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:

Civil disobedience is often necessary. Thank you Chris Kluwe.#civil disobedience

[image or embed]

— protecthb.org.bsky.social (@protecthb.bsky.social) February 19, 2025 at 11:23 AM

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.

 

 

This Is Madness

In case you missed it.

Day 30.

From 60 Minutes

Day 29

Where are the conservatives who endlessly declared that, "No one is above the law, not even the President of the United States." now?

Meanwhile, Outside

It's been a while, hasn't it.

 While it's still available, here's some science from NOAA:

The December global surface temperature was 1.26°C (2.27°F) above the 20th-century average of 12.2°C (54.0°F), making it the second-warmest December on record. This was 0.13°C (0.23°F) below last year's record warm month. December 2024 marked the 49th consecutive December (since 1975) with temperatures at least nominally above the 20th-century average.

It's still getting warmer out there.

But still, there's this from The Guardian: 

Donald Trump’s administration has started to remove or downgrade mentions of the climate crisis across the US government, with the websites of several major departments pulling down references to anything related to the climate crisis. Climate scientists said they were braced “for the worst”.

A major climate portal on the Department of Defense’s website has been scrapped, as has the main climate change section on the site of the Department of State. A climate change page on the White House’s website no longer exists, nor does climate content provided by the US agriculture department, including information that provides vulnerability assessments for wildfires.

Straight down the Memory Hole.  

To show what the current administration is doing take a look (so to speak) at that DOD portal.

This is what it looked like just before Trump's inauguration:

And this is what it looks like now:

Yep. Down the memory hole.

Day 18 of the Second Trump Administration.

 

 

2 + 2 = 5

I will not give in to the lies.

I will not give in to the fear.

2 + 2 = 5

Day Ten.

From The Guardian:

The Trump White House’s 27-year-old press secretary staunchly defended an abrupt freeze on federal grants and proclaimed a new era of aggressive immigration enforcement on Tuesday, marking a confrontational return to Trump-era media relations in the administration’s first official briefing.

Karoline Leavitt, the youngest White House press secretary in history, insisted the controversial funding pause set to activate on Tuesday evening would not affect individual benefits like social security and Medicare, but would target what she called “illegal DEI programs” and the “green new scam” initiatives that she claimed waste taxpayer money.

“The American people gave President Trump an overwhelming mandate on November 5, and he’s trying to ensure that the tax money going out the door in this very bankrupt city actually aligns with the will and priorities of the American people,” Leavitt said.

Let's pause right there. 

According to the FEC, Trump received 49.8% of the votes cast - not even a majority. It was only about 2.3 million more votes more than were cast for VP Harris.

This is not an "overwhelming mandate" in any definition of that phrase.

In other words, this is a lie.

Here's another:

She also defended Trump’s executive order attempting to end birthright citizenship, despite legal challenges from 22 state attorneys general. “This administration believes that birthright citizenship is unconstitutional,” Leavitt said, vowing to take the fight to the supreme court.

And here's what's in The Constitution: 

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.

 2 + 2 = 5

A Judge Responds

Let's start with Trump's assault on the 14th Amendment. 

It contains these paragraphs:

The privilege of United States citizenship is a priceless and profound gift.  The Fourteenth Amendment states:  “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”  That provision rightly repudiated the Supreme Court of the United States’s shameful decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393 (1857), which misinterpreted the Constitution as permanently excluding people of African descent from eligibility for United States citizenship solely based on their race. 

But the Fourteenth Amendment has never been interpreted to extend citizenship universally to everyone born within the United States.  The Fourteenth Amendment has always excluded from birthright citizenship persons who were born in the United States but not “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.”  Consistent with this understanding, the Congress has further specified through legislation that “a person born in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” is a national and citizen of the United States at birth, 8 U.S.C. 1401, generally mirroring the Fourteenth Amendment’s text.  

To understand Trump's error here, let's head over to Hah-vahd, to some actual legal experts:

[Harvard Law Today]: The relevant portion of Fourteenth Amendment states: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” The new administration argues that the phrase “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” does not apply to children of those who are undocumented or who are on temporary visas. What do you make of that claim?

[Gerald L. Neuman, J. Sinclair Armstrong Professor of International, Foreign, and Comparative Law]: The argument is either a crazy theory or dishonest interpretation of the Constitution. The Supreme Court explained what those words mean in the Wong Kim Ark case. It reflects the fact that there are these traditional exceptions that really do involve people who are not subject to the nation’s jurisdiction. The leading example in the 1860s debates was foreign diplomats, who have diplomatic immunity, who are for the most part not subject to our laws, and who retain the citizenship of the country that sent them and which they are serving. Their children share the immunity and would not qualify. There is also the example of a foreign warship visiting a port of the United States — the country does not exercise jurisdiction over foreign warships, and therefore children born on the foreign warships are not citizens of the United States.

With respect to undocumented workers, they are people who come to the United States to work, to participate in our economy, to live in our society, to live safely in our territory. They are subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. Further, the thing that makes the immigration laws so enforceable against them is that they are subject to the jurisdiction of the United States.

Note that last sentence.

Anyway, Trump's executive order was temporarily blocked quickly after it was pinched out of Trump's Oval Office.

From The NYTimes:

A federal judge on Thursday temporarily blocked President Trump’s executive order to end automatic citizenship for babies born on American soil, dealing the president his first setback as he attempts to upend the nation’s immigration laws and reverse decades of precedent.

In a hearing held three days after Mr. Trump issued his executive order, a Federal District Court judge, John C. Coughenour, sided with Washington, Arizona, Illinois and Oregon, the four states that sued, signing a restraining order that blocks Mr. Trump’s executive order for 14 days, renewable upon expiration. “This is a blatantly unconstitutional order,” he said.

“Frankly,” he continued, challenging Trump administration lawyers, “I have difficulty understanding how a member of the bar would state unequivocally that this is a constitutional order. It just boggles my mind.”

Mr. Trump responded hours later, telling reporters at the White House, “Obviously we’ll appeal it.”

Of course he will. Not that this part of the judge's order means anything to the MAGA-cult:

There is a strong likelihood that Plaintiffs will succeed on the merits of their claims that the Executive Order violates the Fourteenth Amendment and Immigration and Nationality Act. See United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169  U.S.  649, 694-99 (1898); Regan v. King, 49 F. Supp. 222, 223 (N.D. Cal. 1942), aff'd, 134 F.2d 413 (9thCir. 1943), cert denied, 319 U.S. 753 (1943)  see also Gee v. United States, 49 F. 146, 148 (9th Cir. 1892). 

But when has Trump ever let the law get in the way of his plans?

 

 

 

 

Trump Pardons

Day Two

From The Hill:

President-elect Trump told NBC it was disgraceful President Biden issued pardons to Anthony Fauci, Gen. Mark Milley, former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), and other members of the House panel that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.

“It is disgraceful. Many are guilty of MAJOR CRIMES! DJT” Trump texted NBC’s “Meet the Press” host Kristen Welker.

Two folks at HuffPost didn't like the Biden's Pardons, either: 

While these pardons may well save these people from months, if not years, of costly litigation for committing no crimes, they were a terrible idea. They create the appearance of corruption, even where none exists. To those marinating in the Trumpian conspiracy swamps, and even for those who do not closely follow politics, they look like a cover-up. Why pardon someone if they didn’t do something wrong? In feeding the conspiracy, they affirm Trump’s argument that politics is just an elite protection racket, so why shouldn’t he get to do the same?

That argument leaves out one little point. From NPR December, 2020:

President Trump issued dozens more pardons on Wednesday evening to many wealthy and well-connected convicts with ties to his innermost circles, including former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, Republican operative Roger Stone and Charles Kushner, the father-in-law of Ivanka Trump.

And:

The case against Stone was brought by then-special counsel Robert Mueller as part of his probe into Russia's interference in the 2016 election and possible ties between Moscow and the Trump campaign.

Stone was indicted on charges of lying to Congress about what he and then-candidate Trump knew about Russian efforts to discredit Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential campaign, witness tampering and obstruction. The charges related to his efforts during the 2016 presidential race to act as an intermediary between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks.

But days before Stone, who is Trump's longtime friend and political confidant, was to report to prison in July, the president commuted the 40-month prison sentence.

Trump's already done it.

To their credit, I suppose, the HuffPost duo did acknowledge:

These [pardons] appear to be purely prophylactic pardons meant to protect these individuals from the threat of investigations launched by President Donald Trump, who had promised vengeance through investigation and prosecution against all of the pardoned individuals.

He was going to go after Fauci, et al, anyway. 

In any event, here's some Day One news from the NYTimes:

President Donald J. Trump, in one of his first official acts, issued a sweeping grant of clemency on Monday to all of the nearly 1,600 people charged in connection with the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, issuing pardons to most of the defendants and commuting the sentences of 14 members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers militia, most of whom were convicted of seditious conspiracy.

Mr. Trump’s moves amounted to an extraordinary reversal for rioters accused of both low-level, nonviolent offenses and for those who had assaulted police officers.

And they effectively erased years of efforts by federal investigators to seek accountability for the mob assault on the peaceful transfer of presidential power after Mr. Trump’s loss in the 2020 election. As part of his pardon order, Mr. Trump also directed the Justice Department to dismiss “all pending indictments” that remained against people facing charges for Jan. 6.

He pardoned them or commuted the sentences of people who committed some MAJOR CRIMES, didn't he? 

For example:

The pardons will also wipe the slate clean for violent offenders who went after the police on Jan. 6 with baseball bats, two-by-fours and bear spray and are serving prison terms, in some cases of more than a decade.

Moreover, Mr. Trump pardoned Enrique Tarrio, the former leader of the Proud Boys, who was serving a 22-year prison term after being convicted at trial of seditious conspiracy — a crime that requires prosecutors to prove that a defendant used violent force against the government.

Sure, but Biden's pardons absolutely reek of political corruption. 

The riot of January 6, 2020 was an act of love simply because The Leader said so.

 

 

Biden Pardons

 Good for him.

From The Biden White House:

I believe in the rule of law, and I am optimistic that the strength of our legal institutions will ultimately prevail over politics. But these are exceptional circumstances, and I cannot in good conscience do nothing. Baseless and politically motivated investigations wreak havoc on the lives, safety, and financial security of targeted individuals and their families. Even when individuals have done nothing wrong—and in fact have done the right thing—and will ultimately be exonerated, the mere fact of being investigated or prosecuted can irreparably damage reputations and finances.

That is why I am exercising my authority under the Constitution to pardon General Mark A. Milley, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the Members of Congress and staff who served on the Select Committee, and the U.S. Capitol and D.C. Metropolitan police officers who testified before the Select Committee. The issuance of these pardons should not be mistaken as an acknowledgment that any individual engaged in any wrongdoing, nor should acceptance be misconstrued as an admission of guilt for any offense. Our nation owes these public servants a debt of gratitude for their tireless commitment to our country.

Good for him.

Resist.

Day one.

George Orwell famously wrote:

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

Elsewhere, he wrote:

And yet the peculiar horror of the present moment is that we cannot be sure that this is so. It is quite possible that we are descending into an age in which two and two will make five when the Leader says so.

In this case, "the Leader" is being inaugurated President of the United States later today.

He's a criminal, found guilty on 34 felony charges in the state of New York. He was also found liable to have committed real estate fraud and sexual assault. He owes hundreds of millions in fines for the fraud and for defaming the woman he assaulted.

These are facts. His MAGA cult will tell you they're lies - and that is just because their leader says so.

Protect your self. Protect your sensitive communications. Especially if you are in any of the communities soon to be targeted by The Leader's second administration.

Get a Proton Mail account.

From PCMag:

You can use Proton Mail at no charge, while paying for an account removes some limits and enables advanced features. Proton Mail stores your data using zero-knowledge encryption, meaning only you can access it. A disgruntled employee can’t rummage through your Proton Mail messages, and the best subpoena in the world can’t force the company to turn over your account.

So if two people are communicating via Proton Mail, it's end-to-end encrypted. You can send encrypted email (password protected) out of Proton Mail as well.

You can store documents there as well - just go to Proton Drive.

Proton also has a VPN.

What's a VPN?

Again, PCMag:

A private network configured within a public network such as the Internet or a carrier's network. A VPN provides anonymity and privacy for every desktop and mobile device that accesses the Internet. VPNs use so-called "tunneling" protocols because they tunnel a private channel through a public network.

Get a Tor Browser.

From PCMag:

The easiest way is with Tor Browser. Tor, which stands for The Onion Router, is more than just one of the best web browsers. It's a technology stack that hides your web activity by routing and obscuring it through multiple nodes, like the layers of an onion. Its use for nefarious activities is well chronicled, but it's your best option if you want real privacy online. Tor Browser is a free, open-source project that simplifies protecting your identity online.

All of the above are available in free versions, though you can upgrade the Proton stuff.

I have no financial interest in any of it. I'm using the free versions.