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Cruelty Is The Policy

Published by Tom Sullivan on April 2, 2025

Time to bump back

“There are things that go bump in the night…. And we are the ones who bump back.”

Wisconsin flipped a middle finger at Elon Musk last night. Sen. Cory Booker (D) of New Jersey filibustered in the Senate for a record-breaking 25-plus hours and stole the news cycle from Donald Trump even as Wisconsin voters elected Judge Susan Crawford, a Democrat, to the state Supreme Court by 10 points, maintaining the Democrats’ 4-3 advantage. Take the win. Kudos to Crawford and state Democrats led by chair Ben Wikler. Musk can take his oligarch money and shove it. The price of eggs was MIA.

Now what?

Today Donald Trump, the mad king, means to announce more tariffs, further destabilizing world trade. Liberation Day, he calls it. Staffers have said they don’t know what items Trump will go after from what countries and in what amounts, but whatever. In the background, Timothy Noah believes, is some Trumpish notion that he can eliminate the progressive income tax with tariff revenue. It makes no sense. The numbers don’t add up. But this is Donald Trump we’re talking about.

Trump is “testing the waters,” immigration advocate Douglas Rivlin tells Greg Sargent’s Daily Blast. Trump’s immigration enforcers don’t care about the rule of law. If they can arrest and deport any “usual suspects” at any time for any reason without due process. It won’t stop there. This was always about scaring immigrants into leaving the country and about looking tough on black and brown people for the MAGA base. They are pushing the envelope for how cruelly they can treat people random people without having to answer for it. The law is what Trump 2.0 says it is. Immigrants are criminals if it says they are. Or I am. Or you are.

Trump is simultaneously cracking down on free speech while Republicans claim to defend it on media platforms they closely control.

Masha Gessen, born in Moscow to Jewish parents, has seen it before: masked men in unmarked cars snatching people off the streets and whisking them off to jails unknown for seemingly random charges. “Shifting goalposts,” neighbors informing on neighbors. And secret lists (gift link):

It’s the lists. More than anything else, in fact, it’s the lists. A private company has launched an app called ICERAID, billed as a “protocol that delegates intelligence-gathering tasks to citizens that would otherwise be undertaken by law enforcement agencies.” The app promises rewards for “capturing and uploading images of criminal illegal alien activity” and possibly even bigger rewards for self-reporting — for adding oneself to the ICERAID registry if one is “an honest, hard-working undocumented immigrant with no criminal history.” The app, in other words, combines two time-tested secret-police techniques: incentivizing some people to denounce their neighbors and inducing others to add themselves to registries.

Trump 2.0 seems to have outsourced surveillance to groups like Mothers Against College Antisemitism. And “Betar U.S., a Zionist organization so extreme-right that the Anti-Defamation League has denounced it; and several other groups that, since the beginning of Donald Trump’s second term, have been reporting people to government authorities and cheering when they are detained, deported or fired.”

Last Friday, mere minutes after Columbia announced the name of its new interim president, Claire Shipman, an entity that calls itself Documenting Jew Hatred on Campus addressed Shipman on X: “We have identified faculty members” who, the group believes, should be purged. The self-appointed enforcers are vigilant. This, too, is a hallmark of a secret-police state.

The citizens of such a state live with a feeling of being constantly watched. They live with a sense of random danger. Anyone — a passer-by, the man behind you in line at the deli, the woman who lives down the hall, your building’s super, your own student, your child’s teacher — can be a plainclothes agent or a self-appointed enforcer. 

We’ve seen that with Texas offering rewards for reporting doctors providing abortion or women seeking them or friends aiding them. Gessen demonstrates that informing on neighbors already is not limited to abortion care.

So savor the win in Wisconsin. Celebrate Booker’s rallying congressional Democrats to get off their butts. This isn’t over. Things that go bump in the night will not win if we bump back.

Find some good trouble this Saturday and get in it.

https://twitter.com/SenBooker/status/1907247846601936902

* * * * *

Have you fought the coup today?

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Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense

Filibooker!

Published by digby on April 1, 2025
Booker and John Lewis

Cory Booker broke the filibuster record set by Dixiecrat racist Strom Thurman when he filibustered the Civil Rights Act of 1957. It’s only fitting. And he didn’t just read “Green Eggs and Ham”, he talked about what’s actually happening, right now, with passion and commitment.

There are a lot of lefty types on social media pooh-poohing this as “performative” and I think that’s unfair. They’ve had to postpone votes because of it, it’s getting lots of attention and it’s driving the MAGA people crazy. It’s also energizing the Democrats in Congress which is a really important thing.

Ruben Gallego has put a hold on all VA nominees and Republicans in the House had to cancel votes for the rest of the week because the Democrats took down the rule (with the help of a few Republicans) and have ground legislation to a halt. Democratic Senators announced a “Social Security War Room” and while I don’t know what it adds up to, I do know that it’s vitally important to highlight that issue if they have any hope of defeating Republicans. I’m sure they can do more but at least they are doing something.

As Tim Miller has been saying for the last two months, Democrats should just stop worrying about what “strategy” they should use and go out and try things! They have no idea what’s going to work or what might be the inspiration that gets the party and the voters to realize that we are in a crisis.

So bravo Cory Booker. More like this, please.

It’s A Bloodbath

Published by digby on April 1, 2025

The former head of the FDA:

CNN reports:

A massive wave of job cuts got underway at US health agencies Tuesday, with some employees receiving early-morning emails saying their jobs were eliminated and some unable to access the building when they arrived at work.

It was not immediately clear how many employees had received notice Tuesday morning. The US Department of Health and Human Services has not responded to CNN’s request for comment.

HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said last week that 10,000 full-time employees would be cut on top of thousands who had already left and probationary employees currently on leave. He said the changes would make fighting chronic disease the priority and reduce “bureaucratic sprawl.” Kennedy promised that the department would do more with less.

After weeks of worry from agency staffers, job cuts — known as a reduction in force, or RIF — were sweeping across offices at multiple agencies, hitting leadership, longtime staffers, scientists, administrators and communications staff.

“It’s a bloodbath,” one US Food and Drug Administration employee said.

The have given some people living in the DC area the opportunity to take jobs at the bureau of Indian Affairs in Alaska, so that’s nice.

Bobby Jr is as bad as Musk at this point and the ramifications may be even more serious.He is a brainworm addled weirdo who truly believes that modern medicine must be destroyed and we should all “b build immunity” by getting deadly illnesses. If our immune systems aren’t up to the task, well, that’s just how it goes.

I don’t think you can overestimate the damage this monster is doing to our country and the world. It is monumental.

You Have Got To Be Joking

Published by digby on April 1, 2025

I don’t think so:

Members of President Donald Trump’s National Security Council, including White House national security adviser Michael Waltz, have conducted government business over personal Gmail accounts, according to documents reviewed by The Washington Post and interviews with three U.S. officials.

The use of Gmail, a far less secure method of communication than the encrypted messaging app Signal, is the latest example of questionable data security practices by top national security officials already under fire for the mistaken inclusion of a journalist in a group chat about high-level planning for military operations in Yemen.

A senior Waltz aide used the commercial email service for highly technical conversations with colleagues at other government agencies involving sensitive military positions and powerful weapons systems relating to an ongoing conflict, according to emails reviewed by The Post. While the NSC official used his Gmail account, his interagency colleagues used government-issued accounts, headers from the email correspondence show.

Waltz has had less sensitive,but potentially exploitable information sent to his Gmail, such as his schedule and other work documents, said officials, who, like others, spoke on thecondition of anonymity to describe what they viewed as problematic handling of information. The officials said Waltz would sometimes copy and paste from his schedule into Signalto coordinate meetings and discussions.

The use of personal email, even for unclassified materials, is risky given the premium value foreign intelligence services place on the communications and schedules of senior government officials, such as the national security adviser, experts say.

Lock him up.

He’s Holding Steady

Published by digby on April 1, 2025

But his numbers on the economy are at 43% approve and 56 disapprove. On inflation it’s even worse. Only 40% approve and 58% disapprove.

Considering those economic numbers you’d think he’d be much lower, wouldn’t you? I mean, I’ve been told in no uncertain terms over and over again that “it’s the economy stupid” and that nothing NOTHING matters more than the kitchen table issues.

Ah yes. It seems people do care about something other than money. 56% apparently LOVE the random cruelty and dystopian Sci-fi images that Trump and his minions send around for their S&M pleasure. That’s what’s keeping Trump’s approval ratings somewhat aloft (even though he’s a point underwater.)

The aggregated polls show that Trump is at about 47% which is similar to his first term numbers. This despite the fact that his “shock and awe” campaign makes his first administration look like nursery school. I don’t know if it’s that they don’t really know what he’s doing (aren’t paying attention or don’t understand the full scope of it) or if they genuinely like it. But it’s clear that so far at least, his cult and quite a few others are fine with all of it.

MAKA

Published by digby on April 1, 2025

Making America Kafkaesque Again

“The Trial” — Wolfgang Lettl 1981

This is the very reason why we have due process of law:

The Trump administration acknowledged in a court filing Monday that it had grabbed a Maryland father with protected legal status and mistakenly deported him to El Salvador, but said that U.S. courts lack jurisdiction to order his return from the megaprison where he’s now locked up.

The case appears to be the first time the Trump administration has admitted to errors when it sent three planeloads of Salvadoran and Venezuelan deportees to El Salvador’s grim “Terrorism Confinement Center” on March 15. Attorneys for several Venezuelan deportees have said that the Trump administration falsely labeled their clients as gang members because of their tattoos. Trump officials have disputed those claims.

But in Monday’s court filing, attorneys for the government admitted that the Salvadoran man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, was deported accidentally. “Although ICE was aware of his protection from removal to El Salvador, Abrego Garcia was removed to El Salvador because of an administrative error,” the government told the court. Trump lawyers said the court has no ability to bring him back now that Abrego Garcia is in Salvadoran custody.

The reason he went to the U.S. in the first place was to escape the MS-13 gang with whom he’s now imprisoned in that gulag. If he manages to survive, I’d assume he will be required to join them now.

This is not the first “mistake” they’ve made but it’s the first they’ve admitted to. Not that it will make any difference. They’ll almost certainly claim that because he is a Salvadoran citizen they have no jurisdiction over him. It’s beyond a catch-22.

And then there’s this. He is the King, after all:

Trump administration attorneys told the court to dismiss the request on multiple grounds, including that Trump’s “primacy in foreign affairs” outweighs the interests of Abrego Garcia and his family.

This is your dangerous criminal:

Abrego Garcia, who is married to a U.S. citizen and has a 5-year-old disabled child who is also a U.S. citizen, has no criminal record in the United States, according to his attorney. The Trump administration does not claim he has a criminal record, but called him a “danger to the community” and an active member of MS-13, the Salvadoran gang that Trump has declared a Foreign Terrorist Organization.

That’s the “administrative error.”

This is getting so bad that even some of our country’s most important and revered leaders are speaking out:

JD Vance responded to the criticism:

“My comment is that according to the court document you apparently didn’t read, he was a convicted MS-13 gang member with no legal right to be here. My further comment is that it’s gross to get fired up about gang members getting deported while ignoring citizens they victimize.”

No he was not. But the right is all high fiving this supposed put-away shot and calling it all a fake news “sob-story.”

There are a whole bunch of these so-called “sob-stories” emerging because Kristi noem’s ICE is obviously just picking up any Venezuelan or Salvadoran male with a tattoo and calling them a gang member.

One of the documents contained in Friday’s filing titled Alien Enemies Act: Alien Enemy Validation Guide, provides a checklist of 20 observations divided into six categories. The categories include judicial outcomes, criminal conduct and information and symbolism.

Each observation has an assigned value ranging from two points, up to 10 points. According to the document, migrants who have a total score of eight points or higher “are validated as members of TDA,” and will be issued a “Notice and Warrant of Apprehension and Removal Under the Alien Enemies Act.”

“Aliens scoring 6 or 7 points may be validated as members of TDA; you should consult with a supervisor and (Office of the Principal Legal Advisor), reviewing the totality of the facts, before making that determination,” the checklist instructions state.

Homeland Security Investigations, and local law enforcement agencies such as the Texas Department of Public Safety, have said Tren de Aragua members have tattoos showing a variety of images, including AK-47s, trains, clocks, crowns, stars, and the Jumpman logo, used to promote the Air Jordan basketball sneakers.

You know who does have some very disturbing tattoos? The Secretary of Defense:

The AK 47 under the flag is very special message. And Deus Vult is a far-right extremist war cry, taken from the medieval Christian crusades.

But they’re sending people to a gulag for having a soccer ball tattoo.

Hallucinations

Published by digby on April 1, 2025

It’s going really well.

And The Pissed-off Will Lead

Published by Tom Sullivan on April 1, 2025

While you were streaming

Via The Guardian:

Democratic senator Cory Booker holds marathon speech to highlight ‘recklessness’ of Trump policies

Senator Cory Booker has been giving a marathon speech on the Senate floor that has lasted into the early hours of Tuesday morning, highlighting what he described as the “recklessness” of the Trump administration.

The New Jersey Democrat began his address on Monday night and said he would continue to speak for as long as he could “physically endure”. By 7.30am ET, Booker was still going.

The focus of his remarks are concerns over president Trump’s proposed cuts to programs like Medicaid.

At the start of his speech, Booker said:

I rise with the intention of disrupting the normal business of the United States Senate for as long as I am physically able. I rise tonight because I believe sincerely that our nation is in crisis.

He went on:

In just 71 days, the president of the United States has inflicted so much harm on Americans’ safety, financial stability, the core foundations of our democracy and even our aspirations as a people for – from our highest offices – a sense of common decency.

These are not normal times in America, and they should not be treated as such.

It’s now 10:30 a.m. ET and Booker is still going. His voice is getting ragged. His colleagues are spelling him by interrupting to ask v-e-r-y l-e-n-g-t-h-y questions to answer. Thank you. Teamwork.

Let’s get real. The complaints are ubiquitous. “Where are the Democrats?” Democrats in Congress have been slow to react to Donald Trump 2.0’s DOGE/Project 2025 predations. Yes, they are in the minority in both houses. But if Rep. John Lewis were still with us, he’d have led a U.S. House sit-in by now.

Thankfully, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) are showing more-stunned allies how it’s done in a string of packed rallies across the country. They are leading, a friend suggests. Booker is a weathervane. But he’s a weathervane with stamina, and that’s refreshing to see. Finally. Good on him.

But all of them are stepping up because millions of pissed-off Americans are voicing their fear and anger at seeing their institutions dismantled, their health and safety threatened, and the rule of law attacked by a criminal government-by-oligarch bent on turning this country into a dictatorship. Americans are turning up at packed town halls whether or not their elected representatives show up. Because an autocrat-friendly U.S. president with visions of imperialist expansion is telling the world and us that we are no longer the good guys. And we don’t like it one bit. And his Republican lackeys can’t find their values or their asses with two hands. We’re out in the streets ahead of our norms-bound leaders because Trump is attacking every check on his criminality from Congress to the courts to democratic elections. And when the people form a parade, politicians will hurry to position themselves in front of it. Good on you.

There are tools you’ll need if you mean to join the parade to save this nation from its 2024 folly. Some of them are below the asterisks. Actor John Lithgow invites you to attend to Timothy Snyder’s 20 Lessons on Tyranny.

Happy Warrior Entertainment is so proud to have produced this incredible project. Now, more than ever, we need the wisdom of our intellects, the patriotism of our citizens, and the passion and talents of those who still believe in the American experiment. I am deeply grateful to Timothy Snyder for his 20 Lessons On Tyranny and for talents of the brilliant John Lithgow for bringing them to life. Great thanks to David Bender for his vision, the support of Abigail Disney, Susan Disney Lord, and Timothy Disney, and the imagination and direction of Sean McGowan, the producer of the PoliticsGirl Project.

* * * * *

Have you fought the coup today?

National Day of Action, Saturday, April 5
The Resistance Lab
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense

Law Is Meaningless To Criminals

Published by Tom Sullivan on April 1, 2025

And so are you

Donald Trump is a criminal. By 34 convictions, by temperament, and by the behaviors of a lifetime. Like Vladimir Putin, his man-crush, Trump believes he can take what he wants. Greenland, for example. Or Canada (though he’s quieted about Canada recently.)

Putin would like nothing better than for Trump to take Greenland. It would finish off the North Atlantic alliance and help Putin justify his taking Ukraine and maybe Poland.

Trump, Elon Musk and co. also believe they can take the United States Institute of Peace building. The think tank founded under Ronald Reagan is a congressionally established independent nonprofit. Congress gifted its site on the Mall to the institute. Its building was constructed with a mix of federal and private funds. But DOGE wants to hand it to the General Services Administration, presumably to sell off. So it means to take it.

Trump the criminal believes he can take land he wants, and buildings. And people.

NEW: In a court filing this evening, the Trump administration said that it had mistakenly deported a Maryland father to a notorious Salvadoran prison due to an "administrative error." www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc…

— Yoni Appelbaum (@yappelbaum.bsky.social) 2025-04-01T02:25:42.641Z

ICE took a Maryland man, a native of El Salvador living in the U.S. under protected status since 2011 (he was 16), and deported him to El Salvador’s “Terrorism Confinement Center,” Nick Miroff reveals in The Atlantic (emphasis mine):

But in Monday’s court filing, attorneys for the government admitted that the Salvadoran man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, was deported accidentally. “Although ICE was aware of his protection from removal to El Salvador, Abrego Garcia was removed to El Salvador because of an administrative error,” the government told the court. Trump lawyers said the court has no ability to bring him back now that Abrego Garcia is in Salvadoran custody.

Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, Abrego Garcia’s attorney, said he’s never seen a case in which the government knowingly deported someone who had already received protected legal status from an immigration judge. He is asking the court to order the Trump administration to ask for Abrego Garcia’s return and, if necessary, to withhold payment to the Salvadoran government, which says it’s charging the United States $6 million a year to jail U.S. deportees.

How much is the kickback from $6 million per year per prisoner?

“They claim that the court is powerless to order any relief,’’ Sandoval-Moshenberg told me. “If that’s true, the immigration laws are meaningless—all of them—because the government can deport whoever they want, wherever they want, whenever they want, and no court can do anything about it once it’s done.”

Our mistake, says the Trump gang. Oopsie…

“What. The. Fuck.”

The Trump officials know deporting Abrego Garcia was their mistake and against the law, and they couldn’t care less. Trump has been saying he couldn’t care less a lot lately. Like about his tariff obsession. He wants his tariffs and couldn’t care less if they raise your cost of living.

It’s not as if Trump not caring less about you should be a surprise to anyone.

Miroff adds:

If the government wants to deport someone with protected status, the standard course would be to reopen the case and introduce new evidence arguing for deportation. The deportation of a protected status holder has even stunned some government attorneys I’ve been in touch with who are tracking the case, who declined to be named because they weren’t authorized to speak to the press. “What. The. Fuck,” one texted me.

They know it’s wrong and they don’t care.

What else is new? It’s been the M.O. of the extremist Republican Party for over a decade: find the lines, cross them, dare people to push them back (in this case, the courts). Trump’s MAGAs simply made policy of ignoring the law and the Constitution. Because his is a criminal regime and a criminal political movement fronted by a criminal.

“Show me a criminal who does care about the law,” asks a recent TikTok video.

What Americans not yet in Trump’s crosshairs and think themselves safe need to realize is that what happened to Abrego Garcia foreshadows what’s coming.

Abrego Garcia was not on the initial manifest of the deportation flight, but was listed “as an alternate,” the government attorneys explained. As other detainees were removed from the flight for various reasons, Abrego Garcia “moved up the list.’’

Trump’s criminal movement won’t stop at removing immigrants, because if the law is meaningless, as Sandoval-Moshenberg observed, they “can deport whoever they want, wherever they want, whenever they want.” They are already trying to strip the citizenships of native-born Americans whose parents were non-citizens. If the 14th Amendment is disposable, so are you. And we cannot count on the courts to hold under Trump 2.0’s relentless assault.

Fighting fascism is not how I expected to spend my retirement, but here we are. Still, we are not powerless. Defiance is an option. Rep. Pramila Jayapal is offering training.

* * * * *

Have you fought the coup today?

National Day of Action, Saturday, April 5
The Resistance Lab
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense