3/20/2025

 Thursday, March 20, 2025

D+133/60

1854 Anti-slavery activists within the Whig party opposed to the Kansas-Nebraska Act formed a new Republican Party; notable politicians who switched allegiance include Abraham Lincoln, Rutherford B. Hayes, Chester A. Arthur, and Benjamin Harrison

2003 A US-led coalition launched a ground invasion of Iraq after an ultimatum for Saddam Hussein and his sons to leave Iraq expired

2018 Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman met with US President Donald Trump at the White House

2025  The first day of Spring

In bed at 9, awake and up at 5.    

Prednisone, day 333; 4 mg., day15/21; Kevzara, day 2/14; CGM, day 2/15.   2 mg. of prednisone at 5:15 a.m. and at 5 p.m.   Other meds at noon.     

Can this truly be happening before our eyes?  The latest "waste, fraud, and abuse" cancellation by the Trump-enabled Muskies is a program at Yale University to track and record the thousands of Ukrainian children forcibly removed from eastern Ukraine and resettled in Russia.  This is a part of the Republican version of the "cancel culture."   We are witnesses to a wide-scale/firehose/flood-the-zone assault on most (all?) of the values that we consider constitutive of the American character.  Right after Trump was elected  (133 days ago, notes the arithmomaniac), 'Christian'  nationalist Russell Vought, now the head of Trump's Office of Management and Budget, was interviewed by the anti-democrat (small and big "d") Tucker Carlson and said: 

The president has to move executively as fast and as aggressively as possible with a radical constitutional perspective to be able to dismantle that bureaucracy in their power centers.

 He would "dismantle" what Steve Bannon would "deconstruct": the "administrative state," which is to say, the instrumentalities through which the federal government seeks "to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity."  Laws and policies to work toward these goals are never self-executing; they require agents and agencies.  The more complex and extensive the society and economy to which the laws and policies apply, the more complex and extensive must be the agencies to implement the laws and policies.  It is hard to imagine a society and economy more complex and extensive, and with more competing interests, than the United States; hence the need for an "administrative state."  If the world in which we live were simpler, our governmental structures could be simpler, as it was in the 18th and 19th centuries.  But it's not simple which became abundantly clear in the bloody 20th century with its world wars, Cold War, Great Depression, nuclear weapons, scientific and technological advances, computerization, and competing interests in every sector of life.  Take away the rules, take away the regulations and we will revert to the world that Thucydides described, where 'the powerful do what they will and the powerless suffer what they must. That is where Trump, Musk, and Vought are leading us.  

Who are the 'wesk' who are bing hurt by these guys?  We can start with those kidnapped Ukrainian children and their families whom Yale's defunded Humanitarian Research Lab was attempting to help. But add all the school children helped by school food programs and families helped by food stamps.  Add all the women and minorities aided by civil rights and other programs that could be considered DEI programs: Blacks, Browns, Asians, Indigenous/Native Americans, handicapped, LGBTQ, the poor, and the disabled.  In attacking Medicaid, they attack not only the poor but also the middle class so any of whose parents rely on Medicaid.  In attacking and disabling environmental regulations and regulators, they hurt all of us as well as our progeny.  Trump's attacks against the news media directly threaten the 1st Amendment freedoms of speech and of the press which harms all of us. In attacking judges, lawyers, and law firms, they undermine not only their safety from right-wing crackpots but the Rule of Law itself, as well as the constitutional rights to a fair trial, represented by counsel, the right not to be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process and equal protection of law.  The right not to be whisked off the streets or out of our homes by men with badges and guns and to be transported to other states or foreign countries without a court hearing before a judge who does not answer to the president but to the law.  In trying to decimate the federal workforce, 30% of which is comprised of military veterans, and firing 70,000 to 80,000 employees of the Veterans Administration, the Trumpkins and Muskies attack veterans and their families, doing violence to Abraham Lincoln's pledge "to care for him who shall have borne the battle," the motto of the VA.

Trump, Musk, Vought, and their myrmidons are dismantling and deconstructing not merely the bureaucracy and the administrative state, but the whole apparatus of democratic self-government, the rule of law, and indeed of law enforcement through knowledgable, expert agencies.  They claim to be doing the opposite, to be restoring democracy by taking power away from unelected bureaucrats and restoring it to elected officials, i.e., the legislature and unitary executive.  They know that the effect of their efforts will be to bring us back to a world in which the strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must.  The strong = the wealthy, the plutocrats.  The weak = the rest of us.

Donald Trump and Elon Musk comprise probably the most dangerous conspiracy ever to face the United States.  The combination of Trump's malice and political power and Musk's wealth put them in a position to defeat almost any Republican legislator who fails to act in accordance with their combined wills.  They are well positioned to simply buy media outlets that oppose them, as Musk did with Twitter.  We can only hope that Musk's political unpopularity will soon rub off on Trump, as it has on Tesla sales and Musk's net worth.  We can only hope.

I say nothing here of Trump's tariffs policies, which seem to hurt almost all of us and to benefit our enemies, notably China and Russia.  To make trade enemies of the U.S. Canada, Mexico, and the EU only benefits China and Russia.  To weaken or effectively destroy NATO only benefits Russia.  For all of America's faults 133 days ago, and there were many, we were in much better shape than we are now, as we are in Matt Groening's cartoon world, Living in Hell.

Springtime for Hitler  by Mel Brooks

CHORUS:

Germany was having trouble

What a sad, sad story

Needed a new leader to restore

Its former glory

Where, oh, where was he?

Where could that man be?

We looked around and then we found

The man for you and me

LEAD TENOR STORMTROOPER:

And now it's...

Springtime for Hitler and Germany

Deutschland is happy and gay!

We're marching to a faster pace

Look out, here comes the master race!

Springtime for Hitler and Germany

Rhineland's a fine land once more!

Springtime for Hitler and Germany

Watch out, Europe

We're going on tour!

Springtime for Hitler and Germany.. 

 Shopping day.  I went up to Wal-Mart this afternoon for some grocery items and birdseed.  Then to Costco to redeem our Citibank rebate and fill up with gas.

The Iliad.  I read the whole work many years ago and greatly enjoyed it.  I pulled my copy off the shelf the other day and moved it to the bathroom for Throne Room reading and really 'got into it' again in the first couple of pages, though I can't conceive of reading the whole work again because my eyesight is so poor, at least in terms of reading.