I have to confess my first thought re: snipers was all the better to shoot protesters. My second thought was perfect! make the arch a target for anyone wishing to do harm in DC……. Big boom incoming. An ammunition depot overlooking hallowed ground? FFS what next….
It simply feels wrong….. ALL of it. I understand non-peace decisions are made in close proximity to this ludicrous proposed spectacle but my god. Further words fail me at the moment.
Senator Mark Kelly publicly reminded the military of their oath to the Constitution, not to a man and that unlawful orders must be refused. Look whas has ensued for him including threatened imprisonment.
And...the thing that stands out about that the most...for me...is that Kelly has not backed down for even a second. If anything...he has come out fighting even harder...REFUSING to back down.
THAT...is how more Americans need to respond...or READY themselves to be able to respond that way: refuse to shrink and become quiet...and choose to get LOUDER...and use their most important voice on November 3rd...their VOTE.
Mark Kelly is the epitome of a true American that loves his country. You have to believe this is eating him alive and he will fight this till the criminal clown car is gone. He is a man that also loves his wife and probably the closest thing to who my dad was like being a paraplegic from WW II that as I was growing up the only ting he could not do is walk across the room. The VA taught those men how to get in and out of hate wheel chairs , how to get up the 2 step turnb from the street to the sidewalk. I watched my dad get in and out of the swimming pool by himself and into his wheel chair. We always had a 2 door car and he put is chair in the back behind his seat. He was one of the first to have hand controls to drive. He was kind and trusting and would loan his workers money to get to the end of the week. The always paid him back. HE would drive to the black part of town alone and pick up day workers. They knew he was fair and honest and would make sure he could get on the job site safely. He was a general contractor of custom homes and many were for disabled vets as he knew th e building codes for them.I see my dad's personality in Mark Kelly. We need more like him fighting these horrific people.
The Arc de Triomphe in Paris was commissioned by Bonaparte to commemorate his military victory at Austerlitz and the damn thing took so long to complete he was dead of syphilis on St. Helena before it was done. Hitler enjoyed hell out of posing in front of it after smashing through the second-largest European military like it was a girl scout campsite in just a few weeks.
Hitler built the flak towers to defend Germany against the Mighty Eighth. They didn't work.
America's military is in tatters, its reputation destroyed for decades to come. This one ridiculous man is the locus for all the worst traits of humanity, and attracts similarly warped people to him the way a cesspit attracts vermin.
None of this matters. It's a distraction to keep us looking away while they ransack what remains of the public treasury they continue to extort from us in taxation, price gouging, and monopolistic practices.
J Hardy...the flak tower comparison is VERY sharp!.
They failed completely and miserably at their stated purpose...the bombers came anyway...and several of them are still standing in Vienna and Berlin...BECAUSE... they're too solid to demolish. That's the real lesson. The thing doe NOT have to work. It only has to be impossible to REMOVE.
The ballroom...the arch...the Kennedy Center...those are the looting. SAME contractors... SAME no-bid vapor...SAME money.
I'm not convinced it's an act of deception by Trump...pulling our eyes away from the theft. It's the RECEIPT.
Thanks for coming with sharp insights...as you have historically always done.
The military would never make such a narrow request on US soil. Trump is just trying another excuse to build his monument and national security is always a last resort.
Congress would never permit a democratic president to spend money the way they have allowed donald to waste dollars - remember the attempts to give people some relief around school loans?? Boy they had a conniption over that. And that would have actually helped some people. These vanity projects are a disgrace. Donald shouldn’t worry- his name will be all over our history as THE WORST PRESIDENT in 250 years
Student loan relief drew lawsuits...floor speeches...and a Supreme Court case about executive overreach.
A $300 million BALLROOM...gets demolition crews BEFORE the approvals clear...and the SAME voices...discover a "deep respect" for presidential discretion. Yeah...B.S.
The principle was NEVER the spending. It was WHO benefits.
Nobody in a uniform will put their name on this. Say that plainly, because it's the whole story. Not a branch. Not a commander. Not a memo with a signature block. A real security requirement survives a records request — it's dated, it's signed, it sits in a file cabinet waiting for a subpoena to find it. What we have instead is a Sunday-morning claim, spoken out loud by the one man who benefits from it, with nothing behind it but his own say-so. That's not a request from the military. That's a man throwing on a costume the second he felt a courtroom breathing on his neck.
File the date: the FAA cleared this thing on the condition it carry an eternal flame. Note which detail survived exactly one week before the entire premise changed — the flame is gone, the ammunition storage is not. An eternal flame and an armory are not two versions of the same building. They are two different claims about what the building is for, and only one of them went through the review process that's supposed to catch exactly this kind of switch.
Which is where this stops being a design dispute and becomes a discovery problem. There are now two federal records describing the same 250 feet of granite, and they cannot both be accurate. One went through the Commemorative Works Act process — planning commission, fine arts commission, the whole slow machinery democracies build precisely so one man can't unilaterally decide what goes up on the ground where the country buries its dead. The other exists only as an oral claim, offered days after veterans filed suit alleging that machinery got skipped. If opposing counsel is doing their job, they don't stop at arguing the process was bypassed. They move to compel the document that authorized the reclassification — under oath, on the record. If that document doesn't exist, the court isn't looking at a paperwork violation anymore. It's looking at a reclassification adopted in bad faith, timed to defeat litigation already in progress. That is a separate and considerably worse problem for this administration than an ugly arch.
But say the lawsuit wins outright. File that outcome too, because it isn't the end of the danger — it's just the end of this particular news cycle. Note what happens in the seventy-two hours after any ruling, win or lose: does this story hold, or does it get quietly buried under whatever outrage arrives next Tuesday, right on schedule? That's not idle curiosity. That's the actual mechanism. Nobody consolidates power by winning an argument in public. They do it by outlasting the public's attention span, one cycle at a time, until the question stops being "is this normal" and becomes "is this just how it is now" — and that second question always gets answered yes, by default, because nobody in power is under any obligation to correct you.
Jack is correct that the danger was never a written order — it's proximity, repeated until a bad night stops being hypothetical. And Jack is correct again that the answer to a government arming itself against its own citizens is not a citizenry that arms itself back. It's paperwork. It's comment periods and discovery requests and elected officials cornered into a yes-or-no they can't wriggle out of.
So here's what you actually do.
File the comment. The planning commission still takes public input on the record, and friction is the one thing that has reliably slowed this down.
Fund the veterans. Their case is the only venue on the map right now with the power to make this administration produce a document that may not exist.
Make your representative answer it straight, on camera: do you support snipers at Arlington National Cemetery — yes or no. Not a statement. A sentence a voter can play back to them in November.
And then keep watching after the headline fades. Check back in seventy-two hours. See if anyone ever produced the paperwork. See if the story's still breathing, or if it got buried on schedule like all the others.
Because that's the whole play. They don't need you to believe the arch is defensible. They just need you to get tired of asking why it isn't.
Thank you Jack for the timely update and analysis on how to counter the regime’s lies and lawlessness and not feed into doomscrolling, powerlessness and panic🫨 We will keep resisting and not normalize regime loyalty over oath to Constitution💪#HOLDFAST
As chaotic and frustrating as things seem day to day.. resistance has actually kept a LOT from happening. I think we sometimes forget just how MUCH worse it could be...right NOW...if the courts had not held as often as they have.
And...as you point out...we must CONTINUE doing so.
Thanks for this article on Trump's devolved purpose of his proposed Arch.
Now that it's been challenged in court - it caused a drastic change to the Arch. It is now not just a monument to Trump himself. No , the arch has becime a military structure. By adding snipers & Drone ports to its purpose; it's become warning to all who venture to protest this Regime.
Trump has been influenced & coach by his Whitehouse Nazi provacutuers very well. Stephen 'Hitler-A History'Miller has been probably coach this Arch plan all along.
Been calling my Congressional members Rep Kiley & Senator Schiff and Padilla numerous times over this proposed arch : now that Trump wants the Arch to be a Military Structure ups the need to keep calling & emailing our Congressional members. Put the Constitution's Pressure ON!
Side note: even though Speaker MosesMike sent all of the house members Home for weeks- they still check there WashingtonDC emails and calls.
You hit all the points most people usually miss, as always. And when I heard of the plan to arm the crap out of the arch-thing, I next thought of the “ballroom”, likewise hardened and armed to the gills. At first blush it seemed like they were indeed building anti-protest bunkers, I’d wager the coverage is mostly thorough, but, they’d need a third for better coverage? Then my mind leapt to the joke-y but, maybe not idea that they would be so equipped to defend themselves when accountability finally comes, but that seems like overkill. Oh, yeah, that: won’t be a problem. And they’re not actually planting mines in the Kennedy either.
Welp, looks like I’m late to the party here. As I was reading this myself was asking me what in the absolute f@ck would make anyone think it’s a good idea to tell EVERYBODY WHERE TO AIM THEIR DRONES? I mean, it’s even lit so ya can’t miss it!!! Enemies, point all weapons HERE!!!!
No wonder Mikey decided to send everybody home. Hegseth’s gotta be a huge fan of this shit.
OK, I’ll calm down. I have letters to write and calls to make. AND A VOTE TO CAST!
Thank you, as always, for telling us what others gloss over. There is no doubt in my cynical mind that he intends to stay in the WH until he's carried out with a sheet over his face. There is no doubt in my cynical mind that he would easily give the order to shoot civilians --- putting people in concentration camps as he is doing with detainees is one step closer to that order. And there is no doubt in my cynical mind that there are plenty in the military or in the fascist militias who would do the dirty work. SO, thank you above all for telling me not to buy a gun. I didn't grow up in that culture, my husband had guns in the AF, and we've both lost too many people in our family and circle of friends to guns. I will, instead, do what you've suggested and send funding to those fighting the good fight. You give me hope even when things look dark. #HoldingFAST
If it is built, my feeling is as soon as the Tyrant kicks the bucket, the Arch will be torn down like the Saddam Hussein statue did in Baghdad's Firdos Square.
Only half way through, but since my mind retains little for any length of time...no.person shall be elected president more than twice. He’s been elected twice.
My fear is that one of the merry band of thieves will run, with another flunky as VP. My understanding is if they both resign, the next body in line is Speaker of the House. If that doesn't make every patriotic American vote straight Dem ticket in November and in 2028, we could see the MAGA elect the doddering antichrist to the position And voila. No election needed.
I was shocked by this news, and that is saying something these days. The chaos he is sowing reeks of desparation. The constant barrage of bull shit that ends with litigation. We all knew that it would get crazy ugly leading up to and after the midterms. It is just shocking what he formulates in that angry brain of his. #holdfast
My short post on BlueSky this morning about this:
Whom does he expect a legion of snipers to be shooting at from that vantage point?
Psychotic and/or frightening.
(An imaginary invasion - or defenders of democracy trying to dislodge him when he stays put beyond 1/20/2029?)
Dr. David....on point!
-Jack
Exactly…he’s afraid of the people and that fear is only increasing with every passing day!
The Orange Shitstain is like a crackhead on a power trip
The Orange Shitstain is like a crackhead on a power trip
The Orange Shitstain is like a crackhead on a power trip
Spot on Dr. David
And a related brief interview I gave the other day - non-clinical, more of a chat:
https://www.alternet.org/alternet-exclusives/sanewashing-trump-reiss/
I have to confess my first thought re: snipers was all the better to shoot protesters. My second thought was perfect! make the arch a target for anyone wishing to do harm in DC……. Big boom incoming. An ammunition depot overlooking hallowed ground? FFS what next….
It simply feels wrong….. ALL of it. I understand non-peace decisions are made in close proximity to this ludicrous proposed spectacle but my god. Further words fail me at the moment.
Thank you, Jack. Restacked it…. Ppl need to know.
Deb...your second thought is the one actual security professionals would raise...and...it's the part almost NOBODY is saying out loud:
You don't reduce risk by concentrating ammunition at the most symbolically valuable address in the country.
When you do that...you give someone a reason to COME.
Thanks for the reStack!
-Jack
Senator Mark Kelly publicly reminded the military of their oath to the Constitution, not to a man and that unlawful orders must be refused. Look whas has ensued for him including threatened imprisonment.
Rod...indeed.
And...the thing that stands out about that the most...for me...is that Kelly has not backed down for even a second. If anything...he has come out fighting even harder...REFUSING to back down.
THAT...is how more Americans need to respond...or READY themselves to be able to respond that way: refuse to shrink and become quiet...and choose to get LOUDER...and use their most important voice on November 3rd...their VOTE.
-Jack
Mark Kelly is the epitome of a true American that loves his country. You have to believe this is eating him alive and he will fight this till the criminal clown car is gone. He is a man that also loves his wife and probably the closest thing to who my dad was like being a paraplegic from WW II that as I was growing up the only ting he could not do is walk across the room. The VA taught those men how to get in and out of hate wheel chairs , how to get up the 2 step turnb from the street to the sidewalk. I watched my dad get in and out of the swimming pool by himself and into his wheel chair. We always had a 2 door car and he put is chair in the back behind his seat. He was one of the first to have hand controls to drive. He was kind and trusting and would loan his workers money to get to the end of the week. The always paid him back. HE would drive to the black part of town alone and pick up day workers. They knew he was fair and honest and would make sure he could get on the job site safely. He was a general contractor of custom homes and many were for disabled vets as he knew th e building codes for them.I see my dad's personality in Mark Kelly. We need more like him fighting these horrific people.
This whole idea is stupid as fuck.
The Arc de Triomphe in Paris was commissioned by Bonaparte to commemorate his military victory at Austerlitz and the damn thing took so long to complete he was dead of syphilis on St. Helena before it was done. Hitler enjoyed hell out of posing in front of it after smashing through the second-largest European military like it was a girl scout campsite in just a few weeks.
Hitler built the flak towers to defend Germany against the Mighty Eighth. They didn't work.
America's military is in tatters, its reputation destroyed for decades to come. This one ridiculous man is the locus for all the worst traits of humanity, and attracts similarly warped people to him the way a cesspit attracts vermin.
None of this matters. It's a distraction to keep us looking away while they ransack what remains of the public treasury they continue to extort from us in taxation, price gouging, and monopolistic practices.
J Hardy...the flak tower comparison is VERY sharp!.
They failed completely and miserably at their stated purpose...the bombers came anyway...and several of them are still standing in Vienna and Berlin...BECAUSE... they're too solid to demolish. That's the real lesson. The thing doe NOT have to work. It only has to be impossible to REMOVE.
The ballroom...the arch...the Kennedy Center...those are the looting. SAME contractors... SAME no-bid vapor...SAME money.
I'm not convinced it's an act of deception by Trump...pulling our eyes away from the theft. It's the RECEIPT.
Thanks for coming with sharp insights...as you have historically always done.
-Jack
EXACTLY…he’s always been good at distraction, as every conman is…the old shell game, of sorts!
The military would never make such a narrow request on US soil. Trump is just trying another excuse to build his monument and national security is always a last resort.
Steven...that packages it nice and tight!
-Jack
Congress would never permit a democratic president to spend money the way they have allowed donald to waste dollars - remember the attempts to give people some relief around school loans?? Boy they had a conniption over that. And that would have actually helped some people. These vanity projects are a disgrace. Donald shouldn’t worry- his name will be all over our history as THE WORST PRESIDENT in 250 years
Lynn...the double standard is the tell.
Student loan relief drew lawsuits...floor speeches...and a Supreme Court case about executive overreach.
A $300 million BALLROOM...gets demolition crews BEFORE the approvals clear...and the SAME voices...discover a "deep respect" for presidential discretion. Yeah...B.S.
The principle was NEVER the spending. It was WHO benefits.
Glad you're here!
-Jack
Thank you Jack. This one shocked me!
Nobody in a uniform will put their name on this. Say that plainly, because it's the whole story. Not a branch. Not a commander. Not a memo with a signature block. A real security requirement survives a records request — it's dated, it's signed, it sits in a file cabinet waiting for a subpoena to find it. What we have instead is a Sunday-morning claim, spoken out loud by the one man who benefits from it, with nothing behind it but his own say-so. That's not a request from the military. That's a man throwing on a costume the second he felt a courtroom breathing on his neck.
File the date: the FAA cleared this thing on the condition it carry an eternal flame. Note which detail survived exactly one week before the entire premise changed — the flame is gone, the ammunition storage is not. An eternal flame and an armory are not two versions of the same building. They are two different claims about what the building is for, and only one of them went through the review process that's supposed to catch exactly this kind of switch.
Which is where this stops being a design dispute and becomes a discovery problem. There are now two federal records describing the same 250 feet of granite, and they cannot both be accurate. One went through the Commemorative Works Act process — planning commission, fine arts commission, the whole slow machinery democracies build precisely so one man can't unilaterally decide what goes up on the ground where the country buries its dead. The other exists only as an oral claim, offered days after veterans filed suit alleging that machinery got skipped. If opposing counsel is doing their job, they don't stop at arguing the process was bypassed. They move to compel the document that authorized the reclassification — under oath, on the record. If that document doesn't exist, the court isn't looking at a paperwork violation anymore. It's looking at a reclassification adopted in bad faith, timed to defeat litigation already in progress. That is a separate and considerably worse problem for this administration than an ugly arch.
But say the lawsuit wins outright. File that outcome too, because it isn't the end of the danger — it's just the end of this particular news cycle. Note what happens in the seventy-two hours after any ruling, win or lose: does this story hold, or does it get quietly buried under whatever outrage arrives next Tuesday, right on schedule? That's not idle curiosity. That's the actual mechanism. Nobody consolidates power by winning an argument in public. They do it by outlasting the public's attention span, one cycle at a time, until the question stops being "is this normal" and becomes "is this just how it is now" — and that second question always gets answered yes, by default, because nobody in power is under any obligation to correct you.
Jack is correct that the danger was never a written order — it's proximity, repeated until a bad night stops being hypothetical. And Jack is correct again that the answer to a government arming itself against its own citizens is not a citizenry that arms itself back. It's paperwork. It's comment periods and discovery requests and elected officials cornered into a yes-or-no they can't wriggle out of.
So here's what you actually do.
File the comment. The planning commission still takes public input on the record, and friction is the one thing that has reliably slowed this down.
Fund the veterans. Their case is the only venue on the map right now with the power to make this administration produce a document that may not exist.
Make your representative answer it straight, on camera: do you support snipers at Arlington National Cemetery — yes or no. Not a statement. A sentence a voter can play back to them in November.
And then keep watching after the headline fades. Check back in seventy-two hours. See if anyone ever produced the paperwork. See if the story's still breathing, or if it got buried on schedule like all the others.
Because that's the whole play. They don't need you to believe the arch is defensible. They just need you to get tired of asking why it isn't.
Don't get tired.
#HOLDFAST
Disgusting as usual. All I have to say is I want EVERYTHING torn down representing him when this nightmare is over. That’s it. My only simple request.
Thank you Jack for the timely update and analysis on how to counter the regime’s lies and lawlessness and not feed into doomscrolling, powerlessness and panic🫨 We will keep resisting and not normalize regime loyalty over oath to Constitution💪#HOLDFAST
You're welcome, Diane.
As chaotic and frustrating as things seem day to day.. resistance has actually kept a LOT from happening. I think we sometimes forget just how MUCH worse it could be...right NOW...if the courts had not held as often as they have.
And...as you point out...we must CONTINUE doing so.
#HOLDFAST
-Jack
Thanks for this article on Trump's devolved purpose of his proposed Arch.
Now that it's been challenged in court - it caused a drastic change to the Arch. It is now not just a monument to Trump himself. No , the arch has becime a military structure. By adding snipers & Drone ports to its purpose; it's become warning to all who venture to protest this Regime.
Trump has been influenced & coach by his Whitehouse Nazi provacutuers very well. Stephen 'Hitler-A History'Miller has been probably coach this Arch plan all along.
Been calling my Congressional members Rep Kiley & Senator Schiff and Padilla numerous times over this proposed arch : now that Trump wants the Arch to be a Military Structure ups the need to keep calling & emailing our Congressional members. Put the Constitution's Pressure ON!
Side note: even though Speaker MosesMike sent all of the house members Home for weeks- they still check there WashingtonDC emails and calls.
202-224-3121
You hit all the points most people usually miss, as always. And when I heard of the plan to arm the crap out of the arch-thing, I next thought of the “ballroom”, likewise hardened and armed to the gills. At first blush it seemed like they were indeed building anti-protest bunkers, I’d wager the coverage is mostly thorough, but, they’d need a third for better coverage? Then my mind leapt to the joke-y but, maybe not idea that they would be so equipped to defend themselves when accountability finally comes, but that seems like overkill. Oh, yeah, that: won’t be a problem. And they’re not actually planting mines in the Kennedy either.
Welp, looks like I’m late to the party here. As I was reading this myself was asking me what in the absolute f@ck would make anyone think it’s a good idea to tell EVERYBODY WHERE TO AIM THEIR DRONES? I mean, it’s even lit so ya can’t miss it!!! Enemies, point all weapons HERE!!!!
No wonder Mikey decided to send everybody home. Hegseth’s gotta be a huge fan of this shit.
OK, I’ll calm down. I have letters to write and calls to make. AND A VOTE TO CAST!
Thank you, as always, for telling us what others gloss over. There is no doubt in my cynical mind that he intends to stay in the WH until he's carried out with a sheet over his face. There is no doubt in my cynical mind that he would easily give the order to shoot civilians --- putting people in concentration camps as he is doing with detainees is one step closer to that order. And there is no doubt in my cynical mind that there are plenty in the military or in the fascist militias who would do the dirty work. SO, thank you above all for telling me not to buy a gun. I didn't grow up in that culture, my husband had guns in the AF, and we've both lost too many people in our family and circle of friends to guns. I will, instead, do what you've suggested and send funding to those fighting the good fight. You give me hope even when things look dark. #HoldingFAST
If it is built, my feeling is as soon as the Tyrant kicks the bucket, the Arch will be torn down like the Saddam Hussein statue did in Baghdad's Firdos Square.
#HOLDFAST #OUTLAST #STANDFAST
Only half way through, but since my mind retains little for any length of time...no.person shall be elected president more than twice. He’s been elected twice.
My fear is that one of the merry band of thieves will run, with another flunky as VP. My understanding is if they both resign, the next body in line is Speaker of the House. If that doesn't make every patriotic American vote straight Dem ticket in November and in 2028, we could see the MAGA elect the doddering antichrist to the position And voila. No election needed.
Far fetched? Probably.
Back to reading.
Sue
I was shocked by this news, and that is saying something these days. The chaos he is sowing reeks of desparation. The constant barrage of bull shit that ends with litigation. We all knew that it would get crazy ugly leading up to and after the midterms. It is just shocking what he formulates in that angry brain of his. #holdfast