REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too?

POSTED BY: 6IXSTRINGJACK
UPDATED: Saturday, April 19, 2025 03:33
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Thursday, April 17, 2025 7:56 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Texas Trumptards are feeling confident in their power

Texas GOP Introduces Bill to Test Waste Water For Abortion Pill Byproducts
The bill also requires testing water for the pregnancy hormone

By Troy Matthews | April 16, 2025

https://meidasnews.com/news/texas-gop-introduces-bill-to-test-waste-wa
ter-for-abortion-pill-byproducts

In one of the most bizarre moves from any Republican state government yet, Texas GOP have introduced a bill that would require water utilities to test waste water for chemical byproducts in urine related to the use of the abortion pill and birth control. SB 1976 would gather data on abortion pill and birth control urinary metabolites in water by area, but the bill also, strangely, requires testing for pregnanediol, the hormone that appears in urine when a person is pregnant.

Why is the Texas GOP trying to require water testing for pregnancy and abortion pill usage in municipalities? They say it is for environmental protection. Anti-choice extremists have long argued, without scientific evidence, that chemicals in the abortion pill mifepristone are harmful to water. However; Republicans, and especially Texas Republicans, are not known for their tough stances on protecting the environment.

It is also serves to back the talking point that abortion pills need to be banned because they are dangerous to women, which the medical community roundly rejects. This same disinformation campaign led to Louisiana classifying abortion pills as dangerous addictive substances, like Xanax and Ambien, which led to requirements that they be locked away in hospitals out of reach, when they are commonly used to treat dangerous miscarriages. No, people don't get addicted to abortion pills.

"This is a growing concern around the country, and it’s not a left or right issue—it’s a health issue," said State Senator Bryan Hughes, the author of the bill.

The bill also calls for testing for estrone and testosterone; spikes of which could be used to determine if people are utilizing gender affirming care in an area.

From the bill:

"(b) In accordance with Subsection (a), the commission shall conduct testing for the following urinary metabolites in the form of gluconates:

(1) benzophenone;

(2) bisphenol A;

(3) estrone;

(4) ethinyl estradiol;

(5) musk ketone;

(6) pregnanediol;

(7) testosterone;

(8) tonalide (AHTN);

(9) mifepristone; and

(10) any other organic substance required to be tested or by the commission.

The commission shall maintain detailed records of all testing conducted under this section and publish the records on the commission's Internet website. The records must include:

(1) the date on which each sample was collected;

(2) the location from which each sample was collected;

(3) the date on which each sample was tested for the presence of the urinary metabolites listed in Subsection (b); and

(4) the results of the test for each urinary metabolite listed in Subsection (b) in parts per trillion."

Whatever their purpose is, Texas republicans having access to urinary testing from entire regions is off putting to say the least. This seems like the next level in government intrusion from the state with one of the most restrictive abortion bans in the country, which also does not provide exceptions for rape or incest.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, April 17, 2025 8:27 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Fire Government Employees and Hire Crooks to do the same work, incompetently

https://theintercept.com/2025/04/17/ice-deportation-contracts-us-advis
ors/

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement just signed a contract worth $73 million with a firm whose executives are accused of taking part in a scheme to manufacture evidence against a co-worker during their time working at the Department of Homeland Security.

According to a contract document reviewed by The Intercept, federal contractor Universal Strategic Advisors will provide services pertaining to ICE’s “non-detained docket,” a master list of millions of noncitizens believed to be removable from the United States but not yet in the agency’s custody.

The contract cites President Donald Trump’s declaration of a national emergency on the U.S.-Mexico border, an overwhelming glut of potential deportees, and a shortage of officers to process them all as justification for hiring a private vendor to assist with the collection of biometric data, coordinating removals, and monitoring immigrant populations.

The document says that with a fleet of new outsourced employees, ICE can reassign hundreds of officers to tasks that better align with Trump’s recent executive orders aimed at maximizing the agency’s detention and deportation operations. With the contractors onboard, the document says at least 675 ICE officers “will be able to take all appropriate actions to comply with the EO’s by prioritizing conducting at-large arrests, removals, and detention related activities.”

A former ICE official, who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity, said they were concerned by this plan to further privatize the agency’s operations at the same time as the Trump administration has dramatically slashed its workforce and gutted important oversight bodies like the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, as well as the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman. “I certainly take issue with them firing career feds and demolishing whole offices, just to hire contractors to do the same work, many of them who are former ICE employees now retired,” the official said.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, April 17, 2025 8:54 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


The Pardon-to-Prison Pipeline

Trump granted clemency to people who keep ending up back in trouble with the law.

By David A. Graham | April 16, 2025, 6:55 PM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2025/04/january-6-pard
on-prison-trump/682485/

Late last month, Jonathan Braun was arrested on allegations of shoving a 3-year-old, “causing a red mark on his back and substantial pain.” This is only his latest brush with the law over the past four years. He was banned by federal and New York State judges from working in debt collection; fined $20 million; and accused of punching his wife and father-in-law, groping a nanny, and attacking a nurse with an IV-bag holder. He also allegedly threatened a man at his synagogue who asked him to pipe down during services.

This crime spree is stunning, but what makes it national news is that it has all happened since 2021, when President Donald Trump commuted Braun’s 10-year prison sentence for smuggling marijuana. Braun, granted clemency during the last hours of Trump’s first term as president, is one of many recipients of a Trump pardon who has found himself back in trouble with the law. Some of them are people convicted of serious offenses on January 6, 2021, and then pardoned at the outset of Trump’s second term in office. Despite Trump’s depiction of the rioters as peace-loving patriots, more than a few of them have proved to be repeat offenders.

Braun, who is now back in prison, is not the only first-term recipient of clemency to be rearrested. Eli Weinstein, a convicted Ponzi schemer who received a last-minute 2021 commutation, was convicted on March 31 in a $41 million fraud case. Philip Esformes, whose sentence for his role in a $1.3 billion Medicare fraud was commuted in 2020, was arrested last year on domestic-violence-related charges, but the state dropped them a month later. The rapper Kodak Black has also been repeatedly arrested since receiving a commutation.

But the group of people convicted in connection with January 6 has been particularly likely to have found more trouble. Former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, who was sentenced to 22 years for seditious conspiracy and other crimes, was arrested for assault just a month after being pardoned—at the Capitol, no less. (D.C. prosecutors declined to pursue charges.) He also tried unsuccessfully to stir up conflict at a conference of Trump critics in February. Matthew Huttle, an Indiana man who received a pardon for entering the Capitol on January 6, was fatally shot by a deputy on January 27 after reaching for a gun. Emily Hernandez, a Missouri woman, was convicted for causing a fatal drunk-driving crash in 2022; the sentencing came days after her pardon for January 6 offenses. Andrew Taake of Texas was pardoned in January, then arrested in February on an outstanding charge for allegedly sending explicit messages to an undercover cop he believed was an underage girl.

It’s not just that clemency recipients have been accused of crimes since their pardons; they’ve also tried to use the pardons to get off for other offenses. Edward Kelley argued that his pardon from Trump for January 6 also covered his plot to kill the FBI agents who investigated him; a judge disagreed. Daniel Ball said that charges of illegally possessing a gun should be thrown out because the weapon was discovered in a search related to now-pardoned January 6 charges, and the acting U.S. attorney agreed, but Dan Wilson, a pardoned Capitol rioter who made a similar argument, had less luck with a federal appeals court. (Other defendants have made similar claims, with varying results.) David Daniel, who was charged with producing and possessing child pornography, also argued that a search that turned up the material was invalid because of his January 6 pardon, but the U.S. attorney in the case disagreed. (Daniel has pleaded not guilty to the charges.)

Seeing so many people who received pardons get back in trouble with the law should be deeply embarrassing for Trump—though to be fair, pardoning people for a violent assault on the Capitol should have been embarrassing to him as well. He is not the first president to issue clemency for personal reasons, but presidential administrations usually carefully administer commutations and pardons, in part to avoid recidivism. The Trump White House, however, has shown little regard for the process. Last month, it fired Justice Department pardon attorney Elizabeth Oyer after she opposed restoring gun rights for the actor Mel Gibson, then tried to block her from testifying to Congress.

Trump, the first convicted felon to serve as president, has long claimed that he will restore “law and order” in America, but his definition is highly selective. Some of the president’s commutations and pardons are simply favors granted to people who are well connected, but in the case of the January 6 commutations, he was eager to reward loyalty and to make a political point: that he and they had both been subjects of political persecution.

This creates a nauseating contrast with statements this week in which administration officials have claimed that Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland resident living under protected legal status who was deported to El Salvador, is a terrorist, despite a total lack of evidence—and despite the fact that the government has previously acknowledged his deportation was “an administrative error.” The search for some offense to pin on Abrego Garcia is also being done to make a political point. If Trump is eager to find dangerous criminals, he could do so more easily by looking at his pardon list.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, April 17, 2025 9:07 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Anyone who looked either at Donald Trump’s personal history or the history of authoritarian regimes in general would have realized that there’s no such thing as a deal with this administration. Whatever you think Trump and co. have agreed to, they feel free to make new demands whenever it suits them.

Sure enough, yesterday the New York Times published an article with the headline “Law Firms Made Deals With Trump. Now He Wants More From Them.”

Big Law has just discovered what it should have known all along: Giving Trump what he wants doesn’t buy you lenient treatment. All it does is signal weakness, which leads to even more onerous demands.

And the fact that Trump never, ever keeps his promises is why he will lose his trade war, why the dollar may lose its status as a global currency, and why America may eventually face a debt crisis.

U.S. efforts to build an anti-China trade alliance are doomed to failure. Why? Because nobody with any sense trusts the Trump administration to honor the terms of any deals it makes, whether they’re deals about pro bono work with law firms or tariff deals with other governments.

And as more and more people realize that Trump and his minions can’t be trusted, the damage will spread from trade to finance. The international role of the dollar and, eventually, America’s ability to service its debt are very much at risk.

Why can’t Donald Trump be trusted? Partly because he’s Donald Trump. But even if he weren’t, absolute monarchs — which is what Trump is trying to become — are fundamentally untrustworthy. The ruler may sometimes choose to honor his promises, but it’s always his choice — a choice that can be changed at any moment.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, April 17, 2025 12:49 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


TDS is just flowing through you today.



--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Thursday, April 17, 2025 3:30 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
TDS is just flowing through you today.
This is NOT about Trump and has bigger consequences than all the things put together by Trump and Project 2025:

Don't ignore Republicans' awful budget

More debt, big Medicaid cuts, and trillions in regressive tax cuts

By Matthew Yglesias | Apr 17, 2025

https://www.slowboring.com/p/dont-ignore-republicans-awful-budget

To start with some self-criticism: Back when the American Rescue Plan was coming together, I thought that if American fiscal policy “overshot” somewhat on the demand side, that would have positive consequences for American politics. Interest rates would rise to contain inflation (this happened) and people would find the higher interest rates annoying (this also happened), and then, as a result, the political system would return to being worried about debt and deficits.

I thought that this would be good, because it would force us into a more real politics, one that wasn’t so dominated by pure symbolism — we would be dealing with hard fiscal tradeoffs and less culture war nonsense.

This did not happen, at all.

Joe Biden and the Democrats surprised me by not returning to the classic Obama/Clinton message of balanced deficit reduction. I found this incredibly annoying, because when Obama was president, the conventional wisdom among pure political hacks was so strongly in favor of a deficit reduction message that the White House ran with it, even though it was inappropriate to the economic circumstances and Obama’s economic team was mixed on the substance of it. But just a few short years later, the conventional wisdom among political operatives had pivoted so hard against deficit reduction that they weren’t focused on it even when it was substantively warranted. Then came the debate, the candidate swap, and what I hoped would be a chance for Kamala Harris to shake the etch-a-sketch and ditch Biden’s extensive set of proposals for new spending in favor of a “reduce the deficit and bring down interest rates” message.

She declined to go down that road. Trump won. And now, while a million crazy things are happening in the executive branch, congressional Republicans are moving forward with a fiscal agenda that is incredibly irresponsible and will add trillions in debt, despite DOGE’s efforts to saves pennies through measures like refusing to help Milwaukee address unsafe levels of lead in their public schools’ drinking water.

Republicans are telling some people that there will be trillions of cuts to social safety net programs while promising other people that there won’t. But all possible versions of the GOP fiscal agenda result in huge increases to the budget deficit. In some, those increases are partially offset by cuts to programs for the poor; other times the deficits are just really large. But every version involves the opposite of sound Obama-style deficit reduction.

What we should be doing is aiming for balanced fiscal consolidation: higher revenue and lower spending, while trying to shelter the most vulnerable from the impact of cuts.

But Republicans want to reduce revenue, raise the deficit, and ensure that the pain of budget cuts falls on the vulnerable.

Republicans’ confusing budget moves

This has all been a bit hard to keep track of, but the first mover in Republican budget drama this year was the House of Representatives, which passed a resolution calling for $4.5 trillion in tax cuts partially offset by big cuts to Medicaid and SNAP.

This ultimately amounted to roughly $2.8 trillion in deficit increases that they chose to pretend would actually reduce the deficit via magical levels of economic growth.


The way this was written, the biggest spending cut by far is TBD but needs to come from the House Energy and Commerce Committee. This is the committee that is responsible for Medicare and Medicaid, and the only way to achieve cuts of that scale would be to cut Medicare or Medicaid. Republicans have sworn up and down that they don’t want to cut Medicare, and their draft “menu” of spending cuts is full of different ways to cut Medicaid, so in practice, this is a plan for huge cuts to Medicaid.

But the Senate didn’t have the stomach for that.

So instead they wrote reconciliation instructions that call for increased military spending, increased spending on immigration enforcement, and $5.3 trillion in tax cuts, offset by a token $4 billion in spending cuts. The fiscal consequences of that plan are truly dire, doubling the pace of debt growth and likely incurring around $1 trillion in extra interest rate costs alone.


Of course, the House and Senate can’t just pass different laws.

So House leadership went back to get their members to agree to the Senate version. Right-wing members of the caucus objected to the absence of spending cuts, but eventually flip-flopped and helped pass it after both House and Senate leaders made informal promises to cut spending.

Right before the vote, Speaker Mike Johnson said, “Our two chambers are directly aligned; we’re committed to finding at least $1.5 trillion in savings for the American people while also preserving our essential programs.”

As pure legislating, this doesn’t make any sense.

The House already passed a budget resolution with $1.5 trillion in cuts, and then the Senate didn’t agree with it, so they came back with the no-cuts budget. Then the House passed the no-cuts budget, even with the Speaker explicitly saying he wants cuts.

They’re talking out of both sides of their mouth in a desperate effort to hold their slender margins together. But turning this into a kind of Schrödinger’s Budget Resolution is also making it harder to criticize them. By continuing to advance this legislation procedurally while hiding the ball in terms of its actual contents, Republicans have thus far managed to avoid it becoming a central political story. I’m always fond of pointing out that the actual low point of Trump’s term one approval ratings was not during any of the major scandals or controversies of his presidency, it was when the news agenda was dominated by ACA repeal and the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

Suggesting this has been a deliberate effort to keep the budget out of view is perhaps giving too much credit to a shambolic process. So far, though, it has been largely out of view, which is good for Trump and Republicans, but bad for America.

A good time to worry about the deficit

The gyrations in the bond market since “Liberation Day” have attracted a lot of attention. We are accustomed to situations in which stocks go up and bonds go down (“risk on”) or else the opposite, where stocks go down and bonds go up (“risk off”), the presumption being that American government bonds are a quintessential safe asset. Trump’s erratic policymaking seems to have undone this dynamic, and now stocks and bonds either both go down (when Trump does something crazy on trade) or both go up (when Trump backs away from the craziness).

These kind of market moves are interesting and important. But the bigger issue here is the basic cost of financing federal debt.

Interest payments as a share of GDP were really high in the 1980s as a result of Ronald Reagan’s bad fiscal policies, but they fell steadily in the 1990s and were consistently low for the first two decades of the 21st-century. This was a long period in which I thought deficit concerns were overhyped. But then interest rates went up under Biden, so debt service costs soared.


The good news is that by 2024, this was leveling off rather than continuing to rise.

With inflation largely in the rearview mirror, it seemed like we should have been set for interest costs to start declining, and then maybe Congress could do something useful on the budget deficit. Instead, Trump has us heading in the wrong direction. (While the Biden administration’s lack of interest in deficit reduction disappointed me, Harris’s proposals were all “paid for” and designed to at least avoid making things worse. ) Tariffs are poised to push inflation up and make it harder for the Fed to cut interest rates. These GOP tax bills are incurring a ton of new debt that will be much more expensive to finance than the debt originally incurred by the Bush tax cuts or during Trump’s first term. And dumping it into a climate of already rising interest rates and diminished confidence in the basic soundness of the United States risks pushing interest rates up further.

This is of more than just budgetary interest.

Loans to the federal government are inherently safer than any other kind of dollar-denominated loan. So when the federal government’s borrowing costs rise, the interest rates on things like mortgages and corporate bonds go up too.

You can’t “re-industrialize” the country (or even do something more prosaic, like create construction jobs) if you’re wrecking the underlying finances of the country.

And that’s what these budgets would do. Annoyingly, Trump seems to have convinced a healthy share of the public that this is why DOGE is a good idea. In reality, DOGE is saving minimal sums of money — sums that are largely offset by things like Trump’s giveaways to Medicare Advantage plans — while pursuing ideological vendettas and centralization of power. But even Elon Musk’s claim that he can cut spending by $150 billion is trivial compared to the scale of the tax cuts congressional Republicans are aiming for.

Boring us into oblivion

I have to admit that I struggled writing this article.

“They’re going to do a bad budget” is not outrageous in the same way that mistakenly sending a man to prison in El Salvador and then pretending you lack the authority to comply with a court order to bring him back is outrageous. Even in the economic policy sphere, it’s just not as riveting as the tariff drama, where Trump’s endless see-sawing and the whipsaws in financial markets are grimly fascinating.

At the same time, I am extremely concerned that Republicans are either going to bait-and-switch a second time on these budget resolutions and enact draconian Medicaid cuts after all, or else plunge ahead with the hyper-irresponsible Senate version, provoke some kind of bond market crisis, and then push for doomsday cuts to the social safety net.

And while the whole point of the budget reconciliation process is that nobody can stop the Republican Party from doing either of those things if that’s what they want to do, I really do think we have an obligation as a public to pay attention to this and not just treat it as tedious legislative arcana. Health insurance for millions of people and the basic financial wellbeing of millions more is on the line. It’s not an affront to Econ 101 or to the rule of law in the way that so many other Trump outrages are, but it is nonetheless incredibly high stakes for the future of the country.

Right now, though, there is essentially no clarity on what’s actually in this legislation, even though it has cleared several procedural hurdles.

One interpretation of that, highlighted in this Politico story, is that there are just a lot of unresolved questions. At each step down the road, leadership has made promises to different blocs of members — promises that are often contradictory. In principle, that means the whole thing could collapse in a humiliating way at any time.

My concern, though, is that at the last minute, the White House will step in, make a bunch of decisions, and then when Trump says “vote for this,” the whole caucus will go do it the same way they defer to Trump on everything. In this scenario, there will have been almost no scrutiny of exactly how much is added to the deficit and how much is cut from Medicaid and where else those cuts are.

I’m acutely aware drafting this column that it’s hard to make all of this compelling when I can’t tell you exactly whose interests are being threatened.

Are they going to screw with the FMAP formula in a way that is devastating to low-income people in blue states? Or, are they going to mess with Medicaid expansion dollars in a way that screws over West Virginia, Kentucky, and Arkansas? The former makes the vote math easy in the Senate (there are basically no blue state GOP senators) but very hard in the House (a huge share of their vulnerable frontline members are from New York and California). The latter is in some respects safer for the midterms, but asks many GOP Senators to cast votes that would be quite damaging to their own states. Or they can just do it the way that doubles the national debt, with all the downsides that entails.

Whatever choices they make, there will be ample political vulnerability. The suspicion that Republicans favor the interests of rich people and will make your life worse in order to indulge them is the enduring vulnerability of the GOP. And that’s exactly what’s happening here. It’s extremely hard to organize against a budget bill that’s so full of blanks, but I’m afraid that unless we start talking about it now, we’ll have final text sprung on us too late to get anyone engaged.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, April 17, 2025 4:47 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Universities Told Students to Leave the Country. ICE Just Said They Didn’t Actually Have To.

By Natasha Lennard / Apr 17, 2025 at 1:10 PM

https://theintercept.com/2025/04/17/international-student-visas-deport
-dhs-ice/

The Department of Homeland Security said this week in a Michigan court that the agency does not have the authority to terminate students’ immigration statuses by terminating their records in the Student Exchange and Visitor Information System. Known as SEVIS, the database allows both universities and authorities to track information about international students on visas in U.S.

Homeland Security’s changes to SEVIS, the Trump administration said, have no bearing on a student’s lawful nonimmigrant status.

“Terminating a record in SEVIS does not terminate an individual’s nonimmigrant status in the United States,” said Andre Watson, assistant director of the national security division for Homeland Security Investigations, in the filing. Watson added that existing laws and regulations “do not provide” the DHS-run Student Exchange and Visitor Program “the authority to terminate nonimmigrant status by terminating a SEVIS record.”

This will be news to many hundreds of students who have had their SEVIS records terminated by DHS in recent weeks — and were then told by their schools or the government that they have thus lost their immigration status and must immediately leave the country.

“Under pressure from ICE, schools have been advising students they are out of status after SEVIS record termination, and in many cases disenrolling them as a result,” said Nathan Yaffe, an attorney representing international students facing deportation in other cases. “Now ICE has submitted sworn declarations that SEVIS record termination has no legal effect on the student whatsoever.”

“Disenrolling students was already a blatant capitulation, and now it is a wholly inexcusable one.”

Based on school officials checking their SEVIS records, hundreds of students have been led to believe that they had lost their student immigration status because a terminated record in the database is broadly taken to mean a student has fallen out of status.

The DHS’s latest claims to the contrary in court are sure to only sow further confusion, but they are strong grounds, Yaffe said, for schools to immediately stop disenrolling students believed to be out of status due to SEVIS record checks.

“Any school that continues to disenroll (and refuses to re-enroll) students is voluntarily punishing students to align itself with the Trump administration’s agenda,” Yaffe said. “Disenrolling students was already a blatant capitulation, and now it is a wholly inexcusable one.”

What Schools Told Students

The DHS declaration was filed in response to a lawsuit brought by four Michigan students, who are suing the Trump administration over the reported loss of their F-1 student statuses. In response, the government argued that the case should be thrown out, since DHS did not remove the students’ statuses when it terminated their SEVIS records.

According to Inside Higher Ed, 16 lawsuits from at least 50 students have challenged the Trump administration over visa revocations and deportation threats. A number of the suits have challenged DHS’s authority to summarily change students’ statuses on SEVIS. It was only for the first time in the Michigan case, however, that the government said that its SEVIS interventions had no bearing on a student’s status.

The admission was an apparent effort by the government to dodge legal challenges. The students are suing to have their legal student immigration status restored, and the government is suggesting that their SEVIS terminations never changed the students’ statuses, so the agency cannot be sued for its actions. Communications from government agencies and school administrations, however, have up until this point taken a SEVIS termination to mean that a student’s status is terminated too.

In an email sent by a school official at the University of Michigan to one of the Michigan plaintiffs, for example, the student was told, “In our daily review of SEVIS, we learned that your SEVIS record was ‘terminated’ by a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official.” The school official continued: “We do not have any additional information, but this termination means you no longer hold valid F-1 status within the United States. You will need to cease any employment immediately. Since this termination does not carry a grace period, we must recommend you make plans to exit the United States immediately.”

The government’s defense in court, however, claimed the direct opposite, noting in a filing: “There are no legal consequences to the termination of a SEVIS record.”

The University of Michigan and Wayne State University — the two schools attended by plaintiffs in the Michigan lawsuit — did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment, nor did DHS, ICE, the State Department, and the Department of Justice, which represents the administration in court.

The War on Immigrants

A student plaintiff in another, similar case filed in California received an email directly from the State Department, informing them that their student visa had been revoked. The email fails to distinguish in any meaningful way between visa status and legal immigration status, which are not the same thing. In one paragraph, the State Department tells the student that their visa has been “revoked under Section 221(i) of the United States Immigration and Nationality Act.”

The email later notes, “Remaining in the United States without a lawful immigration status can result in fines, detention, and/or deportation” — without informing the student that they may very well still have lawful immigration status.

“Given the gravity of this situation, individuals whose visa was revoked may wish to demonstrate their intent to depart the United States using the CBP Home App,” the State Department email told the student.

Ranjani Srinivasan, a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University fled to Canada in March after being targeted by ICE. After DHS terminated her SEVIS status, Srinivasan wrote in a statement that Columbia “arbitrarily de-enrolled” her, ending her “legal status, worker status, and housing.” She blamed “ICE threats and Columbia complicity” for her decision to flee.

The Homeland Security website, which offers official guidance on international student rules and regulations, suggests that a terminated record indicates that the student’s legal status has been terminated too. The site notes that a terminated record in SEVIS means that a student “loses all on- and/or off-campus employment authorization,” “cannot re-enter the United States on the terminated SEVIS record,” and that ICE agents may investigate to “confirm the departure of the student.”

DHS also says that a terminated record “could indicate that the nonimmigrant no longer maintains” their legal status, but that it is “designated school officials,” rather than ICE and other DHS agents who “mostly terminate” these records.

“That Clearly Is BS”

The State Department has been removing student visas en masse. Over 1,200 student visas have been revoked, almost entirely from nonwhite students, since President Donald Trump announced plans to target international students, particularly those who have expressed support for Palestinian freedom.

The removal of a student visa, however, is not the same as, and does not entail, the removal of legal nonimmigrant status in the U.S. as a student.

A visa is required for an international student to legally enter the country to study here. After entering, however, the visa does not affect the student’s immigration status. A student with an expired or revoked visa can remain in legal nonimmigrant student status while not leaving the country; a university has no legal reason to disenroll that student or prevent their continued study in the U.S..

The DHS declaration in Michigan went further in making the distinction between having a visa revoked and being eligible for deportation.

“Prudential visa revocation, absent other factors, does not make an individual amendable to removal,” wrote Watson, the HSI official.

That is, the revocation of a student visa is not, in and of itself, necessarily grounds for a student to be deported. Yet schools have been reacting to SEVIS terminations, not visa revocations, when they have disenrolled students or advised students to immediately leave the country.

This does not mean that the students currently targeted by Trump’s administration are safe. A student in legal immigration status with a revoked visa is at significant risk should ICE seek to pursue deportation proceedings against them. The agency would have to send the student a notice to appear before an immigration judge, and there would be a hearing about the student’s deportability, at which the student could challenge their visa revocation.

The process can be frightening for students, as the cases of detained legal permanent residents like Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi and visa holders like Rümeysa Öztürk make clear. The Trump administration has shown little compunction about taking the next step toward making individual students deportable, attempting to carry out the mass removal of students for minor legal violations, as well as for entirely legal political speech under spurious “foreign policy” grounds and bunk charges of antisemitism.

In trying to stave off litigation, DHS has been clear in other cases that students who have had their visas revoked and SEVIS records terminated have not fallen out of legal status.

“The issue Plaintiffs seek to avoid is the real issue before this court: the State Department revoked Plaintiffs’ visa,” the government argued in another case filed by students in Georgia, “but those actions are unreviewable here.”

“Do you realize that this is Kafkaesque?”

The government is claiming that the students have directed their legal challenge at the wrong government agency, but that they also cannot sue the State Department, because the section of the Immigration and Nationality Act that Secretary of State Marco Rubio is deploying to summarily remove visas “expressly precludes visa revocations from judicial review.” According to the Trump administration the students could only challenge Rubio’s wide and reckless discretion to revoke their visas “in removal proceedings if the revocation is the sole basis for removal.”

Federal judges hearing students’ cases around the country have so far not been impressed with the government’s arguments. At least five federal courts have issued temporary restraining orders on deportation orders linked to SEVIS terminations. On Wednesday, District Court Judge Ana Reyes in Washington, D.C., specifically ordered DHS’s Watson to testify in court over the claims in his declaration, which was also submitted by the government in the case filed by students there.

“I’ve got two experienced immigration lawyers on behalf of a client who is months away from graduation, who has done nothing wrong, who has been terminated from a system that you all keep telling me has no effect on his immigration status, although that clearly is BS,” Reyes told the government. “And now, his two very experienced lawyers can’t even tell him whether or not he’s here legally, because the Court can’t tell him whether or not he’s here legally, because the government’s counsel can’t tell him if he’s here legally.”

The judge said, “Do you realize that this is Kafkaesque?”

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, April 17, 2025 7:06 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


There’s Only One Real Way to Reverse Big Law’s Capitulation to Trump

By Kevin Cope and Rachel Cohen | April 17, 2025 2:47 PM

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/04/big-law-school-trump-excec
utive-order-skadden.html

Shortly after taking office, President Donald Trump began issuing a series of executive orders targeting law firms, penalizing firms that employ—or previously employed—attorneys who have challenged him in court. The orders are plainly retaliatory and amount to state-imposed punishment for speech on matters of public concern—violating the First Amendment’s protections for free speech and free association. And they’re having their intended effect: People and businesses with possible legal claims against the administration are increasingly unable to find representation, as are pro bono clients the president disfavors. Although several firms have resisted the orders and multiple lawsuits are ongoing, other firms continue to concede.

A new approach is needed. We are both former attorneys of the law firm Skadden, Arps. One of us recently resigned her position specifically over Skadden’s capitulation to a threatened executive order; the other of us is now a law professor. Our recent experiences show that law students and junior lawyers have the power to counteract and end the crisis—but only if they act collectively.

One might expect the most powerful law firms in the world to be both well-equipped and deeply motivated to resist such attacks on their independence. And indeed, some firms have mounted legal challenges, prevailing at the initial stages. But others, including Paul, Weiss; Skadden; and Kirkland & Ellis have quickly acquiesced, cutting widely reported-on “settlements” with the administration—not necessarily because the law required it, but because resistance apparently seemed too costly.

Commentators across the political spectrum have criticized the deal-cutters, some calling them “cowards” or “craven.” Former federal appellate judge J. Michael Luttig, a noted conservative appointed by President George W. Bush, lambasted Paul, Weiss for choosing to “cower before the powerful and sell out its firm and the nation’s legal profession to the President.”

Such critiques on principle are well-intentioned, and possibly justified. But if firms see their primary duty as serving their clients and preserving their business—rather than safeguarding legal institutions and constitutional norms—shaming won’t ultimately change behavior. Thus far, it seems that most firms take the former view. Moral appeals, without more, therefore won’t change their incentives. What we’re witnessing is a textbook coordination failure—a form of what political economists call a prisoner’s dilemma. Firms that push back against the administration risk losing clients, lawyers, and revenue to those that don’t. As Paul, Weiss chair Brad Karp put it, the executive order represented “an unprecedented threat” that “could have destroyed [the] firm” had it refused to comply. At first blush, it’s difficult to see how the administration’s unlawful threats could cripple a firm with $7.5 million in profit per equity partner. But in light of reports that peer firms Kirkland & Ellis and Sullivan & Cromwell promptly began pursuing Paul, Weiss’ clients and rainmaker partners, its concerns may seem more understandable.

The threat of an executive order is powerful—but it works only because firms act alone and even in conflict. A failure of collective action makes things worse for everyone. Consider that weeks after trying to poach Paul, Weiss clients, Kirkland & Ellis in turn found itself in the president’s crosshairs. If no firm had conceded, and all had refused to poach Paul, Weiss’ departing lawyers or clients under these conditions, much of the harm might have been avoided. Firms choosing to fight the administration have quickly secured court orders halting enforcement of their executive orders; Paul, Weiss could have done the same. But by defecting individually, Paul, Weiss and others showed the administration that its tactics were working and that more bullying would be fruitful, painting a bigger target on other firms, and soon producing further demands on the settling firms themselves.. And it ensured a collective outcome that’s leaving nearly all worse off than if all had acted together.

There are possible solutions, but they require not just rhetoric, but changing the material consequences of capitulation through collective action. One option would be for firms to legally commit—via binding contract or pledge, with heavy penalties for defection—to resist the executive orders together, to challenge them in court collectively (as with a recent amicus brief joined by 500 firms), and to decline to accept other firms’ departing clients. Such a pact would blunt the effectiveness of coercive pressure by depriving the administration of any leverage over individual firms. But that kind of coordination carries potential legal risks, including antitrust concerns, and it could falter if even a few firms decline to participate.

The more promising strategy may lie with the next generation of lawyers. Law students and junior attorneys can exert real pressure by refusing to work for firms that give in—declining interviews, turning down offers, and encouraging law-school career offices to do the same. Such a move would not be unprecedented; in the 1990s, the Judge Advocate General Corps’ prohibition on openly gay service members led many law schools to formally ban it from campus recruiting. Indeed, law students at Georgetown, Columbia, and elsewhere have already mobilized in recent weeks to refuse contact with certain capitulating firms.

To be sure, such choices carry some short-term costs, and it may seem unfair to ask people just starting their careers to bear this burden. Indeed, in a just world, the most powerful actors would bear the most responsibility for setting things right. Yet throughout history, young people have often been the first—and the most willing—to risk their own privileged status in the name of principle. And importantly, none of the actions above require anyone to quit a current job; they simply require top law students to leave certain firms off of their interview “dance card,” opting for the many comparable firms that haven’t capitulated. And there are even ways that students not interested in big law firms can take action.

If enough do so, these small, individual decisions can be collectively game-changing. Indeed, we’re already seeing many top applicants deliberately prioritizing firms that have stood up to the president over those that have submitted, and additional resignations by existing associates. As these trends grow and firms incur reputational and recruitment losses, the resulting drop-off in top new legal talent and prestige may push firms to reevaluate the long-term costs of short-term concessions. Yet, ironically, the boycott would serve, not harm, firms’ long-term interests. In fact, if conscientious junior lawyers successfully help nudge the legal profession toward collective resistance—instead of fragmented retreat—we all benefit: the firms themselves, clients who need representation, and a constitutional system that depends on an independent bar.

Some have argued that firms that would so quickly shrink from the profession’s core principles are less likely to provide environments conducive to the honorable and ethical practice of law. Perhaps so. Regardless, the measures above can be taken even by those who disagree—who view the firms largely as victims caught in a difficult position. By threatening their independence and viability, it is the president who has unjustly put his thumb on the scale. Junior members of the profession are surely justified in rebalancing it on behalf of the rule of law.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, April 18, 2025 7:29 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Trump Is Helping Putin Kill Ukrainians

Trump refuses to sell Patriot missiles for Ukrainian Air Defense

By Phillips P. Obrien | Apr 16, 2025

https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/trump-is-helping-putin-kill-ukr
ainians

When I wrote in early March, “The Week The USA Started Killing Ukrainians”, some people said it went too far. They said that the US not aiding Ukraine was not the same as killing Ukrainians, that Trump still wanted a deal, etc, etc. Well, it turns out that I did not go far enough.

Just in the last few days we have incontrovertible proof of how Trump is helping Putin kill Ukrainians—both some now and many more in the future. Its the combination of what the US will not sell Ukraine (even though Ukraine has the money to buy them), the Russian missile campaign against Ukrainian civilians, and how the two come together. Let’s start with what came out in the last few days.

Ukraine is desperate to purchase Patriot anti-air missiles, as the Ukrainians are running out of this vital system. These were provided (too late) by the Biden Administration in 2023. From the moment they appeared, however, they revealed themselves to be the most effective air-defense weapons in Ukraine’s arsenal. The Ukrainians have used them to great effect—shooting down some of Russia’s most advanced aircraft and, crucially, some of Russia’s most difficult to shoot down missiles that have been fired against Ukrainian cities. Indeed, the Patriots have proven quite effective against Russian Kinzhal missiles, which the Kremlin used to boast could not be intercepted.

Having Patriots allowed the Ukrainians to keep the power on during the Russian Winter attacks in 2023-2024 and 2024-2025. However, they are very expensive to use. Zelensky claimed in February that 10 Patriot missiles were fired to bring down 6 Russian ballistic missiles—and that the cost of the Patriots was around $30 million.

In sum, these are a very effective but expensive system. They have made Ukraine much safer than it would be otherwise.

And the very effectiveness of the Patriots has provided Trump with a weapon to help kill Ukrainians. Even being sparing in their usage, Ukraine is running out. Patriots are an American system and the USA has been the source of most of the missiles. Right now there is no new US aid on its way to Ukraine. All we have had in 2025 is the left-over amounts of Biden Administration aid, whereas Trump and the GOP Congress have made no efforts to get any more aid for Ukraine—and that reality is not changing.

Russia understands this and is trying to make Ukraine use up all of its Patriots missiles. In the last few weeks the Russians have been using some of their advanced ballistic missiles against Ukrainian civilian targets, from Sumy last week (see picture above) to Kryvyi Rih the week before, to Dobropillia a little before that.

This seems very much to be a deliberate, targeted campaign to terrorize Ukrainian civilians and force the Ukrainians to use up their dwindling stock of Patriot missiles.

And it is working. The Ukrainians are desperately trying to get their hands on more Patriots—and its reached the stage that they are willing to pay whatever it takes to get more. Zelensky told CBS news that he wanted to buy up to 10 new Patriot systems and their missiles, which would be a major win for the US defense economy. Zelensky said he wanted to buy 10 U.S.-made Patriot systems — worth $1.5 billion each — to shield Ukrainian cities from relentless Russian missile and drone strikes.

"We will find the money and pay for everything," Zelensky said, stressing that Ukraine is prepared to purchase, not request for free, the $15 billion package.

Trump is refusing to sell them—even though that would benefit US workers and help the US economy. Indeed, in the last few days he has started boasting about the fact that Ukraine is desperate to buy more Patriots, and he is refusing to make a deal. Two days ago he told an Oval Office press conference:
Quote:
"He's always looking to purchase missiles. Listen, when you start a war, you gotta know you can win a war. You don't start a war against somebody that's 20 times your size and then hope that people give you some missiles."
And it was just reported in Das Bild that the EU made it known that they would support a $50 billion weapons purchase for Ukraine from the USA—including Patriots. Trump has refused to sell to Ukraine, at any price. https://glavnoe.in.ua/en/news-en/trump-refused-to-support-ukraine-even
-in-exchange-for-50-billion-from-the-eu-bild

Remember months ago, when those who said that Trump would definitely be willing to help Ukraine by selling them weapons? Well it turns out that was another lie.

So here we have it. The USA (Trump is the duly elected president with the support of Congress—so this is the official position of the US government) is now working together with the Russian government to see more Ukrainians killed. The USA is encouraging a Russian missile campaign against Ukrainian civilians by letting the Russians know that the US will deprive Ukraine of the means to defend those civilians and no longer provide Ukrainian Patriots.

So, the next time a Russian missile lands in a Ukrainian city and bodies litter the streets, realize this is an act that is being encouraged and supported by the USA. The USA is no longer a defender of democracy in Europe, it is an enabler of dictatorship and death.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, April 18, 2025 7:47 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


How America Can Avoid Becoming Russia

Political pressure must be brought to bear—through the courts, the press, and the states, but also applied to legislators while they still have any power left.

By Garry Kasparov | April 17, 2025, 6 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2025/04/america-russ
ia-trump-putin/682473/

Based on polls, election results, and the markets, Americans seem to be awakening, if only slowly, to the magnitude and nature of the threat they face. President Donald Trump and his allies in power are trying to erect an authoritarian Mafia state like the one Vladimir Putin and his cronies established in Russia. The American opposition talks of “undermining democracy” and “constitutional crisis”—but for the most part, its legislators, activists, and political strategists are pursuing politics as usual. They shouldn’t be.

If this sounds alarmist, forgive me for not caring. Exactly 20 years ago, I retired from professional chess to help Russia resist Putin’s budding dictatorship. People were slow to grasp what was happening there too: Putin’s bad, but surely he’ll stop short of — and you can fill in the blank with a dozen things he did to destroy Russia’s fragile democracy and civil society, many of which Trump is doing or attempting to do in America today.

Attacking the press as fake news and the enemy of the state? Check. Delegitimizing the judiciary, the last constitutional brake when the legislature is co-opted and feckless? Check. Expanding influence over the economy by threatening businesses and using tariffs to introduce a crisis and a spoils system? Check. Creating a culture of fear by persecuting unpopular individuals and groups? Been there, done all of that.

Putin is still in the Kremlin, and I’m writing this from New York City—my family has made its home there, as well as in Croatia, since we were forced to leave Russia in 2013. America’s institutions and democratic sentiment are far stronger than in the flawed, fragile state Putin took over from Boris Yeltsin 25 years ago. Russia was a mere eight years removed from Soviet totalitarianism when it elected a KGB lieutenant colonel who restored the Soviet anthem and called the fall of the U.S.S.R. the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century.

Americans, by contrast, have a well-stocked toolbox with which to defend their democratic institutions, if only they would use it. The press is still free; its only limitations are self-imposed. The economy is strong, even though Trump is working hard to put a stop to that. (People who feel economically insecure, or who depend on the government for their daily bread, don’t often rise up against it. Instilling a feeling of helplessness, a lack of control, is a key ingredient of authoritarianism. For example, the uncertainty created by Trump’s tariff flip-flops are anathema to consumer and business confidence, but uncertain citizens are more likely to follow a strongman.) American federalism and the separation of powers are not trivial for a would-be autocrat to overcome. Political pressure must be brought to bear—through the courts, the press, and the states, but also applied to legislators while they still have any power left.

The American opposition should spend less time criticizing the content of the administration’s executive actions—eliciting sympathy for a deported individual, say, or decrying the impact of Trump’s tariffs on 401(k) plans—than focusing on its suspect methods. The real crisis is the lack of due process in the deportations, to take the first example, and the president’s assumption of Congress’s power to levy taxes, to take the second. Sure, Trump loves tariffs, in other words—but he mostly loves exercising power, and his slate of arbitrary levies, unilaterally imposed by the executive, is a power grab.

Never lose sight of the fact that the Trump administration’s aim is to weaken and devalue the machinery of government, on one hand, and privatize the levers of power on the other. It is accomplishing all of this at a breakneck pace. Supporting a would-be autocrat because you like his policies (say, on DEI or transgender athletes) is a terrible trap, because soon enough, your opinions and support won’t matter at all. But making opposition to the policies the centerpiece of resistance also risks missing the point. America is hurtling toward the loss of its democratic institutions and the establishment of an authoritarian state where there will be no civil discussion of these issues at all: That’s what a principled opposition must fight with its full might.

Spelling out these stakes every day, like Senator Cory Booker did in his record-breaking 25-hour speech at the beginning of the month, is vital. Call hearings, press conferences, protests—everything that can be done to draw attention to the attacks on institutions. Explain due process, and contrast it with illegal or incorrect deportations, as families are torn apart. Don’t let Elon Musk and his vandals pretend that what they are doing is about efficiency when their actions are a rounding error at best in the budget.

Here is another tactic that makes sense for political give-and-take within a democracy, but not as a means of fighting for democracy’s life: picking your battles. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer may have thought he was doing exactly that when he caved to Republican pressure to pass the budget. He had a legal means of countering Trump’s autocratic agenda—rallying his party to refuse to advance the Republican spending bill—but he declined to use it. In regular democratic politics, passing on one battle to fight again another day is normal. But when fighting for democracy, you never know if there will be another day. Fight everywhere you can, always, or you will soon be as irrelevant as the Russian Duma became under Putin’s centralized executive authority.

Another recommendation: Attacking Trump’s character, however abhorrent critics may find it, is futile. The president is not acting alone. In contrast to his bumbling first term, he now has a professional script, stage managers, and a plan. Project 2025 is the product of political machinery that has sprung up around Trump that seeks to tear out the roots of American democracy and then salt the ground. To accomplish this, the Trump administration, much like Putin’s team in Russia, focuses on fear and enemies, not on constructing a brighter future. It will never be tempted to reconcile or coaxed by bipartisan outreach. So set aside the specifics of Trump’s agenda and your distaste for him as a person. Resist on every level, at every opportunity, instead of picking this or that battle. Shout from the rooftops about the attacks on process and democracy, not just the policy content.

Since Trump’s inauguration, Americans have filed numerous legal complaints challenging specific cuts or orders that Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency have made. After all, what authority does Musk, as a private individual, have to collect government data, decide which federal officials to fire, or allocate resources as he sees fit? Musk and Trump have turned their fire on judges who reject the legality of their actions.

Taking DOGE to court is necessary work—by all means, throw sand in the gears at every opportunity—but it’s not sufficient. That’s because Musk, like Russian oligarchs, has proximity to power, but he doesn’t actually have legal authority. To eject his influence means bringing the fight not just to him, but to the elected offices where power still resides.

Americans had probably better get used to learning Russian, so I’ll offer a political term from our lexicon: ponyatie (pon-YAH-tee-yeh), which doesn’t quite have an English equivalent but can be translated roughly as “an understanding.” The understanding of most citizens is that proximity to power is itself a form of power, that “we all know who is really calling the shots.” What we are seeing with DOGE is an example of this phenomenon—the ponyatie that Musk, as a rich man who exercises great influence over Trump, wields tremendous governmental authority despite not having an official title or a constitutional role. The ponyatie that state power can be marshaled against his critics and rivals, while he is immune to it himself. Acquiescence to that kind of thinking must be stopped before it is allowed to permeate the American political system.

To that end, Americans should invest their time and money fighting in the arena where political power still lies: with the American people and in Washington, D.C., with the handful of Republican representatives who could put a stop to the power grab. Go after the weakest links and call them out. Promise to support them against Musk’s threats to fund primary challenges if they defy him—and to raise millions against them if they don’t. Don’t give up on the levers of political power prematurely. Use them, or they will disappear, and marching in the street will be the only recourse—one that I can tell you from painful personal experience doesn’t always work out.

The Trump administration has been cunning in choosing its first targets. Deporting supposed gang members and Hamas supporters without due process may violate any number of statutes, but forcing oppositionists to defend these people’s rights allows the administration to paint them as defending their ideas. Not every battle will be as favorable as standing up for cancer research or veterans’ benefits.

This is why the resistance must center the principles at stake. Does America have rule of law or not? The first line in defense of an incipient police state is: “You don’t have anything to fear if you’ve done nothing wrong.” This fallacy is soon replaced by: “It could happen to anybody,” as the regime sees the value of using arbitrary persecution to spread fear. Again, fear is the autocrat’s goal, as is simply doing many things every day. Even if you don’t like him or his policies, the longer he is there, doing things, the more the autocrat starts to feel inevitable, like the sun rising each morning.

In politics, as in physics, force is mass times acceleration. The administration is mounting a barrage of attacks, with great urgency, to break through the resistance of American legal structures, sometimes by using legal and relatively popular policies (deporting convicted criminals, for example) as cover for likely illegal and relatively unpopular policies (deporting immigrants without due process). The fabricated urgency is a tell: No war, no terrible crisis, compels the president to violate the Constitution. But the administration is breaking down norms and setting precedents faster than judges can stop it. Of course, ignoring judges is also part of the plan.

To fight this onslaught means staying focused. Skip the culture wars, where the ground can easily tilt to favor the MAGA faithful. Concentrate instead on defending American rights and values against billionaires and autocrats who want to take them away. Just because you can’t compete with Trump on populism doesn’t mean you can’t be popular, and polls already suggest that the public believes the president should obey court orders and give Ukraine more aid.

The opposition needs to proudly defend the value system and ingenious framework that made this country great. This may sound corny to cynical Americans who have taken democracy for granted for most of their lives, but it matters. The leaders of the resistance, if such can be found, must serve as spokespeople and examples of these values and institutions if they are to provide a genuine counter to Trumpism.

Rallying to the defense of American constitutional democracy has become alarmingly difficult after years of insistence, from both the far left and the far right, that the system is irreparably broken. The good news is that Trump and Musk may be reminding Americans about what they stand to lose, and to whom, as was evident in the gloating response of Democrats to the Wisconsin Supreme Court election, which Musk’s preferred candidate lost.

Americans can just look to their leaders’ avowed models should they wonder whether things could be worse. The GOP has moved so far to the right that it’s ideologically aligned with Turkey and Russia. The Trump administration’s refusal to criticize Putin may well owe to its hopes to emulate him, much as Putin’s rehabilitation of Stalin’s legacy tracked with policies that duplicated the Soviet dictator’s. And Musk has expressed admiration for Xi Jinping’s China, a repressive one-party state where he has business interests.

Four votes in the Senate. Three votes in the House. That’s all it takes. Find the weakest links. Go after them, democratically. Fundraise for them if they stand up, or against them if they don’t. The two-party system in America right now is Traitors versus Losers. Playing to win means asking every red-state legislator if they are fine with being in the Traitor Caucus.

About the Author

Garry Kasparov is the chairman of the Renew Democracy Initiative and a vice president of the World Liberty Congress, and he was the 13th world chess champion.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, April 18, 2025 9:06 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Trump Needs Someone to Blame
The Federal Reserve chairman, Jerome Powell, is that someone.

By David Frum | April 17, 2025, 11:15 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/04/trump-federal-reserv
e-jerome-powell/682489/

Trump’s all-purpose remedy for economic trouble is cheaper money. When Trump’s first-term trade war crashed the stock market in the fall of 2018, Trump demanded interest-rate cuts to rescue him from his own mistake. In a November 2018 interview with The Washington Post, Trump complained:
Quote:
I am not at all happy with the Fed. I am not at all happy with my choice. I think we have to let it go. You know, if you look at—China is being accommodative. The euro and Europe is being accommodative. We’re not getting any accommodation, and we’re also paying $50 billion, we’re paying down our liquidity, is—you can make the case it’s a positive thing in one way, but another thing, it snaps your liquidity. So I’m doing deals, and I’m not being accommodated by the Fed. I’m not happy with the Fed. They’re making a mistake because I have a gut, and my gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else’s brain can ever tell me.
The numbers and the syntax in that quote are gibberish, but the emotion is real. Just in case anybody missed the point, Trump made it personal, saying he was “not even a little bit happy” with his selection of Powell for Fed chairman.

As a businessman, Trump spent a lot of his career profoundly in debt. His bankers often bailed him out, and he seems to believe that the Federal Reserve should do the same for his presidency.

But the Fed has a mandate to preserve price stability. Trump’s trade war threatens enormous price increases for American businesses and consumers. The trade war is also scaring investors into dumping dollar-denominated assets. U.S. bond prices are falling, and the value of the dollar itself is tumbling. Trump has thrust the Fed into a terrible dilemma, one last encountered during the stagflation that occurred in the 1970s. The Federal Reserve can control only short-term rates; a short-term cut during a period of inflation will frighten investors into expecting even higher inflation in the future, and drive up long-term rates. The Fed can change the price of overnight lending, but the markets decide the price of 30-year mortgages. And if the Fed presses down too hard on the lever it does control, that will force an upward surge by the lever it does not control.

The rescue that the economy needs is a change not in monetary policy but in Trump’s economic aggression against trading partners. End the tariffs, let trade recover, and then the Fed can do its convalescent work. But intelligent policy begins by admitting that Trump’s policy was stupid—and Trump will not soon admit that. So Powell must be fingered as the fall guy instead.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, April 18, 2025 10:21 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Why You Should Fear a Trumpified Fed
Don’t give an abuser power that’s easy to abuse

By Paul Krugman | Apr 18, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/why-you-should-fear-a-trumpified

Sometimes the Federal Reserve has extraordinary power over the economy.

Consider what happened from 1982 to 1984. For most of 1982 the U.S. economy was in grim shape. Employment had plunged, especially in manufacturing. The unemployment rate hit 10.8 percent in December (it was 4.2 percent last month.) And economic pain helped Democrats make major gains in the 1982 midterms.

But everything was about to change, thanks to the Fed. In the summer of 1982 the Fed decided to ease monetary policy. Interest rates plunged, and about 6 months later the economy began a stunning rebound, growing 4.6 percent in 1983 and 7.2 percent in 1984. Ronald Reagan claimed credit for “Morning in America,” but actually it was the Fed that did it.

This episode illustrates the Fed’s power — power that must be insulated from abuse by politicians, especially politicians like Donald Trump.

Over the past few days Trump has been demanding that the Fed cut interest rates and calling for the Fed chairman’s “termination.” It’s worth looking at what he posted on Truth Social to get a sense of how, to use the technical term, batshit crazy he is on this subject:
Quote:
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
The ECB is expected to cut interest rates for the 7th time, and yet, "Too Late" Jerome Powell of the Fed, who is always TOO LATE AND WRONG, yesterday issued a report which was another, and typical, complete "mess!" Oil prices are down, groceries (even eggs!) are down, and the USA is getting RICH ON TARIFFS. Too Late should have lowered Interest Rates, like the ECB, long ago, but he should certainly lower them now. Powell’s termination cannot come fast enough!
8.96k ReTruths 38.2k Likes
Apr 17, 2025,12:12 PM
And we really, really don’t want someone that crazy dictating monetary policy.

The reason we don’t want politicians in direct control of monetary policy is that it’s so easy to use. After all, what does it mean to “ease” monetary policy? It’s an incredibly frictionless process. Normally the Federal Open Market Committee tells the New York Fed to buy U.S. government debt from private banks, which it does with money conjured out of thin air. There’s no need to pass legislation, place bids with contractors, deal with any of the hassles usually associated with changes in government policy. Basically the Fed can create an economic boom with a phone call.

It's obvious that this kind of power could be abused by an irresponsible leader who wants to preside over an economic boom and doesn’t want to hear about the risks. This isn’t a hypothetical scenario. Consider what happened in Turkey, whose Trump-like president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, recently arrested the leader of the opposition. When the global post-Covid inflation shock hit, Erdogan embraced crank economic theories. He forced Turkey’s central bank, its equivalent of the Fed, to cut interest rates in the belief, contrary to standard economics, that doing so would reduce, not increase inflation. You can see the results in the chart:


How can we guard against that kind of policy irresponsibility? After the stagflation of the 1970s many countries delegated monetary policy to technocrats at independent central banks. Can the technocrats get it wrong? Of course they can and often have. But they’re less likely to engage in wishful thinking and motivated reasoning than typical politicians, let alone politicians like Trump.

What makes Trump’s attempt to bully the Fed especially ominous is the fact that the Fed will soon have to cope with the stagflationary crisis Trump has created. Trump’s massive tariff increase will lead to a major inflationary shock:


Moreover, Trump has also created huge uncertainty by radically changing his policies every few days, which will depress spending and may well cause a recession:


Not incidentally, Trump has been able to pursue these destructive policies because U.S. law gives the president enormous discretionary power over tariffs. And now he wants the same kind of discretionary power over the Fed.

As a consequence of Trump’s destructive tariff regime, the Fed will soon face a dilemma. Should it raise interest rates to fight inflation, or should it cut rates to fight recession? It’s a really hard call, and it’s quite possible that Jay Powell will get it wrong. Trump has made Powell’s dilemma even worse with his attempted bullying, because a rate cut would be seen by many as a sign that Powell is giving in to avoid being fired.

But one thing we know for sure is that we don’t want Trump making that call. Like Erdogan, he has embraced crank economic doctrines to justify his policies, in Trump’s case the ludicrous claim that tariffs won’t raise consumer prices. Does anyone doubt that when inflation rises, he’ll dismiss it as “fake news”?

So will Trump’s attempt to bully the Fed succeed? According to the Wall Street Journal, he has spent months talking privately about firing Powell. He doesn’t have the legal authority to do that, but Trump doesn’t worry about pesky things like legal limits to his authority. Yesterday he told reporters that he can easily get rid of Powell: “If I want him out, he’ll be out of there real fast, believe me.”

And given how quickly Trump has been able to subvert or destroy many other government institutions, it’s hard to feel confident that he can’t do the same to the Fed. Fear of market reaction — America is already facing a serious credibility problem, with the dollar falling even as interest rates rise — will probably restrain him, but he may not believe people telling him that taking over the Fed would cause the dollar to plunge while long-term interest rates soar as investors expect higher inflation.

Between Trump’s tariffs, the economic spillover from deportations and terrorization of immigrants and the attempt to politicize the Fed, the upside risk to inflation now looks very high. The bitter irony is that many Americans voted for Trump because they thought he would bring prices down.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, April 18, 2025 2:56 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


18 more TDS posts out of you today, huh?



--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Friday, April 18, 2025 7:06 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


A sizable group of Americans agrees with the phrase ‘I think society should be burned to the ground.’

https://theconversation.com/a-need-for-chaos-powers-some-americans-sup
port-for-elon-musk-taking-a-chainsaw-to-the-us-government-253420

April 15, 2025 8:30am EDT

. . . in our data, those higher in need for chaos report holding more trust in Musk, DOGE and Trump than people who score lower in the need for chaos measure.

Who wants to burn it down?

We are political psychologists who study the link between psychological traits and political beliefs. Last month, the University of Delaware’s Center for Political Communication ran a national survey that we designed to understand where the public stands on various political issues and how those beliefs relate to psychological traits, including need for chaos.

In our national study of 1,600 Americans conducted between Feb. 27-March 5, 2025, by YouGov, we asked respondents how much they agreed or disagreed with the following statements:

• “I fantasize about a natural disaster wiping out most of humanity such that a small group of people can start all over”

• “I think society should be burned to the ground”

• “We cannot fix the problems in our social institutions; we need to tear them down and start over”

• “I need chaos around me – it is too boring if nothing is going on”

Similar to prior work by author Kevin Arceneaux and his colleagues, our data shows that fewer than 20% of the sample agree strongly or agree somewhat with each item.

However, looking at the need for chaos among groups of varying ages, education levels and media habits, we find the highest need for chaos scores among people under age 40, those with less education, and those who pay the least attention to politics.

Burning it down through government policy

Our new data also shows that while people highest in need for chaos report having more trust in Musk, DOGE, and President Trump, these chaos-seeking folks report having less trust in “people in general,” journalists or the federal government. These findings hold even when statistically accounting for other factors, among them party, race, gender, education and ideology.

Musk’s penchant for wielding chainsaws as a symbol of DOGE’s work provides some insight into why chaos seekers may like what they see in Musk.

It’s not clear exactly what Musk’s aim is with his work at DOGE, as he eliminates the jobs of hundreds of thousands of government workers.

What is clear, however, is that by many accounts, the mass firings and the gutting of agencies, like the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Institute for Peace, are sowing chaos. And a significant portion of Americans want just that.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, April 18, 2025 8:39 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Steve Bannon, Trump’s first-term whisperer, once described himself as a Leninist because “Lenin … wanted to destroy the state and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.” Trump was apparently listening and learning.

https://nonsite.org/the-man-who-would-be-king-method-in-trumps-madness
-contradictions-in-trumps-method/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, April 18, 2025 10:36 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Steve Bannon, Trump’s first-term whisperer, once described himself as a Leninist because “Lenin … wanted to destroy the state and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.” Trump was apparently listening and learning.

https://nonsite.org/the-man-who-would-be-king-method-in-trumps-madness
-contradictions-in-trumps-method/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


With $37 Trillion in debt, an illusion that currently costs another $100k per second just to keep up, and everyone around you miserable all the time...

I'm just wondering what it is exactly that you're even defending at this point.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Friday, April 18, 2025 11:00 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Steve Bannon, Trump’s first-term whisperer, once described himself as a Leninist because “Lenin … wanted to destroy the state and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.” Trump was apparently listening and learning.

https://nonsite.org/the-man-who-would-be-king-method-in-trumps-madness
-contradictions-in-trumps-method/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


With $37 Trillion in debt, an illusion that currently costs another $100k per second just to keep up, and everyone around you miserable all the time...

I'm just wondering what it is exactly that you're even defending at this point.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Has there ever existed a Trumptard who realized he was bad? Nope. Any Nazis who realized they were bad? Nope. Maybe Confederate slave-owners who realized they were bad? Nope. Ku Klux Klansmen who realized lynching was evil? Nope, nope, nope.

Trump supporters 'must be ostracized' for America to survive: ex-megachurch pastor

By Brad Reed | April 18, 2025 9:27AM ET

https://www.rawstory.com/trump-supporters-2671799614/

Former megachurch pastor John Pavlovitz has written a new piece on his Substack page that takes a distinctly Old Testament attitude toward supporters of President Donald Trump. https://johnpavlovitz.substack.com/p/for-americas-survival-his-support
ers

In his piece, Pavlovitz makes the case that Trump supporters "must be ostracized" going forward due to their complicity in what he sees as the president's ruinous second-term policies.

"The people we love, live alongside; those we work and study shoulder to shoulder with; those we have invited into our hearts and homes. They are as responsible for all of this as he is , as those in his Cabinet are," he writes.

Pavlovitz argues that Trump supporters have had all sorts of chances to correct course over the years despite seeing the president's cruelty and his authoritarian aspirations up close.

"They shunned their responsibility as Americans, they rejected the teachings of their faith tradition, and they abandoned any kind of moral footing by enabling the ascension of a felon-rapist-scumbag mobster who lacks a single noble impulse," he contends. "Through whatever combination of racism, misogyny, prejudice, intellectual ignorance, and plain old hatred, they willfully coronated him."

He then goes on to advise his followers to simply cut any Trump-supporting friends or relatives out of their lives.

"If we truly believe in bending the arc of the moral universe toward justice at this place and time, his supporters need to become pariahs," he writes. "They should not be welcome where good people gather. They need to be held accountable for unleashing this hell on the rest of us."

Pavlovitz does make an exception for Trump supporters who have "come to their senses" and he advises treating them with a spirit of forgiveness and charity.

"But as far as his cheerleaders, champions, kindred spirits, sycophants, and disciples—they are proving themselves unreachable with reason, impervious to compassion, and mortally allergic to anything that reasonable human beings value," he adds.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, April 18, 2025 11:05 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


For America's Survival, His Supporters Must Be Ostracized

By John Pavlovitz | Apr 17, 2025

https://johnpavlovitz.substack.com/p/for-americas-survival-his-support
ers

His absolute disregard for the Constitution, throwing our nation into perpetual chaos;
his rejection of the rule of Law, stripping elemental rights from tens of millions of Americans;
his unthinkable, unspeakable treatment of human beings rounded up like animals and jailed without probable cause; his capricious and violent crusade against federal workers, universities, law firms, public school teachers, medical professionals, and journalists.

The people we love, live alongside; those we work and study shoulder to shoulder with; those we have invited into our hearts and homes. They are as responsible for all of this as he is, as those in his Cabinet are.

The war crimes in Gaza and Ukraine.
The medical relief, ripped from the poorest of the world.
The scalding panic felt by immigrants, both documented and undocumented.

They are culpable for all of it.

The literal and figurative blood is on their hands.

They may as well be smashing the car windows of a migrant family waiting for their lawyer to ensure due process, joyously ripping the lunches from children living in poverty, unceremoniously terminating federal employees after decades of faithful service, terrorizing transgender students in their school hallways, accosting pregnant women in emergency rooms.

They could have so easily stopped this.

They could have allowed their humanity to come to bear back in the fall, when it was clear that he was cognitively shattered, that his singular goal was a fascist dictatorship, that his agenda would consist solely of retribution against those who sought legal and moral accountability for him.

Instead, our childhood friends, our favorite uncles, and our next-door neighbors ignored revered journalists, Constitutional scholars, renowned economists, and past presidents.

They shunned their responsibility as Americans, they rejected the teachings of their faith tradition, and they abandoned any kind of moral footing by enabling the ascension of a felon-rapist-scumbag mobster who lacks a single noble impulse. Through whatever combination of racism, misogyny, prejudice, intellectual ignorance, and plain old hatred, they willfully coronated him.

And now, they either fully endorse this most vicious and vile season in our nation’s history, or enable it by their cowardice and silence.

And as a result, this senseless waste of life, this asinine global trade war, this stupid squandering of prosperity, this sociopathic predation against citizens and immigrants—they are collaborators on all of it.

And in light of this, they do not deserve proximity with those of us who are hourly pushing back against the criminality, exposing the atrocities, caring for those under duress. They are nothing but barriers to healing and obstacles to justice.

I’m not sure America can even survive the damage we’ve sustained in such a short time. Despite our best efforts, it may not be possible (at least in our lifetimes) to stop the bleeding, reverse course, and repair all that has been damaged since January 20th.

But if any of this is going to happen: if we are going to salvage our Republic from this massive wrecking ball of cruelty, it is going to be necessary for the good people of this nation to sever ties with those still loyal to him. We need to withhold our friendship, exclude them from our holiday gatherings, cut personal and professional ties, and practically speaking, marginalize them.

If we truly believe in bending the arc of the moral universe toward justice at this place and time, his supporters need to become pariahs. They should not be welcome where good people gather. They need to be held accountable for unleashing this hell on the rest of us.

I’m not speaking about those who have or will come to their senses; those with the humility and empathy to admit their errors; those who will be visible and vocal in their resistance to this Administration. While it would have been far better for their souls to have been accessed much earlier, later is still better than never.

But as far as his cheerleaders, champions, kindred spirits, sycophants, and disciples—they are proving themselves unreachable with reason, impervious to compassion, and mortally allergic to anything that reasonable human beings value.

As in other times of historic fascist regimes, there is no ambiguity left now.

The lines are starkly drawn, the factions clearly defined, the opposing values unmistakable.

On one side of this battle for the soul of our nation, the safety of its people, and the welfare of the planet, is the sprawling interdependent community of those committed to healing, kindness, and the common good.

And on the other side stands this historically unredeemable would-be king and those who regardless of the story they tell themselves, still inexplicably stand alongside him.

Compromise is not an option, and because of that many of us are going to need to lean into our convictions and move away from people we know, love, and once respected.

Sadly and tragically, that’s just how this has to be.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, April 18, 2025 11:47 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Steve Bannon, Trump’s first-term whisperer, once described himself as a Leninist because “Lenin … wanted to destroy the state and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.” Trump was apparently listening and learning.

https://nonsite.org/the-man-who-would-be-king-method-in-trumps-madness
-contradictions-in-trumps-method/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


With $37 Trillion in debt, an illusion that currently costs another $100k per second just to keep up, and everyone around you miserable all the time...

I'm just wondering what it is exactly that you're even defending at this point.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Has there ever existed a Trumptard who realized he was bad?


You are brain damaged.

There is something seriously wrong with you.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Friday, April 18, 2025 11:48 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Blah blah blah...

I have never seen a megachurch pastor think he was bad. And SECOND doesn't think he's evil either. But he is.


-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA


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Saturday, April 19, 2025 3:33 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:
Congress Is Looking at Medicaid—What to Know


https://www.theepochtimes.com/article/congress-is-looking-at-medicaid-
what-to-know-5840010


-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA


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