I first learned of International Women’s Day in the 70s, on a Polish research vessel surveying a chilly Georges Bank. My female Polish counterpart clued me in. It was a very popular holiday in Europe, eastern and western. Today I marvel at the strength of President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico. Too bad we can’t have a President like her here. We could have, twice. Now I don’t think I will ever see it in what’s left of my lifetime.

One story jumped out at me today from The New Republic about a woman showing strong leadership and resistance to the chaos being caused by FOTUS and FElon. The ousted head of HR at the IRS, Traci DiMartini, a 21 year civil servant who has never had a bad performance review or discipline action against her, was placed on leave for “ineffective management” and “insubordination” to DOGE. Her crimes and misdemeanors? She told the IRS staff where the firings were coming from. She refused to call them back to work over the weekend after they’d already worked 60-70 hours in the heat of tax season. She DARED call out “flagrant prohibited personnel practices”.

She is challenging her dismissal. “It’s my job to stand up and be the buffer between politicals and career employees, and I’m just trying to do my gd dmn job”. Good on you, Ms. DiMartini. What an excellent example you are setting for others in the same situation.

I spent lots of time on ships and can swear in several languages. I love the fight in this woman, and saved the best quote for last: “They have no idea who they picked a f-ing fight with.”

This week in stupid was especially stupid.  Here, in no particular order, are some jewels.

Pete Hegseth’s brilliant defense department banned references to the Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber that carried the Hiroshima bomb because it was just so GAY…

The acting director of the Social Security Administration stupidly cancelled the Enumeration at Birth contract with a provider that allowed hospitals in the State of Maine to register newborns as has been done for decades.  The change required parents to go to a local federal building to physically obtain the number for their child.  After an uproar, the dumbass rescinded the order and restored the contract.

Trump’s on again, off again tariff threats and lies have roiled financial and multiple markets, including dairy, lumber, steel, aluminum industries.  Trump has been jerking both Canada and Mexico around, but Doug Ford, Premier of the Province of Ottawa, is having none of it.  Ottawa provides electric power to the states of Minnesota, Michigan, and New York.  I’ll refrain for now the wisdom of states not having enough locally generated power to serve their own residents, but that is a subject for a later discussion.  Ford is sick of Trump’s bullshit and has raised the price of power sent over the border by 25% and will keep that surcharge on until Trump stops threatening Canada.  He’s also ordered 100% of US alcoholic beverages off of all shelves.  The targets of Ford’s actions are specifically aimed at states that voted for Trump in 2024.

Meanwhile Trump is trying to turn up the heat on Canada.  His talk of “Governor Trudeau” has gone from joke to deadly serious.  Trump is throwing everything but the kitchen sink at the country including trade, water sharing arrangements, and even the actual fucking border.  He has told Trudeau that he’s going to redraw the border between the US and Canada, and Canadians have finally figured out that Trump is trying to collapse their economy, forcing them to accept statehood.

Trump’s ever shifting and contradictions are not just him being a lunatic.  His thugs are way smarter than him, and they are roiling local and international markets and diplomatic relationship.  The chaos is by design, and the same strategy followed by Putin, making truth unknowable and keeping everyone off balance and under stress.  It’s Steve Bannon’s “flood the zone with shit” strategy through and through.  And it’s working.

The only way to fight Trump is to stay engaged, stay fearless, and call bullshit bullshit, all the time, every time.

The Associated Press reported yesterday that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has given an order to erase more than 24,000 images of female, minority, and gay soldiers as part of the Pentagon’s purge of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) content from Department of Defense archives and histories. One source told the AP that when military social media pages and websites are included, as many as 100,000 images may end up being deleted.

“The vast majority of the Pentagon purge targets women and minorities, including notable milestones made in the military,” the AP reported. “And it also removes a large number of posts that mention various commemorative months — such as those for Black and Hispanic people and women.”

A spokesman for the Pentagon told the AP, “We are pleased by the rapid compliance across the Department with the directive removing DEI content from all platforms.” The spokesman told the AP that “Hegseth has declared that ‘DEI is dead’ and that efforts to put one group ahead of another through DEI programs erodes camaraderie and threatens mission execution.”

Since there is this Pentagon wide effort to erase history, including the history of the famed Tuskegee Airmen, this nation’s first black pilots, I thought it would be useful to preserve at least some of the little known history of the all-black 92nd Infantry Division that served under my grandfather, Lieutenant General Lucian K. Truscott Jr. in Italy during World War II.

The 92^nd, commonly referred to as the Buffalo Division because of its patch picturing a black Buffalo against a green background, was the only all black unit to see combat in the European theater during the war. Most black soldiers who were drafted into the army or volunteered were used in units assigned to do labor or as delivery drivers to resupply troops on the front lines. One black soldier, interviewed for World War II History Magazine, described the arrival of the 92nd in Naples, where black soldiers on the docks in service units cheered as soldiers from the 92nd filed down the gang plank from their troop ship. “Most times you would see a black soldier, he was carrying ammunition, cans of fuel, or chow for the front line—anything but a gun. These guys were carrying rifles. A black G.I. carrying a rifle was not a normal sight to see every day in Europe in 1944.”

This was because the military was still segregated during the war, and in fact the all black 92nd wasn't really all black at all. Enlisted soldiers were black, as were their second lieutenant platoon leaders, but every other officer in the division, from company commanders through battalion and regimental commanders right up through the division commander and all of the staff officers were white.

Here is an army photograph that will survive even if stricken from the army archive because it’s being published right here. It shows soldiers from Company I, 3rd Battalion, 370th Infantry Regiment, of the 92nd Division on the march through mountainous country near Cacina, Italy.

One soldier from the 92^nd, 2nd Lieutenant John Fox, was awarded a posthumous Medal of Honor for calling in artillery fire on his own position to cover the withdrawal of a unit that was suffering heavy casualties under attack by Germans. Fox was a forward observer for an artillery battery. He occupied the second floor of a ruined house and told his battery to fire directly on his position because Germans had completely surrounded him. “Fire it!” he said over his radio. “There’s more of them than there are of us. In three or four minutes they’ll be all over us. Fire directly on the house.” When his position was later retaken by a counterattack, fox’s body was found in the destroyed house surrounded by 100 dead German soldiers.

Because medals for gallantry and valor were systematically withheld from black soldiers during the war, 2^nd Lieutenant Fox was first awarded a posthumous Distinguished Service Cross in 1982 by a general who had been a First Lieutenant in his company during the war. In 1996, Fox’s award was upgraded to the Medal of Honor by President Bill Clinton during a ceremony at the White House where six other black heroes had their medals upgraded as well.

Here's a photograph of a crew from Battery B, 598th Field Artillery, servicing a 105 millimeter Howitzer during the battle on the Arno River in September of 1944.

During heavy fighting near the town of Viareggio in February of 1945, the 336^th Regiment of the 92nd was pinned down for four days by heavy German artillery and coastal guns. Before the regiment could be rescued by reinforcements, 659 enlisted soldiers and 47 officers had either lost their lives, been wounded, or were missing in action. This is a photograph of my grandfather visiting troops from the 92nd after their tragic losses in the hills above the town of Viareggio.

Trump and Hegseth and their obsession with DEI is disgusting enough by itself. Their attempt to erase the history of black and brown and female and gay soldiers who have served their country honorably should be beneath the contempt of all Americans. I'm proud to do my small part in preserving at least some of the history Hegseth is trying to purge from Pentagon records.

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Elon Musk had a lunch with Republican Senators yesterday followed by a meeting with House Republicans in the evening to discuss concerns the lawmakers had with complaints they've been getting from constituents about some of Musk’s cuts to government programs they hadn’t seen coming. Musk handled the situation by giving out his phone number and telling Republicans they could call him with any complaints they had about what his DOGE team has been doing out of sight of the public.

The Washington Post reported on the two meetings between Musk and Republicans as if they are the normal course of business in this new era when the Congress, given the power of the purse in Article I of the Constitution, has sat back and watched an unelected multi-billionaire seize their constitutional authority and do with it what he wants. Listen to this little gem: “Some senators were given Musk’s phone number during Wednesday’s meeting, and the entrepreneur said he would ‘create a system where members of Congress can call some central group’ to get problematic cuts reversed quickly,” the Post reported yesterday. “Musk told members of the House Oversight DOGE Subcommittee that he would set up a similar line of communication for them to reach his team,” the Post story continued in matter of fact prose, as if meetings between billionaires and lawmakers to hash out what to do with the public monies have been happening since the Republic's founding.

Okay, let's take a moment and examine what's going on here. First of all, the meetings Musk had yesterday were with Republicans only. The Post used the title “House Oversight DOGE Subcommittee” as if this thing had existed forever, and it is just an acceptable fact of life in the new Washington D.C. that the committee has only Republican members, or at least that only Republicans matter on Capitol Hill, and certainly only Republicans rate a meeting with the wizard behind the curtain that is running things these days.

The Post also reported that Musk “urged Congress to codify the cuts his group is making unilaterally, telling lawmakers that he realized that the cuts are not permanent if they are not made into law.” The Yale Law School educated senator from Missouri, Josh Hawley, was good enough to confirm Musk’s understanding of constitutional law, telling the Post, “He said unless Congress takes action on this, none of it is permanent.”

Got that? Hawley had to be told by Elon Musk, not Article I of the Constitution, that the Congress has the power to appropriate money and establish the departments of government that are authorized to spend the citizens’ taxpayer dollars in ways that the Congress directs. Boy am I glad that good old fist-in-the-air Hawley got at least that much straightened out before Musk moves forward with the rest of the disassembly of the government which Hawley's branch nominally controls by providing the funds to run it.

Rather than make his changes by what we might quaintly call regular order, Donald Trump with his addiction to chaos decided that he would take apart all at once the government he was elected to head as the executive. He could have taken his time and done it by proposing legislation to eliminate the Department of Education, as it was reported yesterday that he intends to do by executive order, or put forth legislation to change the number of people employed by the Department of Veterans Affairs, rather than just have Musk and his teenage ninja warriors do it for him with a post on Musk’s social media site X announcing firings of 80,000 VA employees.

What Trump has done is to essentially launch a coup to seize control of the government by administrative fiat with a series of executive orders and utterly illegal closures of entire governmental departments like the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which is being treated by the media and by the Congress as a fait accompli, even though a federal judge has issued a temporary restraining order, backed up by the Supreme Court, ordering the reinstatement of all the foreign aid monies that USAID and other departments administered according to laws passed by the Congress.

So, what we're confronted with is an ongoing administrative coup that is being challenged by lawsuits, and at least in some cases stopped by court decisions. In the meantime, the toothless Republicans in Congress who have turned over their constitutional responsibilities to an unelected civilian, have begun hearing from their constituents that they are not all-in with the firing of the guy down the street who has worked for 15 years at the VA, or the closure of the Social Security office that has answered their questions and handled their complaints since the day they turned 65 and became eligible for the meager benefits they spent their working lives earning the right to receive.

The Washington Post quoted a couple of congressmen and senators expressing reluctance to go along with Elon Musk’s plan for them to codify in law the raping he is doing to the federal government and its employees. Here is where that quaint idea about regular order comes into play. The way the Congress operates when it is not frozen by Republican fear of and obeisance to their dear leader Donald Trump is to bring forth bills, and put them through the process of hearings by relevant committees, during which public testimony can be held and debate can be engaged in before the bills come to the floor of the House and the Senate for votes.

Here's the problem with that old fashioned way of doing things: the votes taken by members of the House and the Senate would put Republicans on the record as having voted to, say, slash the budget of the VA, or eliminate the Department of Education that was providing funding for rural schools in their districts as well as the money to fund educational programs and facilities for disabled children. Who wants to take those votes? We're starting to get the answer to that question with yesterday's story in the Post reporting on Republicans basically getting down on their knees and begging the richest man in the world to tell them what he's doing with the money they appropriated to pay for things like agricultural subsidies, Social Security offices, VA hospitals, and Medicaid, a federal program which the New York Times reports today covers 70 million of our fellow citizens.

These are not small matters. The money that Trump and Musk are ripping out of the National Institute for Health, the CDC, the FDA, and the Department of Agriculture is our tax dollars that we paid to the IRS so that responsible custodians would take care that our money went to pay for programs that we voted for by electing our representatives to Congress to do our bidding.

This process of electing people to the congressional and executive branches of our government is what the founders wrote into the constitution to carry out the will of the people. Remember that old phrase we learned in junior high, that ours is “a government of the people, for the people, and by the people?” Well, those words no longer describe our government so long as Elon Musk is running amok in Washington D.C. carrying out the executive orders of Donald Trump. That's why we're starting to hear reports of people saying, “Hey, I didn't vote for that!”

No, they didn't vote for a lot of the stuff that's being done in their name, and that's what a coup is: a small number of people seizing power that wasn't given to them by the democratic process that is supposed to run things in this country. The Republican Party in the person of members of the House and the Senate is sitting by while Trump and Musk shred the Constitution they swore on a Bible to uphold and defend when they took the offices they were elected to. Unless and until these spineless Republicans decide to uphold their oaths and do their jobs, the coup will continue to erode our representative democracy and turn this country into an authoritarian dictatorship. That's where we're at in the the alleged United States of America on March the 6th, 2025.

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It may be more symbolic than substantive change, but Donald Trump’s order designating English as the official national language is a mean-spirited political slap. As he made clear in his address to Congress, Trump sees English-only as another anti-immigrant cultural weapon.

It is unlikely to bring about either “unity” or an effective change in how we speak to each other. After all, more than 30 states already have done the same, and yet Trump feels it necessary to issue a national order carrying the force of law.

For openers, Trump provides nothing to make the idea work, like underwriting classes and making it an invitation to learning. Rather, his approach would be to vanish or deport those who don’t speak English.

Practically speaking, it means that government forms and instructions may not require translation in Spanish, Chinese or other languages where citizens, naturalized citizens and residents need information. Airports and hospitals seem to understand the need to do so even if the White House, which has taken down its Spanish language web page, cannot.

The unfunny part of this is that when someone near you is ill, facing an emergency, or in some kind of trouble, your safety or health may depend on whether there are instructions on the wall that the victim can understand immediately. In cities like New York and Los Angeles, that might involve pointing out exit lanes. health information or voting rules in several different tongues.

Requiring English doesn’t mean everyone speaks and reads quickly in English, though Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff and immigrant whisperer, thinks it is an important warning to those who would come to these shores.

What Problem Are We Solving?

Other than offending Trump personally, what is the problem at hand?

By contrast, then New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg worked to improve his own Spanish speaking skills when in office, and, successfully or not, many politicisms try to reach voters in their own preferred language. That is not Trump’s style, either with voters or with leaders like Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky, whom Trump decided to berate in rapid-fire English while Zelensky was seeking to answer in his thrid spoken language.

For years, there has been an English-only movement that aligns with bilingual education restrictions and tightened immigration. That’s clearly the group that this Trump order wants to reward — a distinct move to underscore a singular viewpoint for a pluralistic America.

The executive order explains that “Establishing English as the official language will not only streamline communication but also reinforce shared national values, and create a more cohesive and efficient society.” It erases a Bill Clinton rule for agencies and recipients of federal funding to provide language assistance to non-English speakers, though it added no real enforcement actions.

So much for Republican efforts to reach out politically to Spanish-speaking voters. What remains a mystery in issuing such a proclamation is exactly what problem Trump is seeking to solve — other than scoring his anti-immigrant political point?  Were people somehow previously confused that most business transactions and government information are in English?

Instead of firing federal employees by the thousand each week, how about sponsoring more public classes for English for speakers of other languages? My own time volunteering as an English teacher for new arrivals came to a halt in the Trump years because people taking the classes feared immigration roundups rather than a welcoming message — in English.

Backlash to Come

Like other Trump broadsides, as in declaring that there are only two genders or that the Gulf should be named for America, not Mexico, someone will sue, and this issue too will end up in court. In English.

While most of the country speaks some sort of English, there are areas where English is not dominant. You can get by in New York City and El Paso, Texas, just speaking Spanish, for example. In Puerto Rico, an American territory, 94 percent of the population only speaks Spanish.

Americans, at least those who would admire this order, see language as a bar to U.S. unity — or conformity — with the same kind of squishy discomfort that they bring to all questions of diversity, equity and inclusion. But some of us choose to speak more than one language, official or not, and see communication as an avenue towards understanding.

Our grandchildren in South Lake Tahoe have attended a bilingual elementary school where they have become fluent in Spanish as well as English, and they easily were able to communicate with our family members in Argentina, which has its own brand of Spanish language. We have been present for proud primary schoolers at their school who were the first in their family to be able to pass an English proficiency and enhance relationships beyond language alone.  We have a daughter-in-law from Madrid, and all three of our adult children can get by in Spanish. Speaking another language is a plus, not a problem, and so my wife and I work at it daily.

My own weekly conversations to help a Ukrainian woman improve her English for a chance for more international work have expanded to a continuing friendship that this week seems particularly challenged by the same English-only speaking Trump.

Of course, for Trump himself, who has long mocked politicians who answer questions in Spanish, perhaps this is a chance for him to lean to speak English rather than social media sloganeering. Based on reading of any of Trump’s “weaves,” as he calls most of his public speeches, that show thoughts radiating at random and often ending, well, nowhere, Trump could use a brush-up in spelling and grammar as well as in critical thinking.

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