our homegrown hitler
25 seconds ago
Saturday, May 10, 2025
Sometimes I just want to scream
It really is time for certain people to shut their mouths and sit their ignorant asses down. That's THE NATION magazine, that's Amy Goodman and all the other fake asses who have brought our country to this point. , and CNN) report:
President Donald Trump has been personally involved in discussions inside the administration over potentially suspending habeas corpus, a legal procedure that allows people to challenge their detention in court, two people familiar with the consideration told CNN.
One of Trump’s top aides, Stephen Miller, confirmed publicly Friday that the administration was “actively looking at” suspending habeas corpus, adding that it “depends on whether the courts do the right thing or not.”
Both the private discussions and Miller’s public comments show this is under serious consideration inside the West Wing.
How did we get here?
By betrayal. See "2024: The Year of Betrayal From Inside The Left." Those of you on the left who worked to suppress turnout for Kamala Harris even thought you knew it was her or Chump? You need to sit your ass down.
You've done more than enough harm. You just shut your lying mouth and sit your ass down.
Chump is toying with ditching habeas corpus.
Do you trashy and closeted Socialists not grasp how serious this situation is and how you put us here with your organized campaign against Kamala Harris?
Just shut the f**k up. Unless you're coming forward to apologize to the country, shut up. That's THE PROGRESSIVE which is really THE SOCIALIST. They could praise Tim Walz because he was DSA endorsed but all they did was trash Kamala. Katrina vanden Heuvel, a 'Socialist' herself (one who went to court to get more of granddaddy's money, arguing she shouldn't have to pay the estate tax on all the money her grandfather ripped off from Black artists) put Marxist Bhaskar Sunkara in as 'president' of THE NATION. JACOBIN is nothing more than US SOCIALIST WORKER reworked after all the racism and sexism sunk the previous rag.
Where do left Democrats go?
That's a really good question. Because for months leading up to the November election, these trashy closet cases wrote columns, took up radio and TV time, were all over YOUTUBE -- never once identified as Socialists -- trashing Kamala. The narrative they were creating was: Even Democrats don't like Kamala.
This didn't happen by accident.
You put us here.
And let's include COMMON DREAMS.
Yeah, after I called you out throughout August and September for the damage you were doing, in early October you stopped that s**t.
But you were part of it too.
I'm sick of all of you and your racism. Ava and my "Media: OWNED finds Eoin Higgins owned by bad journalism" opened with this disclosure:
[On July 19th, Eoin Higgins contacted one of us, C.I., via e-mail. He sent five e-mails over three days. He received a dictated reply or a summary via Martha to each of his e-mails. That's the only contact we've had with Eoin.]
Eoin isn't the only one who's written me. You piss me off enough and I'll start quoting from all of the e-mails from COMMON DREAMS writers. I have no problem doing so.
I didn't initiate contact with any of you. Your b.s. emails in August and September explaining how what you were all doing, attacking Kamala, how that was "right" according to you?
Those e-mails are so much more interesting than any of the bulls**t you post at your website.
As it stands, my plan has been to try to live past the 2028 general election. And if you closet cases who schemed and lied to your readers, listeners and watchers start trying to defeat the Democrat again, my plan is to publish in full your e-mails.
You knew what you were doing. You make that clear in your e-mails justifying the attacks on Kamala. You make it clear that this is how you're finally going to take over the Democratic Party.
Well why don't you get honest now?
Didn't you get what you wanted? Isn't Chump in the White House?
But you don't want to be honest publicly about what you did.
One male COMMON DREAMS writer should especially be nervous because you spent your e-mail sketching it all out, dropping names on who was involved when you weren't telling me how stupid I was not to be part of your 'movement.'
There are so many people who've written over the years to gripe at me, to whine to me, blah blah blah.
And I try to be nice. Unless you're David Sirota threatening me in an e-mail, I don't usually even note it here. You don't have control over your network program? That would certainly crush your audience, wouldn't it? But have I ever mentioned what you wrote in your e-mail?
No.
But in 2028, if I'm still alive, if you pull the s**t you did in 2024 to sink the Democratic Party, you watch your e-mails go public.
And one thing you should immediately do? Rediscover Gaza.
I don't think, in 2028, people will give you a pass to begin with. But when they read how you plotted to use concern for Gaza to give your empty attacks on Joe and then Kamala weight?
When they read that cold hard truth and then note how COMMON DREAMS and others walked away from Gaza? That's going to say much more about you and your lying and whorish nature than anything I ever could.
Not every Socialist took part in this nonsense. WSWS did what they always do, for example. And they are highly -- and rightly -- critical of the DSA branch of Socialism. There are other individuals I would praise but I just called a friend at a left outlet to ask if he was out as a Socialist and he's not. He wrote an important column explaining why the left needed to vote for Kamala. He's not the only one who saw what we were all up against.
Millions of voters saw what this country was up against. And we turned out and we voted for Kamala. That's why Chump didn't get 50% of the vote.
And it's cute the way some of us can point that out but those of us who are closeted Socialists refuse to do so because it's to their interest to slam Kamala for the three month campaign she ran.
Greg Palast's work on the voter rolls makes it clear exactly how close the vote was.
But they want to ignore that and they want to ignore the organized Socialist movement against Kamala that hid in the shadows, created a false narrative and worked to kill voter enthusiasm.
I'm not in the damn mood.
And these same people now pimp David Hogg as an answer.
A body under attack has to defend itself. And it's time for the Democratic Party to start doing that.
Non-Democrats pose as Democrats and attack our party. Sometimes they'll call themselves "progressives" and they muddy up that term in the process.
This site has been up for over 20 years now. It was started to oppose the Iraq War. Bully Boy Bush now looks like a Dream Date in comparison to Donald Chump's second term. Never in my life, did I think I would have to write about the country possibly suspending habeas corpus.
Never.
But here we are.
And we're not here due to the fault of those of us who voted for Kamala Harris.
You're the ones who put us here, those of you who conspired to defeat Kamala. You did it with lies. You did it with racism and you did it with sexism.
And it's way past time that someone took a serious look at it.
You f**ked us all.
Now you want to be 'progressive' (Socialist) and get behind David Hogg who wants to primary 'safe' incumbents?
There's no such thing. Right now, there is no such thing. Democrats have to grab control of the House. Have to. In order to save our country, they have to.
Instead of owning your MASS F**K UP, you same liars now want to come forward and work to defeat Democrats and we're supposed to join you in this bulls**t?
Al Gore was supposed to carry Florida in 2000. That's why various losers told people to vote for Ralph Nader -- an out of touch man who thought he would 'reach' women voters by taking on . . . the high heel industry.
We do not have time to focus on you working to tear down this or that incumbent Democrat because you don't like their position on gun control or whatever your issue is today.
Democrats need to have control of a house to launch real investigations.
They can do field hearings all on their own right now and should.
But we need Congressional hearings and we're not getting that if we're not in control of the one house of Congress.
Shania Shelton (CNN) explains:
Lee Kovarsky, law professor at the University of Texas and expert on habeas corpus, said it would be a “national historical disaster.”
“The executive could just detain you, and there would be no recourse,” he said. “Obviously they would do it to try to detain certain non citizens, but there’s no reason why it’s limited to them.”
White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller said Friday the administration was “actively looking at” suspending habeas corpus and it “depends on whether the courts do the right thing or not.”
But the Constitution allows habeas corpus to be suspended only when “in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.”
“The
Constitution makes clear that suspension of habeas corpus is to be
reserved for actual rebellion or invasion posing the most dire threats
to public safety. And Congress has never passed a law authorizing
deportations without any court involvement, as Miller suggests,” CNN
senior legal analyst and former federal prosecutor Elie Honig said.
Kovarsky said the reason why suspension of habeas corpus is so restricted “is precisely because it’s so severe.”
“You have no right, to a court, to say that you’re being unlawfully detained. So in a way, the cash value of your substantive rights is zero if you don’t have a judge to evaluate them,” he said.
This is where we are and people who put us here should get honest about it. They need to take accountability but they won't.
I can't go to LGBTQ NATION without crying over what's happening. But these 'progressives' responsible from Chump being in the White House aren't bothered.
Dr Carla Hayden has been fired.
Why?
For doing her job.
For doing her job.
The White House
has revealed the true reason why they have fired Carla Hayden, the head
librarian of Congress. During her weekly press briefing, press
secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed that Donald Trump's administration had deemed that Hayden "did not fit the needs of the American people."
[. . .]
Hayden's
dismissal reportedly caused outrage among congressional Democrats. Rep.
Joe Morelle, the top Democrat who oversees the library, slammed Trump
for “firing a patriotic public servant.”
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries further condemned the firing, calling Trump's decision “unjust” and a “disgrace.” Senator Martin Heinrich from New Mexico issued a fiery statement on Twitter, claiming that the president was "taking his assault on America’s libraries to a new level.”
Hayden had also been leading the "Of the People" initiative to bring more works from Black, indigenous, Hispanic or Latino, Asian American and Pacific Islander and other communities of color into the library's collections. She had often spoken about the awe-inspiring job she had to help preserve and protect American history.
The nonprofit American Accountability Foundation, a conservative group dedicated to protecting Trump's "America First" initiatives, had been pushing for Hayden's firing, and celebrated her departure as a defeat for the "woke, anti-Trump" bureaucracy.
Let's be clear about MAGA being racist because they're clear in their videos -- as Coach D, Karen Hunter, Reese Waters and others have done a great job this past week exposing -- they dont like people of color. They applaud the use of the n-word. They get in front of the camera, tape their own video explaining this -- the United States -- is their country. They say it's not a country for -- their terms -- "Black" and "Brown" people.
This is hatred and bigotry. All Dr Hayden did was honor education. We are supposed to want to learn more. That's why they have archaeological digs, for example. It's why historians study various tribes of Native Americans, why a historian would specialize in the study of one tribe.
Dr Hayden was doing her job.
But in the racists minds of Chump and his MAGA bigots, any time or attention take away from a White Straight Male (or a White Gay Republican Male -- let's be honest) puts the White population at risk!!!!!
Man the barricades, cock gobbler Pete Hegseth, man the barricades!!!!!
CBS News 2020 interview in which Dr Hayden explained, "Personally,
being a person of color, it means so much because people who look like
me were forbidden by law to learn to read. That means so much that here is a person of color leading the world's largest library."
That did mean so much.
It'll be interesting to see what White person Chump appoints to the position. Or is Coach D the only one noticing just how White Chump's Cabinet is?
This is White supremacy and it was brought to you not just by MAGA but also by Socialists who call themselves 'progressives' or what have you.
Let's go back to Hegseth. David McAfee (RAW STORY) reports:
U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth can add plagiarism to his list of things he's been formally accused of.
Trump's pick for the top Pentagon spot has previously faced allegations of sexual assault and of having a drinking problem. Now it's being reported that, while in school at Princeton, he copied other pieces for his thesis.
The local Daily Princetonian flagged a particular sentence in the senior thesis authored by Hegseth. In that piece, Hegseth wrote in part, "Bush looked distracted and somber but continued to listen to the second-graders."
"This sentence is notable for recapping the precise moment President George W. Bush was informed of the 9/11 attacks. But it is also notable because it is nearly identical to one published by The Washington Post in 2001, two years before Hegseth wrote his thesis," the bombshell report from Saturday states. "A review of Hegseth’s thesis by The Daily Princetonian, in consultation with three experts on plagiarism, found eight instances of uncredited material, sham paraphrasing, and verbatim copying. But while the three experts all said that the passages violated Princeton’s academic honesty regulations, they differed on whether the violations were serious or too minor to matter."
He's just a liar and a hate merchant. Remember, he was mainly known in college for what other conservatives in classes with Pete considered his 'strange' relationships (with other males) and for having a meltdown when Halle Berry won the Academy Award for Best Actress. All the make up in the world can't hide that reality for Pete.
Evan Williams (TAG24 NEWS) notes:
The White House blocked Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's pick for Pentagon chief of staff and moved to select its own candidate for the position.
Hegseth's pick – Marine Colonel Ricky Buria – was vetoed by the President Donald Trump after months of turmoil at the top of the Department of Defense, an investigation by the Guardian revealed.
The White House reportedly told Hegseth that while Buria was a clear break from Joe Kasper, who left the role amid an investigation into high-profile leaks, his limited experience as a junior military assistant made him a liability.
I could scream for hours. That's all I'm doing right now as I go through the news. And, one more time, it did not have to be this way. Norman Solomon, Rashida Tlaib and the rest of those sorry ass Socialists delivered us to this moment in time. Tom Boggioni (RAW STORY) reports:
During an appearance on CNN Saturday morning where she was tasked with defendingthe questionable arrest of Newark Mayor Ras Baraka by a mob of armed ICE agents outside of an DHS facility, a spokesperson for the agency stated there are plans to arrest more lawmakers in the coming days.
Speaking with host Victor Blackwell, Tricia McLaughlin, Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs at DHS and former advisor to failed GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, kept insisting that Mayor Baraka was arrested for "storming" the facility despite video showing him being taken into custody outside the chain-link gate.
After she grimly recited that the mayor and members of Congress who were also in attendance "put law enforcement at risk, this actually put the detainees, as well, at risk," she added more arrests would be forthcoming.
In the 20 years and several months since this site started, I have written something for this site daily. And I've never before been more worried about our country. I was worried -- rightfully -- before the election which is why in early 2023, I came out stating I would vote the Democratic Party's presidential nominee no matter who it was. We couldn't afford Chump and it was obvious back then. But some people wanted to f**k around and play. And all they did was destroy our country. Betty is right, it will take over a decade for us to recover as a country just in terms of health and science.
You f**k arounds need to stop you nonsense that you've got an idea! You've got a thought! And you know so much better than anyone in history!
You've already gambled with our lives and our democracy. I would think that damage would be enough to shame you into silence but clearly that's not the case.
Roger Stone has called Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly a traitor who deserves to die for questioning the president.
On Thursday, Stone took to X to accuse the Navy veteran, former astronaut, and current Democratic Senator of treason and called for his execution. The crime? Questioning Trump’s crypto connections.
That's normal behavior now -- you've normalized it as you worked to destroy our country.
I love David and his Hoggletts insisting that now's the time to come together --as they try to divide Democrats. Now. After they've destroyed the country. They need to shut the f**k up, grab a broom and start cleaning up the mess that they made.
Naomi LaChance (ROLLING STONE) reports:
Amid a widespread crackdown on immigration and refugee programs, the Trump administration is slated to bring white South Africans to the U.S. as refugees on Monday, multiple news outlets reported. They will now have a pathway to American citizenship.
The move is the first in a "much larger-scale relocation effort," White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller told reporters on Friday. The Trump administration suspended the refugee resettlement program on his first day in office for his second term and froze funding for resettlement agencies. In Uganda, as one example, these cuts mean that food rations for a million people have been cut off.
[. . .]
Elon Musk, the head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, was born in South Africa. He has said in a post on X that a political group is promoting a "white genocide" in the country, a claim that has been widely denied.
"Far-right-wing groups in South Africa actively go to America and promulgate this idea of a white genocide because, of course, when you have a high murder rate, white people do get murdered," Gareth Newham, head of the justice and violence prevention program at the Institute of Security Studies in South Africa told NBC News in February. White people are likely targeted because they are relatively wealthy, he said.
At the root of the Trump administration's claims is South Africa's recent expropriation law that allows the government to seize land under certain circumstances. Thirty years after the end of Apartheid, about seven percent of South Africans are white - mainly descendants of Dutch settlers - but they own almost three quarters of the land. So far, no land has been seized.
That is outrageous. From time to time a drive-by e-mail comes in about how I'm so angry. Yes, I am. I'm angry at all the pieces of crap on the left that conspired to defeat Kamala Harris. I'm mad because you were blind, I'm mad because you were wrong, I'm mad because so many of us across this land are suffering because of your bulls**t.
This is from Ava and my "Media: OWNED finds Eoin Higgins owned by bad journalism:"
How do you miss that?
So many public details are missed, overlooked and ignored. Again, it reads like a first draft.
He notes Peter Thiel and misses a great deal there as well.
Peter Thiel co-writes a book -- THE DIRVERSITY MYTH which is bad book that tries to be like another really bad book from four years earlier, THE BEAUTY MYTH. Nut job Naomi Wolf is pleased to buddy up to Peter these days. Years ago, she wasn't quite grabbing onto the notion that imitation was the sincerest form of flattery. (Her earlier anger over the copying always made us laugh since Naomi's book ripped off the lectures of Judith N. Shklar -- a point we've made here repeatedly for two decades now.)
We bring that up not to just get another dig in at nut job Naomi, but also to point out that the co-writer is David Sacks.
Eion explains Sacks is "an old Stanford friend" of Peter Theil.
That's one way to describe him.
But the detail that we'd zoom in on and that Eion misses? Sacks is from South Africa. Grew up there. Came to America as an adult. Goodness. The book notes how Thiel spent elementary years in South Africa back when he was a German citizen. And, of course, we know Elon Musk learned to embrace, love and dry hump racism from his South African father.
But Eion makes no connection.
Three of Donald Chump's biggest donors are Whites from South Africa and it's not worth noting? That silence from a few months ago to when the book was published last month has not aged well. Sacks, for example, is more than the single-sentence former friend of Thiel's from Stanford scattered on a few pages. December 5th, Gabrielle Canon (GUARDIAN) reported:
Donald Trump announced on Thursday that he was nominating the podcaster and former PayPal chief operating officer David Sacks to be his White House artificial intelligence and crypto czar, continuing a pattern of rewarding big donors with political power.
And, of course, last week found Chump announcing -- in the midst of his attacks on immigrants -- that Whites from South Africa are now to become priorities. Camilo Montoya-Galvez (CBS NEWS) explains:
President Trump on Friday directed government officials to prioritize the resettlement of South Africans of European descent through the U.S. refugee program, which he suspended during his first day in office.
In an executive order, Mr. Trump accused the South African government of discriminating against Afrikaners, an ethnic group in South Africa made up of descendants of European colonists, mostly from the Netherlands, who first arrived there in the 1600s.
Until the 1990s, White South Africans of European descent ruled South Africa, enforcing the brutal system of apartheid against the country's Black majority.
This week, President Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Trump appointee and billionaire businessman Elon Musk all attacked South Africa in a flurry of social media posts.
The South African government, which is made up of a coalition of diverse political parties, responded firmly but diplomatically. President Cyril Ramaphosa said the country would "not be bullied."
By Friday the White House had issued an executive order to cut financial assistance to South Africa, citing disapproval of the country's recent change to land policy and for bringing a genocide case against Israel to the International Court of Justice.
At CNN, Eve Brennan and Alejandra Jaramillo added:
South Africa’s foreign ministry called the order a “great concern” and said it “(lacked) factual accuracy and fails to recognize South Africa’s profound and painful history of colonialism and apartheid,” adding that the move seemed “to be a campaign of misinformation and propaganda aimed at misrepresenting our great nation.”
“It is ironic that the executive order makes provision for refugee status in the US for a group in South Africa that remains amongst the most economically privileged, while vulnerable people in the US from other parts of the world are being deported and denied asylum despite real hardship,” the foreign ministry added in a statement Saturday.
If anyone feels noting the above three stories on South Africa is 'a little much,' maybe they went to school with Eoin Higgins?
Because the above is not minor. His whole attitude reeks of White privilege. Such as when he's failing to grasp that Thiel's support of Ron Paul was not despite of Paul's well known racism but actually because of the politician's well known racism. Equally true, he never notes the racist connection of rich supporters of Donald Chump to South Africa. Or that, for example, Elon leaves South Africa because apartheid is falling. Instead, he -- and Thiel -- just happen o leave South Africa, the country that has allowed them to benefit their entire life from their White skin while discriminating against Black people. The attacks on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion is briefly noted in terms of when Musk took over Twitter and was appalled by the diversity he sees in the company's work force. Higgins treats it as a quirk when, in fact, it's a built-in factory feature of three White men (Musk, Thiel and Sacks) spending their formative years in an apartheid state that fed and deepened their bigotry and hate.
Higgins limited vision can't even see that the end of apartheid was relevant in terms of history and activism.
That's obvious when he goes to attack Generation X and says they didn't have to fight with their parent growing up and they didn't have to fight for anything, "Yes, there were movements against US imperialism and support of dictators in Central and South America. The WTO protests in Seattle were huge. However, unlike the boomers or the millennials, Gen X did not experience formative moments like the earthshaking battles of the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement, the Iraq War, or the Great Recession."
That may be the part of the book where he comes off the most uneducated and unaware. College students across the US were huge leaders and participants in the global anti-apartheid movement. They worked years and years on that. Did no one ever educate him on the shanty towns built up on campuses all around this country?
It was an awful book. And we marveled, Ava and I, over every White person on YOUTUBE, MSNBC and PACIFICA who brought that idiot -- that racist, Socialist idiot -- on a program to rave over that bad book. Factually incorrect, poorly written and reeking of White privilege so great that even the South African wing of MAGA was ignored.
Again, we've got a problem.
And its not going to be one that hurts the White Socialists. Amy Goodman, Katty van van, Norman Solomon, Higgins, Rashida Tlaib -- all those White people aren't at risk. It's Black people. We're again at risk as Chump rushes to bring in White people who supported apartheid in South Africa and now see themselves as victims. Oh, how much fun that will be for us Black people, right? That's what we're saying to each other in the big meeting, "Let's get a lot more racists in this country -- but let's not just get them from anywhere. Let's get them from a country where racial discrimination was legal. That way they'll be really angry and entitled."
One more time, we did not arrive at this moment by accident. It didn't have to be this way. The refusal of those people on the left who worked to defeat Kamala to beg for forgiveness publicly for what they did, to even acknowledge what they did, is the rift in the left -- don't say in the Democratic Party because there is no rift in the Democratic Party. In the Democratic Party, we are together and we know what needs to be done. I
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Friday, May 09, 2025
The snapshot
Friday, May 9, 2025. Two -- count 'em -- two Chump nominees flame out in the same day, Chump admits how weak and tired he truly is yet pulls it together long enough to try to con people on 'deals' he's making, and much more.
Lawrence O'Donnell broke down reality last night on MSNBC.
Lawrence O'Donnell: And today Donald Trump surrendered and withdrew his choice for confirmation of that position. And while he was at it, Donald Trump admitted that, in effect, that he's just too old and too weak to do his job.
Donald Chump: I can only lift that little phone so many times in a day
Lawrence O'Donnell: That's how Donald Trump explained his inability to get the fifty votes he needs from Republican senators plus the vice president to achieve the senate confirmation. And, you know, he only had to make one phone call to get that nomination through the Senate. That would be a phone call to Republican Senator Thom Tillis on the Senate Judiciary Committee who publicly came out and defied Donald Trump as we reported to you here last night. Because Donald Trump is now so politically weak among Republicans in the United States Senate, Thom Tillis said no publicly -- "I will not vote for Donald Trump's choice." And today, Donald Trump just publicly and meekly surrendered to Thom Tillis -- to that one Republican senator who stood in his way with Donald Trump saying "I can only lift that little phone so many times in a day." The singelest stupid explanation a president has ever for being unable to achieve a Senate confirmation.
To be clear, Lawrence was not talking about Janette Nesheliwat. That was his nominee for Surgeon General. Was.
Because yesterday, he withdrew her nomination and is currently going with Casey Means.
That move resulted in low-rent courtesan Nicole Shanahan crawling out from under her semen encrusted mattress to rail at Chump and Robert Kennedy Junior. See the group humor post from last night:
Nicole is spitting mad.
What made Chump and Junior think she would just swallow this?
Past behavior?
Well not this time, fellows, this time she's spitting it out of her mouth. And she's accusing Junior of lying to her -- his former running mate from his failed presidential bid. He lied to her. She explain that there was a deal in place: Janette Nesheliwat gets named Surgeon General and she, Nicole, uses all of her 'power' to back Junior for Secretary of Health and Human Services.
All of her 'power'?
Oh, Nicole, did you learn nothing from Heidi Fleiss? Please, please tell us you didn't also keep a black book with clients' names in it.
Janette, like Matt Gaetz before her, is now a failed Chump nominee. And, as Lawrence O'Donnell was noting, so now is Ed Martin.
As Kat notes in "Nazi Ed Martin keeps lying," Ed couldn't stop lying. And this time, the Senate just wasn't in the mood for it. Dan Friedman (MOTHER JONES) observes:
As US attorney, Martin fired, demoted, and investigated January 6 prosecutors, threatened to prosecute congressional Democrats for hyperbolic political statements, suggested his office would investigate DOGE critics and former prosecutors faulted by Trump, and harassed medical journals, Wikipedia and Georgetown’s law school with threats to punish them over their speech.
Martin’s remarks at the community meeting justified these actions as merely the GOP-version of what Democratic prosecutors did under Biden. I don’t know if Martin really believes that, but it’s not true.
US attorneys do pursue the policies of presidents who pick them, but within legal and normative limits set by the Constitution, Congress, and longstanding practice. No US attorney, until Martin, volunteered to use his office against critics of government policies, including those who “acted simply unethically” and “chase them to the end of the Earth to hold them accountable.” No other US attorney has reportedly attempted to present a grand jury with evidence for a criminal case against the Minority Leader of the US Senate based on five-year-old criticism of the Supreme Court. Nor has a US attorney personally attempted to use criminal investigative power to seize money from environmental groups awarded contracts by the past administration without having any evidence of a crime.
Martin’s Democrats-did-it-first rationalization for debasing his office is not just his. It is the lie justifying Trump’s broader effort to weaponize the Justice Department and turn the entire federal government into an instrument of his personal interest.
Martin, though only an acting US Attorney, got a torrent of negative press coverage in part because he loudly volunteered himself as the leader of Trump’s crusade to use the DOJ against his political enemies. As we wrote in a March: “In a new administration defined by a mixture of malevolence and ineptitude, Martin has emerged as an avatar: a typo-spewing henchman of the moment, eager to help Trump transform the Justice Department into a political tool—and unable to shut up about it.”
The evident defeat of Martin’s nomination is a loss, though by no means a death knell, for proponents of the unitary executive theory’s claim that Justice Department prosecutors are the president’s lawyers, and have always been.
open.substack.com/pub/harrydun... My latest on Ed Martin
— Harry Dunn (@libradunn1.bsky.social) May 6, 2025 at 6:54 PM
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All power is unitary, special Ed Martin edition talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/break...
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm.bsky.social) May 8, 2025 at 11:50 AM
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Ed Martin out. But Jeanine Pirro? This is truly an unserious administration.
— Christopher Webb (@cwebbonline.com) May 8, 2025 at 5:29 PM
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Meanwhile, the economy remains in the toilet where Chump dropped it. So Chump's lied about a deal with the UK. Stephanie Ruhle addressed the reality last night on THE 11TH HOUR WITH STEPHANIE RUHLE.
"Pure theater." "Just a show." Also see Paul Krugman's "Will Trump Pretend to Fix What He Broke?."
Returning to a topic from yesterday . . .
Only a fool, radical Socialist, MAGA or idiot -- or a
working of multiples of the prior listing -- would look at DOGE as a
good thing. It has destroyed so much and it did not achieve anything
but destruction. Bryan Metzger (BUSINESS INSIDER) notes:
Bill
Gates sharply criticized Elon Musk in an interview with The New York
Times published on Thursday, calling out the Tesla cofounder's role in
cutting foreign aid as part of his Department of Government Efficiency
initiative.
The Microsoft
cofounder said that cuts made to foreign aid, particular programs
administered by the now-shuttered US Agency for International
Development, were "stunning."
"He's the one who cut the USAID budget. He put it in the wood chipper, because he didn't go to a party that weekend," Gates told the Times of Musk. "The world's richest man has been involved in the deaths of the world's poorest children."
Gates
also referred to an instance early in President Donald Trump's term in
which administration officials said that the US had been sending condoms
to Gaza via foreign aid. In reality, the US had been providing
contraceptives to a province in the African country of Mozambique.
"They
cut the money to Gaza Province in Mozambique. That is really for drugs,
so mothers don't give their babies HIV," Gates said. "But the people
doing the cutting are so geographically illiterate, they think it's Gaza
and condoms. Will they go meet those babies who got HIV because that
money was cut? Probably not."
This is what Ben Cohen is applauding. See Marcia's "MAGA and Jerry ice cream? Pass and pass on the hideous Ben Cohen" and grasp how disgusting Ben Cohen has become. DOGE was a fake ass scheme to destroy jobs, to destroy needed government oversight, to destroy the economy and to allow Chump to go after the safety net. It was all smoke and mirrors. Jessica Riedl (THE ATLANTIC) notes realities on 'savings' from DOGE:
Musk
initially promised that he would eliminate $2 trillion of the $7
trillion federal budget, before scaling back his ambitions to $1
trillion, and then $150 billion. Even that revised target is highly
improbable.
Precisely measuring the budgetary
effects of the Musk experiment remains difficult, but we can begin by
looking at the claims made by DOGE itself. In late February, its website
claimed to have achieved $55 billion in annual-spending reductions.
However, its “wall of receipts” detailed only $16.5 billion of this
total. Half of that figure came from a typo claiming $8 billion in
savings from terminating an $8 million contract. As The New York Times
has reported,
that was far from the only accounting error. Once such mistakes as
false contract cancellations, triple counts of the same reform, and the
inclusion of contracts that expired decades ago were fixed, verified
budget savings stood at just $2 billion.
The
DOGE website now claims $165 billion in savings. However, it still
details only a fraction of the supposed cuts, and earlier accounting
errors have given way to new ones. A common sleight of hand is canceling
a “blanket purchase agreement”—in which the recipient had been given
the equivalent of a credit limit to incur necessary costs on a
project—and then claiming savings of the full credit limit rather than
the (in many cases substantially lower) amount that was actually spent.
Even assuming that the website’s stated savings have become twice as
accurate as they were in February, annual savings would reach perhaps
$15 billion, or 0.2 percent of federal spending.
Fortunately,
more reliable sources than DOGE’s self-reported figures exist. The best
is the Treasury Department’s monthly accounting of spending by agency
and program. Any true DOGE spending reductions should show up in these
budget totals, as should the results of other White House initiatives,
including cuts to public-health spending and the ongoing efforts to
eliminate USAID and the Department of Education.
These
spending data do not flatter the Musk project. Total federal outlays in
February and March were $86 billion (or 7 percent) higher than the
levels from the same months a year ago, when adjusted for timing shifts.
This spending growth—approximately $500 billion at an annualized
rate—continues to be driven by the three-quarters of federal spending
allocated to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, defense, veterans’
benefits, and interest costs. These massive expenses have been untouched
by DOGE’s focus on small but controversial targets such as DEI
contracts and Politico subscriptions.
We can
see this by looking at Treasury’s breakdowns of monthly spending by
agency. Short-term program spending can fluctuate greatly, and sustained
trends might not be fully apparent for several months, but the early
data are nonetheless revealing. Perhaps the highest-profile cuts under
the Trump administration so far have been to public-health spending and
foreign aid. And yet, even here, the numbers are rounding errors in the
context of the federal budget. Public-health spending, previously about
$8.2 billion monthly, fell to $7.1 billion in March, led by cuts to the
National Institutes of Health and the Health Resources and Services
Administration, the latter of which funds state and local health grants
to serve underprivileged families.
Monthly
spending on targeted foreign-assistance programs has fallen from $2.4
billion to $1.4 billion. This includes spending on “Global Health and
Child Survival” programs—which includes highly effective funding to
combat HIV, malaria, tuberculosis, and other illnesses in less developed
countries—falling in half to $400 million a month. Payments to
“International Organizations and Conferences,” such as the United
Nations, have fallen to zero. And monthly USAID spending has fluctuated
wildly but overall declined by one-third in the first quarter of 2025.
These
cuts have already been highly disruptive to beneficiaries, contractors,
and employees, and they threaten immense long-term harm. And yet, their
total monthly savings have totaled just $2.1 billion. At the Department
of Education, another shutdown target, spending has remained steady
aside from the early termination of post-pandemic funding that was
already scheduled to phase out over the next year.
Cost
reductions from laying off federal employees have been too small to
show up in the data. This is not surprising, because even laying off one
quarter of the 2.3 million federal civilian employees would shave off
just 1 percent of federal spending. To be fair to DOGE, more savings
will materialize in October, when the salaries of the 75,000 federal
employees who took a buyout come off the books. That should save
Washington $10 billion a year, or 0.1 percent of federal spending—except
even that is an overestimate, because Washington will surely end up
hiring contractors to perform at least some of the work previously
handled by those civil servants, and many contractors cost more than
employees.
DOGE was
destructive and it destroyed many people's lives. DOGE motivated
Americans across the country to take to the streets and protest. That
is the strength of democracy. I point that out -- and do so at the
start -- to remind those of us on the left that Socialist Ben Cohen is
not our friend. See Marcia's "." Grasp that he's gone to the other
side. He was a believer in The Politics of Destruction so it was easy
for him to turn around and hop onto The Politics of Destruction and
praise DOGE at his Twitter side, at the Twitter handle he created just
for DOGE and at the pro-DOGE website he started. He is not our friend.
He is not a friend of democracy.
In
2024, The Politics of Destruction made the call that it was more
important that Kamala Harris lose. So you got those working against We
The People like Jill Stein going on any outlet that would have her and
attacking Kamala non-stop while going easy on Donald Chump. Amy Goodman
was part of that campaign and played footsie with her in a ridiculous
interview. Mehdi Hasan did actual journalism and those who
attacked him for that exposed themselves for the fake asses that they
were. The people who worked to stop Kamala are not to be trusted.
This
country is in crisis right now because Chump is back in the White
House. I try to dole out a little reality at a time here because it is
overwhelming. The midterms matter so much. Democrats need one house of
Congress. I am pulling for both. Donald Chump is a threat to the
country and those of you on the left who refused to pull together better
STFU about us pulling together for your pet cause. You don't matter
right now if you worked to put Chump in the White House. You made that
choice. So Palestine or whatever you've lept onto in the minutes since
the election? Doesn't matter.
What matters is saving this country. To do that we need control of at least one house of Congress.
I
don't care that you want universal healthcare. I want that too. But
that's not what 2026 is about. 2026 is about getting control of at
least one House so that we can push back against Chump.
That's all it's about.
Rashida Tlaib and her groupies betrayed this country.
We
don't have time for their right now. People of color are under attack
in this country. People who are immigrants -- with the paperwork or
without -- or look like they could be immigrants are under attack.
LGBTQIA+ people are under attack.Seniors are under attack. You betrayed
all of those communities by working to put Chump back in office. You
had the gall to object to Adam Kinzingler and Liz Cheney campaigning for
Kamala. The gall. As we in the Black community have repeatedly noted
you got a different standard for Bernie. You had your pet issue and you
screwed the whole damn country.
Guess
what? Everything's on hold now. This is not Poppy Bush is in the
White House, this is not Ronald Reagan is in the White House. This is
not about someone we disagree with on basic issues. This is a deranged
convicted criminal who openly defies the Constitution and the court
system.
The
house is on fire. This is not the time for you to worry where you'd
like to put the new couch. This is the time to put out the fire. And
we do that only by taking control of at least one House.
So if that means incumbent Center Centerist who is in love with the Israeli government gets re-elected, that's what it means.
The house is on fire. We do not have time right now to focus on renovations. We have to stop the fire.
You
didn't take the threat of Donald Chump seriously in the lead up to
2024. So sit your ass down now because we can't afford more of your
'help' or more of your 'brilliance.'
Wasting
20 million dollars to defeat Democratic Party incumbents? We can't
afford your bulls**t, White boy. You're putting us a risk, not
yourself. Sit your ass down.
All
money going to the Democratic Party should be about defeating
Republicans. That means you take that 20 million and you donate to
incumbent Dems and you take that money and you donate to people like the
Democratic candidate in Arizona's sixth district. They will be running
against a weak Republican incumbent.
Arizona
has six districts. Four of those districts went to Republicans. Andy
Biggs won with 60.4% of the vote, Eli Crane won with 54.5% of the vote,
David Schwelikert won with 51.9% of the vote and Ciscomani won with
50.0% of the vote.
He
is the easiest to pick off. Until the Democratic incumbent decided not
to run for re-election in 2022, the seat was held by a Democrat. He is
the weakest Republican Arizona has in the House. He got even less
votes than Chump. Mid-terms are usually change elections if the same
party controls the House and the White House.
Currently
the candidates for 6th district's Democratic Party primary are
Johnathan Burma, Chris Donat, Mo Goldman, JoAnna Mendoza and Samantha
Severson. You want to weigh in on a primary, you can help with that
one. That's how the money needs to be spent. Not challenging incumbent
Democrats but picking off the weakest Republicans and pouring money
into their opponents.
Again,
the house is on fire. I think David Hogg's strategy is a losing
strategy but get Chump out of the White House and you can do whatever
you want and I honestly won't care. If you hadn't screwed us all over
in 2024, I wouldn't care now. If we had Kamala in the White House, you
could do whatever crazy scheme you wanted no matter how many times it
has failed in the past. But we don't have that luxury, you ensured that
when you didn't vote for Kamala in 2024.
We
can't afford you right now. In 2023, I announced here that I would be
voting for the Democratic Party's presidential candidate whomever it
was. And that's because some of us are smart enough to know that a
convicted felon who has already attempted an insurrection in his first
term is a clear and present danger to our country. You weren't smart
enough to grasp that or you just didn't care. So you really need to sit
your asses down because 'all you did' in 2024 (which was more than
enough) was hurt the country. In 2026, you might hurt yourself -- yes,
even you White Karens -- male and female -- could be harmed. Most of
you haven't been yet which is why you can be so cavalier to think that
the best use of campaign donations would be to target incumbent
Democrats. But we lose in 2026 and even the various privileges your
White skin brings you might get revoked.
In the meantime, AP reported yesterday, "Russia
and Ukraine both reported attacks on their forces Thursday on the first
day of a 72-hour ceasefire called by Russian President Vladimir Putin,
and Ukrainian lawmakers unanimously approved a landmark minerals deal
with the U.S." Don't know what to tell you there except when you
put a Chump in the White House, Putin's going to make a chump of the
Chump.
The
world laughs at Donald Chump and his terrible twos -- one crying fit
after another as he does his second term as president. Waaah! Waaah!
cries Chump and the world responds, "Just let him wear himself out.
We're using the Ferber method."
Unlike David Hogg, I'm not the queen of tiddly winks. While I'm not a sports fan, I did go to my children's games and root for their teams. So I know at least that you don't decide in the middle of the game to toss out all the plays that you've practiced and instead just have everyone do whatever they feel like.
Hogg has no plan. He has only a sketch and he wants to ignore reality and past performance and history because he just knows he's right. We can't afford his lack of education or lack of experience. He needs to go find a closet, hide in there and text and make videos. He can handle that, if nothing else.
Dear David Hogg, white men, ProHammies, SJD, far left populists and antisemites:
May 6, 2025 at 7:51 AM
We'll wind down with this from Senator Elizabeth Warren's office:
Trump administration abused Death Master File to purge at least 6,300 Social Security numbers, including children and seniors
Letter to SSA Acting Commissioner | Letter to SSA Assistant Inspector General for Audit
Washington, D.C. – U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), along with Senate Finance Committee Ranking Member Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and 11 Senate Democrats, slammed the Social Security Administration (SSA) for transferring thousands of Social Security numbers associated with immigrants to the SSA’s Death Master File, marking them as dead to pressure “self-deportation,” and demanded the agency’s watchdog launch a full investigation into the decision.
Exploiting Social Security’s Death Master File to terminate the SSN of living individuals without full due process violates bedrock constitutional rights. The Trump administration’s actions, which amount to falsifying government records, also violate the Privacy Act. Even Trump’s lawyers reportedly agreed.
“This decision will result in the ‘financial murder’ of living individuals improperly placed in the file, with everything from their credit cards and banking to their ability to access healthcare and housing being ripped out from under them,” wrote the senators.
The senators also called on the SSA Office of the Inspector General to launch a full investigation into the agency’s decision to begin using the Death Master File for this purpose, including how an individual gets targeted, who at the agency has decision-making authority, and how those who have had their SSNs nullified through this process can get it fixed if there is a mistake.
The Trump administration’s abuse of Social Security and its flagrant violation of constitutional guarantees of due process set a precedent that could endanger the rights of all Americans. It also undermines the accuracy of the Social Security Administration’s data, which could lead to more mistakes that limit a person’s access to benefits, regardless of their immigration status.
“The purpose of SSA is to provide for the welfare of number-holders and their dependents, not to serve as an arm of President Trump’s immigration enforcement agenda. This move degrades the solvency, reliability, and accuracy of SSA systems and programs. It is as cruel as it is thoughtless—the impact will be felt in communities across the country and in the future of SSA programs themselves,” concluded the senators to Acting Social Security Commissioner Leland Dudek.
The letter was signed by Senators Peter Welch (D-Vt.), Mazie Hirono (D-Hawai’i), Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Angus King (I-Maine), Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.), Patty Murray (D-Wash.), and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.).
###
Isaiah's THE WORLD TODAY JUST NUTS "Stop Fingering My Corn Bread" went up last night. The following sites updated:
I’m Not Dead
2 hours ago
New Music Friday: The best albums out May 9
5 hours ago
Kash Patel gets called out
11 hours ago
Streaming
11 hours ago
Tuna Grilled Cheese in the Kitchen
11 hours ago
Chump is the threat
11 hours ago
Linda McMahon and Fetty Crap
11 hours ago
The dream team's breaking up!!!
11 hours ago
Maybe her pimp will protect her?
11 hours ago
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