milk and honey

Hang On, There

WTF? Although non-citizens don’t enjoy full free-speech protections, they are entitled to due process.

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, Tricia McLaughlin, confirmed Khalil’s arrest in a statement Sunday, describing it as being “in support of President Trump’s executive orders prohibiting anti-Semitism.”

Khalil’s arrest is the first publicly known deportation effort under Trump’s promised crackdown on students who joined protests against the war in Gaza that swept college campuses last spring. The administration has claimed participants forfeited their rights to remain in the country by supporting Hamas. Time.com

Not letting his wife (an American) or lawyer know where he is being held is especially chilling.

The United States Senate is starting to annoy me. Seriously.

Nick Catoggio:

By tapping a guy accused of having sex at a party with a 17-year-old girl to be America’s top law enforcement officer, Donald Trump discovered that even life forms as supine as congressional Republicans have a limit to how much sleaze they can rationalize. But I wonder if, in hindsight, the president regrets letting Gaetz withdraw from consideration instead of daring the Senate GOP to vote him down.

… everything we’ve seen from them since then proves that they do not, in fact, take their jobs very seriously.

They Break Things

David Brooks:, Feb 13 2025:

The … Trumpist elite think they’re going after the educated elites.. but you know who’s really going to pay? … working-class communities that will continue to languish because Trump ignores their main challenges and focuses instead on culture war distractions… the essence of Trumpism: [is] to be blithely unconcerned that people without a college degree die about eight years sooner or that hundreds of thousands of Africans might now die of AIDS, but to go into paroxysms of moral panic because of who competes in a high-school girls’ swim meet.

Bueller… Bueller… Bueller… Um, he’s sick.

Vis a vis the 2025 coup: Checks and balances only work if the other two branches check and balance. Congress and the courts are, um, sick (unto death, for Congress). If they croak, they’ll be very difficult to resurrect.

Walt Whitman: Democratic Vistas

Of all the dangers to a nation as things exist in our day, there can be no greater one than having certain portions of the people set off from the rest by a line drawn–they not privileged as others, but degraded, humiliated, made of no account.

Plus ça change…

Yuck

Ted Gioia:

Few things are more distressing than praise lavished on irredeemable ugliness.

At the risk of becoming a yeller-at-clouds, I fret about this in our current media environment: The Joker, American Horror Story, Saw (I, II, III, IV, V, VI, 3D), etc. This can’t be a sign of cultural health, right?

Scathing

Cory Doctorow:

I don’t want people to kill insurance executives, and I don’t want insurance executives to kill people. But I am unsurprised that this happened. Indeed, I’m surprised that it took so long. It should not be controversial to note that if you run an institution that makes people furious, they will eventually become furious with you.

Suffice to say, however, being furious is not justification for gunning someone down.

Sounds About Right

[W]e are … not going back to a world where there is a set of trusted truth-mediating institutions, core sources of news and information that everyone recognizes and trusts, a “mainstream” of argument and opinion-shaping that sets the parameters of debate. – Ross Douthat, New York Times, 16 Nov. 2024

If true, then we’ll need to learn to think for ourselves. Not that I believe we will. Which is terrifying.

But lets work on it:
Lesson 1: Yes or No: Does hosting a gameshow make a person fit to be the President of the United States of America?

True in every era; yet, it’s a smack in the face

… the narrative on which many of us grew up no longer applies.

– Joan Didion - (h/t @ayjay)

…well, we’ll live right on…

From my friend, Dan Wilson:

… whatever the outcome… “well, we will live right on.” We will all go about doing what we do, get the kids off to school, go to work, do the laundry, and go about our lives. And that is as it should be because the greatest impact on our world does not come out of Washington anyway. It never has. Ultimately, it comes from each of us and how we live out our ordinary lives, our good deeds, humility, loving our neighbor, and loving God.