MSNBC: Steve Rattner: Red states use Obamacare more; health care cuts hit red states hardest
Reply
Tag Archives: Kentucky
CNN: ‘We don’t answer questions’: Teen faces agents after ICE detains parents and older brother [Video]
ICE agents detained two parents, who are undocumented Mexican immigrants, and their 22-year-old son outside of Chicago as the family was on their way to celebrate their 10-year-old son’s birthday.
Extra.ie: Trump’s ICE agents threaten to deport Irish grandmother living in the US for 47 years
An Irish woman who has been living in the US since she was a child faces deportation over a ‘bad’ $25 cheque she wrote a decade ago.
Donna Brown, 58, who emigrated nearly 50 years ago, is being held by Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement – known as ICE – and faces being sent back to Ireland.
Her husband, Jim Brown, said his wife, an Irish citizen born in England, moved to America when she was 11 and is a legal resident alien, but not a U.S. citizen. The couple married eight years ago, which he believes should also protect her from being deported.
Mr Brown told his local TV station in Missouri: ‘It’s just not fair that you’re telling me I have to be a bachelor the rest of my life because of some stupid policy.’
In July, Donna was arrested at customs in Chicago on her return from Ireland after a family funeral. Her husband said: ‘You don’t arrest 58-year-old grandmothers. It’s just wrong. She hasn’t committed crimes.’
She has now spent more than 30 days in jail in Kentucky as the US government moves to deport her, which Mr Brown fears will happen.
‘It’s egregious that we have allowed a government to allow this to happen,’ he said.
‘It’s egregious that we have allowed a government to allow this to happen,’ he said.
Legal documents for her arrest say that ten years ago, Donna wrote a bad cheque for $25. However, she paid the money back and was given probation. But Mr Brown said the US government is now arguing that was a ‘crime of moral turpitude’.
US courts say a ‘crime of moral turpitude… refers generally to conduct that shocks the public conscience as being inherently base, vile or depraved, contrary to the rules of morality’. It has been used in the past against former IRA members who did not declare their crimes to immigration.
Mr Brown believes his wife’s arrest is a direct result of the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration policies.
‘I think it’s nonsense. I think it’s a blanket thing to catch everybody, to fill [jail] beds. They signed a stupid bill that is torturing innocent people, and that’s the problem,’ he said. He is now protesting at what he calls his wife’s ‘deplorable’ conditions in jail and is campaigning for her release.
‘She’s been in this country 47 years, is married, with five kids and five grandkids, and you’re telling me she’s a flight risk? I want somebody to have the guts and the fortitude to stand up and say, “You know what? This is wrong”,’ he said.
‘It’s crazy that this is happening. It’s just crazy that this is even allowed in this country. That’s the problem. It shouldn’t even be thought that this should be okay,’ he said.
Mr Brown, a veteran who served 20 years in the military, said he won’t stop fighting for his wife. ‘My wife is not a criminal,’ he said. He is now caring for their horses on their nine-acre farm near Troy, Missouri.
A GoFundMe for Donna states it was created to help prepare and support her husband’s ‘fight for justice and freedom of his wife, Donna Hughes-Brown, who was wrongly detained and incarcerated this past July.
‘The goal is to raise the resources necessary to cover the lawyers and court fees, and help Jim and Donna navigate these difficult, stressful and expensive times,’ the appeal reads.
‘Jim and Donna are both very strong supporters and helpers of our community. They are often involved with multiple volunteer organisations and projects. They both are hard-working, honest, and caring individuals. They are good servers of God; humble people who are always willing to help, and kind friends that share knowledge and wisdom with anyone in need.’
In May of this year, Cliona Ward was released from custody in the US where she had been arrested after she returned from visiting her dying father in Ireland.
The 54-year-old Dubliner lives in Santa Cruz, California, and was detained by ICE over minor convictions from almost 20 years ago, which were supposed to have been expunged from her record.
CNN: Trump claims he can do anything he wants with the military. Here’s what the law says
Having rebranded the Department of Defense as the Department of War, the president is going on offense with the US military.
Donald Trump has foisted National Guard troops on Washington, DC, and Los Angeles. Other cities are on edge, particularly after he posted an apparently artificially generated image of himself dressed up like Robert Duvall’s surfing cavalry commander in “Apocalypse Now,” a meme that seemed to suggest he was threatening war on the city of Chicago.
Trump later clarified that the US would not go to war on Chicago, but he’s clearly comfortable joking about it. And he’s of the opinion his authority over the military is absolute.
“Not that I don’t have the right to do anything I want to do. I’m the president of the United States,” he said at a Cabinet meeting in August, when he was asked about the prospect of Chicagoans engaging in nonviolent resistance against the US military.
He’s reorienting the US military to focus on drug traffickers as terrorists and told Congress to expect more military strikes after the US destroyed a boat in the Caribbean last week.
All of this projects the kind of strongman decisiveness Trump admires.
A lot of it might also be illegal.
A ‘violation of the Posse Comitatus Act’
US District Judge Charles Breyer ruled this month that Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth committed a “a serious violation of the Posse Comitatus Act” when they deployed federalized troops to Los Angeles over the objections of the state’s governor and mayor.
The Posse Comitatus Act was passed by Congress in 1878 as Southern states worked to oust federal troops and end Reconstruction. Questions over how and whether troops can be used to enforce laws goes back to the pre-Civil War period, when federal marshals sought help from citizens and militiamen in recovering fugitive slaves and putting down the protests of abolitionists, according to the Congressional Research Service.
It is not clear why Trump has not yet, as he has promised, called up the National Guard to patrol in Chicago, but he may be waiting for the Supreme Court, which has been extremely deferential to his claims of authority, to weigh in on a preliminary basis.
Trump has more authority to deploy the military inside Washington, DC, which the Constitution says Congress controls. But Congress has ceded some authority to locally elected officials in recent decades. DC’s Attorney General Brian Schwalb has sued the Trump administration over the deployment.
Testing the War Powers Act
Trump’s strike on a boat in the Caribbean is also on murky legal ground.
After Vietnam, Congress overrode Richard Nixon’s veto to pass another law, the War Powers Act of 1973, which requires presidents to notify Congress within 48 hours of a military strike. And Trump did do that, at least his third such notification since taking office in January. Trump also sent notifications to Congress about his strike against an Iranian nuclear facility and Houthi rebels who were attacking shipping routes.
The Reiss Center at New York University maintains a database of War Powers Act notifications going back to the 1970s.
Cartels as terrorist organizations
In the notification about the Caribbean strike, Trump’s administration argued that it has declared drug cartels are terrorist organizations and that he operated within his constitutional authority to protect the country when he ordered the strike.
Strikes against terrorists have been authorized under the catchall vote that authorized the use of military force against Islamic terrorists after the 9/11 terror attacks.
But Congress, which the Constitution puts in charge of declaring war, has not authorized the use of military force against Venezuelan drug cartels.
Lack of explanation from the White House
Over the weekend, CNN’s Katie Bo Lillis, Natasha Bertrand and Zachary Cohen reported that the Pentagon abruptly canceled classified briefings to key House and Senate committees with oversight of the military, which means lawmaker have been unable to get the legal justification for the strike.
Many Americans might celebrate the idea of a military strike to take out drug dealers, and the administration is clearly primed to lean on the idea that the cartels are terrorists.
Here’s a key quote from CNN’s report:
“The strike was the obvious result of designating them a terrorist organization,” said one person familiar with the Pentagon’s thinking. “If there was a boat full of al Qaeda fighters smuggling explosives towards the US, would anyone even ask this question?”
Few details
It’s not yet clear which military unit was responsible for the strike, what intelligence suggested there were drugs onboard, who was on the boat or what the boat was carrying.
“The attack on the smuggling vessel in the Caribbean was so extraordinary because there was no reported attempt to stop the boat or detain its crew,” wrote Brian Finucane, a former State Department legal advisor now at International Crisis Group for the website Just Security. “Instead, the use of lethal force was used in the first resort.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the US could have interdicted the boat and made a legal case against those onboard, but it decided instead to blow up the boat. The notice to Congress makes clear the administration will continue with other strikes.
War crime? Vance doesn’t ‘give a sh*t’
“The decision to blow up the boat and kill everyone onboard when interdiction and detention was a clearly available option is manifestly illegal and immoral,” Oona Hathaway, a law professor and director of the Center for Global Legal Challenges at Yale Law School, told me in an email.
The view of the administration could be best summarized by Vice President JD Vance stating that using the military to go after cartels is “the highest and best use of our military.”
When a user on X replied that the extrajudicial killing of civilians without presenting evidence is, by definition, a war crime, Vance, himself a Yale-educated lawyer, said this:
“I don’t give a sh*t what you call it.”
That’s not an acceptable response even for some Republicans.
“Did he ever read To Kill a Mockingbird?” wrote Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky in his own post on X. “Did he ever wonder what might happen if the accused were immediately executed without trial or representation?? What a despicable and thoughtless sentiment it is to glorify killing someone without a trial.”
Congress has power it likely won’t use
Congress has the power to stop Trump’s campaign against boats in the Caribbean. The War Powers Act allows lawmakers in the House and Senate to demand the president seek approval before continuing a campaign longer than 60 days. But that seems unlikely to occur at the moment.
After the strike against Iran earlier this year, Paul was the only Republican senator to side with Democrats and demand Trump seek approval for any future Iran strikes.
During his first term, seven Republicans voted with Senate Democrats to hem in Trump’s ability to strike against Iran after he ordered the killing of Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani. But there were not enough votes to overcome Trump’s veto that year.
Trump’s authority to use military force without congressional approval of the Caribbean operation technically expires after 60 days after he reports on the use of force, although he can extend it by an additional 30 days, although he could also declare a new operation is underway.
The use of these kinds of tactics has likely been in the works for some time.
In February, Trump designated drug cartels, including Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua, as foreign terror organizations. In April, CNN reported the CIA was reviewing whether it had authority to use lethal force against drug cartels.
But the military strike against the alleged cartel boat happened as part of a broader campaign against Venezuela, including positioning US ships, aircraft and a submarine in the Caribbean, according to a CNN report.
Trump may have campaigned as a president who would end wars, but he’s governing like a president who is very comfortable using his military.
Analysis: Trump claims he can do anything he wants with the military. Here’s what the law says | CNN Politics
Having rebranded the Department of Defense as the Department of War, the president is going on offense with the US military.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/10/politics/venezuela-trump-military-strike-war-powers-explainer
MSNBC: Republicans are probing Wikipedia, a longstanding MAGA target
House Republicans are probing the online encyclopedia over claims of foreign manipulation, anti-Israel bias and antisemitism.
House Republicans have launched an investigation into Wikipedia, a long-standing target of conservative criticism.
For several months, Elon Musk and other conservatives have waged a campaign to portray the online encyclopedia as an oppressive tool of leftist manipulation.
Now a House committee is investigating allegations of “anti-Israel bias” at Wikipedia.
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer of Kentucky and South Carolina Rep. Nancy Mace, who leads a subcommittee on cybersecurity, sent a letter to Wikipedia’s CEO demanding data, documents and answers to questions stemming primarily from allegations — laid out in a March Anti-Defamation League report — that Wikipedia editors were permitting anti-Israel rhetoric and antisemitic themes to spread on the platform.
Wikipedia officials have refuted the report, saying it included “unsupported and problematic claims.” But the letter says the report “raised troubling questions about potentially systematic efforts to advance antisemitic and anti-Israel information in Wikipedia articles related to conflicts with the State of Israel.” The lawmakers also reference an Atlantic Council report that found pro-Kremlin forces have used artificial intelligence tools to help whitewash and rewrite the story of Russia’s war with Ukraine.
“The House Oversight Committee is investigating manipulation efforts to determine the role and methods of foreign individuals, those at academic institutions subsidized by United States taxpayer dollars, as well as Wikipedia’s awareness and response,” according to a release from Comer’s office.
The lawmakers clearly want to target specific Wikipedia editors. Along with any documents related to state-sponsored efforts to manipulate Wikipedia entries, they’re demanding “records showing identifying and unique characteristics of accounts (such as names, IP addresses, registration dates, user activity logs) for editors” whose conduct has been evaluated by Wikipedia’s committee for resolving editorial disputes.
A spokesperson for the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, told The Hill that it welcomes “the opportunity to respond to the Committee’s questions and to discuss the importance of safeguarding the integrity of information on our platform.”
The investigation is sure to raise questions, considering that Republicans have spent the past several years denouncing anti-misinformation efforts and demonizing efforts to root out foreign manipulation campaigns such as those that have been known to thrive on MAGA-friendly platforms like the Musk-owned X.
Republicans are probing Wikipedia, a longstanding MAGA target
House Republicans are probing the online encyclopedia over claims of foreign manipulation, anti-Israel bias and antisemitism.
https://www.msnbc.com/top-stories/latest/house-republican-wikipedia-israel-bias-probe-rcna228120
Alternet: Trump’s worst crimes and destructions haven’t even happened yet | Opinion
The worst crimes of Donald Trump and dangers to America from the unstable, monomaniacal, lying outlaw in the White House have yet to come. He is not satisfied with tearing apart our country’s social safety net for tens of millions of Americans (e.g., Medicaid and food program cuts); wrecking our scientific/medical systems, including warning people about pandemics. He is, by wrecking FEMA et al, failing to address the impact of mega-storms, wildfires, and droughts; and allowing cybersecurity threats to increase while giving harm-producing big corporations immunities from the law, more subsidies, and more tax escapes. Recall how he always adds to his attacks on powerless people that “This is just the beginning.”
He just took the next step in his march to madness and mayhem by announcing more concentration camps holding immigrants, arrested without due process, for deportation to foreign countries that want U.S. taxpayer cash for each deportee.
Recent immigrants are crucial to millions of small and large businesses. Consider who harvests our crops, cares for our children and the elderly, cleans up after us, and works the food processing plants and construction sites. Already, businesses are reducing or closing their enterprises – a political peril for Dangerous Donald.
If all immigrants to the U.S. from the last ten years, documented and undocumented, went on strike, our country would almost shut down. Yet Trump, who hired 500 undocumented workers for just one of his construction sites in New York, and had similar laborers at his New Jersey golf course, promises deportations of millions more.
Always bear in mind the self-defined characteristics of corporatist Trump’s feverish, hateful, outlaw mind: (1) He has declared he “can do whatever he wants as President,” proving his serial violations of law and illegal dictates every day; (2) He always doubles down when indicted, convicted, caught, or exposed, falsely accusing his accusers of the exact transgressions they are reliably charging him with; (3) He brags about lashing out at criticism with foul defamatory invectives; (4) He never admits his disastrous mistake; (5) He boasts that he knows more than leading experts in a dozen major areas of knowledge (see, “Wrecking America: How Trump’s Lawbreaking and Lies Betray All”); and (6) He asserts that every action, policy, or program he launches is a spectacular success – the facts to the contrary are dismissed.He is gravely delusional, replaces realities with fantasies, breaks promises that are made to defer any reckoning or accountability, and, like an imaginary King, finds no problem with saying “I rule America and the world.”
His ego defines his reactions, which is why every foreign leader is advised to flatter him. Nobody flatters better than the cunning genocidal Benjamin Netanyahu, who at his last regal White House dinner, held up his nomination of convicted felon, woman abuser, Trump for the Nobel Prize. Netanyahu’s preening comes from a politician whose regime has dossiers on Trump regarding his past personal and business behavior. This helps explain why Trump is letting the Israeli government do whatever it wants in its Gaza Holocaust, the West Bank, and beyond with our tax dollars, family-killing weaponry, and political/diplomatic cover.
The approaching greater dangers from Trump will come when he pushes his lawless, dictatorial envelope so far, so furiously, so outrageously, that it turns his GOP valets in Congress and the GOP-dominated U.S. Supreme Court against him. Add plunging polls, a stagflation economy, and impeachment, and removal from office would become a political necessity for the GOP in 2026 and beyond. In 1974, the far lesser Watergate transgressions by President Richard Nixon resulted in Republican Senators’ demanding Tricky Dick’s resignation from office.
Further provocations are not far-fetched. Firing Federal Reserve Board Chairman Jerome Powell, sinking the dollar, and angering the fearful, but very powerful bankers are all on the horizon. Will the sex-trafficking charges involving Jeffrey Epstein and vile abuses of young girls finally be too much for his evangelical base, as well as for many MAGA voters? This issue is already starting to fissure his MAGA base and the GOP iron curtain in Congress. Subpoenas have just been issued to the Justice Department by the GOP Chair of the House Oversight Committee, Rep. James Comer of Kentucky – a close friend of Senator Mitch McConnell.
There is always SERENDIPITY. Trump, the mercurial egomaniac, offers old and new transgressions to stoke the calls for his impeachment. Does anyone believe that Trump would not start a military conflict, subjecting U.S. soldiers to harm, to distract attention from heavy media coverage of unravelling corruption investigations? Draft-dodging Donald has Pete Hegseth, his knee-jerk Secretary of Defense, waiting to do his lethal bidding, despite possible opposition from career military.
If Trump were to be impeached and removed from office, would he try to stay in office? Here is where a real constitutional explosion can occur. He would have to be escorted from the White House by U.S. Marshals who are under the direction of toady Attorney General Pam Bondi. The Supreme Court has held that the Constitution grants “the sole Power” to try impeachments in the Senate and nowhere else. Thus, the courts would provide no remedy to a lawless president wanting to stay in power.
Then what? The country falls into extreme turmoil. The Defense Department, the FBI, and the Department of Homeland Security are in the Trump Dump. Tyrant Trump can declare a major national emergency, invoke the Insurrection Act, and hurl these armed forces and police state muscle against a defenseless Congress and populace. (Recall the January 6, 2021, assault on Congress.) The abyss would have been breached.
With our society in a catastrophic convulsion, the economy collapsing, what would be the next steps? Like the Pentagon that anticipates worst-case domestic scenarios on possible violent “blowbacks” against U.S. military actions abroad, Americans should start thinking about the unthinkable. Such foreshadowings may make us far more determined NOW to thwart, stop, and repeal the fascist dictatorship which Der Führer Donald Trump is rooting ever more deeply every day. Little restraint on lawless Trump from the Congress and the Supreme Court, and only feeble, cowardly responses by the flailing Democratic Party (and the Bar Associations for that matter) thus far, make for the specter of violent anarchy and terror.
Trump has fatalistic traits. Armageddon shapes his ultimate worldview. Ponder that for a dictator with his finger on more than the nuclear trigger.
Again, Aristotle got it right over 2300 years ago, “Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees the others.”
https://www.alternet.org/trump-s-worst-crimes-and-destructions-haven-t-even-happened-yet
Inquisitr: ‘Had to Sleep on the Floor’—Honduran Woman Detained by ICE During Routine Check-In Describes ‘Inhumane’ Conditions in U.S. Custody
There were no beds and very little food for 30 women.
A Honduran woman, Gladis Yolanda Chavez Pineda, was detained by ICE when she went in for her immigration check-in last month. She did not know that going for a normal immigration check would land her up in inhumane conditions at the Broadview processing center.
She spent 4 days in the center and then transferred to the Kentucky correctional facility. Chavez Pineda who’s also an organizer with the Organized Communities Against Deportations revealed the details about her stay. She was among the 30 women who were held there. They did not have blankets, beds, or enough food.
They did not even know what was going to happen to them next, or where they would be taken next. She was arrested on June 4 along with ten other immigrants arrested that day by ICE in the South Loop.
She noted that she got a text message that asked her to report for the immigration check-in at the Michigan Intensive Supervision Appearance Program office. This way they can monitor those with deportation status change while not taking them into custody.
The moment she arrived there, she was escorted by the ICE agents regarding her new deportation orders. Despite showing the paperwork along with her two attorneys, she was arrested. She has been living in the US for ten years now, and her case is still pending. For now, she has a temporary stay of removal by the appeals council.
She argued that if she applied for her case legally, she should not get detained. She has the work permit, social security number and pays taxes. She was detained for a month in the Grayson County Jail.
There she had to stay with twenty women, and there were just ten beds for them to share. The conditions were harsh with bright light, loud noises, and no access to medical care. They could not sleep or feel safe.
The nights she spent there, she was worried about her three kids; she never wanted them to experience this. Even when she was deported on July 13, she was in handcuffs and ankle-chained till she reached Honduras.
Daily Beast: Trump Celebrates Civil War Win With Brutal Message to GOP
Donald Trump is once again reminding Republicans where disloyalty gets you.
The president celebrated on Sunday night shortly after GOP Senator Thom Tillis announced he would not seek re-election next year. A day earlier, the North Carolina Republican had voted against advancing Trump’s signature spending package—the so-called “big, beautiful bill”—incurring the president’s wrath. Trump quickly slammed Tillis in Truth Social posts and threatened to back a primary challenger.
“Great News! “Senator” Thom Tillis will not be seeking reelection,” Trump wrote on Truth Social after Tillis bowed out.
In a follow-up post, Trump suggested that Republicans who oppose his legislative priorities could pay a political price.
Given Trump’s nosediving approval ratings, coupled with the millions losing benefits, e.g. healthcare coverage, thanks to the Big Fat Ugly Bill, the 2026 midterms are expect to be a major rout of Republicans.
Trump Celebrates Civil War Win by Threatening Entire GOP
The president issued a brazen reminder to any who dare to defy him.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-celebrates-civil-war-win-with-brutal-message-to-gop
NBC News: Nationwide protests loom over Trump’s upcoming military parade
Trump warned that protesters at the parade will be met with “very big force.” He drew no distinction between peaceful and violent protesters.
President Donald Trump warned Tuesday that anyone who protests at the U.S. military parade here on Saturday will be met with “very heavy force.”
Trump told reporters in the Oval Office that they’re going to be “celebrating big on Saturday,” referring to the parade that will wind its way through downtown Washington, D.C.
“If there’s any protester that wants to come out, they will be met with very big force,” Trump said. “I haven’t even heard about a protest, but you know, this is people that hate our country, but they will be met with very heavy force.”
Heil, Trump!
NBC News: As immigration raids continue, ICE protests spread coast to coast
Activists plan more events Tuesday in New York, Chicago, Dallas and Atlanta. A curfew was imposed across downtown L.A. until 6 a.m.
Activists had also gathered in New York, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Atlanta and elsewhere, rebuking the Trump administration’s tough stance against migrants and its aggressive round-up efforts, which Democratic leaders in California have criticized as contributing to a sense of fear across communities.
NBC News has counted at least 25 rallies and demonstrations coast to coast since Monday. Some involved only a few dozen people, while others attracted thousands.
The protests took place as federal immigration raids continued nationwide Tuesday, including a “targeted enforcement operation” in Los Angeles, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, as well as a raid at a meat processing facility in Omaha, Nebraska.
