Friday News Roundup
The Revenge of the Polite
First, we have some good news. On Monday, Canadian voters went to the polls and provided the center-left Liberal Party and its leader Prime Minister Mark Carney with a resounding election victory. The election was widely viewed as a referendum on Donald Trump, especially his tariff war and his threats to annex Canada. As late as December 2024, polls had Pierre Poilievre and the Conservative Party ahead by over 25 percentage points, but an anti-Trump backlash (and the associated portrayal of Poilievre as a “mini-Trump”) enabled the Liberals to hold onto power for a four consecutive term. Trump was such a heavy albatross around Poilievre’s neck that the veteran politician even lost his own seat in Parliament.
We’ll have to get results back from Canadian pollsters to be sure, but it looks like Canadians were more motivated by the desire to preserve their national sovereignty and identity than the merely economic threat of a tariff and trade war. Donald Trump’s decision to send a pre-election message to Canadian voters promising them that they would become a “cherished 51st state” certainly couldn’t have hurt the Liberal Party in its march to victory. Numerical data is hard to come by at this stage, but this roundtable on the Canadian polls by Politico magazine mentioned that even formerly separatist-minded Quebecois were proudly calling themselves “Canadians” in response to Trump’s attacks.
The Rabid DOGE Attack on Our Government
It’s blindingly obvious by now that I’m no fan of DOGE. Somehow, Hillary Clinton’s handling of a secure private email server was the most salient issue to define her in the 2016 elections. Yet, it’s only nine years later, and we’re opening the door and rolling out the red carpet for a group of immature teen and twentysomething hackers to get access to sensitive government databases with no questions asked.
DOGE constantly evades accountability by claiming to be an unofficial body that merely “advises” and “consults” with the federal government. According to this article from the legal news site Lawfare, a recent cache of U.S. government emails that got unearthed in a lawsuit shows that DOGE’s claims are a complete lie. What we have here is that DOGE is unilaterally terminating government contracts in violation of the Constitution’s principle that you cannot control the power of the purse without being explicitly granted or delegated that power by Congress. According to one email, the acting director of a government agency wrote, “It is my understanding that DOGE contacted JMD this afternoon and instructed them to terminate the contract.” [Emphasis mine.]
DOGE put an undergrad intern with no government experience in charge of rewriting housing regulations with AI.(This is another great scoop from WIRED magazine, which continues to do great work on DOGE. Even though I linked to the unpaywalled version of this article, please consider subscribing.)
In yet another lowlight in our government’s DOGE follies, a 23-year-old intern at Elon Musk’s SpaceX company got unauthorized access to classified info on American nuclear weapons.
DOGE claims that they are “auditing” the government to root out waste, fraud, and abuse. But WIRED Magazine actually interviewed real government auditors about what DOGE is doing. According to one auditor who kept anonymous for fear of retaliation, “In no uncertain terms is this an audit, it’s a heist, stealing a vast amount of government data.” My only quibble with this quote is that heist movies are cool, with scenes about people dodging lasers and stuff, but with DOGE, we’re just holding the door open for the thieves.
According to a memo from the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Elon’s financial conflicts of interests with respect to his role in leading DOGE in the U.S. government exceed $2 billion.
Trump’s Deportation Gulag Machine
First, we have some good news. Grad student and Buddhist pro-Palestinian activist Mohsen Madawi walked out of a Vermont courtroom on Wednesday after being released from immigration detention. Keep up the pressure, folks! It works.
Another piece of good news is the across-the-board decline in Donald Trump’s approval numbers. A recent Washington Post analysis shows that Trump had negative favorability ratings on 7 out of 7 major political issues, including immigration, where Trump was opposed by 53% of the public.
The Trump Administration has designated a new militarized zone attached to Fort Bliss Army to serve as a pretext for attacking immigrants who unknowingly cross into the zone. Even North Korea and South Korea have the decency to call their border a demilitarized zone.
Border agents in Tucson are attempting to forcibly separate a Guatemalan immigrant woman and her newborn child. The child, who was born in Tucson, is a U.S. citizen by virtue of the 14th Amendment. The mother is now being forced by the government to make a Sophie’s choice to either be permanently separated from her newborn or to give up her child’s citizenship rights.
A family looking for a fresh start in Oklahoma screamed “We’re U.S. citizens!” as ICE agents ransacked their home in a raid that targeted the wrong house.
A Haitian woman died of after being denied medical care while imprisoned in an ICE detention center in Florida. The center is run by the private prison company, the GEO Group, whose taxpayer-subsidized employees were reportedly “hostile” to questions from members of Congress who tried to investigate the incident at the facility.
Three U.S. citizen children (ages 2, 4, and 7) have been deported from Louisiana with no access to legal representation. The four-year-old has Stage 4 Cancer and was denied access to medication or doctors. According to a social media post by the lawyer representing the mother and the children in this immigration case, “They hid my clients from me and deported them so quickly as to deprive the courts of any review. The horror truly outstrips our ability to process and respond to it.”
Right-Wing Kook Watch
The sleaziest elements of the racist wing of the American Right are still forcing itself into the daylight with a shameful assist from establishment media. In a recent column titled “The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive,” Russ Douthat tosses softball questions at alt-right racist Jonathan Keeperman, while whitewashing Keeperman’s ties to the white nationalist Passage Press publishing house.
In addition, it’s long past time that we call Donald Trump a segregationist. Just this week, the Justice Department under Trump ended a desegregation order in Louisiana that had been in place since 1966. Let’s not mince words here. If you end a desegregation order that is still accomplishing the goals of that order, then you are a segregationist plain and simple.
The Trump administration just canceled a program to keep feces out of the drinking water in Black areas in rural Alabama on the grounds that the program constitutes “illegal DEI.”
Congress members affiliated with the Religious Right have inserted an exemption for “Jews killed Jesus” statements into the Antisemitism Awareness Act currently pending in the House. The anti-Semitic canard that “Jews killed Jesus” has been responsible for over a millennium’s worth of anti-Semitism, long before the modern state of Israel existed. By including this rider, the Antisemitism Awareness Act will be used more to silence criticism of U.S. and Israeli foreign policy than to keep Jews safe from ethnic harassment.
RFK, Jr. went completely insane in a recent statement where he claimed that there is “aborted fetus debris” in measles vaccines. The WI-38 cell line used to make the anti-rubella component of the standard MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine was originally derived from lung tissue from a fetus aborted during a rubella epidemic circa 1964, but no new fetal tissue has been used since.
On April 30, a White House press briefing directed at members of “new media” included the pro-Trump, anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist Dom Lucre, who once posted child sexual abuse material to Twitter. To be fair, Lucre is not a pedophile, but was merely to trying to smear his ideological opponents as a pedophiles. What a prince of a guy!