Category: National

School District Sunday – 2025 03 30

Normally this is a Saturday event, but this week we’ve had to delay to Sunday evening.

Whiskeyleaks

I can barely keep up with the daily news from the White House right now. This week’s story is pretty awful, though, and worthy of analysis not because it’s special but because it’s a loud, overbright version of everything else the administration is up to.

In short words: a bunch of senior officials built a text chain on Signal, a private app for text communication that’s forbidden on secure phones, probably so they could avoid records retention. The group included cabinet secretaries, the vice president, and other senior administration folks, but not the acting chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or the President. They also accidentally invited Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of The Atlantic magazine. My operating theory is that they meant to invite Jonah Goldberg, but whoever they meant to get, they added a journalist, and the journalist recorded the chat as they used it to plan an upcoming military operation.

After the operation, which turns out to have been bombing a civilian apartment building to get a military target, the journalist ratted them out by saying he was in the chat. The Director of National Intelligence, who was in front of Congress, was questioned about the chat. She lied like a rug, figuring the journalist wouldn’t publish. The Atlantic called her bluff, and the chat is all over social media. We know the DNI committed perjury, lawsuits are flying, and a few people are even noticing this “military operation” is a war crime.

Actually calling people out over war crimes is further than most of our political class will go, as we know from the example of Henry Kissinger. But maybe the people involved in this story like Pete Hegseth and Marco Rubio and Tulsi Gabbard should stay close to home for a while in case they have to go to the Hague, as defendants.

Last, but not least, on the subject of operational security, the National Security Adviser, who was in this illegally unsafe Signal chat, had his Venmo information open to the public until the press revealed that he’d done so today. Once the horses were out, though, he closed the barn door.

(I cannot take credit for the title pun; I prefer it to Signalgate.)

Sources:

87 days to dismantle democracy

I’ve been wanting to write about the Mahmoud Khalil matter because it touches on both immigration law and the Trump push to force the judiciary to fall into line under him. Another case with the same features broke over the weekend; the crisis Trump wanted to provoke is here. The administration removed a group of Venezuelans (I’ve seen numbers between 170 and 270) to a private jail in El Salvador in apparent defiance of a judge’s order to turn the planes they were on around and bring them back.

On the immigration side, the administration is relying on the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, best known in the last century as the basis for Japanese internment. The Venezuelans are alleged to be members of the Tren de Aragua gang, which the administration says is invading the United States. None of the Venezuelans have been convicted of any crime, and while I’m describing them as Venezuelans, nobody knows who they are. Some of them might be American citizens.

On the constitutional crisis side, the administration just ignored an order from a federal judge. Usually when a party to a case disobeys a judge, they have plausible deniability: they interpret the order differently, they didn’t get it in time, etc. I know from working for an immigration lawyer that executive branch offices usually obey direct orders from a judge. If the executive branch says “We didn’t obey you! How are you going to enforce that?” we have a constitutional crisis.

Hitler dismantled German democracy in 53 days. We’re on day 87 of Trump II. Our democracy isn’t gone, but this is a big step toward disappearing it, along with those “Venezuelans”.

Sources:

Resources: Calling your reps (federal and state)

If you’d like to do something about whatever your representatives in Austin are doing and/or not doing, one of the things you can do is call to tell them what you’re thinking. It’s not that hard, especially if you have a script to tell you what to say on the issue you care about. But first you have to find those scripts!

A few things about calling your reps (state or federal): only call your reps, because they only care about people who can vote them out of office. Sometimes you’ll see requests to call chairs of committees, but unless they work for you as a constituent, that’s not going to help. With a lot of scripts, you’ll see “I’m a constituent at [address/zip code]” which is to tell them you can vote against them.

If you haven’t done it before, you don’t have to worry about what to say to the staffers beyond the script. They just want to report to their boss what the constituents are calling about and how many are for or against their boss’ position. Very rarely will you get a staffer pushing back; I’ve been calling for years and only once has it ever happened to me. If they do that, remind them they work for you or just hang up and call back later.

Federal level scripts:

  • 5 Calls, which has a web page, an app, and an email newsletter, is a great resource for scripts by issue. They’ll find the numbers for your congressperson and senators with your address and walk you through the process. It’s very easy even if you’ve never done it before.
  • Indivisible, the activist group, has a good resource list that includes call scripts for a bunch of issues at the federal level. They have a newsletter and they’ll send you to-dos every week.
  • Resistbot is a chat bot you can use with your message app on your phone to generate faxes, postal mail, or emails to your representatives. They also have a function to check your voter registration. Resistbot used to be free (the voter registration still is) but now requires donations to keep going because it gets so much use. They also have an app, but I haven’t used it.
  • Home With the Armadillo, the blog of journalist and activist Andrea Grimes, has started a series of Red State scripts. Useful for those of us who live in places like Texas (she’s in Austin).

State level scripts in Texas:

  • Howdy Politics has both Texas and federal call scripts. I know Substack is problematic (to say the least) but this is where the information is in this case.
  • The League of Women Voters has letters/emails to send to your representative which you can also use for call scripts.
  • I also see state scripts in Reddit’s Texas Politics subreddit. Reddit, like Substack, has its problems but if you’re just skimming and not getting into fights in the comments, even the Texas politics subreddit can be usable.

A lot of these folks are going to want your money (Indivisible, LWV, and of course Substack is constantly pushing readers to upgrade their pledge). The only one that’s pay to play at the time of writing is Resistbot, which is understandable since they function on text messages.

There are plenty of other ways to get into activism at the federal and state levels. This is just a starting point and a post I hope to revisit and update as I find more resources.

School District Saturday – 2025 02 15

There is regularly a lot of news about the school districts here in North Texas, which is because just as Texas is the national laboratory for bad government, North Texas is one of the state laboratories for terrible school district decisions. So I’m going to try to round up what’s going on with our local districts and what’s going on statewide (and nationally, if needed) that will affect our local schools.

HERO yesterday, trouble everywhere tomorrow.

I’m sure you’ve heard about Pete Marocco, the new head of USAID, aka the guy in charge of closing USAID down. Dallas folks may remember him as the face of the HERO amendments (Props S, T, and U in the recent elections) and a close friend of hotel billionaire and Dallas Express owner Monty Bennett. You may also know him from other greatest hits like his previous stint at USAID, which he ended up taking leave from after only three months, and also his presence in the Capitol on January 6, 2021. I guess Marocco had to have somewhere to go to wait out the J6 prosecutions. Too bad for us all he and all of his friends are out, and in his case, in government.

That Simple

I managed to get COVID this year after almost five years of avoiding it through a lot of care, isolation, and masking (though less of that as time has gone on). My spouse brought it home from a mandatory work trip and I’ve been flat on my back for a while now. As a chronically ill person, though, I have found one advantage to being flat on my back: it’s remarkably clarifying.

What I figured out this week while I was flat on my back is that you can figure out what’s going on by reading the headlines. The new administration is flooding the zone with crap, so there’s a lot of news, but you don’t need to analyze it that deeply. There’s no twelve-dimensional chess. Occam’s razor will serve you just fine.

Trump really just wanted to avoid going to jail, and now that he’s dodged that for at least four years, he wants to make money and lash out at his perceived enemies. You don’t need to look for more than that. Also, if he’s not making sense, it’s probably because he doesn’t know what he’s doing or suffering from the effects of age and/or illness.

Vance really is a hand-picked tool of Peter Thiel, with all the policy interests that entails. Yes, that’s pretty scary, considering Trump is really that old and not in great shape.

The Project 2025 people really meant what they said about what they were going to do to American society. And unless they do something to piss off Trump, he’s going to let them do it because he doesn’t care about governing (see: making money, avoiding jail, and lashing out at perceived enemies).

Musk really did a Nazi salute. It doesn’t matter whether it’s because he’s a Nazi or, as I suspect, he’s a 4Chan-style troll who thinks it’s funny. The man is the heir of an apartheid South African emerald mine shareholder who bought a bunch of tech companies. He’s the stereotype of a James Bond villain. Assume he’s operating in bad faith and move on.

The biggest problem for the Project 2025 guys and Musk is going to be when they want different things and Trump has to decide. Trump doesn’t really give a shit so his rulings will have no rhyme or reason other than what fulfills his own agenda and beyond that, whim and flattery.

And your MAGA neighbors, especially if you live in a suburb, exurb, or rural area? If they’re that kind of Jesus-y, the kind that says preaching mercy to the downtrodden and frightened should get you deported, they have no idea what’s coming. They think that in the hierarchical society that Project 2025 leans toward, they will be big fishes in small ponds, who get to decide the exceptions to the harsh rules. They’re overestimating their importance. Your local poobahs are not wielding the Shirley exception in the Project 2025 regime.

(They’ve also drastically underestimated the number of things in their own lives the federal government funds, things that executive orders and DOGE will bring to a standstill, but that’s a whole nother discussion.)

This particular line of thought is brought to you by the confirmation of Pete Hegseth, a drunk and a rapist and so on whom Trump hired because Trump liked how he looked on TV. And by the shady way that Senators Collins, Murkowski, and McConnell were let off the hook for voting against him this one time because Republicans knew the Vice President would break the tie. Senator Ernst was whipped into line, and I’m waiting for the moment when Collins and Murkowski either lose their free pass or get primaried for too many wrong votes.

That’s how it is now. It really is that simple.