Playing Calvinball, Uh trumpball, With Kilmar Abrego Garcia's Life

I hadn't been following up on this case from April, as the situation surrounding it was in flux and under serious legal review. But a major step happened last week when the judge overseeing the deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia ordered the man released from custody as well as ripping into trump's corrupted Justice Department for blatant lies and stonewalling (via Edith Olmsted at the New Republic): 

In a 31-page opinion, U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis granted Abrego Garcia’s request to be released from ICE custody. In her ruling, she torched the prosecutors’ efforts to deport Abrego Garcia to Liberia, after they claimed they could not deport him to the country of his choice, Costa Rica.

“This time, when the Court sought information about Liberia and Costa Rica so to fairly assess the validity of Abrego Garcia’s claims, Respondents did not just stonewall. They affirmatively misled the tribunal,” Xinis wrote.

“They announced that Liberia is the only viable removal option because Costa Rica ‘does not wish to receive him,’ … and that Costa Rica will no longer ‘accept the transfer’ of him,” she wrote. “But Costa Rica had never wavered in its commitment to receive Abrego Garcia, just as Abrego Garcia never wavered in his commitment to resettle there.”

Costa Rican officials had previously put in writing that they had no intention to remove Abrego Garcia back to El Salvador once he was in their custody—while Liberia had made no such assurances. Xinis wrote that the government’s continued lies made clear that Abrego Garcia’s lengthy detention was not for the basic purpose of a timely removal to the third country.

Xinis saw what a lot of others saw: there wasn't much legal foundation to what trump and his lawyers were doing in the first place.

Xinis also found that there was never any order for Abrego Garcia’s removal in the first place. “Indeed, Respondents twice sponsored the testimony of ICE officials whose job it is to effectuate removal orders, and who candidly admitted to having never seen one for Abrego Garcia,” she wrote.

Instead, the government argued that the court should take an October 10 “withholding decision” as evidence that an original order existed—but Xinis didn’t buy it. “The October 10 withholding decision is unambiguously not an order of removal,” she wrote.

Continued detention without a removal order violates Abrego Garcia’s rights under the Immigration and Nationality Act, as well as due process.

Of course, given the bullying and vengeful mindset of trump and his entire administration, DOJ lawyers tried to pull a runaround to Xinis' ruling by manufacturing a last-minute "removal order" from an immigration judge as though it would supersede the original order six years ago (something even enraging Andrew C McCarthy over at the National Review (yeah, I know!)):

In a nutshell, after months of playing “hide the ball” (or is it, “hide the lack of a ball”?) about whether there exists an order of removal authorizing Abrego’s detention and deportation, the Trump Justice Department has attempted to cure the absence of an order by what appears to be a blatantly illegal process: To wit, without notice to Abrego, the DOJ went ex parte to a DOJ immigration judge who lacks jurisdiction over the case, but who nevertheless dutifully issued a “sua sponte order correcting scrivener’s error” order, under which everyone is now supposed to pretend — Abracadabra! — that there was an order of removal all along.

I'm not a lawyer but I know a couple of them via Ta-Nehisi's Horde. Every single one of them were screaming (Upper Case Text) in the chat channels "THAT'S NOT WHAT A SCRIVENER'S ERROR DOES!" Along with their utter disgust at how trump's people are idiots with the legal system. Meanwhile:

The entire labyrinthine Abrego litigation — featuring immigration removal actions, habeas corpus claims, and a criminal prosecution that have collectively burdened the DOJ’s immigration tribunals, the district courts of Maryland and Tennessee, the Fourth Circuit, and the Supreme Court — has been pursued by the Trump DOJ on the premise that there was an order of removal, that had been issued in 2019 conterminously with IJ Jones’s order of withholding of removal to El Salvador.

The assumption was that the order of removal authorized Abrego’s expulsion from the United States, and that the order of withholding of removal was just a caveat that Abrego, a Salvadoran, could not be repatriated to his native country. That caveat was in place because (a) Abrego had convinced Jones that he reasonably feared persecution in El Salvador, (b) the DOJ, in the first Trump administration, did not appeal that dubious ruling (it allowed Abrego to be released to live and work in Maryland), and (c) the current Trump DOJ did not (as far as is publicly known) attempt to get the caveat removed based on, among other things, changed conditions in El Salvador...

But as Judge Xinis found, no order of removal was ever issued. The court asked the government to produce it for months; prosecutors neither produced it nor provided a straightforward explanation for its absence from the record – to say nothing of an explanation why, in the absence of the order, they would suddenly arrest Abrego without notice six years after releasing him and then controversially send him to a notorious counterterrorism prison in El Salvador — the one country to which it was explicitly forbidden to deport him...

Yet, as Xinis concluded, if there is no order of removal, then the case Abrego filed against the government cannot properly be deemed a removal proceeding. Rather, it is a habeas proceeding – a challenge claiming that, in the absence of a removal order, the government’s detention and removal of Abrego are illegal. While Xinis would have no jurisdiction to act in a removal proceeding under immigration law, federal district courts do have jurisdiction over habeas and related claims...

To repeat what I argued Friday, that’s an offer (Garcia agreeing to deport to Costa Rica) the DOJ should have leapt at. It would have drawn the curtain on this sorry saga. Instead, the DOJ tried to use Abrego’s desire to go to Costa Rica as leverage in plea negotiations in connection with the dubious criminal prosecution the DOJ brought in Tennessee. The DOJ’s refusal was also vindictive: The Abrego case has been an embarrassment, so rather than accommodate the Costa Rica transfer and end it, Abrego was kept in custody while the administration unsuccessfully tried to arrange his removal to African countries – which didn’t want to take Abrego and to which he didn’t want to go.

In any event, once the DOJ lost the case on Thursday, when Xinis ordered Abrego’s release, Attorney General Bondi and her subordinates apparently decided it was futile to continue resisting a concession that there never was a removal order. But rather than just beginning a new removal proceeding — for which there is a basis since there is no doubt that Abrego entered the country illegally and never obtained lawful status — the DOJ opted for chicanery.

On Thursday evening, without giving notice to Abrego’s counsel, prosecutors went to the aforementioned IJ Phillip Taylor. At a little after 7 p.m., Taylor issued an “Order of the Immigration Judge” with the subheading “Immigration Court’s Sua Sponte Order Correcting Scrivener’s Error...”

Essentially, Taylor has tried to insert a previously absent order of removal into the 2019 document (the order of withholding of removal), label the prior absence a “scrivener’s error” (i.e., a mere clerical mistake of negligible substantive importance), and backdate the whole thing by six years (the “nunc pro tunc” provision, as if what was not there had been there all along.

Perhaps most hilarious is the assertion that this was done “sua sponte” (i.e., of the judge’s own accord). It’s as if IJ Taylor just happened to be sitting in his office on a Thursday evening, thinking about IJ Jones’s six-year-old orders (as I guess IJs are wont to do), and suddenly decided, on his own, to correct what seemed to him to be a clerical error — as opposed to being induced by Trump DOJ officials to make a substantive addition to an order, the absence of which had caused them to lose a high-profile case earlier in the day...

The following Friday, Xinis reinforced her order to release Abrego Garcia and warned the federal government to not arrest him under any pretense. One hopes that when hearings resume during the work week that Xinis shreds the Justice Department lawyers for this circus and starts issuing sanctions and contempt charges.

Out of all of the immigration battles being waged in the United States right now - the mass deportation roundups, the violations of civil rights committed by ICE and Border Patrol goons, the decimation of an honest migrant workforce that's contributing to a growing economic recession - this one person's legal fight is representative of trump and the Far Right's entire war. But it's a little bit more because of one thing: trump made this personal.

Out of the hundreds of Latino - and African, and Asian, and non-White - men - and women and children(!) - getting detained, trump himself seemed to focus on Abrego Garcia as his perfect poster child of "criminal gang-related" stuff he and his staff want to paint in broad strokes across that entire population. By late April as the case gained national attention - and warnings from legal experts that the Justice and Homeland departments were on thin ice with this one - trump went on a media offensive that was offensive (via Julia Conley at Common Dreams):

The White House’s public response on Friday to an image of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland father who the Trump administration sent to a notorious prison in El Salvador last month, was to mock the migrant and the U.S. senator who successfully urged Salvadoran President Nayim Bukele to allow a visit with him—and critics said officials may come to regret that decision.

“I suspect this is going to show up in a variety of court pleadings,” said former U.S. Attorney Joyce White Vance, who is now a law professor. “Whoever thought this was cute at the time may be less giddy when this becomes evidence of intent to disobey a court order...”

The story headline read, “Senator Meets With Wrongly Deported Maryland Man in El Salvador”—but the White House crossed out the word “wrongly,” replaced “Maryland Man” with “MS-13 Illegal Alien,” and scrawled, “who’s never coming back” on the article about the father and sheet metal worker.

The digital graffiti was shared with the White House’s 1.6 million followers even though, as software engineer and writer Lakshya Jain said, “the White House admitted in court that they deported the wrong guy.”

Journalist David Leavitt added that the White House had given a federal court “more evidence of contempt,” two days after Chief Judge James Boasberg of the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. warned that there was “probable cause... to find the government in criminal contempt”—punishable by fines or prison time...

The administration has also flouted the U.S. Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling last week that found the White House must facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return to the United States. Officials have admitted he was sent to El Salvador due to an “administrative error.” Although officials including Vice President JD Vance have called him a “convicted” gang member and Bukele repeatedly called him a “terrorist” in the White House earlier this week, Abrego Garcia has not been convicted of any crimes...

trump even took the time on social media to display a photo - later proved manufactured - of Abrego Garcia's "tattoos" as proof he was a major MS-13 gang leader. The whole thing was fake (via Louis Jacobson at PolitiFact):

"This is the hand of the man that the Democrats feel should be brought back to the United States, because he is such ‘a fine and innocent person,’" Trump’s post says. "They said he is not a member of MS-13, even though he’s got MS-13 tattooed onto his knuckles."

The figures M, S, 1 and 3 and the words below the symbols don’t appear in other photographs of Abrego Garcia’s hand, including the one taken by Salvadoran government officials (and shared on X by El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele) when Abrego Garcia met with Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., on April 17.

We asked the White House whether "MS-13" is tattooed on Abrego Garcia’s hand or whether the photo had been altered, perhaps to show that each of the pictorial tattoos represented one of those letters or numbers. The White House did not respond to our inquiry.

Several gang crime experts urged caution about assuming that any of the tattoos provide proof of MS-13 ties. MS-13 experts said the tattoos’ iconography was unfamiliar, and that those symbols have common meanings in mainstream tattooing...

Marijuana leaves, crosses and skulls are widely used as tattoos by people who do not belong to gangs. Gang crime experts said they did not stand out to them as MS-13 markers.

"I don’t believe a ‘dangerous individual’ would have such anodyne and farcically generic tattoos on his hand," said Liliana Castañeda Rossmann, a California State University San Marcos emerita professor of communication and author of the book "Transcending Gangs: Latinas Story Their Experience."

Sean Kennedy, a former federal public defender in California and now a Loyola Law School professor, said that in his experience representing and interacting with current and former MS-13 members, "The tattoos in the photo don't look familiar to me."

This is a burden on Abrego Garcia, not that he's facing legal challenges and deportation, but that trump has targeted Abrego Garcia for his racist ire.

Always remember: trump never admits to being in the wrong, he never will admit he lost anything (a legal challenge, a fight, an election, etc). In that, trump will blame others, he will claim he really won but his victory was "stolen," he will claim "vindication" even as he's forced to pay his victims in legal settlements. trump can never lose, ergo everyone else must.

This means that trump will never admit he was wrong regarding Abrego Garcia's situation. trump will double down on the lies and gaslighting, and he will enforce his underlings to do the same. he will insist the Justice Department pursue "every avenue" - i.e. manufacture any evidence - to ensure this one man gets convicted as a gang member criminal.

trump's DOJ lawyers are going to play fast, loose, and false with the legal system to twist reality to fit trump's fantasies. But the legal system - for all its faults - doesn't work like that. trump's going to run out of lawyers to do his bidding before he will shatter the American judiciary against his will.

In the meantime, here's hoping Kilmar Abrego Garcia and his family can rest - even for a brief moment - in the middle of this chaos.

"Like a Thoughtless Child, Just Wandering by a Garden Yanking Leaves Along the Way..."

We not only live in the Darkest Timeline, also we live in the DUMBEST Timeline.

"Third Place" Marco Rubio just declared war on typography (via Humeyra Pamuk at Reuters):

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Tuesday ordered diplomats to return to using Times New Roman font in official communications, calling his predecessor Antony Blinken's decision to adopt Calibri a "wasteful" diversity move, according to an internal department cable seen by Reuters.

What the... The default font in Microsoft Word is WOKE?

The department under Blinken in early January 2023 had switched to Calibri, a modern sans-serif font, saying this was a more accessible font for people with disabilities because it did not have the decorative angular features and was the default in Microsoft products.

Anything positive for disabled people apparently triggers the Far Right...

Some studies suggest that sans-serif fonts, such as Calibri, are easier to read for those with certain visual disabilities.

Trump, a Republican, moved quickly after taking office in January to eradicate federal DEI programs and discourage them in the private sector and education, including by directing the firing of diversity officers at federal agencies and pulling grant funding for a wide range of programs.

DEI policies became more widespread after nationwide protests in 2020 against police killings of unarmed Black people, spurring a conservative backlash. Trump and other critics of diversity initiatives say they are discriminatory against white people and men and have eroded merit-based decision making.

All of the things that should matter in these dark times - ending Russia's invasion of Ukraine, ending Israel's devastation of both Gaza and the West Bank, stopping the war in Sudan, pulling back on trump's hostility towards Venezuela and most of Central/South America - Rubio is going after font usage because certain fonts offends the Far Right Male sensibilities.

I swear, I've seen this before in a Saturday Night Live skit:

You can just picture poor Marco suffering the way Ryan Gosling did:

Yeah. He just highlighted Avatar, he clicked the drop down menu and then he randomly selected Papyrus. Like a thoughtless child, just wandering by a garden yanking leaves along the way...

He just got away with it. This man, this professional graphic designer. Was it laziness? Was it cruelty...?

And now, here I am doing what I vowed to never do again, sitting outside his house, hoping to catch a glimpse of him to see him doing his little things, live his insane little life...

Ryan: Do you remember the Avatar logo?

Heidi: Um, yeah. It was tribal, yet futuristic.

Ryan: Papyrus!!!

(He sees the graphic designer glaring at him through a window)

Ryan: I know what you did! I... KNOW... WHAT... YOU... DID!!!

Seriously, if the Alpha Male Wannabes in the trump inner circle are obsessed with manliness, they should have gone with Trajan, a more accurate Roman based font.

Just one more thing that makes us THINK ABOUT ROME!!!

I can finally say Io Saturnalia, peeps!

The Corruption of Abusing Times

Update: Again, many thanks to Batocchio for including this blog article with Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up! Please keep an eye out for Batocchio's annual Jon Swift blog share! Also please take the time to view the rest of the blog site, and consider ordering a copy of the story anthology Funny Locations off of Bookshop.org for the Saturnalia gift-giving season!

Now is the winter of our discontent...
(beat)
That's it. That's all I got.
-- modern day Will Shakespeare

You can see trump's corruption in plain view as he pardons everyone who can pay him off now or in the future (via Alex Woodward at the Independent (UK)): 

Within the first year of his second term in office, after campaigning on ending what he called the “politicization” of the Justice Department under his predecessor, Donald Trump has issued a historic number of pardons for white-collar criminals and political allies accused of fraud, bribery and corruption.

In more than a dozen cases, Trump even issued pardons for people who were prosecuted or convicted within his first and second terms, only to unravel those cases entirely this year. An entertainment executive accused of public corruption was pardoned this week only four months after he was indicted for conspiracy.

Trump’s pardon of former president of Honduras Juan Orlando Hernández, who the Justice Department once said was at the center of the “largest and most violent drug-trafficking conspiracies in the world,” has not only raised questions about what’s fueling Trump’s lethal campaign against alleged drug traffickers but has also erased the work of Emil Bove, Trump’s former criminal defense attorney who was once a federal prosecutor leading the case against Hernández...

Trump’s wave of pardons — largely targeting charges that he has similarly faced — have relied on the sweeping powers of the executive branch to effectively redefine what is criminal, from bailing out dozens of people who support his agenda to “normalizing public corruption” and downplaying the crimes of convicted fraudsters who stripped millions of dollars from victims, according to former Pardon Attorney Liz Oyer.

Crimes involving public corruption — especially among elected officials, like Texas congressman Henry Cuellar, who was pardoned this week after he was federally charged last year with bribery, money laundering and conspiracy — are rarely considered for pardons.

But Trump is now “liberally pardoning corrupt public officials who are charged with offenses that involve abusing their political offices to enrich themselves,” Oyer told PBS.

Oyer, who was fired by the Trump administration in March, has called the president’s pardon streak a “crisis” that imperils democracy by using his vast pardoning power to potentially enrich himself and his allies...

You can see trump's corruption in plain view as he accepts a made-up "Peace Prize" by an organization - FIFA (aka the World Cup overseers) - that has a horrific history of scandal and corruption of their own (via Sophia Kai at Politico):

President Donald Trump’s appearance on the Kennedy Center stage will be at least his seventh encounter this year with FIFA President Gianni Infantino, who has logged more face time with Trump this year than any world leader. Infantino’s savvy navigation of the American political scene has helped FIFA build institutional support for a tournament facing unprecedented logistical complications.

But that success is beginning to weaken Infantino, as the third-term FIFA president faces newfound internal opposition for his over-the-top courtship of Trump. Our interviews with six international soccer officials across three continents reveal widespread frustration with Infantino’s decision to side with Trump even as White House policies cause chaos for World Cup-bound teams, fans and local organizers, clashing with Infantino’s promise to have a tournament that welcomes the world...

Our reporting found that Infantino did not inform his 37-member FIFA Council before creating the FIFA Peace Prize this year, three people familiar with the matter told POLITICO. Over the past year, at least three of FIFA’s eight vice presidents have publicly or privately expressed their concerns about the lengths Infantino is willing to go to please Trump...

Other appearances with Trump placed Infantino squarely between a president intent on solving overseas conflicts and punishing foes, while closing American borders to visitors and trade, and FIFA member nations who may hold starkly different views, or worse.

Infantino stood quietly in the Oval Office as he said he would not rule out strikes against fellow World Cup co-host Mexico to target drug cartels, and joined Trump’s entourage on a trip designed to cultivate investment opportunities in the Persian Gulf.

When FIFA had to delay the opening of its annual congress in Asuncion, Paraguay, to accommodate Infantino’s travel from a Saudi-U.S. Investment Forum in Riyadh, two FIFA vice presidents were among those who joined English Football Association chairwoman Debbie Hewitt and other federation heads exiting in protest. European confederation UEFA — with 55 member nations, FIFA’s largest — attacked him with unusually pointed language...

Nothing threatens to awaken opposition to Infantino as much as his decision to invent a FIFA Peace Prize just as Trump began to complain in October about being passed over for one from the Norwegian Nobel Committee. According to a draft run-of-show for Friday’s draw, Trump is scheduled to speak for two minutes today after receiving the Peace Prize.

“He is just implementing what he said he would do,” Infantino said at an American Business Forum in Miami, also attended by Trump, on the day news of the prize was made public. “So I think we should all support what he’s doing because I think it’s looking pretty good.”

According to FIFA rules, the organization’s president needs sign-off from the 37-member FIFA council on certain items like the international match calendar, host designations for upcoming FIFA tournaments, and financial matters. FIFA’s charter does not contemplate the creation of a new prize specifically to award a world leader, but those familiar with the organization’s governance say it may violate an ethics policy that requires officers “remain politically neutral...”

You can see trump's corruption in plain view as he violates the letter and spirit of the Emolument Clause as he vacuums up more money to himself and his inner circle with acts that make Teapot Dome seem tame (via Robert Reich at Inequality Media):

But as soon as Trump won, money started pouring in. 

And then just days before returning to office, Trump launched a separate crypto scheme, selling TRUMP and MELANIA memecoins. Memecoins are a type of cryptocurrency based on an image or online joke.

But this is no joke: The Trump family has made about $3 billion from crypto so far — with many purchases by foreign buyers. Forbes now estimates that over half of Trump’s entire net worth is crypto-based.

And with Trump acting as both the President of the United States and as his own crypto brand ambassador, it’s hard to tell which job he’s doing at any given moment. 

Around the time that Trump made a state visit to the United Arab Emirates, a UAE firm announced it would buy $2 billion of Trump’s World Liberty Financial currency. 

Do Trump crypto buyers get presidential favors in return? Well, one US company said it explicitly purchased $2 million of Trump’s memecoins to influence trade policy. 

And then there’s Chinese billionaire Justin Sun. You might have heard of him because he spent $6.2 million buying an avant garde art installation that was a banana duct taped to a wall — which he then ate. 

What you might not have not heard was that Sun was charged with crypto-related fraud. But after Trump was elected, Sun invested more than $115 million into various Trump crypto products.

Guess what happened next? Trump’s SEC suddenly stopped prosecuting Sun. How curious and bizarre...!

We as a nation are facing a massive crisis, where the decision-making at the highest levels of our government are bought and sold - by an elite few, and by foreign powers in opposition to the United States - at the expense of millions of Americans facing threats to their wallets, their livelihoods, and their families.

I've been screaming this about trump - his greed, his twisted passions, his destructive ways - for years now. It's just that now he's so open and reckless about it that nobody can deny it or look away (of course, the MAGAts will try to anyway).

This is one of the reasons I haven't been in the mood to celebrate Saturnalia for awhile.

May the gods damn trump and his enablers forever.

The Price of Arrogance Is the Blood of Others

"They're not confessing."
"They're bragging."
-- from The Big Short movie

Update: Many thanks to Steve in Manhattan for including this article at Crooks & Liars Mike's Blog Round-Up! I'd like to say Io Saturnalia but this is not a festive time is it. /rage

It's been reported earlier how our United States military is committing war crimes in the Caribbean by bombing civilian fishing boats claiming they're drug smuggling as part of trump's - and Hegseth's - desire to turn the War on Drugs into a hot war against half of Central and South America.

The horror of what they're doing came into sharper focus this weekend when the Washington Post picked up on how the decision-making into those boat strikes went, including the point where Hegseth pushed to "kill them all" including any survivors (via Alex Horton and Ellen Nakashima, there is a paywall):

The longer the U.S. surveillance aircraft followed the boat, the more confident intelligence analysts watching from command centers became that the 11 people on board were ferrying drugs.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken directive, according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation. “The order was to kill everybody,” one of them said.

A missile screamed off the Trinidad coast, striking the vessel and igniting a blaze from bow to stern. For minutes, commanders watched the boat burning on a live drone feed. As the smoke cleared, they got a jolt: Two survivors were clinging to the smoldering wreck.

The Special Operations commander overseeing the Sept. 2 attack — the opening salvo in the Trump administration’s war on suspected drug traffickers in the Western Hemisphere — ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s instructions, two people familiar with the matter said. The two men were blown apart in the water.

Hegseth’s order, which has not been previously reported, adds another dimension to the campaign against suspected drug traffickers. Some current and former U.S. officials and law-of-war experts have said that the Pentagon’s lethal campaign — which has killed more than 80 people to date — is unlawful and may expose those most directly involved to future prosecution.

What's at issue here are both the constitutional ideal of due process and the right of criminal suspects to face their charges in courts of law, and also the international laws protecting civilians from questionable military strikes. Summarily killing these boaters - and in spite of the analysts vibes, there's no viable proof they are smuggling drugs - increases the likelihood our nation is killing innocent people.

We're witnessing an escalation of war being pushed by unserious people obsessed - yet again - with body counts and the appearance of "rugged manly leadership". Hegseth and trump's behavior throughout this nightmare has gotten to the point where the partisan sides of the Senate are joining forces to condemn what's happening (via Jacob Wendler at Politico):

Sens. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) and Tim Kaine (D-Va.) — both of whom sit on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee — said Sunday that, if accurate, such orders would rise to the level of war crimes.

“If that reporting is true, it’s a clear violation of the DOD’s own laws of war, as well as international laws about the way you treat people who are in that circumstance. And so this rises to the level of a war crime if it’s true,” Kaine said in an interview with CBS’ Nancy Cordes on “Face the Nation...”

Bipartisan leadership of the Armed Services Committees in both chambers vowed to probe the matter, with Sens. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) and Jack Reed (D-R.I.) promising “vigorous oversight to determine the facts related to these circumstances” on Friday.

Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio) told Cordes on Sunday that “if that occurred, that would be very serious, and I agree that would be an illegal act,” and Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) said on ABC’s “This Week” that “if it was as if the article said, that is a violation of the law of war.”

All of this is happening because a Far Right Supreme Court gave their seal of approval to the Unitary Executive theory where presidents can wield extensive and unstoppable powers to do whatever they want. They've granted these powers to a bullying, gaslighting sociopath in trump who's allowing the sociopaths among his lackeys to indulge in acts of cruelty towards everyone they fear and hate.

The arrogance of Hegseth is how he views the entire idea of War: That rather than play by rules and regulations designed to reduce risk of civilian casualties and even loss of our own troops to reckless acts, Hegseth prefers to grant soldiers full license to use excessive force (meaning "kill 'em all" and declare victory).

Hegseth is the kind of person who wouldn't have seen the ethical conflict surrounding My Lai. The need to avoid more bloodshed in war is meaningless to him. The concept of maintaining order through soft power is alien to the likes of him. He wants a body count and he wants to revel in it.

Hegseth's desire to "strike fast, strike hard, kill them all" echoes in the trumpian agenda of inflicting that firepower on our own communities, be it hunting down immigrants or threatening "woke" cities with occupation while militarizing our police into thugs.

The cruelty remains the point. Not only as policy but as an attempt to keep themselves in power through brutality and lawless indulgence.

This arrogance will turn allies into enemies soon enough. And the downward spiral into violence will speed up some more.

Gods help us.

Revenge Tour Collapsing Into Farce (Again)

When trump secured that ungodly re-election in 2024, one of the things we all knew - supporters and opponents alike - was that he would seek to punish the people perceived to have humiliated trump by exposing his scandals, his fraudulent acts, and his sexual assaults.

As much an open secret as anything else, hell the media called it "Trump's Revenge Tour" and documented the atrocities (via Quinta Jurecic at The Atlantic):

When Donald Trump appointed Lindsey Halligan to act as the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, critics worried that he had tapped her specifically to bring prosecutions against his enemies. It didn’t take long for Halligan to prove the critics right. On September 25, she successfully persuaded a Virginia grand jury to indict former FBI Director James Comey. Yesterday, she secured an indictment against New York Attorney General Letitia James. Whether those prosecutions will actually hold up under the scrutiny of judges and juries, however, is a different matter.

Presenting the case against Comey to a grand jury was the first time Halligan had acted as a prosecutor. Trump installed her at the U.S. Attorney’s Office after her predecessor, Erik Siebert, reportedly refused to move forward with the case against James and raised concerns about a potential prosecution of Comey. “There is a GREAT CASE, and many lawyers, and legal pundits, say so,” Trump wrote on September 20 in a Truth Social post addressed to “Pam”—which, The Wall Street Journal reported, was intended to be a private note for Attorney General Pam Bondi, not a public message on social media. After that post, the Justice Department began moving quickly against Comey and James. Other criminal cases, including one against Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton, are in the works...

Just to note, whenever trump claims "many people say so" without providing actual names of who's saying so is him gaslighting (again) that whatever he's arguing for is perfect and legal... when it isn't.

So since that September, how have the persecutions of Comey and James progressed?

Welp. Turns out trump and his "many lawyers and legal pundits" were absolutely wrong as the judge threw both cases out due to serious procedural errors, namely Halligan's appointment was illegal to begin with (via Ryan Lucas at NPR):

A federal judge on Monday dismissed the Justice Department's criminal cases against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, finding that the acting U.S. attorney who secured the indictments against the two prominent critics of President Trump was unlawfully appointed.

The decision from U.S. District Judge Cameron McGowan Currie on the appointment of Lindsey Halligan as the top prosecutor in the Eastern District of Virginia marks a significant setback to efforts to go after the president's perceived political enemies.

In dual rulings, Judge Currie said "all actions flowing from Ms. Halligan's defective appointment," including the indictments against Comey and James, "were unlawful exercises of executive power and are hereby set aside..."

Trump tapped Halligan to serve as acting U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia after he pushed out the previous top prosecutor, who had expressed doubts about bringing charges against both Comey and James.

Halligan is a former insurance attorney who once served as Trump's personal lawyer before his return to office, when she joined his administration as a White House aide.

Halligan, who has no previous prosecutorial experience, was sworn in as acting U.S. attorney on Sept. 22. Three days later, she secured a two-count criminal indictment against Comey—just days before the statute of limitations expired...

Judge Currie dismissed these cases on a simple point of law that Congress set limits on when and how Presidents can appoint US Attorneys, but throughout the proceedings the courts exposed a series of errors, miscues, and illegal decisions from Halligan's office - as well as screw-ups from the rest of the Justice Department under AG Bondi - that could have easily shut down the prosecutions due to sheer ineptitude.

Marcy Wheeler over at Emptywheel has kept track of all the screw-ups, highlighting a few weeks back how the magistrate overseeing the evidence slammed the DOJ for mishandling the grand jury involved in Comey's indictments:

As Fitzpatrick describes, there were several errors. DOJ didn’t scope most of the communications seized in 2019 and 2020 (that is, a Bill Barr fuck-up). And then, they chose not to obtain a new warrant to access the materials for a totally different investigation...

Second, after being exposed to privileged communications, Miles Starr nevertheless still presented the case to the grand jury.

Third, Lindsey Halligan fundamentally mis-informed the jury, first by suggesting that Comey would have to testify at trial, and second by implying there was a bunch more evidence that would be used at trial (which might reflect taint from the privileged comms Starr knew of).

Fourth, she apparently did not re-present the charges the grand jury approved...

The way Wheeler and other legal pundits described it, these were mental errors from Halligan and her crew that even first-year law students learn not to commit when dealing with grand juries. But even Bondi - who does have experience as a state-level attorney general and a number of years as a prosecutor - should have known better, and even she screwed up adding her seal of approval to this entire clown show.

All of this is happening because trump cannot accept certain facts. The criminal and civil cases that he has railed against ever since the 2016 campaign - the investigation in Russia's involvement in US elections (what trump keeps denying as "the Russian Hoax"); the investigations into trump's questionable tax returns at the federal and state levels; the allegations of sexual assault/harassment of women; the matter of trump's illegal taking and mishandling of classified documents; trump's unproven allegations of the 2020 election results being "stolen"; the incitement to insurrection on January 6th - remains a thorn in trump's pride. he continues to deny any and all of those cases were legal, that he's innocent and everything he did/does is "perfect".

In order to play to his gaslighting narrative of innocence, trump has to sell the narrative that all of those cases were themselves illegal in the first place: the "Russian Hoax" was a Hillary Clinton scam; the fraud and tax evasions cases were partisan hack jobs; he has total ownership of government documents, those classified documents belonged to him; his behavior towards women was "normal" and "everybody who's a celebrity" does it; he "won" in 2020 because he never loses; the riot at Capitol Hill was "peaceful and legal".

To flip the narrative that he's the hero (and victim), trump has to accuse everyone else of being the real criminals.

We saw this before: trump's desire to whitewash his ties to Russia during the 2016 elections required him to push for a special prosecutor investigation into Hillary Clinton and her campaign, trying to sell the narrative that she and her cronies faked the entire thing. trump got his replacement AG William Barr - the previous AG Jeff Sessions refused to play along - to find a federal prosecutor John Durham to pursue the matter as special prosecutor. Durham proceeded to follow every conspiracy theory and half-baked lead trying to indict and convict various Clinton campaign officials... all of which either led to misdemeanor plea deals and lost court cases.

Durham's case was doomed to fail because trump's narrative - based on trump's own delusions of greatness and weave of lies he casts around himself - was all a lie. As Marcy Wheeler noted as Durham's investigation collapsed, there was no crime. Just trump's desire to deflect, deny, and denounce everyone else.

It was an Underpants Gnomes kind of case: 

1) Indict people to force them to plea deal and flip on bigger fish, 

2) ? ? ?, 

3) Profit!

Except there's no profit because there's nothing there to begin with.

We're getting the same thing now as trump pursues baseless charges against Comey, James, and even John Bolton - his own former National Security Advisor - all because they made trump look criminal (or worse, a loser). This is how trump views the entire legal system: a weapon only he can deploy against anyone who dares crosses him.

The only good news about all of this is that trump - and his lackeys like Bondi and Halligan, and other wingnuts in the Justice Dept. - is obsessing over the twisted reflections in his own addled mind. The courts - in spite of what the Far Right thinks of the law - require proof and relevancy to work, not rumor hearsay or fake accusation.

The bad news is that trump - and his lackeys Bondi, Halligan, and dozens of other wingnuts - will never admit he is in the wrong, and will double-down on these attacks and fake allegations until all he has left is to burn the entire judiciary to the ground for failing to uphold his lies.

Keep resisting, America. Keep to the facts. 

And Happy Thanksgiving, if you can enjoy that at least this harsh year.

The Downward Spiral of an Unwell Mind

Update: Many thanks to Tengrain for including this article at Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up! Stay safe this Thanksgiving season and remember to avoid turkey drops around the Cincinnati metro...

As a follow-up to the earlier observations about the overwhelming Blue Wave election cycle a few weeks back, there's been more stories in a number of Beltway Media outlets about donald trump's overall behavior since then.

None of it looks good. (via Elyse Wanshel at HuffPost)

On Thursday’s episode of Shane Gillis and Matt McCusker’s podcast, the comedians compared the president to his predecessor, former President Joe Biden, while discussing Trump’s cognitive state.

“You think he’s getting dementia?” McCusker asked his co-host Gillis about Trump.

“I mean, I don’t know. He just seems a little slower than usual,” Gillis responded. “There’s speculation that T-Dog might be rocking Biden brains,” McCusker added.

“He’s definitely not at Biden brains yet,” Gillis replied. “But he’s circling the drain...”

The comedians’ remarks about Trump were prompted amid a longer conversation regarding the president telling Bloomberg reporter Catherine Lucey to be “quiet, piggy” onboard Air Force One earlier this week. Trump said this to Lucey after she asked him a question about the Jeffrey Epstein files...

Regarding trump's insulting behavior last Friday, Rachel Leingang at The Guardian noted how the response outpaced the mainstream media's tepid underplaying of it:

It wasn’t the first time – not even the hundredth time – the US president has attacked the media. And it’s hard for any storyline to break through the administration’s “flood the zone” strategy, much less one like this. Nothing seems to stick. But the “quiet, piggy” clip has taken off, several days after the admonishment occurred on Air Force One last Friday, and without much help from the media itself...

Trump is going through a string of losses: Democrats dominating in off-year elections, having to reverse course on the Epstein files, Republicans refusing to get rid of the filibuster to end the shutdown, a faltering economy. There’s a possibility that he’s losing his air of impenetrability, and his grip on the right could maybe, just maybe, be loosening.

The anger he displayed in the clip could be a sign of someone on the back foot, overreacting to a question Bloomberg correspondent Catherine Lucey was asking about why Trump was fighting against releasing the Epstein files “if there’s nothing incriminating in the files”. The files related to the child sexual abuser released so far by Congress show that Epstein communicated regularly, and derogatorily, about women with a host of prominent friends...

It's not so much that trump was losing control of keeping the Epstein scandal under a tighter wrap. It's not so much that trump is walking back some of his beloved tariffs as their impact on goods worsened the economy for most Americans. It's not so much that trump is angry with the legal system pushing back against his deportation agenda, against his eagerness to deploy troops into our own cities, and against his attempts to charge his perceived enemies - such as former FBI Director James Comey - that are falling apart due to prosecutorial screw-ups (serving his whims, no less). 

It's that there's this unsettling realization that everything in TrumpWorld (tm) is falling apart, and breaking into pieces faster than anyone thought it would (via Kyle Cheney at Politico):

But the extraordinary rebukes and headwinds the president is now facing — much of it from within his own party — are revealing a GOP beginning to reckon with a post-Trump future. That dynamic crystallized after voters surged to the polls to support Democratic candidates for statewide races in New Jersey, Virginia, Georgia and Pennsylvania, shattering expectations of close contests and signaling that even Trump can’t defy political gravity forever.

Trump has spent the days since recycling old grievances, berating members of his own party and choosing sides in a burgeoning intra-MAGA debate about antisemitism and bigotry within the GOP coalition...

A year ago, the idea that a Republican-led Congress would vote overwhelmingly in favor of anything Trump opposed would have been fanciful. Enter the Epstein files.

Trump’s coalition has long viewed the FBI’s trove of records related to the late convicted sex offender and disgraced international power broker to be a holy grail of sorts, one that could shed light on a grander sex trafficking conspiracy implicating world leaders and politicians. But Trump, a longtime associate of Epstein’s until they fell out more than a decade ago, spent the summer leaning on congressional Republicans to cease their search for records. Trump has denied wrongdoing and no evidence has suggested he took part in Epstein’s trafficking operation...

The problems with trump's denials are 1) There is too much physical and eyewitness evidence that showed trump and Epstein close enough for trump to be aware of - and revel in - the shocking number of young girls in those circles; 2) trump himself expressed far too often an "appreciation" for young women that included allegations he spied on Miss Teen contestants in their dressing rooms; and 3) the reality now established that Mr. "Grab 'Em By the Pussy" is a court-confirmed sexual predator with dozens of other sexual assault claims still out there.

That trump used the Epstein scandal in the 2024 campaign to attack Democrats was just another brazen Deflection strategy that the Far Right have perfected: Accuse the Democrats of committing those crimes you yourself are committing, and turn that weakness into a strength. But trump promised to "expose the truth" about Epstein's sex trafficking of girls to the one group - his own QAnon conspiracy base - he shouldn't have, and they wanted trump to fulfill that once he got back into the White House. Problem was, trump's solution wasn't to release more documents but rehash the ones already released and pretend that was it... which only made things look worse for him and his lackeys for "covering up".

trump's attempts to control that narrative - one that kept painting him and his Republican allies as "pro-Sex Offender" - kept failing, because once his gaslighting fails he's got nothing else to go by:

What happened next was perhaps the most stinging intra-party rebuke of Trump’s presidency. Trump tried and failed to pressure Republican lawmakers to pull the plug on a vote demanding the Justice Department turn over the full library of Epstein files. An intense pressure campaign against Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) in particular went nowhere.

The fallout also claimed the relationship of Trump and Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, whose refusal to flinch led Trump to brand her a “traitor” and attempt to turn his coalition against her. Greene has responded by saying Trump’s attacks have endangered her life...

While trump's press people are defending him for "his honesty and transparency" nobody's going to forget how trump fought this for months. And no amount of scrubbing the files before release is going to hide the reality that trump and Epstein were two peas in the same vulgar pod.

Trump’s inability to cajole Congress into his preferred course of action on the Epstein files came at virtually the same time the president and his allies failed to move Indiana Republicans to redraw their congressional boundaries to net Republicans another seat in the 2026 midterms.

Trump had been pressing for a Hoosier redistricting measure for months, but state GOP leaders signaled they simply lacked the votes to make it a reality, drawing a threat from Trump to endorse some Republicans’ primary challengers. Countermeasures by Democrats in Virginia and California could make Trump’s nationwide push a wash.

It's not helping trump that the earlier successful attempt to gerrymander Texas - on trump's public orders - is falling apart in the courts as well. trump's inability to win in the courts is hurting him on other key issues like his beloved tariffs policy:

Trump has long proclaimed that wielding tariffs against foreign governments is the key to negotiating favorable trade deals. Never mind that business and Republican orthodoxy has long considered tariffs as a backdoor tax on Americans.

But the Supreme Court appeared skeptical of Trump’s approach, with justices he appointed sharply questioning whether the president can leverage emergency powers to tariff foreign governments at will. By all accounts, the argument was a drubbing for Trump’s side. And the president seemed to discover that reality when he vented at the court in a pair of Truth Social posts last week.

It’s folly to predict how the high court will rule, even when the justices send clear signals during the arguments. But Trump appears to be bracing for defeat that could have devastating consequences for his economic agenda. His administration has repeatedly emphasized the centrality of tariffs to the recent spate of trade deals he’s made around the world.

trump arguably can craft economic / trade deals across the globe without the threat or use of tariffs anyway. What's hurting him is how he worships the idea of tariffs: trump genuinely believes tariffs can work, and that he needs them as tools to bully / enforce his will upon others. Of any potential legal defeats trump is facing in the White House, this could well be the one that angers him the most.

It's that anger - that rage trump carries with a scowl and a sneer, always driven by slights imagined and real, the willingness to lash out in public without concern or civility, the open cruelty towards those he views (Women, Blacks, poor) his lessers - that's troubling. trump's never had much self-control over his Id, his narcissistic drive to humiliate others, even during his first tenure as President National Destroyer of Norms and the Rule of Law. Five years later, he's gotten older and gotten worse (via Tom Nichols at the Atlantic):

Presidents often lose control over their agenda, or the policy process, or pieces of legislation. Sometimes, they even lose control of their party. But Donald Trump seems to have lost control over the one thing every person, and especially those with immense power, should always maintain control over: himself. Yesterday the president called for the arrest and execution of elected American officials for the crime—as he sees it—of fidelity to the Constitution.

It would be easy merely to note, yet again, that the president is a depraved man and a menace to the American system of government. As remarkable as it is to say it, however, the outbursts of this past week are different, and were likely triggered by Trump’s panic over the release of files about his former friend, the dead sex offender Jeffery Epstein. No one should treat this new phase in the president’s aggression against democracy as just another episode in the Trump reality show...

The president was already showing strain before his attack on the legislators. Last Friday, he lashed out at a female journalist who asked about the Epstein files, calling her “piggy.” (Trump seems to revel in getting away with speaking to women as president in ways that would land him on the sidewalk back in Queens.) On Tuesday, as he sat next to the Saudi crown prince, a man credibly accused by U.S. intelligence of murdering an American journalist, he lashed out at yet another female reporter: He called Mary Bruce of ABC “insubordinate”—a rather telling choice of words—and threatened to use the FCC to attack her network. Tuesday, of course, was the day the Epstein Files Transparency Act passed the House by a vote of 427–1. The next day, it passed the Senate by unanimous consent, and a humiliated Trump signed the bill into law.

Yesterday, Trump seemed to lose the last bit of his grip on his emotions as he fired off a fusillade of Truth Social posts. (“Trump must not have slept well Wednesday night,” Bill Kristol and Andrew Egger of The Bulwark observed today.) “This is really bad,” the president wrote, “and Dangerous to our Country. Their words cannot be allowed to stand. SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR FROM TRAITORS!!! LOCK THEM UP???”

“Lock them up” is a favorite Trump chant, but he did not end with this classic demand. He went on: “Each one of these traitors to our Country should be ARRESTED AND PUT ON TRIAL. Their words cannot be allowed to stand - We won’t have a Country anymore!!! An example MUST BE SET.” The charge, according to the chief executive? “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!” He also reposted a comment that said: “HANG THEM GEORGE WASHINGTON WOULD !!”

Anyone with a basic understanding of U.S. history would remember George Washington never hanged political opponents: when he was rebuffed by the Senate the one time he visited Congress, Washington merely stormed out and swore to never go back. But this is trump raging at us today: Terrible at history, and desperate to lie that other great figures in history would do what he'd want to do.

Trump’s posts risk putting the lives of American lawmakers in danger, and he almost certainly knows it. Many people who have publicly criticized the president have found themselves getting death threats from his most fervid followers. (Like many Trump-critical writers, I started getting them years ago.) As Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a former MAGA doyenne from Georgia whom Trump has now marked as a heretic, wrote on X last week, “A hot bed of threats against me are being fueled and egged on by the most powerful man in the world.” Senator Elissa Slotkin revealed that she is now traveling with a security detail because of what she called “a huge spike” in threats that came to her office after Trump’s eruption yesterday.

This is the same trump who stirred up MAGA supporters to riot at the Capitol on January 6th, the event that trump and his lackeys would like to erase from history, but an act of violence that trump himself would love to revisit on the nation again and again.

A lot of this turns back on that earlier observation from the podcast bros openly wondering "is trump falling into dementia?" It's a serious concern, and it's one a lot of Biden supporters shouted back at the media when they went after Joe for his slowed delivery of speeches and lapse of memory. trump wasn't that much younger than Biden, and in spite of all the public announcements that trump is the "fittest smartest human being of all time" (uh, no) a lot of people could see by 2024 he'd gotten more unsteady on his feet and more prone to brain farts on stage.

There's been more speculation than usual in the past few months that there's serious health concerns: a questionable MRI exam six months after getting one; a missing weekend where trump came back with odd bruising on his hands; trump wandering away during a visit to Japan; falling asleep during an Oval Office presentation, during which someone else collapsed and trump failed to take notice of it at all.

Far be it to speculate or cast rumors, but there is too much growing evidence that trump's questionable lifelong habits - and time itself - is racing up to claim his ticket. It doesn't help that a number of actions trump is ordering on the hurry - such as bulldozing down the East Wing to build his own ballroom, or the insistence of getting a Peace Prize in spite of his bullying tactics, or the release of a new dollar coin (which historically never worked out for Americans) with HIS face on it - a blatant middle finger to the unwritten rule to avoid putting a living person on American money - are obvious clues that he wants to enjoy all of this - fake symbols of his "greatness" - before he no longer can.

You can feel a sense of panic, of things not going well behind the scenes, with this administration this time around. More than just the level of idiocy and ineptitude from the actions they've taken to break the Constitution and the nation for their own interests.

It doesn't help that as I'm typing this, trump's Defense Dept (fuck the name change, Pete) is staging naval and air maneuvers off the coast of Venezuela. They're making more public calls to strike drug cartel locations - not just Venezuela but also Mexico - as part of an "anti-terrorist" campaign that they can't prove. Like as though trump wants a military victory and another half-assed parade before his mind gives out altogether.

And nobody in a position to do anything about it - not the Democrats because they're out of power, but the Republicans in Congress and in the Cabinet - will lift a finger, because they dare not face the rage of a rabid MAGA base. They're perfectly content to let this farce play out, and carve out whatever they can get in the ensuing chaos.

Stay safe, America. Keep protesting in the streets against trump's war on anyone dark-skinned. But be ready for the craziness to hit DEFCON-1 sooner than expected.

The Fall of Florida's Higher Education Under Far Right Republicans

As part of Ron DeSantis' ambitious agenda - for his insane presidential hopes - in 2023 to "fight Wokeness" in Florida's educational system, we witnessed the Sunshine State's schools fall under the merciless attentions of Far Right wingnuts eager to purge "diversity" and any genuine standards at every level. As I wrote back in February 2023:

 Not only are the classrooms at our public schools been emptied of every book so that DeSantis' foot soldier censors can refuse whichever titles they fear, but DeSantis is happily plugging in conservative political hacks into leadership roles at every major state university...

This is essentially a hostile takeover, not just by DeSantis but also by Far Right Republicans obsessed with dismantling higher educational systems they fear are too liberal...

DeSantis is essentially saying that things like civil rights and Title IX protections won't be upheld at state universities. Segregation and racial discrimination, sexual harassment, hostile workplaces, hostile classrooms... all of this will become the norm in DeSantis' Florida.

This is all echoed in DeSantis' efforts to shut down ANY discussion of "Critical Race Theory" essentially meaning our state cannot teach one iota of Florida's history regarding racism, slavery, Jim Crow, Civil Rights marches, all because Republicans are terrified that White People's Feelings (tm) will be hurt if we teach the facts that Yes Goddammit racism happened and keeps happening. He's just making sure that college students will be kept ignorant as much as our K-12 students.

(Christopher) Rufo is, by the by, a wingnut conservative hack actively campaigning to shut down public education of any kind in an obsessive desire to privatize something for greed and racism. DeSantis, desperate to win over 2024 Republican primary voters, is giving Rufo the opportunity to wreak havoc on Florida's educational system...

So it's been two years since then, with DeSantis' presidential hopes all dashed while Florida's educational standards sank into the swamps. In the meanwhile, we had situations like political hack Ben Sasse - Far Right Republican dragged in from another state - causing massive administrative and financial damage to the flagship University of Florida. We keep witnessing Republican leadership at the state level fail our kids and families when it comes to high school success and getting prepared for colleges. The state's budget for education across the board is disappearing, forcing more cuts that shouldn't be happening.

And DeSantis' takeover of New College? How is that turning out? Let Nate Weisberg's report at Washington Monthly educate us:

As Chris Mullin wrote recently in the Washington Monthly, DeSantis exploited Florida’s unusually centralized system of higher-education governance to insert political control directly into the classroom—stacking boards, replacing presidents, and rewriting curricula. His boldest gamble has been a complete takeover and ideological makeover of ​​New College of Florida, a small public liberal-arts college on Sarasota Bay known for its experimental pedagogy and progressive-left campus culture. Charging poor performance and ideological bias, DeSantis announced plans in early 2023 to transform the school into a “Hillsdale of the South”—a reference to the small, selective, conservative-leaning Michigan college that eschews government funds and focuses on teaching the classics. The governor appointed six new conservative trustees to New College, including activist Christopher Rufo, ​who then ​fired its President, Patricia Okker, and replaced her with former Florida House Speaker Richard Corcoran ​at more than double Okker’s salary​. Within months, the new board abolished the gender​ studies program, dismissed faculty and administrators, created athletic teams, and secured tens of millions in state funding.

Two years later, the picture looks grim. New College’s four-year graduation rate has plummeted from 58.3 to 47.4 percent. The school’s U.S. News & World Report college ranking has fallen by nearly 60 spots, from 76th among national liberal-arts colleges in 2022 to 135th this year. Faculty and staff have fled, and students have followed them out the door. “It’s kind of like a Ponzi scheme,” one professor told Inside Higher Ed. “Students keep leaving, so they have to recruit bigger and bigger cohorts.” Spending​ at the college​, meanwhile, has exploded. ​In Tallahassee, there is now open talk of either privatizing New College or shutting it down completely. 

DeSantis’s justification for the takeover was that New College was an educational disaster—a failed experiment in left-wing academic culture. Though the school ​had its problems (it struggled​​, for instance,​​ to reach its enrollment goals, as do many small, less-selective colleges around the country) and ​was indeed ​​left leaning, it was far from a disaster. In fact, by most objective measures, it was a model of what a small public liberal-arts institution could achieve. As Aalia Thomas reported in the Washington Monthly in 2023, New College consistently ranked near the top of the magazine’s l​ist of l​iberal​ ​arts ​colleges ​​for upward mobility, research, and service. ​​Its graduates earned PhDs at rates higher than many of the nation’s most prestigious private liberal arts colleges. Its curriculum mixed ​​postcolonial theory with Aristotle and Voltaire. The college charged about $7,000 a year for low-to-medium-income students—a bargain compared to most similar liberal arts colleges. It enrolled a high share of Pell​ ​​Grant recipients and produced civically engaged graduates—​​92.6 percent of its students were registered to vote in 2020. Far from failing, New College embodied many of the qualities conservatives say they prize in public higher education: affordability, rigor, civic virtue, and upward mobility. 

​​The governor’s appointees arrived convinced they were rescuing a failing school. ​​They replaced New College’s narrative-evaluation system with traditional grades. They bragged about making the college more “selective” (instead, the percentage of new students with a 4.0 or above high school grade point average decreased from 55.1 percent in 2022 to 42.1 percent in 2024)​.​ They recruited athletes and ​​self-described “normal” students to reshape the culture, ​​many of whom quickly transferred out. ​The campus began to change in telling ways: the reopened campus café, operated by a vendor tied to Corcoran, now serves coffee in cups printed with Bible verses, and the college has commissioned a statue of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk to stand on campus in honor of “free speech​.​​​” ​All this change has been financed by ​​an ​​eye-watering ​​boost​​ in ​​spending​​. The college’s budget has grown from​​ ​$53,232,164​​​​ ​​​​the year before the overhaul ​​​​to​​​​ ​​​​$93,043,119​​​​ ​​​​today​​​​—a​​​​ 75 percent​​​​ increase​​​​.​​​​ ​

​​​​​​​​Even DeSantis allies are turning on the project. “There can be no question anymore about what the numbers really are,” said Eric Silagy, a​​ DeSantis-appointed​​ member of the state Board of Governors. Nathan Allen, ​​who served as ​​​​vice president of strategy​​ for New College ​​during the conservative takeover but has since resigned​​, ​suggested where the blame for those numbers should be placed​: “​​New College is not a House or Senate project … It’s a Ron DeSantis project.”​​ ​​​Corcoran himself has said, ​​if New College doesn’t produce something different, “then we should be closed down.”

That Corcoran - a political hack hire who didn't deserve the job in the first place - is looking for the exit is a telling sign of how screwed up New College under Rufo and the other wingnuts turned out. And as much as this is all on DeSantis - pushing a political agenda on our state's schools - all of the state-level Republicans who backed DeSantis' efforts on this need to answer for their own corruption and incompetence here.

Look at the waste in dollars at New College: almost doubling the spending with reduced results, arguably funneling that money into wingnut ideas that aren't working out, if not funneling that money into their own pockets. Remember what happened at UF under Sasse: He hired in 'consultants' and lackeys at double if not triple the pay for no-show jobs and no-show results. It was... it is a huge grift for these greedheads.

For the Republicans, this was never about improving the educational standards of Florida. This was about viewing public education as a cash cow, a means of filling their own pockets with state money while the system breaks down. It was about playing into the hypocrisy of accusing our schools and colleges of being 'broken' and 'corrupt', while being the ones in charge breaking it all and using their own corrupt urges to make it worse.

We've had almost 30 years of constant Republican (mis)rule in the state of Florida, a straight line of crooked behavior by our elected officials and their shady business allies. Why the hell should they be allowed to retain any office after these decades of deceit and destruction?

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...