Author: rosenjoe1@hotmail.com

When the President of the US posts insane shit like this — which he posted Saturday night — it’s time for the 25th Amendment.

 

Trump now claims that Joe Biden was “executed in 2020” and was replaced by a robot.

“I would like to speak briefly and simply about a serious national condition,” Senator Margaret Chase Smith of Maine told her colleagues on June 1, 1950. “It is a national feeling of fear and frustration that could result in national suicide and the end of everything that we Americans hold dear…. I speak as a Republican, I speak as a woman. I speak as a United States senator. I speak as an American.”

“Those of us who shout the loudest about Americanism in making character assassinations are all too frequently those who, by our own words and acts, ignore some of the basic principles of Americanism,” she pointed out. Americans have the right to criticize, to hold unpopular beliefs, to protest, and to think for themselves. But attacks that cost people their reputations and jobs were stifling these basic American principles, and the ones making those attacks were in her own party.

Wisconsin senator Joe McCarthy, who was sitting two rows behind her, led a faction that had cowed almost all of the Republican Party into silence by accusing their opponents of “communism.” Smith recognized the damage McCarthy and his ilk were doing to the nation. She had seen the effects of his behavior up close in Maine, where the faction of the Republican Party that supported McCarthy had supported the state’s Ku Klux Klan.

“Freedom of speech is not what it used to be in America,” Senator Smith said. “It has been so abused by some that it is not exercised by others.”

Senator Smith wanted a Republican administration, she explained, but to replace President Harry Truman’s Democratic administration—for which she had plenty of harsh words—with a Republican regime “that lacks political integrity or intellectual honesty would prove equally disastrous to this nation.”

“I do not want to see the Republican party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny—Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry, and Smear.”

Read the full article here.

The Department of Justice no longer represents the best interests of the American people. Under Bondi, it has been transformed into little more than a cog in the authoritarian machine doing Donald Trump’s bidding. It has abandoned independent judgment and fealty to the law and replaced it with unquestioned obedience to the White House.

After only five months in office, Trump has transformed the Department of Justice into an  instrument for voter suppression. This should come as no surprise.

When Trump nominated Pam Bondi as Attorney General, Democracy Docket described her as an “election denier” who helped spread “voting conspiracy theories and false allegations of election fraud.” Meanwhile, The Washington Post editorialized that she should be confirmed because she was “qualified” and “serious.”

Sadly, we were right, and much of the corporate legacy media was woefully wrong.

Since taking office, Bondi has appointed Harmeet Dhillon, a Republican lawyer with her own history of supporting anti-voting litigation and election denialism, as head of the Civil Rights Division. The most recent addition to the voter suppression team is Maureen Riordan, who recently helped lead a prominent anti-voting legal group. As Democracy Docket reported, she is now the acting head of the Voting Rights Section.

The first sign of the new regime’s focus came last week in North Carolina. Republicans spent six months trying to steal a state Supreme Court election by throwing out more than 65,000 ballots, claiming the voter registrations were incomplete.

Read the full article here.

 

 

 

 

 

Here’s the short version.

• Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele gave money and territory to the MS-13 gang.
• In return, the gang promised to reduce violence from its side and provide Bukele’s party with electoral support.
• And now Trump’s “Dept of Justice” wants to drop charges against the MS-13 leader and not deport him — because — he has threatened to blow the whistle on the El Salvadoran president, who is taking deportees from the US and who is a big friend of Trump.

According to justice department records, the MS-13 figure in question, Vladimir Antonio Arevalo-Chavez, has intimate knowledge of that secretive pact, which – before eventually falling apart – involved Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele’s government ceding money and territory to the gang, who in return promised to reduce violence from its side and provide Bukele’s party with electoral support.

Attempts by the Trump administration to expel Arevalo-Chavez are part of its own deal with Bukele to allow for the US to incarcerate immigrants in a maximum security Salvadoran prison. CNN reported in April that Bukele’s government had specifically asked for nine top MS-13 leaders to be brought back to El Salvador from the US.
…
Arevalo-Chavez is a member of the “Ranfla Nacional”, which is considered to be a directors’ board of sorts for the MS-13 gang. Federal charges pending against him in New York include racketeering, terrorism and conspiring to commit narco-terrorism.

A filing from the US justice department – dated 1 April but not unsealed until Thursday – said federal prosecutors want to dismiss charges against Arevalo-Chavez for “sensitive and important foreign policy considerations”.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/23/trump-administration-ms-13-leaders-criminal-charges-deportation

Neal deGrasse Tyson makes a very relevant point this week:

“If a foreign adversary snuck into our Federal budget and cut science research and education the way we’re cutting it ourselves — strategically undermining America’s long-term health, wealth, and security — we would likely consider it an act of war.”

Trump’s administration just said you can’t get the Covid vaccine unless you’re over 65 or sick, setting up America for more death and disease. As Noah Berlatsky notes in his great Substack newsletter:

“This is the latest effort by Trump to try to kick start a major US pandemic and degrade the health and welfare of the country. Trump has also rolled back food testing, including testing for bacteria in infant formula. He’s made major cuts at the FAA, leading to fears for airline safety—and a number of dramatic airline safety failures already may be related to the destruction of capacity. Cuts at the NOAA may diminish the ability to warn about dangerous weather events. The Republican proposals for Medicaid cuts are likely to lead to tens of thousands of deaths. And of course Trump’s senseless tariffs are increasing inflation, destroying jobs, and could still easily end us in a recession.“

But why? What the hell is going on here?

Read the full article here.

 

 

 

 

 

The uncoordinated, mish-mash, change-when-the-wind-blows “policies” of the Trump administration are — to put it simply — the products of an ignorant, demented mind.  Here’s a roundup of today’s foolishness from the Trump Reich.

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President Donald Trump said he will consider pardoning the men convicted in connection with a plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D).

Speaking with reporters in the Oval Office on Wednesday, the president said he plans to look at the cases of the four men who were either convicted or pleaded guilty on various federal charges stemming from the 2020 plot to kidnap the governor. Trump, when asked about potential pardons by a pool reporter, stated he believes the men were “railroaded.”

“I will take a look at it,” Trump said. “It’s been brought to my attention. I did watch the trial. It looked to me like somewhat of a railroad job, I’ll be honest with you. It looked to me like some people said some stupid things, you know? They were drinking, and I think they said stupid things. But I’ll take a look at that, and a lot of people are asking me that question — from both sides, actually. A lot of people think they got railroaded. A lot of people think they got railroaded. And probably some people don’t.”

On a podcast last week, Ed Martin — who is now the DOJ’s pardon attorney after having his nomination withdrawn to be the lead U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia — said he plans to take a “hard look” at pardons for the men. “We can’t leave these guys behind,” Martin told far-right podcaster Breanna Morello. He added, “In my opinion, these are victims just like January 6.”

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US court blocks Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs

Source: Reuters

NEW YORK (Reuters) -A U.S. federal court on Wednesday blocked President Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs from going into effect, ruling that the president overstepped his authority by imposing across-the-board duties on imports from nations that sell more to the United States than they buy.

The Manhattan-based Court of International Trade said the U.S. Constitution gives the U.S. Congress exclusive powers to regulate commerce with other countries that are not trumped by the president’s emergency powers to safeguard the U.S. economy.

The lawsuit, filed by the nonpartisan Liberty Justice Center on behalf of five small U.S. businesses that import goods from countries targeted by the duties, was the first major legal challenge to Trump’s tariffs.

The companies – which range from a New York wine and spirits importer to a Virginia-based maker of educational kits and musical instruments – have said the tariffs will hurt their ability to do business.

The lawsuit is one of seven court challenges to Trump’s tariff policies, along with challenges from 13 U.S. states and other groups of small businesses.

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Trump claims he is attacking Harvard to help American kids get into Harvard.  He’s lying as usual.

President Donald Trump has mostly justified his lawless attempt to restrict international students from attending Harvard University by pretending it’s designed to root out the antisemites, woke radicals, and dangerous terrorists supposedly nesting in their ranks. Now, however, Trump has a new rationale: It’s all about helping young, aspiring Americans, particularly those in the working class. “We have Americans who want to go there and to other places,” Trump told reporters over the weekend, adding angrily that many of Harvard’s international students are “bad” and are taking Americans’ slots: “They can’t go there because you have 31 percent foreign.”
Trump then tweeted:

Yeah, OK. If Trump really wants to facilitate the upward mobility of America’s working-class youth, here’s a better way to do it: Persuade his fellow Republicans in the House to drop their new budget’s changes to financial aid for higher education, which will restrict access to it for large numbers of working-class students, including many who want to attend—yup—trade schools.

At this point, there’s no need to pretend there’s a genuine public-interest rationale at work here. Everyone knows it’s all about getting universities to surrender to flatter Trump, or about executing a broader hostile MAGA takeover of liberal institutions. For instance, in an article reporting that Trump is now nixing Harvard’s federal contracts on top of canceling billions in grants, The New York Times notes almost in passing that Trump wants to bring Harvard “to its knees,” as if this is unremarkable, when it should be depicted as the power-crazed ravings of a Mad King.

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Fed minutes show rising unemployment, stagflationary risks

Source: The Hill

05/28/25 5:04 PM ET

Minutes from the May meeting of the Federal Reserve’s interest rate-setting committee show stagflationary risk to the economy as a result of new White House trade policies and higher projections for unemployment through the next couple of years.

Fed bankers weighed in with their outlook for the economy in the middle of Trump’s tariff blitz, prior to the trade truce with China earlier this month that paused mutually imposed triple-digit tariffs.

Officials felt that “the labor market was expected to weaken substantially, with the unemployment rate forecast moving above the staff’s estimate of its natural rate by the end of this year and remaining above the natural rate through 2027.”

The Fed projected in March an unemployment rate of 4.4 percent for 2025 and of 4.3 percent for 2026 and 2027. The May minutes suggest those numbers will be higher. Inflation projections were higher and growth projections lower than the ones put out in the March SEP. Inflation was expected to hit a 2.7 percent annual increase this year, and growth was forecast to be 1.7 percent.

Read more: https://thehill.com/business/5322348-fed-minutes-show-rising-unemployment-stagflationary-risks/