Spartans" (as they like to call themselves, mythologizing their own personal pains), ranging in age from 19 to 24. They've been raised all their life on computers and social media, which means sarcasm and spite, so what could possibly go wrong giving them full access to all our information?


Another Set-Back for Jefferson Griffin, But Will It Matter To the Newby Court?


This happened last Friday, as reported by Jeffrey Billman in The Assembly

Wake County Special Superior Court Judge William Pittman rejected Jefferson Griffin’s attempt to overturn his 734-vote loss to Justice Allison Riggs in last year’s state Supreme Court race on Friday, ruling that the State Board of Elections had not erred when it dismissed his challenge in December.

Subhead sez, "The decision isn’t the end of legal battles over the state Supreme Court race, but it is a setback for Griffin’s effort to throw out thousands of votes." All of the issues will eventually meld together before the NC Supreme Court led by partisan Republican Paul Newby.

Griffin has gone largely into hiding since he launched his highly irregular attempt to overturn the last election. But he was present Friday in Judge Pittman's court -- blue suit, yellow tie.


Saturday, February 08, 2025

The Smallness of the Big Man

 

A king needs lots of (fake) gold


Donald Jethro Trump has hated the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts since the 2017 Kennedy Center Honors, less than a year into his 1st term, when some of the honorees -- which included LL Cool J, Lionel Richie, and Norman Lear -- said they wouldn't attend if Trump had a role. (Jethro had done plenty by then to earn their disapproval and distaste, including his "good people" comment about the Nazis who rioted in Charlottesville.)

So yesterday Jethro announced he would be firing the current Kennedy Center board of directors and installing himself as chair. "Real tinpot dictator stuff," commented Molly Jong-Fast on Blue Sky. My gawd! Don't you see the moments coming when he enters the Presidential Box for a big gala performance like the Emperor Commodus entering the Coliseum to the cheers of the bread-'n'-circuses chumps.

Trump always needs a fig leaf to cover up the embarrassing details of his naked ego. In his announcement yesterday, he hilariously blamed drag shows that "corrupt our youth" (thought that was his job!) for his seizing of the Kennedy Center. All sorts of community events happen at the Kennedy Center in addition to the high art of opera, symphony, dance, and the Kennedy Center has hosted events specifically for LGBTQ youth in the DeeCee Metro area. How convenient a "cause" for a man who needs grandiosity to prove he exists, so Trump feigns outrage! I tell you, he's outraged. So much so that he's prepared to install his own gaudy lack of taste and tacky pursuit of gilded elegance into the character and the programming of the Center.

Hard pass.


Trump's Button Man at the DOJ

 

Emil Bove III.
Is the face a reflection of the soul?


Emil Bove III was one of Trump's lead attorneys in the Manhattan fraud trial, which despite Bove's aggressive dissing of the trial judge still led to 34 felony convictions for Trump -- Bove, that shark lawyer, was put into the Department of Justice as the acting Deputy Director as soon as Trump was inaugurated, and he quickly began summoning career attorneys to his top-floor office "to calmly deliver the news they were being transferred, marginalized, or otherwise shoved to the exits" (Glenn Thrush et al.). Their sins? You know without asking. They participated in investigations of Donald Jethro Trump.

What else has Bove been up to at Justice? He forced the transfers of "top nonpolitical officials who were seen as a bulwark against political interference." And he unilaterally fired Capitol riot prosecutors in the US attorney’s office in Washington. 

"At no time has Mr. Bove offered evidence those he targeted had done anything improper, illegal or unethical. Instead he has cited the president’s authority under the Constitution." (NYTimes)

And then, to cap off his first week as Acting Deputy Director of DOJ and to earn his Assassin Badge First Class in the Trump Scouts, he launched the effort to collect a complete list of all FBI agents who worked on Jan. 6 cases. That naming-names demand by Bove caused unanticipated, strong pushback from Acting FBI Director Brian "Drizz" Driscoll and his Acting Deputy Director Robert C. Kissane. (I've written about the fearlessness of "Drizz" before in his standing up against autocracy.) According to Glenn Thrush and his fellow investigative reporters, Drizz Driscoll "was neither persuaded nor intimidated by Mr. Bove. Neither was Mr. Kissane."

Drizz correctly saw Bove's unprecedented demand for the complete list of FBI agents who tracked down the men who beat Capitol police to a pulp -- he saw that move as prelude to a purge. Plus, according to Thrush et al., "It provoked a swift, negative reaction among the F.B.I.’s conservative rank-and-file, a work force that [had been] particularly receptive to Mr. Trump’s law-and-order message." Leaders of the conservative FBI Agents Association wrote a letter of protest to Congress: “Special agents who risk their lives protecting this country” are being targeted “for carrying out the orders they were given by their superiors,” the letter said.

Helps explain why the latest Pew Research polling on the J6 pardons doesn't look so good for Jethro among his own slavish supporters:







































This Is What Ray Pickett and the Rest of the NCGOP Will Cut in Half

 






















Friday, February 07, 2025























Stupidity!

 

MUMPS (the "Musk-Trump Syndicate" -- that's what Thomas Mills calls the junta currently wrecking the furniture and derailing actual human lives) caused the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to abruptly withdraw financial support for testing in clinical trials (in Africa among other places) of new health-care devices and medicines. MUMPS issued a stop-work order to all organizations around the globe that receive its money. ("The abrupt move followed an executive order by President Trump freezing all foreign aid for at least 90 days. Since then, the Trump administration has taken steps to dismantle the agency entirely.") (NYTimes)

The Times focused some reporting on just a few of the persons impacted negatively by this stupidity. Like the 22-year-old woman in South Africa who was participating in a research study that was testing a new device to prevent pregnancy and H.IV. infection -- a device that was surgically inserted into her vagina which required constant monitoring.

In interviews with Times reporters, scientists — "who are forbidden by the terms of the stop-work order to speak with the news media — described agonizing choices: violate the stop-work orders and continue to care for trial volunteers, or leave them alone to face potential side effects and harm."

Not just stupid, but cruel too, and totally irresponsible with other people's lives and health.

The United States is signatory to the Declaration of Helsinki that lays out ethical principles under which medical research must be conducted, requiring that researchers care for participants throughout a trial, and report the results of their findings to the communities where trials were conducted.

The Times identified more than 30 frozen studies that had volunteers already in the care of researchers, including trials of:

malaria treatment in children under age 5 in Mozambique
treatment for cholera in Bangladesh
a screen-and-treat method for cervical cancer in Malawi
tuberculosis treatment for children and teenagers in Peru and South Africa
nutritional support for children in Ethiopia
early-childhood-development interventions in Cambodia
ways to support pregnant and breastfeeding women to reduce malnutrition in Jordan
an mRNA vaccine technology for H.I.V. in South Africa

It's staggering, the Devil-may-care-but-I-don't inhumanity of Musk and his facilitator, Jethro -- it's unethical, it's immoral, it's dishonorable, it's un-American. It involves and implicates ALL OF US as voting citizens of this Republic.

The Scene Outside Thom Tillis's Greensboro Office on Wednesday


These protests appear to be largely spontaneous. Tillis needs to be confronted by his craven obeisance to King Trump. 

Paul Garber for WFDD



Snotnose Republican Freshman in NC House Intends To Limit Early Voting

 

Snotnose


Last Wednesday, Feb. 5th, Republican state Rep. Wyatt Gable filed a bill in Raleigh to drastically cut the early voting period in North Carolina from three weeks down to a mere six days, with a prohibition against any Sunday voting (because it's favored by Black voters, we assume).

Gable is an Onslow County Republican who just won election to his first term in November as a 22-year-old East Carolina University student. 

Did he not realize the enthusiastic participation by Republican voters in early voting last November? Republicans have caught on to the pleasures that they had eschewed because early voting had been such a consistent practice among Democrats. But Republicans out-voted Democrats in 2024 early voting by over 166,000.

Yet genius Gable wants to inconvenience everyone. Republicans don't seem capable of pausing their assault on voting rights, even when a particular option has greatly favored them. 


NC Republicans Don't Like It When A.G. Jeff Jackson Calls Jethro "Unlawful"

 

On January 21st, the day after Donald Jethro Trump issued an executive order supposedly changing the Constitution to deny citizenship to any person born in these United States, NC Attorney General Jeff Jackson joined 20 other attorneys general to file a lawsuit in DeeCee seeking to block the "flagrantly unlawful attempt to strip hundreds of thousands [of] American-born children of their citizenship based on their parentage."

On Wednesday, Feb. 5, three North Carolina Senate Republicans -- Tim Moffitt, Eddie Settle, and Bobby Hanig -- filed a bill to restrict Jeff Jackson, from suing to block any flagrantly unlawful presidential executive orders and from taking legal action against any bills passed by the General Assembly.

That's how the clown-car does it: Hobble justice itself, remove the independence of our state's chief prosecutor to call a spade a goddamn spade.

Our disgust with the Republican majority in the NC General Assembly grows stronger every day. They are never hesitant in going too far. And some day, when there's a Republican Attorney General in North Carolina serving with a Democratic majority in the lege, if this piece of shit law passes, they'll regret ever putting their thumb on the administration of justice.

Thursday, February 06, 2025

People vs. Griffin Rally in Boone: Day/Time/Location

 

Monday, February 17, 4-6 p.m.

Hatchett Coffee, 150 Den Mac Drive, East Boone

Here's the link for registering to attend: https://www.mobilize.us/commoncause/event/753571/


They Want You To Believe That Bullying Worked

On February 5th (yesterday), the U.S. Department of State published this on its Facebook page:





















That announcement came after not one but two new Jethro lapdogs, Little Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth, met with Panamanian officials over Low T's threat to take back the Canal and his complaints that Panama charged too much for passage through.

This morning the President of Panama, Jose Raul Mulino, said that was a big fat honking lie (and by implication, Marco and Hegseth are little eager bitches who hit "SEND" too quickly). Speaking to journalists, Mulino expressed his "absolute rejection" of the US State Department's announcement. "Mulino said he had told U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on Wednesday that he could neither set the fees to transit the canal nor exempt anyone from them and that he was surprised by the U.S. State Department's statement suggesting otherwise."

And by the way, Fat Boy, the Canal is the property of Panama and is not up for sale, lease, or gifting.


The GOP in the General Assembly Once Again Shrug-Off Hurricane Helene

 

Gov. Stein in Boone recently.
Noah Williford, The Appalachian


Just happening in North Carolina: For the second time in three months the Republican bastards in the General Assembly (the new team of Berger/Hall) have proposed much less -- about half of what Western North Carolina needs for recovery from Hurricane Helene and half of what Governor Stein requested for our devastated region -- Berger/Hall say $500 million should be enough, instead of the requested and badly needed $1 billion.

To recap the first General Assembly diss of our ravaged counties, here's Thomas Mills:

In December, when Roy Cooper was still governor, the legislature went back into session, supposedly to address the needs of hurricane victims. Instead, they used the time to strip power from Democrats who won seats on the Council of State in November. They shuffled money around from existing funds but refused to allocate additional resources to the region.

As Republican Representative Mark Pless told The Assembly at the time, “The disaster portion of it doesn’t do anything …. [I]t was just moving money from one account to another without actually appropriating it for anything.”

Stein's request included grants to businesses wiped away or severely damaged by Helene, but Berger/Hall's bill prohibits grants to businesses. Bastards. I know of at least one thriving landscaping business in western Watauga that was totally wiped out -- greenhouses, equipment, plants, the whole livelihood. FEMA does not give disaster money to businesses. It's up to the state. And those Republican SOBs think they can get away with turning their backs on some 30 majorly Republican counties they consider "theirs."  

At least Gov. Stein engineered a public-private fund of some $30 million to help businesses specifically, but that's a mere drop in the bucket. A small Kubota front-end loader, back-end digger will run you over $80,000.


Jefferson Griffin Has Become a Parody of a "Judge"

 























Pam Bondi--"All Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves"

 

We saw Pam Bondi the mean girl coming a mile off -- that polished gleam of pure contempt for everyone not blond enough. Or not trumpy enough.

Within hours of being sworn in as US Attorney General, Bondi sent a memo to all employees at the Department of Justice that the goal formerly known as impartial justice is now replaced by "whatever Trump wants," and any lawyer previously sworn to uphold the Constitution is now expected to uphold Donald Jethro Trump. Anyone who resists the whims of Trump will be harshly dealt with:

“Any attorney who because of their personal political views or judgments declines to sign a brief or appear in court, refuses to advance good-faith arguments on behalf of the administration, or otherwise delays or impedes the Department’s mission will be subject to discipline and potentially termination, consistent with applicable law,” Bondi wrote in a memo.

It's every bit as bad as we all predicted: Trump has guaranteed himself a secret police force to serve his ambitions and a complacent and compliant justice department to wink approvingly. He is hollowing out our government and replacing it with a cow he can milk. Jethro often vowed on the campaign trail that he would use the Justice Department to exact retribution on his political enemies. It's happening. We have our petty tyrant, served slavishly by his ass-kissers.


Wednesday, February 05, 2025

This Elon Musk/Donald Jethro Trump Coup Is Happening Right Now

 

The complete 20-minute briefing Congressman Jamie Raskin gave Brian Tyler Cohen on the coup happening in real time. Watch it.



Whoredom Has Never Been More Embarrassing

 

...in the House, Republicans have largely taken on the role of cheerleaders .... Competition of sorts has broken out for whom the Republican base will see as the most pro-Trump member.

--Luke Broadwater, NYTimes

 

Representative Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) filed legislation to make President Trump eligible for a third term. In one of his first acts in office, freshman Addison McDowell (R-NC) submitted a bill that would change the name of Washington Dulles International Airport to Donald J. Trump International Airport. McDowell said he wanted to put Mr. Trump on "even standing" with former President Ronald Reagan, who has a D.C. airport named after him. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia), filed legislation to expunge the two impeachments of Trump, an attempt to clear the record of any mention of his alleged offenses and make it as if the impeachments “had never passed the full House of Representatives.” And just last week, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Florida) submitted a bill to add Trump’s scowling likeness to Mount Rushmore, placing him alongside George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt.

“It shows the power that Donald Trump has within the Republican Party these days, and that Republican members want to stay on his good side,” said Sean M. Theriault, government professor at the University of Texas at Austin. “A lot of these people are in really safe districts, but they’re also thinking about what their next step is. And so if they have designs on being in the Senate or running for governor or even a position in the administration, then there’s no better way to get on his good side than to do these over-the-top moves toward him.”

Ms. Greene, for instance, has traveled with Mr. Trump so extensively that she feels she knows what he wants before he asks for it. When Mr. Trump proposed renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, Ms. Greene was quick to file legislation on the topic.

“I’ve spent the past five years traveling the country with President Trump, campaigning for him, going to probably more rallies than any member of Congress, and I know how he thinks. I know what’s on his heart, and I know his agenda for America,” she said, adding: “So being quick on those things, it’s not difficult.”

Bottomline: Kiss the tyrant's Gucci feet, you get definite rewards. For example, Marjory Taylor Greene has gone from a virtual pariah deemed unfit to hold a committee seat to the chair of a new subcommittee aimed at cutting government spending. Last week, federal prosecutors in Nashville withdrew from a criminal investigation into Ogles that he said was focused on his campaign finance transactions.

Equal justice under law? Naw. Not for the ass-smoochers, especially for those valiant few who get up right next the hole, where it's black and red and bitter.


UNC-Chapel Hill Punishes a Scholarship Student (and Certifiable Pain in the Ass) -- But It's a Free Speech Scandal

 

Laura Saavedra Forero, a UNC senior, a neuroscience major, and until very recently, part of the prestigious Morehead-Cain Scholarship program, was told on Jan. 6 (a date that already lives in infamy), that the Morehead-Cain Trustees had decided to terminate her scholarship.

Oh she was an activist, you bet! Her interview with the Daily Tar Heel is hair-raising if you're set in your ways:

In her application [for the Morehead-Cain], Saavedra Forero said she wrote about her activism, citing her work surrounding climate justice, the Black Lives Matter movement and for the Latino community in her area. She said in her interviews she talked openly about her use of “nonviolent direct action," her chosen form of protest method.

“I never hid who I was or what I did,” she said. “I always made it very clear, throughout my entire college application process, that if a program or a university did not want me for who I was at my core, and that is someone who organizes for the community, then I did not want to be there.”

But what really pissed off her superiors, all of whom are now either terrified of the partisanship of their governing boards or totally agreeable with suppressing dissent -- the activism that doomed her scholarship were her very loud protests of Israel's campaign against the Palestinians of Gaza, because evidently people like Virginia Foxx and her fellow travelers take a huge leap in equating any criticism of the Israeli government -- which has been a dick -- to "anti-semitism." I reject that.

But she started out as an advocate for handicapped access on campus:

When a broken elevator at her residence hall left Saavedra Forero [who depends on a wheelchair] stuck in her dorm room for 32 hours, she mobilized press and campus activists to start a years-long campaign calling for more accessibility at the University.

She subsequently crossed the apparent "redline" for the increasingly politicized bosses above her -- they are justifiably terrified of what the General Assembly might do next to hurt higher education -- when she organized a noisy protest of a appearance on campus of NC House Speaker Tim Moore, because of his meddling in university governance.

A Morehead-Cain scholarship official named Chris Bradford confronted Saavedra Forero over a graphic she had posted on her Instagram account, indicting Starbucks' pro-Israeli connections -- a bloody depiction of Palestinians being fed into a coffee grinder. That earned her a vague threat about her behavior, that it was under scrutiny. Saavedra Forero wasn't deterred, even though genocide in Gaza ... very verboten. She organized a protest with Starbucks Workers United outside of the Carolina Inn on Oct. 12, 2023. Bradford wrote her another email: “I am very clear that you have a right to free speech, and I do not believe that anyone has a right to not be offended,” he wrote in his email. “But I am equally clear that this scholarship is a privilege, and that the behavior of scholars should be a model for the behavior of others on campus.” Free speech as long as the new political correctness isn't offended.

To cap it all off, she participated very publicly in the UNC pro-Palestine "encampment" on the UNC campus, the event where Chancellor Lee Roberts marched in so theactrically to restore the American flag. Saavedra Ferero got trapped in her wheelchair under a toppled barricade. A week later, she attended an event near South Building organized by Students for Justice in Palestine, and participated in the march that attempted to block Provost Chris Clemens’ car from exiting the parking lot. A few days later, Saavedra Forero was informed that she was charged with “impeding traffic” and “resisting a public officer.” She said she was the only participant charged with impeding traffic. She was also referred to the UNC Honor Court and the Emergency Evaluation and Action Committee for her conduct. 

An alumnus of the Morehead-Cain Scholarship program told the Daily Tar Heel:

“I think there was a moment in time where Laura's boldness went from inspiring to threatening the Foundation,” they said. “And their only understanding of how to react was to assert dominance in this relationship, which is to remind Laura that she is being paid ... by the Foundation.”

The Daily Tar Heel details more. Bottomline: UNC-Chapel Hill is becoming a major university that I used to have respect for.

Ethnic Cleansing

 

Yesterday Donald Jethro Trump proposed taking over the Gaza strip for the U.S., clearing out all 1.8 million Palestinians who actually survived Israel's bombing campaign, deporting them to "other countries of interest with humanitarian hearts." He actually said that. He pointed out the hearts of other peoples while having none himself -- a self-own if there ever was one.

With the Palestinians distributed to other countries, like foundlings left on the doorsteps of nunneries, Trump envisions something grandiose and befitting his thoroughly materialistic mind-set: "the Riviera of the Middle East." Jethro actually said those words too. 

In other words, "level it!"

He wants to take this:













And turn it into this:











One thing you can say about Jethro: Like the scorpion in the fable of the frog, he's always true to his character. Which is vicious shit.


"What Would Drizz Do?"

 

Brian Driscoll, the acting director of the F.B.I., has become an improbable symbol of quiet resistance toward the Justice Department’s campaign to single out F.B.I. employees who investigated the Jan. 6 riot.

--NYTimes, Feb. 5, 2025


"Drizz"


He's known familiarly in the Bureau as "Drizz." He's a young 45, without "the typical G-man bearing of his predecessors" -- bushy mustache, a face framed by long curls, and a twinkle in his eye that bespeaks intelligence. But he quickly became an FBI internal hero after his refusal to furnish the names of employees who contributed to J6 investigations and arrests, as top Justice Department officials desired.

Drizz's demeanor has been celebrated at the FBI with artificially generated memes. One video, a compilation of scenes from the movie The Dark Knight Rises, portrays Driscoll as Batman doing battle with the so-called Department of Government Efficiency.

Friends and colleagues describe Mr. Driscoll as unflappable. He was a special agent with the U.S. Naval Criminal Investigative Service in San Diego before joining the F.B.I. in 2007. His first assignment was in the New York office....

In 2011, he passed rigorous tryouts and was selected to the F.B.I.’s Hostage Rescue Team, a highly trained unit formed in the years after the massacre at the Munich Olympics in 1972....

Former members of the rescue team said that Mr. Driscoll was dispatched in 2013 to Alabama, where they successfully rescued a 5-year-old boy who had been taken hostage in a bunker. He was a gunfighter on the blue squadron.

He also took part in a dangerous raid with U.S. commandos in May 2015 in Syria in the hopes of finding clues about Kayla Mueller, a young woman from Phoenix who was kidnapped by the Islamic State. (Ms. Mueller died in captivity.)

During the operation, Delta Force commandos killed a top militant leader and captured his wife. Mr. Driscoll later testified in a criminal trial in Northern Virginia about the evidence he collected at the scene, including a red laptop that the Islamic State had used to force Ms. Mueller to watch jihadist videos.

In 2020, Mr. Driscoll returned to New York, where he supervised terrorism cases in Africa, Western Europe and Canada. He then took over the Hostage Rescue Team in 2022, which handles the most dangerous missions inside the United States, like disabling a nuclear weapon or rescuing a hostage held by a terrorist.

He's a stand-up dude, and he's the type of government employee that might yet save some portion of the Republic from the tyrant. 


Tuesday, February 04, 2025

G-Men and -Women Ain't Gona Take It Sitting Down

 

BREAKING

Today 9 unnamed FBI agents, "on behalf of themselves and all similarly situated current and former agents and/or employees of the Federal Bureau of Investigation," filed a Class Action Complaint for Injunctive Relief against Donald Trump's Department of Justice. The language of the suit bears memorializing:

"Mr. Trump has ordered the DOJ to conduct a review and purge of FBI personnel involved in these investigations and prosecutions [J6 and Mar-a-Lago documents]. This directive is unlawful and retaliatory, and violates the Civil Service Reform Act 5 U.S.C. §§2301 and 2303....

"Plaintiffs were instructed to fill out a survey that would identify their specific role in the Jan. 6 and Mar-a-Lago cases. Some Plaintiffs were required to fill out the survey themselves, others were told that their supervisors would be filling out the form. Plaintiffs were informed that the aggregated information is going to be forwarded to upper management. Plaintiffs assert that the purpose for this list is to identify agents to be terminated or to suffer other adverse employment action. Plaintiffs reasonably fear that all or parts of this list might be published by allies of President Trump, thus placing themselves and their families in immediate danger of retribution by the now pardoned and at-large Jan. 6 convicted felons. Defendant’s gathering, retention, and disclosure of Plaintiffs’ activities related the acts of former President Trump is a violation of Plaintiffs’ rights under the First Amendments to the Constitution. It is also a violation of Plaintiffs’ Fifth Amendment substantive and due process rights....

 This is police-state shit.

Trump is building his own secret police force, and with Patel at the FBI, and Bondi at Justice, no one will ever tell him nay.