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EDWARD JACOBS

Author: Ed Jacobs

  • 14 March, 2025

    Perhaps the courts will be a check on the onslaught from the Executive branch, but I’m not holding my breath…

    Yesterday in court…

  • 9 March, 2025

    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 beginning to feel the pressure of the unpopularity of its policies. Trump’s rejection of 80 years of U.S. foreign policy in order to prop up Russia’s Vladimir Putin has left many Americans as well as allies aghast. Trump’s claims that Putin wants peace were belied when Russia launched massive strikes at Ukraine as soon as Trump stopped sharing intelligence with Ukrainian forces that enabled them to shoot down incoming fire.

    The administration’s dramatic—and likely illegal and unconstitutional—cuts are infuriating Americans who did not expect Trump to reorder the American government so completely. While billionaire Elon Musk and President Donald Trump repeatedly say they are cutting only “waste, fraud, and abuse” from the government, that insistence appears to be rhetorical rather than backed by fact. And yesterday, new cuts appeared to continue the gutting of government services that generally appear to be important to Americans’ health, safety, and economic security.

    On Friday night, employees at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)—about 80,000 of them—received an email offering them a buyout of up to $25,000 if they resign and giving them a deadline of March 14 to respond. Also as of Friday, nearly 230 cases of measles have been confirmed in Texas and New Mexico, and two people have died.

    The secretary of HHS, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is frustrating even allies with his response to the outbreak. Kennedy, who has long been an anti-vaccine activist, said last week that measles outbreaks were “not unusual,” and then on Sunday he posted pictures of himself hiking above Coachella Valley in California. On Monday the top spokesperson at HHS, a former Kennedy ally, quit in protest. As Adam Cancryn of Politico reported, Kennedy has said that the measles vaccine protects children and the community, but has said the decision to vaccinate is personal and that parents should talk to healthcare providers about their options. He has also talked a lot about the benefits of nutritional supplements like cod liver oil, which is high in Vitamin A, in treating measles. In fact, vaccines are the key element in preventing people from contracting the disease..

    “It’s a serious role, he’s just a couple of weeks in and measles is not a common occurrence, and it should be all hands on deck,” one former Trump official told Adam Cancryn, Sophie Garder, and Chelsea Cirruzzo of Politico. “When you’re taking a selfie out at Coachella, it’s pretty clear that you’re checked out.”

    In another blockbuster story that dropped yesterday, the Social Security Administration announced it will begin to withhold 100% of a person’s Social Security benefits if they are overpaid, even if the overpayment is not their fault. Under President Joe Biden the agency had changed the policy to recover overpayments at 10% of monthly benefits or $10, whichever was greater.

    Those who can’t afford that level of repayment can contact Social Security, the notice says, but acting commissioner Leland Dudek has said he plans to cut at least 7,000 jobs—more than 12% of the agency—although its staff is already at a 50-year low. He is also closing field offices, and senior staff with the agency have either left or been fired.

    Dudek yesterday retracted an order from the day before that required parents of babies born in Maine to go to a Social Security office to register their baby rather than filling out a form in the hospital. Another on Thursday would also have stopped funeral homes from filing death records electronically.

    One new father told Joe Lawlor of the Portland Press Herald that he had filled out the form for his son’s social security number and then his wife got a call saying they would have to go to the Social Security office. But when he tried to call Social Security headquarters to figure out what was going on, the wait time was an estimated two hours. So he called a local office, where no one knew what he was talking about. “They keep talking about efficiency,” he said. “This seemed to be something that worked incredibly efficiently, and they broke it overnight.”

    The administration did not explain why it had imposed this rule in Maine. Senator Angus King of Maine, an Independent, said he was glad the administration had changed its mind, but added that “this rapid reversal has raised concerns among Maine people and left many unanswered questions about the Social Security Administration’s motivations.”

    Trump has said that Social Security “won’t be touched” as his administration slashes through the federal government.

    Trump also said there would not be cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, but on Wednesday the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, which figures the financial cost of legislation, said that Republicans will have to cut either Medicare, Medicaid, or the Children’s Health Insurance Program in order to meet their goal of cutting at least $880 billion from the funding controlled by the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Cutting the funding for every other program in the committee’s purview would save a maximum of $135 billion, Jacob Bogage of the Washington Post noted, meaning the committee will have to turn to the biggest ticket items: healthcare programs.

    Also yesterday, the Department of Homeland Security said it was getting rid of union protections for the approximately 47,000 employees of the Transportation Security Administration who screen about 2.5 million passengers a day before they can board airplanes. A new agreement in May 2024 raised wages for TSA workers, whose pay has lagged behind that of other government employees. Union leaders say the move is retaliation for its challenges to the actions of the administration toward the 800,000 or so federal workers it represents.

    As Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times have reported more detail about the Cabinet meeting Trump convened abruptly on Thursday, we have learned more about Musk’s determination to cut the government. As Musk appeared to take charge of the meeting, he clashed with Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy, who complained that Musk’s team at the Department of Government Efficiency is trying to lay off air traffic controllers.

    Swan and Haberman report that Duffy asked what he was supposed to do. He continued by saying: I have multiple plane crashes to deal with now, and your people want me to fire air traffic controllers? Musk said it was a lie that they were laying off air traffic controllers, and also insisted that there were people hired under diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives working as air traffic controllers. When Duffy pushed back, Musk said Duffy should call him with any concerns, an echo of the message he gave to members of Congress. Like them, Cabinet members are constitutionally part of the government. Musk is not.

    What Musk is, according to an interview published today by Aaron Rupar and Thor Benson in Public Notice, is a businessman who believes that there is waste wherever you look and that it is always possible to do something more cheaply. Ryan Mac and Kate Conger, who wrote a book about Musk’s takeover of Twitter, Character Limit, said that creating confusion is part of the point. Musk creates drama, Conger said, to scare away workers he doesn’t want and attract ones he does.

    The pain that he is inflicting on the country is not making him popular, though. Protests at Tesla dealerships that handle his cars are growing, as are instances of vandalism against Tesla dealerships and charging stations, which now number more than a dozen, including attacks with bottles filled with gasoline and set on fire. Pranshu Verma and Trisha Thadani of the Washington Post report that Tesla’s stock has dropped more than 35% since Trump took office. Tesla sales have dropped 76% in Germany, 48% in Norway and Denmark, and 45% in France.

    On Thursday, another of Musk’s SpaceX rockets exploded, raining debris near south Florida and the Bahamas. The Federal Aviation Administration said 240 flights were disrupted by the debris.

    The New York Times editorial board today lamented the instability that Musk is creating, noting that the government is not a business, that “[t]here are already signs the chaos is hurting the economy,” and that “Americans can’t afford for the basic functions of government to fail. If Twitter stops working, people can’t tweet. When government services break down, people can die.”

    The editorial board did not let Trump hide behind Musk entirely, noting that he has increased instability not only with DOGE, but also “with his flurry of executive orders purporting to rewrite environmental policy, the meaning of the 14th Amendment and more; his on-again-off-again tariffs; and his inversion of American foreign policy, wooing Vladimir Putin while disdaining longtime allies.”

    One of the things that the radical extremists in power hated about the modern American state was that it was a nonpartisan machine that functioned pretty well regardless of which party was in charge. Now Musk, who is acting as if he is not bound by the constitution that set up that machine, is taking a sledgehammer to it.

    In the Public Notice interview, Thor Benson asked Ryan Mac: “What’s something about Elon’s huge role in the Trump administration that people perhaps aren’t understanding?” Mac answered that Musk is the manifestation of the nation’s extreme wealth inequality. “What happens,” he asked, “when there is unfettered capitalism that allows people to accumulate this much money and this much power?”

  • 6 March, 2025

    What the hell is happening to your country?

  • 5 March, 2025

    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. Congress is simply allowing the Executive to eliminate and rewrite decades of foreign policy, now in favor of autocrats, against our own system of representative democracy; so clearly we are now a corrupt system working to benefit the richest among us, and a system driven by spite and vengeance.

    The past weeks have displayed no concern for the open presentation of corrupt moves, most obviously executed by Musk, but he is not the only criminal here. We have the health of Health & Human Services responding to a measles outbreak not with advice to get vaccines, but to try cod liver oil. We have a Treasury Sec’y changing statistics so that the past is rewritten., and that present are misunderstood.

    Social Security, a system we’ve all been paying into for decades, is at risk now along with Medicare and Medicaid. Tariffs, the Executive’s favorite word, are now causing a trade war that is making the world’s economy shudder–let alone damaging relationships with countries around the world. Cutting taxes of the most wealthy. And the focus on the distraction of ‘wokeness,’ whose definition has little clarity, except what I imagine is “opportunity for the other.”

    The lies, the lies, the lies. They are shameless, and unending. And the Republican party is seemingly without any sense of either responsibility or conscience. I read despondent emails, texts, and posts, and I am without any positive responses.

    The decline of our governmental system is rapid and, when the Judicial branch continues its slide back to the 1930s, will be complete. I know longer fear where we’re headed; we are here, and I am frightened by my own country.

  • 1 March, 2025 (2)

    Notable, worth the 5′ watch

    Truly, think about how messed up this all is.

  • 1 March, 2025

    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. I subscribe to “Letter from an American,” and below is the February 28, 2025 ‘letter’ in its original form:

    “Today, President Donald Trump ambushed Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky in an attack that seemed designed to give the White House an excuse for siding with Russia in its war on Ukraine. Vice President J.D. Vance joined Trump and Zelensky in the Oval Office—his attendance at such an event was unusual—in front of reporters. Those reporters included one from Russian state media, but no one from the Associated Press or Reuters, who were not granted access.

    In front of the cameras, Trump and Vance engaged in what Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo called a “mob hit,” spouting Russian propaganda and trying to bully Zelensky into accepting a ceasefire and signing over rights to Ukrainian rare-earth minerals without guarantees of security. Vance, especially, seemed determined to provoke a fight in front of the cameras, accusing Zelensky, who has been lavish in his thanks to the U.S. and lawmakers including Trump, of being ungrateful. When that didn’t land, Vance said it was “disrespectful” of Zelensky to “try to litigate this in front of the American media,” when it was the White House that set up the event in front of reporters.

    Zelensky maintained his composure and did not rise to the bait, but he did not accept their pro-Russian version of the war. He insisted that it was in fact Russia that invaded Ukraine and is still bombing and killing on a daily basis. His refusal to sit silent and submit meekly to their attack seemed to infuriate them.

    Trump appeared to become unhinged when Zelensky suggested that the U.S. would in the future feel problems, apparently alluding to the new U.S. relationship with Russia. “You don’t know that. You don’t know that,” Trump erupted. “Don’t tell us what we’re going to feel. We’re trying to solve a problem. Don’t tell us what we’re going to feel.”

    Zelensky answered that he was just answering the questions Vance was showering on him. “You are in no position to dictate what we’re going to feel,” Trump said. “We’re going to feel very good.”

    Zelensky answered: “You will feel influenced.”

    Trump disagreed. “We are going to feel very good and very strong.”

    “I am telling you,” Zelensky said. “You will feel influenced.”

    Trump appeared to lose control at that point, ranting at Zelensky that Ukraine was losing and that he must accept a ceasefire, but also complaining about former presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama and echoing Putin’s talking points. When he could get a word in, Zelensky reiterated that he would not accept a ceasefire without guarantees of security and pointed out that Putin had broken a ceasefire agreement in the past.

    Later, when a reporter picked up on that question and asked what would happen if Russia broke a ceasefire agreement, Trump became enraged. Among other things, he said: “Putin went through a hell of a lot with me. He went through a phony witch hunt….” Trump referred to what he calls the “Russia, Russia, Russia hoax” that Russia had worked to elect him in 2016. That effort, though, was not a hoax: the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee in 2020 released an exhaustive report detailing that effort.

    One of the things Russian operatives believed Trump’s team had agreed to, the report said, was Russia’s annexation of the parts of eastern Ukraine it is now trying to grab through military occupation.

    Then Trump continued to rant at the reporter, rehashing his version of the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop at some length, tying in former secretary of state Hillary Clinton and former representative Adam Schiff (D-CA) in a larger stew that brought up Trump’s history with both Russia and Ukraine and their roles in his quest to hold power. Clinton ran against Trump in 2016, when Russia worked to elect him, and Zelensky came across Trump’s radar screen when, in July 2019, Trump tried to force Zelensky to say he was opening an investigation into Hunter Biden in order to smear Biden’s father Joe Biden before the 2020 election. Only after such an announcement, Trump said, would he deliver to Ukraine the money Congress had appropriated to help Ukraine fight off Russia’s 2014 invasion.

    Zelensky did not make the announcement. A whistleblower reported Trump’s phone call, leading to a congressional investigation that in turn led to Trump’s first impeachment. Schiff led the House’s impeachment team.

    After unloading on the reporter, Trump abruptly ended today’s meeting, saying it was “going to be great television.” Shortly afterward, he asked Zelensky and his team to leave the White House.

    This afternoon, former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) posted: “Generations of American patriots, from our revolution onward, have fought for the principles Zelenskyy is risking his life to defend. But today, Donald Trump and JD Vance attacked Zelenskyy and pressured him to surrender the freedom of his people to the KGB war criminal who invaded Ukraine. History will remember this day—when an American President and Vice President abandoned all we stand for.”

    —

    Notes:

    https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/28/tass-oval-office-trump-zelenskyy-00206739

    https://apnews.com/article/trump-zelenskyy-vance-transcript-oval-office-80685f5727628c64065da81525f8f0cf

    X:

    joshtpm/status/1895663732241678670

    Liz_Cheney/status/1895543534377152668

    YouTube:

    watch?v=wpAj8rRe-p0

  • 26 February, 2025

    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 Party flat out sucks at governing. Even Tucker Carlson agrees with this. For all the huffing and puffing on the campaign trail in 2016, the first Trump administration largely amounted to tax cuts for the wealthy, 500 miles of a border wall and a destructive pandemic gone viral. George W. Bush got us into a harebrained war in Iraq and then tried to privatize Social Security while letting our financial system drive smack into the Great Recession. And George H.W. Bush governed his way into a one-term presidency because of the economy.

    For Round 2 in office, instead of prioritizing the problems he campaigned on — public safety, immigration and the border and, most of all, the economy — President Trump is hellbent on dismantling the federal government. To accomplish this, he has put his faith in the most incompetent cabinet in modern history: a health and human services secretary who is already targeting federal vaccination efforts and dumped a bear carcass in Central Park as a fun prank at age 60, a director of national intelligence who was devoted to an allegedly abusive yoga-centered cult, a WWE tycoon turned head of Department of Education and a former cable news talking head as defense secretary. Which will result in one clear thing: disorder. There will probably be more enormous tax cuts for the wealthy and Medicaid cuts hitting a lot of other people, but there is nothing the American public despises more than disorder and a broken economy.

    And there’s nothing Democrats can legitimately do to stop it, even if we wanted to.

    With no clear leader to voice our opposition and no control in any branch of government, it’s time for Democrats to embark on the most daring political maneuver in the history of our party: roll over and play dead. Allow the Republicans to crumble beneath their own weight and make the American people miss us. Only until the Trump administration has spiraled into the low 40s or high 30s in public approval polling percentages should we make like a pack of hyenas and go for the jugular. Until then, I’m calling for a strategic political retreat.

    The Army has a term for this: tactical pause. It’s a vision move — get out of the hour-to-hour, day-to-day combat where one side (ours) is largely playing defense and struggling to defend politically charged positions (like explaining D.E.I. or persuading voters to care about foreign aid) and take time to regroup, look forward and make decisions about where we want to get to over the next two years. I don’t think a lot of Americans are waiting around for us to use the same old arguments and same old language to pile on Donald Trump. They’re tired of it, and our Democratic voters are tired of watching us moan and groan to cover up our impotency out of power. They want us to be smarter than that.

    Our first major test in the art of strategic retreat comes in a few weeks, as the Trump administration must get a budget passed that raises the debt ceiling. There are deep internal Republican divides over the budget: Republicans don’t know what they want to include, they don’t agree on an agenda, and they do not have a clear path forward. Mr. Trump has asked for an abolishment of the debt ceiling. The speaker of the House, his close ally, has yet to definitively support him on it.

    Already, many Democrats across the party are itching at their seams for a showdown. Instead of gearing up to fight them — as we love to do — the most radical thing we can do is nothing at all. Let the Republicans disagree with themselves publicly. Do not offer a single vote. Do not insert yourself into the discourse. Do not throw a monkey wrench into the equation. Simply step away and let ’em flirt with a default. Just when they’ve pushed themselves to the brink and it appears they could collapse the global economy, come in and save the day. Be the competent party and not the chaos party. House Democrats know this. It’s time for everyone in our party, including the darlings who want to run in 2028, to understand this as well. You won’t win or achieve anything meaningful going toe to toe with the Trump administration right now.

    This equation must be applied for the remainder of this year. Let the Republicans push for their tax cuts, their Medicaid cuts, their food stamp cuts. Give them all the rope they need. Then let dysfunction paralyze their House caucus and rupture their tiny majority. Let them reveal themselves as incapable of governing and, at the right moment, start making a coordinated, consistent argument about the need to protect Medicare, Medicaid, worker benefits and middle-class pocketbooks. Let the Republicans crumble, let the American people see it, and wait until they need us to offer our support.

    It’s a wiser approach than we pursued in the first Trump administration, when Democrats tried and failed at the art of resistance politics. We voiced outrage on social issue after social issue. We spun ourselves up in a tizzy over an investigation into Russia. We fought Mr. Trump at every corner, on every issue imaginable and muddied up our message in an unwinnable war. We were saved only by his lousy governing and a lot of effort on our side finding good candidates to run for the House and Senate in 2018. Sometimes the most powerful thing we can do is retreat on the immediate battlefield — and advance in another direction.

    It won’t take long. Public support for this administration will fall through the floorboard. It’s already happening. Just over a month in, the president’s approval has already sunk underwater in two new polls. The people did not vote for the Department of Education to be obliterated; they voted for lower prices for eggs and milk. Democrats, let the Republicans’ own undertow drag them away.

    At this rate, the Trump honeymoon will be over, best case, by Memorial Day but more likely in the next 30 days. And in November 2025, we start turning the tide with what will be remembered as one of the most important elections in recent years: the Virginia governor’s race. From tax enforcers to rocket scientists, bank regulators and essential workers — the Trump administration is hellbent on drastically firing the federal work force, despite the fact that federal civilian employees account for just 3 percent of the federal budget. These workers are highly concentrated in Virginia, home to around 144,000 civilian federal employees. It looks set to be a resounding Republican defeat. This will be the first moment when we can take the offensive back and begin our crusade again.

    Half a century ago, Muhammad Ali cemented himself as the greatest heavyweight boxer of all time not by punching his way to glory but by mastering the art of the strategic retreat. Facing George Foreman, who was rolling off 37 knockouts and 40 wins, Ali deployed the famous rope-a-dope strategy, retreating to the ropes of the ring, evading punches right and left, absorbing small jabs, until Foreman’s battery was depleted — and in Round 8 deployed a decisive knockout blow.

    It’s Round 1. Let’s rope-a-dope, Dems.”

  • 24 February, 2025

    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. They wanted a constitutional republic, where power was divided between the Congress and the president and the courts, and we are collapsing that structure,” King said. “[T]he people cheering this on I fear, in a reasonably short period of time, are going to say where did this go? How did this happen? How did we make our president into a monarch? How did this happen? How it happened,” he said to his Senate colleagues, “is we gave it up! James Madison thought we would fight for our power, but no. Right now we’re just sitting back and watching it happen.”

    “This is the most serious assault on our Constitution in the history of this country,” King said. “It’s the most serious assault on the very structure of our Constitution, which is designed to protect our freedoms and liberty, in the history of this country. It is a constitutional crisis…. Many of my friends in this body say it will be hard, we don’t want to buck the President, we’ll let the courts take care of it…. [T]hat’s a copout. It’s our responsibility to protect the Constitution. That’s what we swear to when we enter this body.”

    “What’s it going to take for us to wake up…I mean this entire body, to wake up to what’s going on here? Is it going to be too late? Is it going to be when the President has secreted all this power and the Congress is an afterthought? What’s it going to take?”

    “[T]his a constitutional crisis, and we’ve got to respond to it. I’m just waiting for this whole body to stand up and say no, no, we don’t do it this way. We don’t do it this way. We do things constitutionally. [T]hat’s what the framers intended. They didn’t intend to have an efficient dictatorship, and that’s what we’re headed for…. We’ve got to wake up, protect this institution, but much more importantly protect the people of the United States of America.”

    Senator King, along with Maine governor Janet Mills, who stood up to Trump in person earlier this week, are following in the tradition of their state.

    On June 1, 1950, Senator Margaret Chase Smith (R-ME) delivered her famous Declaration of Conscience, standing up to Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI), who was smearing Democrats as communists. “I think that it is high time for the United States Senate and its members to do some real soul searching and to weigh our consciences as to the manner in which we are performing our duty to the people of America and the manner in which we are using or abusing our individual powers and privileges,” she said. “I do not want to see the Republican party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny—Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry, and Smear.”

    On July 28, 1974, Representative Bill Cohen (R-ME), who went on to a long Senate career but was at the time a junior member on the House Judiciary Committee, voted along with five other Republican members of the committee and the Democratic majority to draw up articles of impeachment against Republican president Richard Nixon, fully expecting that the death threats and hate mail he was receiving proved that that vote would destroy his political career. But, Cohen told the Bangor Daily News, “I would never compromise what I think is the right thing to do for the sake of an office; it’s just not that important. Only time will tell if the people will accept that judgment.”

    Days later, the tape proving Nixon had been part of the Watergate coverup came to light. “Suddenly there was a switch in the people who had been defending the president,” Cohen recalled. “That’s when people back in Maine, Republicans, started to turn around and said, ‘We were wrong, and you were right, and we’ll support this.’ ”

    It’s a good week to remember that politicians used to use as a yardstick the saying: “As Maine goes, so goes the nation.”

  • 23 February, 2025

    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. Popular and necessary programs like Medicaid, Medicare, and SNAP, are all being targeted. In order to pass the tax cut, Republicans have to go through a series of procedural steps. Last night, they took the first step which requires them to pass an outline of their plan, but with it, any senator can offer as many amendments as we want. So my Democratic colleagues and I did just that. 

    Now, we knew that Republicans would largely unanimously oppose them, but we had two objectives here. One, Republicans were forced to put their opinion on record — many for the first time — on the most corrupt parts of Trump and Musk’s agenda. Two, as I’ve been saying, I am going to make every process and procedure as slow and painful as possible for as long as my colleagues choose to ignore the constitutional crisis happening before our eyes. 

    So what did we propose? We proposed no tax cuts for anyone who makes a billion dollars a year. We made them vote on whether or not Elon Musk and DOGE should have limitless access to Americans’ personal data. We made them vote on whether to protect IVF and require insurers to cover it. Every single amendment Democrats proposed was shot down. On almost every single amendment, Republicans universally opposed it. Every Republican voted against our proposal to prevent more tax cuts for billionaires. The corruption and theft is happening in the open here. 

    The whole game for Republicans is taking your money and giving it to the wealthiest corporations and billionaires — even if it means kicking your parents out of a nursing home or turning off Medicaid for the poorest children. They know what they are doing is deeply unpopular. They are offering a tax cut to the most wealthy that is 850 times larger than what they are offering working people. Oh and by the way, any tax cuts for working people are going to be washed out by higher costs for basic necessities, like health care and food. It’s a fundamental injustice. 

    Thanks to your pressure and support, many of my Democratic colleagues have joined my effort to do everything we can to make sure they cannot destroy democracy and steal your money in the dark of the night. We are being loud about what is happening. I’m going to continue to grind the gears of Congress down as much as possible to make it that much harder and slower to get away with this corruption. That’s why the votes lasted until nearly 5 AM. 

    This is a five-alarm fire. I don’t think we have two years to plan and fight back. I think we have months. It’s still in our power to stop the destruction of our democracy with mass mobilization and effective opposition from elected officials. So we can’t miss any opportunity to take advantage of opportunities to put Republicans on the record and shine a light on what is happening. 

    And you have a role to play in this as well. I need you to amplify what’s happening, support the leaders who are fighting for you to make sure they can continue speaking truth to power against Musk and Trump’s billionaire cronies, and show up at rallies and town halls. Use every tool at your disposal to send a message loud and clear about how you expect my colleagues to lead and fight in this moment.

    Every best wish, US Senator Chris Murphy (D – CT)

  • 20 February, 2025

    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 American and a Jew, I find it difficult to resolve my feelings around that Supreme Court case – but I am grateful that the prospect of Nazis marching in their streets spurred the survivors and other Skokie residents to act. They joined together to form the Holocaust Memorial Foundation and built the first Illinois Holocaust Museum in a storefront in 1981 – a small but important forerunner to the one I helped build thirty years later.

    I do not invoke the specter of Nazis lightly. But I know the history intimately — and have spent more time than probably anyone in this room with people who survived the Holocaust. Here’s what I’ve learned – the root that tears apart your house’s foundation begins as a seed – a seed of distrust and hate and blame.

    The seed that grew into a dictatorship in Europe a lifetime ago didn’t arrive overnight. It started with everyday Germans mad about inflation and looking for someone to blame.

    I’m watching with a foreboding dread what is happening in our country right now. A president who watches a plane go down in the Potomac – and suggests — without facts or findings — that a diversity hire is responsible for the crash. Or the Missouri Attorney General who just sued Starbucks – arguing that consumers pay higher prices for their coffee because the baristas are too “female” and “nonwhite.” The authoritarian playbook is laid bare here: They point to a group of people who don’t look like you and tell you to blame them for your problems.

    I just have one question: What comes next? After we’ve discriminated against, deported or disparaged all the immigrants and the gay and lesbian and transgender people, the developmentally disabled, the women and the minorities – once we’ve ostracized our neighbors and betrayed our friends – After that, when the problems we started with are still there staring us in the face – what comes next?

    All the atrocities of human history lurk in the answer to that question. And if we don’t want to repeat history – then for God’s sake in this moment we better be strong enough to learn from it.

    I swore the following oath on Abraham Lincoln’s bible: “I do solemnly swear that I will support the constitution of the United States, and the constitution of the state of Illinois, and that I will faithfully discharge the duties of the office of Governor …. according to the best of my ability.”

    My oath is to the Constitution of our state and of our country. We don’t have kings in America – and I don’t intend to bend the knee to one. I am not speaking up in service to my ambitions — but in deference to my obligations.

    If you think I’m overreacting and sounding the alarm too soon, consider this:

    It took the Nazis one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours and 40 minutes to dismantle a constitutional republic. All I’m saying is when the five-alarm fire starts to burn, every good person better be ready to man a post with a bucket of water if you want to stop it from raging out of control.

    Those Illinois Nazis did end up holding their march in 1978 – just not in Skokie. After all the blowback from the case, they decided to march in Chicago instead. Only twenty of them showed up. But 2000 people came to counter protest. The Chicago Tribune reported that day that the “rally sputtered to an unspectacular end after ten minutes.” It was Illinoisans who smothered those embers before they could burn into a flame.

    Tyranny requires your fear and your silence and your compliance. Democracy requires your courage. So gather your justice and humanity, Illinois, and do not let the “tragic spirit of despair” overcome us when our country needs us the most.”