JV Last the Bulwark makes an important point that has been driving me nuts too:

Our new health establishment is explicit about wanting to go backwards. It’s right there on the hat: Make America Healthy Again.

Again.

Meaning: America used to be “healthy” and now is not.

I’m sorry, I know we’re supposed to meet people where they are and give them a loving truth sandwich, but this is the stupidest fucking thing I’ve ever heard.

Does anyone remember what “health” looked like in America a generation or two ago? Half the country smoked. People dropped dead at 50 on the reg. Child birth was dangerous. Seatbelts were suss. Drug use was off the charts.

Dangerous communicable diseases were still around. Cancer was a death sentence. AIDS looked like an unstoppable tsunami.

Food? Do remember what grocery stores looked like in 1980? Aisles of canned vegetables, processed foods, and frozen TV dinners. Fresh produce? Good luck. That section of the Acme was a shoebox.

He goes on to list one disease and health condition after another that has been eradicated or massively reduced in just the last half century. Cancer alone has changed from an automatic death sentence to commonly treatable and it’s getting better every day. (Or was … until now.)

Yes, diabetes is a major new problem mostly due to obesity. But there are some extremely effective new drugs that Bobby Jr and his crew want to take off the market. He says people just need to “eat right.” (No word on whether they should take steroids like he does.) There was a time when that kind of thing was said to be nanny state authoritarianism but now all those people at the Trump rallies are apparently going to switch to arugula and beet juice because Bobby says they should. Sure.

. . .

No wonder Trump is screaming at the Wall St. Journal nearly every day. It is interfering with his fantasies:

The Federal Reserve’s first set of projections since Donald Trump’s inauguration underscored—in the central bank’s understated and technocratic fashion—just how much the president’s plans to press ahead with widespread tariffs have turned the economic outlook on its head.

Months ago, policymakers presumed they would spend 2025 gradually cutting rates to keep inflation heading down without a big rise in joblessness to achieve the so-called soft landing. The latest projections point to the prospect that tariffs covering a swath of goods and materials will send up prices while sapping investment, sentiment and growth, at least in the short run.

“We now have inflation coming in from an exogenous source, but the underlying inflationary picture before that was basically 2½% inflation, 2% growth and 4% unemployment,” said Fed Chair Jerome Powell on Wednesday.

Officials projected weaker growth, higher unemployment and higher inflation than they had anticipated in December. Moreover, nearly all officials judged that if their forecasts were to be proven wrong, it would be in the direction of even softer growth, more joblessness and firmer price growth.

Everyone on Wall St and all the CEOs know that these tariff threats are ridiculous , that the DOGE cuts are chaotic and destructive, not to mention that foreign relations are as unstable as they’ve been in modern memory. But most of them are going along with it and I’m starting to believe they’ve bought into the “Magical Trump” theory: he beat all the odds despite being a criminal moron slathered in orange make-up with the personality of a used car salesman which means he must be doing something right. So they’ve discarded reality to join the MAGA delusion.

The Fed doesn’t seem to have bought into that. Maybe they will eventually. More likely Trump is going to fire Powell or, at the very least, replace him with a flunky when his term is up next year. But in the meantime, reality still exists in one corner of our official society.

Vivian Jenna Wilson, Elon Musk’s eldest child, has spoken out publicly about her father, saying that Musk “definitely [did] a Nazi salute” at two rallies in January and that he is part of a White House that’s “cartoonishly evil”.

In a new interview with Teen Vogue, her second interview with the media since she publicly denounced her father last year, Wilson, 20, said that the things her father has been doing in the federal government were “fucking cringe”.

“The Nazi salute shit was insane. Honey, we’re going to call a fig a fig, and we’re going to call a Nazi salute what it was,” Wilson said. “That shit was definitely a Nazi salute.”

Wilson entered the public eye last year after Musk spoke about her in a podcast, saying that he had been “tricked” into signing documents so that Wilson, who was 16 at the time, could receive gender-affirming medical treatment.

. . .

A lesson in what happens when you elect a criminal:

From the start of his second term, President Donald Trump and his administration signaled a willingness — even a desire — to flout the law in their quest to overhaul the federal government.

And while the wheels of justice turn slowly, less than two months later a procession of judges have already ruled the administration has done exactly that.

In more than a dozen cases — and in three major rulings this week alone — a federal judge has ruled that the administration either has violated the law or has probably done so.

The total works out to one such finding about every four days.

And the pace is speeding up.

The most interesting thing about this is, as I posted yesterday, this is coming from liberal, centrist and conservative judges, across the board. Just as it was in the post 2020 election period he’s not finding any joy in court. Yet, anyway. I suppose that’s why the threats against judges are picking up:

Elon Musk has made the maximum allowable donation to Republican members of Congress who support impeaching federal judges who are impeding actions taken by President Trump, according to five people with knowledge of the matter.

Mr. Musk has given what had been until recently the legal maximum hard-dollar donation — $6,600 — to the campaigns of seven Republicans who have either endorsed judicial impeachments or called for some form of “action” in response to recent rulings against the Trump administration, including a weekend decision by Judge James E. Boasberg of Federal District Court in Washington.

On Saturday, Judge Boasberg ordered the administration to turn around planes carrying alleged Venezuelan gang members to El Salvador and return them to the United States. The administration did not comply with that order, prompting concerns about a constitutional showdown.

Mr. Trump subsequently said on social media that Judge Boasberg should be impeached.Mr. Musk contributed on Wednesday to Representatives Eli Crane of Arizona, Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Andy Ogles of Tennessee, Andrew Clyde of Georgia, Derrick Van Orden of Wisconsin and Brandon Gill of Texas. He also donated to Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, according to two of the people briefed on the matter.

He’s playing the refs (or nobody told him how impeachment works) but it is stupid. Judges know as well as we do that they don’t have the votes to convict. But I think Elon’s in his feelings right now and just wants to thank his friends.

Talking Points Memo has been following the story of DOGE thugs breaking into the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) in Washington, D.C. TPM has coverage here, and here after a court hearing

But first, this blurb from The Independent on Wednesday’s hearing:

In a hearing in Washington, D.C., Wednesday, District Judge Beryl Howell asked Justice Department attorneys whether Donald Trump’s administration could enforce his executive order seeking to shutter the agency “without using the force of guns and threats by DOGE against American citizens.”

“I mean, this conduct of using law enforcement, threatening criminal investigations, using arms of law enforcement … probably terrorizing employees and staff at the institute, when there are so many other lawful ways to accomplish the goals … why?” she said. “Just because DOGE is in a rush?”

What’s changed (escalated) in the last week is that DOGE now has now forced its way into an independent, nonprofit, national institute separate from the Executive Branch, and did it by coopting D.C. Metro Police and Inter-Con, an armed, private security force with government contracts.
Inter-Con promotional photo. Armed man with brown gloves wears Inter-Con patch.


Josh Marshall is concerned. You should be too:

I want to draw out a critical element of what happened on Monday and which we learned today. DOGE went to the private security contractor working for USIP and essentially said, you don’t have a clear legal or ethical ability to do this. But if you don’t want to lose all your federal contracts, you have to. And they did.

. . .

Americans may not give a damn about foreigners, but they’ll damn sure take their money. And do each year:

Travel and tourism is the largest single services export for the United States, accounting for 22 percent of the country’s services exports and 7 percent of all exports in 2023. The travel and tourism industry contributed $2.3 trillion to the U.S. economy in 2022 (2.97 percent of the country’s GDP), supporting 9.5 million jobs.

And the industry supports many more indirect jobs, as it does in my tourist town. Western North Carolina tourism got hit by Hurricane Helene and then by Donald Trump.

Before Donald Trump took office again in January, the U.S. Travel Association reported that according to the National Travel and Tourism Office (NTTO), “there were 66.5 million international visits the U.S. in 2023, reflecting 31% annual growth, but still at just 84% of pre-pandemic inbound visitation levels.” International travel to the U.S. was booming:

International visitors are vital to the U.S. economy. Visitors from many countries spend an average of over $4,000 per visit, and collectively contribute $155 billion in U.S. travel spending every year. International visits also help balance the U.S. trade deficit, as travel spending is one of the biggest export services for the United States.

And after a few weeks of Trump’s trade wars and harrowing stories of foreigners being detained and abused at U.S. airports and other points of entry? Well, Charlie Pierce reports at Esquire that Trump 2.0 has “done everything except hang a sign at every port of entry reading, CLOSED: UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT.”

The Washington Post reported over the weekend:

Canadians are skipping trips to Disney World and music festivals. Europeans are eschewing U.S. national parks, and Chinese travelers are vacationing in Australia instead. International travel to the United States is expected to slide by 5 percent this year, contributing to a $64 billion shortfall for the travel industry, according to Tourism Economics. The research firm had originally forecast a 9 percent increase in foreign travel, but revised its estimate late last month to reflect “polarizing Trump Administration policies and rhetoric.”

. . .

Donald Trump and his henchmen have set out to break the legs of American democracy by making it difficult for people he hates to hire an attorney to defend themselves or sue the Trump administration. He and Musk are also, with their public statements, apparently trying to terrify federal and state judges into submission with threats that their followers will employ violence.

This could very well herald the end of our republic, transforming America into something that more closely resembles Russia or 1930s Germany than anything Hamilton or Franklin would have endorsed.

First, some background.

The Founders of our nation and the Framers of our Constitution thought they had it all figured out. For thousands of years, Europe had been ruled by warlords, popes, kings, and the morbidly rich. But now, for the first time since the failed Greek experiment three thousand years earlier, a democratic “rule by the people” might actually work.

. . .

The ground was prepared by Trump’s billionaire friends corrupting a handful of Supreme Court justices, so that body would declare in their 2010 Citizens United decision that money was the same thing as free speech, which is protected by the First Amendment. They added that “corporations are persons,” too, so big companies and even entire industries could also spend unlimited amounts of money to purchase elections for their favored politicians.

. . .

Southern Poland’s farmlands don’t conform to the rigid grids seen elsewhere. Instead, they form a mesmerizing patchwork of narrow, ribbon-like fields that evolved over centuries.

Shaped by historical land divisions, the need for road access, and even natural topography, these striking formations are similar to those found in Germany and North America.

Poland’s Unique Agricultural Patterns

From space, farmlands often appear as neatly arranged grids or circles. But in southern Poland, agriculture took a different path. Over centuries, communities formed along rivers and roads, clearing forests for farmland. As land was passed down through generations, it was divided into long, narrow strips—some only a few meters wide—creating a striking striped pattern that appears both chaotic and structured.

A satellite image captured by the OLI-2 (Operational Land Imager-2) on Landsat 9 in August 2024 highlights this unique landscape around Sułoszowa, a village of approximately 5,500 people located 25 kilometers (15 miles) northwest of Kraków. The image reveals a patchwork of ribbon-like fields radiating from a central road lined with homes. Similar clusters of narrow fields extend from other linear settlements, interspersed with dark green patches of forest, adding to the region’s distinct agricultural pattern.

. . .

A message posted on Monday to the homepage of the U.S. Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is the latest exhibit in the Trump administration’s continued disregard for basic cybersecurity protections. The message instructed recently-fired CISA employees to get in touch so they can be rehired and then immediately placed on leave, asking employees to send their Social Security number or date of birth in a password-protected email attachment — presumably with the password needed to view the file included in the body of the email.

The homepage of cisa.gov as it appeared on Monday and Tuesday afternoon.

On March 13, a Maryland district court judge ordered the Trump administration to reinstate more than 130 probationary CISA employees who were fired last month. On Monday, the administration announced that those dismissed employees would be reinstated but placed on paid administrative leave. They are among nearly 25,000 fired federal workers who are in the process of being rehired.

A notice covering the CISA homepage said the administration is making every effort to contact those who were unlawfully fired in mid-February.


“Please provide a password protected attachment that provides your full name, your dates of employment (including date of termination), and one other identifying factor such as date of birth or social security number,” the message reads. “Please, to the extent that it is available, attach any termination notice.”

The message didn’t specify how affected CISA employees should share the password for any attached files, so the implicit expectation is that employees should just include the plaintext password in their message.

Email is about as secure as a postcard sent through the mail, because anyone who manages to intercept the missive anywhere along its path of delivery can likely read it. In security terms, that’s the equivalent of encrypting sensitive data while also attaching the secret key needed to view the information.

. . .