Mostly law professors | Sometimes contrarian | Often libertarian | Always independent
Politics
Eugene Volokh | 4.21.2025 4:38 PM
Start your day with Reason. Get a daily brief of the most important stories and trends every weekday morning when you subscribe to Reason Roundup.
NEXT: No Temporary Restraining Order Against Accusations of Surrogacy Agency Error
Hide Comments (708)
Editor's Note: We invite comments and request that they be civil and on-topic. We do not moderate or assume any responsibility for comments, which are owned by the readers who post them. Comments do not represent the views of Reason.com or Reason Foundation. We reserve the right to delete any comment for any reason at any time. Comments may only be edited within 5 minutes of posting. Report abuses.
While the Trump administration promotes chaos almost at random, answers to questions about enforcement against government law breaking keep getting postponed. It could be that a baleful pattern is emerging, with the judicial system handing down decisions declaring laws broken, but recoiling from use of judicial orders or penalties to deliver enforcement. It will not take much more of this to confirm a new legal status quo, with administrative power held to the law in principle, and left free to break it in practice.
Hmm… might have to get the federal courts to chime in on that confirmation since their judicial insurrection apparently gives them unlimited authority.
I did not vote for "judge" bloasburg.
Huh... but you did vote for the president who nominated and the senators who confirmed so your voice WAS heard wrt the election of any judges since you first registered to vote.
A small break from the constant trump obsession. Self Own story of the day: Maryland removes statue of limitations to bring the evil rotten Church to justice. Then has to scramble and amend the law to drastically limit liability once the lawsuits start flying against their own alleged pedo problems.
https://archive.ph/UU4UG
Every institution in society that interacts with children has had its own pedo problem; The Church's were many years ago at this point, (The Church is positively obsessive about making sure it doesn't happen again.) but bringing it up frequently serves to distract from the others' problems.
The question is that what extent should past bad behavior be held against persons or individuals and I'm of two minds about it.
Suppose a lawyer is disbarred for stealing from a client. Some states allow him to seek readmission and some don't. I myself am of the view that people who have demonstrated repentance should be given a second chance, but I will acknowledge that there is a rational argument that some types of behavior should be permanently disqualifying. Maybe stealing from a client, and harboring child molesters, should be among them.
But one thing that is crystal clear is that such a disbarred attorney would not be taken seriously if he decided to make a career out of lecturing other people on legal ethics. He would be hooted off the stage, even if everything he said was spot on. So maybe forgiveness for the church does not extend to taking its pronouncements on sexual morality seriously for the same reason. Though again, I will acknowledge that that is a form of ad hominem; that the speaker has a past does not change the truth of what he is saying.
I'm not Catholic. I don't even believe in God. But if I were Catholic I would probably take the position that while I believe in redemption for repentant institutions, it does not mean I take those institutions seriously when they presume to lecture others about how to live. Though the Bible does contain numerous examples of people who did very bad things whom God still used.
There's somewhat of a difference here between individuals and institutions, though, isn't there? If you dismiss the institution because of past misbehavior, you're treating individuals who have no personal history of offending the same as individuals who do have such a history.
Particularly when (a) the few abusers were an extreme exception to the norm, and (b) children who had loving parents weren't abused.
No one can ever mention the second one but look at Epstein's girls. What parent would let a 14-year-old fly down to some island without a chaperone? What Epstein did was criminal but he's not the one who ruined their childhoods -- someone else already had. I have no doubt that there is a lot we aren't being told.
Again, I am not justifying what he did (and still think the CIA was behind him) but where was the "your grandmother is going with you" instinct? How many had a parent who even knew they were going?
"Particularly when (a) the few abusers were an extreme exception to the norm, and (b) children who had loving parents weren't abused."
Is that as true as everything else you have said, Dr. Ed 2?
(b) children who had loving parents weren't abused.
Even if this is true, which I doubt, it is totally irrelevant.
Are children from dysfunctional families to be considered fair game for pedophiles? Is the behavior of their parents the children's fault, for which they are to be punished with abuse?
Shouldn't the church rather try hard to be helpful and supportive of those children?
Bernard - you have grossly misinterpred his comment. Its that kids from disfunctional families are more prone to being lured by the pedophiles.
Kids from stable families are less likely to be enticed / lured.
OK, Joe. Not sure I agree, but if you're right doesn't that reinforce the importance of my third paragraph?
Grampa Ed asserts an absolute: those with a good family "weren't abused".
That's him implicitly blaming any kid he doesn't think is from his fantastical vision of a "good family" as somehow deserving being fucked in the ass by a priest (and maybe then run over with a snowplow). It's not the more nuanced and probably correct observation you make, that being in a dysfunctional family makes kids more vulnerable to abuse.
Grampa Ed has never demonstrated that subtle level of understanding, and I'm not going to give him that credit here.
“ Kids from stable families are less likely to be enticed / lured.”
Children of Catholics were the ones getting raped. In the right-wing fantasy world, religious families are stable.
So how do you square that circle?
Personally, I think it’s more likely that religious parents are stupid and trust their religious leaders, despite centuries of proof to the contrary.
When your kid gets raped by a priest, know it’s your fault. You and your stable family.
“ Particularly when (a) the few abusers were an extreme exception to the norm”
Estimates are that 6% of priests sexually abused children. That isn’t “a few”.
“ children who had loving parents weren't abused.”
You have said some vile and horrible things before, but this probably tops them all.
I think predators make no distinction when targeting young people to abuse; they don't care what kind of family one is from. But there is a difference between allowing children to be in environments that are far more likely to risk abuse, and environments where it is reasonable to assume children will be safe. And children who are left to their own devices and judgments, irrespective of their social and economic profile, may well be more apt to suffer at the hands of bad actors. That said, I am unaware of any data that supports a conclusion about abused children being more likely to come from broken homes, unless those homes are where the abuse occurred.
Brett, you yourself have criticized Planned Parenthood because Margaret Sanger was a racist and a eugenicist. I repeatedly see conservatives here attempt to tar the Democratic Party with the Klan because of decades old affiliations even though no Klansman would feel at home in today's Democratic Party. It's the same issue.
Is it fair to condemn today's church for what happened in the past? Of course not, but neither is it fair to tar Planned Parenthood and the Democratic Party with what happened in the past. Yet conservatives do it anyway.
So if that's the standard to which you hold Planned Parenthood, maybe don't complain when others apply it to your beloved Catholic Church. It's exactly the same issue.
You've got to distinguish between an institution with a history that's clearly trying to fix things and an institution with a history that continues to offend consistent with that history. Any Catholic parent can tell you that the Church today is totally obsessive about security around minors.
The Democratic party has an almost unbroken record of promoting racial discrimination, with the only change being who the designated victims were. Planned Parenthood's current priorities are consistent with its eugenicist origins, too.
The white male grievance industry notwithstanding, the Democratic Party does not have an unbroken record of promoting race discrimination, and giving women freedom over their own reproductive rights is hardly the goal of eugenics. That no woman will ever be a linebacker for the Green Bay Packers does not mean that football is misogynist, even though on that specific issue it has that result.
You're desperately attempting to invent a rationale for why your smearing of institutions you don't like is somehow different from other people's smearing of institutions you do like. And nobody except the already converted takes your arguments seriously. If you get to smear Democrats and Planned Parenthood with their past, do not complain when others do the same to the Catholic church. It really is that simple.
Uh huh. Slavery, insurrection, KKK, Jim Crow, segregation. You might want to take a closer look at that Democrat record.
Of how many decades ago?
You mean slavery happened so long ago it is now irrelevant? Good to know. Now go tell the Reparations crowd and the 1619 project. I sure would like those grifters to shut up.
No, Riva, what I mean is that the Democratic Party abandoned those positions so long ago that it's dishonest for you to continue to pretend it's the current situation. Also, what Not Guilty said.
Right, and if the last form of racial discrimination the Democratic party had been pushing was Jim Crow, I'd hardly have bothered bringing it up. The problem is that the modern Democratic party is STILL pushing racial discrimination. You've just changed who gets discriminated against.
They just haven’t gotten around to acknowledging their conduct or even apologizing for their reprehensible history. I’m sure they’ll get around to that soon. After they stop exploiting the victims they’re still exploiting of course.
So Brett, suggesting that people who are currently holding stolen property is race discrimination? (Points and laughs).
"So Brett, suggesting that people who are currently holding stolen property is race discrimination?"
I'm having a little trouble parsing that; Was it "Suggesting [] people [] are currently holding stolen property is race discrimination", or "Suggesting that people who are currently holding stolen property [are X] is race discrimination"?
I'm guessing the former?
Sorry, typo. I meant to say "So Brett, suggesting that people who are currently holding stolen property *should give it up* is race discrimination? (Points and laughs).
No, that wouldn't be racist, though how you go about identifying who is holding stolen property could very well be just a way of disguising racism, and you could be racist in how you decide who it should be handed over to.
I suppose this is segueing into pretending that the proceeds from slavery were generally passed onto whites, rather than destroyed in the Civil war, and so justifying some sort of reparations?
"I suppose this is segueing into pretending that the proceeds from slavery were generally passed onto whites, rather than destroyed in the Civil war, and so justifying some sort of reparations?"
Not necessarily. I think the issue is difficult, complex, and with no obvious solution. It is entirely possible that after a full and complete discussion, that your viewpoint would ultimately prevail on the merits, and I would be fine with that provided there has actually been a full and complete discussion of it.
What I am not fine with is the knee-jerk reaction by the white grievance industry that any attempt to be fair to minorities, or for that matter even to talk about being fair to minorities, is race discrimination against whites. Maybe reparations are appropriate; maybe not. Maybe affirmative action is necessary; maybe not. Don't know yet because we haven't actually had the national conversation. But the attempt to shut down discussion by claiming that advocates for fairness are the real racists is just dishonest. As is the claim that the Democrats are the racist party.
I don't actually see the point in this discussion, any more than I'd see the point in a discussion of whether the descendants of British landlords in Ireland owe recompense to the descendants of the Irish diaspora such as myself.
The problem is the same: Both the victims and the victimizers are long dead. Only the innocent remain. So doing anything about it is already off the table.
"What I am not fine with is the knee-jerk reaction by the white grievance industry that any attempt to be fair to minorities, or for that matter even to talk about being fair to minorities, is race discrimination against whites. "
The problem is with how you DEFINE "being fair to minorities", obviously: That it involves treating them somehow differently from non-minorities.
Being fair to minorities consists of completely and utterly ignoring their minority status, and treating them just like you would anybody else.
There is no "treating minorities fairly". There is only treating people fairly. As soon as you're talking minority status into account, you've already ruled out fair treatment, because fair treatment IGNORES minority status.
But Brett, based on reading your comments here for a very long time, the only time you seem to care about *people* being treated unfairly is when the people are white. I don't recall you ever being concerned about injustice when it's minorities at the receiving end. And I think the lingering effects of American racism are far worse than the lingering effects of the British landlords.
In point of fact, a lot of black people don't have a lot of wealth that would have been passed down to them by their ancestors if not for slavery, Jim Crow, and other forms of racism. And at least some of that wealth is in the hands of whites who benefitted from slavery, Jim Crow, and other forms of racism. And I don't see it as any more unfair to dispossess them of some of that ill gotten gain than it is to continue to deprive blacks of wealth that should have been theirs.
And that's the real rub: At this point, someone is going to end up treated unfairly; the question is whom. You have repeatedly made it clear that you don't care so long as it's not whites. Which is why I have a lot of trouble taking you seriously when you talk about the Democratic Party being racist.
My view continues to be that at this point you may be right, it may be too late. But don't abandon the idea of compensation until we're absolutely, positively certain that it can't be done.
Riva, I am proud of how my political party during the last century repudiated its sordid history of support for slavery and segregation.
Are you proud of how your party has eagerly stepped into the breach?
I recall when then-Governor Ronald Reagan -- to his credit -- repudiated the Ku Klux Klan's endorsement of his 1980 presidential candidacy. The Grand Dragon Bill Wilkinson responded that Reagan could not repudiate the Klan without repudiating the entire Republican Party platform.
Great, they've "Transitioned" from supporting the KKK (who was the last Senator who was a Grand Kleagle?) to supporting Ham-Ass, and if Cums-a-lot had won, you'd have a Bee-Otch slapping "First Gentleman" (Typical Liberal, he slapped his Girlfriend at the Cannes Film Festival)
Except they haven’t repudiated anything and are merrily exploiting the same victims they’ve exploited for over 200 years.
not guilty 5 hours ago Flag Comment Mute User Riva, I am proud of how my political party during the last century repudiated its sordid history of support for slavery and segregation.
NG - The republican party has not stepped into the breach. Its the Democrat party that remains the racist and sexist party.
Joe, I might be tempted to respond to that, except that the last two times we were having conversations and I made a point that you couldn't answer, you responded by turning coward and running away. Once you falsely claimed I was what abouting and the second time you said I suffered from TDS and you wouldn't engage me further.
So I'm not going to give you a third opportunity to turn coward and run away. Have a nice day.
There is a group of posters here who routinely make the most openly bigoted comments, primarily about blacks and Hispanics (who they often call "mestizos"), but also about things like women not deserving the vote, Jews destroying civilization, etc. Every single one of them is a Trump supporter.
DN -I agree there are a few racists in the republican party, yet various forms of racism dominates the democrat party. You and most of the democrat party either ignore or promote the racist platform.
Joe, recall that the Unite the Right rally was organized by a Nazi and featured torch-carrying conservatives chanting “Jews will not replace us”. Virtually every white supremacist group since LBJ was President has supported Republicans because when Democrats turned their backs, Republicans opened their arms. Patriot Front, Proud Boys, Boogaloo Boys, the KKK, you name the white nationalist group and they are openly pro-Republican and proudly conservative.
"The white male grievance industry notwithstanding,"
By which you mean, "I'm not going to count racial discrimination against whites as real racial discrimination."
Society has largely rejected that view, even California regularly votes against racial preferences. And the courts are coming around, too.
I'm confident that the Democratic party will eventually, despite nearly 200 years of tradition, finally give up on racial discrimination. After exhausting all other alternatives.
It's more in the nature of the white male grievance industry being asked to return stolen property. We can discuss whether the current holders of the stolen property are or should be legally responsible, but it's not the same as stealing it in the first place.
Let me know when they give Manhattan back to the Injuns
Whether or not giving Manhattan back to the Indians would be good policy is a separate question from whether proposing it is race discrimination.
You, and Brett, hate the Democrats because, among other reasons, they want blacks to be treated fairly. Reasonable minds may differ on what "treated fairly" would look like -- maybe at the end of the day you're right on the underlying policy of it -- but your hostility stems from the fact that Democrats think fair treatment for blacks is a legitimate question. And that says more about you than it does about the Democrats. It further shows how ridiculous you are for persisting in trying to tie the Democrats to the KKK.
"but your hostility stems from the fact that Democrats think fair treatment for blacks is a legitimate question."
Bullshit. The hostility stems from a lot of things, usually unrelated to any racial issues, but on the racial front, it's not that Democrats think fair treatment for blacks is an issue, it's that they define it as racial discrimination against whites.
they define it as racial discrimination against whites.
Plenty to debate about affirmative action, but no need since the very fact that you think everything with race is affirmative action already shows you're not coming from a place of facts or reason.
Nonsense. You lot are so fragile every change away from white oversaturation in an industry counts as discrimination to you. Which says a lot about your quietly held priors about racial merit.
They're taking down every website that mentions nonwhite luminaries. Don't tell me that's some return to colorblind norm. That's a certain set being unhappy blacks and gays and women are being acknowledged.
Here on the Conspiracy, if someone is going to call someone a slur, or talk about racial IQ, or say blacks are inferior are all MAGA. Not false flags; they are your people.
Yell about the Dems being the Real Racists all you want; it shows you for what you are.
"You lot are so fragile every change away from white oversaturation in an industry counts as discrimination to you. "
No, what counts as discrimination is literally treating people differently on the basis of their race. Which is endemic on the left right now.
"They're taking down every website that mentions nonwhite luminaries. Don't tell me that's some return to colorblind norm. "
No, I'm going to tell you that's malicious compliance aimed at creating ugly headlines.
It's obviously not just about affirmative action. Again, look at the websites taken down. Look at the demands made of Harvard. Look at the broad ban on the word 'diversity' in grants.
It says a lot you think all this shit are false flags. So you know it's wrong, but don't want to admit what MAGA really is.
I also want to push back on equating affirmative action and Jim Crow.
Melodrama is very much a part of white grievance.
"I also want to push back on equating affirmative action and Jim Crow."
Of course you do. Because you evaluate racial discrimination based on whether you approve of who it victimizes, rather than just uniformly opposing it.
Well, before I commit to a particular shooting being murder, I want to know more about it. Was it self defense, for example, or a soldier shooting at an enemy in time of war, or the protection of a third part? And sometimes the identity of the victim is relevant.
You can't just say that every time something has a racial impact that it's race discrimination. You have to look at the context.
You appear to be arguing that affirmation action is as bad as Jim Crow was.
DMN over the weekend I think noted that you have trouble realizing that when there are 2 bad things 1 can still be worse.
It's too dumb. You're not going to succeed in stealing that oppression valor for whitey.
So the Democratic party, around LBJ's time, decides to switch from being racist in favor of whites, to being racist in favor of blacks.
This remains as insane to read as it was the first time you said it.
Humans do not work anything like this.
Sarcastr0 : " ...call someone a slur, or talk about racial IQ, or say blacks are inferior are all MAGA"
Case in point: Last week, someone noted the Naval Academy removing books from their shelves to please MAGA's snowflake professional victims. Maya Angelou’s "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" chronicling her struggles with racism was banned, but two copies of “Mein Kampf” are still on the shelves. Gone is “Memorializing the Holocaust,” Janet Jacobs’s 2010 examination how female victims of the Holocaust have been portrayed and remembered. Remaining is “The Camp of the Saints”, a lurid 1973 novel of the West overrun by Third World immigrants. It's a favorite of white supremacists and heavily promoted by Stephen Miller.
And the much-maligned book, “The Bell Curve”? It remains on the shelves. But a book of essays criticizing it's methodology was banned. Per the Trump Administration, if it's White, it's right.
All other viewpoints must go. It's what MAGA wants.
Bellmore's insistence, of course reads blacks right out of the Democratic Party. No, Bellmore, black people are not content to call an end to affirmative action an end to racial discrimination.
Perhaps more to the point, Bellmore and his ilk—including anti-black racists on the Supreme Court—will prove powerless to end this controversy until black people count themselves equally treated. Until then, all Bellmore's, "Anti-racists are the real racists," bigotry can accomplish is to prolong struggle. The question how long that struggle lasts is in the hands of black people, Bellmore, not in the hands of people like you, no matter how large, arbitrary, or cruel your majority.
That's just silly.
So the Democratic party, around LBJ's time, decides to switch from being racist in favor of whites, to being racist in favor of blacks. Still racially discriminating, just swapped client races.
Why, given that, would you NOT expect to have plenty of blacks in the Democratic party?
“ You've got to distinguish between an institution with a history that's clearly trying to fix things”
They aren’t. They are continuing to hide the pedophiles from discovery and prosecution. Why do you think no one who was a victim stays in the groups that the Church claims are “addressing” the issue?
No changes have been made. No priests have been surrendered for prosecution. None of the voluminous records the Church has maintained for decades on their pedophile priests (and their complicity in moving them around after complaints were made) have been made public or shown to authorities.
If you call willfully obstructing investigations and hiding pedophile priests “trying to fix things”, you’re intentionally lying.
Planned Parenthood has left Sanger and her beliefs behind them long ago. There are STILL pedophile priests in the Church.
“ Any Catholic parent can tell you that the Church today is totally obsessive about security around minors.”
Only the ones whose children haven’t been raped. Yet. Victims and their families have been vocal and clear that the church is not doing anything of the sort.
But we should believe the rapists and the operators of an international pedophile ring over the victims, in your world? Please.
Don’t piss on us and tell us it’s raining.
While it's improved drastically, it's still a thing. The National College of Catholic Bishops reported 17 allegations of child sexual abuse in 2023 and 17 more in 2024. Of the 2023 allegations, they reported 3 as substantiated, 7 still under investigation in 2024, 4 unsubstantiated, and one unexplained "other." That, of course, is just in the US. Importantly, the College reports that it does not have full cooperation from every US church or diocese, so some pedophiles are still likely slipping through the cracks, so to speak.
Pediofiles “slipping through the Cracks” ???
As in ass crack since almost all of the paedo priests where homosexuals, including the recently deceased Arch Bishop/Cardinal of Newark, NJ.
And I would argue that if you're going to require celibacy as part of the job description, you're going to end up with people who disproportionately have issues surrounding their sexuality. By which I do not mean homosexuals, though some are. I mean people who find the priesthood a convenient means to hide who and what they are. There's plenty of abusive heterosexual Catholic priests too.
Celibacy may have provided a mask but was not the cause. See Joe Dallas comment below.
That's true, and it's also a different issue. Pedophiles (whether attracted to male children or female children) will gravitate to where there are children, and every institution that works with children needs to be vigilant. This is not just a Catholic problem.
However, the Catholic church exacerbated it by requiring celibacy, which guarantees that you're going to have a disproportionate number of people with maladjusted sexualities. And some of those people with maladjusted sexualities will be gay, and some will be straight.
"There's plenty of abusive heterosexual Catholic priests too."
Almost all were male priests abusing boys. No heterosexual abuses the same sex.
I just googled "catholic priests who abuse women" and "Catholic priests who abuse girls" and found plenty.
But suppose for sake of argument that it's 100% same sex. So what? 100% of the guards at Auschwitz were German but we do not extrapolate from that that there's anything wrong with being German. You're committing the logical fallacy of affirming the consequent -- just because all dogs have four legs does not mean that everything with four legs is a dog. Since you dislike homosexuals, you're only too happy to ascribe to homosexuality itself the misdeeds of some. Which is not that different from anti-Semites blaming "the Jews" whenever a particular Jew does something bad.
...and yet you provided no links.
And what does "plenty" mean?
"Plenty" in this case means a whole shitload. Just for fun, you google "catholic priests who abuse women" and "catholic priests who abuse girls" and let us know what you find.
And I notice neither of you responded to me pointing out your logical fallacy of ascribing the misdeeds of some to homosexuality itself, just as anti-Semites are fond of ascribing to "the Jews" the misdeeds of some. If you want to respond to that central point, knock yourself out.
Do not underestimate NAMBLA and do not forget where it originated.
Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely -- while there are many advantages to the Catholic model, the advantage of the Congregationalist model is that the congregation votes to hire and fire the minister. I once offered to come back from college if my vote was needed to fire a minister, amongst other things, he was having an affair with the choir director, both were married, unfortunately not to each other. (He counted votes and resigned.)
I look at the Boy Scouts circa 1980, the height of the scandal, and they only caught half of them.
Lighten up on Francis, He's dead Jim
Classy. Maybe hold off on the Catholic bigotry for just a day or two after the death of the Pope?
Pope Francis appears to have been a good man, at least compared to his predecessors. But the institution he headed is corrupt and depraved, having facilitated and tolerated the rape of children on a worldwide basis for decades.
To affiliate with the RoCaMBLA reflects moral idiocy.
Go crawl back into the woodwork just for a few days. Then feel free to spout off your ignorant Catholic bigotry to your bigoted heart’s content.
I'm not speaking ill of the dead. The wretched depravity of the living, however, is fair game.
You never know when to stop, do you? Classless and bigoted. Not a good combination.
You're accusing someone else of being classless and bigoted? Oh, the irony. Well, at least you didn't call him stupid.
Riva is really eager to find offense in any discussion of faith. Lots of potential reasons why; not many of them are flattering.
No need. Stupidity is assumed in bigoted comments.
So, Riva, every time you comment I should assume you're stupid? Thank you for clearing that up.
If I ever stoop to making bigoted anti-Catholic or antisemitic remarks, please feel free to let me know and I’ll make a correction and apology forthwith. I’m not a Democrat.
Anyone who takes literally the doctrine of transubstantiation is highly likely to be batshit crazy.
Riva, you may not make bigoted *anti-Catholic* or *anti-Semitic* comments, but there are plenty of other groups you're happy to rail against.
I’ain’t apologizing to Democrat anti-Semites and anti-Catholic bigots, if that’s what you’re asking.
And why would you be silly enough to think that's what I'm asking?
"Anyone who takes literally the doctrine of transubstantiation is highly likely to be batshit crazy."
How's that different than the idea that men transform into women when they change how they identify?
I very much doubt anyone believes that "men transform into women when they change how they identify." Trans people certainly don't believe that. If you're going to criticize someone's belief system, maybe you should find out what it actually consists of.
They believe that someone who identifies as a man is a man, and someone who identifies as a woman is a woman.
They believe that people can transition from men to women, etc. I'm not seeing the distinction you're making.
Because as you've phrased it, it sounds like people freely transition back and forth on a whim, as in yesterday I was in the mood for chicken and today I feel like having a double cheeseburger. That's not how it works.
Trans theory is that these people already are women and were women all along, and gradually came to understand that over time. But it's not something you choose; it's something that chooses you. And if what you are doesn't match your body anatomically, then go with what you are rather than with what bodily parts you have.
Now, if you want to think that all of that is bullshit, that's fine. I'm candidly not entirely sold on it myself. But what you said, and what I hear from a lot of anti-trans people, is that this is all done on a whim based on how you're feeling today.
That's not necessarily true, especially in the case of genderfluid individuals.
I suppose the question then is, do you believe that genderfluid people exist? Or is it a figment of their imagination, not unlike the person who thinks he's Napoleon?
I suppose that question depends on what you mean by "genderfluid".
Are there people whose sexual preferences are not fixed in stone? Absolutely! (And their existence makes a hash of arguments for outlawing conversion therapy...)
Are there people who change freely from male to female? Nope.
Are there people who decide every morning when they wake up whether they're "male" or "female" that day? Doubtless, but see point 2.
The cover up was pretty bad, and the Church kinda claims a bit more moral authority than the average institution.
Vietnam did an awful lot more damage to this country than people realize. As I understand it, divinity school remained an exception to being drafted when other higher education wasn't -- and hence it attracted a lot of people more interested in not being drafted than in serving the Lord.
I can't see why this didn't happen to the priesthood as well...
Brett Bellmore 2 hours ago "Every institution in society that interacts with children has had its own pedo problem;"
That is largely true. Pedos naturally gravitate to professions and / or hobbies that give them access to children. It was estimated that 5-6% of catholic priests were pedophiles during the heyday of the pedo scandals. At the same time, it was estimated that protestant churches had only slightly lower rates of pedophiles in their programs, likewise with organizations such as the ymca, schools etc.
Whence these estimates, Joe?
“ The Church's were many years ago at this point”
The Church’s are still ongoing, since they won’t share any records and continue to shield priests from prosecution. What, do you think the hundreds of pedophile priests just disappeared suddenly? They’re still there, still offending, and the Church is still protecting them.
“ The Church is positively obsessive about making sure it doesn't happen again”
They absolutely are not. They’re obsessed with making it go away, which is why every single neutral person or victim who get fooled into joining a reconciliation effort withon the Church resigns due to the Church’s obstruction and bad faith.
The only people who believe that the Church didn’t know it had a problem, then swiftly moved to solve it in a transparent and honest way when they suddenly found out they had pedophiles, are idiots and apologists.
You are an apologist.
Why did RoCaMBLA not take protective measures before paying out billions of dollars in damages and settlements because it was unable or unwilling to keep its clerics out of its parishioners' children?
Why was child sex abuse a worldwide phenomenon in countries with significant Catholic populations?
Why are devout Roman Catholics today unwilling to acknowledge the moral idiocy of the clerics and the unmitigated evil of the Church hierarchy in facilitating and concealing the abuse?
"Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep's clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thorns, or figs from thistles? So, every sound tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears evil fruit. A sound tree cannot bear evil fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit." Matthew 7:15-18.
"Either make the tree good, and its fruit good; or make the tree bad, and its fruit bad; for the tree is known by its fruit." Matthew 12:33.
"Why was child sex abuse a worldwide phenomenon in countries with significant Catholic populations?"
Because child sex abuse is a worldwide phenomenon, period, and countries with significant Catholic populations are a subset of that world.
Brett, are you willing to acknowledge that for many years the Catholic Church's facilitation of sex abuse by shielding the offenders from consequences (e.g., moving Bernard Cardinal Law from Massachusetts to the Vatican to escape criminal prosecution) was horrifically evil? Yes or no?
I notice that you dodged my question as to why did the church not take protective measures before paying out billions of dollars in damages and settlements because it was unable or unwilling to keep its clerics out of its parishioners' children.
Rationalizing the Catholic Church's perpetrating its filth and depravity is moral idiocy.
Yeah, I'm glad to admit it was horrible. I don't think among American institutions it was uniquely horrible, but the contrast between exalted claims of moral authority and action was pretty bad.
At the same time, as a Catholic parent, I'm well acquainted with the lengths the Church is currently going to, to prevent a repeat, so I don't care to treat it as an equivalently bad problem today. I'd say that elementary schools are probably the worst place on that measure right now.
The government's exposure is at a scale that makes the Church numbers seem to be insignificant. Between schools and juvenile centers there is just too much chance for bad actors to slip in.
Hypothetically, what if Trump's administration tried to formally recognize a cartel or gang, such as Tren de Aragua, as either a nation, In the sense of "a large body of people united by common descent, history, culture, or language" , or as a government, or as an indian tribe?
Is there any reason why he couldn't do that? in theory, ANY group of people larger, better armed, and more organized that the ~30 warriors and 110 woman and children who participated in Geronimo's third breakout from the Apache reservation in May 1885 could hypothetically count as a nation, government, indian tribe, or invading army, right?
I do agree that the President has the sole authority to recognize a nation (though that decision would probably have some unwanted collateral consequences). Zivotofsky v. Kerry, 576 U.S. 1 (2015) (Holding that, under the Reception Clause, only the President can determine whether Jerusalem is part of Israel)
Is there any reason why he couldn't do that?
Sure there is. Because if Trump did that in this context, you can be sure the aim would to define potential deportation victims into the nation, instead of proving they are members of some pre-existing nation to which the law actually applies.
You seem to think there could be a newly created straw man nation, decreed into existence, and decreed into a state of war against the U.S., simultaneously. And that Trump would be empowered to assign allegiance to that warring power to whomever it pleased him to deport.
Do you think any of that gets called legitimate legal procedure in any U.S. court?
No, the parts about demonstrating a state of war and assigning allegiance to certain deportees would be far more difficult to make work in any court of law, and probably would have to go before a court of law. Certainly with regards to deportees and their allegiance.
However, as an opening bid to attempt to seize control of the conversation, and stake out a major shift in foreign policy, and tee up all sorts of big legal arguments we haven't had in a very long time...
Using the recognition power to recognize, say, every foreign cartel as a de-facto government in it's own right would certainly be a conversation starter.
It may even be true.... "We no longer believe that The State of Mexico has meaningful control or deterrence over the ~six major cartels operating in mexican territory, and from a foreign policy perspective, it just makes more sense to recognize them as six indian tribes with which we're not NOT at war."
THAT would give the State Department something to talk about.
As a bonus, we could finally re-litigate Korematsu. Creating a test case would be EASY.
Given that this administration doesn't appear to value alliances or traditional methods of diplomacy, the obvious downside of recognizing a non-state actor as diplomatically equal to the state they reside within, would likely not constrain Trump.
There is nation and there is government -- and then there are non-state actors. The current law covers all three without a distinction.
Even for this supine SCOTUS that has invented the fake idea that Article II lets the president do whatever he wants just by calling something foreign policy, I would think that "recognizing" something as a nation that doesn't even hold itself out as such might be a bridge too far.
Apparently it’s procedurally more difficult to deport illegal enemy alien gangbangers than the children Biden deported without court hearings during his term. Good thing we have our new judicial co-presidents to control things now. Who knew judicial insurrections could be so helpful?
Trust Riva bot to have the latest talking points. This is a weird one, though--apparently Biden was better at deporting people than Trump??
To save those not getting their talking points from the same places, I believe this is what it's talking about:
https://law.ucla.edu/news/no-fair-day-damning-new-report-reveals-biden-administrations-unlawful-treatment-children-immigration-courts
Here's a relevant quote, though:
“While the administration should be lauded for its efforts to provide children and families access to the court system, its failure to ensure legal representation has produced a massive due process crisis,” said Talia Inlender, Deputy Director of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy (CILP) at the UCLA School of Law. “It should be obvious that immigration court proceedings are far too complex for children to navigate without legal representation, especially when the consequences are so dire. The Biden administration must take swift action to ensure legal representation for all children in immigration court.”
So as usual Riva bot is lying. The children did get hearings; the controversy is over whether they should have been provided lawyers.
But it is true that Biden was a lot better at deporting people than Trump.
uh hun, whatever, but in the end, it’s still procedurally harder to deport illegal enemy alien gangbangers than children during the corrupt reign of Biden.
Oh and try to be a little clever in your childish insults. I don’t mind a clever insult but this ad nauseam parroting is, frankly, rather pathetic. Is there a troll forum where you guys share childish insult pointers?
No it's not. Those kids all got hearings. Maybe they should have had lawyers--I'd say morally they should have regardless of what they law says.
But Trump is trying to deport people without any sort of legal due process, and then refusing to fix mistakes that happen as a result. The Supreme Court has made it clear that's not okay, and rather than just figuring out some framework that provides for due process Trump is trying to sneakily work around that requirement. As a result, he has already burned all of his credibility with the courts, including the three Justices that he himself has appointed and now everything is subject to a lot more scrutiny than if he made any sort of good faith attempt to follow the law.
I don't know whether DMN is right and this is his actual goal, or whether he's a dumbass and just can't get out of his own way (based on his first administration, I vote for the latter). But regardless, he will continue to fail at accomplishing the policy goals your team supposedly cares about. Every week that goes by he falls farther and farther behind Biden's deportation numbers.
P.S. I think it's funny a bot has such thin skin. Nice touch by your programmers!
Forget what I said, keep saying bot, it really makes you look smart, not at all like a troll parrot.
In the end, though it still seems to me it was far easier for Biden to deport kids than it is President Trump to deport illegal alien gangbangers. The same illegal alien gangbangers imported by Biden. Where were all those TROs against the Big Guy? Must have just not made the news.
It was easier for Biden to deport people, including children, because he followed the law instead of trying to work around it. Trump should try that. He might even manage Obama levels of deportations if he tries. Pretty sure he'll never get to Biden numbers, though!
Biden was following the law? There was a law requiring the importation of illegal alien gangbangers? Who knew? And no “bot”? How could you forget the “bot”?
Oh, see. The bot is in fact broken again. It can't tell the difference between "importing" and deportations.
You should go look at the deportation numbers for Biden. He was way better at it than Trump. Also, curious how you think that immigrants that the President "imports" are "illegal"? You seem confused about a lot of things today. It must be hard when your initial talking points turn out to be bad.
The Biden numbers on bringing in the illegals were even more impressive little troll parrot. And, yeah, I do understand the difference. Biden invited in the illegal enemy alien gangbangers and President Trump is trying to deport them.
Don't think that's quite right, because it ignores the fact that Trump doesn't want to deport people; he wants to be seen deporting people. Just using ordinary processes wouldn't enable him to pound his chest on TV and social media. So it's not that Trump is bad at it so much that his goal is different.
I agree. Based on the record, Biden liked to import, not deport illegal alien gangbangers.
The President can recognize a nation, however, this comes from the President’s power to receive ambassadors, which would seem to undercut the idea that the President has power to unilaterally declare something to be a nation when it is not seeking recognition or sending ambassadors or a diplomatic mission to receive. But separately from that, only Congress can declare war. While a country can invade the United States and create a war without Congress’ say so, the President cannot unilaterally create a war without either a declaration of war by Congress or an invasion.
Tell it to those who served (and many who died) in Korea, Vietnam, and the various adventures in the Middle East.
I should add, not declaring war means never having to say you're sorry. Can anyone remember the last time any nation formally declared war against another nation?
If a President wans to invole the Alien Enemies Act absent an invasion of the United States, he has to get Congress to declare a war. It was not invoked in Korea or Vietnam.
Also, Congress did pass an authorization regarding Al Qaida.
He doesn't, however, plan to invoke it absent an invasion. He plans to invoke it in regards to a disputed "invasion", with is not at all the same thing.
No. Truth matters.
You don't get to lie and then say 'well now it's in dispute.'
There is no invasion. You do violence to semantics when you say 'no the constitution meant it like a home invasion too.' No one believes this; they just fervently want to believe. Either they are Trump must win outcome-oriented tools or bigots seeking to reify their fear and loathing by supporting horrible authoritarian things being done to their fellow humans.
It's transparent. It's shameful. And Trump's really revealed a lot of people for who they are at their core.
No, this is politics and government. Truth does not really matter, whose opinion is determinate matters.
And "truth matters" coming from a defender of living constitutionalism has a particularly odd sound.
No, this is politics and government. Truth does not really matter
You duck into nihilism like it's a shield. But it's not; it's just you admitting you're just a tool.
And "truth matters" coming from a defender of living constitutionalism has a particularly odd sound. You're telling on yourself. The variation in preferred methods of constitutional interpretation is a great example of a legitimate dispute and really compares favorably to your semantic bullshitting about what's an invasion.
That assertion, coming from a self-described autistic neuro-divergent person, has a particularly familiar sound. It examples a source of social difficulties inherent in thought patterns among a large subset of autistic children.
The problem is extreme reliance on reason, without recognition of constraints imposed on reason by near-universal social norms. It is commonplace among autistic children.
An autistic child who thinks that way may conclude that if a teacher responds to misbehavior by one class member, by inflicting unjust punishment on an entire class (no recess, for instance), it means the school system is blind to justice. The autistic child may thus become terrified that a teacher permitted to do that would likewise be permitted to murder the child.
Thus, without sufficient notion of pervasive social constraints, when reason flies out the window, autistic tendencies may launch their victims out too. Bellmore's own struggles with that tendency have for years defined much of his commentary on this blog. That may be why he so often reasons clearly, while making little headway in what might be described as larger social context.
It is worth noting that the same general pattern of thought too often afflicts advocacy by political ideologues, at least some of whom are probably not autistic. Political philosopher Michael Oakeshott wrote a superb essay to address that subject, titled, Rationalism in Politics.
Can anyone remember the last time any nation formally declared war against another nation?
I was curious, so I googled. Not going to claim my search was comprehensive, but it appears that it might actually be the U.S. during WWII.
"but it appears that it might actually be the U.S. during WWII."
Is that as true as everything else you say?
There were multiple ones post US.
The last was Mongolia 0n 08-10-1945 against Japan
"Not going to claim my search was comprehensive"
There is literally a wikipedia article on the specific issue.
Indeed there is:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_war
I'll save everyone the read. If you want to count generally recognized states, it was the Iran/Iraq war in 1980. If you aren't as fussy, it was SADR decorating war on Morocco in 2023.
If President Trump actually believes that the Alien Enemies Act should be invoked, nothing is stopping him from asking Congress to declare war on Venezuela.
A declared war doesn't seem necessary to invoke the act.
§21. Restraint, regulation, and removal
Whenever there is a declared war between the United States and any foreign nation or government, or any invasion or predatory incursion is perpetrated, attempted, or threatened against the territory of the United States by any foreign nation or government, and the President makes public proclamation of the event, all natives, citizens, denizens, or subjects of the hostile nation or government, being of the age of fourteen years and upward, who shall be within the United States and not actually naturalized, shall be liable to be apprehended, restrained, secured, and removed as alien enemies. The President is authorized in any such event, by his proclamation thereof, or other public act, to direct the conduct to be observed on the part of the United States, toward the aliens who become so liable; the manner and degree of the restraint to which they shall be subject and in what cases, and upon what security their residence shall be permitted, and to provide for the removal of those who, not being permitted to reside within the United States, refuse or neglect to depart therefrom; and to establish any other regulations which are found necessary in the premises and for the public safety.
(R.S. §4067
While it’s true it’s not necessary, the problem is the other alternative is for Venezuala to have engaged in hostilities with the United States. And so far, Mr. Trump seems to have been rather unsuccessful at persuading Venezuala to send in troops to attack us.
Either a declared war or an invasion or predatory incursion which is perpetrated, attempted, or threatened against the territory of the United States by any foreign nation or government is a sine qua non for invocation of the Alien Enemies Act. The President can ask Congress only for the former.
...and declare the later?
I believe the argument will be made that Venezuela intentionally designed a "predatory incursion" a la the Cuban Mariel boatlift model. That argument may have some legs:
https://cis.org/Arthur/Venezuela-Sending-Violent-Criminals-United-States
On a practical perspective, who's running Mexico right now? Who's running Somalia? Or Tripoli circa 1800?
After April 19, 1775, the British were isolated on the de-facto island of pre-landfill Boston, Henry Knox would haul cannons down from Fort Ticonderoga and put them up on the hills that aren't there anymore (used to fill in mudflats to expand the city) and the British evacuated in March of 1776.
Who was the government of Massachusetts, NH, CT after then? Not the official government. And we never recognized the Confederacy as a government, but it sure acted like one...
The statute includes "invasion " and "predatory incursion" by a foreign nation or government.
The focus to discredit Trumps use of the Aliens Enemy's Act has been on the "Invasion " and foreign nation, while ignoring both the predatory incursion and ignoring the assistance and faciliation of the predatory incursion by the various governments of latin and central america
Sorry, but ordinary immigration or attempted immigration, legal or not, simply isn’t a “predatory incursion.” A predatory incursion is an invasion on a smaller scale, like a raid. Both require shooting to take place.
Nor are would-be immigrants a foreign government.
What next? Catholics are an attack by the Pope on the American way of life and hence their presence in the US is an invasion by the Vatican? There were crazies who used to talk like that.
Well, I mean, if two or more members of TdA conspire to discharge weapons at a rival gang while fighting over drug distribution rights in a certain park or street corner, and they KNEW they were probably going to wind up doing that somewhere in the target american city eventually, before they ever left Venezuela.... That's not not a predatory incursion, right? At some point, they cross the line to where it counts. 20 men fighting over 10 street corners? 200 men fighting over 100 street corners, plus establishing a weapons smuggling route? 2,000 men, 1,000 street corners, a weapons smuggling route, and a command chain in charge of authorizing major acts of extortion?
Posit private, Inconvenient State-Like Organizations,* and you get a plot for a Bond movie.
*Thank you Mrs. Lathrop for that one.
In France they shut down an entire windmill farm for a year because it killed.a single Golden Eagle.
https://www.ouest-france.fr/environnement/apres-la-mort-dun-aigle-royal-la-justice-ordonne-larret-dun-parc-eolien-dans-lherault-ba605342-153e-11f0-9759-9654df6b878b
But in the US, they are allowing Windfarms to kill an estimated 270 Golden Eagles per year, which is above the take level the population can sustain according to a peer reviewed study.
"Anthropogenic mortality is the primary cause of death in adult golden eagles and recent trends indicate their population may be declining. If the current rate of growth of the wind energy industry continues, it could have conservation implications for golden eagle and other raptor populations."
https://www.wind-watch.org/documents/estimated-golden-eagle-mortality-from-wind-turbines-in-the-western-united-states/
...all in the name of saving the planet.
The link discusses a study by folks who apparently do not know much about golden eagles. I have seen many of them. I know numerous sites in the Rockies where you will always see golden eagles during certain seasons. All those places have two things in common: reliable updrafts; and unusually low wind prevalence.
Maybe there are other places where golden eagles love steady winds, and no updrafts. I doubt it.
Do not use lattice-style towers for wind turbines. Those encourage perching by raptors. During autumn, the Conowingo Dam area in eastern Maryland features gatherings of Bald Eagles—perhaps the most numerous gatherings east of the Mississippi. There, Bald Eagles by the dozens can sometimes be seen perching on lattice-style high-tension towers, where power lines from the dam cross the Susquehanna. The eagles fish from those towers, and carry captured fish up to perches on the towers to pick them apart.
So keep the wind turbines off mountain ridges, and out of mountain passes, where they should not be allowed anyway, and I doubt there is much real conflict between golden eagles and wind turbines. Especially if you do not encourage perching with lattice-style towers, which seem to be obsolete technology anyway.
Other kinds of birds behave differently, and should be analyzed separately.
I know I'm making a huge mistake here by making an appeal to authority, but here are study's authors:
Jay V. Gedir, Matthew J. Gould, Brian A. Millsap, Department of Fish, Wildlife and Conservation Ecology, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces
Paige E. Howell, Guthrie S. Zimmerman, Emily R. Bjerre, Hillary M. White, Division of Migratory Bird Management, National Raptor Program, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Washington, DC
And this is journal they published in: Biological Conservation Volume 302, February 2025, 110961
Kazinsky — I read the study before commenting. Did you?
You ignore their method—in this case almost entirely dependent on statistical inferences based on near-zero real-bird-damage corroboration. They offered frankly speculative comments to explain why they did not find more physical evidence that what they inferred was actually happening. A hypothesis about missing evidence carried away by scavengers filled in for something like 90% of the bird mortality they posited.
No doubt if what they posited had been true, and if they had as they suggested monitored the referenced locations only at long intervals, scavenger activity might explain missing evidence. Supposing that does nothing to turn absent evidence into evidence.
I have great respect for wildlife biologists. Also enough experience interviewing and conversing with them to understand they typically confront daunting evidence gathering problems. The ones I have known have always been eager to get informed comment from members of the public. The biologists understand that outdoors enthusiasts may have observed real-life conditions in locations the biologists have not studied, nor visited, nor laid eyes on a photograph to show. Which in golden eagle country throughout the American West includes most of the pertinent geography.
No doubt my own experience is less comprehensive than that of the biologists, although my own amounts to at least hundreds of golden eagle sightings in dozens of separate locations. It remains true that I have sighted and conversed with wildlife biologists by telephone, in offices, after lectures in public halls, and over beers in saloons. In fact, I have photographed and published in newspapers pictures of both golden eagles, and wildlife biologists. But never once did I ever encounter a wildlife biologist while actually observing a golden eagle.
Where I went to see golden eagles, if I wanted to see another person, I had to take the precaution to bring the other person along. And never once did I ever see a golden eagle and a wind turbine within the compass of the same horizon. If we manage wind turbines wisely, it should prove easy enough to maintain that separation, and to do it at very little inconvenience to economically realistic electrical generation opportunities.
This is what's called observational bias: Assuming something is mostly present under the conditions that make it easiest to observe.
It's like thinking rainstorms bringing out earthworms mean that water logged soil is where earthworms are mostly found. No, it's just where they're easiest to spot.
When judging the ranked importance of fighting Democratic factions, the one that's more likely to funnel money into suing lawyer pockets wins. Wind farms for environmentalism clean energy vs. killing endangered animals.
God help the golden eagles if one flew into the head of a kid in a wheelchair.
As an Auburn fan, I’m partial to the Eagles. That being said, they’re scavengers, and will attack any weak target of opportunity(ironically, also describes the F-15 “Eagle” still the worlds best pure Air Superiority Fighter, but primarily attacks the weak and vulnerable from behind) And no crap please about whether Auburns the Tigers or War Eagles, its the same as the Yankees are also called the “Bronx Bombers”
So is Frankie a psychotic troll who invented an elaborate backstory or is he really an immigrant’s kid who has lived in the US over fifty years attending English speaking schools (including Auburn) but somehow never learned third grade English writing skills?
These are the kinds of nuts and/or poorly educated Trump loves!
I done tole you, lost my job, how I sposed to get money to pay dis rent? Can ya let me slide it along? I’ll have it for ya tomorrow, next week, I don’t know,
lol, the kind of pathetic weirdo that MAGA attracts and emboldens, folks!
You be talkin bout the back rent, you ain’t getting no front rent, you ain’t gettin none of it! So I packs up my Johnny Lee Hooker record collection and out the door I went, I’m outdoors, yknow
The kind of nut or dolt the MAGA cult appeals to, folks.
Krayt, if the kid in question is progeny of a mountain goat, you do not need the wheelchair. Golden eagles will sometimes attack the young of mountain goats, to knock them off their crags into an abyss below, and then descend to feed.
Luckily a human kid in a wheelchair is not likely ever to be thus exposed.
Steven might want to look at the permits that the Obama admin gave the windill farms to kill eagles. Yes, they are given a kill quota, they have the right to "take" a not insignificant number of them.
Glad to see you MAGAs taking up the cause of conservation over industry. Now do coal!
Oh wait...it's about a 'progressive' industry. I see what you're doing here, Kaz
It's an asinine industry.
I am an environmentalist just not a fake one that will tear up thousands of acres of land or sea floor to make energy less efficiently.
My cabin is off the grid, I've got 15 acres of pristine forest land in the Sierra Nevada, that's bear, deer, mountain lion, and bobcat habitat.
AND I am past president of the Redwood Jr. High School ecology club.
I just don't happen to believe CO2 is a pollutant.
Glad to see Kaz is so concerned about the environ.....
Oops.....
Trump Allows Migratory Bird Killings, Cancels Further Protection
https://news.bloomberglaw.com/environment-and-energy/trump-allows-migratory-bird-killings-cancels-further-protection
They also are killing Bald Eagles.
Love the concern trolling.
Bird deaths are a legitimate concern about wind turbines. Global warming is also a legitimate concern that threatens a lot of species. Balancing between the two seems hard. If you don't care about either of the issues, though, and are just reflexively annoyed by any sort of power that doesn't use fossil fuels, it's probably not a very interesting version of the conversation.
The Pope has died. Any Catholics on hand to tell us the legal process the College of Cardinals uses to pick his successor? Will the next pope be european?
Dammit, I'm not up on my Cardinals
The only cardinals I have any familiarity with are the ones at our bird feeder.
On the one hand the Church hierarchy is increasingly derived from South America and Africa. OTOH, the European/Western Cardinals really want to retain control of the Church. It's likely to be a fight, but of course we won't get to observe it.
I'm just hoping for somebody more like John Paul II, than like Francis.
American Catholics prefer liberalization. Most of the rest (aforementioned Africa and South America) are still very old school. Who to please?
Well, most growth are in those places. Drying up North America is most donations. Money or future population?
Francis was from.South America, he didn't seem very old school to me.
Old school communist.
Not too classy. How about refraining from the Catholic bigotry for just a few days?
I'm not sure how that's anti-Catholic bigotry. A lot of Catholics would agree with that assessment.
Then they’re as disgraceful as this commenter.
Sorry you're offended by a Catholic's comment on the now departed Pope, but as Brett said, I am not alone.
"Old school communist."
Nah, a Peronista.
Mr. Bumble : "Old school communist"
But was Jesus an "old school communist" too?
No. On another subject, what are your thoughts on the new Penn Station plans?
On your reply, I think a citation is needed. If Pope Francis was a dirty rotten commie, JC's commitment to free markets has to be questioned. True be told, Jesus was too frequently woke and bleeding-heart to be properly MAGA. I think he would have definitely earned a Musk-financed primary challenge back in the day.
On your question, I haven't made much of a study of the latest Penn Station renderings, but have read about Trump taking over the issue. Maybe this is one situation where that works, but I have serious doubts. “President Trump has made it clear: The days of reckless spending and blank checks are over,” his spokesmen said in a statement. But there has been no spending or checks, only endless schemes that start nowhere and never move an inch.
Now, the lie was just rote Trump, but the underlying problem remains. This involves dozen of players, multiple states along with the federal government, and countless separate entities. And all require negotiation and consideration : For instant, the pretty pictures I saw from the Trumpish Grand Penn Community Alliance made Madison Square Garden magically vanish, but James Dolan has years to go on his lease and will fight like Hell to extend it further.
I don't think a tabula rasa solution is possible, so any solution will require endless back & forth among the parties, as well as a designer able to perform miracles with strategic interventions into the existing built fabric. This will be much more complicated than (say) negotiating an end to the Ukrainian invasion, but you already see Trump getting bored with that problem. Our toddler-in-chief has a short attention span and is easily distracted by the next stunt or gimmick. Thus my skepticism.
https://nypost.com/2025/04/18/us-news/grand-plan-for-penn-station-linked-to-trump-donor-could-give-glimpse-of-nyc-transit-hubs-future-after-fed-takeover/
On the other hand, I though Trump ideally suited to pull-off a critical much-needed national reform : Getting rid of the penny. But even there, he let me down. There was a exec order that stopped production of the coin, but no move towards rounding and withdrawing the pesky little buggers.
"If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting, that I might not be delivered over to the Jews. But my kingdom is not from the world.”
John 18:36
Not a communist.
If anyone really prefers something other than a Pope chosen after a conclave guided by the Holy Spirit, then they’re not really Catholic anymore. It’s their and your choice.
Guided by the Holy Spirit?? Be careful and pay heed to the words of Jesus recorded at Matthew 12:30-32 (RSV):
31 Therefore I tell you, every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven men, but the blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven. 32 And whoever says a word against the Son of man will be forgiven; but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come. 33 "Either make the tree good, and its fruit good; or make the tree bad, and its fruit bad; for the tree is known by its fruit.
The fruit of the Roman Catholic Man-Boy Lust Association is corruption, perversity and bigotry.
Heed your own advice.
"pay heed to the words of Jesus"
The Devil will quote scripture for his purposes.
John Paul II was a man for his time. That time no longer exists. What the Catholic church needs is a Pope that can maintain faith in the institution of the Catholic Church in a time when people are retaining ties to spirituality but shunning religious institutions.
Saw JP2 at St Peters 1997(yes I’m Jewish, It’s what you do when you go to Rome, you go to Yellowstone you see Old Faithful, in Rome you see the Pope at St Peters) Cool thing is you could drink the Heiniken you bought from the vender right outside the square, 90% of the service was recognizing various youth groups “and from Udine, “Our Blessed Maria Maria Roseannadanna” Yayyyyyyy!!!!!!!” If you go, do the Catacombs, gotta do the Catacombs
Frank
What about Pope Benedict? Isn't he still alive?
Pope Francis has appointed enough cardinals to ensure the next one will be far worse than he was.
Pope Benedict died in 2022, I know, you didn't even know he was sick.
Let me be the first to one to accuse JD Vance of the hit on the Pope, because I know i won't be the last to make the accusation. This can't be coincidence:
VATICAN CITY (AP) — U.S. Vice President JD Vance met briefly with Pope Francis on Sunday to exchange Easter greetings, after they got into a long-distance tangle over the Trump administration’s migrant deportation plans.
Francis, who is recovering from a near-fatal bout of pneumonia, received Vance in one of the reception rooms of the Vatican hotel where he lives. The 88-year-old pope offered the Catholic vice president three big chocolate Easter eggs for Vance’s three young children, who did not attend, as well as a Vatican tie and rosaries.
“I know you have not been feeling great but it’s good to see you in better health,” Vance told the pope. “Thank you for seeing me.”
https://apnews.com/article/pope-vance-us-migration-c9fc577cabff138de7bd8026133994fc
And yeah I am kidding, and about a dead pope, so I am probably going to hell.
JD missed the perfect opportunity to say…..
“Lighten up Francis!”
"accuse JD Vance of the hit on the Pope"
My wife and I independently had that same first thought when we saw the news!
Francis was a good pope. He decreed that all dogs do indeed go to heaven.
You are truly a disgrace. Congratulations. I’m sure your parents are proud.
Not a dog lover, eh? Not surprised
what about Cats? Ferrets? Goldfish? Turtles? OK, the Snakes I can do without, sorry Snakes.
How about cats and birds?
I don't know if he said anything about them
For DnD purposes I invented the Pope hammer, which causes no damage to live entities, but when applied to a dead body prevents respawning.
As far as the process, they have a great rule: if the College of Cardinals fails to come to a decision, they can be sequestered under increasingly unpleasant conditions to encourage them to do their duty. We should consider that for Congress.
Random selection of the voting cardinals from among themselves would give odds of roughly 40% European, 30% N&S America, 30% Africa and Asia.
(You asked for a Catholic: haven't been to mass other than weddings and funerals for 25 years but I could in theory still show up, confess and take communion.)
Congress, nothing but moldy bread and brackish water until you pass a budget! 😉
"Any Catholics on hand to tell us the legal process" Not Catholic but its pretty simple:
1. Concave of al Cardinals under 80 starts 15-20 days after the death. Cardinals are mostly also bishops but do not have to be. Its kinda an honorary post except for the nice red outfits and the ability to select a Pope. 2. Cardinals meet in the Sistene Chapel to vote by secret ballot. They are locked in to avoid outside influences. 3. Any adult Catholic male is eligible but the last non Cardinal elected was over 500 years ago and the last non bishop over 1200. 3. They vote by secret ballot multiple times a day until someone gets 2/3 vote. The elected can decline but its been many centuries since that happened.
That's basically it. There is a very long wikipedia article on the election history and procedure if you are interested.
One would like to think, given Francis' advanced age and health issues, that a lot of thought had already gone into finding a replacement, and that the process would not take long, there already being a slate of potential candidates.
In an opinion issued today, Tokyo District Court recognized the right to know one's parents as an unenumerated constitutional interest.
The 67-year-old plaintiff was accidentally swapped at birth in a public hospital. Although he did receive compensation back in 2006, he never discovered who his actual parents are. As a remedy, the court ordered the Tokyo government to facilitate the investigation.
Here is a hypothetical question - under this decision, is it unconstitutional for municipal hospitals to set up a baby hatch? (I guess someone has already written a law review article in some journals.)
How was the fuck-up discovered?
DNA testing during a medical exam, according to news reports.
Because all Japanese look alike, I get it
Someone who is 67 would have been born in 1958, only 13 years after 1945. What was Japanese medicine back then it what was a country recovering from near-total destruction?
The US Marshalls Service, which enforces federal court orders, is part of the executive-branch Department of Justice under the Attorney General. In the event the Attorney General were to instuct the U.S. Marshall for the district to ignore a court order, or to fire U.S. marshalls or deputies for attempting to enforce it. what would happen?
Would the courts have any other means of enforcing their orders? Do judges have any statutory or common-law power to order the formation of a posse? Could courts enlist another law enforcement agency?
Could U.S. marshalls simply ignore instructions? Could they ignore purported firings?
Fed.R.Civ.P. 4.1 provides:
(a) In General. Process—other than a summons under Rule 4 or a subpoena under Rule 45 —must be served by a United States marshal or deputy marshal or by a person specially appointed for that purpose. It may be served anywhere within the territorial limits of the state where the district court is located and, if authorized by a federal statute, beyond those limits. Proof of service must be made under Rule 4( l ) . (b) Enforcing Orders: Committing for Civil Contempt. An order committing a person for civil contempt of a decree or injunction issued to enforce federal law may be served and enforced in any district. Any other order in a civil-contempt proceeding may be served only in the state where the issuing court is located or elsewhere in the United States within 100 miles from where the order was issued.
(a) In General. Process—other than a summons under Rule 4 or a subpoena under Rule 45 —must be served by a United States marshal or deputy marshal or by a person specially appointed for that purpose. It may be served anywhere within the territorial limits of the state where the district court is located and, if authorized by a federal statute, beyond those limits. Proof of service must be made under Rule 4( l ) .
(b) Enforcing Orders: Committing for Civil Contempt. An order committing a person for civil contempt of a decree or injunction issued to enforce federal law may be served and enforced in any district. Any other order in a civil-contempt proceeding may be served only in the state where the issuing court is located or elsewhere in the United States within 100 miles from where the order was issued.
So yes, courts could specially appoint other persons, including law enforcement officers, to execute the processes of court. As to criminal contempt, the commentary to Rule 4.1 states:
The new rule does not affect the reach of the court to impose criminal contempt sanctions. Nationwide enforcement of federal decrees and injunctions is already available with respect to criminal contempt: a federal court may effect the arrest of a criminal contemnor anywhere in the United States, 28 U.S.C. §3041, and a contemnor when arrested may be subject to removal to the district in which punishment may be imposed. Fed. R. Crim. P. 40. Thus, the present law permits criminal contempt enforcement against a contemnor wherever that person may be found.
"...or by a person specially appointed for that purpose." Where does that say that person may be appointed by a court?
Rule 4 (c) (3) By a Marshal or Someone Specially Appointed. At the plaintiff's request, the court may order that service be made by a United States marshal or deputy marshal or by a person specially appointed by the court.
And the FBI could arrest these persons. It may lead to a Waco, but we know who left Waco alive and who didn't.
The FBI could arrest those persons for having committed what criminal offense(s)?
Rule 4 refers to a summons, which may also be served by any person who is at least 18 years old and not a party. Rule 4.1 refers to process other than a summons or subpoena.
Don't be silly. Who other than a court would make that appointment?
Could a court appoint a posse comitatus?
I mean, if it comes to it, if you’re going to enforce a court order on, say, the Secretary of Homeland Security, you might need a bit more force than a single individual. And, given the Posse Comitatus Act, you couldn’t use the military.
Well, they could try, anyway. Never bet on a judge thinking that he doesn't have the authority to do something.
A court that can appoint one person can appoint more than one person. I agree that the armed forces are not to be used.
[duplicate comment deleted]
Autocorrect gives the double 'l' a pass because there are people named Marshall, but you want "marshal."
Is this on your constitutional crisis bingo card?
There is a lot of talk about emergencies these days. In my view the US has two emergencies. The first is the burgeoning debt, a decades long problem that has not been addressed. No, Clinton and Gingrich did not balance the budget, they lowered the “debt held by the public,” an accounting dodge that would embarrass an Enron CFO. That doesn’t count the pending payments “owed” to the citizens who are counting on Social Security and Medicare some day. It was a start, but not nearly enough. In the coming decades our aging population can look forward to eating cat food and skipping the doctor visits.
Trump’s tariffs are the second emergency. They severely damage the current world economy, destroy our savings, and make solving the first emergency that much harder.
The first step is to take FDR’s image off the dime. He started the Ponzi scheme. Then start dealing out the pain to repair all this. The pain is inevitable, and will only continue to get worse.
"... In the coming decades our aging population can look forward to eating cat food" Have you seen the price of cat food?
Yeah, that was my reaction. Dog food, maybe. But not cat food!
Dog food is even worse.
You'd need to go to dry dog food to save money. On the bright side, you could buy the sort that makes its own gravy.
But, seriously, while both dog and cat food aren't exactly tailored to human needs, cat food is a lot LESS appropriate for humans. At the very least you'd need to take vitamin C supplements, as neither dogs nor cats require an outside supply of vitamin C.
Rural Philippines they have dog breeds that eat mostly rice. That's cheaper, as it would be here.
SS was not originally a Ponzi scheme at all. What has hurt it is that life expectancy has extended - fwiw a standard risk of defined benefit funds.
If we consider it immoral to unilaterally modify the terms of SS to those who are already receiving it, and those close to, nonetheless there are ways to stem the bleeding before a full reengineering. First, continue to raise the retirement age for SS purposes, but to a schedule depending on your current age.
Second, introduce a special working visa for immigrants below a certain age which has them paying into SS but limits their other benefits. and make this working visa readily available to illegal immigrants of otherwise good characte r. You halt a demographic time bomb by changing the demographics, obviously.
Or just slightly reindex to reflect people living longer. Or change the cap on contributions.
This is not actually a hard problem.
No it isn’t. But anything that requires rich people to pay even one penny more is impossible in today’s politics.
There are, I think, two issues here.
First, SS contributions were increased about 40 years ago, with the idea that the excess would be used to pay down the debt, so that the federal government would be better positioned to handle the shortfall when SS went into negative cash flow. But instead they kept borrowing like mad and just increased spending instead, so all that money that got taken from people like me just got frittered away.
As a result of the increase in contributions, most people retiring today would, if they'd invested that increase instead in retirement savings, be very well situated to retire without SS at all. I know I would have been. (Mandated retirement savings was the alternate, losing solution back then to today's long anticipated shortfall.) We could have phased out SS if we'd gone that route, or at least shrank it down to a much smaller needs tested welfare program.
So, here we are, a lot of people in my position: I WOULD have been able to finance my own retirement, thank you, if the government hadn't TAKEN that money from me, promising me support in my retirement, and then effectively thrown it away.
However, the manifest injustice of this doesn't make the SS system any more sustainable.
And, yeah, it's a Ponzi scam, but the birth dearth has denied the government another generation of legally mandated marks for the scam.
Makes me glad I know how to cook really cheap food, because I anticipate putting that knowledge I gained as a poor college student to use in the coming years.
Here's the thing Brett - it's not all about you. You claim to be for freedom, but it always comes down to YOU being able to do everything YOU want.
And a ton of white resentment as well. DEI doesn't really implicate anything you want to do, but it sure does make you mad.
And no, it's not a Ponzi scheme - it's not a situation where everyone is is planning to get out a ton more than they put in.
Above a certain oncome level, most people will get out less than they put in. To me the problem is that the government keeps raiding it by investing it in a particular low-performing investment - treasury bonds, which just gets treated as revenue and spent. There's not really a trust fund. That's money we owe ourselves that has to be paid out of future tax revenue. What we should have is something like a 401(k), where you get a selection of managed funds to invest in. You can invest it in a bond fund, but you don't have to. Of course this would immediately cut into treasury income and the government would be forced to borrow elsewhere, which is why they don't do this. But that would be a more ideal state we should work towards. And then have welfare for the elderly poor below some income threshold.
I disagree with the 401k idea. Taken as a whole, the function here seems like maximum risk aversion is important.
And it’s not an investment anyhow; it’s society supporting its elderly. A baseline duty of any social group. No need to maximize profits; it’s spending on general welfare and all the rest is faffing about.
In my view, it is immoral to expect society to support you in your old age, barring severe disability. You work for a few decades with the hope and expectation to retire. You should save and invest for it. This self-sufficiency should be the norm. As it is, people think to government have got their backs.
My father invested funds for his clients. He made millionaires out of his secretaries. Regular savings, and long term investment in growth stocks was the key. Companies like Costco have had annual earnings growth in the teens for several decades. Buy and hold, skip the extra nice furniture, HBO, and frequent trips to Disney Land. A little calvinism leaves you with enough to live on after retirement.
We realized SS was a bad deal back in the 1970s. Now we are living the dream. Could we give up our SS checks. Yes. They just help us to invade our principal more slowly. It wasn’t the deal as advertised. But this is going to be painful, regardless of the food source. (The comment about vitamin C is correct. Dogfood doesn’t have it.)
Son of investment guy has ideas about society.
Noted.
" it’s society supporting its elderly. A baseline duty of any social group."
Jeez, what an authoritarian. Why not let individuals decide how much support they get, by deciding how much they save?
That would be a great segue into a discussion about minimum wages and corporations that pay below a living wage such that their employees get government food subsidies to avoid starvation.
There's also some value in having a segment of society that gets a guaranteed fixed income that doesn't vary based on stock market valuation. It creates a type of spending floor so that there's always a minimum amount of commerce at any given time.
"What we should have is something like a 401(k), where you get a selection of managed funds to invest in."
Again, that was the competing proposal at the time: That people be mandated to save for their retirements, private funds associated with particular individuals, with a somewhat curated selection of permissible investment vehicles. And, if we'd gone down that path, the government would have not seen a huge INCREASE in money available to spend, but people of my generation wouldn't actually NEED Social Security, we'd have actual security based on personal savings.
I can't imagine why after the great depression people had concerns with investing everyone's retirement.
I can’t imagine why you think government would get this right, given a big pile of cash involved.
It’s not an investment so there is no right about it.
Brett’s suggestion has been implemented elsewhere. See Canada’s RRSP, e.g.
On this rare occasion, I agree with you. I am pinching myself. It is not a hard problem (mathematically).
We can reindex, if by reindex you actually mean increasing the first bend point, and/or the increase base rate from 90% to 100%. Those two things would help the elderly immensely.
Return SSA to tax free status.
Means testing. Neither Lutnick nor POTUS Trump nor Linda McMahon need social security. At ultra-high income (or net worth) levels, SSA is superfluous.
As for the contribution caps, maybe a one-time adjustment.
These things buy time so that legislation can be passed to privatize SSA to a 401K style system, with heritability. SSA 'return' is ~1%; the market returns~7%+. As you say, it is math. Not complicated.
401K style systems to replace SS are a bad, bad idea. One week you're retired and paying your bills and the next the asshole in the Whitehouse has declared a trade war and your income plummets. I'm not an annuity expert, but some sort of annuity would be a better option--however, any massive shift of funds from SS to any market is going to skew the value of things. The fat cats that own tons of stock would love to have the SS savings diverted into the limited amount of stock they already own and inflate the value. Free money! And pushing that same funding into banking instruments outside of stocks would have similar risks.
What retirees need is stable income and the stock market aint that.
Third: eliminate the cap on SS taxes so that people making more than $150K-ish pay tax on all of their income. Or just raise the cap to $300K. That extends it further.
In the coming decades our aging population can look forward to eating cat food
I have it on good authority that they're eating the cats, so there should be a lot of surplus cat food.
None of the authorities asserting that could be described as "good".
“The National Intelligence Council, drawing on the acumen of the United States’ 18 intelligence agencies, determined in a secret assessment early this month that the Venezuelan government is not directing an invasion of the United States by the prison gang Tren de Aragua, a judgment that contradicts President Donald Trump’s public statements, according to people familiar with the matter.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/04/17/us-intelligence-tren-de-aragua-deportations-trump/
Why do I suspect people in the National Intelligence Council are about to be fired?
Is this anything like the 50 experts who determined that Hunter Biden’s laptop was fake?
Sigh. No. If for no other reason than that they explicitly said that they did not know and were not saying that.
“School officials in one part of the Lone Star State are no fans of the lone nipple on the Virginia state flag, so they have nixed an online lesson that included a picture of the banner.
Virginia’s flag and state seal feature Virtus, the Roman goddess of virtue, whose name suggests a buttoned-down gal but whose toga tells another story — draped so low on her left that one breast is fully out there for God Almighty and everybody else to see.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/04/20/virginia-flag-texas-school-district-breast/
The article was paywalled, but here are the flag and seal of Virginia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_and_seal_of_Virginia
...such firings to be cheered on by the cultist, because there is no greater crime than disloyalty to Dear Leader.
It is extremely difficult to automate making shoes.
https://www.wsj.com/economy/trade/why-its-so-difficult-for-robots-to-make-your-nike-sneakers-47b882b5?mod=hp_lead_pos8
"robots struggled to handle the soft, squishy and stretchy parts that are integral to shoemaking. Shoe fabrics also expand and contract depending on the temperature, while in shoemaking no two soles are exactly alike."
Gluing soles proved to be difficult, as did sewing the swish on the shoes.
Nike gave up in 2019, as did Under Armor.
Same with Baseballs, it’s why MLB Beisbols are made in Costa Rica (used to be Haiti, sad when someone will work cheaper than Haitians) almost all the others in Chy-Na (is there anything they don’t make? Electronics, Clothing, Gain-of-Function Respiratory Viruses?
" (used to be Haiti, sad when someone will work cheaper than Haitians)"
Not necessarily cheaper, but more reliable.
Possibly also better quality...
This comment properly belongs over at MarginalRevolution. WTF are you doing talking economics on a law blog?
Watched Brokeback Mountain again after 15 years. Man, that last 60 seconds is a crusher. I remember reading the short story in the New Yorker when it came out in 1997 and I thought then, as I do now, that it is the greatest piece of literature I have ever read.
Back then, like any annoying new parent, I felt the need to show it off. I gave it to a large redneck buddy who began reading it in front of me. After a few minutes, he got red in the face and threw the magazine on the ground. He then spat, 'Why do these faggots always gotta be pushing their lifestyles on everyone?!' And then he stormed off.
I was think about that incident yesterday. It's basically how you rubes deal with the world and all the hatreds you have to maintain. Even a piece of tender fiction can be a real world threat. Whether it is real of not is immaterial
You want to know about hatred, I’m one of the few people who liked Ang Lee’s Hulk 😉
Oh, I agree. Like all of Ang Lee's work, it was simply gorgeous
We know, but what about his movies?
Why do you faggots always be pushing your lifestyles(I prefer Trojans, “Lifestyles” were the ones the Military bought, low bidder and all that that entrails)? I don’t go around, be like me! Make tasteless insensitive comments! Drive a Vette! Ogle underage girls! Oh wait, I just described Joe Biden
I've got you pegged as an IROC kind of guy, Frankie.
Don't think Frank would appreciate being "pegged".
4th Gen actually, you know anyone who’s got an OEM Optispark?
No douchebag racists have ever driven IROCs.
Frankie doesn’t have a car. His shopping cart full of stuff wouldn’t fit in it.
Here’s a person who is either psychotic and desperate enough to invent an elaborate backstory to interact with strangers on a website comment board or who, according to said backstory, has lived in the US starting as a child for over fifty years and has not been able to learn to write third grade level English.
Delusional, desperate, dumb…MAGA!
Most people’s lives seem “elaborate” if you get to the granular level, the details of mine are insignificant really, Summers in Rangoon, Luge lessons, when I was insolent I was flagellated with my mothers wet thong Bikini….
Most people’s lives seem “elaborate”
Especially the ones made up by desperate psychotics to interact with strangers on a website comment board, like Frankie’s!
Project much? And think you could get someone in to cleanup? Lot of cobwebs in your haid’
Project? I’ve no detailed backstory I offer here that suggests I lived in this country for fifty plus years and yet write like a third grader. That’s you, buddy.
So pretty standard, really.
Free speech is not the ability to force others to listen.
I didn't see the movie then, won't see it now.
To be fair, it does get a bit annoying when every same sex relationship in a movie has to have homoerotic overtones. It's like producers feel like the only dramatic territory worth exploring has to be transgressive in some way.
I do agree that this is how a lot of Trump people think about the world. The problem is a lot of it is blowback. People don't like to be constantly pressured and "educated" and told how to think. They want to see films and read books about people they relate to. Not everything needs to be a lesson in relating to people who are different. Straight white guys also have emotional lives and want to read books that involve people they relate to and speak to the problems they have.
Do not take this to mean I excuse anything about the Trump cult. I just understand some part of how they got to the sad mental (and I mean mental pejoratively) place they are at.
It does get a bit tiresome when it seems they have a spreadsheet where they have X characters with Y screentime so they need Z LGBT characters.
I'm watching Wheel of Time, which definitely isn't worth the effort, and they changed a major plot element just to make one of the characters a lesbian.
No big deal, they ruined it before they got through the first episode, but its a good example.
I haven't started the tv series yet (big fan of the books) so I don't know who this refers to, but you know there was lesbians in the books, right? Explicit and implicit. Though PG either way.
Well since you read the books, this won't be a big spoiler, or maybe it will because you did read it, but its a major deviation from the book for Elayne Trakand, Queen of Andor to be a lesbian, not just characterwise but plotwise.
Of course they could salvage some of the plot by making her bi I suppose.
Okay, yes, that would be a significant change from the books, and — as you said — unless they make her bi would require significant plot rewriting.
People don't like to be constantly pressured and "educated" and told how to think. They want to see films and read books about people they relate to.
So how do you explain the success of all those Yellowstone TV shows?
“How much contempt is stirred up at times towards the vulnerable, the marginalized, and migrants!” he wrote. “On this day [Easter], I would like all of us to hope anew and to revive our trust in others, including those who are different than ourselves, or who come from distant lands, bringing unfamiliar customs, ways of life and ideas!”
Jesus and his progressive gang of thugs illegally immigrated into the Roman Empire and held too many protests. Like and subscribe for more MAGA history revisions
They may have blocked the road on Palm Sunday!
What if Mary, Joseph and their infant had been turned away at the Egyptian border and sent back to King Herod?
Hey-Zeus would have done his magic tricks sooner
Wouldn't anchor baby Jesus have gotten the family a couple of green cards?
He could have miracled a few, he was Hey-Zeus for his sake!
"There is no God, but if there were She would have been a good progressive."
"You have to consider the possibility that God does not like you. He never wanted you. In all probability, he hates you. This is not the worst thing that can happen." Tyler Durden
God said to help your neighbor, not to pull out a gun and demand your neighbor help your other neighbor. (And pay attention to the waggle-fingers.)
More like the Roman Empire enveloped Jesus and his people.
In true Christian spirit, our President reaches out to his enemies on Easter Day:
Happy Easter to all, including the Radical Left Lunatics who are fighting and scheming so hard to bring Murderers, Drug Lords, Dangerous Prisoners, the Mentally Insane, and well known MS-13 Gang Members and Wife Beaters, back into our Country. Happy Easter also to the WEAK and INEFFECTIVE Judges and Law Enforcement Officials who are allowing this sinister attack on our Nation to continue, an attack so violent that it will never be forgotten! Sleepy Joe Biden purposefully allowed Millions of CRIMINALS to enter our Country, totally unvetted and unchecked, through an Open Borders Policy that will go down in history as the single most calamitous act ever perpetrated upon America. He was, by far, our WORST and most Incompetent President, a man who had absolutely no idea what he was doing -- But to him, and to the person that ran and manipulated the Auto Pen (perhaps our REAL President!), and to all of the people who CHEATED in the 2020 Presidential Election in order to get this highly destructive Moron Elected, I wish you, with great love, sincerity, and affection, a very Happy Easter!!!
He and Pope Francis — like two ends of a spectrum.
Not my pope.
Not your kind of guy anyway.
He is still harping on his loss in 2020? Man this dude holds unhealthy grudges.
This reminds me of a few of his similar previous holiday grievance posts. They seem to follow a very similar script and are wholly inappropriate for whatever holiday it is and 100% completely non-presidential in every way.
It does bring me comfort to know that he is such a miserable piece of shit all the time. All the little setbacks of his ridiculous agenda seemingly burn into his supersized ego with the fire of a thousand suns.
Burn little suns. Burn him from the inside out.
Trump thinks and writes at about the same level as Frank Drackman.
But her emails!
Hegseth team gets new jolt with more allegations involving Signal app The embattled defense secretary is accused of sharing pre-operational details involving a Yemen bomb strike with a group of close associates and family.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/04/20/pentagon-signal-leak-hegseth-ullyot/
According to Trump, there's no reason to be concerned. I wonder what ever happened to accountability.
https://jonathanturley.org/2025/04/18/washington-state-university-instructor-arrested-for-allegedly-assaulting-trump-supporter/ https://jonathanturley.org/2025/04/19/when-must-we-kill-them-george-mason-phd-student-captures-the-growing-violent-ideation-on-the-left/
https://reason.com/volokh/2025/04/11/friday-open-thread-15/?comments=true#comment-10998950
You know that a MAGAt actually went on a shooting spree at Florida State last week, right?
It has been 37 days since the Trump Administration arrested and deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia. A mistake they have admitted but have made no effort to correct.
They don’t care. He’s an illegal alien so therefore of no moral weight.
There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
His wife and son are US citizens.
Where’s he being held, a resort? What prison let’s you wear sports clothes and drink Margaritas?
"The margaritas were planted as part of a government conspiracy!"
I'm gonna use that next time.
"37 days"
Ted Koppel is still alive. Maybe he can host a show about Garcia Held Hostage.
That is not accurate, M4e. POTUS Trump himself discussed the case with President Bukele. President Bukele said 'No'. How much more do you want? Concurrently, Senator Van Hollen looks like a fool, prostrating himself at the Altar of Abrego over drinks.
The POTUS is busy with other things, and can't have his time monopolized on a serial, wife beating, illegal alien gangbanger.
I am sure that if President Trump put a 150% tariff on goods from El Salvator that President Bukele would allow the return of Mr. Garcia. Trump pardoned J6 defendants that were wife beaters, abusers, and child abusers, so merely giving Mr. Garcia due process is a much lower bar.
LOL, Bukele said he wouldn't be able to smuggle him in.
I've actually seen no indication anywhere that Trump asked him to return Abrego Garcia. In fact, from what Bukele said it sounds like Turmp told him he didn't want him back or wouldn't let him in. Otherwise, why would there be any smuggling involved?
And just to be clear, he said that in response to a question from a reporter. There's no evidence Trump himself ever asked.
How much more do you want?
Tariffs.
Well to be more exact they said it was an administrative error, not a mistake, because they certainly did think he should be deported, and are glad he is gone.
An administrative error is a category of mistake, no?
an administrative error, not a mistake
For fuck's sake, man.
I don't think he's trying to excuse Trump there. (If he is, he's doing a piss poor job.) The point is that the administration doesn't actually think it was a "mistake"; they're happy they did it.
A positive result whether mistake or error.
Mistake: "an action or judgment that is misguided or wrong."
Someone wrote an essay on the topic in 2023, so this is not just a post hoc rationale: "A mistake is a human action or decision that is not intended or that deviates from the outcome that is expected or good. Mistakes can be made due to lack of knowledge, carelessness, or poor judgment. For example, a student who writes the wrong answer on a test has made a mistake.
An error, on the other hand, is a deviation from accuracy or correctness. In my previous discussion of the difference between mistakes and errors, I label it as a deviation from a system."
They did exactly what they intended and got exactly the result they wanted. But the paperwork wasn't quite right.
This "paperwork wasn't quite right" is such an obnoxious framing of the problem.
There was an order in place that Abrego Garcia was not allowed to be sent back to El Salvador. And yet that's where he was sent. There wasn't a typo on a form--the substantive action was not permissible.
Maybe the administration could have revisited that order and gotten it removed, but that would have required an actual hearing with a judge. Or maybe he could have been removed to a third country, but at the moment it doesn't seem like there's such an option for citizens of El Salvador.
So sure, maybe Trump wanted him out of the country and got the result they desired. And with the taxonomy you provide I guess you could call that an error instead of a mistake. But let's not trivialize the problem by acting like it was a bit of wrong paperwork.
It's kind of missed in all this why Bukele would have his own motivation not to send Garcia back to be free man in Maryland.
I don't think he or El Salvadoran's like to read headlines like this:
"Jury in Rachel Morin murder case find Victor Martinez-Hernandez guilty Rachel Morin was killed in August of 2023 while on a jog Rachel Morin family attorney: Guilty verdict brings 'partial closure' to family Life without parole expected for convicted killer
Albrego Garcia with his MS-13 membership and multiple instances of spousal abuse is certainly at risk to provide more headlines like this to tarnish El Salvador.
When I read about Americans going overseas and murdering or abusing someone, I don't think 'I sure am glad they went over there to do that', usually they already have a criminal history and I wish they kept them locked up here.
I'm not sure where you're reading such stories in the first place, but if I did see such a story my first thought would not be "immigration sucks" or "Americans suck." Nor would that be my second, third, fourth, or fifth thought. Or tenth or one-hundredth thought.
The Trump Administration has changed the COVID web site to now support the lab leak theory. It really doesn't matter what the source of the pandemic was, because the first Trump Administration showed itself to be incompetent in addressing the pandemic. There is little to suggest that they could address a new pandemic any better.
I'm not entirely clear what you wanted Trump to do that he didn't do.
He cleared the obstacles to accelerated vaccine development/deployment. That was pretty critical, actually.
He at least tried to block entry by carriers, the courts got in the way.
He let the states do destructive lockdowns. In retrospect a mistake, but if he'd fought them you'd have been even more pissed off.
What exactly were you looking for, that was actually within his constitutional powers? Refraining from blue skying in public? I'll gladly grant you that much.
During 2020 I don't think Trump did anything wrong policy-wise regarding the pandemic. He was personally ridiculous promoting bleach and whatnot. But that's just his vast ignorance showing. Otherwise, everything took its own course...in my opinion
That's the blue skying I was talking about. It wasn't remotely as ignorant as it was made out to be, if you had a biology background, and made a habit of following the relevant research; He was obviously getting some good briefings.
But Presidents should better watch what they say in public, and I feel like he's properly dinged for that, even of a lot of the complaints were ignorant.
Wasn't ignorant at all, there's a Medical Procedure called "Pulmonary Lavage" where the lungs are flushed with Saline (OK, not Bleach), sounds crazy if you haven't heard of it before.
Extreme blue light sterilization, too. It's used on transplanted lungs, but I expect you could adapt it to in vivio use.
And good success was had with sinus irrigation using very low concentrations of, yes, bleach.
So, no, not ignorant, but I don't think we want Presidents engaging in blue skying in public.
There was a brief Star Trek Voyager meme, where Tuvok says to Neelix, "Imagine your lungs being bathed with light..."
“if you had a biology background”
During a medical crisis we don’t need an official espousing things that “aren’t as ignorant as made out to someone if you had a biology background,” we need directives based on the latest best review of the evidence by experts in the relevant fields. Trump shouldn’t have made himself the focus at those briefings.
No do Gavin Newsom. He did a daily brief every day at noon for at least 2 months. I my opinion the briefing were well done; the policies promoted were questionable at best.
I didn’t see Newsom’s, as you say his were well done so that itself could be a relevant difference.
While I am no fan of Newsom, I did make an effort to listen to his broadcasts every day. The governor made a strong effort to present a reassuring message to the public during a highly uncertain time.
My general feeling was that had Mr Trump done as well as Newsom with his briefings, he would have been unbeatable in 2020.
When he wasn’t violating his own bans on Restaurants
He forced states to bid against each other for masks. He kept undercutting the CDC. He kept blaming people and pointing fingers instead of being the unifying force his office called for in such a national crisis. Don’t you remember ?
In retrospect, he didn't undercut the CDC enough.
He sure did. Most damaging was his downgrading respect for medicine, or at least well informed medicine.
That's something the CDC accomplished on its own, your complaint would be that Trump didn't do enough to shield them from the backlash their own mistakes earned.
Suddenly, Public Health Officials Say Social Justice Matters More Than Social Distance
Yeah, round about the summer we learned that being outside was not nearly as big a problem as we thought early on.
I'm sure there was some folks making a political cost-benefit in their advice. But you're saying the entire CDC is bad because woke.
Can't imagine why people think you've got a white grievance problem.
"Yeah, round about the summer we learned that being outside was not nearly as big a problem as we thought early on."
There was never any damned reason to think that being outside was any sort of problem! Good Lord, how long have we known that respiratory viruses spread almost exclusively indoors? Decades now? Since about the time they gave up on the idea of noxious miasmas?
There was never any damned reason to think that being outside was any sort of problem You're flat wrong about respiratory viruses. Plenty spread outdoors - that wasn't some made up requirement. And we didn't know how it was spread originally, remember? Fomites, surfaces...
You're just retconning your reality so you can be mad at the CDC.
That was not the fucking CDC. Nor was it "public health officials." It was a handful of random people. Were their statements ill-advised? Yes. But stop trying to pretend that this was the government changing its stance.
They’re not called the Center for Disease Continuation for nothing
Brett, what I fail to see from the NIH, CDC is any accountability for getting so many things wrong, during the pandemic. Even today, how much retrospective review is happening, probably not enough.
We will have a third lab leak from China from their careless gain of function research. That is a virtual certainty. Hopefully NIH, CDC will do better the next time. One would hope.
Dan, The CDC stubbornly held to its erroneous early announcements long after almost all public health organizations in developing countries had debunked its positions. As I saw acting as a peer-reviewer, CDC also pushed at least some employees to use their own publications as late as 2023 to insist on falsified propaganda claims in support of early CDC positions.
He was saddled with an incompetent power hungry arrogant CDC, remember the testing fiasco when they said only their test could be used, and then their test turned out to be flawed during the first few months of the pandemic?
"CDC Report: Officials Knew Coronavirus Test Was Flawed But Released It Anyway
On Feb. 6, a scientist in a small infectious disease lab on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention campus in Atlanta was putting a coronavirus test kit through its final paces. The lab designed and built the diagnostic test in record time, and the little vials that contained necessary reagents to identify the virus were boxed up and ready to go. But NPR has learned the results of that final quality control test suggested something troubling — it said the kit could fail 33% of the time.
Under normal circumstances, that kind of result would stop a test in its tracks, half a dozen public and private lab officials told NPR. But an internal CDC review obtained by NPR confirms that lab officials decided to release the kit anyway. The revelation comes from a CDC internal review, known as a "root-cause analysis," which the agency conducted to understand why an early coronavirus test didn't work properly and wound up costing scientists precious weeks in the early days of a pandemic."
https://www.npr.org/2020/11/06/929078678/cdc-report-officials-knew-coronavirus-test-was-flawed-but-released-it-anyway
Not to mention the no masks, then every one wears masks even toddlers and infants pivot, 6 foot distancing that they pulled out of a hat, ridiculous no jogging even alone, closing playgrounds when children weren't at risk and outdoors was the safest place anyway.
Trump's shitty leadership was nonfeasance more than malfeasance.
But hey now we're stupid about Covid in a way that drove some folks to the anti-American MAGA movement. Yay.
"we're stupid about Covid " What do you mean by that? And did you mean the Wuhan and delta variants, or the variants now prevalent? Please clarify.
All
Dan, You obviously had nothing intelligent to say. Moreover, I doubt that you have a psychic connection to S_0 so that you can read his mind.
Brett, you need a way back machine so you can unblock your repressed memories.
- Despite warnings he failed to act quickly to slow the spread. He should have taken the warning more seriously and prepared. Instead of trying to keep people out he would have done better to establish good quarantine procedures. - He should have done more to get protective equipment out and available. He should have done more to get faster COVID testing and linked that to containment. - He should have brought in real experts. He simply relied on Fox News guest because things like the Great Barrington Declaration were beyond his level of reading comprehension. - He gave out way too much money. Government spending was necessary but should have been much more limited and targeted. - He should have been a leader rather than just a person hoping COVID would go away.
M4ever "establish good quarantine procedures." That claim is highly disputed by now. In fact the opposite might be true and likely the reality is that the best practice strongly depends on the ethnic makeup and regional practices of various populations. "should have done more to get protective equipment out and available" You have forgotten that Mr Obama had depleted and not restocked many of those strategic medical supplies "He should have brought in real experts. " This claim is just partisan blah-blah. "He gave out way too much money. Government spending was necessary but should have been much more limited and targeted." But then you claim that he hoped Covid would just go away.
Trump did a good job with getting the vaccines created (one of two things I think he deserves credit for in his first administration). Then once they were released he did a terrible job of improving public confidence in them and encouraging vaccination.
This was pretty much part for the course in Covid as with the rest of his administration: way too much chaos and random shifts in direction (e.g., lots of discussion about using the Defense Production Act but hardly any use of it, or randomly promoting various "cures" that others here have already mentioned).
The most obvious thing that we can hold against him is discouraging testing since he thought that positive tests made the situation look bad. That made it a lot harder to manage the pandemic, and was a complete self-own.
I think that you give an accurate and fair account of what happened. Your last point is especially cogent.
Concur with your points.
jb : "Trump did a good job with getting the vaccines created..."
1. Of course Trump deserves massive credit for the covid vaccine development. Anything done that well in a president's term reflects well on that president, end of story.
2. On covid in general. Trump treated the pandemic as a political playtoy for his most juvenile inclinations. He disparaged the seriousness of the disease, claimed its numbers in cases or fatalities were conspiracy lies, promoted useless junk treatments, demonized his own administration's experts & doctors for a few polling points, and - yes - said people shouldn't test because that would drive the numbers up. At times (as in the infamous Bleach Press Conference) he treated the pandemic as a joke. During it's earliest stages he didn't want to deal with it at all, thinking (somehow) it would remain in Blue cities and not touch his rural Red supporters.
3. Anti-Vaxx Trump wasn't until the last election campaign. For a while he kept bragging about his role in creating the covid vaccines, but got tired of being boo'd by his own cultists. But the people who remade today's Right into an anti-vaxx party followed the Trump playbook on the disease one step further, including vaccinations in their agitprop. They went the only place Trump refused to go.
Slate.com has an excerpt from a new book by Professor Mary Ziegler, a legal historian who has written extensively about abortion rights in the United States, discussing the "fetal personhood" movement in the wake of Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, 597 U.S. 215 (2022). https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/04/supreme-court-abortion-fetal-personhood.html
The fetal rights claims have long puzzled me. About 1/3 of genetically normal embryos naturally fail to implant into the uterus and are washed away with the menstrual flow. Do the proponents of "fetal personhood" give their feminine hygiene products a Christian burial on the chance that one may contain a microscopic "human being"?
Some people do hold a service for miscarriages.
If you were a Chick, you’d know, forget the “Trimester” (normal pregnancy is 40 weeks, so a “Trimester” is 13.33333333333333… weeks) Bullshit, from that first missed period it’s a baby
It is true. Stillbirths, too. Many find comfort in ritual. If that helps with their grief, then do it.
How do we know if all these blastocysts have been purged from the voter rolls? Huh?!
Also, could menstruation in an ICE holding center confer citizenship?
At what point does a living human being acquire the rights of personhood?
That was actually the first topic discussed in my class. A nurse brings a hammer and smashes the head of a baby boy as he peeks out from the mother. In Japanese criminal law, a person is born when any part of the baby becomes visible, so the nurse is guilty of murder. In civil law, a person is born when the entire body is visible. (Though, in this particular example, it doesn't matter because "an unborn child is deemed to have been already born with respect to the claim for damages." Civil Code §721)
Is a person in a terminal, irreversible vegetative state a person with the rights that accompanies that status?
in most civilized countries, yes (in the spirit of friendship (no Homo) I'll omit the "DUH!")
And that they have rights is the correct thing, as seemingly contradictory as it may be.
Humans don't have such a great record dealing with people deemed of lesser competency, even if an academically accurate judgement in some way, so best to assume full, rights-possessing personhood to prevent abuse.
Also, rights are inherent to you, and precede government, and are not granted by anyone, and are inalienable.
We start with that before any of the legion of power mongers from history thru tommorow open their freakin' yappers.
It was explained yesterday somewhere that due process is a right given to a person, not just a citizen. So it seems brown people can LOSE personhood. But why would anyone want to dehumanize them?
It's been proven to work. A decent psych 201 class will discuss how tyrants have long known to direct the populace's hatred against other groups, either an external one, or a small domestic one (read: not enough power) so as to redirect hatred from the tyrant.
I was wondering at what point during (or after) development in the womb a living human being becomes a legal person.
Well, if they're living, then they should be outta that womb and be a full person. Prior to that, it's a subjective excercise which means the state should probably butt out
Seriously? You don't know whether you were alive when you were in your mother's womb?
The traditional answer is birth. Rights obtained at various ages are measured from the date of birth; rights not linked to age can be thought of as obtained at age zero.
Historically, nearly 50% of children failed to reach adulthood. Does that make them "not really human beings"?
And we all die in the end.
Historically reaching adulthood did not guarantee you were considered a human being. Woman and the enslaved were property.
I think the idea of "subjective" personhood makes some sense since some people do consider embryos or fetuses "persons" in some sense. Some have ceremonies when they miscarry or abort. As is there right. Others do not.
https://scholarship.law.pitt.edu/fac_articles/522/
The claims have various levels of seriousness. The "personhood" of a four-month fetus is stronger than a fertilized egg. At some point, common usage talks about "your baby," etc, while talking to a pregnant person. Overall, all the same, I think the personhood discussion in Roe, not refuted by the dissent, is valid.
Again with the "pregnant person" stuff?
Supposedly, in 1971 a feminist named Florynce Kennedy said, "if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament."
So maybe that happy day predicted by Kennedy has finally arrived!
Here I thought you acknowledged I had a point. OTOH, there is the need to find some grievance.
You made a point about intersex people, but you added some stuff about people who deeply believed themselves to be the other sex, and you linked to a CNN explainer about how we should say "penis owners" instead of "men," etc.
In my reply, I ventured the guess that intersex people are more likely to be the *victims* than the *perpetrators* of abortion.
I think if someone has sex traits from both sexes, but can still get pregnant, that would put them on the "female" side of the divide. Just because the border gets fuzzy at times doesn't mean we can't make distinctions, or that there's no border at all.
"Why can't you accept the cultural revolution I'm perpetrating, you...you...you *grievance-monger!*"
Intersex people are not the same thing as "men."
{You edited your comment to talk about the "female side of the divide." Whatever you think, the complexity of sex and gender including of intersex people leads to complexity, including more than two terms ("male" and "female"). Usage of "persons" is a sensible way to deal with the issue. Likewise, the "no border at all" is a strawman, especially given the complexity of intersex people, which again, you acknowledged I had a point on.]
You acknowledged, as you confirm, I had a point about them in this context. Putting aside others possibly involved, too (such as nonbinary people).
I also noted that I cited the source for a specific word usage. You agreeing I had a point doesn't mean you agree with everything I say.
Of course the intersex issue complicates matters. Reality is complicated. But they're still at greater risk for abortion than the average non-intersex person.
And your gender ideology isn't mainly about acknowledging intersex people, since that wouldn't be broad enough: it wouldn't make room for the Stan/Lorettas who passionately *believe* themselves to be other than their biological sex. Such people are in a different category from intersex: deserving of goodwill, but not to the extent of an official pretense that their beliefs, however sincere, reflect reality.
Just as people were friendly and cheerful around "Emperor Norton," the self-proclaimed monarch of the United States, without actually agreeing with him that he could wield the powers of an emperor.
What did Hey-Zeus say to the guy being crucified next to him? (not the Bible version, it’s a joke)
He said, hey, you’re not a sad weirdo who invented a detailed backstory to tell strangers on a comment section on the internet or someone so unintelligent that they couldn’t learn third grade English writing skills in fifty plus years of living in an English speaking country are you? Because either way that’s pathetic!
Wow, now you’re pretending to be (your) Lord and Saviour, in the old days you’d be hung as a Witch, not too long ago they’d stick pointy rods in your frontal lobe, today you’re an “Influencer” and you think I’m the strange one? Oh hey, think you can get someone to vacuum these Neurofibrillary tangles?
I’m just giving you the punchline: yourself!
Frankie is trying hard to hide that his great, great....grandpappy Drack the Fig Squeezer was handing out nails
Nah, too much like work, he was loading the dice for the Soldiers craps game after
He (notice the "He" not "he") said "I can see your house from here!"
For someone who spends so much damned writing on the internet, why don't you have at least passable English skills? Are you an immigrant?
Trump Policies Add to Farming Distress as Bankruptcies Increase
Farm bankruptcy filings soared in 2019 during the height of Trump’s trade war with China, which targeted US agriculture with a sweeping retaliatory tariff regime mirroring the response China is pursuing today. Trump’s administration sent farmers an estimated $23 billion covering export losses to try to stop more farms from going under.
Following the bailout, family farm bankruptcies—filed under Chapter 12 of the US bankruptcy code—declined each year until 2024, when the number of new cases jumped to 216 from a near 20-year low of 139, according to court records. Filings have continued to speed up this year, with 82 cases filed over the first three months of 2025, nearly doubling the figure for the same period a year ago.
Billions of dollars in economic and disaster assistance sent to farmers under the December American Relief Act of 2025 (Public Law 118-158) could reverse declining net farm income, according to a USDA forecast. But Trump’s deportation plans and tariffs threaten to cause further budgetary pain for farmers reliant on migrant labor and international markets.
https://news.bloomberglaw.com/bankruptcy-law/trump-policies-add-to-farming-distress-as-bankruptcies-increase
MAGA screws MAGA and then turns to Socialism.
And who bought up all them farms in 2019? Trumps private equity buddies. You don't think Trump would actually manipulate markets to enrich his circle, do you?
Cherry pick your start date - Why?
The number of U.S. farms filing for Chapter 12 bankruptcy during 2021-23 were in sharp contrast to previous years, when filings hit 599 in 2019 and 560 in 2020. Previous high filings hit 723 in 2010, 712 in 2003 and 637 in 2011.Feb 22, 2024
Because Trump is supposed to be MAGA's savior.
But he's not and MAGA is suffering.
#ETTD
Your response is not relevent, and quite frankly inane
Aren't you proving the gist of the argument? Bankruptcies were super high under Trump, went down under Biden, started to tick up last year and are increasing even more this year.
For bankruptcy rates 15+ years ago, we'd probably want to look back at was going on then (and how many farms there were then versus now as well) to understand what was influencing the higher rates.
Time to predict the next crisis...and it is..
The Chinese invasion of Taiwan in 2026-2027.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/will-2027-invite-conflict-for-taiwan-and-china/
One of the big questions in any such conflict is "How does the US respond?"
Now currently, the US has a policy of strategic ambiguity. The US may or may not intervene. Should it? Will it? And what does the political situation in the US do to influence any such intervention?
I think it's fair to say that Trump isn't a friend of China, and would intervene militarily, and fairly quickly. Question comes from the surrounding political situation. If Democrats took the House and/or Senate, would they oppose a military intervention? As an additional concern, there are quite a number of Chinese nationals living in the US. While nearly all are fine, a small minority may actively oppose US interests. What would be the concerns with regard to this population?
I don't think we have a lot to worry about the Chinese nationals here in the country legally. The ones here illegally might be a serious problem, though.
As I see it, the biggest problem is that we've left our infrastructure terribly exposed, and stocks of long lead time transformers are still utterly inadequate. A fairly small number of saboteurs equipped with anti-materiel rifles and drones could bring our entire electrical grid down in the space of a couple days, and getting it up and running again could take months.
Then there are all those utility system which shouldn't be in any way connected to the internet, but are anyway.
A lot of Chinese products that can connect to the internet are equipped with backdoors, and could be deployed in a coordinated fashion against our IT systems.
In fact, I've come to expect that, as our first sign that China was about to invade Taiwan, a systematic attack on all sorts of infrastructure in the US, to give us bigger things to worry about at home.
The Chinese nationals here in the country legally are just as bad - if not worse - than the ones here illegally because they sometimes have legal access to sensitive data or are able to directly influence adverse operations.
Chinese National Pleads Guilty To Illegally Exporting Semiconductor Manufacturing Machine
Chinese National Convicted of Acting Within the United States as an Unregistered Agent of the People’s Republic of China
Chinese Telecommunications Company Pleads Guilty to Conspiring To Steal Technology From Illinois-Based Motorola Solutions
Private Investigator Sentenced to Prison for Interstate Stalking and Harassment of Chinese Nationals on Behalf of the People’s Republic of China
there are quite a number of Chinese nationals living in the US. While nearly all are fine, a small minority may actively oppose US interests
X set will contain Y subset that are bad is always going to be true. It should take a pretty big Y for us to start treating X as a collective.
No it shouldn't in time of war.
They didn't round up German Americans back in the day.
Yes they did. Just not as many.
See "Internment of German Americans" in wikipedia
" . . . The ones here illegally might be a serious problem, though."
Just over three divisions, based on published data about the border. Think about it. Three divisions of infantry already inside our borders. Aided and abetted by democrat policies and by the judiciary.
Infantry divisions!
LOL what the fuck are you talking about?
It's an overly dramatic way of reporting the numbers. I expect a lot of them are actually people perfectly legitimately (But still illegally!) wanting a new life in the US. The problem with letting a lot of people in without vetting is that you have no way of identifying the ones who might actually be sleeper agents.
And it doesn't take a lot of those to conduct a totally disastrous sabotage attack in the event of war, because, as I said, we're leaving ourselves horribly exposed.
If that's your concern, we're exposed anyhow, unless we completely close down our borders.
National security melodrama has been used to justify all sorts of awful stuff. Not surprised some are scrabbling to use it here.
Oh, come on, a difference in quantity becomes a difference in kind at some point, and letting in literally millions of illegal aliens without vetting is actually a big enough difference in quantity to qualify here.
But, yeah, I think we're actually screwed at this point, it's way too late to fix this in time.
You don't really know much at all about insider threat.
So it's back to NUMBER BIG and that's the end of it.
Because reason doesn't get you where you want to go, so appeal to NUMBER BIG will have to do. See also your long march bullshit. NUMBER BIG at schools = conspiracy. No reasoning need apply there either.
This is just dumb. China is still poor on a per capita basis, but as a nation it is very wealthy. Do you think China couldn't afford to pay non-Chinese people to commit acts of sabotage in the U.S. in the event of an actual shooting war? Or find "vetted" Chinese immigrants to do it?
"Do you think China couldn't afford to pay non-Chinese people to commit acts of sabotage in the U.S.?"
--In which David Nierporent publically tells the Chinese Government that he's "open for business and willing to sabotage the evil Trump Government in exchange for a suitable payment."
Seriously though...typically citizens of a country are not super-willing to sabotage their own country and it's far more effective to get your own people into the enemy country and have them do the sabotage.
The three divisions is about 'military age men', not all Communist Chinese illegal entrants. None of those get out of Communist China with government permission, and most likely government instructions.
All are infantry, apparently.
Even Biden thought that the illegal Chinese "immigrants" bringing tanks with them across the border was a bridge too far.
Bringing tanks now.
When I was a Doc with 2d Mar Div at Camp Lejeune(yes, I drank the Water, can’t you tell?) there were 3 Infantry Regiments, 9 Infantry Battalions, 1 Artillery Regiment with 4 Battalions, separate Battalions for HQ, Recon, Tanks, AAV, LAV, Combat Engineers, now there’s 2 Infantry Regiments with 7 Battalions, I think only 1 Artillery, and no more Tanks
Taiwan semiconductors are a vital US national interest. The US gets 70%+ of it's semiconductors from Taiwan. That is a large part of why the CHIPS Act was passed. The US will fight to preserve access to semiconductors, our country is dead without semiconductors. And if we cannot get Taiwanese semiconductors, then no one will. It is that important.
Yes, there is a large contingent of military-aged Chinese males in the US illegally. They aren't here to serve chop suey.
I expect a blockade of Taiwan, sooner rather than later. China has rehearsed a naval blockade of Taiwan 3X in 5 years. That is an act of war; running the blockade is also an act of war. The US gets it's ass beat in the majority naval simulation exercises (I've read that Blue team loses ~2/3rds of the time). We need a whole lot of standoff missile capability, that seems to be the key to success (meaning overwhelming firepower); a lot of munitions have gone to UKR. I hope our defense contractors are going 24/7.
Commenter_XY : "I expect a blockade of Taiwan, sooner rather than later."
1. I see a blockade as possible. What would ensue (I believe) is a massive coalition of countries around the world committed to breaking that blockade. If we're post-Trump, the U.S. would lead the coalition. Of course Trump has abandoned America's position as leader of the free world, but we could still have some role during his presidency. I'm sure there'd be a place somewhere in the back of the coalition for another gangster regime on the make.
2. I don't see an invasion as possible anytime in the near-term future. Remember how hard it was for the Allies to cross the channel? That was with complete command of air & sea and before the full range of today's tactical missiles & drones. There was recently an account of a Chinese multi-ship bridging system to ferry troops and supplies from off-shore to land. People oohed & aahed, but all I saw was a bunch of floating dead ducks in the event of any real fighting. I would anticipate carnage and failure if China tried to invade across the strait. They can certainly destroy Taiwan at any moment, but can they successfully invade?
3. That said, I confidently predicted Putin wouldn't be such a fool as to launch a full invasion of Ukraine. So you're welcome to keep that in mind.
1. Precisely what role would other countries play in breaking such a blockade (beyond Japan which will join us anyway, for obvious reasons)? What are the Netherlands or Spain going to contribute?
Fact is, the US Navy is the only force which could break such a blockade. The naval forces from most (all) other countries are of such limited capabilities that it's almost an afterthought.
2. Taiwan isn't France. It's closer to Crete or Sicily. An island country, easily blockaded, easily isolated. Blockade and bombard Taiwan for 3 months, no resupply, bait out all those drones and missiles....invasion gets much easier.
The only NATO power with the capability to project power to break a blockade of Taiwan is France via the Charles Du Gaulle and their fleet. It's unclear whether the French would ever send the carrier to rescue Taiwan (even pre-Trump), and even if they were willing to, there's no guarantee that the carrier won't be caught in a refit cycle when the balloon goes up.
The Brits, Italians, an Spanish have light carriers. They aren't worth much in the grand scheme of things since their air wings are too small, using obsolete aircraft, or are actually a composite with US squadrons that would be withdrawn anyways.
Why would Europe care about Taiwan? Our American friends have spent the last 4 months explaining to us that everyone should only care about themselves.
Europe needs semiconductors too, genius.
If only there was a company that makes the world's best machines for making semiconductors...
Anyway, it's like the old joke about the campers and the lion. It doesn't matter that we need semiconductors, in a world where the US only cares about itself, all that matters is that we need Taiwanese semiconductors less than the US does.
That logic doesn't really work. If you actually need Taiwanese semiconductors, what's the advantage of the US needing them more? That you just become less impoverished by their lack than we do? But still become poorer, of course...
Exactly. Europe doesn't care about helping American interests abroad, so the French Navy's usefulness in a Pacific war is imaginary.
Also, given the history of France's involvement in Western defense, they wouldn't help the USA even if Trump was never elected President. France will take action when it's in French interests and not out of any feelings of solidarity or kinship with other westerners.
The "past four months" is mostly Europe getting a dose of its own medicine.
So long as it was politically tenable, I would expect Democrats to oppose any action taken by Trump to defend Taiwan while blaming him for the crisis and how it came about. If it's politically untenable to oppose defending Taiwan, then they'll bite their tongue until they can find something else to criticize or undermine.
Here's a fun thought: will a Democratic judge issue a TRO to block Trump from undertaking a military intervention? Will someone do a "Boasberg" and order the (stealth) planes to be turned around to be followed by contempt proceedings when the administration balks at providing any operational information?
I mean, it's like you don't even pay attention to what Trump says. Democrats are going to be far more supportive of Taiwan in any conflict than Trump — who has several times demanded tribute in exchange for support — is.
Exactly. I far more expect worry the US will sit on the sidelines, but it won't be because of Democrats any more than abandoning Ukraine is due to them.
If that happens, I expect this board to be replete with strangely loud virtue signal defenses of "not our business".
Spend trillions since WWII to dominate the high seas and enforce a Pax Americana. Who knew it would be defeated by some other means?
I hope this is just cynicism and will not come to pass.
You should study your American history.
An opposing party's reluctance to accede a wartime President's policies is reflexive, no matter the context. They will find ways to disagree if only so they don't look like they're rolling over. A notional war with China would be no exception. You are no angel, but it's quaint that you think you are.
As many here have already indicated, if Trump told you that the sky was blue, you'd go outside and check for yourself before you begrudgingly admitted that he was right. Maybe. Until the Atlantic wrote an article saying that it's technically Sky Blue 1.
If a war with China occurs and if Trump offers unconditional support for Taiwan, the least that you'd do is blame him for starting the war in the first place. If the war proved to be unpopular, you'd become anti-war so fast it'd make Jane Fonda blush.
I would expect Democrats to oppose any action taken by Trump to defend Taiwan while blaming him for the crisis and how it came about. I would expect Democrats to oppose any action taken by Trump to defend Taiwan while blaming him for the crisis and how it came about.
Well, imposing massive tariffs is hardly a way to win friends and influence people. Damaging a country's economy does not encourage peaceful relations.
Or the Chinese could approve a Trump hotel and golf course in China and Trump pulls all support from Taiwan.
Does Trump look like a Biden to you?
Only one of them looks like he eats nothing but Big Macs, that's for sure.
And the other can't remember what a Big Mac is!
To be fair, based on the last time I ate there, McDonalds doesn't remember what a Big Mac is, either. Man, has that burger chain ever gone downhill lately.
Careful now, or Trump will revoke your Trumpist membership card, and start demanding that you do pro bono work for him.
As a long time burger lover I'm sure Trump agrees. They can't even keep the shake machines working, sad...
Like Biden said, we libs support and will defend Taiwan. And we won't even extort them to receive our help.
So you say, but when Trump offed Soleimani, you scumbags were criticizing Trump and giving aid and comfort to Iran. Fuck off.
giving aid and comfort to Iran
This guy may be my new favorite comedy conservative poster.
Come for the deep cut hipster right-wing grievances, stay for...well, he only has that one flavor.
But dude is like an *encyclopedia* of random one news cycle nothingburgers from years or decades ago he's still mad about.
Has he done tan suit yet?
I fail to see why China would be in any hurry to invade Taiwan. Trump tariffs present a good opportunity to China to take a dominant position in economic leadership in Asia and in the world. This would allow increasing pressure on Taiwan. China could exploit this with support for new Taiwanese leadership supporting better ties to China. Eventually absorbing Taiwan.
Truth. These tariffs are an excellent opportunity for China to finally take the role of world leader. Coupled with America's self-destruction, Taiwan will be a cake walk in a couple of years. But I do think they will have to invade while Trump is in office. Our former allies will not easily help America if we were to engage and Trump cannot seem to form a coherent foreign policy. A dem president would definitely defend the island and rally support
Crossing a 95 mile strait against a determined enemy isn't a "cakeway." Taiwan should let China know that any attack will be met with chem weps strike in major Chinese cities.
Just give Taiwan 6-10 nukes and the missiles to deliver them. No attack.
They don’t need Nukes, almost no suitable locations for an amphibious landing, Paratroopers don’t do well against machine gun fire, this reminds me of the 80’s when every year Ear-Ron was going to finally beat Ear-Rock with their Human Wave attacks, didnt work out to well for them (I wanted that Wah to last forever, like that Storm on Jupiter)
You're behind the times. China is now building a fleet of very specialized landing craft to deal with exactly that situation.
China Suddenly Building Fleet Of Special Barges Suitable For Taiwan Landings
And practicing with them on similar terrain on their own coast, too. They give every indication of intending to attack Taiwan in the next couple of years, regardless of the cost.
I think Taiwan's best bets are a massive build out of armed drones to make sure nothing on the surface can survive crossing the strait, and/or some kind of strategic nuclear threat that they'll make Bejing glow in the dark for a generation if they try it.
I fail to see why China would be in any hurry to invade Taiwan.
China sees its as a political, cultural, and historical imperative that they take over Taiwan. Indeed, it's so important that China's leadership would wreck their own economy if they felt that they could succeed.
But they can succeed by slowing gaining economic leadership and pressuring Taiwan. China did not race to take back Hong Kong. They let the British lease run out and then set up a transition. It wasn't until they were well established that they began to squeeze Honk Kong. Why not do the same with Taiwan.
Why not do the same with Taiwan[?]
There are a few reasons.
The first is that China lacked the ability to actually take Hong Kong by force. China was a 2nd rate regional power up until recently as exemplified by a situation where, in the mid-90s, the US Navy sailed a carrier battle group through the Strait of Taiwan during heightened tensions and the Chinese discovered that they couldn't do anything about it.
China's old 2nd and 3rd gen aircraft lacked the range to actually attack an American fleet. Their old submarines were hopelessly obsolete, and their surface fleet would have had to accept horrendous casualties just to overwhelm a single American carrier. Maybe.
Had the Chinese tried to take Hong Kong before '97, they stood no real chance. The Brits (and Americans) would have been able to reinforce Hong Kong with impunity while long-ranged air strikes eliminated limited China's ability to project power even to Hong Kong. The coalition of the Gulf War demonstrated just how poorly naked aggression would be accepted by the international community.
The second reason is that China had the luxury of being able to wait to get Hong Kong as it was something that the Brits already promised the Chinese in 1985. The Brits made all of the signs of making good on that promise, so the Chinese felt no rush to retake the city.
Contrast then with today: There's a ticking clock for China to take Taiwan. That clock is being driven primarily by China's shrinking population and the imminent economic consequences they're going to face. China's middle class has grown too accustomed to a certain standard of living, and a demographic-fueled economic collapse would significantly constrain their ability to build a military that can cross the Strait successfully. If China is going to bite the bullet and start a war, it's better to do it now when you still have a useful military-aged male population of sufficient size.
Here's their current population pyramid:
https://www.populationpyramid.net/china/
Here's what 2050 is projected to be:
https://www.populationpyramid.net/china/2050/
That's more than a 50% reduction in available manpower in key age brackets on top of having to support a significant elderly population!
The third reason (and somewhat related to my second reason): China is feeling the pressure due to all of their neighbors arming to the teeth to defend themselves. Japan, Australia, Vietnam, South Korea, the Philippines, and Taiwan are all scrambling to build up their armed forces and modernize. If China waits too long, these countries will have completed their rearmament and modernization programs.
The biggest adversary that China faces, the United States, also has a period of vulnerability due to the USN royally screwing up its shipbuilding schedule.
The USN's submarine building program isn't keeping up with the retirement of Los Angeles-class attack subs. The USN's sub fleet numbers bottoms out around 2028 before slowly building back up as more Virginias slowly trickle in from the builders.
Meanwhile, the newer ships (Zumwalt and LCSs) turned out to be boondoggles. While the Navy is able to find some use for the ships, they aren't as good as a 80's era Arleigh Burke DDG.
Lastly, sometime "after 2030" the US is going to bring into service several new technologies that will counter China's existing defenses for several years. Specifically, true hypersonic weapons, 6th generation fighters from both NGAD programs, drone wingmen, advanced long-ranged missiles, drone subs, etc. All of the new technology that the US is working on now will make attacking Taiwan a very costly, bloody affair..
"I fail to see why China would be in any hurry to invade Taiwan."
They have a demographic and economic timeline after which invasions become far more difficult
"The Chinese invasion of Taiwan in 2026-2027."
Not likely. Unless provoked by a major economic crisis, they will not attack while Trump (or as likely, any republican) is in office. I suspect they will wait for another democrat.
They're going to do it because they know that the clock is ticking. It could be 2027-2028.
Sure, because they can't risk picking a fight with the guy who is famous for his loyalty to his allies.
Just saw that Pope Francis wore an "Iron Cross" (OK haters, I know it was supposedly tarnished Silver) Lets see, Iron Cross, Argentina..... Hmm, what other Catholic World Leader wore an Iron Cross??? and Francis made his last pubic appearance on the guy's birthday???
Anyone here play Blue Prince? It's on Game Pass and PS Plus if you want to try a great mystery game embedded in a roguelike wrapper. Solid puzzles that go several layers deep the further you go with an overarching mystery that expands its reach as you explore further. Really impressive environmental story telling that's constantly asking you to think about what you've seen and read in-game so you can track down the next set of clues.
Why Easter and Passover don't match:
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-ancient-math-that-sets-the-date-of-easter-and-passover?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
This stuff has sat at the intersection of superstition and (unsuccessful) power politics for a millennium and a half: https://jonn.substack.com/p/remember-when-the-north-of-england
It can't be true that the Secretary of Defense has his wife sitting in on some of these alleged Signal chats.
Sleepy Joe had Dr Jill running Cabinet meetings (explains a lot)
I guess it's Edith Wilsons all the way down, right?
It can't be true that SecDef was incommunicado for a week, can it?
rloquitur just can't seem to understand that off topic deflections are nonresponsive.
Just pointing out the endless hypocrisy on your side.
Without any real evidence of hypocricy, and for quite different situations other than they both involved SecDefs.
It is telling that rather than address a question with substantive commentary the first responses are always (almost) but look at the other side. Both of these tribes do this.
It is a common vice, especially on the Internet.
FWIW Cabinet members shouldn't slip out without notifying anyone. And for the Secretaries of State and Defense, it is completely unacceptable. While DepSecDef did know and is meant to be able to act in their place, the lack of transparency was weird and unneeded.
There probably should have been some kind of censure on Austin for that.
Agreed
he would fail admirably as a witness on the stand, wouldn't he?
Why was he out of communication? Was there a medical issue or something? Was the president or his staff aware?
Why was he out of communication? Was there a medical issue or something? Was the president or his staff aware? Duplicate due to commenting system
It wasn't that long ago; do you not remember when Lloyd Austin was out of commission for days? He had experienced complications from an earlier treatment and was admitted to Walter Reed, but they decided to keep him longer. He had told the deputy secdef, but nobody else, including Biden, the National Security Advisor, etc. And the deputy never mentioned it to anyone, so nobody in power knew where Austin was for several days. And on top of that, the deputy was out of town. (That didn't prevent her from doing the job; she could always post her decisions on Signal after all. But it made the whole situation even more of a mess.)
Yes. He seems such a competent and careful fellow.
CNN's introduction by what I assume was one of the last true reporters not slanting anything, mentioned in passing the two male relatives had Pentagon jobs, so maybe there was some valid hook there, and his wife went with him to meetings overseas, so mmmaybe a hook there, though this all remained to be seen.
He then handed it off to yabbering heads.
Why not? He’s a train wreck who got appointed for macho posturing on Fox News. You know, how Trump selects “the best people”.
Comments by the former chief Pentagon spokesperson, a longtime Hegseth supporter who resigned last week:
The Wall Street Journal and other outlets reported that Hegseth “brought his wife, a former Fox News producer, to two meetings with foreign military counterparts where sensitive information was discussed.” Next, the Pentagon set up a top-secret briefing by the Joint Chiefs of Staff on China for Elon Musk, who still has extensive business interests in China. After learning about it, the White House canceled that meeting. Then came the purges. And the news keeps coming. On Sunday night, The New York Times reported that Hegseth shared details about the Yemen strike in another Signal chat that included his wife and brother. There are very likely more shoes to drop in short order, with even bigger bombshell stories coming this week, key Pentagon reporters have been telling sources privately.
The Wall Street Journal and other outlets reported that Hegseth “brought his wife, a former Fox News producer, to two meetings with foreign military counterparts where sensitive information was discussed.”
Next, the Pentagon set up a top-secret briefing by the Joint Chiefs of Staff on China for Elon Musk, who still has extensive business interests in China. After learning about it, the White House canceled that meeting.
Then came the purges. And the news keeps coming. On Sunday night, The New York Times reported that Hegseth shared details about the Yemen strike in another Signal chat that included his wife and brother.
There are very likely more shoes to drop in short order, with even bigger bombshell stories coming this week, key Pentagon reporters have been telling sources privately.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/04/20/pentagon-chaos-ullyot-hegseth-00205594
You'd think the feminists would be happy -- his wife is his partner whose advice he trusts. Get her a security clearance and call it done.
https://www.al.com/news/birmingham/2025/04/theyre-trying-to-shut-him-up-activist-arrested-after-social-media-posts.html
The idea that God is "Our Father" and "his son" died for our sins in some backwater has a certain old-fashioned feel to it.
I don't want to be too "woke," but a more up-to-date version of theism is probably a good idea. OTOH, the current form is pretty successful. We shall now see who the latest successor of Peter will be. Pope Francis appointees will have a major role there.
Linus was the first successor of Peter.
Linus Van Pelt, of Peanuts fame, was not named after him. Charles Schultz named him after fellow cartoonist Linus Maurer.
Another "caretaker" pope, i.e. a really old guy, to hold down the fort basilica a few years while they sort out the real deal?
"more up-to-date version of theism is probably a good ide"
Go for it. Anyone can start a religion.
As evidenced by Scientology and MAGA.
As if liberalism and progressivism are not religions?
And Abortion the High Holy Sacrament
No
""Preemptive Cuts" in Interest Rates are being called for by many. With Energy Costs way down, food prices (including Biden's egg disaster!) substantially lower, and most other "things" trending down, there is virtually No Inflation. With these costs trending so nicely downward, just what I predicted they would do, there can almost be no inflation, but there can be a SLOWING of the economy unless Mr. Too Late, a major loser, lowers interest rates, NOW. Europe has already "lowered" seven times. Powell has always been "To Late," except when it came to the Election period when he lowered in order to help Sleepy Joe Biden, later Kamala, get elected. How did that work out?"
Big shook.
I think rates should be much higher. Trump is wrong here.
Maybe, we need to ask Linus what Easter is all about ...
President Donald Trump is scheduled Monday to attend the annual Easter Egg Roll on the South Lawn of the White House. Hosted by First Lady Melania Trump, corporate sponsors were solicited for this year’s event with promises of branding opportunities on the White House lawn — an arrangement that breaks with precedent and that has been questioned by ethics watchdogs. According to the first lady’s office, companies contributing to the event include Amazon, YouTube and Meta. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.) Tech companies have sought to curry favor with Trump since his return to office.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/04/21/live-updates-trump-attend-corporate-sponsored-easter-egg-roll-white-house/
Given what the price of eggs is in the US, you can't reasonably expect taxpayers to pay for such frivolity.
Egg prices are way down in the last month.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/supreme-court-rejects-gun-appeals-over-age-rules-campus-bans/ar-AA1Dk5RS?ocid=msedgntp&pc=U531&cvid=fdf8b834f2a64befa43d554871ea0631&ei=12
These corrupt fairies should be forced to take cases that the states want them to.
Six purported conservative justices....
Could be three. Also, givne how long campus restrictions have been in place, a conservative justice could very reasonably go along with ongoing bans.
Should you be permitted to carry guns into Federal buildings, courthouses, GOP annual conferences, etc?
"[G]iven how long campus restrictions have been in place, a conservative justice could very reasonably go along with ongoing bans." Hmmm... I suppose, by that logic, Dred Scott was decided correctly.
I suppose, by that logic, Dred Scott was decided correctly.
Er, no. The issue here is not what the correct decision is, but what a political position might lead to. Dred Scott was a conservative decision, of course.
Dred Scott pretended to be a conservative opinion, in the sense that the ruling pretended to be keeping existing rules in place. But judges always pretend to be upholding the existing rules when they're issuing an unpopular opinion they want people to respect.
Taney knew damned well he was actually changing the rules, that blacks had, in fact, been treated as citizens in many of the Northern states, and not even consistently excluded from such treatment in the South if free.
For some conservatives, conservatism means retaining the status quo. For others, it means rolling the clock back. Taney held to the latter.
Do you really not see the difference between federal buildings and courthouses, with metal detectors, armed guards, and limited points of access, and college campuses, which often span hundreds or even thousands of acres and, outside of the military academies, are largely unsecured?
That would make it more appropriate for no restrictions on guns in Federal buildings and courthouses and some restrictions on college campuses,
The issue is not that China has a Hydrogen Fuel Air Explosive bomb, which only has a blast overpressure energy 40% that of TNT, but much more actual heat -- but what they plan to do with it.
This would make a nasty anti-ship missile warhead, although the question I have is how close it must be to do thermal damage. It's hot enough to melt aluminum, but only for 2 seconds and you have to have thermal transfer.
Releasing the technical info makes me think that this is more saber rattling than anything else.
https://www.msn.com/en-xl/news/other/china-tests-non-nuclear-hydrogen-bomb-science-paper-shows/ar-AA1Dfb1I
Anyone but you posted that I’d be worried
You only give away 'secrets' on weapons that don't work.
Interesting report because hydrogen which does burn hot does not radiate a great deal of heat. The actual bomb component is magnesium hydride and magnesium is a hot burning substance. This is really nothing more than a new method of destruction. Something that human have excelled at for many years.
Rumors that Hegseth might be fired. I hope he is not deported because of his tattoos. That would be an oopsie.
Steven Segal, come on down!
https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20230227-putin-decorates-us-actor-seagal-with-friendship-award
I wouldn't be opposed, he has already fulfilled at least 90% of the function he was hired for firing woke generals.
He did a great job there where almost every virtue signalling DEI worshipping commander was fired. That is what he was hired for and did a great job at it, but it doesn't mean he is fit for the next phase.
Here's another one. https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2025/04/fort-mccoy-garrison-commander-who-refused-display-photos/ I suspect there are several more.
She's a colonel?
FWIW, I agree with the discipline. Trump sucks but he is the Commander in Chief right now.
"He did a great job there where almost every virtue signalling DEI worshipping commander ...
*shrug* Since he was talking about generals in the previous sentence, I assumed that was the context for "commander". Maybe it's more fun to just read one sentence at a time, though.
In any case, it doesn't really matter. We both agree her actions were inappropriate.
On the other hand, I do think it's a stretch for you to link every thing a woman does in the military that is bad to DEI (as with your post about the on-board WiFi below). That person made a bad judgement and was punished for it. Lots of white males in the military make bad judgments and get punished for it as well (in fact, your article below mentions a dude from the same unit getting punished for an unrelated thing but for some reason there's no picture of him in the story). None of this has anything to do with Kazinski's concerns about people prioritizing DEI over military readiness.
firing woke generals
You have some fucked up priorities.
...and you are still a douche!
The problem was that the generals and other commanding officers forgot what their priorities should have been.
Or actually were promoted in put in command positions because they had priorities other than combat readiness. I don't care what their personal beliefs are, and the fact people became aware of what their personal beliefs were in a professional context is why it was time for them to go.
Like this: https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2024/06/03/command-senior-chief-convicted-for-unauthorized-wi-fi-on-her-ship/
Bingo. A military that does not prioritize fighting and winning wars is a military that stops fighting and winning wars.
Trump on Hegseth, "Just ask the Houthis"
Pete Hegseth trying to duck the media: "New phone, Houthis?"
Or actually were promoted in put in command positions because they had priorities other than combat readiness.
Because a black man could never earn a job like that on the merits? Is that what you're saying?
(And, implicitly, the idea is apparently that Hegseth did earn his job on the merits.)
Why do you have to pull the racist crap? You libs always do this. It's not about skin color, it's about competence. For example, we on the right loved Gen. Colin Powell. Now I suppose you'll call him an Uncle Tom.
Here's the Trump litigation tracker that I posted several weeks ago updated to 4/17: https://news.bloomberglaw.com/litigation/tracking-trump-in-court-the-scope-of-executive-power-tested-1
FWIW: https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5258857-dhs-secretary-noem-purse-stolen/
Who carries $3,000 in cash? I carry between $100 and $300, but I think I'm unusual.
Is that really the point?
No, just an observation. The USSS is obviously incompetent. But $3,000 cash in one's purse or wallet is unusual, in my opinion.
Well, if we are talking about a drug dealer or bookie maybe but I thing $3000 in cash seems a bit odd for most people.
its not that much money now a days
Is the point something about white on white crime?
The point is that a Cabinet member out for dinner with her family could be subject to a robbery.
...or possibly worse.
Elon probably fired 2/3 of the security detail.
According to every cop filing asset forfeiture claims anywhere, only drug dealers.
That's plainly wrong, drug buyers have cash on hand too. So they can give it to their dealer.
Dunno what the going rate for an 8-ball is, but I bet Noem could have a very snowy Easter with $3000.
She probably only started cash carrying that much cash when she became Director of Homeland Security.
Before that she didn't realize ho sophisticated the ability of domestic and foreign interests to track electronic transactions.
300 will get you through most days, or a few days, then you have to ping the system again.
The Russians prefer to pay their assets in cash, obvs
Oy, so stupid. If she was on the take, it would be a lot more than $3k.
Well, as a general observation and with no specific application to Noem, that's wrong and naive.
If a person is being paid under the table in cash (i.e., paid off/on the take/suborned/etc), they have to spend cash rather than putting it in the books in a traceable form. This is basic tax evasion and money laundering 101. So going to fancy dinner? Bring lots of cash. Shopping? Bring lots of cash. That Rolex she flashed when visiting a concentration camp (er, excuse me, a "prison")? Bring lots of cash.
She wouldn't have the huge payoff amount on her, duh. But if Noem is laundering money from payoffs she'll have a "maintain a high-roller lifestyle" amount of cash on her, that she can launder - as opposed to just using a credit card like a normal person.
Now, I have no reason to suspect Noem is money laundering. Maybe she was just going meet her coke dealer. They don't take credit cards either.
Do drug dealers these days only take cash? Seems out of date.
I lack personal data/experience with this, sorry. Bitcoin? Maybe?
But if Noem wanted a snowy-white Easter, I suspect $3000 would do nicely for her and a few friends.
Indeed. But it would still mean she had plenty of cash, no?
Just yesterday, MAGA were citing the fact that Abrego Garcia had ~$1,000 cash on him when he was arrested in 2019 as 'proof' he was an MS-13 member. Literally, it was a "drug dealers are the only people who carry a lot of cash on them" argument.
It was obvious bullshit, but heh.
Drug purchasers carry a lot of cash too. Snow on Easter weekend ain't cheap.
I mean, I have more than that on my person. But I am a 60-something white man with no tattoos, so not too worried...
The odds are definitely low that you'll have that $$ confiscated, and the burden will be on you to prove it's not drug money, despite your pleas for due process.
But white as you are, the odds are still non-zero.
Just yesterday, MAGA were citing the fact that Abrego Garcia had ~$1,000 cash on him when he was arrested in 2019 as 'proof' he was an MS-13 member.
In all fairness (ha), I think the point was that the ~$1200 in his pocket was at just the slightest bit of tension with the "he was hanging out at Home Depot waiting to get picked for some under the table yard work, duh" story that you and others reflexively advanced when this first came up.
Meh, but the "he had $1000 in his pocket" (or $1200) is also new as far as I know. Like, today is the first I heard this claim. The administration certainly hasn't advanced it in court (due process, what a PITA!).
Got a cite to police report? Or anything reputable, really?
A police report won't say "over $1000". What was the amount of currency, down to the penny?
Like, today is the first I heard this claim.
Maybe a bit of diversity in your news feed wouldn't hurt. The police report was widely discussed nearly a week ago. One example here.
Well, I can answer my own question!
https://www.justice.gov/ag/media/1396906/dl?inline
"Funds in possession" was 1,178.00
Still only ~1/3 of a Noem. Guess she's a MS-13 leader, then.
Maybe I missed the part where she was loitering in the parking lot of the restaurant with other well-known MS-13 members in the vicinity of containers of drugs that totally did not just fly out of their hands when the police approached.
LOITERING
This is what's known as spin. Yes, if there's a whole bunch of MS-13 members meeting each other in a secluded area, and he's with them, that would be suspicious. But that's not the facts here.
(a) There were just twosupposedly known gang members there; (b) it was a place where there's a perfectly innocent explanation for him to be; (c) in the middle of the day in broad daylight in a public place; and (d) there was in fact no allegation that he was "with" them at all, as opposed to merely being in the same parking lot. The police report doesn't say he was talking to them, interacting with them in some other way, or even near them. They were just in the same large area. (Most Home Depot parking lots, like those of other big box retailers, cover quite a bit of acreage.)
Presumably if PGPD had any colorable argument for tying him to what you assume were drugs but which the police report does not actually say are drugs ("several unknown items"),¹ they would not have simply turned him over to ICE without arrest or charges.
¹The police report says that "two small plastic bottles containing marijuana was [sic] located on scene." It very carefully does not say that those were the objects that were discarded. Either way, that doesn't exctly sound like a drug shipment.
(a) There were just two supposedly known gang members there
In a group of four people, just two were known gang members!
it was a place where there's a perfectly innocent explanation for him to be
Yes, Virginia, career criminals often surround themselves with plausible deniability rather than just painting bullseyes on their backs so the cops know which ones to pick up. Good grief.
there was in fact no allegation that he was "with" them at all, as opposed to merely being in the same parking lot. The police report doesn't say he was talking to them, interacting with them in some other way, or even near them. They were just in the same large area.
Dude, Garcia's dolled-up rendition of the story in the frickin complaint went out of its way to get out in front of the fact that the four were in a group talking when the police arrived. Put on your critical thinking hat for 10 seconds and ponder why that might be.
She's certainly been spotted in the vicinity of lots of MS-13 members...
No; that money is not in any tension with the day laborer hanging out at Home Depot thing. That's roughly a week's worth of wages for a construction worker. Most illegal immigrants do not have bank accounts, and thus must keep their money in the form of cash.
...and you know this because?
Because I practiced employment law exclusively for about a dozen years (I still do it, but not exclusively), and I've just described many of my clients over that time.
Most illegal immigrants do not have bank accounts, and thus must keep their money in the form of cash.
Of course, that's a dramatically different proposition (and requires a dramatically lesser degree of credulity) than the notion that it's just garden-variety typical for an illegal immigrant laborer hanging out at Home Depot waiting for a job to elect to keep ALL of his money in his pocket with him.
I have no idea whether that's "all his money," and neither do you. My point is that this isn't a lot of cash for an illegal immigrant to be carrying around. It's merely a single week's worth of pay. If he had just picked up his previous week's pay (or had just visited the check-cashing place), it would be entirely natural and innocent for him to have $1,200. (If he had, say, $10,000, I'd find that far more probative.)
I have no idea whether that's "all his money," and neither do you. My point is that this isn't a lot of cash for an illegal immigrant to be carrying around.
There are two choices: either a) it's all his money and he's carrying it around rather than keeping most of it in a safe place off his person while he's out in public -- you know, like most rational people do -- or b) it's not all his money but he has irrationally decided to carry that much of it around while supposedly hanging out waiting for a day job around people he claimed not to know and therefore certainly couldn't trust.
It's merely a single week's worth of pay.
Illegal day laborers get ~$30/hr now? You cannot be serious.
If he had just picked up his previous week's pay (or had just visited the check-cashing place)
OK, Mr. Employment Lawyer, I'll take a cite on the rough percentage of illegal day laborers hanging out in Home Depot parking lots hoping to get picked up for under-the-table jobs that are a) paid by the week and b) paid by check, and where c) that check actually cleared when they went to cash it.
Noem is so garage glamorous.
I'm not familiar with that term, what does it mean?
Check out the urban dictionary . . ..
https://law.justia.com/cases/texas/first-court-of-appeals/2024/01-23-00391-cv.html
Sickening.
What about the decision that you link to do you find sickening, rloquitur?
I agree I am not sure what is "sickening". I think the county was wrong to fire Dr. Hasan Gokal as he did the right thing by not wasting vaccine. But I don't think Dr. Gokal had a case for racial discrimination. What maybe sickening is that this situation could not have been handled better.
He got fired for not obeying irrational orders, which actually makes sense from a certain perspective.
If you issue rational orders, and people obey, you never know whether they obey because they're committed to doing whatever you tell them to do, or because the orders were rational, and they agreed they were a good idea.
OTOH, if you issue irrational orders, the former group continue to obey, and the latter group out themselves, as Dr. Gokal did.
So from a certain, (And to be clear, very obnoxious!) perspective, issuing the occasional irrational order is very useful as a way to make sure that your subordinates are mindlessly obedient, and a fair number of people in management WANT mindlessly obedient subordinates, not subordinates with minds of their own.
The standard I'm familiar with is illegal orders, not irrational orders.
Irrational seems subjective as hell.
Wanting mindless obedience is, I suspect, a lot more common than wanting criminal obedience. And enforcing that demand is a lot easier to get away with.
This neglects the element of trust.
I'm shocked that Brett has embraced yet another conspiracy theory. That was so unexpected.
"Nadine Menendez, wife of disgraced NJ Sen. Bob Menendez, found guilty in sweeping bribery case"
https://www.nydailynews.com/2025/04/21/nadine-menendez-wife-of-disgraced-nj-sen-bob-menendez-found-guilty-in-sweeping-bribery-case/
I appreciate that there is some effort to address such corruption in the government, which has been applied in a bipartisan way over the years. It is not clear if she will now say the magic words to try to obtain a pardon.
she hasn't beaten police officers while pledging fealty to Trump, so I don't see a pardon as too likely.
He has been open to giving pardons to corrupt people for various reasons.
So the stock market and the dollar both decline sharply, and the bond market doesn't look so healthy either, after Trump makes derogatory comments about Powell.
Given that this is insane behavior by the President, what say the MAGAt's? Eager to hear the excuses.
Tell us, Brett, what is Trump's genius plan?
Trump ran the economy into the ground and now he's angry that the Fed won't bail him out. (But obviously he can't say that out loud.)
You just committed a crime in Germany.
I'm going to report you to 10 Downing St. right now.
The economy has not been run into the ground, that's just false. Coming from a Trump hater, it's not surprising.
Current U.S. Economy: Strong GDP Growth: The U.S. economy has continued to expand at a solid pace, with the GDP increasing at an annual rate of 2.4% in the fourth quarter of 2024. Low Unemployment: The unemployment rate is currently at 4.2%, indicating a strong labor market. Wage Growth: Average hourly earnings are increasing, suggesting that wages are keeping up with or outpacing inflation. Consumer Spending: Robust consumer spending is contributing to economic growth. Manufacturing Boom: Investments in manufacturing are continuing to increase, further boosting economic activity.
They figure that if they repeat often enough that the economy has tanked, people will start to believe it, and just think their own personal situation is unusually good.
Citing the 4th quarter of 2024 as a defense of Donald Trump's economic management is certainly a bold choice.
The stock market should have been pounded down a while ago, and the dollar was too high, making our exports too expensive.
I don't agree with Trump that Powell should be removed for keeping rates too high. He should be removed however for single handedly causing the inflation in 2021 and 2022.
In honour of the pope's passing, let's quote the (non obvious parts of) this year's Urbi et Orbi
I would like us to renew our hope that peace is possible! From the Holy Sepulchre, the Church of the Resurrection, where this year Easter is being celebrated by Catholics and Orthodox on the same day, may the light of peace radiate throughout the Holy Land and the entire world. I express my closeness to the sufferings of Christians in Palestine and Israel, and to all the Israeli people and the Palestinian people. The growing climate of anti-Semitism throughout the world is worrisome. Yet at the same time, I think of the people of Gaza, and its Christian community in particular, where the terrible conflict continues to cause death and destruction and to create a dramatic and deplorable humanitarian situation. I appeal to the warring parties: call a ceasefire, release the hostages and come to the aid of a starving people that aspires to a future of peace! Let us pray for the Christian communities in Lebanon and in Syria, presently experiencing a delicate transition in its history. They aspire to stability and to participation in the life of their respective nations. I urge the whole Church to keep the Christians of the beloved Middle East in its thoughts and prayers. I also think in particular of the people of Yemen, who are experiencing one of the world’s most serious and prolonged humanitarian crises because of war, and I invite all to find solutions through a constructive dialogue. May the risen Christ grant Ukraine, devastated by war, his Easter gift of peace, and encourage all parties involved to pursue efforts aimed at achieving a just and lasting peace. On this festive day, let us remember the South Caucasus and pray that a final peace agreement between Armenia and Azerbaijan will soon be signed and implemented, and lead to long-awaited reconciliation in the region. May the light of Easter inspire efforts to promote harmony in the western Balkans and sustain political leaders in their efforts to allay tensions and crises, and, together with their partner countries in the region, to reject dangerous and destabilizing actions. May the risen Christ, our hope, grant peace and consolation to the African peoples who are victims of violence and conflict, especially in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in Sudan and South Sudan. May he sustain those suffering from the tensions in the Sahel, the Horn of Africa and the Great Lakes region, as well as those Christians who in many places are not able freely to profess their faith. There can be no peace without freedom of religion, freedom of thought, freedom of expression and respect for the views of others. Nor is peace possible without true disarmament! The requirement that every people provide for its own defence must not turn into a race to rearmament. The light of Easter impels us to break down the barriers that create division and are fraught with grave political and economic consequences. It impels us to care for one another, to increase our mutual solidarity, and to work for the integral development of each human person. (...) I appeal to all those in positions of political responsibility in our world not to yield to the logic of fear which only leads to isolation from others, but rather to use the resources available to help the needy, to fight hunger and to encourage initiatives that promote development. These are the “weapons” of peace: weapons that build the future, instead of sowing seeds of death! May the principle of humanity never fail to be the hallmark of our daily actions. In the face of the cruelty of conflicts that involve defenceless civilians and attack schools, hospitals and humanitarian workers, we cannot allow ourselves to forget that it is not targets that are struck, but persons, each possessed of a soul and human dignity.
I would like us to renew our hope that peace is possible! From the Holy Sepulchre, the Church of the Resurrection, where this year Easter is being celebrated by Catholics and Orthodox on the same day, may the light of peace radiate throughout the Holy Land and the entire world. I express my closeness to the sufferings of Christians in Palestine and Israel, and to all the Israeli people and the Palestinian people. The growing climate of anti-Semitism throughout the world is worrisome. Yet at the same time, I think of the people of Gaza, and its Christian community in particular, where the terrible conflict continues to cause death and destruction and to create a dramatic and deplorable humanitarian situation. I appeal to the warring parties: call a ceasefire, release the hostages and come to the aid of a starving people that aspires to a future of peace!
Let us pray for the Christian communities in Lebanon and in Syria, presently experiencing a delicate transition in its history. They aspire to stability and to participation in the life of their respective nations. I urge the whole Church to keep the Christians of the beloved Middle East in its thoughts and prayers.
I also think in particular of the people of Yemen, who are experiencing one of the world’s most serious and prolonged humanitarian crises because of war, and I invite all to find solutions through a constructive dialogue.
May the risen Christ grant Ukraine, devastated by war, his Easter gift of peace, and encourage all parties involved to pursue efforts aimed at achieving a just and lasting peace.
On this festive day, let us remember the South Caucasus and pray that a final peace agreement between Armenia and Azerbaijan will soon be signed and implemented, and lead to long-awaited reconciliation in the region.
May the light of Easter inspire efforts to promote harmony in the western Balkans and sustain political leaders in their efforts to allay tensions and crises, and, together with their partner countries in the region, to reject dangerous and destabilizing actions.
May the risen Christ, our hope, grant peace and consolation to the African peoples who are victims of violence and conflict, especially in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in Sudan and South Sudan. May he sustain those suffering from the tensions in the Sahel, the Horn of Africa and the Great Lakes region, as well as those Christians who in many places are not able freely to profess their faith.
There can be no peace without freedom of religion, freedom of thought, freedom of expression and respect for the views of others.
Nor is peace possible without true disarmament! The requirement that every people provide for its own defence must not turn into a race to rearmament. The light of Easter impels us to break down the barriers that create division and are fraught with grave political and economic consequences. It impels us to care for one another, to increase our mutual solidarity, and to work for the integral development of each human person. (...) I appeal to all those in positions of political responsibility in our world not to yield to the logic of fear which only leads to isolation from others, but rather to use the resources available to help the needy, to fight hunger and to encourage initiatives that promote development. These are the “weapons” of peace: weapons that build the future, instead of sowing seeds of death!
May the principle of humanity never fail to be the hallmark of our daily actions. In the face of the cruelty of conflicts that involve defenceless civilians and attack schools, hospitals and humanitarian workers, we cannot allow ourselves to forget that it is not targets that are struck, but persons, each possessed of a soul and human dignity.
https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/messages/urbi/documents/20250420-urbi-et-orbi-pasqua.html
Meanwhile in Israel the constitutional crisis around the dismissal of Ronen Bar, the head of Shin Bet, continues.
Shin Bet security agency chief Ronen Bar told the High Court of Justice on Monday that he had been fired due to expectations from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that he be personally loyal to the premier, and said it was made clear to him that he needed to obey Netanyahu and not the Supreme Court in the event of a constitutional crisis. In a formal statement to the court regarding petitions against the government’s decision to fire Bar, the Shin Bet head insisted he had been fired because of his refusal to meet those expectations of loyalty owing to decisions he made regarding investigations into the prime minister’s aides; his refusal to help Netanyahu avoid testifying in his criminal trial; and the political fallout from the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack.
Shin Bet security agency chief Ronen Bar told the High Court of Justice on Monday that he had been fired due to expectations from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that he be personally loyal to the premier, and said it was made clear to him that he needed to obey Netanyahu and not the Supreme Court in the event of a constitutional crisis.
In a formal statement to the court regarding petitions against the government’s decision to fire Bar, the Shin Bet head insisted he had been fired because of his refusal to meet those expectations of loyalty owing to decisions he made regarding investigations into the prime minister’s aides; his refusal to help Netanyahu avoid testifying in his criminal trial; and the political fallout from the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/bar-says-netanyahu-demanded-personal-loyalty-obedience-to-him-and-not-supreme-court/
You're an illegal alien, whom just crossed the border.
What due process rights are you now granted w.r.t. being deported that precludes Border Patrol from simply returning you back across the border?
You're walking near the border. The BP arrests you and insists you're illegally in the US. You're not, but like 99% of Americans you left citizenship ID at home. What due process rights are you now granted w.r.t. being deported that precludes Border Patrol from simply returning you back across the border?.
"like 99% of Americans you left citizenship ID at home"
Really? What constitutes 'citizenship ID?' I guess a driver's license doesn't count anymore in many states, 'though California and New Mexico are the only Southern border states that issues licenses to illegals. So, a Texas or Arizona driver's license will do, for citizenship ID. (I don't know if CA or NM licenses indicate citizenship or not.)
Where did you get that 99% of Americans don't carry ID? I assume you got that backwards - that only 1% wouldn't have ID of some kind.
And, 'walking near the border' is not probable cause for a stop and ID. On what legal basis could BP stop and ID you? They would have to have a reasonable, articulable suspicion that you committed a crime, were committing a crime, or were about to commit a crime.
Where did you get that 99% of Americans don't carry ID?
Since you quoted him accurately just one paragraph above, you know full well that he didn't say that.
Citizenship ID means passport or birth certificate accompanied with other proof of ID.
Do you regularly carry your passport or birth certificate around? Does Brett?
Of courser you don't. And a driving licence doesn't prove citizenship either.
No, I carry enough ID to identify myself for normal purposes, and keep the passport and birth certificate at home.
If you're found wading in the Rio Grande without ID, assuming that you're not an American citizen is perfectly reasonable. If you're found hiking in the desert near the border, with a driver's license, the contrary assumption is reasonable.
I've said before, I think people accused of being illegal aliens are properly entitled to an opportunity to dispute it, under oath, with severe penalties if they turn out to have been lying. Those who don't bother disputing it can be deported without further review.
You have no way to verify you're a citizen? No indicators of residency?
Well, you shouldn't therefore get a 5-10 year pass to work in the USA, free benefits, driver's license, free hotels, scholarships, free plane tickets, airport line & security passes, debit cards loaded with $10k, and $17k a year in refundable child tax credits. You shouldn't instantly become a super-citizen getting 50x more government largesse than a regular citizen. That's for sure.
You should go back.
You may well have verification - but not on you and that is the key point. And an indicator of residency means nothing - because as we know just because you live in the US and can prove it doesn't mean you're here legally. And as you must know that, you're not raising that point in good faith.
I agree with ThePublius. About the only time I don't have ID on me out of the house is when I'm swimming, and even then it's nearby. And that's quite normal for anybody but children. Where did you get that 99% from? Someplace dark and stinky, I suspect.
Well, since we don't have national ID cards (yet) the most common form of ID is a driver's license. Since so many states have issued them to illegals they may not be proof of citizenship.
Since so many states have issued them to illegals they may not be proof of citizenship.
Nice try at ignoring legal permanent residents and tourists.
Before the election many Republicans lied that they were only against illegal aliens. Now y'all keep implying that there are no legal aliens.
That's baloney. No one is calling for legal permanent residents and tourists to be expelled. Why do you all make up this stuff?
Both you and Mr. Bumble quite intentionally created a false dichotomy between "issued to illegals" and "proof of citizenship". The part you two tried to erase is people who are here legally and have a driver's license.
Don't cry like a baby when you get called out for it.
You know plenty of legal residents are being expelled. Maybe the some MAGAs don 't want to get every single one out - people tend to make exceptions for the people they know personally - but they in general support expelling - or even indefinitely imprisoning - legal aliens for partisan reasons.
"You know plenty of legal residents are being expelled. Maybe the some MAGAs don 't want to get every single one out - people tend to make exceptions for the people they know personally - but they in general support expelling - or even indefinitely imprisoning - legal aliens for partisan reasons."
That's total B.S.
I'd easily believe too many legal aliens to fit in the proverbial phone booth are being expelled.
Too many to fit in a Holiday Inn at the same time as a Shriner's convention? I kinda doubt it, but some hard numbers would be nice.
I believe you're making the mistake of thinking the cases reported in the national media are the only cases.
There are at least two being deported in the engineering college where I teach, and at least nine on the campus as a whole. It is a not-very-famous commuter school most people haven't even heard of. There were zero encampments or occupations here, so it's not about that.
Considering we're one of a couple thousand colleges and universities I think you're Holiday Inn estimate is low. Plus there is no reason to think they've finished rather than just getting started.
I don't think they'd be the only cases, but neither do I think the cases reported in the national media are remotely a representative sample. Like I said, I'd like to see some hard numbers.
My expectation is that most people being deported are straightforwardly illegal aliens, with legal aliens being a rounding error. But, again, I'd like to see actual numbers, it's certainly possible my expectations are wrong.
Just don't expect me to pretend news coverage is representative of what's going on. The media prefer sensational stories, and have their own narrative to relentlessly push.
I'm only talking about people admitted legally. Obviously where I live busloads of illegal entry cases are taken out every day.
More specifically, the cases at my university are SEVIS cancelled, meaning they were admitted legally (we issue the I-9 and see the visa when they arrive).
Reasons aren't given and you don't hear about them because they're going to leave on their own rather than go to an ICE office and ask questions. Judging by accounts in the local newspaper, the way you know a visit to the ICE office is going bad is when the officer orders you to strip. It goes downhill from there.
They are not proof of citizenship in any state (although it's possible that the REAL ID ones are; I don't have one of those yet so I'm not sure). States that don't issue them to illegal immigrants still issue them to people here legally who aren't citizens.
"They are not proof of citizenship in any state"
Not so.
"MI, MN, NY, VT, and WA, all northern border states, offer enhanced driver’s licenses to serve as proof of identity and U.S. citizenship. These licenses meet the security standards of the REAL ID Act, are marked by the word “Enhanced”, and can have a yellow REAL-ID star at the upper corner. They can be used in place of a U.S. passport to cross a U.S. border."
JFC. I literally said "except maybe REAL ID," and your response is "Not so; what about REAL ID?"
Pub, Mag, Brett: Please read carefully. SRG2 didn't say ID. He said citizenship ID, which strictly means a passport or passport card. Most people don't carry a passport with them.
It is still the case that driver's license plus a birth certificate would be enough in many circumstances. In fact, that's what most people use get a passport. But the administration all three of you support put out an executive order saying that a US birth certificate does NOT prove citizenship. It's held up in court for now, but if it passes presumably you'd also have to prove that your momma was here legally and permanently.
You should read carefully. I specifically addressed the citizenship issue in my reply. For example, what states require citizenship for a driver's license. And, since you can't get a Real ID unless you're here legally, you won't have that if you're not here legally.
You're still "mistaken". Zero states require citizenship to have a license.
You're pulling the Bumble of ignoring the millions of legal residents who have a driver's license.
For example, what states require citizenship for a driver's license.
None. Zero. Not one of the 50 states or D.C. do.
I misspoke. I meant to say licenses for those in the U.S. legally. Some states issue licenses to those here illegally, like California, New Mexico, Massachusetts, etc., but they are the exception, as I'm sure you know.
I misspoke. I meant to say licenses for those in the U.S. legally.
But that's utterly irrelevant to the discussion, which is about citizenship. As we've seen from Trump's efforts, ICE can snatch up people here legally — but not citizens.
Also, it's 19 states, which is a minority but more than just an exception, and they contain about 40% of the country's population.
No, it's not. The discussion was about "The BP arrests you and insists you're illegally in the US." Not about citizenship, about legal residency.
Virtually every non-citizen, in the country legally must carry the appropriate ID (green card, visa) at all times. I also believe that those states that issue Real ID (enhanced) require proof of citizenship.
So getting back to SRGs scenario - citizens are not required to carry ID.
You never really answered the question: if a citizen without ID, or someone claiming to be a citizen without ID, is stopped by the Border Patrol, should they be subject to being taken directly to Mexico on the officer's whim, or do they get some kind of hearing?
Brett at least has an answer. You and Pub seem to just weasel and say it can't happen.
The question was a lame hypothetical. Do you know of any instance of this happening?
The question was a lame hypothetical.
i.e., Mr Bumble doesn't want to address it.
And yes, it has happened. More commonly are citizens being detained for an unreasonable amount of time.
"The question" you refer to was a thread hijack. That wasn't the original question of the thread.
In any event, I didn't say it couldn't happen, I just commented on the ID part. Don't put words in my mouth.
For Bumble: https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-21-487.pdf
For Publius: Maybe you didn't say it couldn't happen. You just decided to post a bunch of incorrect reasons (everyone has ID, lack of probable cause) why it couldn't happen.
The Border Patrol sets up internal checkpoints at which zero cause, much less probable cause, is required. They don't have to be organized or announced, and can last just long enough to detain one person. I've had a lone BP officer speed past me on a rural road and pull across the road with lights on. A custom on the spot checkpoint just for me.
And even if they theoretically needed probable cause, so what? That doesn't stop them. There's no evidence to be excluded and federal agents are virtually immune from lawsuit.
Your ID does not establish citizenship. And you know that perfectly well.
Your ID might establish your citizenship.
Which means it might not.
Which id not what you said.
Because I know that many people here care deeply about how the Dutch commemorate the soldiers who died in World War II, I thought I'd flag this article from CBC:
Why the Dutch still honour Canadians, 80 years after their liberation from Germany
“We cannot give everyone a trial, because to do so would take, without exaggeration, 200 years,” Trump added in his Truth Social post. “We would need hundreds of thousands of trials for the hundreds of thousands of Illegals we are sending out of the Country. Such a thing is not possible to do. What a ridiculous situation we are in.”
Anyone care to defend Trump?
Anyone care about your stupid post?
When pigs fly, of course. I will respond in two ways:
1) If a law cannot be enforced without sacrificing due process, then the problem is the law, not due process. 2) Trump misunderstands/is lying about/both what is required. A full blown criminal trial is not required for deportation. A hearing is required.
Someone once suggested mass hearings, like the mass marriages officiated by Rev. Sun Myong Moon. I think that's actually a good idea. These people came here illegally, en masse, and to think we can have an individual hearing for each prior to deportation is ridiculous.
Begging the question, as you lot invariably do on this subject.
I don't follow. What's your suggestion?
What law says anyone can come across the border and then get a free pass to stay in the United States and instantly get asylum/refugee status?
None. And that doesn't happen.
As it happens, we have constitutional provisions for the exact sort of circumstances where you get enough people coming across the border illegally that individual hearings might be infeasible.
The writ of habeas can be suspended by Congress. Not by the President.
The real question is how much process is due. I'd say the minimum would be an opportunity to dispute the claim that you're an illegal alien. And if you do dispute it, under oath, the consequences of having lied could be enough to discourage most illegals from demanding more than a brief interview.
But the bottom line is that the actual problem is of Congress' creation, their decision to deliberately underfund the immigration courts and detention facilities.
The writ of habeas can be suspended by Congress.
But only in the case of invasion or rebellion. Not just because some people have tantrums when they see people with brown skin.
Race card played, as usual.
And, who decides if there's an invasion or rebellion justifying that suspension? Congress.
10-15% population augmentation qualifies as an invasion.
The number is utterly fictional, and the claim is wrong even if it were accurate.
And, again, who gets to decide that?
Congress, not you.
Not Trump, either, of course... Like I said, it's a power of Congress, not the President.
I am getting increasingly impatient with the Republican Congress not picking up their end of the load. I'm not alone in that, and unless they get their asses in gear soon, the midterms are going to be UGLY.
individual hearings might be infeasible
In which case the answer is, as you suggest, to properly fund the courts and detention facilities, not to just deport people without giving them a reasonable right to be heard. Of course, another alternative is triage - prioritize the actual criminals, etc. and leave the others alone. I don't think they know how to do that.
You and others on the right often express massive distrust of government, yet when it comes to declaring someone an illegal immigrant meriting deportation, you want to give maximum credence to the government's claims, despite its propensity for error or deliberate misconduct.
"In which case the answer is, as you suggest, to properly fund the courts and detention facilities, not to just deport people without giving them a reasonable right to be heard."
Suggest, hell. I thought I came right out and said it. As a first pass, they need at least a chance to dispute their status as illegal aliens. If they don't do that much, (With serious penalties for lying about it!) we can proceed straight to deportation.
"Of course, another alternative is triage - prioritize the actual criminals, etc. and leave the others alone. I don't think they know how to do that."
Oh, I'm sure they know how to do it. They have decided, as a policy matter, to NOT do it. Because even the illegal immigrants who aren't otherwise criminals are here "illegally", and the number of illegal aliens in the country has just gotten intolerably high after 4 years of deliberate lack of border enforcement.
I should add that, the administration RAN ON, as a policy matter, not doing your triage, but instead just deporting everyone here illegally. And got elected on that basis, too.
The electorate have spoken, your triage has been rejected.
Did Trump run on a policy of deporting people who they suspected of being here illegally, or deporting people who are here illegally?
Did Trump run on the below definition of legal due process from J.D. Vance?
"To say the administration must observe "due process" is to beg the question: what process is due is a function of our resources, the public interest, the status of the accused, the proposed punishment, and so many other factors."
Why isn't "prove you're a citizen" reasonable enough?
Yeah, that's my position: You get a chance to claim you're here legally. If you don't, your ass gets deported without further hearings.
If you do make that claim, you're given a chance to prove it, and if it turns out you were lying, you get fined for enough to cover the cost of the proceeding, and deported anyway.
If it turns out to be true, you get a heart felt apology, and ideally some compensation for the trouble you were put through.
They can't help it.
White GOP Rep Calls 77-Year-Old Black Congressman ‘Boy’
These deep cover false flags are sure persistent and numerous!
I don't get that comment.
Do you not get Sarcastr0's comment, or the original insult?
So, this is one of those "only blacks can't be called that" things?
It's weird for any grown up to be called 'boy'
Are you honestly arguing that calling a black Congressman 'boy' doesn't have a racist component?
In principle, anyone can be called "uppity". But it is never used of any white person. Likewise, in principle anyone can be called "boy" (as Foghorn Leghorn is wont to do), but no older white person is ever called "boy", and in practice it is little better than being called "nigger".
As is so often the case, the Babylon Bee gets it right. https://x.com/TheBabylonBee/status/1914361522089873660
Amusing, but naturally begging the question.
SRG2 plays the "begging the question" card twice in one thread!
I thought I knew what the 'begging the question' falacy is, but your use of this makes me question that. How is that Babylon Bee post begging the question? Please explain.
"Begging the question" means assuming that what you are saying is accurate, and using that assumed accuracy to support your statement.
Here, the Babylon Bee is claiming that everyone seeking due process before deportation is rightfully being deported, and so should not be given the opportunity to refute the government's claims.
It's an argument we hear here a lot in immigration cases, especially the Abrego Garcia matter.
"We don't need give that illegal alien gangbanger any kind of hearing or opportunity to defend himself." Well, maybe not all that is true.
They assume nothing of the sort, actually. They're just pointing out the hypocrisy of people who enter the country outside the legal process, and then demand that they only be expelled within it. The law is, apparently, only relevant when it works in their favor. If it works against them it can rightfully be ignored.
"Just pointing out the hypocrisy" as a frame to defend the general position of denying due process
They're just pointing out the hypocrisy of people who enter the country outside the legal process,
The claim that this is what they did is the assumption!
But also, not hypocrisy at all. No more so than an accused bank robber demanding a trial before the government seizes all his assets as the fruit of crime.
No, it IS hypocritical of the bank robber to demand a trial before the bag of loot gets taken from him.
I mean, he should get his trial anyway, but he's still a flaming hypocrite.
Precisely so. ThePublius may now in the position of the judge on the receiving end of one of F.E.Smith's retorts, who said, "I have heard your argument, Mr Smith, but I am none the wiser." Came the response, :no, m'lud, but considerably better informed."
That's what the judges and the ACLU lawyers are assuming.
That if you step foot in this country, you get an automatic 10 year pass before a court hears your case, which also confers all sorts of neat benefits like work permits, welfare, healthcare, free debit cards loaded with cash, free luxury hotel rooms with room service, free airline tickets and passes to skip security, voter registration and driver's licenses, and refundable child tax credits.
Magnus Pilatus, MBA, MD, JD, PhDx2 : " .... all sorts of neat benefits .... (ranting) "
Imagine that! Even though Magnus' fantasy list includes "free luxury hotel rooms" and ice cream on Thursdays, every study shows illegal immigrants contribute more to the U.S. economy in taxes than they receive in benefits. And by a sizable margin. It's very similar to the fact that Blue States subsidize those Red State laggards, except in this case it's all those brown-skinned people supporting underachievers like Magnus Pilatus, MBA, MD, JD, PhDx2.
So why does he believe otherwise, uninformed stupidity aside? Because he's a right-winger and therefore committed to professional victimhood. In today's Right, it's all victimhood all the time. Victimhood is mother's milk to them. Victimhood holds the nihilistic shell of their hollow ideology together. Without continuous whiny victimhood, they'd scarcely be able to think, speak, or breathe. They're like zombies, but instead of mindlessly searching for brains, they mindlessly pursue "victimhood" that exists only in their imagination.
What a life!
Have you been living under rock the past 4 1/2 years?
>It's very similar to the fact that Blue States subsidize those Red State laggards, except in this case it's all those brown-skinned people supporting underachievers like Magnus Pilatus, MBA, MD, JD, PhDx2.
Not when you take the net.
And also not when you remove the "Black Belt", all those dumbass coloreds who are broke as shit, living on the dole but voting Democrat and being generationally dumb and poor.
An anti-Semite writes:<That's what the judges and the ACLU lawyers are assuming.
The judges and the ACLU are assuming that there's a Constitution, the words in it have meaning, and people are protected by it until it can be shown that their status does not warrant full or partial protection.
Is there life on other worlds? A Cambridge team studying the atmosphere of a planet called K2-18b has detected signs of molecules which are only produced by simple organisms here. K2-18b is two-and-a-half times the size of Earth and 124 light years away from us. It orbits a red dwarf star in the habitable zone, receiving a similar amount of light as the Earth gets from the Sun.
Using observations from the James Webb Space Telescope, the Cambridge group found that the planet's atmosphere seems to contain the chemical signature of at least one of two molecules that are associated with life: dimethyl sulphide (DMS) and dimethyl disulphide (DMDS). On Earth, these gases are produced by marine phytoplankton and bacteria. Prof Madhusudhan said he was surprised by how much gas was apparently detected during a single observation window.
"The amount we estimate of this gas in the atmosphere is thousands of times higher than what we have on Earth," he said, "So, if the association with life is real, then this planet will be teeming with life," he added.
Of course there are caveats : Light passing thru an atmosphere 700 trillion miles away necessarily provides faint data which requires interpretation, and the results have to be reexamined and confirmed. There are alternate models for the planet's basic composition and one makes life impossible. And though the two molecules are only produced by life here, it is possible some non-organic origin can be reproduced in the lab. There were similar reports of biologically produced compounds in the upper atmosphere of Venus a few years back, but that quickly fell apart.
The scientists are saying their findings should be firmer after one or two more years of study. What truly earth-shattering news it would be if their conclusions are confirmed....
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c39jj9vkr34o
It's certainly worth further investigation, and I really think we need to build a BIG telescope in space, maybe at the Earth/Sun L5 point, that's capable of properly imaging exoplanets, and gathering enough light for detailed analysis. Something that makes Hubble or Webb look like a spotting scope.
I envision something where the individual mirror segments are independently floating in space, with ultra-high precision station keeping propulsion to hold them in alignment. That way you can keep adding new segments as you go along, and the segments could be mass produced.
But you'd need to do something like that well away from Earth, to minimize tidal forces.
There's another more radical proposal that's beyond current technology but still possibly within reach : Telescopes that use gravity lensing.
It would require one or more space telescopes located at least fourteen times farther from the sun than Pluto, well past the edge of our solar system. At that distance, the telescope could capture light from the target planet being bent around the Sun, which would then act as a magnifying lens (per Einstein). This would allow picture images of other worlds around distant stars. After digital analysis & processing, these images would have the clarity of pictures of the earth taken from the Moon.
OK, here's the bad news : Setting up multiple space telescopes at that distance is several generations away. As I understand it, they would be required to keep station and a telescope would need to be in a particular spot to target a particular distant world. But it is technology that seems just possible while offering something now impossible : To set eyes on a planet hundreds of light years away.
https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2022/05/gravity-telescope-image-exoplanets
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_gravitational_lens
I'm familiar with the proposal. You have to get out far enough that the Einstein ring of light bent by the Sun's gravity emerges from the corona. Then you have to move the telescope around to scan the target, because the entire Einstein ring will be one 'pixel'. This isn't an imaging scope, it's a scanning scope that only sees one point at a time. This requires a LOT of station keeping capacity.
Complicating this is that you need a second probe closer to the Sun to shadow the actual sun, and it has to be moving around, too.
The flip side is that the capacity is incredible. It's just awkward to use.
The sort of giant scope I propose is an imaging scope, it doesn't have the same enormous magnification, but images the entire target at one time, and can be redirected much more quickly.
Brett Bellmore : "Then you have to move the telescope around to scan the target, because the entire Einstein ring will be one 'pixel'"
I think that's the reason some accounts envision a fleet of telescopes. And I'm not sure how you would station keep at an empty point in space anyway. So it looks like a fortune's cost to target one single star system.
That said, as a young tyke, I understood it was impossible by the laws of physics to "see" something as small as an atom, yet it's done today. It should be impossible to ever see another solar system's planets, but apparently it isn't. Of course I very much doubt I'll be around to see it, but such is life.
Of course that was 124 million years ago. Even if extraterrestrial life is found it does nothing to answer the question of its origin. Given the distances involved I doubt we will ever know about extraterrestrial life before we all succumb to global warming(or whatever its called now).
The interesting question is what happens with life outside the Solar System is strongly confirmed, either in a case like this or (more dramatically) from a extra-terrestrial signal. Will it change how people think and act in any significant way?
I think that people, if asked to forecast, will generally say that it will be staggering news, change perceptions, even affect theology...and then when it happens, because the aliens aren't arriving here anytime soon, everything proceeds as though nothing has happened, except that more exobiologists or xenobiologists get tenure.
The most important thing will be to have a national debate over the spectroscopic data, especially the CO2 spectra versus time. That will enable us to determine if they are Democrats or Republicans.
We could start by determining whether the extraterrestrial life is intelligent or not. Science has not disproved the possibly of intelligent Republican life, but it's clearly a very rare phenomena at best.
I dunno - maybe we should just hang around and wait for "them" to show up and ask us how we managed to screwed everything up so completely. In many respects there's barely intelligent life here!
The US government is not paying to keep Garcia or any other El Salvadoran national in El Salvador per a US government filing today.
Despite the 'vibes'-based evidence from Trump foes here, it never made sense to pay El Salvador to take back their citizens that they are obligated to take back under treaty. Garcia is under the exclusive control by the El Salvadoran government, so the idea that the US government can control his release and that the court has the ability to order the government to 'facilitate' his release is preposterous.
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69777799/98/1/abrego-garcia-v-noem/
I thoroughly enjoyed reading the government's objections. Judge Xinis needs to get bent.
Great God Above! No one weasels like a Trump supporter trying to excuse away his idol's criminality. We are paying Bukele to be our thug & jailkeeper. He's our boy, bought and owned. By the terms of our purchase agreement, he does what he's told concerning the disposition of people we "disappear" into his gulag.
The idea that simple cash transaction "works" when the people smuggled out of this country are Venezuelan but doesn't with Garcia is pure farce. But no one does farce more frequently than a desperate Trump supporter. Farce is their wheelhouse. Farce is where they reside, 24/7.
No one weasels like a Trump supporter trying to excuse away his idol's criminality.
Who said I was a Trump supporter?
The idea that simple cash transaction "works" when the people smuggled out of this country are Venezuelan but doesn't with Garcia is pure farce.
Vibes.
tylertusta : "Who said I was a Trump supporter?"
I'm of two minds when I see a Trumpian bootlicker look up from his cult service - tongue still coated with shoe polish - and insist (Insist!) he's not a Trump supporter.
1. On the one hand it shows a faint glimmer of self respect. When your worshiped deity is a orange-tinted brainless huckster buffoon, that's a deeply embarrassing fact. Anyone with any concern for his personal dignity must recoil from admitting the fact. In that sense, I understand & sympathize with your need to dissemble, tylertusta.
2. On the other hand, it's just freak'n pathetic.
And no one believes your B.S. If Trump asked Bukele to return Garcia, he wouldn't hesitate. After all, he's being paid to follow orders, not hesitate in doing what he's told.
Yawn.
Exactly. A lot of nasty nothing.
15 years of constant manufactured existential crises have rotted your brain. The body can't handle that constant load of fear and stress.
You've become retarded... or more retarded in your case.
it never made sense to pay El Salvador to take back their citizens that they are obligated to take back under treaty.
Carefully avoiding the fact that they're also housing Venezuelans, who the US is paying El Salvador to house.
Nothing to avoid since they're now different issues.
You read far too much into the way they dodge the questions; they did not explicitly say what you think they said. They wanted people to infer that, but they didn't.
Moreover, many of the objections are facially frivolous, since they "take the position" that SCOTUS didn't say the exact words "facilitate his release" when in fact SCOTUS did say those exact words.
Also, in contrast to some people's claim here (I'm thinking especially, but not exclusively, of C_XY) that the U.S. isn't obligated to do anything at all, the responses indicate that the government is purporting — they're probably lying, but they said it — to continue to engage in diplomatic efforts to get him back.
What have I 'read too much' into? Can you be specific?
Well, it does not actually say that the U.S. isn't paying them to detain him. It doesn't even say that the U.S. is paying to detain the Venezuelans. As to the latter, it says,
The United States, through the White House spokesperson, has publicly stated that “approximately $6 million” has been made available to the Government of El Salvador (GOES) to be used by the GOES for its law enforcement needs, including “for the detention of these [Venezuelan] foreign terrorists.”
It very coyly does not say "This is true." It says that the White House spokesperson has said that.
And then as for Abrego Garcia, it doesn't say, "We are not paying them" for him.
The United States has not provided any specific assistance with respect to the detention of Abrego Garcia or any other Salvadoran national.
It doesn't say that Abrego Garcia isn't part of the aforementioned $6-million-for-law-enforcement-needs deal. It says that there's no "specific" assistance for him. (People often accuse me of pedantry because I like to be precise, but this is a litigation document, not a blog comment, and you have to read the words carefully as saying only what they expressly say. Implications don't count.)
And saying that ES is "Abrego Garcia is detained pursuant to the sovereign, domestic authority of El Salvador," doesn't say anything at all. Everyone, including the Venezuelans, who is imprisoned by the Salvadoran government is held "pursuant to the sovereign, domestic authority of El Salvador." That we're paying them to do so doesn't change that. (If we shipped the Venezuelans to a privately owned warehouse in El Salvador and paid the owner to hold them, it would be illegal. Only the government acting as a sovereign can hold people in captivity.)
For once I'm not going to accuse you of pedantry, but I do think you're overreading the document because you're uncomfortable with the reality it presents:
1. We gave GOES a $6M lump sum. 2. Part of it was for detaining Venezuelans we deliver to them. 3. None of it was for detaining Salvadorans we deliver to them -- they decide what to do with their own citizens.
Pretty uncomplicated, seems to me.
I have to say I agree with you here.
If the plaintiff's theory is that the US government has control over Garcia because we're paying the El Salvadorian government to detain him on our behalf, then the US cannot have control over him via the use of a non-specific payment that doesn't include him specifically- either by name or type.
I'm sure Judge Xinis doesn't care. She's made up her mind to release Garcia into the United States and to prevent his deportation regardless of what she says on the matter.
the US cannot have control over him via the use of a non-specific payment that doesn't include him specifically- either by name or type.
That doesn't even remotely follow. If I pay you $1,000 every month and as part of that you agree to keep whatever I give you in your storage shed, the fact that my $1,000 isn't for any specific item does not mean that I don't have control over the things I gave you to put in your shed.
... whatever I give you in your storage shed...
Except that wasn't the (alleged) agreement. You gave me $1k to store some things in the shed but we never agreed that you have exclusive use of the shed.
The fact that I may store my own things in there doesn't mean that a judge can declare that my things are somehow actually yours when that judge allows someone to collect on a debt that you owe.
That you can put stuff in the shed too does not have any bearing on whether I have control over the stuff I gave you to put in the shed.
(You think Bukele "owns" Garcia? Gross.)
No, I think you're adding things in. Their responses were pretty darn non-specific, but I think the best reading is that we gave them a lump sum, but it wasn't "for" anything specific at all — just their willingness to cooperate with us. (You say "part of it" was for detaining Venezuelans. But your interpretation fails to identify what the rest of it was for.)
(You say "part of it" was for detaining Venezuelans.
I didn't say that, the administration did: "to be used by the GOES for its law enforcement needs, including for the detention of these [Venezuelan] foreign terrorists."
But your interpretation fails to identify what the rest of it was for.)
Again, I point you to the actual words on the page: "to be used by the GOES for its law enforcement needs." No interpretation needed.
As I was saying earlier, it seems like you so badly need this to line up with the priors you're so invested in that you're doing somersaults trying to come up with ways that some pretty straightforward language might somehow be construed to mean the exact opposite.
I think you just may have skimmed the document too quickly. All I see in that vein is a discussion of Xinis's post-SCOTUS amended order and the 4th Circuit's holding on the meaning of "facilitate."
No. They repeatedly raised the objection that various interrogatories were "based on the false premise that the United States can or has been ordered to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador." (Emphasis in original.)
But that's not a "false premise." It's a true premise. SCOTUS's ruling said "The [district court's] order properly requires the Government to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador." (Emphasis added.) Which is why Xinis's order today called it a bad faith objection, and overruled it.
SCOTUS's ruling said "The [district court's] order properly requires the Government to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador."
It did indeed, but she walked away from that order (because she didn't want to comply with what SCOTUS ordered HER to do and explain the difference between "facilitate" and "effectuate"). That's why the objections quote her revised order. Looks like they botched the cite and a lot of people (including Xinis!) are leveraging that to throw a fit about them supposedly misconstruing the SCOTUS order, but they never said the first thing about SCOTUS and quoted her revised order word for word. Seems like one of those things that's only confusing for those that need for it to be confusing.
Do you think her revised order somehow overrides SCOTUS's order? Because, as her response to this indicates, she doesn't think so.
Of course she wants to have it both ways. SCOTUS's only actual order was for the administration to share status updates, and for Xinis to clarify the scope of her order. Again, she chose to skirt SCOTUS's directive to her and issued a new order instead. She can't now pretend the old order is somehow still in effect when she hasn't cured the defect SCOTUS specifically ordered her to cure.
She expressly cured what you call the "defect." SCOTUS said that the word "effectuate" was ambiguous, so she cured that by removing the word effectuate.
Moreover, Judge Xinis was not amused by the administration's bad faith objections, and ordered them to give legitimate answers:
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mdd.578815/gov.uscourts.mdd.578815.100.0_1.pdf
Man, she's taking the Big Wheel for another lap. Overruled all their objections -- including privilege -- and ordered a full supplement in less than 24 hours. Ain't gonna happen.
Gonna take another trip up to SCOTUS.
Under what theory could the administration appeal a discovery order to SCOTUS?
They won't. They'll appeal the forthcoming contempt order after they don't just roll over and blow privilege &c.
I don't know about a discovery order.
But the appeal that results will revolve around the word "can."
In an unsurprising twist, apparently in Democrat Districts, you can be a literal Democrat Domestic Terrorist, but since you're Fighting Fascism or Saving Sacred Democracy, the Democrat DA won't charge you with any crimes.
Being a Democrat Domestic Terrorist is just too important for laws, they're saving democracy and fighting fascism. Fuck the Law, we got a Democracy to Save!
https://x.com/libsoftiktok/status/1914525831243743729
Please log in to post comments
Mute this user?
Ban this user?
Un-ban this user?
Nuke this user?
Un-nuke this user?
Flag this comment?
Un-flag this comment?
Tosin Akintola | 8.25.2025 5:21 PM
Jacob Sullum | 8.25.2025 3:35 PM
Robby Soave | 8.25.2025 2:24 PM
Joe Lancaster | 8.25.2025 1:15 PM
Elizabeth Nolan Brown | 8.25.2025 11:00 AM
