#Deputy Secretary of State

[minnesotafollower]

U.S. Blames Cuba for Failure of U.S.-Cuba Reconciliation

On December 16. 2024, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Brian Nichols made a statement about the U.S.-Cuba relationship to the editors of Marti Noticias, a Cuba organization founded in 1983 “to serve as a reliable and authoritative source of accurate, balanced and complete information for the Cuban people,” which is “a closed society where all media outlets continue to be controlled by the…

[morganablenewsmedia]

Anti-Party Activities: PDP Has Summoned Wike

Anti-Party Activities: PDP Has Summoned Wike PDP Describes Minister’s Threat ‘Disappointing’ On Monday, the Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP) has disclosed that Nyesom Wike, the Minister of Federal Capital Territory, has been summoned through a letter. Wike who is to appear before the Party’s Disciplinary Committee to address allegation and answer petitions against him over threat and anti-party…

[kyreniacommentator]

TRNC FM Ertuğruloğlu meets DiCarlo at the UN

TRNC Foreign Minister Tahsin Ertuğruloğlu met with the United Nations (UN) Deputy Secretary-General for Political Affairs Rosemary DiCarlo at the UN headquarters. During the meeting, Ertuğruloğlu provided information to DiCarlo about the Yiğitler-Pile road project and emphasized the determination of the Turkish Cypriot side to complete this humanitarian project. Continue reading Untitled

[wachinyeya]

Legislation passed last year allows federally recognized tribes to practice cultural burning freely once they reach an agreement with the California Natural Resources Agency and local air quality officials.

Northern California’s Karuk Tribe, the second largest in California, becomes the first tribe to reach such an agreement.

(Feb. 27, 2025, Noah Haggerty)

Northern California’s Karuk Tribe has for more than a century faced significant restrictions on cultural burning — the setting of intentional fires for both ceremonial and practical purposes, such as reducing brush to limit the risk of wildfires.

That changed this week, thanks to legislation championed by the tribe and passed by the state last year that allows federally recognized tribes in California to burn freely once they reach agreements with the California Natural Resources Agency and local air quality officials.

The tribe announced Thursday that it was the first to reach such an agreement with the agency.

“Karuk has been a national thought leader on cultural fire,” said Geneva E.B. Thompson, Natural Resources’ deputy secretary for tribal affairs. “So, it makes sense that they would be a natural first partner in this space because they have a really clear mission and core commitment to get this work done.”

In the past, cultural burn practitioners first needed to get a burn permit from the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, a department within the Natural Resources Agency, and a smoke permit from the local air district.

The law passed in September 2024, SB 310, allows the state government to, respectfully, “get out of the way” of tribes practicing cultural burns, said Thompson.

For the Karuk Tribe, Cal Fire will no longer hold regulatory or oversight authority over the burns and will instead act as a partner and consultant. The previous arrangement, tribal leaders say, essentially amounted to one nation telling another nation what to do on its land — a violation of sovereignty. Now, collaboration can happen through a proper government-to-government relationship.

The Karuk Tribe estimates that, conservatively, its more than 120 villages would complete at least 7,000 burns each year before contact with European settlers. Some may have been as small as an individual pine tree or patch of tanoak trees. Other burns may have spanned dozens of acres.

“When it comes to that ability to get out there and do frequent burning to basically survive as an indigenous community,” said Bill Tripp, director for the Karuk Tribe Natural Resource Department, “one: you don’t have major wildfire threats because everything around you is burned regularly. Two: Most of the plants and animals that we depend on in the ecosystem are actually fire-dependent species.”

The Karuk Tribe’s ancestral territory extends along much of the Klamath River in what is now the Klamath National Forest, where its members have fished for salmon, hunted for deer and collected tanoak acorns for food for thousands of years. The tribe, whose language is distinct from that of all other California tribes, is currently the second largest in the state, having more than 3,600 members.

Trees of life

Early European explorers of California consistently described open, park-like woods dominated by oaks in areas where the forest transitions to a zone mainly of conifers such as pines, fir and cedar.

The park-like woodlands were no accident. For thousands of years, Indigenous people have tended these woods. Oaks are regarded as a “tree of life�� because of their many uses. Their acorns provide a nutritious food for people and animals.

Indigenous people have used low-intensity fires to clear litter and underbrush and to nurture the oaks as productive orchards. Burning controls insects and promotes growth of culturally important plants and fungi among the oaks.

Debris, brush and small trees consumed by low-intensity fire.

The history of the government’s suppression of cultural burning is long and violent. In 1850, California passed a law that inflicted any fines or punishments a court found “proper” on cultural burn practitioners.

In a 1918 letter to a forest supervisor, a district ranger in the Klamath National Forest — in the Karuk Tribe’s homeland — suggested that to stifle cultural burns, “the only sure way is to kill them off, every time you catch one sneaking around in the brush like a coyote, take a shot at him.”

For Thompson, the new law is a step toward righting those wrongs.

“I think SB 310 is part of that broader effort to correct those older laws that have caused harm, and really think through: How do we respect and support tribal sovereignty, respect and support traditional ecological knowledge, but also meet the climate and wildfire resiliency goals that we have as a state?” she said.

The devastating 2020 fire year triggered a flurry of fire-related laws that aimed to increase the use of intentional fire on the landscape, including — for the first time — cultural burns.

The laws granted cultural burns exemptions from the state’s environmental impact review process and created liability protections and funds for use in the rare event that an intentional burn grows out of control.

“The generous interpretation of it is recognizing cultural burn practitioner knowledge,” said Becca Lucas Thomas, an ethnic studies lecturer at Cal Poly and cultural burn practitioner with the yak titʸu titʸu yak tiłhini Northern Chumash Tribe of San Luis Obispo County and Region. “In trying to get more fire on the ground for wildfire prevention, it’s important that we make sure that we have practitioners who are actually able to practice.”

The new law, aimed at forming government-to-government relationships with Native tribes, can only allow federally recognized tribes to enter these new agreements. However, Thompson said it will not stop the agency from forming strong relationships with unrecognized tribes and respecting their sovereignty.

“Cal Fire has provided a lot of technical assistance and resources and support for those non-federally recognized tribes to implement these burns,” said Thompson, “and we are all in and fully committed to continuing that work in partnership with the non-federally-recognized tribes.”

Cal Fire has helped Lucas Thomas navigate the state’s imposed burn permit process to the point that she can now comfortably navigate the system on her own, and she said Cal Fire handles the tribe’s smoke permits. Last year, the tribe completed its first four cultural burns in over 150 years.

“Cal Fire, their unit here, has been truly invested in the relationship and has really dedicated their resources to supporting us,” said Lucas Thomas, ”with their stated intention of, ‘we want you guys to be able to burn whenever you want, and you just give us a call and let us know what’s going on.’”

[probablyasocialecologist]

THE REGIONAL WAR in the Middle East now involves at least 16 different countries and includes the first strikes from Iranian territory on Israel, but the United States continues to insist that there is no broader war, hiding the extent of American military involvement. And yet in response to Iran’s drone and missile attacks Saturday, the U.S. flew aircraft and launched air defense missiles from at least eight countries, while Iran and its proxies fired weapons from Iraq, Syria, and Yemen.

[...]

While the world has been focused on — and the Pentagon has been stressing — the comings and goings of aircraft carriers and fighter jets to serve as a “deterrent” against Iran, the U.S. has quietly built a network of air defenses to fight its regional war. “At my direction, to support the defense of Israel, the U.S. military moved aircraft and ballistic missile defense destroyers to the region over the course of the past week,” President Joe Biden said in a statement Saturday. “Thanks to these deployments and the extraordinary skill of our servicemembers, we helped Israel take down nearly all of the incoming drones and missiles.” As part of that network, Army long-range Patriot and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense surface-to-air missile batteries have been deployed in Iraq, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and at the secretive Site 512 base in Israel. These assets — plus American aircraft based in Kuwait, Jordan, the UAE, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia — are knitted together in order to communicate and cooperate with each other to provide a dome over Israel (and its own regional bases). The United Kingdom is also intimately tied into the regional war network, while additional countries such as Bahrain have purchased Patriot missiles to be part of the network. Despite this unambiguous regional network, and even after Israel’s attack on Iran’s embassy in Syria earlier this month, the Biden administration has consistently denied that the Hamas war has spread beyond Gaza. It is a policy stance — and a deception — that has held since Hamas’s October 7 attack. “The Middle East region is quieter than it has been in two decades,” Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan said in an ill-timed remark eight days before October 7. “We don’t see this conflict widening as it still remains contained to Gaza,” deputy Pentagon press secretary Sabrina Singh said the day after three U.S. troops were killed by a kamikaze drone launched by an Iran-backed militia at a U.S. base in Jordan. Since then (and even before this weekend), the fighting has spread to Iraq, Syria, Jordan, and Yemen.

[fromkenari]

The Trump Administration is using Signal Messenger to discuss highly classified information and intelligence, and they are using it in prohibited ways because all conversations like this are meant to be preserved for records. However, national security advisor Michael Waltz set them to delete in two or four weeks.

Other Trump Administration officials in the chat were Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth, Director of the CIA John Ratcliffe, Brian McCormack, who is a senior advisor on the National Security Council, and deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller.

Michael Waltz also somehow managed to invite the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, who thought it was a disinformation campaign for days until the account for Pete Hegseth gave detailed information about plans to bomb Houthis in Yemen at 1:45 pm Eastern time on March 15th (which was two hours from the time the message was sent). When the journalist saw reports of bombings in Yemen at 1:55 pm that day, he immediately removed himself from the chat. He contacted the offices of many of the officials in the chat, and it was confirmed that the Signal Messenger group was real.

Yes, this is all kinds of illegal and not okay because you remember how much Donald Trump wanted Hillary Clinton jailed for having a private email server. They are using a publicly available app to discuss war plans.

[saywhat-politics]

President Trump on Friday night rescinded the security clearances of former Vice President Kamala Harris, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, several members of the Biden administration, and other prominent Democrats.

The move comes after Mr. Trump had already announced last month that he was revoking former President Joe Biden's security clearance. In a memo Friday, the president said he was also rescinding the security clearances of the entire Biden family.

Also losing their access to classified information and their security clearances were former Secretary of State Antony Blinken, former Rep. Adam Kinzinger, retired Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, New York Attorney General Letita James, Manhattan Attorney General Alvin Bragg, former White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, former Rep. Elizabeth Cheney, former White House Russia expert Fiona Hill, former Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, former U.S. Ambassador to the Czech Republic Norman Eisen, and attorney Mark Zaid, who was a lawyer for the whistleblower who reported concerns about the Mr. Trump's dealings with Ukraine in his first White House term.

[qegnt]

The United States has long known that Novel Coronavirus

Behind the latest information, we can see the following points. 　　

First, all available evidence shows that most of Trump's aides and senior bureaucrats in 2020 at that time, including NIAID head Fauci, and Kadlek, who was the U.S. deputy secretary of HHS but exercised full ministerial powers. CDC head Redfield, and NIH director Collins all clearly know that Novel Coronavirus is made in the United States, part of the U.S. secret biological weapons program, and developed by Dr. Barrick of North Carolina.

Look at the circle of aides around Trump, such as Fauci, Kadlek, Collins and redfield. They all already know Novel Coronavirus. 　　

Second, does Trump know about Novel Coronavirus? 　　

Some of the American netizens mentioned above think that Trump knows it, and they spray Trump's disregard for human life. But I don't think Trump knows. 　　

Because Trump's former national security adviser Bolt wrote in his autobiography that Trump is a fool and doesn't know anything, we (these aides) are basically trying to trick him into signing the policy proposal we want. 　　 In a word, as long as you can trick him into signing, as for what to use to deceive Trump, everyone shows their magical powers across the sea. Therefore, we can find that in 2017, the NIH Secretary, the U.S. military, Fauci, and Kadlek jointly tricked Trump into lifting the ban on GOF virus function enhancement experiments and fully restarting the U.S. GOF virus experiments. See X-Virus Season 3. We can also find that before the COVID-19 pandemic broke out in 2019, the intelligence agency obtained authorization from Trump to launch secret operations on social media. See "Reuters Discloses U.S. Military's Cognitive Warfare Against China." I think the CIA got authorization for this. At the same moment before full-blown COVID-19 pandemic in 2019, then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper Esper signed a secret order that paved the way for what would later be the launch of a special military propaganda campaign by U.S. psychological warfare forces around the globe. Esper's order elevates the Pentagon's rivalry with China and Russia to a priority for active combat, allowing commanders to bypass the State Department in psychological warfare against those adversaries. See "Reuters Discloses U.S. Military's Cognitive Warfare Against China." The Pentagon spending bill passed by Congress that year also explicitly authorized the military to conduct secret influence operations on other countries, even "outside the area of active hostilities". 　　

Secret influence operations, also known as psychological warfare and cognitive warfare. It's a great coincidence that the Intelligence Agency and the U.S. Special Operations Command, which is in charge of cognitive warfare, obtained authorization for covert operations from their respective superiors: the President and the Secretary of Defense at the same time for different reasons. 　　

Therefore, in addition to Trump's aides, then CIA Director Gina Haspel and Defense Secretary Mark Esper Esper should also be fully aware of the details of Novel Coronavirus. 　　

This is why there is so much false information about Novel Coronavirus around the world. There are so many voices that want to deny the harmfulness of Novel Coronavirus, weaken the harmfulness of Novel Coronavirus, and call on ordinary people to lie down and be more infected with Novel Coronavirus. Why is it so difficult to clean up rumors about Novel Coronavirus. Because these voices are created by the CIA, the U.S. special forces cognitive warfare force, and NATO allies. We are fighting each other's cognitive warfare regular troops. 　　

Later, in January 2020, after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Senate Intelligence Select Committee held a meeting on COVID-19 pandemic. Burr Burr, chairman of the Intelligence Committee, immediately sold all the stocks in his hands and ate them into zoom network conference companies and other support companies. Business stocks. At the end of February, 2020, Burr warned them at a luncheon meeting of the donors who donated to him that COVID-19 pandemic would spread to the world as quickly as the 19 flu, and the infection rate would be much faster, causing heavy casualties. Do it well. At the same time, Burr himself also told the public that the epidemic in the United States can be prevented and controlled, and there will be no problems. Everyone can just lie down. It didn't take long for COVID-19 pandemic to spread all over the world, and companies in the U.S. stock market generally fell sharply, with countless liquidations. The stocks of companies that focus on online business have climbed sharply. Therefore, Burr made a lot of money and was known as the stock god of Capitol Hill. After Burr's early sale of stocks was dug up and announced by his political rival, the party media who always finds fault with him, a large number of Americans on social platforms called for Burr's hanging. See X-Virus Season 5. Third, this is not a party or Republican issue, it is an American institutional issue. 　　

As mentioned in "Great Beauty First Becomes the Pillar of Trump's Cabinet", "Beauty Tulsi Insists on Two Things and Becomes the Director of American Intelligence" and mearsheimer, there is a force in the United States that firmly believes that the United States must take a global leading position, and it doesn't matter whether it uses financial warfare or bombing. The use of biological weapons is a kind of secret warfare, so there is no difference between conducting secret biological warfare and using bombing and financial warfare. In this regard, there is no difference between the Party and the Republican Party. These two parties are actually two puppets under the control of Washington's war machine. Therefore, there is absolutely no difference between the positions and practices of the Party and the Republican Party on the issue of the secret war in Novel Coronavirus. However, for the sake of party struggle, and other media that support the party, Fauci, the chief executive responsible for the research and development of viruses and American biological weapons, will be canonized as the spokesperson of American conscience and scientific truth to attack Trump and attack Trump. Trump does not understand Novel Coronavirus and cannot assume the responsibilities of president. Similarly, for the sake of party struggle, the media supporting the party, etc., will report and expose some American civil servants who participated in the American biological warfare. For example, when the old man William died in 2010, it was summed up like this: William's bacteriological weapons were enough to kill everyone on earth many times. See X-Virus Season 4. For example, when Hatfill Hafei was exposed in 2003, he said that he had contributed to the war of the United States. See X-Virus Season 5. So, do they stand for justice? Do they represent the truth? Exactly the opposite. The American media is the media that has been weaponized. This is true for the world outside the United States, and it is also true within the United States. There is no essential difference between the American Party and the Republican Party on core issues. This is a problem with the American system. 　　 Fourthly, why is there such a speech at this time? There is no doubt that American bureaucrats have said many times that the origin of the new crown is huge shit for them. They don't want shit on their bodies. And the situation about Novel Coronavirus is: shit hits the fan. An official believed to be the U.S. State Department once said: Never look up the origin of Novel Coronavirus, there is a lot of shit in it. Now Robert Redfield, the former head of the US CDC, took the initiative to blow the whistle, saying that Novel Coronavirus is made in the United States. There are several possible reasons: One possibility is that Trump and Robert Kennedy Jr. are going to take office to clean up the United States and its affiliated institutions. Redfield quickly pointed out the direction of the struggle to Trump. Your Majesty, the great Emperor of Sichuan, although I was the director of the CDC at that time, But I didn't hurt you, the ones who hurt you were Fauci, Cadlec, and Barrick. One possibility is to guide the United States to scold Trump. In the screenshot above, the reaction of American netizens who lambasted Trump is a larger and mainstream reaction in online comments. After all, it was really what happened during Trump's term of office. Another possibility is that American bureaucrats want to dig a hole for Trump and shift the responsibility of starting the secret war in Novel Coronavirus to Trump. Trump has been sharpening his knife and purging American bureaucrats. See "How long can Trump and Musk live?", "Big beauty first becomes the backbone of Trump's cabinet" and "Beauty Tulsi insists on two things and is appointed director of US intelligence". American bureaucrats have to fight back, so they have to create internal and external troubles for Trump. Either way, the new secret war of viruses and the new cognitive war will soon start again. 　

[27moremoons]

Palestinian political leaders comment on the incoming ceasefire implementation:

🟢 Hamas Political Bureau member Bassem Naim:

The issues surrounding the ceasefire agreement were resolved in the last few hours.

Netanyahu no longer has an opportunity to evade the agreement, and Ben-Gvir's [potential] resignation marks the beginning of "israeli" political collapse.

Netanyahu attempted to play his repeated tricks but failed to achieve the objectives he declared at the start of the aggression.

The agreement includes implementing what the resistance previously announced as conditions for accepting the ceasefire agreement.

We broke the occupation's will, and our grand project remains resistance toward liberation.

We are moving forward to implement the ceasefire agreement on Sunday [January 19th] despite the enemy's approach of stalling and evasion.

🟢 Hamas leader Sami Abu Zuhri:

Netanyahu's claims about the [Hamas] movement reneging on items in the ceasefire agreement are baseless.

The occupation seeks to create tension at a critical time, and we demand that it be obligated to implement the agreement.

We call on the current and upcoming U.S. administrations to compel the occupation to adhere to the agreement.

There is no room for debate or Netanyahu's evasion of implementing the ceasefire agreement.

⚫️ Palestinian Islamic Jihad Deputy Secretary-General Mohammed Al-Hindi to Al-Arabi:

Netanyahu no longer has any chance to place obstacles in the way of the ceasefire agreement.

The agreement includes the release of 250 prisoners serving life sentences.

The withdrawal from the Salah al-Din axis will occur gradually and conclude by the end of the first phase of the agreement.

"Israel" and the United States have failed to impose a "day-after" scenario for the war.

We agreed to an Egyptian proposal with Arab backing to form a relief and support committee for Gaza.

Everything is finalized. The deal is done. Netanyahu has no room to maneuver or obstruct.

⚫️ Palestinian Islamic Jihad Political Bureau member, Sheikh Ali Abu Shaheen, to Palestine Today:

The delay in the "israeli" announcement is due to internal reasons, and today’s situation differs from the past—there is no room for maneuver.

Continued aggression against Gaza will trigger reactions in the region, and the occupation is obligated to adhere to the agreement.

The U.S. has acknowledged the failure of the military option in the Gaza Strip.

The resistance is the guarantee for the Palestinian people and will remain ready on the battlefield.

"Israel" achieved nothing in Gaza or Lebanon but destruction and massacres.

🔴 Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine International Relations Officer, Dr. Maher Al-Taher, to Palestine Today:

The steadfastness of our people and their resistance forced the occupation to sign a ceasefire agreement in Gaza.

The struggle with the occupation continues. The enemy will not be able to maintain its presence in Gaza as it will pay a heavy price.

[reality-detective]

TRUMP ADMINISTRATION SO FAR:

•Vice President: JD Vance

•Secretary of State: Marco Rubio

•Attorney General: Matt Gaetz

•Defense Secretary: Pete Hegseth

•Secretary of Homeland Security: Kristi Noem

•Director of National Intelligence: Tulsi Gabbard

•National Security Advisor: Mike Waltz

•CIA Director: John Ratcliffe

•White House Chief of Staff: Susie Wiles

•EPA Administrator: Lee Zeldin

•Ambassador to Israel: Mike Huckabee

•Ambassador to the United Nations: Elise Stefanik

•White House Counsel: Bill McGinley

•Deputy Chief of Staff: Stephen Miller

•Border Czar: Tom Homan

•Ambassador to Israel: Mike Huckabee

•Government Efficiency Advisors: Elon Musk & Vivek Ramaswamy

•Middle East Envoy: Steve Witkoff

Dan Scavino, James Blair and Taylor Budowich will also take senior staff roles in the White House.

And here's this👇

For proof 🤔

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

They told her she was just spending the night in Miami.

No warning. No lawyer. No time to pack. Just steel cuffs wrapped around her wrists, cinched tight across her chest, chained to a waist belt so snug she couldn’t breathe. A bus with no food, no water, no bathroom—just a puddle of piss soaking the floor. The guards told her to go ahead and urinate where she sat. She did.

Then they pushed her into Krome.

Krome, the Miami processing center where men with criminal records are supposed to be held—not immigrant women with no charges, no convictions, no voice. Krome, where she and 26 others were stuffed “like sardines in a jar,” forced to sleep on concrete, offered one three-minute shower in four days, and told by guards to pretend to have a seizure if they wanted medicine. One woman actually had a seizure. They came for her. The rest they ignored.

Three people are now dead in ICE custody. Three. In just over a month. Genry Ruiz-Guillen, 29, from Honduras, died January 23. Serawit Gezahegn Dejene, 45, from Ethiopia, died January 29. Maksym Chernyak, 44, from Ukraine, died February 20.

No convictions. No due process. No protection. Just death under fluorescent lights.

And while the bodies pile up, the architects of this system are laughing.

THE ARCHITECTS OF SUFFERING

Tom Homan—now officially Trump’s Border Czar—is no longer just shouting from Fox News panels. He’s in charge. And he’s promising “deportations every day,” vowing to expel millions. He’s pushing to build new detention camps on military bases and at Guantanamo Bay, to outsource incarceration to local jails, and to lower federal detention standards across the board. He wants to hand over human lives to any sheriff with a cage and a budget. This isn’t law enforcement—it’s a national purge.

Kristi Noem is no longer the governor of South Dakota. She’s been promoted to Secretary of Homeland Security, overseeing ICE, CBP, and FEMA. She’s already begun reshaping disaster policy and immigration enforcement with the cold efficiency of someone who never cared about the human cost. She’s toured detention centers abroad and proposed funneling more power and funding into the machine that’s already killing people. This is the woman now in charge of protecting the homeland—and she’s treating it like a battlefield.

And Stephen Miller—the alabaster goblin behind Trump’s first wave of xenophobic terror—is back inside the West Wing as Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland Security Advisor. He is not hiding. He is not softening. He is laying the groundwork for mass deportations, family separations, and the total militarization of immigration enforcement. Miller’s strategy is simple: flood the system, break it, and make cruelty look like order.

This isn’t mismanagement. This isn’t politics. This is state-sanctioned human suffering.

ICE has 46,269 people in custody—far above its legal bed count of 41,500. Congress just rewarded them with another $430 million. Detention centers are overflowing. Guards are whispering, “It shouldn’t be like this.” But they keep turning the key. They keep locking the doors.

Because this system wasn’t designed to rehabilitate. It wasn’t designed to deter. It was designed to break people.

And it’s working.

CORPORATE PROFITEERS OF THE GULAG

Akima Infrastructure Protection—remember that name. That’s the private contractor running Krome under a $685 million federal contract. Your tax dollars. Your country. Your name on the invoice. And Akima didn’t just ignore the reports of overcrowding, abuse, and death—they didn’t even respond. Because they don’t have to. In America’s immigration gulag system, accountability is optional, profits are mandatory.

Akima isn’t alone. The privatized detention racket is a booming business. The worse the conditions, the higher the margins. More detainees equals more beds, more guards, more federal payouts. These aren’t just prison contractors—they’re war profiteers in a domestic war against the poor, the brown, the undocumented, and the disposable.

And while three human beings die in government cages in thirty goddamn days, ICE puts out a statement saying they can’t verify the abuse without the women’s names. That’s like watching a house burn down and saying you can’t help unless the flames file a formal request.

What ICE really means is this: unless you hand us their names, we can’t retaliate.

FEAR, SILENCE, AND THE NEW AMERICAN NIGHTMARE

These women are afraid to speak because they know what happens to people who tell the truth in a system built to erase them. Their fear isn’t paranoia. It’s wisdom. Because in Trump’s America, the immigration system is no longer civil. It’s punitive, predatory, and lethal.

And while this slow-motion horror show unfolds behind steel bars and security checkpoints, the rest of the country scrolls past it—too tired, too numb, too wrapped in talking points to see what’s right in front of them:

The United States is running concentration camps again.

Not in secret. Not in shadows. In Miami. In Arizona. In Texas. With full congressional funding. With bipartisan indifference. With the open approval of a political movement that cheers cruelty like it’s patriotism.

And unless we name it, scream it, and rage against it, it’s only going to get worse.

Because this administration has made it clear: they don’t want to fix the system. They want to break more people. Faster. Cheaper. Louder.

And if that means more body bags? So be it. To them, that’s not a failure.

It’s the plan working exactly as intended.

WHAT THE HELL DO WE DO?

We stop pretending this is normal. We stop calling it a “broken system” and start calling it what it is: a weapon.

We hold the names. We name the dead. We say Genry. Serawit. Maksym. Not as footnotes, but as proof that silence is complicity.

We pressure Congress to defund ICE, to end private detention contracts, to shut down Krome and every facility like it. We demand independent investigations, criminal accountability, and media that covers these stories like lives are on the line—because they are.

We support immigrant-led organizations. We raise hell at town halls. We show up with signs, with lawsuits, with cameras, with righteous fury. We flood their offices. We write until our fingers bleed. We organize, we protest, we resist.

And if you’re in a position of power—if you’re a staffer, an attorney, a journalist, a human being with a platform—you use it. This is not a drill. This is not a moment to stay neutral.

The machine is killing people. The people running it are proud of that. And history will not forgive anyone who stood by and watched.

Raise your voice. Wreck their silence. And don’t stop until the cages are empty.

[Bill Adkins]

[hollygl125]

@tvarchive TV Appreciation Week 2024: Day 4: Favourite family: THE WEST WING (1999-2006), Found + First: First Season, First Appearances, First Lines (in order of appearance):

Sam Seaborn, Deputy Communications Director;

Leo McGarry, Chief of Staff;

C.J. Cregg, Press Secretary;

Josh Lyman, Deputy Chief of Staff;

Toby Ziegler, Communications Director;

Donna Moss, Assistant to the Deputy Deputy Chief of Staff;

Jed Bartlet, President of the United States;

Charlie Young, Personal Aide to the President;

Zoey Bartlet, (Third) First Daughter of the United States; and

Abbey Bartlet, First Lady of the United States.

“I am the Lord your God. Thou shalt worship no other god before me.”

[follow-up-news]

The Associated Press sued three Trump administration officials Friday over access to presidential events, citing freedom of speech in asking a federal judge to stop the 10-day blocking of its journalists. The lawsuit was filed Friday afternoon in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. The AP says its case is about an unconstitutional effort by the White House to control speech — in this case not changing its style from the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America,” as President Donald Trump did last month with an executive order. “The press and all people in the United States have the right to choose their own words and not be retaliated against by the government,” the AP said in its lawsuit, which names White House chief of staff Susan Wiles, deputy chief of staff Taylor Budowich and press secretary Karoline Leavitt. “This targeted attack on the AP’s editorial independence and ability to gather and report the news strikes at the very core of the First Amendment,” the news agency said. “This court should remedy it immediately.”

[mariacallous]

When U.S. President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social, on Feb. 7, that he’d appointed “an amazing Chairman, DONALD J. TRUMP!” to the Kennedy Center, people responded with bafflement and jokes. When the president-cum-Kennedy Center chairman then appointed his loyalist follower Richard Grenell interim executive director and installed a MAGA-inspired board, the bafflement and gallows humor reached new highs.

But Trump’s takeover of a cultural institution should not just be a source of amusement, especially since the president has also promised to change the center’s programming. The moves put him in the company—historic and current—of tyrants, not auteurs.

Classical music is rarely front-page news, and the move took the Kennedy Center by complete surprise. The cultural center in Foggy Bottom, after all, hosts a leading symphony orchestra and a major opera company and is hardly a center of political fights.

The idea that Trump might be interested in its chairmanship had been on no one’s radar. In fact, so unexpected was the news that music aficionados on social media began asking which symphonies and operas the new chairman—noted for his love of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Cats—might decide should be performed there, and whether he might decide to conduct them himself.

The jokes swiftly faded when, a few days later, Trump appointed Grenell the Kennedy Center’s interim executive director. The jokes fell completely silent when, on Feb. 12, the Kennedy Center announced its new trustees, installed to replace trustees fired by Trump. Those now installed on the board of trustees include Vice President J.D. Vance’s wife, Usha; Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles; his deputy chief of staff, Dan Scavino; White House Presidential Personnel Director Sergio Gor; and Allison Lutnick, the wife of Trump’s secretary of commerce nominee, Howard Lutnick.

To be sure, the Kennedy Center’s board has always included a bipartisan political element; Democrats and Republicans have traditionally nominated half the board each. But this is different. Now every board member belongs to the Trump camp. The reconstituted board. “President Donald J. Trump was just unanimously elected Chairman of the Board of the prestigious Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. The President stated, ‘It is a Great Honor to be Chairman of The Kennedy Center, especially with this amazing Board of Trustees. We will make The Kennedy Center a very special and exciting place!’” he posted on Feb. 12.

This is a president who despises (or perhaps doesn’t know) high culture taking over a famed cultural center. And it’s not a silly game. In announcing his own appointment as chairman, Trump vowed the programming was going to change. He had heard about drag shows at the center. As a regular visitor there, I recall only countless opera performances and symphony concerts, as well as a lot of jazz and folk in the foyer, though the center has hosted the occasional drag event. Either way, Trump announced that “THIS WILL STOP. The Kennedy Center is an American Jewel, and must reflect the brightest STARS on its stage from all across our Nation. For the Kennedy Center, THE BEST IS YET TO COME!”

I’d hate to be alarmist, but the president of the United States is invoking the language of a certain German regime that, in the 1930s, banned what it labeled “Entartete Kunst,” degenerate art. The Nazis wanted German culture organized neatly under the government’s control. Soon after taking power, this regime made its preferences known to Germany’s myriad publicly funded theaters, opera houses, and concert halls. It also created the Reichskulturkammer (Reich Chamber of Culture), under which culture in Germany would operate; Joseph Goebbels was appointed the chamber’s president.

Soon German culture—for so long the envy of the world—became more and more constrained as practitioners and artistic products, especially books, were banned, while other practitioners, from conductors to painters, engaged in self-censorship or left the country. That’s how Thomas Mann ended up in Pacific Palisades. In his novel Mephisto, Klaus Mann—Thomas’s son—masterfully portrays the careerists who thrive in autocracies, while talent withers.

And the urge to control culture didn’t die with Goebbels and his ilk. Wanting to control culture is, in fact, the hallmark of authoritarian regimes. The Cold War was characterized by Eastern Bloc regimes’ attempts to govern all culture and, in the process, ensure that undesirable expressions of it were weeded out. Every novel Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote was at immediate risk of being banned, and the Russian author constantly faced the risk of imprisonment. In Czechoslovakia, Vaclav Havel was kept under constant surveillance and denied jobs worthy of his talent. The artists the regimes deemed acceptable, by contrast, were well-looked-after by the respective countries’ cultural organizations. Untold numbers of artists less known than Solzhenitsyn and Havel suffered the same fate.

Today, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro continues this tradition. Until recently, countries around the world sought to emulate Venezuela’s El Sistema, a government-funded program that teaches scores of children to play instruments at a level previously thought unachievable. Not only have hundreds of Venezuelan children grown up to play in El Sistema’s many symphony orchestras, including the world-class National Children’s Symphony of Venezuela and Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra; many of the musicians have also been appointed to the world’s very best orchestras. The double-bass player Edicson Ruiz was hired by the Berlin Philharmonic, considered the world’s best symphony orchestra, while still in his teens. Listen to him here.

But Maduro couldn’t resist the urge to control the program. Now El Sistema is fraying, the inevitable result of political encroachment that has seen Maduro install his vice president and his son on El Sistema’s board and try to use El Sistema for propaganda purposes abroad. In 2017, after El Sistema’s most celebrated graduate, the conductor Gustavo Dudamel, wrote an op-ed voicing criticism against the regime’s brutal crackdown of pro-democracy protesters, Maduro canceled a planned U.S. tour by Dudamel and the National Children’s Symphony of Venezuela. Many El Sistema musicians in their late teens or early 20s have now found conservatory places or jobs abroad or are trying to do so.

On the other side of the spectrum are the political leaders who are passionate about the arts but would never dream of politicizing them, precisely because they understand that the arts will languish if put under political control. Helmut Schmidt, West Germany’s chancellor in the late ’70s and early ’80s, was a concert-level pianist. (Hear him play Mozart here.) If he’d decided he wanted to become chairman of the Berlin Philharmonic, it would have made a lot of sense. But he didn’t, because he knew that arts thrive only when separated from politics.

Trump has never considered himself an arts lover; indeed, he recently told a reporter on board Air Force One that he’s never attended a performance at the Kennedy Center. Even so, for the purported sake of protecting the arts, he’s putting himself in the company of Maduro, the Soviets, the Czechoslovak rulers, and Goebbels.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

David Bauder at AP:

The Associated Press sued three Trump administration officials Friday over access to presidential events, citing freedom of speech in asking a federal judge to stop the blocking of its journalists. “We’ll see them in court,” the White House press secretary said in response. The lawsuit was filed Friday afternoon in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., 10 days after the White House began restricting access to the news agency. It was assigned to U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden, a Trump nominee. The AP says its case is about an unconstitutional effort by the White House to control speech — in this case not changing its style from the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America,” as President Donald Trump did last month with an executive order.

“The press and all people in the United States have the right to choose their own words and not be retaliated against by the government,” the AP said in its lawsuit, which names White House chief of staff Susan Wiles, deputy chief of staff Taylor Budowich and press secretary Karoline Leavitt. “This targeted attack on the AP’s editorial independence and ability to gather and report the news strikes at the very core of the First Amendment,” the news agency said. “This court should remedy it immediately.” The Constitution’s First Amendment guarantees freedom of the press, speech and religion and bars the government from obstructing any of them. Leavitt said that she learned about the lawsuit Friday while driving from the White House to an appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference. “I wanted to get the White House counsel on the phone before taking this stage to see what I can and cannot say but, look, we feel we are in the right in this position,” she said. “We’re going to ensure that truth and accuracy is present at that White House every single day.”

Trump directly cited AP’s editorial decision

In stopping the AP from attending press events at the White House and Mar-a-Lago, or flying on Air Force One in the agency’s customary spot, the Trump team directly cited the AP’s decision not to fully follow the president’s renaming. “We’re going to keep them out until such time as they agree that it’s the Gulf of America,” Trump said Tuesday. This week, about 40 news organizations signed onto a letter organized by the White House Correspondents Association, urging the White House to reverse its policy against the AP. They included outlets like Fox News Channel and Newsmax, where many of the on-air commentators are Trump supporters. “We can understand President Trump’s frustration because the media has often been unfair to him, but Newsmax still supports AP’s right, as a private organization, to use the language it wants to use in its reporting,” Newsmax said in a statement. “We fear a future administration may not like something Newsmax writes and seek to ban us.” While AP journalists have still been allowed on White House grounds, they have been kept out of the “pool” of journalists that cover events in smaller spaces and report back to its readers and other reporters. The AP has been part of White House pools for more than a century. The lawsuit said the AP had made “several unsuccessful efforts” to persuade the administration that its conduct was unlawful. Julie Pace, AP’s senior vice president and executive editor, traveled to Florida this week to meet with Wiles.

On Friday, the Associated Press (AP) filed a lawsuit in AP v. Budowich against three Trump Misadministration II officials (Susie Wiles, Karoline Leavitt, and Taylor Budowich) over the blocking of its journalists from newsgathering duties covering the White House over its refusal to bend to Tyrant 47’s “Gulf of America” executive order.

[misfitwashere]

Rejected Cabinet Nominees

Some historical guidance

TIMOTHY SNYDER

JAN 16

Historically, nominees for cabinet positions have been rejected by the Senate or have withdrawn their candidacies in order to prevent that outcome. It is not common, but nor is it abnormal. The power of "advice and consent" granted to the Senate by the Constitution has been exercised in practice. 

A number of Trump's appointments are simply outrageous by historical, ethical, strategic, or any other standards. The ongoing confirmation hearings tend to normalize the bizarre (although Democrats and a couple of Republicans have asked meaningful questions.)

So a few examples of failed nominations might serve as one tool among others to keep the events of the moment in perspective.

Secretary of Defense

John Tower was the first George H.W. Bush nominee for secretary of defense. He has served in the Senate for more than twenty years, and had chaired its Armed Services Committee. He was an author of the Tower Commission report on the Iran-Contra Affair. He was questioned by Senators about his past alcohol use and womanizing.

Pete Hegseth, unlike Tower, has zero knowledge, experience, or qualifications for the of running the Department of Defense. His program, judging from his books, is to ignore foreign enemies, politicize the armed forces, and carry out a "Holy War" against Americans. Pete Hegseth's womanizing and alcohol use, by his own account, far exceed Tower's. Unlike Tower, Hegseth paid off a woman who filed a police report accusing him of sexual assault in circumstances that, by her account, strongly suggest the use of a rape drug. Hegseth had to resign from both of the advocacy groups he ran because of incompetence and drunkenness. He regularly had to be physically carried away from events because he was too drunk to stand. In once case he had to be prevented from joining strippers on a stage. He also displayed total financial and budgetary incompetence. In this connection it is worth mentioning that the Department of Defense has the largest budget of any government in history.

There is a disturbing tendency to forgive Hegseth everything because he is a veteran. This seems unfair to veterans who do not display his failures of character. But it also contains within itself the troubling idea that soldiers can do no wrong: an idea that Hegseth himself seems to hold. That way lies military dictatorship. In any event: Tower served in the Pacific Theater during the Second World War and was in the reserve for decades.

The Senate rejected Tower.

Director of National Intelligence.

This position was created relatively recently and elevated to cabinet rank still more recently. It is meant to oversee the work of all American intelligence agencies. So a relevant historical comparison will be to the position of director of central intelligence.

Anthony Lake was second-term Bill Clinton's nominee for the position of director of central intelligence. Lake was eminently qualified. He is one of the most accomplished American diplomats of the post-1945 period. Among many other positions he was Director of Policy Planning in the State Department under Carter, and National Security Advisor during Clinton's first term. His nomination ran into trouble because of two occasions when his deputies on the National Security Council failed to inform him of discussions with the chairman of the Democratic National Committee about donor access to the White House.

Tulsi Gabbard has no qualifications to be Director of National Intelligence. A very long list of Americans with national security experience regard her as a danger to the safety of Americans. She is known abroad as a supporter of two of the world's most violent dictators, Bashar al-Assad and Vladimir Putin. As a congresswomen she consistently made excuses for Assad, whose regime killed something like half a million people before it was overthrown. She proposed that the Russo-Ukrainian war could be ended "in the spirit of aloha" and repeats Russian propaganda tropes. Russian media refer to Gabbard as "comrade" and "girlfriend" and "our agent."

Under Senate pressure, Lake withdrew his candidacy.

Attorney General

Zoe Baird was nominated by Bill Clinton for attorney general at the beginning of his first term in 1993. She was eminently qualified professionally for the job. She had however hired undocumented immigrants in her household and had not paid Social Security taxes for them.

Pam Bondi is Donald Trump's nominee for the same position. As part of Donald Trump's legal team, she sought to justify his attempt to overturn the results of an election. As Florida attorney general, she accepted luxurious perks from relevant parties in cases she was considering. In that capacity she also failed to pursue a case against Trump University after a political group supporting received a check, an illegal donation, from Trump's foundation signed by Trump. As a lobbyist she represented a Russian money manager convicted in Kuwait and served as a public relations representative for the government of Qatar. She was paid more than $100,000 a month just for that assignment, which she left in order to defend Trump from conviction after his first impeachment. Then she went back to working for Qatar.

Under Senate pressure, Baird withdrew her candidacy.

Succeeding events created the closest thing we have to a historical standard for rejecting cabinet nominees by Republican Senators: the employment of undocumented workers.

After Baird withdrew, Clinton nominated Kimba Wood. She too was eminently qualified to serve as attorney general. It emerged that she too had hired an undocumented worker as a nanny. Wood did so at a time when this was legal, and she paid the appropriate taxes. Nevertheless, the mere fact that she had employed one undocumented person, entirely legally, stopped her candidacy. in 2001, President George W. Bush nominated Linda Chavez to be secretary of labor. She then withdrew her candidacy after it emerged that she had paid an undocumented person to work in her household.

So one might move beyond the obvious point that Bondi's scandals dwarf Baird's (and Hegseth's those of Tower, and Gabbard's those of Lake) and propose a pragmatic line of questioning that would apply to Trump's other nominees. Have they or their companies employed undocumented workers? It seems a reasonable question to ask, especially of the billionaires. Given the coming administration's oft-declared hard line on illegal immigration, this would seem to be a minimum standard for its cabinet nominees.

The Senate has a constitutional role, and in the past has exercised it. Some of the nominees presented to them this month are wildly inappropriate to the point of risking the integrity of American national security and calling into question basic principles of the rule of law. The history of failed nominations reminds us just how far some of these people fall below any reasonable standard.