دسته: 4

Now Will They Leave Joe Biden Alone?

As I was scrolling through Twitter on Sunday, I read a bunch of anti-Biden tweets, so I added my two cents.

I tweeted:

Maybe it’s just me, but I would rather have Joe Biden (surrounded by highly competent people) asleep than Donald Trump at his best (surrounded by Fascists, haters, and law-breakers) on his best day. @jaketapper @AlexThomp

I once wrote on this blog that I would never criticize Joe Biden because he was running against a man who was totally unfit for the job. Several Trumpers has since written to complain about that statement, saying that it demonstrated my bias, but time has confirmed my view.

Regardless of his mental state, Biden would never have appointed a crackpot to run the National Institutes of Health. He would never have defunded USAID, NPR, PBS, FEMA, the Voice of America, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and the U.S. Department of Education. Nor would he have let loose Elon Musk’s DOGS to ransack federal agencies, fire thousands of expert career officers, mess with the Social Security Administration, and hoover up all our personal data, for whatever nefarious purposes he chooses. Unlike Trump, Biden would not have terrorized institutions of higher education and threatened academic freedom and freedom of speech. Unlike Trump, Biden respected the independence of the Justice Department and the FBI and did not put political lackeys in charge of them or treat them as his personal attack dogs.

Frankly, I can’t keep track of the many federal programs and agencies that Trump has recklessly destroyed. If anyone knows of such a compilation, please share it. Trump and Musk have vandalized our government, and despite the thousands of injudicious, capricious firings, have not saved any money at all.

Then I came across this post by Julie Roginsky, which appeared shortly after the nation learned that former President Biden has prostate cancer, which has metasticized to his bones. She is writing about the new book by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson that aims to prove that President Biden was experiencing severe mental and physical decline while he was in office and that his family and staff collaborated to conceal that decline from the public.

She wrote:

Maybe now they’ll leave Joe Biden alone — or, better yet, spend some time assessing his actual presidency, both in isolation and in comparison with what has followed.

Stick it to legacy media, which has consistently beaten up on a decent man.

Was Biden operating at half-capacity throughout his term? Was he operating at 10%? Here are some facts, regardless of the opinions rendered by amateur neurologists all over media these days.

“Biden inherited an economy that was flat on its back because of the pandemic, and he’s bequeathing an economy that’s flying high,” said Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s, which just lowered the credit rating of the United States for the first time in history under Donald Trump.

Biden’s economic tenure was marred by the inflation that was a hangover of the Covid pandemic. But the numbers don’t lie about the rest of it. On his watch, the Dow Jones rose by over 40%, while the Nasdaq rose by almost 50%. The economy expanded by 11% during his four years in office (compared with under 9% during Donald Trump’s first term). Despite inflation, retail sales grew by more than 20%. Household net worth was 28% higher when Biden left office than when he took over from Trump. Unemployment was 2% lower at the end of Biden’s tenure than when he entered the White House.

Most importantly, no one was predicting the demise of our 250 year American experiment while Biden was in charge.

Now, Biden is diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer, which has spread to his bones. You don’t need to be an oncologist to know that the prognosis is not great.

So maybe now is a good time to reflect not just on Biden’s tenure but on what this obsession with his mental health means for the future of this country. Reporters who have spent the past several weeks on the fainting couch about “the cover up” of his mental condition in the Oval Office have consistently failed to acknowledge the successes of his tenure. They have failed to compare that tenure, both in economic and in governance terms, to what has followed. They have never stopped beating up a man who is no longer in the White House to take stock of the mental health of the current occupant of the White House.

Trump’s mental decline (which is apparent to anyone who has lived in the New York media market for the past four decades) is not happening, you see — because he does not stutter, because he shouts with vigor, because he “truths” at all hours of the night, unlike a septuagenarian who might require more rest.

In short, all this is just “Trump being Trump.” It cannot be that he is stark raving mad.

And Trump’s economic record, the one that is driving inflation ever higher, the one that is destroying consumer sentiment, the one that has driven both the stock and bond markets crazy? Never mind all that. Have you listened to Biden’s conversation with Robert Hur? Now that’s a scandal.

Look, I really don’t care if Biden was confined to a gurney for four years. The facts speak for themselves. The country was more prosperous, the democracy was more stable, the nation was more respected, the people were less terrified, when he was in charge.

Yes, Biden’s staff may have covered up his medical condition while he was in the Oval Office. But the real scandal is the cover up happening now. The media so obsessed with kicking Biden now that’s gone that it is ignoring the very real danger that his successor poses to us all.

I am not a religious person but I hope that whatever higher power exists will look out for Joe Biden. He is a good man, who did well on behalf of the people who entrusted him with the presidency. That is a hell of a lot more than could be said about his successor.

I repeat:

Maybe it’s just me, but I would rather have Joe Biden (surrounded by highly competent people) asleep than Donald Trump at his best (surrounded by Fascists, haters, and law-breakers) on his best day. @jaketapper @AlexThomp

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19/05/2025
Heather Cox Richardson: Trump’s Politics of Distraction

Heather Cox Richardson uses her well-honed skills as a historian to weave together disparate events and demonstrate the media strategy of the Trump administration. It could be summarized by the succinct phrase: “Dazzle them with BS.”

She writes:

MAGA world is performing over-the-top outrage over a photo former Federal Bureau of Investigation director James Comey posted on Instagram, where he has been teasing a new novel. The image shows shells on a beach arranged in a popular slogan for opposing President Donald J. Trump: “86”—slang for tossing something away—followed by “47”, a reference to Trump’s presidency.

Using “eighty-six” as either a noun or a verb appears to have started in the restaurant industry in the 1930s to indicate that something was out of stock. It is a common term, used by MAGA itself to refer to getting rid of somebody…until now.

MAGA voices are insisting that this image was Comey’s threat to assassinate the president. Trump got into the game, telling Brett Baier of the Fox News Channel: “that meant assassination. And it says it loud and clear…. [H]e’s calling for the assassination of the president…that’s gonna be up to Pam and all of the great people…. He’s a dirty cop.” Trump’s reference to Attorney General Pam Bondi and law enforcement paid off: yesterday, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said that the Department of Homeland Security and the Secret Service are investigating Comey. He showed up voluntarily at the FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., today for an interview.

In the past day, Trump’s social media account has also attacked wildly popular musical icons Bruce Springsteen and, somewhat out of the blue, Taylor Swift. Dutifully, media outlets have taken up a lot of oxygen reporting on “shellgate” and Trump’s posts about Springsteen and Swift, pushing other stories out of the news.

In his newsletter today, retired entrepreneur Bill Southworth tallied the times Trump has grabbed headlines to distract people from larger stories, starting the tally with how Trump’s posts about Peanut the Squirrel the day before the election swept like a brushfire across the right-wing media ecosystem and then into the mainstream. In early 2025, Southworth notes, as the media began to dig into the dramatic restructuring of the federal government, Trump posted outrageously about Gaza, and that story took over. When cuts to PEPFAR (the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) and the U.S. Agency for International Development threatened lives across Africa, Trump turned the conversation to white South Africans he lied were fleeing “anti-white genocide.”

Southworth calls this “narrative warfare,” and while it is true that Republican leaders have seeded a particular false narrative for decades now, this technique is also known as “political technology” or “virtual politics.” This system, pioneered in Russia under Russian president Vladimir Putin, is designed to get people to vote an authoritarian into office by creating a fake world of outrage. For those who do not buy the lies, there is another tool: flooding the zone so that people stop being able to figure out what is real and tune out.

The administration has clearly adopted this plan. As Drew Harwell and Sarah Ellison of the Washington Post noted in early March, the administration set out to portray Trump as a king in order “to sell the country on [Trump’s] expansionist approach to presidential power.”

The team set out not just to confront critics, but to drown them out with a constant barrage of sound bites, interviews with loyalists, memes slamming Democrats, and attack lines.

“We’re here. We’re in your face,” said Kaelan Dorr, a deputy assistant to the president who runs the digital team. “It’s irreverent. It’s unapologetic.” The White House brought right-wing influencers into the press pool, including at least one who before the election was exposed as being on the Russian payroll. Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung, who before he began to work for Trump was a spokesperson for the Ultimate Fighting Championship, said their goal was “FULL SPECTRUM DOMINANCE.”

Dominating means controlling the narrative. That starts with perceptions of the president himself. Trump’s appearances have been deeply concerning as he cannot follow a coherent thread, frequently falls asleep, repeatedly veers into nonsense, and says he doesn’t know about the operations of his government. Yesterday, after journalist S.V. Date noted that the administration has posted online only about 20% of Trump’s words, Cheung told Date “You must be truly f*cking stupid if you think we’re not transparent.”

The White House also pushed back dramatically against a story that appeared in Business InsiderMonday, comparing Donald Trump Jr. to former president Joe Biden’s son Hunter. The White House suggested it would take legal action against Business Insider’s German parent company.

Controlling the narrative also appears to mean manipulating the media, as Russians prescribed. Last month, Jeremy Kohler and Andy Kroll of ProPublica reported that Trump loyalist and political operative Ed Martin, now in charge of the “Weaponization Working Group,” in the Department of Justice, secretly seeded stories attacking a judge in a legal case that was not going his way. Martin has appeared more than 150 times on the Russia Today television channel and on Russian state radio, media outlets the State Department said were “critical elements in Russia’s disinformation and propaganda ecosystem,” where he claimed the Democrats were weaponizing the court system. Now he is vowing to investigate Democrats and anyone who criticizes the administration.

As Trump’s popularity falls, Trump’s political operators have spent in the “high seven figures,” Alex Isenstadt of Axios says, to run ads in more than 20 targeted congressional districts to push lawmakers to get behind Trump’s economic program. “Tell Congress this is a good deal for America,” the ad says. “Support President Trump’s agenda to get our economy back on track.”

In their advertising efforts, Musk’s mining of U.S. government records is deeply concerning, for the treasure trove of information he appears to have mined would enable political operatives to target political ads with laser precision in an even tighter operation than the Cambridge Analytica program of 2016.

The stories the administration appears to be trying to cover up show a nation hobbled since January 20, 2025, as MAGA slashes the modern government that works for ordinary Americans and abandons democracy in order to put the power of the United States government into the hands of the extremely wealthy.

Trump vowed that high tariffs on goods from other countries would launch a new golden era in the United States, enabling the U.S. to extend his 2017 tax cuts on the wealthy and corporations, some of which expire at the end of this year. But his high tariffs, especially those on goods from China, dramatically contracted the economy and raised the chances of a recession.

His constant monkeying with tariff rates has created deep uncertainty in the economy, as well as raising concerns that at least some of his pronouncements are designed to manipulate the market. Today, Walmart announced it would have no choice but to raise prices, and the Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index dropped to its second lowest reading on record.

Trump insisted earlier that other countries would come begging to negotiate, but now appears to have given up on the idea. “It’s not possible to meet the number of people that want to see us,” he said, announcing today that he will simply set new rates himself. During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump argued that other countries would pay high tariff duties, helping the U.S. Treasury to address its high deficits at the same time the wealthy got further tax cuts.

Over the course of this week, Republicans tried to push through Congress a measure that they have dubbed “One, Big, Beautiful Bill,” a reference to Trump’s term for it. The measure extended Trump’s tax cuts at a cost to the nation of about $4.6 trillion over ten years and raised the debt ceiling by $4 trillion. At the same time, it cut Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and a slew of other programs.

The Republicans failed to advance that bill out of the House Budget Committee Friday afternoon. Far-right Republicans complained not that it cut too much from programs Americans rely on, but that it cut too little. Citing the dysfunction in Washington, D.C. and the uncertain outlook for the American economy, Moody’s downgraded the credit rating of the country today from AAA to AA1.

Since Trump took office, the “Department of Government Efficiency” also claimed to be slashing “waste, fraud, and abuse” from government programs, although actual financial savings have yet to materialize. Instead, the cuts are to programs that help ordinary Americans and move money upward to the wealthy. News broke today that cuts of 31% to the enforcement wing of the Internal Revenue Service will cost money: tax evasion among the top 10% of earners costs about $700 billion a year.

The cuts were driven at least in part by the ideological extremism of Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget. Vought was a key author of Project 2025, which calls for decimating the federal government.

Vought talked about traumatizing federal workers, and has done so, but the cuts have also traumatized Americans who depend on the programs that DOGE tried to cut. Cuts to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) meant about $2 billion less in contracts for American farmers, while close to $100 million worth of food that could feed 3.5 million people rots in government warehouses.

Cuts to the Federal Aviation Administration have left airports without adequate numbers of air traffic controllers. After two 90-second blackouts at Newark Liberty International Airport when air traffic controllers lost control with airplanes, yesterday the air traffic controllers at Denver International Airport lost contact with planes for 2 minutes.

Cuts to a program that funds the healthcare of first responders and survivors of the September 11 World Trade Center terror attacks are leaving thousands of patients unclear whether their cancer treatments, for example, will be covered. Yesterday, acting administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) David Richardson told staff that FEMA is not prepared for hurricane season, which starts on June 1, and will work to return responsibility for the response to emergencies to the states. A document prepared for Richardson and obtained by Luke Barr of ABC News said: “As FEMA transforms to a smaller footprint, the intent for this hurricane season is not well understood, thus FEMA is not ready.”

Yesterday, news broke that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has been in talks with the producers of the reality show Duck Dynasty for a new reality show in which immigrants compete against each other in cultural contests to win the chance to move their U.S. citizenship applications ahead faster. It is made-for-TV, just like so many of the performances this administration uses to distract Americans from the unpopular policies that are stripping the government of benefits for ordinary Americans and moving wealth upward.

Such a show might appeal to confirmed MAGA. But it is a profound perversion of the American dream.

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19/05/2025
Netanyahu Is a War Criminal. Will Trump Stop Him?

Gideon Levy, a writer for the Israeli progressive publication Ha’aretz, excoriates the ongoing military campaign in Gaza. It’s about to get worse. Netanyahu is perpetuating the war for no reason. He has utterly destroyed Gaza. He has ordered the bombing of hospitals and schools, claiming that they sheltered terrorists while knowing that he was committing war crimes. For the last three months, Israel has prevented food, medicine and humanitarian aid from entering Gaza.

Nothing the Israeli Defense Forces do can eliminate Hamas. Their soldiers live in an elaborate city of well-supplied tunnels, protected from the bombing. When hostages were released, members of Hamas appeared in their uniforms, faces hidden, brandishing their weapons, letting the Israelis know that they are still a force, still in charge. This served to goad the extremists who surround Netanyahu. More killing lies ahead. The only one who could end it is Trump. He’s in the region. He’s not stopping in Israel. He’s not using his relationship with Netanyahu to stop the killing. He should.

He could intervene instead of musing idly about turning Gaza into “the Riviera of the .Middle East” and expelling its people elsewhere.

Gideon Levy wrote:

About 70 people from dawn to noon on Wednesday. Almost twice the number of those killed in the massacre at Kibbutz Nir Oz. 22 of them were children, and 15 were women. The previous evening, 23 were killed in a hospital.

Operation Gideon’s Chariots has yet to begin, and the chariots of genocide are already warming their engines.

How will we call this massacre, so indiscriminate and pointless, even before the big operation has begun? 23 killed in the bombing of a hospital – one of the most serious war crimes – just to try and kill Mohammed Sinwar, the latest devil, with nine bunker buster bombs – everything to provide Yedioth Ahronoth in their lust for the main headline: “In his brother’s footsteps.”

The readers loved it, Israelis loved it, no one came out against it on Wednesday.

They made peace in Riyadh, and in Gaza they massacred. It’s hard to think of a more grating contrast than this, between the scenes in Riyadh and those in Jabalya on Wednesday.

Children’s bodies being carried by their parents, the bulldozer trying to clear a way for the ambulance and being blown up from the air, the people burrowing in the ruins of the hospital searching for their loved ones – all this in the face of lifting sanctions from Syria and the hope for a new future.

Nothing, not even the elimination of another Sinwar, can justify the indiscriminate bombing of a hospital. This unwavering truth has been totally forgotten here by now. Everything is normal, everything is justified and approved, even the attack on the intensive care ward in the European Hospital in Khan Yunis is a mitzvah.

No choice exists but to cry out again: You cannot attack hospitals – and not schools that have been turned into shelters, either – even if the strategic air command of Hamas is hiding underneath them. Even if Sinwar is there, whose kill is so pointless.

Is there anything left we can do in Gaza that will be seen in Israel as morally and legally unacceptable? 100 dead children? A thousand women for Sinwar the brother? It was necessary to eliminate him, they explained, because he was an “obstacle to a hostage deal.”

We’ve even lost our shame. The sole obstacle to a hostage deal sits in Jerusalem, his name is Benjamin Netanyahu, along with his fascist partners, and no one can even conceive that it’s legitimate to harm them to remove the obstacle.

What happened on Wednesday in Gaza is just a promo for what will occur in the coming months, if no one stops Israel. The further Donald Trump’s colossal campaign in the Gulf advances, the pistol that will stop Israel has yet to be seen.

When supposedly there was still a purpose, when the goals were seemingly clear, when the human need to punish and take revenge for October 7 was still understandable, when it still seemed that Israel knew what it wanted at all; it was still possible somehow to accept the mass killing and destruction.

But no longer. Now, when it’s clear Israel has no goal and no plan, there is no longer any way to justify what happened in Gaza on Tuesday night.

No Israeli leader opened their mouth, not a single one. The left’s hope, Yair Golan, on a good day calls to end the war, and like him, tens of thousands of determined protesters.

They want to end the war to bring the hostages home. They are also worried about the lives of the soldiers who will fall in vain.

But what about Gaza? What about its sacrifice? How have we reached a situation in which no Zionist politician can come out in its defense? Not one righteous man in Sodom, not a single one.

The sights from there once again scorched the soul on Wednesday, once again body carts, once again children in a long line of body bags on the floor, here lie their bodies, and once again the heartbreaking weeping of parents for their daughters and sons.

About 100 people were killed in Gaza on Wednesday. Almost all of them innocent, except for their being Palestinians who live in the Gaza Strip. They were killed by Israeli soldiers. This is their appetizer for the campaign their military aspires to – and we remain silent.

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19/05/2025
Drag Show Owners Beat DeSantis in Court

Anyone who has ever seen a drag show knows that they are performances. I remember seeing “Dame Edna” on Broadway, and she was hilarious. There was nothing sexual about her show. And by the way, Dame Edna was played by a straight man who created an original character. Last year, I went to play “Drag Bingo” at a local restaurant, and the performers were funny. Their goal was to entertain.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, America’s number one prude, decided that drag shows had to be banned because they “sexualized” children. In addition to drag shows performed in bistros, there are also Drag Queen Story Hours at local libraries, where drag queens read children’s books out loud. Parents bring their children to these events; the little ones do not come alone.

To heck with parental rights, DeSantis wanted to close down all the drag shows.

Hamburger Mary’s, one of the leading venues for drag queens, sued.

They won.

Scott Maxwell of the Orlando Sebtinel tells the story:

In recent years, Florida Republicans have been on a crusade to censor books, speech, theatrical performances and even thoughts expressed in private workplaces.

Their actions have been repeatedly ruled unconstitutional — often by conservative judges who have more respect for the Constitution than these petty politicians with their phony patriotism.

Still, it takes courage to stand up to political bullies willing to spend unlimited amounts of tax dollars, paying lawyers as much as $725 an hour, even when they know they’ll lose.

That’s why John Paonessa and Mike Rogier deserve credit.

The Clermont couple and Hamburger Mary’s franchise owners are the victors in the latest court fight against Gov. Ron DeSantis and GOP lawmakers’ attempts to silence speech they dislike.

This time it was Florida’s war on drag queens, which was pretty clearly unconstitutional from the day it debuted, mainly because it was so poorly written.

Authors of the so-called “Protection of Children” act claimed to want to protect kids from “shameful” and “lewd” performances, but couldn’t even explain what that meant.

When bill sponsor Randy Fine was asked on the House floor to define “shameful” — so that venue owners could know what kind of performances would be illegal — he responded:

“Um … um … [eight seconds of silence] … I think that it … again, that is things that are … I dunno … I mean, again, you can look these things up in the dictionary.”

Quite the legislative brain trust.

The reality is that Florida already has laws on the books that protect children from sexually explicit performances. Did you know that? A lot of these tinpot politicians sure hoped you didn’t. But two rounds of federal judges did. And they concluded that this law wasn’t written to target obscenity in general, but rather drag in particular. That’s selective censorship. And if you’re a fan of government doing it, you might prefer living in Russia.

Patriotic Americans don’t support government censorship of speech. Dictators in North Korea do.

So after Paonessa and Rogier saw lawmakers repeatedly target drag performers — and even nonprofit organizations like the Orlando Philharmonic rented out their venues for such shows — Paonessa said the two men decided: “If we just let them do this, what is next?”

Both a federal judge in Orlando and appellate judges in Atlanta ruled they were right to do so.

The 81-page appellate ruling from the majority made several key points: One was that the state already has laws to protect minors and that out-of-court comments from guys like Fine and DeSantis made it clear that the politicians were trying to specifically — and unconstitutionally — target drag.

Another was that the state’s own inability to define the kind of behavior it was trying to outlaw proved it was overly broad. “The Constitution demands specificity when the state restricts speech” to shield citizens “from the whims of government censors,” the ruling stated.

The case also laid bare a lie: These chest-thumping politicians don’t actually believe in “parental rights” or “freedom.” Because this law attempted to make it illegal for teens to attend certain performances even when accompanied by their parents.

Keep in mind: These politicians are fine with parents taking their kids to see R-rated movies with hard-core sex and graphic violence. They kept that legal. It was only when drag queens got on stage that these politicians lost their minds.

Drag queens? Evil. Cinematic depictions of bestiality? That’s OK. Those are some strange family values.

I can’t recall ever taking my own kids to a drag performance. But that was my choice — not the government’s. And Paonessa said many of his restaurant’s offerings, including the Sunday drag brunch, were family-friendly affairs that some teens enjoyed so much, they would return with their own kids when they were older.

Of course some drag performances are vulgar — just like some movies are. But trying to use a snippet of one sexed-up drag show to represent all drag performances is about as honest and accurate as using a movie like “Eyes Wide Shut” or the “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” to represent all movies. It’s a tactic of misrepresentation known as “tyranny of the anecdote” that’s particularly effective with the intellectually incurious

For the record, a dissent was authored by a 95-year-old judge appointed by Gerald Ford who invoked states’-rights-themed arguments and said censorship laws needn’t be that specific.

While the judges who shot down the drag law last week were appointed by Democratic presidents, the judges who shot down DeSantis’ other unconstitutional attempts to silence speech have been hard-core, Federalist Society conservatives.

Like the ones who blocked the “Stop Woke Act” that tried to ban private businesses from holding employee-training sessions on topics like sexism and racism that GOP lawmakers found too “woke.”

And the Trump-appointed judge who invalidated the GOP law that called for arresting citizens who donated more than $3,000 to citizen-led campaigns for constitutional amendments.

If you think government should be able to imprison citizens for donating to campaigns that politicians dislike or silence private speech within the walls of private companies, don’t you dare call yourself a constitutionalist. Or even a patriot.

In response to the latest judicial smackdown, a DeSantis spokesman whined about judicial “overreach” and said: “No one has a constitutional right to perform sexual routines in front of little kids.”

Once again, he was banking on your ignorance, hoping you don’t know Florida already has laws that protect minors — just not ones created specifically to target drag.

The appellate judges referred the case back to Orlando Judge Gregory Presnell, who issued the original injunction in a ruling that was maybe even more damning in effectively detailing the law’s many flaws. But there’s certainly a chance the state will continue trying to litigate the case, since it has unlimited access to your money.

Frankly, Paonessa and Rogier, who shut down their Hamburger Mary’s location in downtown Orlando last year in the middle of this court battle and are currently looking for a new home, probably couldn’t have afforded to fight back in this two-year court battle if they hadn’t had pro bono help. It came from a Tennessee attorney, Melissa J. Stewart, who fought a similarly unconstitutional attack on drag in that state.

But Paonessa said they decided to fight for their rights — and yours — because they concluded: “If not us, then who?”

smaxwell@orlandosentinel.com

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18/05/2025
Georgia: Brain-Dead Woman Kept Alive Because She Was Nine Weeks Pregnant

This is one of the saddest stories I have read in a long time. Georgia has one of the most draconian abortion laws in the nation. Because of that law, a woman who is brain-dead will be kept “alive” until she gives birth. She is nine weeks pregnant. The baby will be removed when it reaches 32 weeks. One of those Bible-thumpers should offer to adopt the baby. Lots of Bible-thumpers or the State Legislature should pay the outrageous bills that will pile up.

Robyn Pennacchia of the Wonkette wrote about this horrendous case:

Adriana Smith of Atlanta, Georgia, has been brain dead for more than 90 days.

Back in February, Smith — a registered nurse at Emory University Hospital — started experiencing intense headaches and went to get checked out at a local hospital, because she knew “enough to know something was wrong.”

“They gave her some medication, but they didn’t do any tests. No CT scan,” Smith’s mother, April Newkirk, told 11Alive news. “If they had done that or kept her overnight, they would have caught it. It could have been prevented.”

The next morning, Smith’s boyfriend discovered her gasping for air and gurgling on what he believed was blood. She went back to the hospital, where they finally did a CT scan and discovered multiple blood clots in her brain. Unfortunately, they were too late and Smith was declared brain dead as they prepared to go into surgery.

This would have been a horrific enough scenario under normal circumstances, but Smith was also nine weeks pregnant … and in Georgia. Georgia has one of the worst maternal mortality rates in the nation, 33.9 deaths per 100,000 live births — 48.6 per 100,000 for Black women and 22.7 for white and Hispanic women. Part of that is because women like Adriana Smith are ignored when they tell doctors that something is wrong.

Georgia also has a “Heartbeat Law” that bans abortion after fetal pole cardiac activity is detected (but before there is even an actual heart).

Because of Georgia’s garbage abortion ban, Smith now has to be kept on life support until the fetus is 32 weeks along and can be removed. Like, they are literally using her dead body as an incubator for a fetus.

Please, take a moment to scream into a nearby throw pillow, if you need it.

Via 11Alive:

Under Georgia’s heartbeat law, abortion is banned once cardiac activity is detected — typically around six weeks into pregnancy. The law includes limited exceptions for rape, incest, or if the mother’s life is in danger. But in Adriana’s case, the law created a legal gray area.

Because she is brain dead — no longer considered at risk herself — her medical team is legally required to maintain life support until the fetus reaches viability.

The family said doctors told them they are not legally allowed to consider other options. […]

Now, due to the state abortion ban, Smith is being kept on life support.

“She’s been breathing through machines for more than 90 days,” Newkirk said. “It’s torture for me. I see my daughter breathing, but she’s not there. And her son — I bring him to see her.”

Newkirk said it’s been heartbreaking seeing her grandson believe his mother is “just sleeping.”

It would be bad enough if the state were just forcing the family to keep Smith “alive” on life support in order to be an incubator for the fetus, but they’re also requiring them to pay for it. While it’s not exactly easy to track down exact costs, an ICU bed in a Georgia non-profit hospital costs, on average, $2,402 a day on its own, without any additional treatment. According to a report from the Agency for Health Care Research and Quality, mechanical ventilation costs, on average, “$3,900 per day after the fourth day.” So that’s $6302 a day just for the basics. Then there’s everything else on top of that.

And health insurance doesn’t cover life support when there’s no chance of survival or improvement.

So we’re already at $1.6 million before even getting into the cost of the baby’s care. The average stay in the NICU for a baby born at 32 weeks is 36 days, and a NICU stay can cost $3,000 to $20,000 a day. That is more likely to be covered by health insurance — though it is not actually clear if the baby would be covered by Smith’s health insurance if she’s dead, or for how long. And that’s just in the beginning. It is hard to imagine that a kid born in those circumstances would not have some pretty serious health issues down the road.

This family is fucked.

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I am going to need to point out, for the 80 bajillionth time, that the people who love the idea of forcing a woman to give birth against their will (or while braindead) are almost universally against universal health care. Especially the ones who are going around crying about “birth rates.”

I’m not saying it would make anything okay, it wouldn’t, but the very fact that these absolute pieces of shit want to force people to give birth against their will and pay for the privilege as well is galling. In this case, the state wants to force this family to pay possibly $1.6 million or more to keep a brain dead woman alive so that she can give birth to a fetus that was only nine weeks along when she died.

Perhaps it’s crass to think of money, given the fact that keeping a woman on life support just to incubate a fetus is appalling enough on its own. And it is. But a nearly two million dollar surcharge is a hell of an added insult to injury.

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18/05/2025
McMahon Announces Increase in Funding to Federal Charter Schools Program, Despite Multiple Failures

Secretary of Education Linda McMahon announced an increase of $60 million to the Federal Charter Schools Program, bringing the annual total to $500 million to open new charter schools or expand existing ones.

This decision ignored research produced by the Network for Public Educatuon, showing that $1 billion had been wasted on grants to charter schools that never opened; that 26% of federally funded charter schools had closed within their first five years; and that 39% had closed by year 10.

The charter sector has been riddled with waste, fraud, and abuse.

See the following reports:

Charter failures

The Failure of the Federal Charter Schools Program:

CSP https://networkforpubliceducation.org/stillasleepatthewheel/

OIG report on CSP https://oig.ed.gov/reports/audit/effectiveness-charter-school-programs-increasing-number-charter-schools

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18/05/2025
Trump’s Amazing Accomplishments in the Middle East

Donald Trump has had a remarkably successful trip through the Middle East in recent days. Incredibly successful, that is, for the Trump Organization.

He has been offered a $400 million jet by the government of Dubai. It is a “gift to the nation,” but only Trump will be able to use it. Not everyone is thrilled because the cost of turning it into Air Force 1 will be hundreds of millions, some estimates as high as $1 billion. The mammoth plane has been on the market since 2020, with no bidders.

The Trump Organization will be building two high-rise luxury buildings (Trump Towers) in Saudi Arabia.

The Trump Organization will be building a luxury golf resort in Qatar.

The Trump family made a deal with an Emeriti-backed firm, which invested $2 billion in Trump’s stablecoin.

The Trump International Hotel and Tower in Dubai just opened.

Trump met with the new leader of Syria, who previously served as the chief of Al Queda in Syria, and the first Trump administration had a $10 billion bounty on his head. Trump agreed to cancel All US sanctions on Syria, and Syria granted the Trump Organizatuon permission to build a Trump Hotel in Damascus. A win-win!

Trump says that the Arab nations will be investing in the U.S. The details will be revealed later.

This has been a great week for the Trump family.

Meanwhile, Trump did not schedule a visit to Israel, did not use his influence with Netanyahu to demand an end to the three-month blockade of food and humanitarian aid into Gaza. Trump showed no interest in this tragedy.

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18/05/2025
Bruce Springsteen’s “Message to America” and Trump’s Reply

The superstar Bruce Springsteen was giving a concert in Manchester, England, and he stopped to talk about what was happening in the country he loves.

Watch it here.

He was about to sing “My City in Ruins.”

Watching is better but if you prefer to read:

There’s some very weird, strange and dangerous shit going on out there right now. In America, they are persecuting people for using their right to free speech and voicing their dissent. This is happening now.

In America, the richest men are taking satisfaction in abandoning the world’s poorest children to sickness and death. This is happening now.

In my country, they’re taking sadistic pleasure in the pain they inflict on loyal American workers.

They’re rolling back historic civil rights legislation that has led to a more just and plural society.

They are abandoning our great allies and siding with dictators against those struggling for their freedom. They are defunding American universities that won’t bow down to their ideological demands.

They are removing residents off American streets and, without due process of law, are deporting them to foreign detention centers and prisons. This is all happening now.

A majority of our elected representatives have failed to protect the American people from the abuses of an unfit president and a rogue government. They have no concern or idea for what it means to be deeply American.

The America l’ve sung to you about for 50 years is real and regardless of its faults is a great country with a great people. So we’ll survive this moment. Now, I have hope, because I believe in the truth of what the great American writer James Baldwin said. He said, “In this world, there isn’t as much humanity as one would like, but there’s enough.” Let’s pray.

President Trump was very angry when he heard that the very popular Bruce Springsteen spoke out in dissent about the darkness across our land.

Trump posted this:

Was that last sentence a warning? What a petty, thin-skinned, vengeful man he is.

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17/05/2025
Michael Tomasky: Elon Musk is a Stupid, Incompetent Man

Michael Tomasky, editor of The New Republic, doesn’t mince words when he writes about Elon Musk. The headline of his article says Musk is “an evil piece of human garbage” and a fraud as well. He hates what Musk is doing to our government, and he hates Musk’s indifference to the human damage he is causing.

Does he care that he short-circuited American science and technology with his ignorant layoffs? Does he care that millions of people will die because of his success in shuttering USAID, thereby closing down the distribution of food and medicine to people in need?

He writes:

When I was growing up in Morgantown, West Virginia, I remember very well when that new building went up at the end of Willowdale Road, near the West Virginia University Medical Center and not too far from my friend Doug’s house.

These days, Morgantown—driven by the university in general and by what they now call the Robert C. Byrd Health Sciences Center, in particular—is a sprawling small city, with townhouses and shopping centers and office buildings having swallowed the acres of woods where my friends and I used to play. But in 1970, it was kind of a big deal when a spanking new building like that was conjured into being; this one was of particular interest because it was something different: a federal government building, bringing a little slice of Washington to town.

If you’ve been following the news, you may know that I’m referring to the NIOSH building—the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, which for 55 years employed dedicated researchers in Morgantown studying the effects of black lung on coal miners. Black lung, or pneumoconiosis, occurs when coal dust is inhaled and has killed many men before their time; it killed one of my grandfathers in his fifties. Pap, whom I never knew, died way before the federal government managed to overcome the coal operators’ fierce resistance to even acknowledging that coal mining could expose one to harm and established NIOSH through an act of Congress. But once that happened, laboratories were established in Morgantown and six other cities to research occupational safety, in the mines and other dangerous workplaces. Some 200 people worked at the lab in my hometown and from the mobile van they used to travel across coal country to perform checks on miners, sometimes literally right outside the mine gate.

Until Elon Musk.

Those 200 people were fired in early April by Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. Controversy ensued, and many of them have been temporarily rehired, but they’re slated to be fired again in June. Labs in Pittsburgh and in Spokane, Washington, were also eliminated.

As Musk steps back from DOGE, we’re getting a number of assessments of his “accomplishments.” They’re generally harsh. He vowed to slash $2 trillion in “wasteful” federal spending (the federal government spends just under $7 trillion a year). He recently acknowledged it’ll be more like $150 billion. However, his “cuts” will also cost American taxpayers $135 billion, according to one estimate, because it turns out that some of these bloodsucking deep staters save taxpayers money. But even $150 billion is a grotesque lie. Jessica Reidl of the Manhattan Institute—yes, the staunchly conservative and generally pro-Trump think tank—recently told The New York Times’ David French: “So right now I would say DOGE has saved $2 billion, which, to put it in context, is one-thirty-fifth of 1 percent of the federal budget, otherwise known as budget dust.”

That’s harsh, all right. But it’s not only or even mainly on fiscal grounds that he deserves our contempt. The cuts are leaving thousands of good people unemployed. And they will literally kill people. Coal miners will die prematurely. Children all over the world will die from malaria and other diseases because of the demise of USAID, which Musk called a “criminal organization.” In fact, this is already happening: Children with AIDS in Africa have died because of the elimination of a President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, outreach program. That’s just the beginning of the enormous pain these cuts will inflict across the world. And the richest man on the planet, who grew up amid vast wealth from his father’s emerald-mining operations and has never known hardship or had to rely on a government service in his life (unless you count $38 billion in government contracts, loans, subsidies, and tax credits for his companies), is responsible for every drop of it.

Musk has paid for his political activism. The Tesla brand is stigmatized is many parts of Europe. Sales have dropped precipitously. His fortune, which was estimated at about $400 billion, is now down to “only” $250 billion. Protestors regularly gather at Tesla showrooms to demonstrate against him and his DOGE. Teslas have been vandalized.

But no matter how much his fortune and his reputation declines, it can never compensate for the damage he has wreaked on our government and its services. We will all suffer in some manner because of this arrogant man.

In the Trump budget for next year, the only government agenda that did not get slashed was the military. Science, health research, education, public television and radio, even the CIA and the FBI, were chopped or closed. Most agencies were stripped of their leaders and experienced personnel. We are in for dangerous times in the years ahead.

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17/05/2025
Stephen Miller Wants to Abolish Habeas Corpus. This Is Why He Is Wrong.

Stephen Miller is the evil genius of the Trump administration. He has built his reputation as the person with the least heart or soul. He has been the loudest advocate for kicking out immigrants, as many and as quickly as possible. Miller recently proposed that the Trump administration might need to suspend habeas corpus so as to speed up the expulsion of millions of undocumented immigrants.

Habeas corpus means literally “you should have the body.” It means that a prisoner must be brought before a court so a judge can decide if the detention is lawful.

The U.S. Constitution guarantees the right to habeas corpus in Article I, Section 9,states that the right to habeas corpus, which is a legal procedure to ensure a person isn’t unjustly imprisoned, “shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it“

Miller said: “The writ of habeas corpus can be suspended in a time of invasion. So I would say that’s an option we’re actively looking at.”

Legal scholar Steve Vladeck wrote that “Miller made some of the most remarkable (and remarkably scary) comments about federal courts that I think we’ve ever heard from a senior White House official.” In this post, he explains why Miller is wrong.

He begins with Miller’s words:

Well, the Constitution is clear. And that, of course, is the supreme law of the land, that the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus can be suspended in a time of invasion. So … that’s an option we’re actively looking at. Look, a lot of it depends on whether the courts do the right thing or not. At the end of the day, Congress passed a body of law known as the Immigration Nationality Act which stripped Article III courts, that’s the judicial branch, of jurisdiction over immigration cases. So Congress actually passed what’s called jurisdiction stripping legislation. It passed a number of laws that say that the Article III courts aren’t even allowed to be involved in immigration cases.

Vladeck writes that Miller’s view is just plain wrong:

I know there’s a lot going on, and that Miller says lots of incendiary (and blatantly false) stuff. But this strikes me as raising the temperature to a whole new level—and thus meriting a brief explanation of all of the ways in which this statement is both (1) wrong; and (2) profoundly dangerous. Specifically, it seems worth making five basic points:

First, the Suspension Clause of the Constitution, which is in Article I, Section 9, Clause 2 is meant to limit the circumstances in which habeas can be foreclosed (Article I, Section 9 includes limits on Congress’s powers)—thereby ensuring that judicial review of detentions are otherwise available. (Note that it’s in the original Constitution—adopted before even the Bill of Rights.) I spent a good chunk of the first half of my career writing about habeas and its history, but the short version is that the Founders were hell-bent on limiting, to the most egregious emergencies, the circumstances in which courts could be cut out of the loop. To casually suggest that habeas might be suspended because courts have ruled against the executive branch in a handful of immigration cases is to turn the Suspension Clause entirely on its head.

Second, Miller is being slippery about the actual text of the Constitution (notwithstanding his claim that it is “clear”). The Suspension Clause does not say habeas can be suspended during any invasion; it says “The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.” This last part, with my emphasis, is not just window-dressing; again, the whole point is that the default is for judicial review except when there is a specific national security emergency in which judicial review could itself exacerbate the emergency. The emergency itself isn’t enough. Releasing someone like Rümeysa Öztürk from immigration detention poses no threat to public safety—all the more so when the release is predicated on a judicial determination that Öztürk … poses no threat to public safety.

Third, even if the textual triggers for suspending habeas corpus were satisfied, Miller also doesn’t deign to mention that the near-universal consensus is that only Congress can suspend habeas corpus—and that unilateral suspensions by the President are per se unconstitutional. I’ve written before about the Merryman case at the outset of the Civil War, which provides perhaps the strongest possible counterexample: that the President might be able to claim a unilateral suspension power if Congress is out of session (as it was from the outset of the Civil War in 1861 until July 4). Whatever the merits of that argument, it clearly has no applicability at this moment.

Fourth, Miller is wrong, as a matter of fact,about the relationship between Article III courts (our usual federal courts) and immigration cases. It’s true that the Immigration and Nationality Act (especially as amended in 1996 and 2005) includes a series of “jurisdiction-stripping” provisions. But most of those provisions simply channel judicial review in immigration cases into immigration courts (which are part of the executive branch) in the first instance, with appeals to Article III courts. And as the district courts (and Second Circuit) have explained in cases like Khalil and Öztürk, even those provisions don’t categorically preclude any review by Article III courts prior to those appeals.

Toward the end of the video, Miller tries to make a specific point about whether revocations of “TPS” (temporary protected status) are subject to judicial review. Here, he appears to be talking about a California district court ruling in the TPS Alliance case, in which the Trump administration is currently asking the Supreme Court for a stay of the district court’s injunction (the appropriate remedy in case the district court erred). And as the plaintiffs’ response brief in the Supreme Court explains in detail, the district court had very good reasons for holding that it had the power to hear their case.

I don’t mean to overstate things; some of the questions raised by the INA’s (notoriously unclear) jurisdiction-stripping provisions can get very messy. But there’s a big difference, in my view, between reasonable disagreements over the language of complex jurisdictional statutes and Miller’s insinuation that Congress has categorically precluded judicial review in these cases. It just hasn’t.

Fifth, and finally, Miller gives away the game when he says “a lot of it depends on whether the courts do the right thing or not.” It’s not just the mafia-esque threat implicit in this statement (“I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse”); it’s that he’s telling on himself: He’s suggesting that the administration would (unlawfully) suspend habeas corpus if (but apparently only if) it disagrees with how courts rule in these cases. In other words, it’s not the judicial review itself that’s imperiling national security; it’s the possibility that the government might lose. That’s not, and has never been, a viable argument for suspending habeas corpus. Were it otherwise, there’d be no point to having the writ in the first place—let alone to enshrining it in the Constitution.

If the goal is just to try to bully and intimidate federal judges into acquiescing in more unlawful activity by the Trump administration, that’s shameful enough. But suggesting that the President can unilaterally cut courts out of the loop solely because they’re disagreeing with him is suggesting that judicial review—indeed, that the Constitution itself—is just a convenience. Something tells me that even federal judges and justices who might otherwise be sympathetic to the government’s arguments on the merits in some of these cases will be troubled by the implication that their authority depends entirely upon the President’s beneficence.

***

It’s certainly possible that this doesn’t go anywhere. Indeed, I hope that turns out to be true. But Miller’s comments strike me as a rather serious ratcheting up of the anti-court rhetoric coming out of this administration—and an ill-conceived one at that.

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17/05/2025