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2025 Political Thread

An America like this is far from great.

U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski told a room full of Alaska nonprofit leaders that the tumult of tariffs, executive orders, court battles, and cuts to federal services under the Trump administration are exceptionally concerning.

“We are all afraid,” Murkowski said, taking a long pause. “It’s quite a statement. But we are in a time and a place where I certainly have not been here before. And I’ll tell ya, I’m oftentimes very anxious myself about using my voice, because retaliation is real. And that’s not right.”

-- Source
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With severe weather looming, some NWS offices on the Plains can't launch balloons, but apparently there's plenty of money for this.

Even if this report isn't true, given his other government ties, how is it that the top DOGE isn't being investigated for conflict of interest?

 
Well, Senator Van Hollen is not afraid!

 
Neither is Wired.

...
It’s black-mirror corporate synergy, putting taxpayer data in the service of President Donald Trump’s deportation crusade.

It also extends beyond the IRS. The Washington Post reported this week that DOGE representatives across government agencies—from the Department of Housing and Urban Development to the Social Security Administration—are putting data that is normally cordoned off in service of identifying undocumented immigrants. At the Department of Labor, as WIRED reported Friday, DOGE has gained access to sensitive data about immigrants and farm workers.

And that’s just the data that stays within the government itself. This week NPR reported that a whistleblower at the National Labor Relations Board claims that staffers observed spikes in data leaving the agency after DOGE got access to its systems, with destinations unknown. The whistleblower further claims that DOGE agents appeared to take steps to “cover their tracks,” switching off or evading the monitoring tools that keep tabs on who’s doing what inside computer systems. (An NLRB spokesperson denied to NPR that DOGE had access to the agency’s systems.)

What could that data be used for? Anything. Everything. A company facing a union complaint at the NLRB could, as NPR notes, get access to “damaging testimony, union leadership, legal strategies and internal data on competitors.” There’s no confirmation that it’s been used for those things—but more to the point, there’s also currently no way to know either way.

That’s true also of DOGE’s data aims more broadly. Right now, the target is immigration. But it has hooks into so many systems, access to so much data, interests so varied both within and without government, there are very few limits to how or where it might next be deployed.

The spotlight shines a little less brightly on Elon Musk these days, as more urgent calamities take the stage. But DOGE continues to work in the wings. It has tapped into the most valuable data in the world. The real work starts when it puts that to use...
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bjdeming said:
Well, Senator Van Hollen is not afraid!

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But then, he's a grown-up.

Never thought to see something so grade-school-recess-fight from the White House:



Where's a willingness to follow the Supreme Court's directive and facilitate the man's return for a hearing in this?

I'm sorry to be taking up so much of this thread with these things. I'd much rather focus on volcanoes, etc.

But this is a crisis, and those who can should speak up and describe it as it really is, not what we all wish it was (a squall rather than a life-changing, world-ending stationary top-end Category 5 hurricane).
 
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Today's news kind of underlines for me why we've got Trump 2.0/the whirlwind.

Democrats are disappointing.

1. The protests today. The exuberant "Hands Off!" feeling is lacking, and Indivisible doesn't even mention it, whereas on that day Blue Sky was hanging and you couldn't even access the Indivisible account.

I'm not saying that organization was behind the massive turnout -- as mentioned, it likely was just that a whole bunch of frustrated people used those protests as an outlet that otherwise has been and still is denied to them/us.

That said, Indivisible is a more or less grassroots organization, though political aides and other such folk are at its center. The 50501 group behind today's protests, OTOH, does strike me as an astroturf job.

Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, for instance, and Governor Hochul have powerful positions -- why not do their jobs, sorely needed though difficult in these tough times, instead and leave the people's response to the people?

There must be some meaningful and effective actions the governor of New York State and the House minority leader can take within their respective purviews to not only protest but also thwart excesses of this administration.

2. The rush to El Salvador. One of my own Congress critters wants to see Mr. Garcia now, and there's a news story that the TOP (they still call it GOP, but -- Senator Murkowski and a few others aside -- it's truly Trump's Own Party, as some online wit has labeled it) blocked a move by the Democrats to send a delegation.

Come on. Mr. Garcia lived in Maryland, and Senator Van Hollen rightfully acted at the request of his constituents -- a very risky, frustrating, difficult but ultimately successful action. It took guts and persistence.

There's no basis for Oregon or other politicians to come into that case -- I think that's just attention seeking, headline grabbing behavior. You know, what we've come to expect from politicians on both sides of the aisle.

This takes no guts at all, though the will to persist in such meaningless behavior is there.

Why don't they startle us, as Senator Van Hollen startled us, by doing something useful for their own districts and others there who are in need of some clout?
 
UpperLevelLOL said:
You can be a Nazi without calling for those things. Also, RFK very much does want to send folks with alcohol and drug disorders to "wellness farms" where they can get better by growing tomatoes or something: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/18/health/rfk-addiction-farms.html
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I’m really just curious what your criteria for being a Nazi is? If you want to call them fascists, that’s fine and you could plausibly argue that. I would disagree with you on them being Nazis. It’s an easy throw away line on the internet to really show your disdain/disapproval of a person/party.

Nazism was a form of fascism but its core ideologies changed with the whims and needs of Hitler’s regime with the only consistent thing being what Hitler wanted it to be. Hitler was all too happy to incorporate Muslims into his “Aryan” policies because he wanted them to open up a second front against the British in the ME. I really just don’t think the Trump administration is even close to Hitler. Abhorrent actions in some ways? You bet.

You would have an easier time arguing that FDR, a man who led the US against Nazism in WW2, was closer to Hitler than Trump. He legitimately put and forced a different race of people into camps. FDR was probably our greatest president, but You think Trump was a norm buster and pushed the laws to their limits? Go look up some of what FDR did.
 
Hope this CNN news verifies:

WashingtonCNN —
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem will not recommend invoking the Insurrection Act in a memo the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security are preparing to send to President Donald Trump about the conditions at the southern border, multiple US officials familiar with the matter tell CNN.

The Insurrection Act is a 19th century law that would allow the president to use active-duty troops within the United States to perform law enforcement functions...
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Note that immigration is just used as an example. It also sounds as though I was wrong about alternative reasons for a border deployment, snd thst's great!

Meanwhile, Snopes addresses the martial law aspect, which in general can shut down the courts but in reality would probably put Americans into the streets in numbers that would dwarf even the 1960s-1970s.
 
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ColdFront said:
I’m really just curious what your criteria for being a Nazi is? If you want to call them fascists, that’s fine and you could plausibly argue that. I would disagree with you on them being Nazis. It’s an easy throw away line on the internet to really show your disdain/disapproval of a person/party.

Nazism was a form of fascism but its core ideologies changed with the whims and needs of Hitler’s regime with the only consistent thing being what Hitler wanted it to be. Hitler was all too happy to incorporate Muslims into his “Aryan” policies because he wanted them to open up a second front against the British in the ME. I really just don’t think the Trump administration is even close to Hitler. Abhorrent actions in some ways? You bet.

You would have an easier time arguing that FDR, a man who led the US against Nazism in WW2, was closer to Hitler than Trump. He legitimately put and forced a different race of people into camps. FDR was probably our greatest president, but You think Trump was a norm buster and pushed the laws to their limits? Go look up some of what FDR did.
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I think this is a challenging debate for a variety of reasons. However, I just wanted to point out that the Nazis didn't begin with the Final Solution. There was a lot that led up to that. There were years and years of process and cultural change that led up to the unspeakable crimes the Nazis ended up perpetrating.

I do think it is a fair point to say that a lot of what this administration is doing shares a lot of precedent with what other authoritarian regimes did in the precursor stages of solidifying their power and remaking the state apparatus.

There's broad familiarity with the Nazis and the history of WWII, so I think that's part of the reason it is such a commonly used antecedent for describing authoritarian regimes abusing civil liberties.
 
ICE and their paramilitary nature (and particularly their leaders, Stephen Miller and Tom Homan) are basically the equivalent of the Brown Shirts in the early iterations of the Nazi regime or the Italian Black Shirts in Mussolini's regime.
 
andyhb said:
ICE and their paramilitary nature (and particularly their leaders, Stephen Miller and Tom Homan) are basically the equivalent of the Brown Shirts in the early iterations of the Nazi regime or the Italian Black Shirts in Mussolini's regime.
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They are certainly doing very little to disabuse anyone of making that comparison. Why might that be? Either they revel in the comparison or are totally fine with people thinking that.
 
I don't know whether the lawsuit referenced in this article (subscription supposedly free but doesn't include free email domains like Gmail) was filed before or after the GAO began looking into DOGE. It could "just" be part of the ongoing concentration of power.

 
Trump reportedly still has higher ratings than Biden did, but it's still under 50% and dropping.
 
Y'all inspired me to look up things Hitler actually said, something I've never done before.

I wish I hadn't. Knowing what was really going on and what was to come, it's awfully hard to read over this 1941 speech.

It's chilling, the way he glossed over the ugliness sufficiently to soothe the minds of decent people (most Germans then) while showing enough of the thuggery to attract thugs AND get support from the weak who enjoyed both the sense of empowerment and the ruthlessness.

He was hella persuasive. And Germany had amazing mass media capabilities then, so everybody was influenced.

Just a couple excerpts:

...
Our opponents at that time were those who have always fought us inside as well as outside the country: a conglomeration of people who feel, think and act according to international ideas. We know the coalitions of that time. In this battle of the spirit we have defeated them everywhere. For when at last I was called to power, I came in the legal way, under the Presidency of Reichs General Field Marshal von Hindenburg because I was backed by the strongest movement.

This means that the so-called National Socialist Revolution has defeated democracy, within democracy, by democracy. We acquired power legally and today, too, I am facing you here on a mandate given to me by the German nation, a mandate more comprehensive than that which any one of the so-called democratic statesmen possess today...
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The people's mandate...

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we chose a path between two extremes. The one of these extremes was holding our people: It was the liberal-individualist extreme which made the individual not only the centre of interest but also the centre of all action. On the other hand, our people were tempted by the theory of universal humanity which alone was to guide the individual. Our ideals were between the two: we saw the people as a community of body and soul, formed and willed by Providence. We are put into this community and within it alone can we form our existence. We have consciously subordinated all considerations to this goal, have shaped all interests according to it, and all our actions. Thus the National-Socialist world of thought arose which has overcome individualism, but not by cutting down individual capacities or individual initiative, only by asserting that the common interest is superior to individual liberty and the initiative of the individual. This common interest regulates and orders, if necessary, curtails, but also commands.

Thus we started a struggle against everyone in those days, against the individualist as well as against the humanitarians. And in this struggle we slowly conquered the German nation during 14 years...
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Gah!

A little antidote and advice from one of the few people who understood that situation as it really was:

...we said that there is in Northern Europe a fountain of poison. It is a fact; and it continues to flow. It is obviously nonsense to call it Germany. It is not really satisfactory to call it Prussia. It is much more satisfactory simply to call it Pride. It is a thing of the spirit; it is not a nation; it is a heresy.

The world unwisely allowed this unnatural thing to grow stronger and stronger...

... (after recalling WWI)

Let us pray that if the challenge does come again, we may not meet it by random slander or roaring self-righteousness; that we may test the quarrel by the history of nations as studied by sincere and serious men, and not by nonsense made up in a newspaper-office on a principle of inverted advertisement; or the theory that propagandists may say anything so long as it is abuse, as salesmen may say anything so long as it is flattery. Let us pray to be delivered from the vice and vulgarities of our own civilization; and all the more if we sincerely believe that it is still a civilization, and may need to be defended from something that is still a savagery...
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His God was kind to Chesterton and took him home in 1936, before the nightmare really got underway.
 
A little more mouth rinse to get rid of the bad taste. It's relevant today because the Stooges were criticized by our government for mocking a head of state.

Seriously.

Always do the right thing. It pays off in the long run. Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk. :)

 
On the tariff front: Maybe this will encourage backbone growth in the Hall of the People -- 12 states are suing over tariffs.

...
The lawsuit states that tariffs must be approved by Congress and questioned Trump invoking a 1970s law called the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to enact the levies.

"By claiming the authority to impose immense and ever-changing tariffs on whatever goods entering the United States he chooses, for whatever reason he finds convenient to declare an emergency, the President has upended the constitutional order and brought chaos to the American economy," the lawsuit states.

Trump invoked the IEEPA as the basis for several of his tariffs against China, Mexico, Canada, and other countries.

A president can use the law "to deal with any unusual and extraordinary threat, which has its source in whole or substantial part outside the United States, to the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States," if he has first declared a national emergency.

The lawsuit argues that the law does not actually grant Trump the power he claims to derive from it. The act has never been used to issue tariffs by any president, congressional research shows.
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A new Reuters poll:

screenshot_20250424-005255_firefox-focus.jpg


Interesting balance on immigration. I wish the rule-of-law disapproval was higher.

Speaking of rule of law, the judge gave the administration until 6 pm Eastern yesterday to show what they have done to facilitate Mr. Abrego Garcia's return or face criminal contempt charges. During the day, the administration's lawyers filed a document, and Mr. Abrego Garcia's lawyers filed something -- both sealed, per media reports, but the judge has given the administration another week.
 
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