FOOD FOR THOUGHT 02/10/25

Everyone expects the Judicial branch of our government to be the bulwark against unlimited Executive power.

I want to know what flavor of Kool-Aid they are drinking.

The Judiciary has no innate power. It's power is derived from the acquiescence of the people

So what happens if a duly elected POTUS decides to give the Judiciary the middle finger?

Nothing.....unless the people rise up and take their power back.

The power of the Judiciary, and the rule of law, comes only from principled people who are willing to accept the decision of the court.

Even the SCOTUS is not "supreme". It's nothing... if people don't agree to obey it's mandate.

So if a POTUS or any other government entity refuses to acquiesce to the rule of law, the only way to restore democracy, or the rule of law, is by revolution. 

We saw it in the 1800s. We saw it, again, as recently as the 1960s. Is that where we are headed once again? Sadly, I think so and have since 2015.

I am a concerned citizen. #newsjunkie

ON THE FRONT LINES [ 02/09/25 ] PUBLISHED WEEKLY

FEDERAL BUDGET

As Republicans in Congress look for ways to slash spending, some legislators are floating new taxes on college scholarships, an end to student loan repayment plans and a big hike in taxes on university endowments. The ideas affecting higher education are among many in circulation among House committees that are exploring ways to cover the cost of extending and expanding tax cuts passed in President Donald Trump’s first term.

Washington Post: NIH cuts billions of dollars in biomedical funding, effective immediately.

FOREIGN AFFAIRS

 

“The Trump administration this week eliminated much of the federal government’s front line of defense against foreign interference in U.S. elections,” (the Washington Post reports) [...]  alarmed state election officials and election security experts, who warned that safeguarding Americans from foreign disinformation campaigns will be difficult if no one at the federal level is doing that work.”

Trump’s executive order reauthorizing sanctions against international criminal court (ICC) personnel reflects a disgraceful effort to ensure that no American, or citizen of an ally such as Israel, is ever investigated or prosecuted.

 

US-Panama relationship was ‘very strong’. Then Trump upended the diplomatic playing board

 

Quote of the Day February 9, 2025 at 10:51 am EST
“I don’t think there’s any plans to invade Canada.” — National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, on Meet the Press.

THE CULTURAL WORLD ACCORDING TO TRUMP

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump says he is firing members of the board of trustees for the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and naming himself chairman. He also indicated that he would be dictating programming at one of the nation’s premier cultural institutions, specifically declaring that he would end events featuring performers in drag.

ON THE DOMESTIC FRONT

 

Parents pull kids from childcare as immigration fears hit US’s youngest

 

Childcare workers also nervous to go to jobs due to deportation threats as Ice raids rampant in Trump era

MEANWHILE

 

Early Traders Had Speedy Profit on Trump Coin
February 9, 2025 at 7:06 am EST By Taegan Goddard

 

“The curious trade came a little past 9 p.m. on Jan. 17 — a $1,096,109 bet less than two minutes after the soon-to-be president of the United States posted on his social media account that his family had issued a cryptocurrency called $Trump,” the New York Times reports.

“In those first minutes, a crypto wallet with a unique identification code beginning 6QSc2Cx secured a giant load of these new tokens — 5,971,750 of them — at the opening sale price of just 18 cents each, starting a surge in the $Trump price that would soon reach $75 per token.”

“This early trader, whose identity is not known, walked away with a two-day profit of as much as $109 million.”

SIGN OF THE TIMES

First, the background.

.....so the former POTUS, who served the Nation from 2016-2020, had a wonderful Mar-a-Lago lunch with  white nationalist Nick Fuentes and rapper Kanye West (aka Ye). 

Part of the conversation centered around Ye's intention to make another run for POTUS in 2024. He asked the former POTUS, who served the Nation from 2016-2020, if he would serve as his VP.  

The former POTUS, who served the Nation from 2016-2020, became irate & according to Ye:

"When Trump started basically screaming at me at the table telling me I was going to lose — I mean has that ever worked for anyone in history,”West said in the video. I'm like hold on, hold on, hold on, Trump, you're talking to Ye.”

SOURCE: Vanity Fair

POLITICAL NAIVETE IS NO EXCUSE

Even our forefathers were naive despite their best efforts to construct checks and balances of power.

In their naivete they considered only normal behavior (norms) based on a moral compass. But today we have an abnormal president with no moral compass & the columns, on which OUR Republic stands, are crumbling before his onslaught.

Many talking heads demonstrate that same naivete, HOPING for a cure, effectively saying, rather plaintively: "Gee, that's never happened before; Congress must stand up to the dictator."

The core of this country is -- as we know -- based on an IDEA called democracy and what we see is what results when the people take their democracy for granted and stop participating.

THE REAL MAGA

Senator John McCain's remarks upon receiving the 2017 Liberty Medal:

[...] Some years ago, I was present at an event where an earlier Liberty Medal recipient spoke about America’s values and the sacrifices made for them. 

It was 1991, and I was attending the ceremony commemorating the 50th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor. The World War II veteran, estimable patriot and good man, President George H.W. Bush, gave a moving speech at the USS Arizona memorial. 

I remember it very well. His voice was thick with emotion as he neared the end of his address. I imagine he was thinking not only of the brave Americans who lost their lives on December 7, 1941, but of the friends he had served with and lost in the Pacific where he had been the Navy’s youngest aviator.

“Look at the water here, clear and quiet …” he directed, “One day, in what now seems another lifetime, it wrapped its arms around the finest sons any nation could ever have, and it carried them to a better world.”He could barely get out the last line, “May God bless them, and may God bless America, the most wondrous land on earth.”

The most wondrous land on earth, indeed. I’ve had the good fortune to spend sixty years in service to this wondrous land. It has not been perfect service, to be sure, and there were probably times when the country might have benefited from a little less of my help. 

But I’ve tried to deserve the privilege as best I can, and I’ve been repaid a thousand times over with adventures, with good company, and with the satisfaction of serving something more important than myself, of being a bit player in the extraordinary story of America. And I am so very grateful.

What a privilege it is to serve this big, boisterous, brawling, intemperate, striving, daring, beautiful, bountiful, brave, magnificent country. With all our flaws, all our mistakes, with all the frailties of human nature as much on display as our virtues, with all the rancor and anger of our politics, we are blessed.

We are living in the land of the free, the land where anything is possible, the land of the immigrant’s dream, the land with the storied past forgotten in the rush to the imagined future, the land that repairs and reinvents itself, the land where a person can escape the consequences of a self-centered youth and know the satisfaction of sacrificing for an ideal, the land where you can go from aimless rebellion to a noble cause, and from the bottom of your class to your party’s nomination for president.

We are blessed, and we have been a blessing to humanity in turn. The international order we helped build from the ashes of world war, and that we defend to this day, has liberated more people from tyranny and poverty than ever before in history. This wondrous land has shared its treasures and ideals and shed the blood of its finest patriots to help make another, better world. And as we did so, we made our own civilization more just, freer, more accomplished and prosperous than the America that existed when I watched my father go off to war on December 7, 1941.

To fear the world we have organized and led for three-quarters of a century, to abandon the ideals we have advanced around the globe, to refuse the obligations of international leadership and our duty to remain “the last best hope of earth” for the sake of some half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems is as unpatriotic as an attachment to any other tired dogma of the past that Americans consigned to the ash heap of history.

We live in a land made of ideals, not blood and soil. We are the custodians of those ideals at home, and their champion abroad. We have done great good in the world. That leadership has had its costs, but we have become incomparably powerful and wealthy as we did. We have a moral obligation to continue in our just cause, and we would bring more than shame on ourselves if we don’t. We will not thrive in a world where our leadership and ideals are absent. We wouldn’t deserve to.

I am the luckiest guy on earth. I have served America’s cause?—?the cause of our security and the security of our friends, the cause of freedom and equal justice?—?all my adult life. I haven’t always served it well. I haven’t even always appreciated what I was serving. But among the few compensations of old age is the acuity of hindsight. I see now that I was part of something important that drew me along in its wake even when I was diverted by other interests. I was, knowingly or not, along for the ride as America made the future better than the past.

And I have enjoyed it, every single day of it, the good ones and the not so good ones. I’ve been inspired by the service of better patriots than me. I’ve seen Americans make sacrifices for our country and her causes and for people who were strangers to them but for our common humanity, sacrifices that were much harder than the service asked of me. And I’ve seen the good they have done, the lives they freed from tyranny and injustice, the hope they encouraged, the dreams they made achievable.

May God bless them. May God bless America, and give us the strength and wisdom, the generosity and compassion, to do our duty for this wondrous land, and for the world that counts on us. With all its suffering and dangers, the world still looks to the example and leadership of America to become, another, better place. What greater cause could anyone ever serve. [...]

POLITICAL ALGORITHMS

I equate Bernie Sanders w [the] Donald Trump [movement]. Both are cries for help in a rotting political system of perpetual self service rather than a political system in service of the people/greater good.

Until someone/something changes that trajectory we will see a slow but steady drumbeat for revolution from both sides.

IMO, this is an extremely dangerous time for America in which we can stumble into a major war, distracting us from what is happening at home. Besides the obvious, a question is whether that would unify us as WWII did or divide us as the Vietnam conflict did, furthering the current climate.

Put it another way: The MLK movement of non violence didn't quite fit the American ethos so along came Malcolm X and The Black Panthers. That really got the conversation going. Do you see some similarities in the ebb & flow of our current politics?

LESSON #1: THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT IS NOT A FAMILY BUSINESS.