If you've been worried that the federal Department of Education Office of Civil Rights has been napping-- fear not. Yesterday they announced that after an investigation, they have determined that Connetquot Central School District in Long Island, NY, has been Very Naughty.

Specifically, they changed their mascot's name from "Thunderbirds" to "T-birds." This was the end result of a lawsuit against the state over the state's rule that schools had to get rid of their Native American mascots. CCSD was one of the districts that sued the state, and the mascot change was part of the eventual settlement of that suit. It was a contentious decision, made just last fall, which Native Americans argued didn't change nearly enough to comply with the state order to drop school mascots based on Native American images, possibly because, as near as I can tell, the change seemed to involve going from a bird to, apparently, a bird with a slightly different name (a name that the school had often used in places where the full name wouldn't fit). It raised enough noise to attract coverage by Sports Illustrated. (This, mind you, is a district that has banned Pride flags.) 

But the feds have declared that this mascot change shall not stand. 

See, New York was already in trouble because the state education department had banned Native American mascots, which touched off a kerfluffle in Massapequa over the school's traditional "Chief" mascot. That earned them a visit from Education Secretary Linda McMahon, some noises of support from Trump, and a so-speedy-one-might-suspect-no-investigating-was-done investigation that determined that the state was violating the Trumpian interpretation of Title VI. Why could some schools call themselves, say, "Dutchmen," but not some kind of Native American (hint: some communities actually include people of Dutch descent). It's a complicated issue, but I suspect that for the Trump regime, it's no more complicated than "White people should get to use Native American imagery as mascots if they want to."

At any rate, CCSD was under "investigation" by the department months before they made a final decision. Almost as if the department was using the threat of an investigation to intimidate the district into a particular decision, a sort of agency level use of Dear Leader's fondness for lawfare and threats of lawsuits to bend opponents to his will.

But the department has now reached their conclusion. The announcement came from Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Kimberly Richey:

Today, we found Connetquot Central School District in violation of Title VI for erasing its Native American heritage to comply with a discriminatory New York state regulation. We will not allow ideologues to decide that some mascots based on national origin are acceptable while others are banned. Equal treatment under the law is non-negotiable. We expect the District to do the right thing and comply with our resolution agreement to voluntarily resolve its civil rights violation and restore the Thunderbirds’ rightful name. The Trump Administration will not relent in ensuring that every community is treated equally under the law.

Richey's background as announced by the department on her confirmation mentions that she "has consulted for various organizations, including Parents Defending Education, and previously served at the U.S. Department of Education from 2004-2009 under the George W. Bush Administration and more recently under the Trump Administration from 2017-2021." It also calls her a "certified teacher and attorney," though her LinkedIn account shows no signs of an actual teaching job. She has lawyered for the Oklahoma department of education, worked as managing director for federal advocacy and public policy for the National School Boards Association, deputy secretaried for Virginia's department of ed, and served as senior chancellor for Florida's department of education. 

OCR has "offered" the district the chance to sign off on a resolution agreement that would require them to "reverse its discriminatory erasure of Native American imagery by readopting the name 'Thunderbirds' for its sports teams," logos, mascots, etc.

This call to reverse this dreadful "erasure" comes the same week that the Trump administration removed the informational signs about slaves at the President's House in Philadelphia, attempting to erase the memory of Washington's slaves. It is also the week that, of course, the Department of Homeland Security continued its efforts to erase immigrants. So I'm not sure the high dudgeon over erased Native American sports mascots rings very authentically. 

The district has told news media that it is looking at its options. And while some community members think the old Thunderbirds mascot is just fine, Carolyn Gusoff of CBS in New York though to ask an actual Native American.

Chief Harry Wallace of Long Island's Unkechaug Nation disagrees. "It's a total fallacy to say that it honors the Native American people," he said.

He said the imagery is a desecration of their symbols and harms students.

"As they grow up from children into adults, they carry with them that stereotypical image of hurt and harm and shame," he said.

Despite the mention of funding loss in some coverage, the Ed Department release mentions no actual financial threat. Perhaps that is because district leaders and the feds are on the same side, and this is mostly a swipe at the state government. It's a whole situation with no winners. 

Still from an ICE shooting this morning in Minneapolis. This is horrific.

There are reports online that a man was shot multiple times by ICE agents and has died. The man was on the ground and surrounded by armed agents when he was shot. ICE has flooded the area with agents. They are deploying pepper spray and tear gas indiscriminately. Photos from Minneapolis look like a war zone, not an American city on a Saturday afternoon.

Does this look like a street in the United States on a cold day in January?

We need a nation-wide uprising to protest this outrageous, out of control war against American citizens. Only a week or so ago, Trump was warning Iran to stop killing protesters. Who is going to tell Trump that he has to stop using these masked thugs they’re calling “federal agents” to kill people in the street. Yesterday, they were arresting five-year-old children and using them as hostages. Today, they have their guns drawn and they are shooting at people in the streets of Minneapolis.

We have to find some way to help.

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There is a growing awareness in America that the usual “let’s move on for the good of the nation” ploy to let racist white men off the hook for their evil isn’t going to cut it this time. They’ve crossed too many red lines for us to forgive and forget. There has to be a reckoning. Our job is to bear witness, so when the time comes, all of their sins will be exposed and then carved into their skin forever.

That means it’s time to catch up on all of last week’s news! Grab your knife and sharpen that blade. We have a lot of carving to do…

Monday: The regime is recruiting the weakest of the weak.

Tuesday and Wednesday: abandoned me this week, leaving me all alone to write all of the notes for this week’s podcast. Woe is me!

Busy day on Thursday. First: Podcast!

Also Thursday: Livestream with nerds, a doctor, and a bachelor!

Finally: MAGA, go back to where you came from. You’re not welcome here anymore.

Friday: What happens when all the guardrails don’t collapse, after all?

5 Things I found Interesting This Week

1. How Christian Nationalists Turn Every Carrot into a Spiritual Stick - The traps behind paying people to choose WCN-approved marriage and children by Andra Watkins at For Such A Time As This

2. Minneapolis shows us the only way out - This year will decide the rest of our lives. And the people will decide it. by LOLGOP at The Cause

3. Leaked Doc: Homeland Security’s Domestic Terror Obsession - Forget Greenland; the American public are the real target by Ken Klippenstein

4. What the Trump Administration Is Buying With CBS’s Reputation - The administration’s story about the Renee Good shooting was falling apart. CBS gave them the credibility to put it back together. by Parker Molloy at The Present Age

5. Trump Is Building a Political Police Force in Plain Sight - In ICE, Trump is Building a Private Army by Rachel "The Doc" Bitecofer at The Cycle

Where I sit tonight -- probably the same place as a lot of you right now -- is in the path of the largest winter storm in years. Tracy and I spent the afternoon getting ready. We already went to the supermarket yesterday, so what we were left with was making sure our backup battery power supply is charged and the generator is ready to go. That meant finding the little connection thing to charge the Jackery battery and looking for our collection of extension cords we can run from it, and from the generator outside, to the stuff we’ll want to be able to keep on if the power goes out – the fridge, the wifi router, the TV, and a couple of lamps.

I was toiling away in the room at the back of the house we use for cat boxes and cat feeding and keeping-stuff-we’re-waiting-to-put-away, and I was thinking of what to write at the end of this out of control week, the out of control month that’s about to come to an end, hell, the extraordinarily out of control year we have – so far – survived, when it came to me:

He’s losing.

He’s “losing it,” as the saying goes. He is more and more visibly disconnected from the reality the rest of us, and the rest of the world, live in. They can still shoot him up with something that is not vitamin B and wheel him out in front of the public and the press and turn him loose to babble the lies that make him so happy to repeat over and over – he won the 2020 election that he lost; the prices of things like electricity and food and drugs and health care that everyone else knows are going up, he thinks are going down 400 or a thousand percent or whatever number he’s got stuck in his mind; he’s the greatest president ever, greater even than Washington and Lincoln; and on and on. But it’s not working, and he knows it, and his people know it.

He’s losing his health. A new purple wound bloomed on his hand in Davos that they tried to explain away by saying he hit his hand “on a table.” What? There weren’t enough hands to shake in Davos, so they couldn’t explain it away using that lie, or maybe nobody would shake his hand. Who knows. Something is seriously wrong with him. It’s what his narcolepsy is all about. He couldn’t keep his eyes open if they paraded a bevy of topless teenagers in front of him, he’s on the nod so often and so deeply. The thing about dragging the leg comes and goes, but if I were to guess, I’d say one of the reasons they’re rushing to complete the gold-plated jet from Qatar they say will be ready “by summer” is that they’re installing some sort of elevator he can use to get into the thing.

He’s losing supporters. Three or four polls are out telling the tale of his crash in popularity with the 18 to 30-year-olds. Even those who flipped from Biden to him in 2024, think he stinks, with 65 percent in one poll and 69 percent in others disapproving of the way he’s doing his job. He’s so crazed over his tanking poll numbers that he wants to make it a crime to run polls that say his numbers are falling.

He’s losing Republicans in the House and Senate. How many have said they’re resigning now? I lost count at 40. They’re looking at the losses they’re going to face in the midterms and bailing at record levels.

He’s going to lose the midterms. Everybody knows it. James Carville thinks it’s going to be a blowout. Charlie Cook was just dragged kicking and screaming into admitting control of the Senate is likely to go to the Democrats. The White House announced this week that Trump will be traveling to support Republicans for the midterms once a week between now and next fall. That means rallies. Remember the last one, in the Poconos, when they couldn’t fill a casino convention room and had to wall off a smaller space with big curtains? Just wait: His rally tour is going to turn into the Big Search for the Smallest Event Space So It Will Look the Fullest.

He’s losing it with ICE. The violence and cruelty of his thousands of new barely-trained masked thugs is coming through in spades in Minneapolis. That city is showing what can be done to oppose these modern-day Brownshirts and turn the tide of public opinion against them. His polling on immigration is tanking. CNN ran a poll that found 52 percent find Trump “has gone too far” on immigration. New York Times/Sienna found 61 percent say he has “gone too far” on immigration and customs enforcement. That number included 70 percent of independents. Other polls have had similar results. That whooshing sound you hear isn’t the icy wind bringing the Big Winter Storm. It’s the sound of Trump’s immigration policies flushing down his golden toilet. And these polls were taken before the photo of the five-year-old boy in the knit hat with bunny ears and a Spiderman backpack hit the airwaves. The picture is already being described as “iconic” in the way it shows the inhumanity of Trump’s immigration policy. That’s the hand of an ICE agent holding the boy by his backpack.

He’s losing it internationally. The kidnapping of Maduro was a big fat bust. He’s leaving the same authoritarian regime in place in Venezuela. None of the Big Three oil companies want to touch Venezuela’s stinky, thick, hard-to-drill-for oil. No major countries want to join his toy U.N. “Board of Peace.” I mean, really – Hungary, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Mongolia, Morocco, Pakistan, Paraguay, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan? It’s like a club for wannabe dictators hoping if they please the utterly unpleasable Trump that some crumbs will fall to the table from the Big Mac he’s stuffing in his mouth. Embarrassing. Ridiculous. Absurd. A plaything for Trump’s ever-expanding ego. Europe is gone for him. Not even his pal Putin will listen to his pleadings about stopping the war in Ukraine so he can get another pretend peace prize.

He’s losing it with Wall Street and Banks. That’s what his incredibly rapid shift into reverse on Greenland was all about. The money-boys took a hit to their bottom lines and punched speed-dial for Trump and told him if he wanted to keep the crooked crypto pay-offs coming, he had to finesse a Greenland agreement and drop the threats of new European tariffs, and presto! After screaming for months that he “needs” Greenland for “national defense” and that you “can’t defend a piece of paper,” Trump’s big new deal on Greenland turns out to be a slight expansion of the 1951 treaty signed between the U.S. and Denmark as a – get this – “implementation of the North Atlantic Treaty.” That’s Trump’s bugaboo, NATO, of course. There is new language about “total access” and some filigrees and bows and it will probably be written on stationery in gold leaf lettering, but it’s “old wine in a new bottle,” according to a former NATO official quoted by Politico.

In the end, he is losing because taken together, what has resulted from all his big authoritarian moves is that he looks weak. Panic is setting in. There aren’t enough needles and “not vitamin B” in the world to keep this staggering act going.

That’s not to say he isn’t dangerous. He is. He’s still surrounded by wannabe Nazis like Stephen Miller, and he’s still listening – on the sly now, I suspect – to tech Nazis like Elon Musk. He’s still got a hand puppet running the Pentagon and his hand on a pen that can sign the bloody Insurrection Act any time he takes a mind to. He wants some form of what he thinks is martial law, and if I were to guess, he’s going to try it and end up being knocked back by the courts.

But he’s fading, and he’s fading fast. He is not invincible. Republicans will be heavily damaged in the midterms. If they lose the House and the Senate, Trump’s last two years will be empty theater. He won’t be able to pass a single law. He won’t be able to make a single appointment. He won’t get any new judges on Courts of Appeals. He won’t get any new U.S. Attorneys. Should a Supreme Court vacancy come up, it will stay vacant until 2029, and a Democrat will be in the White House.

He won’t just be a lame duck. His presidency will be a dead letter.

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This was triggered by a post over at our long-term friendly-rival blog, LGM. That post, in turn, was triggered by something stupid that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said recently.

What Kennedy said: he thinks his distinctive hoarse, raspy voice is “spasmodic dysphonia”, which he suspects may have been caused by taking flu vaccines for years.  Because dysphonia is a KNOWN side effect of these dangerous vaccines!  So he stopped getting flu shots back in 2005.

Blogger Shakezula quite correctly deconstructs this nonsense (only one flu shot lists dysphonia as a possible side effect, and that one wasn’t available until after 2005; if dysphonia is a side effect, it’s ridiculously rare, and nobody seems to have ever encountered it).  But then they make a wrong turn:  they suggest that maybe RFK’s weird voice is genetic, because his sister also has a kinda weird voice.

No.  No no no.  

There’s a thing called “heroin voice”.  And yes, it’s an actual thing — go ahead and google it.  There are papers.

TLDR: long-term heroin use can permanently damage your voice.  It doesn’t always happen, but it’s definitely a real and well-known risk.  Long-term junkies and ex-junkies often have a distinctive hoarse, raspy voice.  In rare, severe cases the user may need speech rehabilitation.  More often, they just have a weird voice.  And they may keep that weird voice for the rest of their life, because in most cases the damage seems to be irreversible.

Now on one hand this is a slightly niche topic.  If you’ve never spent much time around junkies, there’s no reason to know about heroin voice.  But on the other hand it’s not exactly a deep obscure secret.  “Raspy voice” is regularly listed as one of the warning signs of heroin abuse.  It’s right up there with pinprick pupils, pallor, reduced appetite, and a marked preference for long-sleeved shirts.

“RFK Jr. used to be a junkie” isn’t a secret either.  He’s admitted to several years of heroin addiction: basically, “It was the Eighties, man”.  I would bet a modest amount of money that he used heroin both more and longer than he’s now willing to admit, but whatever.  It’s relevant to his current position, not because he used to be an addict — there’s no shame in that — but because he grew into one of those ex-addicts who believe, that since they Triumphed Over Addiction through some combination of Clean Living and Personal Awesomeness, they’re now uniquely entitled to tell the rest of us how to behave.  If you’ve ever spent much time around twelve-step programs, you’ll know the type — mercifully rare, but instantly familiar.

Anyway!  RFK Jr. doesn’t have a weird voice because of vaccines.  And it’s not genetic either.  It’s heroin voice.   He has a weird voice because he used to be a junkie.

And that’s all.