The Trump gang keeps shredding civil liberties

The US seems to be following the path of authoritarian countries around the world in steadily abrogating the rights of people. One of the ways that this was done in many countries was to do away with such niceties as requiring warrants for the search of homes or the arrest of people.

Now the Trump gang is actually defying court orders, deporting people even after a federal judge ordered them not to.

The US deported more than 250 mainly Venezuelan alleged gang members to El Salvador despite a US judge’s ruling to halt the flights on Saturday after Donald Trump controversially invoked the Alien Enemies Act, a 1798 law meant only to be used in wartime.

El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, said 238 members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua and 23 members of the Salvadoran gang MS-13 had arrived and were in custody as part of a deal under which the US will pay the Central American country to hold them in its 40,000-person capacity “terrorism confinement centre”.

The confirmation came hours after a US federal judge expanded his ruling temporarily blocking the Trump administration from invoking the Alien Enemies Act, a wartime authority that allows the president broad leeway on policy and executive action to speed up mass deportations.

The US district judge James Boasberg had attempted to halt the deportations for all individuals deemed eligible for removal under Trump’s proclamation, which was issued on Friday. Boasberg also ordered deportation flights already in the air to return to the US.

“Oopsie … Too late,” Bukele posted online, followed by a laughing emoji.

Soon after Bukele’s statement, the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, thanked El Salvador’s leader.

The law is just a joke to these people, to be ignored if they do not like it.
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Republicans cannot help being bigoted jerks

Texas Republican congressman Keith Self is chair of a a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee and during a hearing, he turned to Sarah McBride, a member of the panel and is transgender and referred to her as “Mr. McBride”, deliberately misgendering her because he is, of course, a transphobic bigoted jerk and this is what the Republican party now consists of.

I have got to hand it to McBride. Without missing a beat or showing any outward sign of anger, she replied “Thank you, madam chair’.

A fellow Democrat on the panel Bill Keating of Massachusetts then interjected and demanded that Self refer to McBride properly. Self tried to bat away the implication that he was a bigot by the usual evasion ‘that he was only following orders’ to argue that he was merely doing what the House of Representatives had decided but Keating was having none of it and kept insisting that Self refer to McBride properly. Self then adjourned the meeting.

Watch.
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Kevin Drum (1958-2025)

I am sad to report that Kevin Drum’s wife Marian posted on his blog that he had died on Friday, March 7th. In 2014, he was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, the severity of which fluctuated with the various treatments that he underwent. He wrote openly about his travails with the disease but was never self-pitying or maudlin.

I was a regular reader of his blog starting from the days when he started out as a private blogger Calpundit in 2003 and then moving on to start the blog Political Animal at the Washington Monthly magazine, then to blogging at Mother Jones, before going back to a personal blog again, now called Jabberwocking, in 2021.

While I did not always agree with his politics (he was a little too mainstream liberal, centrist Democrat for my taste), I respected him for his data-driven approach to the news. He wrote well and would take news items and subject them to rigorous fact-checking and often present the results in the form of easy-to-understand charts. He was a big advocate of the idea that lead was a major cause of aggressive behavior in people and I found his arguments and the data he presented in support of it persuasive.

He was a sane, positive, stabilizing presence in the chaotic world of internet punditry and he will be missed.

Insulting federal workers

My earlier post about how some of the people getting fired by Musk-Trump are also getting abuse from their friends and relatives showed how those people seemed to view the fired federal workers as somehow parasites, enjoying a life of luxury off the backs of hardworking taxpayers and doing little to earn their keep, just goofing off while drawing a paycheck.

This misunderstands the nature of work. I suspect that most people, whether in the public or private sector, take pride in doing a good job. It is part of one’s sense of self-worth to know that one is pulling one’s weight and not dragging other people down. It is usually just those who have been treated badly by their employers who try to get away with doing nothing, perhaps out of a sense of grievance or getting revenge. Some of course are incorrigibly lazy but I doubt that they constitute more than a tiny fraction.
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Canadians are mad at Trump and the US

Of all the fights that Trump has instigated, the most pointless seems to be the one with Canada. For a country that has been a good neighbor, a loyal ally, and with a great deal in common linguistically and culturally, Trump’s insulting attitude towards them is mystifying. And it looks like they have had enough.

President Donald Trump’s tariffs on Canadian goods, coming on the heels of his taunting threats to make the country the 51st U.S. state, are eroding the inherent politeness of Americans’ northern neighbors and rallying them around their own flag.

Canadians are removing American liquor and California wines from their store shelves. They’re pulling back on future visits to the U.S. They’re pushing “Buy Canadian” to counter higher costs and spite Trump. And they are uncharacteristically brandishing unvarnished anger over what they see as a betrayal by a longtime friend.

“I will never visit America again,” Angela Qin, a university student, told NBC News as she exited an ice rink in downtown Toronto. “You don’t stab the back of your friend.”

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Musk family values

(Doonesbury)

Even cartoonist Garry Trudeau, who is usually up-do-date on his references, cannot keep up. Musk just announced the birth of his 14th child.

But even that might be understating the number. As Gideon Lewis-Kraus writes:

He has sired, at least in a technical sense, thirteenish known children, and has reportedly offered the dispensation of his sperm to friends, employees, and people he met once at a dinner party. (Musk denies this. Skeptics of the strategy, though, might recall that Genghis Khan, according to legend, had more than a thousand offspring.)

Welcome to America!

A German woman has experienced what so many poor immigrants experience at the hands of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers.

A German tourist is fighting to be released from an immigration detention center after she was denied entry at the San Diego border and taken into custody by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) last month.

Jessica Brösche, a 26-year-old German tattoo artist, is being indefinitely detained by US Customs and Border Protection after she tried to enter San Diego on 25 January from Tijuana, Mexico, with her American best friend, Amelia Lofving. The two were traveling with tattoo equipment.
…

Brösche had her German passport, confirmation of her visa waiver to enter the country, and a copy of her return ticket back to Berlin, Lofving said. But she was still pulled aside for a secondary inspection by a US Customs and Border Protection agent.

Brösche said she then spent days detained in a cell at the San Diego border before being taken into custody by Ice. The agency brought her to the Otay Mesa detention center, where she’s now been for more than a month.

According to KPBS, US Customs and Border Protection accused Brösche of planning to violate the terms of the visa waiver program by intending to work as a tattoo artist during her time in Los Angeles.

According to ABC’s 10News, she was forced to spend eight days in solitary confinement in the facility.

“She says it was like a horror movie. They were screaming in all different rooms. After nine days, she said she went so insane that she started punching the walls and then she’s got blood on her knuckles,” Lofving said of her friend’s experience.

Surely suspicion that she might commit such a minor infraction does not deserve high-handed treatment like this? The republic will not collapse if someone works illegally for a short time as a tattoo artist.

But this is Trump’s America, where border officials have been empowered to treat everyone as potential terrorists. She should consider herself lucky that she has not been sent to Guantanamo and disappeared forever. At least, not yet.