On checks and balances – Peter Baker in NYT: ‘On Wednesday, the day after Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, announced the takeover, neither the A.P. nor Reuters, two mainstays of the White House press corps for decades, were included in the pool. Newsmax and The Blaze, two conservative outlets, were invited to take their places.
The rest of the broadcast networks remained, as did other traditional organizations like Bloomberg and NPR. The pool got a chance to ask Mr. Trump and his billionaire patron Elon Musk questions at the top of a cabinet meeting for about an hour, proof, according to White House aides, that they are not shielding him from scrutiny.’

(…)

‘The move, of course, “does not give the power back to the people — it gives power to the White House,” as Jacqui Heinrich, the senior White House correspondent at Fox, put it on social media. Ms. Heinrich, who sits on the board of the White House Correspondents’ Association, which had traditionally decided pool membership, said the group has long welcomed new voices.
All of this is taking place against the backdrop of a major shift in foreign policy as Mr. Trump pivots away from Ukraine and toward Mr. Putin’s Russia. In recent days, he has blamed Ukraine for Russia’s full-scale invasion of it in 2022. He also called its popularly elected president, Volodymyr Zelensky, a “dictator without elections,” while offering no words of reproach for Russia or Mr. Putin. “He’s a very smart guy,” Mr. Trump said of Mr. Putin on Wednesday. “He’s a very cunning person.” Yevgenia Albats, a leading Russian journalist who had to flee her country under threat of arrest after the 2022 invasion, said the developments in Washington over the past five weeks resemble the early days of Mr. Putin’s reign.
“The oligarchs kissing the ring, the lawsuits against the media, the constraints on which media should be in the White House pool, and which are not — all that sounds familiar,” Ms. Albats said.

But she stressed that, unlike Russia, the United States remains a nation with important checks and balances, no matter how frayed. “There is one huge difference,” she said. “You have a working and independent judiciary, and we did not. And this is a hell of a difference.”’

Read the article here.

The judiciary should save us. The Messiah comes in a judge gown.

Better than nothing I assume.

For the time being, we stay put. The world ran out of safe places after all. Although I saw a proposal: Canada could join the EU.