Trump likes them intimidated. They eagerly comply. Me and my sharpie are signing a ‘zecutive order changing the name of Donald Trump to Donald Toadstool. You will henceforth use my preferred designation. His Insecure Highness has enacted several measures since reentering the Oval Office as non-joking tests of fealty. By your bending the knee to his mighty will he shall know you either as loser or foe. It’s Toadstool’s way of getting you to blurt out, “Thank you, sir! May I have another.” Like loyalty oaths and insisting followers publicly declaring that he won the 2020 election, it’s about getting people to submit to his dominance moves. Or as I picture it, getting littler dogs to roll over on their backs and pee in the air in submission. Toadstool’s mind is so far gone that it’s not clear if he really gives a rat’s ass if the world accepts that with a few strokes of his sharpie he’s changed the 400-year-old name of the Gulf of Mexico. What matters is whether he can compel your obedience by uttering “Gulf of America.” For that, he doesn’t need to think. It’s all instinct.
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I know you don’t like X posts on here and neither do I. But Bluesky still doesn’t have the capability of rendering videos in the blog so there’s not much I can do about it. I would never expect you to sit through a full JD Vance speech but it’s important to at least see some of the clips. It’s just shocking , even for him: He’s saying this in Europe, not Arkansas. Apparently, he really wants to reassure China and Russia that we are with them and encouraging them to do whatever’s necessary to keep them in power in case Americans or Europeans might have other ideas. You really should watch this one: The Trump administration is demanding that everyone in the government say that the 2020 election was stolen and firing people who held the J6 insurrectionists to account. I know hypocrisy has been retired as a concept but this is too much. There’s more unfortunately: JD Vance's speech in Munich sounds like it was literally written by the Kremlin pic.twitter.com/YV1hJlyS48 — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 14, 2025 Then there’s this clown: REPORTER: You have focused on what Ukraine is giving up.
I’m trying to imagine what I would have thought if I’d looked into the future and saw this happening even a decade ago. I think I would have assumed it was some kind of dark joke: Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany on Saturday accused Vice President JD Vance of unacceptably interfering in his country’s imminent elections on behalf of a party that has played down the atrocities committed by the Nazis 80 years ago. A day after Mr. Vance stunned the Munich Security Conference by telling German leaders to drop their so-called firewall and allow the hard-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, to enter their federal government, Mr. Scholz accused Mr. Vance of effectively violating a commitment to never again allow Germany to be led by fascists who could repeat the horrors of the Holocaust. “A commitment to ‘never again’ is not reconcilable with support for the AfD,” Mr. Scholz said at the conference on Saturday morning, in an address opening the gathering’s second day. Mr. Scholz said the AfD had trivialized Nazi atrocities like the concentration camp at Dachau, which Mr. Vance visited on Friday.
“We knew they were going to do this. They get the one starving kid in Sudan that isn’t going to have a USAID bottle, and they make everything DOGE has done about the starving kid in Sudan.” He seems nice. And frankly, it’s clear they don’t give a damn about starving kids in Scranton or Birmingham either. In fact, I think they’re getting off on it. Trump said last week that he campaigned on this. He did not. He would mention “waste and fraud in passing but his pitch was all about “growth” and tariffs taking care of deficits. He ostentatiously ran away from Project 2025 which is the exact blueprint they are following for firing massive numbers of federal workers. It was a bait and switch. So far it doesn’t seem to be bothering the non-MAGA cult members who voted for Trump and the Republicans too much. I guess nothing’s happened to them personally yet. If it’s just some starving kid in Sudan it’s no biggie, amirite?
Grocery prices are going up, we may be dealing with another pandemic, Trump is threatening draconian tariffs and we’re on the verge of deporting the vast majority of the agriculture workforce. So the economy is getting more fragile by the day. One of Trump’s answer to all that is “drill, baby, drill.” Krugman takes a look at that in his newsletter today: Basically, any large decline in energy prices would lead to a fall in production, driving prices right back up. In today’s world, U.S. shale oil drillers are the marginal producers — the producers whose decisions set both a floor and a ceiling on overall oil prices. As I write this, the benchmark price of U.S. crude oil — the West Texas Intermediate price — is just over $70 a barrel. And here’s the thing: any substantial decline in prices from this point would make drilling new wells unprofitable in many U.S. oilfields: This doesn’t mean that production would stagnate; it would decline, as older fields get exhausted.
Snake oil freak RFK Jr was confirmed this week and has laid out his first 100 days: Hours after being confirmed as Secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. issued a statement that laid out sweeping plans for his first 100 days in office. Chief among his goals, he wrote, was to combat what he called a “growing health crisis” of chronic disease. The document called for the federal government to investigate the “root causes” of a broad range of conditions, including autism, ADHD, asthma, obesity, multiple sclerosis, and psoriasis. Conspicuously absent was any explicit mention of childhood vaccines, which Kennedy has long railed against as the head of the anti-vaccine advocacy group Children’s Health Defense. But the document did zero in on another one of his fixations: a class of widely prescribed drugs that treat depression, anxiety, and mood disorders.
Use it now. Before you lose it. “Repetition is really important. And so is repetition” is a message to take to heart. You will be seeing more of it here in coming months. Like this example from Friday: A commentator the other day said that there are only two guardrails left against Musk-Trump’s predations, meaning Congress and the courts. He was wrong. There is a third: Americans in the streets. Former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance offers some analysis on the status of the many of court cases filed to slow Musk-Trump’s rolling coup. It’s just that right now what we have are a series of temporary restraining orders (TROs) Musk-Trump will resist, ignore, and surely appeal, as is Trump’s wont. “There are limits to how much the courts can or will do, even at the TRO stage,” Vance cautions before confirming what I wrote on Friday: That’s not to say I don’t have confidence in the courts, because I do, and I think some progress will be made there, although as we know far too well, it may be very slow. But the courts aren’t the calvary. We are. We have to be in this fight for ourselves. We can’t get complacent.
Do Democrats even have “game”? A few “Democrats concede they are losing an asymmetrical battle with the president and his MAGA allies,” Politico reports. But there is no agreement on how to mount an effective, attention-getting rapid-response: “Republicans are running circles around Democrats for how to connect to the culture today,” said John Della Volpe, director of Harvard University’s youth poll and an expert on Gen Z. “People are still asking me in these post-election meetings, ‘Who is Theo Von?’ Even if they had the best message, you can’t connect if you’re not part of modern American culture, if you’re not injecting yourself into these spaces where people already are.” It’s not just the leadership’s overdependence on traditional media, although that’s part of it. A majority of “swing voters” identified by Navigator Research got their political news “primarily from social media and alternative sources, like podcasts,” while Kamala Harris voters relied on broadcast TV. The GOP is winning the fight for attention.
Seeing Pete Hegseth running around in Europe like he’s a serious person is hard to take but we have to put up with him. His pronouncements about NATO and Ukraine are pretty shocking but they come directly from Trump so you can’t really blame him. Reporter Josh Rogin had a good analysis on CNN of Trump’s “deal making” yesterday that I think is interesting: The problem is that that creates a series of events that‘s now going to unfold that could have drastic and negative consequences for both Ukraine and the U.S., not to mention Europe. And what I mean by that is that the way that they‘re setting up this negotiation by dealing with Putin first and Zelenskyy second, and trying to negotiate away Ukrainian territory and Ukrainian aspirations without talking to the Ukrainians, in my view, is destined to fail.
He’s not drunk, but still “bulletproof” Some people still in federal employ will have no part of Donald Trump corrupting the functions of American justice (The New York Times): Manhattan’s U.S. attorney on Thursday resigned rather than obey an order from a top Justice Department official to drop the corruption case against New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams. To review, the BBC recounts, “Adams is alleged to have accepted gifts totalling more than $100,000 (£75,000) from Turkish citizens in exchange for favours, such as waiving safety regulations at the Turkish consulate in the city. He denies the charges.” Back to the Times: Then, when Justice Department officials transferred the case to the public integrity section in Washington, which oversees corruption prosecutions, the two men who led that unit also resigned, according to five people with knowledge of the matter. Several hours later, three other lawyers in the unit also resigned, according to people familiar with the developments.