In many ways, they did it to themselves.
A few newer sources of independent media:
The Contrarian
Democracy Docket
Zeteo
All Rise News
Friday, May 2, 2025
Trump is planning his birthday parade
Somebody tell DOGE.The planning documents, obtained by the AP, are dated April 29 and 30 and have not been publicly released. They represent the Army’s most recent blueprint for its long-planned 250th anniversary festival on the National Mall and the newly added element — a large military parade that Trump has long wanted but is still being discussed.
The Army anniversary just happens to coincide with Trump’s 79th birthday on June 14.
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[I]t would likely cost tens of millions of dollars to put on a parade of that size. Costs would include the movement of military vehicles, equipment, aircraft and troops from across the country to Washington and the need to feed and house thousands of service members.
AP
I thought November 11 was Veterans Day. Will we not have a Veterans Day now?High costs halted Trump’s push for a parade in his first term, and the tanks and other heavy vehicles that are part of the Army’s latest plans have raised concerns from city officials about damage to roads.
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The plans say the parade would showcase the Army’s 250 years of service and foresee bringing in soldiers from at least 11 corps and divisions nationwide. Those could include a Stryker battalion with two companies of Stryker vehicles, a tank battalion and two companies of tanks, an infantry battalion with Bradley vehicles, Paladin artillery vehicles, Howitzers and infantry vehicles.
There would be seven Army bands and a parachute jump by the Golden Knights. And documents suggest that civilian participants would include historical vehicles and aircraft and two bands, along with people from veterans groups, military colleges and reenactor organizations.
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And it is expected that the evening parade would be followed by a concert and fireworks.
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“We want to make it into an event that the entire nation can celebrate with us,” said [Army spokesman Col. Dave] Butler. “We want Americans to know their Army and their soldiers. A parade might become part of that, and we think that will be an excellent addition to what we already have planned.”
[...]
In a Truth Social post Thursday night that did not mention the June 14 plans, Trump wrote, “We are going to start celebrating our victories again!” He vowed to rename May 8, now known as Victory in Europe Day, as “Victory Day for World War II,” and to change November 11, Veterans Day, to “Victory Day for World War I.”
What?According to the plan, the parade would be classified as a national special security event.
And what else will be happening on June 14?
In DC, the Army parade can just march right down to the protest and haul people off.
Blank sailings
If they realize there aren’t enough bookings to justify a container ship running its standard route, the company will “blank” the sailing, combining the goods that were supposed to be on that ship with those traveling later in the week.
This is normal shipping stuff. But not this month. As the effects of President Donald Trump’s new tariffs on foreign goods—and the trade war they’ve ignited—set in, many shippers who usually send goods across the Pacific Ocean have paused or canceled their shipments. Data from the supply-chain research firm Sea-Intelligence shows that blank sailings to the US’s West Coast spiked 13 percent this week, and is due to jump to 28 percent the week after. The Port of Los Angeles, the nation’s largest, expects 17 total blank sailings in May, which means the port will lose 224,000 “twenty-foot equivalent units of capacity,” the standard metric used to measure the contents in one container. In total, the port’s data shows, import volumes will be down 31 percent next week compared to the same week last year.
That means a lot of stuff once bound for the US is no longer coming—and an especially lot of that stuff is from China. This is the unusual part. “This is very extreme,” says Simon Heaney, the senior manager of container research at Drewry, a maritime research and advisory firm. “It’s unprecedented in the history of containerization.” The blank sailings, he says, are “an early canary in the coal mine."
Wired
MAGA: Back to the dark ages
We don't need no steenkeen science.
Agency priorities.
Also, we don't need no steenkeen doctors.
The Trump regime is going to set America back decades. Our best and brightest are going to leave the country to work elsewhere.
Did John Fetterman recover or go 51/50?
I can't read that article due to a paywall. But...
Six senior staffers have resigned from the office of Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., in recent months, citing frustration over his unwavering support for Israel following the Hamas Oct. 7 terror attack. The departures, which include top communications officials, have fueled speculation about internal dissatisfaction with the senator’s shifting political priorities.
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“This is a guy who came in talking about being a champion for labor, and he’s gone pretty quiet on it,” said a former campaign staffer. “Now, he’s essentially helping Republicans frame bipartisan efforts in their favor.”
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Amid these shifts, Fetterman’s office has struggled to retain and recruit staff. The communications director role has seen multiple turnovers within a year, and sources indicate that hiring experienced Democratic staffers in Washington has become increasingly difficult.
YNet News
The departures come one month after Carrie Adams left as Fetterman's communications director. She had garnered attention when she was quoted in a Free Press article disagreeing with the senator on Israel and the war in Gaza. That followed Fetterman losing three of his top communications staffers last March, before his chief-of-staff, Adam Jentleson, stepped down.
NBC
Perhaps the problem is more than his stance on Israel.
Jesus Christ, Israel
Palestine, Lebanon, now on Syria as a warning.
It marks Israel’s second strike on Syria in 48 hours.
Israel has reportedly been lobbying Washington with a plan for regime change in Syria
Israel said it carried out a strike in Syria against "an extremist group" that attacked members of the Druze community, following through on a promise to defend the minority group as deadly sectarian violence spread near Damascus on Wednesday.
A Syrian Foreign Ministry statement rejected "all forms of foreign intervention" in Syria's internal affairs, without mentioning Israel, and declared Syria's commitment to protecting all Syrian groups "including the noble Druze sect."
[...]
In a statement, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Israel Katz said the Israeli military had carried out "a warning operation and struck an extremist group" as it prepared to continue an attack on Druze in Sahnaya.
"At the same time, a message was passed on to the Syrian regime - Israel expects it to act in order to prevent harm to the Druze," they said.
Reuters
Thursday, May 1, 2025
Jesus Tapdancing Christ.For the past several months, the U.S. military has been carrying out a bombing campaign in Yemen ostensibly aimed at forcing the militant group Ansar Allah, also known as the Houthis, to stop their military intervention on behalf of Palestinians under Israeli assault in Gaza. This campaign has conducted strikes against more than 800 targets, as well as verified claims of civilian harm, including, most recently, a strike against a detention facility housing African migrants that killed dozens of people.
[...]
[S]erious allegations have emerged that the U.S. military has been relying, in part, on anonymous X accounts who post coordinates that they dubiously claim contain military assets.
This week, U.S. warplanes bombed a location alleged by two such amateur open-source intelligence accounts to be a Houthi stronghold, killing innocent bystanders in the process.
A Twitter account—operated by an individual whose bio says they are based in the Netherlands, using the handle @VleckieHond—apologized this week after the U.S. struck coordinates she erroneously suggested, in early April, were the location of an underground Houthi military position; it was not a military site. “Allright, time for me to go through the mud,” Vleckie posted. “Based on satellite imagery I'd marked this quarry as an underground base, and tweeted is out as such. I'm fairly certain Centcom doesn't take their targeting data from Twitter, but this still is a very severe mistake.” Vleckie had highlighted the coordinates in a thread that claimed to have uncovered a Houthi base, and they had relied, in part, on a secondary account, @Galal_Alsalahi, whose bio suggests they are based in Houston. That account, which is hostile to the Houthis, claimed to have discovered a Houthi missile launcher at the coordinates.
The strike that took place on April 28 reportedly killed eight civilians in their homes on the outskirts of the capital of Sana’a. Vleckie’s reading of satellite imagery, the account later said, was incomplete—they said they had privately marked the target as only “possible”—and they would strive to do better in the future, while posting a screenshot of a 500 Euro donation to charity that she had made as penance. “I should never have posted it,” they added.
[...]
To be sure, it may be a mere coincidence that the amateur sleuths identified the location before CENTCOM struck it, but the account used for the Sana’a strike is known to officials in the military, increasing the potential likelihood that it was relied on—at least, in part—for the tragic targeting.
Dropsite News
SCOTUS on notice
Countdown to Trump and his acolytes calling for Judge Rodriguez to be impeached.U.S. District Court Judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr. is the first judge to rule that the Alien Enemies Act cannot be used against people who, the Republican administration claims, are gang members invading the United States. Rodriguez said he wouldn't interfere with the government's right to deport people in the country illegally through other means, but it could not rely on the 227-year-old law to do so.
“Neither the Court nor the parties question that the Executive Branch can direct the detention and removal of aliens who engage in criminal activity in the United States,” wrote Rodriguez, who was nominated by Trump in 2018. But, the judge said, "the President’s invocation of the AEA through the Proclamation exceeds the scope of the statute and is contrary to the plain, ordinary meaning of the statute’s terms.”
Atlanta Journal Consitution
UPDATE 05/02/2025:If the administration appeals, it would go first to the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. That is among the nation’s most conservative appeals courts and it also has ruled against what it saw as overreach on immigration matters by both the Obama and Biden administrations.
This particular case concerns individuals who are detained in that district—so in the Southern District of Texas. And that’s significant, and partially a result of the fact that the Supreme Court held that these challenges to the Alien Enemies Act had to proceed via habeas petitions. And so it’s in part because of that procedural posture that the district court said this ruling just applies to individuals who are being detained in the jurisdiction.
Of course, the Southern District of Texas is not the only place where the administration is detaining people and from where it might try to then summarily expel them to El Salvador. There’s still a ton of moving parts in this litigation. Another district court in the District of Colorado also concluded that individuals who were detained there could not be expelled under the Alien Enemies Act because the administration’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act was illegal. There are a few other temporary restraining orders that are in place: one in New York, another in the District of Massachusetts.
[...]
So it’s very possible we will soon get rulings from those judges that review the underlying merits about whether the administration can use the Alien Enemies Act at all in those jurisdiction, at least as applied to those individuals subject to the proclamation. But because the district judge issued a preliminary injunction, in this case the government can appeal that to the Fifth Circuit.
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And so it’s possible this case will get up to the U.S. Supreme Court shadow docket rather quickly just as a request to stay that is put on hold this preliminary injunction ruling.
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Again, there are so many different immigration detention facilities that the government still has the power to shuffle people around a fair amount. Some of the most recent horrifying expulsions we read about were carried out from Louisiana; those were the instances where the administration sent U.S. citizens to Honduras. But this is just the patchwork landscape that the Supreme Court has created.
[...]
I worry that people will give the Supreme Court a little bit too much credit for ruling against the Trump administration in a few cases as that administration’s popularity just plummets and ignore the ways in which the Supreme Court is furthering the administration’s ideological agenda in other cases and the ways in which they paved the way for the Trump administration in the first place.
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[W]here did the president get this crazy idea that he is above the law and has unreviewable authority? He got it from his daddy Chief Justice Roberts and all of those guys.
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[This] is one of the first cases that actually rules on whether the administration can use the Alien Enemies Act for this group of people at all. Thus far, the vast, vast majority of the rulings on these matters—again, except for that District of Colorado ruling—have been such preliminary relief that the district courts have not yet had occasion to really examine the underlying merits of the claims, that the administration just can’t use the Alien Enemies Act for this reason at all.
[...]
Donald Trump is basically invoking this idea of emergencies and exceptions to assert extraordinary powers. Here, he’s basically claiming there is a foreign invasion and incursion, therefore [he] can use this summary removal deportation procedure to remove and expel people under other processes that are basically less burdensome on the executive branch. In the cases of tariffs, he’s arguing there is some fentanyl crisis that warrants basically crashing the U.S. economy and the global economy. So there are a host of instances where he’s basically saying, There are emergencies that give me extraordinary powers, therefore no one can examine my powers. And this is just one example. And so it is heartening to have a district judge saying, Actually, that’s not how this works.
New Republic
Fallguy for Signalgate gets consolation prize
Four jobs at once. Are any of them getting the time they require?Mike Waltz is out as President Donald Trump's national security adviser and is instead his new nominee for ambassador to the United Nations in a major shake-up of Trump's national security team.
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The position requires Senate confirmation.
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Trump previously picked U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-New York, for the UN ambassadorship, but she withdrew her nomination when a series of special elections jeopardized Republicans' slim majority in the House.
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Yet behind the scenes, the embarrassing mishap, which even Trump started referring to as "Signalgate," took a toll on the relationship between Trump and Waltz, a former Republican congressman from Florida.
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Trump said that Secretary of State Marco Rubio would serve as national security adviser on an interim basis while he continues to lead the State Department.
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Rubio is also serving as acting administrator of the United States Agency for International Development, after Trump gutted the agency, as well as acting archivist of the United States.
USA Today
Waltz' deputy, Alex Wong, is out. SOL, I guess. It was only a matter of time before Trump started firing people. 101 (or is it 102?) days.
UPDATE 06:51 pm:
Maybe this is why he got fired.
Police State
Since Trump took office, the DOJ froze all work on pending police misconduct investigations, including high-profile work in places like Minneapolis, where an officer murdered George Floyd, and Lexington, Kentucky, where a SWAT team killed Breonna Taylor.
Trump has also dismantled the agency tasked with oversight of the Department of Homeland Security, Jessica Piskho writes. Considering the recent high-profile errors, abuses, and violence of ICE and Border Patrol agents, it seems highly convenient that Trump eliminated checks on their power.
Demnocracy Docket
UPDATE 05/02/2025:
Burn it all down
For the umpteenth time, they don't actually care about babies AFTER they're born. They are not pro-life, only anti-abortion.
Why do RFKJ and the rest of the Trump administration hate the world? They're overwhelmingly from the privileged class. What has the world ever denied them? Is it because, despite their feeling of entitlement, the world doesn't like them?
May Day
Started here, but we don't celebrate it. We should.
Have you found your local May Day National Day of Action protest site?
Wednesday, April 30, 2025
North Carolina is seriously schizophrenic
Two days ago, a 3-panel court blocked this shit.
UPDATE 05/01/2025:
North Carolina auditor Dave Boliek (R) appointed a GOP majority to the State Board of Elections after an appeals court allowed a law that took away appointment power from Gov. Josh Stein (D) to take effect. The new Republican members could put the board in the service of the party’s effort to overturn its loss in the state’s Supreme Court race.
Democracy Docket
Court rules against DOGE getting SSA data
I just feel like they were messing in every agency, and if they wanted to get into the computer systems, they probably already have. It may be illegal, but what do they care about that?
Suck it, MAGA
Haha. I've seen this picture numerous times. It's the first time I've noticed the toy cars are stretch limos.
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