Lazy Caturday Reads: Another Horrible Week Under the Trump Regime

Posted: September 20, 2025 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: just because | Tags: ABC, authoritarianism, Brendan Carr, Charlie Kirk, Chicago, dictatorship, Disney, Donald Trump, Erik S. Siebert, extra legal boat strikes, fascism, FCC, first amendment, H1B visas, ICE, immigration, Jimmy Kimmel, Kat Abughazaleh, Midway Blitz, Pentagon reporter rules, Ted Cruz, Tyler Robinson | 16 Comments

Good Morning!!

By Leonid Kiparisov

It has been another horrible week under the Trump regime. Almost no one who is paying attention still believes that we still live in a democracy. We retain a few of the trappings–the courts (except the Supreme Court, of course), a few Congresspeople, some courageous journalists, citizens protesting in the streets.

The “president” who would be king is busy slapping gold on the walls of the oval office and talking to architects about his planned $200 million golden ballroom, while Stephen Miller runs the country. Oh, and he’s still signing executive orders prepared by Project 2025 and throwing tantrums when anyone dares to criticize or make fun of him.

Andrew Perez, Nikki McCann Ramirez, Asawin Suebsaeng summarize the latest dictatorish happenings at Rolling Stone: Donald Trump’s Most Authoritarian Week Yet.

It was clear Donald Trump and his allies would ramp up their crackdown against any and all opposition in the wake of the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk — and this week, the president’s second administration unleashed its most authoritarian blitz yet.

The Trump administration got late-night host Jimmy Kimmel’s show taken off the air by threatening companies’ broadcast licenses if they continued to run his show. Trump and his team threatened to strip the tax-exempt status of liberal nonprofit groups, while the president called for left-wing activists to be jailed for protesting him at dinner. Trump announced he’ll once again try to designate “antifa” — America’s disparate anti-fascist movement — as a terrorist group, with no legitimate basis, clarifying once again where he stands on the whole fascism question.

Meanwhile, the administration worked toward its goal to deport a legal U.S. resident for speaking out against Israel’s relentless assault on Palestine. Reports trickled out that Trump would fire a U.S. attorney for failing to bring charges against one of his enemies, before Trump publicly called for his departure and he quit.

This ugly, authoritarian week didn’t happen in a vacuum. Trump just last month mused about how Americans want a “dictator,” and the administration now appears to be using Kirk’s shocking murder as an excuse to escalate Trump’s ongoing campaign for total power.

The ramp-up began on Monday, as Vice President J.D. Vance hosted Kirk’s podcast from the White House and huddled with Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy White House chief of staff and the man responsible for leading his mass vengeance campaign.

“You have the crazies on the far left who are saying, ‘Stephen Miller and J.D. Vance, they’re going to go after constitutionally protected speech. No, no, no,” Vance said, before immediately pledging to go after a network of liberal nonprofits that supposedly “foments, facilitates, and engages in violence.”

During the discussion, Miller repeatedly invoked Kirk’s death to justify the effort to shut down liberal groups.

On the Jimmy Kimmel firing:

…[O]n Wednesday, Trump’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chairman, Brendan Carr, began issuing explicit threats, demanding that broadcasters take Jimmy Kimmel Live! off the air.

Speaking with right-wing influencer Benny Johnson, Carr pressured broadcasters to tell ABC: “‘Listen, we are going to preempt, we are not going to run Kimmel anymore, until you straighten this out because we, we licensed broadcaster, are running the possibility of fines or license revocation from the FCC.’”

By Diya Sanat

Carr added, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to take action on Kimmel, or there is going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”

Within hours, ABC had indefinitely suspended Kimmel’s show and two large broadcast companies, Nexstar and Sinclair, announced they wouldn’t run it. (Note: The companies all have regulatory matters before the FCC.) Sources told Rolling Stone that while multiple executives at ABC and its parent company, Disney, did not feel that Kimmel’s comments merited a suspension, they caved to pressure from Carr.

“They were terrified about what the government would do, and did not even think Jimmy had the right to just explain what he said,” a person familiar with the internal situation said on Thursday, calling the decision “cowardly.”

Throughout Trumpland and the federal government, there was a heightened sense of glee over their silencing of Kimmel. Administration officials feel emboldened by the multiple scalps they’ve now collected — first Stephen Colbert, now Kimmel — to the point that they’re confident they have momentum to pressure corporate bosses to get rid of Trump’s late-night nemeses over at other networks.

Trump has gotten so full of himself after this big win that he’s now claiming that criticism of him is illegal.

Luke Broadwater at The New York Times: Trump Says Critical Coverage of Him Is ‘Really Illegal.’

President Trump said Friday that news reporters who cover his administration negatively have broken the law, a significant broadening of his attacks on journalists and their First Amendment right to critique the government.

A day after asserting that broadcasters should potentially lose their licenses over negative news coverage of him, Mr. Trump escalated his condemnations of the press, suggesting such reporters were lawbreakers.

“They’ll take a great story and they’ll make it bad,” he said, speaking to reporters in the Oval Office. “See, I think that’s really illegal.”

He added: “Personally, you can’t take, you can’t have a free airwave if you’re getting free airwaves from the United States government.”

Mr. Trump did not cite a specific law he said he believed had been violated. It remained unclear Friday why Mr. Trump believed negative news coverage, which every president has faced and is protected by the Constitution, would be “really illegal.”

Asked for comment, the White House did not cite a specific law Mr. Trump believed was being violated, but a White House official pointed to settlements that media companies, including ABC, have agreed to pay after Mr. Trump’s legal team filed lawsuits against them, and suggested Mr. Trump was attempting to rein in “extreme left-wing bias in television.” [….]

Mr. Trump’s comments on Friday came a day after he suggested that protesters who called him “Hitler” to his face inside a Washington restaurant should be jailed.

The president, who has accused the protesters of being paid agitators and said such people “should be put in jail,” told reporters on Air Force One that he believed the protesters were “very inappropriate” and “a threat.”

Trump got some pushback from a surprising source. NBC News: Ted Cruz rips FCC chair’s Jimmy Kimmel threat as ‘unbelievably dangerous.’

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, blasted Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr on Friday for threats he made this week related to Jimmy Kimmel’s show, calling the Trump administration official’s actions “dangerous as hell.”

“I think it is unbelievably dangerous for government to put itself in the position of saying we’re going to decide what speech we like and what we don’t, and we’re going to threaten to take you off air if we don’t like what you’re saying,” Cruz said on his podcast, “Verdict with Ted Cruz.”

Girl with Cat – Augusta Oelschig , 1945 American, 1918–2000

“I like Brendan Carr. He’s a good guy, he’s the chairman of the FCC. I work closely with him, but what he said there is dangerous as hell,”Cruz said.

Cruz is chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, which has jurisdiction over the FCC. He warned Carr’s actions could have long-term consequences.

“It might feel good right now to threaten Jimmy Kimmel, yeah, but when it is used to silence every conservative in America, we will regret it,”Cruz said….

Cruz went on to say Friday: “I hate what Jimmy Kimmel said,” but likened Carr’s comments about Disney taking the easy way or the hard way to a classic mob movie.

“I gotta say, that’s right out of ‘Goodfellas.’ That’s right out of a mafioso coming into a bar going, nice bar you have here, it’d be a shame if something happened to it,” Cruz said.

Of course Kimmel never said anything critical of Charlie Kirk. What he did do was make fun of Trump blowing of a question about how he was recovering from the loss of his friend to brag about his White House ballroom construction:

Kimmel has also mocked Trump for a specific comment he made in response to being asked by a reporter how he was personally “holding up” after the assassination of Kirk, who he has said was a friend.

Trump had replied saying he was “very good” and then immediately started boasting about the new ballroom he is building at the White House.

Kimmel said after the clip: “This is not how an adult grieves the murder of somebody called a friend. This is how a four-year-old mourns a goldfish.”

There’s also no evidence of involvement of left wing groups in the Kirk assassination. NBC News:

The federal investigation into the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk has yet to find a link between the alleged shooter, 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, and left-wing groups on which President Donald Trump and his administration have pledged to crack down after the killing, three sources familiar with the probe told NBC News.

One person familiar with the federal investigation said that “thus far, there is no evidence connecting the suspect with any left-wing groups.”

“Every indication so far is that this was one guy who did one really bad thing because he found Kirk’s ideology personally offensive,” this person continued.

In addition, two of the people familiar with the probe said it may be difficult to charge Robinson at the federal level for Kirk’s killing, while the third source said there is still an expectation that some kind of federal charge is filed against Robinson.

Factors that have complicated the effort to bring charges at the federal level include that Robinson, a Utah resident, did not travel from out of state; Kirk was shot during an open campus debate at Utah Valley University. Additionally, Kirk himself is not a federal officer or elected official.

Disney (and perhaps even right wing Sinclair) apparently regret the sudden firing of Jimmy Kimmel.

Screen Rant: Disney Is Scrambling After The Backlash To Jimmy Kimmel’s Cancellation Blew Up.

Wholly unsurprising to anyone paying attention, the backlash over the abrupt cancellation of Jimmy Kimmel Live! is only continuing to grow and spread, and Disney is now scrambling to fix a situation quickly spiraling out of its control. After far-right podcaster Charlie Kirk was shot and killed, reactions have been intense, but it’s Disney’s knee-jerk reaction that has drawn the most ire.

Carl Wilhelmson, Svarta Katten (Black Cat).

There has been considerable pressure from the right to crack down on anyone saying anything even remotely controversial about Kirk, and media companies have acquiesced to this pressure. Earlier this week, on Wednesday, Disney announced that it was pulling Jimmy Kimmel from the air indefinitely after a monologue in which he didn’t hold back about Trump’s seeming indifference to Kirk’s murder. [See the quote from Kimmel that I posted above.] You can watch the video at the link.

The media is generally framing it as Kimmel being indefinitely suspended for his comments about Charlie Kirk. If you just watched the above, however, and are now wondering why, as Kimmel’s jabs weren’t aimed at Kirk, but Trump, then you’ve hit on precisely why the backlash against Disney’s Jimmy Kimmel decision is growing – and why it’s not likely to stop any time soon.

The fallout from the decision to pull Kimmel off the air was immediate; the Jimmy Kimmel suspension is already so much worse than Stephen Colbert’s cancellation. On Thursday, hundreds of union writers and actors protested Kimmel’s suspension outside Disney’s Burbank studios (via Deadline). On-air and off-air talent have made their anger clear; mega-successful producer Damon Lindelof, for example, has stated he will not work with Disney unless it reinstates Kimmel.

Wednesday Reads: How Many Ways Can Trump Fail to Distract from The Epstein Files?

Posted: August 13, 2025 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: just because | Tags: 2001, Big Balls Corsitine, Bureau of Labor Statistics, DC Home Rule Act, DC National Guard, Donald Trump, EJ Antoni, Epstein Files, fascism, January 5, Michael Wolff, Smithsonian Museums, Trump tries to distract from Epstein files, virtual meeting on Ukraine, Vladimir Putin | 4 Comments

Good Afternoon!!

Trump’s efforts to distract from his close friendship with Jeffrey Epstein are doomed to failure.

It’s just another day under the rule of fascist dictator wannabe Trump. All I can say is whatever is in the Epstein files about Trump must be really damaging, because every day he dreams up one or two new distractions.

Raw Story: ‘I need a big thing!’ Trump said to be considering major betrayal as Epstein distraction.

President Donald Trump has reportedly been frantically calling aides and allies seeking a “big thing” to distract from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, and he’s purportedly considering a major geopolitical move to turn the page politically.

Trump biographer Michael Wolff told The Daily Beast’s new podcast “Inside Trump’s Head” that the president has been making “relentless” phone calls demanding ideas to get him past questions about his longtime relationships with the late sex offender and his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell.

“Let me go back about a week or so, or 10 days, when Trump started to say to everyone who would listen — and everyone listens to Donald Trump — to staffers and on the phone calls, the relentless phone calls that he’s constantly making, he said, ‘I need a big thing, I need a big thing,'” Wolff told the podcast. ”What’s the ‘big thing?’ And everyone understood that this was code for I need a distraction from Epstein. What’s the thing that will move us beyond that?”

Trump considered turning New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani into a MAGA villain and reportedly called his chief rival Andrew Cuomo to discuss the plan, but Wolff said that option “didn’t get that traction,” so he next moved on to deploying soldiers and federal law enforcement in Washington, D.C., before landing on something else to distract his base.

“That is what he got to,” Wolff said. “‘I’m going to have to do Ukraine.’”

Wolff claims the president will pull the U.S. out of any involvement in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, which Trump believes will appease the isolationist MAGA base, after he meets with Russian President Vladimir Putin this week in Alaska.

“He’s going to sacrifice Ukraine for Epstein,” Wolff said. “Essentially, this is, in his mind, a trade. It is the MAGA people who have pressed this Epstein issue constantly. I mean, they’re the threat.”

Wolff doesn’t think that will work either.

The National Guard began to show up on the DC streets yesterday.

Lisa Needham at Public Notice: Trump’s brownshirts deploy in DC.

On Monday, Trump dropped two executive orders, two fact sheets, and two “articles” (who knew that the White House issues articles?) about his decision to federalize the DC police and deploy the National Guard. Then, he held a bonkers press conference where he gave Attorney General Pam Bondi control of the DC police “as of this moment,” at which point Bondi took the podium to declare that “crime in DC is ending and ending today.”

It’s important to be precise about what’s happening in DC and why. As Chris Geidner explains at Law Dork, calling this a “takeover” of DC itself or the DC police is inaccurate.

DC’s Home Rule Act has a provision that lets the president direct the mayor to provide District police force service for federal purposes if he deems it necessary and determines an emergency exists. He can do that for 48 hours without informing Congress. Once he informs Congress, he gets 30 days. Past that, Congress needs to enact a joint resolution to extend it.

In theory, the legislative branch should act as a check on a lawless president. But given that the GOP majorities in both the House and Senate have willfully abdicated their responsibility to do so, there’s no reason to think lawmakers won’t let Trump’s brownshirts occupy DC as long as he wants.

There are no real impediments to the president calling up the DC National Guard. Unlike state National Guards, which are under the control of state governors, DC’s Guard is commanded by the president. Further, the position of the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel is that the DC National Guard can be used for federal work without being federalized, unlike state National Guards. This means it can be used for law enforcement purposes without running afoul of the Posse Comitatus Act, which otherwise prohibits the use of federal troops for civilian enforcement efforts.

National Guard troops arriving in DC yesterday

So, the DC Home Rule Act, combined with the structure of its National Guard, gives the president a perfectly legal and relatively friction-free way to make local police do his bidding and to have the National Guard roam the streets.

At the moment, there’s a pretense that the DC National Guard will not be performing law enforcement duties. Instead, they have the authority to detain people temporarily until federal agents arrive. But as any first-year law student can tell you, if someone cloaked in the authority of the government has the power to detain you, they are engaged in law enforcement duties. It doesn’t matter that they eventually hand you off to someone else with the proper authority to detain you.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth must be so hyped for this. He can pretend he’s a five-star general in charge of a vast array of troops rather than a doofus civilian whose main achievement currently consists of posting misogynist and eugenicist garbage on his social media accounts — well, and sharing classified military plans in the group chat. He’s pretty good at that. But now, Hegseth gets to do Fox hits and bray about how the DC Guard “will be strong, they will be tough and they will stand with their law enforcement partners.”

Lazy Caturday Reads: Yes, Fascism is Coming to America.

Posted: June 28, 2025 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: cat art, caturday, Corrupt and Political SCOTUS, Donald Trump, ICE Immigration and Customs Enforcement, immigration, SCOTUS, SCOTUS decisions | Tags: ACLU, Birthright citizenship, California, executive orders, fascism, federal courts, haiti, immigration horror stories, nationwide injunctions | 12 Comments

East is a delicate matter, by Zakir Akhmadov

Good Afternoon!!

I don’t see any good news out there today. I wonder if things are just going to continue getting worse until fascism completely takes over our country. It’s already true that we are a failing democracy; and it’s not clear whether we can recover.

We still have some hope that the federal courts can rescue us, but the Supreme Court is making that less likely with each passing day. Yesterday, Dakinikat wrote about the latest nightmare decision from SCOTUS in the birthright citizenship case, and reactions to that decision are still dominating today’s news and opinion, and there are differing opinions about the fallout from the decision.

I also want to highlight some immigration horror stories that demonstrate how fascism really is coming to America, as Dakinikat suggested yesterday.

The Birthright Citizenship Decision

Nicholas Bagley at The Atlantic (gift link): The Supreme Court Put Nationwide Injunctions to the Torch. That isn’t the disaster for birthright citizenship that some fear.

Yesterday, in a 6–3 decision in Trump v. Casa, the United States Supreme Court sided with the Trump administration in a case involving an executive order that purports to eliminate birthright citizenship.

Confusingly, the Court’s decision wasn’t about the constitutionality of the birthright-citizenship order. Instead, the case proceeded on the assumption that the order was unconstitutional. The only question for the justices was about remedy: What kind of relief should federal courts provide when a plaintiff successfully challenges a government policy?

The lower courts had, in several birthright-citizenship cases across the country, entered what are known as “universal” or “nationwide” injunctions. These injunctions prevented the executive order from applying to anyone, anywhere—even if they were not a party to the case. The Trump administration argued that nationwide injunctions were inappropriate and impermissible—injunctions should give relief only to the plaintiffs who brought the lawsuit, no one else.

In a majority opinion by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the Supreme Court sided with the Trump administration and put nationwide injunctions to the torch. That’s a big deal. Not only does it represent a major setback to the states and advocacy groups that brought the lawsuit, it also amounts to a revolution in the remedial practices of the lower federal courts.

But it is not, as the dissenting Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson would have it, “an existential threat to the rule of law.” It won’t even mean the end of sweeping injunctions in the lower federal courts. To the contrary, the opinion suggests that relief tantamount to a nationwide injunction will still be available in many cases—including, in all likelihood, in the birthright-citizenship case itself.

Cat of Morocco by Isy Ochoa

The author, Nicholas Bagley, is a law professor at the University of Michigan and in the past served as legal counsel to Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. He writes that Barrett’s decision was based on history. Nationwide injunctions did not become commonplace until fairly recently in U.S. history; therefore she argued that ‘The federal courts thus lack the power to issue nationwide injunctions. Period. Full stop.” Bagley’s take:

In my book, that’s a positive development. In 2020 testimony to the Judiciary Committee of the U.S. Senate, I argued that nationwide injunctions “enable opportunistic behavior by politically motivated litigants and judges, short-circuit a process in which multiple judges address hard legal questions, and inhibit the federal government’s ability to do its work. By inflating the judicial role, they also reinforce the sense that we ought to look to the courts for salvation from our political problems—a view that is difficult to square with basic principles of democratic self-governance.”

Although the Supreme Court divided along partisan lines, with the liberal justices dissenting, I don’t see this as a partisan issue. (The outrageous illegality and sheer ugliness of President Donald Trump’s executive order that lies underneath this fight may go some distance to explain why the three liberals dissented.) Nationwide injunctions are equal-opportunity offenders, thwarting Republican and Democratic initiatives alike. Today, it’s Trump’s birthright-citizenship order and USAID spending freezes. Yesterday it was mifepristone, the cancellation of student debt, and a COVID-vaccine mandate. Why should one federal judge—perhaps a very extreme judge, on either side—have the power to dictate government policy for the entire country? Good riddance.

ven as it ended nationwide injunctions, the Supreme Court left the door open for other forms of relief that are not nationwide injunctions—but that look a whole lot like them. That’s good news for opponents of the birthright-citizenship order.

You’ll need to read the rest at The Atlantic to understand Bagley’s arguments.

Jonathan Last [who is not a lawyer] at The Bulwark: The Supreme Court Just Made America a Dangerous Place.

The Supreme Court issued its birthright citizenship ruling this morning and it’s worse than just about everyone feared it could be.

The Court’s ruling is composed of two main parts.

The first is its declaration that it is possible that the president can contradict the plain-text reading of the Constitution by issuing an executive order doing away with birthright citizenship.

The second is that lower courts can no longer issue nationwide injunctions against blatantly unconstitutional policies imposed by the executive. Injunctions must now be created on a patchwork basis.

I want to impress upon you how dangerous this is. SCOTUS has empowered the president to impose whatever he likes—irrespective of its constitutionality—and then prevented judicial overview except at the localized level.1 Meaning that we will now have two sets of laws. One that operates in Red America and one that Operates in Blue America.

Separate, but unequal. A house divided against itself.

I think the majority believes it is being clever—that it has found a way to pretend to give Trump a win while (they tell themselves) ackshually delaying a substantive verdict.

But what they have done is not mere make-believe. They have set in motion a calamity.

Mr. Angel, Sir, Some Other Dude Done It, Elisheva Nesis, Israeli artist

I’m going to give you a bit more, because this article is behind a paywall. Last notes that the case before the SCOTUS was not about birthright citizenship, so they didn’t need to deal with that, and they didn’t specifically do that. That question will require further litigation.

The Supreme Court could have jumped ahead and simply ruled that the action proposed by the president’s executive order was unconstitutional. This would have meant widening the scope of the specific question in Trump v. Casa. But scope gets widened all the time.2 The Supreme Court is the Supreme Court. It can do whatever it wants.

The fact that the majority chose to delay answering this question is, all on its own, a statement. My theory is that at least two members of the majority do not believe that the birthright citizenship order is constitutional—but they want to delay making that judgment as long as possible.

And so, by constructing this new idea—that universal stays are now verboten—they tell themselves that they have handed Trump a tactical victory but set him up for a strategic defeat on the substance of his EO later on.

The Supreme Court majority thinks it’s being clever by playing within the rules. They’re actually being fools, because Trump isn’t playing within the rules. Their conception that injunctions should be limited just to the parties in each particular case works only if (1) similar cases will be decided similarly, and (2) the government knows this fact and won’t try to break the law. But the government is, right now, in the process of finding ways to ignore the courts—including the Supreme Court—with as little political price as possible. And the government has shown already—repeatedly—that it will break the law.

That’s very true. See this article at The Washington Post: Trump says he will move aggressively to undo nationwide blocks on his agenda.

An emboldened Trump administration plans to aggressively challenge blocks on the president’s top priorities, a White House official said, following a major Supreme Court ruling that limitsthe power of federal judges to issue nationwide injunctions.

Government attorneys will press judges to pare back the dozens of sweeping rulings thwarting the president’s agenda “as soon as possible,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal deliberations.

Priorities for the administration include injunctions related to the Education Department and the Department of Government Efficiency, as well as an order halting the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the official said.

“Thanks to this decision, we can now promptly file to proceed with numerous policies that have been wrongly enjoined on a nationwide basis,” President Donald Trump said Friday at a news conference in which he thanked by name members of the conservative high court majority he helped build.

Trump on Friday cast the narrowing of judicial power as a consequential, needed correction in his battle with a court system that has restrained his authority.

Scholars and plaintiffs in the lawsuits over Trump’s orders agreed that the high court ruling could profoundly reshape legal battles over executive power that have defined Trump’s second term — even as other legal experts said the effects would be more muted. Some predicted it would embolden Trump to push his expansive view of presidential power.

“The Supreme Court has fundamentally reset the relationship between the federal courts and the executive branch,” Notre Dame Law School Professor Samuel Bray, who has studied nationwide injunctions, said in a statement. “Since the Obama administration, almost every major presidential initiative has been frozen by federal district courts issuing ‘universal injunctions.’”

For another take, see this article at Slate by Matt Watkins: The United States Is About to Embark on a Terrifying Experiment in Mass Statelessness.

Huffpost’s Jennifer Bendery reports on the reactions of the ACLU and other civil liberties groups to the SCOTUS decision: Groups File Nationwide Class Action Lawsuit Over Trump’s Birthright Citizenship Order.

Immigrants rights’ advocates on Friday filed a nationwide class action lawsuit challenging President Donald Trump’s executive order restricting birthright citizenship, just hours after the Supreme Court partially blocked nationwide injunctions challenging Trump’s order.

The lawsuit, filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, Legal Defense Fund and other groups, was brought on behalf of a class of babies subject to the executive order, along with their parents. It charges the Trump administration with flouting the Constitution, congressional intent, and longstanding Supreme Court precedent.

Bohemio et el gato, Luis Garcés

It is also a direct response to the Supreme Court’s decision earlier Friday that puts new limits on nationwide injunctions, and reflects a new legal pathway that groups will likely turn to when challenging the Trump administration’s unlawful actions.

In a 6-3 decision along ideological lines, the high court struck down nationwide injunctions against Trump’s birthright citizenship order, narrowing their scope to provide relief to the specific plaintiff who is suing in a case rather than anyone who would be affected by the order. In addition to drawing sharp criticism from constitutional experts, the court’s decision is a major blow to pro-democracy groups that have been successfully challenging Trump’s lawlessness through the use of injunctions.

But the justices left the door open to challenging the administration in other ways, like class action lawsuits. The ACLU and its cohorts wasted no time using this legal pathway.

In a statement, the groups behind the new lawsuit noted that three lawsuits previously obtained nationwide injunctions protecting everyone subject to Trump’s executive order, but the Supreme Court’s decision narrowed those injunctions and potentially leaves children without protections.

“Every court to have looked at this cruel order agrees that it is unconstitutional,” Cody Wofsy, deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project and lead attorney in this case, said in a statement. “The Supreme Court’s decision did not remotely suggest otherwise, and we are fighting to make sure President Trump cannot trample on the citizenship rights of a single child.”

Read the rest at HuffPost.

Immigration Horror Stories

First, two incidents in California, which is still under Trump’s thumb with his commandeering of the National Guard and his stationing marines in Los Angeles and with masked ICE gangs roaming the streets. We aren’t getting as much coverage about the situation in California, but protests and ICE raids are still going on.

The Guardian: Federal agents blast way into California home of woman and small children.

Federal agents blasted their way into a residential home in Huntington Park, California, on Friday. Security-camera video obtained by the local NBC station showed border patrol agents setting up an explosive device near the door of the house and then detonating it – causing a window to be shattered. Around a dozen armed agents in full tactical gear then charged toward the home.

Jenny Ramirez, who lives in the house with her boyfriend and one-year-old and six-year-old children, told NBC through tears that it was one of the loudest explosions she heard in her life.

“I told them, ‘You guys didn’t have to do this, you scared by son, my baby,’” Ramirez said.

Ramirez said she was not given any warning from the authorities that they wanted to enter her home and that everyone who lives there is a US citizen.

The raid comes as federal agents have ramped up immigration enforcement in Los Angeles and across southern California over the last few weeks. Huntington Park is in Los Angeles county. Immigrants have been swept up in raids at court houses, restaurants and straight off the street. Some of the people targeted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) have been US citizens. In one incident, Ice agents detained a Honduran woman seeking asylum and her children, one of which was a six-year-old boy who had been diagnosed with leukemia.

The agents who raided Ramirez’s home in Huntington Park on Friday also reportedly sent a drone into the house after setting off the explosive device.

Two cats on a colorful cushion, woodcut by Theophile Steinlen

More details from ABC 7: Federal agents blast door off, shatter window during raid in Huntington Park.

Dramatic video shows the moment federal agents blew up the front door of a residence in Huntington Park early Friday morning, using a drone to search room by room for a man they say rammed a federal vehicle last week during immigration raids.

“They were right here with their rifles and we heard some screaming up in the front but we couldn’t see because everything was blocked, but it was pretty shocking,” said Lourdes Salazar.

That man, Jorge Sierra-Hernandez, was not home at the time, but his girlfriend and two young children were, leaving them shaking with fear due to the aggressive tactics of those agents.

He is now back home with his family after turning himself in Friday.

After the break-in and drone search:

Once the drone went out, at least nine agents moved in with guns drawn. They eventually escorted Ramirez and her children outside.

“They didn’t identify themselves until I came out, they told me they were from Homeland Security, from ICE,” said Ramirez.

She said pleaded with them to give her an explanation, but instead of giving her an answer, they said “when we find him he’s going to know why.” [….]

The agents claimed that Ramirez’s car ran into a truck carrying federal agents. It’s not clear if it was deliberate. The agents were also angry because protesters were throwing rocks at them during the incident. Why does that justify terrorizing a mother and two small children? DHS and ICE are on an out-of-control power trip.

Channel 4 Los Angeles reported on another incident: Family outraged after federal agents detain US citizen, accuse her of assault.

A 32-year-old U.S. citizen was released from federal custody Thursday evening after her family said she was wrongfully detained by agents during an immigration enforcement operation in downtown Los Angeles.

According to her attorney, Andrea Velez was released on bond after being detained by immigration enforcement agents on Tuesday and then charged with assaulting a federal officer. The Department of Homeland Security said Velez “forcefully obstructed an ICE officer,” but her family said that’s not the case.

Estrella Rosas documented the frantic moments as she saw her sister being thrown to the ground before being arrested and forced into an unmarked car by unidentified officers near 9th and Main Street in downtown Los Angeles.

Woman with a cat, by Marijan Trepše.

“We dropped off my sister to go to work like we always do, all of a sudden, my mom in the rearview mirror she saw how a man went on top of her. Basically, dropped her on the floor and started putting her in handcuffs and trying to arrest her,” said Rosas, recounting the arrest.

In the video, Velez’s mother and sister can be heard pleading for help. “That’s my sister. They’re taking her. Help her, someone. She’s a U.S. citizen,” said Rosas.

In the criminal complaint, prosecutors alleged that during an immigration enforcement Tuesday morning, “Velez stepped into an officer’s path and extended one of her arms in an apparent effort to prevent him from apprehending a male subject he was chasing and that Velez’s outstretched arm struck that officer in the face.”

In her court appearance Thursday, Velez did not enter a plea in federal court. Velez’s family said she was just walking on her way to work as a marketing designer and did nothing wrong.

Both sisters are U.S. citizens, but these days that doesn’t seem to matter.

One more awful immigration story from The Washington Post: DHS ends deportation protection for Haitians, says Haiti is ‘safe.’

The Trump administration announced an end to temporary legal protections for Haitian migrants in the United States, leaving hundreds of thousands of people at risk of deportation.

The temporary protected status for Haitian nationals in the United States, granted after a 2010 earthquake near Port-au- Prince caused up to 200,000 deaths, will terminate Sept. 2, the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement Friday.

“This decision restores integrity in our immigration system and ensures that Temporary Protective Status is actually temporary,” DHS said in a statement Friday. The “environmental situation in Haiti has improved enough that it is safe for Haitian citizens to return home,” DHS said, and Haitian nationals may “pursue lawful status” through other means if they are eligible.

The statement did not elaborate on why it considered Haiti safe for citizens.

That’s because Haiti is not safe.

Meanwhile, the U.S. government continues to advise Americans against all travel to Haiti, which has been under a state of emergency since March 2024 because of “kidnapping, crime, civil unrest, and limited health care.” The State Department’s travel advisory adds that “mob killings and assaults by the public have increased” and that crimes including “robbery, carjackings, sexual assault and kidnappings for ransom” are common.

Bedtime Story, by Jeanette Lassen

The U.S. Embassy in Port-au-Prince this week noted that some domestic air travel had resumed, and urged Americans to leave the country “as soon as possible.”

In a federal register notice of the decision, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi L. Noem said she decided to terminate the TPS designation for Haiti “because it is contrary to the national interest to permit Haitian nationals … to remain temporarily in the United States.”

“Widespread gang violence in Haiti is sustained by the country’s lack of functional government authority. This breakdown in governance directly impacts U.S. national security interests, particularly in the context of uncontrolled migration,” she said in the notice. While the situation in Haiti was “concerning,” she wrote, “the United States must prioritize its national interests.”

The puppy murderer has spoken.

Lazy Caturday Reads: It’s Over. Trump Won.

Posted: November 9, 2024 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: 2024 presidential Campaign, cat art, caturday | Tags: Adolf Hitler, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fascism, news, politics, Trump | 10 Comments

By Katrina Pallon

Good Afternoon!!

Yesterday I posted a sarcastic comment on Dakinikat’s thread to the effect that I was surprised that she was looking forward to elections in 2026. She explained to me that there would be midterm elections in two years.

Am I the only one here who thinks it’s unlikely there will be any more elections? Trump himself has said that if he won there wouldn’t be any more need to vote. I think this is it. We are living in Germany 1933. It only took Hitler a couple of years to win full control of the German government.

The Guardian, July 30, 2024: Donald Trump repeats controversial ‘You won’t have to vote any more’ claim.

Donald Trump on Monday repeated his weekend remarks to Christian summit attendees that they would never need to vote again if he returns to the presidency in November.

But, after being asked repeatedly on Fox News to clarify what he meant, the Republican former president denied threatening to permanently stay in office beyond his second – and constitutionally mandated final – four-year term.

During the initial remarks made on Friday, which caused outrage and alarm among his critics, Trump told the crowd to “get out and vote, just this time”, adding that “you won’t have to do it any more. Four more years, you know what? It’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine, you won’t have to vote any more, my beautiful Christians.”

Democrats and other critics called the remarks “terrifying”, authoritarian and anti-democratic. And Monday, in a new interview with the Fox News host Laura Ingraham, the former president attempted to explain what he meant.

“That statement is very simple, I said, ‘Vote for me, you’re not gonna have to do it ever again,’” Trump told Ingraham. “It’s true, because we have to get the vote out. Christians are not known as a big voting group, they don’t vote. And I’m explaining that to them. You never vote. This time, vote. I’ll straighten out the country, you won’t have to vote any more, I won’t need your vote any more, you can go back to not voting.”

Okay, so maybe the statement was directed at Christians only. I don’t know. I only know that in 2021, Trump crazies like Michael Flynn urged Trump to invoke the insurrection act and take control of the voting machines, and Trump considered it. I expect him to do that this time so he can use the military to attack protesters and decide whether and when we can have elections.

Just before the 2024 election, Trump told followers that he should have just refused to leave office in 2020. Steve Benen at Maddow Blog: At the finish line, Trump says he ‘shouldn’t have left’ after 2020 loss.

On the last episode of “Fox News Sunday” before Election Day, Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona raised an important criticism about Donald Trump: The former president, the Arizona senator said, is trying to “set up the conditions where he can do what he did in 2020.”

Host Shannon Bream quickly interrupted to say that Trump, at the end of his term, “did leave in 2020.” It fell to Kelly to remind the host and viewers that the Republican left office “after he sent a mob to Capitol Hill,” adding, “There are people who died that day because Donald Trump refused to accept the election.”

The exchange was notable for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was the familiarity of Bream’s argument. Indeed, it’s the line the former president’s defenders have peddled for nearly four years.

By Marina Aizen

Yes, Trump rejected legitimate election results because he disapproved of the voters’ verdict. Yes, he tried to overturn the outcome in ways federal prosecutors believe were blatantly illegal. Yes, he filled his radicalized followers with lies, incited a riot, and deployed an armed mob to attack the U.S. Capitol, as part of a plot to seize illegitimate power by force.

But when it was time for his successor’s inauguration, Republicans argue, at least Trump left the White House when he was supposed to.

It was against this backdrop that the GOP candidate, just hours after Bream’s observation, expressed regret for having left the White House when he was supposed to. NBC News reported:

At another point in the [Pennsylvania] rally, Trump said he should not have left the White House on Jan. 20, 2021, when Biden was sworn in. “The day that I left, I shouldn’t have left. I mean, honestly, because we did so, we did so well,” the former president told supporters.

He didn’t appear to be kidding.

In other words, with just two days remaining before Election Day, as undecided voters made up their minds, the Republican nominee for the nation’s highest office reminded the public about his increasingly overt hostility toward democracy.

Trump is a criminal, a gangster. He is once again going to be president of the United States. There will be nothing to hold him back this time–no “adults in the room.” Thanks to the Supreme Court he is now immune from prosecution as long as he or the Court can define his behavior as somehow part of his official duties. The crimes he has been indicted and prosecuted for are in the process of being erased. He will appoint his fellow criminals and thugs to his cabinet and other powerful positions. Why should I believe he will allow any limits on his powers? Why should he allow elections that might allow Democrats to win House and Senate seats in 2026? This time he isn’t going to fool around. Can anyone stop him? I hope so, but I’m skeptical.

I wrote on Wednesday that I think Putin will be a powerful voice in Trump’s government (as will China’s Xi and Hungary’s Orbán). Trump and Elon Musk have both been talking to Putin, and Russia has obviously helped by spreading on-line disinformation. And of course Musk and his South African buddies expect to have a hand in running the government. It remains to be seen if Trump will go along with that.

As I noted above, Elon Musk obviously thinks he’s the shadow president now. The New York Times: Elon Musk Helped Elect Trump. What Does He Expect in Return?

Even before Donald J. Trump was re-elected, his best-known backer, Elon Musk, had come to him with a request for his presidential transition.

He wanted Mr. Trump to hire some employees from Mr. Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, as top government officials — including at the Defense Department, according to two people briefed on the calls.

That request, which would seed SpaceX employees into an agency that is one of its biggest customers, is a sign of the benefits that Mr. Musk may reap after investing more than $100 million in Mr. Trump’s campaign, pushing out a near-constant stream of pro-Trump material on his social media platform, X, and making public appearances on the candidate’s behalf across the hard-fought state of Pennsylvania.

By Lucy Almey Bird

The outreach regarding the SpaceX employees, which hasn’t been reported, shows the extent to which Mr. Musk wants to fill a potential Trump administration with his closest confidants even as his billions of dollars in government contracts pose a conflict to any government role.

The six companies that Mr. Musk oversees are deeply entangled with federal agencies. They make billions off contracts to launch rockets, build satellites and provide space-based communications services.

Tesla makes hundreds of millions more from emissions-trading credits created by federal law. And Mr. Musk’s companies are facing at least 20 recent investigations, including one targeting a self-driving car technology that Tesla considers key to its future.

Now, Mr. Musk will have the ear of the president, who oversees all of those agencies. Mr. Musk could even gain the power to oversee them himself, if Mr. Trump follows through on a promise to appoint him as head of a government efficiency commission. Mr. Trump has told Mr. Musk that he wants him to bring the same scalpel to the federal government that he brought to Twitter after he bought the company and rebranded it as X. Mr. Musk has spoken of cutting at least $2 trillion from the federal budget.

The effect could be to remove, or weaken, one of the biggest checks on Mr. Musk’s power: the federal government.

“All of the annoying enforcement stuff goes away,” said Stephen Myrow, managing partner at Beacon Policy Advisors, a firm that sells corporations daily updates on regulatory and legislative trends in Washington.

Hal Singer, an economist who has advised parties filing antitrust challenges against technology companies and also is a professor at the University of Utah, said that Tesla and SpaceX can expect less scrutiny from the Justice Department.

“They are unlikely to go after Elon — Trump’s D.O.J. won’t,” he said. “Abstain from investigating your friends, but bringing cases that investigate your enemies — that is what we saw during the first Trump administration.”

Trump stole hundreds of secret documents from the government, and the FBI believes he hasn’t returned all of them. He’ll never have to do that now, and he won’t be punished for these crimes or any future ones. I have no doubt that Trump shared secret information with Putin and other foreign leaders, and he will likely keep doing that as president. Prove me wrong.

Soon, Trump will begin getting intelligence briefings again. Time: Trump, Who Was Charged with Mishandling Secrets, Will Get Classified Briefings Again.

Two years ago, the FBI raided Donald Trump’s home to retrieve government records he had refused to return, including hundreds containing classified information. The indictment that followed alleged the former President had left classified information laying around next to a toilet and stacked on a ballroom stage.

Now Trump is poised to be briefed once again on the country’s secrets to prepare him to take the reins of government on Jan. 20. “They’re not going to restrict it,” says a Republican involved in the transition.

It’s an awkward dance. Biden previously called Trump’s handling of Top Secret documents “totally irresponsible.” And during his first term, Trump raised alarms in the intelligence community when he reportedly shared secrets of a close U.S. ally with senior Russian officials during an Oval Office meeting. In the interim, federal officials charged Trump with violating the Espionage Act for unauthorized retention of national defense information, a case that is now likely to be closed in the coming weeks.

By Catriona Millar

But Biden has directed his entire Administration to work with Trump’s team to ensure an “orderly” transition. That means looking past Trump’s previous history with classified information.

“He was indicted for mishandling classified information,” says Jeremy Bash, a former chief of staff for the CIA and the Department of Defense during the Obama Administration. “But given that he is about to assume the Presidency, the responsible thing to do would be to provide him the classified briefings and offer government resources to help him handle and store any classified material he needs to hold on to.”

For decades, President-elects have been allowed to receive sensitive national security briefings by the country’s intelligence services well before Inauguration Day. It’s a practice rooted in the idea that the voters have chosen the person to run the country, and there is no further vetting required beyond they are sworn into office.

We are all supposed to just pretend that Trump is a normal president-elect, even though he is obviously suffering from dementia and numerous psychological disorders.

At least some in the military leadership are trying to prepare for the worst. CNN: Pentagon officials discussing how to respond if Trump issues controversial orders.

Pentagon officials are holding informal discussions about how the Department of Defense would respond if Donald Trump issues orders to deploy active-duty troops domestically and fire large swaths of apolitical staffers, defense officials told CNN.

Trump has suggested he would be open to using active-duty forces for domestic law enforcement and mass deportations and has indicated he wants to stack the federal government with loyalists and “clean out corrupt actors” in the US national security establishment.

Trump in his last term had a fraught relationship with much of his senior military leadership, including now-retired Gen. Mark Milley who took steps to limit Trump’s ability to use nuclear weapons while he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The president-elect, meanwhile, has repeatedly called US military generals “woke,” “weak” and “ineffective leaders.”

Officials are now gaming out various scenarios as they prepare for an overhaul of the Pentagon.

“We are all preparing and planning for the worst-case scenario, but the reality is that we don’t know how this is going to play out yet,” one defense official said.

Trump’s election has also raised questions inside the Pentagon about what would happen if the president issued an unlawful order, particularly if his political appointees inside the department don’t push back.

“Troops are compelled by law to disobey unlawful orders,” said another defense official. “But the question is what happens then – do we see resignations from senior military leaders? Or would they view that as abandoning their people?” [….]

Defense officials are also scrambling to identify civilian employees who might be impacted if Trump reinstates Schedule F, an executive order he first issued in 2020 that, if enacted, would have reclassified huge swaths of nonpolitical, career federal employees across the US government to make them more easily fireable.

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said on Tuesday that “I totally believe that our leaders will continue to do the right thing no matter what. I also believe that our Congress will continue to do the right things to support our military.”

There’s much more discussion of these issues at the link.

By Gracie Litleman

Politico: Pentagon officials anxious Trump may fire the military’s top general.

Defense officials are getting anxious about the possibility of the incoming Trump administration firing Joint Chiefs Chair Gen. C.Q. Brown, due to perceptions that he is out of step with the president-elect on the Pentagon’s diversity and inclusion programs.

The Trump administration’s DOD transition team — led by former Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert Wilkie — has yet to officially set foot in the Pentagon since the election was called, owing to the transition team’s refusal so far to accept assistance from the federal government. But concern is beginning to bubble up that Brown, who spoke publicly about the challenges of rising through the military as a Black man as Donald Trump urged the Defense Department to crack down on the George Floyd protests in 2020, could be swept out by a president-elect who has promised to make the Pentagon less “woke.”

The chair’s four-year term normally is staggered so they serve the end of one administration and the beginning of another.

For Brown, that two-year mark arrives in September 2025, well into Trump’s first year back in office. There is no rule, however, prohibiting Trump from dismissing him sooner. Any such move would be extraordinary, though not unprecedented.

“There is some anxiety,” said one current DOD official, who like others was granted anonymity to discuss sensitive personnel matters. “I think they are immediately worried,” the official said of Brown’s team.

“He’s a DEI/woke champion,” a second DOD official said. “Can imagine he’ll be gone quite quickly.”

Two people close to the Trump transition team mentioned that Brown has long been a target of congressional Republicans who accused the Pentagon of conducting social experiments with diversity programs, to the detriment of traditional military tasks.

I feel sick to my stomach and sick at heart. This is no longer the country I was born and grew up in. Things were already bad after Trump’s last term. Now they are going to get so much worse. Elie Mystal writes at The Nation: There’s No Denying It Anymore: Trump Is Not a Fluke—He’s America.

America deserves everything it is about to get. We had a chance to stand united against fascism, authoritarianism, racism, and bigotry, but we did not. We had a chance to create a better world for not just ourselves but our sisters and brothers in at least some of the communities most vulnerable to unchecked white rule, but we did not. We had a chance to pass down a better, safer, and cleaner world to our children, but we did not. Instead, we chose Trump, JD Vance, and a few white South African billionaires who know a thing or two about instituting apartheid.

I could be more specific about the “we.” Roughly half of “us” didn’t vote for this travesty. I could be more specific about who did, and as people pore over exit polls, the only thing liberals will do liberally is dole out the blame. But the conversations about who is to blame, the hand-wringing about who showed up and who failed the moment are largely academic and pointless.

Morning Tea and Cat Stretch, by Uta Krogmann

America did this. America, through the process of a free and fair election, demanded this. America, as an idea, concept, and institution, wanted this. And America, as a collective, deserves to get what it wants.

To be clear, no individual person “deserves” what Trump will do to them… not even the people who voted for him to do the things he’s going to do. Nobody deserves to die for their vote, even if they voted for other people to die.

But we, as a country, absolutely deserve what’s about to happen to us. We, as a nation, have proven ourselves to be a fetid, violent people, and we deserve a leader who embodies the worst of us. We are not “better” than Trump. If anything, thinking that we are better than Trump, thinking there is some “silent majority” who opposes the unserious grotesqueries of the man, is the core conceit that has led the Democratic Party to such total ruin. America willed Trump into existence. He was created from our greed, our insecurities, and our selfishness. We have summoned him from the depths of our own bile and neediness, and he has answered.

And now that he is here, we deserve our fate, because the most fundamental truth about Trump’s reelection is that Trump was right about us. He will be president again because he, and perhaps he alone, saw us for how truly base, depraved, and uninformed we are as a country. Trump is not a root cause of our ills. He did not create the conditions that allowed him to rise. He is, and always has been, a mirror. He is how America sees itself.

If people would just look at him, they would see themselves as we’ve always been. He is rich, because we are rich or think we will be. He is crass because we are crass. He is self-interested because we are. He punks the media because the media are punks. He is unintelligent because we are uninformed. The president of the United States is the singular figure who is supposed to represent all Americans, and Trump reflects us more accurately than perhaps any president ever has.

That’s why the people who love him love him so passionately. He is them. And he tells them that being what they are is OK. He never for a second requires America to be better than it is. He never expects more of America than it is able to give. Trump tells America to be garbage. Garbage is easy.

And so on. Mystal is bitter, and so am I. This is the end of America. Trump and his thugs have won. Please, tell me I’m wrong. Tell me why I should believe there will be elections in 2026 and 2028. I’d like to believe it, but right now I can’t.

Lazy Caturday Reads

Posted: September 7, 2024 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: 2024 presidential Campaign, cat art, caturday, Donald Trump, Kamala Harris 2024 | Tags: Dick Cheney, E. Jean Carroll, Economic Club of New York, fascism, Jeff Jarvis, Liz Cheney, media criticism, sexual abuse, tariffs | 4 Comments

Happy Caturday!!

By Tetsuhiro Wakabashi

Yesterday we got some earth-shaking news: Dick Cheney endorsed Kamala Harris for president. His daughter Liz had announced her endorsement a couple of days ago. Of course neither Cheney is announcing agreement with Harris’s policies, but they both see the danger that another Trump term would pose for our country and for democracy here and around the world. With just two months to go before the 2024 election, we the people are building a coalition of people with differing political views who will act together to save us from the forces of fascism.

AP: Former Vice President Dick Cheney says he will vote for Kamala Harris.

CHEYENNE, Wyo. (AP) — Former Vice President Dick Cheney, a lifelong Republican, will vote for Kamala Harris for president, he announced Friday.

Liz Cheney, who herself endorsed Harris on Wednesday, first announced her father’s endorsement when asked by Mark Leibovich of The Atlantic magazine during an onstage interview at The Texas Tribune Festival in Austin.

“Wow,” Leibovich replied as the audience cheered.

Like his daughter, Dick Cheney has been an outspoken critic of former President Donald Trump, notably during Liz Cheney’s ill-fated reelection campaign in 2022.

Dick Cheney put out a statement Friday confirming his endorsement, which read almost entirely as opposition to Trump rather than support of Harris.

“He can never be trusted with power again,” the statement said. “As citizens, we each have a duty to put country above partisanship to defend our Constitution. That is why I will be casting my vote for Vice President Kamala Harris.” [….]

Jen O’Malley Dillon, Harris’ campaign chair, released a statement saying, “The Vice President is proud to have the support of Vice President Cheney, and deeply respects his courage to put country over party.”

Former Vice President and influential Republican Dick Cheney released a statement announcing his endorsement of Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris for President. Speaking out against the Republican nominee, former President Donald Trump, Cheney said that he can “never be trusted with power again.”

“In our nation’s 248 year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” Cheney, 83, said in the statement shared on Sept. 6. “He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him,” he continued, referencing the events of Jan. 6, 2021.

Cheney, who served as Vice President under President George W. Bush between 2001 and 2009 went on to say that American citizens have a “duty” to prioritize the nation over partisan politics.

Cheney’s endorsement marks the most high profile Republican politician to announce that they will vote for Harris over Republican nominee Trump, further spotlighting other former establishment Republicans who have yet to come out to endorse Trump during this run for the presidency—many of whom have been critical of Trump in the past—including his own former Vice President Mike Pence, former President George W. Bush, and former Republican nominee for President Mitt Romney.

Miroco Machiko, 1981-present

Liz Cheney also announced that she will vote for Democrat Colin Allred, who is challenging Ted Cruz for the Senate.

The Hill: Liz Cheney will back Allred in Texas Senate race.

Former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) said she would be backing Rep. Colin Allred (D-Texas) in the Texas Senate race, endorsing the House member over the Republican incumbent, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas).

“I want to say specifically, though, here in Texas, you guys do have a tremendous, serious candidate running for the United States Senate,” Cheney said during her Friday appearance at the Texas Tribune Festival in Austin, stopping as she was cut off by a raucous applause.

“Oh, well, it’s not Ted Cruz, but Colin Allred is somebody I served with in the House, and somebody who really, when you think about the kind of leaders our country needs, and going to this point about, you know, you might not agree on every policy position, but we need people who are going to serve in good faith,” she said.

“We need people who are honorable public servants and in this race that is Colin Allred so I’ll be working on his behalf.”

Allred, who is waging an uphill run to unseat the third-term Cruz, thanked Cheney shortly after on social media, saying the former No. 3 leader of the House Republican Conference is a “patriot who continuously puts country over party because she believes in the importance of protecting our democracy.

“I am so honored to have her support. In the Senate, I will work across party lines to get things done for Texas,” Allred said.

Naturally, the mainstream media is not treating this news with the seriousness it deserves. So far the NYT is AWOL.

Journalist, professor and media critic Jeff Jarvis at his blog Buzz Machine: The unprecedented grand coalition.

As Nicolle Wallace exclaimed on her show Friday, Liz Cheney and Dick Cheney, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders have all gathered together around a cause. That cause is democracy and its standard bearer is Kamala Harris.

This is a momentous time in the United States, unprecedented at least in this century and likely since long before the Civil War. It is the biggest story in my journalism career. The question is whether our national media will understand this moment — or whether they will continue to insist on their trope of a divided America.

By Tetsuhiro Wakabayashi

It is not a divided America. Patriots are gathering together and putting past differences aside to forestall a next civil war, to support and defend the Constitution. The movement that matters is not Trump’s and the Republicans’ fascist insurrection, which is the one that gets attention in news media. The movement that matters now is this one: the movement for democracy.

In recent days, in The Times, Nick Kristof scolded liberals, telling us why we should not demean Trump voters. A few days later in The Washington Post, Matt Bai rebutted, saying he understands Trump voters but asking why he should give them empathy. I say both framings are wrong, for each centers Trump and his fascists.

A much more profound phenomenon is growing — not on the “other side” of the fascists, but instead at the new and true core of American politics and governance. The question is not whether we should demean or understand or empathize with fascists. What we should be concentrating on instead is welcoming those who will stand for democracy in a larger movement.

Jarvis pleads with the both-sides-ing political press:

For God’s sake, political reporters, stop framing these two movements — one to tear down democracy, one to build it up — as equivalent sides across your imaginary continental divide. Stop your false balance. Stop washing the insanity of the fascist party’s leader — and the insanity of his followers for following him. Stop normalizing his and their patently abnormal and abhorrent behavior. Stop trying to predict (in this unprecedented moment, all your “models” and experience and presumptions are worthless). Stop hoping for bad news. Stop making the story about yourself — yes, I am looking at you, A.G. Sulzberger — and please try to understand the threats to democracy, liberty, and life from the perspectives of those who do not share the power and privilege of your platforms. Stop ignoring the rising chorus of critics who are trying to make you and your journalism better — to save journalism from your lapses of judgment. Stop your amnesia about what Trump and company have already shown us to be. Stop making up new white-gloved euphemisms for racism, misogyny, lies, insurgency, corruption, hatred, and grift — call these things what they are, otherwise you are not doing journalism, not informing and explaining reality to your publics.

Yesterday, Trump made a fool of himself again–what else is new? He attended a court hearing on his effort to appeal the jury verdict in the E. Jean Carroll defamation case. Afterward he gave a “press conference” in which he for some strange reason described in detail some of the accusations against him by various women. Trump took no questions as this purported “press conference.”

The Hill: Appeals court weighs Trump’s bid to toss E. Jean Carroll sexual abuse verdict.

Former President Trump appeared before a federal appeals court Friday where his attorney argued that he should get a new trial in writer E. Jean Carroll’s lawsuit accusing him of sexual abuse and defamation that ended in a multimillion-dollar jury verdict.

Cat and butterfly Woodblock print by Ohara Koson

The argument delved into whether Trump’s trial judge erred by allowing the jury to hear from two other women who accused the former president of sexual assault and the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape, in which Trump can be heard bragging about groping women without their permission.

“It’s very hard to overturn a jury verdict based on evidentiary rulings,” noted Circuit Judge Denny Chin.

The three-judge panel on the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, all appointed by Democratic presidents, heard arguments for less than a half-hour, hewing closely to the allotted argument time….

Trump himself attended Friday’s proceeding after not attending any of the trial and later blaming his lawyers for the loss….

Much of the argument revolved around the former president’s claim that his trial judge erred in allowing the jury to hear from two women who accused Trump of sexual assault on a 1979 airplane flight and during a magazine interview in 2005.

Read more about the hearing at the link.

The Washington Post: Trump rants, resurfaces sexual assault allegations for 49 unfocused minutes.

Donald Trump railed against women who have accused him of sexual assault. He baselessly blamed the Biden-Harris administration for his legal difficulties. He appeared to criticize the physical appearances of some of his accusers. “She would not have been the chosen one,” he said of one, later adding that he would “not want to be” involved with another accuser, even as he acknowledged his advisers urged him not to make such a comment.

And those were only some of the ways he veered away from topics voters have said they care most about in what his campaign billed as a “press conference” Friday, with the first ballots to be cast soon in the presidential election. Trump took no questions from the news media.

It was yet another striking strategic choice by the former president, who is in a toss-up race with Vice President Kamala Harris in the polls and facing what could be a historic gender gap in November as he struggles to appeal to women voters. After attending oral arguments Friday morning in his appeal of the verdict that found him liable for sexually abusing advice writer E. Jean Carroll decades ago, he went before the cameras and repeatedly impugned his accusers. He dismissed a string of allegations as entirely meritless as he leaned into his core message that he is a victim of political persecution.

In a roughly 49-minute appearance that sometimes verged into a stream-of-consciousness rant that was hard to follow, Trump also reminisced about his early career as a real estate mogul and reality television star. (“I was,” he said, “a celebrity for a long time.”) He lamented his two impeachments, calling them “impeachment hoax number one, impeachment hoax number two.” And he mentioned Monica Lewinsky, the former White House intern who had an affair with President Bill Clinton, at least three times.

“This is the weaponization of justice at a level that nobody’s ever seen in this country before,” Trump said, blaming the Biden-Harris administration’s Justice Department for his state and federal legal entanglements, even though there is no evidence that the White House has sought to influence any of Trump’s criminal cases. “You see it in Third World countries. You see it in banana republics, but you don’t see it in the United States of America. And it’s a very sad thing. And I think I’m doing a great service by having gone through it.”

“She would not have been the chosen one.” In other words, she was not attractive enough for him to force his sexual attentions on.

Analysis by Aaron Blake at The Washington Post: Trump’s sudden move to re-litigate sexual abuse claims goes off the rails.

Former president Donald Trump is near a crucial juncture of the 2024 campaign. Mail ballots are due to go out soon, his only scheduled debate with Vice President Kamala Harris is happening in four days and Trump is trying to reverse the momentum Harris has generated in her six-plus weeks as a presidential candidate.

By Kanoko Takeuchi

With that as the backdrop, Trump decided to spend nearly an hour Friday rehashing old grievances, offering a laundry list of false and debunked claims, criticizing his lawyers and going into great and seemingly ill-advised detail about the sexual assault allegations and verdicts against him.

Trump even acknowledged he was advised not to say some of what he said, either because it raised the possibility of yet more legal jeopardy or because it was obviously counterproductive politically.

Trump’s ability to go off-message and rant in ways that make his advisers — and, potentially, voters — squirm is unmatched. But even against that backdrop, this was on another level.

The impetus for the media event at Trump Tower was Trump’s appeal of the E. Jean Carroll sexual assault and defamation civil verdict, which was argued Friday morning. (This is the $5 million verdict against Trump — compared to the later $83.3 million case in another Carroll defamation suit.)

Some examples from Trump’s insane rant:

Trump began by repeating many claims he has made before, including that he doesn’t know Carroll and never met her, despite a photo showing the two of them meeting at one point. He said she made up the story of his assaulting her. The claims closely resembled the ones that were found to be defamatory in both of his cases. Carroll could seemingly sue again, an option her lawyer has reserved in the past when Trump kept saying such things. Her lawyer raised the prospect again Friday.

But Trump actually took things a step further.

At one point, he suggested that the 1987 photo of him and Carroll showing them, in fact, meeting “could have been AI-generated.” (This is the photo in which Trump in a deposition mistook Carroll for his ex-wife Marla Maples.) This is as nonsensical as Trump’s claim that recent images of Harris’s crowd size were faked. The photo first circulated in 2019, when Carroll brought her allegations forward.

At another point, Trump echoed his previous claims about another woman who accused him of sexual misconduct, suggesting that she wouldn’t have been desirable enough — a theme he returned to repeatedly throughout the appearance.

“I know you’re going to say it’s a terrible thing to say, but it couldn’t have happened,” Trump said of the other woman, Jessica Leeds, before adding that “she would not have been the chosen one. She would not have been the chosen one.”

The “chosen one” being the one he would choose to assault? Even the most generous interpretation of his bizarre comment makes it hard to conclude otherwise.

Trump has previously suggested he wasn’t attracted to the women who have accused him. But here he was casting assaulting women as something of a selection process.

Trump dwelled on that point, too, despite indicating that a lawyer had told him, “Please don’t say that I would not want to be involved with her.” He said at another point that his “people” told him not to say that, before saying it: “I would not want to be involved with her.”

There’s much more at the WaPo link.

By Tetsuhiro Wakabayashi

Yesterday, Dakinikat wrote about Trump’s embarrassing appearance at the Economic Club of New York and his bizarre response to a question about child care costs. Becky Quick of CNBC was present at the meeting. Josh Fiallo at The Daily Beast: CNBC Anchor: I Can’t Understand Trump’s ‘Crazy’ New Economic Plans.

Trump used a speech to the New York Economic Forum on Thursday to set out his fiscal plans, which included claiming that he would pay for child care by raising tariffs on imports—but left many who saw it confused and unable to explain it.

Among them were the co-anchor of CNBC’s Squawk Box Becky Quick, who was on stage watching while Trump spoke for half an hour.

On Friday morning, she said she couldn’t make any sense of his plans for tariffs.

“The idea you are going to raise a lot of money through tariffs and not have it be inflationary does not make a lot of sense to me,” Quick said on Friday morning’s Squawk Box.

Quick added, “You are either changing behavior or raising money. If you are raising money from it, it is inherently inflationary. Your consumers are not getting low prices.”

Quick’s co-host, Joe Kernen—named in court papers as one of the people on Trump’s contact list when he was in the White House—was equally perplexed at how Trump planned to hike tariffs on foreign goods without sending inflation into overdrive. He called Trump’s plan a “bad, populist idea.”

Trump’s incoherent rant Thursday on tariffs came after—of all things—he was asked what sort of legislation he’d support to make child care affordable.

“If you win in November,” a nonprofit founder asked, “can you commit to prioritizing legislation to make child care affordable, and, if so, what specific piece of legislation will you advance?”

Trump suggested that he’d bring down prices for parents by subsidizing it with money made from higher tariffs on countries like China, but offered no explanation on how that would actually work. His answer went on for two minutes and totaled 360 words, but was mocked by critics as an “absolute word salad.” [….]

I wish someone in the media would follow Lawrence O’Donnell’s suggestion to ask Trump to explain what a tariff is. He describes it as a “tax” on foreign countries, and either doesn’t understand or is lying about the fact that tariffs are simply added to price Americans pay for foreign goods and are obviously inflationary.

One more story before I wrap this up. We haven’t heard much about Ron DeSantis since failed miserably in the Republican primaries. But he is still down in Florida pushing his fascist agenda.

Tampa Bay Times: DeSantis’ election police questioned people who signed abortion petitions.

Isaac Menasche remembers being at the Cape Coral farmer’s market last year when someone asked him if he’d sign a petition to get Florida’s abortion amendment on the ballot.

He said yes — and he told a law enforcement officer as much when one showed up at the door of his Lee County home earlier this week.

Cat in Bamboo, Hiroshima, by Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani

Menasche said he was surprised when the plainclothes officer twice asked if it was really Menasche who had signed the petition. The officer said he was looking into potential petition fraud.

Though the officer was professional and courteous, Menasche, who has had little interaction with police in his life, said the encounter left him shaken.

“I’m not a person who is going out there protesting for abortion,” Menasche said. “I just felt strongly and I took the opportunity when the person asked me, to say yeah, I’ll sign that petition.”

The officer’s visit appears to be part of a broad — and unusual — effort by Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration to inspect thousands of already verified and validated petitions for Amendment 4 in the final two months before Election Day. The amendment would overturnFlorida’s six-week abortion ban by proposing to protectabortion access in Florida until viability.

Since last week, DeSantis’ secretary of state has ordered elections supervisors in at leastfour counties to send to Tallahassee at least36,000 petition forms already deemed to have been signed by real people. Since the Times first reported on this effort, Alachua and Broward counties have confirmed they also received requests from the state.

One 16-year supervisor said the request was unprecedented. The state did not ask for rejected petitions, which have been the basis for past fraud cases….

Menasche later posted on Facebook that it was “obvious to me that a significant effort was exerted to determine if indeed I had signed the petition.” He told the Times that the officer who showed up at his door had a copy of Menasche’s driver’s license and other documents related to him.Menasche said he does not recall which agency the officer was with.

I’m so glad I live in a blue state.

That’s all I have for you today. Have a nice weekend!

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