A Week of Measure Zero, Cut Anyway
Social Security, Military Combat Veterans, Education

From Pubity Group:

And on to contributors of weekly wisdom:

• When it comes to an overload of human tragedy, there often comes to the human psyche an incapacity for empathy. Large numbers become a mere statistic.

  Brian Beutler finds individual cases that make it personal.

  www.cbsnews.com/news/grievin…

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  — Brian Beutler (@brianbeutler.bsky.social) March 19, 2025 at 10:13 AM

  www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news…

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  — Brian Beutler (@brianbeutler.bsky.social) March 17, 2025 at 5:48 AM

  Brian offers a reason and a method for more active opposition:

  No funds for the government until the criminal agency causing pensioners to lose their Social Security is shuttered just might have been a winnable fight. www.wkrn.com/news/nationa…

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  — Brian Beutler (@brianbeutler.bsky.social) March 15, 2025 at 6:08 PM

• Scotties Playtime brings some possible explanations for seniors not only losing Social Security benefits, but finding their bank accounts depleted because, they are told, they are no longer alive.

• News Corpse relays the explanation from Trump’s billionaire Secretary of Commerce that, if his mother’s Social Security benefits were interrupted, she would never complain about it. Only crooks are complaining.

  Key model behavior:
  She’d just think something got messed up, and she’ll get it next month. A fraudster always makes the loudest noise, screaming, yelling, and complaining.

• Disaffected and it Feels So Good doesn’t much care for Republican attempts to take your grandmother’s Social Security.

• The Propaganda Professor attributes a wise saying to Mark Twain:
  History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, But It Often Rhymes

  The professor finds a point in history that provides a host of rhymes with today’s Republican party.

  Key sardonic note:
  Maybe it’s all just coincidence…

• When it comes to a Ukraine peace agreement, Trump trusts Putin to keep his word. By an impressive majority, Americans disagree.

  Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger has the numbers:

  Key skepticism:
  But the American people don’t trust him. They also think Trump is likely to broker a peace that is too favorable to Russia and unfavorable to the Ukraine.

• Vixen Strangely points out that Putin himself keeps demonstrating that Russia does not want peace, and that the basic problem with Trump’s strategy toward Russia is that he does not have a strategy.

• Dave Columbo is finally able to decode Donald Trump’s thinking on Canada:
   
  

• In Hackwhackers Trump is a fanatic about respecting US national borders with one exception.

  Key abrogation:
  Recently, in his continued bizarre, aggressive and harmful statements and actions toward Canada, he’s threatened to erase and redraw the current border for the Great Lakes illegally and in violation of the treaty that established it in 1908.

• Well… if Trump can rename the entire Gulf of Mexico…

  In The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser, Trump buddy Vikek Ramaswamy thinks it’s unfair that only Michigan has it’s own Great Lake.

• Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit links to what seems to be a new tourist requirement for those visiting the US. Authorities will be checking social media to see if you ever criticized Trump.

• Julian Sanchez sees cruel irony in Trump’s imprisonment of immigrants without evidence of any wrongdoing.

  There's something grimly ironic about Trump, whose criminal guilt was quite clear based on public information, managing to land in the White House rather than a prison cell thanks to dragging out Due Process, now handwaving process away and assuming the right to brand criminals by fiat.

  — Julian Sanchez (@normative.bsky.social) March 17, 2025 at 8:38 AM

  In his case, after all, there were mountains of public facts establishing his guilt. Whereas the public has been provided no information meaningfully establishing that the people deported without process are really criminals, or even really aliens, never mind "terrorists."

  — Julian Sanchez (@normative.bsky.social) March 17, 2025 at 8:40 AM

• Here’s an example from Jason Linkins that covers, not only a painful story of government abuse, but media studied neutrality:

  Trump administration just straight up abducting people, here's some painfully neutral coverage about authoritarianism from Politico

  www.politico.com/news/2025/03…

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  — Jason Linkins (@dceiver.bsky.social) March 20, 2025 at 8:43 AM

• Wisconsin conservative James Wigderson reviews the flimsy Trump excuses for ignoring a court order to follow due process before arresting and deporting a physician and college professor:
  1. The order was verbal, (so it wasn’t worth the paper it wasn’t written on).
  2. The order didn’t get to agents before the plane took off for Lebanon, (especially since those agents disappeared and wouldn’t answer their phones).
  3. The order didn’t apply since it was received by pilots over international waters (where laws don’t count).

  James summarizes it all accurately: the dog ate her civil rights.

• tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors finds a new and innovative standard of evidence actually contained in a Justice Department legal submission on arrests without evidence under the Alien Enemies Act:

  Key proof:
  The lack of specific information about each individual actually highlights the risk they pose.

  I can imagine the new warning.
  You are under arrest based on the lack of any evidence against you.
  Anything that isn’t there will be held against you in a court of law
  (which court also may be absent).

• Tommy Christopher has Fox personality Brian Kilmeade falsely accuse two prominent Musk critics of urging protestors to blow up Teslas. Kilmeade goes on to call for their arrest.

  No mention of whether the complete lack of evidence they ever said anything like that makes them even more dangerous.

• Legal experts Imani Gandy and Jessica Mason Pieklo go to podcast, reviewing Trump attacks on the law, including ignoring court orders, and using the federal government to target law firms that oppose his illegal orders.
   
  You may prefer a complete transcript in pdf form.

• From The Borowitz Report, the nation is rocked by the jarring spectacle of a Republican showing respect for the Constitution:

  Key astonishment:
  “At first I thought it was a hoax,” said one American, echoing the views of many. “Then I was like, maybe it’s a different John Roberts? It’s a pretty common name.”

• Juliet at Decoding Fox News reviews a week of pity for persecuted, noble, kind of heroic Elon Musk.

  For those who can listen to entertaining and informative audio, Juliet her own self narrates in podcast form.

• PZ Myers remembers the last great effort to shrink the federal workforce, consolidate agencies, and eliminate hundreds of thousands of pages of rules.

  Key lack of hardship:
  Never disrupted essential services

• Aside from the crime itself, there is a lesser reason this story is angering. It robs the electorate of the opportunity to pass judgment on a Stalinesque attempt to use medical reasons to get rid of political opposition.

  M. Bouffant at Web of Evil has the links to the grimy story as a Minnesota state Senator is arrested for attempting to have sex with a youngster.

  The day before the arrest, he was one of five Minnesota lawmakers sponsoring a medical bill to define criticism of Donald Trump, Trump derangement syndrome, as a mental illness.

• In Letters from an American, historian Heather Cox Richardson reminds us about the heroism of World War II code talkers:

  Key military role:
  The Code Talkers were Indigenous Americans who used codes based in their native languages to transmit messages that the Axis Powers never cracked.

  Key contribution (One of many):
  “Were it not for the Navajos,” Major Howard Connor said, “the Marines would never have taken Iwo Jima.”

  Under Trump’s anti-DEI campaign, the army has been directed to remove all tributes to these patriots.
   
  The same analysis is now available in audio format, as Richardson narrates in podcast.

• driftglass brings news from Arlington National Cemetery. Their website is now scrubbed of all military personnel who died as Black, Hispanic, and women veterans.

• Dave Dubya is back (Yay!!) with an observation on the coming abolition of the Department of Education. Dave points out the replacement in Trump culture by something akin to 1984’s Ministry of Truth.

• @whiskeywhistle98 listens as RFK Jr explains that we should avoid measles vaccine because dying from measles is so 1900s:
   
  

• At The Moderate Voice David Robertson notes the predominant anger by Trump opposition that Senate Democrats did not filibuster a horrible Republican budget resolution, but asks if a shutdown would actually have helped the USA.

  Key complication:
  …then what would congressional Democrats say to federal employees – including members of the U.S. military – who would have lost paychecks if the federal government had been shut down?

  Key comfortable path:
  It is easy to object to the cloture vote if one’s own income isn’t threatened.

• Infidel753 is losing patience with those on the left who demanded a government shutdown.

  Key trade-off
  The left wanted a shutdown inflicting even more pain on an already reeling economy, and costing probably millions of people their incomes, to score a “win” against the Republicans.

  Key moral obtuseness
  To these ideologists, we’re just pawns on the chessboard, to be sacrificed in their game of “oppose the Republicans on everything no matter what the real-world impact”.

• Right Wing Watch brings us pastor Jack Hibbs who has discerned that Trump critics simply hate America.

  Key motive:
  They’d sacrifice you in a second just to defend their woke ideology.

• North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz offers to God a desperate prayer of grief.

  Key sorrow:
  I’m grieving how little kindness seems to be accomplishing, how love is apparently failing to win. I’m mourning the constant waste of life and wondering why it has to be this way. And, I’m grieving how much of my faith feels like it is slipping through my hands as I watch it all happening.

• Sarah Cooper learns how to look sanctified:

• Vagabond Scholar posts a tribute to the already missed blogger Kevin Drum.

• The Journal of Improbable Research finds a study comparing methods of stacking blocks into columns.

  Certainly will make it easier for me to sleep at night.

• Nan’s Notebook recounts a news email of a recently discovered species of blobfish. A photo and description are included. She believes we will join her in recognizing similarities to a public figure.

• At The Onion Vice President JD Vance finds his movements restricted at the Trump International Golf Club when he is reminded that caddies are not allowed in the clubhouse.

• In a related story, SilverAppleQueen has a cat recovering from a bath.

• The Savanna Bananas show how they employ confusion in pitching