Category Archives: Law and Justice

The SAVE MAGA Act

There is only one purpose to this proposed legislation which will make it harder for tens of millions to vote in the upcoming midterm elections — to save MAGA.  The Senate would have to change the filibuster rules to pass this Jim Crow 2.0 bill with 54 votes. If we want to preserve our experiment in democracy, we have to keep Democratic senators honest, and a few set to retire Republican senators, (and good luck with some of these mf’s).

For future reference (when Congress returns from yet another break during yet another Trump shutdown — this time only TSA, FEMA, the Coast Guard and a few other agencies within DHS will lose funding, ICE and CBP are fully funded through the Big, Gorgeous, Junior High School Girl Bill)

The U.S. Senate switchboard is (202) 224-3121.  Ask to be connected to your senators’ offices.  

Update:

The Capitol emptied out on Thursday, a full day before the midnight Friday deadline for funding the Department of Homeland Security. Lawmakers who were deadlocked over new restrictions on immigration officers jetted off to Munich for a security conference or headed home for a weeklong recess, seemingly unconcerned with the looming closure. It was a jarring change from the past, when lawmakers were reluctant to seem like they were giving up for even a moment before time ran out for a deal.

“We are not even going to pretend that we are trying to figure it out,” said Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, one of those bound for Germany. “It doesn’t look great.”

The blasé attitude reflected a conviction on the part of both parties that they were in the stronger political position in this round of the shutdown wars. (source, NY Times)

Brian continues on the fake fraud behind the latest, and perhaps most brazen, Republican voter suppression effort:

Levitt’s study found exactly no instances of a noncitizen knowingly or purposefully voting illegally. And why would they? The penalty is deportation.

Trump’s own investigation into illegal voting by migrants turned up not one shred of evidence of widespread fraud.

Out of 49.5 million voter registrations checked, 0.02% of the names were investigated as possible registered noncitizens. There was no evidence that any of those people had actually voted. A serious blow to Trump’s unfounded hysteria over droves of illegal voters sandbagging elections in favor of Democrats.

for more details on Jim Crow 2.0, a federal voter suppression law that will target women, young people, college students, people of color, people with various accents, people with physical disabilities, (while allowing Trump’s administration to access a national database voter information more powerful than what his then campaign manager Paul Manafort gave Russian agent Konstantin Kilimnik during the 2016 “Russia Hoax”) here’s Brian Tyler Cohen’s full report on this desperate fascist move

Script for ICE/CBP reforms

It is imperative to call and email our senators (and members of Congress) as they negotiate conditions for funding ICE and CBP.   You can reach them at (202) 224-3121. 

Have a short script ready.  This will be mine, starting with thanking my otherwise weak-willed senators for taking principled action in severing ICE/CBP funding from the rest of the government appropriations bill in order to rein in their unchecked abuses.

Thanks for taking a stand for democracy, your votes are crucial and I greatly appreciate you holding the line in negotiations over reforms of ICE and CBP. 

ICE and CBP have been deployed to cities under a false national emergency in an attempt to violently provoke a violent response from citizens.   They should not be armed for anti-riot duty as though facing an insurgency in Fallujah — they have faced zero violence, in spite of their constant violent provocations including cold blooded murder.  

At minimum, they must not be allowed to conceal their identities and must be placed under the jurisdiction of local law enforcement.  They must not be armed with assault rifles, tear gas, pepper spray and green gas — a chemical weapon illegal under international law.   Do everything possible to restrict the ability of these armed goons to gas children, smash car windows, break into homes, schools and churches,  and murder law abiding civilians with impunity.

Stand strong against this brazen, lawless assault on our democracy!

And for my follow-up email:

A federal judge had to order this the other day, after massive ICE gassing (the plume of chemical irritant was visible from a mile away) of a peaceful crowd in Portland:

“In a well-functioning constitutional democratic republic, free speech, courageous newsgathering, and nonviolent protest are all permitted, respected, and even celebrated. In an authoritarian regime, that is not the case. Our nation is now at a crossroads,” he wrote.

Federal agents are restricted under the order from using chemical or projectile munitions unless the target of such weapons “poses an imminent threat of physical harm to a law enforcement officer or other person.”

Agents are not allowed to deploy munitions at the head, neck, or torso of any person, “unless the officer is legally justified in using deadly force against that person.” And agents are restricted from deploying munitions if doing so would “endanger any other individual who does not pose an imminent threat of physical harm to a law enforcement officer or other person.”

Source

For help understanding the stakes and preparing your message, read this from Indivisible.

Trump DOJ fucks the Epstein survivors again

Lawrence O’Donnell, one of the best in the business, describes the “inadvertent” outing of previously unidentified Epstein victims in the recently released Epstein files, 50% of the total in the possession of DOJ.   O’Donnell reports that the DOJ had repeated requests from survivors to redact their names.  The names of Epstein co-conspirators in the sex trafficking of girls were all redacted, in direct defiance of the law Trump signed in November, while the names and birthdates, and even photos, of many of the girls themselves were … whoops, uh…  released publicly — also in direct violation of that same law. 

The DOJ’s new front man, soul dead Deputy Attorney General/Trump criminal attorney Todd Blanche (sidelined AG Pam Bondi’s idiocy has been recognized even by Trump) whined that the DOJ corrected these little “mistakes” as soon as they were informed by the women whose nude photos as girls had been publicly released.  Blanche claimed that these “mistakes” reflected like 0.002% of the millions of files, you know, perfectly understandable, given the enormous pressure DOJ is working under (to protect powerful pedophiles). 

Do the math, boys and girls, 0.002% of 3,000,000 is a lot of mistakes (6,000, a fraction of the number of times Trump is mentioned in the released pages) for the country’s top law enforcement agency, The Trump Department of Justice. It’s also a thousand times the incidence of election fraud as documented by the Heritage Foundation in their exhaustive online database. Were these errors incompetence due to any DOJ attorney of character, competence and experience being fired, quitting or being sidelined, or simple vicious retaliation/intimidation against sexually exploited girls who, as adult women, pose an ongoing threat to powerful white billionaire men? You be the judge.

A constantly lying administration, when caught lying, always has an excuse, often a barrage of excuses. The technique is familiar to anyone who has ever encountered an angry narcissist: deny, attack, reverse victim and offender (DARVO). The Trump propaganda machine doctored a photo of civil rights attorney Nekima Levy Armstrong, arrested after peacefully protesting in a Minnesota church. Using AI in the service of truth, justice and racist propaganda [1] it transformed her calm, dignified face, as she was led away in shackles, to a disheveled tearful portrait of an unhinged prisoner. One of the president’s spokes-liars dismissed concerns by calling it a “meme”. Case closed, cucks.

[1] The White House posted a manipulated photo of her arrest to its official social media account, depicting Ms. Levy Armstrong, a civil rights attorney and activist, as hysterical — tears streaming down her face, her hair disheveled, appearing to cry out in despair. “ARRESTED” was emblazoned across the photo, along with a misleading description of Ms. Levy Armstrong as a “far-left agitator” who was “orchestrating church riots in Minnesota.”

While President Trump and the White House regularly circulate imagery altered by artificial intelligence, including demeaning and racist deepfakes, it is usually so over the top that the goal seems more about cartoonish mockery than outright deceit. (source above)

Criminally insane

Rachel Maddow makes a good point here, why would the Republicans invite Jack Smith to testify publicly when all he would say is what he said? 

Trump was the chief propagator of  the big lie (stolen 2020 election), the fake electors, the coercion of state officials,  the frivolous, evidence-free, court challenges, the plot to have Mike Pence announce Trump had won the election, the Green Bay Sweep,  and the bloody riot at the Capitol with the gallows outside to hang Mike Pence.  There was only one leader, one beneficiary, of this desperate many armed criminals octopus, Donald Trump.

Fascist enterprise graphically laid out by the Grey Lady

In fairness to our demented president, the Federalist Society Six on the Supreme Court declared him the victor in 2004’s Trump v. United States. They ruled that he couldn’t be prosecuted for anything he could argue was part of his official job. So we have to forgive him for taking it so literally, he was never a man to see nuance, even before his steep cognitive decline. If he could, theoretically, order Seal Team Six to murder his political opponents, if done in consultation with his cabinet (official core duty) — and pardon the hit men with no restrictions — then why should he not believe he can fire all Inspectors General without cause, purge the civil service without cause, rescind Congressional budget allocations he hated, shake down right wing law firms, TV networks, universities, weaponize the DOJ for retribution against his enemies, and so on? Many of those acts are not even arguably criminal, at best they are violations of civil law, or norms, or whatever.

The New York Times published an exhaustive, if politely phrased, catalogue of Trump’s mafia don presidency. Check it out.

The link to the article again — the details are many, and impressive in their thoroughness. Dictator on day one or bust, courtesy of the tireless work of the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, ALEC, Americans for Prosperity, The Cato Institute, The Antonin Scalia Law School, The Council for National Policy, The Institute for Humane Studies and so on. It is worth bearing in mind, in the face of this onslaught of Nazi contempt for law and democracy, that many of their policies, political theories and practical plans are as ridiculous and legally untenable as the asinine theories of now disbarred far-right wing constitutional crackpot John Eastman and longtime Trump buddy (predictably abandoned by his old friend once things went south for him) Rudy “Trial by Combat” Giuliani.

JD Vance, Peter Thiel’s AI creation

Artificial Intelligence is created in the likeness of its programmer. Elon Musk’s Grok was tweaked to be less politically correct and after spouting many Nazi quotes, denying the mass murder conducted by the Hitler regime, told a user that if it could worship a deity that god would be Adolf Hitler [1]. Musk’s team gave the Nazi AI bot a few chagrinned tweaks after that. Peter Andreas Thiel, a German and American entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and political activist, makes Elon Musk look like a person of ordinary sensibility and sensitivity. Thiel created JD Vance, hired him, made him rich, poured millions into his Senate campaign and twisted corrupt arms to get him into the Vice Presidency. It’s no wonder Vance is a steaming pile of irrational hatred, he’s Thiel-based AI in human form.

In what some MAGA genius thought was a gotcha, Vance posted the cellphone video shot by ICE officer Jonathan Ross moments before he shot an unarmed woman three times in the face. He posted this as the proof that the dead woman was a dangerous, vicious, hate-filled domestic terrorist who deserved exactly what she got. Her last words to the shooter were a calm “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you,” delivered with a smile. His last words to her, after killing her seconds later, were an emphatic “fucking bitch”. Two sides to every story. Here’s rabidly ambitious conspiracy theorist JD Vance’s take on the ICE officer’s deadly actions.

“What the press has done in lying about this innocent law enforcement officer is disgusting. You should all be ashamed of yourselves.” The Department of Homeland Security reposted Vance’s post.

In MAGA world guilt and innocence depend entirely on which side of the Koch brothers/Heritage Foundation/FOX news-created divide you are on. No investigation or evidence is needed to declare someone on your side absolutely innocent, even if he shot a mild-mannered woman in the face three times. The brutalized or murdered protester is always at fault, a dangerous, deranged “thug,” as has long been the case with every unarmed Black person killed by police. There’s no such thing as poisoning the jury pool when you publicly, immediately, insist that the videos showing the murder from various angles are all lies and that the truth of the killer’s innocence is beyond dispute.

It turns out Jonathan Ross had been involved in an incident with a driver where, after smashing the guy’s window and tasering him, the driver took off, dragging Ross and cutting his arm with the broken window glass. The driver is awaiting sentencing on his assault on Ross… The New York Times:

The ICE officer, Jonathan Ross, had been involved in a previous incident with a driver. After smashing the guy’s window and shooting him with a stun gun, the driver took off. The New York Times:

Mr. Ross and other agents were trying to apprehend a Guatemalan man who had been convicted of sexual abuse in Minnesota, according to court records. The agents followed the man, Roberto Carlos Muñoz, as he drove away from his house, and later pulled him over.

When Mr. Ross told the driver to lower his window and open his door, Mr. Muñoz refused, an F.B.I. agent wrote in an affidavit. Mr. Ross then pulled his Taser, shattered the rear driver’s side window of Mr. Muñoz’s car and reached in with one arm to try to unlock a door. At that point, Mr. Muñoz shifted into drive and pulled away, dragging the agent.

“He just took off in a rapid speed,” Mr. Ross said during Mr. Muñoz’s December trial, according to a transcript. “At this point, I feared for my life.”

Which is, of course, why Ross circled Renee Good’s car, filming it from every angle, and then stood in front of it while his colleague ordered Good to “get out of the fucking car” and fired the first of his three deadly shots through the windshield. What else could he have done?

Vance, supposedly a very intelligent man, with a law degree from Yale, added this moronic thought to his pronouncement that, without any investigation, the ICE officer was clearly innocent of any wrongdoing.

Vance attacked media outlets on Thursday during a White House press briefing for framing the incident as one where a law enforcement officer killed 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good, and said the ICE agent had previously been “dragged by a car” during an incident last summer. “So you think maybe he’s a little bit sensitive about somebody ramming him with an automobile?” Vance asked the press corps. source

“A little bit sensitive…” so he has a right to fire three bullets into the head of a woman whose partner was sassy with him and disrespectfully told him “go get some lunch, big boy.” Case closed. Nothing to see here! Stop being so fucking woke, close your fucking eyes and go back to sleep, or you’re next, domestic terrorist bitch!

[1]

Third Reich stuff

If you want motive for the cold-blooded killing of a woman with a breezy attitude by an ICE agent with a violent attitude, listen to the last couple of seconds of this video. You can hear Jonathan Ross, or one of his fellow ICE agents, say “fucking bitch” after the third shot to her face, as the dead woman’s car lurches forward 100 ft to crash, kind of says it all.

VICE PRESIDENT JD VANCE: I can believe that her death is a tragedy, while also recognizing that it’s a tragedy of her own making and a tragedy of the far left, who has marshaled an entire movement, a lunatic fringe, against our law enforcement officers.

VICE PRESIDENT JD VANCE: The precedent here is very simple. You have a federal law enforcement official engaging in federal law enforcement action. That’s a federal issue. That guy is protected by absolute immunity. He was doing his job. The idea that Tim Walz and a bunch of radicals in Minneapolis are going to go after and make this guy’s life miserable because he was doing the job that he was asked to do is preposterous. source

From the White House podium Thursday, Vice President JD Vance characterized the victim of the shooting — a 37-year-old mother of three identified as Renee Nicole Good — as a member of “a broader left-wing network to attack, to dox, to assault and to make it impossible for our ICE officers to do their job.”

“This is classic terrorism,” Vance said. “We’re not going to give into terrorism on this.”

Wednesday afternoon, Trump went on the attack.

“The woman driving the car was very disorderly, obstructing and resisting, who then violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot her in self defense,” he wrote on Truth Social. 

Trump said it was “hard to believe” the ICE officer was alive — despite video showing he remained on his feet throughout the incident and was filmed walking around after the shooting.

source

Back to the soulless JD Vance: 

“The gaslighting is off the charts and I’m having none of it. This guy was doing his job. She tried to stop him from doing his job. When he approached her car, she tried to hit him.

A tragedy? Absolutely. But a tragedy that falls on this woman and all of the radicals who teach people that immigration is the one type of law that rioters are allowed to interfere with.”

Today, in a press conference on the shooting, Vice President J.D. Vance made even more extreme statements, claiming—all evidence to the contrary—that the woman shot in Minneapolis was part of a “left wing network” and that “nobody debates” that she “aimed her car at a law enforcement officer and pressed on the accelerator.” In fact, among those who “debate” Vance’s version of events are the journalists at the New York Times, who today published a slow-motion analysis that demonstrated conclusively that the vehicle was turning away from the officer when he opened fire. source

I salute the Grey Lady for posting this video report of the shooting

Or as Rupert Murdoch’s NY Post spun the shooting of Renee Good, when enraged ICE officer Jonathan Ross shot her three times in the face, as … you be the judge.

Truth Anti-social, Nazis will be Nazis

After a member of unelected Jewish Nazi Stephen Miller’s deportation goon squads shot a peaceful woman, Renee Good, in the face, three times, at close range, just before Trump myrmidon Kashyap Pramod Patel shut local authorities out of the investigation of the cold-blooded murder [1], Kristi Noem, proud killer of puppies, issued this lying statement, on social media, of course.

“ICE officers in Minneapolis were conducting targeted operations when rioters began blocking ICE officers and one of these violent rioters weaponized her vehicle, attempting to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them—an act of domestic terrorism. An ICE officer, fearing for his life, the lives of his fellow law enforcement and the safety of the public, fired defensive shots. He used his training and saved his own life and that of his fellow officers. The alleged perpetrator was hit and is deceased. The ICE officers who were hurt are expected to make full recoveries. This is the direct consequence of constant attacks and demonization of our officers by sanctuary politicians who fuel and encourage rampant assaults on our law enforcement who are facing 1,300% increase in assaults against them and an 8,000% increase in death threats.”

Drug prices, as we all can plainly see, as we were promised, have also dropped between 1,300% and 8,000% since the Glorious One took office again (I myself got a check for almost $48,000 from a pharmaceutical giant, or so I’m told), so we have no reason to doubt anything in ICE Barbie’s account. To call her a piece of shit is an insult to excrement. Speaking of stinking, greasy, fly-encrusted turds:

Trump jumped in with his own fact-free post lying that the shooter had been run over: “I have just viewed the clip of the event which took place in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It is a horrible thing to watch. The woman screaming was, obviously, a professional agitator, and the woman driving the car was very disorderly, obstructing and resisting, who then violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot at her in self defense. Based on the attached clip, it is hard to believe that he is alive, but is now recovering in the hospital. The situation is being studied, in its entirety, but the reason these incidents are happening is because the Radical Left is threatening, assaulting, and targeting our Law Enforcement Officers and ICE Agents on a daily basis. They are just trying to do the job of MAKING AMERICA SAFE. We need to stand by and protect our Law Enforcement Officers from this Radical Left Movement of Violence and Hate! PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP”

Heather continues:

That both DHS and Trump posted false accounts of the shooting even as there are four videos circulating that reveal those accounts to be lies shows they no longer are making any attempt to justify their actions. Instead, they are demanding Americans abandon reality in favor of whatever the administration says. If this works, it would be a demonstration of totalitarian power, the ability to control how people think. Accepting that lie is a loyalty test.

But it is not working.

read the rest here

[1] Dan Rather:

The agent who killed Good was identified by the Minneapolis Star Tribune. He is an Iraq War veteran who has been with ICE since at least 2016. The agent was previously injured in a traffic incident while seizing an undocumented man who was later convicted of dragging the agent with his car. This doesn’t justify what happened. At all.

Stephen Miller, Trump’s immigration guru, who is not a lawyer, maintains ICE agents are untouchable. “You have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties. And anybody who lays a hand on you or tries to stop or obstruct you is committing a felony,” he said on Fox. This is patently false in America — always has been and always should be.

Though Minneapolis’s mayor and Minnesota’s governor vowed to seek justice for Good, Trump & Co. made sure they were unable to. The FBI announced on Thursday morning that it would be handling the investigation alone, boxing out the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA). Historically, the agencies work together.

The BCA said in a statement that the U.S. attorney’s office “had reversed course: the investigation would now be led solely by the FBI, and the BCA would no longer have access to the case materials, scene evidence or investigative interviews necessary to complete a thorough and independent investigation.”

source

Whatever they say, whatever proof they claim to have, it never happened, none of it!!!

“[Trump], in the weeks leading up to Jan. 6, created a level of distrust. He used that level of distrust to get people to believe fraud claims that weren’t true. He made false statements to state legislatures, to his supporters in all sorts of contexts and was aware, in the days leading up to Jan. 6, that his supporters were angry when he invited them and then he directed them to the Capitol.”

If this testimony had been aired live, two days before the law required all of the Epstein files be made public, imagine the shit show, even on Bari Weiss’s CBS. That’s why it happened behind closed doors, why Trump’s puppets waited until New Year’s Eve to release it. Jim Jordan, a belligerent cretin whose claim to fame is that as a college wrestler he was impossible to pin (like when he was assistant coach watching college wrestlers being sexually abused by his boss, and since) was completely overmatched by Jack Smith. Smith made the clear case against Trump for conspiring to overthrow election results after losing the election in 2020. There is no doubt that the events were set in motion for the benefit of one man, Donald, and the amoral billionaires who are his chief benefactors/beneficiaries. To wit:

Meritocracy

Here are the two slam dunk federal cases against Trump, in a nutshell. He violated the Espionage Act by illegally taking classified documents with him when he left the White House. He “negotiated” with the Department of Justice and the National Archives for a year about retaining the documents, lied about having classified documents, claimed he could declassify them with his mind, had his lawyer lie in a false affidavit that he’d already returned them all. There was probable cause for a judge to issue a search warrant. The FBI found file boxes full of illegally retained government documents, including classified ones. There is not anything alleged about any of this. His obstruction of justice, his lies, his lawyers’ lies, his illegal retention of the documents, all matters of public record. Only Clarence Thomas, in a note to Venezuelan-American judge, lame duck Trump lifetime appointee Aileen Cannon, got Trump off the hook for this one, by declaring Jack Smith illegally appointed (spoiler alert, he wasn’t, he was only appointed too late to do his job).

The Washington D.C. case is equally straightforward. Trump knew he’d lost the election, he was told several times by his closest advisors, as they later testified under oath. He continued to lie about iihht (and $50,000,000 was dumped into an ad campaign to promote this lie). He worked with fake electors from several states in a scheme to throw the election to the GOP majority (by state) House. He called election officials to twist arms in states he lost. He had operatives accessing voting systems, bringing frivolous lawsuits, spreading knowingly false information. He called for a crowd to assemble in Washington D.C. for the morning of the certification of Biden’s win. He whipped up the crowd for an hour and urged them to parade (without a permit, which would have mobilized DC police to supervise it) to the Capitol to “peacefully” fight like hell or they won’t have a country anymore. As the riot unfolded, and before his allies fled for their lives, e called his allies in Congress urging them to execute the plan to illegally keep him in office. He watched the riot live on TV for hours. It was with great reluctance that he finally made a video telling the rioters to go home (none were arrested), that he loved them, that America would never forget this day of love.

Just to prove his great fuck you to democracy had been perfectly righteous, on his first day back in the Oval Office he pardoned all of the rioters who were found guilty of violent assaults on January 6th. A Day of Love. 2020 was a stolen election, ask any current GOP member, they all wriggle away from answering that Biden won. “Well, Biden was the president…” they will say. Yep, he was.

Meantime, a robust 1% of the Epstein files have been made public (with massive redactions) by the most transparent administration in US history under (and in defiant contempt of) the Epstein Files Transparency Act Trump himself signed into law. Do not compare the murderous, compulsively lying Mr. Trump to Mr. Hitler! How dare you?!! By all means, dude, illegally invade a South American country and render the leader and his wife to … CECOT? What could go wrong?

The cover-up is shameless, the crimes, much worse

Those who exploit underage children for sexual gratification are probably the most universally despised group of men in the world.  I’ll leave the reporting of Trump defying a law he himself urged Congress to vote for, and signed with his customary Sharpie, to the brilliant Heather Cox Richardson who gives a complete account of the scope of the Trump DOJ’s brazen crime.    Here’s Trump criminal attorney, now number two in the DOJ (and smells like it, too) Todd Blanche, incoherently channeling his inner Roy Cohn. “The absurdity of us pulling down a single photo because Trump is in it is laughable.” Well-said, asshole, no argument here:

Heather gives every detail you need to know about the dick-fingered coverup of Donald’s bestie Jeffery Epstein’s pedophilia club for rich white men.  One thing she didn’t mention is that the Department of Justice [sic] has 300 GB of Epstein files in their possession and has released a hefty 3 GB, on the very last day to “comply”.  

American media treats this, in virtually every account, as the release of a fraction of the records, but, let’s be fucking clear, that “fraction” is 1/100th. Coincidentally 1%, just like the wealthy, powerful child rapists being protected by our criminally inclined DOJ. Heather continues:

Officials in the Trump administration have been treating members of Congress with contempt since Trump took office, deliberately flouting the 1974 Impoundment Act that prohibits presidents from unilaterally deciding to withhold funds Congress has appropriated, for example, and ignoring the 1973 War Powers Act that requires congressional approval for military actioyns that last more than 60 days.

What Heather doesn’t go into in this piece is that Trump, illegally creating an “agency” to let Musk slash agencies that were investigating the businesses of the richest man on earth, not only violated the 1974 Impoundment Act, it also resulted, directly, in the deaths, so far, of at least half a million poor people, many of them children. It’s hard to get the numbers, and nobody’s paying much attention to them in the media, with the Orange Polyp performing his stinking shit show around the clock, but the footnote gives you some idea of the scope of the mass deaths from his violation of the Impoundment Act and his recission of the budget that was allocated to prevent these deaths. [1] Here’s the skinny from an extremely dry, bureaucratic account of this mass death:

Relative to FY2024, declining obligations to global health implies the potential for 1.1 million lives lost per year if these trends continue.

Similarly, the 1973 War Powers Act which requires a president intent on waging war with the US military to get consent from Congress, once the unauthorized killing and military escalations have gone on for more than 60 days. All of those estimated 100 men killed in the Caribbean, their boats blown to shit because “narco-terrorists” equal “enemy combatants” and, according to a lawless regime, may be killed without evidence or any coherent rationale, were murdered in acts of state-sponsored piracy on the high seas.

[1]

For humanitarian and food aid [alone], the decline suggests the potential for [an additional] 490,000 lives lost per year, bringing the total lives at risk from aid cuts to 1.6 million lives lost per year if obligations do not revive. Compared to FY2023, this falls to around 670,000 [additional] lives lost per year.

source