Newsom is directing his state to pursue “strategic” relationships with countries announcing retaliatory tariffs against the U.S., urging them to exclude California-made products from those taxes.

It sounds like he wants foreign countries to do California a favor without getting anything in exchange (and even that might be unconstitutional). Or is there something that he has the authority to offer in exchange which I’m missing?

Note that the argument about whether or not he is a gang member is beside the point. The White House concedes that he should not have been taken to El Salvador even if he is a gang member, but denies that the court has the authority to order the White House to make even the smallest attempt to bring him back.

The White House is saying that if they grab you and take you to a foreign country where you are imprisoned, that’s it. The courts can’t do anything. It won’t matter if you’re a law-abiding citizen or if taking you out of the USA was unambiguously against the law. Only the executive branch, the people responsible for your predicament, get to choose if and when they do anything at all to secure your freedom.

Read the document they submitted to the court.

I get that eggs are in a lot of recipes, but people’s obsession with them is still surprising to me. There are so many other foods to choose from.

Wouldn’t kids prefer to find something they actually want, rather than an egg (or especially a potato)? I know the fertility symbolism but I’d still rather look for candy bars.

I’m not sure how that’s related to what I wrote.

The actual Economist editorial is here (paywalled but archived).

Have you actually looked at it? The sort of index fund that people put their retirement money in (if they invest in stocks rather than bonds) has doubled its value in the last 7 years. Quadrupled in the last 13.

That’s not how it works. Stock prices don’t fall below the level that rich people are willing to buy them at, specifically because rich people buy them at that level.

Perhaps some leading election deniers are motivated by a psychological defense mechanism, but I think that many realize the strategic benefit. The members of the public who are convinced that Democrats steal elections will vote Republican. They’ll also be more willing to accept a Republican refusing to leave office after losing an election, if things come to that.

I don’t have a dog in this horse.

It’s unfortunate, but Leland Dudek is doing his job. Some people appear naive about what his job is.

Edit: Perhaps I should explicitly say that I’m not happy with the administration’s agenda, and what I mean is that this guy won’t be punished because he’s doing what he was hired to do. I don’t mean that this is what his job ought to be in some moral sense.

Of course as a resident of NYC I am angry about this. Not only is he a criminal but he’s also selling out the city to Trump. I would enjoy knowing how much he was squirming if the case was dismissed without prejudice like Trump wanted it to be, but I suppose it’s better that Trump has less control over him.

I do see a bit of humor in all this, because he accepted such small bribes.

From Wikipedia:

Adams took over $100,000 in bribes from Turkey in exchange for using his powers to help open the Turkevi Center. These bribes mostly took the form of free and discounted luxury travel benefits. These benefits included free hotel rooms, free meals at high-end restaurants, free entertainment while in Turkey, free and heavily discounted flights, and similarly free and discounted flight class upgrades.

I would understand why he might be tempted to give up his integrity and accept the possibility of being caught if large sums of money (millions at least) were involved, but $100,000 is less than his yearly salary would be in the NYPD and he didn’t even get it in cash! I don’t earn as much as an NYPD captain like him (but enough to be comfortable) and I would experience zero temptation to take such a risk even if I had no moral objection to bribery. If I was the mayor then I would even be offended by the offer - who do they think I am if they expect me to sell myself for so little?

He’s just a petty crook higher up in the world than he knows how to be. Pathetic.

Ah, then I don’t think we disagree. Still, the CBG might be overkill when a simple phone call would have sufficed. After all, they don’t want him. We’re paying them to keep him.

Then again, since we’re already threatening Canada and Greenland, maybe we should threaten El Salvador too? We can accuse them of imprisoning residents of other countries who were sent to them extralegally without a trial or any other sort of official procedure. It’s unethical! They would be so confused.

Such public benefits now fall prey to the whims of the president with his pardon of a cryptocurrency company that smacks of political corruption.

So a man who promised to pardon his friends and allies, once elected, pardons his friends and allies. Is that corruption or is it just government policy by this point?

I don’t think that’s a claim that the Trump administration is actually making, even though it’s in the title of the article. Here’s what the article quotes them saying:

“The individual in question is a member of the brutal MS-13 gang — we have intelligence reports that he is involved in human trafficking,” DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement to The Independent. “Whether he is in El Salvador or a detention facility in the U.S., he should be locked up. Remarkable that The Atlantic and other MSM continue to do the bidding of these vicious gangs and ignore their victims.”

On the one hand, murder for the purpose of terrorism is more serious than ordinary murder, but on the other hand I think they might be overreaching given that people on the jury are more likely to be sympathetic to the defendant than they would be to an ordinary murderer. I suspect the feds are more interested in making a strong impression now than they are in the ultimate outcome of a case that will go on for years.

I wonder if that’s actually true, because I think that he is to some extent literally psychotic. What happens when someone who actually has enormous wealth and power still goes through manic phases or experiences something like grandiose delusions? He might really believe that he’s saving the nation and the world, and that this should be obvious to all.

It’s like those movies (I can’t remember which ones but I’m sure I’ve seen some) where the king thinks of himself as good and is genuinely surprised and confused when he learns that the common people feel oppressed by him. Except in this case the king does not (and probably can not) learn a heartwarming moral lesson.

There are certain things that a court can’t (Constitutionally) order you to do, like letting soldiers live in your house during peacetime. That’s true even if you’re alone in a huge mansion and housing those soldiers would be trivially easy for you.

I don’t think a court could reasonably order the government to threaten another country like that - a judge doesn’t get to make such major foreign-policy decisions. My very basic understanding is that the government is saying that, according to this principle, a court can’t order it to make any foreign policy decisions. (Otherwise who gets to decide what foreign-policy decisions is major?)

The government is clearly in the wrong here morally, and letting them do this would seem to authorize a lot of abhorrent behavior. (Can the government have anything they want done to you without recourse as long as they take you to a foreign country and pay that country’s agents to do it?) Still, as a matter of legal principle this isn’t entirely straightforward.

That’s not exactly ICE’s argument. Their argument, as I understand it, is that the judge doesn’t have the authority to order the feds to do that.

Consider a similar but more sympathetic example. The government accidentally releases information which reveals the identity of an American agent working in a foreign country, and that agent is arrested. The agent’s family sues the government, arguing that the judge should order the government to carry out a prisoner exchange. The government says that revealing the agent’s identity was a mistake, but now undoing that mistake would require negotiations with a foreign country and such negotiations are not something that a court can order the government to carry out. The government’s argument in such a case would seem reasonable to me.

My understanding is that Trump’s guys are arguing that the court has no authority to order them to return this guy, not that he can’t be returned. In other words, now that he’s out of the country, his situation is foreign policy rather than American legal proceedings.