Hats off to cartoonists who are able to crystallize a point in one or a pair of images:
I haven't written about Mike Lukovich before, but he's consistently one of my favorites... though his work almost never appears in either of my local papers.
This one ran in the Pioneer Press's Saturday cartoon round-up — a half page where they throw together about 10 cartoons of various persuasions to show they have no opinion about anything.
Misbegotten, vindictive changes afoot at the IRS will also have the effect of increasing the deficit and national debt, which is supposedly so important to fiscal hawks (usually Republicans).
Since yesterday, the Washington Post has reported that the agency "is nearing an agreement to allow immigration officials to use tax data to confirm the names and addresses of people suspected of being in the country illegally." Which means, of course, that all those undocumented people who've been paying taxes — and Social Security, Medicare, etc. — will be much less likely to pay them in the future.
The proposed agreement has alarmed career officials at the IRS, the people said, who worry that the arrangement risks abusing a narrow and seldom-used section of privacy law that’s meant to help investigators build criminal cases, not enforce criminal penalties....
If approved, the agreement would represent a significant shift in how federal agencies manage both taxpayer information and immigration enforcement. The IRS has for years reassured undocumented workers that their tax information is confidential and that it is safe for them to file income tax returns without fear of being deported.
Radley Balko said this about the agreement on BlueSky:
Using tax info to target undocumented people puts the lie to the claim that undocumented people don't pay taxes.... It's similar to detaining them at hearings and check-ins while claiming they never show up for hearings and check-ins.
Today the Post also reported (gift link, I think) that the general chaos at the IRS — mass firings and erosion of enforcement — on its own could decrease revenue by 10% this spring. That's $500 billion. "For context, the U.S. government spent $825 billion on the Defense Department in fiscal 2024."
The IRS has noticed an uptick in online chatter from individuals declaring their intention to not pay taxes this year or to aggressively claim credits and deductions for which they are ineligible, the three people said — wagering that auditors will not examine their accounts.
I am not one to care about the national debt, compared to other more tangible things like climate change. But I know many other people supposedly do.
So the fact that the Congressional Budget Office says extending the 2017 Trump tax cuts will increase the national debt by almost 50% as a percent of GDP, and increase the deficit by about $4 trillion… seems like something some of those people should care about.
But they won't care, just as they haven't cared when the debt has gone up substantially under all of the recent Republican administrations.
Faine Greenwood posted this comment about a graph posted by another person on BlueSky yesterday:
it turns out that women do in fact get uppity and strange ideas about equality when you expose them to education, which is why MAGAs hate educated women so much
This is the graph:
Later in the day, I saw another comment on the graph, by Micah @rincewind.run:
why the fascists want to completely destroy higher education, in table form
And while I don't think it's the only reason the right wants to destroy higher education, it certainly fits with their main reason: undermining their control of ways of thinking.
In the context of the various critical and too-slow legal cases challenging the Trump administration's illegal actions, Angus Johnston, a CUNY professor and historian and advocate for student organizing, had this thread today on BlueSky:
As always, not a lawyer, but one thing that leaps out at me about how things are going down in the courts right now is that the US court system is not designed to be responsive to a crisis like this one. A crisis like this one is not what it's FOR.
Courts are designed to answer small, narrow, discrete questions. But our current crisis isn't an accumulation of small, narrow, discrete questions, and trying to get the courts to solve it is like trying to empty a bucket of sand with a pair of tweezers.
The constitution has a system in place for a crisis like this, and that system is impeachment and removal from office. That's the mechanism by which this kind of a crisis is supposed to be resolved.
Removing that mechanism — as Republican congressional majorities have made it clear that there is literally nothing this administration could do that would make them even contemplate impeachment — is the equivalent of cutting a car's brake lines.
You might be able to stop such a car, there are things you can do to try to stop such a car, but the way you're supposed to stop the car — the mechanism in the car that stops it when it needs to stop — no longer exists.
And so every time a federal judge acts in a way that seems weird or unsuited to the moment, the first thing I try to remember is that they're being asked to empty a bucket of sand with a pair of tweezers.
And if you're being asked to empty a bucket of sand with a pair of tweezers, it may be hard for someone watching from a distance to tell whether you're doing a good job of it, or even really trying.
Speaking of which, how about that invasion and takeover of the United States Institute of Peace?
Look closely to see who has been trapped on this semi-trailer for a long time:
The truck and its abductee can use a wash, by the way.
I feel as though all I can do is post a bunch of the terrible news. I can't ignore it or post around it.
Starting with ICE head Tom Homan saying this morning on Fox News, in effect, "Judges? We don't need no stinking judges!" Since the Mahmoud Kahlil arrest, there have been so many other illegal deportations and detainments of people at the border that I can't keep track of them, including torture of one green card holder. And those are just ones that have been reported. The case of the 261 [supposedly] Venezuelan men, kidnapped and flown to El Salvador against a judge's explicit orders, includes a hideous video produced to feed the frenzy of MAGA supporters.
As Radley Balko said on BlueSky,
They claim they can snatch people up, put them on planes, and deport them to a country run by an authoritarian, where those people will be forced to work slave labor at an inhumane prison. All without due process, and in defiance of federal courts. The hypotheticals are over. This is the nightmare.
The rest are in no particular order...
Columbia revoked 22 degrees of students because they participated in pro-Palestinian demonstrations. And the university, along with others, has generally caved to the Trump administration in calling dissent on the Israel-Palestine question antisemitism.
Elon Musk's gutting of Social Security has begun, with cuts to staffing the phone lines and increasing requirements for online login security. Judd Legum at Popular Information documented this and summarized it on BlueSky. As we all know, seniors are among the most likely to not have good access to the internet or to be able to deal with the hurdles of two-factor authentication. And now Musk is cutting off phone access and decreasing in-person access, when the current level of in-person access is less than half of what would be needed to deal with the number of new visitors created by the requirements. All to manage imaginary "fraud" perpetrated by people who currently call in over the phone .
Oil companies are thrilled to dump the green energy commitments they made over the past years. At their annual energy summit, a spokesman said "The push for a rapid energy transition to clean power...'was doomed to fail.'"
This morning Trump posted his opinion that Biden's pardons are null and void because — get this — they were signed with the autopen.
Cartoonist Aubrey Hirsch put her brain and artistic talent to the task of explaining what the Department of Education does because she just couldn't take the misunderstandings anymore.
Compared to the other things on this list, that's good news, but it's caused by bad news... so I guess it still fits on this list.
One of the Republican Congress members who's been confronted by his constituents at a town hall in recent days is named Chuck Edwards. He represents North Carolina's 11th District, which is in the far west of the state and includes Asheville and other areas devastated by last fall's hurricane. Edwards is the guy who beat the reprehensible Madison Cawthorn in the Republican primary in 2022.
I was blissfully unaware of Edwards until I saw news about his townhall. His constituents, like those at all the others, were unhappy with Trump, Musk, and — consequently — Edwards's answers to their questions about Trump and Musk.
But the thing I keep thinking about when I see coverage of Edwards is this:
Which of these men is Chuck Edwards, and which is the Nazi Trump advisor Seb Gorka? Have they ever been seen in a room together at the same time?
Am I the only one who thinks Edwards is a dead ringer for a slightly thinner Gorka?
I've lived my entire life in a world where NATO existed. I haven't paid attention to what Article 5 is, but now I know it's the collective defense clause of the charter that says, if one member is attacked, it's an attack against all, and requires military assistance from the other members.
The only time it has been invoked was after September 11, when other NATO members joined the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan.
Of course, in a world where Russia was seen by the European members as — rightly — their biggest threat, the U.S. was the primary counter-balancing military power against it.
And now here we are with the U.S., under Trump, threatening more than one NATO country with invasion or annexation. Which would immediately abrogate the NATO treaty and deliver Vladimir Putin's top goal of destroying NATO.
I could never have imagined the U.S. threatening Canada (laughable) or Greenland/Denmark. I have generally not focused on foreign policy much since some courses in college, aside from protesting the war in Iraq.
But here we are. There are many people with the power to stop this madness but none of them show signs of doing it.
You know 350.org, whose name was created as a reference to the number of atmospheric carbon dioxide parts per million we should have as a goal for a habitable climate?
You know how the number of atmospheric carbon dioxide parts per million is reported to be going up each year?
In 2024, the average over the year was 424 parts per million.
You may also know that the measurements of those carbon dioxide levels are made at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawai’i.
Well, the Trump administration is now planning to cancel the lease of the lab that manages those readings (Washington Post gift link). The observatory itself is not on the list, but the Global Monitoring Laboratory is and the lab's staff maintains the observatory.
Data collected from Mauna Loa have been key to human understanding of global climate change since Charles David Keeling started recording atmospheric concentrations of CO2 atop the volcano in the late 1950s, the first known effort to measure the planet-warming gas over the long term.
A chart of those observations, now known as the Keeling Curve, is considered among the most reliable and sound data on greenhouse gas concentrations because the Mauna Loa Observatory is so far from the influences of any major pollution sources.
They hate facts — we already knew that — especially about climate change.
There's a lot of hard-to-believe stuff in Trumpworld, but Lee Zeldin's announcement of EPA's new purpose yesterday may top them all (New York Times gift link).
Rather than the rather clear purpose of environmental protection as the name says, Zeldin revised the agency's purpose as follows:
[he] said his agency’s mission is to “lower the cost of buying a car, heating a home and running a business.”
“From the campaign trail to Day 1 and beyond, President Trump has delivered on his promise to unleash energy dominance and lower the cost of living,” Mr. Zeldin said. “We at E.P.A. will do our part to power the great American comeback.”
Lowering the cost of something is known to lead people to do more of it. So that means even bigger cars and more of them, driven for more miles, and houses heated and cooled at higher or lower temperatures for longer periods or not made more energy efficient.
And "unleashing energy dominance," of course, means drilling for fossil fuels — not becoming dominant in renewables, because why would we want to do that? How could that possibly be part of the "great American comeback" when Zeldin said believing in climate change is a religion?
Zeldin's pronouncement would "overturn limits on soot from smokestacks that have been linked to respiratory problems in humans and premature deaths as well as restrictions on emissions of mercury." It would gut agency enforcement overall, give up on the idea of states being responsible for their wind-borne pollution, and do away with the hard-won concept of environmental justice.
The only redeeming portion of the Times story came in this single paragraph:
The announcements do not carry the force of law. In almost every case, the E.P.A. would have to undergo a lengthy process of public comment and develop environmental and economic justifications for the change.
We'll see how much those quaint-sounding practices and standards hold up in the age of Trump.
In the midst of our current national conflagration, I forgot that it was five years ago this week that we began entering into the covid lockdown.
I looked back at my calendar for this week and I see a lot of emergency meetings for the large spring event I help organize. We ended up canceling it, of course, with huge financial cost.
My calendar also shows the last city council meeting I attended in person. And the morning the cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul announced they were lowering speed limits on their side streets to 20 mph, and city arterial streets were decreased to 25 mph. A small crowd gathered outside next to one of the streets that connects the two cities as Public Works employees changed the speed limit sign. That was the last time I saw something like a crowd of people for quite a long time.
I did two last things in person. One (on Sunday, March 15!) was to help Daughter Number Three-Point-One and her partner move into the house they had bought earlier in the month. Several of her friends were also there. We all felt a little hinky about it, but it was fine. And the very last thing I did, on March 17, was get a haircut — just me and my stylist, alone in her shop.
I was the only person I knew who didn't need a haircut as the next several months wore on.
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These are my posts from March 2020... for posterity. As I reread them and looked at the dates of the posts compared to this recollection, it amused me to see how impossible it is to tell what I was doing on the various days.
