Source: TomDispatch
by Andrea Mazzarino

“The second administration of President Donald J. Trump has already started working its special magic across the Washington, D.C. capital region. Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have fired tens of thousands of federal workers, with more to come. Those who have lost their jobs include people who find housing and other support for veterans struggling with mental illness. They include civil servants who maintained safeguards to prevent our nuclear weapons from becoming dirty bombs. They include healthcare researchers developing treatments for cancer and other killer diseases; workers who ensured that low-income, homeless, and rural students were able to get an education; agricultural researchers who opened up international markets to American farmers; and too many others to mention here. My neighborhood, located on farmland about 40 miles outside Washington, D.C., is among those wracked by this administration’s shakeup of the government workforce.” (04/01/25)

https://tomdispatch.com/the-costs-of-trumps-war-on-federal-workers/

Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Jacob G Hornberger

“Immediately after the recent initial release of records, the mainstream press declared that there were no ‘smoking guns,’ as in the nature of an official confession to the assassination. But that’s a patently ridiculous assertion. Assassination researchers were always certain that the secrecy was not intended to hide a confession. Don’t forget, after all, that these are all records that the national-security establishment knowingly delivered to the National Archives in the 1990s, where they were then kept secret. What are the chances they would have delivered a confession to the National Archives? … it was standard practice within the national-security establishment to never put any reference to a covert state-sponsored assassination into writing. At the risk of belaboring the obvious, that policy would have been especially followed in the state-sponsored assassination of a U.S. president.” (04/01/25)

https://www.fff.org/2025/04/01/the-secret-jfk-records/

Source: New York Post
by Jonathan Turley

“In this age of rage, it is common for people to become the very thing that they despise in others, jettisoning their most cherished values to strike out at those they hate. Since the election, Democrats have shown that very self-destructive quality of rage in adopting anti-immigrant, anti-free speech, anti-labor, and even anti-environmental positions to get at Donald Trump or his supporters. It consumes every part of a person. It is addictive, and it is contagious. What these rage addicts will not admit, however, is that they like it; they need it. That was evident this week in New York, where democratic legislators are again moving to weaponize state laws for political purposes — just like they did with Trump. This time, they are targeting Elon Musk, whose dealerships, charging stations, and customers have been hit by political violence from the left.” (04/01/25)

https://nypost.com/2025/04/01/opinion/elon-musk-derangement-syndrome-has-dems-rejecting-everything-they-claim-to-stand-for/

Source: CounterPunch
by Dean Baker

“The Trump administration had a meeting with all its top national security staff, except Trump, planning a war against the Houthis on an unsecured system. They also managed to unknowingly include a senior editor/reporter from Atlantic magazine in the meeting. … If something like this had happened under Biden, there is no doubt that heads would roll. The people responsible for setting up the meeting (Defense Secretary Hegseth and National Security Adviser Mike Waltz in this case) would surely lose their jobs. In fact, there is a good chance that everyone at the meeting would lose their jobs. … they would be mercilessly trashing ‘Sleepy Joe’ for not even bothering to show up at a meeting where his administration was planning a war on another country and putting US troops at danger.” (04/01/25)

https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/04/01/five-alarm-fire-on-signalgate/

Source: Common Dreams
by Steve Striffler

“On March 7th the Trump administration announced the immediate cancellation of $400 million in government grants and contracts to Columbia University. Less than a week later, his administration followed up with a letter to Columbia’s interim president, Katrina Armstrong, outlining the steps the university would have to take before negotiations to restore funding could even begin. Although largely without precedent, Trump’s demands are entirely in line with an evolving authoritarianism that seeks to destroy possible sites of political opposition. The demands included suspending or expelling some of those who participated in pro-Palestinian protests; centralizing disciplinary power within the hands of the university president; banning mask wearing on campus; increasing the numbers and powers of campus police; and putting the Middle East, South Asian and African Studies department under ‘academic receivership.'” (04/01/25)

https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/columbia-trump-capitulation

Source: Semafor
by David Weigel

“‘The only states that Kamala Harris won in the last election were states that did not have voter ID,’ former Gov. Scott Walker told voters at a rally last month. That’s a popular but incorrect factoid. Harris won New Hampshire and Rhode Island, where voters must show ID to cast ballots, and carried other states like Colorado where ID is required to register. Democrats won the 2020 presidential race in Wisconsin, and the 2018 and 2022 races for governor, with ID requirements in place. The ballots Republicans need today are from the less-frequent Trump voters who usually skip elections; they need them to overwhelm high-turnout liberals who don’t misplace their paperwork.” (04/01/25)

https://www.semafor.com/article/04/01/2025/republicans-double-down-on-voter-id-even-though-it-may-not-help-them