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Yahoo
3 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Right-Wingers Sound Like They WANT Anti-Trump Protests To Turn Violent
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM's Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version. Heading into a weekend of planned nationwide protests against the authoritarianism of President Donald Trump, right-wing figures in politics and law enforcement seem almost giddy at the prospect of protests turning into riots that they can crack down on ruthlessly. When they're not conflating all protests with rioting, some right-wing officials have been using the tableau of street demonstrations to preen as tough guys ready to crack heads. The posturing is almost certainly fueled by the overblown right-wing coverage of the sporadic rioting in Los Angeles that depicts a metro area of 18 million people as under siege. Taking President Trump's lead, the GOP governors in Texas and Missouri have activated their national guards ahead of the expected protests this weekend. Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) hasn't activated the Florida National Guard, but he tried to embody the snarling 'Make my day' ethos of Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry, telling a conservative podcast host: If you're driving on one of those streets and a mob comes and surrounds your vehicle and threatens you, you have a right to flee for your safety. And so if you drive off and you hit one of these people, that's their fault for impinging on you. Elsewhere in Florida, Brevard County officials held a press conference with the tagline: 'Florida: The Anti-Riot State.' After acknowledging the right to protest, the local sheriff launched into tough guy mode with a threatening rundown of the things his deputies would do to protestors who engage in violence: Earlier in the week, the sheriff in Mobile County, Alabama promised it would be a busy weekend for local 'orthopedic hand surgeons' if protestors break the perimeter his deputies set. The controversy over his remarks prompted him to issue a somewhat conciliatory statement, noting that he had been asked about the rioting in Los Angeles coming to Mobile: It is important to clarify that I do not anticipate any such events taking place here. Our past experiences with protests in Mobile have shown them to be peaceful and organized, and I have no reason to believe this weekend's rally will be any different. The right-wing reactivity comes after years of overheated rhetoric, disinformation, and demonization directed toward the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, some of which did including rioting, vandalism, and persistent civil unrest. In the ensuing years, the BLM protests became shorthand on the right for left-wing and Antifa violence and morphed into a rationale and excuse for the Jan. 6 attack. In addition to the ideological edge, there's a provincial element to some of this. Law enforcement in bigger cities where large crowds more frequently gather have more experience with keeping temperatures down and deescalating things before they get out of hand. Smaller communities and more rural areas have less experience with crowd control, but there's also the frisson of a big national event touching on them in some way, however tenuous. You might remember local police being inundated in the summer of 2020 with complaints and tips fueled by crazy rumors and online misinformation circulating on social media about Antifa invaders. Stay cool this weekend. In a rapid series of events late yesterday, U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer held a hearing on Gov. Gavin Newsom's lawsuit challenging President Trump's takeover of the state National Guard, issued a temporary restraining order blocking the move, at which point the Trump administration appealed the order to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which quickly issued an administrative stay last night. For now, the National Guard deployment will continue through the weekend, with an appeals court hearing scheduled for Tuesday. Testifying to the House Armed Services Committee, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth cast doubt on whether the administration would comply with lower courts order reining in President Trump's use of the National Guard but said he would abide by a Supreme Court decision. Hegseth's comments came before the flurry of court actions later in the day in the California National Guard case. I haven't focused on the case of Harvard researcher Kseniia Petrova because it doesn't have the same First Amendment implications of the student protestor deportations or the structural constitutional implication of the Alien Enemies Act and adjacent 'facilitate' cases. It just stands for the Trump administration being really shitty. Petrova's visa was revoked when she allegedly tried to bring undeclared frog embryos through customs at Boston's Logan Airport. The Trump administration wants to deport her to Russia, where she fears reprisals for her earlier political activism. When she challenged the immigration proceedings, the Trump administration drummed up smuggling charges against her for the frog embryo incident. Yesterday, after four months in detention, Petrova was released by agreement of the parties while the criminal and immigrations cases proceed. 'He's a sadist, but not in any fun way …'–Brian Beutler on Stephen Miller Two officers who defended the Capitol on Jan. 6 have sued to try to enforce a law calling for the installation on the West Front of a plaque honoring law enforcement's efforts that day. The House GOP has no apparent plans to put it up. On a 214-212 vote, House Republicans passed a $9.4 billion rescissions bill that enshrines President Trump's unlawful impoundment of federal spending, including cuts to foreign aid and PBS/NPR – but only after two GOP holdout were cajoled into supporting the measure. OMB Director Russell Vought has another funding freeze-rescission scheme in the works, covering some $30 billion in funding for EPA, NOAA, HHS, and other agencies, Politico reports. A new CBO analysis shows how deeply regressive the Trump centerpiece legislation is, an precedented one-two punch of tax cuts for high earners and spending cuts for lower income Americans: In memory of Brian Wilson:
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Abrego Garcia Wants A Judge To Seize Pam Bondi's Phone
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM's Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version. The slo-mo constitutional clash in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia inched forward with a new filing overnight in which his attorneys are now seeking sanctions against the Trump administration – including individual officials – for stonewalling and defying court-ordered discovery into his wrongful deportation to prison in El Salvador. Among the wide-ranging sanctions Abrego Garcia is seeking is a possible court order for Attorney General Pam Bondi and other key officials to turn over their personal devices for U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis of Maryland to review privately in her chambers. The move to impose sanctions comes after what was supposed to be an expedited two-week discovery sprint ordered by Xinis on April 15 turned into a nearly two-month discovery marathon. Xinis ordered the discovery in part to determine with the Trump administration should be held in contempt of court for refusing to abide by her Supreme Court-backed order to facilitate the return of Abrego Garcia. In court the day she ordered the discovery, Xinis was adamant that she would brook no more delays or foot-dragging and ordered lawyers to cancel vacations and drop everything else. 'Nearly sixty days, ten orders, three depositions, three discovery disputes, three motions for stay, two hearings, a week-long stay, and a failed appeal later, the Plaintiffs still have seen no evidence to suggest that the Defendants took any steps, much less 'all available steps,' to facilitate Abrego Garcia's return to the United States 'as soon as possible' so that his case could be handled as it would have been had he not been unlawfully deported,' Abrego Garcia's lawyers argue in the latest filing. The sanctions Abrego Garcia seeks asks the judge: to make factual determinations that are adverse to the administration, such as formally finding that it did not communicate with El Salvador to facilitate Abrego Garcia's release prior to his May 21 indictment; order the administration over its objections to produce the documents it has withheld in discovery thus far, deeming some its privileges waived by its misconduct; or appoint a special master to investigate the administration's 'willful noncompliance' and identify which officials by name 'willfully evaded' the court-ordered discovery, including possibly ordering the personal devices of key officials like Bondi turned over for the judge's review; impose accumulating fines on officials for each day the discovery defiance continues; and hold the administration in civil contempt of court. Notably Abrego Garcia, who was secretly indicted while this discovery dispute raged and subsequently returned to the United States to face charges of conspiracy to transport undocumented immigrants, is not yet seeking sanctions for the weeks-long delay in complying with the court's order to facilitate his return. Instead, he is focused on the administration's alleged misconduct in defying the court's discovery order by failing to produce the required materials and witness and raising frivolous objections and privileges. That seems to be a strategic decision to avoid the harder questions of whether the courts can order the president to engage in negotiations with a foreign country, to demand the release from a foreign prison of someone wrongfully deported to their home country, and other stickier elements of this case about which the Supreme Court has already expressed reservations. Meanwhile, in his criminal case, Abrego Garcia asked the judge to release him pending trial. In another wrongful deportation case, the Trump administration claimed a 'perfect storm of errors' led it to deport Jordin Melgar-Salmeron to El Salvador on May 7 despite an order from the Second Circuit Court of Appeals barring his removal. In the new filing this week, the administration also changed what it had previously told the appeals court about how the wrongful deportation happened. It took long enough, but U.S. District Judge Michael E. Farbiarz of New Jersey ruled that the Trump administration cannot detain or deport Columbia University graduate and pro-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil. But Khalil won't be released immediately, as the judge stayed his order until tomorrow to give the administration time to appeal his ruling. The Trump DOJ fired two more people who worked on Special Counsel Jack Smith's team investigating, including a non-lawyer member of the support staff, Reuters reports. Harmeet Dhillon, assistant attorney general for civil rights, has made an unprecedented demand for a huge volume of 2020 and 2024 election data from the state of Colorado, NPR reports. While the data demand is not explicitly connected the criminal conviction of former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters, the Trump DOJ has already taken the unprecedented step of intervening in her federal appeal of her state New reporting from on the highly politicized speech President Trump gave this week at Ft. Bragg: Internal 82nd Airborne Division communications reviewed by reveal a tightly orchestrated effort to curate the optics of Trump's recent visit, including handpicking soldiers for the audience based on political leanings and physical appearance. One unit-level message bluntly saying: 'No fat soldiers.' 'If soldiers have political views that are in opposition to the current administration and they don't want to be in the audience then they need to speak with their leadership and get swapped out,' another note to troops said. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., announced eight new appointees to the CDC vaccine advisory committee he sacked – and at least a couple of them are real doozies, he NYT reports. The entire board of the Fulbright program resigned over what it said was political interference from the Trump administration in its selection of this year's Fulbright scholars. The NYT reported: The board approved those scholars over the winter after a yearlong selection process, and the State Department was supposed to send acceptance letters by April, the people said. But instead, the board learned that the office of public diplomacy at the agency had begun sending rejection letters to the scholars based mainly on their research topics, they said. The board posted its resignation statement here. 'It angers me when I see these rioters trying to pull barricades out of the hands of police officers and shoving police officers to try and grab the barricades and break the perimeter … I can tell you that if they try to do that in Mobile, Alabama, the orthopedic hand surgeons will have one hell of a weekend fixing hands. That barricade can become a weapon.'–Mobile County, Alabama Sheriff Paul Burch, commenting on this weekend's planned 'No Kings' rally
Yahoo
5 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
How Some Very Bad Luck Has Made It Even Harder To Rein In Trump
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM's Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version. In a deeply unfortunate roll of the dice, the only three Trump appointees on the 16-judge D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ended up being randomly selected for June's three-judge motion panel. That means they get the first bite at the apple on various emergency motions that come to the court and a chance to shape dramatically the procedural posture of some of the most important cases against the lawlessness of the Trump administration. Yesterday, the three judges – Gregory Katsas, Neomi Rao, and Justin Walker – issued an administrative stay blocking a major order from U.S. District Judge James Boasberg in the original Alien Enemies Case. The stay came as the Trump administration faced a deadline of today to propose to Boasberg how it would provide the due process that the Alien Enemies Act detainees at CECOT had been denied when they were removed in March. If you want to get a little deeper into the history and procedure of the appeals court move, Chris Geidner has you covered. But one point he makes that I want to highlight is the administration's foot-dragging for almost a week since Boasberg's ruling, and then rushing to the appeals court at the last-minute while concurrently asking Boasberg to stay his own order. It looks like a tactic designed to add as much delay as possible into the calendar. The temporary administrative stay won't be the last word from the three-judge panel. They still must decide whether to freeze the order while the entire appeal proceeds, but the odds aren't good. For what it's worth, there's no reason to believe the selection of the three Trump appointees for this month's motion panel was anything more than random chance. The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals is still blocking Judge Boasberg's contempt of court proceedings in the original Alien Enemies Act case. Because the appeals court entered what was supposed to be a temporary administrative stay, Boasberg has been unable to move forward since April 18, a 'temporary' delay of almost two months now. The Trump administration is trying to bring a swift end to the contempt of court proceeding in the Maryland case of the wrongfully deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia, arguing that the case is moot now that he has been returned to the United States. In a new filing yesterday, the Trump DOJ didn't just ignore the history of administration's repeated brazen defiance of court orders in the case. It pretended none of that never happened: 'In the face of Abrego Garcia's return to the United States, [plaintiffs] baselessly accuse Defendants of 'foot-dragging and 'intentionally disregard[ing] this Court's and the Supreme Court's orders,' when just the opposite is true.' Abrego Garcia's lawyers are fiercely resisting the case being dismissed, urging Judge Paula Xinis to continue her inquiry into whether the administration was in contempt of court. Given her prior dismayed reactions in-court to the government's misconduct, I would expect her to continue her inquiry if she finds a legal basis for doing so. Still no word on the court-ordered return of Cristian from El Salvador in the other Maryland 'facilitate' case. The Trump administration filed an update Friday that for the first time confirmed that Cristian remains at CECOT. But the administration has erected a fictional wall between DHS and State, with DHS (a party to the case) responding to the court that it's up to the State Department (which is not a party) to negotiate Cristian's return. I would anticipate the court or plaintiff counsel making moves at some point to get answers directly from State. TPM continues to run a liveblog with the major developments on President Trump's military escalation in Los Angeles. The Trump administration could resume sending undocumented immigrants to Guantanamo Bay as soon as today. The planned operation, reported by Politico and the WaPo, would be dramatically larger than the short-lived effort a few months ago to use Gitmo as a detention facility for migrants. The migrants targeted for transfer to the base in Cuba come from a range of countries that includes U.S. allies in Europe. The home countries of the foreign nationals are reportedly not being notified of the transfers to Gitmo. I keep going back to the Trump memo calling up the National Guard equating protests – even absent violence – with rebellion. It wasn't an accident or one-off, as this threat towards any protestors of his military parade this coming weekend in DC shows: ABC News, which kicked off the spate of dubious post-election settlement agreements with Donald Trump, has sent 28-year network veteran Terry Moran packing over his social media post critical of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller. Moran's contract was reportedly set to expire Friday and will not be renewed. Here's the key thing to note about President Trump's decision to revert to the Confederate names of U.S. military installations: He's re-naming the bases ostensibly in honor of people with the same names and initials as the original Confederate honorees in order to get around the law mandating the removal of Confederate symbols from the military. So it's a squirrelly way to have all the racism without having to repeal the law. In an Orwellian irony, the board of the Smithsonian Institute has bowed to political influence from President Trump and ordered a full review of its public-facing content to make sure it contains no … political influence. The Trump EPA is poised to announce the easing of a Biden-era regulation limiting mercury emissions from power plants and the elimination entirely of the limits on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants In 2022-23, DOJ and DHS were sufficiently concerned that Elon Musk was a vector for malign foreign influence that they were actively tracking the foreign nationals coming and going to his properties, the WSJ reports. 'A federal appeals court on Tuesday granted the Trump administration's request to keep the president's far-reaching tariffs in effect for now but agreed to fast track its consideration of the case this summer,' the WSJ reports. 'It is clear that the bureau's current leadership has no intention to enforce the law in any meaningful way. While I wish you all the best, I worry for American consumers.'–Cara Petersen, the acting head of enforcement for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, in a fiery farewell email after she resigned her position
Yahoo
09-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Trump Has Long Been Itching To Use The Military On American Streets
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM's Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version. We come into the new week with more weekend news to process than we've had since February or March, so I'm going to jump right into it. I tried to condense it as much as possible, grouping like things together, in roughly descending order of importance. One note: I wrote extensively about the return of Abrego Garcia on Friday so I didn't include it here given the volume of other news, but we'll come back to this, especially the news that the criminal division chief in Nashville resigned over the Abrego Garcia indictment. In the meantime, Abrego Garcia's lawyers filed a flaming retort last night to the Trump DOJ's attempt to end the original case and sidestep the contempt of court proceeding entirely. We can't talk about the protests in Los Angeles against mass deportation and President Trump itching to send in the military without a quick reminder that we all knew there was an extremely high risk that if Trump were re-elected he would provoke civil unrest in order to use it as a pretext for lawless actions he was already determined to take. It's too early to say whether this particular incident ends up being the defining episode of the erosion of the line between the military and domestic law enforcement. But it's understandable why everyone has a hair trigger about Trump sending in the National Guard over the objections of California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D). Two things in particular: The President's memo was concerningly open-ended. It didn't specify Los Angeles or California; it applies anywhere. It empowered the defense secretary 'to employ any other members of the regular Armed Forces as necessary.' It broadly defined protests as rebellion: 'To the extent that protests or acts of violence directly inhibit the execution of the laws, they constitute a form of rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States.' Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made a big deal over the weekend about a detachment of 500 Marines at Twentynine Palms being ready to provide backup to the National Guard. A former acting vice chief of the National Guard Bureau told Fox News: 'This is an inappropriate use of the National Guard and is not warranted.' The most astute analysis: Law professor Chris Mirasola, who used to work in the DoD Office of General Counsel, unpacks the presidential memo. The NYT's Charlie Savage on the various legal issues implicated. Georgetown law professor Steve Vladeck on what the presidential proclamation did and did not do and why it remains alarming. A helpful thread from Carrie A. Lee, a former associate professor at the US Army War College: 'I'll say it over and over again; you can't build the mass deportation machine without first building the police state machine.'–Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council ABC News suspended veteran newsman Terry Moran for a blistering tweet about White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller. Here's the tweet: A great visualization from Amanda Shendruk and Catherine Rampell on the people Trump doesn't want to exist: This is part of a broader campaign to delete the statistical and visual evidence of undesirables, or at least those who may not fit into President Donald Trump's conception of the new American 'golden age.' Entire demographics are being scrubbed from records of both America's past and present — including people of color, transgender people, women, immigrants and people with disabilities. They are now among America's 'missing persons.' The Trump administration has forced out two senior FBI officials and punished a third for his friendship with former FBI agent Peter Strzok, the longtime Trump target. Damian Williams, the former U.S. attorney in Manhattan, is leaving Paul Weiss, which cut a deal with President Trump, and joining Jenner & Block, which in contrast sued over Trump's executive order against it and won. Proud Boys Enrique Tarrio, Zachary Rehl, Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs and Dominic Pezzola – all convicted in the Jan. 6 attack then given clemency by President Trump – have sued prosecutors and FBI agents in federal court in Florida over their prosecutions, demanding $100 million in punitive damages. An alleged series of thefts of combat equipment from an Army Ranger regiment in Washington state led to the arrest earlier this month of two veterans at a home full of Nazi and white supremacy paraphernalia and a stockpile of stolen weapons, the NYT reports. The Forward: ADL chief Jonathan Greenblatt compared pro-Palestinian student protesters to ISIS and al-Qaeda in an address to Republican attorneys general. A 6-3 Supreme Court granted DOGE access to confidential Social Security records, with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson blasting the decision in a written dissent joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor Jackson. Over the objections of the three liberal justices, the Supreme Court cut back the scope of discovery the watchdog group CREW can seek from DOGE. Frank Bisignano, the new head of the Social Security Administration, declared himself to be 'fundamentally a DOGE person.' In a widely panned decision, two Trump appointees on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals largely reinstated the Trump White House's ban on the Associated Press in retaliation for not using 'Gulf of America' in its stories. Adam Bonica used computational text analysis to examine judicial decisions in nearly 300 cases involving the Trump administration and found what he called an 'institutional chorus of constitutional alarm': The sharp language from the bench isn't judicial activism; it's the sound of democracy's defense mechanisms under unprecedented stress. These interventions span the political spectrum. Judges were responding not to partisan disagreement but to actions that crossed fundamental legal and constitutional lines. The alarm is being sounded by conservative and liberal judges in a range of cases, many of which you'll be familiar with from Morning Memo.
Hindustan Times
06-06-2025
- Hindustan Times
Microsoft tells Windows 10 users: Upgrade to Windows 11 or risk your security
Come October 2025, Windows 10 would reach the end of support from Microsoft. What does this mean? The operating system will no longer receive free security updates, new features, or technical support from Microsoft. Your PC will keep running, but without updates, it's wide open to hackers, malware, and security threats. As Microsoft tries to onboard more Windows 10 users to Windows 11, it's trying out novel ways and campaigns to achieve its goals. A new advertisement on the official Windows YouTube channel is urging people to be on the "right side of risk" by upgrading to Windows 11. While it's true that Windows 11 would be safer to use in the long run due to support from Microsoft, this ad is still getting a lot of attention. Why? Simply because Microsoft is trying to use the end of support for Windows 10 as a way to sell its current software for PCs. It's noteworthy that Windows 11 is not new. In fact, it's been around for almost 5 years. Windows 10, on the other hand, has been around for almost 10 years now and was launched on July 29, 2015. Microsoft's strict Trusted Platform Module (TPM) requirements have also drawn ire from users, with many saying that TPM 2.0 should not be necessary to run Windows 11. Before we talk about how this will negatively impact Windows 10 users, let's explore what TPM means. In short, it's a dedicated chip that is designed to give "hardware-level security services for your device." This means its job is safeguard your personal information and credentials from unauthorised users. Microsoft has made it clear that TPM 2.0 is non-negotiable requirement to upgrade to Windows 11. The problem with this is that many PCs and Windows laptops are now unable to move from Windows 10 because Windows 11 has specific hardware requirements. Essentially, they're now stuck on an older OS that may not provide enough security in the long run. Sure, Microsoft has announced an extended support programme for Windows 10, but it's definitely not a cheap option. Pricing for the same begins at $61 (over ₹5,000) for the first year, $122 (over ₹10,000) for the second year, and $244 (over ₹20,000) for the third year per device. That doesn't sound very customer friendly on paper, but this is how Microsoft is pushing all Windows users to upgrade to Windows 11. Will this strategy work? Only time will tell.
