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Reagan-appointed federal judge Mark Wolf has resigned from the bench in Massachusetts, and his explanation is blunt: he can no longer bear the ethical constraints that prevent judges from speaking out publicly while Trump dismantles the rule of law.
This doesn’t happen. Federal judges—especially Reagan appointees—don’t quit to become activists. They stay in their robes and let careful rulings speak for themselves. Wolf’s resignation is the judicial equivalent of breaking the glass on a fire alarm.
Wolf watched all of that and concluded the constraints of judicial office were now intolerable.
My reason is simple: I no longer can bear to be restrained by what judges can say publicly or do outside the courtroom. President Donald Trump is using the law for partisan purposes, targeting his adversaries while sparing his friends and donors from investigation, prosecution, and possible punishment. This is contrary to everything that I have stood for in my more than 50 years in the Department of Justice and on the bench. The White House’s assault on the rule of law is so deeply disturbing to me that I feel compelled to speak out. Silence, for me, is now intolerable.
Wolf’s full explanation is worth reading in detail. He methodically establishes his credentials—50 years in the DOJ and on the bench—and documents his consistent refusal to let partisan politics influence his work. The examples matter because they show this isn’t some late-career partisan turn. Then he explains why silence became impossible:
As I watched in dismay and disgust from my position on the bench, I came to feel deeply uncomfortable operating under the necessary ethical rules that muzzle judges’ public statements and restrict their activities. Day after day, I observed in silence as President Trump, his aides, and his allies dismantled so much of what I dedicated my life to.
What follows is a systematic takedown of Trump’s corruption of prosecutorial discretion and his attack on the Constitution and the rule of law:
As much as I have treasured being a judge, I can now think of nothing more important than joining them, and doing everything in my power to combat today’s existential threat to democracy and the rule of law.
What Nixon did episodically and covertly, knowing it was illegal or improper, Trump now does routinely and overtly. Prosecutorial decisions during this administration are a prime example. Because even a prosecution that ends in an acquittal can have devastating consequences for the defendant, as a matter of fairness Justice Department guidelines instruct prosecutors not to seek an indictment unless they believe there is sufficient admissible evidence to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
Trump has utterly ignored this principle. In a social-media post, he instructed Attorney General Pam Bondi to seek indictments against three political adversaries even though the officials in charge of the investigations at the time saw no proper basis for doing so. It has been reported that New York Attorney General Letitia James was prosecuted for mortgage fraud after Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, one of Donald Trump’s former criminal-defense lawyers, questioned the legal viability of bringing charges against James. Former FBI Director James Comey was charged after the interim U.S. attorney who had been appointed by Trump refused to seek an indictment and was forced to resign. Senator Adam Schiff, the third target of Trump’s social-media post, has yet to be charged.
Trump is also dismantling the offices that could and should investigate possible corruption by him and those in his orbit. Soon after he was inaugurated, Trump fired, possibly unlawfully, 18 inspectors general who were responsible for detecting and deterring fraud and misconduct in major federal agencies. The FBI’s public-corruption squad also has been eliminated. The Department of Justice’s public-integrity section has been eviscerated, reduced from 30 lawyers to only five, and its authority to investigate election fraud has been revoked.
Wolf doesn’t stop there. The piece catalogs Trump’s broader assault: the unlawful executive orders, the attacks on judges who’ve ruled against him, and the constellation of enablers making it all possible. This isn’t judicial restraint—it’s a prosecutor laying out a case.
If you’re worried that Trump will get to appoint his replacement, he notes that’s actually not true in this case:
When I became a senior judge in 2013, my successor was appointed, so my resignation will not create a vacancy to be filled by the president.
More importantly, Wolf’s making clear this resignation isn’t symbolic retreat—it’s tactical:
I resigned in order to speak out, support litigation, and work with other individuals and organizations dedicated to protecting the rule of law and American democracy. I also intend to advocate for the judges who cannot speak publicly for themselves.
Read the full piece, which has way more than I discussed here. Wolf’s not mincing words or hiding behind careful judicial language anymore.
Not surprisingly, the White House mocked Judge Wolf as trying to pursue a “personal agenda,” while encouraging any other judges who feel similarly to resign as well.
The actual reality is what Wolf documented across dozens of paragraphs: Trump is systematically destroying constitutional constraints on executive power, dismantling the offices that could investigate corruption, and prosecuting political enemies while protecting allies. Calling that a “personal agenda” is exactly the kind of authoritarian gaslighting Wolf quit to fight.
Wolf has the courage Trump’s entire administration lacks. And this is a moment where we need more public displays of courage like this. So kudos to Judge Wolf for speaking out so clearly.
You might recall that not that long ago Trump managed to get CBS to pay him a $16 million bribe based entirely on a lie: that the network’s 60 Minutes program had unfairly edited an interview with Kamala Harris. In reality it was a minor, ordinary edit, and CBS could have easily fought the case and won. Instead, they folded like damp cardboard and kissed the ring, which has been a media trend.
Clearly emboldened by his success at bullying weak-kneed U.S. media outlets, Trump has now taken aim at the BBC for some edits made to a documentary about Trump’s violent insurrection attempt. The documentary in question, “Panorama,” mashed together two parts of Trump’s speech clearly encouraging his followers to storm the Capitol on January 6, 2021:
“The edit spliced together two sections of Trump’s speech, making it seem like he said: “We’re gonna walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be with you and we fight. We fight like hell and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not gonna have a country anymore.”
In reality Trump said “We’re gonna walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be with you” 15 minutes into the speech but “and we fight. We fight like hell” came 54 minutes later.”
So yes, while Trump’s intent was clear either way, it wasn’t the wisest editorial choice knowing Trump’s litigious nature. If you’re going to take aim at this lawsuit-happy con man, you really should have your ducks carefully lined up in a row.
“The conclusion of that deliberation is that we accept that the way the speech was edited did give the impression of a direct call for violent action. The BBC would like to apologize for that error of judgement.”
Buried by this apology tour was the fact that nobody even noticed this “scandal” or cared about the edits until it was created by the right wing Daily Telegraph. Another in a long line of right wing propaganda outlets that routinely engage in far worse, and far more problematic behaviors that rarely see any sort of accountability, creating a lopsided media landscape that endlessly favors the right wing.
You can see in real time how the threats by Trump really do have their intended impact: they disorient journalism and suppress the truth. Trump wants a press that kisses his ass. If he can’t have that, he wants a “both sides” oriented press that’s too afraid to point out factual reality. And he’s getting it.
This New York Times coverage of the BBC fracas can’t even be bothered to mention this “scandal” was started by a right wing tabloid. More curiously, the outlet can’t be bothered to mention that there really was a violent insurrection that the President really did pretty clearly openly support after endlessly stoking completely baseless election conspiracy theories. Kind of important context.
You can be apologetic for errors in judgement (in a way that lessons your legal exposure) without validating the criminal president, turning into a pile of feckless jelly, and burying the fact this was a fake scandal nobody would have cared about if not for the gamesmanship of right wing media.
Earlier this year, I wrote about how ICE had decided to publish a horrifying recruitment video that mixed in footage of ICE raids, including one that got Kristi Noem in some hot water, along with the introduction to the Pokémon animated series, complete with the theme music behind it. The video itself wasn’t terribly surprising. ICE is filled with, and run by, terrible people and their decision to liken illegal immigrants in America to fantasy animals fit only for capture and vicarious battle is simply par for the course. The real surprise for me was that Nintendo, a company I am comfortable labeling as addicted to IP litigation, did absolutely nothing about it.
I can’t stress this point enough: Nintendo attempted to oppose a Costa Rican grocery store’s trademark application for being called “Super Mario Supermarket,” but can’t find enough spine to respond to ICE’s pilfering of its IP with anything other than an acknowledgement that it didn’t authorize its use. Neville Chamberlain would have been proud.
As with anything from this dumpster fire of an administration, failing to slap back at them results only in an increase in bad behavior. Both the White House and DHS appear to be increasing their video game based messaging, now including other game properties as well.
Earlier this week the White House posted an AI-generated image on X featuring President Donald Trump dressed as Master Chief from the Halo series, saluting a US flag (with missing stars) and holding a Covenant energy sword.
This was followed by another post by the official DHS account on X, which showed a screenshot from Halo along with the message “destroy the Flood – join ICE”.
So, unlike in the Pokémon instance, I waited. Not for there to be online outrage about the use of a beloved video game property in order to further the administration’s fascistic goals. I knew that was coming and it showed up right on time. I was waiting for Microsoft’s response to the use of its IP in this manner.
I’m still waiting. As best as I can tell, Microsoft hasn’t said a single freaking word about this whole thing. And, as I said was the case with the earlier Nintendo story, that means that the company either officially or tacitly endorses the use. There is no other potential way to read this. And it is not lost on anyone that Microsoft donated to Trump’s campaign and has all kinds of government contracts with this administration. Their silence, it appears, is designed to keep the money flowing.
Those who worked on the franchise have not been so silent.
Speaking to Game File, Halo co-creator and Master Chief lead designer Marus Lehto said he found the DHS’s ICE recruitment post “absolutely abhorrent”, saying: “It really makes me sick seeing Halo co-opted like this.”
Meanwhile, Jaime Griesemer – one of the chief designers on numerous early Halo games – said he found the post showing Trump as Master Chief amusing, stating that he took it as a compliment because “like anything with cultural capital, it is going to be used by politicians and brands and anyone else looking for relevancy”.
However, Griesemer said he didn’t approve of the DHS / ICE post, saying: “Using Halo imagery in a call to ‘destroy’ people because of their immigration status goes way too far, and ought to offend every Halo fan, regardless of political orientation. I personally find it despicable. The Flood are evil space zombie parasites and are not an allegory to any group of people.”
What those people cannot do is send C&D notices to the government. They can’t get Microsoft’s lawyers involved. They don’t have a legal war chest to throw around, nor the IP rights directly to protect from use by this clown show of a government.
And because of that inaction, the administration has become even more emboldened to do this to others.
Now, journalist Alyssa Mercante has received a statement from DHS saying it had no plans to stop using video games to spread its messaging.
“We will reach people where they are with content they can relate to and understand, whether that be Halo, Pokémon, Lord of the Rings or any other medium,” the statement reads. “DHS remains laser focused on bringing awareness to the flood of crime that criminal illegal aliens have inflicted on our country. We aren’t slowing down.”
Again, these are companies that have been all too happy to throw legal threats and/or lawsuits around for the barest of reasons. Here, however, they are silent.
After forty days. Forty days of the longest government shutdown in American history. Forty days of Democrats saying this is the line—healthcare for twenty-two million Americans. Forty days of holding firm while Republicans bet Democrats would break first.
Chuck Schumer just taught Donald Trump that hostage-taking works.
Not because he had to. Because the framework he operates within cannot imagine doing what this moment requires: actually fighting power instead of managing accommodation to it.
Eight Democratic senators voted to end the shutdown last night. The deal they cut? A “guaranteed vote” next month on ACA subsidies that everyone—including Chuck Schumer—knows won’t pass. They traded their only leverage for a promise they know is worthless. They held the line for forty days, then surrendered for nothing.
The base is in open revolt. Gavin Newsom’s response was one word: “Pathetic.” JB Pritzker called it “an empty promise.” AOC reminded everyone that “working people want leaders whose word means something.” Chris Murphy admitted plainly: “There’s no way to sugarcoat what happened tonight.”
And Ro Khanna did what needed doing: he called for Schumer’s removal as Senate minority leader.
This isn’t just fury at a bad deal. This is recognition that the Democratic establishment is operating within a dead framework that keeps producing the same result: managed decline wrapped in sophisticated justifications.
Schumer’s calculation was pure technocratic management. The shutdown polls badly. Healthcare polls well. Get a vote scheduled, minimize political damage, trust that Republicans will take the blame when premiums skyrocket. Classic establishment thinking: read the focus groups, calculate the risk, optimize for damage control.
What he cannot see—what the framework literally prevents him from seeing—is that the fight itself mattered more than any deal. That people weren’t asking for better negotiating tactics. They were asking for proof that Democrats would hold the line on something. Anything. After Chicago. After ICE raids. After warrantless mass detentions. After watching Trump systematically dismantle constitutional constraints.
This was the test. Forty days to prove Democrats could fight power instead of accommodating it. And Schumer folded.
Symone Sanders got it immediately: “The hostage taking worked.” That’s the lesson Trump learned last night. That’s why Chris Murphy is right to fear Trump gets stronger, not weaker. When you teach authoritarians that threatening to hurt people produces Democratic capitulation, you haven’t minimized damage—you’ve guaranteed more hostage situations.
The establishment will produce sophisticated analysis explaining why this was actually strategic. They’ll point to the guaranteed vote, the federal worker protections, the political positioning for next month. They’ll treat this as a temporary setback in normal political competition.
But this isn’t normal political competition. This is one side attempting regime change while the other pretends it’s just another negotiation requiring careful positioning.
The base understands what Schumer cannot: you cannot manage your way out of authoritarian consolidation. You cannot focus-group your way to resistance. You cannot optimize yourself into fighting power when your entire framework is built on accommodating it.
The governors get it. Newsom fighting homeowner cartels in California. Pritzker calling out empty promises. They’re not waiting for Senate leadership to figure out what time it is. They’re building the alternative: liberal populism that actually fights concentrated power instead of explaining why fighting is unstrategic.
The progressive caucus gets it. AOC reminding everyone that people’s lives depend on Democrats keeping their word. Khanna calling for new leadership. James Talarico declaring “this moment demands fighters, not folders.”
Even establishment voices like Murphy understand something fundamental broke last night. When your own senator has to record a video saying “there’s no way to sugarcoat this” and “I’m angry—like you”—that’s not spin control. That’s recognition that the base has decided the framework is dead.
Forty days was long enough to prove Democrats could fight. Long enough to make Trump pay a political price for hostage-taking. Long enough to show working people that their leaders’ word means something.
Chuck Schumer surrendered all of that for a vote next month that won’t pass.
He doesn’t know what time it is. But the base does. The governors do. The progressive caucus does. And they’re done waiting for him to figure it out.
The dead framework just folded. Time to storm the castle.
Mike Brock is a former tech exec who was on the leadership team at Block. Originally published at his Notes From the Circus.
The Department of Homeland Security says it intends to add state driver’s license information to a swiftly expanding federal system envisioned as a one-stop shop for checking citizenship.
The plan, outlined in a public notice posted Thursday, is the latest step in an unprecedented Trump administration initiative to pool confidential data from varied sources that it claims will help identify noncitizens on voter rolls, tighten immigration enforcement and expose public benefit fraud.
According to emails obtained by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, DHS approached Texas officials in June about a pilot program to add the state’s driver license data, but it’s not clear if the state participated.
Earlier this year, DHS added millions of Americans’ Social Security data to the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, system, allowing officials to use the tool to conduct bulk searches of voter rolls for the first time. According to the document filed Thursday, SAVE also recently expanded to include passport and visa information.
Incorporating driver’s license information would allow election officials whose rolls don’t include voters’ Social Security numbers to conduct bulk searches by driver’s license number. Ultimately, the system would link these two crucial identifiers for the purpose of citizenship checks, said Michael Morse, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
“It is the key that unlocks everything,” Morse said.
State driver’s license databases often include a variety of sensitive information on drivers, including place of birth, passport number, biometrics, address, email and employment information, said Claire Jeffrey, a spokesperson for the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators.
Beyond the privacy concerns this creates, using driver’s license numbers in SAVE could lead to citizens being wrongly flagged as noncitizens, said Rachel Orey, director of the elections project at the Bipartisan Policy Center. Driver’s license numbers are sometimes reused and people can have licenses in multiple states. Also, if SAVE isn’t linked to live versions of state driver’s license databases, the information in the system will be outdated.
“This could have far-reaching consequences for voter access and public trust if inaccurate data were used to question eligibility or citizenship,” Orey said.
DHS says in the notice that linking to driver’s license data, which it calls the most widely used form of identification, “will allow SAVE to match against other sources to verify immigration status and U.S. citizenship, which will improve accuracy and efficiency for SAVE user agencies.”
The department did not respond to questions about the expansion.
Up until this year, SAVE was mostly used to check individual immigrants’ citizenship status when they applied for public benefits. DHS has said the aim in expanding the system was to enable election officials to check voter rolls en masse. But the agency’s data-sharing agreement with the Social Security Administration as well as Thursday’s disclosure make clear that DHS and other agencies can use SAVE for other purposes, including for immigration enforcement investigations.
Information uploaded into the system by state and local election officials and other users will be saved and may be “shared with other DHS Components that have a need to know of the information to carry out their national security, law enforcement, immigration, intelligence, or other homeland security functions,” the notice explains.
Advocacy groups have sued the federal government claiming the pooling of data in SAVE violates the Privacy Act, which is meant to prevent misuse of private data. In filings, the government has said that the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 explicitly allows information sharing to verify citizenship status and that DHS would exercise caution in flagging voters as potential noncitizens.
Some privacy lawyers called DHS’ move to add driver’s license information more evidence of federal overreach. “The administration wants to get as much data as it can, however it can, whenever it can,” said Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University.
The DHS notice, known as a system of records notice, allows for public comment on several aspects of SAVE’s expansion, including some already completed. Typically, such notices are filed when agencies propose changes to federal systems, and the comments are meant to inform how officials go forward. That didn’t happen in this case.
In June, email records show, DHS asked the Texas Department of Public Safety, which issues driver’s licenses and ID cards, to partner on a pilot program to add its data into SAVE.
Timothy Benz of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the branch of DHS that oversees SAVE, wrote that the planned expansion was part of the “evolution” of SAVE into a “one-stop shop for all election agency verification needs.”
“That would require collaboration with each states’ DL agency in order for us to query those DL records in order to provide that information to the querying elections agency,” Benz wrote.
Rebekah Hibbs, a supervisor in the Texas Department of Public Safety’s driver’s license division, replied that DPS is “always happy” to support the SAVE tool and agreed to talk again with USCIS.
It’s not clear what happened next. In response to questions from ProPublica and the Tribune, DPS spokesperson Sheridan Nolen said the “department does not have any ongoing projects with USCIS related to driver record information for registered voters, nor have we been asked to provide that information.”
She did not answer questions about whether DPS has given any data to USCIS. DHS did not respond to questions about whether the partnership moved forward.
Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson announced Oct. 20 that her office had run the state’s entire voter roll through SAVE. Alicia Pierce, Nelson’s spokesperson, said the office did the check using full Social Security numbers, which it routinely obtains from the Department of Public Safety to match with registered voters.
The results showed that around 0.015% of Texas voters, or 2,724 people, are potentially noncitizens.
At least one Texas official is concerned that those initial SAVE results may not be accurate. In a court filing submitted Wednesday as part of the Privacy Act litigation, Travis County voter registration director Christopher Davis wrote that state data shows about 25% of the voters that SAVE flagged as potential noncitizens in the county had provided proof of citizenship when registering to vote.
“I am concerned that the list Travis County received from the Secretary of State is flawed and worry about the potential for voters to be improperly cancelled from the voter rolls and possibly disenfranchised as a result,” Davis’ filing says.
Over the weekend, the President of the United States fell for obvious satire from a website literally called “The Dunning Kruger Times.”
Donald Trump—a man with access to the best, most accurate information on basically any subject—posted to Truth Social a screenshot claiming that “DOGE halts yearly payments of $2.5 million to Barack Obama for ‘royalties linked to Obamacare.’ Obama has collected this payment since 2010, for a total of $40 million in taxpayer dollars.”
Trump’s comment on this fabrication? “WOW!”
This is, obviously, complete and utter nonsense. It’s so stupid it almost feels silly to debunk it, but: Obama does not and has never received “royalties” for the Affordable Care Act. That’s not how legislation works. That’s not how royalties work. That’s not how anything works. The only person clearly profiting millions of dollars off the Presidency is the guy in the Oval Office right now.
The Dunning-Kruger effect describes how people with low competence in a particular domain drastically overestimate their abilities in that domain. A site called “The Dunning Kruger Times” is essentially a warning label: this is bait for extremely overconfident idiots.
And the President of the United States fell for it.
The article itself is from months ago and regularly makes the rounds among the most credulous corners of X. But even a cursory glance reveals obvious red flags. The byline? “Flagg Eagleton – Patriot,” with this bio:
Flagg Eagleton is the son of an American potato farmer and a patriot. After spending 4 years in the Navy and 7 on welfare picking himself up by the bootstraps, Flagg finally got his HVAC certificate and is hard at work keeping the mobile homes of Tallahassee at a comfy 83 degrees.
This is not subtle satire. Seven years on welfare picking himself up by the bootstraps? Keeping mobile homes in Tallahassee a comfy 83 degrees?
This is what the President of the United States falls for?
And just to remove any possible doubt about what kind of operation this is, here’s what the site says about itself:
Everything on this website is fiction. It is not a lie and it is not fake news because it is not real. If you believe that it is real,you should have your head examined.
They’re quite explicit about their target audience:
They arefragile, frightened, mostly older caucasian Americans.They believe nearly anything. While we go out of our way to educate them that not everything they agree with is true,they are still old, typically ignorant, and again — very afraid of everything.
Our mission is to do our best to show them the light, through shame if necessary, and to have a good time doing it, because…old and afraid or not, these people are responsible for the patriarchy we’re railing so hard against. They don’t understand logic and they couldn’t care less about reason. Facts are irrelevant. BUT…they do understand shame.
The site’s entire premise is that its targets “believe nearly anything” and that “facts are irrelevant” to them.
Congratulations, Mr. President. You’re the mark.
Tragically, it’s not at all clear that Donald Trump does understand shame. His superpower is his shamelessness.
But remember all the fuss earlier this year about how no one was willing to seriously discuss the apparent mental decline of Joe Biden while he was President? Remember how people like Jake Tapper insisted that the lesson they learned from that was to be more willing to call out such things in the future?
Well, where is Jake Tapper now?
The President of the United States, with access to the best information and advisors in the world, just fell for obvious satire from a website literally called “The Dunning Kruger Times”—a site that explicitly states anyone who believes its content “should have your head examined.”
If that’s not evidence of a profound cognitive failure that warrants serious discussion about fitness for office, what is?
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This administration isn’t content to be normal awful. It insists on being ghastly awful as often as possible.
Not content to eject hundreds of migrants into foreign torture prisons, the administration has decided it’s time to start killing foreign people in boats just because. That’s not me using a worn-out turn of phrase. That was the administration’s official response when it began engaging in extrajudicial killings in international waters. It fired first and issued its justification after.
At first, the theory was that the international drug trade amounted to war-like actions against the US that would justify the violence. But that excuse only works for so long. Limitations on executive power are supposed to force the president to present his case for war to Congress. Trump doesn’t want to do this even though it’s virtually assured GOP legislators would trip over themselves to rubber stamp whatever xenophobic violence the Trump administration wants to engage in.
Department of Defense (DOD) officials told Democratic lawmakers in a brief on the U.S. military’s strikes against boats off the coast of northern South America that the military is not identifying the occupants of the boats before they bomb them.
[…]
On Thursday, Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-California) told CNN that the Pentagon briefed her and other lawmakers on the attacks, informing them that the administration does not “need to positively identify individuals on the vessel to do the strikes.”
The administration attacked the boats — rather than detaining and then prosecuting the people they claimed were drug traffickers — “because they could not satisfy the evidentiary burden” to successfully prosecute them, Jacobs elaborated.
So, it’s pretty much civil asset forfeiture, but with the military killing people rather than merely robbing them of their property. It’s a middle finger to due process that makes it clear this administration would rather kill people than prosecute them, which is going to get even more frightening when it inevitably decides it can bring this undeclared war back home.
Even though it probably feels it owes no one any explanation for its actions, the Trump administration is still trying to find some way to sell the system of checks and balances on its offshore murder program. Some form of justification is needed for these extrajudicial murders. And the administration’s latest legal theory is both sickening and astounding. Realizing that referencing “hostilities” might put time limits on boat strikes, the Trump DOJ continues to revise its take on war powers, which has led to this bit of galaxy brain rationalization:
A top Justice Department lawyer has told lawmakers that the Trump administration can continue its lethal strikes against alleged drug traffickers in Latin America — and is not bound by a decades-old law requiring Congress to give approval for ongoing hostilities.
The key word here is “hostilities.” The administration must seek approval from Congress for “sustained” actions against a foreign enemy. The War Powers Act was passed in response to President Nixon’s undeclared war on Cambodia during the Vietnam War. Nixon justified military action in Cambodia by claiming the country was harboring Vietcong combatants.
That law sets a 60-day time limit on actions like these and it has been routinely ignored by the Executive Branch. President Obama blew it off to engage in an undeclared war in Libya, while Trump did the same thing during his first term to engage in sustained air strikes in both Yemen and Syria.
The second Trump administration is now blowing off the War Powers Act to prevent it from at least temporarily halting boat strikes in the Caribbean and those that are now taking place in the Pacific Ocean. Here’s how the Office of Legal Counsel — via T. Elliot Gaiser — is seeking to circumvent the long-codified 60-day limit:
Gaiser said the administration did not believe the strikes met the definition of hostilities under the law and did not intend to seek an extension of the deadline nor Congress’s approval of ongoing action, according to three people familiar with the matter, who, like others interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.
In other words, because boat strike murder victims are not firing back at US troops or engaged in any attacks on US military personnel/bases, they are not engaged in “hostilities.” If these strikes aren’t a response to “hostilities,” there should be no time limit on them. And that is some insanely dangerous bullshit.
“What they’re saying is anytime the president uses drones or any standoff weapon against someone who cannot shoot back, it’s not hostilities‚” said Brian Finucane, a former legal adviser to the State Department who is now a senior adviser for the U.S. program at the International Crisis Group. “It’s a wild claim of executive authority.”
Yeah, it is. It’s pedantry in service of straight up murder. The Defense Department has admitted it’s killing people because it can’t secure a criminal conviction. The administration is continuing to pretend that the mere existence of an international drug market justifies drone strikes on boats in international waters. And now it’s going even further, threatening land wars (but without actually declaring war) in Columbia, Venezuela, and for some fucking reason, Nigeria.
We have the same people who see Orwell’s 1984 as a blueprint making it clear they believe Mr. Kurtz is the real hero of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. And as if this wasn’t dystopian enough, the administration is using NSA-esque contact chaining to kill people simply because they might be acquainted with someone (allegedly) in the drug trade:
“What they told us is they have to show a connection to a designated terrorist organization or their affiliate, and as long as they can show that connection, they believe they are authorized to strike,” Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-California) said in an interview.
But such connections could be as much as “three hops away” from a known drug trafficker, Jacobs told reporters after the briefing.
Under this theory, if you know or are acquainted with anyone who purchases/uses illicit drugs, you’re probably just two hops away from a “known drug trafficker.” You’ll only be three hops away if there are enough small-time middlemen involved that haven’t previously been arrested on drug charges. Three hops in the United States would make most of the population a “justifiable” target for an extrajudicial drone strike. Just because it’s happening to non-citizens in international waters doesn’t change the math. It just makes it easier for most Americans to stomach and much easier for the bigots in power to sell to the bigots in their voting bloc.
For the last decade or so, U.S. cable TV customers have been plagued by a steady parade of content blackouts as cable providers and broadcasters bicker over new programming contracts.
For the end user, so-called “retransmission feuds” usually go something like this: a TV broadcaster demands a cable company pay significantly more money to carry the same content. The pay TV provider balks, and one side or the other blacks out the aforementioned content. Consumers spend a few months paying for content they can’t access, while the two sides bitch at each other and try to leverage consumer anger against the other guy.
After a while a new confidential deal is struck, customers face a higher bill, and never get any sort of refund for missing content. Wash, rinse, repeat. Over and over again. With regulators largely sitting on their hands as U.S. consumers get shafted.
While streaming has fixed some of the shittier issues related to cable TV, these sorts of standoffs have made the jump to the modern era.
For example, Google and Disney have been in an ugly contract dispute since October 30 resulting in YouTube TV subscribers losing access to 21 ABC/Disney-owned TV channels, including ABC, ESPN, and The Disney Channel. Not only that, they’ve lost access to content they’d recorded to the cloud via the YouTube TV DVR system, according to Ars Technica:
“…the corporate conflict is highlighting another frustration in the streaming era. As Google and Disney continue duking it out, their customers have lost some access to content they thought was permanent: DVR files and digital movie purchases.”
As Techdirt has long noted, you don’t really own any of the things you pay for in the modern Internet era. And that apparently extends to content you thought you had stored on the servers of companies that can get dragged into annoying contract disputes.
A lot of folks got used to having some sort of “ownership” control over the content they’d saved to their DVR, but as YouTube TV’s help page points out, that’s no longer the case:
“Recordings of Disney content will be removed. If we’re able to reach an agreement with Disney and bring their content back to YouTube TV, subscribers will regain access to recordings that were previously in their library.”
In an act of retaliation, Google has also removed content customers may have purchased via Google Play and YouTube from Movies Anywhere, Disney’s centralized platform for content available on various distributors.
If this follows the trajectory of past disputes, this will continue for a few more weeks or months, with users failing to access content they pay for. Possibly without any sort of compensation. Then a confidential deal will be struck, and everybody will be forced to pay even more money for the same content. It’s the exact sort of annoying bullshit that helped trigger the cord cutting revolution in the first place.
Every so often the FCC hints that it might do something useful to prevent companies from taking out their inability to conduct business like adults out on their customers. But nothing ever really comes from it; and it’s certainly not going to be a priority for a Trump administration that’s busy stripping FCC consumer protection authority down to the studs under the pretense of efficiency.
