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Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: America, are you listening? [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-03-06
We begin this morning with Amanda Marcotte of Salon and the Trump Administration’s plan to blame Americans for all of the disasters-to-come.
Like most abusers, Trump's go-to move when challenged is to blame his victims. Unlike most abusers, however, Trump has a small army of spinmeisters and apologists who will echo his victim-blaming rhetoric. As the economic damage starts to balloon out, the number of people who will be told that they brought this on themselves will grow — likely until most Americans are being blamed for what Trump inflicted on them. "Perhaps they’re not fit to have a job at this moment," argued Trump's lawyer, Alina Habba, when asked by a reporter Tuesday about veterans who are being fired in Musk's sweeping layoffs of federal workers. An estimated one-third of federal workers are veterans. [...] Not that Trump's minions care if their victim-blaming makes sense. Trump's Agriculture Secretary, Brooke Rollins, raised eyebrows this week when she suggested that the solution to soaring egg prices is for Americans to buy backyard chickens. "We've got chickens in our backyard," she told Fox News. "People are sort of looking around and thinking, 'Wow, maybe I could get a chicken in my backyard. And it's awesome!" x Trump’s Sec of Agriculture Brooke Rollins says the solution to high egg prices for Americans is to get some chickens and raise them in your backyard.
[image or embed] — Ron Filipkowski (@ronfilipkowski.bsky.social) March 3, 2025 at 5:41 PM
Taking the country all the way back to the 16th century now.
Annie Lowrey of The Atlantic details the tacky shoe salesman’s latest scheme to create a “strategic cryptocurrency reserve.”
This weekend, President Donald Trump announced that he is moving forward with a plan to create a strategic cryptocurrency reserve, purchasing bitcoin and ether, as well as the more esoteric instruments XRP, solana, and cardano. The reserve will “elevate this critical industry after years of corrupt attacks,” Trump wrote on his social-media site, Truth Social. “I will make sure the U.S. is the Crypto Capital of the World.” [...] Government experts see no strategic justification for the proposed reserve. The United States maintains stockpiles of crucial materials: vaccines and other pharmaceuticals, rare-earth minerals used in weapons manufacturing, crude oil. “There are important differences between reserves for real commodities, like petroleum, where a shortage may result in serious harm to the American people,” and the kind of speculative fund Trump is promoting, Bharat Ramamurti, an economic adviser to the Biden administration, told me. “Cryptocurrency does not meet any of those standard conditions.” [...] The crypto fund is only the latest example of ascendant crony capitalism in Trump’s Washington. The president is strip-mining taxpayer resources and doling out contracts and favors to the politically connected. The risk is not just corruption, but higher interest rates and less competitive markets.
Mike Masonic writes for Techdirt about the dismantling of American democracy and the role that journalism plays in it.
One of the craziest bits about covering the systematic dismantling of democracy is this: the people doing the dismantling frequently tell you exactly what they’re going to do. They’re almost proud of it. They just wrap it in language that makes it sound like the opposite. (Remember when Musk said he was buying Twitter to protect free speech? And then banned journalists and sued researchers for calling out his nonsense? Same playbook.) Good reporters can parse that. Bad reporters fail at it time and time again. But what’s happening now is even more extreme and more terrifying. Something that even experts in democratic collapse didn’t see coming. Normally when democracies fall apart, there’s also a playbook. A series of predictable steps involving the military, or the courts, or sometimes both. [...] The destruction is far more systematic and dangerous than many seem to realize. Even Steven Levitsky, the author of How Democracies Die — who has literally written the book on how democracies collapse — admitsthe speed and scope of America’s institutional collapse has exceeded his worst predictions. And his analysis points to something we’ve been specifically warning about: the unprecedented concentration of political, economic, and technological power in the hands of Elon Musk and his circle of loyal hatchet men as they dismantle democratic guardrails.
Mary Ziegler of Slate reports on a new hurdle to protect abortion rights at the state level.
Last month, the Georgia Supreme Court remanded a challenge to Georgia’s six-week abortion ban to the trial court, instructing it to evaluate the case, Georgia v. SisterSong, in light of a January state high court decision that eliminated third-party standing in Georgia courts. This latest development in SisterSong exemplifies how state supreme courts are imposing new limits on standing, with unpredictable effects for conservative and progressive movements alike... In July 2022—shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization paved the way for the abortion ban the Georgia Legislature passed in 2019 to go into effect—SisterSong, as well as other reproductive rights groups and medical providers, sued, arguing the Georgia ban violated state constitutional provisions on privacy, equality, and equal protection. A separate claim that the ban was void because it was enacted when abortion was still federally protected pre-Dobbs was litigated first and rejected by the Georgia Supreme Court in October 2023. The high court was scheduled to hear oral arguments in SisterSong mid-March, but its January ruling in a separate case, Wasserman v. Franklin County, resulted in the February return of the abortion ban litigation to the trial court. The Wasserman decision revolutionized the rules that apply when anyone brings a claim on another’s behalf, known as third-party standing. Wasserman involved a strange set of facts: Sherran Wasserman had struck a deal with Anthony Pham to sell him property, contingent on Pham being able to place chicken houses on the property. Pham petitioned for permission to do so, but the Franklin County Board of Commissioners voted against him. Wasserman sued the board on Pham’s behalf. The Georgia Supreme Court sided against Wasserman, holding that third-party standing was no longer valid in Georgia state courts.
Sharon Lerner of ProPublica reports that both houses of Congress are prepared to pass legislation that will neutralize the ability of a small program within the Environmental Protection Agency to protect Americans against toxic chemicals.
For decades, Republican lawmakers and industry lobbyists have tried to chip away at the small program in the Environmental Protection Agency that measures the threat of toxic chemicals. Most people don’t know IRIS, as the program is called, but it is the scientific engine of the agency that protects human health and the environment. Its scientists assess the toxicity of chemicals, estimating the amount of each that triggers cancer and other health effects. And these values serve as the independent, nonpartisan basis for the rules, regulations and permits that limit our exposure to toxic chemicals. Now IRIS faces the gravest threat to its existence since it was created under President Ronald Reagan four decades ago. Legislation introduced in Congress would prohibit the EPA from using any of IRIS’ hundreds of chemical assessments in environmental rules, regulations, enforcement actions and permits that limit the amount of pollution allowed into air and water. The EPA would also be forbidden from using them to map the health risks from toxic chemicals. The bills, filed in both the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives earlier this year, are championed by companies that make and use chemicals, along with industry groups that have long opposed environmental rules. If it becomes law, the “No IRIS Act,” as it’s called, would essentially bar the agency from carrying out its mission, experts told ProPublica.
Finally today, a 7-reporter team from Der Spiegel reports on Germany’s struggle to form government.
Germany is likely to end up with its fourth Grand Coalition government since 2005, though the name is no longer particularly accurate. There is nothing particularly grand about the approaching alliance between Merz’s conservatives (made up of his Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU) – a pairing knows as the Union) and Klingbeil’s Social Democrats (SPD). In the newly elected parliament, the two political camps will combine for a thin majority of just 13 seats, a coalition that only became possible because Sahra Wagenknecht’s left-wing populist BSW and Christian Lindner’s Free Democrats (FDP) failed to clear the 5-percent hurdle for representation in the Bundestag. Otherwise, the Union and SPD would have needed a third partner and everything would have grown even more complicated. As it is, the Union and the SPD managed a total of 45 percent in the February 23 vote, even less than Gerhard Schröder’s coalition in 1998, which saw the SPD and the Greens ending up with 47.6 percent. Indeed, it might be time to retire the term Grand Coalition entirely. Little Coalition perhaps? Merz, meanwhile, now has a much better idea of how Angela Merkel must have felt in 2005.That year, Merkel was way ahead in the polls in the months leading up to the election, with Schröder’s government limping to the finish line, and the Union was looking forward to a strong majority to implement its platform: radical tax reform, an elevated retirement age of 67 and a brand new health insurance system. But then, the advantage evaporated and Merkel even almost lost to Schröder. Ultimately, the Union was forced into a coalition with the SPD and the parties managed just incremental reforms, including an increase to the VAT and the raised retirement age.
Everyone have the best possible day that you can!
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