Just see what you've done

"Amaryllis" by Olga Sarukhanova is from the Georgia O'Keeffe-inspired What Flowers Say collection.

I want to quote a bit of this review by Sam Rosenfeld of Michael Lewis' Who Is Government? The Untold Story of Public Service:

The right's hatred for the civil service contains multitudes. There's a sociological angle—the conviction that the administrative state is under the collective control of a particular class of people zealously committed to a dangerous ideology and bent on resistance by hook or by crook to conservative governance. Trump's iteration of this, like his iteration of all ideas, is deeply personalized, grounded in his understanding of the federal civil service as the people investigating and seeking to punish him for his crimes. The ascendant Silicon Valley strain of anti-bureaucracy, meanwhile, espouses a more avowedly demolitionist ethos in keeping with the hothouse managerial culture of tech. At base, however, the case for government administration is the case for government itself, and that is precisely what the right can't abide.

Democracy is a double delegation game. Voters delegate the task of actually making laws to the politicians they elect to represent them. The politicians then delegate the task of executing those laws to bureaucrats. At their most effective, the grounded portraits of individual bureaucrats in Who Is Government? take us, in their hyperspecificity, all the way back to the first step of that game—the question prior to 'who is government?' of 'why have government?' Across the book's accounts, we see bureaucrats engaging with problems for which free markets and private action would not be able to generate solutions on their own. 'No one coal mining company was likely to fund the [safety] research that would benefit all coal companies,' Lewis notes, and in fact the market even incentivized those companies to neglect implementation of safety features for years after bureaucrats like Chris Mark had developed them—until new laws passed by Congress finally added enforcement teeth to the regulations. The FDA's Stone created a reliable mechanism for making important information about discoveries in the treatment of rare diseases accessible to doctors when no such mechanism had earlier existed—the rareness of the diseases means 'it doesn't really pay anyone to do it,' as one biochemist remarked to Lewis. Eggers describes the work of space nerds at Caltech: 'This is government-funded research to determine how the universe was created and whether we are alone in it. If NASA and JPL were not doing it, it would not be done.'

Ordinary people aren't expected to devise on their own the collective answers to every failure in health care or mine management or space exploration—that's what Congress is there to do. But members of Congress aren't expected themselves to build the clearinghouse for rare disease treatment, or devise the software that determines the right roof reinforcement for a specific coal mine, or build panoramic space telescopes that suppress starlight so far-flung planets can be detected—that's what civil servants are there to do. The tasks that lawmakers ask to be performed in their legislative language are legion, complicated, specialized, and ongoing. That's why there are a lot of bureaucrats, and that's why they enjoy, to a greater or lesser extent, some degree of autonomy to do their jobs. 'What the government job gave me was the freedom to do these things,' Mark the mine engineer tells Lewis. 'No one told me to do it. No one could have told me to do it.'

The idea that "unelected bureaucrats" like these are a bunch of lazy grifters who just suck up government paychecks while not doing anything useful is big on the right. (I'm still baffled by people who insist that commercial entities are more efficient and better to deal with than the DMV. I've never had a problem with the Department of Motor Vehicles in my life and I don't have enough imagination to theorize on what issues they've had with them that make anyone think they are inferior to spending weeks or months on the phone being denied health care by your insurance company.) Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) exists, purportedly, to remedy the gross inefficiency of having lots of these "bureaucrats" bloating the government. (The truth, of course, is that while most people want good government, which is what the bureaucrats are for, rich people just don't want to be governed.) So when one of the DOGE kids gave an interview about what he really found in government, he naturally got fired.

A former employee of the Department of Government Efficiency says that he found that the federal waste, fraud and abuse that his agency was supposed to uncover were "relatively nonexistent" during his short time embedded within the Department of Veterans Affairs.

"I personally was pretty surprised, actually, at how efficient the government was," Sahil Lavingia told NPR's Juana Summers.

Lavingia said the overall message at DOGE was transparency and a vibe of "ask for forgiveness, not permission." So, when a blogger asked for an interview about Gumroad, he agreed. And when asked, he talked about his work at DOGE, including how little inefficiency he saw compared to what he was expecting.

"Elon [Musk] was pretty clear about how he wanted DOGE to be maximally transparent," Lavingia said. "That's something he said a lot in private. And publicly. And so I thought, OK, cool, I'll take him at his word. I will be transparent."

Shortly after the interview was published online, Lavingia got an email. Just 55 days into his work at DOGE, his access had been revoked.

[...]

"I did not find the federal government to be rife with waste, fraud and abuse. I was expecting some more easy wins. I was hoping for opportunity to cut waste, fraud and abuse. And I do believe that there is a lot of waste. There's minimal amounts of fraud. And abuse, to me, feels relatively nonexistent. And the reason is — I think we have a bias as people coming from the tech industry where we worked at companies, you know, such as Google, Facebook, these companies that have plenty of money, are funded by investors and have lots of people kind of sitting around doing nothing."

Note that they assumed they'd find waste, fraud, and abuse because that's what they were used to seeing in the tech sector. The real waste, fraud, and abuse we are facing right now comes not from ordinary government "bureaucrats" nor from recipients of Social Security, SNAP, Medicare, and Medicaid, but from the commercial end of the "public-private partnership" — the contractors and blood-suckers to whom government services have been diverted so they can make money providing nothing of earthly value to the public. One of those people is Elon Musk, whose real mission with DOGE was to eliminate the bureaucrats and agencies that oversee fraud and waste from people like him. That's why the first thing he did was fire the Inspectors General.

* * * * *

I can't talk about the attack on Iran, I said all those things a couple of decades ago and I'm afraid I'll just get apoplectic. So right now, it's all about watching the NYC mayoral primary race, where the establishment has stepped right up to support the egregious and disgusting disgraced ex-governor Cuomo (the same guy whose resignation they once demanded) against a young, popular guy who, according to Larry Summers, would destroy the country by introducing a few free bus routes.

That's entertainment! "Trump goes after Leonard Leo in attack on tariff ruling: President Trump denounced a court ruling blocking his tariffs in a lengthy Truth Social post Thursday night that targeted Leonard Leo, who played a central role in shaping Trump's judicial picks during his first term. 'Hopefully, the Supreme Court will reverse this horrible, Country threatening decision, QUICKLY and DECISIVELY. Backroom 'hustlers' must not be allowed to destroy our Nation!' Trump wrote. It marked the president's first comments after a whirlwind 24 hours that saw the U.S. Court of International Trade block the bulk of Trump's tariffs before an appeals court lifted the order. The tariffs were also blocked by a separate court, but that ruling doesn't go into effect for two weeks. Alongside his condemnation of the ruling, Trump went after Leo, who spent decades forming a conservative judicial pipeline as a longtime leader of the Federalist Society and advised Trump on judge selections during his first stint in the White House." Leo, we will recall, is the guy who arranged for certain Supreme Court justices to have wealthy right-wing sponsors to bribe them into staying on the court and moving even further to the right. And yet, the Trump vs. Leonard Leo show was totally upstaged by the the Elon vs. Trump show.

"The IRS Tax Filing Software TurboTax Is Trying to Kill Just Got Open Sourced: The IRS open sourced much of its incredibly popular Direct File software as the future of the free tax filing program is at risk of being killed by Intuit's lobbyists and Donald Trump's megabill. Meanwhile, several top developers who worked on the software have left the government and joined a project to explore the 'future of tax filing' in the private sector. Direct File is a piece of software created by developers at the US Digital Service and 18F, the former of which became DOGE and is now unrecognizable, and the latter of which was killed by DOGE. Direct File has been called a 'free, easy, and trustworthy' piece of software that made tax filing 'more efficient.' About 300,000 people used it last year as part of a limited pilot program, and those who did gave it incredibly positive reviews, according to reporting by Federal News Network. But because it is free and because it is an example of government working, Direct File and the IRS's Free File program more broadly have been the subject of years of lobbying efforts by financial technology giants like Intuit, which makes TurboTax. DOGE sought to kill Direct File, and currently, there is language in Trump's massive budget reconciliation bill that would kill Direct File. Experts say that 'ending [the] Direct File program is a gift to the tax-prep industry that will cost taxpayers time and money.'"

Why does Maryland keep electing these corrupt governors? "A Democratic Governor Lends A Hand To Loan Sharks: Maryland Governor Wes Moore just approved a new carveout exempting predatory payday lenders from state regulations. [...] Thanks to Democratic Gov. Wes Moore, a bill that exempts certain payday lenders from state laws protecting borrowers from exploitation and discrimination just became law in Maryland. Earned wage access lenders target mostly low-wage workers by fronting them their paycheck earlier with sky-high interest rates and excessive fees. Those predatory tactics have been somewhat reined in by Maryland regulations — but they now won't apply to the growing payday loan market."

Hm, I wonder why The Hill claimed no Democrat had come forward to run for the New Hampshire seat that Jordon Wood is running for. Could it be that he's too progressive?

The June issue of The American Prospect focuses on The Golden Age of Scams, and it's everywhere you look. "There's an economic principle named after a 16th-century British financier—Sir Thomas Gresham—who urged Queen Elizabeth I to clean up the sorry state of the national currency. Gresham's Law states that “bad money drives out good,” and while Sir Thomas meant “bad money” in terms of coinage that didn't carry the intrinsic value of gold or silver, the principle applies just as well to the business world. Simply put, honest companies have a hard time competing with dishonest ones. This is intuitive if you think about it. An auto dealership that only sells lemons and lies about it will earn well above fair value for their vehicles. Snake oil doesn't cost as much to make as a useful medication. Robbing your customers is more lucrative than making sure they're satisfied. If you accept this premise, then you should recognize that we're about to see a lot of honest businesses either turn to the dark side or close up shop."

At The Lever, an audio interview with Stephanie Kelton, "Everything You Think About The Deficit Is Wrong: Every major agency has downgraded America's credit rating. Economist Stephanie Kelton explains why it matters — but not for the reasons you think."

RIP: "Brian Wilson, visionary creative spirit for the Beach Boys, dies aged 82: Musician, who suffered from mental health problems, wrote and produced the 1966 album Pet Sounds – seen by many as the greatest album of all time." They were fun when they did "Help Me, Rhonda"; the studio version wasn't much but when they did "Darlin'" live, it rocked; "Kokimo" seemed dull at first until suddenly Carl soared; but "God Only Knows" is one of the most beautiful things I've ever heard. The Wilson boys were all much greater talents than anyone recognized at the time, but Brian gave them the chance to really show it. Yeah, I cried.

RIP: "Sly Stone Dead At 82." I think I only saw them once, back in 1968 when no one had heard of them. A building had been painted blue on St. Mark's Place and we weren't even sure what it was yet, but my friend and I were walkimg by and the guys at the door saw two young women and pretty much begged us to come in. It was free so we decided to have a look, and found a big room with not enough people milling on the floor but a perfectly competent band on stage. So I leaned up against the stage and watched and listened for a while. But I couldn't read their name on the drumhead and eventually I caught the bass player's eye and waved him over to ask what they were called. "Sly and the Family Stone," he said. Little did we know....

"Democrats set out to study young men. Here are their findings.: A widely mocked project to get under the hood about why Democrats are losing young men has sobering results. [...] The focus groups found that young men feel they are in crisis: stressed, ashamed and confused over what it means to be a man in 2025. They vented about conflicting cultural messages of masculinity that put them in a 'no-win situation around the meaning of 'a man,'' according to the SAM project memo. They described how the Covid pandemic left them isolated and socially disconnected. They also said they now feel overwhelmed by economic anxiety, making 'traditional milestones,' like buying a home or saving for kids' college, 'feel impossible,' an analysis of the research said. 'The degree to which those economic concerns are also impacting how they think about themselves and quote-unquote success of being a man, and living up to their own expectations or the expectations of their family or society,' Della Volpe said. 'There's another layer of economic anxiety that I don't think I fully saw until now.'"

The first time I saw a photo of a room in the Sleeper-McCann House, I thought it was a painting, and proceeded to get confused looking for a gallery of Henry Davis Sleeper's work. There are lots of individual scattered photos of the various rooms in the house, but I didn't see much collected together. There are a few in a slideshow on this page.

Bill Medley on Cheers
Bobby Hatfield on Cheers

Guardian quickie interview with Lee Child, author of Reacher.

The Beach Boys, "Heroes and Villains"

Arise, ye prisoners of want!

"The Old Church by the River" is by Frits Thaulow (1847-1906). You can find more of his work here.

"Senate Democrats Have Been Handed a Tool to Stop the Big Beautiful Bill Thanks to a Republican vote to stop California from setting its own auto emissions, Democrats can challenge virtually any Trump administration action, and eat up time on the Senate floor. [...] The bottom line is this: If you found something like 1,000 current or former agency actions—a reasonable number considering all the work executive branch agencies do—you would probably have enough to keep the Senate debating and voting on CRA resolutions through the duration of this Congress. That means the Senate would never have the ability to take up executive branch or judicial nominations, or legislation like the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that recently passed the House. Senate Democrats could put the chamber into permanent gridlock, and thereby save 14 million people from losing their Medicaid coverage, save millions more from loss of SNAP benefits, while also forcing the 2017 Trump tax cuts to expire. That's the level of hardball that can be played here." But will they?

The Supreme Court surprised a lot of people by deciding that Trump can't just deport people without due process, in a 7-2 decision. The 2 dissenters were, of course, Alito and Thomas, and Scott Lemieux makes an interesting point: "The question of whether Trump is primarily symptom or cause is settled by the fact that Trump's most uncritical lickspittles and enablers on the Court are the two he didn't appoint."

And this is an over-optimistic headline, but "Supreme Court tie vote dooms taxpayer funded Catholic charter school: WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Thursday effectively ended a publicly funded Catholic charter school in Oklahoma, dividing 4-4. The outcome keeps in place an Oklahoma court decision that invalidated a vote by a state charter school board to approve the St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, which would have been the nation's first religious charter school. But it leaves the issue unresolved nationally. The one-sentence notice from the court provides an unsatisfying end to one of the term's most closely watched cases."

The mayor of Newark, New Jersey was trying to do his job to inspect an ICE facility that was operating without proper permissions or standards, and three Congress members from the state were given a tour of the place, and as they all left, they were suddenly swarmed by officials and shoved around and the mayor was arrested. About ten days later, Homeland Security posted a short video in which they claimed one of them, Congresswoman LaMonica McIver, body-slammed officials and was being charged. I've watched videos of the event from various angles and what I see is police attacking elective officials who were performing their duties.

"'Indiscriminate, Unrestrained, Brutal': Former Israeli PM Calls Gaza Assault 'War Crimes': Israel's former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert says he now believes his country's relentless assault on the Palestinian people amounts to 'war crimes' and must be stopped. Addressing the people of Israel in an article written in Hebrew and published by Haaretz on Thursday, Olmert, who served from 2006 to 2009, condemned current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government for 'waging a pointless war, without a clear goal or plan, and with no chance of success,' according to Google's translation of the piece."

"The New York Times Really Asked Ms. Rachel If She's Paid By Hamas: The house style of the New York Times is severely outdated. Depending on the topic, the newspaper's purportedly impartial tone instead reads as smug, self-amused, and deeply lazy. The results are disastrous when applied to a recent article which sincerely considers the idea that Rachel Griffin-Accurso, the popular children's entertainer known as Ms. Rachel, might be financially compensated by Hamas. Griffin-Accurso's grave sin is that she wants Israel to stop starving and killing Palestinian children in Gaza. For this, she has become the target of a pro-Israel contingent so committed to suppressing any support for Palestine that they have abandoned basic human dignity. Griffin-Accurso has spoken out on the crisis for a while on her Instagram page, and in the past week, she posted a number of statements that promote organizations which aid children suffering from violence and hunger, including malnutrition in Gaza and famine in Sudan."

RIP: "Susan Brownmiller, author, dies at 90 "— I didn't always agree with her, but she certainly changed the way we talk about rape.

RIP: "George Wendt: Actor who played Norm Peterson in the hugely popular American sitcom Cheers" — It always amused me that his role was so universally acknowleged that Quark's bar in Deep Space Nine had a regular alien patron named Morn.

RIP: "Loretta Swit, who played 'Hot Lips' Houlihan on M*A*S*H, dies aged 87 [...] The growing awareness of feminism in the 70s spurred Houlihan's transformation from caricature to real person, but a lot of the change was due to Swit's influence on the scriptwriters. 'Around the second or third year I decided to try to play her as a real person, in an intelligent fashion, even if it meant hurting the jokes,' Swit told Suzy Kalter, the author of The Complete Book of M*A*S*H. 'To oversimplify it, I took each traumatic change that happened in her life and kept it. I didn't go into the next episode as if it were a different character in a different play. She was a character in constant flux; she never stopped developing.'"

Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson have been roaming around on a book tour for their re-branded version of neoliberalism called Abundance. Most people seem to have figured out what it is, but it's nice to see a comprehensive review of their points in Sandeep Vaheesan's "The Real Path to Abundance" at Boston Review. This is a longer read but definitely worth the time to see a thorough response. A little taste: This is the blind spot running through all of Abundance's anecdotes: the limits of the private sector. The primary conceit is that in many areas, the private sector is ready to invest—and to invest big—if politicians would only lift public barriers standing in their way. There is little evidence that is true. In reality, corporate executives and managers make investment decisions based on expected profits. Even when zoning restrictions are favorable, developers evaluate a range of investment options before committing to construction. They are looking not only for positive returns but for higher returns than alternative options. Homebuilders, in particular, will not build unless they have reason to think they can achieve sufficiently high profits—those that outperform land banking, speculation, or other forms of investment. The much-touted housing boom in Austin is a case in point: after a few years of above-average building activity led to modest rent reductions, residential developers reduced construction substantially. The burst of construction made only a small dent in the dramatic increase in rents since 2010."

Matt Stoller makes some good points about "Monopolies and Fascism [...] Neumann's book, therefore, was received warmly. For Neumann, a key driver of the rise of the Nazi movement was monopolization, because he saw it as a system of economic control that was totally compatible with, and indeed encouraged, the rise of an authoritarian government. He noted that the Weimar Republic oversaw a massive merger wave; chemical giant IG Farben was a result of the combination of six firms in 1925. The Social Democrats, he argued, failed because they 'did not see that the central problem was the imperialism of German monopoly capital, becoming ever more urgent with the continued growth of the process of monopolization. The more monopoly grew, the more incompatible it became with the political democracy.' In the U.S., however, our antitrust laws saved our democracy. 'In Germany,' Neuman wrote, 'there was never anything like the popular antimonopoly movement of the United States under Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.' The Sherman Act, in other words, wasn't perfect, but it did stop the rise of fascism. This kind of influence is obvious in decisions at the time, which had deep moral rhetoric. In 1945, Judge Learned Hand ruled that Alcoa was a monopoly, noting that 'among the purposes of Congress in 1890 was a desire to put an end to great aggregations of capital because of the helplessness of the individual before them.'"

Video: It's been interesting watching right-winger Piers Morgan repeatedly have Mehdi Hasan on his show to argue about whether Israel is committing a genocide. It was even more interesting to see Morgan finally give up and admit that Mehdi is right.

Video: Cory Doctorow's keynote speech about how people like Bill Clinton and Kier Starmer have helped destroy our privacy and control of our lives and possessions.

"The New War On State Regulators: After kneecapping and culling federal agencies, corporate interests have a coordinated plan to defang government protections, state by state. As Elon Musk and his DOGE cronies take a sledgehammer to federal agencies, corporate interests are mounting a coordinated effort to dismantle state rules and regulations — backing legislative efforts to kneecap state watchdogs' ability to enforce everything from environmental protections to worker safeguards. This means that as guardrails for consumers and workers are dismantled on a federal level, states are in danger of losing their ability to pick up the slack. In 15 states this year, according to a review by The Lever, lawmakers have introduced so-called 'judicial deference' laws, which would stack the deck against state regulators and allow corporate America to swiftly challenge and strip away state protections ranging from restrictions on pollution to consumer safeguards."

Hamilton Nolan, "Infinite Contempt For Working People Is Not an Acceptable Default Position [...] Why do I cast the average corporation—employers! Bestowers of life-giving healthcare coverage!—in such harsh terms? Because, as someone who writes about labor issues, I have become aware of the fact that we accept from these companies a sort of hostile, mean behavior towards their own employees that we would never tolerate if companies were, in fact, people, as the legal fiction claims. Major corporations spend huge sums of money on advertising and public relations to give themselves the warm halo of entities that have human personalities, and yet they act towards their own workers—their valued team members, who are their highest priority, etcetera!—in a bestial way that is a rejection of the most basic form of shared humanity. The ability to convince the general public that the standards of common decency that we all expect from one another do not apply to the entire field of business is one of the greatest tricks capitalism ever pulled."

"Andrew Cuomo Is Worse Than You Even Know: The former governor is a corrupt sexual harasser with a pro-corporate agenda and a proven track record of deadly negligence. He will do nothing to improve New Yorkers' lives. Why on Earth is he a contender for mayor? [...] While Cuomo was hailed for his leadership during the pandemic, and was even touted as a sex symbol in parts of the media, he in fact made catastrophic missteps in responding during the pandemic's early days that seriously worsened the death toll in New York. Cuomo initially said the 'seasonal flu was a graver worry' and his spokesperson 'refused to say if the governor had ever read the state's pandemic plan.' As the pandemic raged, the state was dealing with $400 million in Medicaid cuts that Cuomo had supported, and had lost 20,000 of its 73,000 hospital beds due to 'budget cuts and insurance overhauls.' [...] When Cuomo was first elected he 'pursued a decidedly un-progressive agenda[…] passing austerity budgets, targeting public-employee unions, cutting taxes on the wealthy, going to bat for charter schools,' according to City Limits. No surprise, then, that Cuomo 'rake[d] in money from corporate, hedge fund, and real estate interests.' As Politico reported, Cuomo dismissed the idea of raising taxes on the wealthy and introducing a state-level single payer program. The Alliance For Quality Education was scathing about Cuomo's record, writing in 2021 that he 'has been on a mission to underfund high need public schools ever since his first year as Governor, when he cut over $1 billion from schools, while giving a tax break to millionaires.' [...] For years, Cuomo even helped ensure that his own party was kept out of power in the state Senate, and 'encouraged [an arrangement] that allowed the Republicans to remain in leadership even after the election of a Democratic majority.' He wanted to guarantee 'that Republicans had control over the agenda in the Senate, so that he wouldn't be handing over power to New York City Democrats.' Cuomo also tried to hobble progressive political power in other ways. After the Working Families Party worked out a deal with Cuomo, getting progressive concessions in exchange for not running a challenger to him on its ballot line, he 'reneged on those commitments and set out to destroy the party.' Journalist Ross Barkan says that 'an organized progressive wing of the party was terrifying to him.'"

It's always seemed obvious that Betty Boop was based on a black performer so it's nice to see that she's being played by a black woman on Broadway.

Tony Babino, "L'Internationale" (swing jazz version)

Surely, you know it surely won't stand the light of day

Dreamlike Serenity in Blue and Purple by Olya Enina is from the Contemporary Portraits collection.

I can't even begin to list the outrages the Trump administration is committing against people in America, but I'm listening right now to Sam Seder's interview with Jeremy Scahill and it sounds like because Trump is incredibly transactional, ego-driven, and corrupt, he may actually be shifting the politics in the Middle East in a less horrible direction. (You can also read Scahill's interview with an actual Hamas official here.)

You could have knocked me over with a feather when I found out that Elon wants to go to Mars because billions of years from now the sun is going to incinerate the Earth. If he'd said, "So we need to learn how to get into space and this is a first step," I might have been slightly mollified, but he never did. And, to be quite honest, if I still believed it was possible for humans to ever create machines that would take us to the stars, I could only do so if I still believed we would evolve first into the kind of society that was genuinely cooperative and collaborative and not the horrible, competitive, dog-eat-dog kind of world Elon Musk and the people like him have given us. This is not the Star Trek timeline, the Bell Riots never happened, and the Earth, if it is still here, will burn up along with Mars. But we'll probably have died out long before that happens.

In explaining why the administration had just fired Carla Hayden, the Librarian of Congress, a year before her ten-year term was set to expire, the White House spokesblonde said, "There were quite concerning things that she had done at the Library of Congress in the pursuit of DEI and putting inappropriate books in the Library for children and we don't believe she was serving the interests of the American taxpayer well." She thinks it's a lending library for kids?

"Hamas Launches Unprecedented Legal Case in Britain, Demanding the Government Remove its Terror Designation: In a legal filing, a Hamas founder argues that the group has the right to use armed resistance to achieve Palestinian liberation—and that Britain is crushing honest debate about its aims. In an extraordinary legal filing submitted Wednesday in London, Hamas argued that the British government should remove its designation of the movement as a proscribed terror group and recognize its legitimate role as a Palestinian resistance movement engaged in a struggle for self-determination and liberation. A top political leader of Hamas rejected allegations that the movement is an anti-semitic terror organization, asserted that Hamas poses no threat to Western nations, and argues that the political organization has never engaged in an armed operation outside the boundaries of historic Palestine."

Radley Balko "On 'unleashing' the police" makes the excellent point that Trump's recent order to "unleash the police" doesn't make much sense since we have no evidence that the police feel "leashed"—or restrained in any way—to begin with. "As for the executive order itself, it is heavy on bluster and short on details, like most of Trump's orders. Some of the measures are nonsensical, like 'indemnifying' police from damages. (They're already indemnified by taxpayers in more than 99.9 percent of such cases.) For others, it isn't clear if he's referring to federal or state and local police. Trump also provides no funding for his demands. Some would violate the law, such as charging progressive prosecutors for failing to prosecute some crimes to Trump's satisfaction. Others, like directing law firms to do pro bono work defending cops accused of wrongdoing, are both unconstitutional on their own and build on previous executive orders that are also unconstitutional (as a federal court emphatically declared just this week). Still others would require approval from Congress. How much of this agenda is actually feasible depends on whether Trump is willing to push through these barriers, and whether the federal courts are willing to stop him. That, however, is true with or without an executive order."

"The Supreme Court Approved Trump's Trans Military Purge in the Most Shameful Way Possible: On Tuesday, the Supreme Court cleared the way for President Donald Trump to purge transgender people from the military in a brief, unsigned order that did not bother to provide any reasoning. All three liberals dissented. With this decision, the Trump administration may now enforce a sweeping ban on military service, prohibiting the enlistment of transgender people and expelling those who are currently serving. The forced removal of these service members—who joined the military on the good-faith belief that the U.S. government welcomed their service—will mark one of the most sweeping acts of government-imposed bigotry in modern times. And the Supreme Court's shameful, unexplained approval of the policy is certain to weaken the armed forces by pushing out thousands serving their nation honorably."

"Leftist Online Creators Say They've Been Detained and Questioned Over Anti-Trump Content: 'No U.S. citizen should be detained by law enforcement, at the border or anywhere, because of their protected speech.' 'It happened,' said progressive online political commentator Hasan Piker on Sunday in a cryptic post on the social media site X—one that suggested he wasn't altogether surprised when he was detained for several hours by border agents at a Chicago airport after flying back to the U.S. from France. He explained to his 1.5 million followers later that he had been stopped by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents 'for additional questioning.' [...] The questions over the two-hour period suggested that the Trump administration has been following Piker's commentary, which has recently included vehement criticism of U.S. support for Israel as it bombards and starves the people of Gaza. 'They straight up tried to get something out of me that I think they could use to basically detain me permanently,' Piker said. '[The agent] kept saying stuff like, do you like Hamas? Do you support Hamas? Do you think Hamas is a terror group or a resistance group?'"

Hm, what's my new Senator been up to? "Alsobrooks, RFK Jr. spar during testy Senate hearing: U.S. Sen. Angela Alsobrooks squared off against Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at a testy Capitol Hill hearing Wednesday, continuing her campaign against the controversial cabinet head. 'Sir, you are the wrong person for this job,' Alsobrooks flatly told Kennedy." Good. If you can't make law, at least make noise.

"Consenting Sexual Activity at Sex Clubs and Parties in the UK is About to Become a Crime: The Crime and Policing Bill 2025 aims to infringe your freedom and control your sex life"—and it's more than just sex parties: "Under NEW CLAUSE 2: if you paid to be in the same room as someone and expect to be sexually aroused by their activity then it is a crime. Even if you everyone is clothed and there is no touching each other."

RIP: "Pope Francis, first Latin American pontiff who ministered with a charming, humble style, dies at 88: The Vatican said Francis died of a stroke that put him into a coma and led his heart to fail." He was the best Pope of my lifetime, I'll give him that. Mind, this isn't saying a lot, but still. In any case, right-wingers are upset that the new pope, an American who has named himself Leo XIV, talks like someone who was actually raised on the teachings of Jesus.

RIP: "Will Hutchins, Star of ABC's Sugarfoot, Dies at 94. The onetime Warner Bros. contract player also appeared in two Elvis films and played a New York City landlord and Dagwood Bumstead on short-lived sitcoms." OK, he was no big deal, but I just always liked Sugarfoot, he was the cutest of the prime time cowboys.

ROT IN PERDITION: Alan Simpson died just before I had my little accident and I'd almost forgotten about it, but you really shouldn't miss Eric Loomis' remembrance of this horrible monster.

"Leaked Data Reveals Massive Israeli Campaign to Remove Pro-Palestine Posts on Facebook and Instagram: A sweeping crackdown on posts on Instagram and Facebook that are critical of Israel—or even vaguely supportive of Palestinians—was directly orchestrated by the government of Israel, according to internal Meta data obtained by Drop Site News. The data show that Meta has complied with 94% of takedown requests issued by Israel since October 7, 2023. Israel is the biggest originator of takedown requests globally by far, and Meta has followed suit—widening the net of posts it automatically removes, and creating what can be called the largest mass censorship operation in modern history. [...] Despite Meta's awareness of Israel's aggressive censorship tactics for at least seven years, according to Meta whistleblowers, the company has failed to curb the abuse. Instead, one said, the company 'actively provided the Israeli government with a legal entry-point for carrying out its mass censorship campaign.'"

"Douglas Murray's 'Expertise' Is a Sham" In On Democracies and Death Cults, Murray offers a straightforward 'good versus evil' account of the Israel-Palestine conflict. He does this by excluding every piece of information that undercuts his thesis and even spreading outright falsehoods. [...] Instead of discussing the question 'Who is an expert?' we should always ask a different set of questions, namely: 'What is the argument being made and what is the evidence provided in support of it?' It doesn't matter who has been to Israel, it matters what the proof for their claims is. (After all, both Murray and Ta-Nehisi Coates have been there, but they reached very different conclusions.) The focus should be on Murray's thesis and the support he provides for it. Plenty else is irrelevant: the fact that he's spent time in the region, the fact that he has a posh British accent, the fact that his book is a bestseller, the fact that the Times of Israel calls it important. We must zero in on what Murray is arguing and whether it happens to be true. When we do, we quickly see that his argument is nonsense and filled with deception. "

Zeteo has made a film of their investigative report on Who killed the US journalist & Why did Biden cover it up? "A new documentary film reveals the identity of the Israeli soldier who killed the Christian American journalist, as well as a shocking US cover-up. Exclusive interviews with former Biden officials reveal that in order to protect its relationship with Israel, the administration 'failed' Abu Akleh. Former Wall Street Journal Middle East reporter Dion Nissenbaum and longtime foreign correspondent Conor Powell conducted a months-long investigation that uncovered the hidden identity – and fate – of the Israeli soldier who killed Shireen Abu Akleh." You can watch the first 8:55 for free from the link.

Cory Doctorow is still on the case of how enshittification happened and how to fight it with "Who Broke the Internet? Part II: The thesis of the show is straightforward: the internet wasn't killed by ideological failings like 'greed,' nor by economic concepts like 'network effects,' nor by some cyclic force of history that drives towards 're-intermediation.' Rather, all of these things were able to conquer the open, wild, creative internet because of policies that meant that companies that yielded to greed were able to harness network effects in order to re-intermediate the internet. [...] This week's episode of "Who Broke the Internet?" focuses on those IP laws, specifically, the legislative history of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a 1998 law whose Section 1201 bans any kind of disenshittifying mods and hacks. [...] DMCA 1201 has its origins in the mid-1990s, when Al Gore was put in charge of the National Information Infrastructure program to demilitarize the internet and open it for civilian use (AKA the 'Information Superhighway'). Gore came into conflict with Bruce Lehman, Bill Clinton's IP Czar, who proposed a long list of far-ranging, highly restrictive rules for the new internet, including an 'anticircumvention rule that would ban tampering with digital locks. This was a pretty obscure and technical debate, but some people immediately grasped its significance. Pam Samuelson, the eminent Berkeley copyright scholar, raised the alarm, rallying a diverse coalition against Lehman's proposal. They won – Gore rejected Lehman's ideas and sent him packing. But Lehman didn't give up easily – he flew straight to Geneva, where he arm-twisted the UN's World Property Organization into passing two "internet treaties" that were virtually identical to the proposals that Gore had rejected. Then, Lehman went back to the USA and insisted that Congress had to overrule Gore and live up to its international obligations by adopting his law. As Lehman said – on some archival tape we were lucky to recover – he did 'an end-run around Congress.'"

HILARIOUS: "Thanks to DOGE, Gumroad's founder has a second job with the VA [...] To hear it from Lavingia, the Elon Musk-backed DOGE was a shortcut in a direction he already saw himself going. Years ago, during the Obama administration, he applied to the United States Digital Service, the predecessor organization to DOGE, only to find the hiring process arduous. While he officially works for the VA, DOGE gave him an inroad into government work that didn't force him to go through a complicated vetting process." Yes, that's right, this wealth-creating genius thinks he's fit to handle the VA when he was too lazy to complete the application process to work for the government, so he took a short-cut.

ASTONISHING: The Lever interviewed Art Laffer, and this guy really thinks that his clever tax cut plans really improved life for Americans, including minorities. Oh, and he solved he housing market problems in Los Angeles! This guy drew a line on a napkin and he thinks it's more real than the massive homelessness problem he helped create.

Tom Jones and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, "Long Time Gone"

Not trying to pretend

Hydra VIII by Sebrina Seck is from a collection of Iconic Muse Women by European artists.

So, this was the part where I fell and broke my hip, which rather put a crimp in my schedule. Yes, it hurt like hell, and at first the idea that I'd ever walk again seemed fanciful, but after a few days of shuffling down the hall on a Zimmer frame (walker) it started to seem possible and now I'm trying to rein in my impatience and feeling much more hopeful, although I still haven't been able to envision climbing a whole staircase, yet. They've given me good drugs but they are about to run out and we'll see how this thing goes.

Outside of my personal drama, the world seems to be crumbling even faster than I am and the deluge of horrible anecdotes and horrifying announcements has been leaving me numb. It's hard to even know what to say, or where to start.

Spencer Ackerman, "Mahmoud Khalil's Detention Is A War on Terror Milestone: ICE turned a campus activist for Palestine into a political prisoner. Witness a coalescence of several post-9/11 currents that threaten your most basic freedoms. IMMIGRATION AND CUSTOMS ENFORCEMENT (ICE) came for Mahmoud Khalil on Saturday night as he returned home from a post-Ramadan iftar meal. Khalil, who recently graduated from Columbia University's School of Public Affairs and who lived in a Columbia-owned residence, is a Palestinian (with Algerian citizenship) who played a leading role in the Columbia student body's ongoing protests against Israel's genocide of his people. In 2025, that is enough to make him a political prisoner. Khalil's pregnant wife is a U.S. citizen. He himself holds a green card, making Khalil a lawful permanent resident. On paper, that's supposed to keep Khalil from being the kind of person ICE can lawfully detain and potentially deport. But everything about the long 9/11 era, which created ICE, tells us that Mahmoud Khalil is exactly the kind of person ICE and its champions want to detain and deport."

"National Security As An Architecture of Bullsh*t: The authority being used to detain and deport Mahmoud Khalil reveals--for the millionth time--the false foundations of national security. [...] The egregiousness here is precisely that Khalil has broken no laws, and is not being charged with having broken any laws. Yet he is being disappeared all the same. If the Trump administration can do this to Khalil because Khalil says things the snow-flake White House doesn't like, they can literally do this to anybody—the reasoning is so specious to the point of being flagrantly illegal. It's not Khalil but rather the US security state operating on Trump's orders that has broken the law here. [...] My whole point is that the national interest—in practice and as an idea—is full of contradictions that make a mockery of what the phrase 'national interest' is supposed to represent—that which is beneficial to all those belonging to the nation. Check out those lectures if you want to know what I mean specifically, but the gist is that the ideology of national-security politics reduces, ultimately, to the national interest, and the national interest is nothing but the language that political actors use to justify the accumulation or use of state power. The actually existing (not idealized) national security state pisses me off—and it should piss you off too—because it uses the most fallacious reasoning imaginable to do the worst things imaginable, and at great expense. National security is an egregious form of class war from above. [...] And let's not kid ourselves about who benefits from this overreaching exercise of power—reactionaries and oligarchs, enemies of the working class."

"Powerful Speeches From Trans Dems Flip 29 Republicans, Anti-Trans Bills Die In Montana: Transgender Reps Zooey Zephyr and SJ Howell delivered powerful speeches on the Montana House floor on Thursday. Republicans defected en masse to join them in voting against anti-trans bills. A week ago, transgender Representative Zooey Zephyr delivered a powerful speech against a bill that would create a separate indecent exposure law for transgender people. Since then, momentum on the House floor slowed. Today, two of the most extreme bills targeting the transgender community came up for a vote. Transgender Representatives Zooey Zephyr and SJ Howell gave impassioned speeches—this time, they broke through. In a stunning turn, 29 Republicans defected, killing both bills. One Republican even took the floor to deliver a scathing rebuke of the bill's sponsor."

Ian Welsh, "Trump's Liberation Day: This Boy Could Fuck Up Boiling Water [...] So this means that there's going to be a massive economic shock: prices will go up and/or profits will go down and the US government will need to provide massive subsidies to some industries at the same time as Trump's budget plan massively cuts revenue due to tax cuts for the rich."

During Donald Trump's sorta State of the Union speech, Congressman Al Green (D-TX) stood up to insist that no, Trump did not have a mandate to cut Medicaid. Mike Johnson had him dragged out, and later the House voted to censure him, because for some reason this was worse than having Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert stand up and scream at a Democratic presidemt in 2022. So much so that ten Democrats actually voted with the Republicans. Radley Balko had hoped for better when he saw Green speak up against Trump. "Under the optimistic scenario unfolding in my head, once House Speaker Mike Johnson ordered the House Sergeant-at-Arms to remove Green from the floor, another Democrat would stand up in protest to replace him and persist until Johnson ordered that person removed, too. Another Democrat would then replace that Democrat. And then another. Maybe we'd see a dozen or more Democrats interrupt Trump. No, that sort of disruption wouldn't have brought down the Trump administration. But it would have been an emphatic statement that the Democratic Party — or at least a faction of it — understands the threat we're facing. But that, of course, isn't what happened. Instead, the party made clear that Green was on his own. No one followed up when he was removed from the floor. No one backed up him. He was later censured with a majority vote that included an embarrassing number of Democrats. In the days that followed, the Democratic leadership scolded Green. They also scolded the handful of members who quietly walked out of Trump's speech. They even scolded those who 'protested' by merely wearing pink and meekly holding up signs. In the alternate universe in which the Democrats stood with Green, Trump's gaslighting rant was delayed by hours. The country saw the minority party treating the current calamity for what it is. We got a full news cycle covering an opposition party properly sounding the alarm about the Trump administration's full-frontal assault on our democracy. And maybe the good chunk of the public not currently paying attention started to take notice." Radley advises Democrats to face reality: "But it's also time to end the asymmetrical decency. You don't owe any deference or reverence to 'the office' of the presidency when the man occupying it is a vulgar thug who's exploiting the office to enrich himself and smite his enemies and whose administration is provoking a constitutional crisis by openly defying the federal courts. You needn't respect 'decorum' during a speech in which the president is blood-libeling immigrants, threatening allies, promising to wreck the economy, and telling lies that everyone knows are lies as a raw display of power. And it is especially craven to scold one of your own for a modest act of defiance against an administration that has threatened to arrest and imprison you over protected speech." He makes some recommendations for what the opposition should really be doing: Opposition town halls, daily briefings, and a shadow cabinet — oh, and not behaving like Gavin Newsome. All great ideas, and he praises Bernie for doing the first.

From Heartland Signal, "Trump administration terminates billion-dollar food program for schools, food banks: Plus, a GOP bill in Missouri would funnel more tax money to anti-abortion pregnancy centers. [...] 'It is outrageous to think that this promise to Iowa farmers, schools, food banks, and childcare centers could be broken. This could not come at a worse possible time as farmers have already planned their season,' the coalition's executive director, Chris Schwartz, told KGAN. [...] Freshman Missouri state Rep. Christopher Warwick (R-Bolivar) introduced a bill last month that will allow residents to avoid paying any state income taxes if they donate to anti-abortion pregnancy resource centers. [...] These centers are known to mislead women with unethical data and information to persuade them out of getting an abortion."

RIP: Tuppy Owens, 80: The sexual rights activist Tuppy Owens, who has died aged 80, an elegant, imposing figure with a frank, no-nonsense attitude, played an important part in the shifting of attitudes towards sexuality that began in the 1960s and 70s. In 1972 she launched The Sex Maniac's Diary, an annual directory which, in a pre-internet era, covered the minutiae of sexual activity across the world in granular detail." Tuppy was an amazing woman with a long and sometimes awkward relationship to Feminists Against Censorship. It was she who came up with the idea for our 1996 book Tales from the Clit: Female Experience of Pornography, as well as contributing to one of our earlier books. Her activism for disabled sexuality was downright groundbreaking.

RIP: Robert McChesney, the Great Champion of Journalism and Democracy, Has Died: The academic and activist inspired generations of people to challenge corporate power and support a media reform movement that lives on. [...] Bob took the “public” part of “public intellectual” seriously. You knew he wanted to swing into action when he'd say, “We need to put our heads together…” That was his call to write another book, organize another national conference on media reform, or rally another movement to defend the speak-truth-to-power journalism that the founders of the American experiment understood as the only sure footing for representative democracy. Bob kept issuing the call, even as a series of health challenges slowed him down. He was still doing so a few days before his death following a year-long fight with cancer. His was a life fulfilled in the best sense of the word. He died a happy man, holding the hand of his beloved wife, Inger Stole, and reflecting on time spent with his daughters, Amy and Lucy." An inspiration to us all. He was 72.

RIP: "The original hot priest! Farewell Richard Chamberlain, TV eye-candy extraordinaire: From vestment-ripper The Thorn Birds to the steamy Dr Kildare, the actor – who has died at 90 – was known for playing devastatingly attractive and unattainable men"— As a little girl, I had a massive crush on this beautiful man, and was happy to look at that face for the rest of his life. I was delighted when he turned up as Archie Leach in Leverage. This article speaks for me — and has some hot photos, too. I will always love this guy.

RIP: Gene Hackman, 95, after a long and highly-respected career, but the circumstances of his death, along with his wife and a dog, were a much-talked about mystery for days before it was learned that his wife, who was essentially his carer, died first, leaving him alone and housebound to die. The discovery of their bodies generated much speculation, a lot of it more comforting than what actually happened.

RIP: Kevin Drum, OG Blogger "Calpundit", 66. Once upon a time we'd be reading each other's blogs daily, and at one point when he was on vacation he asked me to cover for him for a day. He'd been fighting cancer for a while, now, but even as recently as January he was posting typically in-depth articles like, "Yeah, America can still build stuff" — which is worth your time to read, by the way. I certainly didn't always agree with Kevin, but he was a kind and thoughtful man who really took the time to research articles like that one, and this is a significant loss.

"Inside Trump and DOGE's chaotic effort to release billions of gallons of California's water" — Everyone knew it wouldn't put out California's fires and instead endangered communities and crops, but DOGE insisted on pushing for this and wasted a whole lot of water before it was shut off.

"Meta puts stop on promotion of tell-all book by former employee: Meta on Wednesday won an emergency arbitration ruling to temporarily stop promotion of the tell-all book Careless People by a former employee, according to a copy of the ruling published by the social media company. The book, written by a former director of global public policy at Meta, Sarah Wynn-Williams, was called by the New York Times book review 'an ugly, detailed portrait of one of the most powerful companies in the world', and its leading executives, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg, former chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg and chief global affairs officer Joel Kaplan. Meta will suffer 'immediate and irreparable loss' in the absence of an emergency relief, the American Arbitration Association's emergency arbitrator, Nicholas Gowen, said in a ruling after a hearing, which Wynn-Williams did not attend. Book publisher Macmillan attended and argued it was not bound by the arbitration agreement, which was part of a severance agreement between the employee and company. The ruling says that Wynn-Williams should stop promoting the book and, to the extent she could, stop further publication. It did not order any action by the publisher. A spokesperson for Pan Macmillan gave the Guardian this statement on Thursday: 'Careless People is a first person narrative account of what the author herself, Sarah Wynn Williams, witnessed during seven years at Meta (formerly Facebook). As publishers, we are committed to upholding freedom of speech and her right to tell her story. Due to legal process instituted by Meta, the author has been prevented from continuing to participate in the book's publicity.'"

I'm told that this is totally debunked and from some right-wing hack, and anyway, it's in Politico. And yet, it sounds more true than all of the explanations for why everything is fine. "Voters Were Right About the Economy. The Data Was Wrong [...] The effect, of course, was particularly intense in the wake of the pandemic. In 2023 alone, the CPI indicated that inflation had driven prices up by 4.1 percent. But the true cost of living, as measured by our research, rose more than twice as much — a full 9.4 percent. And that laid bare the oft-quoted riposte that wage gains outpaced inflation during the crisis following COVID-19. When our more targeted measure of inflation is set atop our more accurate measure of weekly earnings, it immediately becomes clear that purchasing power fell at the median by 4.3 percent in 2023. Again, whatever anyone may have claimed from the prevailing statistics during the run-up to the 2024 election, reality was drastically more dire for the great majority of Americans." And maybe it's all crap, but the simple fact is that people don't have enough money, people are afraid seeing the doctor will cost too much (and it does), and homelessness keeps rising.

Hamilton Nolan says the TSA should "Strike, or Else," because, "Less than one year ago, tens of thousands of TSA employees who are members of AFGE signed a seven-year union contract. Today, the Trump administration's Department of Homeland Security announced that 'it is ending collective bargaining for the Transportation Security Administration's (TSA) Transportation Security Officers.' In other words, just tearing up the contract. DHS didn't even really try to put a fig leaf of legality on this action. The agency said bad things about the union— 'The union has hindered merit-based performance recognition and advancement—that's not the American way,' for example—but did not say anything that sounds like a genuine legitimate argument for why they feel they can just exit a collective bargaining agreement six years before it expires. They just want to, so they say they are. That's all." Because a contract is A Thing, you aren't supposed to just be able to tear it up.

Unexpectedly, menswear fashion writer Derek Guy tells Politico who the five most stylish guys in Congress are, and one of them is Bernie Sanders: "His suits are slightly oversized, his clothes perpetually wrinkled, his ties always a bit askew. Yet somehow, it works. Why? Because, like all great style, Sanders' look tells a story. It signals that he is serious but unbothered, willing to wear the uniform of a senator but not consumed by the polish of power. His rumpled suits, the slight disarray — they suggest a man focused on bigger concerns. That kind of detachment, that devil-may-care attitude, is the essence of cool. Unlike Fetterman — whose gym clothes can sometimes feel like a self-conscious performance of working-class grit — Bernie never looks like he's in costume."

The Beatles' "I'll Be Back" is really an extraordinary track.

People tell me I'm lucky

I don't think I've mentioned her paintings of New Orleans before, but Diane Millsap is an artist I've long enjoyed. This one is Old Absinthe House. You can see more of her work here.

Radley Balko has a quick round-up of "the administration's full-frontal assault on democracy" over the preceding week: The first six weeks of this administration have felt like a year. Every day brings a firehose of brazen corruption, mad power grabs and jaw-dropping idiocy. And that of course is the point. Trump aides and allies like Russ Vought, Stephen Miller, and Steve Bannon have said for months that their plan is to overwhelm the press, public, and critics with so much activity that no one can possibly keep up. This roundup is a snapshot of what we saw over just a single five-day period — February 21 - 25. Incredibly, includes a weekend! Not long ago, more than half of these bullet points would have been enough to bring down an administration. Instead, many weren't news for more than a couple hours. (Related: Here's a gift link to a piece I recently wrote for Rolling Stone about the harm Kash Patel could do at the FBI.) It's going to be a long four years."

When people asked for any reason to re-elect Biden, I would say, "Lina Khan." I should have said, "Rohit Chopra and Lina Khan," but as it turned out, though we did lose both of them, Dday says things are not entirely bleak, because it's not just Democrats who want to restrain monopolies. "The New Antitrust Consensus: The Trump administration is maintaining the merger guidelines that Lina Khan co-authored, and big business is angry. [...] On Tuesday, the new leaders of the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department's Antitrust Division both released statements saying that they would continue to follow the 2023 merger guidelines, and not seek to make any changes to them, at least in the near future. Those guidelines reflect the understanding of antitrust statutes and jurisprudence as envisioned by Lina Khan and Jonathan Kanter, the predecessors at those agencies. In other words, the Trump antitrust enforcers are adopting the Khan and Kanter viewpoint on the law. [...] The fact that the richest people in the world, people who populate the funding rosters of both parties, couldn't dislodge these merger guidelines suggests the forging of a new consensus on antitrust policy in the United States. There almost certainly will be selective prosecutorial discretion, and scandals around politicization, in the next four years. But the foundation is in place for what the New Brandeis movement sought for more than a decade: a restoration of competition policy as an economic and social imperative. It's not something, unlike so many other areas, that will have to be built back with a changeover in power." (Matt Stoller has more on this at The BIG Newsletter.)

However, The CFPB Shutdown Is Entirely About Payment Apps: Elon Musk and other Big Tech CEOs want to manage your money without any regulatory protections. [...] Last week, only one CFPB rule showed up on a priority list of CRA resolutions from House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA): the so-called 'larger participant' rule that gives the agency supervisory authority over non-banks engaged in digital payment app transactions. Other CFPB rules, like capping overdraft fees and removing medical debt from credit reports, did not appear among the priority list; neither did more permissive changes to bank merger rules, which has been a priority of some senators. In other words, Republicans are primarily focused on boosting Elon Musk and other Big Tech CEOs as they enter digital payment markets, determined to make managing and transferring money a regulatory-free zone. The move to revoke the larger participant rule takes enforcement decisions out of McKernan's hands, and reveals the degree to which congressional Republicans are doing Musk's bidding, even when it angers their traditional allies at the big banks. As Sen. Warren said at a field hearing on Tuesday, 'Trump and Musk aren't shutting down the CFPB because it's good for consumers—they are doing it to advance their own financial interests.'"

"Trump Stripped All $103 Million of Legal Assistance from Storm and Disaster Victims: Trump campaigned on a promise he wouldn't abandon hurricane and flood victims WASHINGTON—Before officially taking office, the incoming Trump administration directed House Speaker Mike Johnson to strip legal assistance from victims of floods, hurricanes, and fire that had been included in an emergency supplemental spending bill in December. Johnson readily complied, sources familiar with the negotiations said, and the move came even after President Donald Trump's election campaign ran heavily on the claim that Democrats had "abandoned" flood victims, particularly those in western North Carolina. The funding cut, amounting to $103 million, has not been previously reported.."

"The SAVE Act Could Stop Millions of Women From Voting. Here's What You Need to Know [...] The legislation would require all potential voters to provide, in person, proof of citizenship, such as a passport or birth certificate, when they register or reregister to vote. So, for instance, if you're already registered to vote but move to another state, you would probably need to present one of these documents, in addition to a photo ID, at a government office when you reregister. [...] But it would also have a direct impact on anyone whose legal name does not match the name on their birth certificate or passport, such as the 79% of heterosexual married women, per Pew Research, who take their spouse's last name. 'If a married woman hasn't paid $130 to update her passport—assuming she has one, which only about half of Americans do—she may not be able to vote in the next election if the SAVE Act becomes law,' Weiser says." And that's just leaving out trans people or those with mobility issues. We have plenty of safeguards that already prevent non-citizens from voting, but this legislation is clearly meant to disenfranchise legitimate voters.

18F writes "A letter to the American People: For over 11 years, 18F has been proudly serving you to make government technology work better. We are non-partisan civil servants. 18F has worked on hundreds of projects, all designed to make government technology not just efficient but effective, and to save money for American taxpayers. However, all employees at 18F – a group that the Trump Administration GSA Technology Transformation Services Director called "the gold standard" of civic tech – were terminated today at midnight ET. 18F was doing exactly the type of work that DOGE claims to want – yet we were eliminated."

"These Ten Democrats Need to Be Primaried: The party needs fighters to stop Donald Trump and Elon Musk. [...] Democrats—voters and politicians alike—were left reeling by their stinging defeat in November 2024. The initial shock was common to both groups, but the two have diverged in how they're approaching the Trump administration now that it's been sworn in. Democratic voters plainly crave a fight—indeed, they report higher dissatisfaction with their congressional leaders than Republican voters reported at the same time in 2009, at the dawn of what would become the Tea Party movement. By contrast, most Democratic politicians, at least those in Congress, are running their usual playbook: laying low, waiting for Trump to screw up, and getting annoyed with the increasingly frantic demands of their base."

"The Secret Cabal That Owns The World: And the media almost never mention them. [...] Let's do one more industry before we throw our hands up and yell 'I get it already!' The propaganda networks that tell us all of this is fine: Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, etc. Other than the Murdoch family, the biggest shareholders in Fox News are Vanguard, BlackRock and State Street. CNN is owned by Warner Bros. Their top shareholders - Vanguard, BlackRock and State Street. NBC and MSNBC are now owned by Comcast. Biggest shareholders? Did you guess it? Vanguard, BlackRock and State Street. Okay, I'll stop listing every industry, but Vanguard, BlackRock and State Street are also the biggest stakeholders in big pharma, private prisons and policing, deforestation, dystopian surveillance software, AI, the big car companies, big ag, big banks, chemicals, Amazon, Walmart, UBER — Anything you can think of! Literally anything. Go ahead, think of something. …Ok, you got something in your mind? The top shareholders are BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street."

"'We're clearly heading towards collapse': why the Murdoch empire is about to go bang: An explosive succession trial and an astonishing interview with one of Rupert's sons have exposed the paranoia and hatred at the heart of global media's most powerful family. This could get messy... When some of the mind games and manoeuvres that turned a Murdoch family 'retreat' into an ordeal appeared in Succession, the TV drama about squabbling family members of a right-wing media company, members of the real-life family started to suspect each other of leaking details to the writers. The truth was more straightforward. Succession's creator, Jesse Armstrong, said that his team hadn't needed inside sources – they had simply read press reports."

Stephanie Kelton has a good post up which I only have via a gift link so I'm not sure if you can get to it, but "Elon Musk is the Reason Social Security is 'Running Out of Money'." She points out that, by statute, Social Security can only be paid out of payroll tax receipts, but they can just change the statue if they really want to, so removing the cap isn't the only way to make Social Security solvent". And also: "Back in 1983, following the prescriptions of the Greenspan Commission, changes were made that were supposed to prevent Social Security from “running out of money” over the next 75+ years. Yet here we are, in the Fourth Circle of Hell, wringing our hands over looming shortfalls and automatic benefit cuts. But why? As Stephen Goss put it: Well, it turns out that some things are easier to predict than others. As Goss explains, it's not that people are living longer than expected. In fact, “projected life expectancy at age 65 in the 1983 report was extremely accurate.” It's also not because of an unexpected decline in birth rates, for “this was also known and anticipated in 1983.” The main issue—what the Greenspan Commission did not see coming—was Elon Musk. Or, more specifically, the “increasing concentration of earnings at the top of the distribution.” As Goss explains: “The reduced share of earnings subject to payroll tax explains most of the increase in cost as percent of payroll, compared to the 1983 projection.” In other words, rising inequality is the main reason that Social Security appears to be in financial trouble." So, back in the '80s, they "fixed" the problem, but the fix didn't work when they also lowered the top marginal rate to 28%.

It's always worth remembering why things are so horrible, and one of the big reasons is Jack Welch. "The Shareholder Supremacy: I promise you, everything that's happening makes sense. It all feels so chaotic, so utterly, offensively stupid, so disconnected from reality that it's hard to understand how Meta can run a terrible company with decaying services that's also wildly profitable, or how Meta, Microsoft and Google can proliferate unprofitable, unsustainable tech that takes water from the desert and strains our power grids to produce deeply mediocre outcomes based on incredibly vague promises and have their stock prices go up. [...] Welch's tenure was one that destroyed General Electric's ability to innovate while turning it into one of the most wildly-profitable companies in the world, all through a nihilistic form of capitalism where growth is all that matters, even if it means making worse products, constantly entering and exiting industries, reducing spend in research and development, outsourcing multiple parts of the company to avoid paying benefits and higher American wages, and generally treating human beings like inanimate assets."

The Beatles, "Every Little Thing"

You're trying hard not to show it

I just accidentally found out that James Garner's daughter paints, and some of them are pretty neat: Flow Art by Gigi Garner. I think this one is called "Child's Play". (All the proceeds go to the animal rescue charity she set up in honor of her father.)

First, there was an end to guessing about the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau when they finally replaced Chopra and then filled the spot with an architect of Project 2025, and "Vought Stops CFPB From Functioning With Illegal Order: The budget director and acting head of the CFPB also tried to defund the agency, but found it was already funded through the fiscal year." But then, "Vought Restores CFPB Procedure That Sustains Mortgage Markets: The situation reveals that sometimes, even arsonists need the building they’re burning down to stay upright. There's an old saying about the dog that caught the car: They don't know what to do next. Let me tell you the case of the dog that caught the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Russ Vought is an own-the-libs kind of guy, an ideological warrior who delights in watching the world burn. Shutting down the CFPB is his idea of paradise; now the rugged capitalists can get back to work making America great again without interference from meddling bureaucrats determined to punish success. Then he heard about the APOR tables. APOR stands for the 'average prime offer rate,' and it's a little tool that keeps the mortgage market running. It involves public servants, every week, going in and calculating it. Those staffers work at the CFPB, and if they're locked out, you have no APOR tables. And over time, if you have no APOR tables, you have no mortgage market, or at least an uncertain and economically damaging mess. In the face of this, tough guy Vought blinked, and in so doing revealed why even the most John Galt-ian banker needs the government every now and again." It turns out that "Government by Malicious Autopilot" doesn't work very well.

From Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern at Slate, "Elon Musk's Power Grab Is Lawless, Dangerous, and—Yes—a Coup: The federal government is currently under relentless and unlawful assault by a man no one elected to lead it. With Donald Trump's blessing and enabling, Elon Musk and his confederates have laid siege to the executive branch in an onslaught whose appalling and far-reaching consequences have barely begun to be reported, much less understood. Musk's team is tearing through federal agencies at a shocking clip, gaining access to classified material, private personal information, and payment systems that distribute trillions of dollars every year, all in alleged breach of the law. The richest person in the world, who works for no recognizable government entity and answers to nobody, apparently believes he has unilateral authority to withhold duly appropriated funds, violate basic security protocols protecting state secrets, and abolish a global agency in direct contravention of Congress' explicit command. He is reportedly leading a purge of the federal workforce, persecuting life-saving charities, and pushing out principled civil servants who stand in the way of his rampage. What we are witnessing is an unconstitutional seizure of power unfolding so rapidly that, by design, the public and media cannot keep up. Musk, who spent nearly $300 million to get Trump elected, is now attempting to restructure the government around his own whims, vendettas, and obsessions. He is, in effect, serving as co-president without winning a single vote, as the actual president looks on from the sidelines. Musk seems to reject basic aspects of the nation's constitutional democracy, replacing the separation of powers with the rule of an autocrat. Many of his offensives appear to reject the legitimacy of any legal limitations that stand in his way, treating federal statutes and precedents as mere suggestions he can take or leave at will."

All the ways Elon Musk is breaking the law, explained by a law professor: There are a lot of them."

From Haaretz, "Trump and Netanyahu Have Devised the Crime of the Century: Israel's war aimed to make Gaza uninhabitable and find a place for evacuees, as many in the government and military have stated. Last week, U.S. President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu presented an imperialist horror show. An American and an Israeli, each with his own criminal indictments, decided to determine the future of the Palestinian people. The plan for evacuating the residents of the Gaza Strip to other countries is a war crime, and it being introduced by the president of the United States is a death sentence for international law. It's the crime of the century. Trump talks about Gaza like a capitalist who wants to develop real estate. He called it a demolition zone, as it has always been, and invented plans for building a city of the future without its original residents."

Hamilton Nolan interviews "Stephanie Kelton on the Disastrous Republican Economic Agenda," and she sees a frightening imposition of austerity and Democrats who are deluded about the danger. "They definitely appear to be floundering. Are floundering. I'm almost at a loss to find anything that looks like a battle plan to counter in any significant way what we're facing. To sort of sit back and say 'Well, the Republicans are gonna burn it all down. So we'll count on, two years from now, getting the House back and picking up seats, and maybe then we can put forward an alternative plan.' We don't have two years. You won't be able to pick up the pieces. And if your message is, 'We'll pick up the pieces and assemble them the way before'—people didn't like the way the system was structured before. That's why, in part, Donald Trump won in the first place. You have to offer people a different vision if you want to actually win. If your message is, 'Put us back in charge, and we'll give you back the economy we had before they destroyed it,' I don't think that's where Democrats should be right now."

I don't know if you can see this if you're not subscribed to The Lever, but this is from the newsletter on "The Lost Memos That Predicted This Era: THE PLUTONOMY MEMOS: As we welcome in 2025, it's worth noting that this year is the 20th anniversary of the release of the so-called Plutonomy Memos — a series of Nostradamus-like reports that predicted much of the world we live in today. The memos written in 2005 and 2006 came from Citigroup, and they effectively admit that Wall Street and its neoliberal political allies were creating a feudal American economy. These documents — which you can find here, here, and here — survive on economist Brad DeLong's blog and in a few old media mentions, book references, and tweets but barely exist on the internet (Citigroup reportedly worked to get them memory-holed off the Internet). 'There are rich consumers, few in number, but disproportionate in the gigantic slice of income and consumption they take,' the Citigroup analysts wrote. 'There are the rest, the 'non-rich,' the multitudinous many, but only accounting for surprisingly small bites of the national pie.' Underscoring the accuracy of these predictions, a new UBS report finds that billionaires' total wealth has more than doubled over the past ten years to $14 trillion."

Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism, "The Bogus Justification for AI Uptake and the Real Reason for the Scam: Your humble blogger has been reluctant to dignify AI, even in the face of technologists we know and respect saying that it is truly revolutionary. But then the question becomes 'Revolutionary for what?' The enthusiasm for AI, aside from investors in its realm and various professional hangers-on, comes from businesses out of the prospect of cost savings due to productivity increases. And most are unabashed in saying that this means replacing workers. But as we will soon show, AI mainly decreases rather than increases productivity. So if that is the case, why has the fanfare continued at a fever pitch? It is not hard to discern that, irrespective of actual performance, AI is yet another tool to discipline labor, here the sort of white collar and professional laborers that management would tend to view as uppity, particularly those that push back over corners-cutting and rules-breaking. In this it falls in the proud tradition of other labor-bargaining-power-reducing yet overhyped gimmicks like outsourcing and offshoring." Yves backs that part up, too.

Doctorow, "All bets are off: When unions are outlawed, only outlaws will have unions. Unions don't owe their existence to labor laws that protect organizing activities. Rather, labor laws exist because once-illegal unions were formed in the teeth of violent suppression, and those unions demanded — and got — labor law. Bosses have hated unions since the start, and they've really hated laws protecting workers. Dress this up in whatever self-serving rationale you want — "the freedom to contract," or "meritocracy" — it all cashes out to this: when workers bargain collectively, value that would otherwise go to investors and executives goes to the workers. I'm not just talking about wages here, either. If an employer is forced — by a union, or by a labor law that only exists because of union militancy — to operate a safe workplace, they have to spend money on things like fire suppression, PPE, and paid breaks to avoid repetitive strain injuries. In the absence of some force that corrals bosses into providing these safety measures, they can use that money to pay themselves, and externalize the cost of on-the-job injuries to their workers. The cost and price of a good or service is the tangible expression of power. It is a matter of politics, not economics. If consumer protection agencies demand that companies provide safe, well-manufactured goods, if there are prohibitions on price-fixing and profiteering, then value shifts from the corporation to its customers."

You know how on CSI cops are always doing bullet matches to figure out if the bullet came from that gun? Well, there's no science backing up the idea that anyone can reliably do that. A judge held a hearing on the usefulness of such testing and ruled it out for a case — a landmark ruling that meant a real advance in how expert testimony could be treated. But then, "A Chicago judge just erased her predecessor's historic ruling on forensic firearms analysis: The courts continue to think that legitimacy comes not from correcting their mistakes, but insisting that they never make them. [...] But as of last month, Hooks's ruling is no longer valid in Illinois. After a bizarre series of events, which began with an allegation of racism against Hooks and resulted in his retirement, the judge who replaced him then vacated the opinion, effectively erasing it from Illinois case law. Just like that, a small bombshell and long overdue win for science-based forensics was taken off the books."

Stoller on the shut-down of the CFPB, "Monopoly Round-Up: On Ending the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau: In the bargain after the financial crisis, banks got a bailout in return for some mild oversight. They, along with big tech, have now broken that deal. And the consequences will be significant. [...] By shuttering the CFPB, Trump is not just going back to a pre-financial crisis status quo, but to something actually weaker than that. There is essentially no longer any Federal enforcement of consumer protection rules for financial products."

Matt Duss at the Guardian, "Democrats have become the party of war. Americans are tired of it: In defending the militarist status quo, Democrats ceded the anti-war lane to Republicans. As they enter the political wilderness, it's time to reckon with what they got so wrong. The most devastating appraisal of the 2024 Democratic national convention was delivered by the neoconservative doyen Bill Kristol: 'Leon Panetta quoting Ronald Reagan! My kind of Democratic convention.' He meant it as praise. Earlier in the day, rumors had been flying around Chicago about that evening's possible surprise speakers. Who would it be? Beyoncé? Taylor Swift? Close! It turned out to be the 86-year-old former CIA director and secretary of defense who last served in government over a decade ago. In his speech, he cited Ronald Reagan to rail against 'isolationism', telling the assembled crowd: 'Our warriors need a tough, cool-headed commander-in-chief to defend our democracy from tyrants and terrorists,' and declaring that Kamala Harris would be that leader. Trotting out an ageing national security mandarin to reminisce about the 'war on terror' was both tone deaf, and, like the Harris campaign in general, seemed like a huge misread of what voters wanted from prospective commanders-in-chief in 2024." It was like they were trying to copy all of Hillary Clinton's mistakes.

The fact that Trump insisted the 2020 election was rigged is not a reason to shrug off making sure our elections are reliable; on the contrary, it's just one more reason we should make sure all elections are either hand-counted or at least audited. "Why We Should Still Audit the 2024 Election—and Every Election: [...] Unless the electronic vote is cross checked with paper ballots, it would be easy for an attack to go undetected, Duncan Buell Ph.D. told Drop Site News. 'If they were to insert a hack, they would also insert the code that would delete the hack on the way out the door and we would never, ever see it.' he said. Buell, an author on the letter and Chair Emeritus in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of South Carolina, continued: 'I'm thinking of, you know, nation state actors, the Koreans, possibly even a couple of Russian companies that do this kind of thing.'" Not even sure we can trust the (American) owners of the machines, since they are privately held and operated by partisans with their own agendas

"Curing Economics' Addiction to Unreal Theories: A Review of Ricardo's Dream, by Nat Dyer Read almost any recent critique of neoclassical economic theory, and you will find its unreality pointed out. Homo economicus is nothing like flesh-and-blood humans, we are told—again, and again, and again. Remarkably, this critique has been leveled against the precursors of neoclassical economics, all the way back to the origin of the profession. That's what we can learn from a new book titled Ricardo's Dream: How Economists Forgot the Real World and Led Us Astray, by Nat Dyer, an able scholar and entertaining writer on the subject. The title refers to David Ricardo (1772-1823), whose influence was on a par with Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Jeremy Bentham, James Mill, and John Stuart Mill. His dream was to discover economic laws as universal and mathematically tractable as Newton's laws of motion. He became so mesmerized by his models that he gave them priority over the more complicated real world—just like the neoclassical economists of today."

Congressional Dish, where Jennifer Briney reads the bills Congress passes so you won't have to.

"Researchers Create Real-Life "Spider-Man" Web-Slinging Tech"

7:51 minutes of amusing stand-up (in an unfortunately murky video): "Tommy Sledge, PI"

Remember this? Craig Ferguson, The lost Doctor Who cold open — "The triumph of intellect and romance over brute force and cynicism."

A beautiful little Star Trek short: "Unification"

Leonard Nimoy on Carol Burnette

Life in 3D doing an impressive cover of "Unchained Melody"|