Month: August 2025

He said it and he meant it.

FFS:

Ed Martin, you’ll recall, was the guy they tried to make the US Attorney for DC and he was too extreme even for the potted plants in the GOP Senate to confirm. He had defended the January 6th insurrectionists and raised money for them. Naturally, after his nomination was eventually withdrawn, the DOJ immediately hired him and put him in charge of the retribution portfolio.

I suspect everyone who worked on the January 6th Committee should retain legal representation. They are determined to keep trying to erase what happened that day. It’s ineffectual hand-waving since we all watched it happen on live TV but they can successfully harass the people who tried to hold them accountable.

This is the guy who will do it. And he’s certifiably insane.

So, never mind. Nothing will come of it.

Here’s James Fallows, who knows something about this particular issue:

A major determiner of when and whether Xi Jinping eventually thinks, “OK, today is the day it’s finally worth the risk of invading Taiwan,” is when and whether US cuts Ukraine loose.

Surely Marco R “knows” that. And that it would affect “life in America on a daily basis, and around the world.”

Yep. And it’s hard to see that Xi won’t be right to do it (along with every other would be dictator) with a Secretary of State pretty much announcing that the US is now a paper tiger who doesn’t care about the rest of the world except to the extent it will be required to pay Donald Trump some tariff tribute to pretend he isn’t crazy enough to do something stupid.

Who the hell do these people think they’re talking to???

 Despite the protests over Trump’s stunning show of force on D.C.’s streets, MAGA’s most vocal voices believe that if the anti-crime push is successful — and Trump is certain to declare it so — it could win converts in cities and help expand the movement’s rural base.

“We have an opportunity to show city folks that life doesn’t have to be this way,” one senior MAGA media figure told Axios. “There are things you can do to control crime. This definitely could spread to other cities, simply by demand.”

Uhm, this “city folk” has three words for you: go fuck yourself.

Ryan Cooper at the American Prospect:

Among the favorite pastimes of Republican men, two stand out: first, boasting about what strong, courageous, hypermasculine operators they are; and second, publicly melting down about how pants-pissingly terrified they are of American cities.

Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) is the latest in a long line of conservative men expressing delirious panic about an American city, in this case Washington, D.C. “I drive around in Washington, D.C., in my Jeep and, yes, I do drive myself. And I don’t buckle up,” he said on Fox News recently. “And the reason why I don’t buckle up, and people can say whatever they want to, they can raise their eyebrows at me, again, is because of carjacking.” Consider my eyebrow raised.

Before Mullin, there was Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy hyperventilating about almost nonexistent crime on the New York subway. And there was Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) claiming that he tells visitors to D.C. that “you need to be careful where you stay, you need to be careful where you walk, you shouldn’t be out after dark.” And, of course, there was Donald Trump calling various American cities Escape From New York–esque hellholes. “What I guess the mayor did, but whoever it was, they asked the numbers to be fudged so they would show less crime,” he said recently, denying police statistics about dramatically falling D.C. crime. “The fact is, it’s worse than it has ever been.”

This seems to be a core emotion of modern conservatism: wallowing in terror of largely imaginary dangers. But there is a very real project behind their trembling cowardice—the violent subjugation of liberal cities. Today, D.C. is the target. Trump has seized control of the D.C. police department, deployed FBI agents to wander around peaceful D.C. parks, and authorized Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to send in National Guard troops.

I would add the armed ICE thugs who are so terrified of the people they are terrorizing that they’re wearing masks, covering up their license plates and refusing to disclose who they work for. Even the Nazis wore real uniforms and had the balls to identify themselves.

As Cooper says:

I must emphasize that for anyone who has lived in any big American city, these Republican men are almost indescribably pathetic. I have lived in New York, D.C., and Philadelphia, and as a habitual walker who didn’t own a car for most of that time, I have spent literally thousands of hours walking and cycling all over those cities, usually by myself, and often after dark. 

I am an older woman who lives in a big city and also do not feel fearful when I walk down the street or take public transportation. In fact, as someone who lived through periods of high crime in the 70s or 90s I can say without reservation that it is much safer now. And even then I wasn’t as afraid as these big macho men like Mullins (a former UFC fighter!) who are quaking in their boots today.

Cooper points out the real reason they are going after cities:

[C]ities really are full of everything that conservatives hate: liberals, feminists, diversity, LGBT people, immigrants, and so on—essentially, cosmopolitanism writ large. New York City in particular, with its millions of people from all over the world living cheek by jowl in relative harmony, is living disproof of JD Vance’s Volksgemeinschaft ideology. It proves that immigrants can be a vital part of the American fabric, and in fact always have been—and Republicans can’t stand it.

LA too. They can’t stand the fact that it’s a multi-cultural city where everyone gets along quite well, living an working alongside without being frightened or filled with loathing at the mere sight of people who don’t look and sound like you. It refutes everything they believe about how humans are supposed to be.

It’s bracing to see someone making this correct observation about so many of our fellow Americans:

A consistent thread in the history of American conservatism is the enjoyment of inflicting sadistic violence on helpless members of disfavored groups. This stems from slavery, which required brutal violence to function at all, but was also the central pillar of the subsequent Jim Crow regime. Segregation was only the surface of a system in which “white people, mostly white men, occasionally went berserk, and grabbed random black people, usually men, and lynched them … white people also randomly beat black people, and the black people could not fight back, for fear of even worse punishment,” as Hamdan Rice writes. “This constant low level dread of atavistic violence is what kept the system running.”

I think on some level, conservatives know perfectly well that liberal American cities are quite safe. That’s why they have to work themselves into such paroxysms of hysterical cowardice—to give themselves permission to inflict violence on the Americans they hate. It’s what happened in Los Angeles earlier this year, and it’s happening to Washington, D.C., today. 

Yep:

“Liberals already ruined it” spoken by a thug in a mask caught in the act of abducting someone off the streets of the American capitol under color of law.

Read Cooper’s entire article. He’s right. This is who they are.

… or something

RADDATZ: The president went in to that meeting saying he wanted a ceasefire and there would be consequences if they didn't agree on a ceasefire in that meeting, and they didn't agree to a ceasefire. So where are the consequences?

RUBIO: That's not the aim

RADDATZ: The president… pic.twitter.com/fuO9q1Y5ze

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 17, 2025

RADDATZ: The president went in to that meeting saying he wanted a ceasefire and there would be consequences if they didn’t agree on a ceasefire in that meeting, and they didn’t agree to a ceasefire. So where are the consequences?

RUBIO: That’s not the aim

RADDATZ: The president said that was the aim

The clear consensus is that the Alaska meeting was a disaster — for America at least. Russia is very happy with the way it came out. They have Trump once again making the case for Ukrainian surrender of half their country (even parts that are not currently occupied by Russia!) in return for their pinky swear to not invade the rest of the country. What a deal.

Even Rupert Murdoch’s Wall St Journal agrees:

Russian President Vladimir Putin couldn’t have scripted his first visit to the U.S. since 2015 much better.

The Russian leader strutted along a red carpet at a U.S. air base and posed smiling with President Trump, who had weeks earlier been expressing mounting frustration with him and threatening to hit Russia and its trading partners with sanctions. He met with Trump under a sign that read “pursuing peace.”

When they emerged 3½ hours later, the leaders said they hadn’t reached a deal. Instead, Putin used the stage to press his demands on Ukraine. Neither Trump nor Putin, who is facing an international arrest warrant for war crimes, took questions from the U.S. press.

Putin, by clinching a long-awaited summit with Trump, scored a win. The Kremlin leader has staked his legacy on dismantling the post-Cold War world order and resurrecting Russia’s great-power status to put it on par with the U.S.

“Putin achieved exactly what he wanted: He simultaneously preserved his relationship with Trump, avoided additional sanctions, and received the blessing to continue his war,” said Andrey Kolesnikov, a Moscow-based political analyst and a columnist at New Times, an independent Russian-language magazine.

Nobody trusts him:

European and NATO leaders announced Sunday that they’ll be joining President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Washington for crucial talks with President Trump, rallying around the Ukrainian leader after his exclusion from Mr. Trump’s summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The remarkable move — with one European leader after another announcing that they’ll be at Zelenskyy’s side when he travels to the White House on Monday — was an apparent effort to ensure that the meeting goes better than the last one in February, when Trump berated the Ukrainian president in a heated Oval Office encounter.

“The Europeans are very afraid of the Oval Office scene being repeated and so they want to support Mr. Zelenskyy to the hilt,” said retired French Gen. Dominique Trinquand, a former head of France’s military mission at the United Nations.

“It’s a power struggle and a position of strength that might work with Trump,” he said in a phone interview.

I think it’s a good thing that they are doing this. But there is no guarantee it will work. Trump, Vance and their little dog Marco could very well decide that it’s time to publicly dump on our European alliances to show their manhood. It’s all about performance after all.

The stage is being set for the U.S. to adopt “neutrality” and essentially throw in with Russia against Europe. Whether that happens is unfortunately left up to the whims and stupidity of Trump and his henchmen.

By the way — Marco Rubio will never be president. He has destroyed what was left of the tattered remains of his integrity so thoroughly that no sane person could ever support him and MAGA will blame him for failing their Dear Leader. He’s a goner.

Fox recognizes childish when it’s not Trump

California Gov. Gavin Newsom is getting under MAGA’s skin. Check it out.

What’s working beside the mockery is Newsom being relentless about it. Democrats too often one-off their messages and move on.

No, it’s not a Jedi mind trick, but it will do. The thing about image-obsessed fools like Trump is that even if he sees what Newsom is up to it won’t blunt the impact.

* * * * *

Have you fought dicktatorship today?

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MAGAs show us who they are

Maris Kabas of The Handbasket writes:

A delivery worker was tased, punched and kicked by multiple federal agents in the middle of the street outside a popular brunch spot in Northwest DC on Saturday morning, a video shared with The Handbasket shows. While customers sitting outside at the Logan Circle cafe munched on avocado smash and matcha pancakes, two and then an additional four masked agents beat the shit out of the man in broad daylight. This is America.

Kabas continues:

America’s largest cities are currently under siege: Not by local gangs and rampant street crime, but by occupying law enforcement sent by the federal government. Strangers—mostly men, many with their faces covered—patrol neighborhoods by foot, car and even horse in search of problems, and this week the terror entered our nation’s capital. Agents from the FBI to the Secret Service and the immigration agencies of the Department of Homeland Security invaded our nation’s capitol this week. As of Thursday, the White House told TIME that more than 100 people had been arrested since Trump’s goon squad took over, claiming they were a result of warrants for various felonies and violations of immigration orders. On Wednesday night alone, 1,650 thugs occupied the city. 

During the agents’ violent attack on a delivery worker Saturday morning in DC, bystanders repeatedly demanded the agents share their badge numbers. One of them—his face fully obscured by a black balaklava—eventually shot back, “Do I have to answer to you?”

It was a moment as brazen as it was astonishing. We’ve long known that federal agencies operating under Trump consider themselves above or outside the law. But to hear it stated so confidently, so plainly, that the federal government does not have to answer to the people who pay their salaries was jarring.

And another example from Los Angeles:

She runs a large anti-ICE TikTok account—now agents caught on livestream targeting her in violent arrest.

Agents drag her out of Tesla & throw her on ground where she lay unresponsive—then rushed by ambulance to hospital.

She is well-known to ICE as community activist who films raids in Los Angeles, California—it seems she has been targeted for an especially brutal arrest to make an example out of her.

Watch her livestream from inside the car during the arrest. (timestamp 0:34)

There is no official word about Tatiana Martinez’s immigration status—or where she is currently being held. #DemsUnited

Stuart Stevens, the former Republican and author of “It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump,” responds to Tatiana Martinez’s arrest:

Why are we paying fat thugs afraid to show their faces beat up women?

What a bunch of cowards.

Others agree:

More on Martinez and her violent arrest here. ICE is disappearing people from car washes and kidnapping street vendors and day laborers in the Los Angeles area.

Still more stories from L.A.:

“According to his family, agents joked during his arrest that ‘thanks to him, they get to drink this weekend,’ and laughing about the $2,500 they just secured.”

I found this commentary by a military brat particularly pithy:

Truly, to cite Voltaire, “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”

This period will go down as among the darkest in American history, a festival of cruelty.

* * * * *

Have you fought dicktatorship today?

50501
The Resistance Lab
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense

Ann Applebaum on the Alaska meeting. She points out that Trump has been capitulating to Russia from the moment he took office. And they know it:

The administration’s attacks on Zelensky, Europeans, and Voice of America have been celebrated on Russian television. Of course Vladimir Putin knows about the slow lifting of sanctions. As a result, the Russian president has clearly made a calculation: Trump, to use the language he once hurled at Zelensky, has no cards.

Trump does say that he wants to end the war in Ukraine, and sometimes he also says that he is angry that Putin doesn’t. But if the U.S. is not willing to use any economic, military, or political tools to help Ukraine, if Trump will not put any diplomatic pressure on Putin or any new sanctions on Russian resources, then the U.S. president’s fond wish to be seen as a peacemaker can be safely ignored. No wonder all of Trump’s negotiating deadlines for Russia have passed, to no effect, and no wonder the invitation to Anchorage produced no result.

There is not much else to say about yesterday’s Trump-Putin meeting in Alaska, other than to observe the intertwining elements of tragedy and farce. It was embarrassing for Americans to welcome a notorious wanted war criminal on their territory. It was humiliating to watch an American president act like a happy puppy upon encountering the dictator of a much poorer, much less important state, treating him as a superior. It’s excruciating to imagine how badly Trump’s diplomatic envoy, Steve Witkoff, an amateur out of his depth, misunderstood his last meeting with Putin in Moscow if he thought that the Alaska summit was going to be successful. It’s ominous that Trump now says he doesn’t want to push for a cease-fire but instead for peace negotiations, because the latter formula gives Putin time to keep killing Ukrainians. It’s strange that Russian reports of the meeting focused on business cooperation. “Russian-American business and investment partnership has huge potential,” Putin said today.

I appreciate that many Ukrainians, Europeans, and of course Americans are relieved that Trump didn’t announce something worse. He didn’t call for Ukrainian capitulation, or for Ukraine to cede territory. Unless there are secret protocols, perhaps some business deals, that we haven’t yet learned about, Anchorage will probably not be remembered as one of history’s crime scenes, a new Munich Conference, or a Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. But that’s a very low bar to reach.

The better way to understand Anchorage is not as the start of something new, but as the culmination of a longer process. As the U.S. dismantles its foreign-policy tools, as this administration fires the people who know how to use them, our ability to act with any agility will diminish. From the Treasury Department to the U.S. Agency for Global Media, from the State Department to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, agency after agency is being undermined, deliberately or accidentally, by political appointees who are unqualified, craven, or hostile to their own mission.

The U.S. has no cards because we’ve been giving them away. If we ever want to play them again, we will have to win them back: Arm Ukraine, expand sanctions, stop the lethal drone swarms, break the Russian economy, and win the war. Then there will be peace.

Trump doesn’t want to do any of that. He wants to make Ukraine surrender to Russia, call it a “peace deal” and win the Nobel Prize. I suppose he might even get that in the end unfortunately. But everyone will know he’s actually a loser — and so is America.

Trump has been capitulating to Putin since the day he went to Russia for the Miss USA contest and set in motion his dream of Trump Moscow. I don’t know that we’ll ever know the truth of his obsession with the ruthless dictator but there is no doubt that he has one. And it’s destroyed the United States’ position in the world and potentially its national security.

This op-ed in the Washington Post suggests that Scott Bessent is an idiot. Surprise!

The Trump administration seems to be catching on to what has been clear for some time: The president’s claim of virtually unlimited, unilateral power to impose tariffs at whatever rate he chooses is in serious legal trouble.

Hence the blustery letter Justice Department officials sent Monday to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which heard arguments on President Donald Trump’s tariffs last month. The letter warned of a second Great Depression if the court pared back Trump’s tariff authority. “In such a scenario … millions of jobs would be eliminated, hard-working Americans would lose their savings, and even Social Security and Medicare could be threatened,” the letter said. “In short, the economic consequences would be ruinous, instead of unprecedented success.”

And hence Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s doth-protest-too-much assertion on Fox Business on Tuesday that Trump’s border taxes will survive the courts because they are raising so much money for the federal government. “The amount of money that’s coming in here — I think the more deals we’ve done, the more money coming in, it gets harder and harder for [the Supreme Court] to rule against us,” Bessent said. He added that tariff income is “well in excess” of $300 billion.

Think about that for a second. At issue in the tariff case is whether the president is usurping Congress’s power to tax. And the treasury secretary is pointing out that the tax is so large that the courts can’t possibly find that the president has exceeded his power. That has it backward.

The power to raise revenue for the government belongs to Congress. As James Madison wrote in the Federalist Papers, “The legislative department alone has access to the pockets of the people.” Tariffs are taxes paid by U.S. importers — individuals and companies — to Customs and Border Protection, which then gives the money to the U.S. treasury. If Trump is ordering Americans to pay huge sums of money without clear authorization from Congress, that ought to heighten judicial scrutiny of whether the taxes are legal.

This article assumes that the courts will be restrained by logic and that’s not guaranteed. But if they are, this shows that the administration’s rationales for their tariffs are nonsensical. We knew that, of course. But it’s good to see it spelled out in the Washington Post. Maybe some judges will read it.