Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
Members of the Trump administration fuck up big time; they respond by insulting the reporter telling the truth and insulting the magazine he works for.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDZl9nH9cyw
“Alawieh, who graduated from medical school in Lebanon, first came to the United States in 2018 to start a fellowship at Ohio State University. She later began working as a kidney transplant specialist and professor at Brown University’s medical school and obtained an H-1B visa.
According to CNN, Alawieh’s immigration issues first began last month, when she traveled to Lebanon, and her visa to renter the United States was delayed due to increased security vetting of Lebanese travelers. The DHS posted on X that Alawieh had attended the funeral of Hassan Nasrallah, the former leader of Hezbollah who was assassinated by Israeli forces last year. “Alawieh openly admitted to this to CBP officers, as well as her support of Nasrallah,” the post reads.
It’s unclear why Alawieh was stopped by border officials when she arrived in Boston last Friday. A court filing obtained by Boston local news station WCVB states that Alawieh was found with photos of Nasrallah on her phone—though, again, it’s not clear why her phone was being searched in the first place.
“In explaining why these multiple photos were deleted by her one to two days before she arrived at Logan Airport, Dr. Alawieh stated that she did not want to give authorities the perception that she supports Hezbollah and the Ayatollah politically or militarily,” the filing read.
According to the document, Alawieh explained “I think if you listen to one of his sermons, you would know what I mean. He is a religious, spiritual person. As I said, he has very high value. His teachings are about spirituality and morality.””
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“”This administration is not going tolerate individuals having the privilege of studying in our country and then siding with pro-terrorist organizations that have killed Americans,” Leavitt said last week. “We have a zero-tolerance policy for siding with terrorists, period.””
https://reason.com/2025/03/20/why-was-a-brown-university-surgeon-deported-to-lebanon/
DOGE is not significantly cutting the deficit. To do that, you need to go through Congress. They are not creating government efficiency, they are just firing whoever they can, whether they are useful workers or not.
In Elon’s businesses, he gets quick feedback. So he can cut cut cut, and then see what’s broken and add back in. If a car doesn’t work or sell, something is broken, so let’s fix it. The variety of functions of the government don’t work that way. The government isn’t an engineering business building an actual car or rocket.
Some excuses for destroying government and using it to be self-serving are that the Democrats were doing it. But this isn’t really true. The largest change passed by Democrats in the last few decades is the Affordable Care Act…it was a transfer of money from blue states to red states.
Elon either holds several false beliefs, or he regularly lies and misleads about political issues.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vv6AvLsx4g
“If the CDC is anything, it is supposed to be the chief agency that detects, controls, and eliminates infectious diseases. HIV is just such a communicable microbe. The CDC estimates 31,800 Americans were infected with it in 2022, the year in which the latest data are available. The CDC also estimates that “approximately 1.2 million people in the U.S. have HIV. About 13 percent of them don’t know it and need testing.”
Oddly, efforts to cut back on the CDC’s programs aimed at reducing HIV infections stand in contradiction to President Donald Trump’s own Ending the HIV Epidemic in the U.S. (EHE) initiative that he announced during his 2019 State of the Union address. Trump’s original EHE goal was to end the HIV epidemic in the United States by 2030. The EHE initiative boosted preventative strategies including increased HIV testing and the promotion of effective new pre-exposure prophylaxis medications. Thanks in part to the EHE, the rate of HIV infections is down 19 percent since 2016.
The Trump administration’s ultimate plans with respect to the CDC’s HIV prevention division are not yet public, but some reporting suggests that at least some of its programs may be shifted to the Health Resources and Services Administration. As KFF, a health care policy nonprofit, observes, the agency’s primary focus has historically been the delivery of medical care, not implementing preventive strategies.”
https://reason.com/2025/03/21/the-trump-administrations-hiv-prevention-contradictions/
“Until Trump took office in January, the AEA had been invoked only three times in 226 years: during the War of 1812, World War I, and World War II. All of those situations fell into the “declared war” category. The AEA has never previously been invoked in response to a putative “invasion or predatory incursion” outside the context of a declared war. That is the threat Trump cites to justify peremptorily deporting suspected members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.”
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“Trump does not claim to be at war with Venezuela. Nor does he claim that the Venezuelan government has mounted an “invasion or predatory incursion against the territory of the United States.” And a criminal organization, even one that has corrupted or “infiltrated” a foreign government, is not a “hostile nation or government” as those terms are ordinarily understood.
Nor does Trump’s understanding of “invasion or predatory incursion” make sense in the context of the AEA. “As the Supreme Court and past presidents have acknowledged, the Alien Enemies Act is a wartime authority enacted and implemented under the war power,” Katherine Yon Ebright, a lawyer at the Brennan Center for Justice who specializes in national security issues, explained last fall. “When the Fifth Congress passed the law and the Wilson administration defended it in court during World War I, they did so on the understanding that noncitizens with connections to a foreign belligerent could be ‘treated as prisoners of war’ under the ‘rules of war under the law of nations.’ In the Constitution and other late-1700s statutes, the term invasion is used literally, typically to refer to large-scale attacks. The term predatory incursion is also used literally in writings of that period to refer to slightly smaller attacks like the 1781 Raid on Richmond led by American defector Benedict Arnold.””
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“”There is a lot of law about what constitutes a foreign government,” Gelernt told Boasberg. “And I don’t think the United States recognizes [Tren de Aragua] as a foreign government. They recognize Venezuela as a foreign government. I think that’s the
historic understanding of the statute.”
Gerlent also questioned the government’s definition of “invasion or predatory incursion”: “We think the Court certainly can review whether immigration constitutes some kind of invasion….We know of no historical precedent that would suggest that straight migration or noncitizens coming and committing crimes constitutes an invasion within the meaning of the statute or the Constitution.””
https://reason.com/2025/03/21/trumps-reading-of-the-alien-enemies-act-defies-the-usual-meaning-of-its-terms/
“Does it matter that Khalil is not a U.S. citizen? In the 1945 case Bridges v. Wixon, the Supreme Court held that “freedom of speech and of press is accorded aliens residing in this country.” That case involved a longtime legal resident from Australia who was deemed deportable based on the allegation that he had been affiliated with the Communist Party.
“Once an alien lawfully enters and resides in this country, he becomes invested with the rights guaranteed by the Constitution to all people within our borders,” Justice Frank Murphy wrote in a concurring opinion. “Such rights include those protected by the First and the Fifth Amendments and by the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. None of these provisions acknowledges any distinction between citizens and resident aliens.””
https://reason.com/2025/03/24/fire-says-the-law-trump-is-using-to-deport-mahmoud-khalil-is-unconstitutional-trumps-sister-agreed/
“The Trump administration announced Friday that it would end a program that allowed hundreds of thousands of migrants to live and work in the United States. Established under President Joe Biden, the initiative offered legal status and work authorization to Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans (CHNV) who passed security screenings and secured U.S.-based financial sponsors.
Over 500,000 migrants used the program to come to the U.S. legally—suggesting that many people will choose an accessible legal pathway over illegal entry. Getting rid of the CHNV program eliminates that choice for future migrants and penalizes those who came to the country “the right way.””
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“With CHNV benefits set to expire on March 25, many of the program’s half-million beneficiaries could soon find themselves living and working in the U.S. illegally.”
https://reason.com/2025/03/24/trump-ends-program-for-legal-migrants-from-cuba-haiti-nicaragua-and-venezuela/
“new information has come to light suggesting that several deportees are not gang-affiliated at all”
https://reason.com/2025/03/25/deportation-standoff/
“the White House is reportedly confronting a very different reality: one in which Trump’s trade war leaves many Americans worse off, with farmers likely to be hit the hardest.”
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“Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins told reporters last week that the White House has asked her to “have some programs in place that would potentially mitigate any economic catastrophes that could happen to some of our farmers” as a result of a trade war.”
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“The time to work that out might be running short. Trump has promised to ramp up his trade war with Mexico and Canada in early April, and the administration also plans to start slapping so-called “reciprocal tariffs” on imports from other countries on April 2. As the various trade wars escalate, farmers are likely to be on the front lines—because American agricultural exports are an easy target for retaliatory tariffs from other countries.”
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“That’s exactly what happened during Trump’s first term, when his trade war with China caused American farmers to lose a sizable chunk of one of their largest export markets. When farmers complained about it, the Trump administration provided a $28 billion bailout via a New Deal–era program at the Department of Agriculture.
Some of that is already happening. In response to tariffs imposed by Trump in February, China slapped new tariffs on a wide range of American farm exports, including beef, chicken, corn, cotton, dairy, fruits, pork, soybeans, and various vegetables. Both Canada and Mexico have indicated that they plan to retaliate against American tariffs with new levies targeting American agricultural goods.”
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“That’s the nasty thing about trade wars. Not only do they harm manufacturers and consumers seeking to buy raw materials and finished goods from abroad, but they also harm domestic producers (like farmers) who lose access to foreign markets and therefore earn less money. Tariffs hurt Americans who want to eat avocados from Mexico, and Americans growing soybeans to sell there. There are a lot more losers than winners—and that’s before taxpayers get put on the hook for bailouts.
There should be no taxpayer-funded bailouts for American farmers who get burned by Trump’s trade wars. If the White House is concerned about the consequences that higher tariffs will have on American agriculture, there is an easy solution: Don’t impose them.”
https://reason.com/2025/03/25/dont-bail-out-farmers-again/