“President Donald Trump has sought to justify the summary execution of suspected drug smugglers by arguing that the United States is engaged in an “armed conflict” with criminal organizations that supply prohibited intoxicants. Yet the Trump administration also insists that U.S. forces are not engaging in “hostilities” when they blow up boats believed to be carrying illegal drugs.
Those positions are consistent with Trump’s disregard for legal limits on his use of the military to prosecute a literalized war on drugs. But they are otherwise hard to reconcile with each other, and their implications underline the immorality and lawlessness of his bloodthirsty antidrug tactics.”
“Air traffic control (ATC) is too important to be vulnerable to politics. Around the world, governments have acknowledged this fact and depoliticized their ATC systems, beginning with the reformist Labor government of New Zealand in 1987. They removed the ATC system from their transport ministry and permitted the aviation user fees that had been paid to the government to instead be paid to the new Airways New Zealand.
It worked so well that within a decade, a dozen more governments had followed suit, realizing that ATC is essentially a public utility, analogous to electricity. A stream of ATC user-fee payments is a bondable revenue stream that has been utilized by ATC utilities to finance large-scale technology upgrades and consolidate aging ATC facilities into a smaller number of modern ones.
Today, roughly 100 countries receive their air traffic control services from user-funded utilities.”
“To convict Comey, prosecutors would have to persuade a jury that there is no reasonable doubt about either of those propositions. It is therefore not surprising that Erik Siebert, Halligan’s predecessor, was not keen to pursue this case, or that Trump managed to get what he wanted only by intervening at the last minute. He replaced Siebert with Halligan, a neophyte prosecutor whose main qualification was her willingness to overlook the weaknesses that had deterred her predecessor, and he publicly ordered Attorney General Pam Bondi to prosecute Comey before it was too late.
“We can’t delay any longer,” Trump told Bondi. “JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!” Five days later, Siebert delivered the indictment that Trump had demanded, although it was such a hasty job that the details of the allegations against Comey are only now coming into focus. Those details reinforce the impression that Trump was determined to get Comey one way or another, regardless of the law or the evidence.”
If you can’t humanely treat the mass of people you are arresting on immigration charges, then you should arrest less people.
“The emergency lawsuit, filed in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois’ Eastern Division on October 30, accuses the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and ICE of denying detainees adequate access to counsel, food, water, and medical care. An emergency hearing was held on Tuesday, in which Broadview detainees described being held in a cell with roughly 150 other people, sleeping on the floor for days near overflowing toilets, inoperable showers, and a lack of hygiene products like toothbrushes, toothpaste, and soap while at the facility.
One of the detainees who spoke on Tuesday was Felipe Agustin Zamacona, a 47-year-old man who was born in Mexico but has lived in the U.S. for 31 years. He said the cell was never mopped or swept, and had an overflowing garbage can, according to CBS News. He told the judge that “it smelled like a dirty washroom, like sweat, like a dirty locker,” reported The New York Times. Although detainees were given two or three cold sandwiches a day, Agustin only ate his first one after subsequently getting sick with diarrhea.”
“Over the last decade, roughly one in every 10 dollars of budget authority has worn an emergency tag.
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On paper, the Office of Management and Budget has a five-part test for emergency spending: It should be necessary, sudden, urgent, unforeseen, and not permanent. Congress rarely forces itself to demonstrate, item by item, that all five prongs are met. There’s no neutral referee. Once “designated as an emergency” appears in the bill and the president concurs, the amounts are exempt from caps and PAYGO scorecards.
And because this budget label is separate from more specific “national emergency” declarations under statutes like the Stafford Act or the National Emergencies Act, it quietly turns into a vehicle for funding routine projects. It’s such a procedural magic word that fiscal guardrails all but disappear.
Finally, even when a real crisis exists, so too does opportunism. Emergency bills move fast, face weak scrutiny, and become irresistible means for unrelated projects or those that Congress would never approve otherwise. This dynamic marred the 2012-13 Hurricane Sandy package and has recurred in other disaster bills, not because relief is illegitimate but because speed plus political cover invites provisions that would die in regular order.
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The stakes of the abuse of emergency labelling are no longer abstract. Interest costs on debt that results from the extra spending are crowding out core functions of government. Americans are hammered with “emergency” tariff costs. The next true crisis will arrive with less room to maneuver if we keep burning credibility on manufactured ones.
A republic that treats emergencies as a governing philosophy is a republic that lives without its safeguards. We must put the word back in its place: as one describing something rare, reviewable, temporary, and paid for.”
“”Mamdani won about 62% of the vote among New Yorkers under 30, and more than half among those aged 30 to 44,” Spain’s El Pais noted in an analysis of the election, which was followed around the world. “By contrast, among voters over 65, he drew just 29%.”
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In March, Gallup found that “since 2010, young adults’ overall opinion of capitalism has deteriorated to the point that capitalism and socialism are tied in popularity among this age group.” Among millennials and Gen Z, support for both stood at about 50 percent. But among the youngest in that cohort, socialism is winning out over its freedom-friendly rival.”