Category: Uncategorized

In a test of a new system that could change how US border officials handle asylum seekers, the US will initiate a test next week that will provide an initial screening to asylum seekers and provide them with legal counsel to speed the processing of asylum claims, ABC News reports.

Immigration asylum officers will screen people who cross the border illegally and provide them with a lawyer to review their legal options.  The screening would determine which migrants have an asylum claim, and those people will be assigned a lawyer who will be with them through their case’s resolution.

Currently more than 90% of asylum seekers appear for their status hearings.  Asylum seekers who have legal representation are more likely to appear before the courts.  Researchers found that a legal aide helps the applicant to feel their case is getting a fair hearing and to understand the process.  Plus, legal aides act as a de facto case manager for the migrant, keeping them on schedule and reducing flight risk.

Right wing activist federal judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk suspended the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of mifepristone, a drug commonly and widely used to induce abortions, ruled to be so safe it could be sold over-the-counter, the Washington Post reports.

An ultra-conservative Trump appointee who is the only federal judge in Northern District of Texas which makes his the targeted court for implementing conservative doctrine because any conservative activist is sure to get his ruling if they file in that district, Kacsmaryk gave the FDA seven days to appeal the ruling.

Kacsmaryk, who had never served on a court before being nominated by Trump, is known to support far-right causes that would ban birth control, abortion and many health choices for women.

Those poor anti-vax crusaders.  First, they start dying at an accelerated rate from coronavirus because they refuse to get “The Jab,” and now news that they won’t get expected vaccines for things like cancers and heart disease springing from research advancements in the development of the mRNA vaccines.

According to the Guardian, the chief medical officer of Moderna said he expects vaccines for common deadly diseases like heart disease and many cancers to be available by 2030, with mRNA vaccines for rarer, “orphan” cancers being developed to meet patient needs.

Saying that research that was expected to take decades became “unspooled” with research dedicated to coronavirus research reducing the timeframe to years rather than decades, Moderna’s chief medical officer Paul Burton said, “We will have that vaccine and it will be highly effective, and it will save many hundreds of thousands if not millions of lives. I think we will be able to offer personalized cancer vaccines against multiple different tumor types to people around the world.”

“In light of yesterday’s reporting by ProPublica that Justice Clarence Thomas has repeatedly accepted and failed to disclose gifts and travel from billionaire Harlan Crow, we write to request an investigation into these and other outstanding allegations of unethical, and potentially unlawful conduct at the Supreme Court.  To date the Court has barely acknowledged much less investigated, these allegations. Amidst all of this—perhaps due in part to the Court’s inaction—the American people’s trust in the Supreme Court has plummeted to an all-time low. We believe that it is your duty as Chief Justice ‘to safeguard public faith in the judiciary,’ and that fulfilling that duty requires swift, thorough, independent and transparent investigation into these allegations. …

“Should the Supreme Court continue to refuse to act swiftly on these matters, we will continue to press Congress to act to restore accountability and ethics at the highest Court in the land.”  —excerpts from a letter sent to Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts by Democratic Senators Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, and Congressmen Hank Johnson of Georgia and Jerry Nadler of New York.  All four sit on their respective chambers’ Judiciary Committee.

Since sharing links to my articles is a primary reason I come to this platform, I was alarmed and asked what was going on. I was given the option of posting articles on Twitter instead.

I’m obviously staying at Substack, and will be moving to Substack Notes next week.

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) April 7, 2023

We missed Medhi Hassan’s absolute teabagging of Taibbi on Thursday over inaccuracies in his “Twitter Files” circlejerk, but it was bad. Even better is how, at least for now, the saga of Taibbi’s subservience to the capricious and tyrannical whims of Elon Musk appears to be ending.

Tesla employees accessed and shared videos taken by the cars’ external cameras without their owners’ permission, sometimes circulating private images of people, their houses and their children on an internal messaging system, Engadget reports.  And one of the videos circulated appeared to show detailed images of Elon Musk’s own garage.

One video showed a Tesla hitting a child on a bicycle at high speed on a residential road.  Another showed a naked man walking around his car in the privacy of his yard; video from that vehicle also depicted the family’s children.  And the piece de resistance of the trove:  a geotagged image of the special Lotus submarine used in the 1977 James Bond movie The Spy Who Loved Me.  Elon Musk bought the prop and stores it in his garage.  Much of the video collected was filmed while the vehicles were turned off and unoccupied.

Besides the hypocrisy and hilarity of Musk’s own employees monitoring his activities after he went apoplectic when he found a Twitter account tracking his plane’s location using publicly-available information, the practice violates Tesla’s declared privacy policy provided to vehicle purchasers.

This is the world Ron DeSantis yearns for, but instead of anti-war messages, it would be because of his homophobia or white grievance:  Authorities in Russia took a 13-year-old girl away from her father after she drew a cartoon determined to be anti-war at school.

The New York Times reports Aleksei Moskalyov’s daughter was placed in an orphanage after she refused to follow an art teacher’s direction to draw something that supported the Russian military’s invasion of Ukraine.  Instead, she drew a mother and daughter carrying a Ukrainian flag and wrote the words “No war” and “Glory to Ukraine.”

Moskalyov was placed on house arrest for the crime of “discreding the Russian military.”  The daughter was released to the custody of her mother; Moskalyov previously had sole custody and the child did not want to live with her mother.  Her father, however, wrote the girl a letter beseeching her to go with whatever relative claimed her to get her out of Russia’s abusive child care system.

In a series of tweets, conservative gadfly Ali Alexander attacks Republican Georgia Congressman and former team lead pulling the Budweiser wagon Marjorie Taylor Greene, calling out Taylor’s dismissive reaction to reports that Donald Trump is trying to bring Laura Loomer onto his campaign team.

Taylor tweeted:  “Laura Loomer is mentally unstable and a documented liar. She can not be trusted. She spent months lying about me and attacking me just because I supported Kevin McCarthy for Speaker and after I had refused to endorse her last election cycle. She loves the alleged FBI informant and weirdo Nick Fuentes. She tried to get hired on the Ye campaign after the infamous Maralago dinner, but Kanye West refused to hire her so now she’s running to Trump. Never hire or do business with a liar. Liars are toxic and poisonous to everything they touch. I’ll make sure he knows.”

Alexander replies:  “MTG tried to get the meeting with Ye. I fired Milo and said no to the meeting. Laura Loomer not only never tried to come work for YE24, Ye, or Yeezy, she declined an offer to support him. Laura is INSANELY loyal.  This is false, Marjorie, and now I’m about to embarrass you.

Fat former President Trump leads heels-wearing Florida Governor Ron DeSantis 58 percent to 21 percent in a full Republican 2024 presidential primary field in a Reuters/Ipsos survey.

Taken after the twice-impeached pornstar fucker was indicted on 34 felony counts in New York, the survey also found that 40 percent of Republican respondents say the indictment makes them more likely to vote for the Orange God Emperor in the primary. Only 12 percent said less likely.

If Stephen Miller had a female doppelganger, it would be Laura Loomer, the Islamophobic, LGBTQ-phobic, fact-phobic Florida white nationalist who makes performative runs for Congress to make money.  And of course, Donald Trump loves her, so according to the New York Times, he’s instructed his cabal to find a paid position for Loomer on his campaign staff after meeting with her recently.

Trump’s team seems to be slow-walking Loomer’s hire, perhaps fearful that her hate-filled rhetoric would overshadow Trump’s own bigotry, or maybe aware that she would be a mess to deal with, both professionally and relating to having to clean up the messes she would cause as an official member of Trump’s campaign.

“Is killing their babies that important to the younger generation? Wow! Says a lot about them and it is not positive” – The current top comment on the TownHall.com Friday article “The WSJ Gives Republicans a ‘Five-Alarm Warning’ About 2024,” about Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal op-ed “The Left Wins Big in Midwest Elections: The GOP’s decline in Wisconsin’s suburbs is a warning for 2024.”

The evergreen Simpsons meme of Springfield Elementary School Principal Skinner asking himself “Am I out of touch?” before quickly concluding “No, it’s the children who are wrong” comes immediately to mind here. We’ve covered this ground before, but it bears repeating: There is no surer sound of a political death spiral than that of someone blaming voters after a bad loss.

Compare this to the mini-Red Wave of November 2021: It’s true that the “Critical Race Theory” scam was an insulting lie cooked up by the Claremont Institute circlejerkers, it’s true that Democrats didn’t have an answer for it that Virginia and New Jersey voters liked, and it’s true that at least some voices on the left called them racist dumbasses for buying into that garbage.

“Harlan and Kathy Crow are among our dearest friends, and we have been friends for over twenty-five years. As friends do, we have joined them on a number of family trips during the more than quarter century we have known them. Early in my tenure at the Court, I sought guidance from my colleagues and others in the judiciary, and was advised that this sort of personal hospitality from close personal friends, who did not have business before the Court, was not reportable. I have endeavored to follow that counsel throughout my tenure, and have always sought to comply with the disclosure guidelines. These guidelines are now being changed, as the committee of the Judicial Conference responsible for financial disclosure for the entire federal judiciary just this past month announced new guidance. And, it is, of course, my intent to follow this guidance in the future,” says Clarence Thomas in a statement about his luxury vacations with MAGA billionaire Harlan Crow.

The DC Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday overturned a March 2022 ruling by District Judge Carl Nichols saying that the federal prosecutors can’t charge the MAGA insurrectionists with obstructing Congress’s certification of Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election unless the defendants tampered with official documents or records in the attack, Politico’s Kyle Cheney reports.

The 2-1 decision by the appeals court could have implications for Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith’s case against Trump and his minions as they could end up being hit with the very same charge as the rioters who physically attacked the Capitol on that disgraceful day.

This is so true and this miracle should inspire us all. pic.twitter.com/8tgvcwF7YE

— General Mike Flynn (@GenFlynn) April 7, 2023

WHOA! New York County Supreme Court Judge Juan Merchan, who presides over fat former President Trump’s criminal case over his illegal hush money payments to pornstar Stormy Daniels, contributed $15 to the Biden-Harris campaign in 2020, NBC News reports from FEC records.

Merchan also donated $10 each to the groups “Stop Republicans” and “Progressive Turnout Project” the same year, all of which will be used to show that Merchan is compromised by the same assholes who say that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas accepting probably millions in free luxury travel from a MAGA Texas billionaire is not a big deal and Clarence can do whatever he wants.

We’re going to go ahead and guess that Trump nicknaming Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin as “YoungKim” here was on purpose, as the fat bastard has already implied his fellow Republican – one that is almost unanimously viewed as having run one of, if not the smartest GOP campaigns anywhere in the US in the last decade – is somehow Chinese, with the added effect of calling him by the name of Korean-American Republican California Congresswoman Young Kim. It’s still early, but we think this post is a strong contender for one that other Republicans will pretend they didn’t see.

Frustrated with their failure to uncover damning BOMBSHELLS in their investigations of the “Biden Crime Family” so far this Congress, House Oversight Committee Republicans’ Plan B appears to be just keeping what little information they do have away from Democrats in order to hide the lack of anything damning, like the hard drive from Hunter’s laptop, “whistleblower” interviews, and blatantly lying about the number of “whistleblowers” that actually exist, Punchbowl News reports.

Responding to a charge from Ranking Member Jamie Raskin that the Oversight GOP have abandoned “the long-standing bipartisan agreement between Committee Republicans and Democrats that expressly protects the Minority’s right to equal access to information, including whistleblower information used as part of a Committee investigation,” MAGA Chairman James Comer said pleaded guilty, writing “Multiple individuals have approached the Oversight Committee as whistleblowers with a desire to share information confidentially. It should be no surprise that whistleblowers do not trust Ranking Member Raskin. He has revealed himself to be untrustworthy by releasing disingenuous, misleading financial information from the Committee’s investigation.”

The Israeli Defense Forces conducted airstrikes on Hamas positions in the Gaza strip and Southern Lebanon on Friday after rockets were launched into the country – attacks themselves triggered by Israeli police raids at the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem earlier this week, the BBC reports.

“The IDF will not allow the Hamas terrorist organization to operate from within Lebanon and hold the state of Lebanon responsible for every directed fire emanating from its territory,” tweeted the IDF.

Heels-wearing Florida Governor Ron DeSantis wants to impose tolls on the roads into Disney World and taxes on its hotel rooms after the company successfully outsmarted him on his plan to appoint a board of loyalists to oversee its special municipal district put in place in retaliation for daring to question and oppose his draconian “Don’t Say Gay” law, Politico reports.

Tennessee state House Republicans on Thursday expelled Representative Justin Pearson on the third of three votes retaliating against he his two colleagues’ joining an anti-gun protest in the wake of the Nashville Covenant School shooting last week, Semafor’s Dave Weigel reports.

So yeah this is fucking racist since the two Black men got kicked out of the chamber but the white woman didn’t (albeit very narrowly). Would love to find out the names of the Republicans who voted yes on Pearson and Justin Jones but no on white Democrat state Representative Gloria Johnson.