Wisconsin and Florida elections

There were three major elections yesterday, two for congressional seats in Florida and one for a state supreme court justice in Wisconsin. The Florida seats were vacated by the resignations of Matt Gaetz and Michael Waltz. Gaetz, a controversial figure accused of having sex with underage girls as well as using drugs, did not resign because of that but because, incredibly, Trump had nominated him for the position of attorney general. But when even some Republicans viewed his nomination unfavorably, he withdrew it.

Waltz resigned because Trump appointed him as national security advisor, where he has recently been criticized for allegedly including the editor of The Atlantic magazine in a high-security chat group over the unsecured commercial channel Signal. It turned out that this was not the only unsecured group chat Waltz had created to discuss sensitive information, having created 20 more on Signal. He seems sloppy and incompetent to say the least.
[Read more…]

This is what a police state looks like

You are walking along a public street in daylight when suddenly you are surrounded by people dressed in black with masks on their faces who then handcuff you and take you away in unmarked vehicles to an unknown destination and not allowed to contact anyone. This is what happens routinely in authoritarian countries where the rule of law has broken down and death squads operate with impunity.

But this happened on Tuesday on the streets of a Boston suburb to a Fulbright graduate student from Turkey attending Tufts University.

Dramatic footage had emerged on Wednesday evening of the moment US immigration officials, wearing masks and hoodies, detained the Tufts University doctoral student in Massachusetts in the street, handcuffed her and bustled her into an unmarked car.

Ozturk was detained on Tuesday by federal immigration agents, and on Wednesday was being held at the South Louisiana Ice processing center, according to the government’s Ice detainee locator page.

The video, taken from a security camera on a building, shows Ozturk walking along the street when she is approached by several masked figures, who forcibly take her phone and backpack and place her in handcuffs. The officials, some with badges around their neck, all have their faces covered.

After she screams, an unseen onlooker can be heard responding.

“Is this a kidnapping?” asks the bystander, who appeared to be recording the arrest, footage that later circulated on social media.

In separate security-camera footage, the agents can be heard responding: “We’re the police.”

The bystander replies: “You don’t look like it. Why are you hiding your faces?”

Here is video of the event.

Book and TV review: Bleak House by Charles Dickens

I am fond of the books of Charles Dickens but for some reason never got around to reading this particular one that was published in 1853. It is argued by some critics to be one of his best works. I was stimulated to read it because I came across a 2005 BBC adaptation into a seres that looked like it might be good but I thought I should read the book first.

I am not an authority on Dickens so will leave it to others to judge whether this may or may not be one his finest works but it is undoubtedly very good and one of the most Dickensian in its flourishes and plotting. Coincidences, a Dickens staple, abound and people who seemed to be unconnected suddenly discover that they are in fact related, even very closely.

Dickens also has a penchant for creating eccentric characters with strange names and here we find them in abundance. In this book alone are Jarndyce, Guppy, Turveydrop, Jellyby, Snagsby, Smallweed, Chadband, Pardiggle, Squod, Tulkinghorn, Clamb, and Grubble. You rarely find a Smith or a Jones or a Brown in a Dickens novel. Interestingly, Dickens’s own name was considered strange at that time, as one critic wrote, “Mr Dickens, as if in revenge for his own queer name, does bestow still queerer ones upon his fictitious creations.” This shows that names that we now consider as ordinary became so by virtue of familiarity. If Dickens had not become so famous, his name might still have been considered ‘queer’.
[Read more…]

The courts are the only thing holding Trump back

Trump and Musk seem to think that they can do whatever they want to whomever they want. As far as Congress is concerned, they are right because the Republican majority seems to be quite willing to roll over for the two of them and be subservient to their whims, abandoning their constitutional role of being an independent branch of government to serve as a check and balance on executive power.

It is the courts that can do something and they have, up to a point.

A federal judge blocked President Donald Trump’s bid to deprive federal funding from programs that incorporate “diversity, equity and inclusion” initiatives.

U.S. District Judge Adam Abelson ruled that Trump’s policy likely violates the First Amendment because it penalizes private organizations based on their viewpoints. And the judge said the policy is written so vaguely that it chills the free speech of federal contractors concerned they will be punished if they don’t eliminate programs meant to encourage a diverse workforce.

Abelson, a Baltimore-based appointee of former President Joe Biden, said longstanding court precedent bars the federal government from “leveraging its funding to restrict federal contractors and grantees from otherwise exercising their First Amendment rights.”
[Read more…]

Creating a government of crooks, fools, and cowards

Danielle Sassoon, acting acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, resigned rather than be complicit in Trump’s demand that she drop corruption charges against New York mayor Eric Adams.

You wouldn’t think it possible that a Federalist Society member and former clerk for the archconservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia would show more grit in the face of Trumpism than the entire leadership of the national Democratic Party, but here we are. Three weeks into President Donald Trump’s second term in office, Danielle Sassoon, a thirty-eight-year-old lawyer whom Trump had named acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, has provided the first dramatic check against the Trump Administration’s rampage through the federal government. On Wednesday, she refused her bosses’ orders to drop the criminal-corruption case against New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams. She offered her resignation, and put her career on the line, rather than do the dirty work Washington directed her to do.

Following her resignation, six other career federal prosecutors in that same office have resigned in the Southern District of New York because they too refused to drop corruption charges against Adams, as ordered of Emil Bove, the acting US deputy attorney general and former personal lawyer to Trump.
[Read more…]

Challenging Trump in the courts

Trump and Musk are treating the government as if it were a private company that they own and that they can fire people at will, put in place anyone they like, and order the agencies to do whatever they want. When it is pointed out that some of the agencies and personnel are statutorily authorized, their response is simple. They simply declare the statute in question is unconstitutional. Of course they have been taken to court multiple times and judges have weighed in to stop the madness.

Here is just one example.

A judge blocked Donald Trump’s attempt to fire the head of a body that protects whistleblowers and investigates corruption.

Late on Wednesday Judge Amy Berman Jackson reversed the White House order sacking Hampton Dellinger as head of the Office of Special Counsel (OSC), and reinstated him in his post pending a court hearing set for 26 February.
[Read more…]

Fears over pornography

In a long essay, Rebecca L. Davis, a professor of History at the University of Delaware, writes that there is a persistent belief in the US that viewing pornography is harmful. While that belief has remained largely constant over time, what has changed are views about what kinds of erotica causes harm, what form the harm takes, and who is harmed, whether it harms those involved in the creation of it or those who view it or both.

Currently, the danger is perceived to that to young people and as of January 19th of this year, 19 states (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and Virginia) have age requirement verification requirements for adult-content sites. But not qll sites are complying. Some, especially one of the biggest sites Pornhub, have simply chosen to not provide access to people from those states.

Pornhub put up a firewall rather than comply. If nothing else, the move increased traffic to VPN (virtual private network) services, which provide users with unfettered access to Pornhub regardless of their location by securely connecting to a remote server. The given reason for requiring age verification – that pornography harms the minors who view it – is the latest salvo in a centuries-old American debate over erotica.

These state-level conflicts in the US emerged amid an international push for age verification on adult sites. In 2014, Mexico enacted an age verification law. The European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA), passed late in 2022, imposed several restrictions on Pornhub and other large pornography sites, including age-verification requirements. A similar measure in Britain, the 2023 Online Safety Act, took effect in January 2025. France, which already required age verification in an earlier law, recently blocked four pornographic sites (Pornhub was not among them) from operating within its borders after finding that the sites failed to check users’ ages adequately. Members of the Canadian House of Commons continue to debate the Protecting Young Persons from Exposure to Pornography Act, which would require age verification. There, as elsewhere, civil libertarians warn that these laws fail to define ‘sexually explicit material’, and raise serious privacy concerns. Pornhub is challenging the laws on multiple fronts.

[Read more…]

Trump’s obsession with ending birthright citizenship

Birthright citizenship is the right that grants automatic citizenship to anyone born in the US, irrespective of the status of their parentage. Trump issued an executive order cancelling birthright citizenship for any child born after February 19, 2025 to anyone other than US citizens or permanent residents. This order was immediately challenged by multiple states and in the first hearing on it, a federal judge in Seattle immediately suspended the order, calling it “blatantly unconstitutional”.

“I’ve been on the bench for over four decades. I can’t remember another case where the question presented was as clear as this one is,” U.S. District Judge John Coughenour told a Justice Department attorney. “This is a blatantly unconstitutional order.”

Thursday’s decision prevents the Trump administration from taking steps to implement the executive order for 14 days. In the meantime, the parties will submit further arguments about the merits of Trump’s order. Coughenour scheduled a hearing on Feb. 6 to decide whether to block it long term as the case proceeds.

Coughenour, 84, a Ronald Reagan appointee who was nominated to the federal bench in 1981, grilled the DOJ attorney, Brett Shumate, asking whether Shumate personally believed the order was constitutional.

“I have difficulty understanding how a member of the bar could state unequivocally that this is a constitutional order,” he added.
….

The U.S. is among about 30 countries where birthright citizenship — the principle of jus soli or “right of the soil” — is applied. Most are in the Americas, and Canada and Mexico are among them.

[Read more…]

Prosecutorial lust for death

I have railed against the barbaric practice in the US of having the death penalty, something that many countries have dispensed with. But the existence of the death penalty also brings with it a set of perverse incentives for prosecutors. If they have a so-called death penalty case, one in which the district attorney or other body decides merits the death penalty, then the prosecutors in that case are also evaluated on whether they are able to get the jury to apply that penalty.

In most death penalty cases, there are two phases. The first is to determine the guilt or innocence of the accused. If the person is found guilty, the next phase is to decide whether the person is to be executed. The same jury makes both decisions, and it is considered a sign of success if a prosecutor can get a jury to vote for death and is good for their career. So they try everything they can to ensure that the jury that is empaneled will be willing to vote for death if a guilty verdict is reached.
[Read more…]

Gaetz quits

Trump’s controversial nominee for attorney general has withdrawn his name for the position. This took me by surprise since just this morning the House ethics committee was deadlocked on whether to release their report on the various allegations of sexual misconduct, some involving minors, that have plagued him for years. I thought that move would clear the way for his nomination to go through.

In his statement, Gaetz gave the usual ‘for the good of the country’ pablum.

After meeting with senators on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, Gaetz determined that his nomination was “becoming a distraction to the critical work” of the new Trump administration, he explained on X.

“There is no time to waste on a needlessly protracted Washington scuffle, thus I’ll be withdrawing my name from consideration to serve as Attorney General. Trump’s [justice department] must be in place and ready on Day 1,” Gaetz said.
…

The announcement comes one day after the House ethics committee deadlocked over releasing its report on allegations that Gaetz engaged in sexual relations with a 17-year-old girl. The justice department launched its own inquiry of the allegations but declined to bring charges, and Gaetz has consistently denied the claims.

[Read more…]