DL Open Thread: Monday, March 17, 2025
In Amerika, You Can’t Be A Black Man And A Military Hero:
The US defense department webpage celebrating an army general who served in the Vietnam war and was awarded the country’s highest military decoration has been removed and the letters “DEI” added to the site’s address.
On Saturday, US army Maj Gen Charles Calvin Rogers’s Medal of Honor webpage led to a “404” error message. The URL was also changed, with the word “medal” changed to “deimedal”.
Rogers, who was awarded the Medal of Honor by then president Richard Nixon in 1970, served in the Vietnam war, where he was wounded three times while leading the defense of a base.
Can an all-Aryan Army be far behind? This is both sickening and terrifying,
“Oopsie–Too Late”. Trump thumbs nose at courts, collaborates with right-wing dictator:
The Trump administration moved one large step closer to a constitutional showdown with the judicial branch of government when airplane-loads of Venezuelan detainees deplaned in El Salvador even though a federal judge had ordered that the planes reverse course and return the detainees to the United States.
The right-wing president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, bragged that the 238 detainees who had been aboard the aircraft were transferred to a Salvadoran “Terrorism Confinement Center,” where they would be held for at least a year.
“Oopsie … Too late,” Mr. Bukele wrote in a social media post on Sunday morning that was recirculated by the White House communications director, Steven Cheung.
Around the same time, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in another social media post, thanked Mr. Bukele for a lengthy post detailing the migrants’ incarceration.
Y’all Saw This One Too. Right?:
A federal court order that would have halted the immediate deportation of a Rhode Island doctor was issued Friday evening while the doctor’s departing plane sat on the tarmac at Boston Logan International Airport, said a family friend and colleague.
But the plane ultimately took off, carrying Dr. Rasha Alawieh out of the country for reasons still unclear to her family, her lawyer and Brown Medicine colleagues such as Dr. Basma Merhi.
“They did not do anything to stop the plane,” said Merhi, who was learning details of the event through information relayed by Alawieh family members. “So, clearly, they wanted to deport her regardless of if there was a judge’s order or not. She didn’t do anything wrong.”
Tourism Dollars Exit US. So do tourists, upset by Trump’s tsuris:
International travelers concerned about President Donald Trump’s trade policies and bellicose rhetoric have been canceling trips to the United States, depriving the U.S. tourism industry of billions of dollars at a time when the economy has started to appear wobbly.
International travel to the United States is expected to slide by 5 percent this year, contributing to a $64 billion shortfall for the travel industry, according to Tourism Economics. The research firm had originally forecast a 9 percent increase in foreign travel, but revised its estimate late last month to reflect “polarizing Trump Administration policies and rhetoric.”
The Auto-Pen Had A Mind Of Its Own:
Donald Trump claimed late Sunday — in a middle-of-the-night rant on his Truth Social platform — that he’d declared the pardons that were issued by his predecessor, former President Joe Biden, before leaving office to be “VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT.”
The president claimed Biden’s pardons were signed by an autopen, seizing on a report last week from a right-wing group that alleged frequent use of the mechanical device in the Biden White House. Commentators used that report to boost allegations of Biden’s cognitive decline.
“In other words, Joe Biden did not sign them but, more importantly, he did not know anything about them,” wrote Trump, who also used autopen during his first term.
Ho-kay.
An Interesting Environmental Success Story:
It was one of China’s most ambitious environmental endeavours ever.
The Loess plateau, an area spanning more than 245,000 sq miles (640,000 sq km) across three provinces and parts of four others, supports about 100 million people. By the end of the 20th century, however, this land, once fertile and productive, was considered the most eroded place on Earth, according to a documentary by the ecologist John D Liu.
Generations of farmers had cleared and cultivated the land, slowly breaking down the soil and destroying the cover. Every year, the dust from the plain jammed the Yellow River with silt (this is how the river gets its name), sending plumes of loess, a fine wind-blown sediment, across Chinese cities – including to the capital, Beijing.
And so in 1999 the Chinese government took drastic emergency action with the launch of Grain to Green, a pilot project backed by World Bank funding, to regreen the plateau and reverse the damage done by overgrazing and overcultivation of the once forested hillsides that would become what the bank described in 2004 as “the largest and most successful water and soil conservancy project in the world”.
The ‘Shakedown’ Resonating In Delaware:
“It felt like it was a moment we have not seen before,” said Senate Majority Leader Bryan Townsend, D-Newark, who sponsored the legislation. “In fact, in the weeks since we have confirmed in many ways from many perspectives that it’s a moment, a very long moment now, that we have not seen before.”
The bill defines a “controlling shareholder” within a company as someone who owns at least half of a company’s shares or a third of shares plus a managerial role. It reduces the amount of internal due diligence companies must do to review deals between powerful executives and their companies.
The legislation also restricts what are called “books and records” claims, which are requests a shareholder can make to executives for internal company documents. It is not retroactive to any court action before February 17, meaning it would not affect Musk’s appeal in the Delaware Supreme Court.
James An, a lecturer at Stanford Law School, said the evidence shows that last year, “more public corporations moved to Delaware than away from Delaware.”
“This bill is a shakedown, pure and simple. That’s why each of you have been told that Delaware is on the precipice of disaster,” An said. “If you vote for SB 21, you will enable billionaires such as Elon Musk and other controlling shareholders to take advantage of pensions, retirees and ordinary investors. You will make these oligarchs richer and make it easier for them to buy media outlets and elections. You will make billionaires’ lives better, but you will make the lives of your constituents worse.”
The House leadership is trying to fast-track this bill before opposition and public opinion can coalesce against it. They’ve scheduled a hearing on the bill for 10:30 am Wednesday. Betcha it’s on the Agenda on Thursday. Contact your legislators and urge them to slow the Musk Train down.
What do you want to talk about?
I’m reading the excellent memoir by Sebastian Haffner, Defying Hitler. This is the description of the opposition party to Nazism in 1930: “Anyone [who studies this] will find all those factors that make this sort of government the forerunner of the very thing it is supposed to prevent: its discouragement of its own supporters; the way it undermines its own position; its acceptance of a loss of freedom; its lack of ideological weapons against enemy propaganda; the way it surrenders the initiative; and its collapse at the final moment when the issue is reduced to a simple question of power.” Sounds quite familiar, no?
Speaking of right-wing propaganda, Rick Jensen is on another tear. But one of DL’s own refuses to speak ill of the fashy wannabe, a pattern that goes back well over a decade:
https://delawaretoday.com/life-style/wdel-am-radio-host-al-mascitti-talks-about-rick-jensen-of-new-castle-county-delaware/
Fucking gross.
I don’t listen to his show, and never have, even when I worked there. I can’t even get their web site in Europe, nor can I get that Delaware Today article, whatever it is.
You seem to have speaking ill of people down pat. Go for it. And have the balls to say it to my face when I get back to Delaware.
I also notice this is your fifth screen name. I’ll leave this up long enough so people can see your cowardly bullshit, and then buh-bye.
Well its an interview piece from 2012, You look young and fit in the picture. Not sure where this dude/dudette is going but looks like BS to Moi.
Relax, Al.
The best the cowardly troll’s got is a 13-year-old piece from DT. Old news is no news. Once he’s banned, he won’t be missed.
Was gonna ban him already, but enjoying the comments…
…I’ll let it go awhile longer.
I’m always puzzled about why anybody who’s not a conservative would listen to Jensen in the first place. Just to get angry? Same with Limbaugh back in his day.
I realize everybody needs a hobby, but that seems like a dumb one.
“why anybody who’s not a conservative would listen to Jensen ”
Right wing is the default media now. A lot of people who aren’t especially political, or who think themselves “moderate” are actually steeped in right wing media without recognizing it.
But the boundaries are shifting. These days if you aren’t calling for people to be shoved into ovens, you can still think of yourself as moderate. (I hope my hyperbolic example isn’t overtaken by events. It’s getting closer).
No, I mean actual left-leaning people. Kowalko used to rail about Jensen all the time and all I could think was, “Why listen?”
I thought that even when they were paying me to do it. I had a bunch of right-wingers who listened, apparently just to get pissed off at a lib. I think anger is all that keeps some people going.
As for Jensen, he used to be a country club Republican who couldn’t afford belonging to a country club. I haven’t spoken with him in several years so I don’t know where he is on the fascism spectrum these days.
If it’s any consolation to Ides et al, we had plenty of angry confrontations in the hallways, but we also had some laughs. Condemning people is for ideologues. I’ve never been one.
Actually, Al looks more fit now than he did then. Maybe it’s from walking around Paris while “IdesofMarch” stews in his basement about some innocuous interview from 13 years ago. But Al still doesn’t suffer fools lightly, so watch out, “IdesofMarch.”
By the way, “IdesofMarch,” your argument is childish.
Meanwhile, in France:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/17/return-statue-liberty-french-parliament
Don’t understand why Glucksmann was joking about what seems to be a genuinely appropriate thoght.
BTW, someone might want to explain to Ms. Leavitt that, were it not for the French, Herr Trump might still be a subject of the King of England.
The Guardian was the only source I saw that said he was joking. All others reported it as straight but I wanted a link without a paywall.