<FTB's account continues to be deliberately harassed by your people.

After not posting for a week, I made 7 posts and was shut down for the @#$%*&!# excuse of "posting too frequently." By comparison, Orange Face made over 20+ posts today (I stopped counting), including half-a-dozen posts on multiple pages.

This is blatant discrimination by Chessgames. Such discrimination has been going on for years, as I have frequently made clear. It's an unfair, foolish mistake on your part to allow your "trusted" people to target and harass paying members.

Promptly remove ALL restrictions on FTB's account and forbid your charges from their continuous harassment of FTB's account!!

And don't pretend you did not read this again.>

Really, <fredmaggot>? You fancy yourself able to dictate terms from a position of weakness?

<I had a totally different column written for today but tore it up, because President Trump’s dramatic crash in a whole series of recent polls is mesmerizing, demanding our attention.

At the beginning of March, I argued here that the worm was beginning to turn on Trump. A month later, as April dawned, I suggested Trump had gone too far and voters were concerned.

Now, as May approaches, Trump is suffering a broad-based crash.

To be sure, it’s not a total collapse — worse numbers are possible, and Trump’s image is not beyond repair. But all the recent polls tell a dismal story about the president’s standing with the American public.

Trump’s crash is evident across a variety of indicia:

Trump’s approval rating, the single most significant poll number for any president, is lower than that of any president in modern history after 100 days in office.

The disaffection goes beyond generalized discomfort. Americans now disapprove of Trump’s handling of almost every major problem, including immigration, his longtime strength.

Voters also now reject Trump’s positions and arguments on a wide range of issues. Presidents’ political power is directly proportional to their approval ratings. Politicians fear crossing a president with 70 percent approval and fear being seen with a president sporting a 30 percent approval rating.

Presidential approval is directly correlated with both legislative success and with his party’s fate on Election Day.

On average, the four most recent quality national polls (released as of Monday) find only 43 percent approving of Trump’s performance, while 55 percent disapprove. The ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll pegs approval at just 39 percent with 55 percent disapproving — that’s 16 points net negative.

Moreover, voters now disapprove of Trump’s handling of almost every key issue.

He won importantly on the economy, but his ratings on handling this issue are 22 points net negative in both the ABC/Washington Post and CNN polls; 16 points net negative in the CBS poll and 13 points in the New York Times/Sienna survey.

Immigration was another pillar of Trump’s victory and another issue arena where voters now disapprove of his performance.

Net disapproval of Trump on immigration ranges from minus-2 to minus-9 in the four polls — much better than the economy to be sure. But the fact that more people disapprove than approve of Trump’s work on his signature issue is striking.

Trump’s net negatives on these two crucial issues should be sufficient to strike fear in the hearts of Republicans running in anything close to a swing district.

But the rejection of Trump is even broader. In addition to the economy and immigration, majorities disapprove of his handling of foreign affairs, managing the federal government, “looking out for the interests of average Americans,” “stock market turmoil,” tariffs and inflation....>

<....Majorities also oppose a raft of specific Trump policies.

Over 60 percent of Americans oppose shutting down the Department of Education, instituting tariffs, cutting back environmental regulations, freezing foreign aid, ending birthright citizenship, reducing federal funding for medical research, taking control of Greenland or Canada, increasing the role of the federal government in how universities operate, and Trump being more involved in American arts and culture institutions, such as the Kennedy Center and the Smithsonian.

Two-thirds even take Harvard’s side in the university’s clash with Trump and believe federal judges should be able to block questionable administration policy until a trial is held.

Never before has a president presented so broad an agenda, so thoroughly rejected by the public.

One could imagine a situation where voters disapprove of the president’s handling of an issue but accept his rationale. That would suggest room to turn things around.

However, on many core agenda items voters reject Trump’s predicates.

At the broadest level, just 43 percent believe “Trump’s approach has been a necessary shake up in Washington,” while 57 percent are convinced “Trump’s approach has unnecessarily put the country at risk.”

Sixty-four percent believe Trump is going too far in “trying to expand the power of the president” and 62 percent say this administration does not respect the rule of law.

Seven in 10 say tariffs will increase prices. Majorities oppose deporting all those who are undocumented and believe immigration is good for our country.

Desperately scouring the polls for any good news, all the president’s sycophants have reached for the fact that despite the national antipathy to Trump, voters are more likely to trust him to deal with the nations’ key problems than Democrats in Congress (although only 37 percent trust Trump on that issue).

While this bespeaks Democrats’ need for a positive agenda, if “Democrats in Congress” were running against Trump this might be meaningful, but in fact this question is not strongly correlated with any real-world outcome.

Despite it, when asked who they would vote for in a congressional race, Democrats lead by an average of 5 points. Republicans won the House vote by 2.6 points in 2024.

If you’re a Republican who won by less than 10 points, you are either frightened or foolish.>

<On it goes...

on and on...

on and on.

Continuous harassment.

On it goes...

on and on...

on and on.

Institutionalized harassment.

On it goes...

on and on...

on and on.

Continuous harassment.

On it goes...

on and on...

on and on.

Institutionalized harassment.

On it goes...

on and on...

on and on.

Operation target select [sic] paying members.

FTB is continuously stalked by certain employees and privileged volunteer editors of Chessgames. This deliberate harassment has gone on for years.

After not posting for a week, I made 7 posts and was shut down for the @#$%*&!# excuse of "posting too frequently." By comparison, Orange Face made over 20+ posts today (I stopped counting), including half-a-dozen posts on multiple pages.

This is blatant discrimination by Chessgames. Such discrimination has been going on for years, as I have frequently made clear. It's an unfair, foolish mistake on CG's part to allow their "trusted" people to target and harass paying members.

Furthermore, paying members are allowed a second free account but -- you guessed it -- Chessgames has deliberately shut down FTB's free account some years back. Yet zanzibar is allowed untold number of free accounts.

Chessgames operates on a RAGING DOUBLE STANDARD.>

<On Sunday, President Donald Trump sat down for a wide-ranging interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press,” and in characteristic form, he took some time to call out his haters.

“[Democrats] have a new person named [Jasmine] Crockett,” Trump told NBC News’ Kristen Welker while speaking about the state of the Democratic party. “I watched her speak the other day, and she’s definitely a low-IQ person.”

Crockett, who represents Texas in the House of Representatives and frequently criticizes the president, has become a target of Trump as her star has risen in the Democratic party.

Trump’s remarks on Sunday mirror comments he made about her back in March, when he said, “She’s a lowlife, and she’s a very low-IQ person.”

As she’s done in the past, Crockett responded directly to the president’s taunts, writing on X on Sunday: “For you to be in charge of the WHOLE country, you sure do have my name in your mouth a lot. Every time you say my name, you’re reminding the world that you’re terrified of smart, bold Black women telling the truth and holding you accountable. So keep talking...”

Trump has long held up IQ as the be-all, end-all measure of self-worth. (He’s equally obsessed with “good genes,” and others’ ― usually migrants’ ― “bad genes.”) But when he’s claiming a critic is a “low-IQ person” or “individual,” it’s usually a Black woman he’s targeting.

“I listened to President Trump call Rep. Jasmine Crockett a ‘low IQ individual’ and I realized I had heard that before, so put the question to ChatGPT,” NPR “Wait Wait... Don’t Tell Me” host Peter Sagal wrote on Bluesky Sunday, alongside a screengrab of his results: ChatGPT pointed out that Trump had called Rep. Maxine Waters (D-California) “an extraordinarily low IQ person” while repeatedly lobbing “low IQ” barbs at Vice President Kamala Harris.

Sagal isn’t the first to notice this habit. As David Smith of the Guardian noted in 2018, Trump has insulted the intelligence of male critics ― calling former Sen. Mitt Romney “one of the dumbest” candidates in the history of the GOP and the late Sen. John McCain a “dummy” ― but he’s just as likely to deem them a “pompous ass” or a “loser.”

When it’s Black public figures he’s attacking, he tends to denigrate them on the basis of their intelligence alone.

Throughout the presidential election, Trump derided Harris, his opponent, as “dumb,” “mentally unfit,” “slow” and “stupid,” and of course, an “extremely low-IQ person.”

In March, he also suggested Rep. Al Green (D-Texas) ― another “low-IQ individual” in Trump’s book ― should be forced to take an IQ test after the congressman was removed from the president’s address to Congress and later censured by the House.

High-IQ individuals are also intriguing to Trump, but they’re almost always white like him: Elon Musk, Tesla CEO and Trump adviser, is a “seriously high-IQ individual.” (So is Musk’s son, X, according to Trump, though he’s just 4.) In 2016, Trump said his Cabinet ― which only had three people of color in leading positions ― had “by far the highest IQ of any Cabinet ever assembled.”

And Trump loves to trumpet his own IQ, calling it “one of the highest.” The president has also called himself a “very stable genius” on multiple occasions.

The president’s mode of speech ― the markedly different way he speaks about Black people’s intelligence versus white people’s ― reeks of racism, said Carrie Gillon, a linguist and the cohost of “Vocal Fries,” a podcast about linguistic discrimination.

“It’s absolutely evident that he thinks Black people have lower IQs than white people — and believes IQ is an important and real way to measure intelligence, and that there is only one kind of intelligence,” Gillon told HuffPost.

“The history of IQ is racist and eugenicist, and would take a lot to unpack, Gillon noted. “But ultimately: Talking about IQ, particularly in this way, is racist,” she said.

He believes that Black people can have so-called good genes when it comes to sports, but otherwise are ‘low-IQ individuals.’ It’s just blatant racism.Megan Figueroa, a linguist at the University of Arizona, and co-host of The Vocal Fries

When IQ tests were introduced in the 20th century, eugenicists and ethnocentrics latched onto them to argue that a person’s intelligence was influenced by their biology. (Eugenics ― a pseudoscientific idea that’s experiencing an unnerving resurgence ― is broadly defined as the use of selective breeding to improve the human race.....>

<....“They held up the apparent gaps these tests illuminated between ethnic minorities and whites or between low- and high-income groups,” Daphne Oluwaseun Martschenko, an assistant professor at the Stanford University Center for Biomedical Ethics, wrote in The Conversation in 2017.

“In their darkest moments, IQ tests became a powerful way to exclude and control marginalised communities using empirical and scientific language,” Oluwaseun Martschenko wrote.

“Supporters of eugenic ideologies in the 1900s used IQ tests to identify ‘idiots,’ ‘imbeciles,’ and the ’feebleminded,’” she explained. “These were people, eugenicists argued, who threatened to dilute the White Anglo-Saxon genetic stock of America.”

Today, critics of IQ tests have argued that the “cultural specificity” of intelligence makes the tests biased toward the environment they were developed in, which is, more often than not, white and Western societies.

What’s interesting to Megan Figueroa, a linguist at the University of Arizona, and the co-host of The Vocal Fries, is the compliments Trump does extend to famous Black people.

“I find it striking how it compares with how he talked about Deion Sanders’ ‘phenomenal genes,‘” Figueroa said. “He believes that Black people can have so-called good genes when it comes to sports, but otherwise are ‘low-IQ individuals.’ It’s just blatant racism.”

“Since Crockett is ‘a low-IQ person,’ her criticisms of him don’t even require a response, they’re invalid and unimportant,” said Jennifer Mercieca, author of Jennifer Mercieca, author of “Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump,” sees Trump’s insult of Crockett as just another example of his use of an ad hominem attack to dodge criticism and accountability.

“By using this rhetorical strategy ― one of his favorites ― he’s able to avoid the issue being debated or the criticism and rerouting our attention to the person who made the criticism, ” said Mercieca, a professor in the department of communication and journalism at Texas A&M University.

“Since Crockett is ‘a low IQ person,’ her criticisms of him don’t even require a response, they’re invalid and unimportant,” she said. “This allows Trump to insult his opposition without ever having to answer the question. It’s a strategy that works the same way whether there is a racial dynamic or not.”

For her part, Crockett hasn’t shied away from engaging directly with the president’s schoolyard ad hominems.

Last month, while appearing on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!”, Crockett said she would “absolutely” take an IQ test “publicly, head to head” against the president.

The Texas lawmaker also gives the president a taste of his own medicine at times, which may be why she’s gotten under his skin so much lately.

<[Event "19th World Open"] [Site "Philadelphia PA"]
[Date "1991.07.??"]
[EventDate "1991"]
[Round "4"]
[Result "0-1"]
[White "Shibut, Macon"]
[Black "Abramson, David"]
[ECO "C00"]
[WhiteElo "?"]
[BlackElo "?"]

<[Event "19th World Open"] [Site "Philadelphia PA"]
[Date "1991.07.??"]
[EventDate "1991"]
[Round "4"]
[Result "1-0"]
[White "Small, Gregg H"]
[Black "Knecht, Mark"]
[ECO "C04"]
[WhiteElo "?"]
[BlackElo "?"]

<[Event "19th World Open"] [Site "Philadelphia PA"]
[Date "1991.07.??"]
[EventDate "1991"]
[Round "5"]
[Result "1/2-1/2"]
[White "Bukhman, Eduard"]
[Black "Goldin, Alexander"]
[ECO "A04"]
[WhiteElo "?"]
[BlackElo "?"]

<[Event "Wolff-Gurevich m"] [Site "Boston Mass"]
[Date "1986.06.15"]
[EventDate "1986"]
[Round "4"]
[Result "0-1"]
[White "Gurevich, Ilya"]
[Black "Wolff, Patrick"]
[ECO "B08"]
[WhiteElo "?"]
[BlackElo "?"]

<The state of Ohio, which served as a reliable indicator of national political trends and mirrored the broader social and economic landscape of the United States for years, has witnessed a marked shift to the right.

A report in The Guardian published Tuesday notes that Ohio is linked to several notable extremist acts: the individual responsible for the deadly 2017 Charlottesville car attack and the founder of the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer website are both from the state.

A conspiracy to murder Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) was devised in Dublin, a prosperous Columbus suburb with a connection to Cook's childhood.

Ohio had 83 residents charged for their participation in the January 6, 2021 Capitol attack, which was sparked by President Trump. When considering states geographically nearer to the capital (Delaware, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania), Ohio had the highest per capita rate of arrested rioters. Furthermore, in the same year, Columbus reported a higher per capita incidence of hate crimes compared to all but three other US cities, the Guardian report noted.

Even Ohio lawmakers appear to be following this trend.

Republicans in Ohio have expressed extreme viewpoints and enacted legislation that unfairly impacts minority and immigrant populations, who are often targets of white supremacist groups.

Meanwhile, members of the Trump administration, including Steve Bannon and tech billionaire Elon Musk, have supported these white supremacist groups, the report notes.

Bannon has met with and advised far-right political figures in various countries including France, Hungary, and Germany. Similarly, Musk, criticized for allegedly antisemitic posts on X, recently faced backlash for his online appearance at a German far-right AfD party campaign event in January.

Christian Picciolini, a former white supremacist leader, told the Guardian: “The ideas that used to be fringe are much more mainstream under the Trump administration."

“This isn’t just my opinion; it’s the opinion of white supremacists. They love that the president has their back," he added.>

Like this, <ohiyuk>?

The effort started with Columbia University. In early March, the administration canceled $400 million in federal funding for the university. This was framed explicitly as punishment for Columbia’s failure to adequately address anti-Semitism on campus. The administration then issued a set of demands as preconditions for Columbia to get that funding back. These included giving the university president power over all disciplinary matters and placing the Middle Eastern–studies department under the control of a different university body. Columbia soon announced that it would make a list of changes that closely resembled what the administration had asked for. McMahon praised the changes and said that Columbia was on the “right track” to get its money back, though the government has still not restored the funding....>

<....Having successfully extracted concessions from Columbia, the government moved on to Harvard. On March 31, the administration said that it was reviewing $9 billion in federal grants and contracts awarded to Harvard. As with Columbia, it argued that the university had not sufficiently combatted anti-Semitism on its campus. Harvard then began negotiations with the federal government. But on April 11, the administration sent Harvard a list of far-reaching changes that the university would have to make to continue to receive federal funding. These included screening international students for disloyalty to the United States and allowing an external body to audit faculty viewpoints to ensure diversity.

This was too much for Harvard. “Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government,” the university’s lawyers wrote in a letter to administration officials. The university sued the Trump administration, arguing that the government had violated Harvard’s First Amendment rights and failed to follow the procedures to revoke federal grants. The government retaliated. It immediately froze $2.2 billion in grants and $60 million in contracts to Harvard, announced that it would consider revoking Harvard’s nonprofit tax-exempt status, and threatened the university’s ability to enroll international students. Even as the war escalated, the putative rationale remained the same. Trump “wants them to come to the table and change things,” McMahon told Fox News. “It’s a civil-rights issue on campus relative to the anti-Semitism.” McMahon never explained how cutting funding for biomedical research would help address anti-Semitism on campus. But the administration at least gestured in that direction.

No longer. The offenses enumerated in the McMahon letter are a disconnected grab bag of grievances. The closest thing to a legal theory for denying Harvard future grant funding is the accusation that the school has violated the Supreme Court’s ruling striking down race-based affirmative action. But revoking an institution’s funding under federal nondiscrimination law requires following a multistep process that takes months, Derek Black, a law professor at the University of South Carolina, told me. The government has to investigate a complaint and prove that the university will not take any steps to resolve the discrimination. Without showing that Harvard has violated nondiscrimination law—as opposed to merely asserting it, without evidence, in a rambling letter—the government can’t refuse to award it grants. “They went from step one to step five or six in a week,” Black said. “There’s no ‘We don’t like you’ authority in the federal Constitution or in statutory law. In fact, quite the opposite: You’re precluded from that.”

Harvard’s leaders have, under duress, acknowledged that the institution needs to make changes. Last week, the university released reports detailing incidents of anti-Semitism and anti-Muslim bias and a pervasive sense of non-belonging among Jewish students. It has announced that it will not support affinity-group graduation celebrations and that leaders will no longer make statements on political issues that don’t affect the university’s core function. “We were faced with a set of demands that addressed some problems that I and others recognized as real problems,” Harvard President Alan Garber told The Wall Street Journal. “But the means of addressing those problems is what was so objectionable.” The fact that the university is willing to make changes strengthens its legal case challenging the cancellation of funding. Several legal experts have predicted that the university will prevail in court.

In a 2021 speech titled “The Universities Are the Enemy,” then–Senate candidate J. D. Vance declared that universities, as left-wing gatekeepers of truth and knowledge, “make it impossible for conservative ideas to ultimately carry the day.” The solution, Vance said, was to “honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.” We’ve been seeing the aggressive part of that formula for two months. With the McMahon letter, the administration has gotten much closer to honesty.>

<In the dark corners of America’s halls of power, something sinister is unfolding. Attorney General Pam Bondi has launched an assault on one of the most sacred pillars of our democracy: the freedom of the press. And make no mistake, this isn’t just another policy change. It’s a deliberate strategy straight from the dictator’s playbook.

Late last month, Bondi quietly issued a memo rescinding vital protections for journalists that had prevented the government from forcing reporters to reveal their sources or surrender their notes during leak investigations. This wasn’t just any memo; it was a declaration of war against the very foundation of press freedom in America.

Bondi’s memo, released late on a Friday afternoon (a classic timing choice to minimize media attention), rescinded policies that had limited when and how Justice Department attorneys could pursue records or testimony from journalists, including in cases involving the unauthorized disclosure of government secrets to the press. The implications are chilling and immediate.

The Justice Department will now allow federal investigators to pursue communications from media outlets in government leak investigations, marking a complete reversal of Biden-era (and previous administrations’) policies that protected journalists from becoming targets of government intimidation.

Bondi’s justification? The Justice Department “will not tolerate unauthorized disclosures that undermine President Trump’s policies, victimize government agencies, and cause harm to the American people.”

Did you catch that? Not disclosures that threaten national security, but those that “undermine President Trump’s policies.” Since when did the President’s policies become sacred and beyond scrutiny? Since when did exposing wrongdoing by our government become a crime against “the American people”?

Throughout our history, ethical government officials who leaked information to the press have been essential to maintaining our democracy. They’ve exposed corruption, illegal wars, and unconstitutional surveillance, and in many cases they’ve paid a heavy price for their courage.

Take my old friend and correspondent Daniel Ellsberg, perhaps America’s most famous whistleblower. In 1971, Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers, exposing how multiple presidents had systematically lied to the American people about the Vietnam War. He believed the documents contained “evidence of a quarter century of aggression, broken treaties, deceptions, stolen elections, lies and murder.” His brave act helped change public opinion and ultimately contributed to ending that disastrous war.

When Ellsberg released the Pentagon Papers, the Nixon administration tried to block their publication. The Supreme Court ruling in New York Times Co. v. United States upholding the press’s right to publish has been called one of the “modern pillars” of First Amendment rights with respect to freedom of the press.

That same Nixon administration that tried to silence Ellsberg created the infamous “White House Plumbers” unit to stop leaks, which later led directly to the Watergate scandal and Nixon’s downfall.

History shows that when presidents attack whistleblowers and the press, they’re usually trying to hide their own misdeeds. And it sure feels like that’s exactly what Bondi and Trump are now up to.

In more recent history, we’ve seen Edward Snowden expose the NSA’s mass surveillance programs and Chelsea Manning reveal troubling military actions, including the killing of civilians. Both were driven by their conviction that the American people deserved to know about government overreach and misconduct.

The Founders understood that a democracy cannot function without an informed citizenry, and citizens cannot be informed without a free press that can hold the powerful accountable. That’s why they enshrined press freedom in the First Amendment; they knew from bitter experience that power corrupts, and that the powerful will always seek to hide their corruption.

A free press serves as our early warning system against government overreach and abuse. When journalists can protect their sources, those inside the government who witness wrongdoing can come forward without fear of retribution. This critical flow of information is what Bondi is now trying to shut down.

Bondi’s actions come in the midst of an aggressive campaign against unauthorized leaking in Trump’s second administration. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has already referred “two intelligence community leakers” to the Justice Department for potential prosecutions, with a third referral on the way.....>