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Rampop II wrote:
Oh man, you guys I strongly recommend watching the whole thing,
I watched the whole thing that Friday. I meant that I haven't "gone too deep" on writing a detailed take on it, mostly because, well, it speaks for itself, and also because I think that, like Jon Stewart above, the coverage has been adequate enough. Instead, I've been focused on pointing out aspects of the news cycle narrative which are misleadingly missing, such as the simultaneous air assaut escalation by Russia, or the complete lack of any public demands on Putin for concessions while publicly demanding several from Zelensky(y).
Rampop II wrote:
No wonder he "paused" military intelligence–sharing with Ukraine, enabling one of the deadliest strikes on Kyiv civilians thus far. Yes, it was absolutely out of spite.
No doubt it was spite, but in fact this record-setting missile/drone barrage actually commenced during the week prior to the Feb. 28th White House meeting, which, again, is essential context which was omitted from the vast majority of corporate news media coverage of that meeting. Which, as I pointed out previously, is why it was so absurd that Zelensky(y)'s pointing out the fact of Putin's constant breaking of cease-fire agreements would have been so provocative for Trump and Vance at that meeting. But surely this "pause" of military and intelligence aid since then has further hindered Ukraine's abilty to defend against these assaults.
Rampop II wrote:
Now as I'm writing this, fresh news is already coming off the press about Zelenskyy and Rubio in Saudi Arabia agreeing to a cease–fire framework.
I would like to believe that Rubio is more sympathetic to Zelensky and Ukraine that others in Trump's team (no, really, it's just a very comfortable sofa), but it was a smart move to take the initiative and put out the first cease-fire proposal, taking the high-ground and forcing Putin onto defense. It also effectively counters the false (insulting, really) counternarrative that Zelensky doesn't want peace.
And I'm sure that the Ukrainian people themselves fully support Zelensky, who has more than proven his valour in ways that Trump couldn't begin to process, as well as much of Europe, the sad fact, again as I pointed out recently, is that Zelensky really doesn't "have the cards", and is still stuck in a stalemate, even with American support, and that I'm sure he realizes that a cease-fire deal is far preferable than a bloody war without American support. This fact doesn't make Trump, or Vance, any less cruel for using the fact to publicly embarrass Zelensky on the world stage.
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I think Zelenskyy does hold at least one card, though, that being Ukraine's minerals, estimated at somewhere between 12 and 15 trillion USD. I think that's the real reason the maga–manbabies went into meltdown mode that day. They thought they had that treasure in the bag, only to discover they had popped the champagne prematurely. I don't think the embarrassment was Zelenskyy's, it was theirs.
Zelenskyy surely knows that if the US doesn't help Ukraine, those minerals will likely fall into Russia's hands, and the magats can kiss those riches goodbye. I think that's why he knew he could hold out, and I think that's why they got mad. They tried so hard to sweat him into believing he "had no cards," but they couldn't mask the fact that they were salivating for those minerals.
Of course, Trump says he only wants $500 billion worth of minerals, because hey, he's not greedy or anything, right? wink–wink. He just wants compensation — plus astronomical interest — for the roughly $180 billion in US support that Ukraine was never expected to pay back in the first place. And as many have pointed out, perhaps countries like Canada should likewise demand similar compensation from the US, for all their life and treasure sacrificed in Dubya's "coalition of the willing."
I confess I haven't watched the Jon Stewart episode yet, so I have no idea how much of what I've written is rehash of what Jon already said.
Last edited by Rampop II (3/12/2025 8:43 am)
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Rampop II wrote:
Zelenskyy surely knows that if the US doesn't help Ukraine, those minerals will likely fall into Russia's hands, and the magats can kiss those riches goodbye.
As I posted a couple of pages back, Putin has offered "joint support" to the US to help extract these minerals, and, indeed, invited the US to extract rare earth minerals within greater Russia as well. The problem is that MAGA does NOT see Putin as a competitor but as a partner. And the feeling seems to be mutual.
If Trump truly was interested in sticking it to Putin, then he would be calling for Russian reparations to pay for the war's damage, rather than the Ukraine. There's a very clear reason why he is not.
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While Trump has yet been unable to revoke constitutional birthright citizenship, he has taken one step closer to the ideal, by threatening the securities inherent in the status of "permanent residents", ie greed card holders, with the latest Kafka-esque arrest of pro-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil. The case itself - which currently involves no charges or accusations of illegal activity - is already a statutory affront, as an administration does not have the authority to revoke a legal green card without due process, and as nebulous as the only public allegation is against Khalil ("support" for Hamas), any evidence will need to be aired before a judge. But although this administration has no technical authority to deport permanent residents at their own discretion, they definitely tried here, only thankfully rebuked by a judge, Jesse Furman, who blocked the deportation and ordered an expeditied hearing. The fact that Khalil was moved from NYC to an ICE facility in Louisiana is scandalous in itself, an apparent attempt to prevent Khalil from having contact with his lawyer. This looks to be another, escalatory, attempt by the Trump administration to try a blatantly illegal move hoping that maybe they can get away with it before our legal system has a chance to catch up. "Better to apologize than ask permission." (Also, the additional fact that the ICE police didn't even know whether or not Khalil had a student visa or a green card, or the more astonsihing suggestion that the difference didn't matter, is also a daming indictment.)
Although it should go without saying that even some of the more abhorrent statements made by the fringe few during the campus protests last year are more than likely completely protected 1st Amendment speech (barring threats against specific individuals or certain threatening acts, such as painting red triangles on the homes of Jews in the middle of the night), Khalil doesn't seem to have personally crossed the threshold into criminal acts. In fact, for a supposed leader of the Columbia campus protests, it's remarkable how little I can find regarding any of his personal statements at all. Certainly there's no evidence of "material support" to Hamas (the statute which the administration mangled for his arrest), but, so far, the worst I can find which can be personally attributed to Khalil himself is a claim that he said "Zionists don't deserve to live", which, even prior to his arrest, Khalil "unequivocally denied" saying. Khalili appears to have been singled out by pro-Israel activists for some time, but, again, with virtually no evidence of any offense outside of possibly having some radical opinions around Palestine.
Rather than a provocateur, Khalil was a mediator between Columbia University and a student protest group called Columbia University Apartheid Divest. The problem here with ideological attribution is that CUAD is rather "a coalition of several dozen...student organizations that advocate for...financial divestment from Israel". Obviously, this alone is, again, completely 1st Amendment protected speech, and while at least one of the several dozen groups under this umbrella, Students for Justice in Palestine, has indeed venerated Hamas and celebrated the October 7th terrorism (which they call the beginning of the "Al-Aqsa Flood" and a "historic win", and, for more clarity, has even called for "the total collapse of the university structure and the American empire itself...to undermine and eradicate America as we know it" - all of which is as 1st Amendment protected as it is ill-conceived), there are other groups represented by CUAD, like the Columbia chapter of Amnesty International, who mostly certainly do not share these attitudes about Hamas or Oct. 7th. It is unknown, or at least I cannot currently find, whether Khalil sided more with one of these groups or the other. But someone who supports the financial divestment from Israel, as a protest against apartheid and occupation, is not necessarily either someone who supports Hamas or someone who supports the disestablishment of Israel. And all I can currently find is a review of certain instagram and substack posts under a 'CUAD' account which may involve some questionable positions (albeit 1st Amendment protected), but none of which appear to have any individual attribution as to who wrote them.
It might even be easy for me and others if Khalil did actually subscribe to some of the more extreme notions expressed in those posts, but for any rational-headed citizen, this should be absolutely horrifying. Thankfully, for now, it looks as if Judge Furman isn't inclined to appreciate either the case against Khalil or the manner in which he was apprehended and detained. We should know more by Friday.
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Jinnistan wrote:
We should know more by Friday.
Well, we still don't know too much, although there is a minor win in that the judge has ordered Khalil to be sent to New Jersey for his court hearing. This is still a compromise, however, as Khalil should stand in a NYC court as this was both the location of his arrest and whatever so-called crimes he is alleged to have committed. Trump's lawyers are skeptical of what they see as this liberal venue in the NYC Southern District, since this is where Trump lost all three of his cases tried there in recent years, so they asked for Khalil to stand in a more Trump-friendly court in Jersey instead.
But what has only been more fully reinforced in the week since, through the other major constitutional crisis ignited by Trump regarding his invocation of the Alien Enemies Act and openly defying a federal judge's order to halt those deportations, is that they were quite clearly trying to move Khalil out of the country before the courts had a chance to catch up with them. (A Trump spokesperson openly referenced this "little game of 'Catch Me If You Can'" to describe this judicial defiance.)
The big lie of invoking the Alien Enemies Act is that it was in any way necessary to their stated cause. Trump already has the authority to deport any legitimate member of a foreign criminal organization. And the Alien Enemies Act is a wartime resort, and we're not at war, not with Venezuela or El Salvador, not even under the vague form of a "declared invasion". The only plausible reason then to invoke this authority is to bypass the due process requirements of these suspected gang members - Trump's lawyers will not have to prove this criminal affiliation in court. So it's hardly a shock to learn that most of those people being deported on those planes did not have a criminal record, much less were actual gang members. For Trump's Red Queen, this only proves how dangerous these people actually are.
Thankfully, with the Khalil case, we haven't seen any similar moves to round up alleged "terrorists" among the pro-Palestinian protesters and shipping them overseas to escape any due process inconveniences - yet.
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Jinnistan wrote:
Jinnistan wrote:
We should know more by Friday.
Well, we still don't know too much, although there is a minor win in that the judge has ordered Khalil to be sent to New Jersey for his court hearing. This is still a compromise, however, as Khalil should stand in a NYC court as this was both the location of his arrest and whatever so-called crimes he is alleged to have committed. Trump's lawyers are skeptical of what they see as this liberal venue in the NYC Southern District, since this is where Trump lost all three of his cases tried there in recent years, so they asked for Khalil to stand in a more Trump-friendly court in Jersey instead.
But what has only been more fully reinforced in the week since, through the other major constitutional crisis ignited by Trump regarding his invocation of the Alien Enemies Act and openly defying a federal judge's order to halt those deportations, is that they were quite clearly trying to move Khalil out of the country before the courts had a chance to catch up with them. (A Trump spokesperson openly referenced this "little game of 'Catch Me If You Can'" to describe this judicial defiance.)
The big lie of invoking the Alien Enemies Act is that it was in any way necessary to their stated cause. Trump already has the authority to deport any legitimate member of a foreign criminal organization. And the Alien Enemies Act is a wartime resort, and we're not at war, not with Venezuela or El Salvador, not even under the vague form of a "declared invasion". The only plausible reason then to invoke this authority is to bypass the due process requirements of these suspected gang members - Trump's lawyers will not have to prove this criminal affiliation in court. So it's hardly a shock to learn that most of those people being deported on those planes did not have a criminal record, much less were actual gang members. For Trump's Red Queen, this only proves how dangerous these people actually are.
Thankfully, with the Khalil case, we haven't seen any similar moves to round up alleged "terrorists" among the pro-Palestinian protesters and shipping them overseas to escape any due process inconveniences - yet.
What I'm presently trying to grapple with, because I don't know anything, is....do these court rulings ultimately even matter if (once) Trump decides he isn't abiding by courts?
Cant' he just immediately pardon anyone who does whatever illegal acts he wants them to do?
And isn't he basically above the law while he is in office, as long as he is doing acts in his official duty (which can nearly be anything)?
What keeps him within the bounds of the rulings of judges if he eventually decides he doesn't care to be bound. Because my gut feeling is nothing.
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Also, I heard in an interview with Chuck Schumer post flameout talking about Trump's approval ratings. Something about 40 percent and how they are waiting for that very specific moment. That eventually Trump will screw up and his approval will drop to 40 or below, and only then, they will pounce.
So what are the odds that this is the number he has discussed with possibly 'on the bubble' Republicans, ones who might agree to turn against Trump if he falls below a certain threshold. I'm asking because I absolutely have to believe there is some plan to do something out there, anything, and that maybe it's all just out of view for now, just below the surface. Some kind of plan to save us that won't turn out to be a basic Democratic Party wet fart. That could, in a perfect storm scenario, actually have teeth to get this fuckbag out of office? Or handcuff him. Or give him a mysterious brain aneuryism?
Zero percent chance, you say?
Yeah, that's what I thought.
*pets cat and stares into the abyss*
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I guess Jon Stewart didn't quite come to the rescue this week. Not surprisingly, he chose to go after the easy and easily-mockable target of Chuck Schumer, whose inactive method of what James Carville described as "playing dead" finally caught up to him as he actually tried to act surprised that the Republicans railroaded their budget through almost as if that's exactly what they said they were going to do for months.
I can't get mad about any of that though, but I was maybe hoping that Stewart might try to address any of the other more frightening constitutional issues which Trump has sprung over the past week of Stewart's vacation. And it's unfortunate that the Friday night news cycle, and virtually the entire weekend, was so wholly consumed with Schumer's soft-boiled attempt at a backbone, because Friday also saw a far more disturbing event, one which should not only have commanded as much attention but I believe will be one of those 'history book' moments whose date will infamously live long after students have forgotten who Chuck Schumer even is. I speak of course of Donald Trump's speech at the Department of Justice, destined to be considered a touchstone of our nation's increasingly rapid descent into fascism. What makes this speech more disturbing than any old fascistic Trump speech is the venue - presidents have rarely given such political speechs before their Justice Departments, a long-standing custom to when presidents strove to maintain a sense of independence and impartiality for their law enforcement apparatus. Ironic, if not so cynical, in that after years of feigning persecution from politicized law enforcement at the hands of his Democrat enemies, Trump, with the recent blessing of his Suprme Court, is in no small words announcing to the nation his full intent to wield his Justice Department as his own personal vendetta-hatchet, undoing many decades of legal norms going back at least to Nixon. ("Those days are over, and they're never coming back.") He laid out in detail his grievances, again repeating the lie that the 2020 election had been stolen from him, and vowing to put a lot of people in jail. Or as subtle as simply suggesting that "the people who did this to us should go to jail", as if his Justice Department employees will not take this as a tacit order.
And not simply political enemies, but his many critics as well, "It's illegal what they do". But at other times, he's more cagey, "it should be illegal", "it's probably illegal". This is because Trump does not understand or respect the rule of law, and as his recent declaration of being "the chief law enforcement officer in the country", a phrase which Trump has already said more times than any other president in American history, he feels that he is the law. This Dodge City Sheriff mentality that he has a special privilege to say what the law is and isn't, his enemies are America's enemies, enemies of the people, enemies of the state. Do you think it's a coincidence that Trump is now emboldened to unilaterally designate who is or isn't a criminal, a terrorist, as we've seen in his immigrant deportation policies? He calls it "illegal" and "interference" for the media to criticize his judges, while wasting little time to call for the impeachment of "radical lunatic" judges who dare rule against him.
Another factor in Trump's recent assault on legal standards which deserves more attention are the executive orders he's filed against specific law firms. Probably the one with the most attention has been Perkins Coie, which is the firm which outsorced its 'oppositional research' that would become the notorious Steele Dossier. Not that there's ever been any evidence that Perkins Coie, or any of the lawyers at the firm, were involved with the actual production of that dossier, the collecting of intelligence and information comprising it, or involved at all with its eventual dissemination. But nonetheless, Trump has revoked the security clearances of the firm and barred their lawyers from entering any federal buildings - which for a Washington DC law firm is equivalent to putting them out of business for good.
Even if you happen to find some kind of sympathy for Trump for wanting to lash out at a law firm associated with something embarrassing (and, indeed, likely fallacious) as a Putin pee tape, and you don't want to bother the already flailing news outlet Buzzfeed, who actually was responsible for publishing the dossier, this offensive against Perkins Coie is still nowhere near as petty as Trump's attacks on firms like Covington & Burling, who made the grave mistake of representing Special Counsel Jack Smith. Or against the firm Paul Weiss for representing other high-profile Democrats, and some associates who worked on the Mueller investigation, and a "former partner" (who hasn't worked there for over a decade) who helped to prosecute Trump's "hush money" trial in NYC. Even if these orders haven't caught the attention of our corporate media, much less the American public, they certainly have deeply shaken the legal establishment sufficiently to even rattle the right-libertarian Cato Institute into condemning the move. And it's very telling that for someone like Trump, who claims to have won his "landslide" election based at least partially on his so-called avowed defense of "free speech" that he's now trying to use his own brand of 'lawfare' to shutter law firms based purely on 1st Amendment-protected activities, not to even mention his talking about "illegal" media more generally, or arresting 1st Amendment-protected protesters.
For Trump supporters, you have to be pretty damn stupid to still say you believe this man's integrity. Or, more likely, you just have to be mean enough to say that his integrity isn't the point. As a very much non-Trump supporter, I don't see why we're still lying to ourselves that Trump voters are more stupid than mean.
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crumbsroom wrote:
What I'm presently trying to grapple with, because I don't know anything, is....do these court rulings ultimately even matter if (once) Trump decides he isn't abiding by courts?
That's the bridge we're all still waiting to cross. Trump loves a cliffhanger. In an interview with Laura Ingraham, she asked him point blank, "Would you defy a court order?" And he answers, "I never have.....but these are bad judges."
It's also kinda funny - if you divorce yourself from the reality a bit - that Trump was also asked about the statement issued by John Roberts, clearly addressed to Trump's recent social media posting about impeaching Judge Boasberg (of the Salvador/Venezualan deportations), reasonably saying that impeachment isn't the proper process for judicial disagreement. Trump just said, "He didn't mention my name....I just saw it quickly". Which means he just scanned the quote for his own name and disregarded it when he didn't find it there.
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And then lastly, on the Ukraine/Putin peace deal, Trump was ecstatic that Putin agreed to a ceasefire "on energy and civilian infrastructure".
And Putin himself was so elated that he immediately bombed a civilian hospital to celebrate.
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A couple of other sorely underreported international stories:
One of the primary war crimes with which Putin has been charged by the International Criminal Court was Russia's kidnapping of Ukrainian children - estimated at over 20.000 - who were then relocated into Russia and forced through a sham foster care system, "reeducated" so to speak, and doled out as adoptions to new Russian parents. Very quietly last week, the Trump administration cut funding to the Yale University non-profit, the Humanitarian Research Lab, which had assisted the UN in its efforts to fact-find the full extent of these crimes, including identifying some 300+ children and using US government satellite imagsry to track these forced relocations. Worse than that, Trump's State Department may have also deleted the HRL's database containing all of their collected evidence. There were some headlines yesterday about how Zelensky brought up the subject of Ukrainian children in his phone call with Trump, but most of these stories ignored the crucial context of why he would have done so in light of these recent moves to help Putin cover-up his war crimes.
......
And while this isn't strictly speaking a Trump/MAGA story, it still has some very compelling parallels. This week has also seen a commencement of Israeli hostilities on the ground in Gaza, and again most of the American based coverage has been ignoring the underlying story over why that is. In short, Netanyahu is in some deep shit, and he's firing the head of the Shin Bet - Israel's equivalent to the FBI - because the Shin Bet was threatening both to unveil Netanyahu's complicity for the Oct. 7th attacks as well as Netanyahu's corrupt connections to shady financiers in Qatar. To complicate that further, Netanyahu is also threatening to fire his Attorney General, who had intervened to point out that the firing of the Shin Bet chief happened to be illegal. This spurred thousands of Israelis into the streets for protests on Tuesday, decrying Netanyahu's increasingly autocratic posturing, including his own on-going feud with their Supreme Court chief Isaac Amit. The Israeli press is openly describing Netanyahu as "emulating" President Trump in his actions and rhetoric. In addition to using the renewed ground assault in Gaza as a convenient distraction from his legal problems, Netanyahu may also be inspired by trying to deflect momentum for a promising new peace proposal from Egypt for the reconstruction of Gaza and the implementation of an independent Palestinian state which would disenfranchise Hamas. As I've said before, Hamas and Netanyahu are brothers-in-arms in their mutual exploitation of Palestinian suffering, and Netanyahu is far more interested in bombing innocent Palestinian civilians than in trying to solve the Hamas problem.
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I hate seeing every single interview with a Democrat politician these days, and they're all asked "Who's the leader of the party?" and watching these schmucks shrug or say blandly "We have so many". No you don't
You have exactly two. Fucking embrace them.
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Speaking of Bernie, this was a classic "soup's getting cold" moment where he cuts an interview with ABC News short because, rather than talk about the agenda Sanders is pushing at his huge "Fighting Oligarchy" rallies, ABC (who represents Oligarchy, which is why they matter-of-factly denied the existence of price-gouging last year) was more concerned about trying to get a viral clip of Bernie commenting about AOC possibly primary-ing Chuck Schumer. Bernie lost his patience, "You want to do nonsense, you do nonsense....I have 32,000 people waiting." After coaxing Sanders back to his seat, promising not to ask another "inside beltway" question, ABC humiliates themselves by asking about a possible Sanders presidential run in 2028. I don't know if this clip, as seen here, ran this morning on the ABC Sunday morning show, but I hope it did, just so their audience can see exactly why corporate media is completely titless right now.
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In true fashion, looking at typical news headlines of Bernie Sanders interview this morning for ABC News seem focused on defining the narrative as sympathetically as possible towards Trump and the current administration, by suggesting Sanders' support for Trump's immigration policies. Even though the actual news article beneath that headline revealed Sanders as far more nuanced, shall we say: "He wants to deport 20 million people who are in this country who are undocumented. Well, you do that, you destroy the entire country." Instead, the impression from the headline is that Bernie Sanders is generally on board with Trump's immigration efforts.
This is a new type of "Bernie-washing" we're seeing in politics, where corporatist interests are using Bernie Sanders as a means of filtering politics which Bernie does not support, or more plainly as a method of confusing and distracting those most receptive to Bernie's economic policies.
Gavin Newsom is a good example of this type of distraction recently, as he defended his bizarre effort to court Republican influencers on his own podcast (as if being governor of California he didn't have more important things to do). One of these recent guests was Steve Bannon, and Newsom explained his defense for this fat gutted bastard thusly, "It reminds me a lot of what Bernie Sanders was saying. It reminded me a lot of what Democrats said 20, 30 years ago." Abject bullshit. Even if we were to draw the very narrow parallels between Bannon and Bernie, say in their mourning of the decline of the middle-class manufacturing sector, that Venn Diagram starts to spread far and wide outside of that margin when it comes to very basic things like racism and xenophobia (ie, the very immigration debate which corporate media is now pretending that Sanders supports), the utility of robust public investment and the "administrative state", our support for NATO and the EU, or the very survival of liberal democracy itself. In other words, it takes a lot of cognitive muscle to try and pretend as if there's any significant agreement betwen Bannon and Sanders to begin with. But maybe this is made easier by ignoring the actual substance of Sanders' speeches at his recent "Fight Oligarchy" rallies? Instead focusing on the kind of beltway drama illustrated by ABC above?
One other thing worth calling out here is the claim that "Bannon hates Elon Musk and the oligarchy". Now it might be true that Musk and Bannon dislike each other because their respective egos cannot fit in the same room at the same time, but let's be clear on Bannon's real opinion of Musk's DOGE efforts: "DOGE is on fire, and as you know, I fully support Elon on DOGE and cutting the government." So, mainstream media? Some perspective, please?
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*cue Curb tuba*
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Some updates on Trump's various assaults on the legal system:
Judge Boasberg doesn't appear to be taking any gruff, and is maintaining that Trump cannot invoke the Alien Enemies Act to indiscriminately deport hundreds of Venezuelans to an El Salvador prison with documented human rights abuses, because 1) we're not at war, and there's no real "invasion", which are the standards of the already antiquated law; and, it seems nobody is willing to actually go on the record to take responsibility for authorizing the invocation - remarkably not even Trump himself who, in a positive sign that he's finally blinking in this constitutional game of judicial chicken, is apparently denying that he had anything to do with it, despite that the law requires the president alone to invoke the law, and despite that his signature appears to be on the order invoking it. But although the vase is broken, Trump wasn't reeeally running: "I don’t know when it was signed because I didn’t sign it...Other people handled it". In case you missed the crucial detail, this order invoking the Alien Enemies Act was somehow mysteriously signed in the middle of the night last weekend ("in the dark" as Boasberg put it) so even though Trump's signature is on the order there were no witnesses to the signing, and this is one of those ambiguous details that Judge Boasberg is demanding more information on, because this is why it was such a time-crunch for the judge to order the halt of the deportation plans. Or as a Trump spokseperson put it, "a little game of Catch Me if You Can...the judge wasn't able to catch us on this one." But it doesn't really matter whether Trump signed it or not (perhaps using the autopen?) What matters is that Trump's denial itself is a sign that he's backing down from the fight.
......
But Trump is also escalating his other major constitutional game of chicken, involving his attempt to use his executive orders to target and disenfranchise any law firms which he feels have crossed him. This was compounded when the firm of Paul Weiss, instead of standing their ground and fighting what is clearly a capricious assault on their 1st Amendment protected practices of choosing which clients they wish to defend, chose to fold in the face of this abject shakedown and agree to offering $40 million worth of pro bono work for "causes the Trump administration supports". This development has been explosive in the legal profession, but strangely absent from the corporate Sunday talk shows this week (probably because these networks have or are facing similar legal coercive threats against them, and ABC's Disney bosses have already conceded that fight.) Still, the reactions are frank: "Absolutely shameful and spineless behavior", "This is a time for soul-searching", "It’s not too late to leave your firm and find one with a backbone", "abject cowardice". More significantly, this will only give Trump the fuel to continue such extortion going forward, as he displayed last night with a brand new call to target any law firms who would dare represent clients filing suits against his administration's policies, using nonsensical language such as "unethical misconduct" and "actions that violate the laws", neither of which were committed by the law firms Trump has yet targeted. Unless it's unethical or illegal for Covington & Burling to represent Jack Smith as a client. "The law firms that we’re going after, that went after me for four years ruthlessly, violently, illegally". Again, with Trump the Law is whatever he says it is, and anything that goes against him must be illegal by definition. (The "violently" is the best though, because what are words anyway? At Trump's DoJ speech, he also referred to Norm Eisen, the founder of public interest law firm Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, as "violent" as well, which is hilarious for anyone who has ever seen this mild-mannered academic in an interview.) "Frivolous, unreasonable, and vexatious".
The problem with such capitulation is that any lawyer on this scale of an international firm should be aware that the law happens to be overwhelmingly on their side, a truth reflected in the reaction from Judge Beryl Howell in placing an injunction on the order against Perkins Coie: "It sends little chills down my spine. Why shouldn’t we be chilled by this?" The order “threatens to significantly undermine our entire legal system and the ability of all people to access justice". It is “a means of retaliating against Perkins Coie,” as well as Trump “using taxpayer dollars for a personal vendetta.” Naturally, Trump and his goons are now calling for Judge Howell to be removed from the case. But even the Wall Street Journal, which has admirably been steadfast in its own conservative principles (as opposed to MAGA hysterics), has been quite clear on the matter: "Mr. Trump’s order is now targeting the law firm for representing clients Mr. Trump dislikes. He is trying to defenestrate Perkins Coie to intimidate elite law firms from representing his opponents or plaintiffs who challenge his policies. This violates a bedrock principle of American law, which is that even the worst clients deserve representation."
Speaking of the Sunday shows, I will give ABC some credit. They did air the above clip with Bernie putting his foot down, and they should get credit for covering the 'Fight Oligarchy' rallies at all. (Meet The Press did not mention them a single time.) And at least one of the ABC panelists, a Republican, did manage to get a mention towards the end of the episode about these unprecedented attacks on the legal community: "This is the most under-covered story of the administration....This is a retribution story. It is the first time that we have seen the president actually use his power to go after a perceived political foe with all the powers of the federal government behind him, and then use that to threaten everyone else who might consider going behind him. We have not seen a united front from the law firms to say what they're going to do about this, but the result will be that future potential targets of the administration or issues the administration wants to pursue may have trouble getting the counsel of their choice."
But here's the more important quote from Trump on the matter: "Well, the law firms all want to make deals". Right. It's a shakedown, pure and simple. Let's not act like we don't understand what's going on here.
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I will give credit, even for a right-center publication, for a good unassuming joke in the coverage. So Brett Samuels at The Hilll, cheers for this nugg:
"Trump last week also called for an end to nationwide injunctions, suggesting the Supreme Court should intervene in some fashion."
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Looks like the plot has thickened by several degrees today (no pun intended) on the topic of pro–Palestinian students:
Maybe by now we've all seen the video of Turkish Tufts University student Rumeysa Ozturk being nabbed off the street in Massachusetts Tuesday night (3/25/25) by a half–dozen people in masks, with no word of her whereabouts until she showed up on an ICE detainee database tonight (Wednesday 3/26/25) as being held in an ICE processing center in Louisiana — in defiance of a US district judge's orders that she not be moved out of Massachusetts without 48hrs notice — with DHS accusing her of being "engaged in activities in support of Hamas."
So far, the only "activity" she is known to have engaged in is co–authoring an op–ed in her university newspaper last year regarding resolutions passed by the university's community union senate, demanding certain actions of the university president regarding Israel's war in Palestine. So I read the op–ed, and if this is all it takes, well, everyone is using the word "chilling" and I think that's appropriate.
Meanwhile back on the Columbia University story, protest organizers including Khalil are now being accused in a lawsuit of having prior knowledge of the October 7 attack, and operating as a propaganda arm of Hamas.
Oh, and then there's this; totally unrelated, just a little hair of the dog for the ongoing hangover.
EDIT: Silly me, how could I forget:
Republicans have a plan for filling all those jobs left vacant by deported migrant workers. Just loosen restrictions on child labor even more.
Last edited by Rampop II (3/27/2025 2:09 am)
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Rampop II wrote:
So I read the op–ed, and if this is all it takes, well, everyone is using the word "chilling" and I think that's appropriate.
One word that definitely isn't there is "Hamas".
Rampop II wrote:
Meanwhile back on the Columbia University story, protest organizers including Khalil are now being accused in a lawsuit of having prior knowledge of the October 7 attack, and operating as a propaganda arm of Hamas.
Tenuous at best. Someone tweeted something in Khalil's proximity. There was also the recent smear of uncovering his once upon a time "unpaid internship" with the United Nations charity UNRWA, as if this proves a damn thing. The UNRWA is hardly a terrorist organization, and even if - what?,,,17? - members of that organization were found to be complicit in Oct. 7th, out of an organization of 30,000, and Khalil wasn't even in the hemisphere at the time. I'm sure that if Trump's folks could pin some substance on this guy they absolutely would have by now.
....
There's been a handful of these types of abductions, and we're likely to hear more as Rubio said today that up to 300 student visas have been revoked. Another brave story is the South Korean Yunseo Chung, also a green card holder and permanent resident, being threatened with deportation for simply attending pro-Palestinian rallies.
.....
About the only laugh in all of this is that the case over the recent Signal....let's call it a mishap...has been assigned to the same Judge Boasberg.
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There are some intriguing angles to take on the whole Signal debacle. The question of what is and isn't "classified", and more precisely the argument of what should be considered such, gets a bit daft when we keep in mind that just a few days prior, the Trump team was making a big thing about investigating what they were supposing was a more significant leak of classified information, that being the reported contradiction in intelligence reports about the claims being made regarding this Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua, seemingly undermining the pretense for invoking the Alien Enemies Act at all in the midst of this deportation urgency. The funny thing is that this classified information which the NT Times reported on is both "false" and "nevertheless classified", at least enough to provoke a DoJ investigation, I guess. Arguably, the details that the Justice Department is currently denying to state in court, in front of Judge Boasberg, concerning these deportations, is far too sensitive a matter to air in front of the former FISA judge.
But the targets and times and munitions and that one (thankfully?) unnamed CIA guy described in the Signal group chat of a US military strike isn't considered "classified"? I mean, I'm sure we all know how stupid this is, but I've developed a kind of empathy for the professionals who have to act like this is just another season of House of Cards for the cable news viewers.
I appreciate Pete Hegseth's totally sober proclamation that "I know exactly what I'm doing".
"Why is everybody trying to run my life?" - Richard Pryor