Perspectives

 

I started the day making a list of outrages and disasters, as one does sixteen days into this four-year sentence, but I stopped when I got to this article at the Daily Beast.  Meet Hulk (the call sign he prefers), a sergeant in the Ukrainian army.  Hulk lost part of his right leg to a land mine and was back in the line a month and a half later, fitted with a prosthetic.  "We cannot imagine our children living under occupation," he told Anna Nemtsova.  "My motivation is to prevent that."  He is only one of several million people who suffer physical and psychological trauma but fight on.  

By comparison, the crimes of Musk/Trump appear trivial.  There's a saying (it's probably Chinese, they all are) that if you hold a penny up to your eye you can blot out the sun.  You may want to try that today before the penny disappears.  During the first term -- isn't it interesting that both political careers and prison sentences employ the word "term" -- Trump would sometimes grudgingly admit that "the late, great Abe Lincoln" was nearly his equal.  Like the pharaoh who defaced the name of Queen Hatshepsut from all monuments, he has decided to take the sixteenth president's penny out of circulation.  The only question remaining is who will replace him on the five-dollar bill.  The way things are going, it could be Jesus.

In his role as ceremonial president, Trump continues to obsess over trivialities.  He signed an EO Hereby Forbidding the "forced use" of paper drinking straws.  I haven't seen one of these things since elementary school but apparently they're a crime perpetrated by environmental activists ("activist" is once again an obscenity -- see below).  "I've had them many times and on occasion they break, they explode," he explained, "and I don't think that plastic is going to affect a shark very much as they're munching their way through the ocean."  Somebody told him about the island of plastic crap in the Pacific and it triggered the old shark panic.  It's why he doesn't even take baths.

This is how real men drink.

U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmeyer issued an order restraining President Musk's DOGies from accessing Treasury Department systems, shocking Jady Vance:  "Judges aren't allowed to control the executive's legitimate power," he cried.  Yes, actually they are, Jady, it's called "checks and balances."  It's why the founders created three coequal branches of government.  Didn't they cover this at Ohio State?  Of course they did -- Jady was just echoing President Musk's demand that Engelmeyer and other "activist judges" be impeached because "corruption," of course.

Nevertheless Judge John D. Bates ordered the FDA, CDC and Department of Health and Human Services to restore the websites and datasets they scrubbed last month; while Judge George O'Toole declined to rescind his order blocking the deadline for two million government workers to accept the Musk/Trump "buyouts."  He also prevented the regime from placing a transgender woman in a male prison.  Judge Joseph LaPlante ruled against the latest assault on birthright citizenship as enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment.  Last week Trump-appointed Judge Carl Nichols blocked placing 2,200 USAID employees on paid leave.  Judge Beryl Howell ordered the FBI to release some of its evidence in the stolen documents case, now defunct.  Judges, judges everywhere!  What will happen when all the Musk/Trump fuckery reaches the Supreme Court?  Will they support the independence of the judiciary or follow their own fascist leanings?  Not much depends on it, just our faint hope of a future.

Greasy Pete has been putting his thumbprints on the Defense Department, beginning with the very important matter of renaming Fort Liberty, North Carolina, Fort Bragg.  To fend off criticism while wink-winking the racists, it's not hated-by-his-own-men Braxton Bragg, CSA, but Pfc. Roland Bragg, who won the Silver Star and Purple Heart in World War II.  The Pentagon has long recruited at the Black Engineer of the Year Awards event in Baltimore, but that is now at an end, another casualty in the War on Diversity.  

There's waste and then there's waste.  Unnecessary spending was the putative reason for turning the Muskrats loose on sensitive government data, where they singled out every program which made life a little more bearable for non-oligarchs.  Come to find out it cost a chill $800,000 for Trump and his courtiers to attend the Superbowl in New Orleans, which is why all previous presidents watched it on television.  Of course it wasn't all fun -- he also Officially Proclaimed February 9 "Gulf of America Day" before leaving at halftime.  The re-naming craze has spread to Congress and to my very own rep, Earl "Cruddy" Carter.  Buddy?  Sorry.  Best known for owning a string of pharmacies and working hard to keep drug prices high, this sack introduced a bill to purchase Greenland and re-name it "Red, White and Blueland."  I think I threw up in my mouth a little.  From the Independent:

"Danish citizens are seeking to crowdfund $1 trillion to buy the US state of California.  'New Denmark'...would see its world-famous theme park Disneyland rebranded as 'Hans Christian Andersenland.'"  I don't know, maybe North Dakota?  Roughly the same number of people as Greenland.

Getting in on the fun, friend of the blog J.B. Pritzker announced that Lake Michigan would henceforth be called Lake Illinois ("a Great Lake deserves to be named after a great state").  Also, "Illinois will now be annexing Green Bay to protect itself against enemies foreign and domestic...prepare for an important announcement next week regarding the Mississippi River.  God bless America and bear down."  

Too busy to be a hands-on Dictator at the Kennedy Center, Trump has hired former ambassador and advocate for neo-Nazis Richard Grenell as interim chairman.  Grenell posted video of himself supervising the deportation of some Venezuelans from El Paso, so he's obviously qualified.  He promises no more drag shows or other "anti-American propaganda," so he's obviously a hate-filled moron.  

There's religious freedom and then there's religious freedom -- to obey.  A coalition of 27 religious groups, Christian and Jewish, filed a lawsuit challenging Trump's EO making it easier for ICE thugs to arrest immigrants in churches and synagogues.  They're not claiming the ancient principle of sanctuary, but fear of raids is lowering attendance and making it harder to minister to congregants' needs.  When Pope Francis criticized mass deportations in a letter to Catholic bishops, Obersturmbannfuhrer Tom Homan suggested he "focus on his work and leave enforcement to us."  Claiming to be a "lifelong Catholic," Homan sneered, "He's got a wall around the Vatican, does he not?"  Whatever that means.

Congratulations to Mayor Eric Adams.  Whatever form his abasement at Motel a Lago took, the Justice Department has dropped the corruption case against him.  And now the NYPD will look the other way when immigrants are grabbed off the streets.

Amid all the Kendrick Lamar controversy you may have missed this, but researchers at Oxford say they have built a "scalable quantum supercomputer" capable of quantum teleportation.  Beam me up!