The whole letter is short, but here are some snippets:
Over the course of the past week, the federal government has taken several actions following Harvard’s refusal to comply with its illegal demands.
…
Moments ago, we filed a lawsuit to halt the funding freeze because it is unlawful and beyond the government’s authority. I encourage you to read our complaint.
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The government has cited the University’s response to antisemitism …
Before taking punitive action, the law requires that the federal government engage with us about the ways we are fighting and will continue to fight antisemitism. Instead, the government’s April 11 demands seek to control whom we hire and what we teach.
“We cannot give everyone a trial,” says the President of the United States.
“We cannot give everyone a trial, because to do so would take, without exaggeration, 200 years,” he wrote. “We would need hundreds of thousands of trials for the hundreds of thousands of Illegals we are sending out of the Country. Such a thing is not possible to do."
Well, it is consistent in a sense. Trump gave everyone charged with Jan 6 crimes a pardon because it would be too much work to review each individual’s case.
To Jan 6ers: You get a pardon! And you get a pardon!
To “illegals”: You don’t get a trial! And you don’t get a trial!
Well, see, I can understand where that MAGAts are coming from. For years, we have been oppressing them. Just imagine if one of them tried to found R. Wagner State University, focused on elevating WASPy values, eugenics and females-as-property, why, that shit would have been shut down real fast. Hence, they are now hell-bent on getting those years of unfair oppression put right and all the offending institutions brought to heel under their vision of reason, propriety and fairness.
When viewed from the right angle, it makes perfect sense. And now I shall go take the longest, hottest shower ever.
Back when these deportations were still hypothetical, lots of people argued that “You can’t deport ‘millions’ of people because we just don’t have the resources to conduct that many hearings!”
Well, yes, that’s trivially true. But I argued, “That doesn’t mean they’ll stop the deportations, it just means they’ll dispense with the hearings.”
And here we are. Trump has just admitted that I was right all along. He has no intention of giving them due process, if no one can stop him from doing it.
Now it’s just a question of, “Can anyone stop him?”, with a side-order of “Will those people stop him?”
Was just discussing this this morning with my wife, who is giving a semester-ending lecture in her business law class today. A strong theme throughout her class is that due process protections of life, liberty, and property, and the rights guaranteed in the Bill of Rights, are key factors distinguishing our system of government from monarchies, theocracies, etc.
I work in administrative law, and while I agreed with her, I observed that the exact nature and amount of process that is due is debatable.
But the idea that folk within the US - whatever their legal status - can be deprived of their liberty with NO discernible process ought to gravely disturb ANY American.
We are in a situation where Americans are obligated to respect the rule of law, while that one most prominent American is saying “Fuck the Law, I do as I please!” We all can skirt or flout the law, as long as we do not get caught, but he is doing it right in everyone’s faces.
Don’t believe I’ve seen anybody mention this wonderful idea yet…
They are exploring options like reserving 30 percent of Fulbright scholarships to applicants who are parents and/or married, giving mothers that $5,000 “baby bonus” that Trump promised during the campaign season, and even a government-funded program to better educate women on their own menstrual cycles so that they know when they should be trying for a baby.
From the article, “The records include prescription records from pharmacies, lab testing, and genomics records from the Department of Veterans Affairs and Indian Health Service, private insurance claims, and data from smartwatches and fitness trackers.”
This quotes the NY Times, which I don’t have access to. Does it state whether this is for all married couples and / or all parents, or only heterosexual couples who have physically given birth? (In other words, are gays / adoptive parents / IVF parents ruled out, ruled in, or not considered?)
Maybe they should acknowledge that ( IMHO) the primary reasons young people delay starting families are financial and the fact that they are graduating college with a mortgage-sized debt is a big reason they can’t afford to start families.
Then, once they have a couple of kids they find themselves spending half their take home pay on day care, and their work situation is precarious because if one of the kids has a bad winter and gets sick a lot, day care won’t take them and the parents miss too much work, causing their employers, especially conservative ones, to complain that they are lazy and don’t want to work.
And if you aren’t a 9-5 worker and don’t have family willing to give LOTS of help, child care is really problematic. I was surprised to find that even the day care that a local hospital system maintains for their employees doesn’t offer much in the way of extended hours. They open a few hours earlier and stay open a few hours later than most day cares, but they don’t do weekends and close at 7:30 PM.
Those numbers are probably directly from Texas Health and Human Services rather than collected from the CDC. From what I can tell, the CDC is doing near the bare minimum, almost certainly at the command of Mr Parasitic Brain Worm.
While some people at the Federal level might want to cover for the boss, at the state level, it’s kind of important to have accurate information out there for schools and employers. At that level, money talks and BS walks. And even so, the number of cases is likely highly underreported, somewhat because that always happens but also because the folks most affected in the center of the outbreak are themselves a bit nutty.
