I really like your post. Regarding this…
…one word – climate change : - )
8 Likes
My thinking on this also evolved. I originally supported a vote against the CR but came to the conclusion that a vote for the CR was the better–although terrible–place to be for five reasons. First, Musk and company would have continued dismantling the government (to the extent they are federal employees, they would be excepted from the shutdown) but without federal employees around to fix errors or report on it if they can Second, this Administration would have blamed all their and the Administration’s bad acts during the shutdown as well as the normal disasterous effects of a shutdown on Democrats. With a continuation of government, responsibility for bad acts is harder to blame on others. That would also be the news, instead of the shutdown. Third, the courts SLOW down during a shutdown, largely due to DOJ’s lack of staffing, however true that would actually be given the actual staffing of the cases addressing DOGE and other Administration actions. The courts are critical till and after the midterms. Fourth, all the bad actions being taken now everywhere would simply have continued during a shutdown. Fifth, with the likelihood of help for DC, the CR is likely the best overall budget level that could be achieved from any continued bipartisan negotations. Much as I originally wanted to exercise any power at all, it no longer seemed to me to be the better of terrible choices. Continued public resistance, excellent reporting like that at TPM, progress in court actions are the best tools. Democrats need to stop eating each other and execute a plan for the greater good.
58 Likes
The CR was a wedge issue.
3 Likes
Well put. Thanks for adding your POV.
21 Likes
I am angry with the Democratic Senators who enabled this and have no understanding of why they did it, but it’s ridiculous to say that love Trump.
8 Likes
The Military is being led by the personality quirks of cranks and weirdo, self-styled, exclusionary masculinists. Perhaps Mexico and Canada will get together and successfully invade us!
“Comments that question the qualifications and accomplishments of women in uniform are deeply disrespectful of the sacrifices these service members and their families have made for our country,” said Caroline Zier, the former deputy chief of staff to the last secretary of defense, Lloyd J Austin III, and a VoteVets senior policy adviser. “Secretary Hegseth risks alienating and undermining the women who currently serve, while decreasing the likelihood that other women look to join the military at exactly the moment when we need all qualified recruits.”
Hegseth’s office also had social sciences and DEI research axed in a memo announced in early March. The cost cutting measure will save $30m a year in Pentagon funding of internal studies, “on global migration patterns, climate change impacts, and social trends”.
In a post on X, Hegseth said: “[DoD] does not do climate change crap.
But so far, Hegseth has instead shown he’s turning the Pentagon’s gaze toward the border in Mexico, another obsession during his time on air, for the first time in over a century and to the containment of China. Ukraine, Nato and the many Pentagon cuts are in the backseat.
26 Likes
Nice storm prediction center you got there Oklahoma. Shame if something happened to it.
In the not distant past, towns in OK have been leveled by monster tornadoes. But at least they had some warning.
24 Likes
The observations Josh Marshall has made, about the demolition of government that will have happened in the intervening months & by November 2026, chill me. The political climate will be different, but the chance the administration will try to get away with screwing up the elections will be substantial. Working parts of our civilization are being broken; what will replace them has a precedent in the January 6, 2021 mob.
So – will Trump’s fake “payback” set the pattern of what happens in the coming decades in this country? Assuming there is a country?
The more the GOP screws things up, and commits crimes against the people, the harder it will be to resist the challenge, “well, why not? Why should we do anything for any of those bastards?”
David Brooks’s column at the New York Times of a couple of days ago comes to mind. To the rest of the world now comes the realization: America is a Judas.
That “western civilization” all the race-nationalists & fringe characters in Trump’s orbit is – well, first, a fraud, of course, because everything Trump does is some form of fraud – but it’s also toast. Fraud / toast. “Judeo-Christian tradition?” Same. “Well done, Judas,” sang a commenting voice in Jesus Christ, Superstar. It’s like that. All of this Trump stuff, all of it, is trying to put over an idea of a civilization built up from betrayal. Betrayal – abuse, and hazing, as well, liar-yelling at Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office, nothing the dressing-up-in-suits or the “good television” moment Trump asserted it would be did a damned thing to mask what it was – sets the pattern for everything they do. This isn’t “western civilization”; it isn’t any civilization. It’s barbarity. It’s depravity. Anyone with eyes can see there is nothing good in it, and it is undoing everything it purports to promote.
I went through a few recent opinion pieces with a friend on the phone yesterday, pieces by Thomas Friedman, by Bret Stephens, and by David Brooks, the latter two not my habitual reading in the past, and I got a review of “no, I don’t agree with anything he ever says, I don’t bother to read his pieces now.” But those folks and so many more have eyes in their heads, ears, and none of them is stupid (I say that as a guy who doesn’t care what all the names of dainty foods are), and the chorus is – well, they’re right. Stephens, in effect: none of this is going to work. Friedman: none of this is going to work. Brooks: none of this is going to work, and oh, in the world’s [directly witnessing] perception, America is now a Judas.
What will be left, after the destruction – but the payback?
Real payback. Not the kind dreamed up by a bunch of dickheads who jump up and down together and dream up enemies who are at once vulnerable and popular to attack, and who take “retribution” on the innocent and the just?
What will be left?
If it isn’t the darkest variety of disorganized breakdown of the USA as a geopolitical entity, it will entail what Jamelle Bouie gestures towards, a reappraisal of the Constitution and how we govern ourselves.
This is a disaster. With so many pieces being shredded, wood-chipped, murdered by chainsaw, and so much ugly theater being made of it, we have our own agency and capacity to organize in our hands, and our moral responsibilities, but the world in which we form and act on them is on its way to hell, and we will be lucky if we don’t find ourselves in a ruined country undergoing unmanageable catastrophe.
Zakaria, who has departed from the kind of sense I hew to for quite some time now, gets it right when he says Trump is starting our country’s answer to Mao’s Cultural Revolution.
No one is taking me out to any fields, or re-educating me. No one.
Not while I’m breathing, they won’t.
34 Likes
Not so much cultural revolution as Russia post-collapse circa 1991. Americans domestically (non-expats) must view the situation from inside the bubble. Empty commercial real estate, layoffs, sticky markets, uncertainty about pensions, healthcare, food supply, money. This process probably grinds on for several years and will be quite traumatizing. Don’t expect to hit bottom for two or three years.
20 Likes
So my question to Pete: “If climate change is a hoax, and the the US Military does not have to research or prepare for it, where are you going to move all those US Navy bases when their facilities are flooded or damaged?”
(I presume he will say to island areas away from the coast. 
)
18 Likes
I don’t get St. Kitts and Nevis, and Dominica being on that list.
9 Likes
Good luck, Pete.
Your favorite president’s isolationist policy is making China the world leader. It’s the science “crap”, stupid.
By the way, Pete, you might want to check the “height above sea level” for all your naval bases and landing fields.
19 Likes
Thank you for that gift of relief.
8 Likes
Marcy included a gift link to this Kristoff piece. What happened to USAID is shameful.
23 Likes
Racial profiling, not White enough to enter the US. From Wiki:
St. Kitts and Nevis:
92.5% African
3% multiracial
2.1% European
1.6% Indian
0.5% other
0.3% unspecified
Dominica:
75% African
19% multiracial
4% Kalinago
0.8% European or other
0.2% unspecified
22 Likes
I’m not entirely certain the United States has ever quite rid itself of “The Yellow Peril” panic.
12 Likes
Yeah. I don’t see the post-1991 post-Soviet in it. But the grinding, I think you have about right.
3 Likes
Beginning with Naval Air Station North Island at Coronado CA that is across from San Diego. It is a major installation that homeports a number of aircraft carriers, and its elevation is 16 ft.
11 Likes
Yo I just spent about 5 hours last night watching my local News weather team tracking tornadoes headed towards St Louis. First I wasn’t in the watch box on the screen, but they kept mentioning my location. Then I got put in the box, but they only talked about other areas.
I had rain, I had hail, but most importantly I got six phone messages about how my local city’s electrical workers were on stand-by and ready to restore power. The messages started 24 hours ago. And they must have charmed Mother Nature because I never had my power go out.
28 Likes
Do you think the Pacific Ocean will rise as much as the Atlantic Ocean? ; - )
7 Likes