For The Record

 

And Stephen Colbert had a message for the Democrats in Congress: 

Day 45

WTF Is This?

From The Guardian:

Donald Trump is facing a backlash on his Truth Social platform after sharing an AI-created video of him sipping cocktails with a topless Benjamin Netanyahu in Gaza, in a future imagining of the Palestinian territory devastated by Israel’s war.

The video presented a computer-generated vision of Trump’s property development plan for Gaza, under which he said he wants to “clean out” the population of about 2 million people. Named the “Riviera of the Middle East” plan, the proposal has been criticised as a blueprint for ethnic cleansing.

Footage shows the strip transformed into a Dubai-style resort with skyscrapers and luxury yachts. Children play on the beach as money rains down and bearded bellydancers gyrate on the sand.

What the fuck?

 

 

Tiny Victories

They're all we can hope for these days.

Like this tiny victory:

 

From Axios:

Screens at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) building in D.C. on Monday showed a fake video showing President Trump rubbing and kissing Elon Musk's feet, accompanied by the words: "Long Live the Real King."  

And so on.

 

60 Minutes - In Case You Missed It

Day 36

King

The GOP a decade ago:

Whether lamenting the so-called vacationer in chief’s swing of a golf club or criticizing his handling of the healthcare rollout, Republicans are getting in the habit of comparing President Obama to a monarch.

“It’s one thing after another. You know he says he has no choice but to act. He says he has a pen and a phone, and he’s going to act,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) stated on Fox News’s “On the Record” Wednesday, making scepter-like gestures.

{mosads}”That doesn’t sound like our republic,” he added. “He’s not a king. He has to really get approval from Congress.”

Paul has made the comparison several times, including in his Tea Party response to Obama’s 2013 State of the Union speech. More recently, it was Sarah Palin who offered the line to criticize Obama’s use of executive authority.

“With his pen and his phone he’s abrogating Congressional authority — making himself a ruler, not a president,” the former vice presidential candidate told those gathered at a conservative summit in Colorado last month.

“You know, we had a revolution back in 1776 because we don’t do kings,” she said.

And:

Ahead of President Obama's primetime address to the nation regarding immigration reform, House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, released a video statement slamming the president's decision to act unilaterally.

"Instead of working together to fix our broken immigration system, the president says he's acting on his own. But that is just not how our democracy works," Boehner says in the brief video. 

"The president has said before that 'he's not king' and he's 'not an emperor,' but he sure is acting like one," he continues. "And he's doing it a time when the American people want nothing more than for us to work together."

And now:

President Trump is famous for his love of everything gold and other trappings that connote royalty, whether it be large military parades or extravagant inaugural balls.

But in a post on his social media platform Truth Social on Wednesday, Mr. Trump went a step further, likening himself to a king as he celebrated his administration’s move to kill New York City’s congestion pricing program.

“CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD. Manhattan, and all of New York, is SAVED,” he wrote. “LONG LIVE THE KING!”

The White House then reinforced the message, recirculating it on Instagram and X with an illustration of Mr. Trump wearing a crown on a magazine cover resembling Time, but called Trump.

The times, they are a-chanin'.

 

MAGA - What it is

From KABC: 

Former UCLA and Minnesota Vikings punter Chris Kluwe was arrested during a Huntington Beach City Council meeting Tuesday evening when he approached councilmembers after making an impassioned speech that likened the MAGA movement to Nazism.

Kluwe, a Huntington Beach resident, was protesting the council's decision to place a plaque commemorating the public library's anniversary. The plaque included the words "Magical Alluring Galvanizing Adventurous," an apparent nod to President Donald Trump's Make America Great Again slogan.

"We want to honor the library. We want there to be a plaque, but we don't want MAGA on it because the library isn't supposed to be political," Kluwe told Eyewitness News Wednesday.

And this is what he happened:

And he said this:

MAGA stands for trying to erase trans people from existence. MAGA stands for resegregation and racism. MAGA stands for censorship and book bans. MAGA stands for firing air traffic controllers while planes are crashing. MAGA stands for firing the people overseeing our nuclear arsenal. MAGA stands for firing military veterans and those serving them at the VA, including canceling research on veteran suicide. MAGA stands for cutting funds to education, including for disabled children.”

MAGA is profoundly corrupt, unmistakably anti-democracy and most importantly, MAGA is explicitly a Nazi movement. You may have replaced a swastika with a red hat, but that is what it is.

It is what it is. 

KABC continues:

Kluwe ended his speech by saying he would engage in the "time-honored American tradition of peaceful civil disobedience."

The former NFL player then walked up toward councilmembers and placed his hands behind his back as multiple police officers arrested him. Police carried him out of the meeting.

Kluwe said he spent about fours in jail before he was released.

Proud to be in America, where at least I know I'm free.

 

Power Grab

From The NYTimes:

President Trump issued an executive order on Tuesday that seeks greater authority over regulatory agencies that Congress established as independent from direct White House control, part of a broader bid to centralize a president’s power over the government.

The order requires independent agencies to submit their proposed regulations to the White House for review, asserts a power to block such agencies from spending funds on projects or efforts that conflict with presidential priorities, and declares that they must accept the president’s and the Justice Department’s interpretation of the law as binding.

You can read the White House's fact sheet on the EO here. 

More from The Times:

The directive applies to various executive branch agencies that Congress established and empowered to regulate aspects of the economy, structuring them to be run by officials the president would appoint to fixed terms but whose day-to-day actions he would not directly control.

And:

Ending the independence of such agencies and consolidating power over them in the White House has long been an aim of the conservative legal movement, which sees that goal as a means toward reducing regulations and rules the government has imposed on powerful business interests.

But the movement has lacked the votes to persuade Congress to simply rescind the statutes and abolish or curtail such agencies. Instead, since the Reagan administration, conservative lawyers have developed and pushed an ideology called the unitary executive theory, under which the Constitution should be reinterpreted as not allowing Congress to create any pockets of independence within the government from direct presidential control.

Ah, the Unitary Executive Theory. 

Where are the originalists, those guardians of Constitutional orthodoxy regarding Trump's power grab?

At least he wasn't putting mustard on a cheeseburger.