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?