Category Archives: Uncategorized

Several years ago, when our older grandson was ten or eleven, my husband took him to New York, where he was most impressed by the museum at Ellis Island–especially the exhibit that explained the difference between America and many of the countries immigrants were leaving: in those repressive regimes, people could be stopped on the streets and required to produce their “papers.” 

In America, such tactics were scorned. We were a free people.

That grandson is now thirty-six, and the Trump administration is waging war on the  America celebrated in that exhibit. As the Daily Beast (among other outlets) has reported, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem has defended the ICE agents who are stopping people on the streets and demanding that Americans prove their citizenship. When Noem was asked if she  supported allowing federal agents to violate people’s Fourth Amendment rights–they are asking Americans for papers without reasonable suspicion–she responded that “Every single action that our ICE officers take is according to the law and following protocols that we have used for years. They are doing everything correctly.”

Noem evidently slept through her high school government class…

Nor is this throwback to “bad” countries an anomaly. There are increasing  parallels with those “unAmerican” regimes. 

Lincoln Square recently compared remarks from a 1980 speech by Iran’s Khomeni with pronouncements from our increasingly fascist regime. 

Khomeini: Iran should not just be an Islamic republic but a clerical republic. The clergy should be the ruling strata…

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.): “I am a Bible‑believing Christian. Someone asked me today in the media, they said, ‘People are curious, what does Mike Johnson think about any issue under the sun?’ I said, ‘Well, go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it. That’s my worldview.’”

Khomeini: Revolution should come about in all the universities throughout Iran, so that the professors who are in contact with the East or the West will be purged, and so that the universities may become healthy places for the study of higher Islamic teachings.

Steve Bannon: “I’ve told President Trump … we have to go into these elite institutions, cut out all the money. That’s a bitch slap, right? They’ll start paying attention.”

Khomeini: The false teachings of the former regime should be abruptly stopped in universities throughout Iran because all the misery of the Iranian society during the reign of this father and son was due to these false teachings.

President Donald Trump: “For many years, tuition costs at colleges and universities have been exploding … while academics have been obsessed with indoctrinating America’s youth. The time has come to reclaim our once great educational institutions from the radical Left, and we will do that.”

Khomeini: If we had a proper set-up in our universities, we would have never had a university-educated intelligentsia who during Iran’s most critical period are engaged in conflict and schism among themselves and are cut off from the people and are so negligent of what happens to the people, as though they do not live in Iran [shouts of “God is great!”].

Vice President J.D. Vance: “I think if any of us want to do the things that we want to do for our country and for the people who live in it, we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.”

Khomeini: Most of the deadly blows which have been delivered to this society have been due to the majority of these university-educated intellectuals who have always regarded — and still regard — themselves as being great and have always said things — and still continue to say things — which only their other intellectual friends can understand, regardless of whether the people understand them or not.

Trump: “When I return to the White House, I will fire the radical Left accreditors that have allowed our colleges to become dominated by Marxist Maniacs and lunatics.”

These parallels are especially ironic, given Trump’s sudden concern for Iranian protesters while encouraging his ICE thugs to violently attack protesters in America.

Add to that the administration’s increasing use of Nazi slogans . As the Guardian has reported, recent posts from the Labor department have included a video using the phrase: “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage.” a retread of the Nazi slogan: “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer” (“one people, one realm, one leader”). Trump’s labor department has also published artwork that depicts only white male workers. “Its posts frequently cite “Americanism”, decry “globalism” and tout misleading claims that all US job gains under Trump have gone to “native born” Americans.”

They’ve gone way beyond dog whistles. As someone has told us “When people tell you who they are, believe them.”

A government shutdown puts the commentariat–the pundits and pontificators who see themselves as arbiters of political discourse–into overdrive. Unfortunately, most of them are consumed with the more superficial “win/lose” questions: who will voters blame? How will public opinion shake out? Which personalities and parties will benefit, and which will be damaged? Who will blink first, and how long will this shutdown last?

I do a lot of reading, and I’ve seen very few efforts to take a step back and look at the “big picture,” but a couple of days ago, I encountered one. The Daily Prospect pointed out the stark reality of our current situation in a headline that read “The Government Has Been Shut Down for Months.”

The negotiations and debates are operating under the premise that appropriations to federal agencies are flowing today and will stop flowing tomorrow, and that this is something political leaders want to avoid. It’s hard to uncover any evidence that this is truly the case. The Supreme Court’s latest ruling definitively allows the Trump administration to cancel whatever funding they disfavor within 45 days of the end of the appropriation, without any approval from Congress. About 12 percent of the federal workforce has been terminated.

The larger point is that the government is already shut down, and has been for several months, as the Trump administration initiated an assault on this system of government. Activities deemed “essential” by the president—stalking immigrants, lobbing missiles at Iran, etc.—have gone on, but activities purported to conflict with the president’s policies, regardless of whether they have been authorized by the lawmaking body of the United States, have been stopped, interrupted only by occasional federal courts telling the president that doing so is illegal, which the Supreme Court subsequently brushes aside.

The article proceeded to provide evidence for its contention that we haven’t had a truly operational government since Trump assumed office; whatever is being “shut down” bears no resemblance to the government created by our Constitution and faithful to the rule of law.

Our inexplicably corrupt Supreme Court recently allowed Trump to rescind $4 billion dollars in foreign aid, but as the article pointed out, the Court hasn’t addressed the $410 billion that the administration has simply withheld from programs across the country–an amount representing close to half of all  fiscal year 2025 non-defense spending authorized by Congress. Those dollars have simply vanished,  with no explanation of how money is being spent or where that withheld spending is going.

Some 12 percent of the federal workforce has previously been terminated, and the OMB director, Russ Vought, claims a shutdown will allow the Office  to fire many more, despite the fact that a shutdown provides no actual legal authority to fire federal employees. (Legal authority is, of course, beside the point to members of this lawless administration– there was no legal authority to rescind or withhold appropriated spending without congressional approval, or put workers on extended administrative leave, or issue irrational Executive Orders, either.)

No one knows better than the current federal workers that we have no functioning government to shut down.

The Federal Unionists Network (FUN) has sent a letter  to the Democratic leadership, urging them to “reject any bad deal in the name of protecting federal employees.” The letter asserted that fighting Trump’s consolidation of power is more important. “A government shutdown is never Plan A. Federal workers and the communities we serve will face severe hardship. But federal workers will willingly forego paychecks in the hopes of preserving the programs we have devoted our lives to administering,”

The letter, which agreed that the government is functionally shut down, outlined the “unprecedented harms” Americans are already experiencing from Trump’s deadly funding cuts, including to Social Security and the Department of Veterans Affairs, and from Trump’s attacks on independent science and data, agency closures without congressional input, and the decimation of labor.

Others have pointed out that passage of a budget–or a continuing resolution–is actually meaningless, since the administration will continue to ignore its provisions. Agreeing to a mechanism that purports to keep the government open would simply serve to normalize a dramatically abnormal situation–a situation in which a profoundly ignorant and increasingly mentally-ill President being manipulated by the White Christian Nationalists who authored Project 2025 routinely ignores Congress and his constitutional duties.

What is being shut down is the fantasy that we have a functioning government.