2/27/2026

 Friday, February 27, 026

1933 Nazi Germany's parliament building, the Reichstag, was destroyed by fire, possibly set by the Nazis, who blamed and executed Dutch communist Marinus van der Lubbe

1962 South Vietnam President Ngô Đình Diệm's palace was bombed by dissident air pilots in a failed assassination attempt

1968 Walter Cronkite delivered a scathing editorial on America's chances of winning in Vietnam 

1973 American Indian Movement occupied Wounded Knee in South Dakota

2014 Unmarked Russia special forces invaded neighboring Crimea, Ukraine to assist pro-Russian nationalists, occupying government buildings in preparation for annexation

2025  The Trump administration banned NASA scientists and US government officials from attending the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change conference that started this week in Hangzhou, China, which are focused on the seventh IPCC Assessment Report on climate change. 

In bed at 10, awake at 2:30, up at 3:00.   32/22/53/31.  03"10  207.2  124/68/59  94.

Morning meds and 6th half-dose of Bisoprolol at 7 a.m.  Trulicity injection at 10 a.m.

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born.

Trump, seeking executive power over elections, is urged to declare emergency, an article in this morning's Washington Post by Isaac Arnsdorf.  Excerpts:

Pro-Trump activists who say they are in coordination with the White House are circulating a 17-page draft executive order that claims China interfered in the 2020 election as a basis to declare a national emergency that would unlock extraordinary presidential power over voting.

President Donald Trump has repeatedly previewed a plan to mandate voter ID and ban mail ballots in November’s midterm elections, and the activists expect their draft will figure into Trump’s promised executive order on the issue. The White House declined to elaborate on Trump’s plans.

“Under the Constitution, it’s the legislatures and states that really control how a state conducts its elections, and the president doesn’t have any power to do that,” said Peter Ticktin, a Florida lawyer who is advocating for the draft executive order. Ticktin attended the New York Military Academy with Trump and was part of his legal team that filed an unsuccessful 2022 lawsuit accusing Democrats of conspiring to damage him with allegations that his 2016 campaign colluded with Russia.

“But here we have a situation where the president is aware that there are foreign interests that are interfering in our election processes,” Ticktin went on. “That causes a national emergency where the president has to be able to deal with it.”

The emergency would empower the president to ban mail ballots and voting machines as the vectors of foreign interference, Ticktin argued.

The idea of claiming emergency executive powers based on allegations of foreign interference attaches new significance to the administration’s actions to reinvestigate the 2020 election. Trump has never accepted defeat, while never finding evidence of widespread fraud. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard is leading a review of election security that officials said focuses on foreign influence.

A 2021 intelligence review concluded that China considered efforts to influence the election but did not go through with them.

. . .

“I have searched the depths of Legal Arguments not yet articulated or vetted on this subject, and will be presenting an irrefutable one in the very near future,” Trump said on social media Feb. 13. “I will be presenting them shortly, in the form of an Executive Order,” he added the same day. 

Sarah arrived this morning for a weekend visit, a first visit in months.  She returns in June.