The Weekly Sift

In so holding, the court does not pass upon the wisdom or likely effectiveness of the President’s use of tariffs as leverage. That use is impermissible not because it is unwise or ineffective, but because [the law] does not allow it.

– US Court of International Trade,
rejecting Trump’s emergency tariffs

This week’s featured post is “Are Trump’s Tariffs Legal?“

This week everybody was talking about tariffs

That’s the subject of the featured post. The decision of the US Court for International Trade revolves around what powers Trump has and how he exercises them. In the conclusion I note that there are legal ways to achieve Trump’s legitimate purposes, but he has chosen illegal ways that put him into conflict with the courts.

You can view that tendency in a sinister way, as Trump seeking conflict as he angles toward dictatorial power. But the Atlantic’s David Graham puts a different spin on it.

Some of Trump’s most notable collisions with the law and courts are less a product of him wanting powers that he doesn’t have than about him wanting things to happen faster than his powers allow. The president has a great deal of leeway to enforce immigration laws, but he is unwilling to wait while people exercise their right to due process, so instead he tries to just erase that right.

Trump could lay off many federal workers using the legally prescribed Reductions in Force procedure; instead, he and Elon Musk have attempted to fire workers abruptly, with the result that judges keep blocking the administration. Similarly, Trump could try to get Congress to close the Education Department or rescind funding for NPR, especially given the sway Trump holds over Republicans in both the House and the Senate. Instead, he has tried to do those things by executive fiat. Last week, a judge blocked his effort to shut down the department, and this week, NPR sued the administration over the attempt to slash funding, arguing that only Congress can claw back funds it has appropriated.

and Elon’s last day

Another SpaceX Starship rocket failed Tuesday. Friday was Elon Musk’s official last day as a “special government employee“, a status which was always supposed to have a 130-days-per-year time limit — pretty close to the time since Trump’s inauguration on January 21.

Trump and Musk marked the occasion with a joint Oval Office press conference. Send-offs are times for reflection, and this one raises a bunch of questions.

Is he really leaving? Trump says no, for what that’s worth.

Elon is really not leaving,” Trump said. “He’s going to be back and forth. I think I have a feeling [DOGE is] his baby, and I think he’s going to be doing a lot of things.

It’s hard to know how seriously to take that. On the one hand, Musk is still the richest man in the world and can single-handedly finance campaigns at multiple levels. He still owns X/Twitter, which is a powerful force for injecting his point of view into the public mind. So if he wants to have influence in politics, he can.

On the other hand, Musk’s time as the face of the (mostly illegal) DOGE firings and budget cuts has probably not been a fun experience for him. He’s been widely vilified. Trump may well see Musk as a used-up shield. He absorbed blame from Trump’s policies, but became so unpopular that Trump may well not want to be linked with him going forward.

Tesla sales have crashed, as potential buyers began associating the company’s cars with Musk’s politics. He blew $20-some million losing a Wisconsin Supreme Court race in which he led rallies himself.

It had to hurt when fellow mega-billionaire Bill Gates said:

The picture of the world’s richest man killing the world’s poorest children is not a pretty one. I’d love for him to go in and meet the children that have now been infected with HIV because he cut that money

Seeing the New York Times publicize his drug use was probably also not fun.

So Musk may look back on his involvement in government as an unpleasant mistake. Time will tell.

What did he accomplish for the country? For the conservative cut-government-spending movement, not much. He came in promising to find $2 trillion of waste, fraud, and inefficiency. But in spite of all the people he fired or tried to fire, numbers of that size were never on the table. In the end, DOGE claimed it had saved $160 billion, but even that number was inflated. CBS reported an estimate from Partnership for Public Service that balanced that $160 billion with $135 billion in additional costs, resulting in a net savings of $25 billion. Once you factor in lost revenue (like the additional taxes those fired IRS employees might have collected) DOGE may have increased the federal deficit.

In addition, much of what Musk cut had real value, like medical research and the food and medical aid that Gates was talking about. Michelle Goldberg writes:

There is one place, however, where Musk, with the help of his minions, achieved his goals. He did indeed shred the United States Agency for International Development. Though a rump operation is operating inside the State Department, the administration says that it has terminated more than 80 percent of U.S.A.I.D. grants. Brooke Nichols, an associate professor of global health at Boston University, has estimated that these cuts have already resulted in about 300,000 deaths, most of them of children, and will most likely lead to significantly more by the end of the year. That is what Musk’s foray into politics accomplished.

What did he accomplish for himself? Quite a bit. The most obvious benefit Musk has obtained from the Trump administration was to stop government investigations into his companies.

Since the start of the second Trump administration, federal agencies that had scrutinized Musk and his business empire in recent years have begun to look a lot different. At the Department of Agriculture, for example, President Donald Trump fired the person who had been investigating the Musk company Neuralink. At other agencies including the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Trump and Musk have tried to slash the number of employees — potentially hobbling those regulators’ ability to enforce the law against companies including Musk’s Tesla and X.

In the past few months, Trump’s Justice Department has dropped a case against Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, and his Labor Department has canceled a planned civil rights review of his automaker, Tesla. Another regulatory matter against SpaceX has entered settlement talks with the National Labor Relations Board.

And in more than 40 other federal agency matters, regulators have taken no public action on their investigations for several months or more — raising questions about whether those cases may have become dormant, according to an NBC News review of regulatory matters involving Musk’s companies. Those matters range widely, from safety investigations into Tesla’s “self-driving” features to alleged workplace safety violations at SpaceX.

In addition, numerous government contracts have gone to Musk companies, like Starlink and SpaceX.

So maybe the $277 million he spent on the Trump campaign was a good investment.

and Ukraine’s well designed raid

Just a few months after Pearl Harbor, American spirits were lifted by a daring bombing raid on Tokyo, which everyone — including the Japanese — had believed was out of range. It became known as the Doolittle Raid, after its leader, Jimmy Doolittle. Doolittle’s team figured out how to launch the ordinarily land-based B-25 bomber from an aircraft carrier, then maneuvered the carrier close enough to make the attempt. All 16 planes were lost, but Doolittle got the Medal of Honor for the propaganda victory.

Sunday, Ukraine launched a similarly audacious attack, as it smuggled 117 drones close enough to Russian air bases deep in Siberia that it could destroy dozens of the Russian bombers that had been hitting Ukraine. The attacks hit three separate air bases. Ukraine claims to have damaged 40 Russian aircraft, and says that all drone operators are now safely out of Russia.

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I wouldn’t have guessed that this would be the insult that landed hard on Trump’s psyche.

Whenever Trump announces massive tariffs, stock prices plunge. But then something almost always happens, like he puts the tariffs on pause, and then stock prices rebound. If you had known he would do that, you could have “bought the dip” and profited hugely when prices went back up.

Well, among Wall Street traders, this buy-the-tariff-dip strategy became known as “the TACO trade“, where TACO stands for Trump Always Chickens Out. In other words, he’ll talk tough about high tariffs, but will always find some way to back down.

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More evidence that we are being governed by a child:

One idea that has been discussed is to transform the [presidential daily briefing] so it mirrors a Fox News broadcast, according to four of the people with direct knowledge of the discussions. Under that concept as it has been discussed, the national intelligence director’s office could hire a Fox News producer to produce it and one of the network’s personalities to present it; Trump, an avid Fox News viewer, could then watch the broadcast PDB whenever he wanted.

A new PDB could include not only graphics and pictures but also maps with animated representations of exploding bombs, similar to a video game, another one of the people with knowledge of the discussions said.

“The problem with Trump is that he doesn’t read,” said another person with direct knowledge of the PDB discussions. “He’s on broadcast all the time.”

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Conservatives have retaken power in Poland.

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One tool of the creeping surveillance state is the automated license plate reader. Put enough of them in enough places, and you can track who drives where. Like all powers, this can be used for good or ill purposes.

This week 404 Media reported that a Texas police officer used Flock to perform a nationwide search of more than 83,000 ALPR cameras while looking for a woman who had had an abortion. Abortion is almost entirely illegal in Texas but law enforcement reportedly looked at cameras in states such as Washington and Illinois, where abortion is legal.

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Jay Kuo’s brother Kaiser responds to Secretary of State Rubio’s announcement that the US has started revoking the visas of Chinese students.

The soft power cost is immeasurable. For decades, a degree from a U.S. university was the golden ticket, and not just for the prestige and the improved job prospects back home. It was often the start of a lifelong affinity for America, its values, and its people. Some of China’s best-known reformers and tech founders were educated in the U.S. They returned to China with not just skills and credentials, but admiration for an open society that welcomed them. Those days are ending. We are actively teaching the next generation of global talent that America is hostile, capricious, and unwelcoming.

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Sam Stein is an American-raised Jewish Israeli citizen who devoted half a year to being a “protective presence” for Palestinians in the West Bank occupied territories.

For six months, I lived alongside those I’d been relentlessly warned would kill me at first opportunity. The truths I learned there must be shared, especially with others raised on the same fears.

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The Real News Network’s Adam Johnson does a takedown of Jake Tapper and his new book “Original Sin”.

So Tapper has found the great scandal of the Biden years, and it is, of course, not one that upsets anyone at the Pentagon, the US Chamber of Commerce, the editorial boards of the New York Times or the Atlantic or AIPAC. The Biden aging story is the perfect pseudo-scandal for corporate media, and thus the perfect Jake Tapper story: vaguely true, but ultimately of peripheral importance, scapegoating a handful of Biden flunkies and, most important of all, it allows Tapper to polish his Speaking Truth to Power brand without speaking truth to anyone in a position of actual power.

Johnson’s candidate for the real Biden scandal is supporting Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

[I]n over 15 months of co-hosting the influential Sunday news show State of the Union during the Gaza genocide under Biden, Tapper never once platformed a single Palestinian guest, while giving ample platform to a revolving door of Biden officials, Israeli spokespeople, and two softball interviews with Israeli Prime Minister—and fugitive from international justice—Benjamin Netanyahu. 

Consistent with his yawning through the genocide under Biden, Tapper mostly ignores it under Trump and only chimes in to frame the latest Israeli war crime in terms favorable to Israel. Even worse than never bothering to interview a single Palestinian, his Sunday news show, since Israel recommenced its genocide on March 18, hasn’t brought up Gaza as a topic once.

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Anthropologist Anand Pandian has traveled the country speaking to people of all backgrounds and opinions.

In my writing, I try to show how everyday structures of isolation – at home and on the road, for the body and the mind – magnify the social and political divides we lament so often. These interlocking walls of everyday life sharpen the divide between insiders and outsiders, making it hard to take unfamiliar people and perspectives seriously, to acknowledge the needs of others and relate to their struggles.

So much turns on the edges between the familiar and the foreign, these lines we’ve come to live with on a daily basis. Can we learn once again to take these edges as spaces of encounter, rather than hard divides between ourselves and the world beyond?

and let’s close with an intriguing thought

David Farrier considers the possibility that AI might crack animal languages, and what it might do to human consciousness if we learned how other species communicate.

In interspecies translation, sound only takes us so far. Animals communicate via an array of visual, chemical, thermal and mechanical cues, inhabiting worlds of perception very different to ours. Can we really understand what sound means to echolocating animals, for whom sound waves can be translated visually?

The German ecologist Jakob von Uexküll called these impenetrable worlds umwelten. To truly translate animal language, we would need to step into that animal’s umwelt – and then, what of us would be imprinted on her, or her on us? “If a lion could talk,” writes Stephen Budiansky, revising Wittgenstein’s famous aphorism in Philosophical Investigations, “we probably could understand him. He just would not be a lion any more.”

It’s hard to avoid the sense that what we’re seeing on tariffs is another version of the sanewashing that Trump has benefited from ever since he entered politics. People just keep wanting to believe that he’s making sense, that he isn’t as ignorant and irresponsible as he seems. But he is.

– Paul Krugman “The Trade War Isn’t Over“

This week’s featured posts are “What’s up with the Supreme Court?” and “The Big Beautiful Bill“.

This week everybody was talking about the FY 2026 budget

Trump’s “big beautiful bill” squeaked through the House Budget Committee yesterday. Details about what the bill is intended to accomplish are in one featured post.

and Trump’s retreat on tariffs

It’s been about six weeks since Trump announced “Liberation Day”, when drastically increased tariffs freed Americans from the tyranny of full shelves and cheap products made overseas. Stephen Miller called it “the most significant action on global trade policy that has taken place in our lifetimes”.

Then it all started to unravel. (Timeline from The Guardian.) The bizarrely determined individual “reciprocal tariffs” imposed on imports from each country came and went in less than a day, even though deals had been announced only with the UK — and that one was still tentative. A week ago, Trump announced that the 145% tariffs on Chinese goods would go down to 30% for 90 days.

So here we are. The Treasury secretary is still threatening that the “reciprocal” tariff levels will be back if countries don’t negotiate “in good faith”, as if the US has been acting in good faith. But the markets have returned to their pre-liberation levels, as investors seem to be pretending the last six weeks were just a bad dream. Maybe Trump has learned his lesson now, as Senator Collins claimed after voting to acquit in his first impeachment.

Paul Krugman would like to differ.

If you get your picture of what’s happening from “news analyses” rather than experts who actually do the math, you might well think that the Trump trade war is basically over, that we’re back to more or less normal policy.

The reality is that we’ve gone from a completely insane tariff rate on imports from China to a rate that’s merely crazy. And China accounts for only a fraction of our imports. Tariffs on everyone else are still at 10 percent, a level we haven’t seen in generations. And there are still other shoes to drop: Trump has, for example, been promising tariffs on pharmaceuticals.

The trade war is still very much on. … In other words, not much has changed since last week. We may not be looking at the complete economic meltdown that seemed quite possible (and is still a possibility), but we’re still looking at much higher inflation and an economic slowdown at best — i.e., stagflation.

and bribery

Other than going to Vatican City to sleep at Pope Francis’ funeral, the first overseas trip of Trump’s second administration was the tour of the oil-rich kingdoms of the Persian Gulf he completed this week. He took with him friendly tech-company CEOs “including Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Amazon’s Andy Jassy, Palantir’s Alex Karp and two dozen others”.

While it’s not unusual for presidents to promote US business interests overseas, the trip’s biggest headlines concerned the benefits to Trump himself, including Qatar’s gift of a $400 million “palace in the sky” intended to replace Air Force One, which Trump has long considered shabby and whose replacement is behind schedule. (Technically, the plane is a gift to the US government, but Trump’s plan is for it to go to his presidential library foundation — which he will control — after he leaves office.)

A much more direct enrichment of Trump came from an Abu Dhabi firm that invested $2 billion in his crypto-coin scheme. Some of the investments in US corporations involved changes in government policy, like allowing the United Arab Emirates to buy quantities of top Nvidia chips that would have been forbidden under Biden administration policies, trusting the UAE not to pass such advanced tech on to a rival superpower like China.

Richard Painter, previously a government ethics lawyer under George W. Bush, commented:

[T]he impression is given that the position of the United States can be swayed and even bought.

and the Guardian reported:

Past administrations would have run from the perceived conflicts of interest being welcomed by Trump. … “The status quo has been saying no, because it’s an actual and apparent conflict of interest, and it could jeopardize our domestic and foreign policies,” said [Scott] Amey [of the non-profit Project On Government Oversight]. ”It certainly doesn’t pass the sniff test for a lot of Americans.”

The lavish gifts and other investments come as Trump is reshaping America’s policy in the Middle East, skipping Israel and turning toward the Gulf states in a flurry of deal-making that could benefit both sides handsomely.

and the Palm Springs bombing

An IVF clinic in California was bombed Saturday morning, in an apparent terrorist attack. My first thought was that this was the work of people who believe in ensoulment at conception, upset that IVF clinics destroy fertilized embryos after they are no longer needed.

But no, it looks like the perpetrator, who also appears to have been the sole fatality, is an antinatalist. I had no idea what that was until NPR explained it: An antinatalist believes it is wrong to have children.

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We can expect a robust tourist trade this summer.

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It’s got to be hard for satirical sites like The Onion to compete with real headlines like this one: “Trump’s DHS considers reality show where immigrants compete for citizenship, producer says“.

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DOGE is still around, and still exceeding any possible authority it might have. It’s been trying to take over agencies that serve Congress, like the Library of Congress and the General Accounting Office.

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Oklahoma’s new social studies curriculum will encourage students to believe Trump’s conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.

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Some good news on climate change from the UK-based Carbon Brief website, which looks like a good source for in-depth information about the climate.

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and let’s close with something commercial

I’m not sure how Facebook figured out my sense of humor, but lately I’ve been deluged with ads for history-related t-shirts.

NO SIFT FOR THE NEXT TWO WEEKS. THE NEXT NEW ARTICLES WILL APPEAR ON MAY 12.

Resist. Rebel. Rebuild.

– Daredevil, from the season finale of Daredevil: Born Again

There’s no featured post this week.

This week everybody was talking about Pope Francis

Pope Francis died this morning.

I have never been Catholic, so I view all papacies from the outside. But Francis was the first pope of my adult lifetime that I didn’t instinctively think of as a political and social opponent. Previous popes, from my point of view, allowed Catholicism to be dominated by culture-war issues: anti-abortion, anti-gay, anti-birth-control, pro-patriarchy, and so on.

People closer to the Catholic Church can comment on whatever doctrines he may have changed, which were largely invisible to non-Catholics. The church he leaves behind is still a patriarchal institution that teaches many ideas I view as wrong-headed. But to me, the main thing he did was shift the emphasis: from policing people’s bedrooms to standing up for the downtrodden and those on the fringes of society.

Undoubtedly there will now be a battle for the soul of Catholicism. Will the church continue on the path Francis started down, or will it return to its traditional role as an ally of authoritarians and the privileged classes?

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Two of the last things Francis did were to celebrate Easter and meet with J. D. Vance. Call me cynical, but I expect Vance to lie extensively about his papal audience. It is very easy for unscrupulous people to put words into the mouths of the dead.

and Pete Hegseth

Back when the Signal fiasco first surfaced a few weeks ago, many people speculated that this didn’t come out of the blue. Nobody on the chat treated the situation as weird, suggesting they’d done it before.

Well, now we have another example:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shared detailed information about forthcoming strikes in Yemen on March 15 in a private Signal group chat that included his wife, brother and personal lawyer, according to four people with knowledge of the chat.

The first Signal chat group was set up by National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, but this one was set up by Hegseth himself.

This administration is filled with unqualified people like Hegseth who are not serious about national security. Showing off for friends, family, and coworkers is more important to them than keeping Americans safe.

Remind me: Why did anybody ever think Pete Hegseth belonged in this job?

and Harvard

Who expected Harvard to start leading the academic community’s resistance to the Trump autocracy? How did we get here?

On April 11, representatives of the GSA, HHS, and Education Department sent a list of demands to the president of Harvard University and the leading member of the Harvard Corporation. The demands essentially would put in the university in receivership, with “an external party, which shall satisfy the federal government as to its competence and good faith” empowered to audit “the student body, faculty, staff, and leadership for viewpoint diversity”. Departments that failed this audit would required to hire new faculty and admit new students until “viewpoint diversity” was achieved.

In other words: Acceding to the government’s demands would authorize MAGA thought police to roam the campus, searching out dissent and bringing in Trump acolytes to “balance” campus viewpoints. This proposal directly contradicts the government’s demand to eliminate DEI programs in favor of “merit-based” hiring and admissions. “Merit” only matters if you’re Black, not if you’re pro-Trump.

The letter warns that the government’s “investment” in Harvard (i.e., research grants that Harvard wins in competition with other universities) “is not an entitlement”, and depends on Harvard taking steps to prevent “ideological capture” by any ideology other than that of the Trump administration.

Meanwhile, Harvard could contemplate the sad example of Columbia, which knuckled under to Trump’s demands and appears to have gotten nothing in return. Additionally, the law firms that have made deals with Trump are finding the terms changing on them. Once you start paying an extortionist, he’s bound to demand more.

So all in all Harvard felt it had little choice in its response:

The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights. Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government. Accordingly, Harvard will not accept the government’s terms as an agreement in principle.

In a letter to the larger Harvard community, President Garber went further:

The administration’s prescription goes beyond the power of the federal government. It violates Harvard’s First Amendment rights and exceeds the statutory limits of the government’s authority under Title VI. And it threatens our values as a private institution devoted to the pursuit, production, and dissemination of knowledge. No government—regardless of which party is in power—should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.

Various Trump officials then claimed the threatening letter had been sent by mistake. But that didn’t square with the fact that the Trump administration then started carrying out its threats: $2.2 billion in grants are frozen, though they have been slow to announce which ones. The optics of that are going to be really bad for Trump. Cancellations we already know of stop research on tuberculosis and ALS. If you are counting on research like that to produce a miracle cure for yourself or your family, you’re not going to be very happy.

Trump has also threatened Harvard’s tax-exempt status, a move that he probably can’t carry out within the law.

I know no one is shamed by hypocrisy any more, but The Bulwark’s Tim Miller and Sarah Longwell went back to look at the outrage of people like J. D. Vance and Ted Cruz a few years ago when the Right (falsely) thought the Obama administration had instructed the IRS to target Tea Party groups. (In the wake of Citizens United, the IRS did heighten their scrutiny of new tax-exempt groups, which included a bumper crop of new Tea Party groups. But none inappropriately lost their tax-exempt status and no link to the White House was ever found.) Here’s what Vance was saying:

This is about whether we have functional constitutional government in this country. If the IRS can go after you because of what you think or what you believe or what you do, we no longer live in a free country.

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The biggest sham of this whole attack on American universities is that it has something to do with antisemitism. Trump cares nothing about antisemitism.

In Charlottesville, Trump was careful to differentiate between actual Nazis and the “very fine people” who marched next to the Nazis. But there is no similar consideration for any “fine people” who participated in campus protests in honest sympathy with the plight of Palestinians, or out of horror at the genocide in Gaza. To Trump, the presence of antisemites in the demonstrations tars everyone involved. The double standard here has an obvious interpretation: Antisemitism is just a club to use against the universities, which he sees as his enemies anyway.

and the courts

The Trump administration had another bad week in court. First, there’s the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man who came to the US illegally in 2011 and was granted withholding-of-removal status by an immigration court in 2019. The Trump administration ignored his legal status and deported him to the CECOT prison in El Salvador on March 15, in what an administration lawyer has since described as “an administrative error”. On April 10, the Supreme Court unanimously ordered the administration to “facilitate” Garcia’s return to the US, where he might then face renewed attempts to deport him within the law. The Court sent the case back to district court Judge Paula Xinis to work out the details of Garcia’s return.

The administration has defied that order while claiming that it is not defying it, by putting a ridiculous spin on “facilitate” that does not require it to do anything at all. Trump had an oval office meeting with Salvadoran dictator Nayib Bukele, where they each professed their powerlessness to do anything for Garcia, essentially making a joke out of the Court’s unanimous order.

Xinis has ordered a two-week inquiry into the case that will include sworn depositions from administration officials, creating a record that could lead to contempt proceedings. Trump’s lawyers tried to put a stay on her order, which an appeals court unanimously rejected on Thursday. More than just the order itself, Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson’s opinion rejected Trump’s arguments in their entirety.

The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order. Further, it claims in essence that because it has rid itself of custody that there is nothing that can be done. This should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear.

The government asserts that Abrego Garcia is a terrorist and a member of MS-13. Perhaps, but perhaps not. Regardless, he is still entitled to due process.

As Jay Kuo notes, Wilkinson is a Reagan appointee whose conservative credentials are impeccable. This isn’t about left-and-right, it’s about right-and-wrong.

Trump administration rhetoric continues to try to make this case about illegal immigration and its mythical immigrant crime wave. As J. D. Vance tweeted

The entire American media and left wing industrial complex has decided the most important issue today is that the Trump admin deported an MS-13 gang member (and illegal alien)

The problem with that argument should be obvious: Vance assumes what so far has not been proved. If Garcia actually is a gang member who poses a threat to public safety, then by all means deport him. No one argues against that. But so far all we know is that the Trump administration SAYS he’s a gang member who threatens public safety. They could say that about me or you or anybody. If Trump can send someone to his concentration camp in El Salvador just by accusing him of something, then we really are in a totalitarian state.

After all, Trump himself has been very credibly accused of crimes, and even convicted of some. I’ve seen a lot more evidence of Trump’s crimes than of Garcia’s.

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The Supreme Court also ordered 7-2 that further deportations to CECOT be stopped.

In a brief order released at about 1 a.m. Saturday, the court directed the administration to temporarily halt any plan to deport a group of Venezuelan nationals who have been detained in northern Texas and have been designated as “alien enemies.”

Again, Trump wants to make this about immigrant crime, assuming without proof that all the people he wants to deport are actually dangerous. So far, though, everything we know suggests the administration isn’t being particularly rigorous about establishing guilt.

The essential difference between a legitimate prison and a concentration camp is legal process. If you can be sent there on somebody’s unsupported say-so, you’ll stay there until somebody else says you can leave, and while you’re there you have no way to protest your treatment, then you’re in a concentration camp.

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Wednesday, Judge James Boasberg

found probable cause Wednesday to hold the Trump administration in criminal contempt for willfully disobeying his order to immediately halt deportations under the rarely used Alien Enemies Act and turn around any airborne planes. … “The Court does not reach such conclusion lightly or hastily; indeed, it has given Defendants ample opportunity to rectify or explain their actions. None of their responses has been satisfactory.”

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Another judge has ordered the administration to stop its firing of the 1500 employees of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Like Judge Xinis in the Garcia case, Judge Berman is demanding testimony under oath from Trump officials who seem to have ignored her previous order.

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The gist of all these rulings is that time is running out on the administration’s claims that it isn’t disobeying court orders, based on obviously ridiculous interpretations of those orders. Before long they’re going to have to either obey the orders or openly defy them.

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If you need to hear an optimistic voice, read this piece at The Contrarian by Norm Eisen.

I’m pretty much where Eisen is. When Trump took office, I anticipated a lot of the ways he would assault American democracy. The real question in my mind was how clever he would be and whether anyone would oppose him.

Well, three months into his second administration, we can see that he’s not being very clever at all, and opposition is forming, both in the courts and in public opinion. The Economist shows Trump’s net approval rating crossing below his sorry showing from the same point in his first term.

Congress will be slower to come around, but I think that will happen, at least partially. It will start with Republicans’ inability to unite around an FY 2026 budget proposal. What they have so far

• cuts rich people’s taxes
• cuts programs that many small-town and rural Trump voters rely on, like Medicaid and food stamps.
• still has a huge deficit.

A lot of Trump voters still believe that the spending cuts will all be “waste and fraud” cuts that target illegal aliens and maybe some other dark-skinned people they don’t like. (In MAGAland, spending on non-whites is inherently wasteful.) They’re going to see that it really means kicking Mom out of the nursing home, closing their small-town hospital, and skipping a few meals of their own.

Trump could even sell those White working-class “sacrifices” as necessary to control an out-of-control government debt. But calling for sacrifice and not controlling the debt is going to be a hard case to make.

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Alaska’s Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski said out loud what a lot of people have been whispering: Republicans in Congress are afraid to cross Trump. “I’m oftentimes very anxious myself about using my voice because retaliation is real. And that’s not right.”

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Now there’s data to back up what a lot of people intuited some while ago: Foreign tourists are viewing the US as a risky and unpleasant place to visit.

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A transwoman runner in Virginia had to leave the girls cross-country team when the Virginia HIgh School League changed its rules to get into harmony with the Trump administration. So she did what a lot of anti-trans rhetoric suggests she should do: join the boys team.

So now somebody who presents as female is on the male team, presumably raising a new set of locker room issues. Is this better?

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RFK Jr. says he will identify the “environmental toxin” that causes autism. People who have spent their lives studying autism don’t believe such a thing exists, but cranks like Kennedy always know better.

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Remember when Candidate Trump said that ending the Ukraine War was easy, and that he could do it in 24 hours? Well, now that he’s president, Trump is complaining that the two countries aren’t cooperating, so he’s thinking about taking his Peace and going home.

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Trump pledged to lower grocery prices on Day 1, and has even claimed success by making up completely false statistics about the price of eggs. Actually, egg prices hit a record in March.

Average grocery prices were about 2.41% higher in March 2025 than they were in March 2024, Consumer Price Index data shows. This was the highest year-over-year grocery inflation rate since August 2023. And average March 2025 grocery prices were up about 0.49% from February 2025. That was the highest month-to-month grocery inflation rate since October 2022.

And that’s before we see the effect of tariffs on imported foods like coffee and fruit, which should kick in soon.

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More evidence that DOGE is a grift: Musk has

spared the jobs of US Department of Transportation employees who provide support services for spacecraft launches by Musk’s companies, SpaceX and Starlink … While the administration and Doge have targeted hundreds of thousands of federal employees, critics say the decision shows Musk is willing to allow federal workers to remain employed if their work benefits him.

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DOGE cuts are literally killing people.

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The myth behind DOGE is that Musk commands a small army of smart nerds who can revolutionize how government works. But wouldn’t you know it? The Pentagon had already thought of that idea back in 2015 and has assembled its own nerds in the Defense Digital Service. Unlike Musk’s minions, these folks have actually done a few things that worked.

Now they’re all resigning.

One former senior Pentagon official, who asked not to be named because of possible retaliation, described DOGE’s wider incursion into the Defense Department as damaging and unproductive: “They’re not really using AI, they’re not really driving efficiency. What they’re doing is smashing everything,” the former official said. At the DDS, “The best way to put it, I think, is either we die quickly or we die slowly,” Hay said.

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In this era where so many institutions are yielding to autocracy without a fight, I’ve been interested to see what Marvel Studios and their Disney overlords have done with the new Daredevil series Daredevil: Born Again.

No one ever refers to Trump during the series, and if the words Republican or Democrat were spoken, I don’t remember them. But it’s hard to imagine a major studio making a stronger anti-MAGA statement.

The story arc of the season is how Daredevil’s nemesis, Wilson Fisk, a.k.a. the Kingpin, escapes accountability for his criminal past and gets elected Mayor of New York on a very MAGA-ish platform: New York is in crisis and only a crusading outsider like Fisk can fix it. Once in power, he uses a combination of legal and illegal power to co-opt the city’s other power centers. He recruits NYPD’s most brutal officers into an elite “anti-crime” squad that operates outside normal rules, then artificially creates a crisis that justifies a near-complete authoritarian takeover. The “resist, rebel, rebuild” quote at the top of the page is from Daredevil’s rallying message to his allies at the end of the season, presumably setting up the fall of Fisk in season 2.

and let’s close with something embarrassing

I explained last week how my town of Bedford often finds itself in the shade of its neighbors Lexington and Concord. So I felt a little schadenfreude when this particular celebration in Lexington didn’t go exactly as planned.

Tonight, I rise with the intention of getting in some good trouble. I rise with the intention of disrupting the normal business of the United States Senate for as long as I am physically able. I rise tonight because I believe sincerely that our country is in crisis

– Senator Cory Booker

This week’s featured posts are “Is this a turning point?” and “On Tariffs and the Markets“.

This week everybody was talking about tariffs and the resulting stock market crash

That’s the topic of one of the featured posts.

and the “Hands Off” protests

Saturday’s protests at 1400 locations around the country had been planned for some time. But they got a huge boost from a week of bad news for the Trump administration, which I summarize in the other featured post.

Good estimates of how many people participated are hard to come by. Organizers tend to inflate numbers, while news organizations and public-safety departments usually underestimate. Then there’s the problem of combining over a thousand individual estimates into a collective estimate.

The organizers of these protests claim “millions” of participants. And that total sounds reasonable when you see police estimates like 25-30 thousand in Boston alone, or NYT reporting of a march 20 blocks long in New York.

and Cory Booker’s speech

The political impact of Cory Booker’s record-breaking 25-hour speech to the Senate surprised me. It was a stunt, of course. The speech itself produced no direct change in law or policy. And yet it drew massive amounts of public attention and made an important symbolic statement: Yes, Democrats in Congress do realize that American democracy is at a crisis point, and they are looking for ways to do something about it.

The point of a stunt is to draw attention, and Booker certainly did. An estimated 300K viewers livestreamed at least part his speech, and the Tik-Tok stream got 350 million likes.

Like many stunts, Booker’s speech was a feat of physical endurance. He had to remain standing for the full 25 hours, and didn’t take any bathroom breaks. He didn’t have to speak the entire time, because allies in the Senate took up some time by asking him occasional questions. I had thought he would wear Depends or have some kind of catheter strapped to his leg, but apparently not.

I think I stopped eating on Friday, and then to stop drinking the night before I started on Monday, and that had its benefits and it had its really downsides.

I believe I would faint dead away or start hallucinating if I tried that. But Booker mainly reported muscle cramps from dehydration.

A side benefit of Booker’s speech was to take arch-segregationist Strom Thurmond out of the record books. Thurmond’s previous record-holder was a 24-hour speech against a civil rights bill in 1957. Unlike Thurmond, who resorted to reading the phone book at one point, Booker remained on-topic and empassioned right up to the end.

That’s due largely to the changing times, I think. Thurmond was filibustering, so the time he took up was an end in itself. While Booker did interrupt the business of the Senate for 25 hours, there was no particular action he intended to delay. He was trying to build and hang onto a worldwide audience, an impossibility in 1957.

and Wisconsin voters’ rejection of Elon

A number of election were held Tuesday. The most significant was for a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Liberals achieved a 4-3 majority on the court two years ago, and had begun to undo a gerrymander that had put the Republican leadership of the legislature virtually beyond the reach of voters. Wisconsin’s congressional districts are similarly gerrymandered, so that the evenly divided state sends 6 Republicans and only 2 Democrats to the U. S. House. If the conservative had won, flipping the court to a 4-3 conservative majority, that gerrymander would likely have remained.

Elon Musk made himself a major issue in the election by contributing quantities of money variously reported in the $20-25 million range. His contributions were controversial and possibly illegal: He gave voters $100 each to sign a petition denouncing “activist judges”, and offered two million-dollar checks to voters who came to a rally he headlined in Green Bay. Musk claimed “the future of civilization” hung on the outcome of this election.

But apparently Wisconsin voters don’t want the richest many in the world choosing their judges: the Trump/Musk candidate lost 55%-45%.

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Tuesday’s other elections are harder to interpret. Two special elections for Florida congressional seats went to the Republicans, but only by about half the 30-point margin Trump had in those districts in November. Democrats may take encouragement from those elections — and Republicans whose districts were only +15 in November may get anxious — but a loss is still a loss.

and you also might be interested in …

Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia was granted protected status by an immigration judge in 2019, so the government has been specifically barred from sending him back to El Salvador, where he says he would be in danger. The government has claimed that he is in the infamous MS-13 gang, but has never presented evidence supporting that claim.

Nonetheless, Garcia got pulled over while driving on March 12 (his 5-year-old in the back seat) and was sent to the gulag in El Salvador where the administration has been dumping immigrants it doesn’t like. The government has acknowledged the mistake in court (and the lawyer who acknowledged this obvious fact has been put on leave).

[Judge Paula] Xinis on Sunday wrote in a legal opinion that allegations against Abrego were “vague” and “uncorroborated” –– and that in any case, he was under protected status.

“As defendants acknowledge, they had no legal authority to arrest him, no justification to detain him, and no grounds to send him to El Salvador — let alone deliver him into one of the most dangerous prisons in the Western Hemisphere,” she wrote.

She ordered him returned to the US by today, which the Trump administration is refusing to do while it appeals her order. Absurdly, they claim that Garcia is now out of their control, since they do not run El Salvador. If this claim is allowed, it puts a loophole in everyone‘s rights. Trump could arrest me or you, send us to El Salvador, and then claim it made a “mistake” that can’t be rectified.

In one featured post I covered how Fox News has played down the stock-market collapse. Here’s how Fox handled this story: Numerous Fox hosts have argued that Garcia is just one guy, and he’s an immigrant anyway, and Trump’s people claim (without evidence) he’s part of a criminal gang, so it doesn’t matter.

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It turns out there’s an internal reason why the Trump administration keeps running afoul of judges, and it has nothing to do with judicial bias.

In previous administrations (even Trump’s first administration), the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice has been powerful. Essentially, it’s been the executive branch’s internal Supreme Court, the ultimate within-the-administration authority on what the law says or allows. OLC reports are technical and sometimes secret, so they usually slide under most voters’ radar. But occasionally some have drawn attention, like during the Bush-43 administration when OLC came up with creative readings of the law to justify torture.

The head of OLC is a political appointee, so it’s not like OLC has ever been completely independent of the White House. For the most part, it’s going to give the president the most favorable opinion it can justify. Nonetheless, OLC is made up of lawyers who have certain professional standards. They don’t like being pushed to frame opinions so far out of line that judges will sanction administration lawyers who make those arguments in court.

That’s why it’s significant that the Trump administration has downgraded the OLC. Trump still has not named the OLC’s head, and the office has not vetted Trump’s executive orders for legality. It’s part of the larger pattern: No one should tell Trump that he can’t do what he wants to do, even if it’s illegal.

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This looks ominous:

The Pentagon has sent at least six B-2 bombers – 30% of the US Air Force’s stealth bomber fleet – to the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia, in what analysts have called a message to Iran as tensions once again flare in the Middle East. … Images taken by private satellite imaging company Planet Labs on Tuesday show the six US bombers on the tarmac on the island, as well as shelters that could possibly conceal others.

Maybe this is a ramping up of the campaign against the Houthis in Yemen, which the US attacked in mid-March. But it might be something else:

Trump has also been pushing Iran to make a deal over its nuclear capabilities, saying on March 19 that he would give Tehran two months to come to an agreement or face the consequences. There “are two ways Iran can be handled: militarily, or you make a deal.”

The Eyes Only blog adds this bit of interpretation:

the B-2 isn’t just any bomber. It’s the only US aircraft certified to carry the GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator, a 30,000-pound bunker-busting message written in steel and fire. That’s tailor-made for Iran’s deeply buried nuclear sites in places like Natanz and Fordow.

and let’s close with something useless

In addition to all the news-relevant topics I have to research to write this blog, you probably have no idea how much totally useless knowledge I accumulate along the way. This week I learned that the word ritzy derives from a man’s name: César Ritz was a Swiss businessman who founded the Ritz hotels, which became synonymous with luxury.

He opened The Ritz in Paris in 1898, and shortly afterward the upscale Carlton Hotel in London. The North American rights to the Ritz-Carlton brand was franchised to Albert Keller, who opened New York’s Ritz-Carlton Hotel in 1911.

The Ritz cracker appears to have no direct connection to either the hotels or César Ritz. In 1919, Nabisco bought Jackson Cracker company of Jackson, Michigan, which made a precursor of the Ritz. That cracker got rebranded as Ritz during the Depression, as part of a marketing plan to make it seem luxurious. (Apparently, in that less litigious age, the Ritz hotels didn’t sue.) The Ritz cracker also appears to be the first beneficiary of a movie marketing tie-in: Walt Disney included a box of Ritz crackers in Mickey’s Surprise Party in 1939. The Wikipedia article does not mention whether Walt got paid to do this.

Every time I open my phone to read the news, I kind of just stare at the wall for 10 minutes. It’s horrifying what they’re doing, not only to the trans community, but also to migrants, to communities of color, to so many marginalized communities that are being systematically targeted by the new administration and having protections revoked. It’s cartoonishly evil.

– Vivian Jenna Wilson, Elon Musk’s trans daughter

This week’s featured post is “Politics in the Attention Economy“.

This week everybody was talking about the rule of law

From the moment Trump took office, the big question has been whether his administration would obey court orders. We may be about to find out. Federal Judge James Boasberg ordered that the planes of Venezuelans being renditioned to El Salvador not take off, or be turned around if they had not yet landed. But prisoners were delivered to El Salvador all the same. Now he’s trying to get the government to tell him when exactly the planes took off and landed, and he’s being stonewalled. (More about that case below.)

Trump’s lawyers are claiming that they didn’t violate the court order, but their arguments are flimsy. Jack Goldsmith, the former head of George W. Bush’s Office of Legal Counsel inside the Justice Department, described the lawyers as “playing games that verge on defiance”. Goldsmith’s article is a good summary of the legal issues in the case.

Openly defying court orders — especially a Supreme Court order — is a clear line that would define Trump as an autocrat.

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There’s a fundamental fact about rights that I don’t think most Americans understand. I was writing about it during the Bush administration, when “enemy combatants” were being whisked away into military custody, and it comes up again now: If there is anybody who doesn’t have habeas corpus rights, then nobody has rights.

This comes up now because of the alleged Venezuelan gangsters that the Trump administration took off the streets and flew to a prison in El Salvador. Trump’s supporters want the debate to be about whether or not these are bad guys, as in “Why are you taking the side of immigrant gangsters who victimize law-abiding American citizens?”

And who knows? Maybe they are bad guys. (Or maybe not.) Maybe we are all safer because they’re locked up. But that’s not the most important issue here.

Imagine, just for a moment, that somebody scooped you up and put you on a plane to be imprisoned in El Salvador. Probably your first reaction to that suggestion is “That could never happen because I’m an American citizen. They couldn’t do that to me.”

And you’re right: They couldn’t do it legally. But what if your name wound up on a list either by mistake or because you have an enemy somewhere inside the Trump administration or because some ICE officer was too enthusiastic about rounding people up? What if you were put on that plane without a hearing, the way the supposed gang members were? When would you have had a chance to offer evidence that you are an American citizen?

If the answer is “never”, then yes, they can do it to you. Because who stops them?

Habeas corpus means that anybody who is imprisoned has a right to state their case to somebody who is (1) impartial between the prisoner and his accusers, and (2) has the power to order the prisoner’s release.

If there’s a loophole in habeas corpus, then anybody — literally anybody — can vanish down that hole.

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The Homeland Security Department is firing the people who worry about stuff like that: 100 people from three oversight offices have been let go.

“These offices have obstructed immigration enforcement by adding bureaucratic hurdles and undermining DHS’s mission,” DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement. “Rather than supporting law enforcement efforts, they often function as internal adversaries that slow down operations.“

That’s the problem in a nutshell: Inside the Trump administration, human rights like habeas corpus are “bureaucratic hurdles”. If the immigration enforcement people want to do something illegal, nobody should slow that operation down.

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The administration seems to be obeying court orders to rehire many of the government workers it fired. Some are returning to the job, some have been put on administrative leave, and others are still waiting to hear.

When a probationary worker goes from being fired to being on leave, that may not look like much of a victory. But the bureaucratic fiction behind the firing was that the workers were all fired “for cause”, which means they would be ineligible to collect unemployment benefits. So rather than being cut off from all income, they’re getting their regular paycheck again.

It’s worth pointing out that in the name of “government efficiency”, we’re paying people to stay home. Also, many of the contracts DOGE has cancelled will eventually have to be paid for. When all is said and done, I wonder if Musk isn’t costing taxpayers money rather than saving us money.

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Vox’ Ian Millhiser says that of the 132 lawsuits against the Trump administration, you should watch two: the ones about impoundment and birthright citizenship.

No competent lawyer, and certainly no reasonable judge, could conclude that Trump’s actions in either case are lawful. There is no serious debate about what the Constitution says about either issue. If the Court rules in favor of Trump in either case, it’s hard to imagine the justices offering any meaningful pushback to anything Trump wants to do.

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MAGA folks sometimes claim they have nothing against immigrants, just illegal immigrants. But why then is Trump shutting down avenues for legal immigration? Friday, DHS announced that (as of April 24) it is revoking the legal status of half a million Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans who came here as part of a Biden-administration humanitarian parole program. Participants had to have US sponsors. They were granted work permits and a two-year parole from deportation.

Like so many Trump actions, this order is needlessly cruel. These people did nothing wrong, trusted US government promises, and made plans accordingly. Many of them presumably have jobs and leases. Trump could have just waited for their two-year paroles expire. But no, they have a month to leave the country.

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Guardian columnist Nesrine Malik described “the imperial boomerang effect”:

[T]echniques developed to repress colonised territories and peoples will, in time, inevitably be deployed at home. Repressive policing, methods of detention and controlling dissent, forcing humans to produce goods and services for overlords in the metropolis, or even mass enslavement and killing: all “boomerang” back into that metropolis. First, they are used against those who are seen as inferior; then, they are deployed even against those citizens with full rights and privileges if they dare to question authority. In short, the remote other eventually becomes the intimate familiar.

and Social Security

Since my wife made more money in her career than I did, I am eligible for higher Social Security benefits as her survivor than on my own employment record. The system is swamped because the SSA is understaffed, so I had to spend a lot of time on hold when I applied over the phone in February. But at least I was home and able to do other things while I waited.

Thank God I got that done before the new rules kicked in:

The Social Security Administration (SSA) says it will no longer allow beneficiaries and those applying for Social Security to confirm their identity over the phone and will instead require that they do so online or in person at a local office to complete the application process.

Simultaneously, SSA is closing local offices and firing staff.

In 2023 about 119,000 people visited local Social Security offices daily to get help or receive services. The SSA announced plans last month to reduce its workforce by 12 percent, from about 57,000 employees to 50,000, and multiple offices have been closed in recent weeks, according to the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the office established by President Donald Trump to slash federal spending. … SSA staffing was already near a 50-year low when the agency initiated the planned reductions.

The Popular Information blog draws the obvious conclusion:

The combination of fewer workers, fewer offices, and a massive increase in the demand for in-person services could sabotage the Social Security system — effectively denying many Americans the benefits they are due.

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According to MAGA propaganda, Democrats are out of touch with ordinary Americans. Well, listen to this: Billionaire Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick suggests that the best way to find fraudsters in the Social Security system would be to just not send out checks some month.

Let’s say Social Security didn’t send out their checks this month. My mother-in-law, who is 94, she wouldn’t call and complain. She just wouldn’t. She’d think something got messed up, and she’ll get it next month. A fraudster always makes the loudest noise, screaming, yelling and complaining.

Elon [Musk] knows this by heart. Anyone who’s been in the payment system and the process system knows the easiest way to find a fraudster is to stop payments and listen. Because whoever screams is the one stealing!

Before Social Security, elderly Americans were more likely than any other age group to be living in poverty. (Elderly and disabled poverty are the most hopeless kinds, because your earning prospects are so low.) Now they are the least likely to be poor. That’s what Social Security has meant to America.

But if you’re a billionaire like Lutnick, or a centi-billionaire like Musk, you find it hard to imagine that a check not arriving some month might mean that you don’t get to eat, or that you might care enough about not eating that you might complain. Those are the kind of people who are running our country now.

and sabotaging the US tourism industry

Becky Burke from Wales was on a backpacking trip across North America when she was arrested by ICE and held for 19 days. Then she was taken to an airport in leg irons and sent home to the UK. Her crime? She did housework in exchange for a free room, which apparently broke the no-employment condition of her tourist visa.

How many tourist dollars does the US lose every time there’s a story like this?

Similar stories are being told by Germans.

Here’s another story, this time from a Canadian: Nathan Kalman-Lamb, a sociology professor at the University of New Brunswick. Having previously been denied entry to the US, he went through the bureaucratic steps necessary to be assured of admittance, which included an interview with someone from the State Department. This time he was detained for three hours and thoroughly searched, causing him to miss his flight.

Both times, Kalman-Lamb was coming to the US to promote his new book The End of College Football. Exploitation of college athletes has been his special focus in recent years.

Kalman-Lamb’s crime seems to be having opinions about Palestine and Israel. He signed a statement supporting a pro-Palestinian protest encampment at the University of Toronto (where he is an alum) and is a supporter of the movement to divest from Israel. (He has also written articles whose titles include words like gender and intersectionality.) His opinions have caused him to be fingered by the pro-Israel website Canary Mission as “pro-Hamas” and “antisemitic”.

Kalman-Lamb posted Friday:

Well, I have successfully made it in (and now, thank god, out) of the United States. Idk if/when I will be back—which is sad, because I love US folks.

Tourism has been a major industry in the US. Expect it to crater this year. The US is becoming known as a risky place to travel.

and you also might be interested in …

I think Jon Ossoff has the right Democratic message in this one-and-a-half minute clip.

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RFK Jr.’s war on vaccines has begun:

National Institutes of Health officials have urged scientists to remove all references to mRNA vaccine technology from their grant applications, two researchers said, in a move that signaled the agency might abandon a promising field of medical research. … The mRNA technology is under study at the NIH for prevention and treatment of infectious diseases, including flu and AIDS, and also cancer. It was deployed in the development of covid-19 vaccines credited with saving 3 million lives in the U.S. alone — an accomplishment President Donald Trump bragged about in his first term.

A scientist at a biomedical research center in Philadelphia wrote to a colleague, in an email reviewed by KFF Health News, that a project officer at NIH had “flagged our pending grant as having an mRNA vaccine component.”

“It’s still unclear whether mRNA vaccine grants will be canceled,” the scientist added.

In some ways RFK Jr. is worse than an ideologue; he’s a crank, the kind of amateur who thinks he’s smarter than the consensus of the scientific community. Anti-scientific ideas get into his head and no amount of evidence will get them out.

He has already cancelled research into vaccine hesitancy, i.e., public resistance to being vaccinated. It may cost countless lives every year and allow the resurgence of previously eradicated diseases like measles, which now has more than 300 cases in Texas alone. But to him it’s not a public health problem. Worse from his point of view, research would probably attribute much of the problem to disinformation-spreaders like Kennedy himself.

On the subject of cranks, I like this exchange from the 1967 version of Bedazzled.

Stanley Moon: You’re a nutcase! You’re a bleedin’ nutcase!
George Spiggott: They said the same of Jesus Christ, Freud, and Galileo.
Stanley Moon: They said it of a lot of nutcases too.

The Guardian examines vaccine hesitancy in one American city: Sarasota.

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I’ll let a WaPo editorial sum up the situation in Gaza:

In Gaza, a ceasefire deal that came into effect when Trump took office — and for which he took full credit — has effectively collapsed. With Israel and Hamas at a stalemate over whether to extend the ceasefire or move on to fresh talks on ending the conflict, Netanyahu has resumed a full-scale bombing of the enclave. More than 400 Palestinians were killed and hundreds of others were injured on Tuesday, one of the deadliest days of the war.

The official death toll in Gaza is now over 50,000.

The NYT documented the losses of the Abu Naser family, four generations of which lived in a single five-story apartment building in Gaza. 132 of them died in a single Israeli attack. The entire neighborhood is now rubble.

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At a time when DOGE is cancelling many government contracts, Elon Musk’s businesses are in line to get much bigger contracts than they’ve ever had before.

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The dismantling of the Department of Education has begun.

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Sunday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan jailed his most serious challenger in the next elections. Protesters across the country were met with substantial police violence. Over 1000 protesters have been arrested.

The day before, Saturday, Trump’s chief negotiator Steve Witkoff said this to Tucker Carlson:

the President had a great conversation with Erdogan a couple of days ago. Really transformational, I would describe it. I think it’s been underreported, to tell you the truth. … I think the President has a relationship with Erdogan and that’s going to be important. And there’s some good coming – just a lot of good, positive news coming out of Turkey right now as a result of that conversation. So I think you’ll see that in the reporting in the coming days.

I have to wonder if part of the conversation was “Go ahead. Crack down on the opposition.” Or if the current unrest is part of the “good news” Witkoff was expecting.

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Witkoff’s comments about Ukraine are also striking. Up front, he grants most of what Putin wants: Russia will get the parts of Ukraine it currently occupies. Ukraine will not join NATO. What Ukraine will get out of this deal is left vague. And he takes seriously the referendums Russia held in the occupied Ukrainian provinces, as if those were fair elections:

They’re Russian speaking. There have been referendums where the overwhelming majority of the people have indicated that they want to be under Russian rule.

He also promises to back down any time Putin threatens nuclear war, even if it means not getting a “fair deal” for Ukraine.

And while I think we have to get a fair deal for Ukraine, we cannot allow that country to drag us into World War Three.

And he completely ignores Putin’s rhetoric about Ukraine being an illegitimate country that has always been part of Russia.

TUCKER CARLSON: Do you think the Russians want to march across Europe?

STEVE WITKOFF: 100% not.

TUCKER CARLSON: Why would they want that? I wouldn’t want those countries. Like, why would they.

STEVE WITKOFF: First of all, why would they want to absorb Ukraine? For what purpose, exactly? They don’t need to absorb Ukraine. That would be like occupying Gaza. Why do the Israelis really want to occupy Gaza for the rest of their lives? They don’t. They want stability there they don’t want to deal with. But the Russians also have what they want. They’ve gotten—they’ve reclaimed these five regions. They have Crimea, and they’ve gotten what they want. So why do they need more?

I don’t know. After Chamberlain gave Hitler the Sudetenland at Munich, why did he need the rest of Czechoslovakia?

And the idea that Putin doesn’t want to reclaim dominance over Warsaw Pact countries like Estonia and Poland, what does Witkoff base that on? And “I wouldn’t want those countries”? How do Polish-Americans feel about that?

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Trump is using the power of government to extort concessions from non-government institutions: Columbia University and a major law firm are the latest trophies for Trump’s mantle. This is the Orban model from Hungary.

and let’s close with an opportunity

You still have until Sunday to enter the National Wildlife Federation’s annual photo contest. Here’s the second-place photo from the bird section of last year’s contest: a parakeet attacking a lizard.