People Are Saying… It’s a Coup

Posted on Sunday 2 February 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Another sleepy day with a cold, and it’s gloomy and drizzly outside today too.

  • The latest on what’s going on, via Connie Willis and Heather Cox Richardson;
  • LA Times on Trump’s idiotic order to empty two California reservoirs;
  • An example of how the media would cover current US events if they were happening in another country: “Musk Junta Seizes Key Governmental Offices”

Let me summarize the latest outrages via columnists I follow.

Connie Willis on Facebook, 2 Feb 2025: IT’S A COUP–Trump Moves to Completely Take Over Government
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What They’re Trying to Wipe Out

Posted on Saturday 1 February 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Under the weather the past few days, with an ordinary cold, mostly a scratchy-throat driven cough. Today: light reading, and naps.

  • At an FBI facility, someone is literally painting over a wall of value words, like “fairness,” “diversity,” “leadership,” and “Constitution”;
  • The Pentagon is ‘rotating’ out, via some newly-invented policy, press offices to NBC, NPR, and NYT to make room for right-wing venues;
  • Jonathan Chait hits the nail on the head: “The president is promising a return to meritocracy — while staffing his government with underqualified loyalists.”
  • And a sample of comments about the ongoing coup from my Facebook friends.

The Daily Beast, 1 Feb 2025: Trump Admin Paints Over FBI’s DEI Values in Viral Photo

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The Corrosion of America

Posted on Friday 31 January 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Trump 2.0 so far;
  • Comments from Willis, Richardson, and Reich;
  • Krugman on tariffs;
  • Trump’s mediocre cabinet appointments;
  • Lydia Polgreen on our age of mass migration, how countries like the US actually need immigrants, and how opponents of migration can only retreat to belief in a mythic past.
    – – –

    So let’s see if I’m caught up. Trump has invited virtually everyone in the Federal government (including air traffic controllers) to resign, in a kind of buyout, or risk being fired if they don’t agree to Trump’s New Order. The FAA head already resigned on January 20th at the behest of Musk, who resented safety standards being applied to his rocket company. This week a passenger plane and a military helicopter collided over the Potomac River in Washington DC and Trump, along with his toadies, blamed Democrats and DEI, not so subtly implying that only straight white men are competent. After releasing all the January 6th rioters from prison, now Trump is firing the investigators who got them put away. The criminals and incompetents whom Trump nominated for cabinet positions are getting confirmed, one by one; Republicans have no low too low, apparently. What else? Let me check. Trump is moving forward with his tariffs, and threatening more, no matter how often real economists point out they will raise prices that ordinary Americans pay. He tried to freeze government spending on Monday, then reversed the decision on Wednesday, a sure sign he doesn’t understand the consequences of what he’s doing, or is simply flailing.

    What will be left when all this is done? Anything?

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The Usual Villains

Posted on Thursday 30 January 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • A passenger plane and a military helicopter collide over the Potomac, killing 67, and who does Trump blame?
  • Trump’s vile plane crash press conference;
  • David A. Graham on how Trump is just watching, not taking charge;
  • Allan Pettersson’s Symphony #8.
– – –

Last night an American Airlines jet with 64 people aboard, including a number of ice skaters and their coaches, collided with a US Army helicopter (with a crew of 3) over the Potomac River in Washington D.C., moments before the plane was due to land at the Reagan National Airport just south of Washington D.C. Late last night and this morning TV watchers saw a video clip from someone who’d captured the collision. The plane on a glide path from the right, as this map shows; the military helicopter flying in from the left, and an explosion. Both aircraft landed in the river, the plane broken into pieces and the helicopter upside-down. It was quickly established that there were no survivors. When I saw the updates this morning, I predicted that Trump would blame Biden. I was right, but not completely right.

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The latest despicable display by the new administration is how, yet again, Trump and his minions blame everything bad that happens in the world the same set of people and ideas they don’t like. Without evidence of course. Textbook definition of prejudice. Pre-judgments regardless of facts. For everything that happens, like the plane crash last night in Washington DC, all they know is to invoke the usual suspects, the usual villains.

NY Times, 30 Jan 2025: How the Plane and Helicopter Collided in Washington: Maps and Graphics
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The Latest Chaos

Posted on Wednesday 29 January 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Let’s see if I can keep up. Today the Trump administration reversed the directive from two days ago to freeze federal grants until they could be scrubbed of improper thoughts. RFK Jr testified. And Trump announced he’ll build a detention center at Guantanamo for all the nasty immigrants he wants to rid the country of. At least he’s not calling it a concentration camp. Oh, and an internal memo directs defense agencies to ignore certain holidays that do not honor white men. (MLK Day, Black History, Pride, etc.) Only white men matter.

Here’s an item about that last one.

Raw Story via NewsBreak, 29 Jan 2025: Defense agency takes aim at MLK Day and Holocaust Remembrance Day in leaked memo

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Let’s look at takes from the commentariat.

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The Enemies Within

Posted on Tuesday 28 January 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Are those who are actively seeking to dismantle the government and turn the US into a selfish, xenophobic, insular, backward nation. Trump and his minions. And their fans.

  • Trump thinks there’s a big water faucet in California that the military turned;
  • Trump halts funding to government grants to clear them of ideological thinking;
  • Trump, halting funding for anything to do with fighting climate change, will go down as one of the greatest villains of history;
  • Robert Reich’s comments about Trump’s actions;
  • Why Trump’s freeze on science funding will undermine American leadership in the world;
  • How Trump’s actions this past week have unleashed more crime.

This is hilarious.

JMG, 28 Jan 2025: Felon Lies That “Military Turned On The Water” In CA

Trump apparently thinks there’s some big faucet somewhere that someone can turn — he thinks the military actually did that! — to direct water from the northern part of the state to the southern part. This is nonsense in so many ways. Continue reading →

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RIP Wordpad

Posted on Monday 27 January 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Windows has deprecated WordPad, which makes my life more difficult;
  • David French on a German thinker, Carl Schmitt, and the friend-enemy distinction, and how it informs current American politics;
  • Latest thoughts from Heather Cox Richardson, about the cancellation of foreign aid, and Connie Willis, about Trump and the California wildfires;
  • Music: Bob Dylan’s “Restless Farewell,” and Joan Baez’s sublime cover.

Microsoft Windows stopped me in my tracks a couple days ago to update itself, which took 10 minutes or so of downloading, then installing, the updates. And when I was able to use my computer again, I quickly discovered that they deprecated WordPad! WordPad is gone! This is extremely irritating. I Googled and found a statement from MS about how everything can be done with Word or Notepad. Well yes, but with more effort. Word wants to automatically instantiate http links; I write posts in text to copy into WordPress. NotePad is plain text, which entails hitting returns for every spacing between paragraphs, that WordPress will then require me to take out. Just now, I’ve compiled this post in NotePad, and will now copy here. Let’s see how this works. …Later: drafting posts in NotePad, and then copying into WordPress, seems to work. For now.

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Another variation on the idea that human nature has split into two. Conservative/progressive, tribal/cosmopolitan, whatever. A running theme here.

NY Times, David French, 26 Jan 2025: How a German Thinker Explains MAGA Morality. (Gift link.) (In the print paper today, under the headline “Us and Them Is All the Rage”)

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Fury and Chaos

Posted on Sunday 26 January 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • An off-hand summary of what Trump’s done in his first week, apparently working to install an authoritarian police state in America;
  • How those who think the president should solve egg prices don’t understand capitalism, and Vance admits grocery prices aren’t coming down soon;
  • How Trump’s definitions of male and female are nonsense, and useless;
  • How Trump’s war on the “deep state” means dismantling the government that has kept our society running, for a century;
  • A psychologically revealing comment by Mel Gibson about “Daddy” Trump.
– – –

Apparently Trump – or the Project 2025 architect – was smart enough to understand that by opening his presidency with a volley of executive orders, some substantial and some silly, no one would be able to keep up, and a lot of them would slip through without notice. Just for future reference, let me see if I can compile what has happened this past week, mostly off the top of my head, without links. Then some links.

  • Trump freed 1500 criminals, those convicted of various crimes during the insurrection against the Capitol on Jan 6, 2021. Even those who assaulted police. Police groups have complained. Even some Republicans are horrified. The irony: Trump is always complaining that other countries are ‘sending’ us their criminals and refugees from mental asylums as immigrants, while in fact it’s now Trump who is loosening criminals, many quite violent, on the American population.

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Heather Cox Richardson, DEMOCRACY AWAKENING, post 3

Posted on Sunday 26 January 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Summary thoughts about this book.

Richardson tells the story of the past century, of the previous four years (before the book was published in 2019), and of the nation’s first century, in a matter-of-fact style that expresses not so much any kind of partisan position as it does the the development of conflicts between the founders, and those who’ve always opposed them, from first principles, as she, being a historian, understands them. Continue reading →

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Heather Cox Richardson, DEMOCRACY AWAKENING, post 2

Posted on Sunday 26 January 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Continuing my fairly detailed summary notes of this book. The second part of this book is about the ascendance of Trump, finishing with the “Big Lie” that the 2020 election was stolen from him. The third part of the looks back at the roots of America and wonders how we can now reclaim its ideals from the authoritarians and autocrats.

Part 2: The Authoritarian Experiment

Ch11, A Snapshot of America, p83

Trump announced his campaign for president on June 16, 2015. He came from reality TV, a show the producers thought was a joke, beginning in 2004. He was more image than substance. p84.7:
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