CARTOON: The First Couple Make Their Appearance At First Trump Cabinet Meeting
At least as we go down -- and as with any with any corrupt empire -- we have our ruling royalty First Couple: King Elon and Her Lowness Miss Donny.
Cartoons by Mark Taylor / DeMOCKracy.ink
By Mark Taylor
DeMOCKracy.ink (2/27/25)
The dark star of Pres. Donald Trump’s first meeting with his new White House Cabinet was not the president but the little gnome standing at the end of the long polished conference table wearing his black ball cap, t-shirt and jacket: Elon Musk. Thankfully he did not bring his toddler son, X Æ A-12, to wipe juicy boogers on the table and to shush up Trump and remind him he is not the president.
But it was just as bizarre to see Trump’s gaggle of little millionaire and billionaire Cabinet Bros all sitting obediently with paws folded and heads reverentially turned in his direction. ‘Dodgy’ Little Elon dominated the room, speaking three times longer than any cabinet member in the room while prattling on with lies and bullshit about his looting of our personal Social Security, tax, medical and other information by his DOGE-boy techno-twerps, as he scoops up billions in federal contracts and probably trillions in personal and government information.
The nation has fallen and the corporate oligarch fascist coup is now ramping up to loot out the nation in the final poop-out-end-stage of criminal capitalism and collapsing empire.
At least as we go down -- and as with any with any corrupt empire -- we have our ruling royalty First Couple: King Elon and Her Lowness Miss Donny.
“Wait, what just happened?”
My, That Was Quick! Trump's Total Betrayal Of Working People Is Now Complete
While this budget aims to extend all of the tax cuts skewed to the top, it fails to call for extending a tax cut that is well targeted to people who need it: the improved premium tax credits under the Affordable Care Act. Failure to extend this tax cut would raise health care premiums for more than 20 million people, including at least 3 million small business owners and self-employed workers.
By Sharon Parrot, President
Center On Budget & Policy Priorities (2/25/25)
The House Republican budget passed Tuesday night [2/25] calls for massive cuts in health coverage, food assistance, and help paying for college, among some other areas, to pay for huge tax giveaways for wealthy households and businesses. This betrays President Trump’s campaign promises to protect families who struggle financially, as well as his specific pledge to not cut Medicaid, which provides health coverage for 72 million people. While raising costs for families and increasing both poverty and the number of people without health coverage, the budget would swell deficits — all to further Republicans’ expensive and skewed tax agenda.
Both the House and Senate budgets significantly miss the mark on what should be their basic goals: lowering costs, increasing opportunity, and responsibly addressing our nation’s long-term priorities, including reducing future economic risks associated with high deficits. But the enormity of program cuts called for by the House budget stand as a singular threat to the well-being of people in every state, city, and rural community, threatening to take away their health coverage, make health care more expensive, and make it harder to afford food and college.
The Senate should reject the House cuts both now and if Congress ultimately moves ahead with a second budget plan and reconciliation bill this year.
The quick math on the House budget shows a stark equation: the cost of extending tax cuts for households with incomes in the top 1 percent — $1.1 trillion through 2034 — equals roughly the same amount as the proposed potential cuts for health coverage under Medicaid and food assistance under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).
The House Republican budget’s path of higher costs for families, more people without health coverage, increased poverty and hardship, and higher debt — all in service to tax cuts for the wealthy and profitable business interests — is the wrong direction for our nation.
Welfare for the wealthy
Under what set of values does a budget target those who struggle to pay their bills for severe cuts, while giving an annual tax cut averaging $62,000 for those who make $743,000 or more a year? The tax cut for these wealthy households is greater than the annual family incomes for most of the 72 million people — 1 in 5 people in the U.S. — who have health coverage through Medicaid. And the $62,000 figure doesn’t account for the likelihood that this budget would shower large corporations with more tax breaks, given that it allocates $900 billion more than extending the existing tax cuts would cost.
The enormous cuts this budget calls for would increase costs, hardship, and poverty for individuals and families across the country. To be clear, the specific proposals that House Republicans have been considering for weeks to make these program cuts are largely not about curbing fraud and abuse, as some claim. For example, proposals to cap federal funding, shift costs to states, or impose harsh work requirements that trip people up with red tape are aimed at cutting health coverage and food assistance for honest people who need help, not reducing fraud.
And the impact of these cuts could be grave: think of a person who loses health coverage through Medicaid and can’t get cancer treatment, an older and frail adult who loses the home-based care they need to stay out of an institution, a young adult who can’t get insulin to control their diabetes, a parent who skips meals so their children can eat, or an older worker who loses their job and has no way to buy groceries. Make no mistake, these cuts would affect people in every state and of all races and ethnicities. At the same time, the impacts would often be especially severe in poorer states with less ability to fill in for federal cuts and among Black, Latino, and Indigenous people and people in rural communities, who have lower incomes and thus are more likely to qualify for food assistance and health coverage.
The House budget would require the Energy and Commerce Committee to cut at least $880 billion; the Agriculture Committee to cut at least $230 billion; the Education and Workforce Committee to cut at least $330 billion; and other committees to also cut programs to reach a cumulative target of at least $1.5 trillion in cuts through 2034. The magnitude of these reductions would force congressional committees to make enormous cuts in Medicaid, SNAP, student loan assistance and other vital sources of support when they develop the “reconciliation” spending and tax bill that follows the budget resolution.
As bad as it seems, it’s even worse
But as massive as these cuts are, they don’t show the full picture of the overall program cuts that the House budget may generate. The committee targets are minimums or “floors” — meaning the committees must cut at least that amount and may cut more. And a provision included by the House Budget Committee during its consideration of the resolution pushes the committees to cut more, by requiring the overall level of program cuts to reach $2 trillion to retain the full $4.5 trillion in tax cuts.
Beyond this budget’s basic effects of taking away health, food, and other vital assistance from people who struggle to afford the basics and making student loans more expensive to partially offset tax cuts for the wealthy, it would have at least three other harmful impacts.
First, the House budget resolution and the proposals House Republicans are considering could result in enormous cost shifts to state, local, territorial, and tribal governments, which are already facing tougher fiscal conditions than in recent years. For example, some of the proposed cuts in Medicaid and SNAP would force states to pick up a much larger share of the programs’ costs or leave people without needed help. In reality, states will not make up for all or even most of the federal cuts, and families will lose health coverage and food assistance.
Second, while this budget aims to extend all of the tax cuts skewed to the top, it fails to call for extending a tax cut that is well targeted to people who need it: the improved premium tax credits under the Affordable Care Act. Failure to extend this tax cut would raise health care premiums for more than 20 million people, including at least 3 million small business owners and self-employed workers.
And third, even with the budget’s huge cuts in assistance, and the suffering those cuts would inflict on individuals and families, it would still increase our nation’s debt because of the enormous cost of its tax cuts. When you strip away this budget’s fuzzy math with its $2.6 trillion macroeconomic gimmick — which is far beyond expert organizations’ estimates (including estimates of conservative organizations) of possible economic effects from extending the tax cuts from President Trump’s first term and enacting potential new tax cuts — the federal debt under the House budget would increase over the next ten years compared to Congressional Budget Office projections of current law.
Even with the budget calling for a $4 trillion increase in the statutory debt limit, we calculate this limit would be reached in November 2026, only 21 months from now, under the policies assumed under this budget.
The House Republican budget’s path of higher costs for families, more people without health coverage, increased poverty and hardship, and higher debt — all in service to tax cuts for the wealthy and profitable business interests — is the wrong direction for our nation. It is also directly at odds with the recent election in which so many people expressed concern about their ability to afford food, housing, health care, and other necessities — and at odds with the promises made to them by President Trump.
Feds Detain Journalist Max Blumenthal With Family At Dulles International
By Mark Taylor
DeMOCKracy (2/27/25)
The Grayzone journalist Max Blumenthal, his wife and infant child were detained by a federal agent in an interrogation room at Dulles International Airport, in Washington, DC., after arriving at 3 a.m. from a flight from El Salvador. They were returning from a brief vacation in Nicaragua, where he had done no journalistic work.
He was asked if he recognized a short list of names on a list, which he didn’t. The agent then, Blumenthal said, turned the paper over “…and playing some sort of surveillance game with me, asking me if I knew any of the people he had written by hand on the back of the sheet.”
Blumenthal said most of the names were common Muslim names, none which he recognized. There were two Anglo names, which he did not recognize. He asked to photograph the list and was denied. His wife later did a search on the two Anglo names and learned that one of the names — Susan Benjamin — was the birth name of anti-war peace activist Medea Benjamin of Code Pink.
“I still don’t know exactly why this happened to me, “ Blumenthal observed in an interview on the Judging Freedom live podcast earlier today (2/27). “A number of anti-war activists and journalists [and other] travelers were treated on the same day or the day before to extended interrogations by Customs and Border Protections because they had come from the funeral for late Hezzbolah leader Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut. But I wasn’t coming from there. They weren’t interested in my trip to Nicaraqua. … my suspicion is that it has something to do with Israel/Palestine.
“Then there are other questions; is this a flag from the Trump administration? Or is it a flag left over from the Biden administration … I don’t have answers, I can only speculate, but it certainly was an act of harassment and certainly related to my political views.”
In the original live broadcast, Blumenthal and Judge Andrew Napolitinao then discussed the right of individuals to refuse to answer questions by law enforcement. For some reason that did not make it into the final broadcast version. Here is the live stream version, with the essential legal rights information:
28-minute video
Both stressed the US Supreme Court upheld the right of law enforcement officers to lie to you but a crime for you to lie to them. The best course of action when being questioned by police is to decline to answer questions without an attorney. And police cannot search your home without a warrant signed by a judge. I want to stress I am not an attorney. These are issues you need to educate yourself on through groups like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).
This is especially true if you are at all politically active in the United States and doing any foreign travel, but especially to nations the US is waging war on or trying to break.
PETITION: Tell The ICC To Investigate Biden Admin For Aiding War Crimes!
The nonprofit organization Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN) has submitted a 172-page communication to the International Criminal Court (ICC) recommending they investigate former President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin for aiding and abetting Israel’s war crimes in Gaza.
With DAWN’s comprehensive communication, the heavy-lifting for the ICC is already done. Let’s push them to take action!
Defiant Quote Of Resistance For Today’s America…
“You can squeeze a bee in you hand until it suffocates, but it will not suffocate without having stung you. You may say that is a small matter, and, indeed, it is a small matter. But if the bee had not stung you, bees would have long ago ceased to exist.”
— Jean Paulhan, (1884-1968)
Eeek! The idea of Donnie and Elon being a "couple" makes me want to throw up... And how abusive to give a child a "name" that is just a bunch of numbers and letters. What sort of drugs is the Muskrat on?
Let's hope the Economic Blackout goes well tomorrow and is the start of more such actions. Time to make the billionaires sweat!
From one agitated cartoonist to another, Nice Cartoon! My own output is hardly prolific, limited by age and other complications, including depression from reading all the horrible news ignored or denied by the MSM but still available to those who don't want to hide from it. I also thank you for writing all the things I would want to say, so that when my limitations keep me from doing so in a timely manner, I just forward your articles. I hope to figure out how the "restack" option works to help that activity, in addition increasing my own output.