Not-so-common Sense
The climate in the world today is generally tense.
So many of our leaders have lost their common sense––
basing their decisions just on thoughts of recompense.
For all of you who sit there, balanced on the fence
with regrets that your thinking formerly was dense,
please do better thinking as you vote forever hence
For Sunday Poser #236: Common Sense
From Heather Cox Richardson via Letters from an American
Today the story broke that a long-neglected document held by Harvard University Law School, believed to be a cheap copy of the Magna Carta, is in fact the real document. More than 700 years ago, the Magna Carta, or Great Charter, established the concept that kings must answer to the law. (If you wonder what relevance this has to the America of today, please be sure to read the last two paragraphs, printed in bold at the end of this post)
King John of England and a group of rebel barons agreed to the terms of the document on June 15, 1215, at Runnymede, a meadow a little less than an hour from London near the River Thames. After the king had raised taxes, barons rebelled, insisting that he was violating established custom. There were rumors of a plot to murder the king, and the barons armed themselves.
Those two armed camps met at Runnymede, where negotiators for the king and the barons hammered out a document with 63 clauses, mostly relating to feudal customs and the way the justice system would operate. But the document also began to articulate the principles central to modern democracies. The Magna Carta established the writ of habeas corpus—a prohibition on unlawful imprisonment—and the concept of the right to trial by jury.
Famously, it put into writing that: “No free man shall be seized, imprisoned, dispossessed, outlawed, exiled or ruined in any way, nor in any way proceeded against, except by the lawful judgement of his peers and the law of the land.” It also provided that “To no one will we sell, to no one will we deny or delay right or justice.”
The Magna Carta placed limits on the king’s ability to tax his subjects and established the law as an authority apart from the king. Anticipating the idea of checks and balances, it set up a council of barons to make sure the king obeyed the charter. If he did not, they could seize his lands and castles until he made amends.
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The original charter did not last. King John convinced the pope to declare the document illegal because it circumscribed the power of the monarch, and in reaction, barons fought for the rights outlined in the Magna Carta. After the death of King John in 1216, the Magna Carta was confirmed and reissued, becoming an accepted part of the understanding of British rights. In 1297, and then again in 1300, King Edward I reissued the Magna Carta and confirmed that it was part of England’s law. The copy in Harvard’s possession is from 1300. Harvard bought the document after World War II for $27.50, about $500 today. It is one of seven original copies of the 1300 Magna Carta, and in the United States of America in 2025, it is priceless. In the early 1600s, King James I and King Charles I both reasserted the power of the king. Jurist Sir Edward Coke used the Magna Carta to insist that longstanding English customs guaranteed liberties to British subjects and required the king to comply with the law. There were limits to a king’s power to tax his subjects and his power to punish them. This legal struggle was unfolding just as British subjects were colonizing the North American continent, and the charters of the new colonies echoed Coke’s arguments. The 1629 charter of the Massachusetts Bay Company, for example, established that colonists and, crucially, the children they might have in the colony, “shall have and enjoy all liberties and Immunities of free and naturall Subiects.” As constitutional scholar Mary S. Bilder notes, lawyers and political figures put into the documents of the early British settlement of North America the belief that liberties were the birthright of English subjects. That belief informed colonists’ opposition to the 1765 Stamp Act, which imposed a new tax to which they had not given their consent and called for those who violated the law to be tried not by a jury of their peers but rather in admiralty courts. The Massachusetts Assembly declared the Stamp Act to be “against the Magna Carta and the natural rights of Englishmen, and therefore, according to Lord Coke, null and void.” British politician William Pitt told Parliament: “The Americans are the sons not the bastards of England.” In September 1774, as tensions between the king and the colonists intensified, the first Continental Congress met in Philadelphia and wrote a declaration of rights and grievances, claiming the liberties guaranteed by “the principles of the English constitution, and the several charters or compacts.” Showing the unity of the colonies, the Congress published an image of 12 arms holding a column crowned by a liberty cap and resting on the words “Magna Carta.” In 1776 the colonists threw off the monarchy to establish a government based on the idea that all people must answer to the law. As Thomas Paine wrote in Common Sense: “in America the law is king. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other.” In 1776 the new states were writing their own constitutions that defended their liberties, including their protection from loss of life, liberty, or property without due process of the law. That concept went directly into the first ten amendments to the Constitution, known collectively as the Bill of Rights. The Fifth Amendment provided that no “person shall be…deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law,” and in 1868 the Fourteenth Amendment applied that principle to the states as well as the federal government, saying: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” The Harvard document is not the only Magna Carta in the U.S. In 2007, philanthropist David Rubenstein bought a 1297 copy of the Magna Carta from former presidential candidate Ross Perot. It was the only copy in the U.S., and Perot had permitted the National Archives to display it. Rubenstein bought the document for $21.3 million, hoping to keep it in the U.S. “to ensure that Americans could continue to see it, and to thereby be continuously reminded of its importance to our country.” He promptly lent it to the National Archives for public display, “as modest repayment of my debt to this country for my good fortune in being an American.” And yet the fundamental principles on which the government of the United States is based are under attack. In an interview that aired on Sunday, May 4, President Donald J. Trump told NBC’s Kristen Welker that he “didn’t know” if persons in the United States had a right to due process. When Welker reminded him that the right to due process is written into the Fifth Amendment, he said: “I don’t know. It seems—it might say that, but if you’re talking about that, then we’d have to have a million or two million or three million trials.” Musician Bruce Springsteen has no doubts about those rights, embedded as they are in the country’s DNA. At a concert in Manchester, England, yesterday, he warned: “In America, the richest men… [are]… abandoning our great allies and siding with dictators against those struggling for their freedom. They’re defunding American universities that won’t bow down to their ideological demands. They’re removing residents off American streets and, without due process of law, are deporting them to foreign detention centers and prisons. This is all happening now.” He criticized lawmakers who have “no…idea of what it means to be deeply American.” And yet, Springsteen told the crowd: “The America that I’ve sung to you about for 50 years is real and, regardless of its faults, is a great country with a great people, so we will survive this moment.” — Notes: https://apnews.com/article/harvard-magna-carta-rare-copy-97754aee08aaab65a36e49bedebd5992 https://www.parliament.uk/magnacarta/ https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-surrey-32828251 https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2010/winter/magna-carta.html https://avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century/mass03.asp Mary Sarah Bilder, Charter Constitutionalism: The Myth of Edward Coke and the Virginia Charter,” North Carolina Law Review 94 (June 2016): 1545–1592, at https://scholarship.law.unc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi https://www.archives.gov/exhibits/featured-documents/magna-carta/legacy.html https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/magna_carta https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/04/us/politics/trump-meet-the-press-interview-due-process.html https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/magna-carta-muse-and-mentor/magna-carta-and-the-us-constitution.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/15/world/europe/harvard-magna-carta-original.html https://www.forbes.com/sites/abrambrown/2014/03/31/the-man-who-owns-a-magna-carta/ https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/15/entertainment/bruce-springsteen-trump-criticism-scli-intl
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The party was on at a Saudi-backed LIV Golf tournament at the president’s Doral resort in Florida and a fund-raiser at Mar-a-Lago, even as markets tumbled.
Eric LiptonTheodore Schleifer and Zolan Kanno-Youngs
Eric Lipton reported from Trump National Doral in Miami, Theodore Schleifer from Washington, and Zolan Kanno-Youngs from Palm Beach, Fla.
The financial market meltdown was underway when President Trump boarded Air Force One on his way to Florida on Thursday for a doubleheader of sorts: a Saudi-backed golf tournament at his family’s Miami resort and a weekend of fund-raisers attracting hundreds of donors to his Palm Beach club.
It was a fresh reminder that in his second term, Mr. Trump has continued to find ways to drive business to his family-owned real-estate ventures, a practice he has sustained even when his work in Washington has caused worldwide financial turmoil.
The Trump family monetization weekend started Thursday night, as crowds began to form at both the Trump National Doral resort near Miami International Airport, and separately at his Mar-a-Lago resort 70 miles up the coast.
Mr. Trump landed on the edge of one of the golf courses in a military helicopter — just in time for a dinner at Doral. The next day, LIV Golf, the breakaway professional league backed by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, was scheduled to hold a tournament at the course for the fourth time.
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On Thursday at Mar-a-Lago, hundreds of guests gathered for the American Patriots Gala, a conservative fund-raiser that featured Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and President Javier Milei of Argentina, who told his supporters back home that he was hoping to catch up with Mr. Trump while there, seemingly unaware that Mr. Trump was double-booked at two of his family properties that night.
And that was just the weekend’s lead-up.
Mr. Trump ordered a new set of global tariffs on Wednesday from the White House using his trademark Sharpie pen, a version of which is on sale at Mar-a-Lago for $3.
The announcement set off one of the largest market crashes in American history, erasing $5 trillion in market value from companies in the S&P 500 in just two days. Mr. Trump has said his policy would reverse what he calls unfair trade practices, and that eventually the “markets are going to boom.”
On Friday, as markets continued to tumble, thousands of golf fans visited Doral, as did Eric Trump, Mr. Trump’s son, and Yasir Al-Rumayyan, the governor of Saudi Arabia’s $925 billion sovereign wealth fund. Mr. Al-Rumayyan is also the chairman of LIV Golf, and was there to see its stars compete.
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“It is a nice club,” Mr. Al-Rumayyan said as he walked around the golf course watching the players tee off.
LIV Golf — a venture intended to lift the Saudi profile worldwide even as it has burned through hundreds of millions of dollars of state funds — is styled as a daylong party, with club music pumping out of speakers lining tournament courses and machines dispensing wine and large beers. On Friday, fans watched a bit of golf and danced on the edges of the course. Others in MAGA hats walked around smoking cigars.
In short, the economic turbulence seemed far away.
“You are all looking a little too stiff!” said Matt Rogers, a LIV Golf announcer, as he yelled into a microphone, blasting his message across the greens as the first group of golfers on Friday prepared to play with dance music blaring in the background. “You need to turn this up! This is LIV Golf.”
Every room at the 643-room Trump Doral, including the $13,000-a-night presidential suite, was sold out through the weekend. Not a seat could be found at the BLT Prime steakhouse bar, where a porterhouse steak cost $130.
“This is the perfect venue,” Eric Trump said as he strolled the golf course Friday.
He had driven his father in a golf cart from the military helicopter to the resort dinner the day before, as the festivities over the big moneymaking weekend were getting underway.
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The president spent much of Friday at yet another Trump family venue, Trump International Golf Club, not far from Mar-a-Lago, sending out social media messages during the day, including, “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO GET RICH, RICHER THAN EVER BEFORE.”
By Friday night, the center of attention had shifted back to Mar-a-Lago, as Mr. Trump held another in a series of $1 million-a-head dinners at his private club in Palm Beach.
Since he was elected in November, Mr. Trump has hosted at least four of the fund-raisers, including one in December, two in March and the one Friday night, with a fifth planned for April 24.
The fund-raisers unfold in similar ways, according to people who have attended them.
Roughly 20 people gather around a candlelit table with big white flowers in the club’s “White and Gold Room” after a photo session. Mr. Trump speaks, then listens to the guests discuss their businesses, one by one. In just an hour or two, he can raise as much as $20 million — a great return on his time investment, associates say.
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Attendees at some of the post-election dinners at Mar-a-Lago hosted by MAGA Inc., one of Mr. Trump’s fund-raising political action committees, have included the casino owner Miriam Adelson, the sugar magnate Pepe Fanjul and James Taiclet, the chief executive of Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest military contractor, along with representatives from the cryptocurrency and energy industries.
On Friday, Ronald S. Lauder, the cosmetics heir, and Steve Wynn, the former casino executive, both billionaires, were among the guests at the Mar-a-Lago fund-raiser, according to two people briefed on the matter. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the event.
The dinners have been just the start. Mar-a-Lago remains a popular site for Republican candidates to host their own fund-raisers, Federal Election Commission records show. It is not clear to some Republicans why Mr. Trump has been raising money so aggressively, according to eight people involved in conservative fund-raising who have kept track of his Mr. Trump’s efforts. Never before has a president ineligible for re-election vacuumed up so much money for a super PAC.
Some of Mr. Trump’s associates believe it is prudent to fund-raise when the money is available, as corporate interests and others seek to get access to the president or make amends for perceived slights, people close to him acknowledge.
The packed agendas at the two Trump venues recalled the constant buzz and spending by lobbyists, members of Congress and foreign leaders at Trump International Hotel in Washington before the Trump family sold its lease after Mr. Trump’s first term.
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In addition to the Saudi sovereign wealth fund, top sponsors of the Doral golf tournament included Aramco, the Saudi oil company; Riyadh Air, the airline owned by the sovereign wealth fund; and TikTok, the Chinese-owned social media company whose fate Mr. Trump is helping to decide, according to a large billboard outside one of the event’s party tents.
Mr. Trump’s merchandise shops — there are at least three of them at Doral — were also doing swift business, selling everything from a $550 Trump-branded crystal-studded purse to $18 Doral-branded paperweights made in China. The store clerk said that he did not know if new tariffs on imported products would mean price increases.
Fans in the crowd said that they had traveled from as far as South Africa to attend the event. Some purchased special tickets that cost as much as $1,400 to enter exclusive party areas with free drinks and food — tickets that were sold out as of Saturday.
In interviews, tournament attendees and others said that they did not mind the disconnect between the Wall Street meltdown and the events at the Trump properties.
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“The sky is falling every day,” said Mike Atwell, a Key Largo, Fla., restaurant owner who was attending the LIV event with his wife enjoying lunch and drinks. “When you are happy, you drink. When you are sad, you drink. It all works out.”
Tyrell Davis, a 39-year-old entrepreneur spending Saturday afternoon in Palm Beach, said that he admired Mr. Trump for focusing on his own businesses while also implementing tariffs that he believed would benefit Americans.
Mr. Davis said that the United States had given away money to other countries for years while not investing in American cities, and that it only made sense Mr. Trump would continue to bolster his own businesses while in office.
“It’s all about business and money,” Mr. Davis said. “That’s what it’s all about. America is a business. It’s a corporation.”
On Saturday, as the tournament continued at Doral, Mr. Trump showed up at yet another family golf course, in Jupiter, Fla., which is holding its own, more modest tournament.
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Good news was announced by the White House staff: “The president won his second round matchup of the senior club championship today in Jupiter, Fla., and advances to the championship round on Sunday.” Reporters and photographers were prohibited from watching him play, and were held down the street at a coffee shop.
As Mr. Trump returned to Mar-a-Lago, one of his political committees sent out an offer to his followers: They could buy a signed replica of his executive order changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. The minimum contribution was $50. “I want you to have a PIECE OF HISTORY in your home,” Mr. Trump said in the solicitation.
The White House then announced that there would be no more public events on Saturday.
Maggie Haberman contributed reporting from New York.
Eric Lipton is a Times investigative reporter, who digs into a broad range of topics from Pentagon spending to toxic chemicals. More about Eric Lipton
Theodore Schleifer is a Times reporter covering billionaires and their impact on the world. More about Theodore Schleifer
Zolan Kanno-Youngs is a White House correspondent for The Times, covering President Trump and his administration. More about Zolan Kanno-Youngs
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Salve for a Damaged World
Our bruised world’s in need of magic
to soften all its edges.
Sage words to dispense shadows
and draw jumpers off of ledges.
To bring moisture to our deserts
and return our skies to blue.
To rewrite horror stories
with endings that are new.
Our distressed minds need stretching
and action is the key
to snap us out of sorrow
and set our country free.
These pictures were taken at today’s rally to protest actions by the current U.S. administration. It was held in Ajijic, Mexico and was well-attended and peaceful. Most of the attendees were U.S. expats living in Mexico.
My outing is a bit different from everyone else’s but I hope it qualifies for the Lens Artists Challenge to share our last outing.
Words for The Sunday Whirl Wordle 701 are: magic shadows key stretch sage snaps bruise edges writing blue world desert
Someone told me they didn’t vote for Trump, they voted for our country. Now time to do more for it. Get rid of this person who is dismantling it, bit by bit. If you are still unconvinced, order and read the book written by his niece!!! Available for free in ebook or audible with a trial membership on Everand.
Here is a post from Forgottenman that I hope you’ll read. It actually deals with a blog my friend Jere sent to me that I wanted to post but wanted him to check it out first. Here is his reaction and hopefully you’ll give us yours as well.:
This isn’t my usual type of post¹, and it’s hard to find the “Start” button, so I’ll plunge right in.
A couple of weeks ago, I somehow stumbled onto Mike Brock’s Notes From The Circus blog. I was not familiar with him, and I tried to read some of it, but I got bogged down in some of his philosophy-speak² – those shorthand references to concepts that (I imagine) more easily dwell in late-night sessions of a gaggle of students, scholars, philosophers huddled in the back conference room of the campus library. I bookmarked his blog to check out further another day. Today is that day.
Why today? Because that’s when Judy/Remi/LifeLessons sent me a note asking “What do you make of this??? Should I post it?” The link was to a recent post on Mike Brock’s blog! (I had not mentioned him to her previously! Yeah, even with 1400 miles between us, she and I are somehow still joined.)
(For the rest of his post and a link to Mike Brock’s frightening appraisal of current events, go here: https://okcforgottenman.wordpress.com/2025/03/09/mike-brocks-notes-from-the-circus-blog/
I’d like to know what the little post it notes said as well! (Thanks, Brad, for passing this on to me.)
How the Mighty Will One Day Fall
I would pay a pretty tuppence
to see his highness get his comeuppance.
His smug assurance, his galling preening.
He’s like a babe in need of weaning,
sucking at the teat of fame.
What other mortal needs his name
written on towers around the world?
He’s Ozymandius, stone lip curled
in cruel splendor, sure in his power
reasserted on every tower.
But remember, as he counts each coup,
how all the mighty have fallen, too.
False knights wear armor prone to tarnish.
His Midas touch will lose its varnish.
We’ll laud the day when he’ll be dumped—
That day when he’ll be over-trumped!
For: https://weeklyprompts.com/2025/02/22/weekly-prompts-the-one-day-prompt-10/
Screenshot
Maya Miller of the New York Times reported today that the congressional phone system has been jammed with tens of millions of calls from outraged constituents contacting their representatives to demand that they stand against President Donald Trump and his sidekick Elon Musk as they unilaterally dismantle the United States government and gain access to Americans’ private information. The Senate phone system usually gets about 40 calls a minute; now it is up to 1,600.
On Wednesday, Nicole Lafond of Talking Points Memo reported that Senate Republicans were not especially concerned about Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency team rampaging through the federal government, figuring that Musk won’t last long and that the courts will eventually stop him. Today, Musk posted on X: “CFPB RIP,” with a tombstone emoji. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has recovered more than $17 billion for consumers from fraudulent or predatory practices since it began in 2011.
Trump seems willing to let Musk continue to run amok through the government while he becomes a figurehead. Today he posted on his social media site that he has fired the chair and members of the board of trustees of the Kennedy Center, saying they “do not share our Vision for a Golden Age in Arts and Culture.” He promised to announce a new board, “with an amazing Chairman, DONALD J. TRUMP!” “For the Kennedy Center, THE BEST IS YET TO COME!” he wrote.
U.S. District Judge Carl J. Nichols, who was appointed by Trump in 2019, is less impressed with the direction of the Trump administration. Today, he blocked it from placing more than 2,000 employees of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) on paid leave. Trump and his allies have claimed—without evidence—that USAID is corrupt, but Steven Lee Myers and Stuart A. Thompson of the New York Times reported today that the disinformation making those claims on social media posts, for example, comes from Russia.
Senator Angus King (I-ME) took his Republican colleagues to task yesterday for their willingness to overlook the Trump administration’s attack on the U.S. Constitution. King took the floor as the Senate was considering the confirmation of Christian Nationalist Russell Vought as director of the Office of Management and Budget. Vought, a key author of Project 2025, believes the powers of the president should be virtually unchecked.
King reminded his colleagues that they had taken an oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic” and noted that the Framers recognized there could be domestic enemies to the Constitution. “Our oath was not to the Republican Party, not to the Democratic Party, not to Joe Biden, not to Donald Trump,” King said, “but…to defend the Constitution.”
“And…right now—literally at this moment—that Constitution is under the most direct and consequential assault in our nation’s history,” King said. “An assault not on a particular provision but on the essential structure of the document itself.”
Why do we have a Constitution, King asked. He read the Preamble and said: “There it is. There’s the list—ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, ensure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.” But, he pointed out, there is a paradox: the essence of a government is to give it power, but that power can be abused to hurt the very citizens who granted it. “Who will guard the guardians?” King asked.
The Framers were “deep students of history and…human nature. And they had just won a lengthy and brutal war against the abuses inherent in concentrated governmental power,” King said. “The universal principle of human nature they understood was this: power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
How did the Framers answer the question of who will guard the guardians? King explained that they built into our system regular elections to return the control of the government to the people on a regular basis. They also deliberately divided power between the different branches and levels of government.
“This is important,” King said. “The cumbersomeness, the slowness, the clumsiness is built into our system. The framers were so fearful of concentrated power that they designed a system that would be hard to operate. And the heart of it was the separation of power between various parts of the government. The whole idea, the whole idea was that no part of the government, no one person, no one institution had or could ever have a monopoly on power.”
“Why? Because it’s dangerous. History and human nature tells us that. This division of power, as annoying and inefficient as it can be,… is an essential feature of the system, not a bug. It’s an essential, basic feature of the system, designed to protect our freedoms.”
The system of government “contrasts with the normal structure of a private business, where authority is purposefully concentrated, allowing swift and sometimes arbitrary action. But a private business does not have the army, and the President of the United States is not the CEO of America.”
In the government, “[p]ower is shared, principally between the president and this body, this Congress, both houses…. [T]his herky-jerkiness…this unwieldy structure is the whole idea,… designed to protect us from the…inevitable abuse of an authoritarian state.”
Vought, King said, is “one of the ringleaders of the assault on our Constitution. He believes in a presidency of virtually unlimited powers.” He “espouses the discredited and illegal theory that the president has the power to selectively impound funds appropriated by Congress, thereby rendering the famous power of the purse a nullity.” King said he was “really worried about…the structural implications for our freedom and government of what’s happening here…. Project 2025 is nothing less than a blueprint for the shredding of the Constitution and the transition of our country to authoritarian rule. He’s the last person who should be put in the job at the heart of the operation of our government.”
“[T]his isn’t about politics. This isn’t about policy. This isn’t about Republican versus Democrat. This is about tampering with the structure of our government, which will ultimately undermine its ability to protect the freedom of our citizens. If our defense of the Constitution is gone, there’s nothing left to us.”
King asked his Republican colleagues to “say no to the undermining and destruction of our constitutional system.” “[A]re there no red lines?” he asked them. “Are there no limits?”
King looked at USAID and said: “The Constitution does not give to the President or his designee the power to extinguish a statutorily established agency. I can think of no greater violation of the strictures of the Constitution or usurpation of the power of this body. None. I can think of none. Shouldn’t this be a red line?”
Trump’s “executive order freezing funding…selectively, for programs the administration doesn’t like or understand” is, King said, “a fundamental violation of the whole idea of the Constitution, the separation of powers.” King said his “office is hearing calls every day, we can hardly handle the volume. This again, to underline, is a frontal assault of our power, your power, the power to decide where public funds should be spent. Isn’t this an obvious red line? Isn’t this an obvious limit?”
King turned to “the power seemingly assumed by DOGE to burrow into the Treasury’s payment system” as well as the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, with “zero oversight.” “Do these people have clearance?” King, who sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee asked. “Are the doors closed? Are they going to leave open doors into these? What are the opportunities for our adversaries to hack into the systems?… Remember, there’s no transparency or oversight. Access to social security numbers seem to be in the mix. All the government’s personnel files, personal financial data, potentially everyone’s tax returns and medical records. That can’t be good…. That’s data that should be protected with the highest level of security and consideration of Americans’ privacy. And we don’t know who these people are. We don’t know what they’re taking out with them. We don’t know whether they’re walking out with laptops or thumb drives. We don’t know whether they’re leaving back doors into the system. There is literally no oversight. The government of the United States is not a private company. It is fundamentally at odds with how this system is supposed to work.”
“Shouldn’t this be an easy red line?” he asked.
“[W]e’re experiencing in real time exactly what the framers most feared. When you clear away the smoke, clear away the DOGE, the executive orders, foreign policy pronouncements, more fundamentally what’s happening is the shredding of the constitutional structure itself. And we have a profound responsibility…to stop it.”
King’s appeal to principle and the U.S. Constitution did not convince his Republican colleagues, who confirmed Vought.
But today, Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker took a different approach, trolling Trump’s claim that the Gulf of Mexico would now be called “the Gulf of America.” Standing behind a lectern and flanked by flags of the United States and Illinois, Pritzker solemnly declared he was about to make an important announcement.
“The world’s finest geographers, experts who study the Earth’s natural environment, have concluded a decades-long council and determined that a Great Lake deserves to be named after a great state. So today, I’m issuing a proclamation declaring that hereinafter Lake Michigan shall be known as Lake Illinois. The proclamation has been forwarded to Google to ensure the world’s maps reflect this momentous change. In addition, the recent announcement that to protect the homeland, the United States will be purchasing Greenland, Illinois will now be annexing Green Bay to protect itself against enemies foreign and domestic. I’ve also instructed my team to work diligently to prepare for an important announcement next week regarding the Mississippi River. God bless America, and Bear Down [a reference to the Chicago Bears football team].”
—
Notes:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/07/us/politics/congressional-phone-lines-trump-musk.html
https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/the-bureau/
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/07/business/usaid-conspiracy-theories-disinformation.html
Bluesky:
juddlegum.bsky.social/post/3lhmnu426g22o (this is musk tombstone)
calltoactivism.bsky.social/post/3lhmffmg62s2b
X:
trumpdailyposts/status/1887996502955655399
Youtube:
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 