Don’t get distracted. Don’t get overwhelmed. Don’t get paralyzed and pulled into the chaos that President Trump and his allies are purposely creating with the volume and speed of executive orders; the effort to dismantle the federal government ...All of this is intended to keep the country on its back heel so President Trump can blaze ahead in his drive for maximum executive power, so no one can stop the audacious, ill-conceived and frequently illegal agenda being advanced by his administration. For goodness sake, don’t tune out.
-NY Times Editorial today
If we can assert information is power then Americans have been incredibly disempowered in just the last 24 hours. What is it that the Trump fascists don't want you to know, to absorb or to learn? Why the need to demolish information like these reprobates are demolishing agencies of the federal government, as well as critical funding? E.g.
NIH cuts billions of dollars in biomedical funding
We don't know but the signs are alarming and it is past time for Americans to wake up to what this felon-guided administration is up to.
More than 8,000 web pages across more than a dozen U.S. government websites have been taken down since Friday afternoon, a New York Times analysis has found, as federal agencies rush to heed Traitor Trump’s orders targeting diversity initiatives and “gender ideology.”
To give you a perspective: the purges have removed information about vaccines, veterans’ care, hate crimes and scientific research, among many other topics. Doctors, researchers and other professionals often rely on such government data and advisories. Some government agencies appear to have removed entire sections of their websites, while others are missing only a handful of pages.
Among the pages that have been taken down:
(The links are to archived versions.)
More than 3,000 pages from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, including a thousand research articles filed under preventing chronic disease, S.T.D. treatment guidelines, information about Alzheimer’s warning signs, overdose prevention training and vaccine guidelines for pregnant people (the use of the phrase “pregnant people” could have contributed to its removal).
More than 3,000 pages from the Census Bureau, the vast majority of which are articles filed under research and methodology. Other missing pages include data stewardship policies and documentation for several data sets and surveys.
More than 1,000 pages from the Office of Justice Programs, including a feature on teenage dating violence and a blog post about grants that have gone toward combating hate crimes.
More than 200 pages from Head Start, a program for low-income children, including advice on helping families establish routines and videos about preventing postpartum depression.
More than 180 pages from the Department of Justice, including all state-level hate crime data and seven pages discussing anti-L.G.B.T.Q. hate crimes.
Close to 150 pages from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, including more than 50 press announcements about the use of the National Disaster Distress Helpline in the aftermath of shootings or natural disasters.
More than 100 pages from the Food and Drug Administration, including more than 60 regulatory guidelines on topics such as increasing diversity in clinical trials and the potential for addiction and abuse in drug trials.
Almost 50 research papers from the Office of Scientific and Technical Information. The removed papers span multiple fields, including optics, chemistry and experimental medicine.
More than 25 pages from the Internal Revenue Service, including the transcript of a video titled “Here’s how to avoid I.R.S. penalties and interest” and the form private schools must submit annually to certify that they have not engaged in racially discriminatory behavior.
20 web pages from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, including a page detailing the organization’s zero tolerance harassment policy.
18 pages from the Health Resources and Services Administration, including a tool kit to care for women with opioid addictions and an FAQ about the Mpox vaccine.
18 pages from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, including pages about veterans’ innovation and entrepreneurship and a program to teach high schoolers about intellectual property.
Eight pages from the Department of the Interior, including environmental policy initiatives (the phrase “environmental justice” may have contributed to the removal of some pages).
No sooner did Donald Trump take the oath of office than he immediately took a wrecking ball to government agencies and programs that protect nearly every aspect of Americans’ lives.
States, public interest organizations, schools, doctors, unions, immigrants, federal workers and individuals have filed more than 60 lawsuits challenging Trump’s legal authority to take these actions. At least nine judges throughout the country have temporarily halted several of them.
Courts have put temporary holds on Trump’s attempts to: end birthright citizenship for children of undocumented immigrants, freeze billions of dollars in federal spending appropriated by Congress, transfer incarcerated transgender women to men’s prisons, remove scientific data from the websites of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration, give his de facto co-president Elon Musk unfettered access to sensitive Treasury Department records, and put 2,200 United States Agency for International Development (USAID) employees on leave.
— from Robert Reich's Substack
He is the most lawless president in American history.
He’s allowed Musk’s rats unfettered access to the Treasury’s payments system. Banned birthright citizenship. Refused to spend money appropriated by Congress. Closed independent agencies without Congress’s approval. Substituted political loyalists for civil servants. Unleashed the military on civilians. And on it goes.
Republican lawmakers won’t restrain him. In one of the most shameful apologia for dictatorship I’ve ever heard coming from a public official, Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina admits that much of what Trump is doing “runs afoul of the Constitution in the strictest sense.” But, Tillis adds, “nobody should bellyache about that.”
We shouldn’t bellyache about Trump’s torching the Constitution?
As Trump’s marauding continues, America's last defense is the federal courts. But the big story here (which hasn’t received nearly the attention it deserves) is that the Trump-Vance-Musk regime is ignoring the courts.
On Sunday, Vice President JD Vance declared that “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”
This is bonkers. In our system of government, it’s up to the courts to determine whether the president is using his power “legitimately,” not the president.
Consider Trump’s freeze on all federal spending. Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution gives Congress the power to appropriate money, not the president.
So, JD Vance is now saying that he and Trump don’t have to obey federal judges, tweeting, “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.” This is how autocrats run things; it’s an extraordinarily dangerous moment.
It was Tuesday, July 17, 1787 and the men writing the Constitution had convened in Philadelphia to debate the separation of powers between the Congress, the presidency, and the courts. They drew their inspiration for that day from French philosopher Charles de Montesquieu, whose 1748 book The Spirit of the Laws had taken the New World and the Framers of the Constitution by storm.
In it, Montesquieu pointed out the absolute necessity of having three relatively co-equal branches of government, each with separate authorities, to prevent any one branch from seizing too much power and ending a nation’s democracy. In The Spirit of Laws, he laid it out unambiguously:
And, so, it begins—again! Only this time, with new vigor, improved efficiency, and an all-encompassing agenda. Following his four-year layoff from 2020-24, in which he licked his wounds while still dominating the media, Donald Trump’s second presidency has already witnessed a blizzard of executive orders, pardons for fascists and criminals, promises to roll back the welfare state, overt threats to American democracy, and actions that endanger the well-being of the planet. This flurry of activity reflects the sobering truth that, while enough intelligent people expected him to win the election of 2024, no one believed that he would win like he did.
Trump will undoubtedly attempt to enhance his authoritarian aspirations by subordinating other branches of power to his will, inspire his base in civil society, and then, in turn, employ it to increase pressure on governmental institutions in his behalf. This might produce a transition to fascism, but to claim that fascism has taken over the United States is a drastic oversimplification. This empties the word of meaning. We are not yet living in either an authoritarian dictatorship or a “party-state”—and resistance is still possible. America’s democratic institutions and traditions are stronger than those in Italy following World War I or in the Weimar Republic. Institutional checks and balances still exist, though they are under attack, and nominal respect for our Constitution remains.
And:
by Rivera Sun | January 23, 2025 - 6:14am | permalink
If it launched with a Nazi salute … where do you think it ends?
On Monday, January 20th in the Capitol Rotunda, tech billionaire Elon Musk threw what appeared to be a Nazi saluteduring the inauguration of Donald Trump as US president. In case we missed it (or misinterpreted it), he made the emphatic gesture again.
The lame explanations offered for it must be roundly rejected. It doesn’t matter if Musk genuinely intended that gesture to have another meaning. Neo-Nazis were swift to celebrate it. And there’s no one on the planet who doesn’t know its symbolism.
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