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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • It is unclear whether Trump will go ahead with his proposal or, in keeping with his self-image as a shrewd dealmaker pattern of being a manipulative bullshitter who doesn’t care whether anything he says is true or not, has simply laid out an extreme position as a . [sic, sentence ends here in original]

    Yeah, random Reuters reporter, I probably would have needed to stop writing that sentence right there to go throw up in self disgust too.

    His first term in 2017-21 was replete with what critics said were over-the-top foreign policy pronouncements any objective observer would call “lies”, many of which were never implemented.

    I feel like he’s going to make a big show out of being shitty to Palestinians because that’s what his voters want, but I feel like his administration is going to have a hard time finding anything to do to them the previous administration didn’t already allow to happen. We’ve been at the point of dropping bombs on bombed out rubble for months already.


  • My last comment here got determined to be “misinformation” and removed, so let me try to just state my opinion and avoid any factual claims -

    I feel like Trump did say a stupid thing. I feel like the stupid thing Trump said here won’t actually be implemented, but only because actually occupying Palestine with American troops would be extremely costly and Trump’s allies in the area wouldn’t actually gain anything from it they don’t already have. I feel like the Trump administration does want to find some way to make the lives of Palestinians worse that they can show to their voters, but I feel like they will struggle to find any policies that make things much worse than Israel and the Biden administration has already made their lives.

    I don’t feel like that makes what Trump is saying or doing acceptable. However, I feel like many people don’t recognize how bad it has already been for Palestinians because of the actions of the prior administration. Moreover, I feel like elected Dems need to condemn the prior administatrion’s actions if we are going to build the sort of political coalition that can win elections and give us an administration that will be willing and able to hold Israel accountable for what I feel is an ongoing genocide.




























  • The two officials, who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, said some senior career employees at OPM have had their access revoked to some of the department’s data systems.

    The systems include a vast database called Enterprise Human Resources Integration, which contains dates of birth, Social Security numbers, appraisals, home addresses, pay grades and length of service of government workers, the officials said.

    “We have no visibility into what they are doing with the computer and data systems,” one of the officials said. “That is creating great concern. There is no oversight. It creates real cybersecurity and hacking implications.”

    Implications? This sound like an ongoing hack right now



  • the Fediverse really seems like it could be our response to these fuckers controlling the narrative on social media. It could be more than just an interesting decentralized social media platform. I really think this could be a key step in reclaiming our democracy.

    Agreed, and I would add that finding ways to get nonprofit news organizations (e.g. ProPublica) and public media (e.g. NPR, PBS, etc.) to host and administer their own instances and to start directing their readers/listeners to those services would be a great way to advance this goal




  • And I’ll never forgive the pundits and social media commenters who derailed conversations about how the Dems tone-deaf campaigning (e.g. promising the most lethal military in the world, Liz Cheney, etc.) was going to make some voters stay home and risked losing the election, very much like how the Dems blew elections in 2016 and 2004. Whining about alienating your own voters is like a football team whining about their opponents scoring too many points when they should be firing their head coach.

    e; and before it even comes up, I voted straight ticket Dem and have done so my whole life because there is nothing I want more than the total collapse of the Republican party


  • I think the problem here is less the funding and more about potential client access

    More than 85% of immigrants in Colorado fighting deportation and trying to prove their case for asylum or other legal ways to stay in the United States have no attorney. Many of those visit the advocacy network’s help desks and “Know Your Rights” presentations in the courthouse and detention center before they go into court to face an immigration judge.

    The order cuts off funding for “Know Your Rights” programs, which is how advocacy groups across the country screen cases for potential attorney representation, RMIAN director of advocacy Laura Lunn told The Sun on Tuesday. While the network’s 41 employees can pivot to other work, “without this initial touchpoint, it will be very challenging” to identify people who are detained who need legal support, she said.

    This article doesn’t make it super clear if RMIAN attorneys were ever actually turned away from the detention center or if they didn’t bother trying to go back, but attorneys at a similar organization in DC were turned away after this order came down (archived)

    “Our staff were in the detention center because we would continue doing this without getting paid, because that’s our mission,” he said. “Our staff were told to leave, that we could not even go into a detention center and tell people what’s happening and give them an ability to figure out what’s going on their case and find an attorney. And this is going to just destroy due process in the system.”

    [Bolding added]

    I think if the RMIAN attorneys tried to do another rights clinic at the detention center in Denver they’d be turned away too


  • Only barely related, but another stupid law and a stupid court case from recent history is another good example of the US attacking the ability of legal counsel to do important work that this reminds me of, Holder v Humanitarian Law project (discussed by 5 4) (archived)

    This case was brought by the law project to preemptively challenge a law that would make it illegal to provide material support or resources to groups that the US Government classifies as terrorist organizations. Sounds reasonable enough, but look a little closer and…

    [video playback]

    0:00:39.7 Speaker 1: They’ve written the law so broadly that it criminalizes pure speech, the core of what the First Amendment is designed to protect.

    0:00:40.6 Leon: The result of the law is that lawyers cannot provide representation to organizations on the government’s terrorism list, even when the lawyer’s work is meant to push the groups towards more peaceful and legal solutions.




  • I don’t think she made a mistake by resisting Trump’s illegal firing order, that’s probably the smartest way to deal with a fascist American empire because it’s not like appeasement or running is any guarantee so you might as well resist, but now that she’s landed on the administration’s radar anyway it would be in her own interest and the country’s to push back publicly. It’s not like they’re going to forgive her for keeping quiet now and the more people who know her name the more political capital it will cost them to go after her.