Open Mic for the week of 2/10/2025
On this day in 1996, Gary Kasparov lost the first game of a six game match against Deep Blue.
There’s a phenomenon where someone writes an essay about this or that but someone else wants to discuss something that has not yet made it to the front page.
This is unfair to everybody involved. It’s unfair to the guy who wrote the original essay because, presumably, he wants to talk about his original essay. It’s unfair to the guy who wants to talk about his link because it looks like he’s trying to change the subject. It’s unfair to the people who go to the comments to read up on the thoughts of the commentariat for the original essay and now we’re talking about some other guy’s links.
So!
The intention is to have a new one of these every week. If you want to talk about a link, post it here! Or, heck, use it as an open thread.
And, if it rolls off, we’ll make a new one. With a preamble just like this one.
The Department of Justice just established the “Joint Task Force October 7“.
Among other things, it seeks the arrest and extradition of the Hamas leadership living abroad.
I was not aware that doing this was an option.
Oh, and it also targets Hamas supporters in the US (including those on college campuses).
Something about supporting terrorists, I guess.Report
The Justice Department targeting Americans for having political opinions? What could possibly go wrong.Report
Let’s split the difference: Only people on visas should be affected by laws against support for Hamas.Report
Ah yes, only admitting people with the right politics can’t go wrong either.Report
Maybe we could set up something like “intellectual diversity centers” making sure that *ALL* politics are welcome, not just the “right” ones.Report
Weird to see conservatives embracing DEI.Report
“Diversity” *WAS* the compromise position.Report
And of course, peoples without visas are NOT “subject to the jurisdiction of the USA”, as the Administration was repeatedly told us, so they have nothing to be concerned aboutReport
Maybe we could set up something so that undocumented tourists have the same rights as sovereign citizens.Report
We could call both “persons” and leave it at that;
We could write, for instance
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.Report
No, that only refers to members of a *MILITIA*.
Which undocumented tourists aren’t.Report
I was told in my citizenship test that “a well ordered militia” was some inkblot on the original text, and had no significance.Report
Well, if we agree that the constitution has inkblots all over it, we don’t have a problem at all.Report
Musk is tweeting out that DOGE found that FEMA payments are still being made to house undocumented tourists in NYC in contravention of the law.
The guy running FEMA tweeted out that these payments have now been stopped and “Personnel will be held accountable”.
There’s an interesting follow-up: “@USCongress should have never passed bills in 2023 and 2024 asking FEMA to do this work. This stops now.”
And *THAT* makes me wonder: Wait, there were laws passed to do this? What is the exact wording of the laws?
Because if the law says “paying for housing for undocumented tourists”, that money still goes to pay for housing for undocumented tourists. At best, it can be redirected to the detainment centers fixing to remigrate the tourists back to their home countries.Report
So it was in contravention of the law, and also Congress made a mistake passing bills requiring it?Report
If this is anything like other Illegal Actions By The Government it’ll turn out to be “the law required that the disbursing organization file a form KX-3902B and have it fully approved before any funds were disbursed, and we’ve found a form was only provisionally approved at the time of review, which is clearly a violation of the law!”Report
4 Employees at DHS are being terminated for making these payments.
Huh.
Didn’t know that that was an option.Report
The four employees include Mary Comans, the CFO of FEMA.Report
The Dept. of Homeland Security’s Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin has tweeted out:
Report
Check out the latest polls. A new Pew poll has Trump’s approval ratings at -4.Report
Freddie, raising rabble:
Hayes is the host of a show on MSNBC, while Blitzer is a staff writer at The New Yorker. I say this as neutrally as I can – this is, correspondingly, as clear of a dispatch from elite establishment liberalism as you could ever find. And the conversation, to me, is deeply frustrating. It reflects the inability of contemporary liberals to embed moral reasoning in a broader framework of feasibility, legal defensibility, political sense, and simple pragmatism.
[…]
Who’s going to re-build Los Angeles? Undocumented labor, that’s who:
If [the elite establishment liberalism] express this just slightly differently, you can see that it’s exceptionally racist. “You know what would be great? If we let a bunch of people of color into our country and have them do hard, dangerous, demeaning jobs. And get this! We’re going to sneak them in secretly, so they won’t be protected by minimum wage laws, OSHA, regulations on work hours and overtime, and all manner of other labor protections. And most of them are going to be paying into Medicare and Social Security but won’t ever be able to practically draw from those programs that they’ve contributed to. They’ll also be constantly subject to personal, economic, and sexual exploitation because they won’t be able to call the police due to their undocumented status.
And that’s from an ‘Open Borders’ guy… no wonder everyone hates him.Report
I don’t think Freddie is wrong in the abstract but I do think he’s wrong about the actual beliefs that lead to what I think is fairly called total intellectual dishonesty.
My take is that progressives like Hayes and Blitzer on some level believe that immigration is a human right exercised by immigrants themselves, whatever the particulars of the legal regime they are (or more pertinent, are not) following. From this perspective answering no to anyone who wants entry is itself a violation of those human rights. They’re just also smart enough to understand that this framing is incredibly radical and would never be acceptable to the wider electorate, and so they pivot to neoliberal economic arguments as a sort of red herring.Report
Not sure what makes the existing Neo-Liberal regime of exploiting labor a red herring though. Seems like an ordinarily colored herring.Report
I see it as a red herring because it is a way to defend mass unskilled immigration without arguing their implicit but unstated actual position, which is about human rights trumping parochial and/or nationalistic concerns, not really about economics at all. I think their position on the subject would be what it is no matter what the economists (or the Economist) says.
Edit to add, I’m sure Larry Summers actually does hold the ‘neoliberal’ position on the merits, but I do not think thats the case for name your progressive pundit.Report
Ok, it’s probably me not aligning the subject, verb, objects here… are we saying that when people like Chris Hayes invoke ‘unprotected’ labor to do things he’s being disingenuous so that normie libs will cheer-on exploited labor in the name of cheap strawberries and back-breaking work?
And Freddie is being intellectually dishonest for calling that out?
That’s how I’m reading it and it doesn’t quite compute, so where am I off track?Report
Probably my fault for not explaining my thoughts well. They go something like this:
-Hayes et al are not moved by any of the economic arguments in play re: immigration.
-For them it isn’t about GDP or growth or full employment or prices of goods and services (or jobs “Americans won’t do”).
-What they do believe in is a universal rights ideal that anyone can immigrate anywhere and it is the host country’s obligation to accommodate.
-This is probably bolstered by attitudes about what the developed world, Westerners, white people, whoever, owe to the denizens of poorer countries.
-To the extent any exploitation or other moral issues arise from how immigration plays out in practice, their answer is to make every entrant a citizen and/or provide legal status allowing them to benefit from all protections.
-However, they also know that this position is a total non-starter politically.
-Instead they argue for immigration from a perspective of neoliberal economics as a means of winning the argument without actually owning or making the case for their true position.
-This is what causes the weird tension that Freddie is picking up on, and that renders their arguments nonsensical to anyone paying even a little bit of attention to the larger political context and partisan divides.
-Freddie’s mistake is taking the argument Hayes et al are making at face value.
-To me it’s obvious that they really care about all the mushy stuff, not about having people to work at illegally low wages rebuilding LA.Report
I only skimmed the Freddie piece, so I don’t know if that part is fair, but with the rest, I agree, and what’s strange about it is that the economic arguments for immigration never work politically, and are even less likely than usual to work in this moment of populism and nationalism.
I sometimes wonder why people don’t use historical arguments, which can be pretty easily couched in the sorts of language that populists and nationalists love. Basically, why not just point out that for much of this country’s history, the borders were effectively open, and immigrants, who make up most of our ancestors, came in droves, and helped to build this country into an economic and military powerhouse. Ethical arguments generally have little political force, at least in this country, so it would make little sense to make pro-immigration arguments on those grounds, but one could argue in today’s political parlance that immigrants helped to make America great, and in a world of increasing global competition, if we want to make America great again, we are going to need as many people as we can get.Report
I think having the discussion on those kinds of terms would be more productive. Yglesias has his One Billion Americans book that I have not read but as I understand it makes some arguments in that direction.
What it inevitably runs into though is that in the age of jet travel hundreds of millions of people could be here in a relative blink of an eye. Even our own, relatively open door past of mass immigration is not a parallel for what that might look like.
Nevertheless I’d take the honesty of that kind of conversation over what we have today.Report
I thought that Freddie article paired very interestingly with what I could see of his article where he talks about how progressives (himself included) need to accept that they have to take an L on the immigration subject.Report
The issue is that a “neoliberal economics” argument assumes that all the labor involved is trading on the same terms, and (as Freddie points out) this is not the case for nondocumented immigration into the USA.Report
Agreed. That’s where your green card at the border suggestion comes in, and where the total unwillingness to accept that sort of arrangement from the wider electorate follows.Report
He’s got the same idea that I do — which is that they should just be handing out Green Cards at the Tijuana border stop, meaning that all those people coming in to work can file wage-theft lawsuits, file OSHA complaints, sign up for welfare, call the cops when needed…a few years of that and suddenly we’ll find that Americans aren’t such bad hires after all. (Or, more likely, there’ll be fewer jobs overall but a lot fancier machines to do the work.)Report
Good point; could do that. Lots of new and different consequences.
“That’s why Bernie Sanders used to be a pretty passionate immigration restrictionist, because of the way that undocumented labor undermines the fight for better labor conditions.”Report
You’ll lose your ardor for better labor conditions when the price of clothing goes up!Report
Heh, how I long to remove the hidden thumbs on food production that the NeoLibs pretend are for ‘farmers’.Report
Correct me if I’m wrong but weren’t the thumbs on the agriculture side conservatives pretending the subsidies were for “farmers” while the Neolibs were on the other side of that deal pushing food stamps (which actually do go to hungry poor people)?Report
Bush the Lesser, of all people, proposed (a lot of) migrant workers visas, for a period of X months every year, so workers could come and take temporary jobs in agriculture, construction, etc. . They would come without their families (minimizing the services costs), and would leave every year at the end of their visa, returning the following year, when work would be again available. The GOP killed the idea faster than an AK-47 shot bullet.
The undocumented workers didn’t want to move permanently to the USA. They wanted to make enough money to support their families back home, to go back to them in the low season, and to retire back home. That system worked for decades.
Until it worked no more. It became too difficult, too expensive, too dangerous, to come and go. The yearly migration became a permanent move. Families no longer could stay back, so they too moved to the USA, requiring schools, hospitals, services.
And once the whole family was in the USA, and children grew here, there was no reason to go back, and nowhere and no one to return to. Twenty years ago, W wanted to implement a win-win-win solution. But he couldn’t, and here we areReport
In the 90s, that’s how our restaurant workers did it. We had them for six months at a time. They lived 8 to a two-bedroom and they hot bunked it and used castoff televisions for entertainment and only needed a little bit of the devil’s lettuce to get them through their days off.
The only Americans willing to work for the same wages were alcoholics and ex-felons.Report
Was there supposed to be a link?Report
There was… but I’m oppressed here without a proper click-button com-box for link formatting.
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/we-have-to-take-some-kind-of-an-lReport
Pretty sure it was this one.Report
Thom Hartmann adds grist to the Power Play mill.
https://open.substack.com/pub/thomhartmann/p/the-supreme-court-is-corrupt-congress-87a?r=v677&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=emailReport
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/blue-state-law-red-state-law
I only knew knew about Britt’s velvet pushback because of a tip from a TPM Reader. I’m pretty confident there are similar reports from other Senators and representatives in similar positions. As Philip Bump notes here, NIH funding in red states is more likely to go to colleges and universities than in blue states. But it’s the pattern I want to highlight: blue states going to the courts and red states (or at least their political stakeholders) trying to work directly with the administration. As I said, I don’t think this will survive as an across the board policy. There are too many pro-Trump or Trump-adjacent stakeholders affected. But it’s a view toward a different kind of politics or state we could be heading toward: cash and prizes for supporters and nothing for opponents.
There are different and important permutations to this model. We start with cash and prizes for red states and nothing for blue states. But if institutions in blue states declare their love for Trump maybe something can be worked out. These are powerful inducements for political subservience and compliance. I had a number of knowledgable observers tell me last night that that was the obvious next step.
We’ll have to see where and how this plays out. My understanding is that there are both strong administrative law arguments against this and, in addition to that, an additional statute forbidding it which I’m told was put in place after Trump tried something similar in his first term. Of course, the administration’s global strategy seems to be that laws restricting his use of his executive powers are all unconstitutional. This amounts to saying that the opponents have a strong case on the law, even with right-wing judges. But we need to see if the law still matters.Report
Chuck Schumer is a coward.
https://www.salon.com/2025/02/10/schumer-signals-that-senate-democrats-will-collaborate-with-to-avoid-government-shutdown/?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR2fGcAhQDdeypzxNj1sh5oneDzC404D6kV3IMBGkkuedFgzMLu9DQIkcTw_aem_XCIHIRKxwdb7IV2K5dAH4wReport
What about Mitch McConnell?!? Why don’t you ever complain about him?!?Report
I did. A lot. He’s a coward as well. As is John Thune who replaced him. But I do t expect Thune to buck the system that made him appear powerful. I expect better from my own team.Report
Trump wants to kill Medical Research: https://jabberwocking.com/trump-wants-to-wipe-out-medical-research/Report
The American Prospect digs deep: What Trump Could Learn From Hitler on NIH Funding.Report
Judge McConnell ruled that Trump Admin is defying its order: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/10/us/trump-unfreezing-federal-grants-judge-ruling.html
We are in a very bad placeReport
We are.Report
Around 40% of Americans think this is the bee’s knees.Report
New polls! Right Direction vs. Wrong Track has Wrong Track up 3%!Report
2/10 – Trump approve = +9 and +8
2/9 – Direction of Country = Wrong +3
2/4 – Direction of Country = Wrong +10
2/2 – Direction of Country = Wrong +3
1/29 – Direction of Country = Right +4
Biden’s last approval 1/19 – Direction of Country = Wrong +51 and Wrong +29
Biden’s last of 2024 – Direction of Country = Wrong +27
Seems President Trump is doing much better by the people’s opinion.Report
About 40% of Americans thought Trump dispensed reasonable medical advice when he said people should put disinfectant into their bloodstreams.Report
And it’s getting worse:
https://www.newsweek.com/judge-paul-engelmayer-faces-impeachment-blockings-musks-doge-2029461Report
Scoop: FBI finds secret JFK assassination records after Trump order.
I still can’t find a copy of the plan, though. I can find multiple reports of the plan having been delivered! Just nothing with the details of the plan.Report
Someone needs to keep Skinner distracted so we can bust into his office and sneak a peak at those documents.Report
The discovery of an additional couple thousand records that were never provided to a board before is just an additional conspiracy smorgasbord.
Were the documents deliberately withheld?
Are they faked and the FBI has been working with AI on creating them furiously since the hangover wore off back in November?
Was it just an oh-gosh-silly-us mistake?
If it was that last one, that info had best never get out to the public. That’s information that could cause harm to our national security.Report
Is there any timeline on when/if something substantive will be released?
I’m dying to yell ‘we’re through the looking glass here,people..’ at everyone I know.Report
I’m pulling my beard out trying to find *ANYTHING* substantive on that.
The only thing I’ve found is something saying that the 2,400 records’ existence was announced passingly in the plan itself… WHICH I CAN’T FIND A COPY OF.
Jeez louise. We need to have somebody FOIA the dang plan.Report
From a box mysteriously labeled: CIA Grassy Knoll site survey.Report
Here’s their front: https://www.superevilgeniuscorp.com/Report
Trump doubles down on permanently exiling Palestinians from Gaza: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/10/world/middleeast/trump-gaza-us-takeover.html
Is it worth it Jaybird?Report
October 7th?
I’d say that it obviously wasn’t.
Do you think that it was worth it?Report
Game recognizes game: Trump drops Eric Adams corruption probe: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/10/nyregion/eric-adams-charges-doj-trump.htmlReport
To the surprise of no one with half a brain cell, Hamas decides to stop the hostage release despite Israel releasing hundreds of Palestinians for small numbers of Israeli Jews released by Hamas. Hamas has also tortured and starved their hostages while Palestinians are being released to Israel in full health. Fish Hamas:
https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/10/middleeast/hamas-says-postponing-next-hostage-release-intl/index.htmlReport
Apparently, the fact that Americans are among the hostages has Trump upset. So he’s said that Hamas has a deadline by noon on Saturday and if the hostages aren’t all released by then “all hell is going to break out”.
Did he even listen to Garth Brooks singing “Imagine” at Jimmy Carter’s funeral?Report
Trump’s idiocy about Gaza is going to do nobody any good. Not the Palestinians, not Israelis, not Americans, and not Jews world wide. It will just put millions of people in great danger.
At the same time I don’t understand the strategy of the Palestinians or their allies anymore. Even before Israel existed, the Palestinians pursued a strategy of “if we are violent enough, all the cowardly Jews will go away or if we cry enough some group will take all the Jews away.” This didn’t work in 1929 when there were only 150,000 Jews in Eretz Israel and it didn’t work on 10/7/23 when there were over 7 million Jews in Eretz Israel and it was an affluent country with the best army and intelligence services in the region and a lot of social cohesion.
Yet, despite following the same losing strategy for nearly a century, the Palestinians and their allies adhere hard to it. Every defeat just causes them to double down and increase waving their flags with stores in SF boasting about selling “authentic Palestinian olive oil.” There seems to be a real psychological need among the Palestinians and their allies that Israel be defeated with keyboard warriors boasting that the Jews will be allowed to remain if contrite enough. The entire thing is so delusional and ludicrous, I don’t know how to respond to it. They definitely don’t want to admit that Israel is here to stay or that Jews have a right to self-determination even as Israel and Saudi Arabia normalize relations.Report
If you’ve got God on your side, you can’t lose.
It’s gonna turn the corner any minute now. We just have to be faithful.Report
For the Islamists, that is definitely the case. Even for the more secular ones, I think they are still shell shocked because they lost to the Jews repeatedly. “Lose to the Jews, who loses to the Jews?”Report
Anatoly Karpov?Report
This will prove to be the least surprising bit of news for the entirety of DJT’s 2nd term: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-office-of-government-ethics-director/Report
There were a bunch of ICE raids in Aurora, Colorado and LA the other day that were leaked before they happened. This resulted in, of course, less effective raids.
Homan said on one of the morning shows that they’ve found the leaker and the leaker will be charged with a crime.
His guess is that the leak has FBI ties.
Which means that this will get *REALLY* interesting.Report
Out of curiosity, it seems to me that “The Resistance” is less deft this time around. 2025 seems to be fumbling and flailing about compared to what was possible in 2017.
Anybody else seeing this?Report
I think they finally figured out that no matter how hard they try, they are not going to get an election do-over that results in Hillary Clinton winning.Report
Trump played mostly by the rules in 2017. This time they’re playing a completely different game. The resistance looks much better when they sue, get an injunction, and the administration follows it. This time Trump’s saying publicly that they’re just not going to conform when the courts rule against them.Report
2016 was a very different election than 2016- “the Resistance” was driven by a rising tide of the new identarianism that likely peaked in 2020 and has been slowly subsiding. 2024 blew a huge hole in a lot of that identarianisms core conceits and the 2024 election was a very different bird from the 2016 one so the component elements and assumptions are very different. There’s a lot more intra-Dem and intra-Left arguing this time around for one thing. It’s probably going to be healthy in the mid to long run but it’s going to be uncoordinated in the short run.Report
Things are changing quickly. Josh Marshall also argues Resistance in 2016 was quite different than what people remember: https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/gaming-out-going-head-to-head-with-the-trumpist-scourge
“The Resistance” is a specific word about a specific time and it is one mainstream discourse has already significantly made a pejorative, not in every case for bad reasons. But why the difference between Trump’s first term and this one? Some of it certainly is just a deep demoralization coming out of the 2024 election. But the fundamental reason is that at a very basic level most people thought Trump’s first election was an accident, and not just Democrats. Most of Trump’s own party was fundamentally hostile to him, though they were happy to make use of him to pass favored legislation. Part of this was the pure shock of the event. Part of it was that Trump lost the popular vote by a significant margin, the first time since 2000. He also just scraped by in the critical northern swing states. Then just after the election, information began to emerge about Russia’s interference in the election and Trump’s connivance in that interference.
At a very basic level, Trump’s victory seemed not just bad or in some sense unfair but an accident. Because it seemed like an accident, there was a perception that mass protests, mass delegitimizing of his presidency might simply break it. Maybe it would all just fall apart and he’d resign. That, in many ways, was the premise behind the mobilization around airports in the first days of his presidency, the Women’s March and more.
I am absolutely not criticizing these efforts. I’m trying to place them in a particular time and with a particular set of assumptions. The 2024 election was very, very different. It’s wrong to say that people voted for every last thing that is happening now or whatever he happened to say at one point or another on the campaign trail. That’s not how voting works. At least a quarter of the electorate votes with only the vaguest sense of what each candidate is proposing. But it is certainly true that almost everyone had a general sense of what kind of person Trump was and what kind of president he’d be. He’d already been president, after all. What’s more, the entire campaign had been run with the clear understanding that Trump winning was a very real possibility. So people couldn’t vote for him thinking it was a throwaway vote with no consequence. He didn’t just slip through. It was a very close election. But he won a plurality if not a majority of the vote and he reclaimed the industrial midwest.
This led not only to a profound demoralization that Democrats are only now emerging from. It also made his presidency seem far less fragile than it had seemed when it was perceived as (and to some degree was) an accident eight years ago. The logic of mass demonstrations and other kinds of performative resistance just doesn’t play the same way. People are also in the midst, very much the targets of, a far-ranging shock and awe campaign from which they are only now after a couple weeks recovering their wits. So some of the difference people are noting isn’t just demoralization or giving up. It’s a rational response to a different set of circumstances. A few big hits won’t end this. This is for the long haul.
There are various things about the Trump I resistance that now seem dated, ephemeral or even cringe. But things evolve. We can look back at those things and learn from the excesses and areas of wasted energy. But we shouldn’t give in to the shallow cynicism that looks on the opponents of Trumpism as somehow more discreditable than Trumpism itself. The situation is different so it calls for different tools and strategies. There’s nothing wrong with that. Some of the Democratic torpor of the first weeks of the second Trump presidency is just what it seems like: demoralization, some people wanting to simply check out. But it is also (and I expect increasingly so over time) an accurate perception that everyone is now in this for the long haul. None of this will be quickly shortcircuited and endurance and canniness are as important as aggression or display.Report
The NYC DSA is running an ad on behalf of Zohran Mamdani that addresses some of the issues raised by Chuck Schumer and the new head of the DNC, Ken Martin.
Report
It’s cute, but someday they’re gonna realize they can’t do anything through the Democratic Party, and then they can actually build something.Report
Is everyone ready for Red, White, and BluelandReport
Should anyone care to read it the EO reducing the federal workforce is out. Of note, agencies not “required” by statute will be prioritized. Know what doesn’t have an authorizing statue or organic act? NOAA. The Weather service does and the fisheries service does, but despite numerous attempts the rest of NOAA does not.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/implementing-the-presidents-department-of-government-efficiency-workforce-optimization-initiative/Report
Jill Stein’s campaign manger attempts to argue that Harris would have been worse than Trump:
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/e3d2d63332c3c62a66ec49797b18aa7ab325c7a7af16a35758f5232c68668863.jpgReport
At the very least, Musk is Co-Counsel of the U.S. GovernmentReport
Say what you will about Joe Biden, he didn’t need help.Report
LOL, you don’t need help when you are doing nothing.
Or maybe all he had was help since he did nothing and everyone else ran the Federal government while he sipped tea in a ricking chair.Report
Who likes Google Trends? I know I do. If you check Google Trends for “Criminal Defense Lawyer“, you’ll see that Warshington DC has 3 times as many googles for it as the next closest region in the country (which is… Nebraska? What the hell, Nebraska…).Report
Vince McMahon escapes the figure four leg lock:
https://www.aol.com/news/feds-drop-criminal-probe-whether-120000591.htmlReport
The House reconciliation package is out. $2 trillion in cuts. Which means earned benefits getting hit.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/house-gop-releases-budget-calling-trillions-cuts-taxes-spending-rcna191215?Report
‘
In January 2024, Nancy Pelosi suggested that the Pro-Palestinian protestors were receiving Russian and Chinese money and wanted the FBI to investigate. This was ignored at the time. Considering that the protestors have been really silent since Trump took over, especially in the light of Trump’s Gaza announcement, Pelosi might have been on to something:
https://time.com/6589923/nancy-pelosi-pro-palestinian-protests-foreign-influence-russia-china/Report
Why should they keep protesting? They got what they wanted; the Democrats were punished for their failure to stop Israel turning Gaza into rubble.Report
Heh. Good point.Report
…do we really want to normalize “these protests are due to invisible funding” even as Literally Lucius Malfoy is ripping apart USAID?Report
An awesome thread right here that talks about how “there are ~five~ different factions in the Democratic Party vying for power. None of them are dominant, all of them are unsure how to move forward.”
He goes on to talk about the:
Establishment Democrats (Woke Capitalism)
Moderates (New Democrats… Neolibs who want Capitalism to fuel social programs, but not woke ones)
Progressives
DSA Democrats
Blue Dog DemocratsReport
Marshall correctly points out that Trump has effectively turned himself into the Mayor of New York with his pardon of Adams: https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/donald-trump-is-now-the-mayor-of-new-york
“The letter from Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove states explicitly that DOJ will review the matter again after the November mayoral election and decide then whether to reinstate the charges.
So think what this means. Adams isn’t off the hook. He’s essentially been given 10 months to perform for his freedom. Perform for Donald Trump. Indeed, Bove said explicitly that one of the reasons Adams shouldn’t have been charged is that being on trial takes Adams’ focus away from helping Donald Trump with mass deportations out of New York City. (Again, they’re refreshingly candid about why this is happening.) And news just broke that Adams will be meeting tomorrow with Trump border “czar” Tom Homan. Homan says he hopes to “reach an agreement where his officers will help my officers.”
I wonder if Adams will drive a hard bargain.”Report
Unless he lucks into a crowded field of candidates with minuscule name recognition (Andrew Cuomo is licking his chops), this deal will guarantee that Adams loses. Then what?Report
Depends on how he does in the next ten months perhaps or he quicky discovers that the leopards ate his face too.Report
Co-President Musk is apparently ordering the GSA to sell or to look into selling hundreds of Federal Buildings including buildings that hold Senate offices.
Make of this what you will but Senate Republicans have been letting the leopards eat their faces for a while now.Report
A Greek member of the EU’s Parliament sent a formal letter to Elon Musk asking if there were any USAID funds used on migrants to Greece.
Is it really a good idea to make public that these funds were used?
Shouldn’t this be done behind closed doors or something?Report
REPORTER: Right, but every “peace talk” so far has been about what Ukraine has to give up—territory, NATO aspirations, sovereignty. So what exactly is Putin putting on the table?
HEGSETH: Well, I don’t think it’s fair to say we’re just handing Putin concessions.
REPORTER: Okay, so is he withdrawing troops? Paying reparations? Admitting war crimes? Or is his big “compromise” just taking less of Ukraine than he originally wanted?
HEGSETH: Look, negotiations require both sides to make sacrifices.
REPORTER: Yeah, but only one side started a full-scale invasion. If a guy steals your house and offers to return half of your living room, that’s not a “compromise”—that’s a hostage deal.
HEGSETH: I just think it’s time for diplomacy.
REPORTER: Diplomacy is great when both sides want peace. But when one side just wants a “pause” to reload, that’s not diplomacy—it’s a setup for the next invasion.
HEGSETH: So you’re saying no negotiations, just endless war?
REPORTER: No, I’m saying a peace deal where only one side makes sacrifices isn’t peace—it’s surrender with better branding.Report
If there’s a deal on the table my guess is that it’s something like Russia keeps most of what it’s taken, with some swaps for the areas of Russia it’s occupying, Ukraine gets guaranteed massive arms imports, training, and logistical support from the West, sufficient to create it’s own credible deterrent against future Russian incursions. NATO is almost certainly out of the equation if it ever was to begin with.Report
Once Gaza becomes Florida East, maybe we can change Ukraine to Gaza II.Report
There’s probably already enough scammers in that godforsaken corner of the world without subjecting them to that.Report
Good idea – the more Gazas there are, the harder it will be to figure out who exactly we’re giving all those condoms to.Report
“Please sign this petition in support of Gaza!”
“Which one?”
“The Animal Rights one.”
“Oh, no thanks. I was hoping it’d be the Environmental Justice Gaza.”Report
That’s not the deal on the table. The deal on the table is
“Hey Ukraine, fold and give up, and also give us your Rare Earth Metals.”
I’m not why sure people still feel the need to give Trump the benefit of the doubt at times.Report
Today in Orbanification:
1. The acting U.S. Attorney for the S.D.N.Y resigned rather than drop the case against Eric Adams. She is a Federalist Society member in good standing and a former Scalia clerk so she is not exactly a raging liberal.
2. The Acting Deputy A.G. placed all the attorneys from S.D.N.Y. involved in the Adams case on administrative leave: https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/b0b3aaa32bd6fcd0508845e489c904650d13a06cbb56a39f5b1e9622ec2f0808.pngReport
I was planning on mentioning earlier today, but got busy, that it was weird was that the Manhattan US attorney’s office had not dropped charges against Eric Adams, despite being told to do so Monday and that is fairy trivial paperwork , and the media had not noticed and acted like it had been done. Someone pointed this out on Blue Sky, that the only real reason it would take so long it there was pushback.
Well, there was: https://apnews.com/article/new-york-city-us-attorney-0395055315864924a3a5cc9a808f76fd
It’s worth pointing out the reason the Justice Department gave in their memo was:
To start with, ‘so he can campaign for months for reelection without criminal charges’ is nonsense. We’re four months out from the primary, not the election, and the charges were filed September 26, 2024, so eight months from the primary. And the actual election is November 4, 2025. So they were filed slightly over a year out.
Soon we will reach the point where you can literally never be charged with a crime if you plan to run for office, ever.
Secondly…yeah, um, ‘helping on an immigration crackdown’ is not a valid reason for people to get away with corruption. That reason is, itself, blatantly corrupt. Whether or not someone is ‘helpful’ to the administration should have no bearing on whether or not they are criminally prosecuted for crimes they did.
I mean, we all know they’re doing that, but the Justice Department just out and _said_ it in the memo.
So the US Attorney just…refused to do it. And has now resigned.
Meanwhile, I’ve had people point out the courts probably will not approve dropping the case without prejudice anyway. They will not be happy with the explicit statement that Adams’ trial is delayed _only as long as he is helping the administration_. If they do allow it to be dropped (Which they do not), they will certainly require it to be dropped with prejudice so it cannot be filed again if he stops helping them. Because courts are often against *checks notes* literal criminal extortion.
—
It’s going to be interesting to watch how the court system and professional lawyers react to the current administration’s ineptness. Like just blatantly saying the illegal stuff in a memo.
For another example, the Justice Department has filed an idiotic lawsuit against New York that is going to be laughed out of court, asserting that somehow New York is endangering Federal immigration officials by not turning over driver’s license data to the Federal government. The lawsuit, hilariously, claims that Federal law trumps state law, a thing that is true and might be more relevant if there _was_ a law requiring that data be turned over. There is not.
The last time Trump was in office, his idiotic lawsuit gibberish hadn’t really started, and didn’t infect the Justice Department. This time, it has, with cases that are just as grounded as his election cases, with legal theories that are completely insane. And he’s brought in lawyers willing to do them.
Did you all know there’s not legally a reason the courts couldn’t declare the DoJ a vexatious litigant and thus requires the court’s approval before DoJ file lawsuits in Federal court? You’d think logically that shouldn’t be possible, but there ain’t no exception for ‘You cannot do this to actual Federal Department of Justice’ in the vexatious litigant rules.Report
Trump’s DOJ is having a very hard time trying to find someone to dismiss the Adams’ case: https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/defiance-in-new-york
Trump is having a hard time finding someone who will dismiss this case: Since I wrote this initial post things have moved fast. After Sassoon resigned they moved on to the head of the Public Integrity Section in DC. He refused/resigned. Then they went to the head of the Criminal Division. He refused/resigned. Bove himself may end up doing this. Worth noting that these are all “actings” — that’s generally someone you choose from the staff to run things while your nominees move through the confirmation process. So these would appear all to be people the Trump politicals chose or were at least comfortable with letting take over on an acting basis.Report
Since the “Dork in the Road” deferred “resignation” email got nowhere near 5% to 10% of the federal workforce to leave, firings started yesterday. While an exact count is not yet available, agencies are working to fire close to 200,000 probationary federal employees who are less then two years in as Feds. While easier to fire they still must be dismissed for cause which is usually performance related. This includes seasonal wildland firefighters in the Forrest Service and a significant number of staff at OPM.Report
OPM folks were reportedly told they were being fired for not taking the deferred resignation.Report
A couple people I’ve worked with over the last few years got laid off at the Department of Ed. Only one of them was probationary. Trump has said he wants to eliminate that agency, so I assume the handful of other people I know who work there will suffer the same fate soon.Report
My theory on all this is that Elon is legitimately so stupid, and Trump legitimately just believes everything he’s told, that they believed that they were going to be some huge examples of actual fraud they could point at, like government employees just writing checks to themselves or their spouses or things like that.
They assume that they’d find this almost instantly, because this is how they would operate. And this is the sort of stuff that does happen at local government levels.
But it’s not really the sort of stuff that happens at the higher levels, in fact they can’t happen like that. And they haven’t found the stuff they thought they were going to immediately find.
This is why they have to keep inventing things like Politico and I assume everyone has heard about the Reuters ‘social deception’ story by now and what it actually was about? (I kept waiting for that to hit this site, but I guess people were smart enough not to buy it? To spend 10 seconds googling it before posting about it? I admit I am surprised.)
Which, should be pointed out, are not examples of fraud or corruption, even if they had been as presented. So at best we’re quibbling over microscopic amounts of government spending that were properly authorized. Which does not sound important enough to upend the entire government.
And I also think they actually believed that a huge amount of government employees would take the buyout because a huge amount of them were functionally criminals, grifting the system, and would want out before being caught.
Again, projection. I cannot emphasize enough how much this is how they literally think and operate.
That’s why this isn’t going particularly well for them, and they’re being forced to lie about what they find and just start firing people. But it’s not how they expected things to go.Report
They expected 10% to take the buyout. They got 3.75%. And considering how much of the dismantling appears to be following Project 2025 this is just what’s next.Report
And even that 3.75% is misleadingly high. That number is, statistically, _below_ 0%.
How? They got 3.75% retirement in a workforce, over a span of 75% of the year (From now until September), that has a yearly turnover of 6%.
To repeat, they just had 3.75% of the workforce resign in a way that gets them paid until September, a time period over which 4.5% of them were going to resign anyway.
And those people, uh, wouldn’t have gotten paid for several months after resigning. Or would have worked for several more months. One or the other.
This has produced _negative_ savings.
(Presumably, that last 0.75% just haven’t _decided_ they are resigning yet.)Report
References to trans people have been removed from the National Parks Service web page abut Stonewall. It was done fairly ineptly and in real time, as Blue Sky noticed, with ‘gay and trans people’ ending up saying things like ‘gay and people’ and stuff like that, and LGBTQ being edited to LGBQ, before whoever realizing how dumb that was and editing that down to ‘LGB’, which is not a thing, and then making another pass to get rid of the word ‘queer’ in general.
It’s unclear if this was the National Parks Service or some intern with write access to the website.
What makes this worse is, for the record: The riot at Stonewall was not technically over homosexuality laws, but gender policing. While homosexual _sex_ was illegal, that, uh, was pretty hard to police at a bar where people were not having sex, so the police were actually looking for people violating ‘crossdresser’ laws (1) and wearing clothing that did not match their sex…which the police sometimes found hard to determine so would forcibly check genitalia.
So now the government is officially leaving trans people out…when the arrests were literally about gender and the riot was started by Stormé DeLarverie(2), who was being arrested for not conforming to gender norms.
1) Which often were themselves incredibly vague interpretation of ‘masquerade’ or ‘impersonation’ laws. There is a myth among the queer community that you had to be wearing three items of the correct gender’s clothing to be legal, but that never appears to have been the law, and in fact police were often harassing crossdressers with literally no laws backing them up at all, just a vague feeling of ‘You are not allowed to dress like that’. And often arrest anyone near those people just because they wanted to.
2) She was a butch lesbian who probably was being arrested for dressing like a man, aka, _wearing pants_. Although considering she could pass for a man, and had once been arrested on the assumption she was a man dressed as a woman, who even know what was going through the police’s head. Translated from caveman, probably something like ‘This not normal girl or normal boy, arrest weird person!’. Law do not matter to the police.Report
It was indeed the National Park Service, doing it because of Trump’s executive order erasing trans people from existence.
Here’s what’s actually going to happen on this site:
The Trump Administration will say that they didn’t want that to happen, and of course those references should go back up, and you all will yammer about malicious compliance and how dare the Deep State at the National Park Service make the Trump Administration try to look bad.
OR the Trump Administration will say it was supposed to be like that, that’s what they wanted, and y’all will attempt to justify _that_.
You know, exactly how conservatives have always acted towards Trump, where he will do something horrific, they will deny that’s what he meant to do or say or whatever, and then he will just come out and tell everyone that it’s exactly what he meant, and everyone will pivot immediately to defending what was done.
Let’s see if any of you are brave enough to state, IN ADVANCE, whether this was malicious compliance or not? You have the text of the executive order in front of you, did the Park Service do the correct thing under that executive order?Report
https://www.npr.org/2025/02/14/nx-s1-5294328/israel-raid-bookstore-east-jerusalem
Beacon of democracy in the Middle East.Report
https://maxread.substack.com/p/the-zizians-and-the-rationalist-death/comments
Today’s non Trump Story. There is apparently a radical offshoot of the so-called Rationalist movement called the Zizzians which is implicated in at least six murders around the United States. The most recent was on January 17 in Vermont. The leader of the group apparently skipped bail a while ago and faked her own death.
Max Read gives a deep dive into Rationalism and why it seems to produce a lot of cults and the whole thing sounds nuts to me. A philosophy that used Harry Potter fanfic to spread its views?Report
Max doesn’t even get half of how nuts it is.
(And we all read the Methods of Rationality back in 2019!)Report
As someone who has read that fanfic, I thought at the time that the fanfic wasn’t half bad, if way too long and with a lot of weird philosophical stuff that the writer was obviously trying to push.
But the reason it was semi enjoyable was mostly that it was deconstructing all the nonsense in Rowlings’ story, making everyone in all sides in the war act in a much more intelligent manner, and trying to figure out how magic should actually work, and looking back, that doesn’t really make it a good story as much as it makes the original a bad story.
And again, can I emphasize how insanely long it was, like 10 times as long as it needed to be.Report
That was a hell of a read.Report
Chevron is playing to lay off up to 20 percent of its staff. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/12/business/energy-environment/chevron-layoffs-oil.htmlReport
https://bsky.app/profile/ronfilipkowski.bsky.social/post/3li5q2gmsts2b
Trump’s view that the U.S. Government can and should act as a mafia protection racket continues.Report
https://thehill.com/business/5140951-missouri-attorney-general-sues-starbucks-anti-discrimination-laws/
MO’s AG is suing Starbucks for having too many female and/or non-white employees are arguing this causes MO customers to wait longer and pay higher prices.Report
Given that surely Starbucks wasn’t stupid enough to put something like “diversity goals” in a corporate memo, this won’t get off the ground.Report
And apparently Starbucks’ official reply includes the legalese version of “white dudes are shit at customer service and often overly aggressive, which is why we don’t hire more of them.
I don’t have a source or cite for this but I believe it.Report
I’m not sure that normalizing “people of this gender/race have negative traits and that’s why there aren’t more of them as employees” will get us to where you want to go, but I’m willing to find out.Report
I strongly doubt they said that. If they did they should probably settle the case.Report
Last I checked, corporations have free speech and can have whatever the hell political goals they want.
Was that only supposed to apply to corporations with conservative political goals?Report
Yes. “This is covered by ‘Freedom of Speech'”, they should be able to argue.
I am 100% down with this.Report
They can. But it is illegal to discriminate in hiring based on race or sex.Report
Good luck proving that, even pretending the statistics were on their side, which even in a company like Starbucks is not true. The odds are that Starbucks has no more minorities working for it than exist in the general population, and in fact probably less.
Hey, remember all that arguing about how the reason that certain industries had more men in them than women is that women didn’t want to do those jobs as much?
None of you understand quite how much conservatives have spent undercutting employment protection, and making it harder and harder to prove discrimination based on race and sex.
And their statement about diversity may sound statement that they’re going to hire minorities instead of white people, but the court isn’t going to treat them that way, because conservatives argue for years that the opposite isn’t true, or at least isn’t inherently true, victims still have to prove that they were personally discriminated against, and there aren’t even any victims here!
This is why, incidentally, these lawsuits instead have a weird basis in the idea that these hiring decisions are costing customers time and money, a thing that Starbucks is legally 100% allowed to do. They are allowed to actually have as written policy that all coffee orders take an hour
These lawsuits are going to be hilarious.Report
Oh, is that how the court rules on stuff? “James Damore wrote an essay for Google, therefore we find for Starbucks.”Report
When I say ‘conservatives have spent undercutting employment protection’, I do not mean ‘people wrote articles’.
I mean ‘Conservatives group got cases put before courts and conservative judges set precedents in both those cases and other cases’.
It is incredibly hard to prove discrimination in employment, even with a very specific case, aka, a specific _person_ who got harmed, even with tons of documentation that they were harmed because they were in a protected class.
Here, there literally doesn’t appear to be a specific case, no actual person being harmed, and I’m not even sure how the lawsuit is supposed to _work_.
Reading the lawsuit, it really does look like he’s vaguely handwaving at the Missouri population and asserting ‘Starbucks could operate cheaper and faster if they hired the best person for the job instead of minorities, and that harms residents’, but how poorly a company is operating and supposed bad choices they are making is literally not something you can sue over, at least not under _antidiscrimination_ law. (I guess shareholders could sue over that, but that’s not what is happening.)
Or to put it simplier terms: A lot of proving discrimination is demonstrating _patterns_, and not only is there not a pattern here, there isn’t even an incident. Instead, there’s a lot of quoting their web page. Do you know what web pages talking about the behavior of yourself are called in court?
HEARSAY
You have to prove it actually happened, and _then_ you can quote them talking about their own motives. You can’t just quote them.Report
Well, so long as Starbucks didn’t come out and say “we’re going to be hiring on the basis of race”, they should be free and clear.Report
No. It is perfectly legal for a business to have a overtly discriminatory employment policy. It is entirely legal for a business to assert, publicly, that they only hire white people. They can take out ads saying that.
To quote: https://www.eeoc.gov/prohibited-employment-policiespractices
You see where it says ‘have a disproportionately negative effect’? It doesn’t mean ‘Logically will have an effect’, or even ‘is explicitly stated to do that exact effect’. It means have. It requires a thing that has actually happened. The negative effects must have happened, and must be disproportionately happening to one group.
Aka, there has to be a victim. A possible employee who applied and can prove they were denied. Or an employee who tried to get the mentorship program and was denied it. (For the record, Starbucks has denied that was only available to BIPOC, so _someone_ is lying.) And not only do they have to prove not only was it denied to them _for_ that reason, but that it happens enough to be ‘disproportionate’
And at that point, that individual victim could recover damages, the company would also get fined, and the court could issue an order barring future behavior like that. It’s not going to be a big fine.
And they better find such a victim quickly, the status of limitations for filing such a claim is 180 days, which can be extended to 300 days if certain things are true, which I do not believe they are here but I could be wrong. Either way, the stuff the talk about in the suit about the policy in 2023 is overt nonsense, no employment discrimination that happened in 2023 can be sued over.
And that’s not even getting into the stuff the _courts_ make people jump through. That’s just the text of the law.
So anyway, yeah, conservatives have basically completely defanged any sort of anti-discrimination employment law…have fun trying to sue anyone under it, LOL.Report
*I* am not suing anybody.
The AG of Missouri is.
As to how far the AG will get… Well, I understand that AGs are pretty arrogant and think that they can indict sandwiches.
I imagine we’ll find out in the coming months whether there is egg on anybody’s face.
If we hear that there’s a settlement out of court… how do you think we should read that?Report
Well, if you read the lawsuit, there are changes to policy that the AG wants to happen. (Any fines, as I said, are completely pointless for a corporation their size.)
So, it would seem like that’s the logical victory condition, objectively speaking. Whether Starbucks makes those changes or not. I suspect that if Starbucks asserted it would make those changes, the lawsuit would be settled with no money tomorrow.
The problem is that Starbuck has claimed that some of the stuff being alleged _isn’t_ their policy. It’s easy to say ‘Oh, they agreed to these changes that are not in fact changes’.
And I don’t think they’re going to put up with this, and aren’t going to settle. I think they realize what’s going to happen if they do, because part of the setup is to try to get them to admit something to make it easy for people to sue them.
Starbucks earns almost thrice the yearly revenue as Missouri. And unlike Missouri, they aren’t about to have government aid to them crash into the ground and set their budget on fire. They can fight this.Report
Okay. That’s where we can draw the line.
If Starbucks fights this and wins (defined as either “in court” or “Missouri backs down”), then that’s Starbucks.
If they settle out of court (or worse), that’s the AG.
Agreed?Report
I think the ‘if they end up sending out notices about how the were possibly unlawfully discriminatory to employees and former employees as the AG wants, making it both easier and likely for someone to sue them’ is The Line there.
Both because settling without that is likely to be trivial (Fines are never at even vaguely harmful levels.) and will be a result of Missouri trying to back down without losing face, and also because it might be hard to judge other parts of the settlements. But either the letters go out or they do not, that’s something that will be known.
And I am willing to bet that Starbucks is very unwilling to send out those letters, whereas they will be perfectly willing to pay trivial amounts of money or even change policies. In fact, they _already_ changed policies to some extent back in 2023.
I’m actually a little baffled as to why we care what the ‘official’ outcome is? My claim is that Missouri has a crap case, not that Starbucks is some morally upright corporation that will never cave. Starbucks has no morals, it’s a sociopath, like most corporations. It has no problem with paying a fine and changing whatever, it’s not going to ‘protect’ anyone.
The reason they won’t cave is the Missouri AG is trying to set up a situation where they have to admit guilt and notify people of said ‘guilt’, opening them up to tons more lawsuits. (In other words, settling does the exact opposite of what it normally does, aka ‘end this’.) And they have more money than Missouri and can pay more lawyers.Report
Wait, so they have to send out a letter that says “you have grounds to sue us”?
I think that I will instead counter-offer a letter that says “Starbucks only discriminates against bad beans. Never against employees. Here’s a coupon for a free Capuchino” would be where the line should be.
Because commercialese is a thing.Report
That’s what the lawsuit wants, yeah. They want Starbucks to send out a letter _notifying_ employees and potential employees that their rights might have been violated by Starbucks.
To be clear, requiring this sort of notification isn’t super-uncommon in actual real employment discrimination cases that companies lose in court. But it’s not something that tends to be part of a _settlement_, even in, again, real cases that can show real harm. Which this…isn’t. Which is why I am pretty sure that Starbucks is going go hire every lawyer that exists to fight this.
What I’m unsure about is if Missouri put that in there to play hardball as something they can take out later, have Starbucks settles for a trivial fine and policy changes they don’t care about…or if Missouri is doing this entire thing as a political stunt and doesn’t not actually care about the outcome.
Honestly, both ways it is a political stunt, but the question is really ‘Does Missouri want to win a weak victory, or do they want to string this out and run it as a long-term attack?’
The first would be the obvious answer if I believed that Missouri understood how weak their case was. Throw a bunch of stuff at Starbucks, hand Starbucks a deal that requires them to change policies and pay a fine that _sounds_ big to the rubes that do not understand quite how rich Starbucks is, declare victory, and go home.
But we are now at the point where it makes sense to assume that anyone doing any sort of lawyering on conservative sides could be a raving lunatic 10 seconds from disbarment and 30 seconds from being arrested for fraud, so I really don’t know if they understand that.
(Oh, speaking of people being disbarred…Bove has stepped into the Eric Adams case and signed the dismissal of the case herself. Hey, hint: When a bunch of your subordinates resign rather than do something that could get them disbarred, _don’t do it yourself_. And…you do understand the judge can _refuse_ to let you dismiss the case, right? And after this clown-show, will do exactly that?)Report
Okay, yes, I will admit would actually be a violation of Federal law to take out those ads, but I am fairly certain that is dead letter thanks to the corporations getting first amendment rights.
I guess we’ll see, and we’ll also see if what Starbucks has done qualifies as that. That law actually is about _printing advertisements_, not internal policy.Report
LOL, in fact, the article goes into the percentage, I had forgotten. So, uh, looks like 46.5% of Starbucks is BIPOC, and the current population is 41.6%, which not only is essentially even, but also fails to account for the fact that Starbucks generally exist in cities, which statistically have a higher percentage of BIPOC than the nation, so it’s entirely possible Starbucks is under the percentage of people who could plausibly be working at any particular Starbucks. Regardless, they are extremely close.Report
Heh then I suppose they have nothing to worry about and I’m sure nothing remotely damaging will come out of discovery.Report
No judge is going to allow discovery for whatever this is.
Anti-discrimation lawsuits, and in fact all lawsuits, need _victims_. Victims that were harmed by some tort. There are no victims listed in the lawsuit besides a handwave at ‘non-BIPOC Missourians’. That is…not how the law works.
If you could just handwave at a class of people as possible victims, civil rights court cases would have been _so much easier_. We wouldn’t need cases like Loving vs. Virginia, organizations not harmed by the law could have just sued over the law directly.
It’s actually amazing how much of this lawsuit is complete gibberish that exists to sound important but completely fails to lay out the legal theory it is working under.Report
Speaking of DEI…
Report
Seems reasonable to me.Report
“Michigan legislator says she underwent sterilization to avoid pregnancy during Trump presidency”
https://michiganadvance.com/2025/02/06/michigan-legislator-says-she-underwent-sterilization-to-avoid-pregnancy-during-trump-presidency/
Welp, showed him didn’t she.Report
Sterilizing oneself for political reasons has always struck me as kind of a self own.Report
“Hey, look, isn’t it funny that this person was so worried about the health risks of unintended pregnancy under this administration’s attack on reproductive rights that they had to take a permanent option there. Ha ha, what a loser!”Report
This has a distinctly nottheonion vibe.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/trump-administration-wants-un-fire-nuclear-safety-workers-cant-figure-rcna192345Report
The Supreme Court has announced it expects to release one or more opinions on Friday, Feb 21. As is customary, they did not give any indication about which cases.Report
Apparently Donald Trump thinks VATs are tariffs. This is a golden opportunity. Maybe someone can convince him to replace the income tax with a retaliatory VAT. That’ll show those Europeans who’s boss!Report