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Un chercheur français du CNRS refoulé des Etats-Unis pour avoir exprimé "une opinion personnelle sur la politique menée par Trump". Ce chercheur dans le domaine spatial a subi un contrôle aléatoire à son arrivée à l'aéroport, au cours duquel son ordinateur et son téléphone personnel ont été fouillés. Le FBI a ouvert une enquête contre lui, depuis abandonnée. Les Etats-Unis ne sont plus une démocratie lemonde.fr/international/artic

Le Monde · Etats-Unis : un chercheur français refoulé pour avoir exprimé « une opinion personnelle sur la politique menée par l’administration Trump »By Le Monde avec AFP

#ÉtatsUnis : un #chercheur français refoulé pour avoir exprimé « une opinion personnelle sur la #politique menée par l’administration #Trump »

Le ministre de la recherche français a dit sa « préoccupation », mercredi, après cette décision des autorités américaines. Le chercheur du #CNRS aurait subi un contrôle aléatoire à son arrivée, avant que son ordinateur et son téléphone ne soient fouillés.
lemonde.fr/international/artic

Le Monde · Etats-Unis : un chercheur français refoulé pour avoir exprimé « une opinion personnelle sur la politique menée par l’administration Trump »By Le Monde avec AFP
Continued thread

…Acc/to an #AFP source, the incident occurred on March 9. The space #science researcher allegedly underwent a *random* check on arrival, during which his work #computer & personal #phone were searched.…Messages referring to the treatment of scientists by the #Trump admin were found. He was accused of messages "which reflect hatred towards Trump & can be described as terrorism". His professional & personal equipment was #confiscated & the researcher was sent back to #Europe
#law #geopolitics #US

Via Joyce Vance:

Important point from Ruth Ben-Ghiat on the arrest #Turkey's opposition leader:

Autocrats everywhere are becoming more emboldened because they know that they will encounter no real consequences from the #Trump-#Musk administration for their aggressions.

open.substack.com/pub/lucid/p/

open.substack.comErdogan Arrests Top Opposition PoliticianOn CNN Int at 2:30pmET to talk about Turkey; My WIRED Video on Dictators
Continued thread

…according to previously unreported emails obtained by ProPublica, a top lawyer at the #IRS warned #Trump admin officials that the performance-related language in his agency’s termination letter was “a false statement” that amounted to “#fraud” if the agency kept the language in the letter.

The emails reveal that in the hours before the IRS sent out its Feb. 20 termination letter [to nearly 7k employees], a fierce dispute played out at the agency’s highest levels.

Emails Reveal Top #IRS Lawyer Warned #Trump Firings Were a #Fraud on the Courts

The Trump admin cited “performance” failures to justify its #MassFiring of IRS workers. But this claim was “false,” a senior agency attorney warned officials, because the admin had not conducted any such performance assessment.

#FactCheck #TrumpLies #law #DOGE #Musk #TrumpPurge #Congress #PowerOfThePurse #FederalAgencies #SeparationOfPowers #judiciary #ConstitutionalCrisis #authoritarianism
propublica.org/article/trump-i

ProPublicaEmails Reveal Top IRS Lawyer Warned Trump Firings Were a “Fraud” on the Courts
More from ProPublica

I don’t think I really sat with my feelings on why I found myself posting on #mastodon and enjoying the experience of the #fediverse so much, compared to something like #facebook or #instagram.

You’d think that I’d have chosen a platform where I’ve physically met the people who are my connections and who are my friends and family. Not that I don’t consider some of you who I met through Mastodon as friends, but there’s really only six or seven of you who I’ve spent any kind of time with offline and the rest of you I’ve never been in the same room with before.

But I hadn’t ever really stopped to think about why I gravitated to an experience that was somewhat less personally connected and I think I finally found myself sitting down with those feelings to truly understand them.

What I realized was that while I enjoy this, I'm not emotionally-invested in this. If someone engages with me in bad faith here, I feel zero obligation to talk to them and I simply block them without thinking twice. When I was engaging with friends and family, I felt an obligation to maintain the connection with that person. There are people I am no longer friends with because I found out they supported #trump. There's an entire segment of my family I cut out of my life because I found out they were deeply bigoted and racist.

I can't say I'm glad for that knowledge I gained there, all I feel I really gained is a deeper appreciation for the expression "Ignorance is Bliss." I don't want racists and bigots in my life but these are people with whom I once had really deep and abiding connections and friendships and then I found out who they were and I could no longer see a path to my having them in my life.

So I realized ultimately that the reason I enjoy this experience so much is because there's zero risk. The small segment of people I know offline, I know them to be cut from similar cloth. We might disagree on how to implement a CI/CD pipeline or on how to leverage a particular piece of tech, but I don't find myself afraid one of them might secretly be a Trump supporter.

I realized that all it boiled down to was that I had lost friends and family because I found out who they were and honestly I'm exhausted. I don't want to have to deal with that anymore. I cultivate something of an echo chamber intentionally here. I don't want to engage in "Well Actually." I don't want to dig into why someone thinks that anarcho-capitalism is a super neat mode of thinking. I don't want to argue anymore with people I've known for 40 years about why I think they're morons for thinking their child's preschool teacher should be armed at all times and wearing ballistic body armor. These are all actual conversations I had by the way.

I just want to have my nice quiet online experience where they people with whom I've chosen to connect and engage have roughly the same beliefs as me and if I find out they do not, there is zero emotional lift to my ceasing to talk with them because we have literally never met. I want to look at pictures of pottery from the fellow pottery nerds I've found here. I want to rage about Trump with the fellow leftists I found here.

What I don't want is to lose more friends and to lose more family. So I think ultimately the feeling I refused to look at and acknowledge was the extent to which I grieve for the death of those relationships. I lost love and respect for a not inconsequential group of people and I'm tired of finding out awful things about people I once loved.

I just want to be a geeky neurodivergent nerd with like-minded people who I've never met before. That's why I'm here and that's why I stay and that's why between this profile and my original profile on mastodon.cloud I have two thousand plus posts.

Workers at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration this week experienced a kind of whiplash as the federal government tried to reinstate probationary employees who had been fired. @NBCNews reports:
nbcnews.com/science/science-ne

NBC News · Fired workers are reinstated at NOAA, creating confusion on heels of stormsBy Evan Bush
#NOAA#DOGE#Trump
Continued thread

Although the article I shared above doesn't mention the agency, through that same February 18th executive order, Downmarket Mussolini also claimed absolute control of another independent regulatory body that is of great concern to all the billionaire nazis that own his regime; specifically the Federal Trade Commission or FTC.

arstechnica.com/tech-policy/20

Trump fires both FTC Democrats in challenge to Supreme Court precedent

"President Trump fired both Democratic members of the Federal Trade Commission yesterday, advancing his administration's claim that the president can fire FTC commissioners despite a US law and a 1935 Supreme Court ruling stating that the president cannot do so without good cause.

Trump fired Democrats Alvaro Bedoya and Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, both of whom said the firings are illegal. Trump "tried to illegally fire me. I'll see the president in court," Bedoya wrote. The FTC was created "to fight fraudsters and monopolists," but Trump "wants the FTC to be a lapdog for his golfing buddies," Bedoya said.

A statement from Slaughter said, "The President illegally fired me from my position as a Federal Trade Commissioner, violating the plain language of a statute and clear Supreme Court precedent." Slaughter said Trump "fears the accountability that opposition voices would provide if the president orders Chairman [Andrew] Ferguson to treat the most powerful corporations and their executives—like those that flanked the President at his inauguration—with kid gloves."

US law says any FTC commissioner "may be removed by the President for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office." The Supreme Court held in a 1935 case, Humphrey's Executor v. United States, that "Congress intended to restrict the power of removal to one or more of those causes."

The Trump administration claims the case was wrongly decided, but the ruling is still in effect. Trump's Department of Justice said last month that it would urge the Supreme Court to reverse the Humphrey's Executor ruling, saying it "prevents the President from adequately supervising principal officers in the Executive Branch who execute the laws on the President's behalf."

I chose this article because it clearly articulates how long the Trump regime has been working on this, and what their spurious arguments to support it are; but I don't love the hint of both-sidesing here, and that isn't helped by AT changing the original title to no longer center that this is a massive power grab by the executive branch, which is embodied by president Trump. A good example of why I'm not thrilled about the writeup here is printing sub-headers like "FTC Chair: Trump can fire members." The FTC chair is of course some nazi Trump appointed in January, so I'm sure we're all surprised the maggot fascist who owes his job to Trump, thinks Trump can do whatever Trump wants to do, and that is clearly an important detail to highlight in bold, large font text. *Eyeroll*

As such, let me state that based on the current law, and existing SCOTUS precedent, Trump does not have the power to fire two Dem appointed FTC commissioners because he openly admits they'll get in the way of his dogshit plans. The caveat here of course being that we've fully descended into a game of fascist Calvinball, the GOP have a 6-3 majority in the current Supreme Court, and those berobed reactionaries have already shown a willingness to throw out precedent and make up the law as they go, so who the fuck knows if it even matters whether or not he's allowed to fire his political enemies from an independent commission. As it stands now however, what Trump is doing is unquestionably a brazen power grab and also flatly illegal.

Which then brings us to the question of why? Well, consider for a moment what the FTC has been doing recently; this is from an American Prospect article by David Dayen:

"Rebecca Kelly Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya, both of whom served with former chair Lina Khan in the FTC majority under Joe Biden, were told they were terminated today. The three of them made numerous advances over the past three years on antitrust and consumer protection policies, including successful challenges to numerous mergers and new rules cracking down on subscription deception, restrictive noncompete agreements, and other anti-fraud measures."

Please keep in mind that this is the agency that took Google to court and won. Alright, now consider all the extremely rich tech nazi CEOs who got Der Leader elected and really own the Trump regime; can you think of any reasons why those guys might prefer a corrupt, toothless FTC stacked full of nazis? Perhaps billions of reasons, as in dollars they can make doing shady shit that should be illegal without FTC interference?

In other words, Trump isn't just seizing power for the imperial presidency; he's paying the bills he owes billionaire CEOs by destroying the US regulatory state.

Federal Trade Commission Commissioners Rebecca Kelly Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya sit at a table and chat with each other at a Congressional hearing.
Ars Technica · Trump fires both FTC Democrats in challenge to Supreme Court precedentBy Jon Brodkin
#USPol#Trump#FTC