What’s Going on Wednesday: J Dank goes Rogue

Posted: April 16, 2025 | Author: dakinikat | Filed under: Constitutional Crises, kakistocracy | Tags: #Fartus #DeportUs, #FARTUS Mafia State, Blue Origin Space Bunnies, Bring Kilmer Home!, constitutional crisis, FARTUS, J D Vance Family Globe Trotters, J Dank Lonely Boy |8 Comments

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

BB’s under the weather today, so I’ve got the news!  We’ve not heard much about JD Vance besides his globe-trotting mishegas.  He appears gaff and accident-prone, as well as off-putting.  Maybe Trump needed a fall guy; let’s catch up with the lonely Boy since everyone needs a break from #FARTUS and his Depression-inducing policies. The Economics Times has several reports that provide evidence of a hapless Vice President.  This bit of news came earlier in the month. “Second lady Usha Vance says her husband, JD Vance, is very lonely; social media has a field day, here’s what people are saying.”

In her first interview as second lady, Usha Vance revealed that her husband, Vice President JD Vance, is extremely lonely in his new position. To no one’s surprise, social media had a field day. From sarcasm to scathing political criticism, the internet did not hold back. Usha Vance said JD Vance is “very lonely” as Vice President, attributing this to long working hours and little communication, as per a report by BuzzFeed. Her words created a social media storm, with online reactions varying from dark humor to brutally harsh, with scant sympathy for his loneliness. She told the Times that because her husband is so busy, they now communicate primarily via text these days. “I don’t know that he’s asking me for advice so much as it can be a very lonely, lonely world not to share with someone.” JD Vance was a huge hit on the internet! What people are saying is as follows, as per a report by BuzzFeed. Responses from Reddit threads: “Has he tried visiting a furniture store?”—u/parkerplotkin “Did he say thank you to his friends?”—u/GenosseGeneral “They weren’t wearing suits, so.”—u/Dosanaya “Poor JD Vance, oh no. While attempting to remove the benefits that they paid into and dismissing numerous Americans, he is profiting from the same taxpayers that he is disparaging. His children will attend the private, pricey schools that his wealthy friends have been urging taxpayers to fund. Is JD Vance feeling lonely, though? Whoa, that’s really sad.” Others criticized him for making money off taxpayers while pushing to take away benefits and firing many Americans. Some even suggested that JD could quit and be less lonely, urging Vance to shame the rest of the world for being a complete sell-out.” “He can give up, which will make him feel less alone.” Usha Eff and her collusion. You embarrass the others by being a total sell-out. —u/eastwestjewels “Is leaving the country permanently and resigning from your elected position the answer to male loneliness?”—u/500owls

Now, the jet-setting couple are headed to India.  Can he achieve any worse press than he did in his last jaunts to Europe?  “US VP JD Vance, wife Usha Vance to visit India, meet PM Modi amid push for trade deal.”   I thought #FARTUS was in charge of the bullying.

“US Vice President JD Vance will visit India from 21 to 24 April, marking his first official trip to the country since taking office. He will be joined by his wife Usha Vance and their three children — Ewan, Vivek, and Mirabel — as part of a broader diplomatic tour that also includes a stop in Italy. The visit underscores growing US interest in consolidating its relationship with India amid shifting global alliances and economic realignments. A statement from his office confirmed meetings with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and said the discussions will focus on shared economic and geopolitical priorities.”

T Bogg has this bit of news on Raw Story.  “‘Uppity’ J.D. Vance flattened for new screed defying the Supreme Court.”

Vice President J.D. Vance was raked over the coals on Wednesday morning for a series of social media posts on X on Tuesday where he continued to defend the Donald Trump administration for wrongfully shipping a Maryland man to El Salvador despite an admonition from the Supreme Court. With the battle over the deportation and imprisonment of Kilmar Abrego Garcia at a notorious Salvadoran prison camp reaching the point where even the conservative Wall Street Journal editorial board is stepping in and deploring the lack of due process, Vance has doubled down and blown off concerns. In a long post on X, Vance argued, “To say the administration must observe ‘due process’ is to beg the question: what process is due is a function of our resources, the public interest, the status of the accused, the proposed punishment, and so many other factors. To put it in concrete terms, imposing the death penalty on an American citizen requires more legal process than deporting an illegal alien to their country of origin.” He then added, “Here’s a useful test: ask the people weeping over the lack of due process what precisely they propose for dealing with Biden’s millions and millions of illegals. And with reasonable resource and administrative judge constraints, does their solution allow us to deport at least a few million people per year?”

So, let’s not leave out his latest embarrassing moment. This is from ABC News. “Vice President JD Vance fumbles Ohio State football team’s national championship trophy.”  This guy can’t get anything right.

Vice President JD Vance fumbled The Ohio State University football team’s national championship trophy during a celebration at the White House on Monday.

President Donald Trump hosted the Buckeyes after they won the College Football Playoff National Championship against the University of Notre Dame in January.

When Vance went to pick up the football-shaped trophy off a table at the end of the event, the 24-karat gold, bronze and stainless steel trophy nearly toppled over behind him before two players caught it. The base dropped to the ground to gasps from the crowd.

Vance went on to hold the trophy separate from the base.

Though the Pentagram-designed piece appeared to break, the trophy and base are two separate pieces so that the 26.5 inch-tall, 35-pound trophy can be hoisted in the air. The 12-inch-tall base weighs about 30 pounds.

That’s not seriously as bad, though, as the ongoing constitutional crisis of Trump’s DOJ.  He’s breaking our Constitutional Democracy by refusing court orders to bring Garcia home, putting Judge Paula Xinis in a difficult place.  Will she put them in contempt of court or rely on SCOTUS to deal with them.  This is from Politico. “Judge launches inquiry into Trump administration’s refusal to seek return of wrongly deported man, “To date, what the record shows is that nothing has been done. Nothing,” U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis said.”

 A federal judge ordered an “intense” two-week inquiry into the Trump administration’s refusal to seek the return of a man who was wrongly deported from Maryland to a notorious prison in El Salvador.

“To date, what the record shows is that nothing has been done. Nothing,” U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis said at a court hearing Tuesday.

Xinis’ order sets up a high-stakes sprint that may force senior Trump administration officials to testify under oath about their response to court orders requiring them to facilitate the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the United States. Each day that passes, the judge noted, is another day Abrego Garcia spends improperly detained in a maximum security mega-prison.

“We’re going to move. There will be no tolerance for gamesmanship or grandstanding,” the judge said. “There are no business hours while we do this. … Cancel vacations, cancel other appointments. I’m usually pretty good about things like that in my court, but not this time. So, I expect all hands on deck.”

Xinis’ inquiry is the latest chapter in an escalating clash between the executive and judicial branches over Abrego Garcia’s illegal deportation last month. Xinis previously ordered the administration to “facilitate” his release from the custody of El Salvador, and the Supreme Court upheld that directive last week.

Liz Dye of Public Notice puts it this way. “SCOTUS puts constitutional crisis in America’s Easter basket. Instead of a chocolate bunny, we get the president openly defying a court order.”

If Chief Justice John Roberts hoped to save the judiciary by burning it down, he badly miscalculated. Just a week after the Supreme Court’s five male conservatives kicked the legs out from under a respected trial judge to save the Trump administration from the consequences of defying a court order, we are back on the precipice of a disastrous constitutional crisis. Perhaps the justices aimed to protect the judiciary by swerving to avoid a head-on collision with the executive. Maybe they hoped that President Trump would take the win and trim his dictatorial sails. But this is Dr. Strangelove, not Speed, and no amount of vague harrumphing by the high Court was ever going to persuade Major Kong to stand down. Thanks to the Supreme Court’s fecklessness, the judiciary is now squarely back on a collision course with a Trump-shaped iceberg. But this time, instead of planeloads of faceless migrants, the case involves just one man: Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a husband and father from Maryland, whom the government deported to a Salvadoran torture prison despite a court order barring just that. The first confrontation involved planeloads of migrants deported pursuant to the Alien Enemies Act (AEA), a statute associated with some of the most sordid chapters in American history, including Japanese internment. The law empowers the president to deport foreign citizens in times of war, and so Trump simply declared that Venezuela has invaded the US by dispatching members of the Tren de Aragua gang as shock troops, and began rounding up Venezuelan immigrants more or less at random. The fact that we are patently not at war didn’t matter to the Supreme Court. Nor did the revelation that 90 percent of the men deported had zero criminal record. In a hastily drafted order, the five conservative justices rebuffed a challenge to the AEA deportations, airily suggesting that anyone fearful of being deported should just file an individual habeas corpus petition … from a detention cell, in the few hours between when they’re informed they’re being moved and when they’re hustled onto a plane and cast into a windowless dungeon with no access to counsel. This had the desired effect of heading off a confrontation between Judge James Boasberg and the government, which flatly refused to explain why it deported the men after the judge ordered them not to. But along the way the Supreme Court did require the administration to give some process to AEA deportees. “AEA detainees must receive notice after the date of this order that they are subject to removal under the Act,” the majority wrote. “The notice must be afforded within a reasonable time and in such a manner as will allow them to actually seek habeas relief in the proper venue before such removal occurs.” Even this appears to have been too big an ask for the Trump administration, which refused to commit to giving AEA deportees even 24 hours notice before shipping them to a Salvadoran gulag.

There’s more at the link.  ProPublica has this scathing article. “Congress Has Demanded Answers to ICE Detaining Americans. The Administration Has Responded With Silence. Amid increasing reports that U.S. citizens have been caught up in the Trump administration’s immigration dragnet, a dozen members of Congress have written to the government with pointed questions. None has received a reply.”  The analysis is provided by Nicole Foy.

Just a week into President Donald Trump’s second term, Rep. Adriano Espaillat began to see reports of Puerto Ricans and others being questioned and arrested by immigration agents. So Espaillat, a New York Democrat, did what members of Congress often do: He wrote to the administration and demanded answers. That was more than 10 weeks ago. Espaillat has not received a response. His experience appears to be common. At least a dozen members of Congress, all Democrats, have written to the Trump administration with pointed questions about constituents and other citizens whom immigration agents have questioned, detained and even held at gunpoint. In one letter, Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee demanded a list of every citizen detained during the new administration. None has received an answer. “What we are clearly seeing is that with this administration, they are not responding to congressional inquiries,” said Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández, a New Mexico Democrat. Leger Fernández and others wrote to Trump and the Department of Homeland Security on Jan. 28 after receiving complaints from constituents and tribal nations that federal agents were pressing tribal citizens in New Mexico for their immigration status, raising concerns about racial profiling. The congresswoman and others say the lack of response is part of a broader pattern in which the administration has been moving to sideline Congress and its constitutional power to investigate the executive branch. “That is a big concern on a level beyond what ICE is doing,” Leger Fernández said, referring to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a branch of DHS. “This administration does not seem to recognize the power and authority and responsibility” of Congress. Norman Ornstein, a longtime congressional observer at the American Enterprise Institute, said prior administrations’ lack of responsiveness has frustrated lawmakers too. But he’s never seen one so thoroughly brush off Congress. “What’s clear now is that the message from Donald Trump and his minions is: ‘You don’t have to respond to these people, whether they are ours or not,’” Ornstein said, referring to Republicans and Democrats. “That’s not usual. Nothing about this is usual.” A White House spokesperson denied that the administration has been circumventing Congress or its oversight. “Passage of the continuing resolution that kept our government open and commonsense legislation like the Laken Riley Act are indicative of how closely the Trump administration is working with Congress,” said Kush Desai in a statement.

It is obvious they are kidnapping and disappearing people like we’re a mafia state.  And they’re holding their ground because #FARTUS believes the Supreme Court will not do anything to him or anyone in his administration. This is breaking from The Hill. “Bondi says mistakenly deported man ‘not coming back to our country’.”

Attorney General Pam Bondi said the Trump administration failed to take “one extra step of paperwork” before it mistakenly deported a Maryland man, adding that nonetheless Kilmar Abrego Garcia is “not coming back to our country.”

The comments were the latest example of officials under President Trump digging in despite a Supreme Court order requiring them to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return.

Bondi also repeated numerous claims about Abrego Garcia’s ties to MS-13 that his family has denied and for which there is a conflicting court record. “He is not coming back to our country. President Bukele said he was not sending him back. That’s the end of the story,” she told reporters at a press conference Wednesday, referring to the Salvadorian leader. “If he wanted to send him back, we would give him a plane ride back. There was no situation ever where he was going to stay in this country. None, none.” Bondi has previously argued the Supreme Court’s order to facilitate his return meant only that the government would need to supply a plane if El Salvador chooses to return him. Abrego Garcia, a 29-year-old Salvadoran national who fled the country as a teenager to escape gang violence, was protected from deportation by an immigration judge in 2019. The gang Barrio 18 threatened to kill him when trying to extract money from his mother’s pupusa business. The court record shows numerous issues with the government’s assertion he is a gang member.

The DOJ is now the enforcer for Trump’s Mafia State. They might as well erase the Justice from the name. I have one thing I need to rant about.  I don’t know if I should call it the Space Bunny Adventure or Space Barbies.  The women on the Blue Origin Mission deserve all the backlash it was given. This did not empower women.  We have actual women astronauts. We do not need to see 11 women in slinky ‘flight suits’ performing cute space cone exit ploys.  Amanda Hunt, who writes for the New York Times, stated this. “One Giant Stunt for Womankind.  Blue Origin’s all-female flight proves that women are now free to enjoy capitalism’s most extravagant spoils alongside rich men.”

“Though women remain severely underrepresented in the aerospace field worldwide, they do regularly escape the Earth’s atmosphere. More than 100 have gone to space since Sally Ride became the first American woman to do so in 1983. If an all-women spaceflight were chartered by, say, NASA, it might represent the culmination of many decades of serious investment in female astronauts. (In 2019, NASA was embarrassingly forced to scuttle an all-women spacewalk when it realized it did not have enough suits that fit them.) An all-women Blue Origin spaceflight signifies only that several women have amassed the social capital to be friends with Lauren Sánchez.

Blue Origin is one of several private spaceflight companies — among them Virgin Galactic, Space Adventures and SpaceX — now offering rich people and their friends access to space. Its New Shepard rocket is self-piloting, and the six women had no technical duties on the flight. Though two participants had some aerospace experience (Bowe worked for NASA, and Nguyen interned there), Sánchez has said she picked them all because they are “storytellers” who could step off the flight and promote their experiences through journalism, film and song. To Blue Origin, their value lies expressly in their amateurism. Kristin Fisher, a journalist and the daughter of the NASA astronaut Anna Lee Fisher, who joined the livestream, called the flight’s roster “so refreshing.” In the early days of human spaceflight, astronauts “were all white male military test pilots, and they had to have ‘the right stuff.’ You could never talk about nerves, or being nervous, or your feelings,” Fisher said. “But now, in 2025, it is the right stuff.”

Sánchez arranged for her favorite fashion designers to craft the mission’s suits, leveraging it into yet another branding opportunity. Souvenirs of the flight sold on Blue Origin’s website feature a kind of yassified shuttle patch design. It includes a shooting-star microphone representing King, an exploding firework representing Perry and a fly representing Sánchez’s 2024 children’s book about the adventures of a dyslexic insect. Each woman was encouraged to use her four minutes of weightlessness to practice a different in-flight activity tailored to her interests. Nguyen planned to use them to conduct two vanishingly brief science experiments, one of them related to menstruation, while Perry pledged to “put the ‘ass’ in astronaut.”

The message is that a little girl can grow up to be whatever she wishes: a rocket scientist or a pop star, a television journalist or a billionaire’s fiancée who is empowered to pursue her various ambitions and whims in the face of tremendous costs. In each case, she stands to win a free trip to space. She can have it all, including a family back on Earth. “Guess what?” Sánchez told Elle. “Moms go to space.” (Fisher, the first mother in space, went there in 1984.)

The whole thing reminds me of the advice Sheryl Sandberg passed on to women in “Lean In,” her memoir of scaling the corporate ladder in the technology industry. When Eric Schmidt, then the chief executive of Google, offered Sandberg a position that did not align with her own professional goals, he told her: “If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, don’t ask what seat. Just get on.” It is the proximity to power that matters, not the goal of the mission itself.

This is from the Daily Mail, as reported by Daniel Matthews. “Female NFL reporter rips Katy Perry and Co over ’embarrassing’ Blue Origin space mission.”

Pop star Perry was part of an all-female crew – alongside the likes of Lauren Sanchez and journalist Gayle King – that made an 11-minute trip into orbit on Jeff Bezos‘ rocket.

Perry took a daisy into space – in honor of her daughter – and was seen kissing the ground after touching down back on earth. The singer said she felt ‘super connected to life’ and ‘so connected to love’.

The event was hailed by some as a landmark moment but NFL Network reporter Slater hit out at the stunt on social media.

‘The whole thing was embarrassing. So many smart women who worked their whole life to go to space and did the work,’ she wrote.

‘She (Perry) took a daisy and promoted a set list for her new album. If she really cared? Give your spot up to a young girl in the NASA program.’

Slater added: ‘Guess it’s ok for everyone just to care more about themselves and personal motivations these days. Very on brand (with) our culture shift.’

The NFL Network reporter – a self-confessed ‘sci fi geek’ admitted she would ‘love’ the chance to go into space.

But she claimed she ‘would absolutely give my seat up to a woman who has been passed over time and time again by NASA’.

Slater also took aim at how Perry and Co looked when heading into space.

‘I don’t think they truly appreciated the magnitude of the moment. With exception of former NASA scientist Aisha Bowe who absolutely deserved a shot at that flight the bs (bulls***) hair makeup and fits really annoyed me,’ she continued.

‘(It) just felt disrespectful to cosplay as an astronaut in full hair and a curated fit… I cringe thinking what (pioneering female astronaut) Sunita Williams had to think about it all.

‘I also understand why they sent them to promote “space tourism” but yeah the self promotion was so dumb.’

One more from The Guardian. This is written by Moira Donegan. “The Blue Origin flight showcased the utter defeat of American feminism. The trip leaned on a vision of women’s empowerment that is light on substance and heavy on a childlike, girlish silliness ”

But the flight, and its grim promotional cycle, might be most depressing for what it reveals about the utter defeat of American feminism. Sánchez, the organizer of the flight, has touted the all-female crew as a win for women. But she herself is a woman in a deeply antifeminist model. It is not her rocket company that took her and her friends to the edge of space; it’s her male fiance’s. And it is no virtue of her character that put her inside the rocket – not her capacity, not her intellect and not her hard work – but merely her relationship with a man. (The fact that the rocket itself looks so phallic does not help to lessen the flight’s message that the surest way for women to raise themselves in the world is to attach themselves to a man.)

There are at least two women on the mission who can be credited as serious persons: Aisha Bowe, an aerospace engineer, and Amanda Nguyen, a civil rights entrepreneur whose past work with Nasa makes her something closer to an actual astronaut. But most of the crew’s self-presentation and promotion of the flight has leaned heavily on a vision of women’s empowerment that is light on substance and heavy on a childlike, girlish silliness that insults women by cavalierly linking their gender with superficiality, vanity and unseriousness.

In an interview with Elle, the crew members paid lip service to the importance of women, and particularly women of color, in Stem. (The Trump administration has forced Nasa to close some offices in order to comply with its ban on the diversity, equity and inclusion programs that would recruit such candidates.) But mostly, they seemed interested in talking about their makeup and hair. “Space is going to finally be glam,” Katy Perry said, bizarrely. “Let me tell you something. If I could take glam up with me, I would do that. We are going to put the ‘ass’ in astronaut.”

“Who would not get glam before the flight?!” asked Sánchez, who evidently can’t imagine that women might prioritize anything else. “We’re going to have lash extensions flying in the capsule.” Bowe, too, joined in, saying that she had gone to extreme lengths to make sure that she would be, of all things, well coiffed for the experience. “I skydived in Dubai with similar hair to make sure I would be good,” she said. “I took it for a dry run.”

It is not misogynist to say that these women do not have their priorities in order. Rather, it is misogynist of them to so forcefully associate womanhood with cosmetics and looks, rather than with any of the more noble and human aspirations to which space travel might acquaint them – curiosity, inquiry, discovery, exploration, a sense of their own mortality, an apprehension of the divine. These women, who have placed themselves as representatives for all women with their promotion of the flight – positioning themselves as aspirational models of femininity – have presented a profoundly antifeminist vision of what womankind’s future is: dependent on men, confined to triviality, and deeply, deeply silly.

Is this the future that awaits women in Donald Trump’s America: one where the only way to achievement is through sexual desirability, the only way to status as an ornamental attachment on a man who really counts, the only subject on which we are qualified to speak is whether lash extensions will stay in place? If this is the future, count me out. On the other hand, the notion of being launched off of such a grim and sexist Earth is looking more and more appealing.

That’s all, folks! What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

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