Trump's assault on American democracy. Now that gerrymandering has failed as a strategy for hanging onto power, I eagerly await Trump's next move.
Climate change. Check out George Manbiot's column on the possible collapse of the the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation.
The Iran/Lebanon War. Formal peace talks aren't happening. Saturday, Trump told Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff to stay home for now. Iran is offering to re-open the Strait of Hormuz to end the war, essentially offering Trump no gain from it.
Ukraine. Here's the Institute for the Study of War's current update.
This week's developments
This week everybody was talking about gerrymandering
and the shooting at the White House Correspondents' Dinner
Saturday, a gunman fired several shots during the dinner, which President Trump and many other administration officials were attending. The shots were audible inside the ballroom, but none of the guests were injured.
From a pure how-could-this-happen point of view, I found the analysis at the Doomsday Scenario blog informative and down to Earth. Garrett Graff is a journalist who has attended past WHC dinners and has written extensively about presidential security. He thinks the security plan worked pretty well: It's unreasonable to expect the Secret Service to lock down an entire hotel that has multiple unrelated events and guests, so the goal is to stop would-be attackers well before they get within range of the president. That's what happened Saturday.
My political response is that I'm glad the attack was unsuccessful. Anyone who reads this blog regularly knows that I consider the Trump regime to be the greatest threat to American democracy since the Civil War, and I have no great affection for Trump as a person. But I think we're on track to restore the constitutional order through the electoral system, as the Founders intended and as Hungary has recently done. Anything that sends us off on a violent trajectory is a risk I'd rather not take.
Speaking frankly, the attack was fortuitously timed for Trump, perhaps breaking a cycle that sees his popularity touch new lows with each poll. Given the boost his 2024 campaign got from a failed assassination attempt, it's hard not to be suspicious. But I'm not going to push any conspiracy theories unless substantial evidence presents itself. I'd be far more suspicious if the shooter hadn't survived to tell his own story.
Dean Blundell (who is a little too rabidly anti-Trump for my taste) noted that it only took minutes to start the talking point that "This is why the White House needs its own ballroom."
Predictably, the media is asking Democrats if they regret their anti-Trump rhetoric, and completely ignoring the overall rhetorical environment. Trump himself is by far the greatest source of inflammatory rhetoric, often referring to his opponents or critics as insane or treasonous.
and the war
Not much new to say. Trump continues to want to dictate terms to Iran as if he had won the war. Iran doesn't feel defeated and won't be dictated to. The Obama agreement that Trump tore up looks better and better all the time.
Everyone more-or-less agrees on the basic facts: The SPLC paid people to infiltrate various right-wing and white-supremacist groups, as it has done for decades. Since their agents were undercover, the SPLC didn't publicize their work. DOJ is charging that this was a fraud against SPLC's contributors. I haven't given money to the SPLC in years, but I'm still probably fairly representative of their donors. I would not feel defrauded.
Remember the Afghans who are in trouble with the Taliban because they helped us? We've got 1100 of them housed at a military base in Qatar, and we've made them this amazing offer: Go to the Congo or go home to the Taliban.
Canary Media makes the case against biofuels, which sound like a great idea but often aren't. Not only do biofuel crops (like corn) have a high carbon footprint in the US, but internationally they encourage cropland expansion that results in deforestation. Sadly, both parties have latched onto biofuels as a good idea.
Democrats need a new approach to agriculture, focused less on the 1% of Americans who farm and more on the 100% who eat. That would mean redistributing less money from ordinary taxpayers to the biggest farmers who grow the most common row crops, while also opposing the tariffs, price supports, and biofuel mandates that raise prices at the supermarket. Let Trump stand for giving farmers “much better than a level playing field.” Democrats should stand with everybody else.
Small farmers are in trouble this year: Thanks to the closing of the Strait of Hormuz, fertilizer and diesel fuel costs are way up. Most farmers voted for Trump.
Trump and his allies have been having a hard time in court. Laura Loomer's $150 million lawsuit against Bill Maher (for saying on his comedy show that Trump "might be" f**king Loomer) was thrown out -- at least partly because of evidence the claim was true.
And a federal judge appears skeptical of Trump's $10 billion shake-down of the Treasury. He's suing the IRS because some of his tax information got leaked to the media during his first term. Conceivably there might be damage there, but nothing like $10 billion. But that's not what's bothering the judge: Since Trump oversees the IRS, he controls both sides of the litigation. He is essentially in a position to award himself money.
The No Kings protester who dressed as a penis holding a "No Dick Tater" sign is not guilty of whatever police in Fairhope, Alabama tried to charge her with. Attempting to show the woman was trying to get arrested, the prosecution called her husband to the stand as a surprise witness, and asked if he had brought bail money to the protest.
“I always make sure I have bail money!” Fletcher replied emphatically, as if this should be the most obvious thing in the world. Did he have bail money on him now? “Yeah!” Fletcher exclaimed, then gestured broadly. “With this many cops around? Come on.” The room erupted with laughter.
Woe to those who manipulate religion and the very name of God for their own military, economic and political gain, dragging that which is sacred into darkness and filth.
Trump's assault on American democracy. The Justice Department is working increasingly hard to support Trump's conspiracy theories about rigged elections.
Climate change. Rising sea levels is looking like a bigger problem than previously thought.
The Iran/Lebanon war. The Strait is closed again. Trump wants us to believe that he'll achieve a victory-like peace any day now. But it's not happening.
Ukraine. Ukraine is coping with its shortage of soldiers by fielding more robots.
This week's developments
This week everybody was talking about the war
Last week I predicted that Trump's anti-blockade-blockade would fail to convince Iran's leaders they are defeated.
In a few days it will be clear that this move didn’t work either, so Trump will go back to threatening to kill Iran’s “whole civilization“.
We’re offering a very fair and reasonable DEAL, and I hope they take it because, if they don’t, the United States is going to knock out every single Power Plant, and every single Bridge, in Iran. NO MORE MR. NICE GUY!
I see no end in sight here. Trump won't stop the bombing until he has an agreement he can spin as a victory, and there is no victory to be had. So he will keep doing what he's been doing: destroying stuff and killing people, then stopping the bombing and announcing that Iran has made concessions it hasn't actually made, then getting angry when Iran doesn't do what he said they would do, then resuming the destruction and killing.
I am amazed the news media and the stock market keep taking Trump's statements seriously. Thursday, for example, he claimed Iran had agreed to give up its enriched uranium. The claim got lots of headlines and a rise out of the stock market, which set records on Friday. But it was just a fantasy, so Sunday we're back to threatening to commit war crimes.
Meanwhile, Trump's approval is not exactly "cratering", as some claim. Rather, it's just inexorably headed downward, week by week. It's not any one development that's turning people around. Rather, it's the unending bad decisions and outrageous behavior. Every day brings something new. Half the country now disapproves "strongly" of his overall performance, with another 13% disapproving "somewhat".
and Trump vs. the Pope
I would like to ignore the Trump-versus-Pope story, because it's another one of those stories that gets people wound up for no real purpose. (I mean: If Trump were generally governing justly and well, but just couldn't get along with the Pope, it wouldn't bother me.) But I have to comment on the ridiculous ways Trump's sycophants have tried to support him. Nominally a Catholic himself, J. D. Vance warned:
I think it’s very, very important for the pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology.
To understand why the USA is where it is today, all you need to do is see that Trump cannot tolerate even the mildest, insightful criticism from the Pope, but Trump will allow Putin to humiliate him deeply and constantly, while still craving Putin’s approval.
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As predicted last week, Eric Swalwell hasn't just ended his campaign for governor of California, he has resigned from Congress. Simultaneously, Republican Tony Gonzales resigned. He's the guy whose female staffer committed suicide after Gonzales pressured her for sex. The cases proceeded at very different speeds: The Swalwell allegations only surfaced about a week before his resignation. Gonzales had been in trouble since September.
Remember the Dreamers, undocumented people who were brought to America as small children and know no other country? Giving them a path to citizenship has been popular since the Obama administration first offered them protection. Well, Trump's ICE has deported 174 of them.
ICE is doing a better job of avoiding headlines than it did pre-Minneapolis. But it is still a lawless gang of thugs. A federal judge in the Eastern District of New York explains his release order for two men unlawfully detained:
Respondents [i.e., ICE] have arrested individuals, detained them, and then afterwards issued arrest warrants that document the basis for the arrest. Sadly, ICE’s own “testimony confirmed that this illegal practice has become standard procedure for ICE enforcement efforts in this district.” ... Police and law enforcement cannot operate as roving bands, detaining individuals, figuring out the reasons later, and papering over their failures afterwards. This sadly is the practice in many other parts of the world. But in the United States, the law prohibits such conduct.
Charter schools have to maintain a lot of public school standards (like admitting anyone), but they benefit from massive donations from rich supporters. They have better, newer facilities than legacy public schools.
Private schools can pick and choose students, so they get state money while avoiding expensive special ed students and students considered "disruptive". They grow, and also become a destination for white flight, as well as for parents who consider the public schools dangerous.
Public schools lose students and funding, and have to worry about closing.
The Trump regime is stacking the deck in order to get more indictments of his perceived enemies. They have defined a "grand conspiracy" case that claims all the investigations of Trump's illegal acts were part of a single plot, and they are pushing that case in a Florida district where corrupt Trump judge Aileen Cannon can oversee it. They've fired the career prosecutor and replaced her with a Trump puppet.
Utah is constructing a 1300-bed facility for the homeless. It's seven miles from Salt Lake City's center and isn't planned to include public transportation. Common Dreams fears it could become a forced-labor camp.
The war has accelerated or made evident a trend that was already there, which is that the whole Trump administration is about a kind of rebalancing of power, so that we are less powerful and our rivals are more powerful.
Trump's assault on American democracy. The Hungarian election has no direct effect on the US, but Viktor Orbán's landslide defeat (after Trump and Vance pulled out all the tops to support him) has to worry the Trump regime. Orbán was the prototype, and he failed.
Climate change. The difficulty opening the Strait of Hormuz and the resulting $100-per-barrel oil should motivate more countries to transition away from fossil fuels.
Israel/Palestine. The focus of conflict has moved to Lebanon, where Israel is applying a tactic it used in Gaza: domicide, i.e., to "systematically destroy and damage civilian housing to render entire areas uninhabitable".
Ukraine. One winner from the Hungarian election is Ukraine. Orbán was Putin's man in the EU, and his objection was standing in the way of the EU making a 90 billion euro loan to Ukraine.
Epstein. The Iran War had gotten the Epstein scandal out of the headlines, but Melania put if back in. What was she thinking?
This week's developments
This week everybody was talking about the "peace" talks with Iran
One downside of taking a vacation is that I have missed my chance to say "I told you so" about the ceasefire and negotiations, because I did not in fact tell you so. During my vacation I told other people that Trump would announce a fake ceasefire, falsely claim that Iran had agreed to all kinds of concessions, and then resume the war when the reality became clear. But I have no written record to point to.
The reality is this: Trump badly miscalculated when he started this war. American air power can destroy anything it wants in Iran (other than the deeply buried uranium stocks), but it can't make the Iranians surrender.
Trump, though, lives an in alternate reality where his power is absolute. J. D. Vance's mission was doomed from the start because he went to Islamabad not to negotiate peace, but to dictate terms to an enemy Trump falsely insists is defeated. Vance explained his failure: "They have chosen not to accept our terms." Of course they wouldn't. As pummeled as Iran's military currently is, the nation is not defeated. Defeating them will require either hundreds of thousands of ground troops or a willingness to commit genocide.
Increasingly, however, Trump's alternate reality is being taken seriously in mainstream media. After Vance's entirely predictable failure, The Washington Post wrote:
The involvement of Vice President JD Vance had raised hopes around the world that the weekend negotiations in Pakistan would solidify the ceasefire with Iran and put an end to the war within reach.
The WaPo article went on to describe Vance as "President Donald Trump’s most high-profile war skeptic", which is probably how Vance will try to pitch himself in 2028. But there is no evidence that his pre-war self-description as a "skeptic of foreign military interventions" actually resulted in any protest once Trump started bombing.
As many people have reported, Trump went into the war with his Venezuela adventure as a model: A quick decapitation strike would convince the new leaders to do whatever Trump wanted.
Trump understood the Venezuelan leaders, because fundamentally they are like him: They are interested primarily in their own wealth and power, so there is nothing they are willing to die for. Iran's leaders, on the other hand, are willing to lose everything including their lives. So Trump has no idea how to deal with them.
So Trump's latest idea is to blockade the Strait of Hormuz himself. He didn't like the idea that Iran could profit by charging tolls on the Strait, so he's going to block everything, no matter what that does to the price of oil. And that would make sense if the Iranian leaders were motivated by profit the way Trump is. But they're not, so Trump is essentially doing their job for them: Iran intended to disrupt the world economy by driving up the price of oil, and now Trump is helping them do it.
In a few days it will be clear that this move didn't work either, so Trump will go back to threatening to kill Iran's "whole civilization".
Two points:
Ending a country's "civilization" is a war crime. And since the world does not recognize a Nuremberg defense ("I was just following orders"), Trump will be involving members of the American military in war crimes. If anyone you care about is in the military, this should worry you.
Like Netanyahu before him, Trump has fallen for the fallacy that if your opponent is evil, you can't become the bad guy. But you can. Hamas is certainly evil, but nonetheless Netanyahu became the bad guy in the Gaza War. The Iranian regime is likewise evil. But if Trump's unprovoked attack on Iran turns genocidal, he will be the bad guy.
For a high-level view of the Iran War and its place in geo-political strategy, I recommend listening to an hour-long conversation between Timothy Snyder (author of On Tyranny) and Phillips O'Brien (author of War and Power). That's where the quote at the top comes from.
One scary conclusion they come to: The Iran War proves we would lose a non-nuclear war with China over Taiwan. Modern war is less about the big, expensive systems the US military is based on and more about manufacturing large numbers of cheap drones and similar devices. In World War II, the US was "the arsenal of democracy", because we could manufacture planes, tanks, ships, and other munitions in larger quantities than anyone else. We've lost that edge. In the Iran War, we are firing advanced munitions like Tomahawk and Patriot missiles many times faster than we can build them.
Conversely, if you want to manufacture large numbers of things quickly today, where do you go? China. In a war with China, if we couldn't win in a week, we would run out of weapons and lose.
Snyder and O'Brien both like the nonprofit foundation Come Back Alive, which supplies the Ukrainian military. As they describe it, CBA connects what the Ukrainians need to garage-level workshops that make drones and anti-drone tech. Their tech evolves constantly and is currently some of the best in the world.
The goal, at least immediately, is not a Hitler/Stalin style dictatorship where political opponents can be killed at will or arrested and sent to concentration camps. Instead, the government establishes a soft autocracy that maintains the appearance of freedom and democracy, but stacks the deck in ways that prevent the formation of any effective opposition. Vox sums up:
The basic goal was to create a system where the government doesn’t have to formally rig elections, in the sense of stuffing ballot boxes. It could generally rely on the background unfairness of the system, the structural disadvantages opposition parties face, to reliably maintain a constitutional majority. Political scientists call this kind of regime “competitive authoritarianism” — a system in which elections are real, but so unfair that they can’t reasonably be termed democratic contests.
... The result of all this has been a remarkably durable authoritarian system. In the 2014 and 2018 elections, Fidesz [i.e., Orbán's party] managed to retain its two-thirds majority in parliament with less than half of the national popular vote. In 2022, the various opposition parties united around a single candidate and party list to try and overcome its structural disadvantages — and Fidesz actually improved its vote share, easily retaining its two-thirds majority.
The flaw in that model is that if the public gets sufficiently united against the government, the official thumb on the scale might not be heavy enough.
Sunday, Hungarians took advantage of what power they have left to oust Orbán. After 16 years in power, his party was decisively swept out. The opposition has won a 2/3rds supermajority in Parliament, which is big enough to undo the constitutional changes Orbán made.
I happened to be in Budapest Thursday, on a tour I arranged last fall without any journalistic motive. I don't speak Hungarian and had little opportunity to talk to the locals, but I did see the election posters dominating every flat surface, and workmen setting up for a huge opposition concert Friday. I worried about a violent outcome to the election, so I was not sorry to get out before the action started.
and the astronauts
Sadly, the Artemis II mission all but vanished from the headlines. I'm showing my age here, but I remember when the whole nation was transfixed by each new space flight. One of the few things my grandfather and I were both interested in was watching the countdown for John Glenn's launch. In school, we took time out of class to watch an unmanned mission that did nothing more than stick a TV camera onto a rocket and slam it into the Moon.
The four astronauts of Artemis II looped around the Moon, went farther from Earth than any human ever has, and successfully returned to Earth on Friday.
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The week's most mysterious story is why Melania called a news conference to read a statement saying that she was not connected to Jeffrey Epstein. She was not responding to anything obvious in the news cycle, so her main accomplishment was to start people wondering whether what she is denying is actually true.
The most logical explanation: The First Lady is trying to get ahead of forthcoming story about her ties to Epstein. But there are no specific rumors about such a story circulating on social media; it’s all just conjecture based on Melania’s statement.
But The Guardian's Arwa Mahdawi offers a simpler theory:
I have another possible explanation. And that is that the Trumps aren’t just morally bankrupt, they’re also very, very stupid. A lot of people seem reluctant to acknowledge this about the president; they will tie themselves into knots trying to argue that his erratic actions actually represent a genius playing four-dimensional chess. He’s not really a madman, they insist, he’s just playing one on Truth Social! I understand why people want to believe this: it’s comforting to think there’s some sort of method behind the madness. But if there is any sort of method, I certainly can’t see it. All I can see is a man who thinks he can bully his way through life.
Here’s the thing: even if you are blessed with “a very high IQ”, when you are as rich and powerful as the Trumps, you can easily lose perspective. People rarely say “no” to you. Your employees don’t tell you that your ideas are ridiculous because they don’t want to lose their jobs. Melania may not be the president, but she is in the same sycophantic bubble as her husband. It’s possible she just thought she could hold a press conference and command all us plebs to stop talking about her, and we would immediately obey.
US Congressman and recent top contender to be the next governor of California Eric Swalwell has been accused of sexual misconduct by at least four women so far. He has denied the accusations, but a Democrat can't ride something like this out the way Republicans can. He has suspended his campaign for governor, and I'll be surprised if he hangs on to the House seat.
I'm always amazed by candidates who imagine something like this won't come out. How do you recruit people to spend two years or more trying to get you elected, when you know that something you've done could result in all their effort being wasted?
As Congress returns to work, there is still no plan to fund DHS, and Trump really wants action on the vote-suppressing SAVE Act.
The regime revealed plans for Trump's "arch of victory" monument, which is planned to be 250 feet tall. This motivated The Contrarian's Tim Dickinson to review all the things Trump wants to name after himself.
All this self-aggrandizement is futile. As soon as he's gone, everything he's done will be reversed. The Kennedy Center will be the Kennedy Center again. Trump class battleships will never be built. The White House ballroom will be repurposed and renamed.
As for the money he's planning to add his signature to, I think we can shame him out of it. You can get little stamping pads to add comments to currency. I think every Trump dollar should have "is America's worst president" added to it.
Remember what Conan O'Brien said at the Oscars: "Welcome back, we are coming to you live from the Has a Small Penis Theater! Let’s see him put his name in front of that."
and let's close with something far out
The Artemis II crew got some new views of the Earth and the Moon. Here we see how everything is relative: the Earth setting over the Moon looks tiny.
No sifts for two weeks. The next new articles will appear April 13.
In the dramatic circumstances of war ... the media must guard against the risk of becoming propaganda. ... It is up to you to show the sufferings that war always brings to the people; to show the face of war and to relate it through the eyes of the victims, so as not to transform it into a videogame.
Errata: Last week I did a particularly bad job as my own editor: I was fooled by a post apparently by the Stryker Corp IT chief, which was actually satire. (The community notes on X now say so explicitly.) The satirist posts a lot of imaginary inner monologues of tech company officials. They're entertaining and occasionally insightful, but they're not real. I also misspelled James Talarico's name (two weeks in a row). And there were assorted typos that commenters pointed out.
Ongoing stories
Trump's assault on American democracy. The Varieties of Democracy (V-DEM) Institute in Sweden maintains a "Liberal Democracy Index" to measure the overall level of democracy in the countries of the world. The US LDI rating has dropped precipitously in the last year to 57, just behind Ghana (61), tied with Panama, and just ahead of Columbia (52). Most other NATO countries are somewhere in the 70s or 80s, where the US was in the Obama years. V-DEM's annual report notes "The speed with which American democracy is currently dismantled is unprecedented in modern history." Putin, Orban, and similar autocrats took much longer to unmake their democracies.
Climate change. If you worry about the impact of burning a tank of gasoline in your car, imagine how much damage is done by burning a whole tanker or a depot or setting a gas field on fire. In the long run, the Iran War raises the price of gas and points out the unreliability of fossil fuel supplies, which will push more people, corporations, and countries towards renewable energy. But the short-term impact is horrifying.
Israel/Palestine. The eyes of the world have mostly moved on, but NPR looks at Gaza during the Eid holiday. It observes that about 200 truckloads of aid get through Israeli checkpoints each day, when 600 are needed. Most of Gaza's 2 million people "live in makeshift tents and rely on aid for survival". Meanwhile, Israel is expanding its settlements in the West Bank "confining the Palestinian population to smaller and smaller patches of land".
Ukraine. As winter ends, Russia is starting a new offensive and incurring large losses. The war in Iran works in Russia's favor, as it is able to sell more oil at higher prices.
Epstein. The House Oversight Committee that is investigating the Epstein affair has subpoenaed AG Pam Bondi. Bondi announced a briefing for the lawmakers, but indicated she saw this as a replacement for testifying under oath. Democrats on the committee were having none of this and walked out. The deadline for the subpoena is April 14. So the cover-up continues.
This week's developments
This week everybody was talking about Iran
The Iran War is the subject of the featured post. What didn't get covered there is the $200 billion supplemental appropriation the Trump regime is seeking to fund the war. The official request hasn't been made yet, and getting it through Congress can only happen if it is part of a reconciliation package that circumvents filibuster rules in the Senate. Given Republicans' narrow margin in the House, it may not even pass there.
Politically, the best thing for Democrats would be the Republicans passing the appropriation on a party-line vote. At that point, they own the war, and every spending cut Republicans want can be compared to it. "Why was there no money to keep your local hospital open, when there was $200 billion to blow hospitals up in Iran? Why is there no money for cancer research when there is plenty to fight foreign wars?" And so on.
But for the nation, the best thing would be to get this thing stopped any way we can. Democrats can't do that on their own, though. That's what being in the minority means.
and the strange case of Joe Kent
Opponents of both the Gaza and Iran Wars have faced the same challenge: How do you denounce what the Israeli government does without making common cause with antisemites? For centuries, conspiracy theories have been tracing every unfortunate situation back to some nefarious plot by Jews. But sane people should not get involved in that project. While Netanyahu and his buddies are responsible for plenty of wrongdoing, they are not the cause of all the world's problems.
This week delivered a case in point: Joe Kent. Kent is a twice-defeated Republican congressional candidate who failed up: Tulsi Gabbard got him a job as head of the National Counter-Terrorism Center. This week he became the first Trump insider to resign in protest over the Iran War. In the message that accompanied his resignation letter on X, Kent said
Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation,
So far so good, but the sentence didn't stop there.
and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.
Vox' Zack Beauchamp acknowledges that he ought to welcome defections within the Trump war machine, but ...
Kent’s resignation should not be celebrated by principled critics of the Iran war, but rather serve as a cautionary tale for how a just cause could be hijacked by extremists to promote something awful.
Kent's particular awful thing is to portray an American president as nothing more than the dupe of sinister Jews.
Trump and MAGA did not fail in Iran, in Kent’s view; they were betrayed by the same dark forces that have been corrupting American foreign policy for the entire 21st century. And given the corner of far-right politics Kent hails from, it should be fairly clear what religion those dark forces represent.
At the moment, most MAGA fascists are supporting the war whole-heartedly.
But if this war continues to go poorly, public opinion will turn — much in the same way as many Republicans now view President George W. Bush’s war in Iraq as an obvious mistake. In such a future, Republican voters will be looking for someone to tell them why their president led them astray. Kent’s letter is setting up an obvious scapegoat: the Jews. ... Kent’s letter, then, is not really a sign of rising Republican resistance to the Iran war that could augur its premature end. Rather, it is an opening salvo in a future political war over how the war’s (likely) failure should be interpreted — and an extremely ugly one at that.
I'm going to repeat a message that I've posted many times before: Americans should not bring the troubles of the Middle East home. American Jews who support the idea of Israel because they believe there should be a Jewish refuge somewhere in the world are not the same as Netanyahu's fascists. And American Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims who believe Palestinians also deserve a homeland are not the same as Hamas. Americans should not be persecuting or even killing other Americans because of their resemblance to overseas villains.
and ICE
Trump claims that today he will start sending ICE agents to help TSA at airports. Mark Jacob points out the obvious: This has nothing to do with ICE's stated mission.
Trump's plan to send ICE to the airports makes it clear that ICE isn't really an immigration enforcement force. It's Trump's personal Gestapo, his goon squad ready to act out the dictator's fever dreams, no matter how reckless and stupid.
Ron Filipkowski asks another obvious question: Will ICE agents at the airports wear masks?
BBC doesn't sanewash the president's plan, describing it as a "threat". When you quote him more completely, it does sound that way:
I will move our brilliant and patriotic ICE Agents to the Airports where they will do Security like no one has ever seen before.
ICE agents behaving "like no one has ever seen before" is exactly what travelers should fear.
Republicans know that it looks bad for them when ICE agents murder American citizens in the streets and suffer no consequences. So they want to soften their rhetoric and present a more pleasant image. But the underlying thuggishness of ICE isn't changing. Replacing Kristi Noem with Markwayne Mullin is just a change of figurehead at DHS. Stephen Miller still runs the show, and he likes the thugs.
If congressional Republicans really wanted a course correction at DHS, they have a straightforward opportunity without changing its leadership. The agency has been shutdown since Feb. 14, when Democrats refused to support legislation funding the agency because it lacked provisions reforming ICE. The list of demands in their counterproposal is straightforward. ICE agents would be required to wear identification badges and work without masks, and follow existing laws regarding warrants. They would also be banned from targeting people based on race. The GOP’s refusal to rein in the rogue agency even a little shows that the party does not want to “course correct” in any meaningful way.
Brian Beutler sees this as nothing more than an across-the-board plan to save Republicans in the midterms:
They now seem to be tacking back a subtler approach. Not just because they think they’ll get a second chance at authoritarian breakthrough, but because the nature of their conduct over the past 14 months has rendered the whole project politically toxic. What they want, therefore, is to freeze their progress in place, dialing back the braggadocio, in the hope that voters sense the atmospheric differences between March 2025 and March 2026 and assume the worst is behind them. In other words, they are hoping to salvage power through a change in rhetorical emphasis, without substantively backtracking.
Trump still calls the shots for the GOP in Congress, and he opposes "any deal with the Crazy, Country Destroying, Radical Left Democrats". The deal apparently on the table would lead to no changes at ICE, but would make Republicans fully own ICE's rogue behavior: Democrats would vote to fund all of DHS other than ICE, while ICE funding would be part of a reconciliation bill that would be immune to filibuster.
To me, even the Democrats' demands aren't enough. At the very minimum, I want to see charges filed against the agents who murdered Rene Good and Alex Pretti. Until that happens, ICE's thugs will go on assuming they have a 007-like license to kill.
ICE has illegally been taking DNA samples from protesters it arrests. "It's very concerning to me because what it looks like the government is doing is creating this catalog of political dissidents." DHS hasn't said what it does with this information.
and law
The Trump administration had another bad week in court.
They had surrendered those passes in October instead of signing the policy, which empowered the Pentagon to declare journalists “security risks” and revoke their press passes if they engaged in any conduct that the Pentagon believed threatened national security. In his 40-page ruling, Judge Friedman wrote that the Pentagon’s policy rewarded reporters who were “willing to publish only stories that are favorable to or spoon-fed by department leadership.”
Siding with an argument advanced by The Times, Judge Friedman added that the Pentagon had given itself too much power to enforce its new rules. The policy also violates journalists’ due process rights under the Fifth Amendment, he said, writing that it “provides no way for journalists to know how they may do their jobs without losing their credentials.”
According to Law Dork, third-country removals -- deportations to someplace other than the deportee's home country -- is one of Trump regime's "most dramatic anti-immigrant policies". I invite you to think about what an extreme punishment this is: Imagine being dropped into a country you know nothing about, possibly a war-torn country like Sudan. You have no friends there and you may not speak the local language. You don't know what rights (if any) the local system grants you. Even if you aren't immediately imprisoned, you are in rough shape: You have no job and no prospect of getting one.
In its Wednesday post, LD gives a good summary of where the case to restrain these deportations stands: A district court has been trying to rein in this practice, and recently issued its final opinion -- not an injunction or any similar temporary judgment.
[Judge Brian] Murphy has ordered the Trump administration to provide people with “meaningful“ due process before carrying out third country removals.
Trump's DoJ took that ruling to the First Circuit appellate court, which put a stay on the lower court's order while they consider the merits of the case. That stay allows third-country removals to continue temporarily, but LD interprets this as possibly a strategic move by one of the Biden appointees who might ultimately want to affirm the lower-court ruling.
Looking at this strategically, in light of the Supreme Court’s prior shadow docket order, the stay grant prevented the case from going to the Supreme Court now — allowing the First Circuit to fully consider these questions and issue a full merits ruling before this important case goes back up to the Supreme Court.
Instead, the First Circuit is going to hear this case quickly, with briefs and oral arguments finished in April.
RFK Jr.'s reign of error at Health and Human Services got bad news from the courts on two fronts.
Just about everything RFK Jr. has done to discourage vaccine use got thrown out by the same Judge Murphy.
A different federal judge set aside HHS's declaration that gender-affirming care "is neither safe nor effective as a treatment modality for gender dysphoria, gender incongruence, or other related disorders in minors."
Both rulings make similar arguments: There are legal ways to change HHS policy, but Kennedy circumvented them.
The vaccine ruling revolves around the role of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which is supposed to be a board of scientific experts on vaccines. Back in June, Kennedy fired the entire committee, which he subsequently replaced with hacks who agree with him. Judge Murphy noted that of ACIP's 15 current members "only six appear to have any meaningful experience in vaccines". This violates the legislation that established ACIP and numerous laws that refer to it.
HHS, sometimes with the advice of the new unqualified ACIP and sometimes without, changed childhood vaccination schedules and made other vaccine-related rulings -- all pointing in the direction of Americans receiving fewer vaccinations. These moves also violated various laws, including the Administrative Procedures Act.
The ruling blocks these changes to HHS vaccine policy and bars ACIP from continuing to meet in its current form.
In the weeks after Mr. Kennedy issued his written declaration, the Department of Health and Human Services indicated that it would investigate institutions that continued to prescribe medication to minors for gender transitions and would potentially bar them from receiving federal Medicare and Medicaid funds. (As an aside, the declaration re-names "gender-affirming care" as "sex-rejecting procedures". )
The court ruling prevents HHS from enforcing its new policy. HHS will undoubtedly appeal.
The National Trust for Historic Preservation is suing to stop construction of Trump's massive White House ballroom until the project gets congressional approval and submits to the ordinary review process. Verbal comments by the judge in this case have observers speculating that he will side with NTHP when he rules later this month.
and Robert Mueller
The death of Robert Mueller at age 81 provides a news hook for renewed discussion of what Mueller investigated: Trump's ties to Russia. Certainly Trump himself sees the connection:
Robert Mueller just died. Good, I’m glad he’s dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people!
(Remember all the handwringing about "civility" when liberals weren't sufficiently deferential about Charlie Kirk's death?) But certainly Trump is not one of those "innocent people". Marcy Wheeler reviews the convictions Mueller's Russia investigation led to, and points to the pardons of key figures that kept Mueller from fully uncovering the Trump/Russia conspiracy.
Mueller’s failure, solidified by Democrats’ failure to do anything with the impeachment referral, to thwart Trump’s betrayal of the United States is one of many aspects of a larger lesson that the US legal system was not built to hold a corrupt President accountable. Impeachment does not work, and even before John Roberts gave Trump a retrospective and prospective Get Out of Jail Free card, Presidents had too much power to tamper in investigations of their own crimes.
and the Illinois primary
Tuesday, Illinois held primaries for both parties. It's a blue state, so the big news was on the Democratic side. Several races were interpreted in the media as progressive/moderate races, with moderates doing somewhat better. But there was not a clear trend. Illinois does not have a run-off rule, so several multi-candidate races were won with less than 50% of the vote.
The top of the ticket was the race to replace retiring Dick Durbin in the Senate. (Side note: I was living in New Hampshire during the 2008 primary campaign. The Obama victory party was supposed to be upstairs from my favorite brew-pub, but Obama was surprisingly defeated by Hillary Clinton. I was in the pub for dinner, went to the bar for some reason, and noticed I was standing next to Dick Durbin. I let him mourn in peace.) Lieutenant Governor Juliana Stratton won with 40%.
Another noteworthy race was for the 9th congressional district. I was rooting for Kat Abughazaleh, but Evanston Mayor David Biss performed well during the ICE focus on the Chicago area, so I was not sorry to see him win. The big loser in this race was AIPAC, which put a lot of money behind the third-place candidate.
The somewhat better showing of moderates touched off the usual debate about which direction the Democratic Party should go, with many voices pushing for what Matt Yglesias calls "popularism": backing away from unpopular positions. Unfortunately, this is generally interpreted to mean throwing trans people under the bus. I have trouble seeing how this actually works in practice. Harris never mentioned trans issues during the 2024 fall campaign, but that didn't save her because she had supported the trans community in the past.
About the only way this can work is to do what my congressman, Seth Moulton, did: repeat anti-trans talking points yourself. (He's running for the Senate now, and I will not be voting for him in the primary against incumbent Ed Markey.) Even that probably won't work, because your Republican opponent can always make a more extreme anti-trans attack and dare you to match him.
I'm struck by how seldom the same popularist point is made to Republicans about issues like abortion. At most, Republicans are told to soften their rhetoric, not change their position (that abortion should be illegal in nearly all situations, often including ones that endanger a pregnant woman's health). Chair Richard Hudson of the National Republican Congressional Committee told Punchbowl News:
Republicans don’t have a policy problem. We have a branding problem.
Their policy is that a woman who is raped should be forced to bear her rapist's child. In other words, rape should be a viable male reproductive strategy; if you're having trouble attracting women, you can still propagate your genes by force.
Republicans think they can win the issue by painting Democrats as even more out-of-step with the public than Republicans are.
We need to point out that the Democrat position is abortion for any reason, up until the moment of birth, paid for by taxpayers.
But that's hardly any Democrat's real position. Not that the truth actually matters.
Here's my take on where most voters are: They generally dislike abortions and wish the US had fewer of them. But if someone in their family needs one, they don't want the government to tell them they can't get one.
Coincidentally, I think most voters have exactly the same opinion about guns.
TPM collects what is known so far about the DHS contracting scandal. The gist: DHS funds big projects through dummy general contractors who then farm the work out to politically connected sub-contractors. This, plus a few other gimmicks, circumvents the usual government contracting process -- which is cumbersome but designed to prevent exactly this kind of corruption.
Republican rhetoric about the SAVE Act started as painting the bill as common-sense, nothing-to-see-here. But as it looks increasingly unlikely to get through the Senate, they are revving up evidence-free conspiracy theories about noncitizen voting.
The accusation that there is rampant cheating in our election is dramatic, alarming, and oft-repeated. It is also totally false.
After years of audits, recounts, lawsuits, academic studies, and investigations across red states and blue states alike, there is absolutely no evidence—zero—that substantial, outcome-changing voter fraud is present in American elections. There simply isn’t proof.
It turns out that the real fraud is not at the ballot box; it’s claims like the one the president made as he addressed a joint session of Congress.
If I were a Democrat in a general-election debate with a Republican, I'd want to ask this question: "Do any of your proposals address a problem that actually exists?"
The Idaho House has passed another transgender persecution bill. This one makes it a misdemeanor to "knowingly and willfully enter a restroom or changing room ... designated for use by the opposite biological sex". First offense can get you a year in prison, while the second offense can get you five.
OK, I see how this makes life more difficult for transfolk. But how does it make life better for the rest of us? What problem do such bills solve?
Accept for the moment that transgender and nonbinary people exist. (Off the top of my head I can think of three that I've met personally. I wouldn't be surprised if there are others that I haven't noticed.) So picture a person with a female birth certificate who now presents as male, to the point that you really can't tell unless you stare. Like all humans, that person may need a public bathroom from time to time. Which is more disruptive?
Going into the men's bathroom and using a stall.
Going into the women's bathroom looking like a man.
I think the answer is obvious. Idaho's law is mandating the more disruptive outcome. So the point isn't to make society work more smoothly. The point is to persecute trans people.
Trump's concentration of lies seems to be rising. This post must be some kind of record:
FREE TINA PETERS, A 73-YEAR-OLD WOMAN, WITH CANCER, GIVEN A NINE YEAR DEATH SENTENCE IN A COLORADO PRISON BY DEMOCRAT GOVERNOR, JARED POLIS, AND A CORRUPT POLITICAL MACHINE, FOR EXPOSING FRAUD BY THE DEMOCRATS IN THE 2020 ELECTION.
Kyle Clark finds four false claims in those 40 words:
Peters is 70 (not 73), does not have cancer, was sentenced by a judge in Mesa County (not the Governor), and did not expose fraud in the 2020 presidential election.
