So I said - semi-regular wrap-up

More comments on various topics posted somewhere online.

2026-01-18
Right-wing hate preacher Greg Locke claims his house was attacked by someone with a machine gun and played what he claimed was an audio of the attack, featuring the sound of 60 shots in three seconds.

Well, the incident was real (and police have arrested a suspect), but Locke's supposed audio was a fake.

It was supposedly from some home security system but sounded fake to me when I first heard it. Even so, I was prepared to chalk it up to the quality of the system’s recording ability until I looked up the info about the weapon.

See, the police said the weapon was a .40 caliber automatic pistol. That is a SEMI-automatic weapon - meaning the trigger has to be pulled for each shot - with a capacity of up to 15 rounds.

So if he did fire 60 shots, he had to fire 15 times, pause to reload (which police said he did), fire 15 times, reload, and so on. No flaming way in hell did he do than in, as Locke claimed, three seconds.

Why he felt it necessary to manipulate or manufacture the audio I can't say; maybe he thought the original didn't sound as scary as he wanted. Whatever the reason, is was a fake.

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2026-01-18
I've asserted several times that much of the bigotry and hatred around trans folks is actually about discomfort and fear about sex, our societal sickness about the subject. For way too many of us, anything and everything about LGBTQ+ folks in general and trans folks in particular isn’t about who a person is, but about how they “do it," about "what's in their pants," with the unwanted lurid thoughts such notions arouse and the self-loathing guilt they produce turned outward as self-protection.

Here we have another example.

RJ May is - or was until he quit — a member of the South Carolina state legislature.

During his time in office he claimed that children are being "harmed" by "exposing" them to drag shows and "pushing sex changes on toddlers," ranting about “child exploitation.”

And to what should be no one's surprise he has been sentenced to 17.5 years in federal prison after pleading guilty to distributing child sex abuse material, including nearly 500 explicit videos featuring toddlers and young children involved in sex acts and incest between young children and their parents. (He has a seven-year-old child.) 

After his indictment in June, he claimed he'd been framed by his political enemies (of course he did) but wound up pleading guilty to five counts in exchange for the dropping of five others. 

From the article:

Moms for Liberty — the anti-LGBTQ+ extremist group that regularly seeks to ban LGBTQ+-inclusive children’s books as a form of “pornography” and regularly accuses LGBTQ+ people and their allies of “grooming” children for sexual abuse — honored May as their 2023 Legislator of the Year and had him speak at their 2022 event on “Reclaiming Education in America.”

I wonder if they'll take back the honor.

Actually, I doubt it. Just like I doubt there aren't a lot more just like May among the haters.

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2026-01-19
It is time for Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk to be disbarred for judicial misconduct for accepting and ruling on issues where he clearly has a profound personal bias.

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2026-01-21
A post suggested that The Orange Overlord's desire for Greenland is because the area distortions inherent to the Mercator Projection map makes it look much bigger than it actually is.

The post is interesting and worthwhile but have to contest that starting point as I rather doubt that has much if anything at all to do with it. I think it’s much more to do with TOO’s vision of a “greater America,” the same vision that drove the business of Canada being “the 51st state” - something that still sits in the back of his head; note that he recently referred to Greenland becoming the “52nd state.”

(And people in Puerto Rico went “um, hey!”)

What matters here is that he thinks in 19th-century sphere of influence terms, with one nation dominating it’s own: China in Asia, Russia in Europe, and the US in the Americas. In that view, each of those dominant nations should be free to do pretty much what it wants within their own sphere so long as it does not intrude into one of the others.

In that way of thinking, expanding our borders would be the ultimate establishment in the historical record of the US being a great power and him a great leader, something he so desperately desires (which, parenthetically, I think relates to his practice of plastering his name on things and his pathetic desire for a Nobel Peace Prize, ways to be seen and remembered as someone worthy of note). It’s not so much the size of the expansion per se (although it would be significant, increasing the area of the US by about 22%) as the sheer fact of it that provokes his dreams of grandeur.

Footnote: Post author Christopher Lockett protested (with a smile) that he didn’t say that’s why TOO was saying that, rather it was just an excuse to “nerd out about cartography.” To which I replied, that’s okay, I was doing the same thing: using a remark as a hook for my own rant. And that I enjoyed the article.

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2026-01-21
[To my Congressional reps after the release of the elated budget proposal to the floor of the House.]

The public, not to mention Congress, being given just days to consider and react to funding for DHS in general and ICE in particular is disturbing at best, evasive of public response at a time when those agencies are significantly unpopular more likely.

I call on you to vote NO on any appropriations for DHS or ICE until after - repeat, after - major reforms are agreed to and acted on.

DHS, a product of post-9/11 paranoia, should be dismantled. ICE should be stripped down and rebuilt from scratch with strict controls; to steal a phrase, it should be "repealed and replaced." Until then, they should  get nothing.

On this, I will not be satisfied with less.

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2026-01-23

[Background: A commenter on an article at Erin in the Morning said the people behind anti-trans laws should be imprisoned and fined and barred from seeking office “until they are as politically dead as the Whigs.”

NOTE WELL: The writer’s responses to me in this exchange have been edited. While I think they still reflect what was argued, to be completely fair, you should see the whole exchange, which can be found here.

 

I hate to be a downer, but what you're suggesting is an incredibly heavy lift.

 

The first citation [42 USC §1983] is about suing public officials, the second [18 USC §241] is about conspiracy, the third [18 USC §242] is about wrongful official actions under color of law. What all have in common is that they involve violations of rights secured either under the Constitution or by federal law.

There is no federal law establishing a right to GAC (or any health care, for that matter - note that Medicare, the ACA, and the like are about access to care, not a right to it). Even the Biden-era protections for trans folks were an Executive Order based on an interpretation of Title IX and rescinded by The Orange Overlord.

Nor is there any established Constitutional right to GAC or even just to being transgender. In fact, in US v. Skrmetti, upholding a Tennessee ban on GAC for youth, the Scurrilous Six majority said the ban is valid because it merely "removes one set of diagnoses," that is, gender dysphoria, "from the range of treatable conditions” so no violation of rights was involved. I expect any claim that denial of access to GAC violates a Constitutional right would likely be treated dismissively.

The closest I think we could come now is Bostock v. Clayton County, but since that was about employment, not health care and preceded Skrmetti (2020 vs. 2025) I doubt it would be persuasive.
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2026-01-24
[There are laws on state and federal interference with rights to property, commerce, etc. Rights don’t need to be in the Constitution; rather, there must be government power to limit them, otherwise they are plenary.]

 
On the first point, the established power of a state to regulate commerce, in this case the practice of medicine, is exactly what SCOTUS relied on in Skrmetti, arguing that's what Tennessee did: regulate the practice of medicine.

On the second, it's true that the 9th Amendment refers to "enumerated" rights and that a right not being listed does not mean it doesn't exist. But that does not mean that any given non-enumerated right exists legally, rather it must be discovered, usually by implication of those that are.

For example, a right of married couples to obtain contraceptives was found in to exist within the "penumbra" of the 4th Amendment's relation to personal privacy. The principle was later extended to cover unmarried couples and still later to strike down sodomy laws, but legally, that right didn't exist until 1965.

So it seems to me the only way to pursue the suits and prosecutions you suggest is to establish an overall right to health care and then have GAC be an accepted right within that, so that it could not be regulated out of bounds.

Like I said, an incredibly heavy lift.

And as a footnote, all this is without considering the impact of the Constitution's ban on ex post facto laws on your hoped-for prosecutions.
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2026-01-24

]These laws are constitutionally impermissible attempts to mandate that transgender youth be abused with their own sex. Child abuse is already illegal. Those in favor of these laws have no case. And you have no idea what ex post facto means.]

 
I was addressing the legal landscape facing the course you argued for. I stand by it.

Now you are arguing that laws barring GAC (particularly puberty blockers) are "constitutionally impermissible" even though Skrmetti, by virtue of upholding Tennessee's ban, said they are valid.
So at least you have to overcome that barrier. That alone makes it a heavy lift. Doesn't mean it can't be done, but do not pretend it would be anything short of that.

As for ex post facto, you are proposing criminalizing actions that were not considered criminal at the time they were performed, which at the least raises ex post facto concerns. While child abuse laws already exist, the application of them to deny access to GAC doesn't; in fact, it is far more common to hear the opposite, to hear the transmisics and reactionaries screaming that GAC is itself "child abuse" and some places - Texas, for example - have proposed prosecuting parents on just that basis.

Morally and ethically, as you say, "those in favor of these laws have no case."  But unhappily, as someone (I don't recall who) said, "The law is not about justice. The law is about the law." And that is what we're dealing with here.

Bottom line and I think the end from my side: Not impossible. But know how hard it will be to get there and the obstacles to be overcome.
 

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2026-01-24
[Background: Dr. Kirk Milhoan is the head of RF (my father would be ashamed of me) Kennedy Jr's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. He is also an evangelical Christian pastor with no background in immunology who says vaccination should be voluntary.] 

 
So Milhoan is "returning individual autonomy to the first order, not public health, but individual autonomy to the first order," even though "declin[ing] a vaccine may also affect others," is he?

How does he feel about speed limit laws? Sure, speeding "may affect others," but if "individual autonomy" can outweigh public health, why not public safety? 

By the way, is he a flat-Earther? I mean, he says “I don’t like established science” and “Science is what I observe.” Central arguments of flat-Earthers revolve around the "observation" that "Hey, it looks flat" and how you can't trust "the scientific establishment." Sounds pretty flerfy to me.

It's time.

I've been saying for a few months now that yes, it is time for civil disobedience but I kept getting told "after the election" or "after this Congressional vote" or "after" this or that or the other. But always after.

 

So I was heartened and moved by Robert Reich's declaration at the close of this video, when after referencing MLK Jr.'s campaigns, he said "It is time again for civil disobedience, an upheaval across this land."

 

Because yes, it is.

That doesn't mean we stop what we're already doing. So, yes, by all means lobby Congress. Yes, organize for and support progressive candidates in the primaries and the general. But we should be ready, we should be organizing, for more. To do more than lobbying, to go beyond protest¹ to an aggressive (in the social and political senses, not the physical) campaign of active nonviolent civil disobedience, to find the power of, as a '60s quote put it, "doing 'No,'" of stepping beyond "you should not" to "I will stand in your way," a category in which I include among the rest of the tactics a general strike.

My own organizing skills fall woefully short of the level needed to put together such a campaign, so all I can do is plead, argue, and hope. But I genuinely look to see one arise and to which I will pledge, to paraphrase a rather well-known document, my life, my (such as it is) fortune, and my sacred honor.

Footnote: Another response to the same video wrote of using CD "protect your communities." I replied in agreement: 

It is indeed time for organized civil disobedience. "But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security" - Declaration of Independence.

While I don't think any of us are talking about overthrowing the government, I think we are talking about, if you will, "overthrowing" certain select parts of it.

 

¹I almost used the adjective "mere" here but there is nothing "mere" about either street protest or individual acts of conscience.
 

What is this "Constitution" of which you speak?

AP reported recently that an internal ICE memo being used to train new ICE thugs declares that they can smash their way into private homes without the need for a judicial warrant required by the 4th Amendment.

All they need, according to the DHS Office of the General Counsel (in other words, DHS's own lawyer) is an administrative arrest warrant issued by the agency for someone with a final order of removal and the Constitution is totally cool with it.

What could go wrong? Oh, wait....

This news came out in the immediate wake of the case of American citizen ChongLy "Scott" Thao, the man who was dragged out of his home in St. Paul in his underwear in freezing temperatures after ICE secret police thugs smashed their way in with no warrant, screaming and pointing guns at his family. (And because of a delay in posting this clearly before the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti.)

The Tonton Macoute (I keep telling you: Look it up!) wannabes were supposedly after "two convicted sex offenders." In other words, it went just like the memo described and "we don't need no stinking (actual proper) warrant."

Sadly, the AP meekly described the memo as "a sharp reversal of longstanding guidance meant to respect constitutional limits on government searches." This is no "reversal of guidance" as if it's a matter of opinion or worse, convenience, and the agency is not to "respect" such limits, it is to obey them.

What this is, is an immoral, illegal, improper, infuriating rejection of a base Constitution principle on the sanctity of the home that dates back in English law to at least the early 1600s and can even be found to date from ancient Rome.

Our 4th Amendment protections have already been undermined and restricted (for example to the point that your car is often referred to as a "4th Amendment-free zone") but this is not just a bright red line, it's a line of flashing beacons and blaring klaxons.

In an earlier version of the story, one that got updated while I was first writing this, the AP reported that ICE agents sometimes wait hours for a targeted person to leave a house. Apparently we are now to accept that the Constitution must yield because their constitution cannot bear such a burden.

My January 20

A group of folks centered around Toms River, NJ have a weekly Tuesday protest downtown. We knew of the January 20th walkout, but as most of us are retired and/or disabled, we really didn’t have anything to walk out of.

So we decided to do our own version. We agreed to join in by having our usual protest at a different site and then walking as a group (which means marching, really) over to the office of our local Congressional rep (Chris Smith, R-NJ4).

Which we did, about 125 mostly oldsters in 25 degree weather with wind chill in the teens, first waving signs at the traffic and getting responses that featured far more thumbs than middle fingers raised, then marching down the sidewalk (which provoked at least a few déjà vu comments) to his office where we lined up to either request a meeting (which we knew would not happen; he hasn’t has a town hall since 1992, according to his staff) or deliver prepared letters.

I was among those with a prepared letter and the whole selfish purpose of this was to have a reason to post it here. Which I now will. :-)

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Congressman Smith:

 

Despite the range of issues on which we don’t agree, I’m sure there are some on which we do.

There is one in particular facing us at the moment which I hope fits in the second category: The violence and political terror being visited on our cities and communities in the name of combating “illegal immigration.”

There are at this moment 3000 masked armed federal agents in Minneapolis, in effect a secret police who are masked for the avowed purpose of preventing them from being identified (and thus being held responsible for their actions) and there is a threat of 1500 active duty troops being added to that total. They have been sweeping up the innocent (including citizens and non-citizens legally present), repeatedly exceeding their authority, brutalizing and now even killing, while utterly failing in - to the point it can be said lying about - their stated mission of going after “the worst of the worst,” as even DHS admits that less than a majority have any criminal record.

And they are doing all this, note well, not at the request, or with the approval, of state and local officials but over their direct opposition, with many of then calling it an “occupation.”

If we are not to have open borders, then there must be some kind of border control and someone to enforce it. But that is a role which DHS and ICE have proven themselves incapable of carrying out in any humane or even Constitutional way. DHS, consisting of an amalgamation of formerly-separate operations and which was formed only in 2003, should be abolished entirely. ICE should be stripped down and restructured from scratch under strict guidelines; to express it in a way you might find familiar, it should be “repealed and replaced.”

So I call on you to reject any spending for either DHS in general or ICE in particular until we determine how to deal with immigration without resorting to secret police terrorizing communities.

Having returned to New Jersey less than three years ago, I was not here at the time but I’ve been given to understand that during Donald Trump’s first term you were “something of a thorn in his side.”

Certainly, the same cannot be said now. You can do better. You can be better. Please do so.

So I said - bits and pieces

Another gathering of random comments on various things posted by others, arranged chronologically. 

2026-01-08
Everything you need to know about today’s GOPpers in one headline: “House fails to override Trump’s vetoes of 2 bills that passed unanimously.”

Not every GOPper voted against overriding the veto, but quite enough to generalize. Craven weaklings unworthy of public office.

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2026-01-09
ICE has become little more than an armed, masked, secret police, increasingly populated with Tonton Macoute wannabes.

If we’re not going to have open borders (which I do think is an arguable position*) we have to have some kind of border control and some way to enforce it, roles for which both ICE in particular and DHS in general have proven incapable of fulfilling in a humane or even Constitutional manner.

Thus my new slogan, deliberately intended to tweak the MAGAs:

“ICE: Repeal and Replace!”

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2026-01-09
[Background: An attorney was fined $400,000, upheld on appeal, for informing a school that one of their staff was previously involved in sex with a minor on the grounds that it violated a confidentiality agreement regarding a bankruptcy case. The judge said the fine was based on the cost of the investigation.

The question was are the courts at in any way at fault for what seems to be an injustice or were they just constrained by the law.]

Of course both the district and appeals courts at least potentially bear some of the blame.

Is there a law saying that the fine must be based on the “cost of the investigation?” If so, the courts should have required a proof of that cost - meaning receipts, detailed accounts, and not vague items like “hours billed.” If there is not such a law, the court should have ignored that cost as a basis for the fine. In either event, the district court could have withheld judgment for the moment while encouraging the sides to negotiate a lesser amount.

So unless there is both a law specifically stating that the fine is to be based on the cost of the investigation and a detailed proof of those costs, then either court could have at the least found the fine excessive and even included in their rulings (even if it didn’t affect the judgment) some reference to the potential harm avoided by [attorney Richard] Trahant’s actions.

I’m reminded yet again of Joni Mitchell’s lyric (in “Sex Kills”): “Is justice just ice/Driven by greed and lust?/Just the strong doing what they can/And the weak suffering what they must?”

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2026-01-12
I will not forward, “like,” or discuss memes or vids or whatever that do not source the claim made.

I’ve had more than enough experiences of asking for a source (which you’d think the poster had) only to be told some version of “find it yourself” to have confidence in the conclusion that they don’t have one, they either just made it up or, more likely, are just reposting something that itself had no source.

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2026-01-12
[Background: Responding to Congressional Democrats failing to oppose an anti-trans law, someone asked “Do they still expect trans people to vote for them despite this harm they’re causing us?”]

The answer to your question is yes.

This, bluntly, is SOP, par for the course, choose your cliché, but in any case long-standing policy for the institutional Democratic Party. It’s not just trans rights, it’s a range of issues where they figure that as long as they can be or at least present themselves as any degree to the left of the GOPpers, it’s “Hey, whadda you gonna do? Vote for that crowd? It’s us or nuthin’.” They see no downside to taking the left flank of voters for granted.

And if you dare to mutter phrases like “won’t vote” or worse yet “third party,” you’ll be treated as a child to be scolded and shamed rather than an adult to be engaged.

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2026-01-14
In discussing oral arguments before SCOTUS on two suits relating to bans on transgender students in sports, Chris Geidner (Law Dork) suggested they revealed a shift in tone toward avoiding a wide-ranging decision with Constitutional implications, so that while the bans in question would be upheld, it would be done in a manner that it only applied to those particular cases and would leave open the option for other jurisdictions to allow students to participate according to their gender. That is, states could have such a ban but allowing participation based on gender would not violate Title IX, despite the plaintiff's claims.

Now, this of course was oral arguments so is no guarantee of the shape of the ultimate ruling, but according to Geidner the Justices seemed interested in avoiding basic questions about trans rights under the Title.

Which leaves me feeling if there is such a word quasi-optimistic, which is about as good as it gets on this topic these days. There are undoubtedly hard - make that even harder - times ahead but I still believe in the line about the arc of the moral universe.

So I take hope in the shift in tone represented by Kavanaugh’s remark that “one of the themes of your argument has been the more people learn, the more they’ll agree with you.“ I do it both because that is true and because perhaps that, again, shift in tone is the result of some members of the Court starting to think “um this whole business is more complicated than I originally thought.”

And consider that in the period 1998-2008, 26 states added to their state Constitutions provisions banning same-sex marriage at tine when opposition to those rights ran at about 60%. They did it because support was slowly rising and the reactionaries, aware of that fact, pushed these amendments to lock in their bigotry at a time when they could still get people worked up over it.

Despite that, it continued to be an issue, support continued to rise, in 2015 SCOTUS struck all of them down, and polls over the past two years show 67-69% of the public supporting same-sex marriage.

It’s unclear who originated the saying “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes” (no, it wasn’t Mark Twain). No matter; with some recent polls saying that a clear majority of Republican voters think their party is way too concerned with trans rights issues, I don’t feel it remiss to listen for the perhaps faint but still perceptible sound of rhyming chimes.

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2025-01-14
The Democratic-controlled New Jersey legislature has broken a promise to enact a trans shield law in the post-election session, generating a sense of betrayal.

It's a well-justified reaction, yet we should for the moment recall that NJ has an Executive Order in place that functions as a shield and that stays in force until it's overturned or superseded by law.

I have urged [out-going] Gov. [Phil] Murphy to call on the legislature to turn his EO into law without success, so now we have to push [Governor-elect Mikie] Sherrill to do it.

I rather suspect the lack of post-election action arises from a feeling of “We’ve got the shield EO, why raise what might be a contentious issue?” More specifically, I suspect the reason for the idea of a post-election vote was intended as a backstop against the possibility of a win in the governor’s race by Trump-lover Jack Ciattarelli, who certainly would have revoked Murphy’s EO. Since the moderate Mikie Sherrill, who has a pretty good record on LGBTQ+ (including transgender) issues, won, the members of the legislature felt no urgency to deal with it.

None of which changes the fact that there should be a law, not just an EO, and we should be pressing for that.

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2026-01-16
[Background: In response to a 2015 TikTok from John Cena about what makes an "average American," someone asked "WTF happened?"]

WTF happened is that we got lazy, we thought those issues were pretty much settled, that the bastards, bigots, and buffoons had shrunk far enough away that we could coast to the finish line, ignoring or ignorant enough of the fact that the diverse America we saw emerging that was so pleasing to us - one with a “non-majority majority” in which no racial/ethnic group is a majority of the population - was instead terrifying to many of the existing majority whose internal conception of what it means to be “American” is being undermined by that reality.

 *See, for example, https://whoviating.blogspot.com/2019/07/the-erickson-report-page-4-longer-look.html

Votes: cast vs. counted

On January 14, SCOTUS ruled by 5-4 that candidates for public office by that very fact have standing to challenge state election rules regarding the counting of mail-in ballots received after election day.

Writing for the majority, Chief Injustice John Roberts offered a comparison to a foot race in which the length was changed from 100m to 105m while the race was going on, describing that as clearly unfair. But despite being (very) superficially clever, instead of supporting his argument the image reveals its hidden and fundamental weakness. It’s like, in an old saying, a house built on a foundation of stubble and straw.

That's because no one to my knowledge is talking about changing the length of the election campaign in the middle of it. No one, that is, is suggesting changing the date of an election during the campaign, which is what would be the equivalent of Roberts’ example.

What’s involved, rather, is counting mail-in ballots arriving after election day. That is, after the race is over. Every entrant knew the rules going in, knew the dates, knew what they had to do in what time frame, a time frame that ended on election day. Whatever the number of days allowed for mail-in ballots to arrive after that, they must have been posted, that is, cast, by then.

Which reveals the underlying failure of Roberts’ analogy: He is equating when a vote is counted with when it was cast. Which is both nonsense on its face and contrary to previous decisions, which have held that when that mail-in ballot is put in the mail, it is as that point cast.

So unless he is claiming both that all mail-in ballots must be received before election day and (to be consistent) that all counting of votes must stop at midnight (otherwise they would be counted after election day and so invalid), his argument is -

- well, I started to say vapor, but it does have substance in its impact: It empowers those with the contacts and cash needed to pursue suits intended to push the courts to embrace election rules tailored to a particular candidate's own selfish advantage. More broadly, it could result in tangling election rules to the point where not only are tens of millions of voters disenfranchised but, ultimately, no election outcome can be trusted, an idea decidedly not beyond the reactionaries' hopes.

But since Roberts hasn’t shown a lot of interest in fair elections - consider his gradual dismantling of the Voting Rights Act - I doubt he cares.

Footnote: A reply referred to Roberts’ “ridiculous” analogy in his confirmation hearings about “calling and balls and strikes,” saying the Court was instead narrowing the strike zone.

I replied that I think my favorite dumb Roberts’ aphorism was when he justified smacking down affirmative action by saying (as best as I can quote from memory) “The best way to stop discriminating by race is to stop discriminating by race,” which I at the time likened to saying “The best way to get from point A to Point B is to pretend you’re already there.”

I added that as for “balls and strikes,” that wasn’t just ridiculous, it was a flaming lie. But I did enjoy their use of the narrowed strike zone image.

A step toward the nightmare

I have several times referred to ICE and DHS agents as "Tonton Macoute wannabes." For those who don't know and don't want to have to look it up, the Tonton Macoute or just Macoute was a vicious "secret" police and paramilitary force who reported directly to Haitian dictator François "Papa Doc" Duvalier. (I put "secret" in quotes because there was nothing secret about them; everyone knew damned well who they were.)

It was regarded as among the most brutal such forces in the entire world and its criminality extended beyond suppressing any and all opposition: Its members were effectively a law unto themselves, able to steal, murder, torture, and rape as they pleased both because resisting or objecting was a death sentence and Duvalier didn't give a damn as long as he was in his palace and the grift kept rolling.

Well, it appears our own masked secret police is a step closer to achieving its dream.

Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon has decided not to investigate Jonathan Ross, the ICE good who murdered repeat murdered Renee Good.

Not only will he not be prosecuted, not only will he not even be charged, he will not even be investigated. The regime can't even be bothered to, indeed refuses to, look at what happened because they are terrified of the meaning of what they would see, what they already have seen, what they already know. Better to evade the knowledge he would be - and through that their embrace of thuggery would be - convicted. Better to pretend it didn't happen the way they know it did, better to smear accuse and blame and investigate the victim (Renee Good - say her name) on some impossibly vague charge of being "involved with the activist groups that have been protesting Trump’s immigration agenda," better to try to turn "the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances" into "domestic terrorism."

Better to put Ross - whose name, interestingly, is pretty much absent from news coverage, where he is just "the ICE agent" - beyond the law, the better to ignore what he represents, let him be answerable, it seems, only to the Orange Overlord - who, like Duvalier, just doesn't give a damn as long as he is in his palace and the grift keeps rolling.

And the ghost of Papa Doc smiles "Now you're getting it."

Sometimes pushback works

Nice to know some people still believe freedom of expression does not require universality of opinion.

The board of the Adelaide [Australia] Festival runs as part of the overall event Adelaide Writers Week, the nation’s largest free literary festival .

On January 8 the board announced that they had disinvited Australian-Palestinian writer Dr. Randa Abdel-Fattah from the event. They cited “her previous statements" and the "cultural sensitivities“ surrounding the antisemitic mass shooting at Sydney’s Bondi Beach - even as they admitted her writings don't “have any connection with the tragedy.”

They didn’t cite any specific statements by Abdel-Fatah, but we can safely assume they are to referring to her support for Palestinian rights and her denunciation of the Israeli genocide in Gaza, especially given that her exclusion came as the result of lobbying by the Jewish Community Council for South Australia and South Australia state premier Peter Malinauskus.

The upshot? By January 13, 180 speakers - amounting to about 70% of those invited - had withdrawn as had some sponsors of the event, the Festival’s director had quit, the whole event had been canceled, remaining board members were to resign, and the future of the wider Adelaide Festival was in question.

There is to be a new board, hoping to keep the wider festival, now in its 40th year and a major draw for the state of South Australia, going.

Footnote: The statement announcing the cancellation offered Abdel-Fattah a non-apology apology referring not to the actual decision but only to “how the decision was represented” while claiming "this is not about identity or dissent."

Yeah, sure. Whadevah you say, Mac.

Kennedy Center to support art by suing artist. It's not political. Really.

So NPR reports that the Kennedy Center says it’s going to sue Chuck Reed for $1 million for cancelling his annual Christmas Eve Jazz Jam. Reed cancelled the show after the Orange Overlord’s hand-chosen board stuck his name on the Center even though it’s not theirs to rename, as the name was set in the founding Congressional legislation.

(BTW, all praise to NPR for consistently referring to it as "the Kennedy Center," not the "Trump-Kennedy Center.")

Sounding like a petulant 6-year-old screeching “You’re mean!” Center rep Roma Daravi called Reed “selfish” and “intolerant” and as having “failed to meet [his] basic duty” as an artist, which apparently is performing when and where Daravi wants him to.

For his part, Center President Richard Grenell sniveled quite non-politically that the cancellation was a political stunt in a way that renaming the Center obviously was not. He called it an example of “sad bullying by certain elements on the left,” and pouting that it’s all happening because “the Left is mad” that the Orange Overlord “is supporting the arts” in some no doubt special and impressive yet invisible manner. The Arts are indeed magic.

Grenell said “we will not let them” - we can assume he means those “elements of the Left” - “cancel shows without consequences.” The Center says the suit will come after the holidays.

Interestingly, no basis for the suit was mentioned and it doesn’t appear that any suits were filed against other artists - including Issa Rae, Rhiannon Giddens, Peter Wolf, Low Cut Connie, the Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington, DC, and the production company of “Hamilton” - who previously canceled appearances in protest over the name change. Apparently, this one hurt their fee-fees more than usual.

Footnote: In late November, Democrats on the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works announced an investigation into “cronyism [and] corruption” involving “millions in lost revenue, luxury spending, and preferential treatment for Trump allies.” The investigation is being undertaken at a time of, NPR reports, “declining audiences, artist cancellations, layoffs and resignations at the Kennedy Center.”

So I said - something about, well, a bunch of stuff.

A series of comments on posts that I thought worth repeating. Adds some content here, anyway.

2025-12-26
One point I wish people would make, indeed emphasize, is that the Orange Overlord’s toady hit man Marco Rube is decrying supposed “suppression of free speech” (i.e., consumer protection rules) in Europe at the same time that his demented boss is demanding various people be fired and outlets have their broadcast licenses be stripped for saying things he doesn’t like.

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2025-12-26

When I was in college, a silly joke made the rounds “proving” that Alexander the Great had an infinite number of limbs and never existed in the first place.

The first line was “All horses are black. Proved by blatant assertion.” (I'll only tell the rest if someone asks.)

I’m reminded of that by RF “My father would be ashamed of me” Kennedy’s assertion that gender affirming care is “neither safe nor effective” despite multiple decades of experience and studies showing otherwise. It is a blatant assertion untethered to facts and just as accurate as “all horses are black.”

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2025-12-26
I’d like to share others’ vision of appropriate retribution being meted out to the grifters and ghouls of the court of the Orange Overlord for their various crimes and cruelties, but I have a genuine fear that come 2027 for Congress and 2029 for the White House, we will be hearing from the Dem misleaderhip a chorus of “We must look forward, not backward!” coupled with official amnesia.

They did it in 2009. They did it in 2021. It will be up to the mass of us to stop it from happening again - because we can’t depend on the leaders of the institutional Democratic Party to do it on their own.

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2025-12-26
So redactions in the Epstein files can be removed because the incompetent bozos of the White House didn’t use the right version of Acrobat.

So WHERE ARE THEY?

No one publishing them can be accused of wrongdoing; those documents should have been released unredacted (save info IDing victims) on 12/19.

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2025-12-27
[one person suggested SCOTUS would strike down a proposed Shadow Docket Sunlight Act]

I would argue that a law saying that SCOTUS must explain the basis for its decisions, including those on the shadow docket, is well within the authority of Congress.

The Constitution gives Congress a fair degree of latitude to regulate the courts, including SCOTUS. Article III, Section 2, Clause 2 says:

“In all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be a Party, the Supreme Court shall have original Jurisdiction. In all other Cases before mentioned, the Supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.”

A law that doesn’t in any way impact the powers of the Court but only requires that it explain the reasoning for its actions cannot by any rational argument be said to be outside the limits of “Regulations as the Congress shall make.”

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2025-12-28
[A comment raised two versions of a “forced outing” law of transgender students by schools: A)employees must notify parents or B)they can notify or not at their discretion with no requirement either way.]

Bluntly, it doesn’t matter. Either way puts trans students at significant risk of unwanted outing and strips them of privacy rights.

I’m old enough to remember when children would be told that if there was trouble at home they should find an authority figure to talk to - including, specifically, “a trusted teacher.” Now, amid all the pushing for outing laws, that advice should be “except a teacher - unless you can be absolutely certain they will never mention to anyone at any time, even in passing, even at the risk of their career.”

The only acceptable version I can see is (B) with the word “their” replaced with “the student’s.”

Remigration - the one word to rule them all

Welcome to all Jon Swift Roundup readers.

 

I write on a variety of political topics, so if you find my writing interesting or worthwhile, I invite you to check out my blog (whoviating.blogspot.com) or my free Substack (whoviating.substack.com).

 

Comments and other reactions are always welcome.

 

 [This should have gone out a few days ago, but production was slowed by events of the past week involving a fainting spell, a trip to the ER where it was discovered that I had a heart rate repeatedly dropping to like 22 with a BP of something like 85/13, a heartbeat ever more irregular than it already was, and oh by the way I have COVID. 

I left with a pacemaker and (due to wrestling with that damn hospital bed while wearing a heart monitor) a pinched nerve with the result that I can only work for about 10 minutes before my shoulder hurts so much I can't concentrate and have to take a break. Hope it was worth the wait....]

They said it. Not by second-hand reference, not by implication or suggestion or as a passing reference buried in a longer list, but right out. And not for the first time. But this time in shouting all caps.

Just before midnight on Thanksgiving, our rapidly-decomposing Orange Overlord turned to his sickenly-misnamed “Truth” Social for a deranged screed labeling immigration as the root of all our evils¹ - one punctuated with “Only REVERSE MIGRATION can finally cure this situation.”

And there it is. Maybe this time we will finally notice.

“Reverse migration,” you see, is a longer version of “remigration,” once a neutral, descriptive term with no overlying meaning. It meant simply homecoming, of a return to a place you previously lived. It was used, for example, following the end of World War II to refer to Jews who had fled Nazi Germany or Nazi-controlled territory in Europe who were returning to where they had lived before.

However over past couple of decades, particularly over the last 10-15 years and particularly in Europe, the right wing has taken hold of it and as often happens when the right wing grabs onto something, it has been twisted into a vile encapsulation of their inhumanities and unreasoning hatreds.

Put perhaps over simply but still accurately, the right wing saw an opportunity to spread their bigoted, racist xenophobia by amplifying the increasing resentment about both immigrants from Africa and refugees, particularly from Ukraine. “Remigration” was twisted from a straightforward reference to relocating to a previous home into a rallying cry first for kicking out any refugees and then to kicking out all foreigners, whether they had legal status or not.

The concept expanded, as such fanaticism invariably does, in this case to pushing for the “forced return” - the active expulsion - of all non-white immigrants and their children, regardless of their birthplace or citizenship; indeed, it meant forcing them back to their “ancestral home,” their home of racial ancestry, no matter how long their family had lived in Europe.

In other words, “remigration” is a wink-and-a-nod substitute for ethnic cleansing and racial-cultural lily white hegemony.

The driving philosophical idea - although I feel dirty using a fine phrase for such a low concept - the driving idea has been a rebirth in Europe of the idea of “Völkisch” (“people”), an ethno-nationalist movement from the late 1800s which under the Nazis became a policy in law of having to be, it was said, German (mostly, non-Jewish) “enough” to be a citizen.

After the defeat of the Nazis, those laws were scrapped - but like the man said, “Fanaticism is ever busy and needs feeding. Always it is feeding and gloating for more.”² “Völkisch” was rebranded as “Völkisch nationalism,” basically the same racist ideas with a little bit of dressing up - replacing references to “race” with “culture,” for example - without being explicitly antisemitic.

For example, in France, the Nouvelle Droite (“New Right”) emerged during the late 1960s to argue that different ethnicities require their own segregated living spaces, creating a need for remigration of people with “foreign roots.” The ND, as it’s called, gained some importance in the 1980s amid right-wing cries of “La France aux Français” (“France for the French”).

In Germany, the slogan is “Deutschland den Deutschen, Ausländer raus” (“Germany for Germans, foreigners out”) - bringing us to elections in Germany this past February in which the extreme-right Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany) - the AfD³, you remember, the party that Elon Musk and J.D. Vance wanted Germans to support - got 20.8% of the vote, making it the largest opposition party in the Bundestag and the second largest overall.

That degraded duo of Musk and Vance serves to bring it home to the US version.

On October 27, 2024, at a campaign rally at Madison Square Garden, Stephen “Voldemort” Miller, the driving force for this in the campaign (and now in the White House) declared in a deliberate echo of the extremist cries in Europe, “America Is For Americans And Americans Only.”⁴

As I wrote at the time,

I’m surprised that more people have not emphasized the fact that the references have moved from bizarrely false claims about “illegal” immigrants to being about immigrants, period, claims given an exclamation point by Steven Miller’s goose-stepping.

No more the fig leaf of “if only they’d do it legally, there would be no problem.” No more the differentiation of the “bad hombres” from the “good hombres.” Just naked hatred for and irrational fear of any and all among “the other.”

This is fascism fulfilled, paranoia as policy, systematized xenophobia.

It was explicit, it was overt; the extremism, the meaning, was there for all to see - and most of the media to ignore.

And while this was perhaps until that time the most emphatic revelation of their intentions, it was definitely not the first. Mother Jones, for one, flagged it two months earlier, quoting a post from the Orange Soon-to-be-Overlord referring to “return[ing] Kamala’s illegal migrants to their home countries (also known as remigration)” and Voldemort reposting it with “THE TRUMP PLAN TO END THE INVASION OF SMALL TOWN AMERICA: REMIGRATION!”

It was out there - but even then, even after Miller’s invocation of the overtly racist slogans of the furthest of Europe’s far right, still too much of the media (and, bluntly, too many of the rest of us) essentially sleep-walked our way through the declarations, preferring to see it all as a re-run of the old “illegal immigrants invading our country/stealing our jobs/blah-blah-blah” rabble-rousing bullshit.

But it wasn’t. Or, perhaps more accurately, it was the smokescreen. Because it isn’t about undocumented immigrants and for people like Miller it never was. For them, it’s always been about immigrants, period - or, again more accurately, non-white immigrants.

As soon as they got into office, they went to work. The Spray Tan Who Would Be King suspended the nation’s 40-year-old refugee resettlement program on his first day in office.

A few - emphasize few - highlights from the rest of the year:

In April, the White House cabal filed a brief in federal court claiming they can deport someone for their “beliefs, statements or associations.” This came the same day that ICE shared (and then deleted) a social media post saying that it is responsible for keeping illegal “ideas” from entering the US.

In May, the White House announced that an agency called the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, historically involved in supporting refugee programs, would be restructured to “reflect core administration priorities,” including an Office of Remigration to “revers[e] the flow of migrants” and focus on “Western values.”

In June despite the suspension of refugee resettlement, a group of about 50 white South Africans entered as “refugees” fleeing a non-existent “white genocide,” not only going to the front of the line for vetting, but skipping over it entirely.

In July, AttGen Pam Bondage⁵ directed that federal application forms and processes must only be in English, a step to implement the executive order declaring English the official language of the US.

That same month, “border czar” Tom Homan⁶ said ICE and Border Patrol don’t need probable cause to detain and question someone; their “physical appearance” (read: skin color) is enough, a notion to which the Scurrilous SCOTUS Six later gave their blessing.

In September, the Orange Overlord declared that no more than 7500 refugees would be admitted in 2026, just 6% of the number in Biden’s last year. Most of those slots will go to white South African farmer “refugees” like the group that arrived in June.

Over the course of the year they have attacked the idea of DACA and have seized people under its protection.

They have striven to strip protection from temporary protective status (TPS) recipients, more than 1.2 million people who fled wars, oppression, natural disasters, poverty, and more and who have permission to live and work in the US.

They have made a practice of rejecting the concept of due process, dismissing it in theory and denying it in practice.

They’ve openly talked about denaturalization, stripping people of their citizenship, even aggressively pursuing cases.

They’ve even attacked the notion of birthright citizenship, including pressing the Supreme Court for support.

Which brings us to November and Thanksgiving and the deranged post I mentioned at the top, the core of which multi-screen screed can be found in just three statements, which in a way can sum up the entire argument. In order of appearance, they are:

One: The “foreign population stands at 53 million people, most of which are on welfare, from failed nations, or from prisons, mental institutions, gangs, or drug cartels.”

The population figure is from the Census Bureau and it is a count of all “foreign-born” residents of the US, no matter their status - which means it includes not only the long-demonized “illegals” but any who are here legally, including those covered by DACA or TPS, who have asylum claims pending, who have green cards, and who are naturalized citizens, all thrown into one, we might call it, basket of deplorables to be condemned and reviled for the ethnic crime of being foreign-born.

Two: This supposed “refugee burden” is “the leading cause of social dysfunction in America, something that did not exist after World War II.”

The other side of the always-evil present in these xenophobic dreamscapes is the always-glorious, wonderful, mythologized past, one in which, we are here told, there was no crime, no shortage of health care or housing, no urban decay, and no student failed or was failed, at least not enough to care about. It depends on both ignorance of the present and amnesia about the past. That is why history is their enemy and why they’re looking to, for one example, scrub LGBTQ+, particularly trans, history: not just to sanitize US history, but to fantasize, to infantilize, it, the better to turn the past into a weapon of control.

Three: He wants to “deport any foreign national who is ... non-compatible with Western Civilization.”

Which, we can safely assume, would exclude any non-Christians - especially Muslims, indeed I expect it was said with them in mind. (I suppose Jews would be okay. For now.) But questions of “non-compatibility” are not limited to religions but can include cultures. Remember the French New Right and the argument that different ethnicities require segregated living spaces.

Which brings up another, related, and final point. Although I’ve been addressing immigration mostly, don’t think for a moment that this is unrelated to, in fact do know it is wholly intertwined with, their attacks on DEI. Because diversity is exactly what repels them, inclusion is exactly what they can’t abide, and equity is exactly what denies their racial supremacy.

It’s all part of the same overriding racist, xenophobic, white supremicist, Christian nationalist worldview, an openly and consciously fascist ideology, rooted in a vision of racial and ethnic purity that sees non-white people as undeserving of citizenship or even basic human rights.

It is a worldview, an ideology, the Orange Overlord and his minions, most particularly Steven Voldemort Miller, have firmly embraced and are pushing for, trying to wrench our society into their personal warped, evil, dreamscape of a white ethno-state untouched by the contamination of lesser beings.

That’s what they’re after, those are the stakes. And as their speech becomes more openly exclusionary, more eliminationist, it’s ever more important that we never forget and we never let them pretend otherwise.

1 And here you thought it was the love of what he most passionately desires: money. (1 Timothy 6:10, Luke 12:15, Matthew 6:24)
2 Clarence Darrow during the Scopes Trial, Dayton, Tennessee (July 13, 1925). (Yes, the movie used an actual trial quote.)
3 In May, Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution classified the AfD as a “confirmed right-wing extremist endeavor” that “threatens democracy.” The classification was suspended a week later, awaiting a final court decision.
4 If you want to see the video, it’s here.
5 Because she keeps getting tied up in legal knots trying to make sense of the regime’s legal arguments.
6 Good last name for him because, y’know, it’s almost human.

So I said - something about AI in healthcare

Another in an occasional series of trying to provide some more content here by posting worthwhile comments I’ve posted elsewhere.

In this case, I took a YouGov survey related to public perceptions about the use of AI in healthcare. Three of the questions asked for general responses rather than picking from among multiple choices.

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November 26, 2025

What ethical considerations are most important to think about when adding AI tools to healthcare?
I was told by my surgeon some years ago “You treat the patient, not the X-ray.” The more we use AI, the more that adage is reversed.

During my recent hospitalization my PCP came by on their rounds, during which they displayed not through words but tone and demeanor a genuine personal concern for my health, something of which AI is incapable of expressing or feeling, at best offering instead merely an algorithmically-driven facade of concern, a programmed pretense, which well could be likened to the comforting reassurances of the scammer.

  

What is your overall impression of AI in healthcare?

Not ready for prime time. For now, it’s a bandwagon promising what it can’t (and perhaps never will) deliver, driven less by public health than by the profit-driven preferences of the corporate spectrum of health care (i.e., hospitals and the insurance industry) who pursue a goal of “efficiency” (read as “fewer employees”) and would, as I suggested earlier, “treat the X-ray, not the patient,” with us coming to exist less as patients than as datasets.

Is there anything else about AI in healthcare that you would like to share with us?
AI is good for, indeed excellent at, analyzing large amounts of data, producing results that can be viewed and considered mathematically because that’s what they are - mathematical derivations from mathematical data.

But healthcare in general and medicine within that reach involves more than mere data but also includes personalities and foibles and trust and other human interactions along with unavoidable judgment calls driven by such non-mathematical considerations, all of which are beyond its capabilities.

Which, by the way, makes the use of chat boxes by consumers for health information advice fraught with risk and worse as shown by recent suits against various companies whose chat boxes are accused of having encouraged teenager users to commit suicide. AI simply is not up the task to which the health care industry is trying to set it in pursuit of profit.