Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Republicans cannot even be trusted with their own money.

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

The way to stop violence is to stop manufacturing the hatred that fuels it.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

How any woman could possibly vote for this smug smarmy piece of misogynistic crap is beyond understanding.

All hail the time of the bunny!

If you cannot answer whether trump lost the 2020 election, you are unfit for office.

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

If America since Jan 2025 hasn’t broken your heart, you haven’t loved her enough.

Reality always gets a vote in the end.

Humiliatingly small and eclipsed by the derision of millions.

I don’t recall signing up for living in a dystopian sci-fi novel.

We can show the world that autocracy can be defeated.

The media handbook says “controversial” is the most negative description that can be used for a Republican.

There are no moderate republicans – only extremists and cowards.

Oppose, oppose, oppose. do not congratulate. this is not business as usual.

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

Balloon Juice, where there is always someone who will say you’re doing it wrong.

Speaker Mike Johnson is a vile traitor to the House and the Constitution.

There are a lot more evil idiots than evil geniuses.

Polls are now a reliable indicator of what corporate Republicans want us to think.

Weird. Rome has an American Pope and America has a Russian President.

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

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Today in Fascism

What Would Thomas Jefferson and John Adams Do?*

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*Noting that there are many things that those two worthies did that we might not want to replicate…;-)

I have nothing unique to add to an interpretation of today’s news. I am as angry, frustrated, and mortally sad as any of us here, John, Betty, Watergirl, all of us.

But maybe this is worth sharing:

On learning of the latest ICE murder, I did something I haven’t for a very long time: I sought out the Declaration of Independence and read its first section with an ear to its present day resonances.

It’s striking, and useful. (Adjusting for the assumptions of the day. All people, that is, not merely all men…)

…

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness….To prove this [the existence of tyranny], let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

The catalogue indictments Jefferson and his co-authors came up with was extensive, and seemingly specific to the abuses of (episodically) mad King George. But reading through that tally again just now I am struck by how readily many of them translate to our current moment. Some examples:

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

…

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

…

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.

…

For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States: [emphasis added, obviously]

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

…

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:

…

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

…

To be sure, there are a few offenses attributed to George R. that reflect more poorly on the signatories of the Declaration than on that distant king. And there are others that have analogues in Trump’s behavior now but do not map onto current offenses as clearly as those above.

But damn! The armed assault on our people; the impunity claimed and so far maintained for the paramilitary murders and assaults we daily witness; the capricious viciousness around immigration; the idiotic and arbitrary tariffs…all of Trump’s greatest hits are there.

Which leads, of course, to the next, obvious thought: if the end sought in the Declaration of Independence made sense in that moment, how should we respond to our like grievances now, in our current, quite different circumstances?

I don’t have a good answer. But ISTM that’s the question right now.

Open thread.

NB: this is a lightly edited cross post of a rant I put up on Substack’s “notes” app just now.

Image: Léon Cogniet, Massacre of the Innocents, 1824

What Would Thomas Jefferson and John Adams Do?*Post + Comments (79)

Lie, Cheat, Steal. Circumvent the Law. Repeat.

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Destruction is their middle name.

So… how do we get the word out about this?

Miss Bianca took the first step by sending it to me.

How widely can we BJ peeps spread this?

Can you all link to this post on social media?  Share it with any climate-related groups you know of?  What else?

The Trump Administration Is Trying to Revoke the ‘Roadless Rule.’ The Public Won’t Have Much Time to Weigh In

The rule protecting remote wilderness areas received 1.6 million public comments when it was developed. People will have just 14 business days to comment on a key part of its rescission.

By Sarah Mattalian

The U.S. Department of Agriculture is giving the public just three weeks to weigh in on a key step of its attempt to scrap the Roadless Rule, which protects almost 59 million acres of forest land from road construction and timber harvesting.

The U.S. Forest Service (USFS) published a notice Friday seeking comment on its intention to develop an environmental impact statement for the proposed rescission of the 2001 rule. The comment period will run until Sept. 19.

The public had a full month to comment when the rule was created. The USFS received more than 1.6 million comments on the rule, the most it has ever received.

Experts caution that the truncated comment period limits the opportunity for public comment, a key part of rulemaking and a hallmark of the original rule.

Sam Evans, an attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center, said the three-week comment period—only 14 business days from official publication—is an “unusual choice,” given the norm of 30-day comment periods. This also differs, he said, from when the Bush administration proposed repealing the rule in 2005. At that time, the administration offered a two-month comment period, which it extended an additional two months following a public request to do so.

Evans said that a “lengthy and intensive public process,” including over 600 hearings across the country and a flood of supportive comments, was crucial in the development of a strong rule more than two decades ago.

“Nothing like that can happen with the staff capacity and the timeline that the [USFS] is talking about here,” he said. “I think that just goes to show that the Forest Service here is not interested in developing public buy-in or reflecting the interests of the communities that it is supposedly serving.”

How to Submit a Comment

The Forest Service is taking public comments on a key part of its effort to rescind the Roadless Rule. Comments can be shared at Regulations.gov through Sept. 19.

“Regulations do not specify the length of public comments. For the notice of intent to development an environmental impact statement, the 21 days was determined to be efficient to notify the public and seek comment. The comment period for the draft environmental impact statement and the proposed rule will be longer,” the USDA press office wrote in response to Inside Climate News’ questions about the shorter comment period.

“The rationale for repealing the Roadless Rule, I find very puzzling and a bit of a ruse for perhaps some other agenda,” said Mike Dombeck, who served as the chief of the agency from 1997 to 2001 and helped develop the rule. “The Forest Service has been a conservation leader over the decades. We need to make sure we continue to strengthen that image and that capability, because we need it more now than ever.”

Implemented at the end of the Clinton administration, the rule prohibits road construction, road reconstruction and timber harvesting on a wide swath of USFS land, effectively protecting a variety of places in states from Alaska to Vermont as remote wilderness areas.

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced at a Western Governors’ Association conference in June that USFS, which falls under her agency, planned to rescind it. Like many other conservation professionals, Dombeck said that Rollins’ argument—that repealing the rule would open up forests for timber production—doesn’t have a logical basis.

“As I recall from my involvement in developing the Roadless Rule, only about 8 percent of [forest in] the roadless areas is productive timber base to begin with,” he said. “The assumption that there’s a lot of wood [with economic value in] roadless areas is just simply not true.”

Rulemaking is meant to be a slow, deliberate process, and so too is deregulation. But the Trump administration seems to have a faster outcome in mind, Evans said.

“We’ve heard rumors that the Forest Service … expects to finalize the rule next year,” said Evans, leader of the Southern Environmental Law Center’s National Forests and Parks Program. “Obviously, we don’t think that there is a solid case for repeal of the Roadless Rule. We think that the rule has had tremendous benefits.”

Grassroots organizations across the country got the word out to the public about the initial rule during its development, helping strengthen it. Some groups are now echoing earlier efforts of grassroots organizations in their attempts to fight a repeal.

“Our real interest now is making sure that folks understand what the policy measures are that ensure that public lands actually remain the way that people think of them,” said Alex Craven, a senior campaign representative at the Sierra Club focusing on forest conservation.

The announcement comes as Rollins is proposing a plan to reorganize the Forest Service, including closing nine regional offices over the next year. In the proposal, dated July 24, the agriculture secretary argued that the reorganization would improve “effectiveness and accountability.”

However, experts are cautioning that this could greatly weaken the Forest Service as a whole. The National Association of Forest Service Retirees, for example, submitted comments arguing that the proposal lacks detail and could compromise regional functions. The group urged the USFS to reassess the plan.

“It certainly seems like a disorganized approach to reducing the workforce. If it accomplished anything, it created a lot of chaos, both within the agency and among the partners that depend upon the Forest Service,” Dombeck said.

Craven said that most of the USFS regional offices have been located west of the Rocky Mountains. With the reorganization, “it’s looking like maybe it will be flipped,” he said, despite the fact that wildfire risk is higher in Western states.

Closing regional offices could mean losing staff with knowledge of wildfire mitigation and what to do when invasive bug species arrive in their respective regions, weakening the agency’s ability to respond to disasters.

“Losing the capacity and the research stations is kind of horrifying to me,” Evans said.

The reorganization could also lose the agency irreplaceable institutional knowledge and make it difficult to meet statutory requirements under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), such as producing environmental impact statements.

“Those are really important steps, and with the reorganization, with the drain in capacity that the agency has right now, it’s very hard for you to imagine them doing a good job of that,” Evans said. “Let’s say that they push this through with a truncated NEPA analysis or a really skeletal consultation process. They’re going to be stuck with the loose ends of that forever. … Every project that they do in the future is going to be vulnerable.”

Even with the proposed NEPA changes that the Trump administration announced in July, Evans said that the USFS will still have to follow statutory requirements, which have remained the same. The “ultimate responsibility” of the USFS to consider environmental impacts, he said, still stands.

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Simon Rosenberg Sees Emerging Opportunity, and I Make Some Lists

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Simon Rosenberg had a lot to say on his substack this morning, and I have turned some of that into lists that might be useful as we communicate with people who might not be as politically engaged as we are.

Simon Rosenberg sees what’s happening as an emerging opportunity.

According to Rosenberg, in recent days we’ve all been reminded that:

  • sometimes the wheels on the bus go round and round,
  • and sometimes they come flying off.
  • Trump has always been a ridiculous and cartoonish figure.
  • The Emperor never had any clothes.
  • He was always the old man behind the curtain and never the Wizard.

I just get the sense now that the buffoonish, dangerous, sundowning man we all see is now being seen by far more people.

A door is opening, people are waking up to the awful reality of Trump and not the right wing noise machine version of him.

You never know in politics what is the trigger that causes things to change, for new understandings to emerge. I have always believed that there was a limit to how fast some of his weak supporters would have buyer’s remorse, and come to realize they got played. In fact I’ve been surprised how quickly and consequentially his numbers have come down. Down, however they are, even on what was his greatest strength – immigration.

Which is why we need to keep working as hard as we can people. He is stumbling, failing, getting panicky, looking weak and pathetic.

An opportunity is emerging for us and we need to seize it.

That was from yesterday.  This is Rosenberg today.

I made some lists from what Rosenberg wrote, because as text it was overwhelming and my eyes were glazing over.

What Trump Has Done

A quick summary – other than breaking a lot of things and enriching himself Trump has very few wins he can point to right now.

  • His economic strategy is slowing the global and US economies,
  • has caused our credit rating to be downgraded,
  • threatens the fiscal integrity of the United States,
  • raises prices on everyone and does not cutting them,
  • and will cause tens of millions to lose their health insurance,
  • tens of millions more will see their health care costs rise
  • and the overall health care system will be dramatically weakened.

What Trump Promised

  • He promised to end the Ukraine war,
  • bring peace to the Middle East,
  • end the Gaza conflict,
  • 90 trade deals in 90 days,
  • rip Greenland from Europe,
  • make Canada the 51st state

In reality, none of that has happened.

  • global leaders are not bending the knee
  • and some are even mocking him to his face while visiting the Oval Office.
  • He keeps losing in court again and again, badly,
  • and judges are growing far more ambitious in their rulings.
  • He had to bring Kilmar Abrego Garcia home.
  • His bestie Elon tore into him, trashed his terrible budget bill
  • and [Elon]called on him to be replaced as President.
  • No one came to his birthday parade.
  • Rs keep losing and underperforming in elections.
  • His cowardice and indecision has become a global meme.
  • His budget bill is wildly unpopular, and struggling to get through Congress.
  • What may be the largest protest movement in American history has formed against him.
  • It has become impossible to hide the buffoonery of his Star Wars bar cabinet.
  • He looks terrible.
  • His ties are longer, his pants higher and his Truths more unhinged.
  • He fled the G7 on Monday.
  • Respected elected officials in America are getting arrested, charged, assaulted and assasinated.
  • Marines are on the streets of an American city.

Everything he is doing appears designed to make China and Russia – not America – great again.

The circle of defiance to Trump’s agenda of sabotage, plunder and betrayal keeps growing and growing. The world, the American people and reality itself just aren’t bending the knee. Our democracy is proving more resilient and our people more patriotic than he expected. This thing simply isn’t working as this delusional, vainglorious, sundowning old man thought it would.

We, all of us, clearly do not understand how STRONG AND MIGHTY he is.

And now I’ll repeat what Rosenberg wrote yesterday

I just get the sense now that the buffoonish, dangerous, sundowning man we all see is now being seen by far more people.

A door is opening, people are waking up to the awful reality of Trump and not the right wing noise machine version of him.

You never know in politics what is the trigger that causes things to change, for new understandings to emerge. I have always believed that there was a limit to how fast some of his weak supporters would have buyer’s remorse, and come to realize they got played. In fact I’ve been surprised how quickly and consequentially his numbers have come down. Down, however they are, even on what was his greatest strength – immigration.

Which is why we need to keep working as hard as we can people. He is stumbling, failing, getting panicky, looking weak and pathetic.

An opportunity is emerging for us and we need to seize it.

Open thread!

Simon Rosenberg Sees Emerging Opportunity, and I Make Some ListsPost + Comments (124)

Steve Vladeck on Federalizing the National Guard

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I don’t have much to add here, except to share information and link to the source.  While not at all surprising, this is a distressing turn of events.  He is dancing on a very dangerous line.

I. What Trump Did (and Didn’t) Do

There are a lot of misunderstandings and misinformation out there about what Trump has and hasn’t done, and given that I’ve covered these topics before, it seemed worth a quick explainer on why this move is a big deal—but why it also is not as drastic an escalation (or abuse) as many had feared, at least not yet.

The TL;DR here is that Trump has not (yet) invoked the Insurrection Act, which means that the 2000 additional troops that will soon be brought to bear will not be allowed to engage in ordinary law enforcement activities without violating a different law—the Posse Comitatus Act. All that these troops will be able to do is provide a form of force protection and other logistical support for ICE personnel. Whether that, in turn, leads to further escalation is the bigger issue (and, indeed, may be the very purpose of their deployment). But at least as I’m writing this, we’re not there yet.

II. Why the Memorandum is Still Alarming…

That said, there are still at least three reasons to be deeply concerned about President Trump’s (hasty) actions on Saturday night:

First, there is the obvious concern that, even as they are doing nothing more than “protecting” ICE officers discharging federal functions, these federalized troops will end up using force—in response to real or imagined violence or threats of violence against those officers. In other words, there’s the very real possibility that having federal troops on the ground will only raise the risk of escalating violence—not decrease it.

Second, and related, there is the possibility that that’s a feature, and not a bug—that this is meant as a precursor, with federalizing a modest number of National Guard troops today invoked, some time later, as a justification for more aggressive responses to anti-ICE protests, including, perhaps invocation of the Insurrection Act. In other words, it’s possible that this step is meant to both be and look modest so that, if and when it “fails,” the government can invoke its failure as a basis for a more aggressive domestic deployment of troops. What happens in and around Los Angeles in the next few days will have a lot to say about this.

Third, and perhaps most significantly, as I wrote in April, “domestic use of the military can nevertheless be corrosive—to the morale of the troops involved, all of a sudden, in policing their own; to the relationship between local/state governments and the federal government; and to the broader relationship between the military and civil society.” Even uses of the military for relatively modest purposes can have those corrosive effects—especially where, as here, it seems so transparently in service of the President’s policy agenda, and not necessarily the need to restore law and order on the streets of America’s second largest city.

Even as someone who thinks the federal government has both the constitutional and statutory authority to override local and state governments when it comes to law and order (see, e.g., President Eisenhower sending troops into Little Rock to enforce Brown), it seems to me that there is something deeply pernicious about invoking any of these authorities except in circumstances in which their necessity is a matter of consensus beyond the President’s political supporters. The law may well allow President Trump to do what he did Saturday night. But just because something is legal does not mean that it is wise—for the present or future of our Republic.

A lot depends on what happens next. For now, the key takeaways are that there really isn’t much that these federalized National Guard troops will be able to do—and that this might be the very reason why this is the step the President is taking tonight, rather than something even more aggressive.

THE MEMO.

Steve Vladeck on Federalizing the National GuardPost + Comments (56)