Losing My Perspicacity March 5, 2025

Good Morning and Happy Wednesday! Thanks for starting your day with me.

I’ll be honest: I watched the State of the Union but I’m not in any mental state to write about it. Feel free to head over to Bluesky, where you can see my entire string of expletive-laden skeets.

Here’s the general gist of my sentiments:

Welp, we might as well get right to it. Yesterday morning, Trump fired off this banger on Truth Social.

Let’s set aside that this post sounds like a dad threatening, “I will turn this car around, and there will BE NO WISCONSIN DELLS!”, as research has established that Trump speaks at the same level as an 8-year-old child. As you can see, he shot this post off at 6:30 AM, probably as a result of sitting in his pajamas (shudder) and doom-scrolling before he started his day. He doesn’t know, off the top of his head, what a President can and can’t do under the Constitution, so he’s just mad and ranting, lashing out at the world.

Not exactly the best quality in the President of the United States.

As soon as this post started making the rounds, several people texted it to me, along with some variation of “He can’t DO that, can he?” So let’s break this thing down, threat by threat.

No ‘illegal protests’

First of all, let me assure you that, no matter what Trump and his cronies want to claim, there is no such thing as an “illegal protest.” Under the First Amendment, the People (that’s us) have the right to assemble and to speak. Now, if protestors are destroying property, battering other humans, or trespassing, those are individual crimes that protestors might engage in for which they can be charged.

Additionally, protestors might be subject to “time, place, and manner” laws, which are what governments use to control how, where, and when protests take place. Let’s say the local police want to limit a protest to a two-hour block before rush hour starts. In order for that restriction to not violate the First Amendment, the government must prove to the court that their restriction (the two-hour time limit) is narrowly-tailored to advance a significant governmental interest. Legally, that’s a very high bar. Maybe the city can claim a protest will disrupt rush hour traffic, and they don’t have the numbers within the police to keep people safe during rush hour. Depending on the court, that may or may not be enough to allow the restriction to stand. But, by federal jurisprudence, courts are supposed to take a dim view of limitations on free speech. I mean, SCOTUS let Nazis march in Skokie in 1978, for crying out loud.

A protest, in and of itself, can’t be illegal. That’s dictator shit. In this case, and considering it’s coming from Trump, “illegal protests” probably just means protests against him or his interests. He probably saw the video of all the people protesting JD Vance in Vermont and teed off on Truth Social about it.

Federal Funding for colleges and universities

Can Trump pull federal funding for schools based on illegal protests? As with everything Trump has done in the last six weeks, the answer is “probably not, but who is going to stop him?”

Despite the confirmation of Linda McMahon as Secretary of Education this week (we are not a serious country), Trump has had his sights set on the Department of Education for a while. Many people expect him to attempt to “do away” with the DOE via executive order in the very near future. In fact, in McMahon’s email to DOE staff, she talks about the Department’s “final mission.”

The Department of Education was created by Congress in 1979, and that means Trump can’t just destroy it with the stroke of a pen/executive order, though I’m sure he believes he can. A law dismantling the DOE would have to pass through Congress, where Trump’s policies have been met with little to no resistance. But what, exactly, does the DOE do?

Public K-12 schools are funded primarily by local property taxes, which is why blighted neighborhoods lead to blighted schools. A K-12 school’s curriculum is also in the hands of the state. What the DOE does with regard to K-12 schools is mostly to administer federal programs, like Title I, which supplements low-achieving schools in high-poverty areas, and IDEA, which helps schools educate and care for children with disabilities.

Title I and IDEA are federal laws enacted by Congress that Trump can not unilaterally do away with, though the funding is complicated and explaining it all is above my pay grade. Moreover, the federal government enforces civil rights in schools at all levels and tracks how American students are doing when it comes to unimportant things like reading and math. So, by doing away with the DOE, Trump is leaving our most vulnerable students without the resources they need to get a quality education.

What about DOE and high education?

However, when it comes to colleges and universities, the DOE takes on the very important job of running the federal student aid program, and that is where the majority of federal funding for higher education goes. For the 2023-24 school year, the feds disbursed $114.9 billion in student aid (loans, work-study, Pell grants, etc.), approximately 1.7 percent of the federal budget.

The feds also fund, to the tune of about $54 billion in 2022, scientific research and development at colleges and universities. This is where DOGE is trying to “save” money, and why we’re seeing so many protests of federal funding on college campuses. A lot National Institutes of Health (NIH) money is conducted at specific institutions of higher learning.

From Axios:

So, not great.

So, does that mean Trump can’t stop funding schools?

Federal money that goes to schools on any level gets there because it’s appropriated by Congress, which decides how the federal budget should be spent. The President sends his proposed budget to Congress, who hem and haw over it until they come to a landing point. If we’re following the law, POTUS can't just take away funds that have been appropriated for specific needs by a co-equal branch of government. Again, this is overly simplistic because mandatory versus discretionary funding comes into play. But, if we’re following the current state of affairs, however, he absolutely can because no one is stopping him.

Can Trump force colleges and universities to “expel” students who participate in protests? Probably not, but what he can do is make sure the DOJ charges them with crimes that result in the revocation of their student visas or cut off the student aid that allows them to attend school in the first place.

It’s amazing how much of our system of government is based on our congressional reps not being doormats who line up to tell the Emperor how great his new clothes look. Yet, here we are.

Don’t worry, though — the Democrats wore pink at the SOTU. Everything is under control.

Other stuff today: It wasn’t a great day for the environment, either; Alina Habba says “Let Them Eat Cake;” The owner of the LA Times is out of its gourd; The SOTU was a total shitshow; and The High Note.

Here we go.

It gets worse

Whenever you see the five male justices on the Supreme Court standing on one side and the four women of the court on the other, you know a disastrous opinion is in the offing. Today was no exception, as SCOTUS held that the Clean Water Act doesn’t actually require … (checks notes)… clean water.

This ruling was so awful they couldn’t even get Amy Coney-Barrett and her Handmaid’s Tale view of the world to put her name on it.

Meanwhile, Trump had pivoted from “Drill, baby, drill” to “Chop, baby, chop.”

Starting to become pretty clear why they fired all the park rangers, no?

Alina Habba is a bad person

Let me just say this: I was better able to get an exhibit into evidence as a law student than Alina Habba was as the lawyer for the former POTUS. She is terrible at her job — the worst of all Trump’s lawyers in a group that also includes Rudy Giuliani.

I look forward to the day Trump throws her under the bus, which he definitely will. But when you hear right-wing hacks screaming about “DEI hires,” just remember the competency of the people working for this guy.

We need to buy the LA Times

We need to start crowdsourcing this purchase because we can NOT lose another major newspaper to some tech-bro yahoo.

If you missed it, on Monday, the LA Times debuted their AI “Insights” tool, which was to provide “more varied viewpoints” (that’s what other writers are for, dumbass), and offered “an annotated summary of the ideas along with different views on the topic from a variety of source.”

So, of course, it didn’t take long for the bot to start defending the KKK.

Shout out to my former Onion Union brothers and sisters at AV Club for giving LA Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong the treatment he deserves.

Someday I’ll tell you guys about the fight to stop AI at G/O Media. It went about as you’d expect.

All hail Rep. Al Green

I had put the newsletter to bed, but I opened my laptop back up to applaud Rep. Al Green (D-TX), for being the only one in a sea of Democrats who refused to be silent in the face of Trump’s hate and got tossed out for it.

This is what every single Democrat should have been doing during this speech. Instead, they did this:

This is low-key kind of funny and had the potential to really drive Trump up the wall, but of course, the signs were too small and they couldn’t coordinate the responses. Typical.

Though a few did this:

Better, but I did see someone on Bluesky say, “Oh good, a firmly-worded shirt” and now I can’t stop laughing at it. The group that walked out included Reps. Jasmine Crockett, Sydney Kamlager-Dove, Melanie Stansbury, and Maxwell Frost.

The High Note

Each Day, I do my best to leave you with a smile on your face, a song in your heart, and the will to fight another day.

I did not have “wooly mice” on my bingo card for today.

As the story says, the creation of these “wooly mice,” who have more belly fat and longer, blonder hair, is one step on the road to bringing back the wooly mammoth, which is definitely a priority right now.

Either way, those things exist, and even if they are a far cry from wooly mammoths, they are pretty cute. Worst case, we have a new cute pet.

Survive and advance today, kids. Don’t let the bastards get you down.