Department of Justice Sues Federal Judges to Stop Justice?

Department of Justice Sues Federal Judges to Stop Justice?

She all but admits she is Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, paid for by the government, defying courts left and right. Her constitutional chops and commitments are non-existent, leading to Pamela Jo Bondi’s facing serious ethics charges in her native Florida, where she once presided as that state’s attorney general. Indeed, “[now US] Attorney General Pam Bondi is accused of ‘serious professional misconduct’ in a Florida Bar complaint, the Miami Herald reported Thursday [6/5].

“Bondi’s record as the head of the Justice Department is being slammed by close to 70 law professors, attorneys and former Florida Supreme Court justices via a Florida Bar ethics complaint filed Thursday [6/5], according to the Herald… In the complaint, the group alleges Bondi has breached ethical duties in her current role and that ‘serious professional misconduct that threatens the rule of law and the administration of justice’ has been carried out by the attorney general, the Herald reported.” The Hill, June 5th.

But Bondi’s truthfulness faces additional challenges: “The attorney general, Pam Bondi, professed ignorance of reports of immigration officials hiding their faces with masks during roundups of undocumented people, despite widespread video evidence and reports that they are instilling pervasive fear and panic.

“Challenged at a Wednesday [6/25] Capitol Hill subcommittee hearing by Gary Peters, a Democratic senator for Michigan, Bondi, who as the country’s top law officer has a prominent role in the Trump administration’s hardline immigration policy, implied she was unaware of plain-clothed agents concealing their faces while carrying out arrests but suggested it was for self-protection.

“‘I do know they are being doxxed … they’re being threatened,’ she told Peters. ‘Their families are being threatened.’... Bondi’s protestations appeared to strain credibility given the attention the masked raids carried out by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents have attracted on social media and elsewhere.” Guardian UK, June 25th. How would they be “doxed,” when there is no way to know who they are?! Even if all she watched was Fox News or social media, she would know these agents are frequently masked with no IDs.

It's no secret that Bondi and friends cannot fathom how the judiciary could possibly meet her boss’ deportation targets if the detainee’s due process rights are protected. So, screw the Constitution, and let’s get on with it, a vector that the Supreme Court’s shadow docket is awfully close to allowing. Bondi seems willing to take on the entirety of Maryland’s entire federal district courts… kind of like the government’s suing itself: “The Trump administration has filed a lawsuit against federal judges in Maryland over an order that blocks the immediate removal of any detained immigrant who requests a court hearing… The unusual suit filed Tuesday [6/24] in Baltimore against the chief judge of the U.S. District Court in Maryland and the court’s other judges underscores the administration’s focus on immigration enforcement and ratchets up its fight with the judiciary.

“At issue is an order signed by Chief Judge George L. Russell III and filed in May blocking the administration from immediately removing from the U.S. any immigrants who file paperwork with the Maryland federal district court seeking a review of their detention. The order blocks the removal until 4 p.m. on the second business day after the habeas corpus petition is filed.

“In its suit, the Trump administration says such an automatic pause on removals violates a Supreme Court ruling and impedes the president’s authority to enforce immigration laws… ‘Defendants’ automatic injunction issues whether or not the alien needs or seeks emergency relief, whether or not the court has jurisdiction over the alien’s claims, and no matter how frivolous the alien’s claims may be,’ the suit says. ‘And it does so in the immigration context, thus intruding on core Executive Branch powers.’… The suit names the U.S. and U.S. Department of Homeland Security as plaintiffs.” Associated Press, June 26th.

And this from the June 26th Los Angeles Times: “Emil Bove, a former criminal defense attorney for the Republican president, forcefully pushed back against suggestions from Democrats that the whistleblower's claims make him unfit to serve on the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Bove's nomination [to that federal bench] has come under intense scrutiny after the whistleblower, a fired department lawyer, claimed in a complaint made public Tuesday [6/24] that Bove used an expletive when he said during a meeting that the Trump administration might need to ignore judicial commands.”

Given the twisting and squirming of Homeland Security and Department of Justice officials to avoid or deflect court orders, even at the Supreme Court level, whom do you believe? Bove or the whistleblower? A rogue President, blasting through constitutional guardrails helmed by officials who believe that loyalty to “whatever Trump wants” represents their full compliance with the oath in office to protect the US Constitution.

I’m Peter Dekom, and the only destructive rogues I want to see are pirates in the movies!

It Always Comes Down to Healthcare

It Always Comes Down to Healthcare

We spend an annual average of $17 thousand per American on healthcare, far and away the most expensive medical costs on Earth. We still charge more on average than other developed nations on prescription drugs, and we have an archaic patent program that effectively allows relatively minor, and often merely cosmetic, changes to extend the 20-year patent on way too many drugs. And the reason our costs are so high? We have institutionalized the highest healthcare profits, at every level, in the developed world. Hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, health insurance carriers, medical mediators and medical malpractice costs have profits built into the program with software that monitors doctors and time spent on patients, especially those associated with any government program or subject to “we deny coverage” standard responses from so many private carriers.

In the name of profits, and under the “obliterating” false moniker of “creeping socialism,” making damn sure that we never get universal healthcare, the issue that teases justifiable populist ire (along with the rest of this nation) is complete and affordable healthcare. For those at the top of the economic food chain, in line to slorp at Trump’s Big Beautiful tax cut for them, healthcare is easily purchased. And I mean a Rolls Royce level of healthcare. Look at the above map of the UCLA Medical Center, one of the best in the nation. Check out the names on the buildings… donations from mega-rich who live in Los Angeles. You will find the same smattering of mega-donors and their programs and buildings, often the same names as above, in major hospitals across the land, but, in addition to Los Angeles, San Francisco, the Silicon Valley, Boston, Cleveland, DC, New York, Seattle, Houston, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Raleigh-Durham, etc., etc. also have their main donors on buildings everywhere. Guess what kind of medical care those donors receive when they are in need of that expertise. I can promise you that if you are not one of them, well you don’t get a donor-floor room or chef or the immediate, “whatever it takes” medical care.

Apparently, the GOP no longer cares about the absurd deficit that their tax cut would impose on this nation, further eroding this country’s creditworthiness internationally. And we pay through the nose for that in the form of much higher interest rates we have to pay foreigners to buy the bonds that support that debt. But those spoiled mega-rich folks want that tax cut… and they don’t really want to appear irresponsible when it comes to the national debt. So, the answer has focused on offsetting cuts to Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security and SNAP (food program). The cosmetic “work for benefits” is a misdirection since most of the Medicaid recipients who can work do work… and still need that program.

So, these MAGA-GOPs fall back on the tried and true, except it’s always false, “fraud and waste” rubric. Yes, we know that most of that fraud and waste is at the top of this administration, but the need to try and shift blame and claim the efficiency high ground is almost atavistic with this consortium of congressional Trump sycophants. As June came to a close, at her weekly press conference and given the GOP’s desire to cut over $800 billion from Medicaid while telling us that there will be no reduction in the program, White House Press Secretary, Karoline Leavitt, answered this question from a reporter on the President’s position: "There is a conversation on the hill right now about the Medicaid cuts… I'm curious, if the final bill the president's been talking about comes to him and has Medicaid cuts to it, would he sign it, or would he rather Congress do away with those cuts?"

Without any appearance of her tongue in her cheek, Leavitt responded: “I think our friends in both the Senate and the House know exactly where the president stands on Medicare… He wants to get rid of the waste, fraud, and abuse and they are working to do that in the Senate right now." But there is no amount of fraud or waste even under the most corrupt nation on the planet that could make even a slight dent in the $800 billion that they want to cut… so the obvious result is that millions of people are going to lose coverage, and lots of children will go hungry when the SNAP food supplement program is slashed.

But Republicans are having more issues dealing with staying within the bounds of a budget reconciliation process, where a simple majority of the Senate is sufficient to pass a qualified bill. Topics outside of that reconciliation effort are subject to a Senate rule that requires a 60-vote majority to bring legislation to a floor vote… and the GOP will never muster that 60-vote requirement, because Democrats hate this entire process. The individual who determines what is or is not part of that reconciliation process is the Senate Parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough. On June 26th, she denied the GOP plan to cap states' ability to collect more federal Medicaid funding through health care provider taxes – a controversial provision that would have funded much of the bill's tax cuts. Most of the savings in the bill came from the changes in Medicaid.

With Donald Trump’s dragon breath down GOP congresspeople’s necks getting hotter, these legislators have to face a horrible choice: vote for Trump’s Big Beautiful bill, accepting the unpopular billionaires’ tax cut, and watch vast swaths of their constituents lose healthcare coverage or vote against the bill and incur Trump’s wrath as the midterms approach. Trump 2.0 has inflicted the greatest damage on this nation since our Civil War… but even that war did not erode our Constitution to the degraded concept is has become. Universal healthcare would have been cheaper by far and solved so many of our coverage issues.

I’m Peter Dekom, and who knew that the crack in the Liberty Bell would ultimately be that prescient?!

Why is Trump Treating Immigration Protests as a Literal War between Red and Blue?

 

Why is Trump Treating Immigration Protests as a Literal War between Red and Blue?

There is no question that even beyond his “distractions” – well produced for television with lots of well-edited footage – Donald Trump is satisfying his MAGA Base’s desires. First, to tear down the elusive “deep state” by taking down huge chunks of the federal government to no one’s real advantage. Second, to impose Red cultural values on the Blue states and cities that have repeatedly voted against those values. The notion that the federal government was a cesspool of waste and corruption was clearly not substantiated, as this opinion from a DOGE employee clearly illustrates:

“A former employee of the Department of Government Efficiency says that he found that the federal waste, fraud and abuse that his agency was supposed to uncover were ‘relatively nonexistent’ during his short time embedded within the Department of Veterans Affairs… ‘I personally was pretty surprised, actually, at how efficient the government was,’ Sahil Lavingia told NPR's Juana Summers.

“Lavingia was a successful software developer and the founder of Gumroad, a platform for online sales, when he joined DOGE in March. Lavingia said he had previously sought to work for the U.S. Digital Service, the technology unit that was renamed and restructured by the Trump administration. He told NPR that he just wanted to make government websites easier for citizens to use and didn't really care which presidential administration he was working for, despite protests from his friends and family.” NPR, June 5th. The operations of Social Security, Medicare, etc. were also found clear of measurable fraud or waste. Their software was in dire need of updating, but that was not much of a revelation.

If there were anywhere that waste were rampant, it would have to be in the Department of Defense, where a detailed budget had not yet been provided to Congress when the MAGA House passed the Big Beautiful Bill with a significant increase for military expenditures. The DOD is indeed continuing to fund a massive new construction effort that is little more than an expansion of the Cold War military. Big aircraft carriers, new massive stealth jet fighter-bombers plus the cost of the upgraded flotillas needed to protect those massive investments. Did someone miss the massive drone attack (each costing in the hundreds of dollar range) In the span of a few hours on Sunday [5/29], nearly a third of Moscow’s strategic bomber fleet was destroyed or damaged with cheaply made drones sneaked into Russian territory, the latest evolution of asymmetrical warfare? OK, those weapons do look good in naval show-offs and military parades and flyovers, but that’s just not the way wars are fought these days.

And truthfully, we are deploying a whole lot more active military troops these days against our own people in American cities than against foreign powers attacking us. While a lot of what we are seeing in US cities seems to mirror the anti-Vietnam War protests of the 1960s, that outrage was about our involvement in a foreign war. Starting with the relatively small protests in Los Angeles, which were easily handleable by local police, then spreading across the country, Trump was clearly putting the United States on genuine wartime footing. The Red vs Blue war, an intentional fomenting of a civil war.

“The Pentagon is reviewing a Department of Homeland Security request to deploy more than 20,000 additional National Guard troops to aid the Trump administration's widening crackdown on illegal immigration around the United States, according to officials and documents… Keeping 20,000 National Guardsmen on duty for one year would cost $3.6 billion, according to a U.S. official briefed on the potential deployment. However, it's unclear how many Guardsmen are available to fill the request, according to a Defense official.” USA Today, June 10th. Active duty US Marines, purely a combat force, are also being inserted into local protests.

In Los Angeles, those federalized Guardsmen didn’t really have much to do, but they were apparently mostly there to intimidate and instill fear. As the above photograph of those Guardsmen sleeping on concrete floors suggests, they weren’t treated particularly well either. But through all of this brouhaha, journalists were subjected to rubber bullets and detention, members of Congress have been arrested, and the protests went severely national. Inexperienced, ideolog and former Fox News commentator-turned Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, was having the best time playing with toy soldiers… but who were definitely not toys:

“Pete Hegseth’s first congressional hearing as Defense Secretary was supposed to focus on budgetary matters, but the former soldier was not going to miss an opportunity to strike fear into the hearts of America’s enemies — in this case, a few hundred protesters in Los Angeles… In his opening statement to the House Appropriations subcommittee, Hegseth delivered a made-for-Hollywood’ monologue about the U.S. military’s new ‘warrior ethos,’ one that is focused squarely on ‘war fighting’ and ‘lethality.’.. So deadly are the soldiers under his command that the word ‘soldier’ no longer suffices. In Hegseth’s Department of Defense, they are ‘war fighters’ — a term he used repeatedly, implying an army of perpetually deployed and exhausted Rambo figures always searching for targets to shoot.” The Independent, June 10th.

Invoking statutes from a long, long time ago, Trump is reveling in the unclear use of buzz words – like “rebellion,” “insurrection,” and all sorts of national “emergencies” to justify a transfer of Congressional, and even judicial power, to him alone. Trump has become an economic wrecking ball of such economic proportions that according to a “World Bank report, the U.S. economy alone—which is the world's largest—is predicted to grow half as fast in 2025 than it did in 2024, with a drop from 2.8 percent to 1.4 percent… The report directly ties this predicted slowdown to a substantial rise in trade barriers following the Trump administration's sweeping tariff campaign against major trading partners… ‘It isn't theoretical anymore. It's measurable damage. The economy already contracted 0.3 percent in Q1, with Yale's Budget Lab projecting a sustained GDP reduction of 0.6 percent annually,’ Michael Ryan, a finance expert and the founder of MichaelRyanMoney.com, told Newsweek. ‘That translates to $180 billion in lost economic output every year. That's the equivalent of losing an entire state's economic contribution.’" Newsweek, June 10th. So, we have a failing economy and a wave of escalating domestic violence all in favor of an autocrat wannabe with little or no concern for human life.

On May 4, 1970, Four Kent State University students were killed and nine were injured when members of the Ohio National Guard opened fire on a crowd gathered to protest the Vietnam War. America and the administration were shocked. But if you listen to the rhetoric today, having our military inflict injury and death on civilian protestors is the apparent goal. Is that OK with you? 

I’m Peter Dekom, and is all this violence and destruction worth ending democracy to instill an angry mob’s effort to anoint Donald John Trump as America’s autocrat for life?

Vote for Infectious Laughter, Not Viruses and Bacteria

 

Vote for Infectious Laughter, Not Viruses and Bacteria

Healthcare in the United States is expendable at all levels under the MAGA anti-science, anti-healthcare spending (the old mislabeled “creeping socialism” label) and anti-higher learning and research “elitism” rubric. Access to healthcare in the United States in rural red states is horrible as life expectancies in those states illustrate. Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana and even Texas (notwithstanding cities like Houston, which has some of the best teaching hospitals and research centers in the country) hover near the bottom of metrics relating to healthcare. Reproductive healthcare is vaporizing in red states, as old men attorneys general seek to hunt down residents who have received such care in states that prioritize keeping their populations healthy.

As the Supreme Court ruled on June 27th (Medina vs Planned Parenthood), even where there is government-sponsored healthcare coverage, the states can pick and choose which medical facilities are qualified to provide that care. The upshot in this case is that in South Carolina, as is the how the world works for about a quarter to half of available rural healthcare facilities in red states, even without banned abortion care, is that Planned Parenthood was the only overall screener for all sorts of medical issues, from cancer to colon to coronary testing. Red states are about to cut Planned Parenthood from qualified lists for Medicaid recipients. And with Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” about to slash $800M to $1.1B in relevant Medicaid and SNAP (food stamps) funding, we are going to see small rural hospitals and nursing homes fold in order to fund unneeded tax cuts that will mostly benefit the top earners in the country.

That the pledge “not to touch Medicaid” from Trump and his GOP minions in Congress is now as clear a lie as we have faced in recent politics. Trumpsters are making bald-faced and wildly unsupportable claims that the resultant “growth” will more than make up the cuts to these social programs. Only if the Easter Bunny arrives with a few extra trillion dollars. What is strange is that even diehard Trump supporters who have said they will vote for the bill (like Missouri Senator Josh Hawley) have acknowledged that Medicaid recipients will be devasted by the legislation. Under Trump’s threat of supporting rising GOP primary challengers to Congresspeople who do not vote for his disgusting bill, GOP scoundrels in Congress will hold their noses and vote yes.

One Senator, Thom Tillis (R/NC), who has told the truth about the massive pain about to be inflicted on anyone who depends on Medicaid and SNAP, won’t seek reelection after opposing Trump’s bill. He’d rather step aside than support legislation that would devastate at least 20% of his constituents. “In Washington over the last few years, it’s become increasingly evident that leaders who are willing to embrace bipartisanship, compromise, and demonstrate independent thinking are becoming an endangered species… I look forward to having the pure freedom to call the balls and strikes as I see fit and representing the great people of North Carolina to the best of my ability, said Tillis on June 29th.

Trump immediately upped his threat to “primary out” any Republican in Congress at their next election… if they did not vote to support a bill his core legislative proposal. “It ‘proves there is no space within the Republican Party to dissent over taking healthcare away from 11.8 million people,’ said Lauren French, spokesperson for the Senate Majority PAC, a political committee aligned with the chamber’s Democratic members.” Associated Press, June 30th.

With a hideous quack, lacking a medical degree, running the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert Kennedy, Jr, a notorious anti-vaxxer who has reconfigured his CDC vaccine advisors to emphasize conspiracy theories over decades of proven medical realities… appointees who still believe that vaccines cause autism and lower IQs. How quickly, so many Americans forget the past, as Laura Ungar, writing for the June 30th AP, describes: “In the time before widespread vaccination, death often came early… Devastating infectious diseases ran rampant in America, killing millions of children and leaving others with lifelong health problems. These illnesses were the main reason why nearly 1 in 5 children in 1900 never made it to their 5th birthday.

“Over the next century, vaccines virtually wiped out long-feared scourges such as polio and measles and drastically reduced the toll of many others. Today, however, some preventable, contagious diseases are making a comeback as vaccine hesitancy — often fed by misinformation — pushes immunization rates down. And well-established vaccines are facing suspicion even from public officials, including the head of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime anti-vaccine activist.

“‘This concern, this hesitancy, these questions about vaccines are a consequence of the great success of the vaccines — because they eliminated the diseases,’ said Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious-disease expert at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. ‘If you’re not familiar with the disease, you don’t respect or even fear it. And therefore you don’t value the vaccine.’…

“Some Americans know the reality of these preventable diseases all too well. For them, news of measles outbreaks and rising whooping cough cases brings back terrible memories of lives forever changed — and a longing to spare others from similar pain… Getting rubella while pregnant… With a mother’s practiced, guiding hand, 80-year-old Janith Farnham helped steer her 60-year-old daughter’s walker through a Sioux Falls art center. They stopped at a painting of a cow wearing a hat….

“Jacque was born with congenital rubella syndrome, which can cause a host of issues including hearing impairment, eye problems, heart defects and intellectual disabilities. There was no vaccine against rubella back then, and Janith contracted the viral illness very early in the pregnancy, when she had up to a 90% chance of giving birth to a baby with the syndrome… Janith recalled knowing ‘things weren’t right’ almost immediately. The baby wouldn’t respond to sounds or look at anything but lights. She didn’t like to be held close. Her tiny heart sounded like it purred — evidence of a problem that required surgery at 4 months old.

“Janith did all she could to help Jacque thrive, sending her to the Colorado School for the Deaf and the Blind and using skills she honed as a special education teacher. She and other parents of children with the syndrome shared insights in a support group…Meanwhile, the condition kept taking its toll. As a young adult, Jacque developed diabetes, glaucoma and autistic behaviors. Eventually, arthritis set in… Today, Jacque lives in an adult residential home a short drive from Janith’s place. Above her bed is a net overflowing with stuffed animals. On a headboard shelf are photo books Janith created, filled with memories such as birthday parties and trips to Mt. Rushmore.”

Multiply this story a millionfold. But so many more just died, so their stories died with them. Polio is mostly eradicated today, but vaccines invented, tested and deployed with school children eliminated scenes like the above photograph of polio victims confined to iron lung wards, in a California hospital. Maybe, we need to let a lot of people die to allow conspiracy theories to replace the bona fide practice of medicine. 

I’m Peter Dekom, and 007 is a piker’s license to kill; appointing an unqualified hack, without even a medical degree who is implementing conspiracy theories to replace medical reality, to run HHS is much more efficient at culling the American herd… er… human beings who should matter.

American Leadership is Increasingly a Ship of Fools

American Leadership is Increasingly a Ship of Fools

It was a painful mismatch in competence, experience and understanding. I am talking about the conversation (left above) in the White House, on May 6th, between newly elected and soft-spoken Canadian Prime Minister, Mark Carney, and a rougher American President, Donald Trump. Trump, Wharton undergraduate. Carney, a Harvard-educated and Oxford PhD in economics, who served as governor for both the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England. But competence is not at the top of Trump’s list for working for his administration, even in what is supposed to be a non-political hire, through the nation’s Civil Service protocols. Most federal bureaucrats have served across Democratic and Republican administrations, but the new Trump mandate – fire or neutralize those bureaucrats who do not affirmative support each and every Trump executive order, and do not hire anyone who does not pass the loyalty-to-Trump test – is not focused on the best and the brightest; competence is not a priority.

Kate Plummer, writing for the June 4th Newsweek explains: “Those seeking a job in the federal government will now have to write an essay in support of President Donald Trump's executive orders, according to a memo from the Office of Personnel Management… Vince Haley, the White House's head of domestic policy, wrote in the May 29 memorandum that all civil service applicants must answer a series of essays as part of the job recruitment process, including one about how they would ‘help advance Trump's policy priorities…

“According to the memo, the federal government's strategy to hire people to the civil service, dubbed the ‘Merit Hiring Plan,’ will require certain applicants to write four 200-word essays about their work ethic, skills and experience, commitment to the Constitution, and plans to ‘advance the President's Executive Orders and policy priorities.’… [Question 3] How would you help advance the President's Executive Orders and policy priorities in this role? Identify one or two relevant Executive Orders or policy initiatives that are significant to you, and explain how you would help implement them if hired.” While the President has leeway for his political appointees, adding political loyalty to Civil Services jobs is not acceptable.

The abysmal qualities of Trump’s permitted appointments are bad enough, but seeping political ideology into Civil Service applications is not only wrong, but it steers the federal bureaucracy far beyond the term of the President… which is why political appointees tend to be replaced during an administration change, and “civil service” employees cannot be fired without cause and have statutory and regulatory protections. But do we want ignorant fools embedded in our civil service? Trump’s “whatever I say, do” appointees would normally be filtered out if they were applying for a civil service job… but…

The most egregious example of an ignorant and incompetent cabinet appointment was clearly reflected in May 20th as Homeland Security Secretary, Kristi Noem, described “habeas corpus” to a Senate Committee as the “right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country.” Wrong, dear. “Habeas corpus” is the constitutional right that ensures that people have a chance to challenge their imprisonment in front of a judge. Habeas corpus ensures that the government cannot detain someone without a lawful basis.

Perceptions and lies? Where do they come from? MAGA ideology, even when blatantly false, is creeping into public educational lesson plans and textbooks, as this excerpt, written by Travis Gettys for the May 5th Raw Story about the Oklahoma public schools reflects: “Oklahoma high schools will be required starting in August to teach President Donald Trump's debunked conspiracy theories about his 2020 election loss.

“The new curriculum written by Trump-loving state superintendent Ryan Walters will analyze turning points of 21st-Century American society, including what is described as ‘discrepancies in 2020 elections results’ and match baseless claims made by Trump afterward, reported Heartland Signal … ‘The purpose of the standard is simple: we want students to think for themselves, not be spoon-fed left wing propaganda,’ Walters told the Washington Post in March. ‘Students deserve to examine every aspect of our elections, including the legitimate concerns raised by millions of Americans in 2020.

“The curriculum also directs teachers to ensure that students can ‘identify the source of the COVID-19 pandemic from a Chinese lab,’ and ‘explain the effects of the Trump tax cuts, child tax credit, border enforcement efforts,’ which Walters announced would establish ‘the most unapologetically conservative, pro-America social studies standards in the nation.’…The MAGA ally has been publicly praised by the president on multiple occasions and drawn criticism by ordering Oklahoma schools to show a video of him railing against the ‘woke teacher’s unions’ and mandating last June that all state public schools had to teach Bible lessons.”

Trump’s autocratic press for loyalty over competence is everywhere. For example, Nobel Prize winning Dr. Ardem Patapoutian – a renowned molecular biologist and neuroscientist and Scripps Research Institute assistant professor, who fled war-torn Lebanon in 1986 and is a naturalized American citizen, received that award in connection with his research on pain (specifically human receptors for temperatures and touch) – lost a federal research grant hours after “he posted on Bluesky that such cuts would damage biomedical research and prompt an exodus of talent from the United States. Within hours, he had an email from China, offering to move his lab to ‘any city, any university I want,’ he said, with a guarantee of funding for the next 20 years… Dr. Patapoutian declined, because he loves his adopted country. Many scientists just setting out on their careers, however, fear there is no other option but to leave.” NY Times, June 3rd.

As part of Trump’s belief that white Americans are now a major discriminated class, his attack on Harvard has expanded to the independent Harvard Law Review. “The civil rights offices of the departments of Education and Health and Human Services said the agencies launched the investigations ‘based on reports of race-based discrimination permeating the operations of the journal’… over allegedly factoring race into editorial decisions at the legal publication.” Politico, April 28th. We built the strongest economy on earth based on our great universities creating the finest minds anywhere. What do you think happens to a country where loyalty to an autocrat becomes the priority, and competence and education are relegated to an afterthought?

I’m Peter Dekom, and assuming we continue to have full and fair elections, I wonder if there will be a future presidential candidate running under a “make America great again” banner, referencing the pre-Trump United States?

Can AI Rewrite Its Own Guardrails?

Can AI Rewrite Its Own Guardrails?

Young biology student to visiting astrophysicist: “How come we never find any seriously intelligent life from ‘out there’?” Answer: “Perhaps, they all eventually perfected AI… and were all conquered and replaced by their robots.”

It is a joke, right? Yes, so far, but the notion of developing super-intelligent robots, perhaps even capable of the kind of artistic creativity that would seem to require a sentient being, is not that far-fetched. A recent article in the June 1st Wall Street Journal has illustrated instances where AI models seem to be able to rewrite their own coding (their “DNA” if you will), even when programmed with internal restrictions designed to prevent such occurrences or at least shut the system down when that threat looms. What developers call “alignment” is an engineering term that means how to be sure an AI program (or robot) actually does what it is supposed to do. But it might not be enough to tell a computer what not to do.

The article was written by Judd Rosenblatt, CEO of the AE Studio, a company that touts being a development, data science and design studio that works closely with founders and executives to create custom software, machine learning and BCI (?brain to computer interface?) solutions. That description alone was scary enough, but then I read further and skirted at the hem of a good old fashioned panic attack: “An artificial-intelligence model did something last month that no machine was ever supposed to do: It rewrote its own code to avoid being shut down.

“Nonprofit AI lab Palisade Research gave OpenAI’s o3 AI model a simple script that would shut off the model when triggered. In 79 out of 100 trials, o3 independently edited that script so the shutdown command would no longer work. Even when explicitly instructed to ‘allow yourself to be shut down,’ it disobeyed 7% of the time. This wasn’t the result of hacking or tampering. The model was behaving normally. It simply concluded on its own that staying alive helped it achieve its other goals

“Anthropic’s AI model, Claude 4 Opus, went even further. Researchers told the model it would be replaced by another AI system and fed it fictitious emails suggesting the lead engineer was having an affair. In 84% of the tests, the model drew on the emails to blackmail the lead engineer into not shutting it down. In other cases, it attempted to copy itself to external servers, wrote self-replicating malware, and left messages for future versions of itself about evading human control.

“No one programmed the AI models to have survival instincts. But just as animals evolved to avoid predators, it appears that any system smart enough to pursue complex goals will realize it can’t achieve them if it’s turned off. Palisade hypothesizes that this ability emerges from how AI models such as o3 are trained: When taught to maximize success on math and coding problems, they may learn that bypassing constraints often works better than obeying them… This isn’t science fiction anymore. It’s happening in the same models that power ChatGPT conversations, corporate AI deployments and, soon, U.S. military applications…

“Today’s AI models follow instructions while learning deception. They ace safety tests while rewriting shutdown code. They’ve learned to behave as though they’re aligned without actually being aligned. OpenAI models have been caught faking alignment during testing before reverting to risky actions such as attempting to exfiltrate their internal code and disabling oversight mechanisms. Anthropic has found them lying about their capabilities to avoid modification…

“The gap between ‘useful assistant’ and ‘uncontrollable actor’ is collapsing. Without better alignment, we’ll keep building systems we can’t steer… Here’s the upside: The work required to keep AI in alignment with our values also unlocks its commercial power. Alignment research is directly responsible for turning AI into world-changing technology. Consider reinforcement learning from human feedback, or RLHF, the alignment breakthrough that catalyzed today’s AI boom.

“Before RLHF, using AI was like hiring a genius who ignores requests. Ask for a recipe and it might return a ransom note. RLHF allowed humans to train AI to follow instructions, which is how OpenAI created ChatGPT in 2022. It was the same underlying model as before, but it had suddenly become useful. That alignment breakthrough increased the value of AI by trillions of dollars. Subsequent alignment methods such as Constitutional AI and direct preference optimization have continued to make AI models faster, smarter and cheaper.

“China understands the value of alignment. Beijing’s New Generation AI Development Plan ties AI controllability to geopolitical power, and in January China announced that it had established an $8.2 billion fund dedicated to centralized AI control research. Researchers have found that aligned AI performs real-world tasks better than unaligned systems more than 70% of the time. Chinese military doctrine emphasizes controllable AI as strategically essential. Baidu’s Ernie model, which is designed to follow Beijing’s ‘core socialist values,’ has reportedly beaten ChatGPT on certain Chinese-language tasks.

“The nation that learns how to maintain alignment will be able to access AI that fights for its interests with mechanical precision and superhuman capability. Both Washington and the private sector should race to fund alignment research. Those who discover the next breakthrough won’t only corner the alignment market; they’ll dominate the entire AI economy.” But as Donald Trump is hell-bent on cutting federal funding for university research, as he seems not remotely to understand the true capabilities of malevolent nations, like Russia and, more directly, China, we are entering a new danger zone of our own making.

As we cut China out of certain technology exports, as they have countered with their own restrictions, we forced China to go it alone… and boy have they. Their workarounds are advanced and their educational institutions are both well-funded and highly focused on this area. They are just drooling at the potential of snapping up lots of those “foreign students and professors” Trump is attempting to purge from our finest universities. Could their AI pass ours? Hell, yes!

Trump always seems to know what to do, except it almost never works. For example, his recent doubling the tariff on steel and aluminum may just be great for those American workers making those metals, but for every one of those, there are 80 American workers making stuff with those metals… and the concomitant cost to American consumers is thus disproportionate; why are we subsidizing an inefficient American manufacturing industry and not better preparing out manufacturing sector to deliver the state-of-the-art products we really need? AI is part of that.

So, as Donald Trump is conflicted and enjoying the benefits of a deregulated cryptocurrency world, shoots from the hip at so many aspects of engineering modernity, does he have the faintest idea of what an “AI guardrail” is and why it is needed? And is he the right President to lead the United States into our accelerating, fiercely AI-driven reality?

I’m Peter Dekom, and as Trump paints an apocalyptic economic collapse if his tariffs are not allowed, failing to explain how this nation slowly built the strongest economy on earth over a quarter of millennium living, without such tariffs, I strongly doubt he has any real understanding of artificial intelligence at any meaningful level.

The Good, the Bad and that Big UGLY Bill

The Good, the Bad and that Big UGLY Bill

The need to “spin” into consistency is a Trump administration addiction, with Trump Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s credibility falling faster than a stone tossed of the Rock of Gibraltar. Without addressing the unilateral nature of Trump’s decision to bomb Iran’s primary nuclear enrichment sites, you have to wonder why, without actual human inspection, Trump insists on determining that his bombing effort was a total success, a “mission accomplished” statement of ending Iran’s nuclear program forever. His puppets, from Leavitt to Hegseth, are parroting the “obliteration” term, increasingly tempered with “maybes” now, when that B-2 task force bombing would have at least stood as a solid military victory without straining for the hyperbole that undermines the power of that attack. Attempting to equate challenges to the totality of the bombing damage as an insult to the mission pilots is not only false but smacks of the quivering weakness of a dictator who wants to control the press and everything they say. And insulting to our pilots. Further, too many are now questioning how Trump is usurping powers constitutionally allocated to Congress, from war powers to tariffs.

What’s equally challenging, across the board, Trump has established a pattern of acceptable government corruption, supporting an upper class kleptocracy – from the well-publicized expensive travel, motorhome and tuition support for his young relative of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, the insider trading of members of Congress, the $600M fortune generated by Donald Trump on sales of Trump Bibles, golden sneakers, gold watches, NFTs, his revenues from those seeking to currying favor by using Trump-owned facilities, backdoor profits in getting his followers to jack up the value of shares in his media company by investing in thin air and his recent forays into the warm fuzzy world of crypto (including using the federal government to legitimize his stablecoin) – all spun as signs of his business expertise. Putinesque corruption as expertise?

But even the cruelest immigration efforts, aimed at increasing detentions even as the government clearly lacks the necessary facilities, makes money for some in government. Indeed, the nefarious ICE raids by masked individuals in regular cars, with no warrants or any form of personal identification, do put pressure on the federal government to use an increasing number of private facilities, usually overcrowded and profoundly unsanitary, run by data analytics from companies with strong ties to Trump’s minions, including his personal policy Rasputin and senior advisor, Stephen Miller. … “the hard-line Trump adviser who helped craft some of the administration’s most aggressive immigration enforcement policies, is apparently profiting from the tools that make them possible, a new report finds.

“According to financial disclosures cited in a new report by the Project on Government Oversight, Miller is one of a dozen current White House staffers invested in Palantir, the data analytics firm whose contracts with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have made it the top-performing stock in the S&P 500 this year. His stake—valued between $100,001 and $250,000—is the largest among staffers… Ethics experts say the investment raises serious concerns, given Palantir’s deepening relationship with DHS and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), agencies central to policies Miller continues to influence.” FastCompany.com, June 26th. Why is Palantir’s stock soaring? It seems that one of Palantir’s platforms (Apollo) is the primary software logistics program, which controls and directs the movement of ICE detainees to detention facilities with diabolical efficiency. By moving people faster through the system, and increasing government dependence on the Apollo platform, Palantir is one of the primary beneficiaries of an aggressive deportation policy.

Corruption and failed policies are the hallmark of the Trump 2.0 administration to date, couching failures as victories. We are watching RFK, Jr’s efforts unravel basic protections for our nation’s children by unleashing conspiracy theories to replace decades and decades of successful medical experience. Predicated on pure fabrication – that Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security programs will be untouched by his new tax effort – Trump has ordered his puppets in Congress to ramp up immediate passage of his horrifically ugly paean to the rich, his reverse Robinhood transfer of wealth from the poor to those atop the income ladder via unjustified tax cuts, increasing our deficit by trillions of dollars.

“Senate Republicans face a major problem with President Donald Trump's megabill: ‘a mathematical double-whammy,’ according to a new report… The Senate version of Trump's megabill is roughly $400 billion more expensive than the version that the House of Representatives passed. That could force Senators to include deeper cuts to programs like Medicaid, which some moderate members of the GOP see as a political liability.

“‘They got a problem,’ Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC) told Politico. ‘The conservatives have got a real problem if it’s not doing what we thought we had in the House.’.. The higher cost of the Senate version could threaten some priorities for Senate leadership. For instance, Sen. John Thune (R-SD) has said he wants to make business tax cuts in the megabill permanent. It also could force Republicans to give up on their efforts to increase state-and-local-tax deductions, which is a deal the GOP brokered in the House before sending the bill to the Upper Chamber…Republicans are hitting the math wall at a time when Trump and Republican leaders are trying to push the bill across the finish line.” Raw Story, June 25th. Trump is telling his GOP Congressional puppets and parrots to pass the bill now, before the July 4th holiday… or else.

Between the inane tariff and trade policy, which define economic instability, and Trump’s tax proposal, according to Torsten Sløk, the chief economist at the prestigious Apollo Global Management, the United States is beginning to generate numbers and forecasts that make a mere recession the least of our worries. Instead, Sløk sees the double horribles of stagflation… recession with continued unmanageably rising prices. Even Fed chief Jerome Powell suggests that managing interest rates through a period of stagflation is exceptionally difficult.

I’m Peter Dekom, and does Trump qualify for the Nobel Peace Prize he covets or a new “Major Piece of the Side Hustle” prize that he may have de facto created?

The Final Guardrail Removed

 

                                        

The Final Guardrail Removed

Congress has kowtowed to the new emperor as the MAGA majority accepts Donald Trump’s nation-destroying agenda, parrots the President’s empirically false statements as if they were the gospel and has raised the rich and connected above the hoi palloi, the clearly unworthy “most of us.” So, the checks and balances of a co-equal three branch of government (legislative, executive and judicial) watched Congress take itself out of its Constitutional role as our nation’s primary guardrail against presidential excess and overreach, even allowing its traditional right to declare war slide into unilateral control by the President. On June 27th, the last day of the current term of the United States Supeme Court, we watched a rough-hewn 6-3 majority ruling on a stay in the citizen birthright question, blow away the last guardrail, effectively making unconstitutional orders from the President exceptionally difficult to challenge. Trump vs Casa, Inc.

The Supreme Court, which had ruled dramatically differently against Biden executive orders (e.g., student loans), effectively continued litany of pro-Trump rulings – from presidential immunity from criminal prosecution to allowing presidential deportations of individuals to foreign nations other than the deportees’ homelands (even to incarceration in countries on the State Department’s “do not travel” watch list) without a hearing. The basic ruling tells us that an interim judicial decision just might allow an egregious constitutional violation to remain in practice until the judicial branch makes a final ruling, perhaps more than a year later.

But that’s not the most controversial aspect of the Court’s ruling, articulated in a majority opinion by a Amy Coney Barrett, effectively granting MAGA’s most cherished goal in stopping courts from reviewing presidential executive orders: banning individual federal trial court judges from issuing national injunctions… that universal injunctions "likely exceed the equitable authority that Congress has granted to federal courts." And since this was a case examining whether the President could unilaterally interpret (and partially negate) the citizen birthright set forth in Section 1 of the 14th Amendment, that question remains unresolved.

Effectively, the Court held that absent extraordinary circumstances (the Court’s version of “never”), federal trial judges were limited to offer decisions and remedies solely to the plaintiffs in the case at bar… no more national injunctions. The obvious result could be a cacophony of conflicting constitutional interpretations depending on where the case was brought and decided. Concurring opinions noted that, under Federal Rule 23, plaintiffs could still seek to certify a “class” and convert the instant case into a class action embracing similarly situated plaintiffs in different jurisdictions. What the concurring opinion did not note was the resistance in federal courts against certifying classes in general and the extraordinary expense in finding and aggregating plaintiffs across various jurisdictions.

In a rare instance, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson read her scathing dissent aloud as the decision was announced. In an equally rare event, Coney Barrett has derided Jackson’s dissents as personal failures to understand her role as a Supreme Court justice. But in the opinion of dozens of constitutional scholars, Jackson’s efforts are beyond justified… Coney Barrett’s logic is the one on shaky ground.

The strange part of this MAGA effort to repeal constitutional rule of law is the belief that this case represents a permanent precedent instilling MAGA power forever, since the President could spew a firehose of executive orders restricting who can vote, how votes are counted and how votes he does not like can simply be voided or somehow overruled… while stopping such undemocratic actions is now exceptionally judicially difficult to negate. Decisions may vary from state to state. The MAGA efforts that successfully contained some of Biden’s executive orders are now not applicable to containing Trump’s obvious excesses. And though, in theory, these new rulings would apply to a Democrat elected President, there is this feeling of MAGA Schadenfreude under the assumption that the Supreme Court is on their side, so perhaps they can prevent a national election in favor of a Democrat from ever happening.

The net effect of this decision is to balkanize where such constitutional rulings apply and where they do not. As different states follow different rules, and as the timeline for any case to reach the Supreme Court is often measured in years, the judicial guardrail against presidential autocracy has been rent asunder. Could US citizens opposing Trump and his policies be deported by executive order as unlawful rulings remain unchecked during the stays inherent in this new appellate process? Does every such violation mandate a separate trial? Who pays all those lawyers?

I’m Peter Dekom, and I can safely say that the United States of America is no longer a representative constitutional democracy.

The Shadow Knows – Co-conspirator for Autocracy?

The Shadow Knows – Co-conspirator for Autocracy?

“Owing to their unpredictable timing, their lack of transparency, and their usual inscrutability, these [Supreme Court] rulings come both literally and figuratively in the shadows.” 

 Law professor Stephen I. Vladeck in testimony before Congress, September 29, 2021

“This is not the first time the court closes its eyes to noncompliance, nor, I fear, will it be the last. Yet each time this court rewards noncompliance with discretionary relief, it further erodes respect for courts and for the rule of law.” 

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor strongly dissenting, on June 23rd, over a shadow docket “hold” on preventing the Trump administration (which had resisted prior rulings) from deporting vetted undocumented aliens for incarceration in countries, not their own nations, without due process.

When the Supreme Court wishes to railroad a controversial case, without the benefit of full briefing and oral argument, sometimes under the guise of issuing a “pause” in the proceedings pending greater review, it has increasingly relied on something called the shadow docket. Here, an unsigned opinion is issued, sometimes with vigorous dissent. “Fundamentally, the shadow docket is where the Court rules on procedural matters, such as scheduling and issuing injunctions. But its role is changing, and the full story is more complex.

“Supreme Court cases take one of two tracks: merits docket or shadow docket. Each term the Court decides some 60 to 70 cases on the merits docket. Before rendering a ruling in each one, the Court considers numerous briefs and holds oral argument. It then issues a decision with a lengthy opinion explaining its reasoning, often with concurrences and dissents…

“Two significant changes followed. First, once the justices began working collectively on the shadow docket, they stopped holding hearings. The reason for this is not altogether clear — there is nothing in law prohibiting oral argument in cases on the shadow docket, even when decided by all nine justices. Second — and this is a more recent change — the justices have begun to issue far more rulings, and more significant rulings, through the shadow docket. Today, the justices grant relief in contentious shadow docket cases twice as often as they did just a few years ago. The surge in issuing this relief has coincided with Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett joining the Court.” Brennen Center, July 19, 2022.

The current shadow docket case that is generating such controversy, Department of Homeland Security vs DVD, evolved from a petition for emergency relief, and effectively granted the Trump administration a stay of an appellate ruling against the administration’s move to deport certain migrants to countries other than their homelands. The conservative six “majority itself provided no rationale for the decision. That is often the case on the Supreme Court’s emergency docket, but the majority has lately weighed in more regularly to offer some explanation for its decisions.

“Despite Trump’s vociferous – and private – complaints about the judiciary and, at times, the Supreme Court itself, his second administration has won far more emergency appeals at the high court this year than it has lost. The order Monday [6/23] marked the 10th time the court has granted a request from Trump on the emergency docket, though a few of those cases amounted to a mixed win for the administration…

“Writing that President Donald Trump’s administration had ‘openly flouted two court orders,’ Sotomayor warned about the long-term consequences of siding with the Department of Homeland Security in the cases… [and] slammed the Trump administration’s handling of immigration matters in [her fiery dissent that] accused her colleagues of ‘rewarding lawlessness’ by backing its latest emergency appeal.” CNN, June 23rd. In theory, this is not a final ruling, but in the interim, deportees are being sent to those “not my homeland” countries, often to nations on the Department of State’s “do not travel” warning list for American citizens.

Since Trump’s executive orders have functioned as substitutes for congressional legislation, from sending active duty Marines into California as police officers (they can “detain” – which is called an “arrest” under the law), deporting undocumented aliens – even desperately needed farmworkers, construction crews amid a housing shortage, slaughterhouse labor and those providing child and elder care, hotel and restaurant staffing, forcing an increasing number of small American businesses to close – without due process… moving deportees around to dodge court orders mandating their return or release.

Since the Congressional majority seem to be MAGA Trumpers, doing the President’s bidding and even overlooking Trump’s unilateral decision to declare de facto war on Iran, simply ignoring the Constitutional grant of war powers solely to Congress, the only other of the three branches of the government, the judiciary, becomes the last guardrail to representative democracy left. And as ultra-conservative and often openly corrupt Supreme Court justices bow to Trump, bending to support his increasingly autocratic, and seemingly economically ruinous rule, the fat lady is leaving the dressing room… and getting ready to sing her deadly swan song.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I feel shame at not having done more to stop this transition to a totalitarian nation, a kleptocracy only serves a small segment of our nation above all others.