It’s all bad, all the time now. My list of posts chronicling the accelerating fall of democracy and rule of law and their replacement with kleptocratic MAGA tyranny and the rule of MAGA thugs is getting longer all the time. djt didn’t drain the swamp, he franchised it.
Politico reports about some comments by chief justice John Roberts: “Rule of law is ‘endangered,’ chief justice says -- Chief Justice John Roberts described the rule of law as “endangered” and warned against “trashing the justices,” but speaking in Washington Monday he didn’t point fingers directly at President Donald Trump or his allies .... ‘The court has obviously made mistakes throughout its history, and those should be criticized, so long as it is in terms of the decision, really, and not ad hominem against the justices. I just think that doesn’t do any good.’ ”
Geez, really? Ad hominem doesn’t do any good? Mr Roberts, you numbskull, you truly are a completely clueless fracking idiot, or a cynical liar, or both. Oops, my bad. That was wee bit of ad hominem. ☹️
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Politico reports about the fine job that djt and his elite MAGA thugs are doing in foreign policy fantasy land: “US popularity collapses worldwide in wake of Trump’s return -- The 2025 Democracy Perception Index summarizes attitudes toward democracy, geopolitics and global power players, and canvassed more than 110,000 respondents across 100 countries.”
Oops, that can’t be right. China now more popular than the US? The US getting close to Russia? Welp, maybe that’s what happens when a country threatens and insults other countries. People don’t like it. What a surprise. /s
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I had a recent kerfuffle over MAGA elite’s effort to get women to quit their jobs and stay home raising big piles of babies. The effort would be incentivized by a proposed $5,000 annual tax break. The median wage of women working full time is about $54,583/year. $5,000 seems like a feeble incentive, but I’m not a woman.
The MAPA utopia for women
(make America procreate again)
For my convenience, The Guardian reports about this exact issue: “Give birth? In this economy? US women scoff at Trump’s meager ‘baby bonuses’ -- Trump administration is considering pronatalist policies such as awarding $5,000 for every birth – but women say they want universal healthcare and cheaper childcare. Trump officials have made no secret of their desire to make America procreate again.”
Other MAGA ideas under consideration include awarding medals to women who have six or more children.
Attaboy, six kids!
The article also points out that these efforts come from the growing power of the pronatalist movement in US politics. This movement considers the falling US birthrate to be an existential threat to the country’s future. Those people want that the government to incentivize women to give birth.
Nobody can make this up 🤪
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Regarding the sparkly personalities that populate MAGAlandia
and their hilarious high jinks!
NBC News reports: “Ye song glorifying Hitler gets millions of views on X while other platforms struggle to remove it -- Spotify, SoundCloud and other platforms have pulled the song, but its spread underscores the challenges tech platforms face in removing content that violate their policies. .... Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, has been able to share his latest song, titled “Heil Hitler,” along with its companion title, “WW3,” which similarly glorifies Hitler, the architect of the Holocaust.”
As we all fondly recall, Ye has been a high-profile supporter of Donald Trump for years. Only the best people are allowed in with the MAGA elite cadre. And, what about that X? What a fine institution doing fine public service by spreading Ye’s fine, patriotic music! /s /s /s
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In a super-creepy power grab, djt has figured out that he has a way to at least try to poison and neuter the ability of congress to research anything it needs information about. Rolling Stone writes: “Trump Is Trying to Take Control of Congress Through Its Library -- Donald Trump’s administration is attempting a hostile takeover of the Library of Congress — an agency that is part of the legislative branch and functions as its research arm in addition to maintaining the world’s largest collection of books, manuscripts, maps, photographs, and recordings. [This] is the latest effort by the president and his team to subsume the role of Congress and ensure it cannot do its job. ”
The RS article interviewed an unnamed expert on the Library of Congress. “This is a takeover of a major component of the legislative branch. There’s no reason that they’re going to stop there.” The expert also noted that the Congressional Research Service (CRS), an agency in the Library of Congress, “provides confidential advice to Congress, including confidential legal advice, and there is a database that has all the questions that every member has asked for the last 50 years and the answers. That cannot be made available [to the executive branch].”
As usual, djt and his authoritarian MAGA thug enablers claim the library is too woke and needs to be de-DEI-ified. That argument is a bald-faced lie. This is about djt wanting to neuter and disempower congress as much as possible. Blinding congress would tip this source of congressional power strongly in favor of djt. But that’s the whole point.
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Lest we forget, the NYT reports about Israel's ongoing annexation of the West Bank: “In Israel’s Demolition Path, West Bank Residents Pack Up Their Lives -- A monthslong Israeli military operation in the northern West Bank has displaced tens of thousands of people. Some are now learning they may not return. Since January, the Israeli military has conducted a large-scale military operation in three camps in the northern West Bank, displacing tens of thousands of people and causing widespread destruction. Israeli officials, who say the purpose of the campaign is to target militants and their weapons, have said the military should be prepared to remain in the camps for a year. .... Roads in the camps have been ripped up by the Israeli military, a practice that Israeli officials have said was meant to counter the threat of improvised explosive devices that they say militants bury underground.”
Remain for a year? How remain about for a century? We all know how this will play out. I attribute this human disaster mostly to djt and MAGA authoritarianism. djt has given implicit or explicit support for Israel to continue starving Palestinians and annex just about everything that is still in Palestinian control.[1]
Roads bulldozed into dirt
More bulldozed roads
Kicking 'em all out!
Raus! Raus! Schnell, schnell!!
Footnote:
1. Some examples of djt’s support for the expansion of Israel. In 2019, the Trump administration had declared that the United States no longer considered Israeli settlements in the West Bank a violation of international law, reversing four decades of established U.S. policy. In March 2019, djt officially recognized Israeli sovereignty over the occupied Golan Heights, which Israel seized from Syria in 1967. This move was condemned by Syria as "a blatant attack on its sovereignty" but was hailed as "historic" by Netanyahu. In 2018, djt recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and moved the US embassy there. That effectively endorsed Israel’s claim to the unified city, including East Jerusalem, which Palestinians hopelessly envision as the capital of their future state. After the collapse of a ceasefire deal in March 2025, Trump gave Israel a green light to renew military operations against Hamas in Gaza.
In 2020, djt nominally endorsed a “two-state solution,” but it defined Palestinian statehood in such restrictive terms that most experts considered it unviable. For example, his vision of a “Palestinian state” is one where (i) it would lack control over its own borders, (ii) it would be subject to continuous Israeli military presence, (iii) it would be territorially fragmented into disconnected enclaves, and (iv) it could not maintain a standing military.
Hence reasonable beliefs that (1) no reasonable independent Palestinian state is possible, and (2) djt encourages Israel to take essentially full control of what is left of shrinking Palestinian lands.
