NER430

@ner430.bsky.social

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I care about social justice issues.

This most recent order suggests that Judge Sullivan doesn’t believe the government when it says something is the case, even when that “something” is as simple as the identity of the person in a “to” line in an email. But the government has acted like it has something to hide, even after Congress passed the Transparency Act and Trump signed it into law. So the Judge isn’t accepting what the government has represented to it as truthful, and is requiring documentation to support its claims. Under any other president, the Attorney General would have been disturbed by the suggestion prosecutors couldn’t be trusted. There would be disciplinary review. But here, the acting Attorney General is the defendant in the case. It’s paradigmatic of how far DOJ has fallen.
The administration has declined to say how the overall project has been financed. But Air Force Secretary Troy E. Meink acknowledged in Senate testimony that the government was using funds from a nuclear modernization program called Sentinel. Last summer, $934 million was transferred from that program to an unnamed classified project, as The Times previously reported. Senator Christopher S. Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, has repeatedly pressed Trump administration officials for information about the costs and security systems of the temporary Air Force One. He said the funding maneuver was an effort to avoid scrutiny. “We routinely discuss the cost of the existing Air Force One modifications,” Mr. Murphy said. “But they have declared this work to be a national security secret that cannot be divulged even to appropriators. That is absolutely unacceptable.”
The government spent hundreds of millions of dollars to purchase equipment needed to train pilots to fly the 747-8 plane so quickly, on top of the approximately $400 million cost of the upgrades that the administration has publicly acknowledged. The Pentagon has tried to mask the total price tag — including from Congress — by taking the funds from a classified budget for nuclear modernization.
Finally, Congress should codify its 2022 nonbinding resolution to formally restrict the ODNI’s ability to engage in domestic intelligence activities without sufficient evidence that a foreign nexus exists or without an FBI request to assist with a predicated investigation into illegal activities of foreign persons or entities. This would prevent the ODNI from acting independently to pursue discredited conspiracy theories and require it to act based on facts.
An eyewitness told the Portland Press Herald that the man was “bleeding profusely from the head” when they pulled him out of the car. “He was talking. He said, ‘I tried to stop,’” the eyewitness said. Agents surrounded the man on the ground in an intersection. Another witness told the newspaper that a young child, reportedly the victim’s daughter and no older than three years old, was at the scene crying in her Bluey pajamas. In a statement posted to X Monday evening, the Department of Homeland Security said that “the vehicle attempted to flee the scene and, fearing for public safety, an officer discharged his weapon. “The driver of the vehicle was struck, and emergency services were immediately contacted. He passed away from his injuries,” the statement read. It made no mention of whether the driver was ICE’s intended target.
A DHS spokesperson said the officers involved in the incident had not been issued body cameras. The spokesperson said the process of purchasing and issuing the cameras had been delayed because of a partial shutdown this year fueled by a standoff over Democratic demands for ICE reforms. ICE had access to historic levels of funding during the shutdown, which affected some parts of the agency but did not curtail street-level enforcement. “Body cameras have been deployed to more than half the field offices with the remaining half to receive them in the next 60 days,” the spokesperson said.
“I find it sad that these investors have no protection from the S.E.C. — the agency has gleefully abandoned them,” said John Reed Stark, the former chief of the S.E.C. office that investigated online investment fraud. “It is all about a scam that is as old as securities markets themselves — and it is called a pump-and-dump scheme that enriches a few at the expense of the masses.”
To get the reactors built this quickly comes at a cost. This year, NPR reported that the Energy Department completely rewrote its safety and security standards to make it easier for companies to win regulatory approval. The department has said that the cut regulations were "unnecessary" and that safety hasn't been compromised. The department consulted with the companies but not with the public. It also exempted the new reactors from environmental reviews.
Donald Trump ripped up the JCPOA, which he derided as a terrible deal. Now the Iranian regime is in a much stronger position than it was under the JCPOA. Yet we should also recognize that while the U.S. has suffered a military failure, it has also suffered a financial power failure. China has used the war to strengthen an alternative global payments system that bypasses the dollar — and hence allows governments that are at odds with America to evade both U.S. surveillance and U.S. sanctions.
"Her biographical details are beyond impressive: daughter of a working class Hudson Valley family, graduated in the top 2 percent of her West Point class (as the first in her family to go to college), earned advanced degrees from Harvard and MIT, served 16 years in the U.S. Army (winning 3 Bronze Stars), deployed overseas six times to combat, and served as director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council."
Trump’s comparison of Iran to Venezuela is also important. Clearly, he intended his strike on Iran to mimic January’s rapid strike on Venezuela that enabled the U.S. to grab Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, leaving Maduro’s second-in-command Delcy Rodríguez to run the country. Rodríguez has been willing to do what the Trump administration asks, and the Trump administration has eased sanctions against her, allowing her to work with U.S. investors in Venezuela’s oil sector. Late last month, Joshua Goodman, Alanna Durkin Richer, and Jim Mustian of PBS reported that the Trump administration quietly told federal prosecutors in Miami to back off on long-standing criminal investigations of Rodríguez for drug trafficking.
The CRA includes some special features that make it a powerful deregulatory tool. CRA disapproval resolutions are subject to a special “fast track” process in the Senate. As a result, CRA resolutions can pass the Senate with a simple majority vote—rather than the 60 votes necessary to overcome a filibuster. And when a resolution passes both chambers and is signed into law, the agency is barred from issuing a rule that is “substantially the same” as the disapproved rule at any point in the future, unless the agency is “specifically authorized” by Congress to do so.
The March Is Not Over
The indictment is a grotesque attempt to recast white people as the real victims of racism. In the Trump DOJ’s telling, the civil rights advocates who spent decades mapping and dismantling the Klan are somehow its secret benefactors, “enriching” themselves by secretly creating racism — something which is apparently in such short supply that it can only be generated with constant infusions of cash.
"Over just five days, the justices had decided the issue. Even as they debated the Obama plan’s possible burden on the power industry, in the entire chain of correspondence obtained by The Times, not a single justice, conservative or liberal, mentioned the dangers of a warming planet as one of the possible harms the court should consider."
Birthright Citizenship Rally Wednesday, April 1, 2026 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM ET Supreme Court of the United States, 1 1st St NE, Washington, DC 20543 President Trump is attempting to erase birthright citizenship - a fundamental right in America that is upheld in our Constitution. On April 1st, We Are CASA and our partners will argue before the Supreme Court to defend birthright citizenship. And while our lawyers fight inside the courtroom, we need you to rally outside with us. Join us for a rally outside the U.S. Supreme Court on April 1 at 10 AM to show up for the Constitution, families, and the principle that citizenship is not conditional.
February 26 Debra Houry, former chief medical officer: We did get the secretary to put out some tweets that were positive about vaccination. But while speaking to the media, he would talk about deaths from vaccines, saying things like, “I understand why some parents don’t want to inject their children with fetal parts.” I said to our political leadership: “I really want the secretary to be successful. However, when he says that there are fetal parts in vaccines, it doesn’t help him look like he knows what he’s talking about. So how can we ensure he has the talking points that he needs?” And one person in the team said, “I thought there were fetal parts in the vaccine.” I said, “No, there are not.”
Tom Simon, former senior director for scientific programs in the division of violence prevention: There was an executive order about defending the Second Amendment that called on the attorney general’s office to examine how federal agencies interfered with gun owners’ rights. Political appointees from H.H.S. sent us a blank spreadsheet and asked us to fill in which of our programs interfered with gun rights. I told them we only evaluated prevention strategies to see if they worked; we had no authority to regulate or prohibit anything. They took down the first-ever surgeon-general advisory on firearm violence, written by Vivek Murthy, the surgeon general who served under Obama, Biden and the first Trump administration. You’re trying to move the field forward, and you start to see very quickly that — wow, we are not just losing momentum; we are going backward.
Whitehouse suggested that the answer “could…have something to do with Trump’s close friendship with the deceased pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.” He noted that the Epstein files, riddled as they are with references to Trump, are also riddled with references to Russian girls and women, Russian operatives, and Russian president Vladimir Putin. Whitehouse spoke about how many of Epstein’s victims believed he was recording them, and how there were hidden cameras installed throughout his homes. He quoted Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre, who wrote: “He explicitly talked about using me and what I’d been forced to do with certain men as a form of blackmail, so these men would owe him favors.” Whitehouse suggested the possibility that Epstein might have been working with Russian operatives, but emphasized that we don’t know. “Epstein was an inveterate liar and a criminal who often sought to exaggerate his power and influence, and the Epstein files need to be viewed through that lens,” he said. “What we do know is that a significant number of powerful men—our current President, some of his cabinet secretaries, tech billionaires like Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and others—were very mixed up with Epstein at different times. And Epstein seems to have been very mixed up with Russia.”
https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/march-3-2026?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=ek2s
It leads to personal politics or rather personal gain. Given the stupefyingly overt corruption of the Trump administration, one must ask whether the United States armed forces are now being used on a per-hire basis. Gulf Arab states who oppose Iranian power have generated extremely generous packages of compensation for companies associated with Trump personally and with members of his family. The United Arab Emirates invested in a family firm. The Saudis have provided numerous de facto gifts. And sometimes the gifts have been simply gifts. The Qataris gave Trump a jet. The list is very long.
Infuriatingly, the Trump Administration gutted the Trafficking in Persons Office at the State Department, cutting more than 70 percent of the career civil and foreign service experts who worked so hard to prevent trafficking crimes. The annual trafficking report, required by law, was delayed for months. The message from the Trump Administration to the American people and the world could not be clearer: combatting human trafficking is no longer an American priority under the Trump White House.
Trump made a great show of honoring a handful of U.S. military heroes. Meanwhile, thousands of young men and women are a world away, waiting for his orders to go to war. The president of the United States might have taken a moment tonight to tell their families why they’re out there, and what they’re supposed to do. But why bother? The show must go on.
In the statement, McLaughlin described Abreu-Vasquez as “an illegal alien” from the Dominican Republic. Hicks, though, said the man has an alien registration number, which people often receive after applying for a green card, receiving a work permit or taking part in immigration court. “I don't understand why the federal government is taking Minnesotans who are not criminals, who are part of our communities, and violently ripping them off the streets after running into their cars, and then denying them access to life saving medication,” an exasperated Hicks said Friday morning. “For what purpose? What is the end goal here?” she said. “This is not the worst of the worst.”
Despite Trump’s promise to go after violent criminals, the vast majority of adults detained at Dilley over the last year had no criminal record in the United States. Some of the parents I spoke to had overstayed visas. Many had filed applications for asylum, had married U.S. citizens or had been granted humanitarian parole and were detained when they voluntarily showed up for appointments at ICE offices. They said that it was unfair to arrest them, and that detaining their children was just plain cruel.
A memo from a Department of Homeland Security official reviewed by CNN and sent to agents dispatched to Minneapolis last month asked them to “capture all images, license plates, identifications and general information” on “agitators, protesters, etc. so we can capture it all in one consolidated form.” And the official reportedly provided such a form, called “intel collection.” Last month Tom Homan, the president’s border czar, bragged to Fox News about how he was pushing to “create a database where those people that are arrested for interference, impeding and assault — we’re going to make them famous.”
This has gotten scandalously little attention, but ICE has been seeking to deport thousands of people awaiting asylum hearings in the United States to third countries that will take them. This entails asking immigration judges to void asylum applications without ever passing substantive judgment on their merits. When Vance calls this father an “illegal alien,” it appears to reflect the broader position that people awaiting asylum adjudication should be removed before their case receives a verdict.
The department’s Civil Rights Division was created in the wake of the 1957 Civil Rights Act to protect the constitutional rights of all Americans. The division had about 380 attorneys when Trump took office in January but quickly saw a large exodus after Dhillon took the helm, as she insisted the division would align itself with the president’s priorities. She said in April that she welcomed the departures of civil rights lawyers. “I think that’s fine,” Dhillon said. “We don’t want people in the federal government who feel like it’s their pet project to go persecute police department based on statistical evidence or persecute people praying outside abortion facilities instead of doing violence.” “The job here is to enforce the federal civil rights laws — not woke ideology.”
For the last year, I have been warning about the risk that Trump will subvert the results of the 2026 elections. This could take the form of massive voter suppression, investigations and indictments of his political opponents, or even outright election theft. In many quarters, I have been dismissed as alarmist. The legacy media, in particular, cannot bring itself to contemplate these results without turning it into a story of two competing political parties operating on a morally level playing field. You see many of these same tendencies in the early coverage of the attack on Venezuela.
"Yet the implementation of this has been corrupted, according to two former senior State Department officials who witnessed this firsthand. Typically, such an announcement designating a group subject to persecution would be backed up by a serious State Department analysis—often from its Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, or PRM—laying out a substantive case detailing this persecution. But after Trump’s executive order hit, PRM was not directed to work up any such analysis, the officials told me. “PRM was not asked for this,” one of the officials said. Instead, word came down from State Department political appointees declaring that this had to happen simply because the order said so, the officials stated."
"Indeed, Miller’s grander aims are best understood as an effort to destroy the entire architecture of immigration and humanitarian resettlement put in place in the post–World War II era. The 1965 law’s end to ethnic quotas guaranteed that, henceforth, immigration slots would be doled out on a race-neutral basis. That and subsequent measures—which created the contemporary refugee and asylum system—drew heavily on the international human rights treaties that the United States and many countries signed on to after the war. Subsequent U.S. law has enshrined the right to seek refuge here and protections against getting sent home to face persecution or grave danger—and a set of values that, theoretically at least, has been to some degree a bipartisan consensus for decades."
“The mask issue really burns my biscuits,” said Reneé Hall. “I patrolled in the city of Detroit for nearly 20 years. I lived in the place that I policed. I didn’t get to hide my face. And you know what? Every other police officer across this country arresting people for drugs, for violent criminal acts, for gang violence, show their faces, too. My father was a police officer who was killed on duty. He never would have dreamed of hiding his face from the people he served. These federal officers are coming into these communities from other places, hiding their faces, using unnecessary force and violence, and then just walking away. That isn’t how it works. Hell no to that.”
Rally for Kilmar Abrego Garcia Monday, Dec 22 at noon, US District Courthouse 6500 Cherrywood Lane, Greenbelt, MD.
Today, news broke that Trump has added plaques to the hall of portraits of former presidents hanging in the White House. A plaque under the photo of President Barack Obama says he “was one of the most divisive political figures in American History,” who “passed the highly ineffective ‘Unaffordable’ Care Act.” Under a photograph of an autopen, with which Trump replaced the portrait of Biden, the plaque begins: “Sleepy Joe Biden was, by far, the worst President in American History. Taking office as a result of the most corrupt Election ever seen in the United States, Biden oversaw a series of unprecedented disasters that brought our Nation to the brink of destruction….”
What do Republicans get out of these decisions? Well, they stand to save nearly $1 trillion in federal spending over a decade, largely because so many workers and small businesses insured through the ACA marketplaces or Medicaid expansion won’t be able to afford the skyrocketing premiums or handle the process required to stay enrolled. That trillion or so will help Trump & co. realize their true priority—tax breaks predominantly for wealthy individuals and corporations. Trump is nothing if not a loyal friend to the exceedingly well-heeled, no matter what the cost to everyone else. That, too, is terrible politics, and there’s no sign he and most Republicans are rethinking anything at all.
According to the Post, Bradley at some point argued that “the survivors were still legitimate targets because they could theoretically call other traffickers to retrieve them and their cargo.” That is wrong. The theoretical possibility of calling other traffickers for help is not the test. The incapacitated survivors simply may not be targeted unless, as Section 5.9 of the Manual says, they affirmatively committed a “hostile act” or “attempt[ed] to escape.” If the Post’s facts are in the vicinity of the truth, that could not have happened. (The Intercept, which reported the kernel of this event in September, said that the survivors were “killed shortly after in a follow-up attack.”)
Late last year, Mr. Trump’s transition team refused to sign an agreement with the General Services Administration that would have required it to publish the names of its contributors and the amount of money they donated within 30 days of the inauguration in exchange for more than $7 million in federal funding and administrative support. Prior administrations, including Mr. Trump’s in 2016, signed that agreement, which in addition to the disclosure obligation caps individual donations at $5,000 and bars foreign contributions. By declining to sign, the second Trump transition sidestepped those strictures and presumably could accept far larger contributions. Almost exactly one year ago, Susie Wiles, now serving as Mr. Trump’s chief of staff, described the decision not to sign the G.S.A. agreement as a way to “save taxpayers’ hard-earned money.” At the time, she also pledged to disclose the names of donors and to ensure that no noncitizens contributed to the transition
Polgreen: And it’s kind of gross because the answer to the question of should there be accountability should just be yes. Rather than who’s going to get hurt? Which side is going to get more hurt by it? But there’s been a lot of talk about Epstein and the circles that he ran in, that this is actually going to affect more Democrats than it is Republicans. I mean, I don’t know about that. But I have a slightly different view, which is that I think it’ll actually be a really good thing if this whole network and constellation of powerful men who are part of this, in varying degrees — some of them not criminal, some of them just creepy, some of them just really bad judgment. I think if all of those figures, regardless of what their politics are, are swept away and pushed into retirement and sent off to live out the last of their days in some kind of shame, that that would not necessarily be a bad thing.
Overseeing these decisions are dozens of political appointees who previously worked for industries regulated by the DOT. The agency’s top posts are now occupied by lobbyists and consultants, former airline and railroad CEOs, alumni of autonomous vehicle technology startups and shipping and infrastructure firms, and ex-lawyers for pipeline and trucking companies. Some of the appointees previously battled against the DOT divisions they now control. Some took industry jobs after prior stints at the agency and have now cycled back into the upper ranks of the DOT.
Meanwhile the obvious solutions Trump could adopt mostly involve reversing his own agenda. He could stop canceling all those energy projects around the country, for instance. He could stop deporting the agricultural workforce, which his own administration acknowledges is threatening higher food prices. And he could cool it with the tariffs. The Yale Budget Lab estimates that current tariff levels raise costs by the equivalent of $1,800 for the average household, though we haven’t felt the full effect yet.
Bauer noted that the current work requirements box out those who may lose their jobs, but rely on SNAP to put food on the table. “Let’s say you lose your job and you can’t find a job for three months,” she explained. “Because you can’t find a job for three months, you incur a penalty every month. On that fourth month, you are kicked off the program and you are not eligible to receive SNAP for the next 33 months.”
Remember Your Oath Rally, Union Station, DC. 1:00 pm 11/11. Free Ben & Jerry's ice cream served on site.
According to AI, Clark Construction is the contractor for the ballroom. The lead architect is McCrery Architects, and tge lead engineering firm is AECOM.
Woman dressed as Trump's entry in the Epstein birthday book, next to a man dressed as Trump, wearing a sign that says "I am your greatest emergency."
Spread the word: History Teach-In in Defense of history and Museums on Sunday, 10/26
Neither Roberts nor any of the supposedly originalist members of the court seem to either know or care that the presidency, as envisioned by the framers. was meant to be insulated from direct popular influence, not an expression of it. The Electoral College was a single-use legislature designed to stymie factional feeling, and electors were to be chosen by each state legislature. The president was more politically accountable than a justice of the Supreme Court (with lifetime tenure) or a member of the Senate (serving six-year terms and appointed by their state's legislature as well), but far less accountable than a member of the House of Representatives, which was designed to be the most politically accountable institution in the federal government, with two-year terms for each representative.
I want change. No one deserves to be treated like this. To have no rights. It’s just crazy to think about––that they can just mask up and take someone off the street, no questions asked, and you’re just gone. If they feel like it, they can just take you. No. Someone has to be held accountable. I hope change happens in the way that ICE goes about their business. I hope they get proper training. I hope that they’re just not able to racially profile people and just take people off the streets. I hope the government acknowledges that they could do wrong. I hope they take accountability. My case is a perfect chance for the government to say, Okay, we fucked up. You’re right. This isn’t right. And we’re not gonna try to hide it. We acknowledge what we did was wrong.
“Our more moderate members in both the House and Senate — this is not something they would be inclined to do,” said Gregg Keller, a Republican strategist in Missouri, the next red state expected to redraw its maps. “However, when it became clear that these calls were coming directly from the president, directly from the White House, that this was part of a larger national strategy, they realized they were going to need to go along with it whether they liked it or not.”
That death is already underway. Around 4,000 NASA staffers are scheduled to leave the agency this year, either through what the Trump administration calls “deferred resignation”—a kind of delayed, voluntary layoff—or what NASA is branding “normal attrition,” which includes people like Rader who are leaving of their own accord. That represents about a quarter of the agency’s total staff and includes more than 2,000 senior leaders, according to a report in Politico.
Sometimes the news is what it seems to be, meaning, in this case: No deal. The day began with a hellish war in Ukraine, with air-raid sirens in Kyiv and fierce battles in the east, and that is how it ended. The only difference is that Putin got one hell of a photo op out of Trump, and still more time on the clock to prosecute his war against the “brotherly” Ukrainian people, as he had the chutzpah to call them during his remarks in Alaska. The most enduring images from Anchorage, it seems, will be its grotesque displays of bonhomie between the dictator and his longtime American admirer.
No other president, with the possible exception of Lincoln, was Washington’s equal. But for nearly the entirety of American history, up until a decade ago, Washington set the standard. Presidents had to at least appear to be better than they were, offering the tribute that vice pays to virtue. No more. Donald Trump’s corruption is borderless, in ways we’ve never quite seen before. But what’s also precedent-shattering is that he doesn’t try to hide it. His depravity is all in the open.
There are lawyers in the current Trump administration who have refused to take actions they believed were wrong. In February, Danielle Sassoon, the interim U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, quit rather than obey orders to drop the federal corruption case against Mayor Eric Adams. Many other lawyers in the Justice Department have quit or announced plans to quit, including at least 69 of the approximately 110 lawyers in the federal programs branch, which represents the executive branch in civil litigation. Actions like theirs should be taught as a model for ethical conduct at every law school in the country.
There’s something more than craven political expediency going on here. After all, precisely because Mills’s seat is safe, Republicans could break with him without worrying that he’d be replaced by a Democrat. That, however, would violate the spirit of Trump’s Washington, which grants near total license to the president’s allies. This administration glories in thuggish transgression; nothing Mills is said to have done puts him crosswise with its fundamental values.
“On your call with individuals in the public integrity section, did you state, suggest or imply that the section’s career attorneys could be fired if none of them agreed to sign the brief dismissing Mayor Adams’ indictment?” Durbin asked. “No,” Bove said. “Did you state, suggest or imply that any individual who agreed to sign the brief would be rewarded?” Durbin asked him.
It is also striking that the court seemed less willing to grant emergency relief to President Joe Biden than to Mr. Trump. In 2022, for example, the Biden administration petitioned the justices after a district court blocked the Education Department from carrying out Mr. Biden’s student-debt forgiveness program. The justices declined to act, leaving his plan paused for half a year while they considered the case on its normal, slower docket. The justices also declined to take up his administration’s broader complaints about universal injunctions — orders from a single lower-court judge blocking a policy nationwide, as happened with the debt-relief program.