Comments

  1. says

    New York Times:

    A day after […] Trump capitulated on his global reciprocal tariffs, he and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick insisted that one country after another was coming to them to make deals to avoid further economic pain. But the devil is in the details, and Mr. Trump and Mr. Lutnick offered very few. Instead, they said that things would work out, without saying much more.

    Commentary:

    […] As this week got underway, and much of the planet focused on the White House’s trade tariffs, the president published an item to his social media platform that said “more than 50” countries had contacted the administration about negotiating new trade deals. A few hours later, Trump revised the total, touting that it was “almost 70” countries that had reached out.

    On Wednesday, when the Republican announced a 90-day “pause” for much of his tariffs agenda, he wrote that his decision was driven by the fact that “more than 75” countries that wanted to open negotiations with the administration.

    The White House press office soon after said it would not disclose the names of the 75 countries. It also wouldn’t say why the list had to be kept secret.

    Kevin Hassett, the director of the White House National Economic Council, tried to clarify matters a day later, telling CNBC that the total number of countries is more than 75, but only about 15 of them had presented the administration with “explicit offers.” Hassett, a Trump trade adviser, made similar comments on Fox News. […]

    Yeah, Trump is lying and exaggerating. Trump’s lackeys are backing him up by gaslighting the public when they are interviewed on TV.

    More commentary:

    […] Complicating matters further, with a 90-day pause in place, it’s far from clear how the White House intends to strike multiple bilateral deals simultaneously over the course of a few months.

    Given all of this, and Team Trump’s odd refusal to offer relevant details, the administration’s assurances should probably be taken with several grains of salt.

    Link

  2. says

    Here are a few links back to the previous set of 500 comments on The Infinite Thread.

    https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2025/04/03/infinite-thread-xxxv/comment-page-1/#comment-2261227
    China’s official GDP figures are not particularly trustworthy.

    https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2025/04/03/infinite-thread-xxxv/comment-page-1/#comment-2261194
    Space Force commander in Greenland sent email breaking with Vance after his visit

    https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2025/04/03/infinite-thread-xxxv/comment-page-1/#comment-2261191
    No action was taken to address the $1.1 billion hole that [House Republicans] blew in [D.C.’s] local budget

    https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2025/04/03/infinite-thread-xxxv/comment-page-1/#comment-2261185
    Trump Accidentally Burned Himself With His Own Question

  3. says

    Summarized by Steve Benen from a Washington Post article:

    Former Democratic Rep. Tony Cárdenas of California and Chuck Rocha, a longtime Democratic strategist, are launching a new super PAC intended to boost the party’s standing with Latino voters. The organization will be called Campeones PAC. (“Campeones” is the Spanish word for “champions.”)

  4. says

    American Library Association challenges Trump cuts in court, as libraries face new tests

    “National Library Week does not generate significant political attention, but thanks to Trump and DOGE, this year is not like most.”

    Related video at the link.

    […] National Library Week 2025 included an important new lawsuit from the American Library Association. The New York Times reported:

    The American Library Association and a union representing more than 42,000 cultural workers nationwide have filed a lawsuit contesting the Trump administration’s deep cuts to the federal agency that supports the nation’s libraries. … The lawsuit, filed on Tuesday by the library association and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, came days after the Institute for Museum and Library Services dismissed most of its staff of 70, fired its board and began informing state library agencies that their grants had been cut.

    […] the Trump administration, by way of Elon Musk’s DOGE initiative, gutted the Institute of Museum and Library Services, which funds museums, archives and libraries around the country.

    This week’s lawsuit is seeking an injunction to reverse Team Trump’s cuts and halting “any further steps to dissolve the agency,” arguing that it’s up to Congress, not DOGE, to dismantle an agency created by lawmakers nearly 30 years ago with bipartisan support.

    As The New Republic recently noted, local libraries are mostly funded by local tax dollars, but these libraries do receive federal funds for things like employee training and technology updates. A USA Today report added that local libraries have relied on grants from the IMLS to fund everything from summer reading programs to programs that provide books to those with disabilities.

    […] NBC News reported that officials in California, Connecticut and Washington have been notified that the Trump administration has terminated funding the states rely on to operate many local libraries.

    This week, meanwhile, the Mississippi Library Commission scrubbed academic research from a database used by state libraries, targeting research collections focused on “race relations” and “gender studies.”

    Voters might not have realized last fall that the election would launch this kind of systematic offensive against libraries, but that’s precisely what the public is now receiving

  5. JM says

    Old comment 499 KG

    Reasonable points. But Xi’s swift retaliation indicates that one thing he’d risk a trade war with the USA to avoid is appearing to be bullied by Trump.

    Also a good point. China is very much the asian face saving culture country. Once Trump made it public that he expects everybody to come to him and plead for a treaty he made it that much harder for Xi to talk with Trump.

  6. Reginald Selkirk says

    @1 Lynna, OM

    A day after […] Trump capitulated on his global reciprocal tariffs,..

    Consistent with past performance, Trump will probably never admit that he was wrong and stupid. He still hasn’t done so on the Central Park 5, for example. So at first it will be touted as just a pause, and then he/they will claim that it was a huge victory somehow.

  7. Reginald Selkirk says

    The Famous Antikythera Mechanism Was a Mechanical Disaster, New Research Suggests

    …
    New research adds a twist to the story of this famous device, suggesting the Antikythera Mechanism may never have worked as intended, that it was just a fancy knickknack. The triangular shape of the gear teeth wasn’t the issue, according to new simulations—the real problem was likely flaws in the gear construction. The new work shows that even the tiniest manufacturing mistake could’ve caused the mechanism to jam or slip, raising the possibility that the Antikythera Mechanism was either nonfunctional or originally built with far greater precision than scientists can now discern…

    Their work is detailed in a paper, posted April 1 on the preprint server arXiv, that has not yet been peer reviewed…

    That is the one day not to publish your paper if you want it to be taken seriously.

  8. Reginald Selkirk says

    Researchers make breakthrough in cleaning up the ‘forever chemicals’ used in chip manufacturing

    A team at Australia’s Monash University has published its work on a new water filtration membrane that can successfully remove small PFAS molecules from water flow. PFAS, or polyfluoroalkyl substances, are a key piece in multiple facets of semiconductor manufacturing that have earned the name “forever chemicals” for their difficulty to clean up.

    Monash’s research team is ready to utilize some key partnerships to bring the filters to market at a high scale, keeping PFAS out of the groundwater at plants in all of the various industries that work with forever chemicals…

    Monash University’s team, led by Ph.D. candidate Eubert Mahofa, has designed a modified graphene membrane that selectively stops PFAS chains while allowing water to pass through freely. The membrane stops over 90% of PFAS that pass into it, a major improvement over traditional polyamide membranes, which can only remove around 35% of PFAS…

  9. Reginald Selkirk says

    Fed up with attacks, Minnesota Republicans wage war against far-right group

    Top officials in the Minnesota Republican Party recently gathered to take an unprecedented vote: formally condemning a right-wing group that has antagonized GOP elected officials for years.

    Action 4 Liberty was repeatedly attacking Republicans in the divided Minnesota House for compromising with Democrats, while also encouraging “grassroots Patriots” to oust party officers at local conventions and replace them with hardline activists.

    The state GOP’s executive committee declared that leaders of Action 4 Liberty are more focused on “tearing down Republicans” than helping the party win elections: “The leadership of the organization instead works only to enrich themselves, attack those actually making a difference, and claim victories they had nothing to do with,” read the declaration brought forward by committee member Bobby Benson, who’s the state chief of staff for Republican U.S. Rep. Tom Emmer…

  10. Reginald Selkirk says

    How a small Minnesota town ‘seceded’ from the U.S.

    In the summer of 1977, the leaders of a small Iron Range town made a rather bold announcement: Kinney, Minn., had seceded from the United States.

    The statement was tongue-in-cheek, but the town’s situation wasn’t funny. Kinney’s leaders had exhausted their options. The town had to come up with $186,000 to repair its water system and it wasn’t getting the financial support it needed from the state or federal governments.

    What about asking for aid as a foreign country, instead? The idea was hatched at Mary’s Bar, the watering hole owned by the town’s longtime mayor, Mary Anderson. (Well-equipped with a lively sense of humor, Anderson was not only a politician and a bartender, she was also a nurse.)

    In a letter to then-U.S. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, Anderson and five other Kinney leaders declared they had decided to secede from the United States.

    “Be it resolved,” they wrote. “Our area is large enough for it. We are 12 square blocks, three blocks wide and four blocks long. We will be similar to Monaco.”

    The Republic of Kinney was born…

  11. Reginald Selkirk says

    Texas Republicans Want to Steal Space Shuttle Discovery From the Smithsonian

    After NASA’s Space Shuttles were retired in 2010, they were eventually sent to museums in Florida, California, New York, and the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Virginia. But Texas Republicans are not happy that the Lone Star state didn’t get one, given its historic significance to space travel. And they’ve introduced legislation to take the space shuttle currently at the Smithsonian and bring it to Houston.

    U.S. senators John Cornyn and Ted Cruz introduced a new bill on Thursday called the Bring the Space Shuttle Home Act, which would require the space shuttle Discovery to be transferred from the Smithsonian to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston…

    If the legislation passed, it would require the Smithsonian to come up with a plan for moving the shuttle, and that’s where things get very, very tricky. As the news outlet collectSpace explains, it’s virtually impossible to move the shuttle because the hardware used to relocate the four shuttles back in 2012 was destroyed. One of the modified Boeing 747 jetliners that moved the shuttles to their current homes is sitting in a museum and isn’t flightworthy, while the other would need new engines and a lot of other modification work to make it fit for purpose, according to collectSpace…

  12. says

    In early March, when Donald Trump delivered a national address before a joint session of Congress, the president covered a lot of ground, though he seemed especially animated on a specific topic.

    “Joe Biden especially let the price of eggs get out of control,” the president declared. “The egg prices, out of control.”

    The rhetoric was plainly absurd, since egg prices spiked in response to a bird flu outbreak, and presidents can’t simply snap their fingers and undo the effects of H5N1. Trump nevertheless created an unfortunate and ill-advised standard: The White House, the Republican effectively told the nation, is responsible for what American consumers pay for eggs, and it’s up to the incumbent president not to “let the price of eggs get out of control.”

    In the weeks that followed, he kept going. On March 20, Trump claimed that he’d brought egg prices “WAY DOWN.” Last week, he echoed the boast.

    If the president was gambling that Americans would reward him for lowering the price of eggs, it was a very bad bet — because as The New York Times reported, egg prices have reached record highs.

    For weeks, […] Trump has repeatedly boasted that his administration had managed to bring egg prices down. But new data on Thursday showed that egg prices at the grocery store continued to climb in March. Egg prices rose 5.9 percent over the month, according to data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. They climbed at a slower rate, though, after rising 10.4 percent in February and 15.2 percent in January. Compared with a year earlier, egg prices were up 60.4 percent.
    Wholesale egg prices have come down, but retail prices — what American consumers actually pay at grocery stores — have climbed in recent months.

    […] As for the larger context, I’m reminded of comments Barack Obama made last week during an appearance at Hamilton College. The former Democratic president said, “I think this is one of the challenges that we have — and I saw this even before the last election. I think people tend to think, ‘Oh, democracy, rule of law, independent judiciary, freedom of the press. That’s all abstract stuff because it’s not affecting the price of eggs.” Well, you know what? It’s about to affect the price of eggs.”

    Link

  13. says

    https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/robert-f-kennedy-jr-pats-back-repeated-consequential-failures-rcna200930“>Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pats himself on the back despite repeated, consequential failures

    “RFK Jr. boasted his response to a measles outbreak should be seen as a “model for the rest of the world.” That’s ridiculous.”
    Related video at the link features Doctor Vin Gupta factchecking RFK Jr, and adding more information.

    Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who currently leads the Department of Health and Human Services, is apparently under the impression that he’s doing excellent work. In fact, this week, the conspiracy theorist and anti-vaccine activist boasted that his response to a measles outbreak should be seen as a “model for the rest of the world.” [head/desk]

    As a report in The Guardian noted, the comments came “after Kennedy attended the funeral of a third measles victim over the weekend.”

    […] Kennedy’s overlapping failures continue to pile up. NBC News reported:

    Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. called for people to get the measles vaccine while in the same breath falsely claiming it hasn’t been ‘safety tested’ and its protection is short-lived. … In an interview Wednesday with CBS News, Kennedy said the Trump administration was focused on finding ways to treat people who choose not to get vaccinated.

    Kennedy’s on-camera comments were dangerously ridiculous. He talked about treating measles — despite the fact that there are no approved treatments for measles — before claiming that measles cases are inevitable because the vaccine “wanes very quickly,” which is the opposite of what science tells us.

    This coincided with Kennedy downplaying the efficacy of measles vaccines (which was needlessly reckless), describing autism as “an epidemic“ (which isn’t true), insisting that autism is caused by “an environmental toxin“ (which also isn’t true) and dismissing scientific research on autism as “invalid“ (which is bonkers).

    All of this was from a single afternoon […]

    Within the last seven days, the public has learned that more top vaccine regulators at the Food and Drug Administration have either left or been forced out following the resignation of Dr. Peter Marks, the FDA’s top vaccine official, who opposed Kennedy’s “misinformation and lies” about vaccine safety.

    […] We’ve seen RFK Jr. appear completely ignorant about major developments at the agency he ostensibly leads. We’ve seen reports that Kennedy met with the families of two girls who died from measles in West Texas, where he reportedly said to one grieving family member, “You don’t know what’s in the vaccine anymore.”

    In case this weren’t quite enough, Kennedy also said he’d rehire many of the key officials from his department that he’d recently fired, though Politico reported soon after, “Turns out, it wasn’t the plan at all. HHS has no intention of reinstating any significant number of the staffers fired as part of a mass reduction-in-force on Tuesday, despite Kennedy’s assertion that some had been mistakenly cut.” [RFK Jr. is clueless.]

    Remember, all of these developments have unfolded over the last seven days.

    As unsettling as the news has been, none of it is surprising. RFK Jr.’s anti-science reputation was well established long before Donald Trump nominated him. That an unqualified, anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist is behaving like an unqualified, anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist is painfully predictable.

    The fact remains, however, that 52 Senate Republicans were given an opportunity to protect Americans from Kennedy and they failed spectacularly.

  14. JM says

    Politico: ICE says its job is to stop illegal ‘ideas’ crossing the border in since-deleted X post

    Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s job is to stop illegal ideas from crossing the U.S. border, according to a now-deleted social media post from the agency that drew condemnation on Thursday.
    In a promotional graphic on X, ICE said they enforce over 400 federal laws to “ensure public safety and national security,” with the picture showing ICE will stop the crossings of people, money, products — and ideas. The post directs people to visit the ICE website.

    Under Trump this is one of the goals but this was yanked as soon as it was noticed because it’s too blatant even for ICE.

  15. says

    Marjorie Taylor Greene made some shady stock trades before tariff flip-flop

    […] Trump’s urging people to buy stock, coupled with Greene’s suspiciously timed trades, have Democrats calling for an investigation.

    Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Chuck Schumer of New York, Ruben Gallego and Mark Kelly of Arizona, Adam Schiff of California, and Ron Wyden of Oregon sent a letter Friday to the Securities and Exchange Commission chair calling for an investigation.

    “It is unconscionable that as American families are concerned about their financial security during this economic crisis entirely manufactured by the President, insiders may have actively profited from the market volatility and potentially perpetrated financial fraud on the American public,” they wrote. “At this critical moment, the SEC must do its part to restore Americans’ faith in the rule of law and to preserve the integrity of the financial system, in accordance with its statutory mission.” […]

    More at the link, including video.

  16. JM says

    Wired: The Social Security Administration Is Gutting Regional Staff and Shifting All Public Communications to X

    The Social Security Administration will no longer be communicating with the media and the public through press releases and “dear colleague” letters, as it shifts its public communication exclusively to X, sources tell WIRED. The news comes amid major staffing cuts at the agency.

    The regional staff cuts have already been noted but this is the first I have heard of moving to X. The SSA will get rid of all press releases and other public notices for X posts. Obviously tacky conflict of interest and X is a bad choice of media service.

  17. Reginald Selkirk says

    Holy water brimming with cholera compels illness cluster in Europe

    European tourists who toted home bottles of water from a holy well in Ethiopia were likely hoping for blessings and spiritual cleansing—but instead carried an infectious curse and got an intestinal power cleanse.

    Three people in Germany and four in the UK fell ill with cholera after directly drinking or splashing their faces with the holy water. Two required intensive care. Luckily, they all eventually recovered, according to a report in the journal Eurosurveillance.

    The infections occurred in February after some of the patients reported taking independent trips to Ethiopia in January. Two of the German patients and three of the UK patients reported travel to the country, and several reported visiting a holy well called Bermel Giorgis (also spelled ‘Georgis’) in the Quara district. The German travelers and at least one of the UK travelers brought water home with them and shared it…

  18. says

    https://www.wonkette.com/p/elon-musk-admits-doge-will-fall-short

    “Elon Musk Admits DOGE Will Fall Short Of A Trillion In Cuts By Nearly A Trillion”

    “And that’s with all the agony these cuts have and will cause.”

    Here is a riddle for you: When is $2 trillion actually $1 trillion? When it’s $150 billion, that’s when.

    That first number is the amount of spending that […] Elon Musk claimed he could cut from the American government’s yearly $6 trillion in spending. All he and his radical band of shitposting incels had to do was find all the waste, fraud, and abuse that Republicans always think must be infesting the national budget […]

    That second number, $1 trillion, is what Musk reduced his estimate of spending cuts to when he realized what generations of Republicans have discovered before him, which is that holy shit, there isn’t that much fat to cut in the federal budget without touching Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, and in fact over the years spending has already been sliced pretty hard. Maybe we should lower our expectations.

    That last number, $150 billion, is what you get to when your expectations have been properly lowered. As Musk admitted to Donald Trump on Thursday without acknowledging how far down he has now set his sights.

    From Business Insider:

    “Thanks to your fantastic leadership, the amazing Cabinet, the very talented DOGE team, I’m excited to announce that we anticipate savings in FY26 from reduction of waste and fraud by $150 billion,” Musk said during a Cabinet meeting at the White House.

    Fiscal year 2026 does not start until October, so these alleged savings won’t even start for another six months. Meanwhile, government spending since Trump came into office in January is up a bit, according to The Wall Street Journal:

    Last fiscal year, about 73% of federal spending went to interest on the debt and mandatory programs like Social Security and Medicare that operate on autopilot. That amounted to $4.9 trillion.

    As anyone from the wisest budget expert to the dumbest dipshit at America’s Greatest Mommy Blog™ could have told the DOGE boys, cutting even $1 trillion in spending would have required cutting pretty much every government function outside of the military and entitlements. […] most Americans like their government services, no matter what members of the House Freedom Caucus might tell the press.

    And just think about how much chaos and misery DOGE has caused with the $150 billion worth of cuts it has managed to put in place. Hundreds of thousands of government employees have lost their livelihoods, with more on the way. […] Despite Musk’s claim in Thursday’s Cabinet meeting that the cuts will improve service for Americans, the exact opposite has happened, as anyone who has tried to log into the Social Security website or call the agency for help with anything in the last few weeks can tell you.

    Perhaps the sorts of cuts they have made can be summed up by this righteous Chris Hayes rant from his show Thursday night: [video at the link]

    The Trump administration has been making a concerted effort to rewrite history, mostly because the Nazi-curious [people] who work in it think official histories have been entirely too unfair to white people. […]

    But hey, maybe all those kids will forget the humanities and go into the lucrative field of sewing sneakers together in all the sneaker-making factories that are going to bloom across our fair land once Trump and his gang of galactic dipshits finish destroying foreign trade and get all the sneaker-sewing factories chugging to life across our great land.

    Meanwhile, DOGE is reduced to bragging on eXitter about minor user interface changes to government websites [social media post is available at the link]

    It has been a long time since yr Wonkette left behind a career working in technology. But we do know enough to understand that any change to a UI interface is going to go through some pretty widespread testing across various platforms. And this is done in a testing environment, not the live one. And you are going to especially want to thoroughly test the change for such a large public-facing site like that of the IRS, especially during freaking tax season, which is the absolute worst time to risk breaking anything.

    […] It is also absurd to roll in even a minor change in 71 minutes [as DOGE bragged] without fairly rigorous testing.

    […] the only way to slash $2 trillion out of the budget is to go after entitlements directly instead of simply making accessing programs like Social Security an enormous pain in the ass. On Thursday, Republicans took yet one more step in that direction when the House of Representatives approved a budget resolution that will eventually require gutting Medicaid […]

    This was the resolution, sort of and no pun intended, of a standoff between the Senate and the House. The latter had passed a budget resolution that absolutely gashed entitlements. The former passed a budget resolution that, with the help of funny math, did not gash them quite as badly. This led to a standoff in which the hard Right in the GOP caucus refused to sign onto the Senate’s resolution unless the Senate pinky-swore that the final reconciliation package would cut $1.45 trillion in spending over the next decade. Which, again, is going to require steep cuts to Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security.

    […] which is more motivating, sociopathy or stupidity. Let’s just go with “both.”

  19. says

    NBC:

    China raised its total retaliatory tariff on U.S. imports to 125% today after the Trump administration clarified the previous day that U.S. duties on Beijing are now 145% […]

  20. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Kyle Cheney (Politico):

    DOJ trying to cancel today’s Abrego Garcia hearing and delay filing a response to the judge’s order until next week. […] The 9:30 deadline has passed with no information from the Justice Department about Abrego Garcia’s location or status, as demanded by the judge. […] Judge Xinis *grants* the government a partial extension… to 11:30 AM.

    Anna Bower (Lawfare):

    [DoJ] Filed nearly an hour late only to say this: “Defendants are unable to provide the information requested by the Court on the impracticable deadline set by the Court hours after the Supreme Court issued its order.”

    Steve Vladeck (Law professor):

    Just a reminder that Judge Xinis’s original order requiring the government to bring Abrego Garcia back to the United States was in effect for more than 72 hours before it was administratively stayed by Chief Justice Roberts on Monday.

    What did the Justice Department… do… during that time?

    Eric Columbus: “Now, DOJ says they can’t do *anything* until they file briefs on the meaning of ‘facilitate.'”

    Chris Geidner (Law Dork): “SCOTUS said ~nothing~ about Xinis needing to clarify the meaning of ‘facilitate.’ The court only did so as to ‘effectuate,’ which Xinis removed from her updated order altogether—likely to short-circuit this very sort of bullshit as to that word.”

     
    And so the hearing commenced.
    Anna Bower (Lawfare): Abrego Garcia court thread

    Judge: What info do you have?
    DoJ’s Mr. Ensign: I do not have that info.
    –
    Ensign: Plaintiffs have said he was last known to be in El Salvador, government hasn’t submitted evidence to contradict that.
    Judge: So there’s no evidence where he is today.
    –
    Judge: This is a yes or no question. […] I’m not asking what yet… just WAS THERE anything done to facilitate return?
    Ensign: I’m unable to answer, don’t have knowledge of that.
    –
    Judge: That you don’t know suggests you don’t have a full and effective relationship with your client. So can you explain why you don’t have personal knowledge?
    –
    Ensign: Government could have some information/responses by Tuesday […] Says might involve invocations of privilege, but he doesn’t know.
    –
    Judge: “We’re not gonna slow walk this,” “We’re not re-litigating what SCOTUS put to bed.”
    –
    Plaintiff’s council: “It’s quite clear… the defendants are playing a game with their own lawyers.”
    –
    Judge: I’m going to require daily status updates on what if anything the government is doing or not doing.
    […]
    Ensign: […] court deadlines not practicable.
    Judge: Then you can tell the public that every day in status updates.

    Rando: “To put this into context: El Salvador President Nayib Bukele will meet with Trump, the mad king, at the White House on Monday.”

    Kel McClanahan (National Security Counselors):

    They’re going to say that this guy being alive or dead is a state secret because if people found out he was dead it would “harm our foreign relations” and if people found out he was alive they’d have to return him and that would “harm our foreign relations.”

  21. says

    CNBC:

    A federal judge in Maryland on Friday ordered the Department of Justice to give her daily updates on steps it is taking to secure the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia from an El Salvador prison, where he has been held since being deported last month.

    MSNBC:

    An immigration judge has ruled that the Trump administration can proceed with its effort to deport Mahmoud Khalil, a legal permanent resident of the U.S., in a case that Khalil’s attorneys and civil rights experts say has enormous implications for free speech in the U.S.

  22. Reginald Selkirk says

    Canadians required to register with U.S. government if in country at least 30 days

    Many Canadians travelling to the United States will now have to newly register with the U.S. government as of Friday or face potential fines or jail time.

    The requirement stems from an executive order that U.S. President Donald Trump signed on his first day in office for non-citizens who are in the country for 30 days or longer, though the administration has argued that a registration requirement has always existed and that officials are now simply enforcing it for everyone.

    A U.S. federal judge on Thursday allowed the Trump administration to move forward with the requirement that unauthorized persons must register with the federal government and carry documentation.

    Beginning Friday, Canadians over the age of 14 who will be in the U.S. for that length of time will have to register with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS)…

  23. says

    MSNBC:

    Popular outdoor equipment retailer REI has issued a public apology for its previous endorsement of Doug Burgum, the man Donald Trump tapped to lead the Interior Department.

  24. Reginald Selkirk says

    P.E.I. vet college apologizes for asking artist to remove piece showing lemmings and U.S. flag

    The Atlantic Veterinary College has apologized to its former artist-in-residence, who quit after being asked to take down a painting he says was censored by the Charlottetown institution due to its political message.

    In a statement issued Friday morning, the college acknowledged that asking Christopher Griffin to either remove his painting, The Crossing, or leave his residency was a mistake.

    “The decision did not reflect our institutional values, and we regret the hurt and frustration it caused. Art plays an essential role in education and public life — it challenges us, encourages dialogue, and fosters understanding,” the statement said…

    Griffin moved to Prince Edward Island from Ottawa in 2023 and became the regional college’s first-ever artist-in-residence last November.

    The unpaid position gave him the opportunity to brighten up some of the community spaces at the college, which is based at the University of Prince Edward Island…

    One of his recent works, The Crossing, shows a boat full of lemmings carrying a crumpled and discoloured U.S. flag across an icy northern Canadian waterway.

    The college said it received three complaints about the painting, including two from American faculty members…

    snowflakes everywhere.

  25. says

    In early March, ICE announced that it had arrested forty-eight people in New Mexico. A month later, their identities and whereabouts remain unknown. Jonathan Blitzer has a full report. But, first, he breaks down this week’s Supreme Court decisions on Trump’s most drastic immigration policies. […]

    New Yorker link to “The Mystery of ICE’s Unidentifiable Arrests,” by Jonathan Blitzer

    On March 12th, Immigration and Customs Enforcement issued a press release about an “enhanced” operation that the agency had conducted the previous week in New Mexico. Forty-eight people were arrested in Santa Fe, Albuquerque, and Roswell, according to the government. Twenty of them had been “arrested or convicted of serious criminal offenses,” which included homicide, sexual assault, drug trafficking, and shoplifting. Others had committed “immigration violations such as illegal entry and illegal re-entry,” and twenty-one had final orders of removal issued by an immigration judge. “These arrests,” a top ice official said, “exemplify the type of criminals living among us.”

    When ice makes an arrest or stages a raid in New Mexico, Marcela Díaz, the executive director of Somos un Pueblo Unido, a Santa Fe-based advocacy organization, usually hears about it. “We organize in several rural communities, very tight-knit communities where everyone knows each other and knows their churches and neighbors,” she told me. “We have deep connections here.” A month into Donald Trump’s second term, two undocumented Guatemalan immigrants driving from Albuquerque to Santa Fe were pulled over for a traffic violation. After an officer called ice, they were transferred to federal custody. It took thirty-six hours for Díaz to find out about it. Forty-eight arrests—a substantial number in a state as small as New Mexico—should have generated a flood of calls to Somos un Pueblo Unido. A day passed, then two, but no one came forward with any information. “What normally happens when we see sweeps did not happen,” Díaz said.

    Díaz had spent much of the week at the capitol with advocates from across the state to lobby legislators on two bills that would further restrict local law enforcement’s coöperation with federal immigration authorities. Neither passed, but conversations kept returning to the recent ice operation. Were people too scared to come forward, even to trusted allies? Had the immigrants been deported in secret? Sophia Genovese is a managing attorney at the New Mexico Immigrant Law Center; the lawyers at her office visit the state’s three ice detention centers each week to meet with clients. The organization also has a “rapid-response team” with its own hotline. “We receive at least ninety-per-cent notice of all interior enforcement,” she told me. “When we have received referrals in the past, it’s been within one day. I was immediately suspicious. Something was not right here.” […]

    The shroud of opacity cloaking ice’s activities has made it increasingly difficult to trust any information supplied by the agency—especially information the Administration presents willingly. In the first several weeks of Trump’s current term, the White House launched a public-relations campaign highlighting seventy-two cases in which ice arrested allegedly dangerous criminals. Maria Sacchetti, an immigration reporter at the Washington Post, investigated the individual stories, and found that at least half the men whom ice claimed to have arrested were already in government custody. “Hints that they were already incarcerated are in the White House’s photos,” Sacchetti wrote. “Some inmates are dressed in prison uniforms, while others appear against a backdrop of cinder-block walls or industrial doors.” […]

    More at the link.

  26. Reginald Selkirk says

    Disgraced ex-NYC Councilman Dan Halloran arrested at Miami airport with thousands of child sex abuse videos on phone

    Disgraced ex-City Councilman Dan Halloran — who spent years in federal prison for a $200,000 bribery scheme to rig a mayoral election — has been arrested and charged for having hundreds of sickening child sex abuse videos on his phone, according to authorities.

    Halloran, 54, was busted at Miami International Airport on Saturday as he arrived in the US for a layover flight from Cuba, according to a criminal complaint filed in the Southern District of Florida.

    He was found with 1,362 child sex videos hidden on his iPhone — including about 35 videos of “prepubescent” girls being victimized, according to the complaint.
    Halloran booked into the Broward County Main Jail but was in custody at the Federal Detention Center in Miami as of Tuesday morning on two federal child pornography charges…

  27. says

    DHS Demands To Question LA School Kids, Lie About Having Families’ Permission

    Federal agents showed up with no prior notice at two Los Angeles elementary schools this week, demanding to talk to five kids they claimed had previously crossed the border as unaccompanied minors. But it was only a safety check, they said! And the agents also said they had permission from the kids’ families, which was a lie, according to LA Unified School District Superintendent Alberto Carvalho. The agents were turned away by the schools’ principals without contacting the students […]

    At a presser yesterday, Carvalho said four people identifying themselves as Homeland Security agents showed up at an elementary school in South LA Monday and wanted to see four students who were in the first through sixth grades. The principal said nothing doing, and then two hours later, agents arrived at a different school in the area, demanding to speak to a sixth-grader. That school’s principal also refused to let the agents question the student.

    “They declared to the principals in both instances that the caretakers of these students have authorized them to go to the school,” Carvalho said. “We have confirmed that that is a falsehood. We’ve spoken with the caretakers of these children, in some cases parents, and they deny any interactions, deny providing authorization for these individuals to have any contact with these children at the school.”

    Carvalho added that the visitors were not in uniform and that when the principals tried to write down their names, they only briefly showed identification as officers from Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), ICE’s criminal investigations arm. […]

    The people who flashed their badges also didn’t offer any documentation from a court […]

    “I’m still mystified as to how a first-, second-, third-, fourth- or sixth-grader would pose any type of risk to the national security of our nation that would require Homeland Security to deploy its agents to elementary schools,” Carvalho said. […]

    Also, the LA Times reports, several families in LA have reported getting visits from HSI, according to Karina Ramos, an attorney for the nonprofit Immigrant Defenders Law Center. The agents also told those folks they were looking for unaccompanied minors. This is especially fishy! The government does try to keep track of unaccompanied minors who cross the border and are placed with sponsors, usually parents or other family members when possible. But such check-ins are normally done by HHS’s Office of Refugee Resettlement, which is tasked with placing immigrant minors. Not HSI.

    […] many sponsors are both good guardians and afraid of talking to the government has led to a rightwing myth about hundreds of thousands of “missing kids” and gross lies that they’re all being trafficked (by George Soros and Hillary Clinton) because there are no good immigrants, only sex traffickers. (And to complicate matters, some migrant kids are in fact exploited as child labor, a real problem the Right is happy to ignore except when calling for mass deportations.)

    Kids, you are NEVER gonna guess who offered DHS’s take on ICE’s visits to LA schools. Yep, it was Tricia McLaughlin again, and we bet she has a great career ahead of her as a North Korean news anchor, or at Newsmax or OANN, one of those. She confirmed that officers were indeed from HSI, and we’ll just emphasize again that HSI is not a social services or child welfare agency; it’s supposed to do criminal investigations.

    “These HSI officers were at these schools conducting wellness checks on children who arrived unaccompanied at the border,” she said in an emailed statement. “DHS is leading efforts to conduct welfare checks on these children to ensure that they are safe and not being exploited, abused, and sex trafficked.” […]

    Relax! It’s Only A Police State For Some Of Us!

    Several reports are included at that link, including Rubio deporting people for wrongthink; ICE smashing car windows; and the text quoted above regarding DHS questioning elementary school students.

  28. Reginald Selkirk says

    The Louisiana Governor Fought for New MAGA-Friendly Amendments—and All Four Lost

    This weekend, in blazing-red Louisiana, Governor Jeff Landry got his jewels kicked through the roof of his mouth. Landry threw his support behind four MAGA-friendly amendments to the state constitution, and all four of them lost. From the Louisiana Illuminator:

    Nearly two-thirds of voters rejected all of the amendments in an election that could have broader political implications for the rest of Landry’s term. The governor, who has sometimes relied on strong-arm tactics to get his agenda through the Louisiana Legislature, could become more vulnerable to pushback after failing to pass his most ambitious policy proposal at the ballot box.

    Landry’s priority for the election, Amendment 2, would have lowered the maximum income tax rate the state could enact and restricted annual state budget increases. It also would have made it more difficult to enact new tax breaks. The proposal was expected to produce a financial windfall for Landry and state legislators later this year. Amendment 2 would have moved hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenue from state savings accounts into Louisiana’s general fund, where Landry and state legislators could have spent it more easily.

    In Louisiana? Bad idea. Very damn bad idea.

    Amendment 3, which 66% of voters opposed, would have made it easier to send more minors to adult jails and prisons for longer sentences. It spurred national criminal justice reform organizations, such as the Vera Institute and Southern Poverty Law Center, to spend more than $500,000 to turn voters against it. Sarah Omojola, Louisiana director for the Vera Institute, said the results for Amendment 3 show voters are starting to reject incarceration as the sole option for criminal justice. She added that high incarceration rates have only served to destabilize communities rather than reduce crime. “In defeating Amendment 3, voters made clear their desire for the things that actually make our communities safer—like quality education and opportunity,” Omojola said in a statement.

    That is a thoroughgoing ass-kicking—66 percent? zowie—and it is yet another example of conservative policies being far less popular than the people dreaming them up. This shutout was also an example of effective political branding and organization. A lot of people should take careful notes about what the people who beat these amendments have done.

    While those organizations focused on defeating Amendment 3, they also became the backbone of a “No on All” campaign working to vote down all four of the constitutional amendments Landry was pushing…

  29. Reginald Selkirk says

    Iguanas have invaded a Florida island. One man is on a quest to stop them.

    …
    A new business, Down Goes Iguana, was born, with Johnson as its chief hired (air)gun. All with the blessing of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission state agency, which credentials Johnson and his fellow removers of invasive exotic pests.
    …
    Last year, a friend bet Johnson he couldn’t average one a day (made even harder by the leap year) but turned out it wasn’t much of a challenge. “By the end of May, I passed the 366 mark and by the end of the year, I was at 730,” he says. Since he started, Johnson estimates he’s taken out around 1,500.
    …

  30. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Re: Lynna @21:

    An immigration judge has ruled that the Trump administration can proceed with its effort to deport Mahmoud Khalil

    Asterisk.

    Steve Vladeck (Law professor):

    Before folks overreact to headlines […] please note that (1) it was an immigration judge (IJ), not a federal district court; and (2) the IJ had no power to consider Khalil’s constitutional objections. This particular decision was a fait accompli.

    Khalil can raise his constitutional arguments both in his habeas petition (still pending in federal court in New Jersey), and once he is able to challenge the immigration judge’s ruling in the Fifth Circuit.

    It sucks that he can’t raise them before the IJ, but that’s (unfortunately) not unusual.

    Michael Kagan (UNLV Immigration Clinic): “This is A) All true. B) All bad, the normal functioning of a system designed to operate outside the Constitution.”

    Rando: “Worth also noting an IJ does not belong to the judiciary in the separation of powers but rather the executive. They work for the Justice Dept.”

  31. says

    Undaunted: The Associated Press
    “Stand up to bullies, and you just might win.”

    Unlike Columbia University, unlike a pack of big law firms (e.g. Paul Weiss, Skadden Arps), unlike Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, unlike ABC News, and unlike virtually every House and Senate Republican, the Associated Press (AP) refused to capitulate in the face of authoritarian bullying. Rather than accept its “punishment”—exclusion from key venues at the White House and daily access to Donald Trump, simply because it had the galling temerity to call the Gulf of Mexico…“the Gulf of Mexico”—it took the Trump censoring regime to federal court. This week, it won at the district court level.

    Explaining the AP’s position, Executive Editor Julie Pace wrote to the White House chief of staff: “The actions taken by the White House were plainly intended to punish The A.P. for the content of its speech.” Pace continued:

    “It is among the most basic tenets of the First Amendment that the government cannot retaliate against the public or the press for what they say. This is viewpoint discrimination based on a news organization’s editorial choices and a clear violation of the First Amendment.”

    Sadly, the odiously docile White House Press Correspondents’ Association continued business as normal. (It similarly accepted the White House’s unprecedented decision to select members of the press, thereby stocking the pool with toadies and propagandist reporters with close relationships to the president.) Maybe the organization should be renamed the Worthless Press Correspondents’ Association.

    But not the AP. It took up the fight at great financial risk. As the judge who handed down the favorable decision explained (citations removed):

    To state the obvious, if the AP’s wire reporters are not in the room when news happens, they can hardly be the first to break the news. … [R]eporting through second-hand sources simply does not allow for the “same level of completeness” in their reporting as if they had “been there in person.”

    […] Finally, and obviously, they cannot ask questions from outside a closed door.

    Those questions, if the President chose to answer, could lead to incisive and cutting-edge reporting that the AP cannot reproduce by watching from afar. This disadvantage has poisoned the AP’s business model. As its ability to rapidly supply new photographs and breaking news has dwindled, its customers have expressed concerns and turned to other sources for their needs. These concerns also led an advertiser to cancel a $150,000 deal. The facts reflect the precarious realities of life in the fast-paced world of journalism: A delay in capturing photos and details of breaking news can be catastrophic.

    Imagine if the toniest law firms, elite universities, and Republican politicians were as willing to risk financial harm to defend principle against Trump’s attack! Plainly, they were not willing to risk a single client, a single dollar, or a single primary challenge to follow their professional oaths and stand up for democracy. Fortunately for the cause of democracy, the AP endured severe financial pain. “The AP has been economically hemorrhaging for the last two months, and its condition will only worsen as its customers flee to other news services absent injunctive relief.”

    The AP sued and came prepared with a raft of evidence, historical material, and legal precedent in support of its right to have equal access to report on the lawless White House occupants.

    Judge Trevor N. McFadden, a Trump appointee, delivered a 41-page scholarly opinion reaming the president and his lackeys. McFadden began:

    “[T]he Court simply holds that under the First Amendment, if the Government opens its doors to some journalists—be it to the Oval Office, the East Room, or elsewhere—it cannot then shut those doors to other journalists because of their viewpoints. The Constitution requires no less.”

    Reviewing the series of blatantly retaliatory utterances from Trump and his aides, McFadden readily concluded, “The AP claims, and the Court now finds, that the Government has singled out the AP because of its refusal to update the Gulf’s name in its Stylebook, an influential writing and editing guide.”

    McFadden noted, “Indeed, the Government has been brazen about this. Several high-ranking officials have repeatedly said that they are restricting the AP’s access precisely because of the organization’s viewpoint.” The White House rarely conceals its illegal motives these days; the whole point is to publicize its vindictiveness. In fact,

    “At an evidentiary hearing, the AP’s witnesses made clear that its text reporters have been systematically and almost completely excluded from events open to the broader White House press corps since February 13, while its photographers have suffered curtailed access,” McFadden found. “The Government declined to offer witnesses in rebuttal.”

    In this and other legal disputes, the government’s lawyers rely on obfuscation. “All the AP wants, and all it gets, is a level playing field,” McFadden explained, while the White House lawyers insist on “framing things otherwise” and trying to “sidestep” the real issues. McFadden tersely scolded the government:

    “Defendants may pursue their favored litigation tactics, but the Court must address the merits of the relief requested.”

    The decision flowed from uncontested facts. “[T]he AP presented evidence that the Government has discriminated against it based on its viewpoint, a claim the Government all but concedes,” McFadden held. “The AP is thus likely to succeed on its claim that its exclusion from eligibility to access the Oval Office violates its First Amendment rights.” McFadden reached the same conclusion regarding access to other locations (e.g., the East Room).

    Three lessons from this confrontation should not be lost on us:

    1) Democracy does not defend itself;

    2) An attack on one person/entity or one tactic never stops there;

    3) If you stand up to bullies, who often are unprepared or unqualified to defend their position, your chances of winning are high.

    The defense of democracy requires courage and selflessness. The A.P. was stalwart, unafraid, and undaunted. This week, we salute the courageous wire service, its employees, and its lawyers.

  32. Reginald Selkirk says

    Consumers now face “tariff surcharges” for some goods as companies pass along costs

    Foreigners are sometimes surprised that here in the USA, sales tax is usually not calculated into the price of goods, but rather tacked on at the end. Why?It would be simple enough to do. It’s because vendors don’t like the sales tax and wish to rile public sentiment against it.

    Sismilarly, since almost everyone hates the tariffs, it should be singled out on receipts and labeled a “Trump tax.”

  33. says

    Sky Captain @30, thank you for posting a clarification of the facts. Good to know.

    Text quoted by Reginald @28:

    Amendment 3, which 66% of voters opposed, would have made it easier to send more minors to adult jails and prisons for longer sentences.

    It was really welcome news to learn that the amendment, and the other amendments mentioned in your post, were so thoroughly opposed.

  34. says

    Split Screen: Shirley Chisholm, cropped out of history

    “Photography can shape public perception of candidates. Continually showing a woman candidate alone makes it look as if she doesn’t have support.”

    In 1972, U.S. Rep. Shirley Chisholm (D-N.Y.) made history as the first Black woman to run for a major party’s presidential nomination. Her candidacy represented a pivotal moment in American politics. Close your eyes and picture her. Do you see her alone at a podium or commanding a crowd? If you’ve struggled to recall such images, there’s a reason.

    When analyzing the photographic record of Chisholm’s groundbreaking campaign, I discovered three patterns of visual sexism that deserve our scrutiny: the persistent use of isolating close-ups, unflattering camera angles, and technical choices that failed to properly render her skin tone. This visual sexism didn’t just document her candidacy—it also shaped how America perceived her campaign and the campaigns of women who came after her.

    The Politics of Proximity: Close-ups Without Crowds

    One of the most striking patterns in Chisholm’s visual coverage was how frequently she was photographed in tight close-ups that removed the enthusiastic context of her campaign’s energy and support. Her white male opponent, George McGovern, was routinely photographed with crowds of cheering supporters, but Chisholm was visually isolated.

    Media scholar Jane Rhodes, who has extensively studied visual representations of Black political figures, notes that this isolation technique removes the subject from their political context and community of support, effectively diminishing their perceived political power. The contrast was striking. McGovern was shown as a leader with followers; Chisholm was framed as a solo figure, as a curiosity rather than a movement, a symbol rather than a winner.

    Communication researcher Robert Entman’s framing analysis quantified this difference: McGovern appeared with supporters in 78% of published campaign photographs, but Chisholm appeared alone in 64% of her coverage. This visual isolation didn’t report the facts of Chisholm’s campaign; it constructed a psychologically destructive and inaccurate narrative of her viability as a candidate.

    This framing wasn’t accidental. Kathleen Hall Jamieson’s seminal work “Packaging the Presidency” documents how newspapers and television consistently chose tight shots of Chisholm’s face while using wide shots for McGovern that captured the enthusiasm of his campaign events. When Chisholm spoke to packed rooms, photographers somehow managed to frame out the crowds.

    As a cinematographer myself, I recognize that these are deliberate choices, not technical necessities. The decision to crop out Chisholm’s supporters effectively cropped out her political viability.

    Seven Minutes: If She Can’t See It, She Can’t Be It

    Perhaps the most egregious example of visual erasure came during the 1972 Democratic National Convention. Despite being a legitimate candidate who had amassed delegates, Chisholm received just seven minutes of coverage during the entire convention broadcast. For comparison, McGovern received over two hours of airtime, while even non-candidate Senator Ted Kennedy was given a full 30 minutes for his speech. Most tellingly, Massachusetts Gov. John Volpe—a Republican who wasn’t even running—received 15 minutes of coverage, more than twice what was allocated to Chisholm. […] actively diminishing the first Black woman to seek a major party’s nomination.

    […] Seven minutes wasn’t just insufficient, or a mistake; it was actively delegitimizing.

    […] When voters of all genders rarely see images of women commanding stages, drawing enthusiastic crowds, or speaking authoritatively, they develop unconscious biases about who belongs in leadership positions.

    […] Chisholm was more frequently shown in reactive positions—listening or waiting—rather than in active leadership positions. […]

    Looking Down: The Politics of Camera Angles

    When analyzing archival footage and photographs of Chisholm’s campaign, another pattern emerges: she was consistently photographed from high angles that diminished her stature and authority. Camera angles aren’t neutral—they construct power relationships between subject and viewer.

    Analysis of campaign coverage by visual sociologist Bernadette Wegenstein found that Chisholm was photographed from high angles approximately 60% more frequently than McGovern. This wasn’t merely aesthetic; it was political. McGovern was photographed from low angles that emphasized his height and authority, but Chisholm was shot from above, a visual technique that subtly undermined her power. […]

    Overexposing Racial Bias

    […] photographic technology was literally designed around white skin. From light meters to film chemistry, the technical defaults of photography privileged white subjects.

    For Chisholm, this meant that photographers and television cameras frequently rendered her with inaccurate exposure, either washing out her features or underexposing her image. Archival comparison of campaign coverage shows that McGovern was consistently photographed with proper exposure that accurately represented his features, but Chisholm often appeared with unnatural contrast or unflattering color rendering.

    Proper exposure for skin tones isn’t a technical challenge—it’s a choice. When photographers consistently failed to adjust their settings for Chisholm’s skin tone, their seemingly technical decision had political consequences.

    The Visual Legacy

    […] The seven minutes allocated to Chisholm at the 1972 convention didn’t just limit her visibility then, it also limited our visual memory of her campaign now. Our collective imagery of presidential politics remains dominated by white men in front of cheering crowds, shot from heroic low angles, perfectly exposed. […]

    Political scientist Jennifer Lawless found that repeated exposure to images of women in positions of political authority significantly increases voters’ willingness to support female candidates (Lawless, 2016). Without these visual references, voters—regardless of their conscious beliefs about gender equality—tend to default to “traditional” (read: white male) leadership models. […] our imagination is shaped by the images we consume.

    […] Until next time, keep your eyes sharp and your lenses sharper.

    Photos at the link.

  35. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Reuters – US NIH reverses conference travel ban for scientists

    Researchers at the U.S. National Institutes of Health had been told they cannot attend scientific conferences and meetings without official permission, even if they paid their own way and went during time off […] The policy was communicated verbally by managers in at least three of the NIH’s 27 institutes and centers but not put into writing
    […]
    After Reuters reported the travel restriction policy earlier on Thursday, an HHS spokesperson said, “Effective April 10, official travel may resume following established approval processes within each Institute and Center.”

    Asked about the policy reversal, one of the NIH scientists said, “I heard it, too. I’d like to see it written.”

    Carl T. Bergstrom: “Sunlight continues to be an effective disinfectant. Hours after Reuters published the story above, the NIH reversed their policy. “

  36. DrVanNostrand says

    Reginald Selkirk @32
    Digikey has been doing that since at least the first Trump administration. I remember it getting tacked onto all of our company’s invoices and screwing up our accounting system which didn’t like it when the purchase orders and invoices didn’t match. I fully support the practice. Let everyone see the Trump tax.

  37. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    NPR – DOGE may have improperly used Social Security data
    Antonio Gracias—an equity billionaire DOGE embedded at SSA—claimed, on Fox and a podcast, that DOGE had cross-referenced data from an SSA program that grants Social Security numbers to elligible immigrants against some states’ voter rolls, “just because we were curious“. He claimed thousands were registered, and many had voted, echoing a conspiracy theory to import voters. DOGE had been ordered by courts not to share that data and was not permitted to use it in that way.

    Rando:

    Given they don’t understand how dead people’s records might exist but that doesn’t mean they’re being paid, and that orphaned minors get paid, I doubt they understand that people might get a SSN and subsequently become a citizen and vote legally.

  38. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    NPR – The obscure law being used against immigrant student protestors

    the McCarran-Walter Act, or the Immigration Nationality Act of 1952. […] the act states that the U.S. government may deport “an alien whose presence or activities in the United States the Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.”

    It was specifically designed to detain, deport and bar entry visas to communists. […] McCarren “expressed concerns that the United States could face communist infiltration through immigration and that unassimilated aliens could threaten the foundations of American life.” […] “McCarran, in particular, was a virulent anti-Semite. He just sort of thought Jews and communists were overlapping groups,”

  39. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Follow-up #20 on Abrego Garcia.

    Anna Bower (Lawfare):

    When DOJ filed its response to Judge Xinis around 12:15 pm today, it said: “Plaintiff is in the custody of a foreign sovereign.” Drew Ensign’s name was on the brief.

    An hour later, at the hearing, Ensign told the judge that he didn’t have info on Garcia’s whereabouts and custodial status.

     
    Anna Bower:

    Asked about the court order to return Kilmar Abrego Garcia from El Salvador, Trump said this tonight

    Trump: “If the Supreme Court said bring somebody back, I would do that. I respect the Supreme Court.”

    Reporter: And the lower court as well…?

    Trump: “Oh no, no. I’m not talking about the lower court. I have great respect for the Supreme Court.”

    Trump didn’t seem to be familiar with the details of Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s case or the Supreme Court’s decision.

    “I’m not totally well-versed as to the specific case. If they said to bring him back, I would tell them to bring him back,”

    Rando 1: “Stephen Miller is the actual president right now.”

    Rando 2: “I, for one, think it’s very smart to admit you could bring Garcia back whenever you wanted while the rest of your administration is teeing up to pretend it’s not possible. Genius play, Mr. President.”

  40. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Politico – Inside the DOGE immigration task force

    Key DOGE engineers now embedded at DHS include Kyle Schutt, Edward Coristine, (aka “Big Balls”) and Mark Elez […] At least two others, Aram Moghaddassi and Payton Rehling also have access to DHS data
    […]
    They are providing the technical infrastructure for a sweeping set of actions aimed at revoking parole, terminating visas, and later on, reengineering the asylum adjudication process

     
    Nicole Micheroni:

    Department of Homeland Security has given me, an immigration lawyer born in Newton, Massachusetts, seven days to leave the U.S. [Screenshots of an email]

    Aaron Reichlin-Melnick (American Immigration Council):

    I’m not kidding; this is DOGE at work; multiple US citizens getting notices that they just leave the country because USCIS is revoking their humanitarian parole.

    Incompetence. Some DOGE person who clearly didn’t understand the DHS systems automated mass termination notices in a way that ended up sending them to multiple people who are 1) immigrants who don’t have parole, or 2) are US citizens.

    This is an administration so hell-bent on stripping immigrants of legal status as fast as they can they they’re not even bothering to make sure they notify the right people before sending out “leave the country” messages.

    Rando: “Not the biggest issue here but this email reads like a scam phishing attempt.”
     
    Josh Marshall (TPM): “Did they somehow mix up the paroled immigrant with the lawyers of record? epic spreadsheet fail?”

    Keith Olbermann: “I’m surprised she wasn’t tariffed.”

    Rando: “She was, but the mail ended up at the other Italian’s mailbox.”
     
    Aaron Reichlin-Melnick:

    many […] got threatening emails last night terminating “your parole” and telling them to leave the US in 7 days. There’s a big [reddit thread] of baffled people on Reddit trying to figure out what the emails mean or if they’re real. They include: Citizens, Canadians (living in Canada), Green card holders, DACA recipients. Whatever dataset DOGE used was the wrong one.

    Needless to say, even if they admit error and take it back, this is the kind of thing that can send a lot of fear through communities. The government has a responsibility to slow down and make sure it gets it right in each case. There is a reason we have procedures for things.

    There is no reason to believe this is a scam. Thousands of people got it in the last 24 hours. It is reportedly part of their ongoing effort to strip hundreds of thousands of humanitarian parole.

    They aren’t even sending letters by mail. It’s just an email, and it’s being sent to wrong people too.

    Rando: “One of the coolest things right now is that people cannot reasonably determine between what is a government action and what is a scam.”

    Rando: “The cruelty of the Stasi with the blundering inefficiency of a telemarketing robocall.”

    Rando: “The scariest thing is Soc Sec may have categorized [Nicole Micheroni] as dead and revoked SSN.”

    Rando: “I love love love how we now know that ‘but I’m a citizen, this is an administrative error’ isn’t necessarily enough to stop you from getting disappeared to a foreign gulag, maybe permanently?”

    Rando: “Terry Gilliam should sue this Administration for copyright infringement.”

    Rebecca Williams (ACLU lawyer): “This is like adding the wrong person to the Signal chat but sadder.”

  41. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Bree Bridges (Novelist):

    There is something just really difficult to describe about how exhausting it is to be in a situation where they are doing the most evil they can imagine but always in the most bizarrely incompetent ways that do confusing bonus evil no one even knows how to cope with.

    It’s like we’re in a fight to the death with a drunk clown, and what is worse the drunk clown is kind of winning. And you know the drunk clown is going to pass out eventually, but like how many people will they have taken out before they finally fall over.

    How do you even prepare for “today a fake government agency named after an internet dog meme tried to deport a Canadian who is already in Canada”? What?!

    And even when we finally knock the drunk clown out, we have to look at everyone else in the room who is like “uhhh we were just having a scrabble night and YOU brought a drunk clown to the party who started trying to stab everyone” and can’t blame them for not inviting you to game night anymore.

  42. StevoR says

    SpaceX astronaut & billionaire Jared Isaacman is actually standing up for the Artemis program against SpaceX boss, nazi and leading contender for worlds biggest douchebag Elon Musk :

    The incoming head of NASA has boldly defied Elon Musk with a promise to finally put humans on the moon again. …(Snip).. the former fighter jet pilot (Isaacman – ed) shared that he intends to prioritize the Artemis program to return astronauts to the moon while also working on ‘sending American astronauts to Mars’ too. … (Snip).. Answering questions in Congress, he (Isaacman – ed) said: “I’d like nothing more than to see this Artemis 2 crew get around the Moon and then they’re back at home watching their friends walk on the Moon.

    Source : https://www.uniladtech.com/science/space/nasa-jared-isaacman-musk-artemis-program-moon-289799-20250410

    Artemis would also put the first woman and people of colour on the Moon too – no doubt further infuriating the nazis like Musk & Trump.

  43. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    BBC – British man’s tattoo wrongly linked to Venezuelan gang

    A tattoo belonging to a man from Derbyshire has appeared in a US government document used to identify members of a notorious Venezuelan gang—despite the man having no connection to the group. […] Mr Belton’s tattoo—a clock face with the date and time of his daughter’s birth—was included in a set of nine images for “detecting and identifying” TdA members. […] his family have considered cancelling their trip to the US due to the potential risks

    * An earlier comment covered the point system with the tattoo.

  44. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    WaPo – DOGE takes over federal grants website

    The changes to the process—which will allow DOGE to review and approve proposed grant opportunities across the federal government—threaten to further delay or even halt billions of dollars
    […]
    Federal agencies […] historically have posted their grant opportunities directly to the site. Nonprofits, universities and local governments respond […] with applications to receive federal funding for activities that include cancer research, cybersecurity, highway construction and wastewater management.

    But a DOGE engineer recently deleted many federal officials’ permissions to post grant opportunities, without informing them […] [Agency officials] have been instructed to email their planned grant notices to […] DOGE

    Martin Pfeiffer (PoliSci): “This is of course illegal, invalid, illegitimate, & violates statutory & regulatory procedures.”

  45. JM says

    New Republic: Um, It Turns Out No One at the Ports Is Collecting Trump’s Tariffs

    U.S. shippers told the news outlet that they have not been charged higher tariff rates on their containers as recently as Thursday, despite Trump’s claims that tariffs are in effect and are being collected. This latest snafu is on top of the fact that many companies and industry groups are still unsure of when tariffs will be collected, especially since Trump keeps changing the rates erratically in social media posts and executive orders, and making new threats almost daily.

    Technical problems with applying the tariffs have resulted in no new tariffs being applied at ports. Combined with confusion over what tariffs actually apply due to constantly changing exemptions making the customs officials nervous about applying any yet. The government says things will be straightened out within 10 days but who actually knows, if there are actual software problems it could take some time.
    The article doesn’t note it but some companies have begun increasing prices even though they are not paying tariffs yet. Can’t entirely blame them though because when the tariffs will kick in and at what rate is highly unclear.

  46. birgerjohansson says

    Phil Moorhouse / A Different Bias:

    “Trump Playing into China’s Hands”
    .https://youtube.com/watch?v=sqFfdgywFRo
    China has planned for a trade war for many years. Trmp has done no “planning” per se. Both countries will suffer but China will ride it out. And other nations will orient their trade towards China. Trmp has accomplished what Dubya started.

  47. Reginald Selkirk says

    Military Mission for Sealing the Southern Border of the United States and Repelling Invasions

    NATIONAL SECURITY PRESIDENTIAL MEMORANDUM/NSPM-4

    MEMORANDUM FOR THE SECRETARY OF DEFENSE
    THE SECRETARY OF THE INTERIOR
    THE SECRETARY OF AGRICULTURE
    THE SECRETARY OF HOMELAND SECURITY

    SUBJECT: Military Mission for Sealing the Southern Border of the United States and Repelling Invasions

    As the Chief Executive and Commander in Chief, the United States Constitution empowers me to direct the various elements of the executive branch to protect our homeland and ensure the territorial integrity and sovereignty of the United States in the manner I deem most efficient and effective, consistent with applicable law.

    Oh? And when did you give a fuck about ‘applicable law’?

    Our southern border is under attack from a variety of threats. The complexity of the current situation requires that our military take a more direct role in securing our southern border than in the recent past. Through Executive Order 14167 of January 20, 2025 (Clarifying the Military’s Role in Protecting the Territorial Integrity of the United States), I assigned the Armed Forces of the United States the military missions of repelling the invasion and sealing the United States southern border from unlawful entry to maintain the sovereignty, territorial integrity, and security of the United States. This memorandum provides additional guidance on securing the southern border to the heads of certain executive departments…

    Dictator wannabee takes charge of the military. What could possibly go wrong‽

  48. StevoR says

    @44. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain : “Martin Pfeiffer (PoliSci): “This is of course illegal, invalid, illegitimate, & violates statutory & regulatory procedures.”

    Problem is who is enfocing the law and stopping them and holding DOGE accountable here? Seems like .. no one. So when the law is just ignored and treated with contempt.. what then? What now?

  51. StevoR says

    It’s been almost a month since South Australian authorities were first alerted to hundreds of dead marine life washing up at Waitpinga Beach and Parsons Beach on the Fleurieu Peninsula. Some beachgoers also reported seeing a white foam and said they were experiencing respiratory symptoms including coughing, sore eyes and blurry vision, after coming into contact with it.

    On March 25 — after a joint investigation between the Environment Protection Authority (EPA), the Department of Primary Industries and Regions South Australia (PIRSA), the Department for Environment and SA Health — it was confirmed that the deaths were as a result of a toxic microalgae.

    … (Snip)… Principle water quality adviser at SA Health David Cunliffe told ABC Radio Adelaide that the algae is not toxic to humans, but the department is advising people to avoid affected beaches.

    “We’re not advising people not to go into the water, what we are advising people though is to avoid those parts of the beach that are obviously discoloured or have the foam,” he said.

    Dr Cunliffe says there is no issue in humans consuming fish, as long as they are caught alive, but warned people not to “harvest dead fish or dead cockles for human consumption”.

    Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-04-11/sa-concern-fish-deaths-linked-to-algae-bloom/105151408

  52. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Re: StevoR @48:

    Problem is who is enfocing the law

    Deprived parties filing lawsuits, lots of lawsuits. And bringing embarrassing attention in the media—which occasionally works somehow, despite the total shamelessness among the powers that be.

    So when the law is just ignored and treated with contempt.. what then?

    There was an article last month about enforcing civil contempt (jail until compliance with a court order) via an obscure provision to deputize folks even if Marshals go rogue.

  54. StevoR says

    @ 52. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain : I wonder how trying a citizens arrest on Musk or even Trump would go, well, I guess Trump has the secret service but would that mean it couldn’t be tried? Guess not?

  55. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Related to the threatening DHS DOGE emails @40:

    WaPo – Judge will halt Trump administration from ending humanitarian parole

    “The nub of the problem here is that the secretary, in cutting short the parole period afforded to these individuals, has to have a reasoned decision,” […] Last month, the administration revoked legal protections […] setting them up for potential deportation in 30 days.

    They arrived with financial sponsors, applying online and paying their own airfare for two-year permits to live and work in the U.S. During that time, the beneficiaries needed to find other legal pathways if they wanted to stay longer in the U.S. Parole is a temporary status.
    […]
    U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani said she would issue a stay on an order for more than 500,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans to leave the country, sparing them until the case advances to the next phase. Their permits were to be canceled April 24.

  56. StevoR says

    Celebrity spaceflight but maybe it will still help promote science and do some good :

    Katy Perry is about to blast off like a firework on her Blue Origin rocket launch this Monday.

    (Umm.. WHAT!? Hope not. Has the writer of that ever seen what fireworks do! -ed)

    Blue Origin will launch its eleventh crewed flight on April 14, with pop star Katy Perry strapping into the New Shepard space capsule alongside five other passengers, all of them women. The mission, NS-31, will be the first all-female crew since the Soviet Union’s Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space during a solo flight in 1963.

    “Im really excited about the engineering of it all,” Perry told the Associated Press, adding that she’s been listening to Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos” and reading about string theory. “I’ve always been interested astrophysics and interested in astronomy (cool!) and astrology (groan. Grrr.. ) and the stars.” You can watch Blue Origin’s Katy Perry launch on Space.com and our YouTube channel.

    “I feel like we are all made of stardust and we all come from the stars, and it will be exciting to see them twinkle from that site,” (Um, clearly katy doesn’t know what cuases scintillation. Still..) Perry told the AP. “And also have an appreciation for Mother Earth when we see it in that way.”

    Source : https://www.space.com/space-exploration/private-spaceflight/im-really-excited-about-the-engineering-of-it-all-katy-perry-is-psyched-for-her-blue-origin-launch-on-april-14

    Brackets added.

  57. says

    https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show

    No other rhyme or reason’: Trump-inflicted damage to Social Security points to system’s destruction
    Video is 5:09 minutes

    Trump education secretary embarrassingly out of touch on artificial intelligence
    Video is 3:34 minutes

    How is it possible that you have this job?’: RFK Jr.’s incompetence becomes too glaring to overlook
    Video is 11:17 minutes

  58. StevoR says

    Two Texas senators have introduced legislation that would strip the Smithsonian of the retired space shuttle Discovery and send it to Houston for display. … (Snip).. U.S. Senators John Cornyn (R-TX) and Ted Cruz (R-TX) on Thursday (April 10) introduced the “Bring the Space Shuttle Home Act,” which directs NASA to take Discovery from the national collection and its Virginia home of the past 13 years and deliver it to official visitor center for NASA’s Johnson Space Center.

    Source : https://www.space.com/space-exploration/space-shuttle/texas-senators-move-space-shuttle-discovery-from-smithsonian-to-houston

    Nice to see that the Repug pollies keep focusing on reducing the cost of groceries ain’t it?

    / Does this really need a sarc tag?

  60. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Re: StevoR @54:

    I wonder how trying a citizens arrest on Musk or even Trump would go

    That merely delivers them to police. Prosecutors can simply decline to follow through. Wikipedia says states vary, applicable for probable cause of felonies (state-level DC might require crimes be committed in the citizen’s presence; else aiding a real officer with authorization to arrest), generally permitting non-deadly force to restrain. An attorney on StackExchange said a “citizen’s arrest statute is usually a defense to state false imprisonment or assault charges”, so fed arrest is apparently a hypothetical?

    Presidential immunity would make nearly any attempt a false arrest, which would punish the citizen, on top of whatever force their security details used in resisting the attempt. OTOH, resisting a citizen’s arrest isn’t a crime, but could result in assault charges for the arestee if it turned out to be a lawful arrest, or needlessly violent defense.

    Their own destructive lifestyle choices are a bigger threat to them.

  61. says

    Trump Anoints Himself With The Power To Secretly Repeal Regulations

    No longer content to simply rip up the federal government, […] Trump is now reaching into the past to undo agency regulations by fiat.

    “In effectuating repeals of facially unlawful regulations, agency heads shall finalize rules without notice and comment,” read Wednesday’s presidential memo, using a narrow exception in the Administrative Procedure Act to do away with requirements that alert the public to the government’s actions.

    “Facially unlawful” seems to mean “anything that doesn’t jive with the Trumpist vision.”

    In legitimizing this silent erasure, Trump cites recent Supreme Court cases including Loper Bright v. Raimondo, which dealt a death blow to agency deference but was explicitly future-oriented and not permitted to be retroactively applied to old regulations.

    Because everything Trump does exists on the malicious-to-dumb spectrum, this plan appeared obliquely in, of all places, an executive order about water pressure in showerheads. […]

    Buried in the order: “Notice and comment is unnecessary because I am ordering the repeal.” Well, okay then!

    Even its most ardent soldiers couldn’t have wished for more in the war against the administrative state — DOGE and the Trump administration, with likely coming assists from the Supreme Court, have hobbled executive branch agencies, decimated decades of expertise and slashed critical funding nearly across the board.

    Trump has successfully made government jobs unstable and unattractive, guaranteeing that future would-be star feds will look elsewhere (absent major reforms); he’s now trying to eviscerate the work done before his administration’s reign of destruction, seeking to totally blot out agencies and the protections they afford.

  62. says

    The State Department’s interpretation of a recent Trump executive order on supporting Christians who work in the federal government involves Marco Rubio asking State Department employees to snitch on their coworkers — specifically about supposedly anti-Christian behaviors that occurred under Antony Blinken.

    Politico obtained a copy of an internal cable that was sent to embassies around the globe, under Rubio’s name, announcing that the State Department would begin collecting information about any instances of colleagues displaying “anti-Christian bias” and information “involving anti-religious bias during the last presidential administration.” The information will reportedly be collected via an anonymous tip form.

    “Reports should be as detailed as possible, including names, dates, locations (e.g. post or domestic office where the incident occurred,” the cable said.

    Per Politico:

    Some State Department officials reacted to the cable with shock and alarm, saying that even if well-intentioned, it is based on the flawed premise that the department harbors anti-Christian bias to begin with, and warning it could create a culture of fear as the administration pushes employees to report on one another.

    “It’s very ‘Handmaid’s Tale’-esque,” said one State Department official, who was granted anonymity because the individual was not allowed to speak openly about internal department affairs.

    Left-leaning Christian activists and religious freedom groups are already warning the directive will almost inevitably lead to discrimination against non-Christian religious groups and the LGBTQ community.

    Same link as in comment 61.

  63. StevoR says

    @60. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain : Ah. Thanks. Diosappointing but now I know. Is Presidential immunity a legal thiong or just convention here?

  64. says

    MAGA propaganda is a hell of a drug

    The Atlantic tells the story of Nicholas Gilbert, a farmer in upstate New York, near the Canadian border. He had just gotten a shipment of livestock feed with a $2,200 tariff surcharge attached.

    Gilbert cannot increase the price of the milk he sells, which is set by the local co-op. He cannot feed his cows less food. He cannot buy feed from another supplier; there aren’t any nearby, and getting it from farther away would be more expensive. When he got the delivery, he stared at the tariff for a while. Shouldn’t his Canadian supplier have been responsible for paying it?

    “I’m not even sure it’s legal! We contracted for the price on delivery! If your price of fuel goes up or your truck breaks down, that’s not my problem! That’s what the contract’s for.”

    Imagine thinking that the Canadian supplier was responsible for the import tax that President Donald Trump levied on the delivery.

    But Trump’s voters really believed him when he said that foreign countries would be the ones paying his tariffs. It never made sense, but they believed it. And now, Gilbert’s expenses are so high, he may soon be out of business.

    He should’ve known better, but propaganda is a hell of a drug.

    Take the case of Gustavo Garagorry, a proud Trump voter originally from Venezuela. He is angry at former President Joe Biden because his idol, Trump, is deporting his family.

    “The Democrats are always toying with migrants’ emotions. But they’ve not done anything but create chaos and make promises they can’t keep,” Garagorry, a naturalized U.S. citizen, said.

    Right, Democrats—who let his family in—can’t keep promises if you vote for Republicans instead.

    And it’s even worse than that. Garagorry blames Biden because, rather than a law, he used executive action to reform immigration, which could easily be undone.

    But why did Biden use executive action? Because the Republican Party refused to pass a comprehensive immigration reform bill. And why did they do that? Because Donald Fucking Trump told them to stop working with Democrats on a solution!

    But sure, blame Biden instead of Trump‚ the guy who is actually deporting your family!

    Propaganda is a hell of a drug. [social media post available at the link]

    “You better be right with your tariffs,” this guy says. “You just cost the middle class trillions. And have added a couple of years of extra work for people like me in our late 50’s before we can retire.”

    Sounds terrible, right? His retirement decimated, needing to work years more?

    “Still love your policies.”

    Translation: “I love how you are hurting other people, that part is great! But can you please hurt me less?”

    Propaganda is a hell of a drug.

  66. says

    From CNN

    Electronics imported to the United States will be exempt from President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs, according to a US Customs and Border Protection notice posted on Friday.

    Smartphones, computer monitors and various electronic parts are among the exempted products. The exemption applies to products entering the United States or removed from warehouses as early as April 5, according to the notice.

    The US CBP notice states:

    All products that are properly classified in these listed provisions will be excluded from the reciprocal tariffs imposed under Executive Order 14257, as amended, pursuant to Section 3(b)(iv) of that Order, effective for merchandise entered for consumption, or withdrawn from warehouse for consumption, on or after 12:01AM Eastern Daylight Time on April 5, 2025

    So basically, Trump knew he had to cave, but waited for a Friday night news dump to announce that he is caving. All goods classified as electronics (in the specific categories listed out in the CBP notice) are exempt from the reciprocal tariffs.

    Roughly, the US imports from China total $400B, with electronics about 30%. So roughly, $100B of Chinese imports are now exempt from reciprocal tariffs.

    The US exports about $120B worth of goods to China, and about $30B worth of services. All of those goods are now subject to Chinese reciprocal tariffs. And the services exports (travel, tourism, Chinese students studying in the USA etc) will likely drop down to close zero anyway.

    In essence, Trumps move will ensure that US exports to China drops down to close to zero, while we continue to import our Gameboys, and our Nintendos… and our iPhones etc. from China.

    This is a genius move, I tell you. Art of the deal !!

    Link

  67. StevoR says

    One-quarter of a million Palestinians who called Rafah home can no longer have access to it.

    Strategically speaking, this also means the two main crossings connecting the Gaza Strip to the world – the Karem Abu Salem (Kerem Shalom) crossing for commercial goods and humanitarian assistance and the Rafah border with Egypt, which allows people to leave or enter the enclave – are now off limits.

    They’re beyond Palestinians’ reach and that tightens the Israeli siege even more. It also means Palestinians, 2.1 million of them, are now squeezed into about one-third of Gaza.

    The UN estimates about 66 percent of Gaza is already off limits to Palestinians.

    Source : https://www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblog/2025/4/12/live-dozens-of-israeli-attacks-kill-only-women-children-in-gaza-un

  68. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Re: StevoR @63:

    Is Presidential immunity a legal thing

    Thanks to SCOTUS, if Trump does crimes as part of his president duties, he’s untouchable or nearly so. Evidence can be made unusable by cloaking it behind official communications. If he does crimes on the side while president, it’s up to a judge whether he’s immune.

    Wikipedia – Presidential immunity in the United States

    On July 1, 2024, the Supreme Court ruled in Trump v. United States that presidents have absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for those official acts which fall within their “exclusive sphere of constitutional authority”. For those official acts that do not fall within this inner core, but nevertheless within “the outer perimeter of his official responsibility”, a president enjoys at least a presumptive immunity. When it comes to unofficial acts, there is no immunity. The case was returned to the lower courts to determine whether Trump’s actions related to the January 6, 2021, attacks on the U.S. Capitol were official or not, and if so, then to which degree of immunity they would be entitled.

  69. birgerjohansson says

    ‘You just found out’: US trade representative Jamieson Greer testifies before the House as Trump announces tariff pause 
    .https://youtube.com/watch?v=49spQ-KM3UU
    Soo… In the morning as he prepared for the House hearings the plan was tariffs, then Treasure bonds start tanking, a few hours later the tariffs are paused. Totally according to plan. Art of rhe deal, nothing to see here.

  72. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Dave Levitan (Science journalist):

    Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who has required that he approve all contracts over certain thresholds personally, has over 5000 review requests on his desk. Apparently he approves around 15/day.

    NPR – NOAA contracts are being reviewed one by one

    They include maintenance and service contracts for facilities […] where the bathrooms are running out of toilet paper; a contract for translating emergency alerts into other languages, which lapsed last week; and web-hosting contracts for key agency websites that almost went dark last week.

    ProPublica – NOAA scientists are cleaning bathrooms and reconsidering lab experiments after contracts for basic services expire

    The floors are getting dirty and workers have no access to vacuums or mops. Some scientists have bought their own soap and cleaning supplies. […] “It’s making our work unsafe, and it’s unsanitary for any workplace,” but especially an active laboratory full of fire-reactive chemicals and bacteria
    […]
    safety services—which includes the staff who move laboratory waste off-campus to designated disposal sites […] The building maintenance team’s contract expired Wednesday, which decimated the staff that had handled plumbing, HVAC and the elevators. Other contacts lapsed in late March, leaving the Seattle lab with zero janitorial staff and a skeleton crew of IT specialists. […] no updates on when the contracts might be renewed […]
    “they’ve done the most inefficient things possible.”

     
    Podcast (MP3, RSS): ALAB – 31 DOJ and DOGE (1:20:33, Mar 7)
    Co-hosted by a former DoJ attorney.

    (1:01:00): If you want janitorial services, the government can’t have a janitor corps. […] If you thought that things were fucked up in national courts now, wait until they also have to clean their own toilets.

    (1:14:06): Legally the federal government is required to contract for any services that are not inherently governmental functions. This is straight out of the federal acquisition regulation; I think that’s also ensconced in statute. They can’t just do it themelves cuz they feel like it. […] It must go to private business.

    [DOGE announced] that it had cancelled a wasteful contract for watering plants in a government building, and that it would be doing the watering itself, which […] is probably illegal and almost certainly will never be done.

    What that ends up doing is […] to hand an enormous amount of power to the president […] where they go, “I’m just allowed to break contracts and stop paying and ruin those relationships, and you’ll have to take it up with the court of federal claims in 7 or 8 months.[“] If that legal theory is right, then the executive can just destroy government. Even something as simple as the impoundment arguments […] “Yeah, we’ll spend the money, as soon as we have a good contract […] gonna procure a new one.” You could just drag your feet on that.

  75. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Follow-up to 450, 456 in the last batch of 500.

    WaPo – Trump admin overrode Social Security staff to list immigrants as dead

    [25-year civil servant IT manager Greg Pearre] had clashed with Scott Coulter, the new chief information officer installed by Elon Musk. Pearre told Coulter that the plan was illegal, cruel and risked declaring the wrong people dead […] on Thursday, the security guards in Pearre’s office told him it was time to leave.
    […]
    Experts in government, consumer rights and immigration law said the administration’s action is illegal. Labeling people dead strips them of the privacy protections granted to living individuals—and knowingly classifying living people as dead counts as falsifying government records […] in addition to the harm inflicted on those suddenly declared dead, who become unable to legally earn a living wage or draw benefits they may be eligible for.
    […]
    Anybody granted the appropriate permissions within Social Security could mark someone as dead, employees had realized, without having to prove their demise in any way […] In emails and meetings that rose up the management chain, employees warned that the dataset was vulnerable to manipulation […] Employees’ fear was partly that a bad actor who gained access to government credentials could label groups of living individuals as dead to target them for punishment […] Management indicated they were looking into the matter […] But no solution was enacted. […] Around the same time [DHS and DOGE] arrived at the agency.

    [Leland Dudek had qualms about editing deaths.] Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem intervened—and Dudek agreed to move forward. […] The next day, 6,100 mostly Hispanic names and their attached Social Security numbers were added
    […]
    The White House told The Post that […] all have links to either terrorist activity or criminal records. The official did not provide evidence […] The immigrants added to the death database include a 13-year-old, a 14-year-old and two 16-year-olds—as well as one person in their 80s and a handful in their 70s […] agency staff have since checked the names and Social Security numbers of some of the youngest immigrants against data the agency typically uses to search for criminal history and found no evidence of crimes or law enforcement interactions
    […]
    Within Social Security, the general counsel’s office is preparing an opinion that will find [this was] a violation of privacy law […] a group of unions and an advocacy organization […] argued in a new court filing that the agency had violated a temporary restraining order blocking DOGE from the agency’s systems with personally identifiable information by adding names

  76. JM says

    @63 StevoR: Under the US constitution the President is largely immune from regular prosecution while in office and as CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain notes, the Supreme court has recently made that nearly total. Instead Congress is supposed to take care of that through impeachment and removal from office.

  77. says

    Good news: Some Climate Nice Time

    […] et’s do another Climate Nice Time, not because we’re whistling past the graveyard and refusing to acknowledge the abyss, but because staring into that sucker all the time is exhausting.

    The rapid growth of renewable energy in the last couple decades, especially the proliferation of solar, which has become almost ridiculously inexpensive, means that in 2024, a bit more than 40 percent of the world’s electricity came from carbon-free sources. That’s according to the latest annual review of world electricity by the clean-energy thinktank Ember, which looked at electricity use and generation data in 215 countries, not one of which is an island populated only penguins.

    While solar has been the fastest-growing source of clean energy for 20 years running, all solar (both grid-scale power plants and rooftop home installations) still provides only seven percent of world electricity, with wind accounting for another eight percent. Thing is, those percentages keep growing, while the two top sources of carbon-free electricity, hydroelectric (14 percent) and nuclear (nine percent) have remained fairly static. Other renewable sources like geothermal, biomass, and tidal energy account for another three percent; the growth of enhanced geothermal in the next decade is almost certain to take it out of the “other” category […]

    The Ember study notes that total solar generation has doubled in the last three years, and about half of that new solar has come online in China, which is beating the pants off the rest of the world in deploying clean energy.

    Ember had previously predicted that the world’s emissions from electricity would peak in 2023 and begin declining after that, but a series of deadly heatwaves around the world that year boosted air conditioning use and therefore electricity demand past the growth of clean energy, also increasing fossil fuel generation by about 1.4 percent. […] Even if we don’t see a similar outbreak of heatwaves, increasing demand from data centers and for charging EVs means it remains critical to install as much new renewable energy as possible to keep up. Happily, the rest of the world doesn’t have That Man running it. [Guardian source link]

    Here’s just one of the energy success stories that contributed to the growth in clean energy: Germany has in the last few years seen a small revolution in solar panels that can be mounted right on apartment balconies. Unlike rooftop systems that are meant for homeowners, balcony solar is meant to be easily installed by renters, and the basic equipment can be bought online or even in supermarkets. Hell yeah, energy solutions for renters!

    They start at around 500 Euros (around $570) for a simple system. In Germany, […] government incentives also help with the purchase price. The systems include a “microinverter” that converts the panels’ DC output to AC home current, and plugs right into the wall. Regulations limit balcony systems’ output to 800 watts, because grid strain problems could result from lots of folks plugging more powerful systems into apartment walls. Still, it’s enough to power a small fridge or charge a laptop, [and] the cumulative effect is nudging the country toward its clean energy goals while giving apartment dwellers, who make up more than half of the population, an easy way to save money and address the climate crisis.

    Then there’s the sense of shared community involvement in doing one’s part: Neighbors see those panels and want to know more, and as renter Matthias Weyland said of his balcony solar setup,

    “I love the feeling of charging the bike when the sun is shining, or having the washing machine run when the sun is shining, and to know that it comes directly from the sun. […] It’s a small step you can take as a tenant.”

    […] Thanks in part to the incentives in Joe Biden’s climate law, but also because solar is so friggin’ cheap, a whopping 96 percent of new energy capacity in 2024 was carbon-free. Here, have a nice chart from Canary Media: [chart at the link]

    Solar installations dominated power plant additions — 34 gigawatts of utility-scale solar were constructed across the U.S., a 74 percent jump from 2023’s record-high year. Texas and California drove most of this surge.

    Grid batteries were the next-biggest new source of power capacity — and saw the fastest growth. The U.S. built 13 GW of energy storage last year, almost double 2023’s record-shattering 6.6 GW. Texas and California led the way here as well.

    The amount of new wind resources coming online dropped for the fourth straight year, however. The pandemic’s supply chain disruptions, followed by high inflation and the Fed’s high interest rates meant to combat inflation, really did a number on wind, far more than on solar and storage. Wind has also been hit hard by the slow process of connecting new generation capacity to the grid, a huge problem for all new energy. Donald Trump’s bizarre hatred of wind is likely to seriously slow wind growth in the US in the next few years, as will astroturfed rightwing opposition in red states. […]

    We still need to do a good deep dive on just how idiotic Trump’s “energy emergency” declaration is, since it leaves out renewables, the least expensive and fastest-growing energy sector, for the sake of trying to boost fossil fuels — even as his idiotic tariffs will play hell with fossil fuel prices, too! But today is climate nice time, so that deep dive remains on our to-do list.

    Hey, speaking of nice, here’s another fun fact, also from Canary Media and Ember: March was pretty sunny and windy in the USA, and that meant that for the first time ever, America’s energy grid had more clean energy on it than electricity generated by fossil fuels. […]

    Two years ago, Helsinki, Finland, decided to ditch coal power, which at the time made up 64 percent of the city’s electric power. The effort to reach the decision took a decade, but once made, it’s gone into effect quickly. Thanks to being ideally situated for wind power (resulting in absurdly low electric rates that approached zero Euros per kilowatt hour) and having a huge distributed heating system that warms homes and businesses with hot water pipes, Helsinki has largely shut down the coal plants that it used to run on. [Fast Company (paywalled); archive link. Links available at the main link.]

    For Earth Day (April 26) this month, 54 streets in New York City will be closed to cars so people can stroll and bike and generally see what living without cars could look like. It’s a one-day cleaner, quieter, Euro-style […] celebration that the city has been doing since 2016!

    […] plastic pollution along Australia’s coastlines has dropped nearly 40 percent since 2013, and the sea turtles and people walking and doing recreation On the Beach are pretty damn glad to see it. The number of surveyed sites that had no plastic debris at all increased by an impressive 16 percent in the same period […]

  78. says

    https://www.wonkette.com/p/social-security-will-exclusively

    Social Security Will Exclusively Use X To Tell You That You’re Too Dead To Get Benefits

    […] As we have noted, one does not need those benefit cuts to accomplish the longtime conservative goal of yeeting Social Security into the sun. One can simply fire lots of SSA employees, close lots of offices, and make communicating with the agency over the phone or through its website all but impossible.

    Now add making the virtual pigsty formerly known as Twitter but now known as X the only way the Social Security Adminstration will communicate with the media and the public to the pile. The agency announced this week that X will be its exclusive communications platform from now until whenever sanity returns to our government. […]

    Wired reports that the SSA’s regional commissioner, Linda Kerr-Davis, broke the news to agency managers this week. Since the managers are closer to the agency’s customers and know their needs and abilities, this announcement led to sensible questions like What the fuck and No, seriously, what the fuck:

    “Do they really expect senior citizens will join this platform?” asked one current employee. “Most managers aren’t even on it.”

    Hey Grandma, want to keep abreast of all the latest SSA initiatives to help you access your benefits or avoid scammers? Great! We hope you don’t mind doomscrolling through page after page of Nazi slop […] first!

    Imagine trying to get information about Social Security while being bombarded with tweets about how awful Social Security is and why people who need it and other government services like Medicare and SNAP are a bunch of lazy freeloaders who are taking money away from you so they can buy iPhones and pot. Basically X is trying to indoctrinate you against the program that you have to go to X to find any information about.

    It is a dumb and possibly illegal idea for many reasons, as the writer Anil Dash pointed out: [social media post is available at the main link. “This is, in addition to very obviously denying people benefits and clearly excluding the vast majority of seniors, a violation of federal law on accessibility, especially since X requires users to log in and agree to the terms of service to see published content.”]

    […] The Trump administration does not expect senior citizens to join X. It expects senior citizens who rely on Social Security so they don’t have to spend their golden years living in a hobo camp to become confused, then angry, then discouraged, then resigned to losing their benefits and dying so the government doesn’t have to pay them anymore.

    […] the Trump administration also announced it will use the death index to start cancelling Social Security numbers of very much alive immigrants who obtained them lawfully when they came to America and began working. […] The idea is that these people, cut off from being able to access financial or government services without an SSN, will self-deport back to their home countries. […]

    Above all, this use of X is a massive gift to Elon Musk. He now gets millions of users for his dying site, elderly users who are more prone to fall for the sorts of scammers that proliferate unchecked on Twitter. He also gets massive numbers of new potential customers for companies that might want to buy advertising space on X.

    […] late on Friday, either someone was seized by his first-ever ethical thought, or (more likely) as the senator says, someone noticed what the children at DOGE were doing and stepped in. [social media post, including a repost from Social Security: “This is false. Social Security will continue to communicate through and any all mediums.”] […]

    What is true? What is not true? What will DOGE change? And when? Nobody knows.

  79. Reginald Selkirk says

    ‘People might treat us differently’: Trump era leaves US tourists in Paris feeling shame

    … But earlier that morning, on their very first trip to France, Rick, 74, had taken an unusual precaution.

    Before leaving his hotel, he’d taken a small piece of black tape and covered up the Stars and Stripes flag on the corner of his baseball cap…

    Barbara, 70, even had a Canadian lapel pin in her pocket – a gift from another tourist – which she thought might come in useful if further subterfuge proved necessary…

    “It’s a big drop,” said Philippe Gloaguen, the founder of France’s most prestigious travel guides, Le Guide du Routard, sitting behind a cluttered desk in Paris and noting that orders for his books about the US had fallen by 25% so far this year…

  80. Reginald Selkirk says

    US seeks release of ex-FBI informant who admitted fabricating Biden claims

    U.S. prosecutors plan to review the case of a former FBI informant who admitted to fabricating bribery claims against former President Joe Biden and his son Hunter, according to a court filing on Friday.

    The disclosure came as prosecutors, together with defense lawyers for the informant, Alexander Smirnov, asked a federal judge to release him from prison while he appeals a six-year prison sentence.

    “The United States intends to review the government’s theory of the case underlying Defendant’s criminal conviction,” prosecutors wrote in a filing in Los Angeles federal court.

    The move is the latest by the U.S. Justice Department during the Trump administration to review or dismiss cases against supporters of President Donald Trump or those who aided conservative causes.

    Smirnov pleaded guilty in December to causing the creation of a false record after falsely telling his FBI handler years earlier that he had knowledge of bribes paid by executives at a Ukrainian energy company to Joe and Hunter Biden. He also admitted to tax evasion…

  81. Reginald Selkirk says

    Staffers Walk Out of RFK Jr.’s Slur-Ridden Speech About Deep State

    Robert F. Kennedy Jr. stunned FDA staff Friday with a 40-minute tirade featuring a disability slur, “deep state” conspiracy theories, and accusations they are shills for the industries they regulate.

    During his bonkers rant to employees at the Food and Drug Administration, Kennedy, an anti-vaccine crusader and Trump appointee, dropped the slur “r—-ded” when referring to Wassaic State School, a former institution for people with developmental disabilities that once included the word in its name…

  82. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Joshua Friedman (Columbia mag):

    [In a filing] A US State Department official tells Judge Xinis that Kilmar Abrego Garcia is alive and being held in the CECOT prison, “detained pursuant to the sovereign, domestic authority of El Salvador”.

    […] omits any mentions of steps, past or future, to retrieve him.

    […] the Trump administration continues to insist that it has no direct control over Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s captivity. (But IMO it’s too early to conclude that the govt will never take any steps to return him.)

    Rando: “from an administration that has been gleefully chanting ’51st state’ at our friends to the north.”

    Anna Bower: “Garcia’s counsel has filed a motion for the government to show cause as to why it should not be held in contempt”

    Eric Columbus: “Abrego Garcia’s new motion wisely begins by flagging Trump’s comment yesterday that he would bring Abrego Garcia back if SCOTUS told him to. [‘that is precicely what SCOTUS did’]”
     
    Anna Bower (Lawfare):

    [Screenshot from TruthSocial]
    Trump now saying—contrary to his previous statements and those of federal officials—that people removed from the U.S. to El Salvador are in the “sole custody” of El Salvador. [Screenshot]

    Joshua Erlich (Civil rights lawyer): “Are we really paying them? If so, what is the bargain? What happens if we stop paying?”

    Pwnallthethings: “Exciting to find out if it is legal to somehow constructively detain someone in a rube goldberg machine designed so that they cannot file for habeas relief.”

    Chris Geidner (Law Dork):

    That’s why they didn’t just send these people to Gitmo. This is an attempt to find a step beyond Gitmo where the court says, “Well, our hands are tied.” It’s an awful, lawless gambit that must fail, but that is what they want it to be.

    This is what Sotomayor has been writing about. [Screenshots]

    Michael Dorf (ConLaw professor):

    Various Trump administration officials have said, correctly, that the writ of habeas corpus does not run to El Salvador. But they have then said, incorrectly, that a federal district judge therefore can’t do anything. That’s not right.

    The unavailability of habeas doesn’t mean there’s no remedy. SCOTUS implicitly but unmistakably (and correctly) approved of the exercise of equitable jurisdiction here. Thus, Judge Xinis has the traditional powers of equity. These include ordering parties to make good faith efforts towards an end.
    […]
    Trump hates to look weak. If DOJ lawyers come back to court and say “we asked but Bukele said no,” the Trump admin will look weak. “A foreign leader whom the US is paying millions of dollars to detain migrants for the US told us to bugger off” is not credible and is a sign of weakness. […] The public campaign equating a failure to secure the return as weakness should start now.

    Someone else used that same implication to suggest the Venezuelans could potentially file habeas in the last US district they were in.

  83. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Guardian – Elon Musk’s xAI powering its facility in Memphis with ‘illegal’ generators

    [“]xAI is using 35 methane gas burning turbines[“] 420MW of electricity, enough to power an entire city. […] “xAI has essentially built a power plant in South Memphis with no oversight, no permitting, and no regard for families living in nearby communities,”
    […]
    It appears the company found a loophole in the system that allows it to use the gas generators as long as they’re not in the same location for more than 364 days. […] these generators are running 24/7 and pump harmful nitrogen oxides into the air. […] This area is historically Black and has higher rates of cancer and asthma and a lower life expectancy than other parts of the city.

    Locals are raising their concerns with county officials.

  84. JM says

    @82 CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain:

    Various Trump administration officials have said, correctly, that the writ of habeas corpus does not run to El Salvador. But they have then said, incorrectly, that a federal district judge therefore can’t do anything. That’s not right.

    I don’t think the Trump lawyers have thought this one through. The government may not take actions that deprive people of their rights. If being sent to El Salvador means giving up rights then the US government can not forcibly send anybody there ever.

  85. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Trump slammed for ‘covertly’ withholding FEMA funds from blue states

    In March, U.S. District Judge John McConnell issued a preliminary injunction in favor of 23 states that sued the government over its plan to implement a broad pause to state aid.
    […]
    But on Friday, McConnell found the Trump administration in breach of the court’s order. At least 19 states […] not receiving congressionally approved FEMA funding
    […]
    The Trump administration had claimed that FEMA was merely implementing a new manual review process for allocated funding […] McConnell ruled that, in effect, this amounts to an “indefinite pause.”
    […]
    McConnell added the government appears to be withholding the funds “covertly” in accordance with President Donald Trump’s Jan. 20 executive order that, in part, ensures that sanctuary states don’t receive federal aid.
    […]
    He ordered FEMA to “immediately cease” its manual review process and to comply with his original court order. The states didn’t yet seek to hold the Trump administration defendants in contempt

  87. rorschach says

    Was going to put this in the FtB & Social Media thread, but thought maybe here is the better place. I can thoroughly recommend The Sunday Shot, an Australian video podcast run by Dave Milner and Jo Dyer, that looks into issues related to the upcoming Australian federal election. It runs at 9am AEST, and the latest issue dealt with the Atlas network, and the connections between American and Australian right-wing thinktanks, their backgrounds and their agendas.

    Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIpLPbsvttg

  88. Reginald Selkirk says

    Crosswalks in Silicon Valley hacked to play satirical messages from Musk and Zuckerberg sound-a-likes

    A number of Silicon Valley crosswalks were hacked to sound like U.S. big-tech broligarchs, according to reports published by local media this weekend. Palo Alto Online reports that folks pressing crosswalk wait buttons in Redwood City, Menlo Park, and Palo Alto areas heard messages featuring Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg sound-a-likes. It isn’t just the voices that have been changed – instead of the possibly useful warnings about traffic, vocal caricatures of these famous tech leaders deliver messages laced with satire.

    A spokesperson for the City of Palo Alto indicated that the crosswalk button hacking was limited to 12 locations downtown, and probably occurred sometime on Friday. Meanwhile, officials from Redwood City and Menlo Park (the two other areas known to be affected by the hacking) confirmed they were aware of and were working on fixing these voice hacks. However, we don’t have any indication of the number of crosswalks hacked in these other two areas…

    So, what were the satirical messages installed at crosswalks to ape Musk and Zuck? The source embedded several videos that showed the crosswalks with the messages being played.

    The Zuckerberg parody messages included one where he stated, “it’s normal to feel uncomfortable or even violated as we forcefully insert AI into every facet of your conscious experience. And I just want to assure you, you don’t need to worry because there’s absolutely nothing you can do to stop it.” Other Zuckerberg flavored messages feature jokes about “undermining democracy” and delivering “AI slop.”

    An example of a Musk sound-a-like message shared by Palo Alto Online was: “You know, people keep saying cancer is bad, but have you tried being a cancer? It’s f—— awesome.” Other messages tease Musk’s apparent readiness to pay folks to be his friends, and the Tesla and xAI boss’s singular conviction being to self-aggrandizement…

  91. says

    What does every Wall Street crash have in common?

    The lie that won’t die is that Republicans are better for the economy than Democrats. By every measure possible, that is just not correct. Republicans break shit, Democrats fix it, and voters reward them by ushering Republicans back in power. Lather, rinse, repeat.

    Now, the stock market is not “the economy,” and even boom times have seen economic decline for a significant percentage of people in the United States, particularly in its decaying rural regions. But the market is a proxy for strong economic performance, however inequitable it might be distributed.

    At that very least, there’s no scenario in which we have economic development without a strong market. If companies are to create jobs, there has to be a strong market—or investors, in anticipation—pumping money into that job growth.

    That’s all to say that Republicans are terrible for the job market. Just take a look at Wall Street’s 10 worst crashes:

    1) MARCH 12, 2020
    Republican Donald Trump was president, and the emergence of a deadly pandemic and ensuing shutdowns signaled a period of economic uncertainty. Rather than calm jittery markets, Trump suggested that people inject bleach (April 24, 2020) to cure COVID-19. The markets had every reason to panic. […]

    2) NOV. 20, 2008
    Republican George W. Bush was president when the subprime mortgage crisis took down the global economy. Years of Wall Street deregulation—cheered on by Republicans—created the conditions for this mess.

    3) APRIL 4, 2025
    Trump is president again, and here we are in a completely self-created and enabled crisis because Wall Street didn’t learn from the lessons of 2020, and their greed overrode all evidence that Trump is a disaster to not just our democracy but to global order. […]

    4) NOV. 6, 2008
    Bush done f’d stuff up.

    5) OCTOBER 15, 2008
    Same as #2 and #4, courtesy of Bush and his merry cabal of deregulators.

    6) OCTOBER 7, 2008
    Same same.

    7) MARCH 9, 2020
    Trump again.

    (8-10) OCTOBER 9, 10, AND 22, 2008
    Bush really made a mess of things, which makes it particularly maddening that people walked away thinking that Republicans knew anything about running an economy. Eight years of manufactured scandals against Democratic President Barack Obama really did a number in the United States, ushering in the age of Trump.

    It’s quite obvious that, once Trump’s tariffs have fully left their mark, 2025 will occupy far more than just one spot on this list.

    Other notable crashes?
    – Black Friday in October 1929, with Republican Herbert Hoover as president.
    – Post-9/11 market crash, with Bush as president.
    – Black Monday on October 19, 1987, with Republican President Ronald Reagan.

    It’s a Republican. Every. Single. Time.

  92. says

    […] Usually, investors in search of a haven from a plummeting stock market will flee to buy safe, reliable U.S. Treasury bonds, but the opposite seems to be happening, indicating that investors no longer view the U.S. government as the safest bet in town.

    […] as the Financial Times’ Tej Parikh pointed out earlier this week, the United States “isn’t the main driver of global trade growth,” and despite being the world’s largest economy, just over 13 percent of world imports flowed into its borders (as of November 2024). Instead of reshaping trade partnerships to further benefit the U.S., it could be left behind.

    One analysis Parikh cites—as something of a thought experiment, hopefully—tries to model what would happen to America’s trading partners if the country were to be fully closed to trade in 2025. That analysis predicts that, within the year, nearly 41 percent of U.S. trading partners would have fully recovered from the lost U.S. exports, and by 2029, 100 out of 144 trading partners would have recovered the entirety of their loss of U.S. sales because of the expected growth in other economies.

    Link

  93. says

    Jonathan Freedland of The Guardian

    […] As the Economist rightly observed, Trump relishes “being the focus of a planetary guessing game”. Trump used to get his dopamine hit from a mention in the gossip columns of the New York tabloids; now he’s tasted the thrill of commanding an audience in the billions and he’s hooked.

    But consider the price we are all paying. I don’t (only) mean those trillions of dollars wiped out at a stroke through tumbling stocks, or even the investments put on hold as businesses decide that, amid all this uncertainty, now is not the right time to open that new factory or launch that new product, thereby delaying, perhaps for ever, the jobs or wages that would have found their way to people who need them.

    Same link as in comment 92.

  94. says

    More than a dozen vaccination clinics were canceled in Pima County, Arizona.

    So was a media blitz to bring low-income children in Washoe County, Nevada, up to date on their shots.

    Planned clinics were also scuttled in Texas, Minnesota, and Washington, among other places.

    Immunization efforts across the country were upended after the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention abruptly canceled $11.4 billion in covid-related funds for state and local health departments in late March.

    A federal judge temporarily blocked the cuts last week, but many of the organizations that receive the funds said they must proceed as though they’re gone, raising concerns amid a resurgence of measles, a rise in vaccine hesitancy, and growing distrust of public health agencies.

    “I’m particularly concerned about the accessibility of vaccines for vulnerable populations,” former U.S. surgeon general Jerome Adams told KFF Health News. Adams served in President Donald Trump’s first administration. “Without high vaccination rates, we are setting those populations and communities up for preventable harm.”

    […] Measles is top of mind in Missouri, where a conference on strengthening immunization efforts statewide was abruptly canceled due to the cuts.

    The Missouri Immunization Coalition, which organized the event for April 24-25, also had to lay off half its staff, according to board president Lynelle Phillips. The coalition, which coordinates immunization advocacy and education across the state, must now find alternative funding to stay open.

    “It’s just cruel and unthinkably wrong to do this in the midst of a measles resurgence in the country,” Phillips said.

    Dana Eby, of the health department in New Madrid County, Missouri, had planned to share tips about building trust for vaccines in rural communities at the conference, including using school nurses and the Vaccines for Children program, funded by the CDC. […]

    Link

    More at the link.

  95. says

    On Saturday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) made a surprise pit stop while on the road for his “fighting oligarchy” tour with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) across the West. He appeared at the Coachella annual music festival.

    Sanders took the stage to introduce the singer Clairo, whom he praised for standing up for reproductive rights and speaking out against the war in Gaza. He then urged the crowd to get energized and fight back against President Donald Trump’s lawless, authoritarian agenda.

    “The future of what happens to America is dependent upon your generation,” Sanders told the crowd. “Now you can turn away, and you can ignore what goes on, but if you do that, you do it at your own peril. We need you to stand up, to fight… for economic justice, social justice, and racial justice.”

    Coming on the heels of Sen. Cory Booker’s (D-N.J.) recent marathon speech to Congress, Sanders’ music festival appearance is the latest high-profile attempt by a sitting member of Congress to rally opposition against Trump. […] Coachella’s audience, which tends to be mostly Gen Z and millennials according to one survey, is a crucial demographic for the Democrats. Sanders was not the only lawmaker at Coachella: he was introduced by Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.), the youngest member of Congress.

    Sanders got a warm welcome; Trump, not so much. Each time Sanders mentioned him, the crowd roared with boos. “I agree!” he replied at one point. The 83-year-old Sanders warned, in a roughly three-minute speech, of the threats Trump and the GOP pose to tackling climate change and improving abortion rights, worker’s rights, and access to equitable healthcare. […]

    Meanwhile, Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez have been hitting the road. He delivered the Coachella speech after making a stop earlier in the day in Los Angeles with the New York lawmaker. In a post on X, Sanders said the LA turnout was about 36,000 people, making it “our biggest rally ever.”

    Link

  96. says

    New York Times link

    “Russian Missile Attack on City Center Kills 34”

    “The midmorning strike hit as Ukrainians were celebrating Palm Sunday, officials said. It appeared to be the deadliest attack on civilians this year.”

    Two Russian ballistic missiles slammed into a bustling city center in northeastern Ukraine on Sunday morning, officials said, killing at least 34 people in what appeared to be the deadliest attack against civilians this year.

    The midmorning strike on the city of Sumy was the latest in a string of intensifying Russian attacks on urban centers in Ukraine that have inflicted heavy civilian casualties despite the Trump administration’s push for a cease-fire. [Not sure I would characterize what Trump is doing as pushing for a cease-fire. It’s more like Trump is pushing for Ukraine to submit to Russia’s demands.]

    Officials said the city center was crowded with civilians out enjoying Palm Sunday, a Christian celebration popular in Ukraine, when the missiles hit. Lively streets were turned into scenes of carnage: Video of the aftermath showed mangled and bloodied bodies laying motionless, burning cars and debris covering the road as screams and sirens wailed in the background.

    Two children were among the dead and at least 117 people were wounded, according to Ukraine’s emergency services.

    “People were harmed right in the middle of the street — in cars, on public transport, in their homes,” the interior minister, Ihor Klymenko, lamented on social media.

    Volodymyr Boiko, a 69-year-old Sumy resident, was riding in the back of a crowded bus when one of the missiles hit. He survived with cuts to his face, but said that those seated toward the front were not as lucky and took the full force of the blast. “It was just bodies, stacked on top of each other,” Mr. Boiko said.

    He compared the scene outside the bus to a “horror movie,” adding that “it was the first time in my life I saw people that mutilated.”

    The strikes came just over a week after a Russian missile hit near a playground in the central city of Kryvyi Rih, killing 19 people, including nine children. In that attack and in the one on Sunday, according to Ukrainian officials, Russia used ballistic missiles, which travel at high speeds, making them very difficult to shoot down.

    Overall, civilian deaths have increased since U.S.-mediated cease-fire talks began in March. The United Nations said last week that 164 civilians were killed in Ukraine last month, a 50 percent increase from February and 70 percent more than the same period a year earlier.

    President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine — who has accused Russia of using the cease-fire talks to stall for time — said the attack on Sumy showed that Moscow had no real interest in a cease-fire despite the Trump administration’s efforts to broker one. [True]

    “A strong reaction from the world is needed. From the United States, from Europe, from everyone in the world who wants this war and the killings to end,” Mr. Zelensky said in a message posted on Telegram. “Russia seeks exactly this kind of terror and is dragging out the war.” [True] […]

  97. says

    Followup to comment 64.

    Here are 90 people across Fox News and Fox Business who cheered Trump’s destructive tariffs

    On April 2, President Donald Trump announced various tariffs on nearly every country. A week later, he announced what he called a “pause” of some country-specific tariffs, while implementing a universal 10% import tax rate for 90 days on most goods, significantly raising import taxes on Chinese goods, and keeping new tariffs on Canada and Mexico for goods not covered by the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement.

    In the week between Trump’s April 2 announcement and the so-called pause, at least 90 people across Fox News and Fox Business, including 8 guests from the Trump administration and 16 Republicans in Congress, praised his tariff plan. […]

    Details at the link. Alarming.

  99. says

    Followup to comment 97.

    Republicans race to heap praise on Trump’s tariffs as economy spirals

    Republicans celebrated on Wednesday after […] Trump’s half-baked “pause” on his “Liberation Day” tariffs led the stock market to rise, calling Trump a “genius” and his trade war debacle the “art of the deal.”

    But those same Republicans had egg on their faces not even a day later, when the market once again plunged after investors realized that Trump’s 90-day “pause” wasn’t a pause at all, but rather a 10% tariff on nearly every country, as well as an insane 145% tariff on China.

    “I think America needs to recognize we’re in a remarkable moment. We have an actual genius of an entrepreneur and one that loves our country,” GOP Rep. Burgess Owens of Utah wrote on X on Wednesday.

    Owens did not amend his comment when the market tumbled not even 24 hours later, reflecting Trump’s chaotic tariff policy that amounts to a $4,000 tax hike on every U.S. household.

    Not to be upstaged by Owens, GOP Rep. Ronny Jackson of Texas—who once ridiculously claimed that Trump was the picture of health—posted on X that Trump is the “UNDISPUTED MASTER of the art of the deal!”

    “The days of America being taken advantage of by China and other nations are OVER! The Trump era is all about POWER and WINNING!” he wrote.

    According to the GOP, it’s considered “winning” when the stock market collapses just one day later.

    Meanwhile, GOP Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona agreed “100%” with a batshit-crazy X post from creepy White House adviser Stephen Miller.

    “You have been watching the greatest economic master strategy from an American President in history,” Miller wrote.

    And GOP Rep. Mike Lawler of New York posted a graphic on Wednesday declaring that the “stock market posts third biggest gain in post-WWII history.”

    Too bad that gain was nearly erased one day later. Not to mention, the temporary gain didn’t even make up what was lost after Trump’s “Liberation Day” anyway. [!!]

    Similarly, GOP Rep. Nicole Malliotakis of New York wanted in on the action of praising Dear Leader, scrounging up one of Trump’s X posts from 2014.

    “Deals are my art form. Other people paint beautifully or write poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals. That’s how I get my kicks,” he wrote.

    Also paying homage to Trump’s “The Art of the Deal,” GOP Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida posted a meme calling the short-lived stock market boost the “art of the deal.”

    Meanwhile, other GOP lawmakers have tried to criticize the few Republicans who have stood against Trump’s tariffs.

    “See? Trust the President. He understands trade and economics and NEGOTIATIONS better than his critics give him credit for. The critiques from certain Senate Republicans were premature, to say the least,” Rep. Dan Crenshaw of Texas wrote on X.

    The Republicans who have actually been right are those like Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, who have said that tariffs are bad because they are a tax on consumers and will lead us to economic calamity.

    “Tariffs raise the prices of goods and services. Even those who obstinately deny that basic fact will soon realize that the tariffs are a tax on the American people, whether while paying for groceries or looking at their investment portfolio,” Paul wrote in National Review op-ed.

    You know things are bad when Democrats agree with Rand Paul.

    The depth of delusion revealed by Republican comments praising Trump’s tariffs still startles me. JFC

  100. says

    Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) believes manufacturing “isn’t going to come” to the U.S. despite the Trump administration placing tariffs on countries to do so.

    Khanna, who represents Silicon Valley, joined CBS News’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday, where he said he doesn’t think manufacturing for technology will come to the United States and that it will instead go where there are lower tariffs.

    “Let’s say you suddenly put tariffs on China. What it would mean is the production would move to other parts of Asia. It still isn’t going to come here, unless you’re financing those factories here, willing to buy here,” Khanna said, pointing to the tech industry and semiconductor chips.

    Khanna argued that companies and production will shift away from China, which President Trump put a 125 percent tariff on, but instead go to India, Malaysia or Vietnam.

    “If you want to bring back the manufacturing to the United States, you have to invest in the workforce, you have to have some investment tax credit for the facilities, and you have to be able to buy the things we make in the United States,” he said. […]

    Link

  101. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    DOD issues guidance to advance civilian workforce overhaul

    The April 7 memo offers a simple litmus test for judging a position’s necessity.

    “If this position didn’t exist today, and we were at war tomorrow, would we create it?” the memo states. “If the answer is no, it should be consolidated, restructured, or eliminated.” […] every civilian role that doesn’t “directly enable lethality” should be “reclassified, outsourced, or removed”
    […]
    The memo also calls for the reduction of jobs with duplicate responsibilities, the elimination of reviews for a speedier “process,” reallocation of money that isn’t directly tied to “warfighter outcomes,” termination of civilian roles not tethered to operational priorities and leveraging of automation and artificial intelligence.

    Single points of failure are efficient!
    An idle military incapable of anything useful during peacetime.
    Outsourced, ka-ching!

  102. whheydt says

    Re: CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain @ #101…
    DoD used to contract for technical support personnel from companies that built things for them. That took place at least from the 1950s to the early 1970s. I know because my father held that sort of job, first with the Air Force and later with the Navy. Then it was decided that dropping the contracts and directly hiring (as Civil Service) would save money. My father was one of the ones that was hired. He kind of went full circle… He went into the Navy right out of High School in 1927 (for 6 years), and was a civilian employee of the Navy when he died in 1975.

  103. Reginald Selkirk says

    Pennsylvania governor and family evacuated from suspected arson attack on home

    Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro has said he and his family had to evacuate his official residence after it was set ablaze by a suspected arsonist.

    The Democrat, often touted as a future White House contender, said he woke up in the middle of the night to authorities banging on the door of the home as a fire spread.

    “Thank God no one was injured and the fire was extinguished,” Shapiro said in a statement on X on Sunday morning.

    The governor and state authorities say the fire was the act of an arsonist, though no arrests have been announced. No one was injured, Shapiro added…

  104. Reginald Selkirk says

    @103

    Pennsylvania police make arrest after suspected arson at governor’s mansion

    Police say a man has been arrested and will face charges, including attempted murder, terrorism and attempted arson, in an early morning fire that badly damaged the Pennsylvania governor’s mansion and forced Gov. Josh Shapiro and his family to quickly escape…

    Pennsylvania State Police Col. Christopher Paris identified the man in custody as Cody Balmer, 38, of Harrisburg, Pa. Paris emphasized at a Sunday afternoon news conference that the investigation is continuing.

    Dauphin County district attorney Francis Chardo said that forthcoming charges will include attempted murder, terrorism, attempted arson and aggravated assault.

    Authorities said the suspect hopped over a fence surrounding the property and forcibly entered the residence before setting it on fire.

    Police deputy commissioner George Bivens said Balmer had a homemade incendiary device and evaded police, who knew there had been a breach…

  105. Reginald Selkirk says

    Liberal operatives planted ‘stop the steal’ buttons at conservative conference

    Two Liberal Party staffers attended last week’s Canada Strong and Free Networking (CSFN) Conference where they planted buttons that used Trump-style language and highlighted division within the Conservative Party.

    The conference, often referred to by its former name, the Manning Conference, is an opportunity for conservative-leaning Canadians to talk about policy proposals and network. It was held at the Westin Hotel in downtown Ottawa.

    Some attendees noticed buttons appearing at the event.

    One said “stop the steal” — an apparent reference to Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the result of the 2020 U.S. presidential election.

    The Liberal Party of Canada has sought to tie Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre to the American president in speeches and ads. Some Conservative supporters have expressed skepticism about polling numbers that put the Liberals ahead.

    Another button had the name “Jenni Byrne” crossed out, with the name “Kory Teneycke” underneath. Byrne is the national campaign director for the Conservative Party of Canada.

    Teneycke is a longtime Conservative strategist, who played a key role in Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s re-election campaign. He has been deeply critical of the Conservative Party of Canada’s campaign to date.

    The buttons were scattered in the event space in a way to give the impression that they were made and left by people attending the conference.

    In fact, the idea came from the Liberal war room…

  106. Reginald Selkirk says

    New armed extremist group claims responsibility for bombing near rail company headquarters

    A new extremist group claimed responsibility Sunday for a bomb that exploded near the offices of Hellenic Train, Greece’s main railway services operator and the planting of another near the Labor Ministry in early February.

    The explosion Friday evening resulted in limited damage and no injuries. The perpetrators had forewarned of the explosion by calling two media organizations about 40 minutes before it happened.

    In a lengthy posting on the website Athens.indymedia.org on Sunday, the perpetrators, who styled themselves the Revolutionary Class Struggle, explained the reasons for their action, which they said was part of an armed struggle against the state.

    Revolutionary Class Struggle dedicated the bombings to “the Palestinian people and their heroic resistance” and paid tribute to Kyriakos Xymitiris, a man who was killed last year when the explosive device he was assembling exploded in a central Athens apartment…

  107. Reginald Selkirk says

    Wisconsin teen allegedly killed parents in extremist plot to assassinate Trump, FBI says

    A Wisconsin teen allegedly killed his parents to “obtain the financial means and autonomy necessary” to kill President Donald Trump and overthrow the U.S. government, federal authorities said in court documents.

    Nikita Casap, 17, was arrested in March and charged with two counts of first-degree murder and two counts of hiding a corpse, according to Waukesha County authorities. Other charges include theft of property over $10,000 and misappropriating ID to obtain money.

    Court documents show investigators are pursuing federal charges including conspiracy, presidential assassination and use of weapons of mass destruction…

  108. John Morales says

    I read a lot: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-025-02276-3

    Article — Open access
    Published: 07 March 2025
    Worldwide rooftop photovoltaic electricity generation may mitigate global warming
    Zhixin Zhang, Zhen Qian, Min Chen, Rui Zhu, Fan Zhang, Teng Zhong, Jian Lin, Liang Ning, Wei Xie, Felix Creutzig, Wenjun Tang, Laibao Liu, Jiachuan Yang, Ye Pu, Wenjia Cai, Yingxia Pu, Deer Liu, Hui Yang, Hongjun Su, Mingyue Lu, Fei Li, Xufeng Cui, Zhiwei Xie, Tianyu Sheng, …Jinyue Yan Show authors
    Nature Climate Change volume 15, pages393–402 (2025)

    Abstract
    Rooftop photovoltaic (RPV) is often understood as a niche contribution to climate change mitigation. However, the global potential of RPVs to mitigate global warming is unknown. Here we map the global rooftop area at 1-km resolution, quantifying 286,393 km2 of rooftops worldwide through geospatial data mining and artificial intelligence techniques. Using nine advanced Earth system models from the coupled model intercomparison project phase 6, we reveal that RPVs could substantially contribute to reducing global temperatures by 0.05–0.13 °C before 2050. Region-specific analysis underscores the variability in RPV potential and the necessity of tailored approaches to optimize RPV deployment, considering local solar resources, existing infrastructure and grid carbon intensity. Our findings reveal that leveraging RPV systems offers a viable and impactful strategy for reducing carbon footprints and combating climate change globally, while advocating targeted interventions to enhance the benefits of RPVs, particularly in areas with high solar radiation or rapid urbanization.

  109. StevoR says

    It’s not really about showers, wrote Feldman, but an attempt to gut the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) of 1946, which is currently being used by federal courts to block Trump’s unlawful actions. The order directs the secretary of energy to reverse a Biden-era regulation defining “showerhead”, which was done under the APA “notice and comment” process.

    The APA requires that the repeal of a regulation must undergo the same process, but Trump’s order states: “Notice and comment is unnecessary because I am ordering the repeal.” In other words, because I say so.

    Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-04-14/trump-tariff-executive-order-showerhead-administrative-procedure/105170714

  110. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Aaron Reichlin-Melnick (American Immigration Council):

    Marco Rubio just announced 10 more people were sent to be imprisoned in CECOT. They were flown there from Gitmo to be imprisoned potentially for life based not on any crime for which they were convicted, but on unproven allegations of gang membership with no due process. [Screenshot]

    Rando: “Interesting, they are no longer called ‘gangs’, but are now ‘foreign terrorist organizations’!”

  111. whheydt says

    https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c045dk29xqqo

    Upstairs Downstairs co-creator and actress Jean Marsh has died aged 90, her agent has confirmed.

    The British screen and stage star won an Emmy for her portrayal of hard-bitten but ultimately kind-hearted maid Rose Buck in the 1970s TV drama about the class system in Edwardian England.

    Marsh also had roles in Hollywood films including Cleopatra, Willow and Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy and on TV in Doctor Who.

    In a statement, Marsh’s friend the film director Sir Michael Lindsay-Hogg paid tribute to her as “wise and funny… very pretty and kind, and talented both as an actress and writer”, adding she died “peacefully in bed looked after by one of her very loving carers”.

  112. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Today’s DoJ daily update on Abrego Garcia lives down to expectations.

    Kyle Cheney (Politico):

    The Trump administration says it has “no updates” for Judge Xinis about efforts to facilitate return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Reiterates that a judge in 2019 viewed him as a member of MS-13.

    In a separate filing, the govenrment says its arrangement with El Salvador to house deportees in the notorious CECOT prison is classified.

    Quinta Jurecic: “They couldn’t even be bothered to get his name right.”
    * He is “Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia”, not “Kilm[e]r Armando Abrego[-]Garcia”.

    Rando: “‘No, actually you’re the one flouting a Supreme Court order, judge’ is quite the strategy. [Screenshot]”

    Rando: “‘We shouldn’t have to produce these [classified] documents because we’re regularly updating the court’ … meanwhile today’s update is ‘We have no updates'”

    DoJ (1st filing):

    in 2019, an immigration judge upheld DHS’s decision not to grant bond, finding that DHS’s determination that he was a member of MS-13 was “trustworthy” and “supported by other evidence,”
    […]
    Abrego Garcia is no longer eligible for withholding of removal because of his membership in MS-13 which is now a designated foreign terrorist organization.

    Rando:

    [A PGCPD beat cop picked him up for loitering at a Home Depot.]
    1. ICE: [Confidential Informant] said he was MS-13 [specifically of NY where he’d never lived].
    2. Plaintiff: Produce CI under oath.
    3. ICE: Not our CI we got this from PGCPD.
    4. Plaintiff subpoenas PGCPD for info.
    5. PGCPD: The detective who talked to CI is no longer with us. None of our detectives know anything about it.

    Also, he was wearing a Chicago Bulls hat and a hoodie.
    The government has contested none of this. [Filing: recapping it in 2025]

    From that recap:

    Abrego Garcia was granted withholding of removal […] after the immigration judge agreed that he had established it was more likely than not that he would be persecuted by gangs in El Salvador
    […]
    Prince George’s County law enforcement never again questioned him regarding MS-13 or accused him of membership in MS-13.

     
    Chris Geidner (Law Dork):

    two days in a row [DoJ’s filing] was not “a declaration made by an individual with personal knowledge” of the information sought by Judge Xinis in Friday’s order
    […]
    “an exceptionally narrow view of “facilitate,” which could mean Abrego Garcia would have no way to get back to the U.S. even if released. [To “remove any domestic obstacles” that’d impedede his return.]
    […]
    Finally, the signature block looks different today. The lawyer who actually practices before Judge Xinis—in the District of Maryland—did not sign the document, instead asserting that she merely “Filed” it. [Tarra DeShields Minnis Asst US Attorney]

    This follows the Friday morning issue when DOJ’s initial filing was rejected b/c the lawyer who filed it, DeShields Minnis, was not on the filing and the lawyers on the filing weren’t admitted there. She was then on the follow-up filing and another Friday. Today, she is only listed as “Filed by.”

    It’s not too hard to imagine that DeShield Minnis attempted to stay off the filings, was forced onto Friday’s two filings by higher-ups, and now is seeing if this works for the court

    Rando (Ex-attorney): “For anyone unfamiliar, lawyers must be members of a particular federal district’s bar to file there and doing so subjects them to that district’s Local Rules of Practice. […] sanctions, monetary & professional, if they screw around.”
    Rando (Ex-attorney): “Doesn’t the /s/ attorney have to be the one who e-files it?”
    Rando (Lawyer): “Yes that’s the rule in MD […] that’s an ECF violation.”
    * Dep Asst AG Drew Ensign was a signatory. Tarra DeShields Minnis filed.

    Rando (Lawyer): “I’ve never submitted a pleading as ‘filed by.’ Of course I also have never been contemptuous of court orders either, so I guess there are ways to practice I just don’t know.”

  113. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    More commentary regarding the DoJ filings @112.

    Aaron Reichlin-Melnick:

    There is no such thing as post-hoc invalidation of a lawful grant of withholding due to a future act [—designating MS-13 a terrorist org—] which makes a person ineligible. If they want to get rid of it, they have to go through a process. They didn’t.

    Ryan Goodman (Just Security):

    DOJ’s refusal to provide updates on efforts to get Abrego Garcia released from custody is also an affront to what the unanimous Supreme Court ordered.

    SCOTUS: Government should be prepared to share what it can concerning the steps it has taken and the prospect of further steps.

    Owen Barcala (Attorney):

    Amid all this rending of garments about interfering with a foreign sovereign like El Salvador, it’s interesting to recall that there’s a statute directing the president to invade the Netherlands if an American is ever detained by the Int’l Criminal Court.

    There are obvious differences with Abrego Garcia, but this idea that it’s crazy to expect the US to exert influence on a foreign government to release someone wrongfully imprisoned there is a new development, to say the least.

  114. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Follow-up to #66.

    Mediaite – Trump claims ‘There was no tariff exception’
    Trump wrote—and Lutnik explained—that Friday’s ‘exception’ was exempting from reciprocal tariffs [sic] while still applying 20% fentanyl tariffs [sic], not 0%. But that reprieve is temporary because those exempted electronics will be subject to new semiconductor tariffs in a month or two.

  115. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Gizmodo – Social Security reverses decision to cut phone services after outcry

    it won’t be cutting phone services for seniors—a policy it had previously claimed would go into effect on Monday. Now, the agency has shifted its position, claiming it will “allow all claim types to be completed over the telephone.”
    […]
    According to the White House, new software has been installed that allows the SSA to perform anti-fraud checks on retirees’ accounts. People who are flagged by this new system will still be required to undergo an in-person ID proofing check.
    […]
    Just because the agency says it will maintain phone services doesn’t mean the program isn’t still in trouble. [Layoffs, closed offices, glitches, code rewrite.]

  119. birgerjohansson says

    Ron Perlman just turned 75, Diana Ross just turned 80. Jeez, I am getting old.

  121. birgerjohansson says

    Also, Trump is now goving the Supreme Court the finger, refusing to follow their order.

  125. birgerjohansson says

    Stream-of-consciousness question:
    How hard would it be in terms of engineering to build big structures like telescopes on the summit of very tall mountains, like Denali in Alaska and Chimborazo in the Andes?
    .
    Initially you would need to build a serpentine road with a steepness of maybe 1 in 20 (that’s 100 km right there), later you might build a funicular to bring bulky equipment to the summit. And the crew would obviously need oxygen masks.
    Still it would be cheaper than building and launching big space telescopes. I just don’t know how much easier.

    And at 6000 m you are above half the atmosphere, so rocket engine bells do not have to make big compromises for atmospheric pressure (although it might be cheaper to launch small rockets from aircraft).
    Finally, a big gun could provide the first 2-3 km of velocity, if the hardware of the rockets can cope with immense g forces.

  126. Akira MacKenzie says

    107:

    When I first saw that headline this weekend, my pre-frontal cortex thought was “Oh shit! The right is going to blame this on the left.” Then I read the article and found out it this guy was one of those “Order Of The Nine Angles,” nuts. Ironically, this kid lives in the same county I do, and Waukesha County, being a largely rural white flight refugee community, is a deep, deep red region chock full of Bible-beaters and Trump supporters.

  127. birgerjohansson says

    Akira MacKenzie @ 124
    Obviously none. And if one of the old corrupt ones croak, Thump can replace him with a new corrupt one.
    I do not see Dem senators standing in the way. And even if they do, the Evil Party will abolish the wossname limit for SCOTUS appointments, appointing judges by a simple majority.

  128. birgerjohansson says

    John Morales @ 108
    While I loathe Xi and his genocidal party it is quite possible that Chinese technology will play a major role in saving the human race from itself.
    And in places with continental climate [during summer] and in subtropical/tropical regions indoor climate control consumes immense amounts of power while the sun is up.
    .
    Now, storing the photovoltaic energy for the evening is a different problem…

  130. birgerjohansson says

    Quote from The Guardian :
    “One can only imagine the horror the late Iain Banks would have felt on learning his legendary Culture series is a favourite of Elon Musk.”

  131. says

    In authoritarian style, Trump intensifies offensive against the free press with CBS rant

    “[Trump] labeled the latest “60 Minutes” episode as “unlawful and illegal behavior” in a brazenly authoritarian display.”

    In the run-up to Election Day 2024 , Donald Trump was nearly as eager to attack the free press as he was to attack Kamala Harris. […] referred to journalists as “the enemy of the people,” media outlets as “evil” and news professionals as “scum.”

    […] Trump also made clear that he hoped to use governmental power to crack down on journalism he dislikes. It’s why he invested so much time and energy talking about the FCC stripping TV networks of their broadcast licenses for airing coverage he disapproves of. […]

    The Associated Press reported:

    […] Trump bitterly attacked “60 Minutes” shortly after the CBS newsmagazine broadcast stories on Ukraine and Greenland on Sunday, saying the network was out of control and should “pay a big price” for going after him. “Almost every week, 60 Minutes … mentions the name ‘TRUMP’ in a derogatory and defamatory way, but this Weekend’s ‘BROADCAST’ tops them all,” the president said on his Truth Social platform. He called on Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr to impose maximum fines and punishment “for their unlawful and illegal behavior.”

    […] Trump accused the news program of “fraud,” airing “defamatory” segments, “illegally” intervening in the last presidential election, “corruptly changing major answers to Interview questions,” and being a “Political Operative” that has engaged in “unlawful and illegal behavior.”

    […] To the extent that reality has any bearing on the discussion, there was nothing wrong with the segments in question, one of which covered Trump’s drive to acquire Greenland, while the other focused on the ongoing war in Ukraine. The president might not have liked the episode, but to define journalism that’s unpopular with ruling powers as “unlawful and illegal behavior” is, practically by definition, authoritarian.

    [I snipped other examples of Trump’s pattern of going after the press] That came on the heels of Trump repeatedly referring to MSNBC as “a threat to democracy.”

    Those who take the First Amendment’s press freedoms for granted need to recognize the fact that Trump is eyeing the kind of crackdown on journalism that’s unheard of in any modern democracy.

    So, we know Trump watches “60 Minutes.” He has been informed concerning the facts.

  132. says

    Elon Musk lowered his spending cut targets from $2 trillion to $1 trillion to $150 billion — and even that total is no longer credible.

    Last week, at a White House cabinet meeting, the president’s top campaign donor added to the pattern, declaring that he and the quasi-governmental DOGE initiative “anticipate” $150 billion in spending cuts — a small fraction of the goal he pitched to voters last fall.

    Making matters worse, that figure appears to be wrong, too. The New York Times reported:

    …[As] Mr. Musk’s group tallies up its savings so far, it inflates its progress by including billion-dollar errors, by counting spending that will not happen in the next fiscal year — and by making guesses about spending that might not happen at all.

    The Times’ report […] added that while the DOGE website claims to have saved $150 billion in federal spending, as of last week, “it has provided receipt-level breakdowns for less than 40 percent of that amount.” […]

    Rebecca Cisco, a spokesperson for the Illinois Department of Employment Security, told the newspaper, in reference to the billionaire’s bogus assertions, “This data has been readily available, reported on and audited at various government levels and departments [for years]. … This is yet another example of a DOGE ‘report’ misunderstanding this data at best, blatantly mischaracterizing this data at worst.”

    This comes on the heels of a related problem in which Musk also peddled false claims about Social Security fraud, leading to similar questions about whether the billionaire was simply confused or whether he was deliberately trying to deceive the public.

    Indeed, for as long as there has been a DOGE endeavor, there has been evidence of Musk’s governmental incompetence.

    […] they arrive in D.C. and discover just how little they knew about governing and policymaking at the federal level.

    The less charitable explanation is that Musk actually understood the relevant details perfectly well, and he peddled absurd claims out of a cynical belief that many would fall for nonsense.

  133. says

    Trump adds fresh chaos and uncertainty to his flailing tariffs agenda

    ” ‘I know what the hell I’m doing,’ Trump said last week, referring to trade tariffs. There’s fresh evidence to the contrary.”

    As the world struggled to keep up with the White House’s erratic approach to trade tariffs, Rep. Jim McGovern told his congressional colleagues last week, “How is any company supposed to forecast for their future, build a plant, hire workers, if they have no idea what the hell this president is gonna do in his next tweet?”

    […] Alas, that was before the administration added even more uncertainty to its own flailing plan.

    As last week got underway, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick suggested that many Americans are eager to join “the army of millions and millions of human beings screwing in little screws to make iPhones.” He went on to insist that this is the kind of work that’s “going to come to America” thanks to the White House’s tariffs.

    Five days later, in an apparent Friday night news dump, the administration exempted smartphones, computers, and other tech devices and components from Donald Trump’s new tariffs, contradicting the line Lutnick peddled earlier in the week.

    Two days after the exemption came to public attention, Lutnick said the reversal would soon be reversed, and as Reuters reported, the president pushed the same line.

    […] Trump on Sunday said he would be announcing the tariff rate on imported semiconductors over the next week, adding that there would be flexibility with some companies in the sector. The president’s pledge means that the exclusion of smartphones and computers from his reciprocal tariffs on China likely will be short-lived as Trump looks to reset trade in the semiconductor sector.

    Let’s not forget that a week ago at this time, Trump and his team told the world that he’d implement his dangerous trade tariffs; there would be no pauses, delays or extensions; and he wasn’t considering exceptions.

    Since making those declarations, Trump has announced a 90-day pause on part — but not all — of his tariffs plan, followed by a related announcement about a major exemption, which was followed by another announcement that the exemption would disappear in the “near future.”

    “You know, you have to show a certain flexibility,” Trump told reporters on Sunday night. “Nobody should be so rigid. We have to have a certain flexibility.”

    […] I’d love to hear more from the president about how he defines the word “flexibility.” Because if it means “careen wildly without any coherent plan or direction,” then it’s the perfect choice.

    […] Consider a revised timeline of recent events [complete timeline is available at the link]:
    […] April 2: In a speech filled with bizarre lies, the president announces it’s “Liberation Day” and unveils sweeping international tariffs based on a formula that was quickly exposed as gibberish.

    April 3 to April 8: The president, White House officials, congressional Republicans and their allies insist there is simply no way that Trump would back down under pressure as his tariff policy rocks global markets and raises the specter of a recession.

    April 9: Trump backs down under pressure, pausing much — but not all — of his failing policy.

    April 10: Markets fall sharply as investors come to realize that Trump’s “pause” actually created a net increase in U.S. tariff rates.

    April 11: The administration announced a tariff exemption for smartphones, computers, and other tech devices and components.

    April 13: Trump said he’d end the exemption, though he didn’t say when, how or to what extent.

    “I know what the hell I’m doing,” the president told congressional Republicans last week. Given recent events, I’d be hard-pressed to imagine why anyone would believe such a boast.

  134. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Re: birgerjohansson @125:

    How hard would it be […] telescopes on the summit of very tall mountains, like Denali in Alaska [6,190 m (20,310 ft)] and Chimborazo in the Andes [6,263 m (20,548 ft)]?

     
    Wikipedia – University of Tokyo Atacama Observatory

    at an altitude of 5,640 m (18,500 ft) within a lava dome in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile. […] optical-infrared telescope […] infrared light is absorbed by water vapor in the atmosphere, so it must be located at high altitude […] TAO was noted as one of the few major telescopes in the world with light pollution below acceptable levels of interference.
    […]
    Because of the high risk of altitude sickness for construction workers and astronomers, a base facility was also constructed in San Pedro de Atacama (about 50 km from the summit), for the telescope to be operated remotely.

    Wikipedia – List of highest astronomical observatories

    AtlasObscura – Where on Earth can you put a giant telescope?

    Mauna Kea [4,190 m (13,750 ft)] is so high that altitude sickness slowed down the construction crews
    […]
    general rule, a site tester might start with the highest mountains, with the fewest neighbors, and narrow down […] in northern Chile, there are still hundreds of summits that could, in theory, provide good astronomical conditions.
    […]
    there are three main types of places in the world that are most suited for telescopes observing visible light. One is Antarctica—the high peaks of arid plateaus have little turbulence and are surrounded by darkness. Conditions are brutal, but, advocates argue, sending a telescope to Antarctica is cheaper than sending one to space. The second is mountainous coastal areas, where the wind comes from the sea, minimizing turbulence whipping over the peaks. Chile fits this description. The third is an isolated mountain on a island, where all other conditions are right. Hawaii has mountains just like that. So does the Canary Islands. And that’s about it. […] Astronomers do entertain the possibility that prime sites exist elsewhere. […] But the most obvious and most desirable places to put giant optical telescopes haven’t changed since the 1960s and 1970s.

  135. says

    ‘Not just measles’: Whooping cough cases are soaring as vaccine rates decline, by ProPublica

    In the past six months, two babies in Louisiana have died of pertussis, the disease commonly known as whooping cough.

    Washington state recently announced its first confirmed death from pertussis in more than a decade.

    Idaho and South Dakota each reported a death this year, and Oregon last year reported two as well as its highest number of cases since 1950.

    While much of the country is focused on the spiraling measles outbreak concentrated in the small, dusty towns of West Texas, cases of pertussis have skyrocketed by more than 1,500% nationwide since hitting a recent low in 2021 amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Deaths tied to the disease are also up, hitting 10 last year, compared with about two to four in previous years. Cases are on track to exceed that total this year. [graph at the link]

    Doctors, researchers and public health experts warn that the measles outbreak, which has grown to more than 600 cases [some sources report 712 deaths], may just be the beginning. They say outbreaks of preventable diseases could get much worse with falling vaccination rates and the Trump administration slashing spending on the country’s public health infrastructure.

    […] Not only have vaccination rates for measles, mumps and rubella fallen, but federal data shows that so have those for pertussis, diphtheria, tetanus, hepatitis B and polio.

    […] half of states have seen an across-the-board decline in all four vaccination rates. Wisconsin, Utah and Alaska have experienced some of the most precipitous drops during that time, with declines of more than 10 percentage points in some cases.

    [Illustration showing “Measles vaccination rates in most states were below herd immunity in 2023” is available at the link, and vaccination rates for Pertussis]

    Tucked inside each state are counties and communities with far lower vaccination rates that drive outbreaks.

    For example, the whooping cough vaccination rate for kindergartners in Washington state in 2023-24 was 90.2%, slightly below the U.S. rate of 92.3%, federal data shows. But the statewide rate for children 19 to 35 months last year was 65.4%, according to state data. In four counties, that rate was in the 30% range. In one county, it was below 12%.

    […] dramatic cuts to public health funding and staffing could heighten the risk. And the elevation of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime vaccine critic, to the secretary of the federal Department of Health and Human Services, several experts said, has only compounded matters.

    The Trump administration has eliminated 20,000 jobs at agencies within HHS, which includes the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the nation’s public health agency. And late last month, the administration also cut $11 billion from state and local public health agencies on the front lines of protecting Americans from outbreaks […]

  136. birgerjohansson says

    Tory attack on Lib Dems may need some work.

    “Tories Say Vegans Are Extremists”

    Now that they are no longer in power we can laugh at their stupidity.

  139. says

    Rubio tells his staff to snitch on ‘anti-Christian’ colleagues

    The Trump administration is once again blurring the line between church and state—this time by turning the State Department into a Christian grievance hotline.

    According to Politico, department staff have been instructed to report their colleagues for any perceived “anti-Christian bias” as part of a sweeping new initiative tied to an executive order aimed at “protecting” Christian federal workers. The department even created a formal tip form, encouraging employees to snitch on one another anonymously.

    The instructions are clear: Give names, dates, and locations of the alleged bias, with a task force set to meet on April 22 to review the “evidence.” The goal? To collect examples of religious discrimination under the Biden administration, because nothing says “freedom of religion” quite like your coworkers quietly documenting your every move for a federal task force.

    […] Employees are also encouraged to report repercussions for refusing to participate in events that “promote themes inconsistent with or hostile to one’s religious beliefs.” [Encourging Christians to play the part of victims.]

    The directive was sent to U.S. embassies worldwide under Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s name […]This latest stun t could be Rubio’s attempt at clawing back favor in Trumpland.

    The tip form isn’t subtle, and neither is the agenda. Once tasked with promoting democracy abroad, the State Department now moonlights as a surveillance arm of Trump’s evangelical protection racket.

    Trump, for his part, has made it abundantly clear that he only cares about protecting one religion. […]

    Christian nationalism is clearly ascendant in Trump’s America, but very few Americans subscribe to that ideology. […]

    Still, Trump’s February executive order launched a “task force to eradicate anti-Christian bias,” despite Christian conservatives already holding enormous sway in government. […]

    The Interfaith Alliance told Politico that it’s worried the initiative may claim to combat anti-Christian stigma—especially toward Catholics—but in reality, “it will weaponize a narrow understanding of religious freedom to legitimize discrimination against marginalized groups like the LGBTQ community.”

    One State Department official, meanwhile, told Politico the whole thing felt “very ‘Handmaid’s Tale’-esque.”

    And they’re not wrong. This isn’t about religious liberty; it’s about weaponizing religion to police speech, silence dissent, and entrench Trump’s culture war politics deeper into the federal bureaucracy.

  140. says

    A new report reveals that the Trump administration has outlined a plan to eliminate the research arm of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, while also closing weather and climate labs. Democratic lawmakers are sounding the alarm over this enormous blow to public safety.

    “On today’s episode of “He’s Tearing This S**t Up”—Trump plans to dismantle NOAA, shutting down climate research and weather labs,” ​said Rep. Jasmine Crockett of Texas.

    She condemned the move, writing, “In Texas, that means fewer hurricane warnings, less drought data, & more risk to our communities.​ This isn’t just a budget cut—it’s a threat to our safety.” [social media post available at the link]

    […] These attacks on science, along with aright-wing push to privatize these science- and tech-driven government agencies, are just more gross examples of how Trump and the GOP are scrounging to fund their tax cuts for the rich.

    Link

  142. Pierce R. Butler says

    birgerjohansson @ # 130: One can only imagine the horror the late Iain Banks would have felt on learning his legendary Culture series is a favourite of Elon Musk.

    I suspect (but cannot prove) it would compare with Robert Heinlein’s reaction to hearing how Charles Manson centered his cult on Stranger in a Strange Land.

  143. says

    Trump, Bukele say they won’t return mistakenly deported man to US

    Related video at the link.

    Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele said Monday that he has no plans to return a Maryland man wrongfully deported to a prison in his country, telling reporters, “Of course I’m not going to do it.”

    Bukele’s Oval Office meeting with President Trump was the first since the Supreme Court ruled last week that the U.S. must “facilitate” the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia.

    […] both Trump and Bukele suggested they don’t have the power to return the Maryland man and Salvadoran national to the U.S., with several Trump administration figures gathered in the office mischaracterizing the substance of the court’s order.

    “How could I return him to the United States? I smuggle him to the United States? Of course I’m not going to do it. The question is preposterous,” Bukele said, going on to refer to Abrego Garcia as a terrorist.

    “I don’t have the power to return him to the United States. I’m not releasing — I mean, we’re not very fond of releasing terrorists into our country,” he added, saying El Salvador is no longer the murder capital of the world.

    Before Bukele spoke, Trump and a number of his aides suggested the decision would rest with El Salvador.
    “That’s up to El Salvador if they want to return him. That’s not up to us,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said.

    Trump repeatedly bashed CNN reporter Kaitlan Collins and the network for asking about Abrego Garcia.

    “How long do we have to answer this question from you? Why don’t you just say, ‘Isn’t it wonderful that we’re keeping criminals out of our country?’” Trump remarked.

    The Supreme Court ruled last week that the government must “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return.

    “The order properly requires the Government to ‘facilitate’ Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador,” the Supreme Court ruled, referencing a lower court decision.

    in suggesting they have no power to secure Abrego Garcia’s return, Trump aides focused only on certain aspects of the ruling.

    “The Supreme Court ruled, president, that if El Salvador wants to return him…we would facilitate it, meaning provide a plane,” Bondi said.

    White House aide Stephen Miller said seeking Abrego Garcia’s return would equate to kidnapping him.

    “A district court judge tried to tell the administration that they had to kidnap a citizen of El Salvador and fly him back here. That issue was raised at the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court said the district court order was unlawful and its main components reversed, 9-0, unanimously stating clearly that neither the secretary of state nor the President could be compelled by anybody to forcibly retrieve a citizen of El Salvador from El Salvador, who again, is a member of MS-13,” Miller said during the meeting.

    Abrego Garcia’s family has said he was not a member of MS-13 and fled El Salvador to escape gang violence. The Trump administration has accused Abrego Garcia of being a member of the gang based on a report from a confidential informant, who claimed he was involved with the international criminal gang in New York, a place his family says he has never lived.

    Rep. Jamie Raskin (Md.), the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, on Monday referenced an agreement between the U.S. and El Salvador.

    “Trump can get Abrego Garcia back tomorrow and comply with the Supreme Court because: (1) El Salvador is our agent (and junior partner) in this arrangement by which we pay them millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars to hold our deportees; (2) they are dependent on U.S. support; (3) and the president of El Salvador is coming to the White House this week,” he wrote on X ahead of the meeting. “Act now.” […]

    Outrageous statements one the part of the Trump administration, and from Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele.

  144. says

    https://www.wonkette.com/p/trump-administration-openly-ignoring

    “Trump Administration Openly Ignoring Supreme Court, Now What?”

    On Friday, the Supreme Court effectively let Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the innocent immigrant and father of three who was deported by “mistake” and sent to El Salvador torture prison, stay in El Salvador torture prison, ruling that while the government must “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s release, Trump cannot be ordered to “effectuate” it, because Trump is Executive King of All He Surveys and the only one who can conduct foreign affairs, even when/if he conducts them by OOPS:

    The order properly requires the Government to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador. The intended scope of the term “effectuate” in the District Court’s order is, however, unclear, and may exceed the District Court’s authority. The District Court should clarify its directive, with due regard for the deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs.

    But, the Roberts Court conceded, the government “should be prepared to share what it can concerning the steps it has taken and the prospect of further steps” for facilitating while not effectuating the whoops. […]

    More details and video at the link.

  146. says

    All eyes were on the West Texas desert Monday morning as Katy Perry and five other celebrities launched into space on a short flight aboard Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket and capsule.

    Joining Perry as part of the all-female crew was Gayle King, “CBS Mornings” co-host; Lauren Sánchez, a former journalist who is Jeff Bezos’ fiancée; Aisha Bowe, a former NASA rocket scientist; Amanda Nguyen, a bioastronautics research scientist; and Kerianne Flynn, a movie producer.

    The high-profile launch drew a crowd, with several famous faces in attendance, including Oprah Winfrey, NASA astronaut Jeanette Epps, former astronaut Mae Jemison, Kris Jenner and Khloé Kardashian.

    Liftoff took place at 9:30 a.m. ET from Blue Origin’s launch site in Van Horn, Texas.

    During the roughly 10-minute flight, the six crew members flew just above the Kármán line, an invisible boundary at an altitude of 62 miles that is widely accepted as the edge of space.

    While in space, Bowe held up a patch representing the Bahamas and the women tumbled and did handstands in weightlessness. Perry also sang “What a Wonderful World” and held up a daisy.

    “Daisies are common flowers, but they grow through any condition,” Perry said after the flight. “They are resilient. They are powerful. They are strong.”

    It appeared to be a picture-perfect flight. The reusable New Shepard booster returned to Earth and landed vertically a few miles away from the launch site before the capsule made its own descent under parachutes and touched down in the Texas desert.

    It was a jubilant and emotional return for all six crew members. Perry and King kissed the ground after they exited the spacecraft and most fought back tears as they described the experience of gazing back at Earth from the edge of space.

    Link

  147. says

    Russian attack that left bodies scattered on city streets is not a ‘mistake’ — it’s a strategy

    U.S. President Donald Trump described Russia’s double ballistic missile strike on the Ukrainian city of Sumy that killed 35 and wounded 117 as a “mistake” by the Russians.

    But it’s no such thing.

    The Sunday attack on Sumy, like the April 4 one on Kryvyi Rih, where a Russian ballistic missile filled with cluster munitions killed 20 people and wounded 80, is a part of a Russian military strategy. The aim is to terrorize the civilian population into turning against the Ukrainian military and government and force them to sue for peace with Moscow.

    […] It’s a tactic that countries have used against each other since the advent to air warfare in the 20th century, but there are few if any examples of terror bombing being effective in getting civilians to rebel against their government; usually, the response to such attacks is the opposite.

    […] After the attack on Sumy, Mariana Bezuhla, an opposition MP, accused the Ukrainian military of endangering civilians by holding an award ceremony for soldiers in Sumy despite knowing about the upcoming Russian attack. The soldiers were unharmed as they were in a shelter.

    Artem Semenikhin, mayor of the Konotop, a town in the Sumy region, accused the local governor of planning a ceremony for a local military brigade. He added that by doing so, the governor helped Russia justify “a genocidal attack on us, Ukrainians.” […]

    More at the link.

  148. says

    WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—A South African man who invested millions in Donald J. Trump is in a “state of shock” after losing a fortune, the man said on Monday.

    “I’m still trying to process what went wrong,” he said. “If Donald Trump can’t make money, who can?”

    The man said he was “baffled” that his investment had soured, given Trump’s “unparalleled track record of business success.”

    “I just don’t understand how this happened,” he said. “He seemed so smart on The Apprentice.”

    Link

  150. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Wired – HHS Systems Are in Danger of Collapsing

    Much of the IT and cybersecurity infrastructure underpinning the US health system is in danger of a possible collapse following a purge of IT staff and leadership […] staff who oversee and renew contracts for critical enterprise services are no longer there. The same staff oversaw hundreds of contractors, some of whom play a crucial role in keeping systems and data safe from cyberattacks.
    […]
    Employees who were subject to the RIF, as well as some who remain at the agency, tell WIRED that without intervention, they believe the systems they managed could go dark, potentially putting the entire health care system at risk. “Pretty soon, within the next couple of weeks, everything regarding IT and cyber at the department will start to operationally reach a point of no return,” […] “pretty soon, the department will be completely open to external actors to get at the largest databases in the world that have all of our public health information in them, our sensitive drug testing clinical trial information at the NIH or FDA or different organizations’ mental health records,”
    […]
    [DOGE] Clark Minor, a software engineer who worked at Palantir for over a decade and was recently installed as the department’s chief information officer. […] seemed overwhelmed by the sheer scale of HHS, an agency that accounted for over a quarter of federal spending in 2024 and consists of an almost innumerable amount of offices and staff and operating divisions.
    […]
    Some internal systems are already breaking down, […] the RIF “set federal travel back to processes that were in place prior to the first Electronic Travel System contract in 2004.”
    […]
    they all agreed that without a radical intervention in the coming weeks, the fallout could be catastrophic. “If the US health system lost CMS, FDA, NIH, and CDC functionality indefinitely without warning, and no backup systems were available, this would be an unprecedented systemic shock,”
    […]
    “There is no transition, and those in charge are AWOL,” one person currently working at HHS tells WIRED […] “I’m doing nothing productive. I’m answering emails stating we cannot help, we cannot process, we have no guidance, we cannot operate. This ship has no captain whatsoever, and I’m playing in the band while the Titanic sinks.”

     
    Meanwhile
    The Guardian – Pete Marocco who oversaw dismantling of USAID leaves State Dept
    Weeks ago, he’d announced his intent to be Director of Foreign Assistance in the State Dept. As of Thursday, he’d been holding meetings to plan for that. Now gone. Sources said he may have been pushed out.

  151. Reginald Selkirk says

    @142

    I suspect (but cannot prove) it would compare with Robert Heinlein’s reaction to hearing how Charles Manson centered his cult on Stranger in a Strange Land.

    … Which was itself based on the New Testament. Really, the cannibalism scene at the end was a dead giveaway.

  153. birgerjohansson says

    CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain @ 150
    I realise this will be a huge disaster leading to the loss of life down the road.

    But if the criminally stupid gangsters are going to cause a disaster that cannot be swept under the carpet, let it happen early in Trump’s presidency so the backlash from GOP voters and GOP -supporting billionaires will start to move this malign mountain of stupidity and make it back down.

  154. says

    Harvard says it will not yield to Trump’s demands

    Lawyers for Harvard University said Monday the school will not comply with a new list of demands sent by the Trump administration on Friday, as part of what the government describes as a crackdown on antisemitism and alleged civil rights violations at elite universities.

    The new demands expand on a previous list sent to Harvard’s leaders on April 3, which ordered the university to close diversity offices and cooperate with federal immigration authorities, among other directives — or risk the cancellation of billions of dollars in federal research funding.

    The Friday list went further. It said the university must “reform” the way it admits international students to screen out anyone “hostile” to “American values” or “supportive of terrorism or antisemitism.” It also ordered Harvard to audit a list of specific academic programs alleged to have “egregious records of antisemitism or other bias.”

    In a campus-wide message Monday, Harvard president Alan Garber vowed not to acquiesce to “unprecedented demands being made by the federal government to control the Harvard community.”

    “The University will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights,” Garber said.

    Harvard’s stance is the most forceful pushback yet against the Trump administration’s crackdown on elite universities. It is a sharp contrast to the approach taken by Columbia University’s leaders who acquiesced to a list of demands from the Trump administration last month. Columbia promised to change student disciplinary procedures and place a Middle East studies department under new oversight, among other measures.

    Tyler Coward, a lawyer with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a free speech advocacy group, described the administration’s tactics as unlawful abuses of government power, and praised Harvard’s response.

    “We’ve been saying since this started that it’s going to take an institution standing up for its own rights to put an end to this,” he said. “Thankfully, Harvard chose a different course than Columbia and is asserting its rights to remain free from a hostile takeover from the federal government.”

    Elise Stefanik, a Republican congresswoman who helped launch a congressional investigation into Harvard’s response to antisemitism, condemned the university’s response.

    “Harvard University has rightfully earned its place as the epitome of the moral and academic rot in higher education,” she said in a statement. “It is time to totally cut off US taxpayer funding to this institution that has failed to live up to its founding motto Veritas.”

    Harvard is one of at least seven elite universities the Trump administration has threatened with funding cuts over alleged civil rights violations. Most of the accusations stem from what federal officials describe as elite universities’ failure to protect Jewish students from antisemitic harassment stemming from the campus protests over the Israel-Hamas war. […]

    More at the Boston Globe link.

  155. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Southpaw: “The president told a Central American dictator to build five more massive slave labor camps to hold US citizens.”

    Aaron Rupar: “Trump to Bukele: “Home-growns are next. The home-growns. You gotta build about five more places. It’s not big enough.” [*room laughs*] [Video clip]”

  156. says

    Followup to comment 96.

    […] Trump is victim-blaming Ukraine after Russia carried out a missile attack on civilians at a Palm Sunday celebration in the city of Sumy, killing at least 34 people, including two children.

    On Sunday night after the bombing, Trump said in an interview on Air Force One that the ballistic missile attack was “a mistake” and a “horrible thing”—even though a ballistic missile attack has to be directed and thus could not have been a benign error as Trump suggested. [!]

    But on Monday morning, Trump’s tone grew angry as he blamed former President Joe Biden and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for the attack that Russia carried out, writing in one of his embarrassing Truth Social missives:

    The War between Russia and Ukraine is Biden’s war, not mine. I just got here, and for four years during my term, had no problem in preventing it from happening. President Putin, and everyone else, respected your President! I HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH THIS WAR, BUT AM WORKING DILIGENTLY TO GET THE DEATH AND DESTRUCTION TO STOP. If the 2020 Presidential Election was not RIGGED, and it was, in so many ways, that horrible War would never have happened. President Zelenskyy and Crooked Joe Biden did an absolutely horrible job in allowing this travesty to begin. There were so many ways of preventing it from ever starting. But that is the past. Now we have to get it to STOP, AND FAST. SO SAD!

    Let’s set aside the fact that it’s sociopathic to bring everything back to the 2020 election, which Trump still says was rigged, even though it wasn’t. To again blame Biden and Zelenskyy for a war that Russian dictator Vladimir Putin is 100% responsible for is sick and twisted—and raises questions about why Trump refuses to assign Putin any fault for his actions. [!!!]

    Trump dug in later on Monday as well. In the Oval Office, Trump told reporters, “[Zelenskyy is] always looking to purchase missiles. … Listen, when you start a war, you gotta know you can win a war. You don’t start a war against somebody that’s 20 times your size and then hope that people give you some missiles.” [JFC]

    Trump has repeatedly blamed Zelenskyy over Putin.

    In February, Trump repeated Russian propaganda when he ridiculously accused Zelenskyy of being a “dictator” for not holding an election in his war-torn country.

    Later that month, Trump attacked Zelenskyy in a disgraceful Oval Office ambush, in which Trump and Vice President JD Vance teamed up on Zelenskyy to demand he be more grateful for American aid in the war.

    […] “I believe, sadly, Russian narratives are prevailing in the U.S.,” Zelenskyy said. “How is it possible to witness our losses and our suffering, to understand what the Russians are doing, and to still believe that they are not the aggressors, that they did not start this war? This speaks to the enormous influence of Russia’s information policy on America, on U.S. politics, and U.S. politicians.” [True]

    […] Worse for Trump is that his embrace of Putin and attacks on Zelenskyy are losing him support from voters.

    A Gallup survey released on March 18 found that 46% of Americans believe the United States is not doing enough to help Ukraine fend off Russia’s attacks—a 16-percentage-point increase since December. […]

  157. birgerjohansson says

    How dare they hurt a friend of the killing Angels? #shorts

    .https://youtube.com/shorts/ng8YcycrKs8
    The thing about the killing angels in the TV version of Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency is that they are plugged into the cosmos in another level so weapons don’t work on them.

  158. says

    https://www.wonkette.com/p/idaho-judge-makes-states-abortion

    “Idaho Judge Makes State’s Abortion Ban Slightly Less Deadly”

    “Meanwhile, Texas lawmakers are determined to make their own even worse.”

    Women in Idaho with severe pregnancy complications are now somewhat less likely to die due to not being able to obtain an abortion, thanks to Judge Jason Scott who issued a ruling Friday that broadens the state’s teeny tiny, barely perceptible medical exception to include patients who are at death’s driveway rather than death’s door.

    The ruling will allow doctors to perform abortions even when death “is neither imminent nor assured” if their “good faith medical judgment” tells them that a patient faces a risk of dying “at some point” without an abortion. Prior to the ruling, doctors could have faced a felony for performing an abortion in that situation.

    […] The law still won’t allow abortions for fatal fetal anomalies — because it’s more important that people unrelated to the situation have an opportunity to “witness” a miracle than it is to not force people to give birth to babies that will either die on their way out or live for a few hours in excruciating pain. It also will not allow exceptions for patients who doctors believe will be at serious risk for suicide if forced to give birth to a dead baby.

    Texas Lawmakers Remind Us All That Things Can Always Get Worse

    On Monday, the Texas Senate will debate SB33, a bill to ban taxpayer funds from being used to fund “abortion assistance entities” or to directly support those going out of state to obtain abortions.

    This is likely in response to cities like San Antonio and Austin setting up their own funds to assist those who need to leave the state for an abortion, as well as providing funds to groups like Jane’s Due Process and Sueños Sin Fronteras that provide logistical and travel assistance to abortion patients.

    Importantly, SB33 provides a new definition of “abortion provider” that could have far wider implications. Right now, when Texas law refers to an “abortion provider,” it is referring to an actual facility where abortions are performed. This law changes that definition to “a person who performs or induces an abortion,” which would include those who self-manage their abortion, putting them at risk of criminal prosecution. […]

    Speaking Of Doing That

    Lawmakers in a dozen states — Alabama, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Texas — have recently introduced bills that will cause abortion patients to be charged with murder. (A crime that, in many of these states, is punishable by death.)

    […]

  159. birgerjohansson says

    In one single day, Trump decides to ignore the supreme court and make excuses for Putin’s missile attack.
    Myself @ 153
    This is why it may be least harmful to let the cretins make the whole house fall down early – despite the appaling consequences- as there is no upper limit to what the madman can do if left unchallenged the next three years and nine months.

  160. says

    U.S. businesses sue to block Trump tariffs, say trade deficits are not an emergency

    “The lawsuit alleges Trump has illegally usurped Congress’ power to levy tariffs by claiming trade deficits with other countries constitute an emergency.”

    A group of five small businesses on Monday sued President Donald Trump, seeking to block new tariffs that he has imposed on foreign imports in recent weeks.

    The lawsuit in the U.S. Court of International Trade alleges that Trump has illegally usurped Congress’ power to levy tariffs by claiming that trade deficits with other countries constitute an emergency.

    “Congress has not delegated any such power,” the suit says. “The statute the President invokes — the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (‘IEEPA’) — does not authorize the President to unilaterally issue across-the-board worldwide tariffs.”

    The Liberty Justice Center, which is representing the owner-operated companies, said Trump’s so-called Liberation Day tariffs of at least 10% on imports from most countries, and higher rates for scores of other nations, are devastating small businesses across the country.”

    “His claimed emergency is a figment of his own imagination: trade deficits, which have persisted for decades without causing economic harm, are not an emergency,” the suit says.

    “Nor do these trade deficits constitute an ’unusual and extraordinary threat.”

    The Liberty Justice Center noted that the Trump administration imposed tariffs even on countries with which the United States does not have a trade deficit, “further undermining the administration’s justification.” […]

    The plaintiffs include New York-based VOS Selections, which imports and distributes small-production wines, spirits, and sakes; FishUSA in Pennsylvania, a retail and wholesale e-commerce business making and selling sportfishing tackle and related gear; and Genova Pipe in Utah, which makes plastic pipe, conduit, and fittings for plumbing, irrigation, drainage, and electrical applications.

    The other plaintiffs are MicroKits LLC in Virginia, which makes educational electronic kits and musical instruments, and Terry Precision Cycling, a Vermont-based brand of women’s cycling apparel.

    “Terry Cycling has already paid $25,000 in unplanned tariffs this year for goods for which Terry was the importer of record, and Terry projects that the tariffs will cost the company approximately $250,000 by the end of 2025,” the suit says.

    Terry Cycling in 2026 expects to “face an estimated $1.2 million in tariff costs — an amount that is simply not survivable for a business of its size,” the suit says. […]

  161. John Morales says

    #151: “… Which was itself based on the New Testament. Really, the cannibalism scene at the end was a dead giveaway.”

    No.
    The title is from the OT (Exodus 2:22), and there is no anthropophagy in the NT.

  162. beholder says

    @107 Reginald

    A Wisconsin teen allegedly killed his parents to “obtain the financial means and autonomy necessary” to kill President Donald Trump and overthrow the U.S. government, federal authorities said in court documents.

    Interestingly he seems to have been directed by an individual or group in Ukraine. Strange bedfellows.

    @accelerationist: what country do you think will get the blame for this?

    Unknown: Russia will be blamed for it, this is the goal.”

    Some of the juicy bits:

    FBI personnel performing the preliminary review also saw a Telegram direct message conversation with “POMaH BiКТОВИЧ,” … In the conversation, @accelerationist (Casap) states:

    “How long will I need to hide before I will be moved to Ukraine? 1 -2 months?”

    “Also I probably should brush up on my Russian, because I can understand just fine but speaking is harder lol”

    “So while in Ukraine, I’ll be able to get a normal job and have a normal life? Even if when it’s found out I did it?”

    “Do the other 10 people also have similar beliefs to I? Or are they different?”

    “Assuming that my parents won’t leave…” [remainder of message cut off]

  163. Rob Grigjanis says

    John @161: The explicit cannibalism is in Heinlein’s novel, which I’m sure you knew. For the NT reference, see John 6: 53 et seq. That the title of the novel is from the OT is irrelevant.

  164. John Morales says

    “Interestingly he seems to have been directed by an individual or group in Ukraine. Strange bedfellows.”

    No, he does not. Not outside your fevered imagination.

  165. John Morales says

    Rob, yes, Jubal.
    And I’m very very tired of explaining to people that is not cannibalism, it’s theophagy.

    And the novel is absolutely not based on the NT.

    It was a very silly claim.

  166. Reginald Selkirk says

    I suggest this would be a better place if the troll was banned.

    Also, for any third parties paying attention, refusal to engage is not an acknowledgment that the troll won.

    Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day.
    John 6:54

  168. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Anna Bower (Lawfare):

    [Stephen Miller lied on Fox: “A DoJ lawyer, who has since been relieved of duty, saboteur, a Democrat, put into a filing incorrectly that this was a mistaken removal. It was not.”]

    Trump admin officials who have conceded that Kilmar Abrego Garcia was erroneously removed to El Salvador:
    1. Solicitor General John Sauer, in a filing at SCOTUS.
    2. ICE official Robert Cerna, in a sworn declaration.
    3. DOJ lawyer Erez Reuveni, in court filings and at a hearing.

     
    Democratic congress members are getting involved.
    Sen Chris Van Hollen (D-MD)

    I’ve requested to meet with President Bukele during his trip to the United States, and—if Kilmar is not home by midweek—I plan to travel to El Salvador this week to check on his condition and discuss his release

    Ritchie Torres (D-NY) introduced the RESCUE Act: Repatriation of Expelled Sovereign Citizens and Unjustly Exiled. Details at the link, not that it would pass, speaking up to fight normalization is still good.

  169. whheydt says

    Re: Reginald Selkirk @ #167…
    There’s a good case for any US citizen traveling out of country taking a burner phone with them, rather than one they normally use.

  170. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Prem Thakker (Zeteo):

    The Trump admin has just detained Mohsen Mahdawi, who:
    – has green card
    – was Columbia Buddhist club president
    – saw his best friend shot & killed by Israeli soldier
    – said “we are against antisemitism because antisemitism is a form of injustice, and injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere”

    He’s a Palestinian who grew up in a West Bank refugee camp. He co-founded a Student Union to “celebrate Palestinian culture”.

    Intercept – Called in for citizenship interview—then arrested by ICE

    he hoped that, after 10 years in the U.S., he would pass the test to become a naturalized citizen.
    […]
    Mahdawi was one of the leaders of the pro-Palestine student protest movement until spring 2024, when he said he took a step back from the movement to focus on building bridges with Jewish and Israeli communities on campus. […] Since then, Mahdawi became a focus of attacks from a member of Congress and Zionist groups like Canary Mission and Betar.
    […]
    Instead of taking him off the street, however, immigration authorities scheduled the citizenship test at the Burlington USCIS office and took Mahdawi into custody when he arrived. Now, Mahdawi is facing an order to deport him to the occupied West Bank […] “It’s kind of a death sentence,” Mahdawi said. […] recently, he lost two cousins in the growing violence […] His aunts and uncles’ homes have been destroyed and his father’s store was blown up
    […]
    he was worried it might be a trap. In anticipation of the worst, Mahdawi contacted his representatives in the Congress, including Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. and Peter Welch, D-Vt., as well as Rep. Becca Balint, D-Vt., to make them aware of his situation and ask them to intervene if possible.

  172. Reginald Selkirk says

    JD Vance drops college football trophy at White House ceremony

    US Vice-president JD Vance has dropped the College Football Playoff National Championship trophy at the White House on Monday during Ohio State Buckeyes’ visit.

    The 2025 College Football champions were invited by President Donald Trump to celebrate the team’s title-winning season with a ceremony on the South Lawn.

  173. Reginald Selkirk says

    Ecuador’s President Daniel Noboa wins re-election

    Sitting centre-right President Daniel Noboa has won the run-off round of Ecuador’s presidential election, meaning he will now serve a full four-year term.

    Noboa, who described his victory as “historic”, has only been in power since November 2023 after winning a snap election.

    He has defined his presidency, so far, through a tough military crackdown on violent criminal gangs in the country, which has become the most violent in the region.

    His left-wing challenger, Luisa González, said she did not accept the result and claimed fraud, without providing evidence…

  175. Reginald Selkirk says

    Jury selected for retrial of Sarah Palin’s New York Times defamation suit

    A jury was selected on Monday for the retrial in Sarah Palin’s lawsuit against the New York Times for allegedly defaming the former Alaska governor and Republican vice presidential candidate in a 2017 editorial about gun control.

    Palin, 61, who was unsuccessful in her 2008 bid for the second-highest U.S. office alongside running mate John McCain, lost her first trial against the Times and former editorial page editor James Bennet in 2022.

    But the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan last August decided that the verdict was tainted by several rulings by the presiding judge, and ordered a retrial.

    Opening statements are due to begin on Tuesday at 9:30 a.m. EDT (1330 GMT) before U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff in Manhattan.

    The nine-person jury selected by Rakoff and lawyers for both sides includes five women and four men.

    Palin sued the newspaper after it published an editorial on June 14, 2017, bearing the headline “America’s Lethal Politics” that wrongly suggested she may have incited a January 2011 mass shooting in an Arizona parking lot in which six people were killed and U.S. Representative Gabby Giffords was gravely wounded. The Times quickly corrected the editorial and apologized…

  176. Reginald Selkirk says

    Słupcio: A 6,000-year-old amber ‘gummy bear’ that may have been a Stone Age amulet

    This unique carved amber bear was discovered in northern Poland by workers digging for peat in 1887. An ancient hunter likely wore it as a protective charm, since the bear was the most powerful and dangerous animal that lived in the area during the Stone Age.

    “Słupcio” — or “little guy from Słupsk” in Polish — is the name given to the amber bear in 2013, when a Polish kindergartner won a contest to name the artifact. (The lucky winner also snagged a teddy bear.)

    The carved bear is on display at the National Museum in Szczecin, around 136 miles (220 kilometers) southwest of his original find spot, and he has become something of a local symbol, where copies of him are widely available as souvenirs.

    The figurine is 4 inches (10.2 centimeters) long and 1.65 inches (4.2 cm) tall and may date to Europe’s Mesolithic period (12,000 to 5,000 years ago). At this time, people were mostly hunter-gatherers, so archaeological evidence of their settlements is rare. But in the area of Pomerania on the southern shore of the Baltic Sea, archaeologists have found Stone Age sites with artifacts, such as pottery, tools and weapons, along with objects made from amber that washed ashore. This type of amber comes from marine sediments…

  177. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Today’s DoJ daily update on Abrego Garcia was much like yesterday’s @112.

    Chris Geidner (Law Dork):

    Filed an hour late, today’s government declaration in Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s case comes from the acting general counsel of DHS, claiming DHS has no authority to “extract” Abrego Garcia from El Salvador and providing a YouTube link to the Oval Office comments
    […]
    Ironically enough, including that link constitutes a submission of Stephen Miller’s disgusting, lying propaganda in the Oval Office that “the Supreme Court said that the district court order was unlawful and its main components were reversed 9-0 unanimously…” [@168]

    Good luck there, Drew Ensign! […] On Tuesday, we start moving toward seeing what Xinis will do about this.

    Quinta Jurecic (Lawfare): “Second day in a row they misspelled [his name].”

  178. JM says

    @174 Reginald Selkirk: Grok is actively used word in some circles and appears in dictionaries. It shouldn’t be allowed as a trademarked term at all. They should be forced to come up with some new or at least so obscure nobody has heard it. Make the companies go with GrokAI if they want to trademark it.

  179. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    It’s always dumber than you imagine.

    Trump’s $1 billion law firm deals are the work of his personal lawyer

    Boris Epshteyn, who has been indicted in Arizona on charges related to Trump’s 2020 election loss […] Epshteyn has never tried a criminal or civil case and carries a white business card that reads, “Boris Epshteyn, Esq.” that lists his Gmail email account and a cellphone number. He calls a steakhouse in Washington where he hosts meetings every week his unofficial office.
    […]
    Some of the law firms privately worried about negotiating with a lawyer who wasn’t employed by the government and didn’t have a government email address […] But they decided talking with Epshteyn was their best path to avoid a government investigation or executive order […] after determining he had serious sway with Trump.
    […]
    He previously pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct as part of a bar incident. He was accused by Trump’s campaign lawyer of shaking down potential administration nominees for consulting contracts.
    […]
    the monetary figures were less onerous than they might seem […] For example, the pro bono commitments in some instances were to be completed “during the Trump administration and beyond.” Beyond, could stretch until the end of time, a lawyer involved in one of the deals said.

  180. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Justin Baragona (The Intercept):

    The White House cites an NPR feature that states “banana slugs are hermaphrodites” as a reason to cease public funding of the network.

    But banana slugs literally are hermaphrodites! Like that is just a scientific fact! Also, yes, “some deer are nonbinary.” This isn’t just some WOKE nonsense that NPR is putting out there to trans your kids.

    Miriam Goldstein (Ocean Sci): “Also clownfish and over 400 species of other fish literally do change sex?”

    Rando 1:

    It’s another way that fascism is actively maladaptive, in that this kind of obsession with reducing clarity in language is clearly stupid.
    […]
    Current right wing bigotry in America would rather be more confused about the nature of the world and how things work, and have less understanding of social dynamics, in exchange for being able to inconvenience people who make them uncomfortable.

    Rando 2: “My pet peeve is that every rancher knows about nonbinary livestock. It’s not uncommon. It’s not controversial. But now the party of rural ‘Merica pretends vigorously that ‘nonbinary’ can’t possibly be real becuse their own hate requires that.”
    Rando 3: “Anybody who knows what a freemartin is should be able to understand that sex is more than chromosomes present at time of conception.”

  181. whheydt says

    Re: CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain @ #180…
    …and anyone who ever read Brave New World should know what a freemartin is.

  182. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Video (FB, BS): Rep Melanie Stansbury (D-NM) (3:16)

    I’m here at the Social Security Administration office in Albuquerque, and we were just denied entry […] we had an appointment, and we notified them in advance that we were planning to come […] not only had they not notified us that they were cancelling the appointment, when we tried to get onto the 2nd floor and meet with the administrative staff, we overheard on the radios that they were denying us entry and that nobody was allowed to either talk to the press or to us.

    Then they handed me a little slip of paper with an anonymous phone number and email address for an office in Texas, which I called, and there was nobody on the other line.
    […]
    This building was built to house over 600 Social Security employees. They currently only have about 250 to 300 […] call times of over 4 hours.
    […]
    we don’t know what exactly the endgame is […] but what we do know is that for years, the GOP has been trying to dismantle Social Security and privatize key services and programs and make it possible for the private equity world to use the balances of Social Security to make money on the stock market.

    We want to say to you Elon Musk, “Hands off our Social Security.”

    The next HandsOff protests are Saturday, April 19.

  183. birgerjohansson says

    Watched the Late Night hosts joking.
    .
    Kate Perry returned from space.
    She said she has always been interested in space physics and astrology.
    NO! NO! YOU WERE DOING SO WELL UP TO THIS POINT!
    .
    Various GOPers doing sycophantic flattering of DJT
    Old man Gingrich: “He is like the various Scandinavian Beowulfs”
    NO! There was only one Beowulf! And the plural would be Beowolves.
    .
    Idiot i forgot the name of: “He will be the new Moses ”
    No! Only a Jew can be Moses. DJT would faint during the circumcision. And he would never learn the sh*t needed before a bar mitzva.
    The fucker cannot even recall the name of the Tesla brand, no way he would remember the difference between hanukkah and yom kippur. And he would use the shofa as a diet Coke holder.
    The only thing he would show an interest in is the pushka, and you would need to post guards to stop him from stealing it.

  185. StevoR says

    @125. birgerjohansson :

    Stream-of-consciousness question:
    How hard would it be in terms of engineering to build big structures like telescopes on the summit of very tall mountains, like Denali in Alaska and Chimborazo in the Andes?

    In addition to what #134 CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain noted there’s also the The Sphinx Observatory located on the Jungfraujoch which I saw (I think – presume same one) described as a Gacier Observatory in a news story / show the other day. Unless that was talking about something else?

    See :

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphinx_Observatory

  186. birgerjohansson says

    A cheerful link.
    Saveafox: “Cuddle with Emmie Fox.”
    .https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1BSB9WcpZJ/

    Unfortunately these fluffy critters pee everywhere – unlike dogs they are “tame” not “domesticated.

    The three-legged one in the background had such injuries a leg had to be amputated. They take good care of the animals but when they are first brought in some are in very poor condition.

  187. Rob Grigjanis says

    birger @183:

    And the plural would be Beowolves

    I think the OE plural would be Beowulfas.

  190. KG says

    beholder@162,

    I notice you give no source for your claim Casap: ” seems to have been directed by an individual or group in Ukraine”. Why not?

    According to Reginald Selkirk’s Yahoo link @107:

    The sheriff’s department issued a search warrant and say they found material on the teen’s phone related to “The Order of Nine Angles,” which is “a network of individuals holding new-Nazi racially motivated extremist views,” according to investigators.

    The Federal Bureau of Investigation reviewed documents allegedly written by the teen, which calls for the assassination of Trump and the start of a revolution to “save the white race,” according to federal court documents.

    Now there are neo-Nazis in Ukraine, just as there are in the USA, in Russia, and I’d guess in almost all countries. Or non-neo-Nazi Ukrainians hating Trump, entirely understandably, might possibly try to make use of an American neo-Nazi.
    But how would they have recruited Casap? How could they possibly think he might succeed in assassinating Trump? Without a credible source, I simply don’t believe your claim.

  191. KG says

    birgerjohansson@159,
    What credible way is there for “the whole house to fall down early”, short of a nuclear war? Are you thinking of a military coup? A civil war? I can’t see how either would come about, at least within the next 4 years.

  192. KG says

    Further to my 191,
    Ah, looking back to birgerjohansson’s #150, #153, I understand what he’s getting at @159.

  193. Tethys says

    Birger- And the plural would be Beowolves
    Rob- I think the OE plural would be Beowulfas.

    The S ending is singular genitive, which is strongly preserved in English. The nominative plural of ulfr in Old Norse is úlfar. Úlfar, úlfa, úlfa, úlfum.

    In Old Saxon it is wulfes in singular genitive, and wulfos in plural nominative.

    Proto Germanic had the Z grammatical ending of wulfaz, which morphed into the highly confusing modern method of using the s ending for both genitive and plural forms in modern English.
    Otherwise the plural form of Germanic words generally use a different vowel to differentiate the plural.

    Mouse mice. Goose geese.

  194. rorschach says

    Birger @159,
    “This is why it may be least harmful to let the cretins make the whole house fall down early”

    Like KG said, how? Doesn’t look like we’re having a general strike anytime soon, the courts obey or are being ignored, the media are compliant, the comedians are making their jokes as if it was still democracy, and so on. Sure, the Chinese could sell their billions in US bonds, and tourism to the US is about to fall off a cliff, but I don’t reckon that’s nearly enough to topple this regime.

  195. Reginald Selkirk says

    FCC head Brendan Carr tells Europe to get on board with Starlink

    One of President Donald Trump’s top officials has warned European allies hesitant about working with Elon Musk’s satellite Internet company that they needed to choose between US and Chinese technology.

    Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr told the Financial Times that “allied western democracies” needed to “focus on the real long-term bogey: the rise of the Chinese Communist party.”

    His comments come as European governments and some European companies consider whether Starlink—which is owned by Musk’s SpaceX and provides satellite broadband and limited mobile services—is a reliable partner after Washington threatened to switch off its services in Ukraine….

    “allied western democracies” – The Trump administration is not especially democratic, and we are seeing how they treat their allies.

  196. Reginald Selkirk says

    Coal Miners Sue Trump Admin After It Halts Black Lung Protections

    …
    Whether the current president actually loves the chemical compound that is coal or not, his administration doesn’t seem to give much of a shit about the health and safety of the workers who dig it out of the ground. The new government continues to attack and dismantle worker protections that provide health and economic benefits to a whole array of workers, including those who toil in subterranean mines. Now, two unions representing miners have sued the White House over its recent threat to their welfare.

    In These Times writes that the United Miner Workers of America (UMWA) and the AFL-CIO’s United Steelworkers have filed litigation against the Mine Safety and Health Administration which, under Trump, has paused a long-pursued regulation that would have limited miners’ exposure to a toxic chemical commonly found in mines. The rule, called “Lowering Miners’ Exposure to Respirable Crystalline Silica and Improving Respiratory Protection,” would have—just as it says—enforced new regulations that drastically reduced miners’ exposure to crystalline silica, which is a toxic mineral that can cause serious respiratory problems when inhaled. The outlet writes:…

  197. Reginald Selkirk says

    This Unassuming Mushroom Packs the Bitterest Taste Ever Measured

    Would you eat the forbidden fungi? Scientists have uncovered a mushroom-derived compound that seems to be the most bitter substance known on Earth.

    Researchers in Germany made the not-so-tasty find in a species of mushroom called Amaropostia stiptica—also aptly known as the bitter bracket fungus. The compound is one of three new bitter molecules discovered by studying the mushroom. The findings may help scientists better understand how animals like us evolved to detect bitterness, among other unanswered questions, the researchers say…

    Though A. stiptica isn’t toxic like some species of mushroom, it is practically inedible due to its bitterness. The researchers found that some of its taste can be explained by the previously known compounds oligoporins A and B, which are examples of triterpene glycosides. But they also discovered three new similar compounds, which they’ve coined oligoporins D through F.

    One of these compounds, oligoporin D, is so bitter that it can set off our bitter taste receptors (formally called TAS2Rs) at the incredibly low concentration of 63 millionths of a gram per liter, according to the researchers. To put it in plainer terms, this would be the equivalent of one gram dropped into roughly 100 bathtubs’ worth of water.

    Scientists at the Leibniz Institute for Food Systems Biology at the Technical University of Munich in Freising and at the Leibniz Institute of Plant Biochemistry in Halle made the discovery together. Their findings were published earlier this February in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry…

  200. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Politico – The FDA fired its tobacco enforcers. Now it wants them back.

    Senior FDA officials asked laid-off employees in recent days to temporarily return after mass cuts decimated the agency’s ability to penalize retailers that sell cigarettes and vapes to minors
    […]
    senior leaders are seeking volunteers among those who Kennedy fired to return from administrative leave and help maintain continuity until they’re officially terminated on June 2. As of Friday, more than two dozen staffers had agreed to return, a development one of the officials attributed in part to workers’ fears of being denied severance benefits if they refused.
    […]
    Though some senior FDA officials within the Center for Tobacco Products are still trying to get the office fully reinstated, others have warned returning staffers that there is likely no path to being permanently rehired.
    […]
    The Center for Tobacco Products is funded entirely by user fees paid by industry, meaning the terminations won’t create any taxpayer savings. Instead, officials said, it may end up costing money; the fines that the FDA collects from retailers are funneled directly to the federal treasury.

    TvTropes – Blue-and-Orange Morality

    These characters have a moral framework that is so utterly alien and foreign to human experience that we can’t peg them as “good” or “evil”. […] they may seem to act terrifyingly randomly […] their understanding of “law” as a concept may not even be equivalent to ours. […] often likely to commit acts we would see as horrific […] they tend to act as if nothing were the matter. Because in their world/mind, that’s just what they do.

  202. says

    New York Times reported:

    Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, disclosed on Monday that she had purchased between tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of stock on April 8 and 9, the day before and the day of President Trump’s announcement that he was pausing a sweeping set of global tariffs, a pivot that sent the stock market soaring out of a sizable slump. Ms. Greene bought between about $21,000 and $315,000 in stocks on those days. The day before Mr. Trump’s move, she also dumped between $50,000 and $100,0000 in Treasury bills, according to required public disclosures made to the House.

    Commentary:

    […] These disclosure documents are public information, which have been published online. In this instance, they show the right-wing congresswoman made nearly two dozen trades — ranging from $1,001 to $15,000 — the day before and the day of her presidential ally’s “pause” announcement. […]

    Shortly after the news broke, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries sat down with MSNBC’s Jen Psaki, who sought his reaction to the developments.

    “So many of these people are crooks, liars and frauds, and Marjorie Taylor Greene is, of course, Exhibit A,” the New York Democrat said. “We are seeing corruption unfold before us in real time. And House Democrats and Senate Democrats are going to partner together to make sure we, of course, shine a spotlight on these issues. One, we do need to change the law so that sitting members of Congress cannot trade stock. Period. Full stop. And until we get to that point, we obviously have to continue to highlight why this is problematic.”

    Jeffries is hardly alone on this. Around the time he was on MSNBC, one of his fellow House Democrats, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a longtime critic of lawmakers being able to make stock trades, delivered remarks to a sizable crowd in Idaho, where she addressed the Times’ report. [social media post available at the link]

    “We saw Majorie Taylor Greene buy that dip,” the New York Democrat said. “How much did you make? How much did you make off of people’s despair? How much did you make off of that panic? How much did you make off of that suffering? No more. We can’t accept it.”

    In the other chamber, meanwhile, the morning after Trump’s move, Democratic Sens. Adam Schiff of California and Ruben Gallego of Arizona wrote to the Office of Government Ethics demanding an investigation into possible market manipulation. A day later, an even larger group of Senate Democrats appealed to the Securities and Exchange Commission, calling on the agency to launch an investigation into “potential violations of federal securities laws by President Trump and his affiliates.”

    I don’t imagine we’ve heard the last of this. Watch this space.

    Link

  203. JM says

    As he lionizes a strongman, Trump flexes power over the law, top colleges and the media

    Only three months into his new term, President Donald Trump is escalating a battle against institutions that challenge his strongman instincts, including the courts, the legal profession, elite education and the media.

    The administration is projecting presidential authority in a broader and more overt way than any modern White House. Its expansive interpretation of statutes and questionable interpretations of judges’ rulings is causing alarm about its impact on the rule of law, freedom of expression and the Constitution.

    This is obvious to anybody who has been paying attention but it making headline news at CNN is significant.

    Laurence Tribe, a renowned constitutional scholar, told CNN Monday that the administration’s defiance made it likely the case would end up back before the Supreme Court – which would then face a fateful choice. “It is not just immigrants who are subject to this kind of game. It is a deadly game that could be played with any citizen,” Tribe, professor emeritus at Harvard Law told Kaitlan Collins, who had earlier questioned Trump and Bukele in the Oval Office. “The president has already begun to play it. That is not the country that any of us I think grew up in.”

    Tribe understand what is going on. If the government can disappear an alien due to administrative error and there is no path to correction then they can disappear anyone at any time for any reason.

    The idea that the administration would ignore constitutional protections available to all Americans, even those who are incarcerated, and deport them to draconian prison camps overseas might strain credulity. But Trump’s words came amid an atmosphere of growing authoritarianism around his White House and an apparent determination to reject constitutional constraints on his behavior.

    It doesn’t strain credulity at all. I just find it surprising the speed with which Trump has managed this. I didn’t expect him to be this organized or effective in undermining the country. It was obvious in his first term that he wanted to be a petty dictator but his own incompetence got in his way.

  204. birgerjohansson says

    Sweden is the most Americanised country in Europe. And we are weeping for you.

  207. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    U.S. tariffs are about to trigger the greatest trade diversion the world has ever seen

    The tariffs have redirected billions of dollars in exports originally bound for the U.S., which are now poised to flood global markets
    […]
    The world has been here before. In the 1930s, the U.S. enacted the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which raised tariffs on thousands of imported goods in an effort to shield American industries during the Great Depression. The result was a rapid contraction of global trade.

    What ultimately tipped the world over the edge wasn’t direct retaliation against the U.S. Instead, global trade collapsed as U.S. trading partners turned on each other. Faced with a flood of diverted goods, they rushed to protect their own manufacturing by enacting trade restrictions of their own.
    […]
    In some respects, the world may be in a more precarious position today than it was in the early 1930s. For close to a decade, western policymakers, including G7 members, have sounded alarm bells over “Chinese overcapacity.” China consumes too little at home and exports too much abroad, often using unfair non-market practices such as covert subsidization to undercut local prices. […] At the same time, global trade rules meant to safeguard against protectionism have become brittle. The U.S. has blocked the appointment of judges to the World Trade Organization’s highest court, which is tasked with enforcing trade rules.
    […]
    If countries stick to these rules, the global trading system can weather the storm. Just as possible, though, is a slide toward protectionism. Faced with a deluge of goods coming from China, the temptation to erect illegal trade barriers like the U.S. already has will be high.

  208. says

    https://www.wonkette.com/p/bill-maher-trumps-useful-idiot

    Bill Maher has always been a feckless, narcissistic, dumb asshole. But on last Friday’s episode of MAX’s “Real Time with Bill Maher,” Maher finally reached his final form: Trump water-carrying stooge.

    Maher began by recounting how a humble, common man such as he found himself being hosted to dinner at the White House by a sentient constitutional crisis.

    MAHER: I had dinner with President Trump. A dinner that was set up by my friend Kid Rock […]

    Truly a man of the people. The picture of the dinner, also attended by UFC President and noted spouse slapper Dana White, is truly an out-of-touch masterpiece.

    Maher tried at times to simultaneously state his self-importance and make the dinner seem loftier in its symbolism…

    MAHER: […] Because we share a belief that there’s gotta be something better than hurling insults from 3,000 miles away.

    …while also doing the “I’m just a dumb comedian” defense that Joe Rogan and Jon Stewart use to deflect just criticism.

    MAHER: Lemme first say to all of the people who treated this like it was some kind of summit meeting, you’re ridiculous… like I was gonna sign a treaty or something. I have no power, I’m a fucking comedian, and he’s the most powerful leader in the world.

    But Maher knows if he had “no power,” this entire segment would be pointless. So Maher quickly went back to his delusions of grandeur.

    MAHER: I’m not the leader of anything, except maybe a contingent of centrist-minded people who think there’s got to be a better way to run this country than hating each other every minute. […]

    Why does this idiocy sound so familiar? [Image of Joe Manchin’s book]

    Maher proceeded to explain why […] Trump presents no danger to anyone because he had a lovely two-hour dinner with him and HE felt safe.

    MAHER: The guy I met [Trump] is not the person who the night before the dinner tweeted a bunch of nasty crap about how he thought this dinner was a bad idea. […] But when I got there that guy wasn’t living there.

    Maher also assured us that privately he challenged Trump on topics like Gaza, the Syrian refugee crisis, Iran, and Trump’s threat of a third term. Maher even said (gasp!) Trump admitted he lost the 2020 election.

    MAHER: I don’t remember exactly what we were talking about but it must have been something about the 2020 election because I know he used the word “lost.” And I distinctly remember saying, “Wow, I never thought I’d hear you say that.” He didn’t get mad. He’s much more self-aware than he lets on in public. […]

    Oh, for fuck’s sake! Are you also gonna tell us Trump is also secretly a great dancer and generous lover in private […]

    Maher continued by sharing how he felt he never “had to walk on eggshells around” Trump while trying to still assure the audience of his “liberal” bonafides.

    MAHER: And honestly, I voted for Clinton and Obama, but I would never feel comfortable talking to them the way I was able to talk to Donald Trump. That’s just how it went down, make of it what you will.

    […] But while Maher plays a liberal on TV, he couldn’t hide who he is underneath. In truth, Maher has always had a weird level of comfort with bigots that he doesn’t seem to have with progressives. From Milo Yiannopoulos to Steve Bannon to the numerous appearances on his shows of Ann Coulter, Kellyanne Conway, Matt Schlapp, Glenn Greenwald, Tomi Lahren, Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, and many more.

    And he peppered those revelations in between heaping helpings of praise for Trump.

    […]

    MAHER: My friend said to me “What are you going to wear to the White House?” I said, “I don’t know. But I’m not going to dress like [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelenskyy, I’ll tell you that that.”

    Or this uninterrupted run that sounded like Maher’s audition tape for Daily Wire, if they’re still hiring that is.

    MAHER: Check the tapes. Moving Israel’s embassy to Jerusalem? Loved it! The border did need to be controlled. I’m glad the cops are getting their morale back. DEI had gone too far. Biological men shouldn’t be playing women’s sports. Europe should pay for their defense. And, of course, it makes sense that Arab countries should take in Arab refugees like the million Syrians who wound up in Germany when Saudi Arabia took none.

    Maher concluded by slathering a bit more praise without a hint of self-awareness.

    MAHER: Don’t worry MAGA. Your boy gave me nothing. Just hats and a very generous amount of time, and a willingness to listen and accept me as a possible friend even though I’m not MAGA, which was the point of the dinner. […] Trump was gracious and measured, and why he isn’t that in other settings, I don’t know and I can’t answer and it’s not my place to answer. I’m just telling you what I saw, and I wasn’t high.

    Maher’s guests on this show were Piers Morgan, Steve Bannon, and Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin. [photo at the link]

    While it seemed no one would push back, Josh Rogin was the closest we got during the panel discussion. Rogin stated the obvious reality that Maher was used like a useful PR fleshlight by Trump … albeit while trying to soften the blow of his critique so much that Maher himself called him out as being patronizing. [video at the link]

    Link

    Video at the link.

  209. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Gov Exec – OPM strips career HR from Schedule C appointments, salary setting

    low-level political appointees […] Schedule C salaries cap out at $195,200. […] Traditionally, […] HR employees evaluate an incoming appointee’s resume and experience, ensure they are properly vetted, and provide input about the appointee’s proposed starting salary. […] last week’s memo appears aimed at expediting the replacement of career workers with political appointees by removing career-employee guard rails from the process.

    “[When] we processed appointments, the White House would tell us what position they were encumbering and what their grade or salary would be,” they said. “Sometimes they’d listen to us, but they could always overrule us. What they’re doing now, […] is they’re cutting HR out of it completely, so HR will take people who are totally unqualified and put them in whatever positions and at whatever salary the White House sets for them.”
    […]
    “I think you’re about to see a s——d of Schedule C employees making $195,200,”

  210. says

    [Trump] has signed fewer bills into law at this point in his term than any new president since Dwight Eisenhower. It’s worth appreciating why.

    […] 12 weeks into Donald Trump’s second term, if you’re thinking you haven’t seen a lot of bill-signing ceremonies lately, it’s not your imagination. Punchbowl News reported that the Republican president has taken a great many ambitious steps to advance his priorities, yet signed very few bills into law.

    Trump has signed fewer bills into law at this point in his presidency than any new president taking office for the last seven decades, according to government records. Trump has signed just five bills into law so far: three Congressional Review Act resolutions overturning Biden-era regulations, the Laken Riley Act and a stopgap funding bill needed to avoid a government shutdown last month.

    […] every other modern president — including presidents of one party working with Congresses led by the other party — had signed more bills into law by this point in their terms. In fact, in his first term, even Trump himself had signed 24 pieces of legislation by mid-April.

    […] the easiest explanation is also the most obvious: Trump isn’t signing a lot of bills because he doesn’t feel the need to rely on Congress to advance his priorities. [Trump] has governed — I’m using the word loosely — almost entirely by executive order, signing 124 EOs since returning to the White House.

    […] In theory, Congress might push back against the idea of institutional irrelevance, but in practice, GOP leaders in the House and Senate appear quite content to let Trump consolidate power and pursue far-right goals without meaningful contributions from Capitol Hill.

    In fairness, this might soon change. Last week, Republicans managed to advance their budget blueprint, which opened the door to a sweeping and radical reconciliation package, which will likely include costly tax breaks and dramatic cuts to vital social service programs, including Medicaid. No one knows when such a bill will take shape, but it’s very likely to exist in the near future, setting the stage for one of the biggest legislative showdowns in years. […]

  212. birgerjohansson says

    The Guardian 
    “Millions tune in for three-week live stream of Sweden’s moose migration”   
    .https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/apr/15/millions-tune-in-for-three-week-live-stream-of-swedens-moose-migration
      ‘Slow-TV’ as welcome escape from the cacaphony of news.
    .
    “The Glassworker: Studio Ghibli’s legacy lives in Pakistan’s first hand-drawn feature”  
    .https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/apr/16/the-glassworker-studio-ghibli-movie-sbs-on-demand-pakistan

  213. says

    Trump’s team targeted Harvard with an extortion scheme. When the university balked, the administration’s retaliation was swift.

    The parallels between Donald Trump’s offensive against law firms and his related campaign against American higher education are unsubtle. In both instances, the president has launched what are effectively extortion campaigns, telling firms and schools they’ll face harsh penalties unless they meet the White House’s unreasonable demands.

    In both instances, some of the targets have tried to appease [Trump], while others have chosen to fight. In both instances, Trump has publicly taunted his victims.

    And in both instances, at least some of the president’s targets have come to realize that bending the knee in the face of authoritarian-style pressure doesn’t always work out well.

    Nearly a month ago, for example, Columbia University agreed to most of the White House’s demands in the hopes that Trump and his team would restore $400 million in federal funding. Not only were those hopes soon dashed — Columbia didn’t get its money back — but the administration soon after proposed installing oversight personnel to help run the school in ways that would make the president happy.

    In effect, the White House responded to Columbia’s appeasement by trying in part to take over Columbia. [!]

    Other universities took note. Take Harvard, for example.

    The White House approached Harvard with 10 demands on a wide variety of topics, including the installation of outside auditors who would monitor academic departments to ensure “viewpoint” diversity, as defined by Team Trump. Harvard refused to the terms.

    As NBC News reported, the retaliatory response was swift.

    The federal government on Monday night said it was freezing more than $2 billion in grants to Harvard University after the school said it would not accept Trump administration demands that included auditing viewpoints of the student body. … [The administration] said that $2.2 billion in multi-year grants and $60 million ‘in multi-year contract value’ would be frozen to the Ivy League university.

    This might not be the full extent of the punishment. The morning after Harvard resisted the extortion scheme, the president turned to his social media platform to peddle a new and related threat.

    “Perhaps Harvard should lose its Tax Exempt Status and be Taxed as a Political Entity if it keeps pushing political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting ‘Sickness?’” Trump wrote.

    The developments mark a breakthrough moment in an extraordinary and historically unusual fight: No previous White House has ever tried to use the power of the state to steer the nation’s preeminent institutions of higher learning in an ideological direction favored by the president.

    It also helps to set the stage for a series of legal fights that will be of enormous importance, as a variety of leading universities — Cornell, Northwestern, Brown, Princeton, Penn et al. — face Trump’s wrath.

    The consequences have the potential to be far-reaching. I didn’t agree with everything in The Washington Post’s recent editorial on the subject, but the paper’s editorial board noted, “U.S. research universities, and the federal funding that supports them, are one major reason Americans have collected more Nobel Prizes than citizens of any other country. They also help make the United States the world’s innovation engine and the top destination for foreign students. No other country is as adept at converting raw human talent and ideas into cutting-edge products. Research universities anchor innovation clusters such as Silicon Valley, which in turn fuel the country’s economic growth.”

    The stakes, in other words, are quite high.

  214. says

    Josh Marshall:

    […] all just smoke and BS.

    Almost every part of the agreements [between the Trump administration and big law firms] are worded in ways that make the purported commitments basically meaninglessness. So for instance, each agreement has the firm agreeing not to do “illegal DEI hiring.” But that’s easy for them to agree to, as far as they’re concerned, because they don’t think whatever DEI or affirmative action hiring they do is illegal. So whatever “illegal DEI hiring” might be they don’t do it. End of story. And the same applies to pretty much all the other fairness related commitments.

    Even the pro bono work, which now includes “other free legal services” is a bit less than it appears. […] this part of the agreement appears to be with Trump himself apart from the presidency and continues past the duration of his administration. But the same language means that the notional commitment to either $100 million or $125 million in pro bono work is over an indefinite and actually unlimited period of time. So by the terms of the agreement Kirkland & Ellis or Cadwallader can run down that commitment over a century. Or two. Any amount of time is okay. Maybe Trump will still be assigning free legal work when he’s 200. […]

    My point here isn’t to say these agreements are fine. It’s that they amount to agreements to lie to each other. And everyone else. Except to the firm’s own staff. They get the real story. Or what the management committee believes is the real story. Or anyone else who says the firm’s betrayed their principles. They get told the firm didn’t really agree to anything.

    […] the White House didn’t agree to anything more than to end the EEOC probes and not to release an executive order targeting the firms in the near future. That last point is key. Each firm was made to believe that an executive order was imminent. And now it’s not imminent. But could the administration come back with something else in six months? Or a year? Sure. […]

    My own read is that the firms see this gambit as simply a necessary and mostly meaningless effort to get the White House off their back. I think they assume or hope that the political climate shifts and by the time it does they say these agreements were always BS. They’re unenforceable, made in duress and against threatened actions that were illegal. […]

    Of course, inking the deals at all – or non-inking them, as the case may be – still achieves something very tangible for Trump: the appearance of the powerful and mighty all bending to his will. For Trump that’s a big deal […] If everyone agrees to pretend Trump is all powerful then he kind of is. [!] In a way the firms are doing an incremental damage to the broader society and its relative freedom at little or no real expense to themselves. […]

    […]

    https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/whats-really-in-the-white-house-law-firm-agreements

    In terms of the PR factor, most of the public still thinks major law firms are capitulating to Trump’s demands.

  215. says

    Reaction To The Latest Oval Office Debacle

    Adam Serwer: “This rhetorical game the administration is playing, where it pretends it lacks the power to ask for Abrego Garcia to be returned while Bukele pretends he doesn’t have the power to return him, is an expression of obvious contempt for the Supreme Court—and for the rule of law.”

    Jonathan V. Last: “The real question is: Does the chief justice understand this state of affairs? Or is he blind to reality?”

    Timothy Snyder: “On the White House’s theory, if they abduct you, get you on a helicopter, get to international waters, shoot you in the head, and drop your corpse into the ocean, that is legal, because it is the conduct of foreign affairs.”

    Chris Geidner: “[I]t appears that the administration — likely led by Stephen Miller, based on who is and how he performed in the Oval Office on Monday, with a pliant Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem helping him — has centered in on an approach to get out from under these pesky federal courts by shoehorning all manner of illegal and even unconstitutional actions into “foreign relations” [Yep. That’s true.] and beyond the reach of the courts.”

    Joyce Vance: “If there were a map that showed democracy slipping into dictatorship, we would be at the spot marked “You are here.” We shouldn’t sugarcoat the danger. Due process matters to immigrants and Americans alike. When the presidency refuses to honor it, we are all in danger. Donald Trump could snap his fingers and secure Abrego Garcia’s return to the United States. We all know that’s true, no matter what pretense this administration assumes.”

    Link

    Several news reports are presented at the link.

  216. says

    The Trump White House denied the Associated Press access to the President’s Oval Office meeting with Bukele despite a court order forbidding the Trump administration from punishing the AP for refusing to rename the Gulf of Mexico.

    Same link as in comment 215,

  217. says

    FEMA denies Washington state disaster relief from bomb cyclone

    The Federal Emergency Management Agency has denied Washington state’s request for emergency relief funds to help repair an estimated $34 million in damage from a deadly bomb cyclone storm system in November, according to Gov. Bob Ferguson.

    Ferguson said in a news release on Monday that the state’s January application for assistance was denied in a letter he received on Friday. The state’s application had met all of the criteria necessary to qualify, he said.

    “This is another troubling example of the federal government withholding funding,” Ferguson, a Democrat, said. “Washington communities have been waiting for months for the resources they need to fully recover from last winter’s devastating storms, and this decision will cause further delay. We will appeal.”

    The November storm system battered the state with strong winds and rain that caused widespread damage and power outages, and toppled trees that killed at least two people. It was considered a “ bomb cyclone,” which occurs when a cyclone intensifies rapidly. Bomb cyclones have been associated with major weather events across the country including hurricanes in recent years.

    After Washington’s storms, then-Gov. Jay Inslee issued a disaster declaration in 11 counties — including where Seattle is located — and filed the application for disaster relief with FEMA to repair damage to public highways, public utilities and electrical power systems.

    FEMA’s letter denying the application didn’t give an explanation and said the assistance was “not warranted.” The state has 30 days to appeal.

    The denial comes as FEMA’s future is in question. […] Trump has questioned whether to disband it entirely and give money directly to states to handle disasters. Trump has created a council to study what to do with FEMA and whether to get rid of it. […]

  219. says

    Consequences:

    […] I haven’t bought a single thing at Target since before January 24, when they announced that they would be rolling back their “DEI” (diversity, equity, and inclusion) efforts in advance of expected segregationist changes to the cultural zeitgeist. (Your mandatory reminder: “anti-DEI” is the new rightwing shorthand for Black people and gay people and women shouldn’t exist outside the home in our society, and hiring them means you’ve probably discriminated against a white man.) […]

    I’m far from alone. The big box retailer’s stock fell to a four-year low of $88.76 a share earlier this month (down from a high of $266.38 a share on November 15, 2021), and in-store foot traffic has been decreasing every week for the last 10 weeks […]

    One could chalk this all up to people being more circumspect about their purchases in light of the whole tariffs situation were it not for the fact that Costco is killing it.

    Stock for Costco, which bucked the trend and very publicly vowed to hold onto their DEI initiatives, actually hit a four-year high of $968.99 on February 12 — and, as of April 4, their foot traffic had increased for 13 straight weeks. […]

    https://www.wonkette.com/p/its-only-a-flesh-wound-target-keeps

  220. says

    Democratic lawmakers say they’ll travel to El Salvador to push for Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s release

    Democratic lawmakers led by Sen. Chris Van Hollen say they are willing to go to El Salvador to seek the release of a man who the Justice Department says it mistakenly deported there — a plan that has gained steam after the country’s president said during a visit to the White House that he would not send the man back to the U.S. […]

    “We must all stand as a united front against the kidnapping and illegal detention of Kilmar Abrego Garcia in El Salvador,” progressive Rep. Maxwell Frost, D-Fla., said in a post to X, tagging Van Hollen. “Senator, I am willing to join you and help Organize other members of the House to do the same.”

    Rep. Yassamin Ansari, D-Ariz., reshared Frost’s post, writing that she was “ready to join” her colleagues in traveling to El Salvador to demand Abrego Garcia’s release. […]

  222. says

    Words & Phrases We Can Do Without

    […] If you didn’t know better you would think “polarization” descended from on high, a plague for which no one party is responsible. This deliberate obfuscation of our political situation suits the corporate media’s obsession with moral equivalence and contrived balance.

    History provides clarity. We would not have said the Confederacy was “polarized.” The Confederacy, as professor Stephanie McCurry wrote in 2020, was a “big, centralized state, devoted to securing a society in which enslavement to white people was the permanent and inherited condition of all people of African descent.” Tyranny results not from polarization but from oppression.

    Other countries’ experiences help distinguish polarization from authoritarianism. Hungary’s problem is not polarization; it’s the authoritarian rule of Viktor Orban who suppresses dissent, silences the media, and strips the judiciary of independence. Many Hungarians want the return of the rule of law, free speech, and robust civil society while Orban does not. But who would call that a “polarization” problem? It’s a dictator problem.

    Whether it is Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s police state in Turkey or neo-fascist parties in Europe or MAGA’s takeover of the Republican Party, the defining feature that should concern us is not mutual intransigence or a widening ideological gap. […]

    The central feature in the U.S.—a cult of personality in which the erratic, chaotic, and unhinged leader runs roughshod over its people—has nothing to do with Democrats. We cannot blame the small “d” democrats (or the large “D” ones either) for extremism or intransigence simply for insisting their fellow countrymen recognize objective reality and respect democratic norms.

    When we look at individual issues, the rampant, inappropriate use of “polarization” stands out. It would, for example, be absurd to say we are “polarized” on the issue of immunization. Gosh, if only each side were not so stuck in its position. Those Democrats are so fixated on medicine and science. One side has, frankly, lost its mind on the subject; the other has not. […]

    More at the link.

  223. says

    Why are incarcerated people dying from lack of food or water, even as private companies are paid millions for their care? The report is by Sarah Stillman, writing for The New Yorker.

    Excerpts:

    […] Carlin years later, in August of 2022, when his then partner, Eric, drove him to Banner-University Medical Center, in Tucson, Arizona. The pair walked into the emergency room. There, Carlin found his mother, looking skeletal in a hospital bed, wearing a diaper. When he’d last seen her, that spring, Mary was a healthy hundred and forty-five pounds, her cheeks bright. Now she was so emaciated that Carlin gasped. “She looks like a famine victim,” he told Eric. He stepped closer.

    Mary’s hair—once long and lustrous, a lifelong point of pride—was matted to her head, Carlin noticed. She weighed ninety-one pounds.

    […] Carlin had no idea he was stepping into a scandal that involved health-care corporations with, in at least one case, an annual revenue of roughly a billion dollars—a scandal that implicated core institutions of American public life and affected a shocking number of victims across the country. At its worst, the wrongdoing involved state-sponsored homicides of the most vulnerable citizens, covered up by private companies and county officials.

    At the hospital, Carlin had a conviction he later came to regard as painfully naïve: that he could expose whatever horrible thing had happened to his mom, and put a stop to it.

    [I snipped personal histories of incarceration.]

    By the time the pandemic began, Mary, in her early sixties, was homeless. […] Police arrived at the scene, interviewed Mary, and let her go, but she wound up in police custody again the next day, after assaulting a man who’d tried to help her. She was released on probation, the terms of which required her to maintain an approved residential address. But Mary lacked a job and slept in a tent encampment in a park. She hadn’t fully processed that, in Tucson, her homelessness could be treated as a crime.

    […] If you’ve ever considered calling for help during a loved one’s mental-health crisis, you’ll know the potential terror of getting law enforcement involved. People with untreated mental-health issues are sixteen times more likely to be killed during a police encounter than others approached by law enforcement […] Your friend or family member might […] get jailed in the midst of a psychiatric episode—a far more common outcome than a police killing, but one that can also prove lethal.

    […] Today, the nation’s three largest mental-health providers are New York’s Rikers Island, L.A. County’s Twin Towers Jail, and Chicago’s Cook County Jail. According to a recent report by the Pima County administrator, more than half the people locked up at the local jail have, like Mary, a mental-health condition that requires medication.

    […] Mary’s family tried to put money in her online account for virtual messaging, but they were told that she wasn’t eligible for the service. Weeks passed, and Mary remained incommunicado. She had entered some mysterious vortex.

    […] Finally, on August 16, 2022, nearly four months after her arrest, Mary entered the courtroom in a wheelchair. The judge had no inkling of Mary’s former radiance. Still, he seemed stunned by her skeletal frame.

    “What are we going to do, Mary?” Judge Howard Fell asked. Mary, who’d been chatty and energetic just months earlier, was too far gone to speak.

    “She is, as you can see, a shell,” Edminson, her public defender, said. “She needs care immediately. She looks like she’s dying, Your Honor.”

    Fell said, “I know.” He set aside Mary’s charges and sent her to the emergency room. There, doctors began an effort to save her.

    […] For nearly a month, the hospital tried to bring Mary back to life. Then its ethics committee convened to discuss her case. When Mary was admitted, she had been suffering from “severe” malnutrition, a physician noted. Any further interventions on her behalf, the committee concluded, would be “medically futile.” Mary was released to hospice care. The family loaded her into a rented van and took off for Kaj’s house, in San Diego.

    […] her medical care at the Pima County Jail wasn’t handled by the county alone. Instead, the county had contracted with a private company, an Alabama-based firm called NaphCare.

    […] Since the seventies, private companies have offered a solution by taking health care out of the counties’ hands. Often, a company like NaphCare signs a contract with a county to provide medical and mental-health care at a capped cost; any additional money expended on care comes out of the corporation’s earnings. The companies often try to control their costs by understaffing

    […] the top five companies in that market—including NaphCare—had death rates that were eighteen to fifty-eight per cent higher than those of jails whose medical services were publicly managed. NaphCare had the highest death rate across a three-year period.

    […] “This is a multibillion-dollar industry dominated by a few major players. […] NaphCare is one—they were getting nearly eighteen million a year to provide medical and mental-health care at the Pima County Jail.”

    […] The firm also had experience with cases involving starvation. Recently, Budge & Heipt had represented the parents of an eighteen-year-old named Marc Moreno. Marc’s father had taken him to a county mental-health crisis center during a serious episode. […] officers took him to the county jail. […] The jail, which had outsourced its medical care to a private company that’s now called Wellpath, put Marc in an isolation cell and took little action when he stopped eating and drinking. He died eight days later, of dehydration; records show that he had lost thirty-eight pounds.

    […] After leaving the Tucson hospital, Mary’s family set up a nursing station for her at her sister Kaj’s house. […] Karina was eating Chips Ahoy! cookies when her mom said, “I want some!” Karina was glad to hear it; she fed the cookies straight into Mary’s mouth.[…] The next morning, Mary did not wake up.

    […] Mary’s cause of death was found to be protein-calorie malnutrition, an apparent result of her prolonged starvation in the county jail. […] How many others might have starved to death?

    […] During the past year, I found it hard to explain, to family and friends, a strange truth. I was reporting on places where starvation and dehydration deaths had unfolded across a span of weeks or months—but these were not overseas famine zones or traditional theatres of war. Instead, they were sites of domestic lawlessness: American county jails.

    […] The victims were astoundingly diverse. Some, like Mary, were older. Some were teen-agers. Some were military veterans. Many were parents. In nearly all the cases I reviewed, the individuals were locked up pretrial, often on questionable charges.

    Many were being held in jail because they could not afford bail, or because their mental state made it hard for them to call family to express their need for it. (These jail deaths would not have occurred, several lawyers pointed out to me, in the absence of the cash-bail system.)

    […] Often, the starvation victims were held in solitary confinement or other forms of isolation, which is well proved to deepen psychosis. Some were given no toilet and no functioning faucet, or were expected to sleep on mats on concrete floors, in rooms where the lights never turned off.

    […] I’d accumulated a file that included deaths from starvation, dehydration, and neglect in county jails across nearly every part of the country. [Examples are available at the link.]

    […] I identified more than twenty private correctional-health-care companies that were responsible for providing care in jails where deaths from alleged neglect occurred.

    […] causes of death are listed as “natural.” [As] are the vast majority of starvation and dehydration deaths in jails.

    […] In some instances, these individuals suffered a fate I would have thought impossible in the twenty-first-century United States: they were left to be fed on by insects and rodents.

    […] Trump wasn’t wrong about the Fulton County Jail’s capacity for torture. The previous year, a thirty-five-year-old named Lashawn Thompson had been sent, pretrial, to the jail, where NaphCare was the medical provider. Thompson, who was assigned to the mental-health unit, never made it out. Malnourished, dehydrated, and deprived of his prescribed medications, he died of neglect, including “severe body insect infestation.”

    […] On April 30th, the day of Mary’s arrest, an emergency medical technician notified NaphCare that Mary was “requesting to be placed back on psych medications.” […] for much of the time that Mary was jailed, the company did not have a chief psychiatrist for the site, despite the fact that its contract with the county required it to do so.

    […] Mary, untreated, had stopped eating […] Mary went weeks, and then months, without her medications […] many paid professionals had witnessed Mary’s decline across her nearly four months of starvation and heard her cry out in distress. […] others had tried to save her

    […] Three of the largest correctional-health-care corporations—Corizon (now YesCare), Armor, and Wellpath—have filed for bankruptcy in recent years. Wellpath, which filed this past November, has been hit with more than fifteen hundred lawsuits claiming inadequate medical care of incarcerated people. “A big part of this industry’s business model is filing for bankruptcy, cleansing their balance sheet of responsibility for their misconduct, and then starting all over again,” […] “They’re stealing billions of taxpayer dollars and not providing constitutionally required services to the people in their care, services they were contracted to provide. They are using the bodies of incarcerated people to extract wealth.” […] “It’s just like the Sackler family and opioids—they’re making money hand over fist. But no one knows their name.”

    […] Margot Mendelson, the executive director of the Prison Law Office, in Berkeley, California, asked me. Mendelson strongly opposes the privatization of jail health care—“It’s a repulsive social choice to put a dollar sign on this public system,” she said—but, in her view, the much bigger problem is that jails are “totally ill-suited” to being mental-health-care providers. “Where is the infrastructure that isn’t the jail, to address the mental-health crisis we’re in?” she asked.

    […] NaphCare recently underwent a national expansion. […] NaphCare is eager to pioneer the use of artificial intelligence to manage jail health care. “We’re looking at developing a chatbot for jails and prisons,” he said, “that will interact with our patients in terms of helping them with their mental-health needs.” […]

  224. JM says

    Newsweek: Russian Economy Braces for Blow From Collapsing Oil Price

    Although Trump pressed pause on the tariffs he announced last week on multiple countries—with the notable exception of the levies on China—global markets have shuddered since the president’s “Liberation Day” on April 2.
    Since January 15, the price of Brent crude has fallen from $83 a barrel to $64 today, with West Texas Intermediate tumbling from $78 to $60 in that period.

    Trump has accidentally driven a huge blow to Russia. It’s estimated that the break even point for Russia selling through it’s shadow fleet is someplace around $40 a barrel so a drop from $80 to $60 is a huge blow. Even slightly worse because Russia has to charge a bit less then the going rate to get people to buy the grey market oil. This will blow a big hole in the amount of available cash Russia has for it’s military. How much is hard to say as Russia does sell some via pipeline, which is much more profitable, and they have setup ways to evade the restrictions by selling second hand and other shell games.

    British newspaper The Guardian reported on Sunday that the U.K. and other G7 countries were weighing up lowering the $60 cap after prices fell below this threshold for the first time in years.

    The $60 cap was put in place when oil prices hovered around $100, now they have dropped low enough that a $60 cap means little. Russia is probably charging less then that anyways.

  225. says

    You won’t believe how much Homeland Security pays for secretary’s cosplay

    Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s cosplay habit is getting in the way of actually doing her job, and some days, it’s unclear whether she’s trying to lead her department or if she’s simply vying for a brand deal.

    “Live this AM from NYC. I’m on it,” Noem wrote on X on January 28, as she joined an early morning ICE raid.

    People familiar with the mission told the Wall Street Journal that Noem’s publicity stunt actually hindered agents from being able to arrest as many people as they intended.

    Tricia McLaughlin, the top spokesperson of DHS, disputed this claim, saying that Noem didn’t make the post until the end of the raid.

    But of course, that wasn’t her last time posting live updates during a government operation.

    Last week, Noem teamed up with Libs of TikTok creator Chaya Raichik, who posted step-by-step updates of ICE’s movements during three arrests in Arizona. Noem shared a video of herself during which she noticeably aimed her weapon at the head of a fellow DHS employee, who quickly took a step back.

    Since joining […] Trump’s Cabinet, Noem has been working overtime to get in as many media appearances as possible. From riding on an ATV along the border wall to joining the coast guard in a rescue boat, Noem loves playing dress-up.

    “I will tell you that I oversee 26 different components of the Department of Homeland Security, and they are so proud of the fact that I’m willing to wear an ICE hat, that I’m willing to wear an HSI vest, that I’m willing to go into there and wear something and be proud of them and the work that they do. They didn’t have that with the last leadership team,” she told Fox News.

    But Noem’s team of photographers and videographers costs money, which is interesting considering the Trump administration’s supposed efforts to cut “waste, fraud, and abuse.”

    According to the Wall Street Journal, the Trump administration allotted $200 million to Noem’s PR efforts, and she’s used about $9 million on an ad where she tells undocumented immigrants to “leave now.”

    This funding came from the now shuttered DHS Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, but—unsurprisingly—has been excluded from the so-called Department of Government Efficiency’s magnifying glass as it takes an axe to vital federal programs. […]

  226. says

    Maine and Gov. Janet Mills saw Trump in court and won

    It’s a small victory, but it is a victory. […]

    U.S. District Court Judge John Woodcock granted a temporary restraining order against the USDA over funds frozen from child nutrition programs, according to Maine Attorney General Aaron Frey. The USDA unconvincingly claimed innocence.

    The USDA announced the freeze after an April 2 letter to Mills from USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins. The freeze was due to the Governor’s response in “defiance of federal law.”

    It’s not a “federal law.” It’s an executive order that has the effect of a law, but without any intervention of Congress. Trump’s EO is contradicted by civil rights laws that Congress has passed. When an executive order conflicts with a law passed by Congress, Congress takes top priority. Executive orders are meant to implement existing laws, not create new ones.

    The problem is that Trump has redefined the words discrimination and civil rights. So now he gets to say that DEI is discrimination, and that by allowing trans to participate in women’s sports, women’s civil rights are being violated. […]

    There was also the Social Security contract that allowed new Social Security numbers to be issued electronically by the hospital reporting a birth, and keeping deaths recorded also. Sen Susan Collins got that reinstated after days of haggling.

    So, there’s two small victories so far. There’s still a lot of “investigations”, which should be called witch hunts, for Title IX DEI discrimination, now focused on grants and contracts to the Maine University System. The investigations are also going after the Maine Principals’ Association, as the trans girl is in high school, and the government says that doesn’t make any difference. The schools are still in Maine.

    […] The Trump administration is still planning to pull all federal education funding from Maine. They could do what has already been done, which is complete an investigation without any interviews, evidence gathering or giving Maine a chance to respond. They just do judge, jury and executioner first, and then Maine has to respond with a lawsuit to fix things.

    […] Gov. Mills will never give Trump the “full throated apology” he demanded, and that enrages him even more. Good for her.

  228. says

    NBC News:

    A group of universities — including Brown University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — and education groups filed a lawsuit on Tuesday seeking to halt the Department of Energy’s cuts to federal research grants.

  229. says

    Reuters:

    One of U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s leading advisers, Dan Caldwell, was escorted from the Pentagon on Tuesday after being identified during an investigation into leaks at the Department of Defense, a U.S. official told Reuters. Caldwell was placed on administrative leave for ‘an unauthorized disclosure,’ the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. The decision has not been previously reported.

  230. says

    Washington Post:

    The Trump administration is using personal data normally protected from dissemination to find undocumented immigrants where they work, study and live, often with the goal of removing them from their housing and the workforce.

  231. says

    Associated Press:

    The Trump administration has expanded the power of adviser Elon Musk’s government-cutting team over the State Department, making a Musk lieutenant acting head of foreign assistance.

    A senior U.S. official confirmed the new job for Jeremy Lewin, an associate of the Department of Government Efficiency earlier appointed to help finish dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development.

  232. says

    Associated Press:

    A female Army Ranger for the first time competed in the annual Best Ranger Competition, and her two-soldier team finished the grueling three-day event over the weekend and came in 14th overall.

    First Lt. Gabrielle White, and her teammate, Capt. Seth Deltenre, were among the 16 teams that made it through the final events, where Ranger teams compete for accolades as the best of the elite military force. All together, 52 teams competed and all of the others were made up of only male soldiers. [Wow. So 14th overall is impressive!]

    Female soldiers were not allowed to be Army Rangers until 2015, when the Army opened Ranger school to women. In August 2015, two female soldiers completed the Ranger course for the first time. Later that year, the Defense Department opened all combat jobs to women.

    […] According to the competition, soldiers must move more than 60 miles during the three days, with little rest. It includes helicopter missions, physical fitness tests, land navigation, weapons qualification, obstacle course and other tests.

    While in previous years the Army would likely have noted the historic first in a story or press release, that won’t happen this time.

    Under President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the department has banned anything that touts diversity, equity and inclusion. And in the recent purge of the military’s online websites and social media postings, mentions of historic firsts by women and minorities were largely eliminated.

    […] White, 25, is a Black infantry officer assigned to the maneuver captains career course. She graduated from the Military Academy at West Point in May 2021 and completed the Ranger School in April 2022, according to Christopher Surridge, an Army spokesman.

    According to the Army, 154 females had graduated from the Ranger School as of January 2025.

    Link

  235. Reginald Selkirk says

    Canadian Math Prodigy Allegedly Stole $65 Million In Crypto

    A Canadian math prodigy is accused of stealing over $65 million through complex exploits on decentralized finance platforms and is currently a fugitive from U.S. authorities. Despite facing criminal charges for fraud and money laundering, he has evaded capture by moving internationally, embracing the controversial “Code is Law” philosophy, and maintaining that his actions were legal under the platforms’ open-source rules. The Globe and Mail reports:

    Andean Medjedovic was 18 years old when he made a decision that would irrevocably alter the course of his life. In the fall of 2021, shortly after completing a master’s degree at the University of Waterloo, the math prodigy and cryptocurrency trader from Hamilton had conducted a complex series of transactions designed to exploit a vulnerability in the code of a decentralized finance platform. The maneuver had allegedly allowed him to siphon approximately $16.5-million in digital tokens out of two liquidity pools operated by the platform, Indexed Finance, according to a U.S. court document…

  237. Reginald Selkirk says

    Ant smugglers arrested in Kenya as government warns of changing trafficking trends

    Two Belgian teenagers were charged Tuesday with wildlife piracy after they were found with thousands of ants packed in test tubes in what Kenyan authorities said was part of a trend in trafficking smaller and lesser known species.

    Lornoy David and Seppe Lodewijckx, two 19-year-olds who were arrested on April 5 with 5,000 ants at a guest house, appeared distraught during their appearance before a magistrate in Nairobi and were comforted in the courtroom by relatives. They told the magistrate they were collecting the ants for fun and did not know that it was illegal.

    In a separate criminal case, Kenyan Dennis Ng’ang’a and Vietnamese Duh Hung Nguyen also were charged with illegal trafficking in the same courtroom, following their arrest while in possession of 400 ants.

    The Kenya Wildlife Service, or KWS, said in a statement that the four men were involved in trafficking the ants to markets in Europe and Asia, and that the species included messor cephalotes, a distinctive, large and red-colored harvester ant native to East Africa…

  238. Reginald Selkirk says

    ‘Andy, that’s not true:’ Texas Republican mocked after admitting he doesn’t know what intersex is

    A Republican representative in Texas is proving what LGBTQ+ advocates have been saying all along — conservatives don’t know a single thing about the queer community.

    The state House of Representatives voted 118-26 to approve a $337 billion budget Friday morning, but not without first killing several amendments targeting LGBTQ+ and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. One such amendment, proposed by Republican Rep. Andy Hopper, aimed to eliminate state funding for the University of Texas at Austin over its LGBTQ+ and DEI programs and degree plans.

    In debating the amendment, Democratic Rep. Lauren Ashley Simmons prodded Hopper until he made a stunning admission. The moment, which has since gone viral after being posted by the Human Rights Campaign and Texas Democrats, began with Simmons challenging Hopper after he stated “when you’re born, you have a set of chromosomes.”

    “Are you speaking about biological sex? Or are you speaking about gender? ‘Cause one is scientific, one is a social construct,” Simmons said, adding, “‘Cause I have a follow up question after.”

    “They’re one and the same, ma’am,” Hopper falsely asserted, grinning smugly.

    “That’s not true, but moving on. So, in the same vein, what about intersex individuals?” Simmons questioned.

    To which Hopper responded: “I don’t even know what that means, ma’am.”

    The crowd in the room responded with a mix of surprise and laughter. When the noise died down, Simmons continued.

    “You are not sure what intersex people are, if they exist or not, but you want to defund a program about something that you don’t understand,” she said. “That’s why I’m seeking clarification. … Then again, you haven’t yet answered my question about where do intersex people fall into that equation?”

    “Those intersex individuals are still XX or XY,” Hopper replied. “So, you can’t change that.”
    …

  239. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Way back in February, DOGE had installed PuTTY. At the time, they told the court they would abide by security policy and privacy laws. Also one of them, Jordan Wick, had left his his GitHub projects public.

    Welp, NPR just published a looong story on what DOGE did at the NLRB. It’s bad.

    NPR – DOGE may have taken sensitive labor data

    the National Labor Relations Board […] investigates and adjudicates complaints about unfair labor practices.
    […]
    technical staff members were alarmed about what DOGE engineers did when they were granted access, particularly when those staffers noticed a spike in data leaving the agency [10 gigs, almost all text]. It’s possible that the data included sensitive information on unions, ongoing legal cases and corporate secrets—data that four labor law experts tell NPR should almost never leave the NLRB and that has nothing to do with making the government more efficient or cutting spending.
    […]
    the DOGE team asked that their activities not be logged on the system and then appeared to try to cover their tracks behind them, turning off monitoring tools and manually deleting records of their access—evasive behavior that several cybersecurity experts interviewed by NPR compared to what criminal or state-sponsored hackers might do. [They disabled restrictions on unauthorized mobile devices, disabled 2FA, and exposed an interface to the public internet. An unknown user exported a “user roster,” a file with contact information for outside lawyers who have worked with the NLRB.]
    […]
    The employees grew concerned […] particularly after they started detecting suspicious log-in attempts from an IP address in Russia [within minutes of DOGE’s access, using correct user/password for an account DOGE created (that attempt was blocked).] […] The whistleblower believes that the suspicious activity warrants further investigation by agencies with more resources, like the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency or the FBI. [Their own request for CISA was disrupted without explanation.]
    […]
    attempts to raise concerns internally within the NLRB preceded someone “physically taping a threatening note” to his door that included sensitive personal information and overhead photos of him walking his dog that appeared to be taken with a drone

    Midway through, the article starts over in more detail.

    DOGE engineer Jordan Wick had [a GitHub project] titled “NxGenBdoorExtract.” […] While NPR was unable to recover the code for that project, the name itself suggests that Wick could have been designing a backdoor […] to extract files from the NLRB’s internal case management system, known as NxGen [which contains] proprietary data from corporate competitors, personal information about union members or employees voting to join a union, and witness testimony in ongoing cases. Access to that data is protected by numerous federal laws, including the Privacy Act.
    […]
    five PowerShell downloads on the system […] tools that he said appeared to be designed to automate and mask data exfiltration. There was a tool to generate a seemingly endless number of IP addresses called “requests-ip-rotator,” and a commonly used automation tool for web developers called “browserless”—both repositories starred or favorited by [Jordan Wick on GitHub] […] someone appeared to be doing something called DNS tunneling to prevent the data exfiltration from being detected [by disguising traffic as domain name lookups].
    […]
    the House Oversight Committee […] is in possession of multiple verifiable reports showing that DOGE has exfiltrated sensitive government data across agencies for unknown purposes […] not an isolated incident. [CFPB was similar. GSA had an exfiltration.]

  240. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    * The article @239 had a lousy illustration of the scale of 10 gigs of text: “a full stack of encyclopedias”. I’d say a 300-page novel in plain text is about 1/2 MB, so 20,000 novels.

    The article said it may have been compressed too. I can compress a novel to half the size without doing anything fancy, making room to send twice as much. That’s prose. A database dump could be incredibly repetitive and thus far more compressible.

  241. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    * Actually compressing a test novel got me 1/3, so 3x the prose without special effort.

  244. whheydt says

    Re: CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain @ #240…
    The old standard for rough size checking was to assume the average word in text has 5 letters. For computers, you need to make that 6 because the space between words has to be stored. Novel sizes vary all over the place (and have gotten bigger over recent decades, possibly–at least in part–because it’s a lot easier to write one using a computer). So if you take the average novel as 100K words, then it would be 600K characters –> 600K bytes. So your “1/2 MB” is a pretty decent estimate. Provide me with the plain text of a work and I can give you back–immediately–the byte count, and with a bit of futzing around, readability scores (that is, what level of education is presumed to be needed to understand the text…Most novels should come around 6th to 8th grade level, and–yes–that’s for ones intended for adults).

  247. whheydt says

    Re: whheydt @ #244…
    Checked on of my systems. The *nix command “style” gives readability scores (using several different methods, and specified in the man page), plus a bunch of other analyses.

    There is also “diction” which flags things like overused phrases.

    Both good tools for any aspiring writer.

  248. whheydt says

    This is the output from “style” of the text of post 183 (I picked it because consists solely of a comment posted with no quoted text):

    readability grades:
    Kincaid: 3.3
    ARI: 3.1
    Coleman-Liau: 5.9
    Flesch Index: 87.3/100
    Fog Index: 6.3
    Lix: 22.0 = below school year 5
    SMOG-Grading: 7.3
    sentence info:
    681 characters
    160 words, average length 4.26 characters = 1.31 syllables
    18 sentences, average length 8.9 words
    22% (4) short sentences (at most 4 words)
    11% (2) long sentences (at least 19 words)
    1 paragraphs, average length 18.0 sentences
    0% (0) questions
    44% (8) passive sentences
    longest sent 25 wds at sent 18; shortest sent 1 wds at sent 4
    word usage:
    verb types:
    to be (8) auxiliary (11)
    types as % of total:
    conjunctions 5% (8) pronouns 9% (14) prepositions 8% (13)
    nominalizations 1% (1)
    sentence beginnings:
    pronoun (4) interrogative pronoun (0) article (2)
    subordinating conjunction (0) conjunction (3) preposition (0)

    Here is what “diction” has say about the same sample:

    sample1:5: YOU WERE DOING [SO] WELL UP TO THIS POINT!

    sample1:8: He is [like] the various Scandinavian Beowulfs” NO!

    sample1:9: [There was] [only] [one] Beowulf!

    sample1:9: And the plural [would] be Beowolves.

    sample1:12: [Only] a Jew [can] be Moses.

    sample1:12: DJT [would] faint during the circumcision.

    sample1:12: And he [would] never learn the sh*t needed before a bar mitzva.

    sample1:13: The fucker cannot even recall the name of the Tesla brand, no way he [would] remember the difference [between] hanukkah and yom kippur.

    sample1:13: And he [would] use the shofa as a diet Coke holder.

    sample1:14: The [only] thing he [would] show an interest in is the pushka, and you [would] need to post guards to stop him from stealing it.

    16 phrases in 18 sentences found.

  249. StevoR says

    @245. John Morales : StevoR @242, it is the arctic where the fastest warming is occurring; Europe happens to be nearby, but so are other populated areas. (That is, the claim is hyperbole)

    Dr Gilbz clarifies early on – about 20 seconds in – that Europe is the fastest warming continent which it is inpart becuase it includes bits of the Arctic which is a martime region. She also mentions the Arctic sepcifically from the 4 mins 15 secs mark onwards. So, no, not hyperbole.

  250. StevoR says

    Another dodguy nAF candidate for billionaire douchebag Clive Palmer’s “whistlke of wankers” party exposed :

    Clive Palmer’s Trumpet of Patriots party has endorsed a candidate prohibited from providing health services, following an investigation that found he “posed a risk to the health and safety of the public”. The political party on its official candidates page also falsely claims that candidate David Sarikaya holds a PhD in psychology — which, in 2009, police found was purchased online. Mr Sarikaya is running in the Sydney seat of Reid.

    … (snip).. In 2023, the NSW Health Care Complaints Commission (HCCC) issued a warning about the Trumpet of Patriots candidate that said it was “not safe” to receive counselling or health services from him, after receiving complaints from the public. It followed a damning 2016 investigation by the HCCC that found Mr Sarikaya had misled clients over several years into believing he had relevant credentials to deliver counselling services, which was not the case. ”Mr Kaye has no formal qualifications in psychology or counselling,” the statement of decision reads. 

    … (Snip).. David Sarikaya’s candidate profile on the Trumpet of Patriots website continues to misrepresent his qualifications. The HCCC in 2016 said evidence showed the candidate’s PhD was in theology and not related to his practice in counselling or psychology. 

    It said the doctorate was obtained from an American, online, non-accredited institution called “The American College of Metaphysical Theology (ACMT)” — which at the time had a decommissioned website. 

    Further, when NSW Police raided his home as part of an investigation into Mr Sarikaya’s conduct in 2009, they located a document that showed the PhD was purchased on the internet for “approximately $249”. 

    Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-04-16/trumpet-of-patriots-david-sarikaya-misrepresented-qualifications/105179728

  251. StevoR says

    @191. KG : “What credible way is there for “the whole house to fall down early”, short of a nuclear war? Are you thinking of a military coup? A civil war? I can’t see how either would come about, at least within the next 4 years.”

    I was hoping for a military coup to save the USoA – & rest of the world – from the Trump regime. Seems Trump has replaced some of the better Generals with his loyalists so maybe less likely now. However, I still think that a military coup or Civil War in the USoA could well happen within, hell, even later this year maybe and certainly within the next 5 as a possibility. Not saying it will but certainly wouldn’t rule out and can imagine scenarios where those happen – & might be better alternatives to letting the TrumpMusk dictatorship continue. Everything in Trump’s Amerikkka is going to shit and collapsing extremely fast now as you’ve probly noticed already?

    A nuclear war occurring relatively soon is also not something I’d rule out tho’less likely. Hoepfully it won’t happen..

  252. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Kevin Beaumont (Cybersecurity journalist):

    4chan, the internet’s litter box, got hacked. I suspect 4chan will be down for a while, looks like a pretty comprehensive own including SQL databases, source and shell access.

    Rando 1: “That’s an insult to litter boxes, litter boxes are useful.”

    Rando 2: “I’ve always thought the nature of an image board made it fairly unappealing as a target; everything is anonymous and temporary. Like you could hack it, then what?”
    Rando 3: “I guess you then realize it’s not as anonymous or temporary as they led you to believe?”

  253. John Morales says

    StevoR:”Dr Gilbz clarifies early on – about 20 seconds in – that Europe is the fastest warming continent which it is inpart becuase it includes bits of the Arctic which is a martime region. She also mentions the Arctic sepcifically from the 4 mins 15 secs mark onwards. So, no, not hyperbole.”

    She might clarify that once one clicks on the video and actually starts watching it; I explicitly quoted the hyperbole: Europe’s climate is heating faster than any other.

    Again: the Arctic actually, demonstrably, factually, etc. is heating faster Europe.

    Nothing about continents there, and even if there were, other inhabited places are heating as much as Europe — see my link for details.

    —

    Not just hyperbole, but misleading hyperbole.

    (Clickbait)

  254. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    AI-hallucinated code dependencies become new supply chain risk

    ‘slopsquatting’ has emerged from the increased use of generative AI tools for coding and the model’s tendency to “hallucinate” non-existent package names. […] a spin on typosquatting, an attack method that tricks developers into installing malicious packages by using names that closely resemble popular libraries. […] Instead, threat actors could create malicious packages on indexes like PyPI and npm named after ones commonly made up by AI models in coding examples.
    […]
    Although there are no signs that attackers have started taking advantage of this new type of attack, researchers […] warn that hallucinated package names are common, repeatable, and semantically plausible, creating a predictable attack surface that could be easily weaponized.
    […]
    The only way to mitigate this risk is to verify package names manually and never assume a package mentioned in an AI-generated code snippet is real or safe.

  255. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Today’s DoJ daily update on Abrego Garcia was extra contemptuous.

    Anna Bower:

    In a new status report, the government does not provide any new info on Abrego Garcia—but says that if he presents at a port of entry in the U.S., DHS would “remove him to a third country or terminate his withholding of removal because of his membership in MS-13” and remove him to El Salvador.

    Aaron Reichlin-Melnick wrote a thread on his removal circs. He’d entered US illegally in 2011 at 16. Then 8 years later arrested for loitering while undocumented. Gang allegations only came up as an excuse to keep him detained. He’d missed the window to file for asylum, so the next best protection was “withholding of removal” which means “anywhere but El Salvador”. In practice such individuals are rarely removed at all. Technically he could be sent somewhere else. A process exists to cancel the withholding to make El Salvador viable too, but the admin never bothered.
     
    And about those gang allegations (besides wearing the wrong hat @112)…

    TNR – Trump’s case against man deported in “error” just took another big hit

    the lead detective on his case had been “suspended.” The current filings don’t name the officer, and they don’t say why he was suspended.
    […]
    Ivan Mendez was the officer who filled out this gang interview sheet […] Mendez was suspended […] for “providing information [related to an ongoing investigation] to a commercial sex worker who he was paying in exchange for sexual acts.” […] “This is clearly not an officer that respects the rules and protocols,”
    […]
    But it bears stressing that even if real evidence of Abrego Garcia’s criminality were to emerge, his removal is still illegal, and he is still entitled to due process

    Jacqueline Sweet (RollingStone):

    “The [gang sheet filled in by Mendez] had been entered into the Prince George’s Police Department database at 6:47 p.m. on March 28, 2019.”

    FOUR DAYS LATER
    “The PGPD was first made aware of the allegations against Mendez on April 1, 2019. He was suspended on April 3, 2019.”

  256. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    So then the Abrego Garcia hearing happened.

    Heidi Li Feldman (Law professor):

    Judge Xinis is ordering two weeks of intense discovery as to what Trump executive has and has not done to bring Abrego Garcia back. She has to order this fact finding before she can find anybody in contempt.

    Discovery means putting Trump officials, including possibly Noem, Bondi, Rubio under oath and asking them specific questions via depositions (in person) or interrogatories (written).

    Heidi Li Feldman:

    Judge Xinis is following exact procedure used in previous cases where cabinet officials held in contempt. […] There are numerous cases where reviewing courts have vacated contempt judgments bc they are not backed with clear and convincing evidence. Roberts Court will look for any excuse to vacate a contempt judgement against Trump officials. Xinis and plaintiffs attorneys must make case as airtight as possible.

  257. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Aaron Reichlin-Melnick:

    In case you’re wondering, the Trump admin’s official position at this point is HOW DARE YOU CALL HIM “MARYLAND MAN” and Fox News panels are out here mocking the idea that people are calling him a father. [Screenshots]

    They want their base to stop thinking of him as a human being.

    DHS: he is an MS-13 gang member involved in human trafficking

    Eric Columbus: “DHS now claiming ‘intelligence reports’ link him to human trafficking, something no one ever thought to mention before today. Color me skeptical.”

    Richard Heppner (Law prof): “I mean, they trafficked him to El Salvador. That’s involvement, I guess.”

  258. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    WaPo – DOGE sought to assign a team to an independent nonprofit group

    DOGE representatives seemed unaware that Vera Institute recently lost its federal grants and of how nonprofit groups that receive grants operate differently from government entities that have independence from the executive branch.
    […]
    [DOGE Nate Cavanaugh] said on the phone call that DOGE wants to have teams assigned to every institute and agency that receives federal funds through the congressional appropriations process. He did not specify if this included all organizations that received federal grants. […] Cavanaugh referenced the U.S. Institute of Peace as an example of DOGE assigning a team to an independent nonprofit. [yikes!]
    […]
    A Vera Institute attorney then asked on the call what legal authority DOGE had to demand involvement with an independent, nonprofit organization […] The DOGE employees reportedly responded that there was no point in getting into details since the Justice Department already terminated Vera’s grants. [lol]

    Tina Vasquez (Immigration reporter): “It truly adds insult to injury that DOGE members are evil, AND painfully, overwhelmingly fucking dumb.”

    Aaron Reichlin-Melnick: “This is positively Soviet. Vera is a nonprofit organization that funds lawyers for indigent people. The government sought to embed people there like political commissars”

  260. JM says

    Bloomberg: China Open to Talks If US Shows Respect, Names Point Person

    China wants to see a number of steps from President Donald Trump’s administration before it will agree to trade talks, including showing more respect by reining in disparaging remarks by members of his cabinet, according to a person familiar with the Chinese government’s thinking.
    Other conditions include a more consistent US position and a willingness to address China’s concerns around American sanctions and Taiwan, said the person, who asked not to be identified to discuss internal thinking.
    Beijing also wants the US to appoint a point person for talks who has the president’s support and can help prepare a deal that Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping can sign when they meet, the person said.

    China is operating under the belief that the Trump administration works like the Chinese government. In particular that anything a cabinet official says must follow a Trump approved position. That is assuming way too much organization on the part of the Trump administration. They also want a more consistent position from the Trump administration, which is likely impossible because Trump is switching positions daily. Having a single point person assigned to talk with China is possible but just because they have Trump’s backing Monday doesn’t mean they will have it Tuesday.
    Notice also that they are trying to wedge Taiwan into the discussion. They probably plan to take advantage of the complexity of trade negotiations to wedge some concessions from the US.

  262. birgerjohansson says

    Stevo R @ 249, etc.
    Yes, when different categories of geographical regions get mixed in text, there is room for confusion.

    Living in northern Sweden, adjacent to the arctic as well as being in Europe, I can report that both places are changing: you can see trees grow much higher on the mountain sides while the glaciers shrink.

  263. Reginald Selkirk says

    Uncle Sam abruptly turns off funding for CVE program. Yes, that CVE program

    US government funding for the world’s CVE program – the centralized Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures database of product security flaws – ends Wednesday.

    The 25-year-old CVE program plays a huge role in vulnerability management. It is responsible overseeing the assignment and organizing of unique CVE ID numbers, such as CVE-2014-0160 and CVE-2017-5754, for specific vulnerabilities, in this case OpenSSL’s Heartbleed and Intel’s Meltdown, so that when referring to particular flaws and patches, everyone is agreed on exactly what we’re all talking about.

    It is used by companies big and small, developers, researchers, the public sector, and more as the primary system for identifying and squashing bugs. When multiple people find the same hole, CVEs are useful for ensuring everyone is working toward that one specific issue…

  264. Reginald Selkirk says

    The physics of bowling strike after strike

    More than 45 million people in the US are fans of bowling, with national competitions awarding millions of dollars. Bowlers usually rely on instinct and experience, earned through lots and lots of practice, to boost their strike percentage. A team of physicists has come up with a mathematical model to better predict ball trajectories, outlined in a new paper published in the journal AIP Advances. The resulting equations take into account such factors as the composition and resulting pattern of the oil used on bowling lanes, as well as the inevitable asymmetries of bowling balls and player variability…

  265. Reginald Selkirk says

    Trump Admin Has a New Target: People Who Aggressively Believe in Nothing

    Over the past decade, there’s been a lot of talk about “ideological extremism” on both the left and right, and the government has often claimed that warped political beliefs are encouraging Americans to commit violent acts. However, under the new Trump administration, the government now seems prepared to go after people who don’t believe in anything at all.

    Independent journalist Ken Klippenstein writes that the government has a new target in its war on extremism: nihilists—more specifically, Nihilist Violent Extremists, or NVEs. The government has reportedly come up with this designation as a kind of catchall for the culprits behind various violent incidents, and the term has shown up in several recent court cases…

  266. KG says

    Independent journalist Ken Klippenstein writes that the government has a new target in its war on extremism: nihilists—more specifically, Nihilist Violent Extremists, or NVEs. – Reginald Selkirk@265 quoting Gizmodo

    I’d guess this means violent MAGAts they don’t want to admit are indeed MAGAts.

  270. says

    Text quoted by Sky Captain @258

    Tina Vasquez (Immigration reporter): “It truly adds insult to injury that DOGE members are evil, AND painfully, overwhelmingly fucking dumb.”

    That is so well said.

    Ignorance and evil mixed together. We may need to add incompetent.

  272. says

    White House increasingly at odds with itself on Iran nuclear negotiations

    “Team Trump’s nuclear talks with Iran would probably improve if White House officials stopped contradicting one another.”

    Related video at the link.

    […] Trump’s policy toward Iran and the international nuclear agreement with Tehran was one of the most dramatic and consequential mistakes of his first term. The president’s own national security team told him in no uncertain terms that that policy was working as intended, and it was in the United States’ interest to leave it intact. But Trump abandoned the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) anyway.

    By withdrawing from the multi-nation deal that was working effectively, for reasons he struggled to explain, Trump inadvertently made Iran more dangerous and prompted an adversary to ramp up its nuclear program.

    Now, however, Trump appears keenly interested in revisiting one of his most impactful failures. In fact, the White House has already initiated a series of preliminary talks with Iranian officials about a possible path forward. Now the problem isn’t just that the administration’s strategy is already breaking down, it’s also why the administration’s strategy is already breaking down. The New York Times reported:

    In the past 24 hours, officials have left a contradictory and confusing set of messages, suggesting the administration might settle for caps on Iran’s activities — much as President Barack Obama did a decade ago — before backtracking on Tuesday.

    For reasons that have never been explained, Trump has deployed Steve Witkoff to serve as the administration’s top negotiator with Iran. If his name sounds familiar, that’s because Witkoff is also helping lead the administration’s negotiations with Russia and Ukraine, despite the inconvenient fact that Witkoff is a New York real estate developer with no meaningful experience in foreign policy or delicate diplomacy. [!]

    This past weekend, the president’s envoy did, in fact, meet with Iran’s foreign minister in Oman, and Witkoff sounded quite optimistic after the discussion. In fact, as The Wall Street Journal reported, he appeared on Fox News earlier this week and talked about developing a “verification” system that might allow Iran to continue to keep producing low levels of uranium for a nuclear energy program.

    […] the original JCPOA was built on a verification system that allowed Iran to continue to keep producing low levels of uranium for a nuclear energy program. The framework that Trump’s envoy endorsed on Fox News was similar to the policy Barack Obama and his team created — and that Trump destroyed roughly seven years ago.

    […] Witkoff’s position was wildly at odds with the White House national security advisor’s position [Yep. “Wildly at odds” is accurate.]: Michael Waltz recently insisted that the administration would demand that Iran, as part of any deal, had to abandon its facilities for enriching nuclear fuel altogether. “Full dismantlement,” Waltz said. [Incompetence and disorganization on display. What must Iran think?]

    In other words, Trump’s lead negotiator with Iran and Trump’s White House’s national security advisor pushed two contradictory positions at around the same time.

    In an apparent attempt to clarify matters, Witkoff published an item to social media in which he wrote, “A deal with Iran will only be completed if it is a Trump deal. Any final arrangement must set a framework for peace, stability, and prosperity in the Middle East — meaning that Iran must stop and eliminate its nuclear enrichment and weaponization program.”

    Or put another way, Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East went from disagreeing with the White House’s position to disagreeing with his own position.

    […] As for Trump’s recent saber-rattling, suggesting a possible U.S. military offensive if Iran fails to come to an agreement with the administration, I’m reminded of a tweet Trump published in 2013: “Remember that I predicted a long time ago that President Obama will attack Iran because of his inability to negotiate properly — not skilled.”

    JFC.

  273. says

    Followup to davetheresurrector @271: Boasberg moves to hold Trump admin in contempt over deportation flights

    A federal judge Wednesday found probable cause to hold the Trump administration in criminal contempt for willfully disobeying his order to immediately halt deportations under the rarely used Alien Enemies Act and turn around any airborne planes.

    U.S. District Judge James Boasberg’s order gives the administration a final opportunity to come into compliance but says he will otherwise take steps to identify the specific people who flouted his March 15 ruling, which was later lifted by the Supreme Court, and refer them for prosecution.

    “The Court ultimately determines that the Government’s actions on that day demonstrate a willful disregard for its Order, sufficient for the Court to conclude that probable cause exists to find the Government in criminal contempt,” Boasberg wrote.

    “The Court does not reach such conclusion lightly or hastily; indeed, it has given Defendants ample opportunity to rectify or explain their actions. None of their responses has been satisfactory,” he continued.

    The order is a blow to a Trump administration that has dug in on its claims it has no obligation to return any of the men swiftly deported to a Salvadoran prison after Trump invoked the 1798 Alien Enemies Act […]

    Boasberg’s order gives the Trump administration an opportunity to “purge” or rectify its contempt, but stopped short of requiring what he called “the most obvious way” for the administration to do so, instead asking the government to propose options for doing so.

    “The most obvious way for Defendants to do so here is by asserting custody of the individuals who were removed in violation of the Court’s classwide TRO so that they might avail themselves of their right to challenge their removability through a habeas proceeding,” he wrote.

    “Per the terms of the TRO, the Government would not need to release any of those individuals, nor would it need to transport them back to the homeland. The Court will also give Defendants an opportunity to propose other methods of coming into compliance, which the Court will evaluate.”

    […] The parties are set to tell Boasberg later Wednesday whether they believe the case can still move forward in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling. Meanwhile, the American Civil Liberties Union has taken the high court’s direction and filed several new challenges throughout the country, which remain ongoing.

    Looks to me like Judge Boasberg has still left some opportunities for Trump’s lackey/lawyers to exploit loopholes and to at least delay the process.

  274. Reginald Selkirk says

    @263

    CVE, global source of cybersecurity info, was hours from being cut by DHS

    …
    The 25-year-old CVE program, an essential part of global cybersecurity, is cited in nearly any discussion or response to a computer security issue, including Ars posts. CVE was at real risk of closure after its contract was set to expire on April 16. The nonprofit MITRE runs CVE and related programs (like Common Weakness Enumeration, or CWE) on a contract with the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS). A letter to CVE board members sent Tuesday by Yosry Barsoum, vice president of MITRE, gave notice of the potential halt to operations.
    …
    Late Tuesday, the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) “executed the option period on the contract” to ensure a continuation of services, CISA told security site BleepingComputer. “We appreciate our partners’ and stakeholders’ patience,” a CISA spokesperson was quoted as saying.

    Nextgov reports that CISA’s extension is for 11 months. News reports have cited midnight on either April 15 or 16 as the potential time when CVE funding would expire…

  275. johnson catman says

    re Lynna @272:

    By withdrawing from the multi-nation deal that was working effectively, for reasons he struggled to explain(my emphasis), Trump inadvertently made Iran more dangerous and prompted an adversary to ramp up its nuclear program.

    He may have struggled to publicly explain it, but it was obvious that Orange Hitler wanted to shut down any successes that Obama had experienced. Mainly because Orange Hitler is a racist and wrongly assumed that a black man was inferior. Also because he was very jealous of Obama’s popularity.

  276. Akira MacKenzie says

    @ 269

    Well that would make him perfect for most Americans, the trashiest people on Earth.

  277. johnson catman says

    re me @275: The Orange Baby-man thinks that no-one could be better or smarter than him since he is such a successfull multiple-failed businessman.

  278. Akira MacKenzie says

    @ 265

    And what marginalized group is often accused of “believing in nothing?” I fear atheists are on short list of those who are getting a one way trip to El Salvador.

  279. Reginald Selkirk says

    Government IT whistleblower calls out DOGE, says he was threatened at home

    A government whistleblower told lawmakers that DOGE’s access to National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) systems went far beyond what was needed to analyze agency operations and apparently led to a data breach. NLRB employee Daniel Berulis, a DevSecOps architect, also says he received a threat when he was preparing his whistleblower disclosure.

    “Mr. Berulis is coming forward today because of his concern that recent activity by members of the Department of Government Efficiency (‘DOGE’) have resulted in a significant cybersecurity breach that likely has and continues to expose our government to foreign intelligence and our nation’s adversaries,” said a letter from the group Whistleblower Aid to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence leaders and the US Office of Special Counsel.

    The letter, Berulis’ sworn declaration, and an exhibit with screenshots of technical data are available here. “This declaration details DOGE activity within NLRB, the exfiltration of data from NLRB systems, and—concerningly—near real-time access by users in Russia,” Whistleblower Aid Chief Legal Counsel Andrew Bakaj wrote. “Notably, within minutes of DOGE personnel creating user accounts in NLRB systems, on multiple occasions someone or something within Russia attempted to login using all of the valid credentials (e.g. Usernames/Passwords). This, combined with verifiable data being systematically exfiltrated to unknown servers within the continental United States—and perhaps abroad—merits investigation.”
    …

  280. Reginald Selkirk says

    Trump administration plans to end the IRS Direct File program for free tax filing, AP sources say

    The Trump administration plans to eliminate the IRS’ Direct File program, an electronic system for filing tax returns directly to the agency for free, according to two people familiar with the decision.

    The program developed during Joe Biden’s presidency was credited by users with making tax filing easy, fast and economical. But Republican lawmakers and commercial tax preparation companies complained it was a waste of taxpayer money because free filing programs already exist, although they are hard to use…

  282. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Pluralistic – Tesla accused of hacking odometers to weasel out of warranty repairs

    a California driver […] noticed that the odometer readings for his identical daily drive were going up by ever-larger increments. This wasn’t exactly subtle: he was driving 20 miles per day, but the odometer was clocking 72.35 miles/day.
    […]
    his car’s odometer had rolled over the 50k mark and Tesla informed him that they would no longer perform warranty service on his lemon. Right after this happened, the new mileage clocked by his odometer returned to normal. […] subreddits are full of similar complaints […] Sure, a driver might claim that their odometer is showing bad readings, but they can’t dump their car’s software and identify the code that is changing the odometer.

    The article describes several other scams, segues through blaming DMCA, then suggests tariffs could finally incentivize other countries to repeal their anticircumvention laws to legalize jailbreaking Teslas, which would unlock all subscription features, allow modding to fix stuff, tank Tesla’s stock, and force Musk to pay back the loans he’d premised on the stock value to buy Twitter and the US.

  285. says

    Oh baby, Musk’s trying to build a breeding cult ‘before the apocalypse’

    Elon Musk, the leader of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency and its assault on federal agencies and federal workers, is reportedly obsessed with fathering a “legion” of babies ahead of an imagined crisis.

    The Wall Street Journal reports that Musk has had at least 14 children with four different women, and multiple sources told the outlet that his real number of kids is likely “much higher” than has been publicly revealed.

    In private texts with one of the mothers of those children, Ashley St. Clair, Musk referred to the children as his “legion,” the same terminology used by the Roman Empire for their elite military units.

    “To reach legion-level before the apocalypse, we will need to use surrogates,” Musk wrote in a text while discussing his obsession to create more babies.

    Musk has referred to falling birthrates as “the single biggest problem” for world governments to solve, and he has oriented his companies like SpaceX around the notion that humans will need to colonize planets like Mars before a crisis makes the Earth uninhabitable.

    To bring about his cultish “legion,” Musk reportedly recruits some women via direct messaging them on X (formerly Twitter), the social media network that he owns and has turned into a hive of misinformation and antisemitism.

    The Journal reports that in one instance Musk promoted cryptocurrency influencer Tiffany Fong via his X account, increasing her social media reach and revenue. He then allegedly approached her for impregnation. But after Fong discussed the issue with others, he reportedly unfollowed her and her income plummeted.

    The arrangements for Musk’s constellation of women and children, described by some to the Journal as a “harem,” are reportedly set up by his fixer Jared Birchall. On Musk’s behalf, Birchall reportedly acquired property for Musk in Austin, Texas, to be used as a compound with multiple residences for his children and their mothers. In one text, Musk reportedly told St. Clair he wanted her to come to the compound to spend time with “our kid legion.”

    It was through Birchall that St. Clair was reportedly offered a $15 million payoff to keep silent about the child she had with Musk, who was left off of the birth certificate. When she declined the payment, Musk allegedly cut much of his financial support for the child, and she has accused him of using X for “derogatory messages about me and our child.”

    When he’s not reportedly setting up the Musk baby compound, Birchall also administers funding for Musk’s super PAC—most recently seen financing the losing campaign in a Wisconsin Supreme Court race. Thus, Musk’s pseudo-messianic baby-making and his investments in Republican politics are intertwined.

    Musk spent hundreds of millions to install Trump as president, and since January, he has been empowered by Trump to hobble government agencies and purge thousands of dedicated government employees.

    This was all done while Musk reportedly built up his strange apocalypse-obsessed crusade of impregnating women—which is apparently ongoing.

    Ew, and yuck, and WTF.

  286. says

    Trump is turning the White House into Mar-a-Lago—at taxpayers’ expense

    […] Trump is gilding the White House, using his so-called “gold guy” to add gold touches to the Oval Office on the taxpayer dime to make the historic building look like his tacky Mar-a-Lago club in Florida, The Wall Street Journal reported.

    Trump has gilded the furniture, affixed gold ornaments to the Oval Office fireplace, added gold sculptures and picture frames, and reportedly installed a gold Trump crest over the doorway into the White House. He even ordered his and Vice President JD Vance’s portraits to be reprinted with a gold border because he wanted the pictures to “catch the light,” the WSJ reported.

    “It’s the Golden Office for the Golden Age,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told the WSJ.

    The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump also wants to add a ballroom to the White House complex where he can hold events, like he does at his Florida club, where guests pay stupid amounts of money for the chance to heap praise on the egomaniacal leader.

    Trump loves his gilded Mar-a-Lago ballroom, telling guests at an event in February, “The ballroom is in top shape. We just spent a lot of money on gold. I’ve got more gold in the ballroom than anybody’s ever had in a ballroom before.”

    […] The ballroom addition is a project Trump has wanted to do since 2016, when he reportedly spoke to the Obama White House and offered to build the $100 million project […] The Obama administration laughed off Trump’s offer.

    “I’m not sure that it would be appropriate to have a shiny gold Trump sign … on any part of the White House,” then-White House press secretary Josh Earnest said at the time.

    But in Trump’s second term in office, where he’s acting like the dictator he’s always dreamed of being, he is now serious about remaking the White House […]

    Trump’s tacky ballroom would be in addition to his plan to pave over the Rose Garden, the beautiful green space outside the White House where presidents hold events and press conferences. Trump’s reason for that? He said women are uncomfortable when their high heels sink into the grass. […]

    Trump is gilding the White House and turning it into a gaudy mess comes at the same time that his administration is slashing federal spending for critical social safety net programs like Social Security, Medicaid, food stamps, preschool education for low-income Americans, and more. He is also cutting medical research, disease mitigation, and foreign aid, which is already having disastrous consequences and will undoubtedly lead to even more.

    Worse, as Trump demands austerity from the country, he’s reportedly planning to spend tens of millions on a grotesque military parade in Washington, D.C., to celebrate his own birthday. […]

  287. says

    NBC News:

    Four students were injured, including three with gunshot wounds, after a shooting at Wilmer-Hutchins High School in Dallas on Tuesday afternoon, officials said. Officials with Dallas Fire-Rescue confirmed the injuries and said the patients’ ages were 15 to 18. They had injuries that ranged from serious to non-life-threatening, the agency said.

  288. says

    Washington Post:

    The Trump administration announced on Tuesday that it is lifting sanctions placed on Antal Rogan, a close aide of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, earlier this year.

    It looks like Trump is doing favors for Urban.

  290. says

    Followup to comments 271 and 273.

    […] Outside of court, the administration continues to harp on the lie that Abrego Garcia is a gang member, in Vice President [Vance’s] lonely Xitter screed, and with Karoline Leavitt piling on “human trafficker” to Abrego Garcia’s resume, on top of “terrorist.” [video at the link]

    The lies are BRAZEN. Abrego Garcia has lived in the US for the past 14 years, since he was 16 years old. In 2019 a judge found he would be in danger from gangs back in his birthplace of El Salvador, and granted him permission to stay. He has no criminal record in the US or El Salvador, and is a metalworker and union member of the Building Trades of North America. One police officer testified that he thought Abrego Garcia was a member of a gang that operates somewhere Abrego Garcia has never lived, based on some double-hearsay, and because he was wearing a Chicago Bulls hat. That’s the evidence.

    Speaking of MS-13, Mother Jones has a story claiming it’s actually Trump’s new BFF Nayib Bukele who has the gang ties:

    Bukele made that secret agreement with the gangs five years ago that helped his party win elections. In exchange, Mr. Bukele freed some of the gang bosses, including a few who were facing extradition to the U.S. After leaving El Salvador they were captured in Mexico and sent to the United States where they were indicted. Some of the indictments include allegations of the gang’s collusion with authorities in El Salvador. We also know that when Mr. Bukele offered Marco Rubio to receive deportees and criminals, he also requested that the gang bosses be sent back to El Salvador, and at least one of them was included in those first flights. [!]

    HMM! It’s almost like every single thing with gangster administration is projection.

    So, what next? At some point after two weeks probably this gets back to the Supreme Court, where the administration will argue that all Trump’s foreign policy is Holy, even if that policy is ignoring the government’s promises of rights to green card holders and refugees. And that whatever oops the government has done (or might do to US citizens in the future), the Roberts Court has declared itself impotent to do anything about it.

    Oh, and the administration has revoked Temporary Protected Status for Afghan refugees too, which includes people who risked their lives to help the US during the war we started, and will now face torture and death as traitors when they get sent back.

    And let us not forget the 237 other people also sent to El Salvador with no due process, the vast majority of whom don’t have as much as a parking ticket. And students with revoked visas. This is the government turning from an instrument of fairness to one of terror, it’s very grim […]

    protestors have been gathering outside of the courthouse in Greenbelt, and angry Iowans even raged and jeered at Chuck Grassley, as he repeated the party line of “El Salvador is an independent country” beside-the-point-ing.

    It’s all stomach-churning, and, but, we will keep you posted.

    https://www.wonkette.com/p/not-a-nice-time-day-34-of-kilmar

  291. says

    In comment 288, “Urban” should be “Orban.” Damn autocorrect to hell.

    In other news, a followup to Sky Captain @239: Hey, What Is A Russian Server Doing With DOGE Logins?

    “And why is DOGE trying so hard to cover their tracks? Very curious!”

    Well, well, well, NPR has a UHH YIKES STORY about the “Department Of Government Efficiency,” from a statement to Congress by a whistleblower in the IT department of the National Labor Relations Board.

    You know DOGE, that secretive cabal of favored Elon Musk company employees and teenaged hackers going around to all the federal agencies, doing what Elon Musk says is “tech support” and “cutting waste, fraud and abuse,” but instead is breaking everything, eliminating tens of thousands of jobs and is projected to cost the government $500 billion while only “saving” it $150 billion? [Embedded links to those and other sources are available at the main link.]

    That one. Anyway, according to whistleblower Daniel Berulis, and confirmed and corroborated by documentation and multiple reports […] after the DOGE goons inserted themselves at the National Labor Relations Board to do whatever it is that they are trying to do, they refused to let their digital movements be tracked, which was NOT PROPER and VERY SUSPICIOUS. Then, after they were in, the systems immediately began transferring out large amounts of data, as if a “nation-state attack from China or Russia” was going on. And THEN government-employee whistleblowers “started detecting suspicious log-in attempts from an IP address in Russia.” And THEN the DOGE hackers frantically scrambled to delete any records of their access, like a bunch of criminals.

    What’s more, “Whoever was attempting to log in was using one of the newly created DOGE accounts — and the person had the correct username and password.” (!)

    And then, after voicing his concerns, the whistleblower got threats: “someone ‘physically taping a threatening note’ to his door that included sensitive personal information and overhead photos of him walking his dog that appeared to be taken with a drone.” (!!)

    And what was this data they and/or DOMAIN IN RUSSIA were accessing, was it just waste-y, fraud-y stuff like how the NLRB is maybe ordering too many pencils and staplers? Nyet! Some of the data they had access to included “sensitive information on unions, ongoing legal cases and corporate secrets.”

    Oh hey, guess who would benefit from that kind of information? Any company that has been accused of union-busting, such as, say, ELON’S. Remember how the United Auto Workers filed labor charges against him after he and Trump had that […] session, in which Trump encouraged Musk to fire any striking workers at Tesla, slobbering:

    “I won’t mention the name of the company, but they go on strike and you say, ‘That’s okay, you’re all gone. You’re all gone. So, every one of you is gone.’”

    […] threatening people into not joining unions is against labor laws […] in 2021, the NLRB found that Tesla violated labor laws when it fired a union activist and Tweeted threats to take away workers’ stock options if they voted to form a union. […]

    And, but, what’s the deal with the Russian IP address? Was this state-sponsored hacking, or, say Edward “Big Balls” Coristine transferring one of his Russian-registered domains for his own personal reasons? Or what? We may never know, as Pete Hegseth paused offensive cyberoperations against Russia by US Cyber Command last month, WEIRD, and the NSA and US Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) have been gutted (though with some employees force-rehired by a judge).

    Not to mention, the interim US Attorney for the District of Columbia is election-denying loon Ed Martin, who has somehow convinced the police to act like DOGE’s personal security force, and frogmarch away anyone who might challenge them.

    As this lawlessness rages on, about 20 lawsuits against DOGE are still pending, many in the discovery phase, and DOGE’s/the government’s lawyers are still playing at them being an agency when it comes to having the rights to see everybody’s data, yet NOT an agency when it comes to any kind of oversight, or record-keeping, or having to say who is actually telling whom to do what.

    It’s all quite shady, and we can only guess what’s actually going on, in the land where oversight has died.

  292. Reginald Selkirk says

    Supreme Court backs ‘biological’ definition of woman

    Judges at the UK Supreme Court have unanimously ruled that a woman is defined by biological sex under equalities law.

    It marks the culmination of a long-running legal battle which could have major implications for how sex-based rights apply across Scotland, England and Wales.

    The court sided with campaign group For Women Scotland, which brought a case against the Scottish government arguing that sex-based protections should only apply to people that are born female.

    Judge Lord Hodge said the ruling should not be seen as a triumph of one side over the other, and stressed that the law still gives protection against discrimination to transgender people…

    And how many of those chucklefucks have degrees in biology?

  293. Reginald Selkirk says

    Racially charged row between Musk and South Africa over Starlink

    The tussle between Starlink boss Elon Musk and South Africa over the company’s failure to launch in the country stems from the nation’s black empowerment laws, and could be one factor behind the diplomatic row between the US and Africa’s most industrialised nation.

    To his more than 219 million followers on his social media platform X, Mr Musk made the racially charged claim that his satellite internet service provider was “not allowed to operate in South Africa simply because I’m not black”.

    But the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (Icasa) – a regulatory body in the telecommunications and broadcasting sectors – told the BBC that Starlink had never submitted an application for a licence.

    As for the foreign ministry, it said the company was welcome to operate in the country “provided there’s compliance with local laws”.
    …

  294. says

    https://www.wonkette.com/p/the-unbearable-weirdness-of-barron

    “The Unbearable Weirdness Of Barron Trump, AI Slop Christian Music Megastar”

    Lots and lots of unbearable weirdness is documented in that report. Videos are available at the link. Tragically, lots and lots of fans fall for the AI slop, even though every video includes a disclaimer.

    There’s also this weirdness:

    Last week, Anna Merlan at Mother Jones reported on a similar phenomenon — the proliferation of “heartwarming” AI videos of Trump and Trump administration officials telling judges off for not letting them wear their cross necklaces in court.

    So Barron Trump has “87 different beautiful-if-slightly-robotic voices” and the MAGA Christian rightwing loves him for it. I throw my hands up in eternal WTF!?

  296. says

    Followup to JM @224.

    Unintended consequences, Trump’s Tariffs F*cking Over His Oil Industry Pals. Gosh, That’s A Shame

    During the presidential campaign, Donald Trump loved to explain how he would end inflation by drill-baby-drilling for more oil, even though the USA during the Biden years was already drill-baby-drilling more oil than any nation ever. We had to produce even more oil, and Big Oil sure loved Trump’s promise that he would roll back all of Joe Biden’s progress on climate.

    Once in office, Trump got to work rolling back climate regulations and ignoring the Constitution, even trying to bring (bogus) criminal charges in an attempt to undo Biden climate programs. Betcha the oil industry gratefully reciprocated with a new boom in drilling, huh?

    Funny thing there! It turns out that oil companies are also capitalists, and unless there’s money to be made, they won’t just go and drill new oil wells to Own The Libs. And as Heatmap’s editor Robinson Meyer points out, Trump’s nutso tariffs were TERRIBLE for Big Oil, leading immediately to sharp drops in the prices of oil and oil company stocks. The day after Trump announced the tariffs, OPEC announced it would sharply increase oil production, which would only drive oil prices lower — a move Trump had been asking OPEC to make, because he promised lower oil prices.

    Somebody probably should have told Trump that if “West Texas Crude” drops below $65 a barrel, new wells won’t bring a profit. That price went to about $62 after the tariff announcement, and as of Tuesday afternoon, it remained around $61.50.

    The oil price shock “could essentially prohibit any new drilling activity in the United States for the time being,” Meyer explains, and if prices stay low, even some current wells may shut down because they aren’t profitable.

    Even after Trump partly delayed some of the tariffs, oil prices have yet to rebound because the 10 percent baseline tariff on all imports, plus the huge tariffs on China, have everyone pretty sure there’s a recession on the way. On Monday, OPEC downgraded its oil demand growth forecast for 2025 and 2026 […] It cited the likelihood of turmoil from American tariffs as the reason.

    But the oil cartel also said it remained committed to the increased production targets it had announced earlier, so that’s going to be a lot more product chasing slower demand, which is likely to drive down oil prices and further reduce any incentive for US oil companies to drill new wells.

    […] The Guardian adds that major banks have also revised their forecasts for oil prices, too, because of the likelihood of a worldwide recession.

    The Swiss bank UBS cut its price forecast by $12 a barrel to $68 a barrel for this year while Goldman Sachs said it expected the benchmark crude price to average $63 a barrel this year, and fall further to $58 next year.

    Those are not prices that are likely to inspire a lot of new drill-baby-drilling […]

    you can’t just go drill oil and gas wells without a hell of a lot of equipment like

    steel pipe, motors, condensers, valves, and more — and a large share of those goods come from overseas. Since Trump imposed a 25% tariff on steel and aluminum last month, drillers have watched the price of tubular steel pipe rise by roughly 30% […]

    And yes, we checked; the 25 percent steel and aluminum tariffs are separate from the Liberation Day tariffs, and were not rolled back. […]

    Not only is Big Oil likely to be screwed by Trump’s tariffs, Meyer notes that fossil gas isn’t enjoying any kind of Trump boom either, even though he insisted that was inevitable. Trump rolled back Biden’s ban on new liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminals, but the countries most likely to import LNG haven’t announced any new contracts with US gas companies because the market is in chaos and several of them were targeted for high tariffs; even with those temporarily off the table (but the universal 10 percent tariff still on), they aren’t so sure they’ll really need US gas now. [I snipped more details concerning the market for liquefied natural gas] […]

    As Meyer said recently in a lovely little satirical piece at Heatmap, the practical effect of Trump’s weird obsession with tariffs may actually result in exactly the kind of worldwide degrowth that some of the most radical environmentalists have called for, resulting in far lower carbon emissions as the world economic order collapses. Of course, it would come at the cost of a worldwide depression, which more responsible climate advocates tend not to favor, what with all the human costs. But hey, that’s just Green New Donald pursuing his radical plan to decarbonize the economy by wrecking it. […]

  297. says

    Washington Post link to an exclusive report: “Internal budget document reveals extent of Trump’s proposed health cuts”

    The Trump administration is seeking to deeply slash budgets for federal health programs, a roughly one-third cut in discretionary spending by the Department of Health and Human Services, according to a preliminary budget document obtained by The Washington Post.

    The HHS budget draft, known as a “passback,” offers the first full look at the health and social service priorities of […] Trump’s Office of Management and Budget as it prepares to send his 2026 fiscal year budget request to Congress. It shows how the Trump administration plans to reshape the federal health agencies that oversee food and drug safety, manage the nation’s response to infectious-disease threats and drive biomedical research.

    The 64-page document calls not only for cuts, but a major shuffling and restructuring of health and human service agencies.

    The administration already has downsized HHS by about one-fourth of its workforce, with about 20,000 imminent departures since Trump took office. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention staff who worked on programs to prevent drowning and gun violence, improve worker safety and test for sexually transmitted illnesses and hepatitis were among those laid off. [I snipped details, including blather from RFK Jr.]

    The proposal would reduce the more than $47 billion budget of the NIH to $27 billion — a roughly 40 percent cut. It would consolidate NIH’s 27 institutes and centers into just eight. Some of its institutes and centers would be eliminated, including the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities and the National Institute of Nursing Research.

    […] A new, $20 billion agency named the Administration for a Healthy America would be created. AHA would include many pieces of other agencies that are being consolidated — such as those focused on primary care, environmental health and HIV.

    AHA would have $500 million in policy, research and evaluation funding to be allocated by Kennedy to support “Make America Healthy Again” initiatives [What could possibly go wrong?]

    […] many specific programs would be eliminated under AHA, according to the document, including programs focused on preventing childhood lead poisoning, bolstering the health-care workforce, advancing rural health initiatives and maintaining a registry of patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS.

    The proposal would fund the Food and Drug Administration at a level that allows it to continue to collect drug and medical device fees from the industries the agency regulates. Unless the agency is funded at a certain level, the FDA’s ability to use these funds, which help expedite safety reviews for devices, drugs and other products, would be limited.

    The proposal would cut the CDC’s budget by about 44 percent, from $9.2 billion to about $5.2 billion, and would eliminate all of the agency’s chronic disease programs and domestic HIV work. The chronic disease programs being eliminated include work on heart disease, obesity, diabetes and smoking cessation. [Wait a minute? Don’t those programs sound like they are addressing issues RFK Jr. wants to address?]

    Rural programs formerly under the Health Resources and Services Administration appear to be hard-hit. The rural hospital flexibility grants, state offices of rural health, rural residency development program and at-risk rural hospitals program grants are listed as eliminations under AHA.

    Money for the Head Start program, which provides early child care and education for low-income families and is funded by HHS’s Administration for Children and Families, would be eliminated. “The federal government should not be in the business of mandating curriculum, locations and performance standards for any form of education,” the document says. […]

    Head Start is just one early childhood provider that is going to be cut.

    “It would be catastrophic,” said Tommy Sheridan, deputy director of the National Head Start Association. “More than a million parents wouldn’t be able to go to work […], or they would have to scramble to find some other type of option. In a lot of communities, Head Start is the only early childhood provider in the community — especially rural America.”

  298. says

    El Salvador denies Maryland senator’s request to meet with Kilmar Abrego Garcia

    Related video at the link.

    A top Salvadoran official on Wednesday rejected Sen. Chris Van Hollen’s request to meet with Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the man the Trump administration said it mistakenly deported to El Salvador last month.

    Van Hollen, D-Md., met with Félix Ulloa, the vice president of El Salvador, and framed Abrego Garcia’s deportation as an “illegal abduction.” He said he asked for an in-person visit to ensure Abrego Garcia’s safety and health.

    Ulloa refused to allow a virtual or in-person meeting, in addition to denying Van Hollen’s request to facilitate a phone call between Abrego Garcia and his family.

    “I asked him if I came back next week whether I’d be able to see Mr. Abrego Garcia. He said he couldn’t promise that either,” Van Hollen said.

    The Maryland senator, who represents the state where Abrego Garcia lived before he was sent to a prison in El Salvador, called the Trump administration’s resistance to facilitating Abrego Garcia’s return to the U.S. an attempt to “cover up” his wrongful deportation.

    Van Hollen flew to El Salvador on Wednesday to push for Abrego Garcia’s release after the mistakenly deported man was not returned to the U.S. by midweek, one of the senator’s conditions for embarking on the trip. […]

  299. Reginald Selkirk says

    Archaeologists May Have Just Found the Site of Jesus’s Tomb
    FFS

    “At the place where Jesus was crucified, there was a garden, and in the garden a new tomb, in which no one had ever been laid.”- John 19:41

    As a literary device, this description of the burial place of Jesus Christ is effective; it offers a contrast between the site of Jesus’s death at the crucifixion site of Calvary (also called Golgotha, both derived from the Latin for “place of the skull”) and a fertile garden, brimming with life. It also provides a cyclical shape to the final chapter of the Christ narrative, which begins with his arrest in the garden of Gethsemane.

    So, as storytelling, this single sentence from the Gospel of John (the most recently written of the four canonical gospels, most scholars agree) has a substantial power to its brevity. But, as a historical record of where, exactly, one of the most famous men who ever lived was laid to rest, you’d be forgiven for finding it sorely lacking in detail.

    Yet, thanks to a new discovery reported in the Times of Israel, that sentence might be key to confirming where the real man at the center of the Christian faith was placed after his famous crucifixion.

    What Stasolla’s team found was that, in the time between when the quarry was originally mined during the Iron Age and the construction of the church atop it, the area to which the burial site is attributed had (at one time) been used for agriculture, based on the discovery of 2,000 year-old olive trees and grapevines…

    Stasolla acknowledged that a full analysis of all the artifacts uncovered during the excavation—which also included coins and pottery dating roughly to the 4th century—would take years to complete…

    Wow, it’s probably the only agricultural site next to a cemetery in the entire nation of Israel. /s
    Also, within three centuries ought to be close enough..

  300. Reginald Selkirk says

    Elite Pentagon Unit Resigns En Masse After Clashing With DOGE

    The Pentagon’s elite tech unit is collapsing after clashing with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

    Nearly every staffer at the Defense Digital Service (DDS) is resigning over the coming month, according to the program’s director Jennifer Hay and three other current members of the office—effectively shutting down the program.

    “The best way to put it, I think, is either we die quickly or we die slowly,” Hay said, according to Politico. She plans to leave by May 1…

    Every employee interviewed by Politico said they would have stayed if not for DOGE…

  301. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    WaPo – Inside DOGE’s push to defy a court order and access Social Security data

    At first, officials obeyed the courts. Immediately after Hollander issued her order, the agency cut off DOGE staffers from all systems […] But Russo’s swift action did not go over well with the Trump administration. […] He was replaced as chief information officer by Scott Coulter, a New York-based hedge fund manager and a member of Musk’s DOGE team
    […]
    Meanwhile, Mark Steffensen—another Trump appointee and DOGE ally serving as acting general counsel […] was fighting with career lawyers at Social Security […] to issue a memo giving DOGE access […] he began circumventing the lawyers by telling DOGE representatives to keep working on their projects anyway […] the Trump administration repeatedly promoted Steffensen, giving him more authority. […] DOGE team members asked staff to let them back inside the agency’s databases, citing Steffensen’s approval
    […]
    Department lawyers told Steffensen that under no circumstances should DOGE be allowed […] DOGE kept up the pressure and, according to current and former officials, tried unsuccessfully to get Steffensen fired for failing to get them access. Members of the DOGE team also sought an exemption from the judge for several projects […] It is unclear if the judge agreed.

    In recent weeks, Social Security hired a new DOGE team member, but Dudek—not realizing this staffer was a member of the DOGE team—granted him access to some of the agency’s data, violating the judge’s order […] Once Dudek realized his mistake, he removed the DOGE staffer from the agency’s systems [That error got Dudek summoned for a hearing, but the Trump admin said in a filing that he would not appear.]

  302. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    WaPo – Trump’s D.C. US attorney pick was on Russian state media over 150 times

    Nominee Ed Martin did not initially disclose his RT and Sputnik appearances from 2016 to 2024 to the Senate.
    […]
    No evidence has emerged that Martin acted at the direction of any Russian official or entity. Rather, he is among a segment of American conservatives who appear to agree with […] disinformation pushed by the Kremlin.
    […]
    On Dec. 9, 2024, one day before Trump announced that Martin would join his new administration, Martin wrote about Putin […] He decried the dismantling of Western civilization by “our ruling elites” and their “weak, incompetent” servants. These “mediocre” American men “despise figures like Vladimir Putin,” Martin said, “not because he’s an enemy of the West, but because he reminds them of their inadequacies.”

    Eric Columbus: “Who among us hasn’t forgotten about 150 appearances we did on Russian state media?”

    Brad Moss (Security clearance attorney):

    I wonder if he reported any of his RT appearances under Section 20b.6 of his SF86 [Questionnaire for NatSec Positions].

    “Have you […] in the last seven (7) years had any contact with a foreign government, its establishment or its representatives, whether inside or outside the U.S.?”

    * From the form: “knowingly falsifying or concealing a material fact is a felony which may result in fines and/or up to five years imprisonment. In addition, Federal agencies generally fire, do not grant a security clearance, or disqualify individuals who have materially and deliberately falsified these forms”

  303. Akira MacKenzie says

    @ 294

    They want cultural validation for their beliefs. Since evil “communist” Hollywood isn’t on the MAGA train (yet), they have to create it on their own. They want to be ruled by a white Christian monarchy, and they’ve chosen Barron (as opposed to any of this other equally-abhorrent siblings) as Donald’s heir apparent. They have their god-king, now they want their handsome prince.

  304. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    His 19-year-old is in Bukele’s mega-prison

    He had no criminal record, neither in Venezuela nor the U.S., nor did he have any tattoos […] just steps from his home, ICE agents stopped him. “The officers grabbed him and two other boys right at the entrance to our building. One said, ‘No, he’s not the one,’ like they were looking for someone else. But the other said, ‘Take him anyway.'”
    […]
    his detention was unjustified since he currently has an immigration court case pending with his father and was showing up to court and doing the right things.

     
    They even took someone who’d already filed for habeaus.
    Government illegally detains father of two in notorious Salvadoran prison

    Mr. Quintero, originally from Venezuela, is a 28-year-old carpenter, fisherman, and father of two young children. He turned himself in to immigration officers when he came to the U.S. border in 2024. ICE later took him into custody during a routine ICE check-in and held him while an immigration court was determining whether he should be deported […] solely because he lacked immigration status. Eventually, he gave up fighting his deportation to Venezuela […] After eight difficult months in ICE custody […] in Lumpkin, GA, he filed a habeas petition in February 2025. He asked a federal court to order that the government could not keep holding him for no reason, since deportations to Venezuela were not possible. Instead of responding to Mr. Quintero’s lawsuit, the government sent him to CECOT

  305. StevoR says

    An exoplanet has been calculated to exist in a polar orbit around twin brown dwarf suns :

    The suns, dubbed 2M1510 A and B, circle each other, like peas rolling around a plate. Their planet companion, the researchers suggest, loops over and under the twirling pair. It’s the first time this so-called “polar orbit” pattern has been seen in a dual-sun system.

    … (Snip)…

    .. Observations from the Very Large Telescope in Chile showed they didn’t move exactly the way the researchers expected. The brown dwarfs traced a slightly different path in space each time they completed an orbit.

    Study lead author Thomas Baycroft, a PhD student at the University of Birmingham, calculated the best explanation for these movements.

    “We concluded that the only effect that is significant enough to cause it is if you have a third companion that’s very inclined to the orbit of the binary,” Mr Baycroft said. The researchers believe the most likely explanation for this companion is a planet, although it’s currently difficult to know much about its size or other characteristics.

    Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2025-04-17/star-wars-tatooine-like-exoplanet-strange-orbit-two-suns/105179506

  308. StevoR says

    @ 306. BTW whilst the part interview with Mosen Madawi was great there; Dave Smith, OTOH, on Ukraine and the last election in the second half of that is just What the…?!? He is totally wrong as history is proving right now. This wasn’t an election to F around with and Trump was NEVER going to be anything but extremely brutally anti-Palestinian as Mehdi Hasan explained long ago here. (5 & half mins aprox.) Also Ukraine – NOT the USA’s or Ukraine’s fault or proxy war. A nation fighting against Russian imperialism and Putin’s invasion of Putin’s choice. FFS! Didn’t realise DS believed such tankie BS.

  309. StevoR says

    Climate change threatens blood supplies and may also trigger an increase in the need for blood, researchers say. Their warning comes after Cyclone Alfred last month resulted in the cancellation of more than 3,500 blood donation appointments in Queensland and NSW when 22 donor centres were closed for four days. Researcher Elvina Viennet said the cyclone had an “unprecedented impact” on blood donations in Australia.

    Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-04-17/climate-change-blood-supplies-substantial-risk/105179316

    I don’t think its just Oz where access to blood supplies and ability to collect blood donations is going to be a worsening problem.

  310. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    More TROs blocking further AEA deportations.
    Previously: S.D. Texas and S.D.N.Y.
    Monday: District of Colorado.
    Tuesday: Western District of Pennsylvania.

  311. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Follow-up to #273.

    Anna Bower: “DOJ files notice that intends to appeal Judge Boasberg’s order finding probable cause for contempt.”

    Aaron Reichlin-Melnick: “What is even appealable about that?”

    Steve Vladeck (Law prof):

    Chief Judge Boasberg’s probable cause ruling is *not* an appealable order.

    DOJ can ask the D.C. Circuit for an extraordinary writ of mandamus, but that requires showing that the district court ruling both (1) was clearly wrong; and (2) is not otherwise capable of being remedied on a future appeal.

    Quinta Jurecic: “Civil procedure? I hardly knew her.”

    Sam Libby (Lawyer): “What even is a writ of mandamus anyway? Asking for… the DOJ.”

    Rando: “I move for a bad court thingy.”

    Joshua Erlich (Civil rights lawyer):

    DOJ is just acting like every order is subject to immediate review which is just not how anything works. As slow as litigation is, every case would take decades if you could run to the circuit court on every ruling.

    Generally, the case progresses until judgment and you can then appeal anything (basically) that happened earlier in the case.

  312. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Aaron Rupar: “Bondi is escalating the rhetoric against Abrego Garcia, who she calls ‘one of the top MS-13 members’ and ‘a terrorist’. [Video clip]”

    Rando 1: (2019) “So the head of MS-13 was apprehended outside of a Home Depot while looking for work? Huh. Times are tough in gang land I guess.”

    Rando 2: (2025) “Union member working full time, raising a kid, while running a gang remotely. Impressive.”

  313. KG says

    Judge Lord Hodge said the ruling should not be seen as a triumph of one side over the other, and stressed that the law still gives protection against discrimination to transgender people… – Reginald Selkirk@292, quoting BBC

    Judge Lord Hodge must be a fool, as well as ignorant of biology, if he did not anticipate the gloating reaction of leading transphobes. Interestingly, the judgement says that trans men, as well as trans women, should be excluded from “group conselling of female victims of sexual abuse”, because their transtioning has given them “a masculine appearance”. So “biological sex” is not to be the deciding factor when it clashes with the desire to exclude transgender people. One wonders what hospital ward or prison trans men are to be sent to. And of course, what is to be done with cis women who have a “masculine appearance”, by choice or otherwise.

  314. Reginald Selkirk says

    Astronomers Detect a Possible Signature of Life on a Distant Planet

    Astronomers have detected what may be the strongest evidence yet of extraterrestrial life on K2-18b, a massive exoplanet orbiting a star 120 light-years from Earth. The research team, led by Cambridge astronomer Nikku Madhusudhan, published their findings today in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

    Using the James Webb Space Telescope, researchers found significant concentrations of dimethyl sulfide and dimethyl disulfide in K2-18b’s atmosphere. On Earth, these sulfur compounds are exclusively produced by living organisms, particularly marine algae…

    Other scientists remain cautious. Christopher Glein of the Southwest Research Institute suggested K2-18b could instead be “a massive hunk of rock with a magma ocean and a thick, scorching hydrogen atmosphere.” Further observations with Webb and future NASA telescopes will be necessary to confirm whether K2-18b is truly habitable or inhabited, though planned budget cuts may impact follow-up research…

  315. Reginald Selkirk says

    Anonymous Hacks Putin’s Secret Data—Publishes Trump File

    The Anonymous PR machine is in full flight once again, with a new attack on Russia “in defense of Ukraine.” The hacking collective has released a cache of some 10 terabytes, which it says includes “data on all businesses operating in Russia, all Kremlin assets in the West, pro-Russian officials, Donald Trump, and more.”

    These Anonymous hacks don’t have the same impact as in the past, potentially because there have now been so many. And Cybernews reports that “from what files have been examined so far, the overall consensus seems to be that the leaked info is simply not that exciting, and apparently not that secret.” …

    For now, you can ignore this as a mid-week distraction. But we will clearly return to the story if and when anything more interesting turns up in the data…

  317. Reginald Selkirk says

    United Airlines flight sees engine fire after takeoff due to apparent rabbit strike

    A United Airlines flight experienced an engine fire shortly after takeoff that was apparently caused by a rare rabbit strike.

    United Flight 2325 had departed Denver International Airport en route to Edmonton, Alberta, on Sunday when the incident occurred.

    LiveATC audio documents the flight crew asking that the plane be inspected for an engine fire and being told that it was a rabbit that apparently got sucked into an engine…

  318. Reginald Selkirk says

    Trump’s Insistence on Real ID Has Become a Flashpoint for His Tinfoil Hat Fans

    After several false alarms over the past two decades, it looks like Americans will soon need a Real ID-compliant form of identification to board a plane. President Donald Trump’s administration has made it clear there won’t be another extension of the deadline, and that’s creating some real tension with some of Trump’s most ardent supporters: batshit crazy conspiracy theorists.

    Alex Jones, a conspiracy theorist and Trump supporter for years, took to his Infowars show Monday to try and explain how Real ID was dangerous and insisted Trump must not understand how it actually works…

    I’m sure there are a lot of things Trump does not understand.

    Maybe we should put an export tariff on batshit.

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