Milestones Toward an Authoritarian Government

They have started to deport undocumented immigrants to Gitmo.

Confirmed that we will be holding people in perpetuity in our famous torture facility:

“Some of them are so bad, we don’t even trust the countries [of origin] to hold them because we don’t want them coming back,” he said. “So we’re going to send them out to Guantánamo. This will double our capacity immediately.”

Forever jail without trial. Isn’t that why we were told Russia was bad when we were growing up?

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That’s not what I was told, but they called it the Soviet Union back then.

Regardless

is very bad.

I recall The Economist writing about the terror suspects held there and it was something along the lines of “the people being held here are NOT good people. The fact that the Bush administration managed to turn them into a sympathetic lot is some next-level political incompetence.”

And let’s just say that Trump is like a trillion times worse than W.

I find it extremely disturbing that Trump is trying to move people outside the reach of the U.S. court system to try and hold them in permanent detention. I’d think there are all sorts of constitutional issues here where they aren’t actually deporting these people that were imprisoned on U.S. soil and are now holding them on a U.S. base. What’s the criteria for deciding that someone shouldn’t be returned to their home country?

Paying to keep illegally migrated foreign citizens in our torture facilities for life. An open offer to house American citizen prisoners in El Salvador and other countries known for inhumane treatment of prisoners.

Of course, we’ll write up the criteria for which people get sent to El Salvador so it’s only disparate impact and not disparate treatment that it affects people of color more. Which, the government has been rescinding various memos requiring the government to care about disparate impact. A number of programs will begin treating people differently, but as long as people of color are only impacted disproportionately and not directly targeted, it’s fine.

1% of the workforce sounds like the % of the workforce that at any given time is less than 6 months from retirement and just has yet to put in their notice.

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We’ll be applying for passports tomorrow. Debating whether to rush service on it or not.

CIA employees were also offered the unfunded buyout offer. They will be replaced with sycophants.

Come to Vancouver for a visit. I’ll take you to a Canucks game.

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Tickets are deeply discounted these days… /s

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And Trump is bragging about wanting to engage in ethnic cleansing in Gaza. I feel like this story is vaguely familiar…

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The messages indicate that, under Elon Musk’s leadership, DOGE is actively taking steps to make sure its communications and records are not subject to the Freedom of Information Act, a records transparency law commonly used by journalists and lawyers to hold government accountable. Instead, DOGE is asserting that rather than reporting up through the Office of Management and Budget as the United States Digital Service did for years, it is reporting through the Executive Office of the President and to White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles. Under OMB, it was generally subject to FOIA. Under the White House Chief of Staff, records it creates are generally not subject to FOIA.

This would make DOGE a Presidential Records Act entity, meaning records it creates are not FOIAble until years after a president leaves office rather than a Federal Records Act entity, which would make its records FOIAble now. This is a very notable, but unsurprising move that federal records experts have been worried about since the issuance of Donald Trump’s executive order renaming the United States Digital Service—an agency of federal tech workers that was formed under the Obama administration—to the United States DOGE Service. That executive order specifically states that the renamed entity “shall be established in the Executive Office of the President,” and that the USDS administrator (Elon Musk) “shall report to the White House Chief of Staff.” The Dispatch, for example, wrote a very informative article about this could limit public scrutiny of DOGE and the “clever” executive order that did this.

Government experts 404 Media spoke to said the directive to not use Slack and the assertion that DOGE is now under the Executive Office of the President rather than OMB is not surprising but that it is very concerning, and that this assertion can be, will be, and is being legally challenged.

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Unbelievable memo from the AG. The office is now instructed to vigorously defend anything Trump wants to do regardless of legality. Have a problem with defending illegal actions? Leave.

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You should be very afraid.

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So what you’re saying is you want me to be more zealously?

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Prior to 20 January, passport turnaround times under regular processing were reported to be pretty quick, to the extent that normal rush processing probably wasn’t worth it (but the next level up, where you physically went to a passport office to get a passport in a matter of days…if you could get an appointment… still was for short-notice/emergency needs).

I haven’t heard anything about whether that has changed in the past couple of weeks.

(Towards the end of last year, I toyed around with renewing mine and my wife’s. They expire late 2027. I decided that the rigmarole to appease my paranoia wasn’t worth it at that time, but that I’d reconsider the matter after my spring and summer TATL trips…around the time when I’ll be needing to chat with my employer about the expiration of my Canadian work permit.)

When I started the at what point do you leave a failing country thread I did not anticipate the US being in that sub-set of countries.

Trump has managed to be much worse than I expected.

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Letter seems to be a standard statement that when a lawyer agrees to take on a client that they have a legal obligation to act on their client’s best interest regardless of their personal beliefs.

Public Defenders are in a similar boat: they will often have a client whom they have every reason to believe that they are guilty; but still have the duty to ensure that opposing counsel still follows due process and the law during their prosecution of the defendant.

With that said, I don’t see the letter in and of itself being “unusual”.

I’m not saying that there won’t be additional “undocumented” communications about how the term “zealous” is to be applied . . . and I am concerned about what sort of ethics will be promulgated downward (I’m not optimistic about there being a high-standard being set in this regard).

And I do agree that there is very likely to be less input from the “details people” upward to the “decision makers”.

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The unusual is the conflation of government interest with the executive. The Justice Dept is not the President’s personal lawyers.

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