I’ll put this here, because Heather Cox Richardson enumerates the many elements of the chaos being sowed far better than I. From her “Letters from an American” that arrived in my emailbox this morning:

“Yesterday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent made it clear that the Trump administration’s goal is to slash the federal government and to privatize its current services. As the stock market has dropped and economists have warned of a dramatic slowdown in the economy, he told CNBC “There’s going to be a natural adjustment as we move away from public spending to private spending. The market and the economy have just become hooked, we’ve become addicted to this government spending, and there’s going to be a detox period.”

Bessent’s comments reveal that the White House is beg...

What the hell is happening to your country?

I’m having trouble finding words these days. The U.S.A. has three branches of government and it appears as though the Legislative branch, the one with ‘the power of the purse’, is completely ceding its role to the Executive branch. For much of the past 30 years, since the appearance of Newt Gingrich in ’95, the House and Senate have often done little, primarily acting as a foil to the Executive. But the current Congress has rolled over in fear of the Executive.

We are soon to be a satellite state of Putin’s Russia, it seems, as we are in the process of shutting down all defenses against foreign election interference, against Russian cyber attacks, and ceasing support of Ukraine’s fight against Russia’s invasion...

Notable, worth the 5′ watch

Truly, think about how messed up this all is.

I’m often dismayed at the spin on a day’s news. The left-of-center sources are no less disappointing to me than those from the right, as I just want a “straight-up facts” source. Heather Cox Richardson‘s “Letters from an American” often feels leftward-spun to me, but with the historical perspective one might expect from a highly respected historian. I find her writing succinct and accessible–I love it.

Today/last night’s ‘Letter’ seems ‘unspun’ to me, and a straight-up presentation of one of the most shameful displays of the past few weeks, Zelenskyy’s meeting in the White House yesterday. Undoubtedly, in retrospect, this will become one more of a litany of shameful displays, many of which we’ve already seen...

Quoted below, from James Carville, in the NYTimes, “Give them all the rope they need.” “Sometimes the most powerful thing we can do is retreat on the immediate battlefield — and advance in another direction.” Advocating for a “rope-a-dope” strategy. I agree with much of what he says here [“The Republican Party is…effective at…winning elections, but…flat out sucks at governing.”], but the idea of a ‘tactical pause’ seems remarkably self-repressive. But perhaps we, the people, can scream, while pols exercise smarter tactics?

James Carville: It’s Time for a Daring Political Maneuver, Democrats; Feb. 25, 2025

“The Republican Party is all too often effective at campaigning and winning elections, but there’s another fact about it that a lot of Americans forget: The Republican Part...

An excerpt from today’s Letters from an American, by Heather Cox Richardson:

In the Senate, on Thursday, February 20, Angus King (I-ME) [also] reached back to the framers of the Constitution when he warned—again—that permitting Trump to take over the power of Congress is “grossly unconstitutional.” Trump’s concept that he can alter laws by refusing to fund them, so-called impoundment, is “absolutely straight up unconstitutional,” King said, “and it’s illegal.”

“[T]he reason the framers designed our Constitution the way they did was that they were afraid of concentrated power,” King said. “They had just fought a brutal eight-year war with a king. They didn’t want a king...

2.21.25 Report from the Senate Floor, written by US Senator Chris Murphy (D – CT):

Last night in the Senate, something really important happened. Republicans forced us to debate their billionaire bailout budget framework. We started voting at 6 PM because they knew doing it in the dark of night would minimize media coverage. And they do not want the American people to see how blatant their handover of our government to the billionaire class is. 

So I want to explain what happened last night and what we did to fight back. The apex of Republicans’ plan to turn over our government to their wealthy cronies is a giant tax cut for billionaires and corporations. And they plan to pay for it with cuts to programs that working people rely on...

From Illinois governor J.D. Pritzker’s State of the State address on 19 February, 2025:

“”As some of you know, Skokie, Illinois once had one of the largest populations of Holocaust survivors anywhere in the world. In 1978, Nazis decided they wanted to march there.

The leaders of that march knew that the images of Swastika clad young men goose stepping down a peaceful suburban street would terrorize the local Jewish population – so many of whom had never recovered from their time in German concentration camps.

The prospect of that march sparked a legal fight that went all the way to the Supreme Court. It was a Jewish lawyer from the ACLU who argued the case for the Nazis – contending that even the most hateful of speech was protected under the first amendment.

As an America...

After a wonderful few days visiting the grandsons, I’ve retaken a horrible mood by looking at the news. So very many horrid items to note, truly a dystopian chapter. There seems no end to what this crew of fascists is willing to do to people the world over. Just one person’s thoughts today, this from Bret Stephens:

“In April 1928, Joseph Goebbels, later the Third Reich’s chief propagandist, wrote a newspaper essay addressing the question of why the National Socialists, despite being an “anti-parliamentarian party,” would nonetheless compete in that May’s parliamentary elections.

“We enter the Reichstag to arm ourselves with democracy’s weapons,” Goebbels explained. “If democracy is foolish enough to give us free railway passes and salaries, that is its problem...