Mostly Monday Reads: Of Protests, Grass Roots, and Boycotts

Posted: September 22, 2025 | Author: | Filed under: #FARTUS, #MAGAnomics, #We are so Fucked, kakistocracy | Tags: , , , , , | 6 Comments

“It’s a movement!” John Buss, @repeat1968  (me: Check his diaper)

 

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

There are signs of democracy that indicate that a lot of us are not going to go peacefully into the dark night of authoritarianism. Instead, we’re going peacefully into the streets day after day to protest the takeover of American Cities by ICE and the military. The next big “No Kings” protest is on October 18th. It looks to be much larger than the first. The number of Americans concerned about First Amendment Speech Rights can be seen in the growing numbers impacting the Disney stock prices and sales. The outrage surrounding the firing of Jimmy Kimmel has grown into its own movement. You can see it in the numbers. Trump is extremely unpopular. You may see that in the numbers, too.

You may have noticed that I’m relying a lot on the Substacks of what are generally known as public intellectuals. Well-known researchers like Dr Paul Krugman and many others have switched from the Op-Ed pages of compromised newspapers to the platform. Happy little nerds like me thrive on folks who can produce the evidence.

Today, I give you “Strength in Numbers.” This is the substack of G. Elliot Morris, who calls himself a data-driven journalist. “A lot of powerful people just don’t realize how unpopular Trump is. The backlash to ABC/Disney canceling Kimmel shows why it’s important for businesses and the public to understand that two-thirds of Americans are not Trump voters.” It’s hard to fight back against an executive branch full of incompetence, extremist thinking, and chaos. However, underlying trends and events show that the resistance is clearly growing. Go look at the graph. To describe the increase in the number of Google searches for “Cancel Disney” is eye-popping.

Last week, ABC/Disney canceled Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show after the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, threatened to revoke the broadcast licenses of television stations that carry the program. The backlash has been swift: As I pointed out Saturday morning, search interest for “Cancel Disney+” has hit an all-time high — even higher than the boycott movements from when Disney “went woke” in 2020-2022. The current Disney boycott is now 4x as large as any over the last 5 years, gauged by search interest:

Last week, ABC/Disney canceled Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show after the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, threatened to revoke the broadcast licenses of television stations that carry the program. The backlash has been swift: As I pointed out Saturday morning, search interest for “Cancel Disney+” has hit an all-time high — even higher than the boycott movements from when Disney “went woke” in 2020-2022. The current Disney boycott is now 4x as large as any over the last 5 years, gauged by search interest.

This is not limited to internet posters and Google searchers; investors are worried too. Disney’s stock is down 2% over the last week, while the overall market is up nearly 1%.

This all intersects with a point I’ve been making in this newsletter for a while: many people fundamentally underestimate how unpopular Trump is. As the Disney episode illustrates, they do this at their own peril.

The graphs for Trump’s unpopularity are also astounding. Now, if we can just get out the vote and overcome all the anti-democratic election tampering going on in Republican States. The challenge will be a strong GOTV for all these Trump Haters. However, the intensity measures are astounding. We could do it.

Compare Trump’s topline job approval (-11) to that of other recent presidents, and he stands out quite clearly (not in a good way).

The president’s entire domestic policy agenda is underwater, too — especially on the economy and inflation, the two issues that won him the 2024 election.

This analysis by CNN’s Stephan Collinson highlights the nonsense performance by Trump and his cronies in an attempt to take the bases’ short, hateful, attention span away from military attacks, the destruction of the White House, and, however you frame all the nonsense surrounding Charlie Boy’s untimely death by gun violence that he clearly encouraged. “Trump will never change, but Kirk’s death shines a path to MAGA’s future.”

Of course, now that fascism has been clearly implanted in America, it is “wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.”

President Donald Trump wants the world to understand that Charlie Kirk’s killing will not temper him or induce him to mend the country’s divides.

…

But Trump bluntly and deliberately signaled that forgiveness and unity were for others, and that he’d use Kirk’s assassination to intensify his efforts to impose personal power even more ruthlessly.

He therefore confirmed that the immediate political consequence of Kirk’s shocking assassination will be more political discord.

The president described the Turning Point USA founder as “a missionary with a noble spirit and a great, great purpose.”

“He did not hate his opponents. He wanted the best for them,” Trump said. But in a moment of brazen self-awareness that epitomized his presidency, he then broke from the script. “That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponent.” Trump went on, “And I don’t want the best for them.” Trump seemed to almost apologize to Erika Kirk. But it was a moment when couldn’t stop himself. Or didn’t want to, so he could remain true to himself.

Statements like these are why we must remember the lessons of the civil rights movement. We cannot afford to surrender the high ground or make it invisible. We also must continue to shine a light on the ongoing grift that is the primary feature of any Trump endeavor. This reminder is from NOTUS and written by Jose Peliery. Trump’s public appearances are sideshows and attention grabs. Pulling the curtain back is mandatory. “The Justice Department Had 36 Lawyers Fighting Corruption Full-Time. Under Trump, It’s Down to Two. The Public Integrity Section is the latest casualty in the administration’s attacks on Nixon-era good-government reforms.”

All the other lawyers in the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section have either quit under pressure, resigned in protest or been detailed to other matters across the nation, according to several sources who spoke with NOTUS. The section has also lost all but one of more than a dozen paralegals.

“To me, it just screams that public corruption cases are no longer a priority of DOJ,” said Andrew Tessman, a prosecutor who left the Justice Department this month. “I cannot understand why we would want to restrict that section.”

Sources with knowledge of the section’s operations say the reduction in staff means it can no longer advise the 94 U.S. attorneys’ offices around the country on how to build cases against crooked government officials — let alone prosecute new cases on its own.

To protect against politically motivated abuses, the DOJ’s Justice Manual has long required prosecutors in local U.S. attorneys’ offices to consult with the Public Integrity Section on any “federal criminal matter that involves alleged or suspected violations of federal or state campaign financing laws, federal patronage crimes, or corruption of the election process.”

But Trump’s DOJ reversed that policy in June. “Department leadership is currently revising this section,” this part of the Justice Manual now says. “The consultation requirement is suspended while revisions are ongoing.”

Several former Justice Department employees expressed extreme concern that the change in the Justice Manual, coupled with the flattening of the Public Integrity Section, opens the door for the Trump administration to engage in partisan prosecutions of Democrats by assigning the job to prosecutors working for U.S. attorneys — political appointees nominated by the president.

This news is no surprise, given the rest of what we’ve examined today. Maybe we can get rid of them with the latest 2-day extravaganza Rapture that never happens.  Once again, I bring you William Kristol from The Bulwark: “Bag Man.”

Who uses cash anymore? Tom Homan, that’s who. On September 20, 2024, Trump’s border czar accepted $50,000 from undercover FBI agents. And no, it wasn’t Venmoed. The cash was in a bag from the food chain Cava. (Since you asked: I’m partial to the Spicy Lamb + Avocado combo. But I haven’t yet tried the newly minted Garlicky Chicken Shawarma Bowl. Morning Shots readers, let me know how it is in the comments).

The story broke Saturday afternoon in a detailed and well-sourced MSNBC News report by star investigative reporter Carol Leonnig, a four-time Pulitzer Prize winner who left the Washington Post less than two months ago, and Ken Dilanian, who has covered the Justice Department and the intelligence agencies for NBC and MSNBC for a decade.

Here’s the heart of the story:

In an undercover operation last year, the FBI recorded Tom Homan, now the White House border czar, accepting $50,000 in cash after indicating he could help the agents — who were posing as business executives — win government contracts in a second Trump administration, according to multiple people familiar with the probe and internal documents reviewed by MSNBC.

The FBI and the Justice Department planned to wait to see whether Homan would deliver on his alleged promise once he became the nation’s top immigration official. But the case indefinitely stalled soon after Donald Trump became president again in January, according to six sources familiar with the matter. In recent weeks, Trump appointees officially closed the investigation, after FBI Director Kash Patel requested a status update on the case, two of the people said.

The federal investigation was launched in western Texas in the summer of 2024 after a subject in a separate investigation claimed Homan was soliciting payments in exchange for awarding contracts should Trump win the presidential election, according to an internal Justice Department summary of the probe reviewed by MSNBC and people familiar with the case. The U.S. Attorney’s office in the Western District of Texas, working with the FBI, asked the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section to join its ongoing probe “into the Border Czar and former Acting Director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement Tom Homan and others based on evidence of payment from FBI undercover agents in exchange for facilitating future contracts related to border enforcement.”

Remarkably, the Trump Justice Department isn’t actually denying the cash payment or any other fact reported by Leonnig and Dilanian. FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche simply asserted that their review of the case “found no credible evidence of any criminal wrongdoing.”

A New York Times report soon followed up on MSNBC’s story, adding the fun Cava bag detail and also the intriguing fact that the sting “grew out of a long-running counterintelligence investigation that had not been targeting Mr. Homan.” In other words, the Biden Justice Department was not out to get Homan.

Steve Levy of Wired has this interesting bit of news today. “I Thought I Knew Silicon Valley. I Was Wrong. Tech got what it wanted by electing Trump. A year later, it looks more like a suicide pact.” Go look at the artwork. It’s genius.

For decades, Mark Lemley’s life as an intellectual property lawyer was orderly enough. He’s a professor at Stanford University and has consulted for Amazon, Google, and Meta. “I always enjoyed that the area I practice in has largely been apolitical,” Lemley tells me. What’s more, his democratic values neatly aligned with those of the companies that hired him.

But in January, Lemley made a radical move. “I have struggled with how to respond to Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook’s descent into toxic masculinity and Neo-Nazi madness,” he posted on LinkedIn. “I have fired Meta as a client.”

This is the Silicon Valley of 2025. Zuckerberg, now 41, had turned into a MAGA-friendly mixed martial arts fan who didn’t worry so much about hate speech on his platforms and complained that corporate America wasn’t masculine enough. He stopped fact-checking and started hanging out at Mar-a-Lago. And it wasn’t only Zuckerberg. A whole cohort of billionaires seemed to place their companies’ fortunes over the well-being of society.

When I meet Lemley at his office at Stanford this July, he is looking vacation-ready in a Hawaiian shirt. In the half year since he fired Meta, very few powerful people have followed his lead. Privately, they tell him, you go! Publicly, they’re gone. Lemley has even considered how he might be gone if things get bad for anti-Trumpers. “Everybody I’ve talked to has a potential exit strategy,” he says. “Could I get citizenship here or there?”

It should be the best of times for the tech world, supercharged by a boom in artificial intelligence. But a shadow has fallen over Silicon Valley. The community still overwhelmingly leans left. But with few exceptions, its leaders are responding to Donald Trump by either keeping quiet or actively courting the government. One indelible image of this capture is from Trump’s second inauguration, where a decisive quorum of tech’s elite, after dutifully kicking in million-dollar checks, occupied front-row seats.

“Everyone in the business world fears repercussions, because this administration is vindictive,” says venture capitalist David Hornik, one of the few outspoken voices of resistance. So Silicon Valley’s elite are engaged in a dangerous dance with a capricious administration—or as Michael Moritz, one of the Valley’s iconic VCs, put it to me, “They’re doing their best to avoid being held up in a protection racket.”

Nothing ever surprises me when you separate the businesses where profits are the guiding light instead of the things Disney is suddenly learning about, like integrity and a sense of who your customers are, what they value, and what they expect from you in terms of corporate character. Speaking of lack of integrity and character, “Transcript: Trump Boat Bombings Get Worse as Damning Info Emerges/ As Trump’s military attacks on supposed drug smugglers in the Caribbean Sea get worse, a legal expert explains what we know and what we don’t—and why we may be headed toward even darker lawlessness.”  This is from The New Republic‘s Greg Sargeant’s podcast.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

Everybody seems to have moved on from the awful story involving President Trump’s decision to bomb a small boat allegedly carrying drugs in the Caribbean Sea. That’s a shame because really bad stuff is continuing to happen on this front. The White House is now circulating a draft of a bill that would vastly expand Trump’s authority for exactly these types of bombings. We’ve also had another one of these strikes, and it appears just as dubious as the first one. And Trump announced that strike with an absolutely deranged tweet that should raise alarms everywhere, but isn’t. Meanwhile, Democrats just introduced a measure to restrain Trump, and the prospects for getting the GOP support it needs are approximately zero. Brian Finucane, an editor at Just Security, has been doing some great writing on this topic. So we’re talking to him about all of it. Brian, thanks for coming on.

Brian Finucane: My pleasure.

Sargent: So let’s start with the second bombing. It occurred in international waters, killed three people. Trump said these people were quote unquote positively identified as drug smugglers or narco-terrorists. But according to [The New York Times], he hasn’t identified the group or the people. Brian, has that changed? Can you bring us up to date on this bombing and how forthcoming the administration has been about it?

Finucane: Well, the administration has not been very forthcoming, unfortunately. We don’t have much additional information. We have various assertions from Trump and others in the administration, mostly in his Truth Social post, including the characterization of the people aboard the vessel as confirmed narco-terrorists, characterization of the supposed illegal narcotics aboard as, “a deadly weapon poisoning Americans,” representations about the threat this supposedly poses to Americans that would justify the use of lethal force here. But we don’t have information about the identity [of] people aboard the vessel, who they might have been affiliated with, the destination or the exact nature of the cargo.

Sargent: Yeah. And the reason he’s calling the drugs a deadly weapon is to try and recast this as a strike against a war combatant, right?

Finucane: Right. So the administration is trying to cloak its operations in the Caribbean under the mantle of counterterrorism and war more broadly. And it’s using  not just the wording, but also the tools and the tropes of counterterrorism and war. But that’s a misappropriation of those frameworks because this is not a war, this is not an armed conflict, and this is not like prior counterterrorism strikes the U.S. has been conducting for two decades post 9/11.

Sargent: It certainly isn’t, and the administration, by the way, still hasn’t even presented any kind of detailed legal rationale or any information about the first strike, which killed 11 people. Now the Times reports that the White House is circulating this bill that would essentially let him unilaterally wage war against drug cartels that he decides to label terrorists and against nations that harbor them. It seems to say that part of this would be done in consultation with Congress, but it doesn’t define what it would entail to consult with Congress. The Times says this bill is setting off, “alarm bells among some people,” at least in the White House and on Capitol Hill. Brian, what do we know about this, and what do you make of it?

Finucane: So I want to caveat at the top that it’s hard to know at this point how seriously to take this legislation. Reportedly, it was introduced or was put forward by Representative Cory Mills of Florida. It’s also been reported that it’s been circulated by [the Office of Management and Budget] to departments and agencies for comment. That’s normally a process associated with legislation that the administration takes somewhat seriously, but I don’t think we know for certain just how seriously the administration is taking this. But the text is really quite striking. It is modeled on the 2001 Authorization of Use of Military Force, which has been the principal statutory authority for the U.S. war on terror for the use of force against the Taliban, against Al Qaeda, ISIS, Al Shabaab, and other Al Qaeda and ISIS affiliates. And it really gives the president a blank check to use force anywhere in the world against anyone he designates under the provisions of this as a narco-terrorist. There are no geographic restrictions, so potentially they could include the United States. It would provide detention authority. And I think it’s really important to note here that this represents a dramatic reallocation of Congress’s war powers to the executive. It would be the president deciding who the United States goes to war with and where that takes place.

A pirating we go! Ho Ho Ho!

I’d really like to say that this entire new Trump term is literally making me sick. The stress, the craziness, the dysfunctional brains of the cast and characters are like some kind of dystopian, D-grade horror movie. But my No Kings t-shirt is clean. I have a new pair of walking shoes coming via UPS soon, and I have grandchildren to think about. I’m still standing. Plus, I have to read this article from CNN before I see students tonight. The few with inquiring minds want to know and do ask. Plus, it’s data!  And I’m a numbers nerd! “The U.S. economy has a new problem: Democracy is under siege. The nation’s top economic statistician was fired. Central bank independence is being undermined. The federal government is buying chunks of private companies and demanding cuts of revenue streams. Presidential power to lob tariffs has been wielded in unprecedented fashion. And federal regulators are threatening media companies over late-night comics.” Matt Egan has the byline.

These events all took place this year, and not in a third-world country, but in the world’s preeminent democracy under President Donald Trump.

Some political scientists see a pattern that suggests American democracy is being undermined in real time. The stakes are massive for the US economy and the business world.

“I have never been this concerned about democracy in the United States,” Vanessa Williamson, a senior fellow of governance studies at the nonpartisan Brookings Institution, told CNN in a phone interview.

CEOs are growing alarmed — even if they’re publicly staying quiet to avoid the wrath of the White House.

Business leaders are “quite alarmed” in private about the state of democracy in the United States, according to Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, the Yale professor known as the “CEO Whisperer” due to his extensive rolodex in the business community.

“We’ve had a serious erosion of the foundations of democracy,” Sonnenfeld, founder and president of the Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute, told CNN

Research shows that democracies tend to thrive financially.

“Democracy is just good for the economy. And autocracy is bad for the economy,” Williamson said. “Autocrats are just not good at managing economies. Policymaking tends to be erratic as democratic institutions decline.”

Democratizations increase GDP per capita by about 20% in the long run, according to a 2019 study titled “Democracy does cause growth” that was published in the Journal of Political Economy, a University of Chicago peer-reviewed journal.

Researchers said the positive effects of democracy “appear to be driven by greater investment in capital, schooling and health.”

Well, I’ll just keep lecturing on this until they throw me in one of those made-for-profit prisons down here in Lousyana for people with brains and different viewpoints.

What’s on your Reading, Action, and Blogging list today?

Mostly Monday Reads: A Rogue Supreme Court

Posted: September 8, 2025 | Author: | Filed under: #FARTUS, #MAGAnomics, Broligarchy, kakistocracy, Polycrisis | Tags: , , , , , , , | 11 Comments

“This is what some people voted for…” John Buss, @repeat1968

Good Day Sky Dancers!

I’m quite late. The intense heat and humidity have left New Orleans for the moment. I woke up at 9:30. It was 76°F. I immediately rolled over and went back to sleep. I’m just glad I didn’t get a glance at the headlines then. The chaos of what used to be our institutional protectors of the Constitution worsens. This Reuters headline is like a slap in the face of all democracy-loving people. It’s a good thing I subscribed to them last month because wow! This needs to be shared. “US Supreme Court backs Trump on aggressive immigration raids.” They’re inching closer to the Inquisition with each majority opinion. Andrew Cheung has the lede.

Donald Trump’s hardline approach toward immigration on Monday, letting federal agents proceed with raids in Southern California targeting people for deportation based on their race or language.

The court granted a Justice Department request to put on hold a federal judge’s order temporarily barring agents from stopping or detaining people without “reasonable suspicion” they are in the country illegally, by relying on race or ethnicity, or if they speak Spanish or English with an accent, among other factors.

The Supreme Court’s three liberal justices publicly dissented from the decision, directing pointed criticism at its conservative majority.
The administration “has all but declared that all Latinos, U.S. citizens or not, who work low-wage jobs are fair game to be seized at any time, taken away from work, and held until they provide proof of their legal status to the agents’ satisfaction,” Justice Sotomayor wrote in the dissenting opinion.

“Rather than stand idly by while our constitutional freedoms are lost, I dissent,” Sotomayor added.
Los Angeles-based U.S. District Judge Maame Frimpong found on July 11 that the Trump administration’s actions likely violated the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches and seizures. The judge’s order applied to her court’s jurisdiction, covering much of Southern California.

The Supreme Court’s order was brief and issued without any explanation, a common way it handles emergency matters, but one that has generated confusion in lower courts and criticism from some of the justices themselves. The court has a 6-3 conservative majority.

Concurring with the decision on Monday, conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh said that “apparent ethnicity alone cannot furnish reasonable suspicion” but it can be a “‘relevant factor’ when considered along with other salient factors.”

Kavanaugh added: “If the officers learn that the individual they stopped is a U.S. citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States, they promptly let the individual go.”

In a written filing, the Justice Department defended targeting people using a “reasonably broad profile” in a region where, according to the administration, about 10% of residents are in the country illegally

The administration’s request marked its latest trip to the Supreme Court seeking to proceed with policies that lower courts have impeded after casting doubt on their legality. The Supreme Court has backed Trump in most of these cases.

This part of the decision is rather stunning.

In other cases, the Supreme Court has allowed Trump to deport migrants to countries other than their own without offering a chance to show harms they may face and to revoke temporary legal status previously granted by the government on humanitarian grounds to hundreds of thousands of migrants.

So much for the Rule of Law and Due Process. This also violates international treaties and law. We are a nation led by a War Criminal.

The New York Times (article shared) also has an excellent analysis of the situation written by Adam Liptak.”Supreme Court Lifts Restrictions on L.A. Immigration Stops.  A federal judge had ordered agents not to make indiscriminate stops relying on factors like a person’s ethnicity or that they speak Spanish.” This is white christian nationalism on full display.

The Supreme Court on Monday lifted a federal judge’s order prohibiting government agents from making indiscriminate immigration-related stops in the Los Angeles area that challengers called “blatant racial profiling.”

The court’s brief order was unsigned and gave no reasons. It is not the last word in the case, which is pending before a federal appeals court and may again reach the justices.

The court’s three liberal members dissented.

In the near term, it allows what critics say are roving patrols of masked agents routinely violating the Fourth Amendment and what supporters say is a vigorous but lawful effort to enforce the nation’s immigration laws.

The lower courts had placed significant restrictions on President Trump’s efforts to ramp up immigrant arrests to achieve his pledge of mass deportations. Aggressive enforcement operations in Los Angeles — including encounters captured on video that appeared to be roundups of random Hispanic people by armed agents — have become a flashpoint, setting off protests and clashes in the area.

Civil rights groups and several individuals filed suit, accusing the administration of unconstitutional sweeps in which thousands of people had been arrested. They described the encounters in the suit as “indiscriminate immigration operations” that had swept up thousands of day laborers, carwash workers, farmworkers, caregivers and others.

“Individuals with brown skin are approached or pulled aside by unidentified federal agents, suddenly and with a show of force,” the complaint said, “and made to answer questions about who they are and where they are from,” violating the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizures.

One plaintiff, Jason Brian Gavidia, a U.S. citizen born in East Los Angeles, was stopped by a masked agent while he was working on his car outside a tow yard. The encounter was captured on video.

The agent asked whether Mr. Gavidia was American, and he said he was.

The agent then asked what hospital Mr. Gavidia had been born in, and he said he did not know. According to the lawsuit, the agent and a colleague proceeded to slam Mr. Gavidia against a metal gate, twist his arm and seize his phone.

“Fearing for his life, Gavidia offered to show the agents his ID,” the lawsuit said. “The agents took the ID, and about 20 minutes later, returned Gavidia’s phone and set him free. They never returned his ID.”

This is nothing but siding with grandiose racial profiling. The ACLU of Southern California has this to say on the subject. “U.S. Supreme Court Grants Stay in L.A. Raids Case. Decision lifts temporary order barring DHS from unlawful stop practices .”

Today, the Supreme Court granted the federal government’s request for a stay (or pause) of a temporary restraining order (TRO) prohibiting federal agencies–including the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)–from continuing their unlawful actions in Los Angeles and surrounding counties.

The court judgment reverses the judgement from two lower courts in Vasquez Perdomo v. Noem that bars immigration agents from stopping individuals without reasonable suspicion and from relying solely on four factors – alone or in combination – including apparent race or ethnicity; speaking Spanish or English with an accent; presence in a particular location like a bus stop, car wash, or agricultural site; or the type of work a person does.

Today’s unexplained order from the Supreme Court does not halt further proceedings in the case. On September 24, the federal district court will hear arguments on whether to issue a preliminary injunction based on additional evidence of the government’s unlawful tactics.

In response, the following statements were issued:

“When ICE grabbed me, they never showed a warrant or explained why. I was treated like I didn’t matter–locked up, cold, hungry, and without a lawyer. Now, the Supreme Court says that’s okay? That’s not justice. That’s racism with a badge,” said Pedro Vasquez Perdomo, named plaintiff in the case. “I joined this case because what happened to me is happening to others everyday just for being brown, speaking Spanish, or standing on a corner looking for work. The system failed us today, but I’m not staying silent. We’ll keep fighting because our lives are important.”

“This decision is a devastating setback for our plaintiffs and communities who, for months, have been subjected to immigration stops because of the color of their skin, occupation, or the language they speak,” said Mohammad Tajsar, senior staff attorney at the ACLU Foundation of Southern California. “In running to the Supreme Court to request this stay, the government made clear that its enforcement operation in Southern California is driven by race. We will continue fighting the administration’s racist deportation scheme to ensure every person living in Southern California—regardless of race or status—is safe.”

“Today’s decision gives license to the Trump administration to resume racially discriminatory raids across Los Angeles, detaining people without evidence or due process simply because of the color of their skin, the language they speak, or the work they do,” said Mark Rosenbaum, senior special counsel for strategic litigation at Public Counsel. Our community has come together to confront this injustice with courage and determination, uncovering the truth and showing the nation these raids were never about public safety but about targeting immigrants and sowing fear. This fight is not over. We will continue pressing our case in court until every person in our communities can live free from fear, with their rights and dignity fully protected.

“The Supreme Court’s decision deals a devastating blow to communities reeling from the government’s racially discriminatory raids. Through the stroke of a pen, through its emergency shadow docket, the court has written off decades of Fourth Amendment law. But we always knew this was going to be a long fight, and we are already preparing for what comes next,” said Annie Lai, director of the Immigrant and Racial Justice Solidarity Clinic at the UC Irvine School of Law. “Our clients have faced the government with incredible bravery and will continue to do so. We will be right there alongside them.”

“Today’s SCOTUS ruling puts farm workers — and every Californian who looks or sounds like they might be an immigrant — in greater danger,” said UFW President Teresa Romero. “This does not impact immigrants in a vacuum, it will affect all of us. We will continue to seek a preliminary injunction in this case, and we will keep fighting for farm workers and all immigrant communities across the USA.”

“The Supreme Court has ruled in favor of racial profiling. A dark shadow has been cast over this country’s Constitution and its future,” said Armando Gudino, executive director of the Los Angeles Worker Center Network (LAWCN). “This is a dangerous precedent for immigrant rights and civil liberties. The decision legitimizes the unconstitutional practice of targeting individuals based on their race, language, or neighborhood. It turns back the clock on decades of legal progress and reinforces a system where some communities are seen as suspect by default.”

I am ashamed of my country. As David Bowie puts it, “I’m afraid of Americans.”  This decision jeopardizes the economy, the legal system, and our humanity. The Supreme Racists on the Court have gone mad with power, enabling Yam Tit’s Reign of Terror with abandon. Ari Berman, writing for Mother Jones, has this headline today. “Project 2026: Trump’s Plan to Rig the Next Election, From nationalizing voter suppression to flooding the streets with federal agents, the president and his allies are using all the tricks in the authoritarian playbook to tilt the midterms in their favor.”

On an April episode of the popular Politics War Room podcast, the veteran journalist Al Hunt posed an increasingly common question from listeners to Democratic strategist James Carville. “Is Trump looking to spark enough protest to justify declaring martial law in 2026, thus suspending the election?” Hunt asked.

“You’re so correct to be concerned about this,” Carville responded. “It’s getting worse by the day. It is not going to stop getting worse. And I would be—we ought to be—on high, high alert.”

Such chatter is widespread these days among Trump’s opponents—and with good reason. Trump is the most openly authoritarian president in US history and has already incited an insurrection in an attempt to remain in office.

The good news, according to experts, is that Trump doesn’t have the power to unilaterally cancel the midterms. The states, with oversight from Congress, run their elections. Voting will go forward whether Trump likes it or not.

But there are still many reasons to be concerned about the rapidly escalating threats to America’s election system. Given Trump’s extreme assertions of executive power, the autocratic nature of his second term, and the stacking of his administration with hardline loyalists, many of the outlandish schemes he considered to stay in power in 2020—such as using the military to seize voting machines in battleground states—don’t seem as far-fetched today. And his deployment of the National Guard and Marines in response to protests against ICE in Los Angeles, which was followed by a similar federal takeover of Washington, DC, has heightened fears about how far Trump will go to keep his party in control of Washington. “The California events really rattled a lot of people,” says Sophia Lin Lakin, director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project.

The scale of Trump’s interference in the midterms has become crystal clear in recent weeks. The president pressured Texas to pass a mid-decade redistricting plan last month that would add five more Republican seats in the US House. Shortly thereafter, he vowed to “get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS” and “Seriously Controversial VOTING MACHINES,” through an executive order. “If we do these TWO things,” he wrote on Truth Social, “we will pick up 100 more seats.”

But there are still many reasons to be concerned about the rapidly escalating threats to America’s election system. Given Trump’s extreme assertions of executive power, the autocratic nature of his second term, and the stacking of his administration with hardline loyalists, many of the outlandish schemes he considered to stay in power in 2020—such as using the military to seize voting machines in battleground states—don’t seem as far-fetched today. And his deployment of the National Guard and Marines in response to protests against ICE in Los Angeles, which was followed by a similar federal takeover of Washington, DC, has heightened fears about how far Trump will go to keep his party in control of Washington. “The California events really rattled a lot of people,” says Sophia Lin Lakin, director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project.

The scale of Trump’s interference in the midterms has become crystal clear in recent weeks. The president pressured Texas to pass a mid-decade redistricting plan last month that would add five more Republican seats in the US House. Shortly thereafter, he vowed to “get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS” and “Seriously Controversial VOTING MACHINES,” through an executive order. “If we do these TWO things,” he wrote on Truth Social, “we will pick up 100 more seats.”

What kind of President Declares war on an American City?

The article then lists 10 ways that Trump will interfere with the midterms and voting. Voter Suppression Tactics are at the top of the list, but the others are equally as devious. If you’re going to read just one thing today, please give the list a thorough read. It’s coming to a voting place near everyone.

ProPublica continues to be an enormously useful source of real journalism with real investigations. This is a must-read for those who will be or are dependent on Social Security. “The Untold Saga of What Happened When DOGE Stormed Social Security.” Eli Hager has the lede. I’m just going to use their “highlights” since the story is a narrative of everything that went on. It also has some interesting insight into Leland Dudek and his management of the process and gaffs.

Reporting Highlights

  • Missed Opportunity: Some Social Security officials said they welcomed DOGE — the agency needs a technological overhaul — only to see DOGE ignore them and prioritize quick (often empty) wins.

  • Internal Revolt: Leland Dudek, the agency’s then acting chief, helped DOGE at first, then tried to resist when he saw what it was doing, Dudek said in 15 hours of candid interviews.

  • DOGE Lives On: Multiple former DOGErs have taken permanent roles at the Social Security Administration, and Senate-confirmed Commissioner Frank Bisignano has embraced its approach.

Trump has started to move on to a “crime” agenda. As usual, it’s racist, full of lies and bias, and is designed to push buttons on the MAGA Cult. This is from AXIOS and is written by Marc Caputo. “Stabbing video fuels MAGA’s crime message.”

MAGA influencers are drawing repeated attention to violent attacks to elevate the issue of urban crime — and accuse mainstream media of under-covering shocking cases.

  • Shocking video of the fatal Aug. 22 knife attack on 23-year-old Iryna Zarutska on a light-rail car in Charlotte, North Carolina, dominated weekend conversation on Trump-friendly social media.

The big picture: The rising number of surveillance cameras in public spaces, including on Charlotte’s light rail, has become a big accelerant in these cases.

  • The video is easily shared or leaked, and can instantly pollinate across social media — a visual counterpoint to statistics showing crime decreases.

Driving the news: President Trump, asked about the Charlotte video by a reporter Sunday, said he wanted to find out more about the stabbing before commenting.

  • “I’ll know all about it by tomorrow morning,” Trump said.
  • A Trump adviser told Axios: “This is exactly what he’s talking about, and it’s going to be an issue he’s going to highlight. This is not just about North Carolina. Other campaigns will deal with this.”

Elon Musk repeatedly posted about the Charlotte case this weekend for his 225 million X followers.

  • Also commenting on X: White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, Trump confidant Charlie Kirk, Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy.
  • North Carolina Senate candidate Michael Whatley — a former chair of the national GOP — invoked the case to accuse his Democratic opponent, Gov. Roy Cooper, of being soft on crime.
  • Charlotte Mayor Vi Lyles called it a “heartbreaking attack.”

Zarutska recently arrived in Charlotte from Ukraine to escape the war there, The Charlotte Observer reports.

  • The suspect, Decarlos Brown Jr., 34, was charged with first-degree murder. His criminal record includes charges of armed robbery, felony larceny, breaking and entering, and shoplifting, according to jail records cited by WBTV.
  • Mecklenburg County District Attorney Spencer Merriweather, in an interview with Axios Charlotte last week, didn’t comment directly on the case but acknowledged the limitations and complexities of holding defendants with mental health issues accountable.

What they’re saying: Whatley wrote on X that in June 2020, “Cooper signed a soft-on-crime executive order, and just three months later, Brown was released from prison.”

  • The executive order established a “racial profiling task force” and sought to reduce “systemic” racism. But it didn’t call for the early release of suspects.

Cooper’s campaign accused Whatley of “lying,” and said: “Roy Cooper prosecuted violent criminals and drug dealers, increased the penalties for violence against law enforcement, and kept thousands of criminals off the streets and behind bars.”

  • Whatley spokesperson Danielle Alvarez countered that Brown was released from prison early, just as Cooper was spending more time talking about “fighting racism” and less about keeping “career criminals” like Brown locked up.

Between the lines: Influential conservative social media accounts accused major national news outlets of not covering the racial dynamics of the Charlotte killing — a white victim and a Black suspect — with the same intensity as they did in the case of Daniel Penny.

  • Penny, who is white, choked to death a homeless Black man who was threatening passengers on a subway car in Manhattan in 2023. A jury acquitted Penny of criminally negligent homicide.

You may read more about this at the link. I will close with this article concerning Yam Tits and the decimation of Science and Universities. It’s a New York Times (shared)  Guest Op-Ed written by Stephanie Greenblatt, a Harvard Humanities Professor. “We Are Watching a Scientific Superpower Destroy Itself.”

The Trump administration’s assault on America’s universities by cutting billions of dollars of federal support for scientific and medical research has called up from somewhere deep in my memory the phrase “duck and cover.” These were words drilled into American schoolchildren in the 1950s. We heard them on television, where they accompanied a cartoon about a wise turtle named Bert who withdrew into his shell at any sign of danger. In class, when our teachers gave the order, we were instructed to follow Bert’s example by diving under our desks and covering our necks. These actions were meant to protect us from the nuclear attack that could come, we were told, at any time. Though even in elementary school most of us intuited that there was something futile in these attempts to shield ourselves from destruction, we dutifully went through the motions. How else could we deal with the anxiety caused by the menace?

The anxiety greatly increased in October 1957, when Americans learned of the Soviet Union’s successful launch of the world’s first satellite, Sputnik 1. The vivid evidence of the technological superiority in rocketry of our Cold War enemy provoked a remarkably rapid response. In 1958, by a bipartisan vote, Congress passed and President Dwight Eisenhower signed the National Defense Education Act, one of the most consequential federal interventions in education in the nation’s history. Together with the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, it made America into the world’s undisputed leader in science and technology.

Nearly 70 years later, that leadership is in peril. According to the latest annual Nature Index, which tracks research institutions by their contributions to leading science journals, the single remaining U.S. institution among the top 10 is Harvard, in second place, far behind the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Trump’s war on science and academia is one of the most-sighted of all his ego-stroking projects. The pride that people like me felt about our Space Program and medical achievements was beyond the moon. As a cancer survivor of a rare cancer that has now become more curable since I had the disease, I just can’t believe this administration has such a fixation on killing people. But there it is.

There’s another Countrywide “No Kings” demonstration on October 18th, if you care to take part.

What’s on your Reading, Blogging, and Action lists?

Finally Friday Reads: It’s all as Bad as you Think

Posted: September 5, 2025 | Author: | Filed under: American Fascists, Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Constitutional Crises, Corrupt and Political SCOTUS, Economic Racism and injustice, kakistocracy, kleptocracy, Polycrisis, religious extremists | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

“Arrgh, Matey!” John Buss, @repeat1968

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

For the moment, the BLS is still providing reliable measurements of economic activity in the USA. The employment numbers are showing signs of bad policy and Trump-inflicted wounds. The strain from the tariffs is beginning to show. This is from The Guardian. “US added just 22,000 jobs in August, continuing slowdown amid Trump tariffs. The latest report also contained more bad news – the US lost 13,000 jobs in June, according to the latest survey.”

“The US jobs market stalled over the summer, adding just 22,000 jobs in August and continuing a slowdown in the labor market as businesses adjusted to disruptions caused by tariffs.

The latest jobs report also contained more bad news. The US lost 13,000 jobs in June, according to the latest survey, the first time it went into the negative since December 2020.

The unemployment rate for August inched up to 4.3%, the highest it’s been since 2021.

The healthcare sector added 31,000 last month but most other sectors were flat or lost jobs.

Trump’s new BLS leader has a disgusting past. This is from CNN. “Trump’s pick to lead BLS ran Twitter account with sexually degrading, bigoted attacks.”  As usual, Trump hires “only the very best.”   Go see his photos. He’s as creepy as Stephen Miller.

President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics operated a since-deleted Twitter account that featured sexually degrading attacks on Kamala Harris, derogatory remarks about gay people, conspiracy theories, and crude insults aimed at critics of President Donald Trump.

E.J. Antoni, a 37-year-old economist for the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation, posted the comments from approximately 2017 through 2020 under a series of usernames and display names. CNN verified that all of Antoni’s posts came from the same Twitter account and that the posts from the anonymous aliases shared strikingly similar biographical details as Antoni.

An outspoken critic of the nonpartisan BLS, which calculates US job growth and unemployment figures, Antoni is a stout Trump loyalist. NBC News reported and CNN confirmed that he was a “bystander” at the US Capitol riot on January 6, 2021. There is no evidence he entered the Capitol.

His appointment comes after Trump fired the Biden-appointed BLS commissioner and accused the agency without evidence of corruption after a report showed job growth in May and June was weaker than previously estimated.

Antoni has positioned himself as a watchdog for government accountability in media appearances and Heritage Foundation blog posts. But his own digital trail reveals a pattern of incendiary rhetoric that veered frequently into conspiracy theories and misogyny.

In 2019, the since-deleted account known as “ErwinJohnAntoni” changed its username to “phdofbombsaway.” The account posted at least five sexually suggestive tweets implying that then Sen. Kamala Harris had advanced her career through sexual favors.

Shortly after Harris ended her 2020 presidential campaign, Antoni wrote, “You can’t run a race on your knees,” in response to a tweet of a doctored campaign poster that depicted a sexually explicit image of Harris.

Antoni also referred to Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who accused Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault, as “Miss Piggy.” In February 2020, he retweeted a post titled “Advice For Women: How To Land a Great Guy,” which instructed women to “be in shape,” “grow your hair long,” “be sweet,” “learn to cook,” and “don’t be annoying.” The post concluded: “Angry feminists and simps will try to sabotage you in the comments. Don’t listen to them. Listen to me.”

Disgusting.

Speaking of disgusting Trump appointees, Steven Miller is evidently the one running the District into the ground, according to the Washington Post. “How Stephen Miller is running Trump’s effort to take over D.C.” It’s amazing how many young NAZIs are in his employ.

From the head of the conference table in the White House’s Roosevelt Room, Stephen Miller was in the weeds of President Donald Trump’s takeover of policing in the nation’s capital.

The White House deputy chief of staff wanted to know where exactly groups of law enforcement officers would be deployed. He declared that cleaning up D.C. was one of Trump’s most important domestic policy issues and that Miller himself planned to be involved for a long time.

Miller’s remarks were described to The Washington Post by two people with knowledge of the meeting who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal White House business. The result is a behind-the-scenes glimpse of one of Trump’s most trusted aides in action, someone who has emerged as a key enforcer of the D.C. operation in the month since Trump federalized the local police department and deployed thousands of National Guard troops to patrol city streets. While widely seen as a vocal proponent for the president’s push on immigration and law and order, Miller’s actions reveal how much he is actually driving that agenda inside the White House.

The deputy White House chief of staff has emerged as a key enforcer of the D.C. operation in the month since Trump federalized the local police department.

“It’s his thing,” one White House official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss personnel matters. “Security, crime, law enforcement — it’s his wheelhouse.”

Miller’s team provides an updated report each morning on the arrests made the night before to staff from the White House, Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security, among others. The readouts include a breakdown of how many of those arrested are undocumented immigrants.

He has also led weekly meetings in the Roosevelt Room with his staff and members of the D.C. mayor’s office. Last week, he brought Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, according to two people briefed on the meeting. It’s unclear why Bessent attended the meeting.

A person familiar with Bessent’s thinking said he was encouraged by D.C. officials’ enthusiasm and collaborative tone.

Yam Tits and Miller know they have the District’s leaders over a barrel. Its special status gives the federal government a lot of power over the District. Its leadership is undoubtedly trying to avoid Trump taking the entire District over and removing them.

The source of all federal power over Washington comes from Article I, Section 8, Clause 17 of the Constitution. It grants Congress authority “To exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever” over the federal district.

That phrase—”exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever”—is absolute. It establishes a power imbalance between the federal government and D.C. residents that has defined their relationship for over two centuries.

Undoubtedly, the Supreme Court would give Orange Tits whatever he wanted.

Trump’s approach to the economy and foreign policy continues to bring one failure after another. The Washington Examiner reports that “Immigration officers raid Hyundai EV manufacturing site in Georgia.” This is a bizarre strategy given that any produced in the United States goes to the US GDP numbers despite foreign ownership. Additionally, these are good jobs for parts of the country that really need them. Then there’s the factor that we just pissed off one of our major trade partners. This makes no sense whatsoever.

An Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesperson told the Associated Press that agents were focused on the electric vehicle battery plant construction site.

The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that agents executed a search warrant “as part of an ongoing criminal investigation into allegations of unlawful employment practices and other serious federal crimes.” It did not say whether anyone was detained or arrested.

Georgia State Patrol troopers blocked the road to the Hyundai plant, and the state Department of Public Safety said it was assisting. A social media video showed agents telling workers that they were with DHS and that they had a search warrant.

“We need construction to cease immediately,” the man said. “We need all work to end on the site right now.”

Operations at Hyundai’s EV manufacturing plant weren’t stopped, a spokesperson said.

The joint venture, HL-GA Battery Company, “is cooperating fully with the appropriate authorities,” the company said. “To assist their work, we have paused construction,” they added.

The administration has targeted other businesses in large raids as well. Two California cannabis farm raids in July yielded more than 300 arrests. One farm worker died after sustaining injuries during the raid.

The Trump administration has made deporting numerous illegal immigrants and migrants a top priority.

The Wall Street Journal reports, “Hundreds Arrested in Immigration Raid at Hyundai Site in Georgia. South Korea protests after more than 300 Korean company workers are detained.”

Nearly 500 people were arrested as part of an immigration raid at a Hyundai Motor battery plant under construction in Georgia as part of a criminal investigation into employment practices at the site, a Homeland Security official said Friday.

The operation Thursday resulted in the arrest of 475 individuals. More than 300 were South Korean nationals, according to an official from the country.

Those arrested had illegally crossed the border, entered through a visa waiver program that prohibited them from working or had overstayed their visas, Steven Schrank, a special agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations in Atlant a, said at a press conference Friday morning.

“This was the largest single site enforcement operation in the history of Homeland Security investigations,” Schrank said.

No criminal charges were filed as of Friday, he said, and the investigation remains ongoing.

“Those who exploit our workforce, undermine our economy, and violate our federal laws will be held accountable,” Schrank said. Schrank said the government’s investigation has been ongoing for months.

The carmaker has pledged $26 billion in U.S. investments in recent weeks.

South Korea protested the action to the U.S. and said it was trying to secure the release of its citizens.

“This was not an immigration operation where agents went into the premises, rounded up folks and put them on buses,” Schrank said. “This has been a multimonth criminal investigation where we have developed evidence, conducted interviews, gathered documents, and presented that evidence to the court in order to obtain a judicial search warrant.”

A search warrant in the case was issued Aug. 31, according to a court filing. The government filed a motion to unseal a redacted version of the warrant Friday, and a judge granted the request. A copy of the warrant wasn’t immediately available.

“The United States is proud to be a home for major investments and looks forward to continuing to build on these historic investments and partnerships that President Trump has secured,” said Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman. “Any foreign workers brought in for specific projects must enter the United States legally and with proper work authorizations. President Trump will continue delivering on his promise to make the United States the best place in the world to do business, while also enforcing federal immigration laws.”

The New York Times (gifted article) reports that we now have a diplomatic issue with an ally, South Korea. “South Koreans Swept Up in Immigration Raid at Hyundai E.V. Plant in Georgia. They were among nearly 500 workers apprehended at a construction site for a South Korean battery maker, officials said. The episode prompted diplomatic concern in Seoul.” Like I said previously, why would you want to disturb a huge plant that is creating good jobs and value for our country?

The battery manufacturer, LG Energy Solution, which co-owns the plant with Hyundai Motor Group, said in a statement that employees of both companies had been taken into custody.

Hyundai said in a statement that none of those detained were Hyundai employees, as far as the company was aware.

“We are closely monitoring the situation and working to understand the specific circumstances,” Hyundai said on Friday.

South Korea’s Foreign Ministry confirmed on Friday that South Koreans were among those in custody, without saying how many. Mr. Schrank told reporters at the plant on Thursday that some U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents had been detained initially and were being released.

The agencies involved in the operation included the Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the F.B.I., according to the Atlanta division of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which also participated.

The operation, part of President Trump’s crackdown on immigration, caused diplomatic alarm in South Korea. Just over a week earlier, Mr. Trump hosted President Lee Jae Myung of South Korea at the White House, where the South Korean leader pledged to invest an additional $150 billion in the United States, including in battery manufacturing.

The lithium-ion battery plant, which predated Mr. Lee’s pledge, was expected to start operating next year. It is the kind of large-scale, job-creating investment that the United States has pushed for from South Korea and other nations.

The Ellabell site is part of one of Georgia’s largest manufacturing plants. Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, a Republican, has promoted the $7.6 billion Hyundai E.V. factory there as the largest economic development project in state history.

Yes, I saved the most disgusting for last. The RFK Jr. hearing yesterday was on a whole different level as the pathological liar and loony proved himself unfit again and again. There were some major players in the Senate Committee showing exactly how ignorant Worm Boy is of his own department and science. The one thing I found amazing was the number of Republicans giving him a difficult time. There are likely several reasons for this. NBC News‘ Berkley Lovelace reports the story. “Ahead of Kennedy hearing, GOP saw poll showing Trump voters support vaccines. The poll, conducted by veteran Republican pollsters, found that a majority of Trump voters believe vaccines save lives and support immunizations against measles and hepatitis B.”

Polling showing that a majority of President Donald Trump’s voters support vaccines was shared with several Republicans lawmakers’ staffers in a closed-door meeting Wednesday, according to two people familiar with the meeting.

NBC News obtained a copy of a memo, dated Aug. 26, summarizing the poll results. It was conducted by veteran Republican pollsters Tony Fabrizio and Bob Ward and concluded “that there is broad unity across party lines supporting vaccines such as measles (MMR), shingles, tetanus, diphtheria and pertussis (TDAP), and Hepatitis B.” Fabrizio and Ward presented the findings during the meeting, the sources said.

In an email to NBC News, Ward confirmed the memo was authentic but declined to comment about the meeting. It’s unclear who commissioned the poll or arranged the meeting. A source close to the White House denied that the administration requested the poll.

The poll results may explain the shift in tone from some GOP senators at Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s hearing Thursday before the Finance Committee.

Among those at Wednesday’s meeting were staff members for senators on the Finance Committee, according to one of the sources.

The hearing grew contentious at times, with Kennedy facing questions from both Democrats and Republicans about limiting access to this fall’s Covid vaccines and the dismissal of newly confirmed Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Susan Monarez.

Alexander Bolton from The Hill provides a similar analysis. “GOP senators signal to Trump that Kennedy is on thin ice.”

Republican senators are sending clear signs of disapproval and unhappiness with Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., making it plain to President Trump that they want the administration to address the chaos Kennedy has caused by trying to rewrite the nation’s vaccine policies.

GOP senators have stopped short of calling on Kennedy to resign and haven’t yet said they regret voting for him in February, but they want him to back off efforts to change vaccine policy recommendations without sound scientific backing as the administration faces a growing public backlash.

Kennedy received an unusual admonishment from Senate Republican Whip John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), an orthopedic surgeon, when he testified before the Senate Finance Committee on Thursday.

“I support vaccines. I’m a doctor. Vaccines work,” said Barrasso, the Senate’s No. 2-ranking Republican leader.

“Secretary Kennedy, in your confirmation hearings, you promised to uphold the highest standards for vaccines,” he said. “Since then, I’ve grown deeply concerned.”

Barrasso pointed to a national measles outbreak, the sudden ouster of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Susan Monarez, and questions raised by the leadership of the National Institutes of Health over mRNA vaccines as raising troubling questions.

“Americans don’t know who to rely on,” he said. “If we’re going to make America healthy again, we can’t allow public health to be undermined.”

Here’s Elizabeth Warren shredding the Worm Guy.

Some smart aide to my Senator Bill Cassidy evidently suggested that he kiss up to Yam Tits while shredding Worm Guy. He’s not so popular down here for reelection. The MAGA crowd calls him a Rhino and hates that he actually voted to impeach Trump.  That vote was one of the few things he’s ever shown a spine about.

The drama between the rest of the world and Orange Caligula continues.  Here are some headlines, including one of those “praise dear leader” by the tech businesses.

I’m still waiting for the latest on our new Department of War and our open hostilities with Venezuela. Feeling great and safe yet?

Here’s one last article about one of the major loonies in the Supreme Court. This is from NBC News. “Justice Amy Coney Barrett says country is not in a ‘constitutional crisis’. Speaking to Free Press founder Bari Weiss to promote her new book, the conservative justice said the American people should trust the Supreme Court.” The last group of people I would trust with anything are the so-called conservatives on the Supreme Court.

Conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett said Thursday she does not believe the United States is in a constitutional crisis as President Donald Trump seeks to unilaterally reshape the government and his administration frequently feuds with judges.

Barrett, a Trump appointee who is part of the Supreme Court’s 6-3 conservative majority, defended the Supreme Court as an institution and said Americans should have faith in its ability to address probing problems with integrity.

“I think the Constitution is alive and well,” Barrett said in an interview with Bari Weiss, hosted by the Free Press in New York, to promote her new book.

“I don’t know what a constitutional crisis would look like. I don’t think that we are currently in a constitutional crisis, however,” she added. “I think our country remains committed to the rule of law. I think we have functioning courts.”

A constitutional crisis would have arrived if “the rule of law crumbled,” Barrett said. But, she added, “that is not a place where we are.”

Lower courts have frequently blocked Trump’s executive actions as unlawful exercises of power, only for the Supreme Court in most cases to then rule in favor of the administration via brief orders that often include no reasoning.

And Weirdo Kavanaugh thinks shadow docket is too truthy and wants it renamed “interim docket”.  This does not feel like the country I grew up in at all.

What’s on your Reading, Blogging, and Action list today?

 

 

Finally Friday Reads: Escaping Today and 20 years Ago

Posted: August 29, 2025 | Author: | Filed under: "presidential immunity", #FARTUS, #We are so Fucked, 2025 What Fresh Hell?, American Fascists, Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Constitutional Crises, kakistocracy | Tags: , , , , , , , , | 8 Comments

“How dare they!” John Buss, @repeat1968

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

I’m moving quite slowly today. I thought I had mentally prepared myself for the 20th Katrinaversary. Emotions have check-mated all that. I’m glad for the 4-day weekend because I need more solitude than usual. I evacuated with Miles, my cat, and my labs, Honey and Karma, to join the Grad students who were staying in a Lake Charles Motel.  I had told them to evacuate even though my original plan was to stay. I grabbed the craziest things before heading out in the mighty mustang. The last thing I did was try to cover my grandmother’s Steinway parlor grand with an orange tarp. It took me all day, in mostly stopped traffic, to get to Lake Charles. I slept on a futon on the floor with two grad students. I drove to Dallas, where they could catch a plane and a bus to safety. I headed to Omaha, where my oldest daughter had just started Med School, and my youngest was finishing up high school. I really wanted to avoid talking about it today. But it is what it is.

My late friend Jane took me in, and I spent a lot of time glued to CNN reports. All I heard was the devastation in the Ninth Ward. They did not figure out that there were upper and lower 9. I finally saw my house on Google’s satellite. It was there, roof and all. When I got home and realized that buying a house on the “sliver by the river” was the best decision I ever made. I had minor wind damage and some damage caused by the neighbor’s roof hitting my house. When I was finally able to see the real damage up close, I developed survivor’s guilt as well as PTSD. I relive that annually. I’ve made my short trips to the Gulf Coast since then. Every time I drove to the lower 9 to show friends and family the devastation up and beyond Thanksgiving, they were still pulling bodies from buildings. Never forget the incompetence that let this happen and killed so many.

I never thought I’d see an administration as incompetent as Dubya Bush. But here we are.  Let’s review today’s disaster. I planned to start with RFK Jr., but then Yam Tits did something astoundingly awful today. This is from Politico. “White House declares $4.9B in foreign aid unilaterally canceled in end-run around Congress’ funding power. The administration is setting up clash with Capitol Hill over its use of the “pocket rescission.”

President Donald Trump threw a grenade Friday into September government funding negotiations on Capitol Hill, declaring the unilateral power to cancel billions of dollars in foreign aid by using a so-called pocket rescission.

Escalating the administration’s assault on Congress’ funding prerogatives, the White House budget office announced Friday morning that Trump has canceled $4.9 billion through the gambit that Congress’ top watchdog and many lawmakers argue is an illegal end-run around their “power of the purse.”

The move to unilaterally nix money previously approved by Congress raises tensions on Capitol Hill as lawmakers face an Oct. 1 deadline to avoid a government shutdown, pitting Republicans at the White House against GOP lawmakers and increasing pressure on Democrats to force a funding lapse unless Trump stands down.

Democrats and Republicans alike have warned that a pocket rescissions request would hamper cross-party talks to avert a shutdown at the end of September, while fulfilling White House budget director Russ Vought’s wish that the process of funding the government be “less bipartisan” to accommodate a raft of conservative priorities.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer hinted Friday that Democrats could refuse to offer the votes to get a government funding bill through the chamber before funding lapses late next month if congressional Republicans don’t push back against Trump’s latest funding move.

“Republicans don’t have to be a rubber stamp for this carnage,” Schumer said, adding that “if Republicans are insistent on going it alone, Democrats won’t be party to their destruction.”

Yet three congressional Republicans, granted anonymity to speak candidly, said they expect Vought to send additional requests to revoke funding between now and the end of the current fiscal year, which would only inflame tensions.

“Any effort to rescind appropriated funds without congressional approval is a clear violation of the law,” the Senate’s top Republican appropriator, Maine Sen. Susan Collins, said in a quick and clear rebuke of the Trump administration’s gambit.

But the Trump administration is embracing the strategy boldly and without apology, while also signaling it intends to stare down any legal challenges that may come its way as a result: “Congress can choose to vote to rescind or continue the funds — it doesn’t matter,” an official from the White House budget office said in a statement. “This approach is rare but not unprecedented.”

I’m seriously waiting for the Democratic Congress Leadership to respond to this. Talking Points Memo has that angle on this story. “Democrats Predict Shutdown After Trump Tries to Snatch Congress’ Most Important Power.” We’ll see. This is reported by Kate Riga.

Congressional Democrats point to skyrocketing odds of a government shutdown Friday after President Trump announced that he’ll unilaterally take back money Congress had already appropriated for foreign aid, according to multiple outlets.

“As the country stares down next month’s government funding deadline on September 30th, it is clear neither President Trump nor Congressional Republicans have any plan to avoid a painful and entirely unnecessary shutdown,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said in a statement.

The move forces members of Congress to confront a question that has lingered over the legislative branch all year: What is the point of the two parties negotiating a federal budget if the executive branch insists it has the power to unilaterally determine what funds get spent? In this case, the administration seeks to make use of a loophole it claims it has discovered to refuse to spend funds appropriated by Congress.

The unprecedented gambit goes even further than what unfolded in July, when the White House sought to cancel money Congress had already approved. Then, at least, lawmakers voted on the rescission, which required only 50 votes and passed with only Republican support. This time, Trump isn’t bothering to get congressional Republicans’ sign-off. This new so-called pocket rescission totals $4.9 billion, according to the Office of Management and Budget.

“Any effort to rescind appropriated funds without congressional approval is a clear violation of the law,” Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), the Senate’s head appropriator, said in a Friday statement. She pointed to the Government Accountability Office (GAO) finding that pocket rescissions are illegal under the Impoundment Control Act, as well as Congress’ power of the purse. The GAO, an independent watchdog agency within the legislative branch, has repeatedly stated that pocket rescissions are illegal.

“Republicans should not accept Russ Vought’s brazen attempt to usurp their own power. No president has a line item veto — and certainly not a retroactive line item veto,” Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), the head Democratic appropriator, said in a statement, calling it an “absurd, illegal ploy” to “steal” lawmakers’ congressional power.

Vought, the director of the OMB, has led the charge on pocket rescissions, telegraphing for months his intention to request the rescission once the clock wound down on the fiscal year. Under the administration’s untested theory of the case, the timing loophole lets the President zero out any already allocated funds he chooses.

“I refuse to label Vought’s gambit a ‘pocket rescission’ because it gives his unlawful attempt to steal the promises Congress enacted an air of legitimacy it does not deserve,” Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT), the head Democratic appropriator in the House, said in a Friday statement.

Experts are dubious that even this ultra-conservative Supreme Court will sign off on such a brazen defiance of the separation of powers, with one telling TPM he doubts the gambit will get “a single vote” from the justices.

The move also strips the minority of what little power it usually has to demand concessions in exchange for votes during the appropriations process.

Now, we may switch to the conspiracy theorist who runs Health and Human Services, and specifically the CDC.  RFK Jr. is in a race with Yam Tits to win the crown for the most insane person in this regime. This analysis is from Don Monyihan’s Substack, Can We Still Govern? “RFK Jr. is bad for your health. Public servants are trying to warn us that state capacity is being undermined. The Centers for Disease Control shitshow is a microcosm of the mismanagement of the Trump era. It also demonstrated some extraordinary courage among principled public servants, who were willing to lose their jobs to draw attention to damage being done to public health.”

The Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is an anti-vax crank. He should never have been confirmed to any sort of public health position. He lied to the Senate about how he would manage vaccines if confirmed, and most Republican Senators, including physician Dr. Bill Cassidy, chose to believe him and ignore his record.

While much of RFK Jr.’s work at HHS is meaningless photo-ops with food providers promising to remove food dyes here, or add beef tallow there, he has invested real effort in exactly the place his record suggested: targeting vaccines. He has fired all members of the CDC vaccine advisory committee, baselessly accusing them of conflicts-of-interest, and replacing them with fellow vaccine skeptics.

To be clear, this goes beyond Covid vaccines: childhood vaccines to stop the spread of preventable diseases are now in the crosshairs, even after Kennedy assured Senator Cassidy that they would not be touched. Kennedy has defunded research on mRNA vaccines, ensuring that the world will less ready for the next pandemic. He is encouraging states to weaken vaccine requirements.

On Monday, RFK Jr. told the CDC Director, Susan Monarez, in place for just over a month, to accept two conditions if she wanted to keep her job.

First, he wanted her public support for his policies to limit access to vaccines. Monarez is an infectious disease scientist who has served in government for a long time. In effect, RFK Jr. was asking that she lend her personal credibility as a scientist, and the credibility of CDC, to his anti-vax policies. She demurred, saying she needed to talk to senior staff at CDC.

Second, Kennedy ordered her to fire those staff. Since they are career civil servants, it would be illegal to fire them without cause, although this has become the norm now in the Trump administration. For example, career officials at FBI were fired for refusing to fire their fellow civil servants without cause.

Monarez refused both requests.

To be clear, RFK Jr. can implement these vaccine policies without the blessing of Monarez. What he wants is for public health officials to lie to the public. What he wants is to purge medical doctors and infectious disease researchers with decades of public health experience if they don’t go along with his woo-woo medical theories.

Elizabeth Cooney has this analysis at STAT. “Crisis within CDC is spilling into real world, experts say. From food safety to vaccine availability, loss of trust and talent threaten health: ‘We are in much worse shape’”

The implosion of leadership at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention threatens the agency, its mission, and the trust people place in public health, medical experts told STAT Thursday, a day after Director Susan Monarez refused to dismiss top scientists only to be ousted herself.

The crisis in the agency, which has been battered by personnel and policy changes ordered by health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is spilling into real-world harms, the experts said. They are seeing uncertainty from the public about vaccine recommendations and availability, in light of new Covid-19 vaccine policies announced by Kennedy, as well as deeper concerns about emergency preparedness for the inevitable next challenge to the nation’s health.

“I’m worried that CDC will not be there with the full capacity that’s necessary to help us with the next big threat,” Georges Benjamin, a physician and executive director of the American Public Health Association, told STAT. “But I’m also worried about the current threats that we have today.”

White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said Thursday that a statement from Monarez’s lawyers “made it clear she was not aligned with the president’s mission to make American health again,” so Kennedy asked for her resignation.

“The president and Secretary Kennedy are committed to restoring trust and transparency and credibility to the CDC by ensuring their leadership and their decisions are more public-facing, more accountable, strengthening our public health system and restoring it to its core mission of protecting Americans from communicable diseases, investing in innovation to prevent, detect, and respond to future threats,” Leavitt said.

Budget cuts ordered by President Trump have steadily hammered at jobs and programs, in some cases erasing entire sectors of the agency’s public health activity. That list includes air quality as well as individual diseases like HIV, viral hepatitis, sexually transmitted infections, and tuberculosis. There has been an erosion of the study of gun violence.

In other news, we have some more craziness by the Orange Caligula. First, from the New York Times, this piece on the continuation of Trump’s resurrection of traitors of the Lost Cause.  Greg Jaffee reports this. “Pentagon Is Reinstalling Portrait of Confederate General at West Point Library. The Pentagon is putting back up a portrait of Gen. Robert E. Lee at the military academy, as the Trump administration seeks to restore honors for American figures who fought to preserve slavery.” Trump still continues to argue that slavery wasn’t that bad.

The Pentagon is restoring a portrait of Gen. Robert E. Lee, which includes a slave guiding the Confederate general’s horse in the background, to the West Point library three years after a congressionally mandated commission ordered it removed, officials said.

The 20-foot-tall painting, which hung at the United States Military Academy for 70 years, was taken down in response to a 2020 law that stripped the names of Confederate leaders from military bases.

That legislation also created a commission to come up with new base names. In 2022, the commission ordered West Point to take down all displays that “commemorate or memorialize the Confederacy.” A few weeks later, the portrait of General Lee with his slave in the background was placed in storage.

It was not clear how West Point could return General Lee’s portrait to the library without violating the law, which emerged from the protests that followed George Floyd’s killing by Minneapolis police officers in 2020.

This is from the AP. “Trump ends ex-Vice President Harris’ Secret Service protection early after Biden had extended it.”

President Donald Trump has revoked former Vice President Kamala Harris’ Secret Service protection that otherwise would have ended next summer, senior Trump administration officials said Friday.

Former vice presidents typically get federal government protection for six months after leaving office, while ex-presidents do so for life. But then-President Joe Biden quietly signed a directive, at Harris’ request, that had extended protection for her beyond the traditional six months, according to another person familiar with the matter. The people insisted on anonymity to discuss a matter not made public.

Trump, a Republican, defeated Harris, a Democrat, in the presidential election last year.

His move to drop Harris’ Secret Service protection comes as the former vice president, who became the Democratic nominee last summer after a chaotic series of events that led to Biden dropping out of the contest, is about to embark on a book tour for her memoir, titled “107 Days.” The tour has 15 stops, including visits abroad to London and Toronto. The book, which refers to the historically short length of her presidential campaign, will be released Sept. 23, and the tour begins the following day.

CBS News reports this headline. “Joni Ernst won’t seek reelection to Senate in 2026, sources say.”

Republican Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa has told confidantes she plans to reveal next week that she won’t seek reelection in 2026, multiple sources familiar with the matter told CBS News.Ernst’s announcement is scheduled for Thursday, the sources said. Ernst, 55, has served in the U.S. Senate since 2015.

Spokespeople for Ernst did not reply to requests for comment.

Some Iowa Democrats have already jumped into the race, including state Sen. Zach Wahls, state Rep. Josh Turek, and Des Moines School Board chairwoman Jackie Norris.

Ernst has been evasive about whether she would run for a third term in 2026, but in public remarks earlier this month, predicted continued GOP control of Iowa.

This is from Zoe Schiffer writing at WIRED. “The White House Apparently Ordered Federal Workers to Roll Out Grok ‘ASAP’. A partnership between xAI and the US government fell apart earlier this summer. Then the White House apparently got involved, per documents obtained by WIRED.”  You may remember this AI disaster went on full metal NAZI meltdown a few months ago.

The White House appears to have instructed leaders at the General Services Administration (GSA) to add xAI’s Grok chatbot to a list of approved vendors “ASAP,” according to an email sent by agency leadership earlier this week, which WIRED obtained.

“Team: Grok/xAI needs to go back on the schedule ASAP per the WH,” states the email, sent by Josh Gruenbaum, the commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service. “Can someone get with Carahsoft on this immediately and please confirm?” Carahsoft is a major government contractor that resells technology from third-party firms.

“Should be all of their products we had previously (3 & 4),” the email continued, seemingly referring to Grok 3 and Grok 4. The subject line of the email was “xAI add Grok-4.”

Sources say Carahsoft’s contract was modified to include xAI earlier this week. Grok 3 and Grok 4 both currently appear on GSA Advantage (an online marketplace for government agencies to buy products and services) as of Friday morning. Now, following some internal reviews, any government agency can roll Grok out to federal workers.

The White House and GSA did not respond to a request for comment from WIRED.

The email comes after a planned partnership with xAI fell apart earlier this summer following Grok’s widespread praise for Hitler and the spouting of other antisemitic beliefs on X, WIRED previously reported.

One last one as Yam Tits moves to take over more big American Cities beyond L.A. and the District. This is from Reuters and written by Tom Hals. ”

As President Donald Trump began his push to send the National Guard and Marines to U.S. cities, military leaders privately questioned whether the troops had received proper training and warned of the “far-reaching social, political and operational” risks of aiding law enforcement, according to a Reuters review of military records disclosed in court.

U.S. Army officials planning an operation in MacArthur Park during the June deployment in Los Angeles determined that using troops to protect agents carrying out Trump’s immigration crackdown posed an “extremely high” risk to civilians, troops and the military’s reputation, according to an internal document.

Officials warned that the operation could attract protests and spiral into a riot with potential for “miscommunication and fratricide” as well as accidental harm to civilians, including children, the operation planning document said.

The trove of internal military reports and messages, disclosed during a trial to resolve a lawsuit by California Governor Gavin Newsom, offers a rare inside look at concerns from commanders after Trump broke a long-standing tradition against using the military in support of domestic law enforcement over the objections of local officials.

Since deploying 4,000 National Guard and 700 U.S. Marines to Los Angeles to quell protests against immigration arrests, Republican Trump has sent National Guard troops to Washington and is considering expanding the military presence in other Democratic-run cities.

To mitigate the risks of the Los Angeles deployment, military lawyers drafted rules for using force and de-escalation that troops could access on their phones and that warned of the high stakes of the deployment.

The very nature of domestic operations — American military forces operating in U.S. communities — has such significant implications that the mistakes of a few soldiers can have far-reaching social, political, and operational effects,” according to an undated document titled “Los Angeles Civil Unrest SRUF.” The acronym means Standing Rules for the Use of Force.

Louis Caldera, Army Secretary to Democratic former President Bill Clinton, said in an interview that deploying the military domestically threatens to put soldiers and civilians at risk, undermines recruitment and erodes public support.

Trump has broken a lot of norms,” said Caldera. “His predecessors would not use the military in this way.”

I hope you have a great Labor Day Weekend. I plan to stay away from the news and throw myself into movies, books, and games which reflect a reality different from the horrible one we find ourselves in now. Hang tough! The resistance is growing.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

 

Mostly Monday Reads: Are we really even the United States Anymore?

Posted: August 25, 2025 | Author: | Filed under: "presidential immunity", #MAGAnomics, #We are so Fucked, Agency Purges, American Fascists, cartoons, Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Climate change, Crime, kakistocracy, Trump Krewe Crime and Punishment, tRump threat to society | Tags: , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

“Time seems to be running out.” John Buss, @repeat1968

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

I have to admit that watching TV News is about as bad as I remember it when I was a kid, and watching body counts in Vietnam and little children my age being fire-hosed somewhere down south with a name that I’ve forgotten now. Between that and listening to my family history, I suppose it was inevitable that I would grow up with a strong sense of justice.

Watergate was a difficult time, but I always felt that the Supreme Court and Congress would properly deal with it. I was thrilled by the local desegregation efforts forced by the courts. It didn’t impact my school district, but it impacted me the few years I taught high school for the city public schools prior to finishing my master’s with an eye towards my doctorate. I headed to Oklahoma to fight for the passage of the ERA when I was pregnant with my oldest. I’ve never stopped fighting. Positive change was slow as a turtle, but it came, even though many things, but the ERA still rattles around out there waiting for the light of day. I have and will never quit the fight for true social justice.

I don’t know about you, but I dread what will show up in the news the next morning. Cruelty and ignorance are the flavors of the day. It was only a matter of time before we saw a headline like this one from Newsweek. “Donald Trump Issues Order Defying Supreme Court Precedent.”

A new executive order signed by President Donald Trump Monday bans the burning of the American Flag, in direct opposition to a precedent set by the Supreme Court in the Texas v. Johnson case in 1989 deeming the action an act of “symbolic speech”

Trump recognized while signing the order that the action was protected by the court but said that burning the flag was an open door to violence.

“They burn the American flag,” he said, adding “They call it freedom of speech.”

“When you burn a flag is the area goes crazy. If you have hundreds of people, they go crazy. You can do other things. You can burn this piece of paper, you can and it’s but when you burn the American flag, it incites riots at levels that we’ve never seen before,” the Trump said.

The executive order would create a penalty of one year in jail, Trump said during the press conference in the Oval Office.

Evidently, burning the Constitution is acceptable. I can’t wait to see what the creepy, Christofascists that are the Republican Supreme Court Jurists have to say about that. I’m sure the Alitos and Thomases already have something disgusting in mind. Also, there is the sad news that Trump’s racism, xenophobia, ignorance, and cruelty have created an obsession with torturing Kilmar Ábrego Garcia and his family, once again. This is from The Guardian. It’s reported by Dharna Noor. “Kilmar Ábrego García detained after reporting to US immigration agents. Maryland man, back in the US after being wrongly deported to El Salvador, is threatened with deportation to Uganda.”

Kilmar Ábrego García – who has been thrust into the middle of an acrimonious deportation saga by the second Trump administration – has been detained after reporting to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in Baltimore on Monday, just three days after his release from criminal custody in Tennessee.

“The only reason he was taken into detention was to punish him,” Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, an attorney representing Ábrego, told a crowd of supporters outside a Baltimore ICE field office on Monday. “To punish him for exercising his constitutional rights.”

The attorney also said his client filed a new lawsuit on Monday morning challenging his potential deportation to Uganda and his current confinement.

Ábrego faces deportation to Uganda after recently declining an offer to be deported to Costa Rica in exchange for remaining in jail and pleading guilty to human smuggling charges, according to a Saturday court filing.

“The fact that they are holding Costa Rica as a carrot and using Uganda as a stick to try to coerce him to plead guilty for a crime is such clear evidence that they are weaponizing the immigration system in a matter that is completely unconstitutional,” Sandoval-Moshenberg said.

The lawsuit Ábrego filed early on Monday asks for an order “that he is not allowed to be removed from the United States unless and until he has had full due process”, said Sandoval-Moshenberg.

“The main issue, aside from the actual conditions in that country is – is that country actually going to let him stay there?” the attorney said. “They can offer to send him to Madrid, Spain, and unless Madrid, Spain, is going to let him remain in that country, essentially what it is – is a very inconvenient layover on the way to El Salvador, which is the one country that it has already determined that he cannot be sent to.”

The Costa Rican government has agreed to offer Ábrego refugee status if he is sent there, court filings from Saturday show. A judge in 2019 ruled that Ábrego cannot be deported to El Salvador.

Before walking into his appointment at the Baltimore Ice field office, Ábrego addressed a crowd of faith leaders, activists, and his family and legal team organized by the immigrant rights non-profit Casa de Maryland.

“My name is Kilmar Ábrego García, and I want you to remember this – remember that I am free and I was able to be reunited with my family,” he said through a translator, NBC News reported. “This was a miracle … I want to thank each and every one of you who marched, lift your voices, never stop praying and continue to fight in my name.”

After Ábrego entered the building, faith leaders and activists rallied to demand Ábrego’s freedom, chanting “Sí, se puede” (roughly “yes, we can”) and “we are Kilmar” as well as singing the hymn We Shall Not Be Moved with an activist choir.

“Laws have to be rooted in love, because love does not harm us,” a senior priest at Maryland’s St Matthew Episcopal church identified as Padre Vidal said through a translator.

According to the Wall Street Journal, “Kilmar Abrego Garcia Is Set for Deportation After ICE Arrests Him.”

Indeed, nearly all of the reforms surrounding Due Process and access to the legal system seem destined to be attacked by Orange Caligula. This is from Reuters. It is definitely created to hinder the poor and people of color. “Trump signs orders aimed at ending cashless bail policies.”

U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Monday that seeks to end cashless bail by threatening to revoke federal funding for jurisdictions that use it, part of a White House effort to push crime fighting to the top of the national agenda.

Trump signed a separate order that instructs police in Washington, D.C. to charge suspects with federal crimes and hold them in federal custody to avoid cashless bail, according to a fact sheet seen by Reuters.

“Cashless bail, we’re ending it. But we’re starting by ending it in D.C. and that we have the right to do through federalization,” Trump said during a signing ceremony in the White House.

Trump has seized control of the police force in Washington and is allowing National Guard troops to carry weapons while on patrol in the city. He is also threatening to expand the U.S. military presence to Democratically-controlled cities like Baltimore and Chicago.

Critics have slammed the administration’s actions as unnecessary overreach.

The focus on crime is seen as a preview of how Trump and his fellow Republicans plan to use the issue as they seek to retain control of both houses of Congress in the midterm elections next year.

Yes, I’m not fond of Joe Scarborough, but I am glad that he focused on the topic of violent crime and the really dangerous places. New Orleans has not seen this low level of shooting and violent crime in some time.  This is true of most cities, including the ones where National Guard, like ours, are being sent to Blue Cities to hype a false narrative and scare people into not leaving their houses to do things like vote. The only exception in New Orleans is domestic violence. The rest are lower than the small rural towns of Louisiana, where gun violence is rampant. New Orleans shootings are comparable to what happened in the 1960s. The same cannot be said of Mike Johnson’s part of Louisiana. “Joe Scarborough Hammers ‘Red States’ as ‘Most Violent’: ‘Send’ National Guard to ‘Mike Johnson’s District’.” This is from Mediaite.

Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough hammered “red states” as the “most violent” in his takedown of President Donald Trump’s suggestion on Friday he may send National Guard troops to Chicago and New York City, as he has in Washington, D.C., as part of a crackdown on crime.

The tirade came on Monday morning’s show just days after Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson openly pushed back on the president’s deployment threat, adding he was exploring legal options to block any such move.

As the Morning Joe crew reflected on Trump’s idea, Scarborough unloaded on the decision, defending New York City in particular as “one of the safest large cities” while comparing murder statistics there and in Chicago to “much higher” per capita figures for cities located in “red states.”

You know, the thing about this is, of course, we’ve talked about Washington, D.C., it’s the nation’s capital, a federal government, Congress could get involved, work with the president, and, together, as we’ve been talking about for a long time, figure out how to partner with the city. And that hasn’t happened. And now we’re talking about Chicago. We’re talking about New York City. Neither one of those cities are in the top ten for most violent cities in America.

Rounding on the numbers, the host then took aim at House Speaker Mike Johnson’s own district:

And if you want to look per capita, they need to do no more than look to Mike Johnson’s home state, the Speaker of the House, and look at violence per capita. You have a much higher chance of dying in Monroe, Louisiana, than you do Chicago, Illinois. A much higher chance of dying in Shreveport, Louisiana, than you do in Monroe. A much higher chance of dying in New Orleans, Louisiana, than you do in New York City.

I mean, New York, that’s fabulously crazy. New York City continues to rank as one of the safest large cities in America. And I don’t know that there’s a close second.

So, there are all of these cities and towns in red state America. You could look at Little Rock, Arkansas, you could look at Monroe, Louisiana, you could look at Shreveport, Louisiana. You could look at New Orleans, Louisiana. You could look at Memphis, Tennessee. You could look at one Nashville, Tennessee. You can look at one red state after another – Bessemer, Alabama – and you will see violent crime rates much, much, much higher per capita than Chicago, Illinois, San Francisco.

Throwing up a tweet of California Governor Gavin Newsom’s criticism of the move, Scarborough read it aloud and continued:

The chance of having violent acts committed upon you in Mike Johnson’s Louisiana, in red state Louisiana, red state that Donald Trump carried and every Republican has carried since Bill Clinton, the chances of being murdered in Louisiana 400 times higher than in California.

Let me say that again. Let me underline that again: You have a 400% higher chance of being murdered in red state Louisiana, Mike Johnson’s home state, than you do on the left coast in Gavin Newsom’s California.

There is no emergency. There is no logic to Chicago, to San Francisco, if you’re looking at the numbers, if you’re looking at data, I don’t even think this Supreme Court can turn a blind eye to this. They just can’t because data is data. Numbers are numbers, and the numbers are clear. And the numbers don’t justify – no emergency!

The host began calling on Trump to send the troops “to red states where they need them” and listed out all the cities he’d flagged statistics for:
Send those troops to Shreveport, Louisiana. Send them to Mike Johnson’s district. Send them to Little Rock, Arkansas. Send them to Memphis and Nashville, Tennessee. Send them to red states where they need them.

We have a huge Environmental Accident in Tangipoha Parish requiring evacuation and shutting down rivers, high violent crime in rural districts, and a looming Hurricane Season. Our National Guard will be worn out with all that marching around to deal with the state’s crises that are real.

We’ve finally got the EPA in charge. I was actually thinking they were probably weakened to the point of uselessness. It’s also in a very red parish that needs help. But I suppose our Guard is getting to know these cities so they can block their inner city voting locations later. We have a governor with a need to appease Yam Tits and a bunch of Swampbillies that love him. He’s already expanding his control over the District and labelling it a place with a “crime emergency.”

The White House continues its plot to erase American History. Of course, his entire administration is filled with ignoramuses. “JD Vance flunks the basics on World War II as the White House targets history museums. If anyone would benefit from some quality time at a history museum, it’s White House officials. Take Vance’s line on the end of World War II, for example.” This is from MSNBC.

Donald Trump’s offensive against the Smithsonian reached a dramatic new level last week, with a presidential declaration that the institution and its museums are “OUT OF CONTROL.” To help bolster his point, the president added that Smithsonian history museums focus on “how bad Slavery was.”

The White House confirmed soon after that, as part of Trump’s broader efforts, administration officials want to target other museums, too. “He will start with the Smithsonian and then go from there,” a spokesperson told NBC News.

While the presidential campaign to control what Americans know and learn about history is clearly reflective of his authoritarian agenda, there’s also a degree of irony to the developments — because if anyone would benefit from some quality time at a history museum, it’s Trump and his team.

The president, for example, has talked about American forces having “manned the air” and taking over “the airports” during the Revolutionary War — despite the fact that airplanes didn’t exist at the time. He later said, “If you look at the end of the Civil War, the 1800s, it was a very turbulent time. You take the end day, was it 1869? Or whatever.”

His vice president isn’t much better. HuffPost noted:

Vice President JD Vance fumbled some very textbook facts of world history while talking foreign policy on Sunday’s ‘Meet the Press.’ During the interview, the Yale Law School alum defended President Donald Trump’s decision to entertain Russia’s terms for a peace deal with Ukraine by claiming all wars end in compromise.

NBC News’ Kristen Welker asked the Ohio Republican an important question, “If Russia is allowed to keep any of the territory that it illegally seized, what message does that send to China? Does it give China a green light to invade Taiwan? Does it give Russia a green light to invade other European countries, which is what your European allies are concerned about?”

Instead of answering the question directly, Vance took issue with the premise.

“Kristen, this is how wars ultimately get settled,” he said. “If you go back to World War II, if you go back to World War I, if you go back to every major conflict in human history, they all end with some kind of negotiation.”

No. If one actually goes back and assesses every major conflict in human history, they mostly ended with one force either conquering or repelling a rival force.

Meanwhile, a follow-up on the argument that Trump’s a Marxist and Maoist. Proper Industrial Policy is helping the industry thrive, not shaking it down for money and gifts!

Q: During the campaign, you called Kamala Harris a communist, but the Biden-Harris admin never called for nationalizing a private company like you're proposing with Intel. Is this the new way of doing industrial policy?TRUMP: Yeah. Sure it is. I want to try to get as much as I can.

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2025-08-25T15:54:21.264Z

We’re coming on the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina (Katrinaversary). This is my statement on it.

Whenever I think of all this, it still brings me to tears. I was lucky to drive out of there with my 2 labs and my munchkin cat. I sat on my friend’s sofa in Omaha, stunned, speechless, helplessly watching the suffering and death, with perpetual tears. What recovery we were granted was imperfect and incomplete. We will never forget. I was glad to come back home, but the sadness of knowing so many were lost just never leaves me.

With all the people we lost, who suffered, whose homes and businesses were gone, I offer up this news from the good people of FEMA. This is from the Washington Post.  As if George W Bush didn’t kill a lot of us with Heckuva Job Brownie, and all those deadly Middle East quagmire wars, Trump’s management is upping the likely death count. “FEMA staff warn that Trump officials’ actions risk a Katrina-level disaster. About 180 FEMA employees, many of them anonymous, signed a letter to Congress arguing that the agency leadership has hindered the ability to effectively manage emergencies.” This is reported by Briana Sacks.

More than 180 Federal Emergency Management Agency employees sent a letter Monday to members of Congress and other officials, arguing that the agency’s direction and current leaders’ inexperience harms the agency’s mission and could result in a disaster on the level of Hurricane Katrina.

The letter, on which more than three dozen employees signed their full names, says that since January, staffers have been operating under leaders — Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem, acting FEMA administrator David Richardson and former leader Cameron Hamilton — who lack the legal qualifications and authority to manage FEMA’s operations. This has eroded and hindered the agency’s ability to effectively manage emergencies and other operations, including national security work, the letter says.

After Hurricane Katrina became one of the worst disasters in the nation’s history, in part because of failures of local, state, and federal governments, Congress passed the Post-Katrina Emergency Reform Act to give FEMA more power and responsibility. That hurricane made landfall in southeast Louisiana in August 2005, leading to at least 1,800 deaths and $100 billion in damage. The resulting legislation allowed FEMA to better prepare communities for and help them recover from disasters.

But the letter warns that the Trump administration is sending the agency and country back to a pre-Katrina era, by not having a Senate-confirmed and qualified emergency manger at the helm; by slashing mitigation, disaster recovery, training and community programs; and by thwarting officials’ ability to make decisions because of a restrictive new expense policy.

The letter demands that federal lawmakers defend FEMA from the Homeland Security Department interference, protect the agency’s employees from “politically motivated firings,” conduct more oversight, and ultimately take FEMA out of DHS and establish it as an independent Cabinet-level agency in the executive branch.

“Our shared commitment to our country, our oaths of office, and our mission of helping people before, during, and after disasters compel us to warn Congress and the American people of the cascading effects of decisions made by the current administration,” the employees wrote, adding that they are sounding the alarm “so that we can continue to lawfully uphold our individual oaths of office and serve our country as our mission dictates.”

If you want to know what Retired General Russell Honore, our Katrina Hero, has to say about all this, please follow him on his Facebook. He’s outspoken and frequently gives interviews. Here are his thoughts on NPR.  “A retired general recalls Hurricane Katrina’s chaos and lessons still unlearned.”

“It broke my heart when I saw a lady with a toddler and a shopping basket pushing the baby in the water,” Honoré said in an interview with NPR’s Michel Martin. “The water was up to the baby’s chest and she was trying to get into the Superdome to save [the] baby and herself. And I said, ‘We’ve got to get these people out of here.'”

The Superdome was a last refuge for many. And as supplies ran low, it became a symbol of misery.

Before Katrina hit, forecasters warned of catastrophe if people failed to evacuate. But New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin did not issue a mandatory order until Aug. 28, 2005.

Roughly 20% of the local population stayed behind, most of them being poor and elderly. “They want to stay because they know where the medicine is and many of them lived alone,”Honoré said. In some cases, the system failed them. “The city did send people to pick them up, but at that time, you couldn’t take an animal in an ambulance. And the elderly people said, ‘I’m not leaving if I can’t take my dog with me.'”

Since Hurricane Katrina, federal law has changed to include shelter for pets.

I would also like to remind you that, as we speak, the folks who helped us most to recover are the fearless and hard-working men who came here to work. They still work here, and we depend on them.  My friend Anne Renee shared this with me. It’s from NOLA.COM.  “They came to rebuild New Orleans after Katrina. Under Trump, ICE is trying to deport them. Advocates have identified numerous Katrina workers detained by ICE under the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.”

“The cousins fled Guatemala’s rural highlands, seeking stability in the United States. They found it in a city ravaged by Hurricane Katrina.

Arriving in New Orleans after the storm, Abner Uriel Gomez Velasquez and Ever Eliseo Velasquez Fuentes found jobs in the booming industry Spanish speakers came to call “reconstrucción” — the back-breaking work of ripping mold-infested flooring, sodden drywall and fried appliances from flooded homes, and then, eventually, rebuilding them.

“Many left,” said Giovanni Lopez, a U.S. citizen and 40-year New Orleanian, born in Guatemala, who attends church with one of the men at St. Anthony of Padua in Mid-City, a hub for local Hispanic families. “They were here. They entered those homes first.”

New Orleans remains their home nearly two decades later.

Now, both men are confined to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in north Louisiana, caught in President Donald Trump’s immigration dragnet.

Federal agents arrested the men, who have no criminal records, while they worked a construction job together near Lafayette on June 12 with two other St. Anthony parishioners, church leaders said. They are awaiting deportation at the Pine Prairie ICE Processing Center, accused of entering the country illegally on their way to New Orleans after Katrina.

As the city girds for the landmark storm’s 20th anniversary this month, the arrests have highlighted immigrants’ foundational roles in rebuilding.

Demand for workers so outstripped supply after the storm that the Bush administration suspended rules requiring employers to verify workers’ immigration status. A 2006 survey of construction workers in the city found half were Hispanic, and half of those were here illegally. And New Orleans’ Latino population grew by 71%, to 103,000 residents, between 2000 and 2013, according to Census data.

A precise number of Katrina construction laborers who remain in New Orleans is difficult to tally. But under Trump, whose administration has often detained immigrants accused of no other wrongdoing, lawyers and advocates have identified numerous Katrina workers apprehended by ICE. They include a man deported to El Salvador following a May worksite raid at a marquee New Orleans anti-flooding project.

The White House’s immigration strategy has driven up deportations. Yet it has not been applied evenly: outcry from community members and Republican lawmakers has led some detainees to be released, while others remain in jail or face deportation. Supporters of Gomez Velasquez and Velasquez Fuentes have petitioned for a measure of that relief, citing their contributions to New Orleans in letters to their congressmen.

Spokespeople for the Department of Homeland Security and ICE did not respond to multiple inquiries about Gomez Velasquez and Velasquez Fuentes’ cases.

The Trump administration has vigorously defended its agenda.

After the May New Orleans raid, an ICE spokesperson said the agency’s worksite enforcement aims to “deter employers who hire unauthorized workers,” and to “promote self-compliance in the business community.” The raids, they said, “protect employment opportunities for the nation’s workforce.”

A New Orleans story

The cousins each crossed the U.S. border with Mexico on their way north from homes in Guatemala’s verdant but impoverished San Marcos province. They entered “without inspection,” said Sue Weishar, a St. Anthony’s volunteer. Velasquez Fuentes came to New Orleans in 2006, and Gomez Velasquez followed in 2008.

They continued their construction careers — both became skilled caulkers — after the rebuild ended. They married. Gomez Velasquez met his wife Olivia in 2008 at a streetcar stop; Velasquez Fuentes met his wife Susana in 2016 in Metairie. They had children, all U.S. citizens.

And they deepened their faith. Gomez Velasquez leads a prayer group at St. Anthony, his home church. Velasquez Fuentes’ 16-year-old stepson was confirmed there.

Both men were unable to secure residency status because they did not qualify for many visa programs, such as those for relatives of adult citizens, people of certain professions and crime victims, church leaders said. They have not been accused of any other offenses.

“Our church recognizes that a country has the right to regulate its borders,” the Rev. Augustine J. DeArmond, St. Anthony’s pastor, wrote to the judge handling Gomez Velasquez’s case. “Our responsibility is also to act with justice and mercy.

On a recent Monday, about two dozen parishioners lined the church’s pews to pen letters calling for the men’s release. They asked the men’s families to describe how their detentions have upended their lives.

“I’ve never been separated from him for so long,” Axle, Gomez Velasquez’s 12-year-old son, said of his father as he fought back tears. “I miss him taking me to church and soccer. I want him to come home.”

I definitely have overdone it here. You may see so much American Spirit in so many. You may also assure yourself that we have the worst regime and the worst people ever in charge of it. Here are a few songs by us old, wrinkly hippies still protesting.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

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