<....Trump also used the interview to repeat a false claim that California governor Gavin Newsom and other officials refused to provide water from the northern part of the state to fight fires. He falsely claimed that Newsom prioritised the preservation of endangered fish over public safety.

Even the White House website has been compromised. Among the claims on Trump’s official biography are that he won “a landslide victory” last year and he “defines the American success story”. But the site leaves out what might be Trump’s “big lie” that he won the 2020 presidential election, stating he “won a second time despite several assassination attempts and the unprecedented weaponization of law fare against him”.

But while fact-checkers continued to hold Trump to account, Republicans seemed less willing than ever to correct the record while rightwing influencers were eager to amplify his falsehoods in what is now a fragmented media ecosystem. The leaders of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and X attended his inauguration; Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg recently announced that the platform will abandon third party fact-checking.

Kurt Bardella, a Democratic strategist and media relations consultant, said: “If there’s any lasting impact from Donald Trump’s time on the political stage it’s that we live in a world now where you can just make up your own facts and truth is however you decide to bend it.

“There are content creators and content machines that exist solely for the purpose of laundering anything that Donald Trump says and making it true to a certain degree. It’s a play off the [Richard] Nixon quote: if the president does it, it is legal; well, if the president says it, it’s true. That’s the world that we live in now.”>

<Republicans are reportedly starting to run out of patience with President Donald Trump’s national security nominees — as several controversial choices are soon to face confirmation votes in the Senate.

According to NBC News, an unnamed Republican senator who has voted for all of Trump’s nominees thus far warned that he and his colleagues could vote down national security picks who “sound more like Tucker Carlson than a Republican.”

“We’ll only give so much,” the senator told NBC. “Because this is the future of the country. It’s not entertainment television.”

Newly-confirmed Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth made it through only with the help of Vice President JD Vance — who was forced to break a 50-50 tie late Friday night, as three Republican Senators and all Democrats voted against Hegseth. Trump’s picks for FBI Director (Kash Patel) and Director of National Intelligence (Tulsi Gabbard) are among those who are thought to me in for a tough fight.

But the White House is warning of “consequences” for any Republican Senator who does not get on board with Trump’s nominees.

“It’s pass-fail. You either support everyone or you don’t,” an unnamed senior White House official told NBC. “The Senate needs to advise and consent, not advise and adjust.”

The anonymous official added, “There is a very well-funded consortium of outside groups and political actors that are sophisticated, smart and tough. We’ve already seen that they’ve provided air support and narrative support to some nominees. They’ll still be very well-funded when the nominations are over, and they’ll exact consequences, I’m sure, to those who do not support the president’s nominees and get them to the finish line.”

There is, however, a question of just what kind of consequences can be imposed on several notable Republicans — including those who voted against Hegseth. Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is thought to be unlikely to seek re-election, while Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) represents a state which Trump lost by 7 points in the 2024 election, and Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) has already defeated a MAGA challenger in 2022.>

<Federal economic data is one of the purest forms of infrastructure, says Erica Groshen, a former commissioner at the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

“These data keep our economy running as much as roads and bridges do,” she said.

Policymakers, businesses, organizations and other entities rely heavily on the vast trove of detailed data and long-running statistical trends to make investments and decisions — actions that ultimately affect people’s livelihoods.

But that statistical infrastructure — which already has been in a precarious state in terms of funding, response rates and public trust — is now at greater risk of crumbling, warn Groshen and others.

It remains to be seen how federal statistical agencies may fare under President Donald Trump, who has criticized economic data and seeks to rollback government programs; as well as in the age of DOGE, when the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency aims to streamline large swaths of the government.

Concerns about potential cuts or changes to data — which world leaders, regulators, economists and executives have relied upon for decades — come at a time when statisticians inside and outside of the government have clamored for funding to better modernize how the critical data is collected, tabulated and disseminated.

Other researchers have told CNN that their fears are amplified (and, in some cases, realized) as to how surveys and economic data could be affected by an administration that not only questioned the legitimacy of economic figures in recent months, but also is actively shutting down some federal programs and websites that provide resources to underserved communities.

Federal data is considered the “gold standard,” because of its longstanding reliability, quality, comprehensiveness, transparency and history, to name a few.

It’s also at a crossroads.

Surveying people — one of the tried-and-true means of obtaining information — is in trouble, said William Beach, who served as BLS commissioner during Trump’s first term.

“Surveys are dying,” Beach told CNN. “And it’s not a cold, it’s a terminal disease.”

People are tired of taking surveys, Beach said, especially via the means the government relies upon: in-person and over the phone. Response rates have plummeted in recent years for a variety of surveys that serve as the backbone for some of the most important economic data.

“With lower response rates, our estimates are going to be more volatile, and our benchmark revisions (which typically factor in hard data sources such as tax records) are going to be greater,” Beach said.

And that volatility opens the door to criticism, he said.

“With the larger revisions and the statistical system kind of on its heels, people are taking pot shots at the data,” Beach said. “It’s very unfortunate that they’re doing it, and it’s being done left and right. It’s not a Republican or Democrat thing. It’s just politicians finding good targets.”

One of the most prominent examples of this came in August 2024, when the BLS released its preliminary benchmark revisions of employment data for the 12 months ended in March 2024. The initial estimated downward revision of 818,000 was larger than seen in the past 15 years, which spurred Trump to post that the jobs data was a “lie” and that the Biden administration “has been caught fraudulently manipulating job statistics.”

The revision process happens every year — and did so under Trump — and economists noted that the larger revision (which was a tiny fraction of overall employment) was due to ongoing effects from the pandemic and the subsequent immigration surge.

“Trust is mission-critical to the statistical agencies,” Groshen said. “If you build a bridge but nobody trusts it, they don’t drive over it.”

In addition to lower response rates, statistical agencies have been facing the long-term trend of declining funding, Groshen said.

In turn, the agency has become more efficient, she said; but that hasn’t come without trade-offs.

“It has had to reduce some of the bandwidth that it used for contingency, resilience and modernization, because it needs to maintain the flow of the data that users depend on,” she said.

The Census Bureau has been working to modernize the Current Population Survey, which is one of two major surveys that compose the monthly jobs report and which serves as the source for the national unemployment rate. But it’s also had steadily declining response rates, due to issues such as privacy concerns, cellphone-only households and respondents’ availability....>

<....The aim would be to add an online-based response component.

“To make a change like this, you have to really test it, and it’s a slow, exacting process that maintains this continuity of this information over time,” she said. “BLS and the Census Bureau have been asking for that to be funded for five years, and it hasn’t been funded.”

Some of the stated plans to streamline the government present a “huge” risk to federal data, because the statistical agencies fall into under discretionary funding, she said.

“If you’re going to take a big whack at the budget, pretty much all discretionary spending would have to go, and that would include the statistical agencies,” she said.

And that would be the opposite of the desired effect, she said.

“If you want government to be efficient, how are you going to get it to be efficient if you can’t measure anything; if you can’t measure cause and effect; if you can’t measure economic conditions so that you can target where problems are?” she said. “If companies and governments that are making decisions have less information or worse information, their decisions are going to be worse. The economy will be less efficient. Investors won’t have as good information on where to invest their money.”

Still, Groshen said, she believes there is common ground in some of the proposals floated in Project 2025, the controversial playbook for a reimagined federal government published by conservatives at the Heritage Foundation in advance of a second Trump term. The chapter on the Commerce Department included a suggestion of consolidating some statistical agencies.

“I think [the consolidation] idea has some merit done the right way, it could be very good for the statistical agencies,” said. “I wouldn’t put them under a cabinet secretary. I would put them in an independent agency headed up by the chief statistician of the US, and I would make sure their funding was secure.”

When money is short, there also could be opportunities to explore partnerships with universities on running certain surveys and programs or cutting back others, Beach said.

There are some backstops in place.

Several organizations, grassroots and otherwise, actively crawl and archive government websites — especially during times of administration changes.

One of those is the End of Term Web Archive project, which has been active since 2008. The organization aims to collect and preserve the information disseminated on the government and military domains at the end of presidential terms.

The End of Term Web Archive takes nominations for URLs to be archived, or as the organization calls it, “seeds” for the web crawlers.

“I’ve checked our reports, and all of those [economic data] agencies’ sites have been nominated,” James Jacobs, US government information librarian at Stanford University and EOT participant, wrote in an email response to CNN.

Noting that economic data is often collected based on legislative requirements, Jacobs said organizations such as the Census Project and the Association of Public Data Users actively track and advocate for government data at the Congressional level.

The extent to which data may be scaled back or information removed could have chilling effects for underserved communities, according to a report released last week by the UCLA School of Law’s Williams Institute, which conducts research on sexual orientation and gender identity law and public policy.

Trump’s executive orders that redefined “sex” as only male and female and that eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion-focused efforts could ultimately affect the federal data involving marginalized Americans, including those within the LGBTQ+ community.

“This creates a lack of being able to understand what’s going on with a very vulnerable population,” said Christy Mallory, the Williams Institute’s interim executive director and legal director. “In order to address some larger economic issues and employment issues, we need to know what’s going on with sub-populations of people. It’s hard to eradicate unemployment without knowing what’s going on with marginalized communities, including trans people, who are disproportionately unemployed or underemployed.”

But the risk, she said, goes much deeper and ultimately can affect the health and wellbeing of Americans.

“To no longer see questions about you asked on a survey or to read about questions being rolled back has some other impact that folks don’t often think about: How people feel when they’re being erased,” Mallory said.>

As a result of scoring that DB, I have managed to group the players at URS-ch sf (1947) as follows from three semifinal events played that year:

Leningrad: Aronin, Taimanov, Lisitsin, Bronstein, Vasiliev, Zagorovsky, Chekhover, Zhukovitsky, Sokolsky, Kopilov, Mikenas, Batuev, Kuzminykh, Goldberg, Kirillov and Klaman;

Moscow: Averbakh, Panov, Konstantinopolsky, Holmov, Petrosian, Ravinsky, Kan, Kasparian, Simagin, Veresov, Kamyshov, Podolny, Zagoryansky, Lyublinsky, Fridstein and Abramov.

<During the United States' 2024 presidential race, Donald Trump hammered President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris mercilessly on the economy — especially inflation, which he blamed the Biden Administration for. And his messaging worked: Trump, who won the popular vote by roughly 1.5 percent (according to the Cook Political Report), returned to the White House for a second term on Monday, January 20, 2025.

Rich Logis — the former Republican and ex-Trump supporter who founded the group Leaving MAGA — examines that economic angst in an think piece published by Salon on January 26. And he argues that many Trump supporters suffer from "an all-enveloping misunderstanding of American capitalism."

"One delusional mythology about American capitalism that has been instilled in We the People is that we somehow have a <guaranteed right> to prosperity," Logis writes. "This imaginary right has been deployed by politicians who are afraid of educating their constituents about how our model of commerce actually works…. With due respect to the many Americans who voted for Donald Trump, their overwhelming sense of <entitlement> dwarfs that of the hard-working immigrants who cut their grass, scrub pots and pans in the restaurants they frequent, and care for their kids and elderly loved ones."

Logis adds, "Too many Americans have come to believe they are owed financial comfort and material abundance, not to mention eggs and gasoline at predictable prices…. Welcome to capitalism, a system whose proponents always cite unequal outcomes as a reason for extolling it."

Logis argues that "many millions" of Americans "are better off" because of former President Joe Biden's administration, which "oversaw the recovery of millions of jobs lost during the COVID pandemic and the creation of millions more."

The former MAGA Republican recalls that back in 2016, Trump's "populist campaign resonated with" him. But he has since rejected the MAGA movement.

"Welcome to the 'laws' of supply and demand, which all of us must navigate on a daily basis," Logis emphasizes. "If you don't know or don't remember these details, ask yourself why you don't. If you're a Trump voter, then ask yourself whether you might have voted differently in November had you been aware…. What do Trump voters, and especially true believers in the MAGA community, of which I was once a full member, think capitalism is?">

Pro tip for maggats about to be reeducated: if you are looking for sympathy from this quarter, not to bother. Your Fuehrer painted his evil intentions on a signboard, yet you lapped it up and begged for more.

<The first week of Donald Trump's second presidency played out without the palace intrigue that disrupted the start of his first term — but a report claimed there's discontent brewing among his staffers and allies.

Billionaires have been parading through the Oval Office to meet with the newly inaugurated president, but tech mogul Elon Musk remains a dominant force in the White House from which he claims to be working, although Trump has denied that he has an office there.

The influence of the world's richest man has ruffled some feathers, reported NOTUS.

“Feelings toward Elon are kind of mixed,” said a source familiar with conversations. “Staff is annoyed, but what is there to do about it?”

Musk has been pushing for an office in the West Wing to bring him closer to the president, who shrugged off Musk's public criticism of a deal with his nemesis Sam Altman and other tech CEOs on artificial intelligence, and while some White House officials say he has played a prominent role in staffing recommendations, other Trump allies question his influence.

“He does have influence, but he doesn’t have power,” said right-wing influencer Steve Bannon, who served as Trump's chief strategist early in his first term. “He doesn’t have the ability to really make a decision. He really doesn’t even have the power to even muscle guys into position. So right now, his power will come from the influence that he makes on this DOGE.”

White House communications director Stephen Cheung denied tensions involving Musk, saying sources who say otherwise "simply have no idea what they are talking about because they aren’t in the room," and he also knocked down complaints about the glacial pace of filling the federal government's 4,000 political appointments.

“Everything is going according to plan," he told NOTUS in a statement. "The President and his entire Administration have been focused on implementing his America First agenda and working for the American people."

The White House says it has filled 1,300 of the 4,000 roles available across the government, but some Republicans said hiring was off to a slow start due to rigid loyalty requirements and the transition team’s late agreement on background checks with the FBI, and campaign aides and others who believed they'd been promised jobs still don't know what's going on.

“That has been really frustrating for some people, especially for those who’ve already moved here and are still awaiting instructions or direction as to what they’ll actually be doing,” said one GOP official. “They’ve given themselves a pretty gratuitous [sic] timeline though, until March, to fill the remaining positions that are available.”>

<Democrats are considering a proposal to flip the script on the debt limit to block president Donald Trump's sweeping plan to remake the U.S. government and economy, according to a new report.

Republicans have for decades used the threat of a national default to force Democrats to cave on their agenda, but the Washington Post reported that some liberal lawmakers are pushing to weaponize upcoming negotiations on the debt ceiling in what the newspaper calls a "stark role reversal."

“The days of Democrats just voting to raise the debt ceiling under a Republican president, they need to be over, period,” said Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-PA), the top ranking member on the House Budget Committee. “We need to make sure that Democratic priorities are met, if we are in any way going to vote to increase the debt ceiling. But at the very least, we need to make sure there’s a permanent resolution to the perennial debt ceiling dysfunction.”

Boyle intends to introduce legislation authorizing the Treasury Department to continue borrowing to pay the bills even if Congress doesn't raise the debt limit, and his bill would also seek guarantees to protect safety net programs like Medicare and Social Security, as well as the permanent end to the debt ceiling – which Trump has been demanding.

“He brings it up every time and all the time,” said Rep. Kevin Hern (R-OK) last week after returning from a White House meeting with the newly inaugurated president.

However, some House Republicans are refusing to suspend the borrowing limit without spending cuts, and rank-and-file members are telling House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and GOP leadership they probably don't have the votes to raise the limit without help from the Democrats, who are hoping to leverage the issue to extract concessions.

“I am against these ideas to raise the debt ceiling in order to provide more tax breaks for billionaires — the end,” said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR). “That is my prism and my test for getting into this issue.”

Michael Strain, director of economic policy studies at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, said Democrats can exploit the exceedingly thin GOP majority to fight cuts Social Security [sic] and other popular programs.

“I think trying to trade their votes on suspending the debt ceiling for something like ‘don’t cut Medicaid or don’t cut food stamps,’ that’d be a wasted opportunity,” Strain said. “That would just be kind of fiddling around the edges of these programs when they could do something more meaningful and lasting.”>

<For President Donald Trump, inheriting a relatively quiet and orderly southern border with Mexico is a political inconvenience. During his campaign, he painted an apocalyptic picture of migrants swarming the frontier, and he returned to the White House organized and ready for border wars, even as U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported fewer and fewer illegal crossings. Shortly after taking the presidential oath Monday, Trump declared a national-security emergency for the border, ordered the military to make plans to “secure” it, and signed a constitutionally questionable executive order restricting birthright citizenship.

Much more telling and immediately consequential, though, was the new administration’s decision to shut down the border agency’s app, CBP One, which had allowed asylum seekers who had not yet crossed into U.S. territory to make appointments at legal ports of entry. Migrants who were waiting in Mexico and expecting to meet with CBP screening officers this week learned that “existing appointments have been canceled.”

Far from preventing chaos, though, killing CBP One could produce more. Then again, Trump’s political interest lies in exploiting the border, not effectively managing it.

This week, social-media platforms were flooded with pictures of crying asylum seekers who had appointments scheduled after Trump’s oath and realized they were out of luck. Those pictures may gratify MAGA diehards, and make some in the Trump coalition think “cry harder.” But migrants don’t simply disappear by wishing them away. The conditions that brought them to the U.S. border didn’t miraculously get less pressing with Trump’s presidency. And people who cannot seek asylum legally in the United States may instead pursue unlawful ways to enter the country.

The president and his supporters would have the public believe that CBP One was an “online concierge service for illegals,” as Senator Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, recently described it. “They made an application to facilitate illegal immigration,” Vice President J. D. Vance declared last week. In fact, CBP One embodied the kind of imperfect but pragmatic compromise that’s essential in immigration policy. The app was introduced under the Trump administration in 2020 to manage cargo-truck crossings at the border. The Biden administration expanded CBP One in 2023, creating a process by which a limited number of migrants could lawfully apply for asylum—which, under federal law, people fleeing persecution in their home countries are allowed to do—while also imposing considerable restrictions on that opportunity.

Previously, people entering the country could assert their intention to seek asylum after presenting themselves to a U.S. official anywhere along the border; they would then typically be paroled into the country while awaiting a hearing on their application, and they could apply for a special permit to work lawfully. Eventually, President Joe Biden concluded, albeit amid intense political pressure, that the asylum system was being overused and that an influx of applicants was swamping the government’s ability to administer it.

After CBP One was established, asylum seekers needed to present themselves at a port of entry (if they could get there) at a specified time (if they could get one of 1,450 appointments available each day). The administration generally declined to hear asylum claims made by any other means. Even as the system created a clear process for seeking asylum—one that, according to the Associated Press, facilitated the entry of nearly a million migrants—it was intentionally designed to curb asylum access and has been much maligned by progressives and immigration advocates for that reason. Indeed, immigrant-rights advocates sued the Biden administration because they viewed the app process as exclusionary to the point of violating federal law....>

<....The recent decline in illegal crossings—the 46,600 illegal crossings in November represented the lowest number in more than four years—is happening partly because Mexico and other countries throughout Latin America are clamping down on migration via their territory. But it’s also because CBP One had helped to end a free-for-all and establish a well-organized line.

Despite his anti-immigrant rhetoric, Trump was not obviously more effective than other recent presidents in controlling migration flows. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the lowest number of illegal crossings during his first administration occurred at the height of the coronavirus pandemic. In place of CBP One, the new administration has asserted that it will reinstate Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, under which many asylum applicants would have to stay south of the border while their cases are being adjudicated. During Trump’s first term, about 70,000 asylum seekers waited in Mexico for an immigration hearing, and unlawful border crossings were higher than during the Obama administration; the number of illegal crossings in the final months of Trump’s first administration were higher than in the final months of Biden’s.

Trump’s recent moves have unsettled the legal process. This week, immigration-rights groups that have sued the government over CBP One sought an emergency hearing to determine the new administration’s impact on asylum efforts. They had contacted government lawyers to ask about the effect of Trump’s announcements, but those lawyers, according to the plaintiffs’ legal filings, “said they could not provide their position” yet.

The value to Trump of ending CBP One appears to be mostly political. The current situation at the border neither accords with his base’s expectations nor justifies the kind of far-reaching emergency measures that the new president and his allies are intent on pursuing. The asylum process has been thrown back into confusion, and the abolition of legal pathways to asylum increases the incentives for illegal crossings. Ending CBP One conveniently helps lay the groundwork for more aggressive policies. The voters who sent Trump back to the White House may have been appalled by past chaos. For Trump’s anti-immigration offensive, order is a bigger problem.>

Just to follow up on Keres: Have you read Kasparov's Predecessor books, the 2nd vol. in particular?

He shows all the games Keres lost to Botvinnik and in general more of Keres' defeats than victories. He also says something like Keres didn't contribute much to opening theory.

I was quite appalled when I read the chapters about Keres and astonished by Kasparov's barely hidden attempt to reduce the importance and achievements by Keres. Perhaps Kasparov has been influenced by Botvinnik in the view on Keres. Perhaps by the general attitude in the old Soviet against the Estonian, who was very popular in the West in those years.

Still, I don't know why Kasparov had the intention of belittle the accomplishments of Keres. Any idear?

---

It could well be that Botvinnik passed his views of Keres on to young Kasparov, who was by nature hotheaded, impulsive and impressionable. While Keres was 'rehabilitated', given his importance to the higher aim of upholding the vaunted Soviet School of Chess, in my mind that does not necessarily mean that Botvinnik, as the epitome of Soviet Man as defined in the Kotov/Yudovich work <The Soviet School of Chess>, had any use for Keres away from the 64 squares.

Beyond all that, I too do not understand why Kasparov should wish to denigrate Keres' extraordinary accomplishments.

<Since returning to the presidency, Donald Trump has broken the law many, many times. Some of his illegal actions seem designed to sow chaos. Others appear aimed at establishing supremacy over the federal government. And still more seem calculated to tee up court battles that will remove all remaining limitations on his power. His unlawful purge of the National Labor Relations Board on Monday serves all three goals at once. With these firings, Trump has paralyzed the board, asserted control over its agenda, and engineered a legal showdown over the scope of his constitutional authority. The move is both a power grab in itself and a trial balloon—a preview of worse abuses to come if he gets away with it. And at this Supreme Court, he probably will.

Trump’s assault on the NLRB took the form of two firings, one of which is far more disturbing than the other. First, the president removed general counsel Jennifer Abruzzo—essentially the chief prosecutor for the NLRB, directing enforcement priorities and choosing cases to bring before the board. Abruzzo, a Joe Biden appointee, was arguably the most pro-union general counsel in the board’s history. And while her four-year term does not expire until July, she serves at the pleasure of the president. Biden fired Trump’s previous NLRB general counsel on his first day in office, so this tit-for-tat was expected (if still a painful blow to organized labor).

What wasn’t expected was Trump’s second dismissal: the firing of Gwynne Wilcox, a board member confirmed by the Senate to a five-year term ending in August 2028. Wilcox, like Abruzzo, is also a Biden holdover and staunch union ally. But unlike Abruzzo, she does not serve at will. Rather, federal law allows the president to remove NLRB board members only “for neglect of duty or malfeasance in office.” Congress expressly barred the president from removing board members for any “other cause,” including political disagreements. Trump did not claim that Wilcox neglected her duties or engaged in malfeasance. So her termination is flatly unlawful.

It also kneecaps much of the NLRB’s work. With Wilcox ousted, only two people remain on the five-member board, which interprets and enforces federal labor law by ruling on specific disputes. The board therefore lacks a quorum, grinding much of its work to a halt. It cannot resolve appeals, certify union representation, or issue injunctions against unfair labor practices—all work at the heart of the agency’s mission. As Matt Bruenig explains in NLRB Edge, employers can easily exploit this situation, dragging out disputes that require rulings from the board. By appealing decisions against them, abusive employers can continue to violate labor law until the board regains a quorum.

Trump’s termination of Wilcox was likely motivated, in part, by a desire to freeze the NLRB’s work, at least until he can install a new Republican majority. But he appears to have a broader objective: the dismantlement of a 90-year-old Supreme Court precedent called Humphrey’s Executor. That 1935 decision allowed Congress to shield independent agencies like the NLRB from partisan interference by prohibiting the president from removing their members at will.

There are now more than 50 independent agencies, some of which exercise immense power over the nation. They include the Federal Reserve, the Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, the Federal Election Commission, and a slew of agencies that regulate energy, housing, civil rights, and the environment. Thanks to Humphrey’s Executor, the president cannot fire the leaders of these extraordinarily influential regulators without a very good reason....>

<....Congress granted these agencies independence to prevent the president from corrupting their work through improper political pressure. Consider the Federal Reserve, which regulates banks, sets interest rates, and helps manage the nation’s monetary policy. The Fed’s board of governors, including its chair, cannot be demoted or removed without good cause. This protection allows the board to enact policy that, in its expert opinion, promotes economic growth and stability over the long term.

If the president could fire board members at will, he would effectively wrest control of monetary policy from the experts, risking serious damage to the economy. For instance, current Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell has declined to cut interest rates in January. Trump, however, has demanded that the Fed cut interest rates, insisting that he understands the situation better than Powell. Without Humphrey’s Executor, Trump could remove Powell and replace him with a MAGA loyalist. The new chair could recklessly slash interest rates at the president’s direction, triggering out-of-control inflation. Trump could then demand a rapid spike in interest rates to cool the inflation, triggering a recession. Or he could order the chair to meddle with the Fed’s research and data to create a misleadingly rosy view of the economy under his watch. Lawmakers might then enact tax cuts, or additional spending, based on faulty information, inadvertently destabilizing the dollar.

Humphrey’s guards against this mischief—but it is under serious threat from the Supreme Court. The conservative majority has recently expanded the president’s constitutional prerogative to fire “executive officers,” including agency heads. In 2020’s Seila Law v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, it struck down removal restrictions for agencies led by a single member. But it has not yet overturned Humphrey’s. Instead, the court has declared that the precedent now applies only to multimember commissions. In the process, though, the conservative justices have cast serious doubt on its entire constitutional foundation. Two justices, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, have explicitly called for the precedent’s reversal. The rest of the court’s conservatives don’t seem far behind; any restrictions on the president’s removal power seem to conflict with the majority’s “unitary executive” theory of total presidential control over the executive branch.

By firing board member Wilcox, Trump has set the stage for a challenge to Humphrey’s. (He effectively promised to do so on the campaign trail, promising to put independent agencies “back under presidential authority, as the Constitution demands.”) Wilcox has said that she plans to challenge her removal, which is, after all, plainly unlawful. The only question remaining is whether the Supreme Court will uphold the law that protects her. Seila Law certainly hints that it won’t: The ruling’s sweeping language seems intended to give the president almost authoritarian control over the “administrative state,” laying the groundwork for the overturning of Humphrey’s. Trump is taking up the court’s implicit invitation.

If the Supreme Court does scrap Humphrey’s, it will probably unleash a spate of firings across other independent agencies. Trump could bring every regulatory body under his thumb, terminating anyone who questioned his priorities. And he would not stop there. The president has already claimed authority to fire high-ranking members of the civil service, who have merit protections, and has begun illegally removing them. He is seeking to reclassify at least 50,000 more career employees so he can easily oust them. And he is, of course, already purging other agencies with weaker protections than the NLRB—including the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, whose structure largely mirrors the labor board. Breaking with precedent, Trump fired two Democratic commissioners from the EEOC on Monday (as well as its general counsel), depriving it of a quorum. It’s unclear whether he can legally remove commissioners, and both have said they will sue. That case may represent yet another opportunity for the Supreme Court to overrule Humphrey’s.

<One of President Donald Trump's Day One executive orders that flew under the radar is provoking significant pushback from Congress — including from at least one House Republican.

The Atlantic reported Tuesday that Trump is now apparently violating Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution with an executive order pausing the disbursement of federal funds already appropriated by Congress. On January 20 — the same day Trump pardoned January 6 insurrectionists and attempted to repeal birthright citizenship — Trump issued an executive order entitled "Unleashing American Energy."

That order includes a section dubbed "Terminating the Green New Deal," which freezes hundreds of billions of dollars in funding for various infrastructure projects launched during former President Joe Biden's administration. However, that money was already approved via the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which members of Congress were counting on for jobs in their districts.

Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.), who represents a purple district in the Omaha area, told the Atlantic that Trump's executive order was "alarming," particularly for his constituents, who were counting on $73 million from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to upgrade Omaha's airport.

"You just can’t determine what laws you want to execute and what you don’t," Bacon said, adding that executive orders from presidents representing both parties have "gotten out of hand."

"“You can’t change the law,” he added. “I think Republicans should stay true to that notion.”

According to the Atlantic, Bacon called the White House after that executive order was signed, which later prompted the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to issue a memo clarifying the scope of the "Green New Deal" section of the executive order in question. The Nebraska Republican said he was told the order mainly applied to the IRA provision pertaining to electric vehicle mandates, and was not a blanket cancellation of federal appropriations.

But Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), who is the ranking member on the House Appropriations Committee, wasn't convinced, saying she believed "everything is at risk." She flatly called the executive order "illegal," and characterized the president's move to freeze federal funds as "stealing."

"It’s creating chaos,” she continued. “I honestly don’t think the people who are dealing with this know what they are doing.”

During his confirmation hearing last week, OMB Director-designate Russell Vought (who was a leading architect of the far-right authoritarian Project 2025 playbook) refused to say whether he would allow Trump to violate the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, which prevents presidents from denying the disbursement of federal funds already appropriated by Congress. He refused to say under oath whether Trump would abide by the law, telling the Senate Budget Committee: "For 200 years, presidents had the ability to spend less than an appropriation if they could do it for less."

Trump's executive order may not survive muster in the federal courts if the administration is sued over the impoundment issue. His executive order denying 14th Amendment protections to the children of undocumented immigrants was recently paused by U.S. District Judge John Cougheneur, who called it "blatantly unconstitutional.">

Unfortunately, there are native Greenlanders who propagate independence - which is good in itself! - but without the slightest idea of how that should work.

Many years ago Denmark gave Greenland the right to seize authority over c. 80 different areas to rule, many of them very important to govern a country. They only decided to take 3 of them, one of them being rules about using the flag!

<Robert F. Kennedy Jr. came under bruising scrutiny in the first of two U.S. Senate confirmation hearings to possibly put him in charge of Donald Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services.

The hearing did not go well.

Kennedy, who is widely known as an anti-vaxxer, struggled in the hearing to reframe his opposition to vaccines as concern for “chronic disease.”

“News reports have claimed that I am anti-vaccine or anti-industry,” Kennedy said in his opening statement. “I am neither.”

“He lies!” shouted a protester in the hearing room.

Throughout the hearing, Kennedy repeatedly flubbed and evaded the facts about HHS programs in the secretary’s remit, including those related to the department’s two largest.

When questioned by Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana about Medicare and Medicaid, which cover over 100 million older and low-income Americans, Kennedy described Medicaid’s premiums and deductibles as too high. Neither program charges those fees.

Kennedy’s past statements, some promoting conspiracy theories, haunted him throughout the questioning.

Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado (D) asked Kennedy, “Did you say that exposure to pesticides causes children to become transgender?”

Kennedy replied, “No, I never said that,” despite his repeated assertions that man-made chemicals in the environment could be making children gay and transgender and cause the feminization of boys and masculinization of girls.

Bennet also grilled Kennedy about HIV and AIDS. Kennedy has repeatedly promoted the false claim that HIV is not the cause of AIDS, instead attributing it to other factors like use of amyl nitrate, or poppers, and “lifestyle.”

“Did you write in your book it’s undeniable that African AIDS is an entirely different disease from western AIDS? Yes or no? Mr. Kennedy?”

He replied, “I’m not sure.”

Bennet also asked Kennedy about his past support for reproductive freedom, even as he’ll be complicit in eliminating those rights as Trump’s HHS Secretary.

“Did you say, ‘I wouldn’t leave abortion to the states. My belief is we should leave it to the woman. We shouldn’t have the government involved, even if it’s full term,’?” Bennet asked.

Kennedy replied, “Senator, I believe that every abortion is a tragedy,” a dodge he repeated in answer to other senators’ questions about a woman’s right to choose.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) asked Kennedy to explain his stance on the childhood measles vaccine.

“Is measles deadly, yes or no?” Wyden asked Kennedy, who wouldn’t answer the question directly while repeating that he isn’t “anti-vaccine.”

Wyden then confronted Kennedy with the transcript of a 2023 podcast in which he said, “There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective.”

“Mr. Kennedy, all of these things cannot be true. So are you lying to Congress today when you say you are pro-vaccine?” Wyden asked.

Kennedy only said the podcast statements have “been repeatedly debunked.”

Kennedy has promoted his anti-vax theories in appearances both online and in other hearing rooms more receptive to them. Louisiana recently ordered staff at the state’s Department of Health to stop advertising the availability of COVID, flu, and mpox vaccinations, a policy traced back to Kennedy’s appearance at a committee hearing in the state legislature in 2021.

Trump’s HHS pick entered today’s hearing after news broke that his cousin Caroline Kennedy wrote a scathing letter addressed to senators accusing him of being a “predator.” She described her cousin as “addicted to attention and power” and accused him of enticing family members into addiction.

“Bobby preys on the desperation of parents of sick children — vaccinating his own kids while building a following by hypocritically discouraging other parents from vaccinating theirs,” she wrote.

Kennedy may have been the most forthcoming when Wyden asked about another conspiracy theory that he has spread.

“Did you say Lyme disease is a highly likely militarily engineered bioweapon?” Wyden asked.

“I probably did say that,” Kennedy answered.>

<Very simply Al, "repugnant" surely exists in your overused thesaurus. Repellent is for biting insects should you ever bother to venture out into the real world.

Odd and rather unfair that an ethically challenged man of profusely lewd vulgarity would criticize another's sexual behavior given how proud one is of sexual liberation (a long-time proud supporter of sexual predator Bill Clinton), including exposing school children to sexually explicit reading materials and encouraging underage sex changes. In other forums, you have always considered such madly objectionable indoctrination to be developmentally healthy for kids.

Be consistent Al; you can't sit on both sides of the fence. Could it be that your racism is showing again?>

Projection and confession rolled into one, a staple of <fredfradiavolo>.

Guess <fredthestalker> is so stupid that he does not understand that 'repellent' is also an adjective.

Were we ever to meet again, it would be his moment of reckoning. Maybe he would wind up in the same corn field to be picked at by the crows as many a mobster who ran afoul of their masters in Chicago.

Stop skimming, <boy>! The money is nice, but it is a lethal habit.

<Cowboys owner Jerry Jones dragged his feet on a Dak Prescott extension. Prescott's four-year, $240 million extension, averaging $60 million per year, to make him the NFL's highest-paid player wasn't done until hours before Dallas' regular-season opener. The deal has an NFL-record $231 million in guarantees where $129 million was fully guaranteed at signing. The $129 million includes a $78,453,333 signing bonus, which is the largest ever.

The Cowboys picked up $10,516,667 of 2024 salary cap room with the Prescott deal that could have come in handy with a more timely extension. Instead, the Cowboys sat on the sidelines during the first wave of free agency when the major signings of players on the open market occurred.

Given the actual timing of the deal, Jones would have been better served having Prescott play out his contract with a $51,141,467 2024 cap number to preserve his options. Outside of winning Super Bowl LIX, Prescott's contract leverage wouldn't have been any greater by waiting.

Prescott already held all of the cards in the negotiations because of the nature of the four-year, $160 million deal, averaging $40 million per year, he signed in March 2021. The 2021 deal had a no-trade clause and a provision preventing Dallas from designating Prescott as a franchise or transition player in 2025 if he played out his contract. Thanks to four different contract restructures strictly to create cap space since signing the deal, the Cowboys were going to have a $40.46 million 2025 salary cap charge (i.e.; dead money) if Prescott's contract expired.

Prescott struggled in 2024 before being sidelined for the rest of the season after eight games with a torn right hamstring that required surgery. He completed 64.7% of his passes for 1,978 yards with 11 touchdowns and eight interceptions for an 86.0 passer rating. The Cowboys only won three of Prescott's eight games.

It probably would have been harder for Prescott to command the $60 million-per-year deal he signed from Jones or on the open market with two subpar seasons surrounding a 2023 NFL MVP runner-up campaign. Considering the Cowboys missed the playoffs with a 7-10 record and just hired Brian Schottenheimer, a career assistant, as head coach, having $40.46 million in 2025 dead money could have become a more viable alternative.

Prescott has 2025's largest salary cap number at $89,896,666. The expectation is up to $37.196 million of 2025 cap room will be created by converting as much as $46.495 million of Prescott's $47.75 million 2025 base salary into signing bonus.

Prescott couldn't be traded even the Cowboys wanted to, which they don't. Assuming Prescott waived his no-trade clause, Dallas would have $103,226,667 of dead money. That's $13,330,001 more than his current 2025 cap figure.>

Nice dithering, Incompetent Dilettante Jones.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvy...

<Just days before a devastating plane crash near Washington, D.C., Donald Trump made the reckless and perplexing decision to fire the heads of TSA and gut the Aviation Safety Advisory.

To be clear, there is no evidence so far that Trump’s actions caused the devastating crash. However, the accident is a stark reminder that aviation regulation and safety is a life-and-death matter. These are not agencies to be tampered with. On January 29, an American Airlines airplane collided midair with a Black Hawk helicopter above the Potomac River. The plane had departed from Wichita, KS, with 60 passengers and four crew members onboard, while the helicopter carried three crew members. Officials have confirmed there are likely no survivors. The identities of the passengers and crew have not yet been released as recovery efforts continue. However, it has been confirmed that U.S. and Russian figure skating community members were on the flight.

It is too early to determine or speculate on a cause for the devastating crash. As usual, though, MAGA promptly insisted that DEI was to blame. During a press conference in which President Trump was supposed to speak about the accident and provide answers to grieving families, he launched into a rant insisting, without evidence, that Barack Obama and Joe Biden had lowered standards for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). Although he can deflect and blame all he wants, America isn’t going to forget that he is the one who recklessly gutted a vital aviation safety committee and is tampering with aviation matters he doesn’t understand.

Within days of taking office, Trump immediately fired the heads of TSA and gutted the federal Aviation Security Advisory Committee, which serves as a TSA advisory body. He fired every committee member. The committee has served the TSA since 1989 and was constructed in response to a terrorist attack on Pan Am Flight 103. It will continue to exist, especially since the committee was made permanent through the Aviation Security Stakeholder Participation Act of 2014. However, it will not function because no one can carry out its safety duties.

Pilot James Fallows told The Atlantic the committee “was collaborative; it combined public, private, military, civilian, academic, and other institutions to pool knowledge; it avoided blame; but it focused relentlessly on lessons learned.” While its dismissal may not have impacted the Potomac River plane crash, over time, its absence likely will be noticed as the TSA operates without vital safety recommendations and advice. Additionally, the Trump administration could provide no reason for the dismissal of the committee. The Department of Homeland Security issued the customary response that the committee didn’t align with Trump’s agenda. It doesn’t acknowledge that committees like the Aviation Safety Advisory aren’t supposed to be about politics and enforcing the right-wing agenda. They are about keeping America safe.

At the time of the plane crash, the FAA was also without a chief, as Michael Whitaker resigned on January 20. His resignation was foreseeable once Trump won re-election, especially since Trump’s right-hand man Elon Musk had attacked Whitaker and demanded his resignation. Instead of prioritizing a replacement for Whitaker, Trump focused on gutting advisory committees and firing TSA heads as the FAA struggled with dangerous staff shortages.

Trump can cry DEI all he wants, but, as Brett Meiselas urged, “Let’s remember what Donald Trump did just last week.” The last time an incident of the scale of the Potomac River crash occurred was almost 24 years ago. Yet, Trump is interfering in things that were working well. The nation already can’t comprehend this recent devastating accident. Now, Trump is impulsively taking actions that threaten to increase the number of incidents like this in America.>