Roaming Charges: Judge Not, Lest Ye be…Jailed
“St. George’s Kermis with the Dance Around the Maypole,” Pieter Breughel the Younger, 1627.
The dominant culture of the world teaches us that The Other is a threat, that our fellow human beings are a danger. We will all continue to be exiles in one form or another as long as we continue to accept the paradigm that the world is a racetrack or a battlefield.
– Eduardo Galeano
+ What if the remarkable string of federal court decisions against Trump’s policies (several rendered by his own appointees) isn’t evidence of an inept, blundering executive, but the intended result, where in the ultimate goal isn’t just to execute mass deportations, but to consolidate executive power by villifying and impugning the federal judiciary as an impediment to the popular will.
+ Indeed, this has long been the strategy advocated for years by Trump’s malevolent amanuensis Stephen Miller. As detailed in Jonathan Blitzer’s excellent book on the recent history of immigration from Central America, Everyone Who is Gone Is Here, during the first Trump administration Miller pushed for intentionally breaking federal laws and regulations and forcing the courts to rule against the administration, then ignoring the court rulings in the confident that the Trump-majority Supreme Court would ultimately rule in your favor.
+ But now Miller and his cohort are willing to go even further, by jailing members of the federal judiciary who stand in the way. This week, White House spokesperson Kathleen Leavitt even refused to rule out arresting Supreme Court justices who attempt to hold the Trump administration to account for constitutional violations.
+ Here’s a sample from MAGA Central…
+ JD Vance (like John Yoo, a Yale Law School Grad); “Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power…If a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal. If a judge tried to command the attorney general on how to use her discretion as a prosecutor, that’s also illegal.”
+ Vance: “When the courts stop you, stand before the country like [early US president] Andrew Jackson did and say: ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.”
+ Vance on the jailing of judges: “What we are really doing is fixing 40 years of accumulated bogus bureaucratic BS. We’re fixing 40 years of judges thinking they rule the country instead of the American people. We’re fixing 40 years of judges telling the American president what to do… It had to happen and thankfully, we’re getting it done.”
+ AG Pam Bondi: “What has happened to our judiciary is beyond me. I think some of these judges think they are beyond and above the law. And they are not.”
+ Fox News Sandra Smith asked Bondi, “So when you see these judges trying to obstruct your efforts to make this country safer, what is your message to them?”
“We are going to prosecute you, and we are prosecuting you,” Bondi vowed.
+ Fox News’ Steve Doocy asked White House spokesperson Kathleen Leavitt: “You guys arrested a Milwaukee County Circuit judge for allegedly helping illegal immigrants get away. As you guys look at other judges, would you ever arrest somebody higher up on the judicial food chain, like a federal judge or even a Supreme Court justice?”
Leavitt: “That’s a hypothetical question, again I defer you to the Department of Justice for individuals that they are looking at or individual cases. But let’s be clear about what this judge did: She obstructed federal law enforcement who were looking for an illegal alien in her courthouse. She showed that illegal alien the door to evade law enforcement officials. That is a clear-cut case of obstruction. And so anyone who is breaking the law or obstructing federal law enforcement officials from doing their jobs is putting themselves at risk of being prosecuted, absolutely.”
+ Stephen Miller: “This is the choice facing every American: Either we all side, and get behind President Trump to remove these terrorists from our communities, or we let a rogue, radical left judiciary shut down the machinery of our national security apparatus.”
+ Then there’s the popgun Congressman from New Orleans, Clay Higgins…
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+ In a May Day ruling, Trump-appointed Federal Judge Fernando Rodriguez, Jr, of the Southern District of Texas, will permit those targeted by the Alien Enemies Act in South Texas to proceed with a class action against the government.
+ Two weeks after a family from Maryland moved into a new rental house in Oklahoma City, 20 armed ICE agents burst into their home. “I didn’t know who they were,” the mother later said. “It was dark. All the lights were off. I kept asking them, ‘Who are you? What are you doing here? What’s happening? And they said, ‘We have a warrant for the house, a search warrant.’”
+ “You can’t just walk up to people with brown skin and say, ‘Show me your papers,” said U.S. District Court Judge Jennifer L. Thurston, before issuing a preliminary injunction forbidding the Border Patrol from conducting warrantless immigration stops throughout a wide swath of California.
+ Federal Judge Brian Murphy has barred DHS from transferring migrants to other agencies (like DOD) in a backdoor effort to evade due process guarantees before deportation.
On Tuesday, a DHS official told a federal court that agency leadership diverted 10-20 employees to run 1.3 million names of international students through a database that tracks criminal charges. It took 2-3 weeks. There were fewer than 6,400 hits (0.004%). But thousands of those were for charges that never led to convictions or were dropped. These are the students who had their F1 status revoked by ICE, many of whom also had their State Department visas revoked. ICE put the blame on Rubio and the State Department.
+ As the New York Times reported this week, Trump’s original deal with Bukele was that El Salvador would only accept deportees with criminal convictions, whom he was willing to take for a fee in order to help subsidize his massive prison complex. Bukele told Trump that he couldn’t spin holding non-criminal deportees as being in the best interest of El Salvador. But after the first three shipments of deportees, it became clear to Bukele that 90 percent of the people deported by ICE to El Salvador had no criminal records at all.
+ Other than money, why was Bukele so eager to get MS-13 gang members out of the US court system and back to El Salvador? Because he feared they might expose his own deals with MS-13 before he imposed the State of Exception: “Both the Treasury Department and Justice Department have accused Mr. Bukele’s government of making a secret pact with MS-13, offering its leaders behind bars special privileges to keep homicides down in El Salvador.”
+ The deportation process was so disorganized and sloppy that eight women were among those flown to be incarcerated in the all-male Salvadoran prison…
+ Two weeks after a family from Maryland moved into a new rental house in Oklahoma City, 20 armed ICE agents burst into their home. “I didn’t know who they were,” the mother later said. “It was dark. All the lights were off. I kept asking them, ‘Who are you? What are you doing here? What’s happening? And they said, ‘We have a warrant for the house, a search warrant.’”
Flashing the warrant, ICE raided the house, seizing cellphones, computers, and the family’s life savings. While ICE agents ransacked the house, they forced the mother and three daughters to stand outside in their underwear. “We are citizens!” the mother screamed at the ICE officers. “You have guns pointed in our faces. Can you just reprogram yourself and see us as humans, as women?”
When she was allowed to read the warrant, the mother noticed that it referred to the house’s previous tenants. She pointed this out to the agents: “They were very dismissive, very rough, very careless,” she said. “I kept pleading. I kept telling them we weren’t criminals. They were treating us like criminals. We were here by ourselves. We didn’t do anything. One of them said, ‘I know it was a little rough this morning.’ It was so denigrating. That you do all of this to a family, to women, your fellow citizens. And it was ‘a little rough?’ You literally traumatized me and my daughters for life. We’re going to have to go get help or get over this somehow. I asked, ‘When are we going to get our stuff back?’ They said it could be days or it could be months.”
They didn’t even leave a contact card.
+ Defense attorney Andrew Fleischman: “It would be unfair to say that all ICE agents are dumb, thieving, perverts. But [in this case] they did break into an American home, steal everything that wasn’t nailed down, and force the daughters to stand outside in their underwear due to gross negligence and rank incompetence.”
+ A Trump administration memo disclosed this week urged ICE to break into homes in search of noncitizens to kidnap without a warrant. The memo stated that ICE can curb the “proactive procedures” put in place to obtain a warrant, since they “will not always be realistic or effective in swiftly identifying and removing alien enemies.”
+ The Guardian reported this week on internal ICE documents showing that the agency is seeking out unaccompanied immigrant children in operations nationwide with the intent of deporting them or pursuing criminal cases against them or their guardians.
+ ICE is luring noncitizens who are trying to follow the law into traps. Take the case of Rosmery Alvarado, the wife of a naturalized US citizen, and mother of a daughter who is also a US citizen. Alvardo, a native of Guatemala who lives in Pittsburg, Kansas, had applied for a green card as the wife of a US citizen. A couple of weeks ago, Rosmery received a summons from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) office to come to Kansas City for her spousal interview. When Rosmery arrived for her interview, she was immediately taken into custody by ICE and told she would be deported to Guatemala. The summons was a ruse. Rosmery had no criminal record. Alvardo’s daughter, Carina Moran: “My father was then approached by an ICE officer, and he was told, ‘We arrested your wife and she’s going to be deported. We didn’t get any kind of warning. They didn’t let us say goodbye.”
+ Last year, a family of three turned themselves in to immigration after crossing the border in Texas and were separated by ICE. The father, Maiker Espinoza Escalona, was sent to a men’s detention prison, and the mother, Yorely Bernal Inciarte, was detained in a women’s prison, as their asylum claim was being processed. Their two-year-old daughter was sent into government custody. After a few months, the couple rescinded their asylum claim and asked to be deported so that they could be reunited with their daughter. Instead, Maiker was sent first to Guantanamo, then deported to Bukele’s concentration camp in El Salvador. Meanwhile, Yorely was put on a deportation flight to Venezuela without her daughter, who remained in ICE custody: “I started yelling at the officers asking where my baby was, but ICE officers ignored me.”
When the Venezuelan government protested the kidnapping of the couple’s daughter, the Trump administration responded by smearing Maiker and Yorely with the dubious charge of being leaders of the Tren De Aragua gang. “The child’s father, Maiker Espinoza-Escalona, is a lieutenant of Tren De Aragua who oversees homicides, drug sales, kidnappings, extortion, sex trafficking, and operates a torture house,” DHS said in a statement. ”The child’s mother, Yorely Escarleth Bernal Inciarte, oversees recruitment of young women for drug smuggling and prostitution.”
Neither Maiker nor Yorely has a criminal record in the US or Venezuela. However, they do both have tattoos. Maiker is a barber and tattoo artist who inked the birthdates of Yorely’s mother and father, the name of her son, and some flowers on her chest. Neither has any gang tattoos.
Yorely, who has no way of contacting her 2-year-old daughter, told ABCNews: “I wouldn’t wish this on any mother.”,
+ Cliona Ward, a 54-year-old Irish woman who has been living legally in the United States for decades, was taken into detention by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) after a trip to Ireland to visit her sick father. Ward moved to the US in her early teens and is the sole carer for a son with special needs. She is being held in an ICE facility in Tacoma, Washington.
+ Harvard cancer researcher Kseniia Petrova on being kidnapped and locked up in an ICE prison: “I would call it a grinding machine. We are in this machine, and it doesn’t care if you have a visa, a green card, or any particular story… It just keeps going.”
+ Jack Herrera: “When Texas started arresting migrants for trespassing in ‘21, many paid hefty bail to get out of jail. But instead of releasing them, Texas handed them over to ICE. I spent over a year investigating: One county has made over $1 million by taking bail from deported migrants.”
+ Marco Rubio: “We are actively searching for other countries to take people from third countries. Not just El Salvador. We are working with other countries to say, ‘We want to send some of the most despicable to your countries. Will you do that as a favor to us?’ And the further from the US the better.”
The two countries Rubio’s talking about? Libya and Rwanda.
+ Columbia student Mohsen Mahdawi walked out of ICE detention on Wednesday, freed by federal judge Geoffrey Crawford in Vermont, who referred to the Trump administration’s deportation of pro-Palestinian students as similar to the Red Scare: “Legal residents–not charged with crimes or misconduct–are being arrested and threatened with deportation for stating their views on the political issues of the day.”
+ In front of a large crowd singing “We Shall Overcome” outside the ICE detention center, Mohsen Mahdawi said: “To my people in Palestine: I feel your pain, I see your suffering; and I see freedom and it is very very soon.”
Judge Crawford said: “Yes, Mohsen’s a peaceful figure—but he has rights even if he were a firebrand.”
+++
+ 45% of Americans give Trump’s first 100 days an “F.” That’s higher than:
Obama: 11%
Biden: 26%
And Trump’s first term: 32%
+ Jim Naureckas: “I would give Trump’s first term an F. This term gets a grade of ‘Call 911–there’s an active shooter in the building.'”
+ According to the courtier scribes at Axios, Trump has been “lashing out” at “fake polls” depicting his plunging approval ratings and raging that news outlets that publish them should be “investigated for election fraud.” So he’s running again?
+ Even with his failing grades, Trump’s still less loathed than his opponents.
Who’d do a better job as president?
Trump 45%
Harris 43%Who can better deal with the main U.S. problems?
Trump 40%
Dems in Congress’ 32%– CNN Poll
+ Kamala Harris: “And folks, what we are experiencing right now is exactly what they envision for America. Right now, we are living in their vision for America. But this is not a vision that Americans want.”
+ Fortunately, Harris is so bad at the politics thing that she could never be elected. But if she is elected through some nationwide glitch in electronic voting machines, the blacklash will whip us back to the early Pleistocene…
+ DemAnon: So authentic and believable they wouldn’t even put their name to the sentiment…
+ When Strom Thurmond filibustered against the Civil Rights Act of 1957 for 25 hours, he didn’t turn around two weeks later and vote to approve Ike’s nominee to run the Civil Rights division of the Justice Department…
+ The Bulwark reports that Democratic Minority Leader in the House, Hakeem Jeffries, wants Democratic members of Congress to stop making trips to check on the status and well-being of deported constituents. This, after Trump’s poll numbers have finally shifted into reverse on his signature issue. It’s hard to imagine the Democrats could have hand-picked two more incompetent and spineless leaders than Schumer and Jeffries. A top staffer, Jeffries, said: “One trip was sufficient; it made sense that Van Hollen went, but when the safest possible members go, it gives fodder for the National Republican Campaign Committee to start using it against other Democrats. They should understand what they’re doing is going to be hurting us in the long run.”
+++
+ Trump on China: “They made a trillion dollars with Biden selling us stuff. Much of it we don’t need. Somebody said, ‘Oh, the shelves are gonna be open.’ Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls, and maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more.”
Less stuff (including made-in-China MAGA caps), but more expensive. What a bargain!
+ Expected price increase of Apple products to cover the cost of Trump’s tariffs
iPhone: 43%
Apple Watch: 43%
iPad: 42%
Mac: 39%
Airpod: 39%Source: Rosnblatt Securities.
+ Bloomberg News reports that Chinese purchases of American oil are down 90% year-over-year, while Chinese purchases of Canadian oil are up +700% year-over-year.
+ Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to Fox Business: “I’m told that in parts of Florida, gasoline is $1.93, and that’s an automatic tax cut for the American people. We’re probably gonna see a lot more car travel this summer. So I think things are in good shape.”
The average price of regular gas in Florida is nowhere near $1.93 per gallon and has increased over the last week:
Current Ave. $3.179.
Yesterday Ave. $3.148.
Week Ago Ave. $3.123…
+ On Monday, Trump said Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg are “great” and billionaires like them “hold me in a higher level of respect.”
+ On Tuesday morning, after Amazon announced it would post the cost of tariffs included in the price of each item, the White House responded by calling it a “hostile political act” by a “China-aligned” company….
+ I thought they were proud of their tariffs and would appreciate it if Bezos showed them how they would replace the income tax.
+ By Tuesday afternoon, Amazon had folded, going from Ben & Jerry’s-like defiance to IG Farben-like compliance in less than two hours! And Trump was back to calling Bezos a “smart guy.”
+ David Warrick, CEO of Overhaul, is sticking to his guns, calling the display of tariffs costs “transparency” in retail sales: “Consumers should understand that this is what you’re paying for, and what the cost of trade policy is and how it’s uplifting prices. It’s useful, and a good demonstration of how tariffs are impacting daily spending.”
+ Since April 30, the online swimwear company Triangle has been displaying tariff charges on its items, including a one-piece swimsuit that retails for $119, but after taxes and costs $362.46.
+ In a new letter to shareholders, General Motors has cut its profit guidance and said that tariffs could cost the automaker up to $5 billion.
+ Bjørn Gulden, CEO of Adidas: “Since we currently cannot produce almost any of our products in the U.S., these higher tariffs will eventually cause higher costs for all our products for the U.S. market.”
+ One reason Trump declared a national energy emergency was to keep his non-stop gaslighting fueled…
+ US GDP for Q1 contracted by -0.3%, below estimates of +0.2%, pushing the odds of a recession in 2025 to 64%.
+ Looks like the tariffed are kicking the ass of the tariffer…
Q1 GDP data
+0.6% Spain
+0.4% Eurozone
+0.32% Ireland
+0.3% Italy
+0.2% Germany
+0.2% Austria
+0.1% France
+0.2% Mexico-0.3% U.S.
+ According to the Financial Times, Trump’s top economic adviser, Stephen Miran, met with top bond investors last week, and he was described as incoherent” and “out of his depth.”
+ The amount most Americans believe they’ll need to retire comfortably: $1.26 million.
+ Median amount of savings for most Americans at retirement age (65-70): $200,000
+ But many millions of Americans have almost no retirement savings at all. In fact, an AARP survey from last year found that 20% of adults ages 50+ have no retirement savings, and nearly have no savings in retirement accounts.
+ The federal minimum wage is now officially a “poverty wage.” A single adult working full-time all year round at $7.25 an hour would fall beneath the poverty line of $15,650 a year.
+ I’m sure ChatGPT is as good as any Freudian analyst. Unfortunately, most Gen Zers can’t afford a couch…
+++
+ Elon Musk has packed up his stuff and left the White House. Now, who will run what remains of the government?
+ Despite DOGE’s cut-and-run assault on the federal workforce and social welfare programs, the federal government spent nearly $220 billion more than in Trump’s first 100 days than it did last year.
+ Finally, someone Americans dislike more intensely than Trump, the GOP and the Democrats: Elon Musk: 34% favorable, 54% unfavorable. (NPR poll)
+ The House GOP wants to spend another $45 billion to extend the Trump border wall–four times as much as the cost of the original wall. In four years under Trump, the existing border wall was breached at least 3,200 times. How’s that for efficiency in government?
+ On April 8th, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who sits on the House Homeland Security Committee, bought stock in Palantir. On April 17th, ICE announced a $30 million deal with Palantir. Palantir’s stock price has now risen 48% in the three weeks since its purchase.
+ Jacob Silverman explains why the Trump family’s crypto venture may be the biggest financial scandal in presidential history, even though it’s happening right before our eyes.
+ I won’t be convinced AOC means it, until I see “Against Oligarchy” hand-stitched by Haitian seamstresses in a Port-au-Prince sweatshop onto her $100,000 gown at the next Met Gala.
+ A Morgan Stanley estimate of the number of human workers expected to be replaced by humanoid robots in the US…
2030: 40 thousand
2035: 500 thousand
2040: 8.4 million
2045: 26.7 million
2050: 62.7 million
+ Duolingo, the language program, announced it’s going “AI-first” and plans to replace contract workers with AI. The company also plans to utilize AI in its hiring process and performance reviews. “Duolingo will remain a company that cares deeply about its employees,” said Duolingo’s CEO, Luis von Ahn. He didn’t clarify whether he meant human or cyber.
+ Mark Zuckerberg claims that Meta is creating personalized AI “friends” to supplement your real ones: “The average American has three friends, but has a demand for 15.”
Sam Stein: “This sounds more like a confession than a business plan.”
+ According to a study by the Getulio Vargas Foundation, Brazil experienced a historic drop in income inequality in 2024. Income for the nation’s poorest quintile increased by 10.7% compared to a 6.7% increase for the wealthiest 10%. This resulted in a 2.9-point drop in the GINI Coefficient’s measure of income inequality.
+++
+ Trump’s National Security Advisor Mike Waltz and his deputy Alex Wong are out. Did Trump’s Cromwell, Laura Loomer, wield the axe again? Or was there just too much winning?
+ Trump says Waltz’s role will be filled on an “interim basis” by Marco Rubio, which means that Rubio’s portfolio will now include: Secretary of State, interim National Security Advisor, acting administrator of USAID, acting Archivist of the United States, and personal revoker of student visas for pro-Palestinian international students. Either Rubio’s a remarkable multitasker (for which there’s no empirical evidence; indeed, he had one of the worst attendance records in the US Senate) or his job just isn’t that demanding.
+ Move over, Alger Hiss! According to a piece in The Daily Beast: “Marco Rubio’s State Department has launched a dystopian hunt for staff who spoke ill of Trump, Elon Musk, Alex Jones, Joe Rogan, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and mentioned keywords like Black Lives Matter, January 6, Q-Anon, immigration, and anti-vaxx.”
+ Travis Akers: “Since hiring Kristina Wong from Breitbart News as the Secretary of the Navy Communications Director this week, the Secretary of the Navy’s Twitter account has twice posted the incorrect date of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, ‘a date which will live in infamy.’”
+ Northwestern, one of the universities Trump has threatened to withhold federal money from unless it bends the knee to him, reported this week, “As of this writing, we have received 98 stop-work orders, mostly for Department of Defense-funded research projects.” So not all bad, right?
+ Paramount owner Shari Redstone asked Paramount/CBS CEO George Cheeks to delay sensitive ’60 Minutes’ stories about Trump or his policies, especially one on Gaza, until after she had closed the Skydance deal. Redstone’s meddling prompted the resignation of 60 Minutes’ executive producer, Bill Owens.
+ Of course! The ultimate blood libel gets an exemption, but then it was never about protecting Jews but shielding Israeli atrocities from public opprobrium…
+ A British doctor who returned from Gaza speaks on amputating the limbs of children gravely wounded by Israeli airstrikes.
Dr.: I had with me, because I’m prepared for these mass casualty events, I had some Ketamine. I had two syringes of ketamine and that was my sedation. And I had to pick and choose who to give the sedation to and who not to give the sedation to. Ketamine can also be used as a painkiller as well as a sedative.
Interviewer: How do you even make that decision? What’s the thought process?
Dr.: I was just very pragmatic, right? The thought process was: if I knew this child was going to die, even if they’re in agony and in pain, I wouldn’t give them the ketamine. And the reason was because the children that could live, I didn’t want them traumatized for the rest of their lives with what I was about to do to them (amputations), so I would sedate them. And I would leave those other children to die. Those are the decisions you have to make every day when you’re in Gaza.
+ Raviv Drucker, former Israeli ambassador: “God did the state of Israel a favor that Biden was president during this period, because it could have been much worse. We fought in Gaza for over a year, and the administration never came to us and said, ‘Ceasefire now.’ It never did. And that’s not to be taken for granted.”
+ I seem to recall someone telling us team Biden was “working tirelessly for a ceasefire.”
+ The Observer reports “members of [Columbia’s] board of trustees were in direct communication with Republicans in Congress and… the Trump administration, offering information and advice on what demands to make and how to present them.” Columbia wasn’t so much negotiating or caving to Trump, as using Trump as an excuse for what they wanted to do on their own.
+ Massive Attack’s defense of Kneecap…
+ In the last two weeks, Kneecap has soared from 100,000 listeners on Spotify to more than 1.1 million.
+ Albert Pinto and Kate Mackenzie, April is the Cruelest Month: “In international relations, trade, security and capital markets, the themes are the same: in place of decades of reliance on the US and its assets, the rest of the world is now seeing to diversify, decarbonize, defend and dedollarize….[while the US] has decided that it now needs to engage in full-scale demolition of the same system it created….The US is becoming weaker as it dismantles the very system it once built.”
+ The US military apparently took the coordinates of an alleged Houthi bunker from a public Twitter account (VleckieHond) and then programmed a drone strike on the supposed “base,” killing eight innocent people. The command-and-control base was actually a … quarry.
+ Who could Nazi this coming? Trump’s DC attorney nominee Ed Martin “apologized” for praising convicted Capitol rioter and white supremacist, Timothy Hale-Cusanelli. Martin said he didn’t know about the alleged Nazi sympathizer’s views that he repeatedly praised on his podcast. Martin called Hale “an extraordinary man, and an extraordinary leader” and presented him with an honorary award last August from Martin’s nonprofit group at Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. In July of 2020, Martin told Hale: “In your case, they used your phone and took a photo and leaked a photo to say, ‘Ah, look … MAGA people are antisemitic. You had like a mustache shaved in such a way that you looked vaguely like Hitler and making jokes about it. Again, you know, not your best moment, but not illegal.”
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+ David Geir, the man RFK Jr. tapped to help run his autism study, was penalized by the Maryland State Medical Board for injecting autistic children with puberty blockers. He has no medical degree or license to practice medicine, though he was cited for doing so without one.
+ RFK Jr on the measles vaccine: “The MMR vaccine contains a lot of aborted fetus debris…parents should do their own research.”
+ Research: The MMR vaccine contains no fetal tissue or fetal cells.
+ Because like climate change, cancer’s no longer a thing in America…
+ Eric Reinhart, social psychologist and political anthropologist: “There’s a scary, superficial paradox at the heart of Trump and RFK Jr’s calls to reopen asylums and ship off people with mental illnesses and substance use disorders to cells and work camps: the asylum model of care hinges on psychiatric authority, but RFK Jr is adamantly anti-psychiatry, undermining its diagnoses and treatments at every turn. Why is this so frightening? Because the paradox dissolves when we realize that what Kennedy wants is even worse than asylums: he wants just prisons and concentration camps without any pretense of treatment.”
+ RFK, Jr. told Dr. Phil this week, he may appoint a “Chemtrails Czar“: “I’m going to do everything in my power to stop it, or bring on somebody who’s going to think only about that, find out who’s doing it, and holding them accountable.”
+ The National Institute of Health is now prohibiting the awarding of new grants to any institutions that boycott Israeli companies. Boycotts of companies from other countries are perfectly okay.
+ 53: number of Palestinian children starved to death in Gaza while food waits just meters away behind a fence, blocked by Israel.
+++
+ The worst of the living neoliberals, Tony Blair, continues to make even Bill Clinton look good by comparison. Here he is fronting for dubious carbon capture scams, that will further enrich fossil fuel companies and do almost nothing to reduce atmospheric CO2: “Any strategy based on either ‘phasing out’ fossil fuels in the short term or limiting consumption is a strategy doomed to fail.”
+ Stephen Miller: “Children will be taught to love America. Children will be taught to be patriots. Children will be taught civic values for schools that want federal taxpayer funding. So as we close the Department of Education and provide funding to states, we’re going to make sure these funds are not being used to promote communist ideology.”
+ I don’t know, Stephen, this sounds kind of Maoist to me…
+ Doug Henwood on the scabrous turncoat, professional hysteric and academic witch hunter David Horowitz, who died this week:
“Now that the evil David Horowitz is dead, I can tell a story that my late friend Bob Fitch, who worked with him at Ramparts in the late 60s before his turn to the right, told me years ago; Horowitz would commission three articles on the same subject, plagiarize the best bits of each, and publish the resulting bricolage under his own name. Oh, a footnote: By the end of Ramparts’s run, they’d burned every printer in North America and were looking to Italy to get the last issue printed. Horowitz thought it was cool not to pay your printing bills.”
+ But his predacious progeny lives on, as the (Ben) Horowitz of the $42 billion Trump-backing Andreesen Horowitz venture capital firm in Menlo Park, a primary underwriter in the AI scourge.