"The news that filmmaker Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele, had been murdered was horrifying enough on its own. The emerging details, that the primary suspect was their son, Nick Reiner, who has struggled with addiction, made it a tragedy layered with grief, complexity, and heartbreak. In moments like these, Americans traditionally look to the president not for commentary, but for compassion."
"Meanwhile, many major media companies do not have Trump’s vile post on their front page news coverage, and when they do, it is sanitized to normalize this behavior."
"When a reporter asked him yesterday why he didn’t ask Congress for a declaration of war against those South American drug cartels he claims are at war with the United States, Trump answered: 'Well, I don’t think we’re gonna necessarily ask for a declaration of war, I think we’re just gonna kill people that are bringing drugs into our country."
"Ever since Donald Trump began his campaign of blowing up boats off the coast of South America early last month, journalists covering the story have been too accepting of his obviously bogus rationale."
"The attacks -- which, one needs to acknowledge right from the start, amount to extrajudicial executions, or murder -- have little or nothing to do with combatting the flow of deadly drugs from cartels into the United States. ...
So what are Trump’s real motives for attacking these boats? I think there are three obvious attractions to Trump here, that satisfy his deep needs."
"A broad range of specialists in laws governing the use of lethal force have called Mr. Trump’s orders to the military patently illegal. They say the premeditated extrajudicial killings have been murders — regardless of whether the 43 people blown apart, burned alive or drowned in 10 strikes so far were indeed running drugs."
In news from the quivering bowels of Vichy America, a major liberal law firm has agreed to work for fascists and stop hiring so many women, brown people, or members of the LGBTQ community to placate an aggrieved, would-be dictator and keep raking in those sweet government contracts:
Trump-Targeted Law Firm Caves, Vows $40M in Legal Support to Right-Wing Causes
"resident Donald Trump withdrew an executive order targeting a major Democratic-leaning law firm after the firm agreed to provide $40 million in pro bono legal services in support of his administration’s far right initiatives.
“This is unbelievably shameful from Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP,” Molly Coleman, executive director at People’s Parity Project, said on LinkedIn. “I’m embarrassed to have any association with this firm that failed to find the courage the moment requires.”
Recently, the White House has escalated attacks on law firms whose attorneys have been involved in legal efforts opposing Trump. Just last week, Trump signed an executive order attempting to revoke security clearances from Paul, Weiss attorneys, restrict the firm’s access to federal buildings, and terminate any of its government contracts. The order reportedly prompted at least one client to sever ties with the firm.
However, following a meeting between Trump and Brad Karp, the chair of Paul, Weiss, the administration abruptly rescinded the order. “We look forward to an engaged and constructive relationship with the President and his Administration,” Karp said in a statement."
So, let's make sure we all understand what's going on here. Trump is brazenly and almost certainly illegally, shaking down a powerful law firm that has literally worked on cases opposing him in the past, and is known from their commitment to diverse hiring practices, and instead of fighting back, or even just taking the loss of government money on the chin, they've decided to check notes concede that a former partner who worked on cases against Trump was engaged in "wrongdoing," work pro-bono for the fascist regime, and capitulate to the fascist "war on DEI" - an idea whose ever-expanding meaning appears to be "restore mandated white supremacy in America."
Are you kidding me? Does the larger liberal establishment in the United States have anything resembling a spine to share between them? More importantly, if Americans trapped inside the increasingly ominous, fascist nightmare that is Trump 2.0 can't count on a high profile law firm in the business of protecting civil rights and taking on the government, to even stand up for the firm's own rights, how can they have faith that anyone in position to defend their rights in a legal capacity, is going to step up to the plate for them? The answer of course, is that they can't.
Folks, you'll get no argument from me if you say that the greater evil in this story is a fascist president who would be king, using the authority of his office to gain revenge on law firms that helped charge him for real crimes, he absolutely committed. As the extorted settlement proves, this too is part of Trump's plot to take complete control of America as a dictator. This isn't legal, and as a federal judge's restraining order in a similar case involving the Trump-targeted firm Perkins Coie demonstrations, complete surrender was not the only option Paul Weiss and its chair Brad Karp had here. By that same measure you can't win if you don't fight, and when losing means capitulating to fascism, a law firm full of civil rights lawyers has a goddamn responsibility to resist.
“It is a sad day for the legal industry. Paul, Weiss, didn’t just bend a knee, it set a new standard for shameful capitulation. This is a stain on the firm, every one of its partners, and the entire legal profession,” Marc Elias, founder of Democracy Docket, said on Bluesky."
Folks, I've been talking about and writing about the rise of fascism for over a decade now. And I'm not bragging, because I wish I had been wrong about the signs I was reading around me, but I have largely been right when I insisted we were all heading for a moment like this. Furthermore, I have repeatedly warned that a liberal establishment (no, not you; your leaders, your media, your "liberal" capitalist employers) which would always have the option of simply collaborating with the fascist order, wasn't going to save us from fascist predation. There is no cavalry; the opposition party, the courts, and the lawyers aren't going to stop this. At the rate things are going, I have no idea how long I'll still be able to tell you that we are the cavalry, and the only way this nightmare ends is if we use our bodies en masse to shut down the fascist order and the profits that motivate the guys paying for all this; but it's the truth. If you can do it to Tesla, you can do it to any of them.
If you're wondering why the pundit class and the mainstream media organizations that employ them have been so tepid in their criticism of Trump, so unwilling to name the fascist beast and draw the logical conclusions the regime's actions imply, perhaps it's because they know they've been complicit in this fascist nightmare? As Joan Westenberg notes in this brilliant March 15th drag out piece, the normalization of the fascist ideology the Trump regime is running on now has many fathers in American society, and not all of them are folks who'd want to be known as supporters of MAGA fascism; but that's precisely the role they've served, for personal gain:
The Pundit Class Played Devil’s Advocate. Now the Devil’s at the Door.
"A revolving door of New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post columnists made a career of platforming people who—either blatantly or through implication—argued that transgender people shouldn't exist. That democracy had "gone too far." They raged against "wokeism" because they couldn’t conceive of a world where it wouldn’t prevail. They bemoaned "cancel culture" not because they cared about free speech, but because they mistakenly believed the right-wing ideologues they dined with had been cast out for good.
In their intellectual stupor, they decided that the forces of social change were so overpowering and unstoppable that the world needed a voice to speak up against them in an infernal balancing act. And it felt daring, didn't it? To be the literary equivalent of the Cool Girl—not like those Other Girls who care about freedom, equity, history, and common sense.
They dressed themselves up as the beatniks of cultural commentary. They convinced themselves of their "underground" status. They basked in institutional protection, indulging in a self-congratulatory circle-jerk of mock dissent where the stakes were always someone else's problem. They positioned themselves as lone voices against an imagined tide of unthinking dogma, pretending that they were fighting against orthodoxy when, in reality, they were just reinforcing the status quo with a hipster filter. They weren't holding truth to power. They were selling a brand: rebellion without responsibility, provocation without principle, and the posture of dissent with none of the burden of consequence.
They dined on the aesthetic of courage without ever taking a risk. And why not? The market for disaffected liberals playing footsie with fascists was lucrative and full of opportunities for highbrow grift."
On #HolocaustRemembranceDay, we remember the six million Jewish women, men and children, hundreds of thousands of Roma, and all other victims of the Holocaust.
Today we mark the 80 years since the liberation of the Nazi concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau.
It is our duty to teach future generations about European history, including its darkest chapters.
An image of the railway tracks leading to the main gate of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Nazi concentration and extermination camp. The text reads, "80 years since the liberation of Nazi concentraition and extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau." Below is the hashtag #WeRemember.
Former colleagues of retired CBS News correspondent David Dow say the newsman, who covered the O.J. and Rodney King trials, has died. He was with the network for 30 years and in retirement helped the homeless in L.A. and taught at USC.
@w7voa Has the CBS paid trump yet to settle the orange one's derangedly spurious lawsuit to settle the fact CBS... interviewed presidential candidate Harris, of all possible miscarriages of justice!
Looking at their online 'news' selection I might die of shame as well if my career was affiliated with the CBS network.
"As we prepare to begin this fight with the incredible gift of a bit of time to prepare for what we know is coming, we must not be naive or compromised. We must understand that Donald Trump is only possible because Americans have rejected principles. Self-proclaimed Christians have embraced domination over love."
"It is frustrating and, frankly, frightening that the defense of basic rights and democratic self-government against the authoritarian onslaught depends so much on powerful individuals and institutions that have so far proved largely unable and/or unwilling to model anything but normalcy, compliance, and acquiescence. We need and deserve better."
"Former German chancellor Angela Merkel’s first mistake with Donald Trump, she writes in her memoir, was treating him as if he were 'completely normal', but she quickly learned of his 'emotional' nature and soft spot for authoritarians."
"The recent wave of symbolic recognitions that began in 2024 now appears to be the only step many European powers are willing to take in the face of genocide, following nearly two years of moral, material, and diplomatic support for the Israeli regime as well as near-total impunity."
Yara Hawari: "This kind of recognition is not just ineffective—it is dangerous. It reinforces a narrow partitionist framework that reduces “Palestine” to the West Bank and Gaza and the Palestinian people to less than half of who we are."