“Tariff Man doing Tariff Man stuff..” John Buss,@repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
Last night, I dreamed I had been to an amusement park where everything spun oddly and fell apart. Guess who followed me around his theme park at one point shoving his hands down my shirt to grab my tits until a nice black lady in a black suit with sun glasses on said “Sir, you really shouldn’t do that.” I pressed an elevator at one point, and some skinny, red-headed white guy in a flannel shirt on the other side of what turned out to be a duo door elevator had the ground pulled out from under him. The ground below him started dropping. All I could do was watch from the other side. There were guys everywhere with stacks of boxes, trying to sell stuff they wouldn’t let you see. All the time #FARTUS just followed me, bragging about each ride that was more dangerous than the next.
I doubt I need a Jungian psychologist to decode all that. A lot of my time was spent trying to get children to get off and get out of here before they were hurt. Oddly enough, I was more fascinated during the dream than anything else. It was a bit like a Salvador Dali show. Maybe some of the celebratory herb wafting from the 4/20 Party at the bar on the corner got into my bedroom. Who knows? I woke up thinking, “What a Long Strange Trip It’s Been.” I heard a lot of Grateful Dead on Temple’s last walk of the day.
Trump’s 100th day in office officially happens this month on the 30th. So far, not good. This headline in theWashington Post, attached to an op-ed analysis from Dana Milbank, grabbed me. And not by the you know what. “Trump is wrapping up 100 days of historic failure. America has seen ruinous periods, but never when the president was the one knowingly causing the ruin. It will be far worse if Trump tries to illegally remove Fed President Jerome Powell from his post. He’s trying to blame Powell for this mess. I’m not sure who will be dumb enough to take that bait, but I do know that Republicans won’t stand in his way of his lawlessness, as usual.
“By any reasonable measure, President Donald Trump’s first 100 days will be judged an epic failure.
He has been a legislative failure. He has signed only five bills into law, none of them major, making this the worst performance at the start of a new president’s term in more than a century.
He has been an economic failure. On his watch, growth has slowed, consumer and business confidence has cratered, and markets have plunged, along with Americans’ wealth. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said Wednesday that “growth has slowed in the first quarter of this year from last year’s solid pace” and that Trump’s tariffs will result in higher inflation and slower growth.
He has been a foreign-policy failure. He said he would end wars in Gaza and Ukraine. But fighting has resumed in Gaza after the demise of the ceasefire negotiated by his predecessor, and Russia continues to brutalize Ukraine, making a mockery of Trump’s naive overtures to Vladimir Putin.
He has been a failure in the eyes of friends, having launched a trade war against Canada, Mexico, Europe and Japan; enraged Canada with talk of annexation; threatened Greenland and Panama; and cleaved the NATO alliance.
He has been a failure in the eyes of foes, as an emboldened China menaces Taiwan, punches back hard in the trade war and spreads its global influence to fill the vacuum left by Trump’s retreat from the world.
He has been a constitutional failure. His executive actions, brazen in their disregard for the law, have been slapped down more than 80 times already by judges, including those appointed by Republicans. He is flagrantly defying a unanimous Supreme Court, and his appointees are facing contempt proceedings for their abuse of the legal system.
Even his few “successes” amount to less than meets the eye. Border crossings are down from already low levels, but despite all the administration’s bravado, there’s little evidence of an increase in deportations. Hopes for cost-cutting under the U.S. DOGE Service, which Elon Musk originally projected at $1 trillion this year, have been scaled back to just $150 billion — and much of that appears to be based on made-up numbers.
But Trump, whose 100th day in office is April 30, has achieved one thing that is truly remarkable: He has introduced a level of chaos and destruction so high that historians are hard-pressed to find its equal in our history.
And yet, he persists. There’s a long list that follows. Seeing it all in print is disturbing. Zachary Basu has another take posted on AXIOS. “Trump’s United States of Emergency. ”
In his first 100 days, President Trump has declared more national emergencies — more creatively and more aggressively — than any president in modern American history.
Why it matters: Powers originally crafted to give the president flexibility in rare moments of crisis now form the backbone of Trump’s agenda, enabling him to steamroll Congress and govern by unilateral decree through his first three months in office.
Paired with his assault on the judiciary, legal scholars fear Trump is exploiting loosely written statutes to try to upend the constitutional balance of power.
How it works: The president can declare a national emergency at any time, for almost any reason, without needing to prove a specific threat or get approval from Congress.
The National Emergencies Act of 1976, which unlocks more than 120 special statutory powers, originally included a “legislative veto” that gave Congress the ability to terminate an emergency with a simple majority vote.
But in 1983, the Supreme Court ruled that legislative vetoes are unconstitutional — effectively stripping Congress of its original check, and making it far harder to rein in a president’s emergency declarations.
The big picture: Since then, presidents have largely relied on “norms” and “self-restraint” to avoid abusing emergency powers for non-crises, says Elizabeth Goitein, senior director of the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program.
That precedent was broken in 2019, Goitein argues, when Trump declared a national emergency in order to bypass Congress and access billions of dollars in funding for a border wall.
President Biden stretched his authority as well, drawing criticism in 2022 for citing the COVID-19 national emergency to unilaterally forgive student loan debt.
But Trump’s second-term actions have plunged the U.S. firmly into uncharted territory — redrawing the limits of executive power in real time, and fueling fears of a permanent emergency state.
Zoom in: Trump’s justification for his tariffs cites the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), which can be invokedonlyif the U.S. faces an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to its national security, foreign policy, or economy.
According to the White House, America’s decades-old trading relationships — including with tiny countries and uninhabited islands — qualify as such threats.
As a result, a 1977 law originally designed to target hostile foreign powers — and never before used to impose tariffs — is now being deployed to rewrite the global economic order.
There’s much to look forward to as we lurch towards the midterms. Little Marco Rubio is sure fucking up the state department. All you need to do is see a cabinet meeting. His face is telling. He looks like the only one who knows he’s going to hell. This is from NPR as reported by Graham Smith. “The State Department is changing its mind about what it calls human rights.” What fresh hell is this lil Marco?
The Trump administration is substantially scaling back the State Department’s annual reports on international human rights to remove longstanding critiques of abuses such as harsh prison conditions, government corruption and restrictions on participation in the political process, NPR has learned.
Despite decades of precedent, the reports, which are meant to inform congressional decisions on foreign aid allocations and security assistance, will no longer call governments out for such things as denying freedom of movement and peaceful assembly. They won’t condemn retaining political prisoners without due process or restrictions on “free and fair elections.”
Forcibly returning a refugee or asylum-seeker to a home country where they may face torture or persecution will no longer be highlighted, nor will serious harassment of human rights organizations.
According to an editing memo and other documents obtained by NPR, State Department employees are directed to “streamline” the reports by stripping them down to only that which is legally required. The memo says the changes aim to align the reports with current U.S. policy and “recently issued Executive Orders.”
Officially called “Country Reports on Human Rights Practices,” the annual documents are required, by statute, to be a “full and complete report regarding the status of internationally recognized human rights.”
Human rights defenders say the cuts amount to an American retreat from its position as the world’s human rights watchdog.
“What this is, is a signal that the United States is no longer going to [pressure] other countries to uphold those rights that guarantee civic and political freedoms — the ability to speak, to express yourself, to gather, to protest, to organize,” said Paul O’Brien, executive director of Amnesty International, USA.
A spokesperson for the State Department declined to comment on the memo or the human rights reports. NPR confirmed the memo’s authenticity with two sources close to the process.
There is some good news on the front of Trump’s kidnapping and disappearing people to El Salvador. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) managed to get a meeting with Kilmar Abrego Garcia, as was his goal. Historian Heather Cox Richardson, writing at her Substack, gives us some perspective.
Today, Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) posted a picture of himself with Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man whom the Trump administration says it sent to the notorious CECOT prison in El Salvador through “administrative error” but can’t get back, and wrote: “I said my main goal of this trip was to meet with Kilmar. Tonight I had that chance. I have called his wife, Jennifer, to pass along his message of love. I look forward to providing a full update upon my return.”
While the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, apparently tried to stage a photo that would make it look as if the two men were enjoying a cocktail together, it seems clear that backing down and giving Senator Van Hollen access to Abrego Garcia is a significant shift from Bukele’s previous scorn for those trying to address the crisis of a man legally in the U.S. having been sent to prison in El Salvador without due process.
Bukele might be reassessing the distribution of power in the U.S.
According to Robert Jimison of the New York Times, who traveled to El Salvador with Senator Van Hollen, when a reporter asked President Donald Trump if he would move to return Abrego Garcia to the United States, Trump answered: “Well, I’m not involved. You’ll have to speak to the lawyers, the [Department of Justice].”
Today a federal appeals court rejected the Trump administration’s attempt to stop Judge Paula Xinis’s order that it “take all available steps” to bring Abrego Garcia back to the U.S. “as soon as possible.” Conservative Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson, who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan, wrote the order. Notably, it began with a compliment to Judge Xinis. “[W]e shall not micromanage the efforts of a fine district judge attempting to implement the Supreme Court’s recent decision,” he wrote.
Then Wilkinson turned his focus on the Trump administration. “It is difficult in some cases to get to the very heart of the matter,” he wrote. “But in this case, it is not hard at all. The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order. Further, it claims in essence that because it has rid itself of custody that there is nothing that can be done. This should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear.”
“The government asserts that Abrego Garcia is a terrorist and a member of MS-13. Perhaps, but perhaps not. Regardless, he is still entitled to due process.” The court noted that if the government is so sure of its position, then it should be confident in presenting its facts to a court of law.
Echoing the liberal justices on the Supreme Court, Wilkinson wrote: “If today the Executive claims the right to deport without due process and in disregard of court orders, what assurance will there be tomorrow that it will not deport American citizens and then disclaim responsibility to bring them home?” He noted the reports that the administration is talking about doing just that.
“And what assurance shall there be that the Executive will not train its broad discretionary powers upon its political enemies? The threat, even if not the actuality, would always be present,” he wrote, “and the Executive’s obligation to ‘take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed’ would lose its meaning.”
Sen. Chris Van Hollen confirmed Thursday night that he has met with Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the man whom the Trump administration said it mistakenly deported to El Salvador in March.
“I said my main goal of this trip was to meet with Kilmar. Tonight I had that chance. I have called his wife, Jennifer, to pass along his message of love. I look forward to providing a full update upon my return,” Van Hollen, D-Md., wrote on X.
Images of Van Hollen’s meeting with Abrego Garcia were first posted online by Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, who has rebuffed calls to return Abrego Garcia to the United States.
Bukele said on X after the meeting that Abrego Garcia will remain in El Salvador’s custody “now that he’s been confirmed healthy.”
President Donald Trump lashed out at Van Hollen Friday morning in a post on Truth Social, saying the Democratic senator “looked like a fool yesterday standing in El Salvador begging for attention.”
At an Oval Office meeting with Trump on Monday, Bukele argued that he didn’t “have the power to return him to the United States.”
Attorney General Pam Bondi said the same day that the United States would provide a plane for Abrego Garcia to travel back to the country should El Salvador allow his release, framing the decision as being solely in Bukele’s hands.
In a statement Thursday night, the White House called Van Hollen’s efforts in support of Abrego Garcia “disgusting” and said Trump will “continue to stand on the side of law-abiding Americans.”
Trump threats to Fed Chair Powell scare the shit out of me. I am totally with Senator Elizabeth Warren on this statement. “Markets will ‘crash’ if Trump can fire Fed’s Powell, Elizabeth Warren warns.” You can listen to her interview at this link. Nobel Prize-winning Economist Dr. Paul Krugman explains the dangers of a “Trumpified Fed” at his Substack today. “Why You Should Fear a Trumpified Fed. Don’t give an abuser power that’s easy to abuse. He even starts with the holy grail of economics charts from FRED. The Fed is a significant source of economic data. I spent hours as a new grad student in 1978 in the basement of the University of Nebraska at Omaha with a huge accounting pad and pencil in the Federal Documents area, writing down months of data to type onto punch cards with some code ordering up a graph that I had to wait hours for as I watched a huge printer spit out green bar paper. Now it’s just a few clicks of a mouse button to get the same data from FRED.
Sometimes the Federal Reserve has extraordinary power over the economy.
Consider what happened from 1982 to 1984. For most of 1982 the U.S. economy was in grim shape. Employment had plunged, especially in manufacturing. The unemployment rate hit 10.8 percent in December (it was 4.2 percent last month.) And economic pain helped Democrats make major gains in the 1982 midterms.
But everything was about to change, thanks to the Fed. In the summer of 1982 the Fed decided to ease monetary policy. Interest rates plunged, and about 6 months later the economy began a stunning rebound, growing 4.6 percent in 1983 and 7.2 percent in 1984. Ronald Reagan claimed credit for “Morning in America,” but actually it was the Fed that did it.
This episode illustrates the Fed’s power — power that must be insulated from abuse by politicians, especially politicians like Donald Trump.
Over the past few days Trump has been demanding that the Fed cut interest rates and calling for the Fed chairman’s “termination.” It’s worth looking at what he posted on Truth Social to get a sense of how, to use the technical term, batshit crazy he is on this subject:
And we really, really don’t want someone that crazy dictating monetary policy.
The reason we don’t want politicians in direct control of monetary policy is that it’s so easy to use. After all, what does it mean to “ease” monetary policy? It’s an incredibly frictionless process. Normally the Federal Open Market Committee tells the New York Fed to buy U.S. government debt from private banks, which it does with money conjured out of thin air. There’s no need to pass legislation, place bids with contractors, deal with any of the hassles usually associated with changes in government policy. Basically the Fed can create an economic boom with a phone call.
It’s obvious that this kind of power could be abused by an irresponsible leader who wants to preside over an economic boom and doesn’t want to hear about the risks. This isn’t a hypothetical scenario. Consider what happened in Turkey, whose Trump-like president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, recently arrested the leader of the opposition. When the global post-Covid inflation shock hit, Erdogan embraced crank economic theories. He forced Turkey’s central bank, its equivalent of the Fed, to cut interest rates in the belief, contrary to standard economics, that doing so would reduce, not increase inflation. You can see the results in the chart at the top of this post.
How can we guard against that kind of policy irresponsibility? After the stagflation of the 1970s many countries delegated monetary policy to technocrats at independent central banks. Can the technocrats get it wrong? Of course they can and often have. But they’re less likely to engage in wishful thinking and motivated reasoning than typical politicians, let alone politicians like Trump.
What makes Trump’s attempt to bully the Fed especially ominous is the fact that the Fed will soon have to cope with the stagflationary crisis Trump has created. Trump’s massive tariff increase will lead to a major inflationary shock:
I’ve been using that “s” word for a while now. If Krugman uses it, run for the hills.
So, this is running long, so I’ll quit with this. I hope your weekend is peaceful. We’re gearing up for Jazz Fest, so I have a few more weeks of Ugly American Tourists in the hood, and then it might get more normal since Trump is decimating the tourist industry.
U.S. tourism has dropped with visits from other countries down as much as 11% in March, while more Americans are moving outside of the country to places like Canada. NBC News’ Liz Kreutz talks to USC Hospitality and Tourism Professor Hicham Jaddoud on the drop.
Maybe those disruptive Airbnb’s will be used for the people who live here. I can only hope.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
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The news is mostly bad as it has been since Trump moved into the White House, and I have to admit I’m feeling frightened and depressed about what is happening to our country.
Trump is waging all-out war on Harvard University, and Harvard is fighting back. That’s one bright spot.
Harvard University is taking hits from Trump on multiple fronts. Here’s the latest:
The Internal Revenue Service is making plans to rescind the tax-exempt status of Harvard University, according to two sources familiar with the matter, which would be an extraordinary step of retaliation as the Trump administration seeks to turn up pressure on the university that has defied its demands to change its hiring and other practices.
A final decision on rescinding the university’s tax exemption is expected soon, the sources said.
The administration already has blocked more than $2 billion in funding from the nation’s oldest university, which is fighting the White House’s policy demands, citing the constitutional right of private universities to determine their own teaching practices.
President Donald Trump in recent days raised the idea of punishing the Ivy League university for not complying with what the administration has sought to portray as a campaign to fight antisemitism.
“Perhaps Harvard should lose its Tax Exempt Status and be Taxed as a Political Entity if it keeps pushing political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting ‘Sickness?’ Remember, Tax Exempt Status is totally contingent on acting in the PUBLIC INTEREST!” Trump posted on Truth Social on Tuesday….
Asked about CNN’s reporting on “The Arena,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said that she doesn’t know whether Harvard will lose its tax exempt status but argued “it was certainly worth looking into.”
“We’ll see what IRS comes back with relative to Harvard,” McMahon told CNN’s Kasie Hunt. “I certainly think, you know, in elitist schools, especially that have these incredibly large endowments, you know, we should probably have a look into that.”
McMahon added that it is her “guess” that the IRS is also looking at tax exempt statuses of other universities.
Gary Shapley, whom Trump this week picked as acting IRS commissioner, has the authority to rescind the tax exemption under federal law. Doing so typically comes after the agency has made a determination that an organization has violated the rules that govern tax exemptions for not-for-profit entities.
Harvard spokesman Jason Newton said in a statement that there was “no legal basis” to rescind the university’s tax-exempt status. Newton said the status “means that more of every dollar can go toward scholarships for students, lifesaving and life-enhancing medical research, and technological advancements that drive economic growth.”
Some Trump allies predicted that Harvard would only be the first of numerous colleges and universities that the administration would target over their tax-exempt status.
“I think they’re going to go after a whole bunch of them,” said Newt Gingrich, the former House GOP leader. “I’m not sure why we need to be funding people who aggressively refuse to give up a variety of values and structures that most Americans don’t agree with.”
Earlier this month, the Trump administration demanded broad control over Harvard’s operations over complaints about “diversity, equity and inclusion” policies in hiring, admissions and curriculums and student activism surrounding Israel’s war against Hamas.
Harvard rejected those demands on Monday, marking the first time a university formally countered the administration’s campaign for sweeping changes in higher education. Hours later, the administration responded by saying it would freeze more than $2 billion in federal funding.
If Harvard loses its tax-exempt status as President Trump has threatened, it would be extremely rare, but not unprecedented.
Moreover, the only instancein higher education thatexperts are aware of shows how far a university had to go to lose that coveted status.
View of Harvard Yard
In 1976, the Internal Revenue Service stripped the tax exemption from Bob Jones University, a private fundamentalist Christian institution in Greenville, S.C., because the school forbid interracial dating by its students. The university objected, saying it wasn’t practicing racial discrimination because the policy applied to all students.
The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which upheld the IRS action in 1983. The 8-1 ruling likely would be the legal precedent for the Trump administration if it revokes Harvard’s tax-exempt status over allegations it practiced discrimination through diversity equity and inclusion initiatives and a failure to protect Jewish students from antisemitic harassment by Gaza war protesters.
“In 1983, the Supreme Court established the precedent that universities which practice racial discrimination can be stripped of their nonprofit status,” conservative activist Christopher Rufo wrote on X Tuesday. “Harvard’s DEI programs are openly discriminatory and, therefore, the president has every right to proceed with this remedy.”
In Trump’s twisted notion of discrimination (it only counts if it’s against white men), I guess lots of tax-exempts institutions could be targeted.
That’s not all the administration is threating to do to Harvard. They want to stop the university from admitting foreign students.
The Department of Homeland Security sent Harvard a letter on Wednesday threatening to revoke its eligibility to enroll international students unless it submits information on international students’ disciplinary records and protest participation.
In a Wednesday press release, the DHS wrote that it had also canceled two grants worth $2.7 million to Harvard.
The letter threatening Harvard’s authorization to host international students, which was signed by Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, accused Harvard of creating a “hostile learning environment” for Jewish students.
“It is a privilege to have foreign students attend Harvard University, not a guarantee,” the letter read.
American universities may host international students on student visas only if they have certification under the Student and Exchange Visitor Program.
The Wednesday letter calls on Harvard to provide information regarding visa holders’ “known threats to other students or university personnel,” “obstruction of the school’s learning environment,” and any disciplinary actions “taken as a result of making threats to other students or populations or participating in protests.”
It comes less than a week after three federal agencies threatened to pull Harvard’s federal funding unless the University agreed to report international students for violation of its conduct policies. Harvard rebuffed the government’s demands on Monday and now faces cuts to more than $2.2 billion in federal funding.
The University also announced last week that a total of 12 current Harvard students and recent graduates have had their visas revoked.
Another view of Harvard
CNN: Harvard weighs its next moves amid the federal funding standoff.
About 24 hours after the Trump administration said it would freeze more than $2 billion in federal grants and contracts, Harvard University’s research arm began to assess the fallout.
The impact is already acute at Harvard’s School of Public Health, where professors are scrambling to salvage their research into tuberculous and cancer treatments.
Harvard – the nation’s oldest and richest university – has emerged as a new symbol of the Trump resistance after refusing to capitulate to a series of policy changes the administration had demanded. Now, having put itself in an uncertain position, Harvard must weigh its next moves.
John Shaw, vice provost for research at Harvard, emailed colleagues Tuesday evening asking them to notify the Office for Sponsored Programs of any funding disruptions they become aware of – and what steps they ought to take.
“While there will inevitably be important research that will suffer as a result of the funding freeze, we are asking for your help in assessing how best to preserve vital work and support our researchers, while using institutional resources responsibly through this disruption,” he wrote, according to an email reviewed by CNN. “This is meant to stabilize the research environment while we gather information, coordinate decision-making, and strive to protect what matters most.”
Professors at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, home to Harvard’s undergraduate and PhD programs, were notified in a separate email that a town hall would be arranged in the coming days to answer questions, according to the email.
The funding freeze threatens as much as $9 billion in federal money for Harvard. Beyond the practical implications of losing those funds, it’s not clear how far a standoff could go.
As we have seen, Trump is also attacking foreign students and immigrants individually, grabbing them off the streets or when they report to update their immigration status and disappearing them.
When federal officials led a handcuffed Mohsen Mahdawi out of an office building in northern Vermont on Monday, he became the latest international student whom the Trump administration had apparently targetedfor speaking out against Israel’s war in Gaza.
But those who know Mahdawi say it’s absurd to suggest he “engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity,” as the president has said of protesters at Columbia University where he was a student. Rather, they describe him as a peaceful 34-year-old Palestinian who had a remarkable journey from a refugee camp in the West Bank to a cabin in rural Vermont to an Ivy League institution in New York City.
Mohsen Mahdawi
He is widely known in the upper Connecticut River Valley of Vermont and New Hampshire, where he has been based since moving to the United States more than a decade ago, as a spiritual man who grew up Muslim, is a practicing Buddhist, and whose closest friends are Jewish.
“He is such an advocate for peace. He is such an opponent of any kind of violence,” said Rabbi Dov Taylor, who leads Chavurat Ki-tov, a Jewish cultural and educational organization in Woodstock, Vt. “His love just comes out in what he says.”
Simon Dennis, a carpenter and a former selectboard member in nearby Hartford, described Mahdawi as “a person of great gracefulness and dignity and gravitas” who is “destined to go forward and do great things in the world.”
Mahdawi, who was set to graduate this spring, was being held Tuesday in Vermont’s Northwest State Correctional Facility in St. Albans.
On Wednesday evening, some 200 supporters gathered in a windswept field several hundred yards from the prison. They hoisted Palestinian flags and signs calling for his release. An organizer, Jesse Lubin of Burlington, encouraged the crowd “to be loud enough so that he might be able to hear us” from inside the prison.
Just a bit more, because this is behind a paywall:
Crystal Cole of St. Albans told fellow protesters that she was there to demonstrate that even residents of this rural county on the Canadian border were outraged about Mahdawi’s detention.
“People up here in Franklin County know just as well as everyone else across the state, across the country, and across the world that free speech is a right, kidnapping is a wrong, and we refuse to stand for it,” she said.
By all accounts, Mahdawi has assiduously accumulated friends in the Upper Valley since moving from the West Bank in 2014. He’s done so while working as a bank teller, joining faith events, speaking at lectures and protests on the Middle East, and serving as a jack-of-all-trades at Dan & Whit’s, a popular general store in Norwich.
“Everyone loved him,” said Dan Fraser, a former owner and manager. “The town loved him. The town knows him.”
Mahdawi has lived for years in Fraser’s home in Hartford. He attended Lehigh University in Pennsylvania before transferring to Columbia in 2021. He was expecting to enter graduate school there in the fall for international affairs.
Mahdawi has been a permanent resident, or green card holder, since 2015, according to his attorneys, and appeared on track to attain citizenship. He had been in hiding after a friend and fellow Columbia student organizer, Mahmoud Khalil, was detained on March 8, according to friends.
He sounds really dangerous, right?
We are all familiar with the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was sent to the torture prison in El Salvador. The Trump administration admits this was a mistake, but they are determined not to return Garcia to his family in Maryland. Yesterday Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen traveled to El Salvador in an attempt to meet with Garcia.
Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) flew to El Salvador on Wednesday seeking to secure the release of a man wrongly deported by the Trump administration, as officials ramp up their defense of the administration’s actions in an escalating battle over President Donald Trump’s mass deportation policy.
The Trump administration has made the fight around Kilmar Abrego Garcia the centerpiece of its broader deportation efforts, resisting efforts to bring him back to the United States, despite a Supreme Court ruling that the administration must “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return after his illegal deportation.
Chris Van Hollen
But after a meeting with Salvadoran Vice President Félix Ulloa, Van Hollen was denied the opportunity to see Abrego Garcia or visit the maximum security prison where he’s being held.
In a press conference on Wednesday, Van Hollen said that he asked Ulloa for a meeting with Abrego Garcia. Ulloa said he would have needed to “make earlier provisions” to visit, according to the senator, and also added he would be unable to arrange a phone call.
“I asked the vice president — if Abrego Garcia has not committed a crime, and if courts found that he was illegally taken, and the government of El Salvador has found no evidence he was part of MS-13 — then why is El Salvador continuing to hold him?” Van Hollen said.
Statement from Van Hollen:
“The goal of this mission is to let the Trump administration, let the government of El Salvador know that we are going to keep fighting to bring Abrego Garcia home until he returns to his family,” Van Hollen said in a video from the airport on his way to San Salvador, adding that he hopes to “meet with representatives of the government” and “see Kilmar.” Van Hollen, in second a video posted to X, said he arrived in San Salvador a little before noon and that he was on his way to the U.S. embassy.
Trump border czar Tom Homan slammed the Democratic senator for his visit, calling the trip “disgusting” on Fox News on Wednesday morning and echoing a line from the administration that the senator is more concerned with an “MS-13 terrorist” than Rachel Morin, a Maryland woman whose killer — who was convicted this week — was an undocumented immigrant.
“He wasn’t abducted. He is an MS-13 gang member, classified as a terrorist, that was removed from this country. So we got rid of a dangerous person — an El Salvadoran national was returned to the country of El Salvador, to his home,” Homan said, going on to call Abrego Garcia a “public safety threat.”
There’s no evidence Garcia is a gang member or terrorist.
We are in a true Constitutional crisis right now, since the Trump administration is ignoring court orders about these actions from two judges. So far, the judiciary is holding the line. It remains to be seen whether the Supreme Court will come down on the side of democracy or let Trump become a dictator. Here’s what’s happening on the immigration front this morning.
The Trump administration is appealing efforts by two judges to investigate whether government officials defied their rulings over the deportation of migrants to El Salvador, escalating a confrontation between the executive and judicial branches.
On Wednesday night, the Justice Department said it would appeal Washington-based U.S. District Judge James Boasberg’s finding that there was probable cause to believe the government had violated his order to return alleged members of a Venezuelan gang who were deported to El Salvador on March 15 under an 18th-century wartime law. Boasberg said administration officials could face criminal contempt charges.
Also late on Wednesday, government lawyers asked the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to stop U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis in Greenbelt, Maryland from ordering U.S. officials to provide documents and answer questions under oath about what they had done to secure the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a migrant who was wrongly deported to El Salvador.
In both cases, the Trump administration has denied it violated court orders and accused judges of overstepping their authority.
“A single district court has inserted itself into the foreign policy of the United States and has tried to dictate it from the bench,” the Justice Department lawyers wrote in its filing with the Fourth Circuit.
“Emergency relief is needed.”
Below are commentary pieces on the El Salvador prison and what Trump is doing to immigrants.
Extraordinary times call for extraordinary and strong language. President Trump’s plan to have migrants — and potentially U.S. citizens — rounded up, flown to El Salvador, and confined there in a maximum security facility that specializes in indefinite detention meets that bar. However, even when news coverage and criticism has acknowledged Trump’s vision is almost certainly illegal and unquestionably dangerous, it has often used fairly normal terminology and referred to the flights as deportations to a “prison.” That is not what is happening. President Trump is sending people to the camps.
The distinction comes from some of the unique features of the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, the infamous El Salvadoran facility that is holding people on behalf of the Trump administration. A “prison” is most typicallydefined as an institution holding inmates who have been sentenced for a crime. And, of course, most sentences have an end date. However, El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele and his government have boasted that people placed in CECOT, “have no chance of getting out.”
U.S. prisoners arriving at El Salvador prison
Because of the prospect of indefinite detention and the lack of due process the Trump administration has afforded the people it has sent to CECOT, experts who spoke to TPM said the facility could be more accurately described as a “concentration camp,” “penal colony,” or “permanent prison camp.”
Dr. Sandra Susan Smith, who is the Daniel & Florence Guggenheim Professor of Criminal Justice at Harvard’s Kennedy School, was very clear on this point in an email.
“More than a prison, El Salvador’s CECOT has many if not all the hallmarks of a concentration camp,” Smith wrote. “The Trump administration has unlawfully deported a group it finds highly undesirable — migrants largely from Venezuela — to CECOT, a facility known for its utter brutality and unyielding inhumanity that is located in a foreign country where US courts have no jurisdiction. Further, they have done so with no evidentiary basis for claims of migrants’ criminality and with no due process.”
Smith’s point might sound extreme since the term “concentration camp” is most closely associated with the German Nazi regime that left millions dead. However, mass executions are actually not part of the official definition. According to the Holocaust Encyclopedia published by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, “the term concentration camp refers to a camp in which people are detained or confined, usually under harsh conditions and without regard to legal norms of arrest and imprisonment that are acceptable in a constitutional democracy.”
Mike Wessler, the communications director of the Prison Policy Initiative, said he and his team were “discussing” whether CECOT should be called a “prison” this morning or whether another term should be applied. He pointed to the Holocaust Encyclopedia definition of “concentration camp.”
“I think there is a strong case to be made that the term prison does not fit for these sorts of facilities. Prisons are generally considered part of a larger legal system that is subject to judicial oversight and has somewhat defined processes, including around sentences, conditions, and releases,” Wessler said.
Bukele ordered the mega-prison built as he began his campaign against El Salvador’s gangs in March 2022.
It opened a year later in the town of Tecoluca, about 45 miles (72 kilometers) east of the capital.
The facility has eight sprawling pavilions and can hold up to 40,000 inmates.
Each cell can fit 65 to 70 prisoners.
CECOT prisoners do not receive visits and are never allowed outdoors. The prison does not offer workshops or educational programs to prepare them to return to society after their sentences.
Occasionally, prisoners who have gained a level of trust from prison officials give motivational talks.
Prisoners sit in rows in the corridor outside their cells for the talks or are led through exercise regimens under the supervision of guards.
Bukele’s justice minister has said that those held at CECOT would never return to their communities.
The prison’s dining halls, break rooms, gym and board games are for guards.
A row of Latino men with shaved heads and stoic expressions wearing identical white boxer shorts stand behind thick metal bars. In the back fellow prisoners sit cross-legged on large shelves that look like they’re meant for boxed furniture at IKEA, but are instead being used for humans. Outside the bars, free, is a white man in a blazer and collared shirt, his arm stretched out to hold the camera being used to take the photo of him and the men. The image is grotesque. And now it is history.
If you’re not familiar with the names Riley Moore and Jason Smith, don’t worry; I wasn’t either until yesterday. They’re Republican Congressmen from West Virginia and Missouri, respectively, who took a trip to El Salvador on Tuesday where they were given a tour of Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT), a two-year old maximum security prison. Each posted photos to their social media pages after the visit, gloating about their access….
Go to the linked article to see photos these Congressmen posted on social media….
Photos like this are only possible when you’ve become so divorced from the humanity of others that they become nothing more than props in your political ploy.
But they weren’t alone in their casual disregard: A photo posted to X by the US Embassy in El Salvador confirmed an additional five House Republicans went along for the trip, including Claudia Tenney (NY), Mike Kennedy (UT), Carol Miller (WV), Ron Estes (KS) and Kevin Hern (OK). I’ve reached out to the offices of these members and will update if I hear back.
These members at least had the sense not to brag about it on social media, but it also makes me wonder why? If visiting CECOT has become a Trump loyalty pilgrimage, why haven’t they blasted out thumbs up pics of their own? Is it enough for Trump just to know they went, or do Smith and Moore understand that you only truly get credit for your depravity if you broadcast it?
Senator Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat from Maryland, had a very different experience when he arrived in El Salvador. Wednesday morning to check in on one of his constituents who was wrongfully and illegally imprisoned there beginning in March. He met with the country’s Vice President and asked if he could visit CECOT to meet with Kilmar Abrego Garcia: In a press conference later that day, he revealed he was told no. He also said the embassy told him they hadn’t received any direction from the administration to facilitate Garcia’s return, despite a court order.The visit by Republican members of Congress and Van Hollen’s subsequent rejection the very next day show that CECOT isn’t a prison holding Americans, but a place for Trump to hold his political prisoners—and where only his allies can wander and gawk. Some have compared the prison’s conditions to Nazi concentration camps.
The Trump administration is working hard to convince the public that its mass-deportation campaign is fully under way. Over the past several weeks, federal agents have seized foreign students off the streets, raided worksites, and shipped detainees to a supermax prison in El Salvador using wartime powers adopted under the John Adams administration.
The tactics have spread fear and created a showreel of social-media-ready highlights for the White House. But they have not brought U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement much closer to delivering the “millions” of deportations President Donald Trump has set as a goal.
“We need more money,” Tom Homan, Trump’s “border czar,” told me in an interview. “We won’t fail if we get the resources we need.”
Using the budget-reconciliation process, Republican lawmakers are now preparing to lavish ICE with a colossal funding increase—enough to pay for the kind of social and demographic transformation of the United States that immigration hard-liners have long fantasized about achieving.
Although GOP factions in the House and Senate have squabbled over the contours of the bill, spending heavily on immigration enforcement has bicameral support. The reconciliation bill in the Senate would provide $175 billion over the next decade. A House version proposes $90 billion.
To put those sums in perspective, the entire annual budget of ICE is about $9 billion.
The funding surge—which Republicans could approve without a single Democratic vote—would allow ICE to add thousands of officers and enlist police and sheriff’s deputies across the country to help arrest and jail more immigrants. It would funnel billions to private contractors to identify and locate targets, jail them in for-profit detention centers, and fast-track their deportations.
Paul Hunker, who was formerly ICE’s lead attorney in Dallas, likened Trump’s deportation campaign to a gathering wave. “It seems intense now, but wait until five months from now when the reconciliation bill has passed and ICE gets a huge infusion of cash,’’ he told me. “If that money goes out, the amount of people they can arrest and remove will be extraordinary.’’
ICE officials envision a private-sector contracting bonanza that would rely on old workhorses such as CoreCivic and Geo Group-–the for-profit firms best known for running immigration jails—while enlisting large data companies to make the deportation system run more like an e-commerce platform.
Read the rest at the link. It sounds a lot like the Nazi railroad cars, only with planes.
That’s for me. This is way too long already. Take care everyone.
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BB’s under the weather today, so I’ve got the news! We’ve not heard much about JD Vance besides his globe-trotting mishegas. He appears gaff and accident-prone, as well as off-putting. Maybe Trump needed a fall guy; let’s catch up with the lonely Boy since everyone needs a break from #FARTUS and his Depression-inducing policies. The Economics Times has several reports that provide evidence of a hapless Vice President. This bit of news came earlier in the month. “Second lady Usha Vance says her husband, JD Vance, is very lonely; social media has a field day, here’s what people are saying.”
In her first interview as second lady, Usha Vance revealed that her husband, Vice President JD Vance, is extremely lonely in his new position.
To no one’s surprise, social media had a field day. From sarcasm to scathing political criticism, the internet did not hold back.
Usha Vance said JD Vance is “very lonely” as Vice President, attributing this to long working hours and little communication, as per a report by BuzzFeed.
Her words created a social media storm, with online reactions varying from dark humor to brutally harsh, with scant sympathy for his loneliness.
She told the Times that because her husband is so busy, they now communicate primarily via text these days. “I don’t know that he’s asking me for advice so much as it can be a very lonely, lonely world not to share with someone.”
JD Vance was a huge hit on the internet! What people are saying is as follows, as per a report by BuzzFeed.
Responses from Reddit threads:
“Has he tried visiting a furniture store?”—u/parkerplotkin
“Did he say thank you to his friends?”—u/GenosseGeneral
“They weren’t wearing suits, so.”—u/Dosanaya
“Poor JD Vance, oh no. While attempting to remove the benefits that they paid into and dismissing numerous Americans, he is profiting from the same taxpayers that he is disparaging. His children will attend the private, pricey schools that his wealthy friends have been urging taxpayers to fund. Is JD Vance feeling lonely, though? Whoa, that’s really sad.”
Others criticized him for making money off taxpayers while pushing to take away benefits and firing many Americans. Some even suggested that JD could quit and be less lonely, urging Vance to shame the rest of the world for being a complete sell-out.”
“He can give up, which will make him feel less alone.” Usha Eff and her collusion. You embarrass the others by being a total sell-out. —u/eastwestjewels
“Is leaving the country permanently and resigning from your elected position the answer to male loneliness?”—u/500owls
Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday March 29, 2025
“US Vice President JD Vance will visit India from 21 to 24 April, marking his first official trip to the country since taking office. He will be joined by his wife Usha Vance and their three children — Ewan, Vivek, and Mirabel — as part of a broader diplomatic tour that also includes a stop in Italy.
The visit underscores growing US interest in consolidating its relationship with India amid shifting global alliances and economic realignments. A statement from his office confirmed meetings with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and said the discussions will focus on shared economic and geopolitical priorities.”
T Bogg has this bit of news on Raw Story. “‘Uppity’ J.D. Vance flattened for new screed defying the Supreme Court.”
Vice President J.D. Vance was raked over the coals on Wednesday morning for a series of social media posts on X on Tuesday where he continued to defend the Donald Trump administration for wrongfully shipping a Maryland man to El Salvador despite an admonition from the Supreme Court.
With the battle over the deportation and imprisonment of Kilmar Abrego Garcia at a notorious Salvadoran prison camp reaching the point where even the conservative Wall Street Journal editorial board is stepping in and deploring the lack of due process, Vance has doubled down and blown off concerns.
In a long post on X, Vance argued, “To say the administration must observe ‘due process’ is to beg the question: what process is due is a function of our resources, the public interest, the status of the accused, the proposed punishment, and so many other factors. To put it in concrete terms, imposing the death penalty on an American citizen requires more legal process than deporting an illegal alien to their country of origin.”
He then added, “Here’s a useful test: ask the people weeping over the lack of due process what precisely they propose for dealing with Biden’s millions and millions of illegals. And with reasonable resource and administrative judge constraints, does their solution allow us to deport at least a few million people per year?”
So, let’s not leave out his latest embarrassing moment. This is from ABC News. “Vice President JD Vance fumbles Ohio State football team’s national championship trophy.” This guy can’t get anything right.
Vice President JD Vance fumbled The Ohio State University football team’s national championship trophy during a celebration at the White House on Monday.
President Donald Trump hosted the Buckeyes after they won the College Football Playoff National Championship against the University of Notre Dame in January.
When Vance went to pick up the football-shaped trophy off a table at the end of the event, the 24-karat gold, bronze and stainless steel trophy nearly toppled over behind him before two players caught it. The base dropped to the ground to gasps from the crowd.
Vance went on to hold the trophy separate from the base.
Though the Pentagram-designed piece appeared to break, the trophy and base are two separate pieces so that the 26.5 inch-tall, 35-pound trophy can be hoisted in the air. The 12-inch-tall base weighs about 30 pounds.
That’s not seriously as bad, though, as the ongoing constitutional crisis of Trump’s DOJ. He’s breaking our Constitutional Democracy by refusing court orders to bring Garcia home, putting Judge Paula Xinis in a difficult place. Will she put them in contempt of court or rely on SCOTUS to deal with them. This is from Politico. “Judge launches inquiry into Trump administration’s refusal to seek return of wrongly deported man, “To date, what the record shows is that nothing has been done. Nothing,” U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis said.”
A federal judge ordered an “intense” two-week inquiry into the Trump administration’s refusal to seek the return of a man who was wrongly deported from Maryland to a notorious prison in El Salvador.
“To date, what the record shows is that nothing has been done. Nothing,” U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis said at a court hearing Tuesday.
Xinis’ order sets up a high-stakes sprint that may force senior Trump administration officials to testify under oath about their response to court orders requiring them to facilitate the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the United States. Each day that passes, the judge noted, is another day Abrego Garcia spends improperly detained in a maximum security mega-prison.
“We’re going to move. There will be no tolerance for gamesmanship or grandstanding,” the judge said. “There are no business hours while we do this. … Cancel vacations, cancel other appointments. I’m usually pretty good about things like that in my court, but not this time. So, I expect all hands on deck.”
Xinis’ inquiry is the latest chapter in an escalating clash between the executive and judicial branches over Abrego Garcia’s illegal deportation last month. Xinis previously ordered the administration to “facilitate” his release from the custody of El Salvador, and the Supreme Court upheld that directive last week.
Liz Dye of Public Noticeputs it this way. “SCOTUS puts constitutional crisis in America’s Easter basket. Instead of a chocolate bunny, we get the president openly defying a court order.”
If Chief Justice John Roberts hoped to save the judiciary by burning it down, he badly miscalculated. Just a week after the Supreme Court’s five male conservatives kicked the legs out from under a respected trial judge to save the Trump administration from the consequences of defying a court order, we are back on the precipice of a disastrous constitutional crisis.
Perhaps the justices aimed to protect the judiciary by swerving to avoid a head-on collision with the executive. Maybe they hoped that President Trump would take the win and trim his dictatorial sails. But this is Dr. Strangelove, not Speed, and no amount of vague harrumphing by the high Court was ever going to persuade Major Kong to stand down.
Thanks to the Supreme Court’s fecklessness, the judiciary is now squarely back on a collision course with a Trump-shaped iceberg. But this time, instead of planeloads of faceless migrants, the case involves just one man: Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a husband and father from Maryland, whom the government deported to a Salvadoran torture prison despite a court order barring just that.
The first confrontation involved planeloads of migrants deported pursuant to the Alien Enemies Act (AEA), a statute associated with some of the most sordid chapters in American history, including Japanese internment. The law empowers the president to deport foreign citizens in times of war, and so Trump simply declared that Venezuela has invaded the US by dispatching members of the Tren de Aragua gang as shock troops, and began rounding up Venezuelan immigrants more or less at random.
The fact that we are patently not at war didn’t matter to the Supreme Court. Nor did the revelation that 90 percent of the men deported had zero criminal record. In a hastily drafted order, the five conservative justices rebuffed a challenge to the AEA deportations, airily suggesting that anyone fearful of being deported should just file an individual habeas corpus petition … from a detention cell, in the few hours between when they’re informed they’re being moved and when they’re hustled onto a plane and cast into a windowless dungeon with no access to counsel.
This had the desired effect of heading off a confrontation between Judge James Boasberg and the government, which flatly refused to explain why it deported the men after the judge ordered them not to. But along the way the Supreme Court did require the administration to give some process to AEA deportees.
“AEA detainees must receive notice after the date of this order that they are subject to removal under the Act,” the majority wrote. “The notice must be afforded within a reasonable time and in such a manner as will allow them to actually seek habeas relief in the proper venue before such removal occurs.”
Even this appears to have been too big an ask for the Trump administration, which refused to commit to giving AEA deportees even 24 hours notice before shipping them to a Salvadoran gulag.
There’s more at the link. ProPublica has this scathing article. “Congress Has Demanded Answers to ICE Detaining Americans. The Administration Has Responded With Silence. Amid increasing reports that U.S. citizens have been caught up in the Trump administration’s immigration dragnet, a dozen members of Congress have written to the government with pointed questions. None has received a reply.” The analysis is provided by Nicole Foy.
Just a week into President Donald Trump’s second term, Rep. Adriano Espaillat began to see reports of Puerto Ricans and others being questioned and arrested by immigration agents.
So Espaillat, a New York Democrat, did what members of Congress often do: He wrote to the administration and demanded answers. That was more than 10 weeks ago. Espaillat has not received a response.
His experience appears to be common.
At least a dozen members of Congress, all Democrats, have written to the Trump administration with pointed questions about constituents and other citizens whom immigration agents have questioned, detained and even held at gunpoint. In one letter, Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee demanded a list of every citizen detained during the new administration.
None has received an answer.
“What we are clearly seeing is that with this administration, they are not responding to congressional inquiries,” said Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández, a New Mexico Democrat.
Leger Fernández and others wrote to Trump and the Department of Homeland Security on Jan. 28 after receiving complaints from constituents and tribal nations that federal agents were pressing tribal citizens in New Mexico for their immigration status, raising concerns about racial profiling.
The congresswoman and others say the lack of response is part of a broader pattern in which the administration has been moving to sideline Congress and its constitutional power to investigate the executive branch.
“That is a big concern on a level beyond what ICE is doing,” Leger Fernández said, referring to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a branch of DHS. “This administration does not seem to recognize the power and authority and responsibility” of Congress.
Norman Ornstein, a longtime congressional observer at the American Enterprise Institute, said prior administrations’ lack of responsiveness has frustrated lawmakers too. But he’s never seen one so thoroughly brush off Congress.
“What’s clear now is that the message from Donald Trump and his minions is: ‘You don’t have to respond to these people, whether they are ours or not,’” Ornstein said, referring to Republicans and Democrats. “That’s not usual. Nothing about this is usual.”
A White House spokesperson denied that the administration has been circumventing Congress or its oversight. “Passage of the continuing resolution that kept our government open and commonsense legislation like the Laken Riley Act are indicative of how closely the Trump administration is working with Congress,” said Kush Desai in a statement.
Attorney General Pam Bondi said the Trump administration failed to take “one extra step of paperwork” before it mistakenly deported a Maryland man, adding that nonetheless Kilmar Abrego Garcia is “not coming back to our country.”
The comments were the latest example of officials under President Trump digging in despite a Supreme Court order requiring them to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return.
Bondi also repeated numerous claims about Abrego Garcia’s ties to MS-13 that his family has denied and for which there is a conflicting court record.
“He is not coming back to our country. President Bukele said he was not sending him back. That’s the end of the story,” she told reporters at a press conference Wednesday, referring to the Salvadorian leader. “If he wanted to send him back, we would give him a plane ride back. There was no situation ever where he was going to stay in this country. None, none.”
Bondi has previously argued the Supreme Court’s order to facilitate his return meant only that the government would need to supply a plane if El Salvador chooses to return him.
Abrego Garcia, a 29-year-old Salvadoran national who fled the country as a teenager to escape gang violence, was protected from deportation by an immigration judge in 2019. The gang Barrio 18 threatened to kill him when trying to extract money from his mother’s pupusa business.
The court record shows numerous issues with the government’s assertion he is a gang member.
The DOJ is now the enforcer for Trump’s Mafia State. They might as well erase the Justice from the name.
I have one thing I need to rant about. I don’t know if I should call it the Space Bunny Adventure or Space Barbies. The women on the Blue Origin Mission deserve all the backlash it was given. This did not empower women. We have actual women astronauts. We do not need to see 11 women in slinky ‘flight suits’ performing cute space cone exit ploys. Amanda Hunt, who writes for the New York Times, stated this. “One Giant Stunt for Womankind. Blue Origin’s all-female flight proves that women are now free to enjoy capitalism’s most extravagant spoils alongside rich men.”
“Though women remain severely underrepresented in the aerospace field worldwide, they do regularly escape the Earth’s atmosphere. More than 100 have gone to space since Sally Ride became the first American woman to do so in 1983. If an all-women spaceflight were chartered by, say, NASA, it might represent the culmination of many decades of serious investment in female astronauts. (In 2019, NASA was embarrassingly forced to scuttle an all-women spacewalk when it realized it did not have enough suits that fit them.) An all-women Blue Origin spaceflight signifies only that several women have amassed the social capital to be friends with Lauren Sánchez.
Blue Origin is one of several private spaceflight companies — among them Virgin Galactic, Space Adventures and SpaceX — now offering rich people and their friends access to space. Its New Shepard rocket is self-piloting, and the six women had no technical duties on the flight. Though two participants had some aerospace experience (Bowe worked for NASA, and Nguyen interned there), Sánchez has said she picked them all because they are “storytellers” who could step off the flight and promote their experiences through journalism, film and song. To Blue Origin, their value lies expressly in their amateurism. Kristin Fisher, a journalist and the daughter of the NASA astronaut Anna Lee Fisher, who joined the livestream, called the flight’s roster “so refreshing.” In the early days of human spaceflight, astronauts “were all white male military test pilots, and they had to have ‘the right stuff.’ You could never talk about nerves, or being nervous, or your feelings,” Fisher said. “But now, in 2025, it is the right stuff.”
Sánchez arranged for her favorite fashion designers to craft the mission’s suits, leveraging it into yet another branding opportunity. Souvenirs of the flight sold on Blue Origin’s website feature a kind of yassified shuttle patch design. It includes a shooting-star microphone representing King, an exploding firework representing Perry and a fly representing Sánchez’s 2024 children’s book about the adventures of a dyslexic insect. Each woman was encouraged to use her four minutes of weightlessness to practice a different in-flight activity tailored to her interests. Nguyen planned to use them to conduct two vanishingly brief science experiments, one of them related to menstruation, while Perry pledged to “put the ‘ass’ in astronaut.”
The message is that a little girl can grow up to be whatever she wishes: a rocket scientist or a pop star, a television journalist or a billionaire’s fiancée who is empowered to pursue her various ambitions and whims in the face of tremendous costs. In each case, she stands to win a free trip to space. She can have it all, including a family back on Earth. “Guess what?” Sánchez told Elle. “Moms go to space.” (Fisher, the first mother in space, went there in 1984.)
The whole thing reminds me of the advice Sheryl Sandberg passed on to women in “Lean In,” her memoir of scaling the corporate ladder in the technology industry. When Eric Schmidt, then the chief executive of Google, offered Sandberg a position that did not align with her own professional goals, he told her: “If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, don’t ask what seat. Just get on.” It is the proximity to power that matters, not the goal of the mission itself.
So, WTF are they riding? Phallic Veneraton anyone?
This is from the Daily Mail, as reported by Daniel Matthews. “Female NFL reporter rips Katy Perry and Co over ’embarrassing’ Blue Origin space mission.”
Pop star Perry was part of an all-female crew – alongside the likes of Lauren Sanchez and journalist Gayle King – that made an 11-minute trip into orbit on Jeff Bezos‘ rocket.
Perry took a daisy into space – in honor of her daughter – and was seen kissing the ground after touching down back on earth. The singer said she felt ‘super connected to life’ and ‘so connected to love’.
The event was hailed by some as a landmark moment but NFL Network reporter Slater hit out at the stunt on social media.
‘The whole thing was embarrassing. So many smart women who worked their whole life to go to space and did the work,’ she wrote.
‘She (Perry) took a daisy and promoted a set list for her new album. If she really cared? Give your spot up to a young girl in the NASA program.’
Slater added: ‘Guess it’s ok for everyone just to care more about themselves and personal motivations these days. Very on brand (with) our culture shift.’
The NFL Network reporter – a self-confessed ‘sci fi geek’ admitted she would ‘love’ the chance to go into space.
But she claimed she ‘would absolutely give my seat up to a woman who has been passed over time and time again by NASA’.
Slater also took aim at how Perry and Co looked when heading into space.
‘I don’t think they truly appreciated the magnitude of the moment. With exception of former NASA scientist Aisha Bowe who absolutely deserved a shot at that flight the bs (bulls***) hair makeup and fits really annoyed me,’ she continued.
‘(It) just felt disrespectful to cosplay as an astronaut in full hair and a curated fit… I cringe thinking what (pioneering female astronaut) Sunita Williams had to think about it all.
‘I also understand why they sent them to promote “space tourism” but yeah the self promotion was so dumb.’
One more from The Guardian. This is written by Moira Donegan. “The Blue Origin flight showcased the utter defeat of American feminism. The trip leaned on a vision of women’s empowerment that is light on substance and heavy on a childlike, girlish silliness ”
But the flight, and its grim promotional cycle, might be most depressing for what it reveals about the utter defeat of American feminism. Sánchez, the organizer of the flight, has touted the all-female crew as a win for women. But she herself is a woman in a deeply antifeminist model. It is not her rocket company that took her and her friends to the edge of space; it’s her male fiance’s. And it is no virtue of her character that put her inside the rocket – not her capacity, not her intellect and not her hard work – but merely her relationship with a man. (The fact that the rocket itself looks so phallic does not help to lessen the flight’s message that the surest way for women to raise themselves in the world is to attach themselves to a man.)
There are at least two women on the mission who can be credited as serious persons: Aisha Bowe, an aerospace engineer, and Amanda Nguyen, a civil rights entrepreneur whose past work with Nasa makes her something closer to an actual astronaut. But most of the crew’s self-presentation and promotion of the flight has leaned heavily on a vision of women’s empowerment that is light on substance and heavy on a childlike, girlish silliness that insults women by cavalierly linking their gender with superficiality, vanity and unseriousness.
In an interview with Elle, the crew members paid lip service to the importance of women, and particularly women of color, in Stem. (The Trump administration has forced Nasa to close some offices in order to comply with its ban on the diversity, equity and inclusion programs that would recruit such candidates.) But mostly, they seemed interested in talking about their makeup and hair. “Space is going to finally be glam,” Katy Perry said, bizarrely. “Let me tell you something. If I could take glam up with me, I would do that. We are going to put the ‘ass’ in astronaut.”
“Who would not get glam before the flight?!” asked Sánchez, who evidently can’t imagine that women might prioritize anything else. “We’re going to have lash extensions flying in the capsule.” Bowe, too, joined in, saying that she had gone to extreme lengths to make sure that she would be, of all things, well coiffed for the experience. “I skydived in Dubai with similar hair to make sure I would be good,” she said. “I took it for a dry run.”
It is not misogynist to say that these women do not have their priorities in order. Rather, it is misogynist of them to so forcefully associate womanhood with cosmetics and looks, rather than with any of the more noble and human aspirations to which space travel might acquaint them – curiosity, inquiry, discovery, exploration, a sense of their own mortality, an apprehension of the divine. These women, who have placed themselves as representatives for all women with their promotion of the flight – positioning themselves as aspirational models of femininity – have presented a profoundly antifeminist vision of what womankind’s future is: dependent on men, confined to triviality, and deeply, deeply silly.
Is this the future that awaits women in Donald Trump’s America: one where the only way to achievement is through sexual desirability, the only way to status as an ornamental attachment on a man who really counts, the only subject on which we are qualified to speak is whether lash extensions will stay in place? If this is the future, count me out. On the other hand, the notion of being launched off of such a grim and sexist Earth is looking more and more appealing.
That’s all, folks!
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
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Hey, don’t believe this bullshit up top…as I have seen many a cartoon or meme these past couple of days. The Trump assholes know exactly what they are doing!
I think those last few cartoons are rather on point.
This is from the AP. “Suspect in arson at Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s residence being treated at hospital, police say.”
A man who authorities said scaled an iron security fence in the middle of the night, eluded police and broke into the Pennsylvania governor’s mansion where he set a fire is in police custody at a hospital after an unrelated medical event, state police said Monday.
Cody Balmer, 38, told police he had planned to beat Gov. Josh Shapiro with a small sledgehammer if he found him, according to court documents. He was being treated at the hospital, which police said was “not connected to this incident or his arrest.”
Balmer’s mother told The Associated Press on Monday that she had tried in recent days to get him assistance for mental health issues, but “nobody would help.” She said her son had bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. The AP was not able to verify that information.
“He wasn’t taking his medicine, and that’s all I want to say,” Christie Balmer said, speaking at the family home in Harrisburg.
The fire left significant damage and forced Shapiro, his family and guests to evacuate the building early Sunday. Balmer, who was arrested later in the day, faces charges including attempted homicide, terrorism, aggravated arson and aggravated assault, authorities said.
Balmer had walked an hour from his home to the governor’s residence, and during a police interview, “Balmer admitted to harboring hatred towards Governor Shapiro,” according to a police affidavit, but it didn’t explain why.
Shapiro said he, his wife, their four children, two dogs and extended family had celebrated the Jewish holiday of Passover at the residence Saturday and were awakened by state troopers pounding on their doors about 2 a.m. Sunday. They fled and firefighters extinguished the fire, officials said. No one was injured.
At a Sunday evening news conference in front of the badly damaged south wing of the governor’s residence, Pennsylvania State Police Col. Christopher Paris identified the man in custody as Balmer.
A judge has revealed the terrifying epidemic of unexpected pizza deliveries to US judges’ homes across the country amid their war with Trump as he battles his executive orders through court.
US District Court Judge Esther Salas labeled the deliveries an ‘intimidation tactic’ on Friday after a slew of judges faced Trump’s wrath after they blocked his executive orders.
‘I found out about it on Tuesday night, and we had already known about hundreds of pizzas that had been going out to judges all over this country,’ she told MSNBC.
Salas said the deliveries were meant as a threat.
‘The point is, someone wants that judge, someone wants those judges to know, “I know where you live,”‘ she said.
Not only were the pizzas being delivered to the judges’ homes, but also to the homes of their children, Salas added.
‘So now, “We know where you live and we know where your children live,”‘ she continued.
Is this the country you thought you lived in? Is this what you learned that our country was about as you sat through history and civics courses and read books in your English classes that represented various periods our country experienced. It is no wonder that one of the past Presidents that Trump most admires is Andrew Jackson, the author of the Trail of Tears and Indian Removal Act. He also defied the Supreme Court. Many indigenous natives died on the Trail to the Indian Territories in Oklahoma, which was later turned over to white immigrants for settling. Jackson also owned slaves.
Now, for our latest Constitutional Battles. This is from Johnathan V. Last writing at The Bulwark. He actually offers up 3 examples that will rule the week’s news.
If you were Chris Krebs, would you flee the country?
Your answer before last week would probably be “no.” Your answer after last week is probably “maybe.” Your answer after the coming week might be “absolutely.”
Let’s break it down to understand what just happened and what is coming in the next 48 hours. Because the next two days may determine whether or not America crosses more critical red lines into open authoritarianism.
Last Wednesday, the president signed a memorandum instructing both the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security to investigate Chris Krebs. You’ll remember that during Trump’s first term, Krebs headed the new Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency—and was fired two weeks after the 2020 election for publicly rebutting Trump’s lies about the integrity of the election. Trump’s memorandum flips truth upside down, accusing Krebs of having “falsely and baselessly denied that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen,” and it not only orders an investigation into Krebs himself but it also commands that the entire cybersecurity company he now works for be stripped of any security clearances it has.
On Thursday, in an unsigned, unanimous decision, the Supreme Court ordered that the Trump administration must “facilitate” the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the immigrant whom Homeland Security mistakenly (by its own admission) arrested and extradited to a gulag in El Salvador.
On Saturday the government responded to the SCOTUS decision by stonewalling the district court judge and then claiming that it could not “facilitate” the return of Abrego Garcia because he is now detained by a sovereign nation on which the United States could not possibly exert any influence.
Also on Saturday, Nayib Bukele, the authoritarian ruler of that sovereign nation, arrived in the United States.
On Sunday, the government stonewalled the district court judge yet again—filing an update saying it had “no updates”—and in a separate filing challenged the Supreme Court’s order to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return, and added that the details of the deal with Bukele to imprison deportees from the United States are “classified.”
On Monday, Bukele will meet with his patron, Donald Trump.
So, why can’t Bukele just bring Abrego Garcia with him on whatever plane and hand him over to Donald Trump? Is this another dark shadow performance of how Trump bullies everyone, including innocent people and other dictators? This is the historical perspective by Heather Cox Richardson.
In her opinion, filed April 6, Judge Xinis wrote that “[a]lthough the legal basis for the mass removal of hundreds of individuals to El Salvador remains disturbingly unclear, Abrego Garcia’s case is categorically different—there were no legal grounds whatsoever for his arrest, detention, or removal.…. [H]is detention appears wholly lawless.” It is “a clear constitutional violation.” And yet administration officials “cling to the stunning proposition that they can forcibly remove any person—migrant and U.S. citizen alike—to prisons outside the United States, and then baldly assert they have no way to effectuate return because they are no longer the ‘custodian,’ and the Court thus lacks jurisdiction.”
The administration had already appealed her April 4 order to the Supreme Court, which handed down a 9–0 decision on Thursday, April 10, requiring the Trump administration “to ‘facilitate’ Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador,” but asking the district court to clarify what it meant by “effectuate,” that release, noting that it must give “due regard for the deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs.”
The Supreme Court also ordered that “the Government should be prepared to share what it can concerning the steps it has taken and the prospect of further steps.” Judge Xinis ordered the government to file an update by 9:30 a.m. on April 11 explaining where Abrego Garcia is, what the government is doing to get him back, and what more it will do. She planned an in-person hearing at 1:00 p.m.
But the administration evidently does not intend to comply. On April 11, the lawyer representing the government, Drew Ensign, said he did not have information about where Abrego Garcia is and ignored her order to provide information about what the government was doing to bring him back. Saturday, it said Abrego Garcia is “alive and secure” in CECOT. Today, it said it had no new information about him, but said that Abrego Garcia is no longer eligible for the immigration judge’s order not to send him to El Salvador “because of his membership in MS-13 which is now a designated foreign terrorist organization.”
There is still no evidence that Abrego Garcia is a member of MS-13.
Today, administration lawyers used the Supreme Court’s warning that the court must give “due regard for the deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs” to lay out a chilling argument. They ignored the Supreme Court’s agreement that the government must get Abrego Garcia out of El Salvador, as well as the court’s requirement that the administration explain what it’s doing to make that happen.
Instead, the lawyers argued that because Abrego Garcia is now outside the country, any attempt to get him back would intrude on the president’s power to conduct foreign affairs. Similarly, they argue that the president cannot be ordered to do anything but remove domestic obstacles from Abrego Garcia’s return. Because Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador, is currently in the U.S. for a visit with Trump, they suggest they will not share any more updates about Abrego Garcia and the court should not ask for them because it would intrude on “sensitive” foreign policy issues.
Let’s be very clear about exactly what’s happening here: President Donald J. Trump is claiming the power to ignore the due process of the law guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, declare someone is a criminal, kidnap them, send them to prison in a third country, and then claim that there is no way to get that person back.
All people in the United States are entitled to due process, but Trump and his officers have tried to convince Americans that noncitizens are not. They have also pushed the idea that those they are offshoring are criminals, but a Bloomberg investigation showed that of the 238 men sent to CECOT in the first group, only five of them had been charged with or convicted of felony assault or gun violations. Three had been charged with misdemeanors like petty theft. Two were charged with human smuggling. In any case, in the U.S., criminals are entitled to due process.
There is also this about my hope he comes on the plane, however. This is from the Washington Post. It’s hot off the web. “Salvadoran president says he won’t return wrongly deported man to U.S.”
Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele said Monday that he did not plan to return to Kilmar Abrego García to the United States. “How can I return him to the United States?” Bukele asked Monday during a meeting with President Donald Trump in the Oval Office. “I smuggle him into the United States? Of course I’m not going to do it.” The comments come a day after the Justice Department told a federal judge that it isn’t required to bring home a Maryland man mistakenly deported to El Salvador. Since Bukele struck a deal with Trump’s administration, he has accepted more than 200 Venezuelans deported from the U.S. in recent months and housed them in his country’s draconian mega-prison. Later Monday, Trump is scheduled to welcome the Ohio State football team to the White House to celebrate its 2025 national championship.
Come on, Ohio State! Remember Kent State? Be Better! Another not-a-shocker from the Washington Post’s John Hudson. “No evidence linking Tufts student to antisemitism or terrorism, State Dept. office found. An internal memo, prepared days before Rumeysa Ozturk was detained by ICE agents, raises doubts about the Trump administration’s claims that she supports Hamas.”
Days before masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detained Tufts University student Rumeysa Ozturk to deport her, the State Department determined that the Trump administration had not produced any evidence showing that she engaged in antisemitic activities or made public statements supporting a terrorist organization, as the government has alleged.
The finding,contained in a March memo that was described to The Washington Post, said Secretary of State Marco Rubio did not have sufficient grounds for revoking Ozturk’s visa under an authority empowering the top U.S. diplomat to safeguard the foreign policy interests of the United States.
The memo,written by an office within the State Department, raises doubts about the public accusations made by the Trump administration as it has sought to justify Ozturk’s deportation. The Department of Homeland Security has said Ozturk engaged in activities “in support of Hamas,” a U.S.-designated terrorist organization, but neither that agency nor U.S. prosecutors have provided evidence for that claim.
What has Trump done to Little Marco?
Steve Vladick, a law professor at George Town, has this to say about the idea of using the US Military for obvious Domestic Policies. I have this nightmare that all these professors I want to meet will wind up bunking with me and BB in some form of Trump Gulag. Maybe we get a Guantanamo visit. “Five Questions About Domestic Use of the Military. The federal government’s authorities to use the military for domestic law enforcement are old, broad, and vague. They may soon become far more relevant than they’ve been for quite a long time.” Trump was stopped by his Generals last time. Now it’s between us, the Constitution, and a drunk rapist who used to shill conspiracy theories on the weekend at Fox News.
But one of the problems when so much is going on is that we may neglect other stories that are also important, but not as immediate. And so I wanted to use today’s “Long Read” to tackle a topic that may soon become a very big deal—the President’s power to use the military for domestic civilian law enforcement. One of President Trump’s January 20 executive orders directed various officials to report back about the propriety of using the Insurrection Act (about which more in a moment) at and along the border. That report is due April 20, i.e., this coming Sunday. And last Friday, President Trump signed an ominous memorandum authorizing the military to take control of a wide swath of federal land along the U.S.-Mexico border (the “Roosevelt Reservation”)—a move that seems designed to allow the military to arrest non-citizens trying to enter the country unlawfully on the ground that they’re trespassing on military property.
For obvious reasons, the President’s power to use the military for domestic law enforcement is a big deal—and has, historically, been a matter of substantial controversy. Indeed, there are lots of good reasons why we have come to reflexively oppose domestic use of the military except when it is absolutely necessary. But there is meaningful daylight between using the military for domestic law enforcement and using the military in ways that are anti-democratic. And as little as this administration can or should be trusted to hew to the historical line, it’s worth at least articulating what that line is in advance of what may well be the first domestic deployment of regular armed forces since 1992.
…
About a hundred 21 years ago, I wrote my student note in law school on the “Militia Acts”—a series of statutes enacted by early Congresses, and then amended in 1861 and 1871, to delegate to the President domestic emergency authority that the Constitution had given to Congress—“[t]o provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions.” These statutes, which have unhelpfully become known as the “Insurrection Act” (unhelpful because the authority isn’t limited to suppressing insurrections), are one of the President’s most important—and most controversial—domestic emergency powers. And it’s possible President Trump may soon seek to use the Insurrection Act in some immigration-related capacity; indeed, as noted above, one of the January 20 executive orders calls for a report on potential invocations of the statute by next Sunday.
Although the details of any invocation will matter, I thought it would be useful to tee up even a potential invocation of the Insurrection Act with a brief explainer of where the statutes come from, what they do and don’t authorize, and why, historically, domestic use of the military has been so controversial. To make a long story short, any invocation of the Insurrection Act under our current circumstances would be a dangerous move from the Trump administration, but contra some hot takes on the internet, it would not be tantamount to a declaration of martial law.
Read more about this act and also the deportation to El Salvador atrocity at the link. Here’s another Hot Take from Wiredwhich is moving up in the Journalism World with its reporting. “HHS Systems Are in Danger of Collapsing, Workers Say. The purging of IT and cybersecurity staff at the Department of Health and Human Services could threaten the systems used by the agency’s staff and the safety of critical health data.”
Much of the IT and cybersecurity infrastructure underpinning the US health system is in danger of a possible collapse following a purge of IT staff and leadership at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), four current and former agency workers tell WIRED. This could put vast troves of public health data, including the sensitive health records of hundreds of millions of Americans, clinical trial data, and more, at risk of exposure.
As a result of a reduction in force, or RIF, in the Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO), the sources say, staff who oversee and renew contracts for critical enterprise services are no longer there. The same staff oversaw hundreds of contractors, some of whom play a crucial role in keeping systems and data safe from cyberattacks. And a void of leadership means that efforts to draw attention to what the sources believe to be a looming catastrophe have allegedly been ignored.
Thousands of researchers, scientists, and doctors lost their jobs earlier this month at HHS agencies critical to ensuring America’s health, such as the Centers for Disease Control and and Prevention (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Hundreds of administrative staff were also subjected to a reduction in force. Many of these staffers were responsible for helping ensure that the mass of highly personal and sensitive information these agencies collect is kept secure.
Employees who were subject to the RIF, as well as some who remain at the agency, tell WIRED that without intervention, they believe the systems they managed could go dark, potentially putting the entire health care system at risk.
“Pretty soon, within the next couple of weeks, everything regarding IT and cyber at the department will start to operationally reach a point of no return,” one source, who was part of a team that managed these systems at HHS for a decade before being part of the RIF, alleges to WIRED.
Like many across the agency, administrative staff found out they were part of the RIF on April 1 in an email sent at 5 am Eastern, though a number of employees only realized they had been let go when their badges no longer worked when trying to access HHS buildings.
Five former prosecutors who worked on criminal cases stemming from the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol are urging the disciplinary office governing lawyers in Washington, DC, to open an investigation into President Donald Trump’s controversial pick to be the district’s top prosecutor.
The filing is the latest turn in the nomination of Ed Martin to be US attorney for DC and comes as Senate Democrats have pledged to delay any confirmation vote.
Martin, who has been serving in the post on an interim basis since Trump returned to the White House, is a divisive pick for the job. After stepping into the position, he used his new powers to dismiss January 6 Capitol riot cases, fire prosecutors who were involved in the investigations, go after his and Trump’s political adversaries, and launch internal reviews in an attempt to find misconduct within the office.
In a letter filed Sunday with the DC Bar’s Office of Disciplinary Counsel, the former prosecutors outlined those controversial actions, as well as others, saying that Martin violated several professional rules.
“He has used his brief time in office to demonstrate a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of a federal prosecutor, announcing investigations against his political opponents, aiding defendants he previously represented, and communicating improperly with those he did not,” the group wrote.
“These actions are not worthy of the Department of Justice, undermine the Constitutional guarantee of equal protection of law, and violate Mr. Martin’s professional obligations,” the letter reads.
Martin’s office declined CNN’s request for comment on the letter.
Okay, so I’m bumping 3800 words now. I also want to return to my hot Macha Tea and floofy cuddly furbabies. I think we all need a group hug now.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
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Trump’s 100th day in office officially happens this month on the 30th. So far, not good. 
And yet, he persists. There’s a long list that follows. Seeing it all in print is disturbing. Zachary Basu has another take posted on 
There’s much to look forward to as we lurch towards the midterms. Little Marco Rubio is sure fucking up the state department. All you need to do is see a cabinet meeting. His face is telling. He looks like the only one who knows he’s going to hell. This is from NPR as reported by Graham Smith. 
There is some good news on the front of Trump’s kidnapping and disappearing people to El Salvador. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) managed to get a meeting with Kilmar Abrego Garcia, as was his goal. Historian Heather Cox Richardson, writing at her 
Trump threats to Fed Chair Powell scare the shit out of me. I am totally with Senator Elizabeth Warren on this statement. 
So, let’s not leave out his latest embarrassing moment. 
That’s not seriously as bad, though, as the ongoing constitutional crisis of Trump’s DOJ. He’s breaking our Constitutional Democracy by refusing court orders to bring Garcia home, putting Judge Paula Xinis in a difficult place. Will she put them in contempt of court or rely on SCOTUS to deal with them. This is from 
Liz Dye of
There’s more at the link. 
It is obvious they are kidnapping and disappearing people like we’re a mafia state. And they’re holding their ground because #FARTUS believes the Supreme Court will not do anything to him or anyone in his administration.
I have one thing I need to rant about. I don’t know if I should call it the Space Bunny Adventure or Space Barbies. The women on the Blue Origin Mission deserve all the backlash it was given. This did not empower women. We have actual women astronauts. We do not need to see 11 women in slinky ‘flight suits’ performing cute space cone exit ploys. Amanda Hunt, who writes for the 
One more from 
Pitting Americans against each other should not be a political strategy. It gets people killed. No one knows this better than Judge Esther Salas, whose son was murdered and husband badly injured by a crazed Trumper. This is from the Daily Mail. 
Is this the country you thought you lived in? Is this what you learned that our country was about as you sat through history and civics courses and read books in your English classes that represented various periods our country experienced. It is no wonder that one of the past Presidents that Trump most admires is 
So, why can’t Bukele just bring Abrego Garcia with him on whatever plane and hand him over to Donald Trump? Is this another dark shadow performance of how Trump bullies everyone, including innocent people and other dictators? 
There is also this about my hope he comes on the plane, however. This is from the
Come on, Ohio State! Remember Kent State? Be Better! Another not-a-shocker from 
Steve Vladick, a law professor at George Town, h
Read more about this act and also the deportation to El Salvador atrocity at the link. Here’s another Hot Take from 
Had enough of Trump’s appointments yet? Try this one. This is from CNN. 
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