Week of No Kings
NoNoNoNobel, Trump Thumped, Epstein Files, War on Venezuelan Boats, DOJ Revenge Tour

Letter to a local paper begins:
I’m one of those radical leftist lunatics the president calls a danger from within.

Nan’s Notebook prints the letter and asks readers: Does This Describe You?.

There could have been any number of motives for that decision. The mainstream consensus is that Iraq had a lot of oil.

My own view differs. I believe it likely Bush officials were trapped by a belief system telling them that such monumentally evil acts as the Twin Towers and the Pentagon attacks could not possibly have come from a turban-wearing, comic-book villain operating from a cave in Afghanistan.

There had to be state sponsorship. There just had to be.

In any case, there was no actual evidence, nothing persuasive, to make that case except private intuition. You sell a war to America based on a feeling.

The Bush administration made up evidence to prove to the public the need to go after Saddam Hussein in Iraq. And so, the illusion of Weapons of Mass Destruction, WMD, came into being.

Which brings us to today.

The shared value of anti-fascism, Antifa, has suddenly become a thing, an imaginary organization with a headquarters somewhere, a structure, and funding from anti-American billionaires.

Those of us who reflexively oppose fascism find ourselves cast as characters in a fantasy world. The administration could as productively declare war on the organization of anti-astrology or scientific anti-creationism. In each case, there is no there there.

Disaffected and it Feels So Good draws a parallel. Antifa has become Trump’s WMD as he uses the US military to attack those who protest against thuggish ICE tactics.

All Opposed:
It is the official position of the White House, per press secretary Karoline Leavitt, that “the Democrat Party’s main constituency is made up of Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens, and violent criminals.”
 
This is more than just casual slander. She wasn’t talking specifically about Saturday’s No King’s protests, but her comments dovetailed with ongoing, orchestrated GOP efforts to smear the pro-democracy protest movement in America. They call it a “hate America” movement. Antifa. Pro-Hamas.

Key anxiety:
These people sound unhinged because they, or whoever told them to speak this way, are desperate. They also have all the tools they need to violate the constitutional rights of protest organizers and activist groups in uncomfortable ways, with near impunity.

All in Favor:
It’s also, to my mind, the most urgent calling of our lives. The stakes are nothing less than whether the most militarily powerful nation in the history of the planet becomes a rogue dictatorship.
 
Where in the world will be lastingly safe if authoritarian kleptocrats carve the globe into spheres of influence?

To be fair, he does accurately represent the accusation repeated by any number of Republicans in Congress. Reasonable, I suppose, if you consider America to equal Donald Trump.

He moves on, ripping into foolishly obvious malfeasance by Trump, Kristi Noem, Mike Johnson, and JD Vance, all combined into a giant serving of sliced and dice mincemeat.

It does bring to mind a host of memes on social media:
Somewhere in America, a young Hispanic girl is hiding in an attic writing a diary

Key abuses:
In just the past two weeks, in Chicago alone, it’s all too easy to find accounts and videos of federal immigration authorities committing wanton violence rather than serving the public.

Trumpers appear on CNN defending that politicization by insisting it was a simple opinion and that everyone knows Biden did the same thing.

Tommy Christopher has the transcript as each defense gets sliced and diced into oblivion

1. Her long dead father listed 4 units in their building when he could have said 5 if he had counted the basement. And THAT’s a charge?

2. She once helped her daughter buy a home. A form checked it as her primary residence. Obviously meant her daughter.

   In fact, she explicitly said in other documents submitted at that time that this was NOT her primary.

   She put “NOT” in all caps.

Frances Langum brings us Letitia James, her own self, in fiery defiance.

Key quote (pointed out by Frances Langum — at 02:10):
I stand on solid rock. And I will not bow. I will not break. I will not bend. I will not capitulate. I will not give in. I will not give up.

It is seldom explained at its simplest. It is your right, when accused of a crime, to appear before a judge and insist that you are innocent.

Sometimes that becomes impractical. When police are returning fire or preventing the imminent loss of innocent life, there is no opportunity and process is no longer due. Same in war when capture is not possible.

If authorities simply declare you guilty and put you away, the rest of us have to object.
If a fishing boat is declared by the President to be carrying drugs and, instead of arrest, he simply orders that everyone on board be killed, we have to protest that as well.

At The Moderate Voice, Kathy Gill chronicles the high seas killing of people on Venezuelan boats, when they could easily have been arrested, and growing protests, including objections from a small but growing number of conservatives.

Trump is going much, much further than that.

The issue in this case concerns paychecks during the Trump shutdown to those in the US military, something pretty much everyone favors. Trump could ask Congress to convene for the purpose of exempting military paychecks from his shutdown.

Instead, Trump the Transcender is granting to himself power to move any funding passed by Congress away from its original purpose to pretty much anything he wants.

In Letters from an American, historian Heather Cox Richardson traces current law over the past 150 years, and its origins back to the colonies. She points out what is at stake: Trump, in essence, has crowned himself King.

The same analysis is now available in audio format, as Richardson narrates in podcast.

Key collective hysteria:
When their glorious leader did not win the coveted Nobel Peace Prize his servants at Fox News predictably went into a full emotional meltdown meant for an audience of one — the contest was rigged, the judges were woke, it was a meaningless prize, even Norwegians have Trump derangement syndrome, Alfred Nobel was a monster anyway, and people all over the world will demand that Trump get the prize next year.

The audio version has more detail and does not lack for entertainment value.

From last week, sorry, News Corpse has fun with a YouGov poll, and so does Jimmy Kimmel.

Turns out Kimmel is way more popular than Trump.
Bigly.

Thank you to News Corpse for bringing the video:

Key quoted wisdom:
He who makes himself a sheep shall be eaten by the wolves

She remembers her religious youth and explains why Preaching to the Choir can be a good, very good, practice.

To illustrate, he goes to a question-answer session with prospective NYC mayor Zohran Mamdani.

Key meaning:
More shared prosperity to reduce economic inequality; more widely distributed political power so that people have more control over their own lives; more political stability to keep upheaval at bay; and, most important of all, more time with the people we love.

Why it fits:
These things are all worth fighting for, and they should fit at the core of what the Democratic Party professes to be: the party of the little guy; a party that will fight to get you more prosperity, power, stability, and time. Perhaps more importantly, this mission involves recovering something that’s been taken from us.

He goes back to younger days, reviews coverage and analysis of critical events as they happened, and compares them to retrospective coverage today. Why so different?

There will always be distortions caused by ownership of fact-based reporting institutions by organizations devoted entirely to profits.

Headline:
The Fourth Estate Has Sold Our Democracy

Those instances are horrific, but she sees much of the reaction as performative, to be viewed with suspicion.

America, she says, has always been experienced by marginalized groups as oppressive and racist.