Cleto Escobedo III, R.I.P.

A tragic Loss

I have a small bit of tangential history here. I am heartbroken for all of Cleto's family and all of his friends in our mutual Las Vegas music tribe.

"Thinking critically?"

 

I got to teach collegiate "critical thinking" for 5 fun years while living in Las Vegas (evening school adjunct faculty; my day gig was that of a credit risk analyst in a bank). I never really liked the curricular title. I'm likewise guarded about cavalierly using the word "idiot."

Too many of my students came in thinking "oh, cool, we're just gonna argue about stuff endlessly and get our gripes off our chests..." 

Also, "idiot" is not a dtrect synonym for "stupid," notwithstanding common invective usage. Greek "idios," aware of only one's self. Yeah, one could argue that such egocentric fixations are "stupid:" I suppose, but, dunno, brosdly.

Stay tuned... 

 

UPDATE

 

Will have to get back to this. Cleto Escobedo III just died.

Andrew Ross Sorkin follow-up.

The gift who keeps on giving.
   

   
apropos of some prior posts, e.g., here, and here.

 

He's certainly making the interview rounds of late. Justifiably so. A delightful man. His SME chops are compelling. His totally pleasant, self-deprecating personality could not be more endearing.

 

See also Andrew's chat with Anthony Scaramucci. Interview length ~0.002 Scaramuccis.

Gotta say, I have new respect for Scaramucci after viewing his 1929 Sorkin interview. Astute guy. I've not paid sufficient attention to him. 

Do yourselves some serious favors; acquire and study Andrew'a books. I've moved on to several new titles, but keep looping back around.

 

  

Below: Recurrent relevant riff of mine. "An ongoing concern, one rather acutely ramping up in recent years, is one of our sociopolitical Bifurcation (particularly as it goes to economic policies). to wit, [1] Those of us bound by the law yet not protected by it, in contrast with [2] those protected by the law but not bound by it. Which cohort applies to you?"

 

Human affairs get "governed" one way or another. Sorry, MAGA you're-not-the-boss-of-me "FreeDumb & Liberty" peeps.

Another, older fav book of mine:

 

If there were only one man in the world, he would have a lot of problems, but none of them would be legal ones. Add a second inhabitant, and we have the possibility of conflict. Both of us try to pick the same apple from the same branch. I track the deer I wounded only to find that you have killed it, butchered it, and are in the process of cooking and eating it. 

The obvious solution is violence. It is not a very good solution; if we employ it, our little world may shrink back down to one person, or perhaps none. A better solution, one that all known human societies have found, is a system of legal rules explicit or implicit, some reasonably peaceful way of determining, when desires conflict, who gets to do what and what happens if he doesn’t. 

The legal rules that we are most familiar with are laws created by legislatures and enforced by courts and police. But even in our society much of the law is the creation not of legislatures but of judges, embedded in past precedents that determine how future cases will be decided; much enforcement of law is by private parties such as tort victims and their lawyers rather than by police; and substantial bodies of legal rules take the form not of laws. but of private norms, privately enforced. 

Going farther afield in time and space we encounter a much greater diversity, both in the sources of legal rules and in the ways in which they are enforced. If we are considering all systems of legal rules in all times and places, the ways in which legal rules are created and enforced in America in this century are simply data—one out of many possible solutions to the problem of human conflict, one out of many possible systems of legal rules.

Friedman, David D.. Law's Order: What Economics Has to Do with Law and Why It Matters (p. 3). (Function). Kindle Edition.  

Connection to these newer books will commence as we speculate upon where things might plausibly (interconnectedly) head—e.g., AGI/LLM/robotics, private finance/ECON markets, crypto, etc...

 

UPDATE

 

This is nicely done.

 

Recall my "Tranche Warfare" 'eh?

NPR: A reporter outlines Trump's options to subvert the 2026 midterm elections

Heard this on WYPR while driving. Well worth your time. Goes to this post.

 

David A. Graham of The Atlantic.

My Grandson Calvin and his newborn baby brother Arlo

How blessed am I?

PROVE ME WRONG

The Article I Branch is intubated in hospice care, with a DNR taped to the fridge. The Article III Branch, well... 

 

Give Donald Trump a millimeter, he'll take a light year. His Feb 18th, 2025 Executive Order was clear.

Sec. 7.  Rules of Conduct Guiding Federal Employees’ Interpretation of the Law. The President and the Attorney General, subject to the President’s supervision and control, shall provide authoritative interpretations of law for the executive branch.  The President and the Attorney General’s opinions on questions of law are controlling on all employees in the conduct of their official duties.  No employee of the executive branch acting in their official capacity may advance an interpretation of the law as the position of the United States that contravenes the President or the Attorney General’s opinion on a matter of law, including but not limited to the issuance of regulations, guidance, and positions advanced in litigation, unless authorized to do so by the President or in writing by the Attorney General..      

HE decides what the law is. So he thinks.

 

UPDATE

 

Donald Trump has had an unhappy couple of days. First, the NY, NJ, VA, and CA elections and referendum poll results, followed by the SCOTUS  Trump tariffs case Oral hearing today. I listened via C-SPAN. It went long, and was largely skeptical pf the Solicitor General's Fred Astaire arguments.

Defiance

    

I just ran across this. Thinking about perhaps becoming a paying member, subject to some confirmatory due diligence. We'll see. Things are not good in the U.S.   

 

 

From an April post of mine:

Improper Ideologies.

I am a 79-year-old natural born U.S. citizen from western Long Island, New York (Floral Park, bordering Queens borough, to be precise). I now live in Baltimore, Maryland. I recently renewed my passport and was shortly thereafter granted a Global Entry Pass by TSA. My Maryland driver’s license is Real ID compliant. I have no criminal record, and have had an FBI background check (replete with fingerprinting) pursuant to my 2000-2005 tenure as an OCC/FDIC regulated bank credit risk officer.

I have never wanted nor owned a firearm (never had a tattoo either). The totality of my experience with physical violence comprises one absurd schoolyard fistfight when I was a sophomore in high school. It lasted perhaps 30 seconds and didn’t resolve anything (beyond confirming my not even coming close to being the cinematic adolescent badass I’d assumed I was).

My wife and I have been together since 1974. We raised three children, and are now retired doting grandparents / great-grandparents. Across my wife’s career as an increasingly senior quality assurance executive, she underwent numerous federal security clearance investigations, and repeatedly held what is known as the (always project-specific) “Q clearance” (for her nationwide work in DOE nuclear waste remediation and worldwide DOD contractor engineering and construction, much of it classified). She has performed QA audits at all of the federal National Laboratories, and at US military facilities around the globe. She has forgotten more about classified information SCIF-level security protocols than our poignant Marvel Comics SecDefBro Pete Hegseth ever knew.

Notwithstanding the breadth and depth of our dispositively documented loyal U.S. citizen histories, it would not surprise me one whit were we to be detained and perhaps renditioned by Donald Trump‘s ICE/DHS thugs the next time we return from visiting abroad.

The unacceptable offenses? Hmmm… suborning Woke Leftist Secular Globalist MAGA/Project 2025-averse “alignment” with “Homegrown Improper Ideologies?”

'eh?

 

UPDATE 

 

Been crawling their website. I have as many questions as answers thus far. Below, bottom of the home page.

 

    

I would not have gone there.

GLENN KIRSHNER

 

____ 

"Civil society leaders recently launched what’s been dubbed a “NATO for nonprofits” — a mutual defense pact where organizations pledge to rally behind any group targeted by Trump’s revenge machine. Hollywood leaders have done the same for the entertainment industry.

Now we must do it for individuals. If President Trump keeps weaponizing government to go after elected leaders, whistleblowers, or other opposition figures, they shouldn’t have to stand alone. We should make it clear, in advance, that we’ll stand with them.

A first wave of former government officials has come together to launch the DECLARATION OF DEFIANCE for exactly that purpose. See below"

 

PUBLIC FIGURES WHO HAVE SIGNED ON THUS FAR

Jeff Modisett
Former Indiana Attorney General
Brian P. McKeon
Former Deputy Secretary of State for Management and Resources
Chris Gorman
Former Attorney General of Kentucky
Stephanie Grisham
Former White House Press Secretary
Richard Lyman
Senior Advisor to former Massachusetts Governor Bill Weld
Marty Linsky
Former Massachusetts Republican State Representative
Paul Rosenzweig
Former Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy, DHS
Ty Cobb
Former White House Special Counsel and federal prosecutor
Bob Inglis
Former Member of Congress
Alexander Vindman
Lt. Col (Ret.)
Emil H. Frankel
Former Assistant Secretary, U.S. Department of Transportation
Rosa Brooks
Former Counselor to the Undersecretary of Defense
Denver Lee Riggleman III
Former Member of Congress
Joe Walsh
Former Member of Congress
William Kristol
Former Chief of Staff to the Vice President, White House
Sidney Blumenthal
Former Assistant and Senior Advisor to President Clinton
Joyce Vance
Former U.S. Attorney
Hon. Paul W. Hodes
Former Member of Congress
Christopher Shays
Former Member of Congress
Kathy Boockvar
Former Pennsylvania Secretary of State
Reid Ribble
Former Member of Congress
Brad Miller
Former Member of Congress
Kevin W. Techau
Former U.S. Attorney
Barry R. Grissom
Former US.. Attorney
Murray Dickman
Assitant to the Attorney General
John Cavanaugh
Former Member of Congress
Gerry Sikorski
Former Member of Congress
Brian Baird
Former Member of Congress
Ben Chandler
Former Attorney General and Congressman from Kentucky
Kelly M. Fay Rodríguez
Former U.S. Special Representative for International Labor Affairs
Matt McHugh
Former Member of Congress
John W. Carlin
Former Governor of Kansas
James Greenwood
Former Member of Congress
Peter H Kostmayer
Former Member of Congress
Paul Begala
Former Counselor to the President, Clinton Administration
Mel Levine
Former Member of Congress
David Skaggs
Former Member of Congress
Matt Bennett
Former Deputy Assistant to the President, The White House
Jim Lewis
Former U.S. Attorney
Miles Taylor
Former DHS Chief of Staff
David Lapan
Former DoD and DHS spokesman
Karan English
Former Member of Congress
Richard Gephardt
Former Member of Congress
Gregory P. Wilson
Former Deputy Assistant Secretary, U.S. Department of the Treasury
Russ Carnahan
Former Member of Congress
Joe Hoeffel
Former Member of Congress
Joe Hunter
Former Deputy Assistant Secretary, Department of the Interior
Robert F. Orr
Justice (retired)
Mark Udall
Former U.S. Senator Colorado
Olivia Troye
Former White House Homeland Security Advisor, Trump Administration
Mickey Edwards
Former Member of Congress
Karen Loeffler
Former U.S. Attorney
Barbara Comstock
Former Member of Congress
Mark Harvey
Former National Security Official, The White House
Desiree Cormier Smith
Former Special Representative for Racial Equity and Justice
Claudine Scheider
Former Member of Congress
Seth Wayne
Former Trial Attorney, DOJ Civil Rights Division
Julia Gegenheimer
Former DOJ Special Litigation Counsel and Assistant Special Counsel
Mary B. McCord
Former Acting Assistant Attorney General for National Security
Les AuCoin
Former Member of Congress
Russ Feingold
Former U.S. Senator, Wisconsin
John M. Mitnick
Former Associate Counsel to the President; former General Counsel, DHS

Topically apropos, JON STEWART

 

 

SOME PRIOR TRUMP RIFFS OF MINE

• Define 'Ignorance'
• Book 'im, Dano
• BabaDon Update 

By no means exhaustive. And, I have numerous other continuous topics of legit concern.

More shortly...

Politics & Prose. Andrew Ross Sorkin interview.

 

I finished the 600+ page 1929. A totally marvelous read. Finishing up Too Big to Fail. I'm already well-versed in that topic. I could have written parts of it.

 

The "Politics & Prose Bookstore?"

 

I may have to jump on Amtrak to DC Union Station and go there. They also tout this:

 

Lordy. I'll go broke. Bookstore / Coffeehouse / Winebar?

 

The Sorkin interview above is a great way to spend an hour & 3 minutes. 

 

IRONY UPDATE

 

Some Warm Fuzzies sedative words of the FIRE Sector.

TRUSTS, SECURITIES, EQUITIES, BONDS... 

"We at Trust National Bank of Main Street assure you that our words are our Bonds. Your Equities are Secure..."

 

Right. To which we now, in the budding age of crypto, catatonically add in "TRUSTLESS." 

 

Generic Zoloft Jargon aside, we're really just talking enforceable contract law.

 

Another fine read.  

 

An ongoing concern, one rather acutely ramping up in recent years, is one of our sociopolitical Bifurcation. to wit, [1] Those of us bound by the law yet not protected by it, in contrast with [2] those protected by the law but not bound by it. Which cohort applies to you?

 

ADDITIONAL RECOMMENDED RECENT TOPICAL READING

 

   

 

A couple more:

 

    

More in a bit...

The Builder in Chief

... [W]e must remember that a weak and broken man like Donald Trump cannot succeed without the support of rich and powerful enablers. From the feckless and compliant Republican Congress to the billionaires and corporate executives, money is just as essential to his success as obedience. And rather than facing a chorus of “no” from these people, many have chosen to say “yes” to him by handing over tens of millions of dollars.

This has been an ongoing reality since his inauguration on Jan. 20, which was funded by the corporate elite who proudly stood behind him in the rotunda of our nation’s Capitol. But it came into fresh focus again yesterday when the White House released the names of 37 corporations and rich donors whose dollars are being used to strip away the history and memories of our White House to make way for Trump’s enormous Mar-a-Lago-style ballroom which will dwarf the People’s House.

While specific dollar amounts were not noted, the list includes Altria Group, Amazon, Apple, Booz Allen Hamilton, Caterpillar, Coinbase, Comcast, J. Pepe and Emilia Fanjul, Hard Rock International, Google, HP, Lockheed Martin, Meta, Micron, Microsoft, NextEra Energy, Palantir, Ripple, Reynolds American, T-Mobile, Tether America, Union Pacific Railroad, Adelson Family Foundation, Stefan E. Brodie, Betty Wold Johnson Foundation, Charles and Marissa Cascarilla, Edward and Shari Glazer, Harold Hamm, Benjamin Leon Jr., The Lutnick Family, The Laura & Isaac Perlmutter Foundation, Stephen A. Schwarzmann, Konstantin Sokolov, Kelly Loeffler and Jeff Sprecher, Paolo Tiramani and Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss.

This list includes tech and AI giants, arms manufacturers, crypto financiers and wealthy individuals committed to funding Trump’s grotesque abuse of our history, traditions, values and democratic processes. While he has demolished the East Wing without explicit official approvals and with indifference to the will of the people, their money gives him cover and support. Their money tells him that he can continue to act as he sees fit.

“He is the builder in chief,” his lead propagandist Karoline Leavitt proudly said yesterday on Fox News. “In large part, he was reelected back to this People’s House because he is good at building things. He has done it his entire life, his entire career.”

Get it? Rather than lowering the price of eggs, making healthcare more affordable or making life more livable, Trump was reelected to build monuments to his ego.

Trump initially said this billionaires’ ballroom would cost $200 million; now he says it will cost $300 million, a sum he spouted without explaining how all that money is being raised or spent. (This along with lying that he wouldn’t “touch” the now gone East Wing.) Reportedly, the payments are being managed by the Trust for the National Mall, a non-profit that works with the National Park Service.

Make no mistake: Beneath the pseudo-legitimacy of these organizations is a coordinated campaign to channel corporate money and support for Donald Trump. For example: The BBC reported that, according to court documents, YouTube is paying $22 million as part of its legal settlement of Trump’s lawsuit over the platform’s suspension of his account in the wake of the Jan. 6 insurrection.

This is where we are: The Supreme Court won’t say no to Trump’s unfettered demolition. The Republicans in the House and Senate won’t question any of his lawlessness or abuse of power. Too many corporations and billionaires won’t say no when he demands more money. All this convinces Trump to keep going ... [Steven Beschloss]

apropos of my prior post?

 

 Below, from BARKING JUSTICE MEDIA: 

Since 2017, and with breathtaking speed since Trump’s re-election, the very fabric of American democracy has been torn apart: laws subverted, loyalists installed, dissent criminalized, and power consolidated with ruthless efficiency. Programs that protected the vulnerable have been erased, voices of truth silenced or hunted, and the levers of government twisted to serve not the people but oligarchs, cronies, and authoritarian ambition.

  
We are crossing critical thresholds. This is not a warning. It is already our reality, an America where rule of law, decency, and civic courage face extinction by design.

Where is our nation headed?

I posted this image and text this morning to BlueSky, Meta, and TwittX:

THIS is likely where we’re headed, given that the Article I Branch is now in hospice care with a DNR.

That photo jibe is a knock-off from a WWII fascist quote aimed at the Pope. Hyperbolic today?

 

Consider, from Joyce Vance's new book, just released.

 

to wit,

...Judicial review positions the Court, arguably the weakest of the three branches of government, to determine when one of the other branches exceeds the scope of its constitutional authority and to countermand the unconstitutional act. 

Marbury v. Madison establishes the principle of judicial review, which allows courts to assess laws passed by Congress for constitutionality. The contours of judicial review are not laid out in the Constitution, but Chief Justice Marshall understood that if the new nation were to have a functional rule of law, the Supreme Court had to have both the authority to deem laws unconstitutional and to overrule them so they could not stay in effect in violation of the Constitution. 

But what about unconstitutional acts by a president? [emphasis mine] That part of the equation was explicitly confirmed by the Court in a case heard a century and a half later. By then, plenty of case law already pointed to this obvious conclusion, but the Court made plain: Even a president can’t bypass the courts and ignore judges’ decisions. In Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, decided in 1952, the Supreme Court refused to let President Harry Truman take over US steel mills during the Korean War. Though Truman didn’t like the decision, he complied. That’s how the rule of law works. 

By December 1951, trouble was brewing in the nation’s steel mills. There was a dispute with organized labor over wages and working conditions. But the United States had been at war in Korea for more than a year, and China had also entered the fray. Then, negotiations with the United Steelworkers of America, a powerful union, failed. The union filed notice that it would strike at the end of the month when existing agreements with employers expired. Federal mediation with the union was tried and failed. Truman sent the case to the Federal Wage Stabilization Board in an effort to avoid a major disruption of material in such a delicate moment. That failed as well, and the union gave notice that a nationwide strike would commence on April 9, 1952. 

The Court explained what President Truman did next in its opinion: “The indispensability of steel as a component of substantially all weapons and other war materials led the President to believe that the proposed work stoppage would immediately jeopardize our national defense and that governmental seizure of the steel mills was necessary in order to assure the continued availability of steel. Reciting these considerations for his action, the President, a few hours before the strike was to begin, issued Executive Order 10340…. The order directed the Secretary of Commerce to take possession of most of the steel mills and keep them running.” The issue before the Court was whether a president had the power to take this action via executive order. 

The steel companies tried to fight off the executive order in court, arguing that the president lacked the power to make the seizures because neither the Constitution nor an act of Congress granted it to him. On April 30, 1952, the district court ruled in their favor and enjoined the government’s seizure. The court of appeals weighed in the same day, but it came to the opposite conclusion. It stayed the district court’s injunction, which meant the president could move forward. In a display of the speed with which the Supreme Court can act when motivated, it granted certiorari, agreeing to hear the case on May 3, and set it for oral argument on May 12. 

Plenty of case law from the intervening 149 years since Marbury pointed toward the conclusion the Supreme Court reached in Youngstown, but its decision settled the matter once and for all…

Vance, Joyce. Giving Up Is Unforgivable: A Manual for Keeping a Democracy (pp. 24-26). (Function). Kindle Edition. 

 Will Donald Trump simply scoff? He scoffs crudely at everything else these days

 

 Joyce's Substack (I subscribe).

 

Click here.

Below, another worthy read.

 

 

 

 

BACK TO JOYCE

 

Cutting to the chase.

 

 

UPDATE

 

From Rick Wilson's Substack.

[Steve] Bannon is road-testing a narrative that treats the Constitution as negotiable, the law as elastic, and power as a permanent condition of the right people in the right offices. He’s not coy about it either. Asked how they’d get around the pesky “no third term” rule, he purred that there are “many different alternatives,” and that, at the “appropriate time,” he’d unveil the plan.

Translation: they’re workshopping pathways to normalize the unthinkable and daring the rest of us to stop them.

This is how authoritarians advance: by saying the quiet part out loud until it isn’t quiet anymore. They float the balloon, smirk while you sputter, then call your protest hysteria. The goal isn’t persuasion; it’s habituation. Bannon’s prediction isn’t a legal argument; it’s a loyalty oath: accept that Trump is destiny, that elections are a formality, and that rules are for the weak.

'eh?

Gaza 2025

 

We in the U.S. have no clue.

 

And, then there's this...

 

National day of peaceful constitutional protest