Uh, oh. The people that fucking complain about every are fucking complaining again. Those Trump Boy are in a big heap of trouble this time.
What have these first harried months of this second Trump presidency brought? How do we process the mass dismantling we have all just witnessed? We are trying to wrap our collective heads around what 100 days of lawlessness really means, for us, for the country, for the world. But the mistake we make is that we in the press want to tell the unified legal story of the first 100 days of Donald Trump through the lens of reasoned objectivity. That is understandable. Both journalism and law draw from long traditions of reason and objectivity.
The problem is, this tendency results in the making of broad claims about how shambolic and dysfunctional Trump’s legal moves have been—executive orders issued and immediately challenged; unlawful actions halted instantly by judges across the ideological and political spectrum; admissions of “administrative error” in the mass renditioning of alleged gang members to a prison in El Salvador. Mistakes and screwups. Every legal action is reckless, and many, if not most, have been met with equal and opposite legal reactions.
But that is only half the story. This Trump administration is staffed by hollow-eyed cultists and loyalists who neither act as a brake on his most unconstitutional efforts nor possess the capacity to be shamed by the judicial system. They flood the zone, and even if they win only 10 percent of their stupid gambits, those gambits still create material harm for real people. Most worrisome, even when they effectuate their unconstitutional wishes stupidly and clumsily, they don’t actually care enough to try any harder to get it right. Which means they may be on the precipice—if they have not already gone over the cliffside, and this is the thing we are holding our breath tracking—of fucking around and finding out whether there are still limits on what can be done. Whether there are still courts and law to stop them.
This Trump administration is staffed by hollow-eyed cultists and loyalists who neither act as a brake on his most unconstitutional efforts nor possess the capacity to be shamed by the judicial system.
Oh, this one is especially rich.
Saquon Barkley’s Trump meet-up riled the racist left — and he won’t accept their shame
The liberal left has a grand sense of entitlement when it comes to dictating black men’s actions and even our thoughts.
Their constant expectation, freely expressed, is that black men must remain subordinate to a race-centered dogmatic worldview.
The quality of your character doesn’t matter to them: If you’re a black man who thinks for himself, you will face the wrath of a multi-racial liberal coalition hell-bent on ridiculing you into submission.
Saquon Barkley, the Philadelphia Eagles’ Super Bowl-winning running back, is just the latest man to collide with this grievance-obsessed syndicate.
On Sunday, when he chose to golf with President Trump the day before his team’s scheduled White House celebration of their championship, Barkley faced an onslaught of abuse.
While some of his teammates, including quarterback Jalen Hurts, gained acclaim for choosing not to attend the traditional White House function, Barkley caught heat for embracing an opportunity to spend one-on-one time with the president of the United States.
Adam B. Coleman is the author. He’s a good follow on X. https://x.com/wrong_speak
The DNC No Longer Wants To Crank The Hogg.
Boom! Phrasing!
And then there is this panty-dropper. I bet this got Rick Springfield more trim than an entire neighborhood of houses.
The walls are still closing in, even after 10 years.
I predict they will finally get him out of the White House within 4 years never to return.
He’ll live on in the form of an Emmanuel Goldstein figure for another 50 years or so until the current crop of Resistance warriors has died out.
TRUMP 2028!
Yes, but the people who didn’t vote for Trump assure me that the people who did vote for him are now expressing remorse and have seen the error of their ways. CHECKMATE!
+100 days of Kaos.
Well some have. Any who didn’t vote for him who now say they should have?
I can’t speak for everyone, but I’ve found it helps to complain that the dismantling is insufficient in its scope and swiftness.
They don’t. You’re neither. And it’s really pathetic to try to piggyback off the prestige of law school when even real journalism schools are widely known for having academic standards akin to a community college.
I was promised door-to-door round ups and extermination camps.
Trump is a dictator who will never relinquish power. And he’s also given up all his power to Musk, who is now the President.
All hail the King of Mars.
When I was an undergrad (pauses to adjust onion on belt), the College of Journalism was as difficult to get into as some of the engineering disciplines. All kinds of otherwise-bright kids were longing to be the next Woodward and Bernstein.
Something certainly changed over the last few decades, because now, majoring in Communications means “I don’t have the intellectual chops to tackle a more challenging subject, like Elementary Education.”
At least the pretty ones get to work in television, I guess.
“You cant understand what is wrong with schools until you have fucked an ElEd major.” — PJ O’Rourke.
I am sure I screwed up the quote a bit.
I took one journalism class in college (something on government use of media). It fulfilled a requirement for my major. The professor graded on a curve. The journo students hated the few non-journos throwing the curve.
I am with Pat.
This isn’t making much news and the video is obviously sensationalized but if true….I have become a huge Kash Patel fan.
The few news reports I see on it are either leftist propaganda spin or understating the importance of it.
Oh, I guess you want the link, dont you. You people…..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLM4lkBTxmM
From what I’m seeing, Patel and Bongino are killing it. Today’s announcement:
“…I can now report the FBI and our partners have arrested two individuals on charges of operating an international child exploitation enterprise.”
https://x.com/FBIDirectorKash/status/1917641945318580661
Sorry, Suthen but (from the description under the video):
Boo GT, booooooo.
As I said, sensationalized. The legit news stories seem to back up the facts.
Great! I’ll search for those if you don’t happen to have any other links handy. Thank you!
What have these first harried months of this second Trump presidency brought? How do we process the mass dismantling we have all just witnessed? We are trying to wrap our collective heads around what 100 days of lawlessness really means, for us, for the country, for the world.
She complained about Obama too right?
The problem is Obama and Biden did all their changes in darkness, slowly, while Trump is doing everything in the open.
Liberals have been slowly tightening the ratchet for decades. They are reeling because he has undone that in a mere 100 days. Tinkering around the edges wouldn’t have worked; he needed to go into full goblin mode, move fast and break shit. “Lawlessness” is just a way of saying that the executive isn’t allowed to actually run the federal government day-to-day without playing “mother may I” with the Congress and the Judiciary.
” Tinkering around the edges wouldn’t have worked; he needed to go into full goblin mode, move fast and break shit.”
This is what I have been saying for year now, although not so eloquently. When you build massive walls around your fortress, it will take the biggest monster to break through, and, lo and behold, here we are. Every person who came out in the last 100 days saying some version of “I agree we need to look into some of this spending, but the time to start was years ago” Yes, it did. And it had to be this rough, as no one would listen 20 years ago.
My complaint is not nearly enough dismantling.
Mine too.
Trump is all show, no go.
Seriously.
More mass, please.
Assumes facts not in evidence.
Snubbing the president is alternately heroic and treasonously disrespectful of our cherished institutions and (D)emocratic norms, depending on the party currently occupying the white house.
“Gained acclaim”
From who exactly? Dem politicians, the press, and the 20% of our population that is bat shit crazy?
Acclaim from all professional racists.
I ended up watching Cabaret last night. I can’t help thinking the lefty gender activists are play acting a fantasy Weimar Republic in which performative decadence will somehow wow the Nazis into submission.
While drinking a Cabernet?
While sitting on a cabriolet?
play acting a fantasy Weimar Republic in which performative decadence will somehow wow the Nazis into submission
We sort of saw that actually happen out recently when the Taliban retook control. It turns out waving around your gender study degree has little effect on armed and angry mullahs.
Key words “play acting”.
For most of them it is just foot-stamping bullshit; children who have nothing else going on.
If it wasn’t for having the media and every other institution in their pocket nobody would pay them any attention.
The caption on the image in the David Hogg article:
He’s as much a Parkland “survivor” as I’m a Columbine “survivor,” inasmuch as I watched it on TV from 1000 miles away.
I’ve been close enough to hear gunshots. Does that make me a survivor?
Sure it does. Congress just gave a Gold Metal to the all black women unit that sorted WWII g.i. mail for a couple of months in 1945 Scotland.
The whole Hogg thing is so inside lefty baseball I can’t figure out exactly WTF is going on there or who is pissed at whom or what.
James Carwille has described Hogg and an insufferable twerp. I dont often agree with Carville but…
I think even the Dem wits have figured out that Hogg is poison.
Carville was always an asshole, but he at least knows you need to win over voters instead of just calling people Hitler and hoping for the best.
He is batshit crazy but yeah, one of the few Dems who actually sees what’s going on.
Yes TOK, when even Carville thinks you are an ass….
I remember him also cursing some of the useful idiot college age interns during the election. Apparently they are completely mush-brained incompetents; flat-voiced, blank-eyed robots that just repeat simpleton versions of marxist talking points.
Hey Jimmy, you and your party are responsible for that. You are responsible for David Hogg. You created those monsters, so fuck you.
even if they win only 10 percent of their stupid gambits, those gambits still create material harm for real people.
I’m guessing this author shed zero tears over the countless lives that were destroyed by the government’s action on Covid. Whether nursing home deaths, bankrupted businesses, dying alone, etc.
Off topic 15 minutes before time, but I’m fucking giddy.
So, I “upgraded” to Win10. It broke my PDF maker on Word 2016. The end result is that I can have either a high-quality press-ready PDF without working links (print to PDF) OR I can have a not-great PDF with links that work (publish to PDF).
I have been dealing with this for years and just kind of put up with it and half-assedly looked for a resolution.
WHELL. Today I was just done. DONE.
After QUITE a bit of googling, I saw a random comment on some obscure forum that said to re-download the DLL for the Word plugin. So, I did. Chrome got nasty about it, so I had to turn THAT off, replaced the old DLL et voilà! My PDF maker is back. Print-ready text AND working links.
It was just one of those tiny niggling little things one puts on one’s to-do list and doesn’t do until they’re just DONE and decide to fix it.
I’d check the MD5 hash on any DLL I downloaded, and run it through a malware scanner to be sure.
Did both.
Mojeaux:
Good deal.
Congratulations.
Lol, they’re already nagging me that support ends in 6 months so I had better upgrade to 11.
I’m surprised you don’t use something like LaTeX for those kinds of PDF publications.
LibreOffice exports to PDF with working links by default, so you could probably copy your Word documents over and spit them out that way as well. The only real caveat with that is that some macros and functions in Microsoft’s open-standard-but-we-actually-add-proprietary-extensions-lol document formats break when you import them to software that uses the published standard without Microsoft’s proprietary extensions.
I’m too in bed with Word to change (that article was written 15 years ago; I’m much better now). I use macros like crazy and write them directly in VBA. I have templates and styles, etc. It can save to a very clean HTML I can edit for my epub conversions. My transcription clients always demand Word (on Windows, no Mac) because that’s what integrates best with electronic medical record systems.
I did have a client who had math equations in his book (which he wanted converted to an ebook) (which I cannot find online AT ALL, so I don’t know WTF he did with it), and not until your comment did it occur to me I could’ve used LaTeX for those instead of images, so lost opportunity there. I may install it and tinker with it and see what happens.
That makes sense.
LaTeX is the go-to tool for equations and scientific notation, from what I understand, but I’ve heard virtually no occasion to use it.
Husband was on 7 until recently when he “upgraded” to 10 because some other software provider wasn’t going to be able to support its own product on 7. Or something. Anyway, he was pushed into a corner because of different software, not Windows nagging.
We both turned off the updates and upgrades nagging. By the time I get to 11, all the things people don’t like will have had workaround utilities made for them, so I can go on pretending like I’m on Win 3.x.
I had a similarly-confusing conundrum last night when my printer started playing music.
Turns out it was the paper jamming.
I REALLY need to keep you away from my husband.
PC LOAD LETTER
Ted S.:
What’s a Paper Cartridge have to do with anything?
hollow-eyed cultists
Mirror, mirror, on the wall…
Including a number of former Democrats lol.
“their stupid gambits” [sfx: a woman’s slipper stamping]
“this is the thing we are holding our breath tracking—of fucking around and finding out”
Much petulant, but an admission of defeat. And, oh, how they hate the phrase FAFO.
those gambits still create material harm for real people.
Only if you consider government functionaries “real people”.
If you’re a black man who thinks for himself, you will face the wrath of a multi-racial liberal coalition hell-bent on ridiculing you into submission.
Those runaways don’t understand how well off they were.
Lawmakers pump brakes on annual national car fee
Hey stupid party, FYCS.
So, a poll tax.
Get rid of the goddamned income tax, the IRS with it and stick that vehicle tax up your ass.
You know how you phase out the federal gas tax?
Maybe by phasing out the federal gas tax…?
Yeah. There are code phrases that translate.to “it’ll never happen” and “We aren’t going to do shit”
My favorite is “…get to the bottom of this…” . And this one “..eventually we will…” or “we will but we need X first”
I know. It takes the republicans to do something so stupid.
What loving father doesn’t want to reassure his children everything will be all right?
“I don’t have a hundred percent confidence in anything, OK? Anything,” Trump replied. “Do I have a hundred percent? It’s a stupid question.”
Pressed further, Trump added: “You don’t have a hundred percent. Only a liar would say, ‘I have a hundred percent confidence.’”
What a monster.
Man, I remember Obama still having to deal with Bush’s economy that he inherited, 7 years into his presidency.
This seems to be this week’s talking point: that 47’s staffers, from the Cabinet on down, are incompetent and wholly out of their depth.
I take this to mean “they’re not establishment DC insiders who want to perpetuate the status quo.”
That’s been the talking point since the confirmation hearings, tbh. Government sinecures are the rightful property of the credentialed aristocracy, and Trump is just installing common trash from the outside!
One of my teammates is a George Bush-style neocon Republican, and that’s exactly how he feels. Trump demeans the office and has surrounded himself with incompetent rookies.
God, I would love to dress down a George Bush fan.
I was in the room when Goldwater said LBJ demeaned the office of president. They all do! Participating in an Easter egg roll and hugging the Easter Bunny? Taking selfies with other big shots? Wandering around the stage like an imbecile? Getting into insult contests with Z list celebrities?
Their intersectionality scores are low.
I generally think that every admin, especially within the first year, are filled with incompetent people. The only difference is how much the media is covering for them.
Mass dismantling? If only.
A GOP proposal to create an annual $20 fee for all U.S. vehicles
How will we fund the roadz when cars no longer run on gasoline?
All of the attempts at weaponizing empathy for fedgov workers, fake claims of economic armageddon, chaos, etc….They keep changing the talking point because none of it is taking. People are believing their lying eyes and remember the scorn and indifference those same people were treating, in some cases still are, the private sector and voters in general.
How they ever thought ‘learn to code’ and denigrating voters, telling people to lower their expectations etc was going to win over voters is sociopathic.
The days of the democrats being well meaning but mistaken and not a bunch of evil leftist radicals is long in the rearview now. They really are evil.
My wife’s friend was complaining about cuts to the government employees. Her husband is a federal employee. My wife said, “You know what? My husband has been laid off before. His company goes through layoffs every couple years. That’s the real world.” “But he’s in the private sector!” That sense of entitlement makes me ever less sympathetic. Losing your job sucks, but don’t think your job will be yours forever and that it is owed to you.
Overturned truck covers Texas highway in 8 million dimes
Something something “turn on a dime.”
“Somebody’s gotta go back and get a shit-ton of dimes!”
I need help finding the right Blazing Saddles clip.
They really dropped a dime on someone!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Zp6IjMttIE
The right Blazing Saddles clip
Obligatory — “I’m lookin’ for the guy supplying the dimes!”
Alt-take… whoever did this should face harsh discipline. No quarter.
Damnit, the only thing like that I have come across was a truck of donuts flipped.
I had to narrow my glaze, or I would have driven into a hole.
It occurs to me that concerning the “collapsing” economy that the left is so gleefully celebrating, I haven’t seen a breakout of government versus private sector.
Imagine that.
A recession is when your neighbor loses his job. A depression is when some government HR functionary has to actually show up to work for the first time in 5 years.
OT: in sports news, the English Championship football final games are Saturday and there’s still quite the battle for promotional spots. (Feel free to bail out now, it gets rather detailed below.)
Leeds and Burnley are tied at the top of the table and will both be promoted to the Premier League regardless of their results Saturday. Spots 3 through 6 will have a playoff to be the third and last team to be promoted; Sheffield United and Sunderland (’til I die!) have already wrapped up 3rd and 4th place, respectively, to clinch a playoff spot. Five teams have a chance for the last two playoff spots (!), with the following points and goal differentials going into the final game:
Bristol City 67, +4
Coventry 66, +4
Millwall 66, 0
Blackburn 65, +5
Middlesbrough 64, +10
The final games that matter are Preston @ Bristol City, Middlesbrough @ Coventry, Millwall @ Burnley, and Blackburn @ Sheffield United. Millwall and Blackburn have road games against teams ahead of them in the standings. Bristol City hosts a weaker team that barely avoided relegation, and the final two contenders play each other.
Using the betting odds (taken from oddsportal.com) to estimate the chances of a win, lose, or draw in each of the key matches, I calculated the probabilities for each team finishing 5th or 6th, thereby making it to the promotion playoffs (may not add exactly due to rounding):
Bristol City 61.3% + 24.0% = 85.4%
Coventry 23.8% + 37.1% = 60.9%
Millwall 4.5% + 8.6% = 13.0%
Blackburn 6.8% + 14.3% = 21.1%
Middlesbrough 3.6% + 15.9% = 19.5%
Middlesbrough’s superior goal differential helps their chances since a win over Coventry and a Millwall tie or loss puts them ahead of those two teams, and if Bristol City also loses, they beat all three of them due to points or the goal differential. Millwall’s lesser goal differential puts them at a distinct disadvantage.
Note that I assumed that non-ties were decided by a single goal; individiual games with a much larger differential (4 or more) might affect these probabilities by a small amount since some of the goal differential advantages might change.
Bottom of that table is also interesting. Hull are down; Plymouth are down all but mathematically (need a win and to overcome 14 goal difference). But five other teams could fill the third sport.
And I think Bristol City gets one of the spots.
Yes, I should work those out, too.
Okay, I had to fiddle with the program, but here are the probabilities of relegation from Championship:
Stoke 3.8%
Derby 4.2%
Preston 26.7%
Luton 25.9%
Hull 39.4%
Cardiff is the team at the bottom of the table and already absolutely eliminated. Luton is close to Preston despite a much worse goal differential since Preston plays one of the teams fighting for a promotion playoff spot (Bristol City). Also, Stoke is at Derby, Luton at West Brom, and Hull is at Portsmouth.
I should say that I’m ignoring the highly unlikely event of Plymouth overcoming the huge goal differential.
“Both journalism and law draw from long traditions of reason and objectivity.”
I keep hearing something like this in my world. I was at a function last week where a professional colleague and friend was doing the MC duties. Their opening remarks lamented that these are difficult days to be an historian. They noted they were not talking about the difficulty of the work noting that manual labor was much harder.
But they lamented that, as historians, we’re training in marshaling arguments, using facts and information to make points, etc. Now, knowing this person and being around historians, this is absolutely true when it comes to their research. The problem historians run in to is two fold. First, they think they are better equipped than most people to discuss public policy when, in fact, their knowledge in such areas does not come from doing the same kind of research as they do in publishing. Second, the assumption is that, if they’ve investigated a current event thoroughly, and come to a fact-based conclusion, then theirs is the ONLY reasonable interpretation.
The problem here is that, contrary to Daniel Moynihan, these days everyone CAN have their own facts. Just go to sources with which you agree on a presuppositional basis and, voila, you’ve got the only possible right answer.
History was always established by consensus based on necessarily incomplete and unobservable information, and subjective interpretation of past events, even before Marxist revisionism overtook the field a century ago, before being supplanted by critical theory 30 years ago. There’s nothing particularly mystical about constructing arguments based on information to persuade people of your point of view. Kids start doing it their first year in grade school. It’s hard to imagine how up your own asshole you would have to be to think you’re uniquely talented for being able to defend your own biases.
“It’s hard to imagine how up your own asshole you would have to be to think you’re uniquely talented for being able to defend your own biases.”
TBF, my friend is one of the VERY few academics with whom I will even discuss current politics.
OTOH: I think it’s like all groups. When you create a peer group, most of whom already share the same views, and then obtain all their info from the same sources, it can become v. hard to understand that other people can use reason & information to arrive at different conclusions. Tangentially, this what I see as the biggest problem in the contemporary world. We no longer disagree – vehemently – over policy etc. No, it’s become a good/evil; patriotic/unpatriotic; pick your contrast argument.
I think this is one reason libertarianism has an increasingly difficult slot. WE think, hey everyone gets to decide for themselves. Everyone else seems doom if people don’t do the same thing. I mean, imagine how warped your thinking is to declare that, if you don’t want to send Americans to die in Iraq you’re unpatriotic and if you voted for Trump, you’re fascists salivating at the generational return of fascism.”
And to add one more thing: in many cases people look at other people with whom they’ve been friends for decades, whose character they know but are now willing to read them outside the camp because of political views.
I know what Glibs will be watching tonight: https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2025/04/30/after-months-of-laying-low-kamala-harris-to-slam-trump-in-major-new-speech/
I think I’ll watch hockey instead.
That’s just because you are afraid of a strong black woman.
I was planning to watch Engineering Catastrophes, not political catastrophes.
If RC Dean happens to drop by:
Trump’s Tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China: Update and AnalysisFebruary 6, 2025
Trump says he will introduce 25% tariffs on autos, pharmaceuticals and chipsFebruary 18, 2025
All within 1Q2025
And for the record I think the tariffs are stupid, but I don’t disagree that he as a point and that domestic production of certain things when crisis occurs is a valid concern. I’m also not a sky is falling end f the world guy here either. What aggravates me is the chaos and horse trading. I get his art of the deal shit, but how is a CEO supposed to plan for any kind of growth in that environment. No wonder GDP shrunk. And I view downward movement in markets as volatility and not the end of the world. It’s just unnecessary.
Truthfully, don’t know how much it caused the current economic contraction. Couldn’t have helped.
Nevertheless, the president getting to unilaterally raise taxes and then deciding on a case by case basis who gets relief is literal socialism and also a fundamental violation of the separation of powers this entire government is philosophically based on.
I don’t care for it.
I also didn’t care for it when the Biden administration declared a climate emergency to give billions to their political allies and make everything worse for Americans.
I actually would go so far as to say the Supreme Court needs to step the fuck in here. Congress cannot give its powers away. Not how it’s supposed to work. Should have done it decades ago. Not. Too. Late.
At least we’re not Canada!
We are learning about 35 to 40 years too late that a lot of countries don’t like us, and are actively working to get on top of the pecking order, or at least cozying up to countries that have a shot at that.
As for GDP, I wanna see the real value, not the fake one that includes FedGov do-nothing work.
I don’t particularly think it a useful measure either.
Good info, Sensei. Thanks.
I deadthreaded it at the end of the last thread, but my back of the envelope calculation on the GDP contraction is that it was a grand total of $23BB during 1Q, taking their numbers at face value. I think Musk may have cut that much from fedgov spending. Regardless, it’s not the hairpulling Armageddon we are invited to believe.
Hope so
I didn’t calculate the dollar amount. Interesting. Thanks!
I do think Shorsey is a great show though
Today I learned from local news that that meatball Tom Homan is from far northern New York, and I learned that supporting cops is “controversial”. I’m not a cop-sucker but when did that become “controversial”?
Well, when you marinate in an ACAB cosplaying bubble, it would be controversial to hear that some people don’t actually want cops hunted through the streets.
Apparently he was in Rochester to back the cops who had the nerve to help ICE to round up some illegals, days after the mayor threw his city’s cops under the bus because sAnCtUaRy.
I cannot imagine any of this playing out even 10 years ago.
My only question; How could they tell?
Child damages $56M Rothko painting at Netherlands museum
https://www.yahoo.com/news/child-damages-56m-rothko-painting-232041257.html