Niall Ferguson: A User’s Guide to Wrecking the Global Financial System
Elon Musk’s D.O.G.E is crashing the US housing market
Blame Canada
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US deports hundreds of Venezuelans despite court order
Planes carrying more than 200 Venezuelans deported from America have landed in El Salvador, hours after a US judge ordered the Trump administration not to do so.
What Happens When The Administration Defies the Courts?
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The chance that courts will have to resort to contempt proceedings in order to hold the administration to account still grows with each passing day. Officials such as Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt have declared that, despite federal rulings to the contrary, the president has the power to hire and fire anyone within the executive branch at will.
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As far as Trump pardoning someone in contempt, remember these are civil cases. That means that any contempt proceedings and penalties would be civil, not criminal. And here’s the kicker: That in turn means the president’s pardon power isn’t triggered by them. The Supreme Court noted this distinction in the case of Ex Parte Grossman from 1925. “For civil contempts, the punishment is remedial and for the benefit of the complainant, and a pardon cannot stop it,” the Court wrote.Why trying to understand what the Trump admin did in response to the TRO matters
Planes were in the air. They kept going. What did they do, and why? I strongly believe that it matters for our future that we work to understand what is happening.
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Heather Cox Richardson – Letters from an American – March 15, 2025
March 15 is a crucially important day in U.S. history As the man who taught me to use a chainsaw said, it is immortalized by Shakespeare’s famous warning: “Cedar! Beware the adze of March!”
He put it that way because the importance of March 15 is, of course, that it is the day in 1820 that Maine, the Pine Tree State, joined the Union.
Maine statehood had national repercussions.
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A Sunday thought
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You have every right to feel depressed and enervated. You have every reason to despair.But wait.
It’s possible that future generations will look back on this scourge and see something else — not just what was destroyed but also what was born.
Even prior to Trump, our democracy was deeply flawed. The moneyed interests were drowning out everyone else. Inequality was reaching record levels. Corruption — legalized bribery through campaign contributions — was the political norm (Musk is the logical ending point). The bottom 90 percent were getting nowhere because the system was rigged against them.
It’s entirely possible that future generations will look back on this awful time and see the seeds of fundamental reform.
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The DNC is Losing Rural Democrats
I’m a rural Democrat. I work with rural Democrats. I hang out with rural Democrats.
We have to work double-time in our communities — we don’t have the advantage of being in the majority. We risk our livelihoods and our relationships by way of our voting habits. You have to be made of tough stuff to live where we live.
One thing you need to understand — rural Democrats have no use for weak-kneed folks. No use for someone in power who won’t use their power to stand up and speak up. No use for entitled lawmakers bowing to the wealthy instead of fighting for everyone.
No use for flip-flopping or business as usual during a damn coup.
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The head of a Biden program that could help rural broadband has left
Evan Feinman says a Trump administration overhaul could lead to ‘deeply negative outcomes’ while making ‘the world’s richest man even richer.’
Evan Feinman is out as the director of the $42.5 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program, reports ProPublica’s Craig Silverman in a Bluesky post today. BEAD aims to bring high-bandwidth internet to underserved areas of America, much of which is rural. Silverman shared screenshots from a department-wide email Feinman sent on Friday, in which he warned there would be “deeply negative outcomes” if the program shifts from fiber build-outs to using satellite-based internet like that which Elon Musk’s Starlink offers. “Feinman’s term ended and he was not reappointed,” Silverman writes.
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COVID & Health News, 3/16/25
Overall, respiratory illness activity has decreased to MODERATE across America. Emergency department visits for COVID, Flu and RSV are decreasing, but wastewater levels for Influenza are still MODERATE nationally and Influenza B is quite high still in the Northeast.
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Why Trump Is So Desperate to Keep Mahmoud Khalil in Louisiana
Government lawyers would be happy to avoid a legal precedent set in the case of Ravi Ragbir during the first Trump administration.
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In 2019, Ragbir won a ruling from the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals — the federal appellate court that covers New York — that affirmed noncitizens’ right to challenge targeted deportations as unconstitutional retaliation under the First Amendment.
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Chuck Schumer Is Facing a Biden Moment
The problem wasn’t just the sellout. It was the sense that he lacked vigor.
SENATE MINORITY LEADER CHUCK SCHUMER’S handling of the government funding fight has caused such damage to his standing in the party that even supporters were privately discussing this week whether it represented the nadir of his lengthy political career.It wasn’t because they felt Schumer had erred in shepherding a House Republican-authored bill to passage in the Senate. It was how feeble he appeared to be in the process—a leader in title but not spirit.
They weren’t alone in that assessment. Among scores of Democrats we talked to this week, there was a genuine belief that Schumer may become the next victim of what is colloquially now known as the Joe Biden treatment.
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The secret history of the secret history of the intelligence business
I keep reading this story that’s going around about a former KGB officer from Kazakhstan who wrote on Facebook that Trump was recruited as a Russian asset during a visit to Moscow in1987. An entire substructure of facts and rumors and speculation has swirled around Trump and Russia ever since the day in Florida in 2016 that Trump uttered his infamous “Russia if you’re listening” remark at a press conference urging Russia to look into, you guessed it, Hillary’s emails. Then there was the Mueller report that while failing to come up with a provable conspiracy between Trump and Russia during the 2016 campaign, certainly established that Trump was the beneficiary of an all-out effort by Russia to aid in his election. Mueller was even able to indict Russian intelligence officers and civilians working for the Russian government who either interfered actively in the election for Trump or aided him by flooding social media with fake news and Russian propaganda.
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What you might call the secret history of the secret history of the way the United States collects intelligence is not widely known in this country, but you can be sure of one thing: it is known to Vladimir Putin and his henchmen in Russia, and it is known to Xi Jinping in China, and it’s known to the other countries who are, if not our enemies, at least very much not our friends.Cui bono? Not you and me and our fellow citizens, but I’d be willing to bet that Donald Trump has figured out a way to fatten his own wallet from all the damage he has done to the foreign policy and national security interests of this country.
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Stand Your Ground. Plant Some Flowers On It Too
You know who’s doing great organizing for us right now? Elon Musk and Donald Trump, that’s who. By attacking and alienating more and more swathes of the American public, they’re handing us the possibility of a coalition bigger and broader than maybe anything we’ve ever seen in this country before. A gift, if we take it and do something with it. Friday veterans marched to the nation’s capital and state capitals all over the country, from Alaska to Arizona, from Florida to Maine, in an event called by a group I hadn’t even heard of before called Fourteenth Now.The military newspaper Stars and Stripes reports, “Disabled veteran Don Carter rode shotgun in his son’s Chevy pickup truck for 11 hours from Illinois to the nation’s capital to take part in a political protest for the first time in his life. Carter, a 92-year-old Korean War veteran, and his son, Larry, joined a crowd of nearly 3,000 for a two-hour national veterans’ rally Friday on the National Mall to protest cuts by President Donald Trump to veterans’ federal jobs, services and benefits.” Veterans are a powerful constituency in part because it’s pretty hard to call them unpatriotic woke wimps and things like that. Newcomers and first-timers are a sign that an anti-Trump anti-coup movement is ready to grow.
Every cruel and destructive action by the Trump Administration is a recruiting opportunity for the opposition. Add up who’s impacted by the attacks on immigrants, trans people, people reliant on social security and Medicare/Medicaid; include people who care about free speech and the first amendment national parks and national forests; people who work or worked for the federal government who’ve been impacted by the slash-and-burn attacks on so many departments; people who care about Ukraine and Palestine and about the millions of people around the world that USAID was providing medical care and nutrition for until Marco Rubio and Musk barged in with their wrecking ball; AIDS activists, medical workers, public health experts, and the rest of us horrified by the failure to respond appropriately to the measles outbreak and the sabotage of public health measures under RFK’s sinister jurisdiction; people who care about farmers, businesses trashed by tariffs and shutdowns, hungry children here at home, higher education, and research; people who like safe air travel, clean air, clean water, food safety; people who don’t like the threats against Canada, Greenland, Mexico, and Panama…. Add them all up and you have a huge majority ready to act if and when they’re not already, like Friday’s veterans, being mobilized, and you start to see some possibilities.
Possibilities are not inevitabilities.