The most disgusting thing I've seen in a long time.
Wednesday, February 19, 2025
Maybe Democrats in the US House and Senate need to sue Elon Musk because they are the injured party
Judge Tanya Chutkan correctly ruled that the Attorneys General who sued Musk demonstrated no harm to their states.
The interests of Congress are harmed, however, regardless of party, even if most Republicans are too stupid to realize it. Their constitutional prerogatives have been usurped. Being in the majority, however, and servile to Trump, Republicans don't care. Democrats, in the minority, have no other remedy.
Of course this is partly a political matter, in which the court might refuse to meddle, and that is arguably correct. The remedy is political in that it is to be settled at the ballot box in two years. But that seems like an awful long time to wait for the system to correct itself, and it might not.
It might take a Democrat White House lording it over congressional Republicans in the minority in the future to demonstrate to them what they seem incapable of grasping now, but of course if this stands that will be too late for them to do anything about it.
What goes around comes around, in politics as in life.
What this really is is a constitutional matter. It is about the executive branch using a novel scheme to infringe on the powers specifically reserved to the Congress. Democrats should make that their case. The court system is the traditional place to adjudicate such things.
But given outright Democrat hostility to the constitution, e.g. to the Electoral College among other things, they may just not have the heart for it.
Sad!
... But Chutkan said that the states hadn’t shown “that they will suffer imminent, irreparable harm absent a temporary restraining order.”
“The court is aware that DOGE’s unpredictable actions have resulted in considerable uncertainty and confusion for Plaintiffs and many of their agencies and residents,” she wrote in the 10-page ruling. “It remains ‘uncertain’ when and how the catalog of state programs that Plaintiffs identify will suffer.”
Chutkan went on to say that even though the states’ larger case against Musk is “strong,” their arguments at this stage in the litigation were not good enough to satisfy the standard that must be met to warrant emergency action by the court.
“Plaintiffs raise a colorable Appointments Clause claim with serious implications. Musk has not been nominated by the President nor confirmed by the U.S. Senate, as constitutionally required for officers who exercise ‘significant authority pursuant to the laws of the United States,’” she wrote. “But even a strong merits argument cannot secure a temporary restraining order at this juncture.”...
Congressional Republicans are unhappy with imprecise and rash spending cuts and personnel reductions, resulting in violations of the law, mistakes, and human carnage in their districts and states
Trump faces growing DOGE revolt from GOP lawmakers
... "We all want efficiencies, there is a way to do it, and the way these people have been treated has been awful in many cases. Awful." ... some are quietly fuming that their Constitutional role in controlling federal funds could be steamrolled in the process. The House Republican who spoke anonymously warned that many conservatives are "very constitutionalist" and may be inclined to protect Congress' power if forced to do so. "Even though it's our guy in the White House, if there's a lot of executive overreach, we want to protect the institution of Congress," they said. ...
Victim blaming: Trump says Ukraine's Zelenskyy, attacked by 25-year dictator Vladimir Putin, is the dictator
When you've lost Sent Defender, you've lost.
Tuesday, February 18, 2025
Victim blaming: Trump says Ukraine started the war with Russia
Didn't he do this to women who accused him?
Democrat Rosa DeLauro (CT-3) is correct: Elon Musk is an unelected interloper, with no authority and no legitimacy who makes a mockery of the appropriations process
Musk exercises nonexistent dictatorial line-item-veto powers over spending and personnel as a "super cabinet" official who was never confirmed by the US Senate like the other cabinet members he now tells what's what.
The whole scheme is illegal and unconstitutional, which is why Trump is now all of a sudden denying that Musk is head of the so-called DOGE, just like Trump hastily made Musk a special government employee after lawsuits were filed on February 3 questioning Musk's authority.
It's an end run around the constitution no less serious than the National Popular Vote Compact, which seeks to neuter the Electoral College.
Trump has been making this bullshit up as he goes and has been since Musk endorsed Trump after the July assassination attempt and then became part of Trump's circle of intimates in August.
The tech oligarchy got front row seats at the inauguration for a reason.
Congress closing in on shutdown deadline with no clear plan
“We cannot come to a deal where you hammer out gains, losses, but you come to a conclusion and you come to a meeting of the minds,” Rep. Rosa DeLauro (Conn.), the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, told reporters. “That should not be subject to some third party deciding that that’s not what they want.”
“We had a deal last year, all of us and so forth, and then there was an interloper with no authority, no legitimacy, nonelected, who said, ‘Don’t vote for it,’” DeLauro said, as Democrats have continued to zero in on tech billionaire Elon Musk, the head of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Trump's MO is to cut people out of negotiations: He's cutting out Ukraine just like he cut out the Afghans and negotiated directly with the Taliban
"Watch me hand over Ukraine to Putin like I handed over Afghanistan to the Taliban."
Monday, February 17, 2025
Ukraine should just surrender to Putin and join the East, given Trump's immoral treatment of Ukraine
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard for The UK Telegraph:
Panic in Kyiv as US president demands higher share of GDP than Germany’s First World War reparations
Donald Trump’s demand for a $500bn (£400bn) “payback” from Ukraine goes far beyond US control over the country’s critical minerals. It covers everything from ports and infrastructure to oil and gas, and the larger resource base of the country.
The terms of the contract that landed at Volodymyr Zelensky’s office a week ago amount to the US economic colonisation of Ukraine, in legal perpetuity. It implies a burden of reparations that cannot possibly be achieved. The document has caused consternation and panic in Kyiv.
The Telegraph has obtained a draft of the pre-decisional contract, marked “Privileged & Confidential’ and dated Feb 7 2025. ...
Sunday, February 16, 2025
If you think Trump is a nutball with this Napoleon stuff, Luigi Mangione announces that in himself we have now finally achieved the classless society of which red diaper doper babies everywhere have long dreamed
The mental illness problem in America is much worse than I thought.
Friday, February 14, 2025
Former S&P sovereign bond unit executive who participated in the Obama era 2011 credit downgrade basically calls Trump's America a banana republic, and DOGE not a proper government department
WSJ: What about DOGE’s accessing the Treasury Department’s payment system?
Kraemer: We don’t have all the details of what they took and on what basis. It seems highly irregular. People from a department, which is not even a proper government department, that have gone and gotten access to data, that we have to assume is quite, I should say sensitive, which doesn’t belong in the hands of unelected individuals.
WSJ: Have you ever seen anything like this before?
Kraemer: Yes, I think I have seen this. Regimes that don’t respect checks and balances. But they tend to be more in the emerging markets. This is exactly what sets rich and poor countries apart, right? It’s the qualities of institutions, the rule of law, the transparency of decision-making.
So have I seen this? Yes. But have I seen it in an advanced economy, in an OECD member country? No, I have not.
The whole thing is here.
Three House Republican chuckleheads, but I repeat myself, want to waste everyone's time impeaching Trump's enemy judges
Pure grand-standing from:
Republican Eli Crane (AZ-2)
Republican Andrew Clyde (GA-9)
Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene (GA-14).
House GOP leaders have not weighed in on the calls to impeach the judges — and the chances of such an effort succeeding in their removal is close to zero.
It would take near-unanimous support from House Republicans to impeach a judge if Democrats do not support the measure, and support from Democrats would be required to clear the two-thirds threshold to convict on impeachment articles in the Senate.
More.
Or what king, going to make war against another king, sitteth not down first, and consulteth whether he be able with ten thousand to meet him that cometh against him with twenty thousand?
-- Luke 14:31
Beer-swilling surrender monkey SECDEF Pete Hegseth stands by his original comments yesterday and doubles down on them today
No return to pre-2014 borders for Ukraine.
No NATO membership for Ukraine.
No US troops for Ukraine (like Biden ever wanted that).
J. D. Vance is proving himself to be a very intelligent imbecile
Earlier in the week there were no good guys nor bad guys in the Ukraine War:
Later in the week the Russian army is invading European countries en masse:
Everyday actually:
Holy cow, a seventh prosecutor resigns over the renegade DOJ attempt to toss the Eric Adams case
A seventh federal prosecutor resigned Friday over the Department of Justice’s controversial order to dismiss criminal corruption charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams.
The prosecutor, Hagan Scotten, in a blistering letter to top DOJ official Emil Bove, said “I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion” to dismiss the Adams case.
“But it was never going to be me,” wrote Scotten, who had been the lead prosecutor in Adams’ case for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York.
On Thursday, Scotten’s boss, acting U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon resigned in protest over Bove’s order to toss the case. ...
Scotten is a Harvard Law School grad, who clerked for Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts after serving in the U.S. Army in Iraq in the Special Forces. He also served as a clerk to Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh when Roberts’ fellow conservative was sitting on a lower court.
More.
The new Attorney General Pam Bondi is really working overtime to accumulate obloquy.
Banana Republican Donald Trump denies meddling in New York Mayor Eric Adams case as 6 top prosecutors quit over DOJ dismissal order
... After Sassoon refused to dismiss the case Thursday, the matter was reassigned to John Keller, the acting head of the DOJ’s Public Integrity Section, who then also refused to dismiss the case and quit, NBC reported. ...
Acting DOJ criminal division chief Kevin Driscoll also resigned Thursday after refusing to accept the Adams case.
At least three other senior officials in the DOJ’s Public Integrity Section quit after that following a meeting with the deputy attorney general. ...
Sassoon had been the lead prosecutor at the fraud and conspiracy trial of Sam Bankman-Fried, the former head of the failed cryptocurrency exchange FTX. Bankman-Fried was sentenced last March to 25 years in prison.
More.
US District Judge Amir Ali orders resumption of foreign aid disbursements in place before Trump took office
. . . the latest blow to the administration’s sweeping efforts to halt international aid. ...
The judge said in his ruling that the administration has not yet “meaningfully contested detailed and credible evidence of harm to countless American businesses, ranging from shutting down programs, to furloughing and laying off employees, to shuttering altogether.” ...
More.
Thursday, February 13, 2025
A libertarian wants you to know that accumulated losses in a war are "not sensible", as if war were ever sensible
"Here, let's look at this completely irrational thing and apply some logic to it now that we're down 28 points in the fourth quarter".
Their tidy little world of dollars and cents makes no sense, either.
Imagine Winston Churchill saying this after Dunkirk.
The GOP controlled US Senate has confirmed both Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Jr
The only Republican with the courage to say No was Mitch McConnell.
The lunatics control the asylum.
Thirteen paragraphs in we learn that last month's wholesale price headline was, well, total fiction
Which means that this headline is what then?
Producer prices report points to softer Fed inflation measure than feared:
A gauge of wholesale prices rose more than expected in January ... Over the past year, the all-items PPI increased 3.5%, well ahead of the central bank’s objective. ...
“Wholesale price growth came in slightly higher than expected for January, and the read for December was adjusted upward,” said Elizabeth Renter, senior economist at personal finance site NerdWallet. “In other words, inflation at the producer level remains high, and one concern is that this inflation could ultimately be passed along to consumers.”
Revisions to the December numbers also complicated the inflation picture, with the gain now put at 0.5%, compared with the 0.2% increase previously reported.
Last month's headline: Inflation watch: Wholesale prices rose 0.2% in December, less than expected.
As usual, the truth is under the hood of the polished headline, or maybe next month's polished headline.
Nothing looks soft to me in the measures shown below, which are the not-seasonally-adjusted ones.
Overall producer prices are up 0.7% in Jan 2025, and 3.5% year over year. Core producer prices are up 0.5% in Jan 2025, and 3.6% year over year. At least until next month.
The billionaires never say, Raise taxes now or face an economic heart attack
The word "tax" appears nowhere in this story.
Ray Dalio is worth $19 billion.
“Make sure that you really know what you’re doing and you’re practical,
and do it on … the conservative side, because you know, how much can the
cutting actually be?”
Wednesday, February 12, 2025
Elon Musk is the biggest federal government teet sucker in history, the wealthiest man in the world on the backs of American taxpayers, and the biggest hypocrite about it
The hypocrite:
The grifter:
Over the last decade, Musk's companies SpaceX and Tesla were awarded at least $18 billion in federal contracts, according to spending data -- with SpaceX winning more than $17 billion worth of contracts since 2015.
And don't forget the benefit of the government coin in the till for every Tesla purchased:
The beer-swilling surrender monkeys of the Trump administration have just caved to Putin
The art of the cave.
The art of the deal would drop NATO membership for a return of the occupied lands, but no, let's concede EVERYTHING for . . . what exactly?
A cessation of hostilities?
These people are a joke and a disgrace.
In Jan 2025 the average price of utility natural gas is 49% more than the 2017-2020 average
The average price of utility natural gas was $1.04 per therm 2017-2020.
In Jan 2025 it costs $1.55, 49% more.
Since about 10% of natural gas production is diverted to LNG export for big profits, most of the increase is related to diversion of natural gas from heating to electricity production because of the lunatic policy of retiring massive amounts of coal electric generation capacity.
It makes heating your home much more expensive, and keeping the lights on much more expensive at the same time.
Thanks for nothing, green energy assholes. It's 22 degrees F and snowing in Grand Rapids, MI.
Nine basic foods posting new all time high average prices in January 2025 according to the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank
Round steak $8.28/lb
Eggs $4.953/doz
Frozen OJ $4.48/12oz.
Coffee $7.019/lb
Sugar $1.011/lb
Ice Cream $6.459/half gallon
Steaks, all $10.905/lb
Table wine $14.035/liter
Beer $1.813/pint
Everybody's favorite food inflation indicator, eggs, made another new all-time record high average price in January 2025: $4.953/dozen
Sorting for the 100 largest flocks of egg-layers affected by H5N1 bird flu since 2022 which have had to be destroyed, as of this morning I count in excess of 21 million chickens destroyed to stop the spread so far in 2025 alone.
At 3.258% in Jan 2025, the rate of core cpi inflation year over year is still 65.8% worse than the annual average 2017-2020
At 3.258% in Jan 2025, the rate of core cpi inflation year over year is still 65.8% worse than the annual average 2017-2020.
The rate has been going sideways since Jul 2024, seven months.
The Fed has failed, the Congress has failed, and the Executive has failed. They all suck at their jobs, which is to say they're doing great! They're bloodsuckers after all.
All figures are the not-seasonally-adjusted figures.
The 2017-2020 average was 1.965%.
The 2024 average was 3.4%.
The 2021-2024 average was 4.48%.
The percent change in Jan 2025 was +0.56986%, which since Jan 2021 is the third worst Jan out of four.
Tuesday, February 11, 2025
Steve Bannon pleads guilty to one count of first degree scheme to defraud in New York in plea deal to avoid trial and jail
Trump pardoned Bannon on the federal charges literally at the 11th hour in January 2021, but not Bannon's partners, who all went to the big house.
New York State went after Bannon separately.
... Bannon and three other men were accused of pocketing donations, while
the group managed to build a paltry three miles of fencing along the
southern border. ...
GOP trainwreck Nancy Mace accuses ex-fiance in US House floor speech, adultery with whom almost made her late for a prayer breakfast in 2023, of recording sex acts with her and others without their consent
Rep. Nancy Mace accuses ex-fiancé and associates of assaulting her and raping others in House speech
... Saying she was going “scorched earth,” Mace detailed how, in November
2023, she says she “accidentally uncovered some of the most heinous
crimes against women imaginable. ..."
The prayer breakfast incident occurred in July 2023:
Nancy Mace tells prayer breakfast she told fiancé ‘we don’t got time for that this morning’
Maybe she'll change it to an "S" now?
Monday, February 10, 2025
Literally the very last line in this story
Trump announces plan to stop making new pennies, citing production costs
In the U.S., discontinuing the penny entirely may require congressional approval.
I got Elon Musk's Grok to admit that the penny underpins the dollar system and allows it to be more precise, and that for saving $192 million on annual penny production, reprogramming all the accounting software would conservatively cost $5.5 billion LOL
Eliminating the penny would take only 28.6 years to pay for itself ha ha ha ha ha.
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