The Supreme Court on Wednesday allowed California to use a new voter-approved congressional map that is favorable to Democrats in this year’s elections, rejecting a last-ditch plea from state Republicans and the Trump administration.
No justices dissented from the brief order denying the appeal without explanation, which is common on the court’s emergency docket.
The justices had previously allowed Texas’ Republican-friendly map to be used in 2026, despite a lower-court ruling that it likely discriminates on the basis of race.
Conservative Justice Samuel Alito wrote in December that it appeared both states had adopted new maps for political advantage, which the high court has previously ruled cannot be a basis for a federal lawsuit.
Give SCOTUS points for respecting precedent for once. Their own.
The release of the latest batch of Epstein files has set off a wave of high-profile resignations and criminal investigations across Europe, even as Trump administration officials resist calls for greater scrutiny.
In the United Kingdom, former U.S. ambassador Peter Mandelson resigned from his position in the House of Lords and the Labour Party after recently released documents detailed his close relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. Prime Minister Keir Starmer said Mandelson “lied repeatedly” to officials about his ties to Epstein, adding mgr he had “betrayed our country, our Parliament and my party.”
“I regret appointing him,” Starmer told the House of Commons on Wednesday. “If I knew then what I know now, he would never have been anywhere near government.”
The Slovakian national security advisor, the United Nations Refugee head and numerous Lithuanians have also resigned or been fired, among others.
You may have noticed that nothing like that has happened in the U.S.:
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said the official “review” of the files is “over” and dismissed the prospect of further investigations or charges.
“It’s not a crime to party with Mr. Epstein,” Blanche told Fox News.
President Donald Trump lashed out at a CNN reporter on Tuesday when asked about “justice” for Epstein survivors.
“I think it’s really time for the country to get on to something else, now that nothing came out about me,” he said.
A ton of stuff has come out about him, including accusations of rape and violent abuse. It’s also clear that he was in touch with Epstein long after he says he stopped speaking to him. And it’s not just him, half of his cabinet was partying with him and begging to be included in his nefarious deeds. The more you see of the files, the more obvious it is that his BFF”wingman” for 20 years, Donald Trump, knew what he was doing and participated in it. After all, it seems that most of the wealthy men in the world were in on it.
This story is sickening and it will haunt Trump and many others forever. I’m not a believer in conspiracy theories but I admit that I have, for the first time, begun to seriously question Epstein’s suicide. He certainly had ample reason to do it, but there are so many rich, global elites, including the president, who have an incentive for him to die that it’s impossible to discount the possibility.
Current economic conditions and Trump administration policies could lead to “a widespread collapse of American agriculture,” a bipartisan coalition of former Agriculture Department officials and leaders of farm groups warned in a letter on Tuesday.
The letter to the heads and ranking members of the House and Senate agricultural committees was signed by 27 influential figures in the farming sector, including former heads of powerful associations representing corn and soybean farmers and officials from the Bush and Reagan administrations. It expressed dismay at the “damage done to American farmers.”
While there are many reasons for increasing farm bankruptcies and decreasing profits, “it is clear that the current administration’s actions, along with congressional inaction, have increased costs for farm inputs, disrupted overseas and domestic markets, denied agriculture its reliable labor pool, and defunded critical ag research and staffing,” the letter warned.
The signatories called on Congress to relax tariffs for the agriculture sector, expand international markets, pass a new farm bill and restore funding for agriculture research and staffing.
Oh heck.
I would assume that every sector of the economy would like Congress to relax tariffs due to exactly the same concerns. But they are whistling past the graveyard because Trump will never, ever give up on them entirely because they are his north star and have been for over 50 years. Sure he might whittle around the edges but he will continue to use them as threats because that’s the main thing he loves about them. And that is what is creating all the uncertainty and the urgent need among foreign nations to find new markets and new suppliers.
As for the other concerns, Stephen Miller isn’t going to give up on his quest to ethnically cleanse the country and Russ Vought isn’t going to give up on starving all government funded research and development in his crusade to turn the nation into a Christian nationalist paradise. And, as we’ve seen, Republicans in Congress are so devoted to their Dear Leader that they are prepared to destroy the country from the inside in order to please him.
The only way to right this will be to thoroughly repudiate this entire movement at the box office and in society and then rebuild from the ground up. It’s going to take at least a few of the people who love the Trump Show and hate people like you and me to get onboard that project. Maybe this is a first step.
They laid off 300 journalists today successfully neutering it so that one of the top five richest men in the world could give Donald Trump a thrill. He didn’t have to do it. He wants to:
The government first began gathering detailed information on benefits use by citizenship status in 1994. The data show:
For each year from 1994 to 2023, the US immigrant population generated more in taxes than they received in benefits from all levels of government.
Over that period, immigrants created a cumulative fiscal surplus of $14.5 trillion in real 2024 US dollars, including $3.9 trillion in savings on interest on the debt.
Without immigrants, US government public debt at all levels would be at least 205 percent of gross domestic product (GDP)—nearly twice its 2023 level.
These results, which do not account for any of immigration’s indirect, tax-revenue-boosting effects on economic growth, represent the lower bound of the positive fiscal effects. Even by this conservative analysis, immigrants may have already prevented a fiscal crisis.
Republicans enjoy using the Jim Crow-era Democratic Party’s support for segregation as proof that their embrace of white nationalism is not worth mentioning. It’s bothsidesism as a “get out of racism free” card.
There was a time post-September 11 when the GOP’s bogieman du jour was from somewhere vaguely Middle East or Muslim. We were coached to become a nation of bedwetters convinced that bearded men with long, curved knives were coming to kill us all in our beds. We packed heat and opened fire on anything that went bump in the night either at home or abroad.
Now it’s anyone nonwhite. I’d missed that Aliya Rahman, 43, the disabled American citizen dragged from her car in Minneapolis is Bangladeshi. It went by fast in her testimony on Tuesday. She mentioned seeing a combat knife come at her and fearing that the agent meant to harm her. Instead he cut off her seat belt so agents could drag her out of the car and onto her face.
Marimar Martinez survived after being shot five times during an ICE assault in Chicago. She also testified. We’d heard previously about the agent who shot her bragging about five shots and seven holes. But on Tuesday, we heard a new detail.
Marimar Martinez: I was escorted out through the back in a https://t.co/HBG9JTEKDG of the agents came up to me with his cell phone and took a photograph of me. It still haunts me that this agent has my photo on his phone. Was this the agent that shot me? Was this a trophy for… pic.twitter.com/dloJrYmqc8
Martinez testified in Congress Tuesday about how she was shot after she followed an agent’s car in Chicago while trying to warn her neighbors. DHS initially claimed that when the officers exited their vehicle, Martinez tried to run them over, “forcing the officers to fire defensively.” She was charged with felony assault of a federal officer despite ending up in the hospital herself.
In her testimony, Martinez revealed a new detail about what happened after she was shot.
“After being at the hospital for less than three hours, I was discharged from the hospital into custody of the FBI. As we left the hospital, I was escorted out through the back in a wheelchair. I observed over dozens of Border Patrol agents waiting outside the hospital,” Martinez said. “One of the agents came up to me with his cell phone and took a photograph of me. It was the same agent who had previously kept coming in and out [of my hospital] room, and I had to repeatedly tell him to leave. I told him I did not consent … but he did not care. It still haunts me that this agent has my photo on his phone. Was this the agent that shot me? Was this a trophy for him?”
A couple of decades ago we were supposed to fear foreigners coming to coming to kill us in our beds with their long, curved knives. Under the Trump-Miller ethnic cleansing effort, it’s anyone foreign-looking, citizens and non-citizens alike, who must fear that amped-up, masked agents of our own government are coming for us. Dehumanizing us as “bodies,” as Rahman testified, to be harvested, counted, and warehoused.
Judge Ana Reyes did not have to go far to discover Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s animus toward Haitians. She just had to read her social media feed. “I am recommending a full travel ban on every damn country that’s been flooding our nation with killers, leeches and entitlement junkies,” Noem wrote on X in December. She added, “WE DON’T WANT THEM. NOT ONE.”
Reyes, a Federal District Court judge in Washington, cited Noem’s post at the very beginning of a blistering opinion issued Monday night preventing the administration from ending Temporary Protected Status for Haitians, at least for now. That status was due to expire on Tuesday, rendering more than 350,000 Haitians who are now legally living and working in America undocumented overnight.
Goldberg visited Springfield, Ohio, with a population nearly one-quarter Haitian. (You know, the subhumans allegedly eating cats and dogs?) The Trump-Miller plan to void their Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and round them up for deportation leaves them a community living in fear:
On Sunday evening, Rose Goute, a Haitian restaurant, was almost deserted. “People stay home,” said Jean Philistin, a 50-year-old who was there picking up takeout. “People are scared.” He said he was less frightened than many others because he became a citizen a few years ago, though he wasn’t sure how much that would matter. “The worst thing is, since you’ve got an accent, or since you’re Black, they can stop you for no reason.”
Philistin had been a civil engineer back in Haiti and now worked refurbishing houses. He has two teenage children, both born in America. “I don’t know why they hate my community,” he said sadly.
I’d call that a rhetorical question.
In a 2005 op-ed about the Bush II “extraordinary rendition” and torture regime, I asked whether Americans were “fighting terrorists, breeding them, or becoming them.” We have our answer.
Absurdist theater based on Donald Trump’s presidency presents a problem for the Hamburg State Opera (Associated Press):
Tobias Kratzer spoke in disbelief ahead of the world premiere of “Monster’s Paradise” by Olga Neuwirth and Elfriede Jelinek, which features a gluttonous, ravenous, insatiable President-King, lampooning U.S. President Donald Trump.
“The metaphor has become a reality,” the Hamburg State Opera artistic director said in his office Sunday morning. “I’m really hoping in — what is it, eight hours? — the piece is not completely outdated because up until now it has always gone closer and closer to not being a satire but being reality.”
When I was posting spoof flyers around town for New Age workshops and therapies in the 1990s, there came a time when reality began overtaking satire. I once invented a men’s movement workshop where particpants would reconnect with their lost godhead by sharing stories of their “wounding” by circumcision. My psychologist brother-in-law later wrote that he’d run across one.
So Kratzer gets it.
Jelinek, 79, won the 2004 Nobel Prize in Literature. Neuwirth, 57, won the 2022 Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition, and was the first woman composer to present a work at the Vienna State Opera:
Alfred Jarry’s 1896 play “Ubu Roi” was the inspiration, a profane, scatological work that had a one-performance run in Paris, cut short by an angry audience response.
Aspects of Jarry’s King Wenceslas and Ubu characters were adapted into The President-King for what Neuwirth and Jelinek call a Grand Guignol opera, which has a six-performance run through Feb. 19. It moves to the Zurich Opera from March 8 to April 12 and next season to Austria’s Oper Graz. An audio recording is planned.
The President-King entered in a gilded Oval Office with a Coca-Cola filled refrigerator. A golden crown sat on his desk along with a red button that jettisoned visitors such as an Elvis Presley impersonator in the manner of a TV game show as a trio of red X-shaped lights flashed. A woman resembling Melania Trump lurked in the background.
They’re laughing at you, Donald. Here in the U.S. we’re almost passed finding the humor.
The startling extremism of the Trump regime, even compared with other modern wannabe dictatorships, is obvious to the naked eye. But I always find quantification useful. So I was very pleased to see that the estimable John Burn-Murdoch of the Financial Times has risen to the occasion, producing an index of democratic backsliding that lets us compare the trajectory of the United States under Trump with those of other nations we used to view as cautionary tales. (I’ve looked at how the index is constructed, and it’s reasonable.) We’re on a uniquely steep descent, at least for modern times.
It’s a horrifying picture. Yet the flip side of the naked extremism of the MAGA power grab is that it has produced a remarkably strong backlash. The size and determination of civil resistance to ICE has been incredible and inspiring, like nothing we’ve seen since the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s. Republicans are being punished at the polls: On Saturday a deep-red Texas Senate district that went Trump +17 in 2024 voted in a Democrat with a 15-point margin.
So what happens now?
I keep asking two questions as ICE runs wild. First, what is the strategy here? How do Trump, Stephen Miller, etc. think this is going to work for them? Maybe their initial belief was that a display of force would shock and awe their opponents into submission. It’s not happening, yet they just keep ramping up the threats and violence, apparently not knowing how to do anything else.
The obvious answer is that there isn’t any strategy. These people aren’t evil masterminds — evil, yes, but masterminds, no. They’re just thugs too crude and undisciplined to control their own thuggishness. They were caught off guard by the strength of the resistance because the very concept of citizens standing up for their principles is alien to them, and they still can’t believe it’s real.
The second question is, how does this end? Most immediately, what will happen during and after the midterm elections? Everything points to a blue wave in November. Yet many people in MAGA simply can’t accept losing power — among other things, their actions over the past year mean that if they lose power, many of them will go to jail.
Actually, Trump will pardon everyone so they needn’t fear that at all. But losing power is a deep, deep fear because they are afraid of other kinds of retribution — loss of work, status, money, community acceptance. They aren’t just going to go quietly we know that. The stakes are much, much higher than they were in 2020 — and the country is much more focused.
As Krugman notes:
[I]t’s just being realistic to say that MAGA will try, somehow, to prevent voters from having their say. Will ICE try to prevent blue districts from voting? If that fails, will they reject the results, in a midterm version of Jan. 6? Call me alarmist, but remember: The alarmists have been right, and the people telling us to calm down have been wrong, every step of the way.
Yep. Expect the worst with these people and plan accordingly. It will be very hard for them to steal 2026 if the turnout is huge.
