O Canada! (Thank God)

God exists, and She's Canadian (yes this is a Gen X Dogma reference).

Canada held their national elections this Monday, facing down a potential conservative flip the way most other western liberal nations were facing in the post-COVID reactionary world. However, thanks to one unavoidable factor - donald MOTHERFUCKING trump, out here hitting their nation with high tariffs and taunting them with threats to make them "the 51st state" - affecting the overall mood of the Canadian electorate, the results are favoring the liberal party under new-ish leadership to continue their fight against trump's bullying ways.

Ed Kilgore over at New York's Intelligencer site took note of how trump screwed it up for himself and his wingnut conservative allies in the Great White North (paywalled):

...The bookmark at the end of the month was Monday’s national election in Canada, which Donald Trump worked hard to make a referendum on his various threats to our most important trading partner’s economy, independence, and even integrity. Elections are rarely defined by a single issue, but there’s not much doubt north of the border that Trump personally turned a certain victory for his Conservative counterparts into a stunning win for the left-for-dead Liberals. The ruling party made mobilizing the country against Trump’s various provocations the successful formula (personal edit: search for #ElbowsUp, kids!) for a fourth consecutive national win under the leadership of recently appointed prime minister Mark Carney, who is sort of the Kamala Harris of Canada, given long-time leader Justin Trudeau’s handoff to him in January.

Despite clear signals he was putting Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre in an impossible spot, Trump never let up, issuing this especially provocative bit of advice to Canadians on Truth Social on Election Day itself:

Good luck to the Great people of Canada. Elect the man who has the strength and wisdom to cut your taxes in half, increase your military power, for free, to the highest level in the World, have your Car, Steel, Aluminum, Lumber, Energy, and all other businesses, QUADRUPLE in size, WITH ZERO TARIFFS OR TAXES, if Canada becomes the cherished 51st. State of the United States of America. No more artificially drawn line from many years ago. Look how beautiful this land mass would be. Free access with NO BORDER. ALL POSITIVES WITH NO NEGATIVES. IT WAS MEANT TO BE! America can no longer subsidize Canada with the Hundreds of Billions of Dollars a year that we have been spending in the past. It makes no sense unless Canada is a State!

Trump was essentially offering to displace the entire Canadian election system and extinguish that country’s sovereignty in exchange for his benevolent rule from Washington.

So Trump has produced a revived government in Ottawa with a distinct mandate to fight him tooth and nail. But that’s not the only way he was a loser on Monday. It’s not at all unusual for politicians to rally domestic support by picking a fight with other countries; it’s a jingoistic political tale as old as time. In this case, there is zero evidence (outside the hardest core of MAGA loyalists) that Americans have rallied to Trump’s Canada-bashing cause. Au contraire, as they might say in Quebec. An April 22 Washington Post–ABC–Ipsos poll showed Americans opposing a takeover of Canada by an astounding 86 percent to 13 percent. Even Republicans opposed it, 71 percent to 27 percent. Yes, many of them viewed this “idea” as a classic example of Trump just trolling the world. But if that’s what it was (and he has denied he’s trolling at all), he’s taken the joke far beyond the point where anyone in Canada is laughing, making himself a bit of a laughing stock in the process...

Somewhere in trump's aging, dementia-addled brain, he's gotten the notion that he can coax, bully, and/or harass the entire nation of Canada into succumbing to his will and joining the United States as one huge state (never mind the geographic, logistical, political, and cultural nightmares that would all cause). He clearly flunked out of 19th Century U.S. history, which would have taught him that Canada resisted even American military invasions during the War of 1812. Hell, that resistance developed their own rise of nationalism and pride in having defended themselves against our arrogance. They view the Battle of Queenston Heights the way Americans view Yorktown, or Gettysburg, or D-Day.

For trump to keep insisting that "it'll be better" for them to surrender to trump's annexation pleas is a huge ongoing insult to Canada. If he's doing it to intentionally troll them, to get them to roll over in his tariff negotiation tactics, he horribly miscalculated. He's made it so that anything even indirectly related to trumpism such as the conservatives in Canada - who probably made hourly phone calls to their American buddies begging them to get trump to shut up for even a day - got the Elbows Up treatment. It's telling that the leader of the national Conservatives Pierre Poilievre lost his own seat, a humiliation even UK Tories leader Sunak never endured (via Promit Mukherjee at Reuters):

Canada's main opposition leader Pierre Poilievre lost his seat in Monday's general election, results from Elections Canada showed, as the Conservatives were beaten by the incumbent Liberal Party.

Poilievre, 45, failed to retain his seat in the Ontario district of Carleton, losing it to Liberal Bruce Fanjoy...

Poilievre, a career politician, looked set to become Canada's next prime minister at the start of the year as he pitched himself as a change from former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who had led the Liberals since 2015.

Poilievre rode an anti-Trudeau wave and his sharp one-liners resonated with the public.

But as U.S. President Donald Trump imposed tariffs on Canada and often mused about making it his country's 51st state, opinions shifted in favor of Carney over Poilievre...

Poilievre tried to deflect any anti-trumpism by loudly decrying trump's tariffs and calling on national pride, but his own rhetoric style and decades of attacking liberalism made Poilievre the one target Canadians could punish. They couldn't punch trump - safe behind our border - but they could punch him.

Granted, the Conservatives did gain seats - there is a terrifying trend of young men voting far right in Canada as much as here in the U.S. - but they failed to win the plurality, giving Liberals the opportunity to form another coalition. Poilievre may lose his spot as party leader now that he's ousted from office, but now it's a question of the next party leader and how Far Right they'll be (and how susceptible they'll be to trumpian Far Right ideology takeover).

For the Center-Left in Canada, there is relief. For the Center-Left in America, there is a sliver of hope.

For the ongoing trade and border wars trump is threatening to escalate...

Where Would You Hide, America, When All the Laws Are Laid Flat

Sir Thomas More: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's!
-- from A Man For All Seasons, written by Robert Bolt

trump's thugs are arresting judges now (via Alanna Durkin Richer, Devi Shastri, and Scott Bauer at AP News): 

Protesters chanted and marched Saturday outside the FBI after agents arrested a Milwaukee judge accused of helping a man evade immigration authorities. The case has escalated a clash between the Trump administration and local authorities over the Republican president’s sweeping immigration crackdown.

Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan is accused of escorting the man and his lawyer out of her courtroom through the jury door last week after learning that immigration authorities were seeking his arrest. The man was taken into custody outside the courthouse after agents chased him on foot.

President Donald Trump’s administration has accused state and local officials of interfering with his immigration enforcement priorities. The arrest also comes amid a growing battle between the administration and the federal judiciary over the president’s executive actions over deportations and other matters...

Court papers suggest Dugan was alerted to the presence of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in the courthouse by her clerk, who was informed by an attorney that they appeared to be in the hallway.

The FBI affidavit describes Dugan as “visibly angry” over the arrival of immigration agents in the courthouse and says that she pronounced the situation “absurd” before leaving the bench and retreating to her chambers. It says she and another judge later approached members of the arrest team inside the courthouse, displaying what witnesses described as a “confrontational, angry demeanor.”

After a back-and-forth with officers over the warrant for the man, Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, she demanded that the arrest team speak with the chief judge and led them away from the courtroom, the affidavit says.

After directing the arrest team to the chief judge’s office, investigators say, Dugan returned to the courtroom and was heard saying words to the effect of “wait, come with me” before ushering Flores-Ruiz and his lawyer through a jury door into a non-public area of the courthouse. The action was unusual, the affidavit says, because “only deputies, juries, court staff, and in-custody defendants being escorted by deputies used the back jury door. Defense attorneys and defendants who were not in custody never used the jury door.”

A sign that remained posted on Dugan’s courtroom door Friday advised that if any attorney or other court official “knows or believes that a person feels unsafe coming to the courthouse to courtroom 615,” they should notify the clerk and request an appearance via Zoom.

I may not be a lawyer or an expert on law, but from what I do know - my exposure as a journalism student and research librarian - is that judges don't like law enforcement entering their courtrooms threatening to arrest people there. There is an expectation - sort of like treating the spaces as holy ground - that people required to appear before their benches be protected if only in that moment from further police harassment of any kind.

It's become a popular trap for ICE agents, appearing at courthouses to "arrest" the migrants going through the established process to be in the U.S., who are required by the laws to show up regularly for hearings tracking their approval. trump's thugs want to scare these perfectly normal people - some who have broken no laws - into staying away from the courthouses - which is why judges want courts to be safe places - so that the agents can officially claim them breaking the rules and justify arresting them in the first place. It's a sadistic Catch-22 that shouldn't even be happening. 

Marcy Wheeler has her thoughts on the matter:

After Judge Dugan interacted with the arresting officers and, upon learning that they only had an administrative warrant and after telling them they needed a judicial warrant, she directed them to go meet with the Chief Judge (who wasn’t at the courthouse, but who spoke with the ICE officer on the phone). Then, Judge Dugan apparently adjourned Flores-Ruiz’ scheduled hearing and directed him and his attorney to leave via the jury door...

Flores-Ruiz appears to have gone, via back hallways, to the same sixth floor public hallway via which he had entered the court room. According the complaint, both DEA officers saw Flores-Ruiz in the public hallway before he entered the elevator...

Rather than arresting Flores-Ruiz, whom the officers knew was unarmed, there on the sixth floor, one of them rode down the elevator with him and his attorney and the other alerted the other officers. Four of them convened outside of the courthouse and chased him down the street and arrested him, just 22 minutes after he entered Judge Dugan’s courtroom at 8:43.

If the ICE agents were still able to track and arrest Flores-Ruiz, how the hell does that justify obstruction charges? And Dugan pointed out the agents had an administrative warrant, which doesn't really establish the authority to arrest somebody.

In a criminal complaint, the government charged Judge Dugan with 18 USC 1505, obstruction of a proceeding, and 18 USC 1071, concealing a person from arrest. [docket] The FBI arrested Judge Dugan at the courthouse on Friday amid a deliberate media frenzy, up to and including the FBI Director posting a picture of Judge Dugan’s arrest in violation of DOJ guidelines designed to prevent prejudice...

Both Pam Bondi and Stephen Miller also made comments that arguably violate rules prohibiting comments that prejudice a proceeding (remember that Judge Dale Ho already found that Pam Bondi’s public comments about the Eric Adams case likely violated local rules)...

For obstruction, it will be contested whether an immigration removal counts as an investigative proceeding. For concealment, it will be contested whether the administrative warrant qualifies, and whether directing Flores-Ruiz via a back hallway to the very same public hallway where the officers had planned to arrest him and had a chance to arrest him amounts to concealment.

Both charges will pivot on Judge Dugan’s intent: whether she had corrupt intent and the intent of helping him evade arrest entirely, or whether she wanted to protect the sanctity of her own courtroom.

Key to her intent is her belief, which she made clear to the officers, that they needed a judicial warrant...

It may also matter that, by description, she didn’t actually look at the administrative warrant, because it might matter if she knew whether Flores-Ruiz had been deported before. In a report published before the arrest, Dugan is quoted as stating that “a warrant was not presented in the hallway on the 6th floor,” and by description, she was not shown one.

Thus far, the complaint seems to want to suggest that Dugan had corrupt intent because she was angry...

But judges get angry for lots of reasons, including that someone showed up outside her courtroom to surprise someone with business in it.

Wheeler's key point:

The arrest has rightly been viewed as an attempt, at a time when Trump and his minions are already making wildly inappropriate attacks on judges, to bully the judiciary.

trump and his lackeys have been getting a lot of pushback from the federal judges over their violations of due process and established norms. So here's the bullies, finding excuses to arrest judges and put the fear of their executive abuses onto the entire third branch of our Constitutional government.

trump despises the legal system, mocks it with every criminal and civil violation all because he'd abused that system for decades, and he now has a Supreme Court in his pocket that will excuse away every sin he's committing now.

Our most basic rights established by the Constitution, in the Bill of Rights, are all under attack. trump and his racist anti-immigrant allies may be attacking only the "dread Others" for now, but they are doing so by shredding due process, the writ of Habeas Corpus, every protection of the Rule of Law set up over centuries of British and American legal rulings that serve ALL AMERICANS to this day.

The second those "Others" - who are human, they are us in spite of the fears that the racists spread - lose legal protections under the Rule of Law, we - the rest of the nation - can and will lose those protections as well.

These judges are fighting to uphold the Rule of Law, defending the centuries of precedence and norms and case history.

And trump will throw every one of those judges into jail.

First they came for...

Update: looks like a late-day sharing at Crooks&Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up from Steve in Manhattan. Thank you, Steve! 

The Idiocy, It Burns (The Defense Dept)

Update: Oops, halfway through Friday before finding out Steve in Manhattan added this article to Crooks & Liars' Mike's Round-Up today. Sorry I didn't clean up more, and the lack of cake...

This is what happens when you put national intelligence under the control of the nation's dumbest idiots (via Quil Lawrence and Tom Bowman at NPR):

Embattled Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth pushed back Tuesday on the latest revelations that he shared military attack plans on his private phone with his wife, brother and personal lawyer...

But the details he shared, two hours before airstrikes hit in Yemen, almost certainly were classified, according to retired Marine Lt. Col. Mick Wagoner, who was a military lawyer for 17 years and deployed to four war zones.

"A launch of an attack there is just no-way, no-how, that an American military operation starting off is going to not be classified for Lord's sake," he said.

And Hegseth's defense also tacitly confirms that he shared those details with people, like his wife, he knew were not authorized to have the information...

This isn't any better than the FIRST TIME Hegseth got caught with loose lips.

According to a U.S. official not authorized to speak publicly, after CENTCOM commander General Erik Kurilla sent Hegseth details over secure communications about impending military operations on March 15th, Hegseth shared that information, verbatim, with two separate chat groups on Signal. One was made up of top Trump administration officials — and inadvertently included journalist Jeffrey Goldberg. But the other chat group included people with no clear reason for receiving the sensitive information.

"The last time he was wrongly using an insecure communications device, and he mistakenly thought he was speaking only to security clearance holders," said Kevin Carroll, who served 30 years in the Army, then in the CIA and then the Department of Homeland Security in the first Trump administration. Security breaches like what happened in the Signal group chat are called "spillage" by the military, but this is more, says Carroll.

"Here he's knowingly using an insecure communication device and he's knowingly giving classified information to people who are not security clearance holders so it's really more than a spill," Carroll said. "It really gets more to the sort of willfulness that is typically prosecuted by the Department of Justice."

Except the Justice Department - thanks to the corrupt Idiot-in-Chief trump looking to surround himself with lackeys who will never challenge his ineptitude - will never pursue charges because Attorney General Pam Bondi's job is to prevent Boss trump from ever looking bad in public.

Just to get an idea of the severity of the situation that involved Goldberg, go read his article at the Atlantic as long as you can get past the paywall. The one thread woven throughout his description of what he witnessed behind the scenes - through communications intentionally trying to avoid federal guidelines - was how things were under the command of people who didn't know what they were doing, other than that what they DID do was illegal:

I have never seen a breach quite like this. It is not uncommon for national-security officials to communicate on Signal. But the app is used primarily for meeting planning and other logistical matters—not for detailed and highly confidential discussions of a pending military action. And, of course, I’ve never heard of an instance in which a journalist has been invited to such a discussion.

Conceivably, Waltz, by coordinating a national-security-related action over Signal, may have violated several provisions of the Espionage Act, which governs the handling of “national defense” information, according to several national-security lawyers interviewed by my colleague Shane Harris for this story. Harris asked them to consider a hypothetical scenario in which a senior U.S. official creates a Signal thread for the express purpose of sharing information with Cabinet officials about an active military operation. He did not show them the actual Signal messages or tell them specifically what had occurred.

All of these lawyers said that a U.S. official should not establish a Signal thread in the first place. Information about an active operation would presumably fit the law’s definition of “national defense” information. The Signal app is not approved by the government for sharing classified information. The government has its own systems for that purpose...

The only logical reason to go onto Signal to avoid regular channels was to avoid future repercussions of what they were doing, which could fall under war crimes considering they could have bombed civilians in Yemen. And even then trump's staff were all idiotic enough to not verify just who the hell were joined in their "little chats," because they had invited a reporter who had obligations to report the facts of possible wrong-doing.

This is kakistocracy on crystal meth. All of this, not just including unvetted people but also mishandling national security classified documents in ways that get other people thrown in jail. 

Hegseth is out there defending himself from these accusations by how he's the one ending "woke" and DEI measures in the armed forces. All he's doing is highlighting the damage done by mediocre unqualified white guys like himself.

Remember, Hegseth's major qualification that got him the Secretary of Defense job was that he was a talking head pundit on Fox Not-News: Brought on as a "national security expert" during trump's 2016 campaign - the irony, it burns as well - got hired to promote his toxic world-views during trump's first train wreck. Hegseth was someone who agreed with trump that the military should be a tool for violence, and pushed for trump to pardon several soldiers from the Iraqi/Afghani wars of occupation who had committed war crimes against civilians. 

Everything else about Hegseth highlighted how far out of depth he was doing anything else. His own military career was in the National Guard, although during the Iraqi/Afghani occupations that did see him deployed to three tours. His highest rank was major, which is often an office job; and yet here he is ordering generals around (this is like promoting the Assistant Circulation Librarian of a small branch to Head of a County Library System). He supposedly ran two non-profit groups for veterans but both of them shut down while he faced accusations of mismanagement, misogyny, and alcoholism.

This wasn't a guy who was qualified to oversee the largest department in the federal Executive branch. Hegseth is there because he was a media personality who played to trump's vanity, and he's still behaving like a gossiping media insider who doesn't understand the severity of the job and the importance of national security.

Gods help us. THIS is the moran trump is counting out to organize any military operations in the works against Mexico... and Canada... and Panama... and Greenland... and anybody else trump wants to bully and punish into submission.

The entire Defense Department is in chaos right now because they're being led by an idiot more focused on his TV makeup than on overseeing logistics and keeping the generals and admirals in line.

The idiocy is burning but it's going to set fire to the whole nation if not the whole planet.

Smoke On the Altar, The Miter On This Guy. Francis, the Pope Who Lightened Up

Jesus. It felt like only yesterday I was making "Lighten Up, Francis" jokes.

Pope Francis passed away last night (via Scott Neuman at NPR):

Catholics across the globe are mourning the death of Pope Francis, remembering him for his humility, generosity of spirit, concern for the poor, and steadfast efforts to restore trust in the church after years of scandal.

Francis died early Monday in Rome at the age of 88, just one day after Easter Sunday. His death marks the end of a 12-year papacy that began in 2013 following the historic resignation of Benedict XVI — the first pontiff to step down in nearly six centuries.

You might need to refresh your memories about how eventful that transition was: Popes tended to rule the Church until dying, because you didn't want the whole "Infallibility" matter crop up if there are two guys - no girls allowed, damn them - running around with claim to that kind of power.

But Benedict was facing numerous scandals, some of which he couldn't resolve without compromising his own authority, and so handing off power to a replacement Pope was the third option available. To his credit, Benedict didn't seem to interfere with Francis' work in his retirement, so they avoided that problem in the long term.

Francis brought a more liberal - other than retaining the Church's conservative views on homosexuality - agenda to Catholicism that had been sinking into reactionary conservativism - in response to the Vatican II Reforms - since the reign of the long-lived Pope John Paul II. It helped Francis' cause that he was one of the more notable successes of a church serving to millions of Catholics across the globe.

Francis, the first-ever Latin American pope, once served as archbishop in Buenos Aires. In the Argentine capital, the government declared seven days of mourning and citizens gathered for a special mass at the city's cathedral, Reuters reports.

The pope also touched the lives of many Latinos around the world by communicating with them in Spanish. Hatciri Lopez, a lifelong Catholic from rural Johnston County, N.C., told NPR member station WUNC that Francis grew her faith...

Where John Paul II broke through as a non-Italian Pope in 1978, Francis went further as an Italian-descended immigrant to a Latin American nation, and expanded non-European representation towards Third World nations struggling with poverty and political oppression. When Francis spoke about the need to protect and support refugees, and promoted favorable immigration policies, he meant it.

One of Francis' last admonitions as his health declined was going after Vice President JD Vance - who converted to Catholicism in 2019 - and trump's anti-immigrant policies (reported by AP News correspondent Nicole Winfield via PBS News):

Francis took the remarkable step of addressing the U.S. migrant crackdown in a letter to U.S. bishops in which he appeared to take direct aim at Vice President JD Vance’s defense of the deportation program on theological grounds.

History’s first Latin American pope has long made caring for migrants a priority of his pontificate, demanding that countries welcome, protect, promote and integrate those fleeing conflicts, poverty and climate disasters. Francis has also said governments are expected to do so to the limits of their capacity.

The Argentine Jesuit and President Donald Trump have long sparred over migration, including before Trump’s first administration when Francis famously said anyone who builds a wall to keep out migrants was “not a Christian.”

In the letter, Francis said nations have the right to defend themselves and keep their communities safe from criminals.

“That said, the act of deporting people who in many cases have left their own land for reasons of extreme poverty, insecurity, exploitation, persecution or serious deterioration of the environment, damages the dignity of many men and women, and of entire families, and places them in a state of particular vulnerability and defenselessness,” he wrote.

Citing the biblical stories of migration, the people of Israel, the Book of Exodus and Jesus Christ’s own experience, Francis affirmed the right of people to seek shelter and safety in other lands and said he was concerned with what is going on in the United States.

“I have followed closely the major crisis that is taking place in the United States with the initiation of a program of mass deportations,” Francis wrote. “The rightly formed conscience cannot fail to make a critical judgment and express its disagreement with any measure that tacitly or explicitly identifies the illegal status of some migrants with criminality...”

It's a bit of dark humor that the Pope died just hours after meeting Vance in person to "exchange views" that clearly made it seem as though Francis wanted to pope-slap the fool before expiring. Comparisons to how Vance's visit to Francis mirrored Liz Truss' visit to Queen Elizabeth II before the Queen died were unavoidable on social media.

With that all said, what will be Francis' legacy? Alongside pressing the Western world to be more accepting of migrants, he also reportedly worked to appoint bishops and cardinals to reflect the diversity of a church catering more to Africa, Asia, and South America than ever before. While Francis remained opposed to gay marriage and gay adoption rights - to keep the more conservative internal factions in line - he did work to tone down the harsher rhetoric - opposing criminalizing homosexuality for example - and showed signs of setting a foundation of making the Catholic Church more amenable to gay rights with whomever succeeds him as the Capo de Capo uh Pontiff.

Francis had to deal with a lot of the fallout from earlier papal reigns such as the sex abuse and coverups - and a simony scandal thrown in - but he notably recovered the Church's reputation to at least a grudging (re)acceptance on the world stage. His personal reputation leaves behind a man known for his dedication to science, humility (he lived a spartan, simple life even as Pope), humor, and above all that Christian virtue of Grace.

And now?

Now we get to see if that movie Conclave got it right.

P.S. De Chelonian Mobile.

The Folly of trump's Nativism and Me-First World-View as the Trade Wars Escalate

trump is still obsessed with tariffs, even after all the economic chaos he's inflicted over the last three months.

Unhinged

[image or embed]

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) April 20, 2025 at 4:07 PM

trump remains convinced tariffs are a winning move, that the "billions in revenue" getting raised by him - by the by, none of the ports were taking in tariffs because their systems are still screwed up - will fill our coffers even as Elon Musk and his DOGE minions empty them to their own pockets, and that - as always - he's the big business genius while every other financial expert/banker/CEO are screaming how tariffs won't work and are gutting their profits.

trump is still crowing how his "trade deficit" announcements are forcing nations to deal with him, even as there's every evidence that our major trading partners are about to drop very big hammers on us (hat-tip to Comrade Misfit who shared this CNBC report from Lori Ann RaCocco):

U.S. importers are being notified of an increase in canceled sailings by freight ships out of China as ocean carriers try to balance the pullback in orders resulting from President Trump’s tariffs and the escalation of tensions in the trade war.

A total of 80 blank, or canceled, sailings out of China have been recorded by freight company HLS Group. It wrote in a recent note to clients that with the trade war between China and the U.S. leading to a demand plummet, carriers have started to suspend or adjust transpacific services...

The impact of the diminished freight container traffic to North America will be significant for many links in the economy and supply chain, including the ports and logistics companies moving the freight. If each sailing was carrying 8,000 to 10,000 TEUs (twenty-foot equivalent units), that would equal a decline in freight traffic of between 640,000-800,000 containers, and lead to decreased crane operations at the ports, lower fees that could be collected, and declines in container pick-ups and transports by trucks, rails, and to warehouses for storage...

“We have no way of knowing how significant this drop in orders will be on vessel schedules,” said Alan Murphy, CEO of Sea-Intelligence. “There are no models to extrapolate this. What I can tell you is the majority of containers on the vessels servicing the Asia to U.S. trade routes is China. We won’t go to zero containers, but we will see a decrease in containers and as a result, in the future, we will see a massive raft of blank sailings announced...”

This is the first wave of a cascade effect, where the lack of shipments from China will disrupt our nation's supply chain from ports losing businesses to trucks / planes / trains / shipping companies losing money from dropped demand to deliver incoming materials across the nation. We won't see it now but in a month, maybe two months: fewer goods reaching our shelves at Wal-Mart or warehouses for Amazon. Fewer cars, and fewer car parts to manufacture here in the U.S. Fewer people working our supply chains, increasing unemployment and accelerating a growing economic recession. Among other losses to our nation's well-being.

And still trump thinks this is all glorious, that tariffs work.

I've written before why trump believes in tariffs, that he seems to think they generate revenues far greater than they really do. There are several other reasons he's obsessed: 

trump believes he's a world-class negotiator and that tariffs allow him to break and make deals to serve his whims. This is partly a vanity program; driven by pride and arrogance, blended with the stupidity and ignorance about how global economics really work (what the hell did he fail to learn at UPenn Wharton College of Business???).

trump really doesn't understand how trade deficits - which he based his blanket tariff orders a few weeks ago - work, and how little they affected our nation's economic strengths. Just because we were operating massive trade deficits with smaller (Third World) nations didn't mean those nations were defrauding the United States in any way: In a lot of cases it was because those nations didn't have enough revenues to buy things from our nation that would have meant any value to them. We traded with Madagascar for their vanilla but they had no reason to buy our soy or our motorcycles, not at the scale that would have balanced the books. And yet, the United States kept running one of the largest (based on GDP and sheer financial wealth) economies on the planet. Trade deficits didn't hurt us at all. Trade boycotts due to these tariffs, however, that will hurt...

But what's proving to be the biggest reason - other than trump's overall stupidity - is trump's Nativist / America-First world-view blinding him to how vital trade can be. trump wants to push his Narrative of "Make America Great Again" and to him that means cutting the United States off from the rest of the planet (with the exception of trump's BFFs Putin and Russia). Shutting down our foreign aid, closing off half of our State Department's foreign relations, pushing a harsh border enforcement to drive away foreign students AND tourists AND anybody else - and no lie, including penguins - all of this comes from trump's belief that America is a "superior" nation under attack by lesser mortals looking to defraud or destroy us.

It's a world-view no different than the one shared with trump's idol, the person he's admired for years. Yeah, that guy, he loved inflicting tariffs as soon as he came to power in Germany (via Timothy W. Ryback at the Atlantic (paywalled)):

Hitler had what one might call a diffident, occasionally felonious disregard for financial matters. He owed 400,000 reichsmarks in back taxes. His understanding of economics was primitive. “You have inflation only if you want it,” Hitler once said. “Inflation is a lack of discipline. I will see to it that prices remain stable. I have my S.A. for that.” (The S.A., or Brownshirts, were the original paramilitary organization associated with the Nazi Party.) Hitler held Jews responsible for most of Germany’s financial woes.

Hitler relied on Gottfried Feder, the National Socialist Party’s long-serving chief economist, to develop the specifics of an economic program. Feder had helped concoct the strange brew of socialism and fanatical nationalism in the original 25-point program of this putative “workers’ party.” In May 1932, Feder outlined what would become the first Nazi economic plan, in a 32-page position paper designed for ready implementation were Hitler to suddenly find himself in power. High on Feder’s agenda for a Hitler economy were tariffs.

“National Socialism demands that the needs of German workers no longer be supplied by Soviet slaves, Chinese coolies, and Negroes,” Feder wrote. Germany needed German workers and farmers producing German goods for German consumers. Feder saw “import restrictions” as key to returning the German economy to the Germans. “National Socialism opposes the liberal world economy, as well as the Marxist world economy,” Feder wrote. Our fellow Germans must “be protected from foreign competition...”

Any of that anti-foreigner rhetoric sound familiar?

The crash of 1929 had plunged Germany, along with much of the rest of the world, into an abyss. Markets collapsed. Factories were idled. Unemployment soared. In the early 1930s, one out of three German workers was unemployed. But Hitler had inherited a recovering economy: In December 1932, the German Institute for Economic Research reported that the crisis had been “significantly overcome”; by the time Hitler was appointed chancellor, in January 1933, the economy was on the mend.

You could say the same about Biden's economic recovery post-pandemic, which the mainstream media underplayed while obsessing over the price of eggs. trump's chaotic decision-making undid a lot of that, much like what happened in Germany:

But Hitler made no effort to reassure the markets, insisting that the tariffs were necessary and that he needed time to fix the ruined country his predecessors had left him. “Within four years the German farmer must be saved from destitution,” Hitler said in his first national radio address as chancellor. “Within four years unemployment must be completely overcome.” Hitler provided scant details as to how this was to be accomplished. By this point, he had broken even with the tariff cheerleader Feder, and had abandoned most of the action items for developing a nationalist and socialist economy. These items had included increased taxation of the wealthy; state supervision of large corporations; and the prohibition of “new department stores, low-priced shops, and chain stores.”

As chancellor, Hitler left his own plans for the German economy intentionally vague. His chief priority, as he told his ministers, was to secure an outright majority in the March 5 Reichstag elections. Hitler calculated that he needed between 18 million and 19 million votes. “There is no economic program that could meet with the approval of such a large mass of voters,” Hitler told party leaders.

But although the average voter may not have cared about the details of the Hitler economy, the markets did. The initial surge in stocks that greeted Hitler’s appointment halted then dipped and flattened amid the political and economic uncertainty of Hitler’s chaotic first weeks as chancellor...

The Hitler tariffs, announced on Friday, February 10, 1933, stunned observers. “The dimension of the tariff increases have in fact exceeded all expectations,” the Vossische Zeitung wrote disapprovingly, proclaiming the moment a “fork in the road” for the German economy. It appeared that Europe’s largest and most industrialized nation would suddenly be returning “to the furrow and the plow.” The New York Times saw this for what it was: “a trade war” against its European neighbors...

The primary targets of the Hitler tariffs—the Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands—were outraged by the sudden suspension of favored-nation trading status on virtually all agricultural products, as well as on textiles, with tariffs in some cases rising 500 percent. With its livestock essentially banished from the German market, Denmark, for example, was facing substantial losses. Farmers panicked. The Danes and Swedes threatened “retaliatory measures,” as did the Dutch, who warned the Germans that the countermeasures would be felt as “palpable blows” to German industrial exports. That proved to be true.

“Our exports have shrunk significantly,” Foreign Minister Neurath informed Hitler in one cabinet meeting, “and our relations to our neighboring countries are threatening to deteriorate.” Neurath noted that informal contacts with Dutch interlocutors had been “bruskly broken off.” Trade relations with Sweden and Denmark were similarly strained, as were those with France and Yugoslavia. Finance Minister Krosigk anticipated that the agricultural sector would require an additional 100 million reichsmarks in deficit spending...

The costs of those tariffs arrived in the form of harsher sanctions and cutoffs, forcing the government to spend more than expected to aid farmers (and likely other industries). But none of that mattered to Hitler, who pushed forward on his agenda to seize authoritarian control of Germany outright, and basically building up a war machine with the armies to begin annexation and invasion of neighboring countries, triggering a world war by 1939.

If anyone else can notice the trends here - the tariffs leading to trade wars leading to military aggression and straight-up wars of blood and carnage - you can see where trump is taking the United States. We're not going back to some glorious isolationist nativist homeland that never existed outside of the fevered fantasies of a white patriarchal class: We're turning ourselves into a pariah state no different than Iran or North Korea, and about to escalate matters with our neighboring trade partners in Mexico and Canada with our unjustified version of an Anschluss. 

"This is NOT going to end well" is a fcking understatement tonight.

Where Is Kilmar Abrego Garcia? (w/ Update)

trump's ongoing war against legal immigrants - and basically any American who isn't White Rich and/or Male - has taken the darkest turn yet. His street-level bullies among ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) are grabbing people who are innocent of any criminal activity - without presenting ANY evidence of wrong-doing in a court of law as required by Writ of Habeas Corpus - and still shipping them overseas to a private-run prison to avoid any accountability to the federal courts back home.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia is the most clear example of these brazen attacks on our civil rights (via Ben Finlay at AP News):

Abrego Garcia grew up in El Salvador’s capital city, San Salvador, according to court documents filed in U.S. immigration court in 2019. His father was a former police officer. His mother, Cecilia, sold pupusas, the nation’s signature dish of flat tortilla pouches that hold steaming blends of cheese, beans or savory pork.

The entire family, including his parents, two sisters and older brother, ran the business from home, court records state. Abrego Garcia’s job was to buy ingredients from the grocery store and make deliveries with his brother.

“Everyone in the town knew to get their pupusas from ‘Pupuseria Cecilia,’” his lawyers wrote.

A local gang, Barrio 18, began extorting the family for “rent money” and threatened to kill his older brother Cesar — or force him into their gang — if they weren’t paid, court documents state. The family complied but eventually sent Cesar to the U.S.

Barrio 18 similarly targeted Abrego Garcia, according to his immigration case. When he was 12, the gang threatened to take him away until his father paid them “all of the money that they wanted.” They still watched him as he walked to and from school.

The family moved 10 minutes away, but the gang threatened to rape and kill Abrego Garcia’s sisters, court records state. The family shut down the business, moved again and eventually sent Abrego Garcia to the U.S...

Abrego Garcia fled to the U.S. illegally around 2011, the year he turned 16, according to documents filed in his immigration case. He joined Cesar, now a U.S. citizen, in Maryland and found work in construction.

About five years later, Abrego Garcia met Jennifer Vasquez Sura, a U.S. citizen, the records say. In 2018, after she learned she was pregnant, he moved in with her and her two children. They lived in Prince George’s County, just outside Washington.

In 2019, Abrego Garcia went to a Home Depot looking for work when he was arrested by county police, according to court filings. Detectives asked if he was a gang member. After explaining he wasn’t, he was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Abrego Garcia later told an immigration judge that he would seek asylum and asked to be released. Vasquez Sura was five months into a high-risk pregnancy.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, however, alleged that he was a certified gang member based on information that came from a confidential informant used by county police, records state.

According to Abrego Garcia’s attorneys in his current case, the criminal informant had alleged that Abrego Garcia belonged to an MS-13 chapter in New York, where he has never lived...

Again, our legal system relies too much on "confidential informants" who can't be verified and tend to provide erroneous claims. Just the simple fact that this "informant" put Abrego Garcia with a gang in a completely different state makes no sense and should have been put under stronger scrutiny.

In October 2019, an immigration judge denied Abrego Garcia’s asylum request but granted him protection from being deported back to El Salvador because of a “well-founded fear” of gang persecution, according to his case. He was released, and ICE did not appeal.

Abrego Garcia checked in with ICE yearly while the Department of Homeland Security issued him a work permit, his attorneys said in court filings. He joined a union and was employed full time as a sheet metal apprentice.

He and Vasquez Sura were raising three kids, including their 5-year-old son, who has autism, is deaf in one ear and unable to verbally communicate, according to the complaint filed against the Trump administration. They’re also raising a 9-year-old with autism and a 10-year-old with epilepsy.

Everything about Abrego Garcia says he's a family man, raising kids, working a solid job. Nothing here screams "street gang." For whatever he'd done to come into this country, Abrego Garcia was going through the legal motions to stay here on work permit, doing everything by the book.

And still trump's ICE thugs seized him, relying again on those dubious gang claims and immediately shipping him to El Salvador without a hearing, without a judge's say-so, without any of the due process our legal system is supposed to employ.

Abrego Garcia was pulled over March 12 outside an Ikea in Baltimore with his son, according to court records. An agent called Vasquez Sura and said she had 10 minutes to retrieve their son or ICE would request child protective services.

Abrego Garcia called his wife from jail and said authorities pressed him about MS-13, according to court documents. They asked about a photo they had of him playing basketball on a public court, and his family’s visits to a restaurant serving Mexican and Salvadoran food.

“He would repeat the truth again and again — that he was not in a gang,” Vasquez Sura stated in court documents.

In the mad rush under trump's call to deport as many "illegals" and "criminals" they could, ICE was under pressure to round up any suspected "gang members" even when the existing paperwork and judicial rulings said otherwise.

Everything that happened to Abrego Garcia was so outrageous, unethical, and arguably illegal that even ICE officials admitted this was "an administrative error," the legalese spoken to try and avoid liability for any criminal or civil charges aimed their way.

You would think then in a sane respectable legal system that when the officials admit they've made a mistake like this, they would work hard to undo said mistake and return their victims back to their lives. Instead, trump and his DOJ lackeys are mocking any effort to recover Abrego Garcia, basically telling the judges to get bent (via Josh Gerstein and Kyle Cheney at Politico):

The Trump administration insisted Sunday that it has no legal obligation to arrange for the return of a Maryland man illegally deported from the United States, arguing that a Supreme Court ruling last week only requires officials to admit him into the country if he makes it back from a high-security prison in El Salvador.

Justice Department lawyers told a federal judge that they don’t interpret the Supreme Court’s Thursday ruling — that the administration “facilitate” Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s release — as obligating the administration to do anything more than adjust his immigration status to admit him if El Salvador’s government chooses to release him...

The DOJ lawyers sadists are claiming this is all on El Salvador now, even though it's trump whose migrant-bashing policies illegally sent an innocent man to that prison, and even though trump is supposed to be a President with vast executive powers. This is pure gaslighting bullshit.

The administration’s position suggests officials do not view the Supreme Court’s order as compelling them to seek Abrego Garcia’s return. The Salvadoran native entered the country illegally around 2011 and had been living in Maryland. The Trump administration has admitted it deported him to El Salvador in violation of a 2019 immigration court order barring his deportation to that country. Though Abrego Garcia was denied asylum, a judge found he could not be sent to his home country because of a legitimate fear of persecution by a local gang.

The administration continued Sunday to flout a Friday order from Judge Xinis to deliver “daily updates” to the court describing its efforts to return Abrego Garcia to the United States. Sunday’s update from Evan Katz, the assistant director of removal operations for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said the administration had “no updates” for the judge. A day earlier, in a similarly threadbare update, the administration turned to Michael Kozak, the State Department’s senior bureau official in the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, who said Abrego Garcia was still alive in El Salvador’s CECOT prison.

The administration is also bucking demands from Abrego Garcia’s attorneys that officials detail the arrangement to ship hundreds of foreign nationals to a notorious prison in El Salvador. One of the Sunday filings insists those details are classified and could be subject to attorney-client and state secrets privileges...

What this all boils down to is: trump believes he has Absolute Authority as President Sadist-In-Chief - thanks to that Supreme Court ruling that granted presidents vast executive powers without checks or balances - and this is his attempt to bully and break our federal judiciary into utter uselessness against his grand scheme to rule as Dictator For Life.

This is a severe Constitutional Crisis, far greater than anything we've witnessed since Watergate or the desegregation showdowns of the Civil Rights movement. trump - and the sadists serving at his pleasure not to their Oaths of office - refuses to obey legal court orders from the Third Branch of our federal government, daring the judges to cross a line - something like holding Justice Department officials in contempt of their courts - that could trigger terrible retributions from a quisling-esque Republican Congress or trump's own brute squads.

If trump succeeds here - if Judge Xinis or any of the other judges fighting these deportations that are clear violations of our constitutional rights crumples here, if they allow Abrego Garcia and hundreds of others who were accused of criminal behaviors without proof in the courts of law - this would be a green light for trump and his lackeys to escalate their war on the rule of law and start denying our rights to more groups of Americans trump and co. would want broken and/or removed.

You think trump and Stephen Miller and half the Republican leadership will just stop at going after "illegals"? They're trying to get rid of Birthright Citizenship, something that protects ALL of us - Latino, Black, Asian, Native, Women, Gays/Lesbians, Trans, even other Whites - from losing our protections under the Constitution.

That "When they came for..." poem wasn't exaggeration. When the fascist bastards take over a government and start their purges, they'll keep removing anybody they despise/fear/hate until they get their bloodied, ashen, and morally bankrupt Utopia. trump and the Republican wingnuts are not going to stop. They will go after Latinos. They will go after Blacks. They will go after Chinese and Indians and Japanese and other Asians. They will go after people registered to vote Democrat. They will go after women who aren't already beholden to their patriarchy. They will go after anyone who offends their evangelical hate-filled faith.

We are all on that list destined for those privatized prisons, for the elimination of our citizenry, for the end of any rights - to vote, to own property, to fight for good wages, to cherish and share our lives with those we love, to speak out in protest - we've taken for granted the last 200-plus years.

We are all going to end up like Kilmar Abrego Garcia if we don't fight back.

We all need to speak out about where Abrego Garcia is, and why he isn't home with the family that loves and misses him.

Where Is Abrego Garcia?

He's in a hell that a broken, corrupt sadist sent him to. This is all on trump, and that bastard needs to answer for his crimes (again).

Update 4/15: As a helpful guide, Aaron Reichlin-Melnick drew up a diagram to follow regarding Abrego Garcia's situation and the dubious arguments trump and his thugs are using to claim the man guilty without trial.

Just updated this timeline to fix a typo and address an error in the last box where I'd gotten the manner of arrest wrong. I present the full version Mr. Abrego's time in the United States, using court documents to explain the allegations of gang membership and what actually happened in his case.

[image or embed]

— Aaron Reichlin-Melnick (@reichlinmelnick.bsky.social) April 15, 2025 at 11:18 AM

Reichlin-Melnick btw is a fellow at the American Immigration Council, graduate from Georgetown Law, who comments on immigration policies on social media.

An Anecdote Involving Air Conditioning

Update: Thanks again to Batocchio for sharing this blog at Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up! Just remember to save up your pennies, kiddos, 'cause trump's tariff rollercoaster ain't done yet.

Last week, I needed to replace my air conditioner.

The unit was as old as the duplex, built in the mid-1990s. I bought the place - with my parents help, as I was still recovering from long unemployment - in 2014 with the understanding that things were 20-plus years old and at some point will age out and die on me.

The AC compressor had been a problem for years, barely generating enough air to cover the two-bedroom place. The far ends of the house - which happened to be the master bed and bath - wasn't getting much air at all the last five-six years. The AC repair guy told me the last two annual checkups that the compressor was doomed sooner rather than later. This winter, it finally doomed.

The repair guy came out and checked, and showed me the points of failure in the compressor that meant getting a replacement. Problem is, the whole unit was thirty years old, and replacement parts - even compressors - were no longer available. The whole thing needed switching out.

And the cost was going to be around $7500.

Any homeowner will tell you things can get expensive - have been even before the housing booms of the 1980s and 1990s, and the housing market crash of 2007-08. It was still something above my annual income, and it was something I had to get further help from the parents, who were understanding because they knew I lived alone and had no other options other than an equity loan that would cost me a lot more later down the road. They had already helped to clear my mortgage, so replacing the AC was something they could help.

Also, this is the middle of Florida, heading into April and the goddamn heat wave that is April through November anymore (fuck you deniers, climate change is REAL). Air conditioning should not be a privilege, it should be a constitutional right in this state.

So I put in the repair order, the AC guys came out with a three-person crew, they worked on it early Thursday morning well into noon, finishing an hour early, and got the system turned on and pumping clear air. I checked: the new compressor is strong enough to get air to the back rooms of my duplex. At last.

While showing me that new compressor, pointing out what I need to look at in case there are any issues during the limited warranty period for it, the three AC guys all complimented me on spending $7500 on the whole thing.

"Why?" I asked.

"Because," the lead guy responded. "Next week, our company has to raise the price on these units by 20 percent."

Basic math told me 20 percent (.2) of $7500 (and change) was $1500 (and change) meaning a cost spike to $9000 (and change). THAT would have even made my parents give pause and suggest I just live with the ceiling fans on full blast for the rest of my life. 

I had to ask this. "Is this because of the trump tariffs?"

All three of the repair guys - where at least one of them had to have voted for that shitgibbon trump in 2024 - said "Yup!" while shaking their heads in discomfort if not alarm.

And this was just as trump unleashed his "liberation" Retribution tariffs on every country and territory on the maps - save for his buddies in Russia - to where we've started trade wars with the entire planet - again, save for Russia - even the islands populated solely by penguins (no, I am not making that up).

I could go into the illogic of trump - and his handlers' - math regarding how his tariffs are "fixing" any trade deficits we have with penguins and most of humanity, and I would argue that trade deficits we've had since the 1970s aren't damaging our economy the way trump claims. Hell, it's not trade deficits that have caused recessions, it had been reckless deregulation of financial markets; the upending of our housing markets; and a global pandemic that our political leaders - especially trump himself - barely took serious.

But I'm sticking to this anecdote as an example - that I'm certain is repeating across many households  this weekend - that right now, the American economy as we know it - our industrial capacity, our supply chains, our ability to provide goods and services, our ability to get reliable air conditioning - is doomed by trump's irrational and aggressive push for high tariffs.

The U.S. economy is not ready for any of this. And all the other damage trump and his lackeys are inflicting on us - the dismantling of our federal agencies, the theft of revenues, the growing job losses - is turning this all into the early stages of an economic depression. It won't even be a recession long enough to ease the coming fall off the cliffs.

Gods help us.

Get Yer Hands Off Us, trump and Musk

So today there was an organized national protest opposing trump/Musk's attacks on our federal infrastructure and our legal migrants called Hands Off, and a local event in nearby Lakeland FL was on the calendar for 1:00 PM so I decided to contribute with my presence for an hour.

Parking downtown was intriguingly tight today, so by that metric turnout seemed pretty good. I've seen the videoclips of the marches in the major cities like New York City, Washington DC, Boston, Chicago, and... is that Salt Lake City? Did someone get video from Anchorage by any chance?

It's nice to witness that there's still more Americans siding with you against the corruption and stupidity of the trump regime. It'd just be nicer if the f-cking mainstream media will recognize that these anti-trump protests are bigger and better organized than those staged tea party ragefests the billionaires set up during Obama's tenure. /sigh

Anywho, here's a few photos and videos I took at the Lakeland rally.

I should have made a sign that noted NO ONE VOTED 4 ELON but I didn't think to do so, alas.

I hope your protests went well today.

Keep fighting.

trump Destroying Heroes

Update: Thank ye, Steve in Manhattan for adding this article at Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-up! Please remember to support your public libraries as trump and his lackeys are nuking library funding outright through shutting down the IMLS agency. (posted at my writing/librarian blog) /rage

If there's any good news is that millions of us are rising up in protest, if the turnout at the Hands Off rallies are anything (of course, the mainstream media barely paid notice).

There's been a lot of bullshit happening in this second round of trumpian destruction, but this is something that drew my ire. trump continues his war on American history - and on our education and literacy - by getting his fellow racists to purge our libraries to straight-up whitewash everything (via Lolita C Baldor at AP News):

The U.S. Naval Academy has removed nearly 400 books from its library after being told by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s office to review and get rid of ones that promote diversity, equity and inclusion, U.S officials said Tuesday.

Academy officials were told to review the library late last week, and an initial search had identified about 900 books for a closer look. They decided on nearly 400 to remove and began doing so Monday, finishing before Hegseth arrived for a visit Tuesday that had already been planned and was not connected to the library purge, officials said. A list of the books has not yet been made available.

As a librarian, this enrages me. NO LIBRARY - be it public, be it school, above all a university library - SHOULD EVER PURGE A BOOK ON POLITICAL ORDERS.

The Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, the Air Force Academy near Colorado Springs, Colorado, and the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, New York, had not been included in President Donald Trump’s executive order in January that banned DEI instruction, programs or curriculum in kindergarten through 12th grade schools that receive federal funding. That is because the academies are colleges.

Pentagon leaders, however, suddenly turned their attention to the Naval Academy last week when a media report noted that the school had not removed books that promoted DEI. A U.S. official said the academy was told late last week to conduct the review and removal. It isn’t clear if the order was directed by Hegseth or someone else on his staff...

Hegseth has aggressively pushed the department to erase DEI programs and online content, but the campaign has been met with questions from angry lawmakers, local leaders and citizens over the removal of military heroes and historic mentions from Defense Department websites and social media pages.

In response, the department has scrambled to restore some of those posts as their removals have come to light.

The confusion about how to interpret the DEI policy was underscored Monday as Naval Academy personnel mistakenly removed some photos of distinguished female Jewish graduates from a display case as they prepared for Hegseth’s visit. The photos were put back...

While the AP News weren't able to confirm in that story which books were getting removed, follow-up reports got out that some of the books under fire were biographies on Martin Luther King Jr, and WWII soldier - and major league baseball Hall of Famer - Jackie Robinson.

In short, Hegseth and trump and the rest of their anti-woke racists were desperate and eager to purge books on American heroes.

This is indefensible. Former congresscritter Steve Israel makes the case (via The Hill):

As a member of the House Armed Services Committee, I took on the issue of professional military education. It may not have garnered many headlines, but education was viewed as critical from the top echelons of the Pentagon to the remote operating bases I visited in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We sharpen our warriors’ effectiveness when we develop their skills in critical thinking, languages, cultures and history. But we are now going dangerously backwards.

The New York Times reported that the U.S. Naval Academy is identifying books in the school’s Nimitz Library that may be pulled from circulation because they relate to so-called diversity, equity and inclusion. Among the 900 potential offenders: a biography of Jackie Robinson, “The Autobiography of Martin Luther King Jr.” and “Einstein on Race and Racism.”

The Chinese military is expanding. Russia is threatening Europe. But you can sleep better tonight knowing that the Navy is keeping its men and women safe from Jackie Robinson...

The irony in this move is rich. In the name of freedom, we mustn’t let our future leaders do things like, oh, read what they want to read. We must treat them like snowflakes, so brittle and sensitive that they must be protected from the offensive views of Robinson, King, Einstein and whoever else is on the blacklist of the Navy Blue and Gold.

Our warriors need body armor, not censorship. The best of them want to build their intellectual resilience. When I visited them in Iraq, Afghanistan and our military academies at home, many consistently told me that they fought better when they had time not only to drill, but to learn. To read...

It was a Marine who later explained to me why military education was so important: “If you know how to think, you realize you don’t have to kick in the door and start shooting; sometimes, you can find a safer way — for yourself...”

Instead of supporting our warriors with libraries that will give them an unvarnished telling of history, the Pentagon has decided to whitewash it. Instead of encouraging critical thinking skills, the Navy has decided to dull them...

There was nothing offensive in what Martin Luther King represents even as a man of peace who stood for civil rights. MLK may have spoke against the Vietnam War, but so did others of his era, and there is no shame in letting our military schools offer his biographies to highlight the man's overall commitment to justice.

There was nothing offensive in what Jackie Robinson represents even as a veteran of the Second World War - one of the few "good" or Just Wars humanity's ever known - who faced court martial during his service over refusing to move to the back of a segregated bus, and who broke the racial barriers in professional baseball to make it truly America's Game.

But these men - and many other men and women who impacted our nation's history over the centuries - offend trump and Hegseth and others among trump's ranks of hate-driven lackeys all because the likes of King and Robinson were heroes who dared to confront and bring an end to the institutionalized racism that scarred the United States since our nation's birth... and clearly still scars us to this day.

MLK offends the likes of trump because Reverend King dared to win the Nobel Peace Prize fighting for our nation's soul, sacrificing his own life in the pursuit of equality, justice, and economic fairness not just for Blacks but for the poor.

Jackie Robinson offends the likes of trump because Robinson suffered years of public attacks by haters while proving racists wrong that Black players were just as good as Whites, helping his Brooklyn Dodgers make playoffs and even a World Series championship. Jackie entered the hallowed Hall of Fame - notorious as one of the hardest sports halls to join - and his jersey number retired by all the major league teams in honor of what he endured.

King and Robinson and dozens if not hundreds of other American heroes - those who are Black, or Latino, or Natives, or Asians, or Women - offend trump and his ilk because King and Robinson and those hundreds of Blacks and Latinos and Natives and Asians and Women all defy the white supremacist myth that only White Men are capable and worthy of respect (that even the most mediocre White Man is superior to all others).

Rather than step away from an easily disprovable lie - that Whites can be mediocre and ought to live with the reality that We Are All Human capable of both greatness and failures - trump and the patriarchal racists would rather whitewash - literally - every fact and human face from our history books, from any form of information and knowledge that can inspire our generation and those who follow us.

trump will erase the fact we have heroes who aren't him - that there are heroes with different faces and different skins and different genders than him - just to make himself a false god.

Damn him.

Do not purge our heroes from the shelves, America.

Do not let these tiny, broken, hollow men erase everything good about our nation.

The Problem With Liberalism

(This is, by the by, NOT an April Fools prank. Sorry about the timing, I've been working on this for a month...)

(also wik, this is my 2,500th blog post. It's a question if any of us will be here for the 3000th...)

With all of the current chaos in the United States - with trump and his Far Right MAGA brownshirts rampaging through our federal government - there's discernable alarm among the Democratic faithful wondering why the hell their own party leadership - who ought to be opposing trump's smash-and-grabs more forcefully - is publicly playing nice with a conservative Republican party that keeps punching Dems in the metaphorical (and sometimes literal) face.

There's a number of theories why the modern Democratic Party seems so apprehensive in the face of historic destruction by Far Right Wingnuts. I'll throw this one hypothesis out here to give me the excuse to discuss yet another political philosophy (those -isms) of how Liberalism - as a core foundation of modern Democratic Party world-view - is the source of this seeming inaction and timidity.

Liberalism I would argue started as the American world-view, back when it wasn't confined to just one political party. If you look up the term in the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (3rd ed, 2009), liberalism "is the belief that it is the aim of politics to preserve individual rights and to maximize freedom of choice." (p. 306) As a philosophical response to the shifts in the United Kingdom from absolute monarchism - the Divine Right of Kings argument that had led to Charles I's execution and then the end of Stuart rule with James II's expulsion in 1688 - the emerging Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke and John Stuart Mill developed ideologies justifying the actions against the British kings that didn't want to play nice with others.

Locke in particular had a major influence on American political (liberal) thinking. In Locke's First Treatise of Government, he directly countered the Divine Right of Kings - posited in Sir Robert Filmer's Patriarcha - as a form of slavery (from York University's PDF archive):

To make way for this doctrine, they have denied mankind a right to natural freedom; whereby they have not only, as much as in them lies, exposed all subjects to the utmost misery of tyranny and oppression, but have also unsettled the titles and shaken the thrones of princes... However we must believe them upon their own bare words, when they tell us, “We are all born slaves, and we must continue so;” there is no remedy for it; life and thraldom we entered into together, and can never be quit of the one till we part with the other... (p.8)

Locke made this point, against the ill intents of absolute rulers:

The great question which in all ages has disturbed mankind, and brought on them the greatest part of those mischiefs which have ruined cities, depopulated countries, and disordered the peace of the world, has been, not whether there be power in the world, nor whence it came, but who should have it. The settling of this point being, of no smaller moment than the security of princes, and the peace and welfare of their estates and kingdoms, a reformer of politics, one would think, should lay this sure, and be very clear in it: for if this remain disputable, all the rest will be to very little purpose; and the skill used in dressing up power with all the splendor and temptation absoluteness can add to it, without showing who has a right to have it, will serve only to give a greater edge to man’s natural ambition, which of itself is but too keen. What can this do but set men on the more eagerly to scramble, and so lay a sure and lasting foundation of endless contention and disorder, instead of that peace and tranquility, which is the blurriness of government, and the end of human society? (p.69)

Having argued against Divine Right in the First part, Locke dug into the Second Treatise (same PDF source):

To this purpose, I think it may not be amiss to set down what I take to be political power. That the power of a magistrate over a subject may be distinguished from that of a father over his children, a master over his servant, a husband over his wife, and a lord over his slave. All which distinct powers happening sometimes together in the same man, if he be considered under these different relations, it may help us to distinguish these powers one from another, and show the difference betwixt a ruler of a commonwealth, a father of a family, and a captain of a galley... Political power, then, I take to be a right of making laws, with penalties of death, and consequently all less penalties for the regulating and preserving of property, and of employing the force of the community in the execution of such laws, and in the defence of the commonwealth from foreign injury, and all this only for the public good... (p.106)

To understand political power aright, and derive it from its original, we must consider what estate all men are naturally in, and that is, a state of perfect freedom to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and persons as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of Nature, without asking leave or depending upon the will of any other man. A state also of equality, wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another, there being nothing more evident than that creatures of the same species and rank, promiscuously born to all the same advantages of Nature, and the use of the same faculties, should also be equal one amongst another, without subordination or subjection, unless the lord and master of them all should, by any manifest declaration of his will, set one above another, and confer on him, by an evident and clear appointment, an undoubted right to dominion and sovereignty... (p.106)

That is where the basic element of classical liberalism - the rights of an individual compared to the power of the state - takes root. Locke does care to set limits:

But though this be a state of liberty, yet it is not a state of licence; though man in that state have an uncontrollable liberty to dispose of his person or possessions, yet he has not liberty to destroy himself, or so much as any creature in his possession, but where some nobler use than its bare preservation calls for it. The state of Nature has a law of Nature to govern it, which obliges every one, and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions... (p.107)

There's arguably a lot more I can quote from Locke, but I'll stop here because this is the point where we can see Locke's influence on Thomas Jefferson, whose work on the Declaration of Independence is the keystone of American political philosophy: From which we derived the belief "that all men are created Equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness."

You might notice Jefferson switches out "possessions" or "property" for "happiness", because that created back in 1776 a rather sticky moral conflict with America's UN-Equal system of chattel slavery on Blacks. Which does point to a more subtle yet still potent problem with liberalism as a political -ism that refers to the main problem overall.

What Locke - and Jefferson, and the rest of the liberal movement of the late 18th Century - aimed for was the establishment and reinforcement of the idea of The Social Contract (edited/cited by Alex Tuckness at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy): 

Locke used the claim that men are naturally free and equal as part of the justification for understanding legitimate political government as the result of a social contract where people in the state of nature conditionally transfer some of their rights to the government in order to better ensure the stable, comfortable enjoyment of their lives, liberty, and property. Since governments exist by the consent of the people in order to protect the rights of the people and promote the public good, governments that fail to do so can be resisted and replaced with new governments...

The most direct reading of Locke’s political philosophy finds the concept of consent playing a central role. His analysis begins with individuals in a state of nature where they are not subject to a common legitimate authority with the power to legislate or adjudicate disputes. From this natural state of freedom and independence, Locke stresses individual consent as the mechanism by which political societies are created and individuals join those societies...

Into all of this Locke and other liberals built up the the concept of "The Rule Of Law": 

The Rule of Law comprises a number of principles of a formal and procedural character, addressing the way in which a community is governed. The formal principles concern the generality, clarity, publicity, stability, and prospectivity of the norms that govern a society. The procedural principles concern the processes by which these norms are administered, and the institutions—like courts and an independent judiciary that their administration requires...

In this, Liberalism subsists on a structured, procedural form of governance where the people as is their right elect leaders, the leaders create laws and enforce them, and the courts balance things out by defining the laws. If that system breaks down in any way, liberals - if any were in charge - would make changes to the laws and realign the administration and argue for judicial decisions to keep the system going.

This is how the Founding Fathers - balanced between more "conservative" world-views of business and class culture, with the "liberal" world-views of democratic/republic principles and legal stability - worked themselves from makeshift state-level confederations into a "strong" federal Constitutional system designed to provide the individual freedoms promised by their liberalism while guaranteeing that chaos/anarchy and the threat of European monarchism (the Absolutism of the day) did not threaten the American way of life. 

This is why when arguing about the nature (well, the sins) of Conservatism I disagreed with Frank Wilhoit's contention that Conservatism was the only American -ism. Wilhoit believed Conservatism - the modern, twisted version of it - had driven all other -isms out of the political landscape. My contention is that Conservatism - obsessed with seizing and maintaining political/economic/social control for the elite few - exists today as a counterpoint to Liberalism - the guarantees of individual rights within a shared community - which persists as a primary American ideology because the institutions it built - our entire Constitutional system of checks and balances - remain standing.

The problem with our modern Liberalism is how it has blinded itself to the perpetuation of that constitutional system, even as it is collapsing on itself from Far Right conservative misrule.

That Rule of Law that liberals insist on - believe still functions normally - is under attack as trump and his underlings both in the Executive and Legislative branches work to undo all of it: Either through attacking civil liberties of Americans and legal residents, or dismantling/shutting down federal agencies without following procedure or getting legislative consent as Locke intended. I've said this before: A lot of our constitutional federal system relied a lot on Good Faith, that all parties involved were acting for a common purpose or at least with genuine conviction to do the right thing. Without that, without the "unwritten rules" of governance that our nation's relied on for centuries to make things work within both the letter and the spirit of the law, the system's falling apart.

And yet, our current Democratic liberal leadership - that should be in active opposition to the damage trump and the radical Conservative Far Right are inflicting on that system - are still acting - almost deluding themselves - as though the political norms can still be upheld. They're so beholden to the Liberal ideology of the Social Contract that they're opening themselves to manipulation by their Conservative opponents to accelerate the constitutional system's collapse.

The likes of Minority Leader Schumer, and half the state governors planning to run for the Presidency in 2028 - as though a corrupt trump won't shut down elections altogether to seize power permanently - are going through the motions like the political norms they're used to will still be there after trump and the wingnut conservatives have burned it all down. They don't see the urgency or dangers of the moment, because they want to believe the liberal foundations of our nation will somehow survive even without action or defense on their part. They don't want to act in ways that would upset their understanding of that Social Contract: those unspoken norms, those natural rights.

The other problem with adhering to those norms of The Social Contract - that individual rights are upheld through the law, and with justice for all - is how uneven how unequal the enforcement of that Social Contract can be. Even as liberalism as an ideology demands equality for all as a right, in practice our liberal systems have a hard time enforcing or even defining those equal rights because even liberalism desires stability - a status quo - over change. 

You have to remember, even the liberal Founding Fathers compromised on the American system of Black slave labor to get the Declaration approved and the Constitution enacted. The liberalism of early American politics, business, and culture allowed slavery to thrive and spread to where it threatened our nation's well-being by the 1850s, and did little to stop the steady march towards Civil War when the spiritual and political harm of slavery could no longer be tolerated. It became the breaking point of the Social Contract, one that required a full Reconstruction and amendment reforms to repair... and which was left unfinished by the 1870s once the Social Contract (between White leaderships) was reimposed, leading to a century of Jim Crow inequality requiring another round of Civil Rights reforms by the 1960s to achieve even a modicum of justice under the Rule of Law. (All now threatened by a very anti-liberal trump regime undoing every Civil Rights act and social shift of the last 60 years)

Even as that Civil War allowed more left-leaning progressives among the liberal powers to enact major reforms involving education, agriculture, business, and law, and even as the Civil Rights movement attempted even further reforms, those reforms were not equally enforced to ensure the liberal system lived up to its own ideals. This is Liberalism's darkest flaw: It relies on a shared agreed-upon social order that bends too much to the corrupt world-view of more conservative, self-serving ideologues.

This is why there's a power struggle between traditional (classical) Liberals and more progressive (socialist) elements of the Democratic Party pushing for radical reforms and stronger equality for all to undo the damages of conservative elites eager to bring back Divine Right of trumps Kings to dominate us all: Liberals are wary of even incremental changes to the political system if it throws their understanding of the Social Contract into chaos.

There are other elements of Liberalism - such as the early adoption of Capitalism as an economic reform against the authoritarian corruption of mercantilism, without realizing how greed undermined Capitalism like any other economic -ism - that would require more discussion, but I've spent too long trying to hammer this essay out and I need to refocus on other outrages and observations of the current train wreck(s) we're enduring.

In short: Liberalism's problem isn't that it's weak, or vacillating when confronted by conservative or even fascist opposition. It's a genuinely well-informed, well-founded -ism compared to the other more destructive political beliefs that rise and fall with the cycles of history. Liberalism's problem is that it holds too much faith in a Social Contract that's too easily shredded and requires the same repatching over and over. At some point, our modern system of liberalism (neoliberal, I think) has to reposition itself on the chessboard and realize a more profound, truly just system of equality and opportunity has to be forged.