The Imperial Presidency

[robkelk]

Politically hot parts of US Constitution briefly deleted thanks to 'coding error'

It would be a simple matter to take the Library's word when it said a coding error caused the issue, but some internet denizens weren't willing to accept that excuse, as all three missing bits related to one Trump controversy or another.

[robkelk]

Trump wants to take over some U.S. cities. It's unlikely — but he can make life hard for them

tl;dr: His Orangeness is upset that people might elect mayors who don't like him. It's unlikely he can override Constitutional guarantees of States' rights to take over NYC or LA... but DC isn't in a state.

He's gone and done it.

Trump to deploy National Guard in D.C. — even as data shows crime at 30-year low

U.S. President Donald Trump announced on Monday that he will deploy hundreds of D.C. National Guard troops on the streets of Washington as part of a push to rein in violent crime, even as local police data shows those incidents are down sharply this year.

[classicdrogn]

just a bit of wordplay that occurred to me while waking up - "rob-public-again malarchy" with the latter pronounced halfway between a normal prefix and root combination of mal- with -archy and "malarkey."

[Labster]

Yeah, Mississippi is sending in some National Guard troops to DC, presumably in revenge for all of that Civil Rights stuff back in the '60s.  Also India and China are having some high level diplomatic meetings right now, because it's much easier to solve a decades long border war than to figure out wtf Trump is going to do with tariffs. (not sarcasm)

It's starting to be not fun.  Already, government officials are saying that there is no room for people like me in the United States.  It's like the only emotions I've had in the past few months are hatred, rage, and despair, and all I can manage to do is cycle through them.  It's not that there was some breaking event, it's just the gradual erosion of life and reason here.  Every day is just a little worse than the day before.  And life tomorrow will be worse than it is today, and the day after tomorrow will be even worse, and it will go on like that, without end, no chance of getting better.  This I know as a self-apparent fact.

I used to take my dog for a walk to calm down, but that stopped working yesterday. You see, I start thinking about the teenager who was abducted off the street by ICE while he was walking his dog down in LA, and how outsiders have come into my home and start telling us who can and can't be part of our people.  My dog likes walking through the dollar store to smell things (girls like shopping, y'know?).  I picked up a tube of toothpaste on the way, because it's cheapest there.  Then I notice the toothpaste is made in Mexico, and it will probably get more expensive with tariffs.  We walk outside the store, and around the corner is a lamppost bearing a sign of a missing person, an immigrant, asking for information.  We walk past the hospital on the way home.  The hospital is fine, but without work, there's no way I could afford to ever go there, even if I was dying.  The government has told me that I do not qualify for any assistance on health care, even canceling insurance that I was paying for.  But maybe that's a bright side?  Why would I want to live longer, anyway?

So yeah, anger-hatred-despair.  This is why I never get any writing done.  I can barely remember what it's like to have normal emotions, and it's hard to write characters if you're just guessing what happiness or jealousy or curiosity feel like.

I mean, things are objectively not that bad (yet), and sociopathic leaders are hardly a new phenomenon (cf. The Iliad). But it's just watching the goodness evaporate slowly away in the name of greatness, and knowing the name of the dross remaining when good vanishes. It's like an existential hurt, knowing that at long last, after centuries of revolutions and science and enlightenment, that us humans will never escape cruelty and selfishness and violence, simply because that is what we prefer.

[Dartz]

I've just been reading that fake Newsome profile tweets. They're funny. Taking the absolute piss out of authority is the best way to bring it down.

Some folk seem to be fighting back.


Also They want you to despiar.


Also, Vance is complaining that his wife won't fuck him anymore because all she can think of is the picture of him with a bald head everytime she looks at him.

[Isodecan]

The Trump Regime seems to have forgotten however that the people they get to do their dirty work are people too.  

Consider all the bonuses that DHS is having to pay people and the way they are having to lower standards, lower and raise age limits and they still are losing people faster than they can hire them (as evidenced by their trying to poach employees from other parts of the Federal Government that could hire people except they are under a hiring freeze).  

Trump is going to run out of minions, and the problems they are having with recruiting strongly suggest that the people as a whole aren't evil, just regrettably gullible.  

As my dear departed mother once said "You can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, and sometimes that's enough".

[Labster]

Trump is going to run out of minions, and the problems they are having with recruiting strongly suggest that the people as a whole aren't evil, just regrettably gullible.  

As my dear departed mother once said "You can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, and sometimes that's enough".

This is something that sounds a lot like a good argument, but it's only true to an extent.  A good portion of voters apply their own dreams and values on to a candidate for highest office, as if he can somehow defy physics and/or politics. This is a multipartisan problem -- just look at how many people thought Obama would end racism, when at the end we somehow got a country that was more racist than before.  Trump is exceptionally talented at saying things that sound good emotionally until you think about them, and also at targeting his message.

But... like, we had four years of Trump before, lots of us died in the pandemic because he thought masks made him look weak, and he basically said that he was going to do the same stuff as before but not listen to people trying to hold him back. I don't think someone gets to absolve moral responsibility just because they're gullible.  The fact that he was re-elected after his policies of tearing apart families and keeping children in cages and trying to overthrow the republic -- the fact of re-election itself -- means that a majority of the whole are evil.  Or were evil on at least one day last year.  I think trying to assign moral culpability to a sociopath like Trump is pretty questionable, but to those people who decided that election day, they carry the full weight of Trump's actions.

And moreover, it doesn't really matter if Trump has minions, if people are so divided that he gets what he wants anyway.  I want to share this article: Deeply divided Supreme Court lets NIH grant terminations continue. The setup: Trump/Kennedy terminates all health grants that do DEI things, like mention that race or gender exist.  The suit goes to federal district court to stop that.  This particular challenge that made it to the Supreme Court was that the district court wasn't the proper venue to bring the case, and it would have to be brought in Federal Claims Court instead, so the previous injunction requiring grants to be paid was invalid.

The court was so divided between whether it was the proper venue and if the injunction held that basically one person got to decide the whole case on her own opinion, and Barrett chose to split the baby.  Not like the biblical story about splitting the baby, but actually going through with the damn thing.  The end ruling is that federal district court is the correct venue to determine if the action was constitutional, but to actually get the government to disburse money, it would need to be filed at the claims court.  So in this case, to restore the grant money, the injunction won't work, because they will need to first win a case in district court, exhaust all appeals, and then once this is done, file a brand new lawsuit in a different court to actually get the money... and then 6 years later, you finally get the grant funding to continue researching on that cancer patient ... oops, she's dead already.

The point is, the court was divided enough that the end result is effectively zero accountability for grant terminations.  And no one was willing to back off from the dumbest possible way of doing it.  The Supreme Court now seems — how do I say it? — collectively but differently seditious?  There's a line beyond which partisanship crosses into sedition and it kinda feels like everyone crossed that line.  Except maybe Roberts, the Chief Justice, but he's been marginalized for a while.

Meanwhile in California: man delivering strawberries in Little Tokyo was detained for being foreign, right across the street from the museum where they have all of the exhibits on the Japanese internment during WWII. No ichigo keiki for you, that guy is getting deported.

[robkelk]

[quote="Isodecan" pid="229394" dateline="1756001315"]
...  The fact that he was re-elected after his policies of tearing apart families and keeping children in cages and trying to overthrow the republic -- the fact of re-election itself -- means that a majority of the whole are evil.  Or were evil on at least one day last year. ...

I was going to say that it was a majority of voters who actually voted, but then I remembered an old quote:

Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion. Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing. He is not a good man who, without a protest, allows wrong to be committed in his name, and with the means which he helps to supply, because he will not trouble himself to use his mind on the subject.
– John Stuart Mill, inaugural address at the University of St. Andrews, 1867

So, yes, everybody who could have voted but didn't bother is as culpable as the people who voted for more of the evil.

I understand you have another vote coming up next November...

[Labster]

CDC director has been ousted just weeks after Senate confirmation.  In typical fashion, it's utterly shambolic.  If you thought the Liz Truss premiership was bad, strap in bugalugs!

So first note that they went to the trouble to get this doctor confirmed by the US Senate (*checks watch*) three weeks ago.  She then had the temerity to say that she wanted to consult the scientists at her agency before removing a covid vaccine from the market.  So obviously, she has to go.  They told her to resign; she said no and asked a Senator for help.  So they announced that she had resigned, and wished her luck at her next job.  She has since pointed out that at no point had she resigned.  This is stupid: the government said she resigned, so she must have done it, even if she was never aware of doing it.

Also:
“You know, China intelligently went and they sort of took a monopoly of the world’s magnets, and nobody needed magnets until they convinced everybody 20 years ago, ‘Let’s all do magnets,’” Trump went on. “There were many other ways that the world could have gone.”

Yep, every day, sure as the Sun, life gets worse.

[classicdrogn]

In 2012, duotone closeups of Megatron with the caption "Destroy All HOPE" and "TRANSFORM Into a Gun" riffing on Obama's campaign posters were a joke. Today, announcing a Decepticon Day parade would only be a surprise because it was an improvement in the situation and general competence level of the federal government if they could organize a properly impressive parade.

[robkelk]

Bloomberg: Global Tariffs Found Illegal by US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, case sent back to a lower court to determine whether the ruling applies to everyone or only the plaintiffs.

tl;dr: the link text pretty much sums it up... except that the tariffs remain in effect until the question has been answered.

[Dartz]

Today, The Internet has been gripped by one question.

Is Trump Dead?

-----

man in New York goes up to a newsstand and buys a newspaper.
He then glances at the front page, then turns aside and tosses the whole newspaper straight into the trash.
Next day, he turns up, and does the same thing. Buys it, glances at the front page, throws it in the trash.
Next day, same thing. The newsstand worker is increasingly puzzled, but doesn't say anything.
But eventually, after a couple of weeks of this, he can't take it. "I'm sorry, friend, but I must ask: why do you buy the paper every day and then just look at the front page and throw it out?"
"Oh, I'm just checking for something."
"OK, but: what are you checking for?"
"I'm checking for a particular obituary."
"But sir, you don't even open the newspaper! The obituaries aren't even on the front page!"
"Oh, believe me, the one I'm waiting for will be."

[Norgarth]

well, he often seems brain dead, but we can only hope that his zombie-like carcass has been laid to rest.

[classicdrogn]

Unfortunately, in another parallel to Hitler, just having Trump gone would still leave a dozen or so other assholes who facilitated him and were rewarded with various positions of trust and authority.

[Norgarth]

Unfortunately, in another parallel to Hitler, just having Trump gone would still leave a dozen or so other assholes who facilitated him and were rewarded with various positions of trust and authority.

yes but they'd likely start fighting among themselves to be the new top dog, and none of them have The Cheeto's ridiculous charisma among the Base, so the Red Hats would fragment into infighting as well.

[Labster]

Okay quick question, which one of these is the fake story:

* Trump seeks to rename John F. Kennedy Center for the Arts to the Donald J. Trump Center
* Trump seeks to rename the Commanders to the Redskins
* Trump seeks to rename Mount Rushmore to Mount America
* Trump seeks to rename the Department of Defense to the Department of War
* Trump renames the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America
* Trump renames Fort Liberty to Fort Bragg, named after an army private who happened to have the same name as the Confederate general

I made up one of them, but the rest are all true. Presumably because if you're thinking about names, you won't be thinking about names that are in the Epstein Files.

[Norgarth]

I'd guess the Mount Rushmore one is fake. If anything Trump would be making plans to add his face to Rushmore.

[robkelk]

How Trump's deportation crackdown turned D.C.'s vibrant immigrant community into a ghost town

[Labster]

I'd guess the Mount Rushmore one is fake.  If anything Trump would be making plans to add his face to Rushmore.

Honestly I had trouble coming up with a fake one.  The real ones are so stupid and obvious but stupid, that it's hard to come up with something else that absurd. During the W. Administration I was super good at this, I spent so much time doing satire, and now I struggle to come up with a single joke more absurd than reality.  I miss that guy.  Sure, he started wars and deregulated too much, but at least he wanted to build a "peeance freeance secure Iraq", you know?

Anyway: U.S. reportedly to funnel half a billion dollars to Alberta separatists

Like uh.... I thought the point of the tariffs were to spend money in America, and here we are just giving it to Canadians?

[robkelk]

Anyway: U.S. reportedly to funnel half a billion dollars to Alberta separatists

Like uh.... I thought the point of the tariffs were to spend money in America, and here we are just giving it to Canadians?

No, the referendum committee is not legally allowed to accept even one red cent from anyone outside of Canada. Referendum Act, Section 14

But when has a little thing like federal law stopped His Orangeness from doing something?

[classicdrogn]

"It's important to hang on to your momentum, unless you're losing it. Then it's time to stop."

--Donald Trump

"LOL. LMFAO."

-- Me

[robkelk]

Because News has started a new radio season, mentioning the "ICE Bucket Challenge"...