Our Military Implosion

Update: Thank you Batocchio for providing another link at Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up this morning. As the attacks on Iran seem to be intensifying this morning (April 7th) into full-scale genocide, please everyone stay safe but please also keep standing against this stupid, globally destructive war. 

Also Update: Just posted my thoughts this morning (April 7th) about our slide into genocide. Goddamn trump and every idiot who supported him.

The damage being done to our nation's military - not by our enemies but by our own leaders - in the middle of a goddamn war is a straight-up nightmare (via Tom Nichols at the Atlantic): 

The United States is in the middle of a major war, but that didn’t stop Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on Thursday from firing General Randy George, America’s most senior Army officer. George was the Army’s chief of staff, and he was cashiered along with another four-star general, David Hodne, and Major General William Green Jr., the top Army chaplain, in what has been a rolling purge by Hegseth of senior officers—particularly those close to the Secretary of the Army, Dan Driscoll.

Firing the Army chaplain in particular is a hell of a move, something that's never happened before, and allegedly by someone in Hegseth who claims to be of Christian faith. A little more on that later.

Why were these men fired while U.S. forces are fighting overseas? The Defense Department has given no official reason for their dismissals, but likely they are the latest victims of Hegseth’s vindictive struggles with the Army, which he feels treated him poorly—the service “spit me out,” he said in his 2024 book—as he struggles in a job for which he remains singularly unqualified.

Hegseth began his tenure by acting against what he sees as a Pentagon infested with DEI hires. He pushed for the removal of the then–chairman of the Joint Chiefs, C. Q. Brown, who is Black, and he fired a raft of female military leaders, replacing them all with men. But dumping the Army chief of staff in the middle of a war, without explanation, is a reckless move even by Hegseth’s standards. George is a decorated combat veteran who was slated to stay in his job until 2027, and he has never publicly feuded with Hegseth—despite having good reason to do so.

This is where firing the Army Chaplain becomes an issue, because Green - guess what - is Black. Hegseth didn't see the man's qualifications as a preacher or an officer: all he saw was a "Woke" hire and let his racist world-view push Green out the door.

Making this all worse is how Hegseth - fulfilling trump's own dark hatreds - is clearly attempting to redesign our prestigious armed forces to reflect his own recklessness, viciousness, and disdain for others.

Trump and Hegseth have been on a clear mission to politicize the U.S. military, and to turn it into an armed extension of the MAGA movement. Hegseth regularly proselytizes, both for Trump and for his right-wing evangelical beliefs, from the Pentagon podium. He has intervened in Army promotions, recently culling four colonels—two Black men and two women—from the list for advancement to brigadier general. (This may be the tip of the iceberg: NBC is now reporting that Hegseth has also canceled the promotions, across multiple services, of at least a dozen minority and female officers.)

...Even in less dangerous times, the public would still have a right to answers about such an unprecedented purge of the senior U.S. military ranks. These officers are all people with long and distinguished records of service; none of them has been charged with any wrongdoing, and none of them has been accused of any kind of incompetence or disloyalty. They all seem to have committed only the offense of being part of a military institution that Hegseth—who still harbors obvious bitterness about his undistinguished and ultimately shortened military career—wants to restock with MAGA loyalists.

Instead of maintaining a military that spent decades developing a genuine system of merit based on qualifications and understanding of how things work, Hegseth is switching that out for a system openly based on toadying, ego-stroking, and posturing. Granted, some of that does happen in any organization, but at least the Defense Dept. tried to keep that on the down-low to avoid incompetency blowing everything up. Hegseth wants that as Standard Operating Procedure.

And while the U.S. military has a rather scary history of religious fervor among the ranks, they've tried to keep it moderated and leveled out between the various faiths (and among different Christian beliefs). Hegseth doesn't care about that: He's openly pushing the Christianist evangelical platform of Holy War in a way we've never seen from our political leadership in previous wars (not even during the GWOT versus the Taliban and Iraqi Sunnis). Today, a major scandal erupted when he staged a Good Friday prayer service... that failed to invite the Catholics - a world church currently criticizing the unjust war against Iran - to one of their major holy days (from Jennifer Bendery at HuffPost):

The Pentagon has invited more than 3,500 employees to attend a Good Friday service at its in-house chapel. Except it’s only for Protestants, not Catholics.

“Just a friendly reminder: There will be a Protestant Service (No Catholic Mass) for Good Friday today at the Pentagon Chapel,” reads a Friday email sent by Air Force leadership, a copy of which was shared by an employee.

“I guess so the Catholics know their kind ain’t welcome,” said this employee, who requested anonymity to speak about internal communications. “It’s so ridiculous.”

A Pentagon spokesperson confirmed it is not hosting another, separate religious service for Catholic employees.

I'm Unitarian, and even I know - well, I have my ex-Catholic dad as a source - that Good Friday is one of the Big Ones, especially where they perform the Stations of the Cross. Even the Pope does it (well, when he's young enough to handle carrying the heavy crucifix). To exclude the Catholics from a Good Friday service - even one meant for Protestant service - is a huge insult to that church. Considering how many Catholics are in the U.S. armed forces (roughly 1.8 million Americans in uniform or families or base employment) this could well have serious effects on morale.

And as Nichols noted earlier, Hegseth is clearly waging a war on women in the military, allowing sexism to affect the chain of command. He's risking our armed forces at the worst possible time for the dumbest (and selfish) reasons (from Edith Olmstead at the New Republic):

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s rampant racism and sexism extend further than we previously knew.

Hegseth has made efforts to block or delay the promotion of more than one dozen female and Black officers across the Army, Air Force, Navy, and the Marines, according to nine U.S. officials familiar with the process who spoke with NBC News.

“There is not a single service that has been immune to this level of involvement by Hegseth,” one of the U.S. officials told NBC News...

The apparent reasons to block these promotions varied but seemed to have nothing to do with conduct—more with the identities of the officers and what they represented to Hegseth.

These are qualified officers: People who have served in the military for decades, who know how things work and how to get the best out of the personnel under their commands. Hegseth is kicking out people who know their jobs, all because Hegseth doesn't know his own job.

This ongoing war - not just the war in Iran, and South America; but the Culture War against America's move towards social justice - is going to get worse, and it's not going to end until these goddamn wingnuts from the Far Right are out of power forever. Pray for that.

What If: When THAT Happens

There's an old joke, no one is sure of the origins other than it came about during the early days of daily newspaper publishing. Thing is, Franklin D. Roosevelt reportedly told this joke a lot during his tenure as President, so it's attributed to him:

A kid starts working Monday at a newsstand, where he meets a businessman who comes up, buys the morning paper, glances at the headline, then tosses the paper down in anger. That businessman keeps coming back all week doing the same: buys the morning paper, looks at the headline, tosses the paper away. On Friday, the kid asks the businessman when he approaches "Hey mister, why do you buy the paper only to throw it away?"

The businessman answers "I'm looking for the obituary."

The kid replies "Well mister, the obituaries are on the back pages."

To which the businessman snarls "Kid, when the son of a bitch I'm waiting for dies, it'll be on the front page!"

It's a joke I think of often, especially in this day and age because, well...

It's not like anyone is openly writing about it, other than the occasional news report of You Know Who showing signs of physical injury or illness, like recently (via Digby):

His doctor just said he was using a cream on his neck without announcing that he has shingles. But that’s almost certainly what he has. I had them in the same place. Combined with the stress and his age, he’s not feeling well at all. That can’t be good for the world.

There's been a lot of talk on social media, about the bruised hands, the increased signs of dementia, the inability to stay awake, etc. But nobody wants to say it too much too loudly (mostly because nobody wants to jinx it), but among a lot of the non-MAGA people this particular thought is now out there: "I can't wait for IT to happen."

Even the McSweeney's site doesn't exactly spell it out, but you don't need to read between the lines:

It’s impossible to say when IT will HAPPEN. But it can’t be too long until IT HAPPENS. Looking at the data (age, high-stress job, cardiac history), it is statistically plausible that IT will HAPPEN in the next thirty-six months.

Eighteen, if you factor in hamburger consumption and all the weird bruising.

Of course, it doesn’t feel right to want IT to HAPPEN. And it’s obviously not okay to try to make IT HAPPEN. That’s not what this is ABOUT, just to make things CLEAR LEGALLY as far as VARIOUS AGENCIES are concerned.

But regardless, IT is going to HAPPEN. So you’re allowed to think about IT...

When IT HAPPENS, it will probably be FEELING. Just a huge, overwhelming sense of FEELING, the kind where you didn’t even realize how starved you were for FEELING. Punctuated with alternating waves of SECOND FEELING, as well as SENSATION.

Plus, a sudden absence of THIRD FEELING, which makes you realize the toll of A CONSTANT BASELINE OF LOW-GRADE THIRD FEELING for ten goddamn TIME PERIODS straight, even though you were still plenty aware of THIRD FEELING, trust me...

For all the spiritual and emotional catharsis the event could be, for all the whispered wishes every time every American to the Left of the John Birchers prays at night... what WOULD really happen when IT happens?

Well, the simplest answer to that is the 25th Amendment will kick in, and Vice President JD Vance will get sworn in as President and take over the reins of the White House. It will be done within minutes, maybe an hour or two just to make sure You Know Who is officially an ex-shitgibbon. 

After that, chaos will prevail as the entire Far Right ecosystem between the wingnut media, the wingnut preachers, the wingnut congresscritters, and a handful of guys named Dave begin to fight each other over the rotting corpse of trump's MAGA empire.

For starters: While Vance is going to be in prime position to claim the mantle of MAGA leadership, he's not exactly well-liked even among the Republican base. He's relatively new to politics and doesn't have the network in place within the party ranks to seize control. Above all, he really doesn't have anyone he can trust to help corral a fracturing coalition that will fracture because others will scheme in the backrooms to undercut Vance and seize the MAGA crown for themselves.

Even within trump's Cabinet, there at least two people - Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth - who could challenge Vance for leadership of that rabid MAGA base. Rubio in particular has sold himself as the future of the Republican Party ever since 2010 when he got elected Senator, and happily marketed by the Beltway punditry as the GOP Savior... only to get undercut by trump's rise to power in 2016. If Rubio has any presidential ambitions still in him, he has to known his window of opportunity is closing soon, and having that unpopular Vance blocking his way isn't going to help him.

Granted, in this scenario Vance will likely purge the Cabinet of anyone he thinks will work against him, which likely kicks Rubio out of State and out of any position to sabotage whatever bankrupt foreign policy our nation has left. That could give Rubio the chance to play spoiler for party leadership on the outside, criticizing any miscues Vance would likely commit in office, and primary challenge Vance for 2028. Thing is, in modern presidential politics it's been rare to challenge an incumbent let alone beat them, so there's no guarantee for Rubio to win that way (the best possibility is that early primarying exposes Vance and he declines to run for re-election like Truman and LBJ. But in that scenario the GOP primaries become wide open for another crazy field of multiple candidates).

Any "What If" guessing about a post-trump aftermath relies on one key question: How will that rabid Far Right MAGA base react to losing their golden idol trump? It depends a lot on whomever among the Republican leadership that voter base would see as the worthy successor... which becomes its own problem. There isn't anyone that the MAGAts seem to respect as a future standard bearer: Not Vance, not Rubio, not either of trump's kids with political ambitions (junior and that other guy). There are other hardline panderers among the GOP ranks that *could* appeal; but some of them - Marjorie Taylor Greene comes to mind - have turned against trump publicly and could be hurting their own standing, or others like Rick "Medicare Fraud" Scott or Jim "Sex Scandal" Jordan who have alienated other party leaders to where a schism in Congress is unavoidable.

This is the thing about trump's devoted followers: They are more devoted to HIM than to the Republican Party itself. Given opportunities to change their support to other political figures, they refuse. We saw this in the 2024 primaries even with trump facing a number of criminal and civil charges (and convictions) that normally would make a candidate vulnerable: The likes of Ron DeSantis did his best to "own the libs" the way trump did, only to get rejected hard because the Real Thing was still available and the MAGA base did not want to abandon trump.

I've railed about this before: trump habitually, constantly violated social and political norms and yet kept gaining more voter support. he defied political gravity every time a scandal would have ruined anyone else. Of all of trump's business failings, he is good at one thing: Marketing himself. he wields a horrifying and dark charisma that claimed dominion over a section of the American population - the haters, the fearmongers, the grifters - that no else can reach.

trump is shameless, in a way nearly every other person on the planet isn't. A lot of politicians know how to appeal, how to pander, how to demagogue: None of them can sink themselves to the level of shamelessness trump can, which is why none of them can appeal to that MAGA base the way he does.

Vance tries to do it and gets mocked. DeSantis tried and failed. If Greene or other Far Right figures try to rise up and fill the vacuum of hate, they arguably won't be able to fill that void no matter how vile or vicious they behave. Because they run the risk - through self-awareness, through hesitation or moderation to keep themselves even vaguely human - of succumbing to political gravity where trump never fell.

As for the fracturing nature of the Republican Party itself: trump has made himself so indispensable to the party's organization and survival that there is a genuine possibility the GOP will fracture once he's gone. Again, we could see a civil war between the various trump wannabes rising up to pander to the rabid Far Right base for the 2028 presidency. But we could also witness a Republican Party falling apart between the various factions that are torn between keeping our international prestige high (and stopping Russian / Chinese hegemony from taking our top spot), keeping our business overlords happy (by ending trump's disastrous tariff wars), or pandering to an "America First" mob base that also wants a Christian Nationalist war against the heathens to bring about the End of Days.

A lot of that remains speculation. When - IF - THAT happens, we'll have to see what actually plays out.

Something we should prepare for when THAT happens is the likelihood of trump's devoted base going on the warpath. trump has called often at his rallies for his supporters to act out and attack others. We've seen what happened on January 6th, in spite of the MAGA faithful trying to whitewash / excuse the horrors of that riot. This isn't speculation: there is genuine fear if/when trump dies, his base will react with fire and fury.

We can look to how the Far Right reacted after the assassination of one of their media elites Charlie Kirk. The conservative punditry tried to turn Kirk into a Free Speech saint - ignoring all the hate speech he promoted and the colleges he attempted to censor - and attacked anyone on social media they viewed as dishonoring Kirk's memory. They actively got people fired from jobs for their own free speech rights, and a number of people and institutions were harassed with death threats.

At the same time, that same conservative punditry turned on each other trying to make themselves into Kirk's heir to his conservative empire. The likes of Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Nick Fuentes, and Ben Shapiro pulled out the knives to backstab each other to claim the audience and financial base for their own. Owens in particular has gone after Charlie's widow Erika, who's been using the martyrdom to rise to political power on her own. Some of the rancor is over the growing anti-Semitism driving the Far Right rage conflicting with the public necessity of siding with Israel in the Middle East chaos going on right now. But a lot of it is really about who gets to be the next Trump - the role Charlie Kirk was growing into - and profiting from it all when trump himself kicks the bucket.

The unity we see in the modern Republican Party - the Far Right Conservative movement as a whole - really only exists as a money-making machine for those at the top who can profit from the graft, the insider trading, the kickbacks, the marketing of hats and t-shirts, the influence peddling, and open bribes. All of it led by the Grifter-in-Chief trump who's trying to squeeze every nickel he can (pennies are phased out, by the way) before he has to answer to a wrathful deity.

And that's the thing. A lot of the corruption trump is pulling right now - and a lot of the half-baked foreign and domestic policy debacles he keeps inflicting upon himself - shows all the trademarks of a con artist half-aware he's running out of time (look at how desperate trump is to see that hideous ballroom of his finished). His end is coming, and Judgment cometh right soon.

It's going to be a question of surviving the chaos that follows.

Observations of the November 2025 Elections

So there were a number of elections across the United States - in what is an off-year between the 4-year presidential cycle and the congressional midterms - this November 4th 2025, involving city, state, and a few special federal elections that tend to indicate the overall mood of the American electorate heading into the 2026 midterms.

At the top of the list were key elections in Virginia and New Jersey for governorships and other state officials, a retention vote for Democratic judges in Pennsylvania, a special election in Texas' US House 18th district, a referendum in California that would grant the Dems in control there to gerrymander against the Red state gerrymandering attempting to rig the 2026 House districts for Republicans, 

And the top observation - considering how the Democrats and mostly liberal-leaning referenda won the votes across nearly the entire country even in Deep Red Republican places! - is: Wow, a lot of voters are PISSED at the Republicans.

Via Stephen Fowler at NPR:

Democrats flipped two seats on Georgia's statewide Public Service Commission by wide margins, one of many surprise victories for the party Tuesday up and down the ballot in the handful of races across the country.

Polling shows the Democratic Party is historically unpopular, but at polling places this year voters have helped the party overperform in elections against the backdrop of President Trump's even less popular policies.

Beyond the blowout victories in the New Jersey and Virginia governors' races, Zohran Mamdani winning a majority of votes in New York City's mayoral election and California voters approving a plan to temporarily redraw the state's congressional districts to add Democrat-leaning districts, the party continued its trend of electoral success in the 2025 general election...

In terms of blowouts, the governor wins for Abigail Spanberger in Virginia and Mikie Sherill in New Jersey were around 13 percent over their Republican opponents. In this age of polarized voting bases, getting to double-digit wins means A) your own base (Democratic) of voters showed up in droves, B) their base (Republican) failed to show, and/or C) the independent voters that tend to go 50-50 (at best 60-40 leaning to one party) really hated everyone and everything the Republicans were offering this time around.

But those results alone don't describe just how overwhelming the Blue Wave was this year, even when you throw in how Democrats in Virginia secured control of both houses of the state legislature. Back to Fowler:

In Georgia, Peter Hubbard and Alicia Johnson will be the newest members of the state's five-person public utility regulator after earning roughly 60% of the vote. It's the first time Democrats have won a nonfederal statewide office there since 2006 and one where soaring energy costs and displeasure with incumbents dominated the race.

Pennsylvania voters chose to retain three state Supreme Court judges that were first elected as Democrats after millions of dollars in outside spending driven by conservative billionaire Jeff Yass' efforts to reshape the state court's politics. Democrats also won special elections for a seat on Pennsylvania's Superior Court and a seat on its Commonwealth Court.

Also in Pennsylvania, Democrats swept the top "row offices" in the purple-hued Bucks County, electing the county's first-ever Democratic district attorney and defeating an incumbent Republican sheriff a year after Trump narrowly won there. Democrats similarly notched commanding victories in county executive races in Erie, Lehigh and Northampton counties, all bellwether counties in recent presidential elections.

At the state legislative level, Mississippi Democrats have broken a GOP supermajority in the state Senate after flipping two seats in that chamber plus another pickup in the state House. A federal court ordered lawmakers to redraw 14 total House and Senate districts after finding the maps drawn in 2022 discriminated against Black voters...

In many local races across the country, Democrats touted victories that will reshape their communities, like the flipping of all three city council seats in Georgetown, S.C., the unseating of the last remaining Republican city council member in Orlando, Fla., and winning back mayoral races in Connecticut...

I knew things were really skewing well for Democrats when I heard about those Georgia state committee wins. In a Deep South state heavily dominated by Republicans, and where any Democratic wins in the past decade were down to the wire, getting over 60 percent of statewide voters in blowout wins is a huge sign of anger by voters towards the Far Right GOP.

An opinion piece by Rex Huppke at USA Today spells it out:

Polling had already shown how much Americans broadly dislike everything the Trump administration is doing. But in the first election of Trump’s second term in office, voters in red, blue and purple states made clear they aren’t buying the smug cruelty and king-like behavior the president and his lackeys are selling.

In the most high-profile races – for mayor of New York City and governors of Virginia and New Jersey – Democrats fended off millions of right-wing dollars and relentless Islamophobic and anti-transgender fearmongering to win all three offices convincingly.

What happened in New York City where the Far Right, the billionaire elites, and even the mainstream media attacked winner Zohran Mamdani for his Muslim heritage underlined the racism and fear that drives the Far Right. And in Virginia, the Republican candidates' open transphobia - in an attempt to build on the DEI fearmongering that propelled outgoing governor Youngkin in 2021 - ignored the voters' ongoing concerns about cost-of-living/affordability issues that are still hampering a majority of Americans in this post-pandemic world.

In short: the Republicans were too desperate to mudsling their Democratic opponents to remember that most voters still care about their financial and familial well-being. They were able to lie about the price of eggs in 2024 to ruin Biden/Harris' and the Democrats' chances to win, but with the GOP in full control of the federal government - and responsible for the economic downturns happening under that control - they couldn't fearmonger their way out of this election cycle. As Huppke notes:

This is the kind of ballot-box walloping that’s earned, highlighting the simple fact that Trump has gone to great lengths to anger and outrage Americans since his second term started in January.

Consider this multitudinous array of deceptions, blunders and outrageous acts:

After promising to lower food prices and inflation on Day 1, food prices are increasing and inflation has risen every month since April and is now higher than it was in January.

The U.S. government is in its longest-ever shutdown because Republicans want to do away with Affordable Care Act subsidies and Democrats won’t agree. Health insurance premiums are skyrocketing, and now food aid is in limbo because the Trump administration is delaying funding to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, putting millions of Americans in danger of going hungry...

Also in short: trump and his Republican allies are acting like assholes. That may impress the mainstream punditry - who always misinterpret arrogance for leadership - but it doesn't impress most voters.

The night before SNAP benefits expired, Trump posted a slew of photos showing off his fancy marble remodel of the Lincoln Bathroom, then he attended a "Great Gatsby"-themed Halloween party at his Florida resort.

Trump demolished the East Wing of the White House to make room for a massive ballroom that nobody asked for, thumbing his nose at the optics of desecrating a historic building and erecting a monument to opulence while Americans struggle to afford meat.

The GOP has secured tax cuts for billionaires while slashing Medicaid and putting a squeeze on rural hospitals...

None of this is popular. None of this has made any regular American’s life better. None of this has brought down grocery bills, made housing more affordable or provided better health insurance.

Perhaps a president who gleefully shows off a video of himself wearing a crown and flying a jet that drops poop on the heads of protesting Americans is a cool thing inside the MAGA bubble. Maybe anti-transgender hate and cruelty against immigrants bring the good kind of tingle to a small subset of the population.

But as the Nov. 4 blue wave demonstrated, most Americans don’t find Trump’s childishness cool. They don’t get off on cruelty. And they aren’t, in any way, shape or form, feeling the good kind of tingle.

While it's good news that a sizable plurality of American voters across the whole nation are wising up to how bad the Republicans under trump are performing, the bad news is that past experience with Republican setbacks is that these assholes will double-down on the ineptitude, cruelty, and graft. Especially trump: he can never admit he is in the wrong, that his conduct is offensive, or that his policies aren't working (and will never work).

It's going to take the 2026 midterms and the other state-level elections that year for most American voters to hold the Republicans and this crooked trump accountable for the ongoing damage they're committing and threaten to make worse. That is, if the Republican-controlled Supreme Court will let us have fair elections next year... /rage

Keep resisting, America. This isn't over.

The Shadow That Was Dick Cheney

The big news today has been the passing of former Vice President (and administrative tone-setter) Richard "Dick" Cheney.

The best thing I can say about this was already said back in 2014:

Considering the former Vice President's recent hypocritical and vile comments about Obama's handling of the Iraqi mess Cheney left behind, about the prolonged history of Cheney's lies and distortions, about the thousands of lives broken and killed under his orders, there is only one thing to say:

Arrest the son of a bitch for war crimes and shove his goddamn criminality back into his goddamn face.

That's all that needs to be said now and forever.  No more television interviews.  No more speaking events.  No more book deals.  Send him to jail, put him on trial.  Make him answer for the torture regime, the lies about WMDs, the war-profiteering, the folly of waging two wars with massive debt and without end.

I also said a few things in 2013, when I reviewed Bush the Lesser's presidential tenure, noting how the real power in that White House flowed through and from the Veep's office:

So if Bush the Lesser was really a Passive-Positive at heart, something that Ivins points to, why was Dean so convinced that Bush was really an Active-Negative?

Because much of the Bush administration was a disaster of obsessive secrecy, reckless war-making, and abuse of powers that one regularly sees in an A-N administration.

Mind you, Passive-Positives preside over scandal-plagued tenures - Reagan's was chock-full, as was Harding's and Grant's - but for different reasons than an Active-Negative's such as Johnson or Nixon.  Pass-Pos' scandals are due more to the nature of such Presidents allowing their cronies free range to embezzle and indulge, whereas A-N's scandals stem from the President's own personal faults and obsessions...

It might help to understand that a Passive-Positive President is by nature too trusting of his allies and cronies: Harding is a perfect example.  It's often noted in a Pass-Pos administration the tenor of the office defined more by an underling or group of underlings (much like Franklin Pierce's seemed more dictated by his Southern Democrat allies, and Reagan's with regards to the Iran-Contra scandal).  With that consideration, also note that during Bush the Lesser administration we had the most politically-powerful VICE President our nation ever saw in Dick Cheney...

Cheney was different.  Cheney seemed to dominate Bush the Lesser's administration the minute he was given any authority by Bush, and that even began during the 2000 campaign.  Entrusted as a family friend of his father's, Bush put Cheney in charge of finding his Vice Presidential ticket balancer.  There seemed to have been a review process but in the end the selection was... Cheney himself, which puzzled people then but makes more sense when you look at Cheney more closely...

This was a man who was perfectly willing to tell a fellow politician on the floor of the Senate to "go fuck yourself."  Granted, this wasn't a full-on assault with a walking cane, but certain rules of decorum apply (you're supposed to save that for the parking lot).  This was a guy who told a fellow Secretary of Treasury that "deficits don't matter (regarding more massive tax cuts that even the Secretary felt were unneeded).  This is our due."

This was a man who chaired the secretive energy policy meetings.  This was a Vice President who had his office and had his friends in the Defense Department set up a competing "investigative office" to undercut CIA intelligence that didn't fit their "Iraq Has WMDs" narrative.  This was a Veep whose Chief of Staff "Scooter" Libby was indicted for his role in revealing the classified identity of a CIA agent whose husband had publicly questioned the WMD story.

This was a Vice President who used his unprecedented level of authority to ignore standard procedures on a regular basis.  When confronted by the National Archives' Information Security Oversight Office - the ones who handle and store classified materials on a daily basis, mind you - about refusing to turn over materials starting from 2003 into 2007, Cheney did his best to eliminate that part of the National Archives altogether.  Cheney's argument?  As Vice President serving both Executive and Legislative duties (as President of the Senate), he was exempt (the "Fourth Branch" of government argument).  Basically claiming he didn't have to answer to anybody.  Not even to the President.

In short: Everything nasty, vulgar, illegal, and corrupt about the modern Republican Party evolved entirely from whatever dark template that spawned Dick.

That Cheney came to openly despise donald trump - his true heir to the Far Right regime Cheney engineered over the decades - is mostly due to how he viewed trump as too self-serving and stupid to be the Forever Dictator of a Republican-ruled America.

There are a number of obits today burying Cheney for the sins he'd committed while he sat in power, so I'll offer a number of links here so you can get a more informed understanding of how soulless that person was.

Mark Danner at Salon: Dick Cheney's Dark Legacy

David Frum at Atlantic: There Was Only One Dick Cheney All Along

George Chidi at The Guardian: Dick Cheney Remains Divisive In Death

Eoin Higgins at The Intercept: Dick Cheney Doesn't Deserve Your Heartfelt Eulogies

When you consider how the only one more hated was Henry Kissinger, Cheney is leaving a foul legacy indeed.

P.S. also sharing Stonekettle's simple observation on Bluesky:

Well, hell. Looks like I'm going to need to drink more coffee. Dick Cheney died and I'm going to need a full bladder for the funeral.

— Stonekettle (@stonekettle.bsky.social) November 4, 2025 at 8:44 AM

Just sayin', 2 liter bottles of Mountain Dew pass through much faster...

 

Republicans Ruling Over the Ashes: 2025 Edition

Update: Thank you Steve in Manhattan for sharing this article on the Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up! Just to let you all know, I spotted a church with its parking lot full on a Monday morning. It's a church I drive by all the time going to work, and I've never seen the parking lot full on a Monday morning. It's also a church I know offers a weekly food bank, and my first thought was "is that a run on their food bank?"

I didn't write much about the latest Republican-backed government shutdown during this long month of October, only because it'd be me repeating the same line of "why the fuck do people keep voting in Republican assholes who don't want government to work in the first place?"

Still, what's happened this 2025 has been one of the longest federal government shutdowns in modern times, and at least this time around most Americans know who to blame (via Julianna Bragg at Axios): 

As the government shutdown stretches into its 30th day, more Americans blame President Trump and Republicans than Democrats for the impasse, according to a Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll.

Why it matters: More Americans are growing deeply worried about what is now the second-longest government shutdown in U.S. history — one that will soon cut off food stamp benefits and has already left more than a million Americans without a paycheck...

By the numbers: Almost half of Americans — 45% — say Trump and the GOP are responsible for the ongoing shutdown, while 33% blamed Democrats and another 22% say they're not sure who's responsible...

Yes, but: 63% of Americans say they disapprove of Trump's management of the federal government, while only 36% approve...

Context: The Senate failed to advance a bill to end the shutdown for the 13th time Wednesday, even as disruptions impact air travel and hundreds of thousands of federal employees remain furloughed.

As much as the Republican leadership - Speaker Mike Johnson especially - are trying to blame the Democrats for refusing to surrender forever for sticking to their agenda of reducing health care premiums to the ACA, there are enough observers who note that as the Republicans control both the House and the Senate, they could pass their own budget and get around any filibuster the Dems could threaten.

Except the Republicans don't want to. They know damn well that their current fiscal plans will gut social services for their own Red State voters and hurt millions of (White) American families who'll finally realize those trumpian tax cuts for the uber-rich were bad for the rest of the nation their own. So they want the Democrats to "compromise" on a "bipartisan deal" that the Far Right media can blame on Democrats when that "deal" nukes the countryside.

(as a side note, Speaker Johnson doesn't want to reopen the House for business because he'd be forced to seat a newly elected Democrat filling a vacant seat that would put in motion a vote to release the Epstein Files filled with trump's dirty deeds)

As much as we've stumbled through October without major disruptions to the United States' well-being - if only because some of the damage from DOGE gutting our agencies already caused disruptions - we're getting to that point in the GOP Shutdown where the emergency efforts behind the scenes by whatever's left in charge can't keep this house of cards standing. We're getting into the winter holidays of Thanksgiving and Christmas, massive economic cycles for our food and retail businesses now starting to see trump's tariffs squeeze them in painful ways. We're getting to the point where the community organizations struggling to fill the gaps in the social safety nets aren't going to keep up. 

We're staring into the dark abyss of a painful unhappy winter season for the United States, all because the Republicans hope to burn it all down so they can rule the ashes.

And yes goddammit, we warned you all this would happen. And the bills for all that cruelty, ignorance,  and greed is coming due - again - faster than you all realize.

Brief Thoughts About Hegseth's Craven Urge to Rename the Department of Defense

Update: Thanks again to Steve In Manhattan for including my blog on the Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up. 

P.S. I am noticing an insane uptick in visits to my blog even though I can't see where the traffic is coming from. I'm worried the new traffic is coming from AI vacuuming up all Internet content. Anyone got suggestions on how to block that AI? Please comment below or skeet me at Bluesky @paulwartenberg.bsky.social

Hegseth and trump - and other chickenhawk Republicans - want to rename the Department of Defense to the Department of War mostly because the Ministry of Peace (MiniPax) was already copyrighted.

As Tom Nichols at the Altantic notes, this is all ego-stroking and a waste of time (paywalled):

Last month, when the plan was still just a hypothetical, the president was asked why he favored it. He said that Department of War “just sounded better” and that it would be a callback to the name under which U.S. forces fought in the two world wars. But the change is also a reflection of how much Trump and Secretary of Defense (his title for now) Pete Hegseth think of themselves as tough guys, real fighters who will no longer trifle with silly names about “defending” things. Hegseth in particular is obsessed with “warfighters”—a clunky Pentagon term that’s been around for far too long—who will engage in “warfighting” with great “lethality.”

Both men seem to think that wimps cower and defend, but real men go on the offensive and whack the bad guys...

It is almost impossible to overstate the inanity of this move. The United States has a Department of Defense for a reason. It was called the “War” Department until 1947, when the dictates of a new and more dangerous world required the creation of a much larger military organization than any in American history...

These leaders understood that America could no longer afford the isolationist luxury of militarizing itself during times of threat and then making soldiers train with wooden sticks when the storm clouds passed. Now, they knew, the security of the country would be a daily undertaking, a matter of ongoing national defense, in which the actual exercise of military force would be only part of preserving the freedom and independence of the United States and its allies.

Defense is a serious job for a nation to uphold, and these clowns can't accept it. Gods help us.

Update: Ron Filipkowski knows exactly why Hegseth is so giddy about being a warmonger.

And there it is …

[image or embed]

— Ron Filipkowski (@ronfilipkowski.bsky.social) September 5, 2025 at 6:09 PM

We are being led by five-year-olds eager to throw punches at the world and making us take the body blows. Considering the recent violation of international waters and the ongoing harassment of nations over tariffs and bullying Denmark over Greenland, we're going to be in a shooting war sooner rather than later. And the US military is going to get mismanaged into disaster after disaster.

I keep saying this: We are royally fucking screwed. 

Observations of the Occupation

During my emotional break(down) away from political blogging for most of this month, trump declaring a "crime emergency" in Washington DC to abuse presidential powers pretty much dominated the news traffic I read.

Deploying various National Guard units and other federal agencies to take over the metro's local law enforcement, trump issued lie after lie justifying his power grab that for all intents is his first big step into authoritarian rule that he will never leave (via Daniel Dale at CNN Politics):

President Donald Trump delivered a barrage of false claims about crime in Washington, DC, during a series of Monday comments defending his takeover of the police force and deployment of the National Guard in the nation’s capital.

Touting an ongoing 11-day period with no reported murders in Washington, Trump falsely claimed it had been “many years” since the city had previously had a murder-free stretch of even a week; in fact, Washington had three such periods since late February of this year, one of them 16 days long. Trump falsely claimed Washington now has not only no murders but “no crime” at all; while reported crime is down during his takeover, there have still been hundreds of offenses. (personal note: including the illegal use of a sandwich, but we'll talk about that a bit later)

Trump falsely claimed Washington had been at an “all-time” high in crime at the end of the Biden administration; in fact, it had been nowhere close to the violent peaks of the early 1990s. And Trump wildly overstated Washington residents’ support for the takeover, baselessly putting it at “95%” even after a poll showed overwhelming local opposition...

It's during this crisis that I look back at the window of opportunity that the Democrats had between 2021 and 2023 when they controlled the House and Senate and the Presidency to where Biden could have pushed for statehood to DC (and Puerto Rico) to avoid these kinds of abuse the federal government can inflict on the locals. Statehood is a serious thing for what is one of our nation's biggest population centers suffering under an outdated fear of the nation's capitol being under attack by its own residents. trump's own attempt at insurrection on January 6th proved it's not the locals that's the problem, it's the partisan agitators from the Republican Party side of things.

And it's still the Republicans pandering to their worst fears and biases, aimed at "urban" metros that Fox Not-News and other Far Right media outlets depict as wretched hives of minorities and liberals. You'll notice all the media attacks aimed at DC, New York City, and Chicago while the metros in Republican-controlled states like Houston and Memphis TN are suffering higher crime rates (per 100,000 people as of 2024). Speaker Mike Johnson can't admit the main city in his Louisiana district - Shreveport - has a higher crime rate than DC.

In the meantime, with all the federal officers and National Guard units deployed across the city the biggest observation is that these extra law enforcement people are... just standing there (via Benjamin Wittes at Lawfare):

I can’t say I found them threatening, though I am admittedly not an undocumented immigrant living in fear of ICE. While a few were armed, they weren’t arresting anyone or pursuing anyone or, actually, doing much of anything. They were all, well, just standing around. 

I am not the only one who has captured photographs of this deployment of National Guard being really boring.

A friend, jogging on the Mall today, noticed this gaggle of them at the World War II Memorial. Notice all the crimes they are not stopping...

The common theme here is that this deployment isn’t really about doing anything. It’s not going to do anything about D.C.’s crime problem, though I’m sure the president will make up whatever numbers he needs to to claim otherwise. And while I’m sure it is creating fear among Washingtonians who have reason to worry about immigration detention and deportation, I don’t think it’s really about that either...

The answer, I think, is nothing more or less than chest-thumping machismo. It’s a dog and fire hydrant thing. Putting troops on the streets, even bored troops who aren’t doing anything except helping people navigate public maps, is a form of dominance...

This is part of the Far Right obsession with Alpha Male status, of using power not to affect change or improvements but just to show off how manly - even the conservative women that love to pose with guns and brag about killing puppies - they are. This is vice signaling to their racist MAGA voting bloc that they are "owning the libs" and making life miserable for all the Blacks, Latinos, Asians, and "deviants" they fear existing in our major cities.

In the meantime, the Real Americans serving in our Guards are stuck outside in DC during the hot and humid month of August picking up trash because they're not really doing anything else except play to trump's dictatorial fantasies.

Even the DC residents - the ones who would be most affected if there were actual crimes taking place - know the whole thing is a staged act, and arguably violations of their own civil liberties while the "crackdown" imposes more curfews and limitations of their rights. The locals are doing what they can with civil protests, but also with more direct efforts to give trump's Justice Department lackeys serious headaches (via Quinta Jurecic at the Atlantic (paywalled)):

It’s rare for grand juries to refuse to indict. It’s even rarer for grand juries to refuse to indict multiple times in a single month—in significant part because prosecutors usually know better than to present shaky cases that might not gain jurors’ approval.

But Donald Trump’s desire to crack down on crime in Washington, D.C., seems to have come at the cost of that good judgment. Over the past month, federal prosecutors in D.C. have failed at least five times to persuade a grand jury to indict a D.C. resident for allegedly attacking federal law enforcement. These are not the only embarrassments suffered recently by federal prosecutors in the District, and judges have begun to lose their patience over missteps and sloppy cases. Despite the president’s promise to “take our capital back,” his law-enforcement surge is struggling in court.

The most recent rebuke by a grand jury involves the case of Alvin Summers, who allegedly scuffled with a U.S. Park Police officer after driving his car onto the Mall. Before that came a grand jury’s refusal to indict Sean Charles Dunn, the man now memorialized as “Sandwich Guy,” who hurled a salami sub at a Customs and Border Protection agent early in Trump’s federal deployment across the capital. The three grand-jury refusals before that all came in a single case: that of Sidney Lori Reid, whom prosecutors charged with a felony—potentially punishable by eight years in prison—over a tangle with FBI and ICE agents while Reid was protesting an immigration arrest. The agents pushed Reid up against a wall, they said, and the resulting scuffle produced a few scrapes to an FBI agent’s hand.

Even the common people who make up these juries know damn well that a Subway BMT footlong is not a lethal weapon (well, unless the gluten count is too high). The infamous saying of "a grand jury can indict a ham sandwich" now has a notable exception.

These juries know this all isn't about "cracking down on crime." They know this is all about the conservative urge to inflict cruelty on the Outsider groups they fear and hate, that this is all performative political bullshit on trump's part to justify his iron-fisted rule from the White House. They see the minor infractions getting enlarged to federal felonies and refuse to play along. They know who's inflicting the harm here - trump's street thugs - and won't accept trump and his lackeys' excuses.

What happens from here depends on the courts - at the district and appellate levels going against trump's power grabs - and on a Republican-controlled Congress now facing the growing discontent of a majority of Americans - even in their own states - who are not enjoying the preening and posing of trump as a strongman while issuing more economic hardships with inflation and disappearing jobs.

While trump is only supposed to issue these "emergencies" as temporary powers, you can see him and his legal cohorts arguing to keep such powers permanent... and to spread such powers further out across America to Blue States and Blue Cities in violation of the Constitution. It's not going to stop with Los Angeles, not with DC, not with what he's planning to do to Chicago next. There is hope that the courts can and will overturn these efforts and rein in trump's abuses... except for the fact that the Roberts Supreme Court have demonstrated they are willing to roll over and beg for anything trump wants to do to the rest of us.

This won't end until trump is out of power and all of his handlers and minions are sitting in jail cells for all the crimes they're committing in his name (at this point, I doubt trump will ever see the inside of a prison ever, goddamn him).

Keep fighting, America. It's not exaggerating to say everything is at stake here.

Fighting the Fear in Florida

It's hard to keep track of all the atrocities trump and his thugs are inflicting on the United States, but this one back in June really stood out as they were pulling this shit in my backyard: 

Pandering to the harsh anti-immigrant war on our American communities, Governor DeSantis and his cronies are fast-tracking a migrant detention center in South Florida (via Rachel Treisman at NPR):

Despite resistance, Florida officials are turning an airfield in the Everglades into a migrant detention center, which they've nicknamed "Alligator Alcatraz" due to its proximity to the apex predators.

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier proposed the project last week, saying in a video posted to X that, in support of the Trump administration's crackdown on illegal immigration, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis had asked state leaders to identify places for temporary detention facilities.

"I think this is the best one, as I call it: Alligator Alcatraz," Uthmeier said, referencing the infamous prison island in San Francisco Bay...

If anyone's paying attention to the overwhelmed ICE "detention facilities" right now, there are serious overcrowding, food availability, and wellness problems to where people are dying in custody. Even this horrific attempt to alleviate crowding at existing facilities won't stop this new prison - it's not a detention center, trust me - from being overcrowded itself. Stephen Miller wants his fucking quotas filled, and doesn't give a damn about treating his and ICE's victims with any basic decency or civil rights.

From what people can see happening at the airfield - there are already protestors gathering, bless them - it's looking like a bunch of portable classrooms getting converted into barracks, which I guarantee you will not be adequately air-conditioned. I doubt there will be any serviceable water or sewage considering that abandoned airfield would need months of dedicated construction efforts to make it genuinely livable.

This isn't going to be a safe or healthy place to get imprisoned...

And it turns out I - and the environmental and civil rights activists as well - was right about that hellhole being unsafe, unsound, and inhuman. Last week, federal judge Kathleen Williams gutted the anti-immigrant bastards for their sins (via AP News / NPR):

U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams' injunction formalized a temporary halt she had ordered two weeks ago as witnesses continued to testify in a multiday hearing to determine whether construction should end until the ultimate resolution of the case...

The judge said she expected the population of the facility to decline within 60 days through the transferring of the detainees to other facilities, and once that happened, fencing, lighting and generators should be removed. She wrote the state and federal defendants can't bring anyone other than those who are already being detained at the facility onto the property. The order does not prohibit modification or repairs to existing facilities, "which are solely for the purpose of increasing safety or mitigating environmental or other risks at the site.,"

The preliminary injunction includes "those who are in active concert or participation with" the state of Florida or federal defendants or their officers, agents, employees," the judge wrote in an 82-page order.

The judge said state officials never sufficiently explained why the facility needed to be in the middle of the Florida Everglades. "What is apparent, however, is that in their haste to construct the detention camp, the State did not consider alternative locations," Williams said...

DeSantis and Uthmeier never explained why they put the concentration camp there because they didn't want to repeat under oath their gleeful desire to "witness alligators eating any detainees trying to escape." Cruelty may play well on Fox Not-News but not in a courtroom.

While the legal ruling focuses mostly on the environmental impact of the camp, it helps stall the ongoing efforts by the Far Right under trump and Stephen Miller to incarcerate every dark-skinned person they can find in majority-Democratic cities/states. With any luck, it'll at least end that tasteless and profane merch industry that sprang up promoting "Alligator Alcatraz" like it was fcking Disney World.

If there's any good news right now, it's that ICE and the Florida AG aren't ignoring this court order: reports are that camp is emptying out and should be cleared in a few more days.

The bad news is: Where the hell are those poor detainees - most of them honest working people, family members, not at all the criminal rot the fearmongers insist upon - going? There is no way these haters are going to give up the targets of their fear/rage: ICE is most likely shipping these people to the other concentration camps they've been setting up in other Red states across the country. 

This is all going to turn into a sick and cruel game of "hot potato": moving immigrant prisoners from state to state dodging the lawsuits that will get filed in response to any legal abuses the Far Right leaders across those states will inflict on their victims.

If only we had a working Congress that would use its' constitutional powers to rein in a lawless, vulgar, monstrous president shitgibbon. 

Keep fighting. Keep protesting. Stop every concentration camp from getting built. Stop these hatemongers.

Fascism in Florida: Building the Horrors to Come

Update 7/3/25: Oooh, I am so sorry I missed getting mentioned on Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up today. I'm a bit distracted with taking care of an ill kitteh and a few other personal things, sorry. Thank you, Batocchio, for the share. To anybody still visiting, I promise to blog four times for the 4th of July (my Four For the Fourth thing) so I hope to see you tomorrow.

There are times I hate living in this godforsaken deep Republican hellhole that is Florida.

Pandering to the harsh anti-immigrant war on our American communities, Governor DeSantis and his cronies are fast-tracking a migrant detention center in South Florida (via Rachel Treisman at NPR):

Despite resistance, Florida officials are turning an airfield in the Everglades into a migrant detention center, which they've nicknamed "Alligator Alcatraz" due to its proximity to the apex predators.

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier proposed the project last week, saying in a video posted to X that, in support of the Trump administration's crackdown on illegal immigration, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis had asked state leaders to identify places for temporary detention facilities.

"I think this is the best one, as I call it: Alligator Alcatraz," Uthmeier said, referencing the infamous prison island in San Francisco Bay.

The goddamned trumpshirts can't give up their fantasies about Alcatraz, can they?

Uthmeier told the right-wing podcast The Benny Show on Monday that the federal government had approved his plan that morning, with the facility on track to open the first week of July. He said it would have 5,000 beds — half of its total capacity — by "early July."

"Alligator Alcatraz will expand facilities and bed space in just days, thanks to our partnership with Florida," the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) later wrote on X.

DeSantis is using emergency powers to take over the site, which is owned by Miami-Dade County.

But not everyone is on board.

Environmental organizations and immigration advocates have expressed concerns about multiple aspects of the project, from the potential consequences on the fragile Everglades ecosystem to the well-being of the people who will be detained there, especially in the hot summer months.

If anyone's paying attention to the overwhelmed ICE "detention facilities" right now, there are serious overcrowding, food availability, and wellness problems to where people are dying in custody. Even this horrific attempt to alleviate crowding at existing facilities won't stop this new prison - it's not a detention center, trust me - from being overcrowded itself. Stephen Miller wants his fucking quotas filled, and doesn't give a damn about treating his and ICE's victims with any basic decency or civil rights.

From what people can see happening at the airfield - there are already protestors gathering, bless them - it's looking like a bunch of portable classrooms getting converted into barracks, which I guarantee you will not be adequately air-conditioned. I doubt there will be any serviceable water or sewage considering that abandoned airfield would need months of dedicated construction efforts to make it genuinely livable.

This isn't going to be a safe or healthy place to get imprisoned.

And the majority of people getting sent to this forsaken swampy Alcatraz aren't going to be gangbangers, or criminals, or violent people. It's going to be nurses, mothers, veterans, families, honest-to-God citizens.

This isn't even really a prison: it's a goddamned concentration camp, and the first of many under trump.

This is ethnic cleansing, the likes of which we've seen in Nazi Germany, and the Balkans in the 1990s, and dozens of other places we used to pretend we'd never be like. Except that is for the history of us punishing Native Americans in the 19th Century and Japanese residents during the Second World War.

This is us at our worst, America. We need to fight back against what trump and Miller and their ICE thugs and their wingnut allies are doing to our communities and our neighbors. 

Addendum: JFC the Florida Republicans are selling t-shirts promoting this! This is akin to Nazis shilling merch promoting Dachau! Yes I went there, because these goddamn wingnuts are blatantly rounding people up just like 1930s Germany.

The cruelty is not only the point, the cruelty is not only policy, the cruelty is open vice signaling to their fellow haters. GODDAMN THEM.

The Unqualified Are Taking Over Thanks to trump

Update: Many thanks to Steve in Manhattan for including this article to Crooks and Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up! Please remember to order an excessive supply of Lucky Charms Marshmallows to tide you over as the trump tariffs disrupt our cereal industry, that is all...

I mentioned last article there's a ton of things to catch up on, but trump is just overwhelming me with assholery aimed at my own profession so I got to respond to this bullshit (yes I am pissed over this). 

This past weekend, trump went and fired the head Librarian of Congress - is that even something he could do? - over "complaints" that she was too woke and for the most absurd reasons (via Kara Yorio at School Library Journal):

President Donald Trump fired Librarian of Congress Dr. Carla Hayden in a terse, two-sentence email sent on Thursday night...

"This is unprecedented, and unnecessary; Dr. Hayden has served Congress and the American people with integrity and distinction,” EveryLibrary executive director John Chrastka said in a statement. “This is a purely political move. And coming as it does right after the Preliminary Injunction and TRO reopening IMLS, it is hard not to see it that way. Congress should be outraged at this overreach."

EveryLibrary has launched a petition asking the public to signal their support to stop the attacks on the Library of Congress.

Hayden was nominated to lead the Library of Congress by President Barack Obama and sworn in for a 10-year term in September 2016. She was the first woman and the first African American to serve in the position.

AP reported that Hayden had been targeted by a conservative group, American Accountability Foundation, which tweeted on Thursday: “The current #LibrarianOfCongress Carla Hayden is woke, anti-Trump, and promotes trans-ing kids. It’s time to get her OUT and hire a new guy for the job!”

Her removal is the latest for the administration that is stripping federal agencies of women, people of color, and anyone whose work is believed to be in opposition to Trump's agenda...

In a later press briefing, the White House accused Hayden of being "woke" and including "inappropriate books" in the library collection, completely ignorant of HOW the Library of Congress actually functions (via Kerry Pickett at Washington Times):

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Carla Hayden was fired as librarian of Congress because she promoted DEI and pushed “inappropriate books” for children...

“We felt she did not fit the needs of the American people,” Ms. Leavitt told reporters at the White House. “There were quite concerning things that she had done at the Library of Congress in the pursuit of DEI and putting inappropriate books in the library for children.”

And we don’t believe that she was serving the interests of the American taxpayer well. So, she has been removed from her position, and the President is well within his rights to do that.”

Leavitt - and everybody else in that press room - doesn't understand that the Library of Congress has a mandate to include every professionally published book securing its Copyright - by that I mean books from established large and mid-sized publishers, including university presses: they do NOT take self-published books, trust me - so that Congressional staff and elected members have access to research materials (and even fictional entertainment). Hayden couldn't stop getting LGBTQ+ books if she wanted to. 

Also, these are NOT books that circulate or even go into Interlibrary Loan: NO CHILDREN are going to get their hands on these books through LOC, let alone people from outside of Congress (there is a reading room where visitors can borrow a book if available but they can't leave it with, and threats to cutting / stealing pages prevent anybody from walking out with one). Every excuse trump and his fellow book-burners anti-woke mob are tossing out there are lies. It wasn't the taxpayers she was serving, it was Congress (and researchers able to visit in-person). If Hayden was doing anything, she was acting as Archivist for the printed works of human knowledge stretching back to the 1800s, with the Library of Congress as one of the world's largest holdings of the modern era (if not all of human history, bigger than the famed Library of Alexandria). And that is something the anti-woke mob cannot abide.

This morning, trump added onto the bullshit by appointing Todd Blanche - as white a name you can get - acting Librarian, in spite of the fact Blanche has no work history or experience as a librarian period (via Hillel Italie at AP News):

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, who represented Donald Trump during his 2024 criminal trial, has been appointed acting Librarian of Congress, the Justice Department said Monday.

Blanche replaces longtime librarian Carla Hayden, whom the White House fired last week amid criticism from some conservatives that she was advancing a “woke” agenda. She was nominated by Democratic President Barack Obama in 2015.

Blanche was named the number two Justice Department official after serving as a criminal defense attorney defending Trump against two cases brought by the Justice Department during the Biden administration. Blanche is a former federal prosecutor who was a key figure on Trump’s defense team in his New York hush money trial, which ended in a conviction on 34 felony counts.

There is NOTHING on this guy's resume that even hints he did time as a paralegal working a law library for research projects. I doubt Todd can tell you the difference between DDC, LC, and SUDOC (I've studied and worked all three, by the by).

The ONLY thing that qualifies this guy is his utter loyalty to trump, and a likely willingness to purge the entire Library of Congress - which is supposed to belong to CONGRESS - of every "woke" "DEI" "climate change" book in the collection. 

Do you understand the severity of what is about to happen if Blanche - an unqualified white boy hire - is able to weed out thousands of now-rare, hard-to-find books - some titles so old and out-of-print that even large research libraries like Harvard and Yale don't own them - all because they offend the racist/sexist/evangelical/ignorant sensibilities of the Far Right fringe? 

The book burnings of the Reich are about the most recent equivalence you can match that to. The destruction of the ancient Library of Alexandria would be the closest poetic example, except that destruction honestly took centuries of fires big and small to wipe it out. Trump and Blanche and the entire MAGA fringe are capable of wiping out the Library of Congress in weeks if not days.

What the absolute hell, America. If even one rare book from 1860 gets destroyed, our nation will regret it forever.

Call your congresscritters. DEMAND they defend their own Library!

This incident, by the by, is a perfect distillation of the damage trump and his Republican cohorts are inflicting on our federal government. Purging our agencies of effective, qualified personnel, and replacing them with idiotic, toadying nobodies clinging to trump out of loyalty and self-interest. What's happening to the Library of Congress is happening to CDC, to the IRS, to Social Security Administration, to offices of Veterans Affairs, to our national parks, to even our Defense and Justice Departments. We're getting the worst government led by the worst people, and Americans are going to suffer for this for generations to come.

Update: Just finding out now trump fired the head of the Copyright Office at LOC, arguably over a published report about AI's ineffectiveness and potential to destroy copyright protections for authors, artists, and musicians. This is going to get worse.

Revision to the Update: Got pointed out on Bluesky that there's more to what trump is doing with the Library of Congress. he and his lackeys are trying to gain access to the personal data of congressmembers and their staffs, especially any legal questions/research requests that are supposed to remain confidential. Basically, trump is looking for his own kompromat on both his opponents and allies to compel them to submit to his rule.

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.

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— 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.