DL Open Thread: Wednesday, October 1, 2025
Welcome, Blue Delaware Reader(s?)!
Y’know, I used to joke that, in those rare instances when we broke a story over here, Blue Delaware would have it in 3-2-1, without attribution. Guess I’ve gotta come up with a new joke. That guy was a serial plagiarizer, presumably because he never came up with even a sentence on his own that was worth reading.
Don’t be misled by the government shutdown. By far the biggest and most important story is the insane and terrifying ‘address’ to the brass. An address that will go down in history. Let’s not bury the lede: The President of the United States told the generals that they should be training troops by using American people as target practice. Full stop. Yes, we can go on about how a serial drunk also lectured the generals on grooming and obesity:
President Trump defended the use of U.S. troops in American cities and told top U.S. commanders that the military would be used against the “enemy within.”
“This is going to be a big thing for the people in this room, because it’s the enemy from within, and we have to handle it before it gets out of control,” Trump told those gathered for the highly unusual event at Quantico, Va. “It won’t get out of control once you’re involved at all.”
Trump said he told Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that the U.S. “should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military,” a reference to the Democratic-run cities that he has long said have high crime rates that make them uninhabitable.
Hegseth said the newly renamed Department of War had lost its way and become the “woke department,” and added: “To ensure peace, we must prepare for war.” He made fitness a key part of his remarks and announced that “anyone wearing the uniform will take the PT test twice a year, and pass height and weight requirements,” including generals and admirals.
Note that he said nothing about sobriety. Is this mic on? This is insanity. Where are the calls for this President to step down or to have the 25th Amendment activated? The military gunning down Americans? That’s not a deal-breaker? The lack of push-back enables Fascism just as much as the Fascists who are pushing the envelope. As stunned as I am by that shit-show yesterday, I’m even more stunned by the muted response to it. This is pretty much the only article I could find about Trump’s further descent into mental incapacity:
The president talked at length, and his comments should have confirmed to even the most sympathetic observer that he is, as the kids say, not okay. Several of Hegseth’s people said in advance of the senior-officer conclave that its goal was to energize America’s top military leaders and get them to focus on Hegseth’s vision for a new Department of War. But the generals and admirals should be forgiven if they walked out of the auditorium and wondered: What on earth is wrong with the commander in chief?
And so it went, as Trump recycled old rally speeches, full of his usual grievances, lies, and misrepresentations; his obsessions with former Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama; and his sour disappointment in the Nobel Prize committee. (“They’ll give it to some guy that didn’t do a damn thing,” he said.) He congratulated himself on tariffs, noting that the money could buy a lot of battleships, “to use an old term.” And come to think of it, he said, maybe America should build battleships again, from steel, not that papier-mâché and aluminum stuff the Navy is apparently using now: “Aluminum that melts if it looks at a missile coming at it. It starts melting as the missile is about two miles away.”
As comical as many of Trump’s comments were, the president’s nakedly partisan appeal to U.S. military officers was a violation of every standard of American civil-military relations, and exactly what George Washington feared could happen with an unscrupulous commander in chief. The most ominous part of his speech came when he told the military officers that they would be part of the solution to domestic threats, fighting the “enemy from within.” He added, almost as a kind of trollish afterthought, that he’d told Hegseth, “We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military—National Guard, but military—because we’re going into Chicago very soon. That’s a big city with an incompetent governor. Stupid governor.”
In 1973, an Air Force nuclear-missile officer named Harold Hering asked a simple question during a training session: “How can I know that an order I receive to launch my missiles came from a sane president?” The question cost him his career. Military members are trained to execute orders, not question them. But today, both the man who can order the use of nuclear arms and the man who would likely verify such an order gave disgraceful and unnerving performances in Quantico. How many officers left the room asking themselves Major Hering’s question?
Which reminds me, just as an aside, Chris Coons is not up to the task of fighting the takeover of this country. Won’t somebody please step up and run against this Trust Fund nobody?
Yes, the Government Shut Down. Dueling blame-games to follow:
The shutdown is the first since January 2019, and the fourth of Trump’s two terms. White House officials this time, though, have signaled plans to use the closed agencies as a way to vastly reshape the federal government and consolidate power under the presidency.
White House budget director Russell Vought ordered agencies to considermass firings rather than instituting furloughs.
And instructions to agencies from his Office of Management and Budget include guidance on rewriting regulations surrounding federal grants and challenging Congress’s constitutional power over spending.
Yep. Fascism.
Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-New York) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York) met with Trump on Monday at the White House, demanding that Republicans extend Affordable Care Act health insurance subsidies and roll back cuts to social safety net programs enacted in the White House’s One Big Beautiful Bill.
Those demands, GOP leaders said, were nonstarters. Vice President JD Vance accused Democrats of holding the government “hostage” to extract victories on health care policy.
Now, that’s something that all Democrats should go out there and scream from the mountaintops. “We’re fighting for YOU and your healthcare.” I remain skeptical that they will. Own the narrative for once, whydon’tcha?
Trump Keeps Losing In Court, Keeps Acting Illegally. He figures he’s got the Supreme Court as his backstop. Soon to be renamed ‘The Corrupt Supreme Court’. Some examples from yesterday:
Trump’s Crackdown On Palestinian Activists Ruled Illegal:
A federal judge in Massachusetts used a First Amendment case to take the Trump administration back to civics class in a 161-page opinion that answers the question of whether non-citizens have the right to free speech with a booming “yes.”
U.S. District Judge William G. Young offered page after page of searing criticism for both the president and those who fail to hold him accountable for his actions, which he found “scandalous” and “unconstitutional.”
The case was brought by a collection of university professors’ groups in objection to President Donald Trump’s crackdown on pro-Palestinian activism, labeled antisemitic by the administration.
Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have threatened to use their powers to revoke the visas of students who show peaceful support for Palestinians, and have, in some cases, done so, essentially creating two tiers of speech rights: one for citizens and a lesser one for non-citizens.
After a hearing and nine-day bench trial, Young found that Rubio, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and their subordinates worked to chill free-speech rights “deliberately and with purposeful aforethought.”
The judge released a postcard he had received along with his response:
The judge, BTW, was a Reagan appointee. We need everybody to be like that judge.
A federal judge on Tuesday disqualified Nevada’s top federal prosecutor from handling cases, a rebuke to the Trump administration’s attempts to circumvent federal appointment procedures put in place by Congress.
Judge David G. Campbell of the Federal District Court in Arizona, who was temporarily assigned to handle the case in Nevada, said that the prosecutor, Sigal Chattah, was “not validly serving as acting U.S. attorney” and that her involvement in cases “would be unlawful.”
Challenges to her appointment had been brought in four different cases. The judge disqualified her from supervising the cases or “any attorneys in the handling of these cases.”
Ms. Chattah’s office declined to comment on the ruling.
Ms. Chattah is a Republican activist and a supporter of President Trump who was previously a lawyer for the state Republican Party. She was also the party’s unsuccessful candidate for attorney general in 2022.
Hmmm, Rethug activist and failed Rethug candidate. Julianne Murray, anybody?
Henry Tries To Throw Meyer Under The Bus:
In a bombshell accusation, New Castle County Executive Marcus Henry told state legislators Tuesday that his predecessor – Gov. Matt Meyer – delayed the release of property reassessment data until after the 2024 election.
The assertion, made during an extraordinary committee hearing held in Dover to investigate Delaware’s first statewide reassessment in more than three decades, could mean that northern Delaware residents had less time to examine and appeal what many have described as unreasonably high property valuations.
Henry said that the county’s assessment contractor, Tyler Technologies, was prepared to release tentative valuation notices to the public in the summer of 2024 – right in the middle of a heated gubernatorial primary between Meyer and former Lt. Gov. Bethany Hall-Long.
“It is also our understanding that the former Administration said no to those recommendations,” Henry said. “Instead, the assessment office was advised that tentative value notices couldn’t go out until mid-November. Accordingly, in mid-November 2024, Tyler mailed those notices of tentative value to property owners, the school districts, and to the municipalities.”
In a written statement to Spotlight Delaware, Henry said the reason for the delay in releasing tentative valuation notices is not documented in any county records. (Oh.)
Sussex County officials, however, also released tentative property valuations in November, mailing out notices on Nov. 20, and Nov. 27. (Oh)
After Tuesday’s hearing, State Senate Majority Leader Bryan Townsend (D-Bear), a co-chair of the joint legislative committee, called Meyer’s decision to not release tentative valuations until November “unacceptable.”
OK, I’ve got no dawg in this fight. I voted for both Meyer and Henry in the primary. Both have done things to disappoint me, not that I’m their target audience or anything. I’m just saying that, for now, we have Henry’s unsubstantiated assertions that Meyer manipulated the timing of the release of the preliminary assessments for political purposes. That’s it. I await more information.
What do you want to talk about?
My 2 cents on yesterdays big tent show:
– has any of the top brass who were there made any public comments criticizing the speeches?
– you have to remember 1/2 of our country wants the military to overrun cities and states that are democrat controlled.
I wouldn’t expect any of the top brass to say anything. Chain-of-command and all that. But, I suspect that many of them are wondering what to do if our deranged president orders them to do something that they consider outside the scope of the military’s mission.
I’ve got a dog in that fight: Bryan Townsend is the phony progressive I always assumed he was. No corporate attorney has ever been a progressive. Fuck him.
Also, no offense, but an embattled middle class is not going to man the barricades over health care for the poor.
The message should be obvious: The Republicans didn’t need Democrats to enact their reign of terror. If Democrats could block anything, why would they wait until now? You can’t even get your own loyal foot soldiers to vote for your shit bill,
Their own dogs took a shit on their lawn, and they want Democrats to clean it up? Fuck you, Cletus. Clean up your own shit and leave us out of it.
It’s pretty common knowledge Meyer delayed this. What backs it up? Him asking the chancery court for another year. Meyer knew what he was doing….and I guess Marcus been under attack for a year had enough.
War is war sometimes
The only thing I’ve taken away from this entire issue is one as old as civilization: People don’t want to pay their taxes.
As I’ve said before, if your property taxes went up by a lot, it means you were getting away with paying too little for decades.
Or maybe the second oldest issue known to civilization — politicians acting like politicians
Why? Politicians have fuck-all to do with this, unless you mean the county politicians who broke state law for 40 years by failing to reassess as required.
There are several more legitimate reasons to shit on Meyer.
“War is war sometimes”. Cringe. Please go touch grass.
Meyer’s choice to delay data that directly impacted landowner ability to assess and appeal Tyler’s results, therefore delaying the awareness of widespread issues and delaying the ability for council and legislators to act – not to fix any issues but solely to protect his elections – should be investigated as election interference. His continued choice – even when explicitly asked – not to be present in these conversations speaks to there being no further reasoning to this. If his Admin had spent the delay combing the Tyler records to be productive, surely they’d have found Amazon and other extreme anomalies.
So – Was Meyer the problem reassessment had? No. Did he make it worse by requesting these delays for his own optics? Yes.
People had four months, November to March, to challenge their assessments. I am not aware of any mechanism by which anyone is allowed to challenge the assessment of property not their own.
What role would state legislators have played, other than grandstanding, at whatever point the data was released?
Given the widespread freakout, the logic of delaying it until after the election is obvious. You’ll have to explain for me what the objective of an investigation into “election interference” would accomplish.
Respectfully, we didn’t. The full weight of the increases didn’t occur until summer. We got a letter in November that said our increase may go up 411%. Electeds all over social media told people “don’t worry, your taxes aren’t actually going up that much. Some will go down, some will go up, and some will stay the same.” There were no alarm bells with the November notices. No reason to be up in arms. It was in July when the full understanding of reassessments came into view — well beyond the period to challenge the assessment.
You got a letter that said your increase could be 411% and that didn’t worry you? Who was that letter from?
I got no such letter. I got a letter from Tyler asking if the information they had me down for was correct. I amended it and sent it back (I don’t have a full basement, which they thought I did). I get the feeling from stuff I’ve seen on Reddit that a lot of people just ignored that letter, or didn’t recognize what it was, so the actual increase came as a shock.
A big part of the problem for homeowners is that electeds don’t control the school portion of those bills, and that’s where people got socked the hardest. The districts that decided to pile on created the big increases, not the counties. All the electeds could tell you about is the portion they control.
But logically, if there were no alarm bells in November, what difference does it make if you’d gotten that letter earlier?
Respectfully, the biggest source of outrage seems to be that commercial properties lost value, which in the case of office buildings is just reality. The huge difference in Amazon’s assessment – how could it be so low when someone paid a much larger sum for it just a couple of years ago? – is a different matter, and a valid reason to investigate Tyler’s methodology.
But the increase in residential property values is a separate matter, and it’s linked to the housing shortage. If rents increase, which they certainly have, then the value of the property being rented increases. And the increase in rental property vs. owner-occupied property keeps driving that up.
The overall increase in real estate value since the last assessment was 375% – the average house that sold for $200,000 in 1983 is now worth $750,000. But some have gone up far more.
I’ll give you a personal example. I bought a row house in Union Park Gardens in 1984 for $34,000. The average value there is now $233,000, an increase of nearly 700%.
This absurdly long period without reassessments has been flagged as a problem for decades now, and after years of stonewalling by the counties it led to the lawsuit about school funding. But despite those of us who kept pointing out the unfairness of this, nobody gave a shit until their own bills went up. And this reaction demonstrates exactly why the counties failed to follow the law.
I can’t stress this enough – those who saw increases got away with underpaying for 35 years. Funny, but I don’t see much complaining by the people whose bills went down, and consequently were overpaying all those years. They have a legitimate complaint against their county governments, and no recourse for recouping their overpayments.
Tl;dr: What goes around comes around.
This is the only correct response. It’s messy snd inconvenient for some but I agree with Alby. No one wants their taxes raised. We get it. Good lesson to do it sooner than 2065 next time.
Are you implying property taxes be raised 300%?
That’s not at all how it works.
I totally understand what you are saying. But, yes, the letter we got in November was GENERAL. It did not have SPECIFIC numbers. The SPECIFIC numbers did not come out until the summer.
No one could have imagined we’d take the hit we did because NO ONE could have imagined the burden would have been shifted in the way that it did from commercial to residential. That’s the problem here. That’s the controversy. Considering the whole goal of reassessment was to be NET NEUTRAL, the fact the poor and working class are shouldering increases of up to 100% and — in the city of Wilmington — more than 200% in some cases is unfathomable.
Taxes go up a few hundred a year? OK…especially since quite a few districts passed referenda last year. Residential taxes going up — in some cases — THOUSANDS of dollars? That only happened because of the shift from commercial to residential.
Trust me — if we had been given the raw numbers and increases in November, thousands more folks would have done something about it. We didn’t get the raw numbers and actual dollar amounts until July.
I’m not disagreeing with your scenarios above. This shitstorm has been overdue to be corrected for decades. However, I do believe there are reasonable complaints here about how all this rolled out.
“Net neutral” means that if commercial values go down, residential values will go up. IIRC the shift from commercial to residential shifted a bit more than 10% of the total burden, so that’s not why anyone’s bill went up by thousands of dollars. The math doesn’t add up.
To use the UPG example, total value went up by 375%, but that house went up 700%. Almost double the increase means almost double the tax.
Those scary-large numbers are percentages. In absolute terms, that homeowner is still paying about 1/3rd the amount of someone in a $700,000 house. And when you start from a low base number, the increase is going to look vey large in percentage terms.
People in $700,000 houses built since the 1980s probably saw very small increases because their values went up by about the average percentage.
The people with valid complaints are those whose assessed values are out of line with the actual value of the house, which isn’t necessarily the same group as those who saw significant increases.
I disagree about the timing of the rollout being the cause of the complaints. Those complaining would complain no matter when they learned of it.
And those complaining about Meyer’s role in this mostly want to complain about Meyer, an entirely separate complaint from the higher bills. He didn’t make the bills higher, Tyler Tech did.
I know how it works. Do you? You explained how housing has increased so much in the last 40+ years (Union Park Gardens as an example) and there has not been a reassessment since 1984. So taxes, at least to your thinking, are arbitrarily too low. My 1989 house purchase had taxes of $1650 that year. When I sold it in 2021, the tax had risen to $4200. Assessments aren’t more important than the mileage determined by the powers that be. One way or another, government will get their money. And you didn’t answer my question.
How much of that was the county portion, and how much the school portion? You obviously don’t know how it works. The school portion keeps rising because they hold referendums.
Drop the attitude or fuck off.
And that’s one more fuckwad out the door.