Author: sauer@technologists.com

curated citations to news sources

Atlantic: For Trump, This Is a Dress Rehearsal

Ordering the National Guard to deploy in Los Angeles is a warning of what to expect when his hold on power is threatened.
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The state, counties, and cities of California employ more than 75,000 uniformed law-enforcement personnel with arrest powers. The Los Angeles Police Department alone numbers nearly 9,000 uniformed officers. They can surely handle some dozens of agitators throwing rocks, shooting fireworks, and impeding vehicular traffic.

If and when those 75,000 uniformed personnel feel overmatched by the agitators, California can request federal help of its own volition. When California has asked for needed federal help—during the wildfires earlier this year, for example—Trump has begrudged that help and played politics with it. Trump is now forcing help that the city and state do not need and do not want, not to restore law but to assert his personal dominance over the normal procedures to enforce the law.

But if the Trump-Hegseth threats have little purpose as law enforcement, they signify great purpose as political strategy. Since Trump’s reelection, close observers of his presidency have feared a specific sequence of events that could play out ahead of midterm voting in 2026…
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AP: Immigration authorities extend activity in Los Angeles area amid street protests

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Border Patrol personnel in riot gear and gas masks stood guard outside an industrial park in the city of Paramount, deploying tear gas as bystanders and protesters gathered on medians and across the street, some jeering at authorities while recording the events on smartphones.
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Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said the activity was meant to “sow terror” in the nation’s second-largest city.

In a statement on Saturday, ICE Acting Director Todd Lyons chided Bass for the city’s response to protests.
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Bulwark: Why Is Trump Trying to Fire This Museum Director?

If he succeeds, it could put the whole Smithsonian under his thumb.
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So far, Sajet, a 60-year-old Dutch art historian with a long career in American and Australian art museums who became the National Portrait Gallery’s first female director in 2013, is reportedly still at her desk. The gallery’s website still lists her as director, and its press releases give no inkling of any turmoil at the museum.
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…But much of the right-wing criticism directed at Sajet is far more ideological and intolerant than any of the offenses imputed to her—particularly considering that those offenses include an entirely accurate label for a portrait of Donald Trump.
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Slate: Why the Supreme Court Decision Protecting a “Majority” Plaintiff Was Really a Win for Civil Rights

Some Supreme Court cases are not difficult because of the legal questions; they are difficult because of the narratives that test them.

Ames v. Ohio Department of Youth Services, in which the Supreme Court correctly struck down a judge-made rule that imposed a higher burden of proof on discrimination plaintiffs from so-called majority groups, is one of those cases. The court, in a unanimous opinion written by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, was right to remind us that Title VII speaks to individuals, not demographics. And it was right to do so at a moment when the meaning of civil rights law is being contested from every direction.

The plaintiff in Ames was a straight woman passed over for a promotion in favor of a lesbian colleague and later replaced by a gay man. Courts below applied a special evidentiary hurdle to her claim, because of her status as a heterosexual woman. That rule wasn’t in the statute. It wasn’t in the case law. It was invented to screen out claims that judges instinctively distrust.
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But Title VII is a different tool. It does not directly allocate future opportunities. It adjudicates harm. It asks whether this person, in this workplace, was treated differently because of a protected trait. And that inquiry must remain universal, not because all forms of discrimination are historically equal—they are not—but because justice must be.
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Dispatch: There Is No Deep State

If MAGA Republicans understood the nuts and bolts of the CIA, they wouldn’t see conspiracies so easily.

It’s become gospel in much of the American right that a liberal “deep state” exists, forming an alternate government that works against Donald Trump and the Republican Party. “Either the deep state destroys America,” Trump declared during his first major rally of his last campaign, “or we destroy the deep state.” This supposed pernicious matrix is spread throughout the press and the federal bureaucracies, though most dangerously embedded in the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the rest of the Justice Department.
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WSJ: Elon Musk Calls Trump Megabill a ‘Disgusting Abomination’

Billionaire sides with GOP critics who say measure doesn’t cut spending enough

Former White House cost-cutting czar Elon Musk called President Trump’s “big, beautiful” tax and spending package a “disgusting abomination,” stepping up his criticism just as the Senate is trying to quickly pass the measure and get it signed into law by July 4.

“Shame on those who voted for it: you know you did wrong. You know it,” said Musk, in comments on his X social-media platform. Musk, who left the administration last week, called the package a “massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill.”
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[site access disrupted after May 28 Austin storms/power/Internet outages]

Dispatch: How Kindness Became Criminalized

Three years ago, the city of Tempe, Arizona, was celebrating Austin Davis as a hero. It even gave him an award for his charitable work, which included driving the city’s homeless people to addiction or mental health services and putting on Sunday picnics, where he shared food with those who were hungry. Last summer, he was jailed for the same work.

In 2023, the city began requiring Davis’ group, AZ Hugs, to obtain “special events” permits to host public picnics. Even though Davis didn’t think the law applied to him, he tried to get one. But the city said he wasn’t qualified because he had continued these picnics while his application was pending.

Undeterred, Davis continued to share food, taking care to clean up after each event. Equally undeterred, Tempe police began citing him each time. After multiple charges, threats of serious fines, and even spending a night in jail, Davis finally relented. He accepted a plea deal that prohibited him from entering public parks or any other areas where homeless people gathered.
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WSJ: Ukraine Still Isn’t Defeated

Daring drone raids on air bases deep inside Russia show Kyiv’s continuing will to fight.

JD Vance likes to say that Ukraine isn’t winning its war with Russia, which the Vice President seems to think is an argument for withdrawing U.S. military support. But if the will to fight is worth something, then Ukraine is still showing its mettle as it tries to repel the Kremlin’s designs for conquest.

Ukraine’s daring weekend drone attack on military bases deep inside Russia is a brilliant example of creativity and resolve. Ukraine sources say it was able to smuggle drones across Russia, fire them at close proximity to air bases, and destroy numerous aircraft. The planes reportedly included bombers that fire cruise missiles at Ukraine and some that can carry nuclear payloads.

It isn’t clear how many planes were destroyed, but there was enough damage that Russia’s defense ministry felt obliged to acknowledge the strikes. Bases were hit in Siberia and in the far Russian east.
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[site access disrupted after May 28 Austin storms/power/Internet outages]

Los Angeles Times: AI ‘hallucinations’ are a growing problem for the legal profession

You’ve probably heard the one about the product that blows up in its creators’ faces when they’re trying to demonstrate how great it is.

Here’s a ripped-from-the-headlines yarn about what happened when a big law firm used an AI bot product developed by Anthropic, its client, to help write an expert’s testimony defending the client.

It didn’t go well. Anthropic’s chatbot, Claude, got the title and authors of one paper cited in the expert’s statement wrong, and injected wording errors elsewhere. The errors were incorporated in the statement when it was filed in court in April.
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NY Times: C.D.C. Contradicts Kennedy and Keeps Advice That Children May Get Covid Shots

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said on Tuesday that the vaccine would no longer appear on the childhood immunization schedule. C.D.C.’s update counters his policy.
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The agency kept Covid shots on the schedule for children 6 months to 17 years old with a new condition. Children and their caregivers will be able to get the vaccines in consultation with a doctor or provider, which the agency calls “shared decision-making.”

The shots will also continue to be available under those terms to about 38 million low-income children who rely on the Vaccines for Children program, according to an emailed update from the C.D.C. on Friday.

However, the picture is less certain now for pregnant women, a group the C.D.C. had considered to be at high risk for a bad outcome from the virus. The official C.D.C. position for pregnant women is “no guidance,” according to a communication released from the agency Friday. Mr. Kennedy’s pronouncement on Tuesday had included a decision to drop the recommendation for pregnant women to receive Covid shots.

The C.D.C.’s new guidance on pregnant women is a troubling turn of events for experts familiar with research showing that their risk of stillbirth, hospitalization and death rises if they have Covid.
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