Opinion

The Boogeyman isn’t living under MAGAs' beds — he is actually the person sleeping in them

Something terrifying lived under my bed when I was a little boy.

There wasn't a single night I can remember when I didn’t navigate the final moments of the dreaded bedtime hour with a running start, and a leap into the warm safety of the covers atop my bed.

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It's a crime spree — not a 'constitutional crisis'

The Justice Department has asked a judge to stop or amend another judge’s order, issued Saturday, that blocks Elon Musk from accessing the Treasury Department’s payment systems. The DOJ’s move came after Donald Trump’s allies openly questioned the constitutional authority of independent judges.

“Officials ranging from billionaire Elon Musk to Vice President JD Vance have not only criticized a federal judge’s decision early Saturday that blocks Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency from accessing Treasury Department records, but have also attacked the legitimacy of judicial oversight, a fundamental pillar of American democracy, which is based on the separation of powers,” the Associated Press reported.

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Here's what happens when the world's richest man puts a target on your back

— Why every American should care about CBS settling ‘dangerous’ Trump lawsuit, even MAGA. CBS’s parent company, Paramount, wants to merge with Skydance, another media giant, but they need the approval of Trump’s FCC to make it happen. CBS, meanwhile, is being sued by Trump personally for $10 billion for violating “news distortion rules.” The suit is a blatant attempt to intimidate a network into favorable coverage — something straight out of Viktor Orbán’s playbook (or Putin in his early days) — but CBS is, according to insiders quoted in the media, seriously considering making some sort of a settlement, handing millions to Trump to make the suit go away. This follows ABC doing the same thing after George Stephanopolis said that Trump had been found liable for “rape” — a description of Trump’s attack on E. Jean Carroll that the judge in the case said was appropriate — but, again, the network paid him off with $15 million to make the threats go away.

In an extraordinary and risky show of defiance, CNN anchor Jake Tapper took to the airwaves to explain that CBS’s considering a payoff is an extraordinarily dangerous thing to do. He said that to “settle the suit would be a white flag of surrender… the network of [veteran broadcaster] Edward R. Murrow… saying, we will not speak truth to power. We will acquiesce to power at the expense of truth.” He wrapped up his rant, saying, “You live long enough and you see how eroded standards that politicians think work for their side always end up being wielded against them. And at that point, it doesn’t even matter who started it. It just matters that corporations are leaning on news divisions to supplicate themselves to whomever is in power because of their bottom line and the implied threat from the government.”

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The only thing standing between democracy and dictatorship in America

Trump wants FBI agents who investigated his coup attempt, his facilitating espionage, or his other financial and criminal activities fired.

Let’s be very clear: this is how dictatorships start.

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Greenlight for tyranny as impotent Dems' lack of resistance opens the floodgates

Is Trump’s, Musk’s, and Putin’s coup against democracy complete?

Under the guise of a 44-year campaign to reverse the middle-class advances of the New Deal and Great Society, rightwing billionaires and the Republicans they own have pushed a fundamentally fascist agenda that is now openly at war with America. They are engaging in a coup, finishing the work Trump started on January 6, 2021.

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The real estate of empire: How colonial gentrification fuels Trump's Gaza plan

By Peter Bloom/Common Dreams

U.S. President Donald Trump's latest proposal concerning the future of Gaza has sent shockwaves throughout the international community. The plan, which envisions the mass displacement of Palestinians to make way for large-scale real estate development, has been described by many as a modern form of ethnic cleansing. However, beyond its immediate human rights implications, the proposal reflects a broader and increasingly pervasive trend: the privatization of colonialism. This emerging form of power, which fuses state-backed military interventions with corporate real estate ambitions, is not only reshaping geopolitics but also reinforcing patterns of displacement and profit-driven development that have long characterized capitalism.

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Efficiency − or empire? How Elon Musk could end government as we know it

By Allison Stanger, Distinguished Endowed Professor, Middlebury

Elon Musk’s role as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency, also known as DOGE, is on the surface a dramatic effort to overhaul the inefficiencies of federal bureaucracy. But beneath the rhetoric of cost-cutting and regulatory streamlining lies a troubling scenario.

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Kansas Senate leaps to follow in Elon Musk’s footsteps with ‘COGE’ committee

Opinion editor Clay Wirestone’s weekly roundup of legislative flotsam and jetsam. Read the archive.

Hey, Kansans! Are you excited and delighted by the work of Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency workers in rooting through government records in search of waste?

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Democratic 'leadership' has disappeared as pock-faced Orcs are unleashed on our government

The sell-by date is officially up for Americans telling me they just can't pay attention to what is happening in this country right now, because it is all just too much to take; or because they are tired; or because there’s nothing we can do about it; or because it’s time for somebody else to care for awhile …

Admit it, you know these people. I run into ‘em all the time, and I am officially done being polite and sympathetic.

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Our allies may never forgive us. Anti-American forces, on the other hand, are giddy.

Trump’s unhinged proposal to take Gaza, “relocate” more than a million starving people to an unspecified locale, and turn their bombed homes into a resort for the wealthy didn’t go over well. Following his threats to Colombia, Panama, Mexico, Canada, Denmark, and Greenland, the civilized world is aghast at the madman at the helm, and has learned a new lesson: that America betrays her allies. It is a dangerous lesson from which the US may never recover.

Anti-American forces, on the other hand, are giddy.

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A common thread between Trump's agency destruction, his absurd Gaza plan and Dems' silence

There is one thread that ties together Trump’s destruction of American government agencies, his offer to take the Gaza crisis off Israel’s hands and dump it on our military, and senators’ and representatives’ failure to challenge him: This is how kingdoms operate. Rule by decree.

It proves that we’re asking the wrong question.

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A funny thing happened on the way to closing the Department of Education

The Trump administration continued its head-scratching appointments by anointing billionaire Linda McMahon as Secretary of Education — even though he had campaigned on a pledge to abolish the department. The president has expressed his hope that McMahon would eventually “put herself out of a job.”

She has been part of the president’s inner political circle, but is best known as president and co-founder, with her husband, of World Wrestling Entertainment. McMahon used to be a wrestler herself. Her only K-12 experience was a brief stint on the Connecticut Board of Education, although she feels wrestling showed her what all students should learn about respect, leadership and such.

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An assault weapons ban had momentum until Colorado Democrats dropped it

Democrats in the Colorado Legislature might finally succeed in passing groundbreaking restrictions on semiautomatic firearms.

They have introduced a bill that would ban the sale of semiautomatic rifles and shotguns that can accept detachable magazines. Numerous lawmakers have signed on, and the bill already cleared its first hurdle when it passed a Senate committee vote last week.

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