Trump / Musk (other than DOGE)

[nycfan]

Trump Transition: Lawyer Says Client Saw Gaetz Have Sex With Underage Girl

The client’s reported testimony before the House Ethics Committee added to the controversy around Donald Trump’s pick for attorney general as the president-elect tries to fill his cabinet.

www.nytimes.com

“… Mr. Trump’s top immigration policy adviser, Stephen Miller, said that military funds would be used to build “vast holding facilities that would function as staging centers” for immigrants as their cases progressed and they waited to be flown to other countries.

…The Trump team believes that such camps could enable the government to accelerate deportations of undocumented people who fight their expulsion from the country. The idea is that more people would voluntarily accept removal instead of pursuing a long-shot effort to remain in the country if they had to stay locked up in the interim.

Mr. Miller has also talked about invoking a public health emergency power to curtail hearing asylum claims, as the Trump administration did during the Covid-19 pandemic.

… Other elements of the team’s plan include bolstering the ranks of ICE officers with law enforcement officials who would be temporarily reassigned from other agencies, and with state National Guardsmen and federal troops activated to enforce the law on domestic soil under the Insurrection Act.

The team also plans to expand a form of due-process-free expulsions known as expedited removal, which is currently used near the border for recent arrivals, to people living across the interior of the country who cannot prove they have been in the United States for more than two years.

And the team plans to stop issuing citizenship-affirming documents, like passports and Social Security cards, to infants born on domestic soil to undocumented migrant parents in a bid to end birthright citizenship.

Mr. Trump has already signaled his intent to follow through on his promises with personnel announcements. He named Mr. Miller as a deputy chief of staff in his administration with influence over domestic policy. And Mr. Trump said he would make Thomas Homan, who ran ICE for the first year and a half of the Trump administration and was an early proponent of separating families to deter migrants, his administration’s “border czar.” …”

 

[mynameisbond]

Have we talked about Chris Wright yet?
DOE headed by a climate change denier.
What could possibly go wrong?

 

[superrific]

Let's say you have groups A and B where the crime rate committed by members of A > B. Let's assume the targets of the crimes committed by members of one group are equally likely to be in any group. (In reality crimes are committed against members of the same group at a higher rate than otherwise which you could add to the argument.) Now let's say you introduce C (immigrants) whose crime rate is less than A or B.

There will be some crimes committed by C against members of A or B. These are the ones you can argue "but if C didn't exist, so-and-so in A or B would not have been harmed." While true and unfortunate for the victims, the actual rate of crimes committed against members of A or B would be lower because A (having the higher crime rate) will now be committing some of their crime against group C. This would be a higher number than C committing crimes against A. So, in effect, you have lowered the rate of crime committed against A and B.

Something like that but I suppose to make it a fallacy one would have to make it about something more generic. I would imagine if we thought hard enough we could come up with other more benign scenarios that essentially boil down to the same problem.

I think this is identical to what I wrote above. You've reproduced the arithmetic argument precisely, and the fallacy can be named "but for" or "excess causation."

Legal theory addresses these problems because they come up in court. There's a famous case where an ambulance was driving an injured person to the hospital when it was hit by another vehicle and rendered undriveable. It wasn't like a hit-and-run or a reckless driving or anything like that -- it was just an ordinary accident. But the patient died because they didn't get to the hospital in time, and the patient's family then sued the driver for wrongful death. If the driver hadn't hit the ambulance, the patient would have survived. And the court said (and this is either a view of all states or a large majority of them) that the accident was not the cause of the patient's death. It was a "but for" cause, but not the "proximate cause" (which was whatever caused the injury in the first place).

There was also a subplot in the third season (I think, maybe second season) of The Good Place that indirectly addressed the issue. It was the discovery that nobody had been able to get into the Good Place for centuries because so many of our actions cause harm that we can't see, and thus we aren't "good." Like if you eat chocolate, you are subsidizing slave labor in Africa so you're bad.

 

[superrific]

And the team plans to stop issuing citizenship-affirming documents, like passports and Social Security cards, to infants born on domestic soil to undocumented migrant parents in a bid to end birthright citizenship.

This is core MAGA. The cruelty is the point. These are men who are literally taking out their anger on babies. The economic anxiety is just so much to overcome.

 

[nycfan]

Have we talked about Chris Wright yet?
DOE headed by a climate change denier.
What could possibly go wrong?

Won’t be the first time the GOP has put a climate change denier in that job.

 

[superrific]

Have we talked about Chris Wright yet?
DOE headed by a climate change denier.
What could possibly go wrong?

The EPA is the more relevant department for climate change. Yes, there's an anti-climate person there too. This is one reason why I have viewed Trump's election as catastrophic for the planet. They could set climate progress back a decade and make it all but impossible to avoid the worst case scenarios.

 

[nycfan]

NPR (@npr.org)

SpaceX and Amazon are asking the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals to find the National Labor Relations Board unconstitutional. The federal agency is tasked with enforcing workers' right to organize. https://www.npr.org/2024/11/18/nx-s1-5192918/spacex-amazon-nlrb-labor-board-elon-musk

bsky.app

 

[superrific]

I'm cautiously optimistic about DOGE. Objective assessment and change often has to be spearheaded by an outsider, which Musk and Ramaswamy are.

Dude, "rooting out inefficiency in government" has been a GOP thing for decades. Every GOP administration sets up some sort of task force to cut the fat. Sometimes Congress too. Do you remember Simpson Bowles?

And the reason you don't hear about it is that there just isn't much waste at all (outside of the DoD, which I can't comment on). When the GOP talks about waste, they are only talking about things they don't like (as always) and it's usually ignorant. These things have a purpose. If you don't like the purpose, fine, but it's not just waste or inefficiency.

You'll see. This DOGE thing will come up with basically nothing and probably you will never hear of it again after the inauguration. If you do, it will be some symbolic bullshit or talking about cutting valuable programs that Musk etc. just don't like (which is not the same thing at all).

 

[superrific]

NPR (@npr.org)

SpaceX and Amazon are asking the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals to find the National Labor Relations Board unconstitutional. The federal agency is tasked with enforcing workers' right to organize. https://www.npr.org/2024/11/18/nx-s1-5192918/spacex-amazon-nlrb-labor-board-elon-musk

bsky.app

Yep, part of the plan. Fifth Circuit will do it, Supreme Court will affirm 6-3. It will be Jarkesy redux. That the underlying theory is preposterous and without any basis in the constitution is irrelevant.

They will stop at the Federal Reserve, even though there is no principled distinction between the Fed and any other agency, because they know that invalidating the Fed will affect them adversely.

 

[JCTarheel82]

This is core MAGA. The cruelty is the point. These are men who are literally taking out their anger on babies. The economic anxiety is just so much to overcome.

Isn't this also unconstitutional? 14th Amendment?

 

[finesse]

DoD spending sure isn't driven by the needs of the nation.

 

[superrific]

Isn't this also unconstitutional?

Says who? There are only nine justices whose opinions matter, and those justices loathe the 14th Amendment, except when they use it to strike down diversity initiatives. If they want to end birthright citizenship, the fact that the text and original intent of the 14th clearly establish it will not matter to them at all.

 

[CFordUNC]

Isn't this also unconstitutional? 14th Amendment?

Hey, Trump *did* say he'd entertain the idea of suspending the Constitution.

 

[ChapelHillSooner]

Isn't this also unconstitutional? 14th Amendment?

To add to what super said, I believe their argument revolves around the "and subject to the jurisdiction thereof" phrase. That phrase is why children born in the US of diplomats aren't granted citizenship because they are not subject to the jurisdiction of the US. The same if a foreign army invaded the US and some soldiers had children while here. Since they are foreign invaders they wouldn't be subject to the jurisdiction of the US.

Conservatives are trying to make the argument that an undocumented immigrant - via their status - and children are not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. Most people think it's a weak argument but it doesn't matter what most people think.

 

[CFordUNC]

The entire prison population in the United States is currently around 1.2 million people. Fascinating that the Trumpers believe that they'll be able to somehow arrest, detain, and hold 10-15 million undocumented immigrants.

 

[ChapelHillSooner]

The entire prison population in the United States is currently around 1.2 million people. Fascinating that the Trumpers believe that they'll be able to somehow arrest, detain, and hold 10-15 million undocumented immigrants.

If it gets done, it will resemble Nazi concentration camps (the ones that were not considered death camps but plenty of people still died of disease and starvation) far more than US prisons. There isn't going to be anything humane about it. Even if their intent is to do it humanely, that will get lost in the process.

 

[CFordUNC]

If it gets done, it will resemble Nazi non-death concentration camps far more than US prisons. There isn't going to be anything humane about it. Even if their intent is to do it humanely, that will get lost in the process.

Yeah. I agree, the inhumanity of such a scenario would be the worst aspect, and of course there would be dire economic ramifications felt by all of us, as well.

I tend to think that this whole "we're going to deport illegal immigrants" thing will look very similarly to the "build a wall and make Mexico pay for it" bullshit from the first term. There will be widely-publicized raids and round-ups of people who are *already* incarcerated or in the crosshairs of the legal system. There will be an enormous Trumpian show and performative theater, as there always is, and there will be all sorts of outright lying and fudging and obfuscation of statistics and data that will make it seem like the five-figure number of illegal immigrants "deported" actually numbers in the millions. But short of creating a concentration camp-style system of incarceration, it's hard to even understand logistically how Trumpers expect it to work.

 

[Enigma94]

Says who? There are only nine justices whose opinions matter, and those justices loathe the 14th Amendment, except when they use it to strike down diversity initiatives. If they want to end birthright citizenship, the fact that the text and original intent of the 14th clearly establish it will not matter to them at all.

Would it be retroactive? Could every citizen who is the child of an immigrant have their citizenship revoked? I mean we are all ultimately children of immigrants (except NA), but I'm wondering if this policy would be going forward only or would existing birthright citizens of immigrant parents be at risk as well?

 

[UNCatTech]

I wonder how many Biological Males that transitioned played HS Womens sports?? The number
And how many of them were built like Lawrence Taylor

The numbers are very low. I believe I read that the state of NC had 15 trans women athletes.

But thats not really the point. The right wants to use this to turn people against all trans people even those who couldn't care less about playing sports.

 

[rodoheel]

To add to what super said, I believe their argument revolves around the "and subject to the jurisdiction thereof" phrase. That phrase is why children born in the US of diplomats aren't granted citizenship because they are not subject to the jurisdiction of the US. The same if a foreign army invaded the US and some soldiers had children while here. Since they are foreign invaders they wouldn't be subject to the jurisdiction of the US.

Conservatives are trying to make the argument that an undocumented immigrant - via their status - and children are not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. Most people think it's a weak argument but it doesn't matter what most people think.

Just to be clear, I personally think that it is worse than a "weak argument," it is completely laughable. There is no real argument that illegal immigrants aren't subject to US jurisdiction - otherwise we couldn't prosecute them for crimes! I've read the legal theories as to why "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" implicitly requires that the US government have consented to someone's presence here and I'm not convinced. It also would be a practical nightmare to administer and would result in a constant flood of legal proceedings about citizenship.

Of course, none of this means the current activist court won't adopt this insane argument. The hope is that Roberts and ACB, at least, aren't willing to go that far.