At yesterday’s indoor inauguration, there were of necessity a limited number of seats. The first row was reserved for Trump and Vance family members. Tech billionaires and their wives and female companions sat in the second row. Trump’s choices for his Cabinet sat behind the billionaires. Elected officials were not allowed to bring their wives or companions.
Trump tamed the billionaires, who dutifully applauded his ascension, exchanging their independence for his toleration.
On his first day in office, President Trump signed an executive order eliminating birthright citizenship. He intends to amend the Cinstitution of the United States by his order. This is unprecedented. Eighteen state Attorney Generals filed suit today against this action.
The Fourteenth Amendment to the constitution begins with these words:
AMENDMENT XIV
Section 1.
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Attorneys general from 18 states sued President Trump on Tuesday to block an executive order that refuses to recognize the U.S.-born children of unauthorized immigrants as citizens, the opening salvo in what promises to be a long legal battle over the Trump administration’s immigration policies.
The complaint, filed in Federal District Court in Massachusetts was joined by the cities of San Francisco and Washington, D.C.
The states view Mr. Trump’s attempt to limit birthright citizenship as “extraordinary and extreme,” said New Jersey Attorney General Matthew J. Platkin, who led the legal effort along with the attorneys general from California and Massachusetts. “Presidents are powerful, but he is not a king. He cannot rewrite the Constitution with a stroke of the pen.”
On Monday, in the opening hours of his second term as president, Mr. Trump signed an order declaring that future children born to undocumented immigrants would no longer be treated as citizens. The order would extend even to the children of some mothers in the country legally but temporarily, such as foreign students or tourists.
Mr. Trump’s executive order asserts that the children of such noncitizens are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States, and thus aren’t covered by the 14th Amendment’s longstanding constitutional guarantee.
We will learn soon enough whether Trump has corrupted enough judges so that he is free to revise the constitution with a stroke of his pen.
Jeff Tiedrich shows how the media tried to sanitize Elon Musk’s Nazi salute at the inauguration ceremonies.
Even the ADL (the Anti-Defamation League) issued a statement saying that Elon’s salute was merely “an awkward gesture.”
So Jeff does everyone a favor by inserting two clips, side by side. One shows Elon, the other shows Adolph.
What kind of salute do you think it was?
Trump freed all the J6 insurrectionists, even those convicted and sentenced to 20+ years for insurrection.
The Republican Party is not the party of law and order.
Read Jim Stewartson and be alarmed.
Attacking police officers, trying to stop the peaceful transfer of power is now a sign of patriotism.
Even JD Vance said that the J6 terrorists who committed acts of violence would not be pardoned. He was wrong.
Even the guy wearing the “Camp Auschwitz” T-shirt was pardoned.
All of Trump’s thugs.
Oliver Darcy was senior media critic for CNN, when he left to start his own Substack, called Status. There he reports on the latest buzz.
Here he writes about the moral collapse of the mainstream media in the Second Coming of the Convicted Felon. Despite the many admonitions by scholars of authoritarianism not to “obey in advance,” the media is normalizing the new Trump regime. Yesterday Trump unleashed a blizzard of executive orders and rescissions of Biden policies. Just a few: Trump withdrew the US from the Paris Climate Accord (again) and from the World Health Organization. He declared that the Gulf of Mexico is now the Gulf of America. He rolled back Biden’s limit of $2,000 per year for the cost of prescription drugs for those on Medicare and Medicaid. He pardoned the J6 criminals, even those who violently assaulted police officers.
He wrote:
Four years ago, moments after Joe Biden was declared the winner of the 2020 election, Jake Tapper delivered a blistering sermon about Donald Trump’s legacy live on CNN. He looked into the camera and bluntly described Trump’s four years in office as a “time of cruelty,” a “time when truth and fact were treated with disdain,” and an “era of just plain meanness.”
“It must be said, to paraphrase President Ford: For tens of millions of our fellow Americans, their long national nightmare is over,” Tapper concluded, ending his unsparing mini-monologue.
That Jake Tapper was nowhere to be found on Monday as Trump was sworn back into office, becoming the 47th president of the United States. Instead, appearing on CNN was a Tapper incapable or unwilling to deliver the type of no-holds-barred commentary that sent his star soaring during Trump’s first administration.
As he narrated Monday’s proceedings, Tapper, CNN’s lead Washington anchor, glossed over how Trump was twice-impeached and a convicted felon. He made no mention about how the Capitol Rotunda was stuffed with right-wing extremists and conspiracy theorists. Instead, Tapper largely avoided delivering any commentary that might be perceived by the MAGA movement as inflammatory. Outside the physical body, the Tapper of 2025 shared little in common with the pugnacious Tapper of 2020.
To be fair to Tapper, he was not alone. In fact, Tapper embodies a larger trend gripping the news media, which has tamped down its once aggressive posture toward Trump. The appetite for hard-hitting reporting and stinging analysis has dissipated in the c-suites of several major news outlets, with executives wary of offending the new president and the muscular movement he leads.
That was all reflected in Monday’s inauguration coverage. Across the entire television news landscape, the reporting on Trump’s inauguration lacked firepower. The profession’s stable of news anchors and correspondents who branded themselves as truth-telling journalists willing to hold power to account were present on screen, but their fervid spirit had unmistakably evaporated. It was like the invasion of the body snatchers — familiar faces delivering the news, yet devoid of the passion and conviction that once defined them, as if their former selves had been hollowed out.
It’s not like there wasn’t plenty to discuss. Trump repeated lies about the January 6 insurrection, claimed the 2020 election was rigged, and falsely alleged the Democrats tried to rig the 2024 election, among other things. He welcomed conspiracy theorists to the inaugural ceremony, such as Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Vivek Ramaswamy, andRobert F. Kennedy Jr. And he put on display how he had bent the most powerful figures in Silicon Valley to his will.
In other words, it was a highly abnormal affair to watch. But the way in which television news outlets covered it — with the exception of MSNBC — was out of sync with that reality. Most of the commentary focused on the years-old traditions and ceremonies of Inauguration Day, which in turn framed the events as fairly ordinary.
A search of closed captioning revealed that most networks almost entirely avoided using terms like “twice-impeached” or “convicted felon” when discussing Trump during the hours and hours of special coverage offered to viewers. In fact, no one on the Mark Thompson-led CNN (which found time to interview an outside expert about Melania Trump’s outfit choice) used either of those terms a single time, according to the closed captions search that I conducted. Yes, really. That important context was somehow missing from broadcasts of Trump’s resurgence to power.
After years of sounding the alarm about the very real threats that Trump poses to America’s bedrock democratic principles, and after years of watching Trump and his allies wage a historic disinformation war on the country, the on-air coverage was muted and failed to meet the moment. Even Trump took notice, lauding the press for its coverage. “Maybe the fake news is changing,” Trump said.
The dose of coverage the country was treated to on Monday is likely a sign of what is to come. Billionaire owners like Jeff Bezos and corporate parents like Warner Bros. Discovery have signaled that they want their outlets to be less hostile to the MAGA movement. They do not wish to be the so-called #Resistance. They would much rather be allies of the president, particularly while they have high-wire business matters before the federal government.
Which means that at a time when Trump, by all accounts, poses more of a threat than ever, the news media is less willing than ever to treat him to the tough coverage the moment calls for. It’s a troubling shift that will have far-reaching consequences for the country. And, frankly, it’s just bad journalism.
The AP reported on a promising development. A Taliban leader says that girls and women should be allowed to get an education. But don’t celebrate until there is an actual policy change.
A senior Taliban figure has urged the group’s leader to scrap education bans on Afghan women and girls, saying there is no excuse for them, in a rare public rebuke of government policy.
Sher Abbas Stanikzai, political deputy at the Foreign Ministry, made the remarks in a speech on Saturday in southeastern Khost province.
He told an audience at a religious school ceremony there was no reason to deny education to women and girls, “just as there was no justification for it in the past and there shouldn’t be one at all.”
The government has barred females from education after sixth grade. Last September, there were reports authorities had also stopped medical training and courses for women.
In Afghanistan, women and girls can only be treated by female doctors and health professionals. Authorities have yet to confirm the medical training ban.
“We call on the leadership again to open the doors of education,” said Stanikzai in a video shared by his official account on the social platform X. “We are committing an injustice against 20 million people out of a population of 40 million, depriving them of all their rights. This is not in Islamic law, but our personal choice or nature.”
Stanikzai was once the head of the Taliban team in talks that led to the complete withdrawal of foreign troops from Afghanistan.
It is not the first time he has said that women and girls deserve to have an education. He made similar remarks in September 2022, a year after schools closed for girls and months and before the introduction of a university ban.
Think about it: in Afghanistan, women can be treated only by female doctors, but women are not permitted to study beyond sixth grade. How can women get any healthcare if women are not allowed to study and become doctors?
Don’t the Taliban care about the well-being of their mothers, their sisters, their daughters?
Governor Bill Lee is determined to enact universal vouchers in Tennessee, and it ought to be a slam-dunk since Republicans control both houses of the legislature. He tried and failed before, because some rural Republican legislators opposed vouchers.
But the billionaire money behind vouchers make them tough to resist, so Governor Lee is making vouchers his top priority this session.
As Marta Aldrich explains in Chalkbeat Tennessee, Governor Lee
Governor Mike DeWine of Ohio signed a “Don’t Say Gay” law, which goes into effect in 90 days.
The blog Wonkette reported:
Ohio is one of the most gerrymandered states in the nation. Oh, wait. We’ve said that before. And before that. But the point here is that gerrymanders — like fair elections — have consequences, and this week we saw some of the worst. Governor Mike DeWine, famous here at Wonkette for giving trans kids a brief reprievefrom the worst impulses of Ohio’s GOP legislative supermajority, has spent the last year hurting trans folks over and over to make up for that one act of kindness. This week’s example goes extra further to attack all the QTs and their alphabet friends by signing Ohio’s very first “Don’t Say Gay!” bill, HB 8. The bill is now a law and goes into effect 90 days from Thursday.
The bill is modeled after Florida’s, of course, thus the identical nickname even if it’s officially known as the Parents’ Bill of Rights. From The Advocate:
H.B. 8 prohibits educators from discussing “sexuality content” in grades K-3, and mandates that instruction at other levels be “age appropriate.” The bill defines “sexuality content” as “oral or written instruction, presentation, image or description of sexual concepts or gender ideology.” It does not define “sexual concepts,” [or] “gender ideology[.]”
Of course it doesn’t. You define those things specifically if you want to be really certain you get rid of exactly the content that’s causing a problem. You don’t define things specifically if your goal is to create a climate of self-censorship, where teachers are constantly afraid that a truly innocent bit of information will get them fired if their principal or a student’s parent interprets “gender ideology” a little more conservatively than the teacher herself. Is telling a first grader that it’s okay for boys to cook and do dishes and maybe even their own laundry “gender ideology”? Could be!
“Sexuality content” now can’t be taught without advance notice to parents (who have a right to opt their kids out). Thinking about telling Tim and Tina that they can’t bully Terri for having two dads? That might be acceptable under the “incidental” exception in paragraph G(5)(b), but it also might not. Better get a permission slip first!
The entire bill is so full of insane bureaucratic requirements that the Don’t Say Gay! label really sells the crazy short. Before each student starts classes each year, and again if a child transfers schools, every parent must be notified of all medical services available at or through the schools, as well as any “facilitated” by the school. What constitutes “facilitation”? Unclear! But we know that any time a student starts or stops receiving school counseling another notice must be sent.
Read the bill and it requires notice after notice after notice. If the child might be trans, definitely send a notice, but it’s not just that! Parents are now entitled to a letter from the school about any number of possible teaching topics, as well as any changes in “Student’s mental, emotional, or physical health or well-being.” The bill spells out that this includes “Any request by a student to identify as a gender that does not align with the student’s biological sex,” but it doesn’t stop there. Injuries, a change in academic performance, psychological trauma all have to be reported.
Meanwhile, parents can remove their children from school for hours per day for “religious instruction” without those kids being considered absent so long as they don’t miss “core curriculum subjects.” Religious instruction had previously been available subject to district discretion, conditions and limits, but no more. Now districts must release students for religious education, with no maximum number of hours away from the classroom.
As a whole, the bill goes somewhat farther than Florida’s law, and it’s unlikely to be interpreted leniently if legislators have anything to say about it. A year ago one of the sponsors and advocates for HB 8, state Rep. Beth Lear, actually said opponents of an anti-trans bathroom bill (now law) were better off dead:
“In Luke 17, Jesus says that if you cause one of these little ones of mine to stumble, it would be better for you to have a millstone hung around your neck and be thrown into the deepest sea,” state Rep. Beth Lear said while defending House Bill 183 in a committee hearing.
Lear also compared transgender people to animals in her defense of the discriminatory bill, continuing: “If I had a child who thought he was a bird, am I going to take him to a doctor who tells him the best thing to do is to let him explore being a bird? And oh, by the way, there’s a five-story building next door — why don’t you jump off and see if you can fly?”
She seems nice!
With bathroom bills, sports bills, anti-trans regulations on health care meant to be onerous enough to make care impossible without attracting the negative attention of a ban, and now HB 8, Ohio’s trans kids have suffered a horrifying wave of attacks for twelve months now, and with the GOP defeating a bill that could have ended their gerrymanders, nothing is getting better any time soon.
This statement was released by the White House today after Trump’s swearing in. Be sure to read the last two pledges:
The first promises to restore the names of Confederate leaders to federal facilities like military bases where they had been changed. They were changed to acknowledge that Confederate leaders were traitors. Trump will once again recognize them as heroes. Time will tell if he intends to re-erect the Confederate statues that were removed. For those that were destroyed, he could commission replacements.
The second pledges to remove any recognition of transgender people. Under Trump, they no longer exist.
. MAKE AMERICA SAFE AGAIN
Andy Borowitz is one of our very best political humorists.
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—District of Columbia officials confirmed on Tuesday that they are constructing a fence around a federal government building to keep a sexual predator 500 feet away from the public.
With a Monday deadline for completion of the barrier fast approaching, the calls to “build the wall” have only grown louder.
“Once we got official word last week that the felon in question would not be going to prison, we immediately got to work on the fence,” D.C. spokesman Harland Dorrinson said. “We’re doing everything we can to keep people safe.”
D.C. residents praised the decision to build the fence, but warned that one is still needed around the Supreme Court.
Diane Ravitch's blog 