Baffled European

Tag: deportations

  • Making a summer

    The immigrants are back. Swallows are flying into my woodshed, looking for a place to nest. They’ll find it – I’ve screwed a piece of wood to the rafters. It’s nice for them up there, and safe from the cats. I find this approach better than brooding over imagined resentments, before working myself into a lather of ever-escalating rage until I burn down the woodshed. But then I’m an old-fashioned type.

    There are developments in the Abrego Garcia case. The government went to the Supreme Court in an attempt to get Judge Xinis removed from the case. The Supreme Court very firmly gave the case back to her. She is now demanding that the government return Garcia to the USA, and to give daily progress updates. The government is refusing to comply.

    Will this end up as the constitutional crisis that everybody is waiting for? It’s going to happen at some point, so why not this case?

    Assuming it gets there, it’s hard to see the Supreme Court giving in on this. They want to be able to deal with people by themselves, without being subordinate. If they accept that the government can simply disappear people without the courts getting involved, they are basically powerless.

    Maybe it’s best that this is sorted out now. The government is attempting to deport or rendition thousands of people, because they think these people might be criminals. No evidence. Please clarify the situation.

  • Nixon could see this

    When a river literally catches fire, you know you have a problem. The Cuyahoga river was less a body of water than a thick, toxic, oily gloop filled with junk that slowly oozed its way into Lake Eyrie. Warmed by the outflow from power stations, it was incapable of supporting life and poisoned everything it touched. It caught fire in 1969. Again.

    Investigations into the fire led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA was intended to clear up the mess that humans had left behind, while at the same time preventing this sort of thing from happening again. Such an agency is always going to be attacked from both sides, but it is undeniable that it has fulfilled its remit.

    Undeniable that is, except to a clutch of fanatics who deny reality. The EPA has been attacked by DOGE, as with everything else. The scale and extent of the destruction is the same as elsewhere. It is essentially being reduced to a placeholder agency, presumably to fulfill statutory requirements, but without any power or ability to do anything.

    This is the most frustrating thing about the new order. It’s as if they are looking at every mistake that humans have made in the last hundred years and they are determined to repeat them. And they do it with such enthusiasm. They have absolutely no understanding of how the world works or why. And these are the people who are in charge.