curated news excerpts & citations
Steve Vladeck: Five Questions About “Extrajudicial Killings”
There is no obvious legal argument to support President Trump’s expanding campaign of strikes against alleged drug boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean. And the implications are even scarier.
… the post that follows explains why this is a serious underreaction—and why there is, especially as of this past Monday, no viable legal basis under U.S. law for what the Trump administration is doing.
Worse than that, whatever the internal legal rationale for these strikes is (and the Trump administration has pointedly refused to share it with anyone other than a handful of Republican members of Congress), there’s no publicly obvious reason why it would be limited to non-citizens and/or targets outside U.S. territory. Kentucky Senator Rand Paul was absolutely right to describe these strikes as “extrajudicial killings,” a term that has come to be used to refer to targeted uses of force by the state against specific individuals. But they’re even worse than that, for they are, near as I can tell, blatantly unlawful as a matter of U.S. domestic law—and a quickly spreading stain on whatever is left of the executive branch’s commitment to the rule of law.1
(Steve Vladeck more…)
NewsNation: Hegseth says military struck alleged drug boat in Caribbean, killing 3 ‘narco-terrorists’
AP: Trump has accused boat crews of being narco-terrorists. The truth, AP found, is more nuanced
GÜIRIA, Venezuela (AP) — One was a fisherman struggling to eke out a living on $100 a month. Another was a career criminal. A third was a former military cadet. And a fourth was a down-on-his-luck bus driver.
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Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American – November 6, 2025
“None of this is complicated,” political data specialist Tom Bonier wrote yesterday about Tuesday’s dramatic Democratic victories around the country. “The [Republicans] ran on affordability in 2024. They gave sanctimonious lectures on cable news on election night about how the ‘silent working class majority’ had spoken. Then they governed as reckless authoritarians, punishing the working class.”
For nine months now, officials in the Trump administration have pushed their extremist policies with the insistence that his election gave him a mandate, although more people voted for someone other than Trump in 2024 than voted for him. Tuesday’s elections stripped away that veneer to reveal just how unpopular their policies really are.
(Heather Cox Richardson more…)
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Rook T. Winchester: Deporting Donna-Hughes Brown
Donna Hughes-Brown has lived in America longer than most of her ICE jailers have been alive. Born in Ireland, raised in England, she moved to the U.S. at age eleven and never left. Forty-seven years later, she’s locked inside a Kentucky detention center — humiliated, isolated, and pressured to “self-deport” over a $22 bounced check at a grocery store she wrote and repaid a decade ago.
(Rook T. Winchester more…)
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Joyce Vance: Thursday
There is a lot going on today. The sandwich thrower was acquitted today. That means there was not a single juror who believed the government proved its case against him. The administration took humiliating beatdowns in court in both the SNAP case and the case involving Customs and Border Patrol agent Gregory Bovino, whom we discussed in detail earlier this week. Judge Sara Ellis found that he lied when he testified in her courtroom: “In one of the videos Bovino obviously attacks and tackles the declarant Mr. Blackburn to the ground … But Bovino despite watching this video says that he never used force.” Concluding that “The use of force [by federal agents] shocks the conscience,” Judge Ellis entered a preliminary injunction that prohibits the use of excessive force against peaceful protesters and journalists and requires that agents wear body cameras.
Lisa Needham: The softest Nazis you ever did see
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Steward Beckham: Blackout State
Tragedy in Tanzania.
… nowhere has the darker edge of this generational wave been more evident than in Tanzania.
The backlash was immediate and fierce. Youth-led protests spread across Dar es Salaam, Mwanza, and Arusha. Yet instead of conceding to public outrage, the state responded with overwhelming force: internet blackouts, military deployment, enforced curfews, and, according to opposition sources, extrajudicial killings and mass disappearances. Due to the blackout, the true scale of violence remains unknown. Kenyan human rights groups, using satellite phones and cross-border couriers, helped transmit footage to international agencies such as AFP. The images reportedly show bodies being removed by police and transported to undisclosed locations. One opposition claim alleges over 700 deaths, but independent verification remains elusive.
(Steward Beckham more…)
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Lev Parnas: Ukraine Hits Russia Where It Hurts — Refineries, Fuel Depots, and Drone Base Struck
While the media stops covering the war, Ukraine is dismantling Russia’s energy and drone infrastructure
(Lev Parnas more…)
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Daily Express: Russian civil war fears rise as paranoid Putin levels huge accusation at the West
A visibly paranoid Vladimir Putin has accused Western intelligence agencies of plotting to undermine him and carve up Russia into tiny, controllable statelets.
(Daily Express more…)
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Above the Law: Judge Calls Trump’s Border Commander A Lying Liar
… In deposition testimony, Bovino had justified his use of tear gas, saying he was hit in the head with a rock before deploying the noxious gas. “Video evidence ultimately disproved this,” said Ellis.
“Defendant Bovino admitted that he lied,” she said.
(Above the Law more…)
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Wired: FBI Warns of Criminals Posing as ICE, Urges Agents to ID Themselves
In a bulletin to law enforcement agencies, the FBI said criminal impersonators are exploiting ICE’s image and urged nationwide coordination to distinguish real operations from fakes.
(Wired more…)
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NY Times: Judge Orders Trump Administration to Fully Fund Food Stamps This Month
A federal judge rebuked the administration for the way it tried to fund only partial benefits to food stamp recipients.
(NY Times more…)
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Steve Vladeck: The Breezy Inequity of Trump v. Orr
The Supreme Court’s latest grant of emergency relief to the Trump administration illustrates in technicolor the direct (and ugly) consequences of the two different ways it keeps messing up “equity.”
(Steve Vladeck more…)
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James Eagle: America’s debt mountain hits 38 trillion dollars
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The deeper question here isn’t just whether America can afford its debt, but what kind of world we’re building on it. Borrowing has become the silent engine of prosperity, a way of stretching the present at the expense of the future. As populations age and productivity slows, that trade-off grows harder to sustain.
(James Eagle more…)
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Jay Kuo: Did SCOTUS Just Reveal Its Line in the Sand?
The surprising oral arguments in the tariff cases showed the justices aren’t always prepared to go to bat for Trump.
NY Times: Trump Team Now Claims Its Trillions in Tariff Revenue Are ‘Incidental’
In arguments before the Supreme Court, the White House backed away from its claims that President Trump’s tariffs were about raising revenue.
Bulwark: Which Conservative Justices Will Fall for Trump’s Tariff Power Grab?
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Forbes: Trump Falsely Says Gas Prices Have Reached A 20-Year Low—Here’s The Real Data
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Health Nerd: Are Administrators To Blame For Skyrocketing Healthcare Costs?
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The US definitely has an issue with too many administrators. That being said, the graph at the top—the one that regularly goes viral—is clearly nonsense. It’s a great meme, but it obscures the truth, which is that the problems are complex and very hard to solve.
(Health Nerd more…)
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James Eagle: Obesity falls but diabetes keeps rising
We are living longer, but not necessarily better. Across much of the world, health outcomes are improving on paper, yet beneath the surface the story is more complicated. America’s obesity rate is finally edging down, but diabetes keeps rising. It’s as if the body mass is shrinking while the metabolic damage remains – a reminder that slimming a nation doesn’t always mean healing it.
(James Eagle more…)
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TNR: DOJ Admits to Republicans That Epstein Files Are Even Worse for Trump
Details in the files are reportedly even more damning for Donald Trump than previously indicated—and it was already bad.
…Michael Wolff, a longtime chronicler of Trump’s White House who conducted extensive interviews with Epstein prior to his death, told The Daily Beast last month that Epstein had shown him photos of Trump with half-naked “young girls” in his lap.
These rumors have galvanized into a legitimate movement among Republicans, who are now, Schuster wrote on X Wednesday night, clamoring for the files’ full release.
(TNR more…)FingerLakes1: Epstein Files Rumored to be even more damaging to Trump than GOP had imagined
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Decoding Fox News: Let SNAP Freeloaders Eat Cake!
Trump Action Tracker
Timeline: Tracking the Trump Justice Department’s Anti-Voting Shift
Tracking the Lawsuits Against Trump’s Agenda
Trump Pardons Database
Project 2025 Tracker
DOGE Tracker
ProPublica: Elon Musk’s Demolition Crew
Wired: 6 Tools for Tracking the Trump Administration’s Attacks on Civil Liberties