Political News

On Saturday morning, Kennedy Center officials confirmed that they had removed all signs with President Trump’s name from the building after a federal judge declared the previous day that the signs were unlawful. The officials also stated that they updated their website “to remove all reference to the institution as the ‘Trump Kennedy Center.’”

To justify his takeover of the Kennedy Center, Trump has repeatedly stated that the cultural center was no longer “going to be woke.”

On Friday, another federal judge ordered that the Trump administration must restore exhibits and placards on subjects like climate change, slavery, and civil rights that it had taken down following a March 2025 executive order that deemed them “ideological indoctrination or divisive narratives that distort our shared history.”

In a preliminary injunction, US District Judge Angel Kelley ruled in favor of scientists, historians, and park conservationists and rangers, stating that the removal established a “dangerous precedent of censorship and sanitization.” Kelley gave the Trump administration a reinstallation deadline of 21 days, by the 250th anniversary of the US.

The US Department of the Interior said in a statement that “the ruling is from a liberal activist judge” and would evaluate options to appeal the decision while they “celebrate UFC Freedom 250.”

Both orders act as a massive blow to President Trump’s censorship campaign to take control over federal historical sites and cultural institutions. As my colleague Dan Friedman reported in February, the Trump administration’s efforts were shrouded in secrecy—the Interior Department has so far refused to disclose the number of signs and exhibits they are targeting as “non-conformant” with the president and signs were taken down without notice.

And as my colleague Jeffrey Kelly also wrote in February, local residents and government officials of targeted areas have been fighting back against this censorship through protests and even makeshift signs to replace the ones that’d been removed, because despite the administration’s best efforts, “nothing can change what happened at these places, and who it happened to.”

President Donald Trump says just about anything, doesn’t he? Earlier this week, when asked about soaring inflation due to his idiotic war in Iran, Trump responded by saying, “I love the inflation.” He then took a lavish, joy-killing nap at the NBA game between the New York Knicks and San Antonio Spurs—after calling the NBA a “political organization” that no one cares about in 2020.

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An obscure Texas firm secretly connected to the president’s son said it received at least $100 million from Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries. At the same time, the Ambani family secured major policy wins from the Trump administration. By Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott and Alex Mierjeski for ProPublica In late November in Jamnagar, India, the scions of two of the most powerful…

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Caribbean Matters is a weekly series from Daily Kos. Hope you’ll join us here every Saturday. If you are unfamiliar with the region, check out “Caribbean Matters: Getting to know the countries of the Caribbean.“ There’s a very long history between the United States and Cuba. And though many Cuban Americans are staunch supporters of racist right-wing efforts like the blockade against Cuba…

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A cartoon by Mike Luckovich. Related | Nothin’ but naps: Trump gets dunked on for sleeping through NBA game…

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Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and acting Attorney General Todd Blanche gave a press conference on Thursday to tell reporters about 300,000 supposedly “missing” immigrant children. These were unaccompanied minors who’d crossed the border alone during the Biden administration, before being apprehended by the government and then quickly released to sponsors—typically adult relatives.

Mullin and Blanche claimed the Biden administration lost track of these children, and that many ended up with adults who purported to be family but were actually criminals who abused them. “Kids now have been paying for it,” Mullin said. “They have been getting raped over and over and over again because the previous administration chose not to enforce our nation’s laws and protect the most vulnerable.”

The claim that 300,000 unaccompanied minors went missing has already been thoroughly and repeatedly debunked. Still, over the past year, the Trump administration has used this misleading narrative as justification to go out and find these kids. Officials have gotten back in touch with nearly 150,000, whether calling or visiting their homes or encountering them in the community. Hundreds have been re-detained. Their sponsors must then be re-vetted before the kids can be released.

“It is not right that I have to stay here for so long when I have someone to take care of me who knows me and loves me.”

The administration says it’s doing this for the good of the children. “We are going to rescue as many kids as we possibly can,” Mullin said. And it’s true that there have been some horrific cases: The press conference was pegged to the indictment of three people who allegedly lied about their identities to gain custody of minors; a fourth man was sentenced for raping a girl in his care.

But lawyers around the country who work with unaccompanied children paint a remarkably different picture. They tell me that abuse by fake sponsors is relatively rare, and that most sponsors really are who they say they are: family members. The Trump administration, by and large, isn’t saving kids—it’s separating them from loved ones and putting them in detention for months on end.

Unaccompanied minors taken into custody at the end of the Biden administration were held by the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) for about 37 days on average. Under the Trump administration, the average is about six months, and many children have been detained more than a year. “A majority of the kids in our facilities today have biological parents who want them home, and there’s no reason the government shouldn’t be releasing them,” says Jessica Richardson, an attorney whose nonprofit, The Door, works with detained kids in New York.

“Family separation under the first Trump administration got so much attention, and DHS is doing it again, but with everything else they’re doing it hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves,” says Jen Smyers, who served as ORR’s deputy director under Biden. “DHS is kidnapping people’s kids.”

At the press conference, Angie Salazar, Trump’s acting ORR director, touted more stringent vetting requirements for sponsors—families must jump through many more hoops than before to prove they’re worthy of getting their kids back. The process, Salazar said, “should mirror the standards of the American foster care system,” with “rigorous background checks, vetting of caregivers, financial stability verification, and home visits before a child is turned over.”

Several families are now suing, arguing that the new requirements have led to detention periods that are too lengthy and violate the Flores agreement, a court settlement requiring kids to be released from government care “without unnecessary delay.”

The Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act also requires ORR to “promptly” place unaccompanied minors “in the least restrictive setting that is in the best interest of the child.”

“These children have been forced to spend extremely long periods of time away from their family, friends, school and community without justification,” notes the families’ complaint, which was filed by Democracy Forward and the National Center for Youth Law.

“It’s incredibly stressful and confusing, especially for the little ones. They don’t understand why they can’t get out.”

“It is not right that I have to stay here for so long when I have someone to take care of me who knows me and loves me,” a child told the court in another similar lawsuit. “I don’t know if I can tolerate it much longer.”

Under Biden, says Michigan-based attorney Ana Raquel Devereaux, who works with unaccompanied minors, parents could “receive the child in a relatively swift manner. Now, the barriers to sponsor reunification are so significant that, from our perspective, sponsor reunification is essentially nonexistent.”

Acting director Salazar said at the press conference that ORR is “prioritizing child safety over placement speed.”

But is holding kids for months, or even a year or more, really good for them? ORR facilities are often called shelters, but they are “essentially prisons,” says attorney Richardson. “They have specific times they are allowed to shower and use the bathroom. Specific times they are allowed to go to get food.”

Some of the detained kids are having suicidal ideation, depression, and anxiety because of the lengthy detention, or are acting out or running away. “ORR is meant to be a very, very short-term place for unaccompanied children,” notes Smyers, the former ORR official.

Among the plaintiffs is Diego N., a 14-year-old who’d been living with his father in Texas. Since being re-detained, “he has little privacy,” the complaint states. “He misses being able to go outside for fresh air when he wants to and being able to talk to his friends.” Detention has interrupted his schooling—ORR classes are primarily focused on basic language skills: “He is being taught how to name fruits in English when he should be a freshman at his public high school.”

Younger kids are confused about why they’re detained at all, says Alexa Sendukas, an attorney in Texas. “It’s incredibly stressful and confusing, especially for the little ones. They don’t understand why they can’t get out.”

Rather than saving these kids, she says, the administration is using them “as bait.” Last year, ORR began requiring sponsors to attend in-person meetings to verify their identification documents—and sometimes ICE arrests them when they show up. “We’re seeing family members detained,” says Sendukas. (This week, federal agents raided the offices of organizations that provide legal services to unaccompanied minors, to gather more information.)

Kids are so terrified for their parents that some decide not to go through the sponsorship process at all. Mario C., a 17-year-old plaintiff who’s been detained for months, wants to live with his mom, but he’s considering foster care instead because he doesn’t want to risk her arrest. Other kids are so desperate to get out of detention that they self-deport, returning to countries where they haven’t lived in years, even though their parents are in the United States.

Trump officials remember the public outrage that ensued after they split up kids and parents at the border in 2017. Now they’re splitting them up in the interior and holding press conferences about saving missing children to justify it. They want to make their activities more palatable to the public.

But even rebranded, family separation is still just family separation.

This story was originally published by Canary Media and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Last year, Marie Tai needed a better way to keep her condo cool. Her window air-conditioning units were borderline ineffective, even running at full blast. Summers have been getting more intense in Tai’s Boston neighborhood because of a rapidly warming climate, and she had just adopted a 16-year-old cat named Mittens, who was still recovering from being hit by a car.

Tai had already been considering a heat pump, an all-electric appliance that heats and cools spaces and lets homeowners ditch polluting fossil fuels. But three contractors had quoted her prices ranging from about $28,000 to $40,000. Tai, who heads finance and administration at Harvard University’s Project Zero, thought those estimates seemed excessive for her 1,000-square-foot, two-bedroom place. So she had hit pause on the project.

“Even though homeowners often save significantly over time, the first quotes can bring real sticker shock.”

But with Mittens’ well-being front of mind, Tai renewed her heat pump search last spring. Through Facebook, she found an opportunity to participate in a program that aggregates demand, organized by Laminar Collective, a local startup that does research on the tech and coordinates installations.

These heat pump group-buy initiatives let installers purchase equipment in bulk and spend less time chasing leads, accruing savings that they can pass on to customers. Tai, tantalized by Laminar’s menu of low prices for a heat-pump setup, decided to give it a shot.

After a representative from the startup visited her home to check what heat pump size and configuration would fit her needs, Tai signed up for a ductless minisplit system for $20,000—thousands less than even her lowest initial quote. She then also took advantage of an additional $8,500 state rebate and eight-year financing with zero percent interest.

The new equipment has been life-changing, Tai said.

She no longer has to buy fuel oil for heating in the winter, and the heat pump is so efficient that last year she saved roughly $1,300 on her energy bills. In contrast to the old, noisy window ACs, the new system’s wall-mounted, air-filtering indoor units ​“are so quiet,” she said. Her allergy symptoms have improved. And Mittens is comfortable and doing well, she noted. ​“I couldn’t be happier.”

Group-buy initiatives smooth out demand by allowing for planned installations when business naturally slumps.

Like Tai, homeowners in communities across the US are signing up for an unusual way of buying heat pumps: together. Companies, nonprofits, and local governments are increasingly offering programs that coordinate consumer demand to secure meaningful discounts of around 10 percent to 20 percent, which can translate to roughly $3,000 to $6,000 per installation. It’s like a group buying a pack of muffins at Costco rather than each buying a muffin at Starbucks.

The bulk-buy approach is taking off as the Trump administration demolishes electrification incentives. Last year, the Republican-led Congress eliminated a $2,000 federal tax credit for home heat pumps. Late last month, the administration said that it won’t allow home energy-efficiency rebates to be used by people looking to get off gas.

While heat pumps reduce pollution and typically cut owners’ energy bills, they can be a pricey proposition up front. Whole-home installations typically range from $17,000 to $30,000, depending on the property size, insulation, climate, and many other factors, according to electrification advocacy nonprofit Rewiring America.

“Even though homeowners often save significantly over time, the first quotes can bring real sticker shock,” said Cole Merrick, founder and CEO of VoltHub, an online heat-pump installation marketplace.

VoltHub and heat-pump general contractor Vayu organized a California group-buy program this spring to serve the counties of Los Angeles and Orange and the greater San Francisco Bay Area. They’re offering another one this summer.

Most heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning replacements are emergencies, and these jobs will continue to make up the majority of Vayu’s business, said founder and CEO Shreyas Sudhakar. But for households that can hold off on getting a heat pump installed, group buys are ideal, he noted.

The process entails a waiting period, which can be several weeks to about six months, as the slots fill up and the installer determines the final pricing. The installer then confirms individual quotes with customers—who can decide not to move forward without penalty—and schedules the work.

Electrician and technicians install a condenser/compressor to connect a residential heat pump system on July 21, 2025 in Charlotte, Vermont.Robert Nickelsberg via Getty

Heat pump group buys come in different forms. They can be organized at the grassroots level, offered by a contractor, or run by a third party that aggregates demand over a limited time window. Through a competitive bidding process, the third party vets qualified installers and chooses one or more to carry out the jobs.

The collective bargaining approach has succeeded in the past. Nonprofit Solar United Neighbors has led similar group buys for rooftop solar since 2007, helping thousands of households net deals on installations.

Now, the organization is partnering with iChoosr, an international company that helps households electrify, in order to get group deals for heat pumps, too. Using iChoosr’s Switch Together platform, people in select areas can sign up to unlock group discounts for the all-electric appliance, as well as solar and batteries.

Since 2023, more than 5,100 US homeowners have gotten their solar panels or batteries via iChoosr, which earns a fee from participating vetted installers for jobs they get through the platform, said Fred Wu, a director of community engagement for the company.

iChoosr was already running successful bulk-purchasing programs for heat pumps in the UK and the Netherlands, and launched its first offerings in the US last year with Solar United Neighbors. They opened one program in the Colorado Front Range and another in the Washington, DC, area in July, closed those lists in September, and finished up the installations—for about 90 households—by the end of the year.

On the heels of that success, iChoosr reran group buys in both regions this spring. More than 1,000 households have signed up expressing interest so far.

“The first thing we need…is a local government that wants to bring this to their constituents.”

This year, the company will also launch new programs in the metro areas of Houston and Dallas, Chicagoland, and northern Arizona around Flagstaff, partnering with nonprofits and local governments at no cost to them, Wu said.

For contractors, these bulk-buy initiatives are a boon.

They cut down on the installers’ sales and marketing costs, thanks to word of mouth and publicity from third parties like iChoosr. Home electrification contractor Elephant Energy, which is working with iChoosr to deploy the Colorado heat-pump installations, saves about $300 per project, said CEO and co-founder DR Richardson. Elephant has also run its own community bulk buys across its California, Colorado, and Massachusetts markets, he noted.

Group-buy initiatives smooth out demand by allowing for planned installations when business naturally slumps. Heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning work is highly seasonal, with most people calling an HVAC technician during the first heat wave or cold snap.

“For a lot of businesses, two months will make up 70 percent to 80 percent of the revenue for the year,” said Sudhakar of Vayu. ​“So to be able to have some guaranteed revenue that is on the books and [can] fill downtime is really valuable.”

But heat pump group-buying programs aren’t ubiquitous yet. Wu of iChoosr recommends that homeowners who are interested but not in a rush contact city and county leaders to let them know that they’d like to get a bulk deal going in their area.

“We’re continuously trying to expand the program,” Wu said. ​“The first thing we need…is a local government that wants to bring this to their constituents.” These partnerships lend credibility and visibility to the group initiatives, since local governments help promote them.

Tai in Boston was grateful to be part of Laminar Collective’s heat-pump bulk buy. It not only helped her save money but also provided her time to get her questions answered without the sales pressure she felt from one-on-one solicitations. ​“It’s empowering,” she said. After she told her neighbor about her experience, they got their heat pump that way, too.

The Supreme Court did something extraordinary on Thursday night: It refused to help the state of Alabama carry out an execution. Since the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy in 2018, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has almost never intervened in capital cases on defendants’ behalf. The justices have even overridden lower courts’ stays so that executions could take place on the state’s preferred schedule, even in cases where serious constitutional issues were at stake.

But in Lovelace v. Lee, the court declined to step in at Alabama’s request. The case is important for three reasons. First and foremost, it appears to be the first successful constitutional challenge to a specific execution method since the Eighth Amendment’s ratification in 1791. Jeffrey Lee, a death-row prisoner who was convicted of killing two people in 1998, filed a federal lawsuit last year to challenge Alabama’s plan to execute him via nitrogen hypoxia. Alabama adopted the new method in 2018; Lee argues that it would violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

Nitrogen-hypoxia executions are fairly simple in theory. Earth’s atmosphere is roughly 78 percent nitrogen and 20 percent oxygen, with trace elements rounding out the remaining 2 percent. Humans have evolved to breathe large amounts of nitrogen, and we can do so indefinitely as long as some oxygen is present. Alabama’s plan is to simply subtract the oxygen—or, more accurately, to place a mask over Lee’s face so that he only breathes pure nitrogen until he dies.

The state has already killed seven death-row prisoners by this method; Louisiana also executed a man via nitrogen hypoxia last year. Three other states have authorized the method. Proponents describe it as relatively simple and largely painless, even compared to lethal injection. Justice Sonia Sotomayor described it differently in a dissenting opinion last year:

Take out your phone, go to the clock app, and find the stopwatch. Click start. Now watch the seconds as they climb. Three seconds come and go in a blink. At the thirty-second mark, your mind starts to wander. One minute passes, and you begin to think that this is taking a long time. Two … three.… The clock ticks on. Then, finally, you make it to four minutes. Hit stop.

Now imagine for that entire time, you are suffocating. You want to breathe; you have to breathe. But you are strapped to a gurney with a mask on your face pumping your lungs with nitrogen gas. Your mind knows that the gas will kill you. But your body keeps telling you to breathe.

Sotomayor said that the death-row prisoner in that case would “immediately convulse,” “gasp for air,” and “thrash violently against the restraints holding him in place as he experiences this intense psychological torment until he finally loses consciousness” before finally dying about 15 to 20 minutes later. The justice’s description also assumes that everything goes as planned. Unsurprisingly, Lee asked the court to let him be executed by firing squad instead, which can be virtually instantaneous when done correctly.

A federal district court judge in Alabama rejected those claims, citing the high threshold for execution-method challenges laid out by the Supreme Court in the 2015 case Glossip v. Gross. (More on that later.) The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that ruling and instead found that there would be a “substantial risk of serious harm,” then asked the district court to consider whether Lee’s firing squad recommendation would be viable. The district court concluded that it would be and entered judgment in Lee’s favor.

In its appeal to the justices, Alabama claimed that the ruling amounted to “the first-ever permanent ban on a legislatively enacted method” in American history. The Supreme Court itself has never explicitly held a specific method of execution to be unconstitutional. Though the justices have suggested in passing that the Eighth Amendment forbids certain medieval methods of execution, such as breaking someone on a wheel or burning them as the stake, the high court has never before compelled a state to abandon its preferred option.

Instead, execution methods have changed over the years largely due to public pressure and criticism. Hanging was the most common method of execution in the nineteenth century, but it was often administered by unskilled amateurs. A competent hangman would ensure that the prisoner’s neck snapped at the first drop. More common outcomes were grisly scenes of strangulation or, in rare cases, decapitation.

By the early twentieth century, states began to experiment with alternatives. New York carried out the first execution by electric chair in 1890 after the Supreme Court rejected the prisoner’s Eighth Amendment challenge. Electrocution was billed as a more scientific and humane method of execution in the early 1910s, but the reality was far more grim. In the late 1990s, the state of Florida carried out multiple executions with an unreliable electric chair, including at least one where a prisoner’s head burst into flames.

After the Supreme Court agreed to hear an Eighth Amendment challenge to Florida’s use of electrocution, Governor Jeb Bush called a special session of the state legislature to switch to lethal injection. A three-drug cocktail developed by an Oklahoma medical examiner in the 1970s soon became the most widely used method of killing death-row prisoners in the late twentieth century. This form of lethal injection was explicitly sanctioned by the Supreme Court in the 2008 case Baze v. Rees.

Things fell apart a few years later. The European Union imposed an embargo on drugs for executions in the United States in 2011 amid pressure from death penalty abolitionist groups. Many pharmaceutical companies had already largely cut off the flow in previous years. With no U.S.-based manufacturers of certain key drugs, death penalty states began to rely on unfamiliar chemical cocktails. This haphazard improvisation led to a series of botched executions in the mid-2010s, including one in Arizona in 2015 where a prisoner survived for almost two hours while gasping for air after the injections.

The Supreme Court ultimately heard a challenge to Oklahoma’s use of the controversial sedative midazolam in the 2015 case Glossip v. Gross. It was not as receptive to the Eighth Amendment argument as abolitionists had hoped. At oral arguments, Justice Samuel Alito asked whether it was “appropriate for the judiciary to countenance what amounts to a guerrilla war against the death penalty,” which had “reduced” states to using less reliable drugs like midazolam. That hostile mindset was reflected in the court’s final opinion, which Alito wrote.

In the U.S. constitutional order, the government has powers and the people have rights. When the former conflicts with the latter, the latter must generally prevail unless the government has an exceedingly good reason for doing something. The government’s mere desire to enact a preferred policy is typically not enough to overcome a person’s constitutional rights.

Alito apparently disagrees. In Glossip, he subordinated a prisoner’s right to be free from cruel and unusual punishment to the state’s desire to kill prisoners. Because the death penalty is constitutional, he reasoned, “there must be a constitutional means of carrying it out.” Alito borrowed this flawed reasoning from Chief Justice John Roberts, who first expressed it in his three-justice plurality opinion in Baze. Glossip marked the first time that a majority of the court embraced it.

In his own concurrence in Baze, Alito had warned that the court “should not produce a de facto ban on capital punishment by adopting method-of-execution rules that lead to litigation gridlock.” In Glossip, he turned that policy preference into constitutional law. To win the “guerrilla war,” Alito also required death-row prisoners to provide courts with a “substantially” less painful alternative method to be killed when challenging a state’s chosen option on Eighth Amendment grounds in the future.

That requirement also came from Roberts’s plurality opinion in Baze, where the chief justice laid out a hard-to-overcome standard for challenges to execution methods. “To qualify, the alternative procedure must be feasible, readily implemented, and in fact significantly reduce a substantial risk of severe pain,” Roberts wrote. Showing marginal improvements in safety weren’t enough. Only then would a state’s refusal to adopt the alternative method be sufficient to suspect a desire to inflict cruel and unusual punishment.

This is a threshold plainly designed to produce a specific outcome: Leave constitutional challenges theoretically intact, but make it effectively impossible for them to succeed. You can see echoes of this approach in later decisions written by Alito. Earlier this month in Louisiana v. Callais, for example, the conservative justices erased the last vestiges of the Voting Rights Act by imposing bespoke hurdles. In effect, they elevated a state’s interest in partisan gerrymandering—a fig leaf in some states for eradicating Black electoral influence—above the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.

Alito even required VRA plaintiffs to produce maps to achieve a state’s stated redistricting goals when they accuse that state of racial gerrymandering, echoing his earlier demand in Glossip for death-row prisoners to describe their preferred way to die when challenging an execution method. There is something deeply unseemly about the Supreme Court forcing litigants to argue against their own interests if they wish to defend their constitutional rights. It smacks of deterrence by humiliation.

Moreover, this case was procedurally irregular, to say the least. The Supreme Court’s shadow docket typically works by hearing arguments for interim relief. (Justice Brett Kavanaugh has even argued that it should be called the interim docket.) In other words, the court’s shadow-docket rulings almost always involve preliminary injunctions and temporary restraining orders. Final judgments by lower courts are generally resolved by the court’s merits docket—which until 10 years ago was just “the docket.”

Alabama’s challenge was different. Steve Vladeck, a Georgetown University law professor and expert on the shadow docket, warned the justices in a friend-of-the-court brief that the state was asking for something more significant this time. “Alabama’s application wears the familiar costume of a ‘state-on-top’ death penalty application—where a State asks this Court to vacate a lower court’s temporary stay so that an execution may proceed,” he wrote.

“But the relief it actually seeks is far more extraordinary—the evisceration of a federal court’s final equitable judgment,” Vladeck continued. The Supreme Court has a long history and well-established set of precedents for handling last-minute appeals from death-row prisoners. Indeed, until the mid-2010s, that was the most significant work it performed on what we now describe as the shadow docket. Since Alabama was asking the court to “effectively set aside a final judgment on the merits,” Vladeck explained, it was really asking for summary reversal, which the court handles through its normal petition-for-certiorari process.

The justices did not explain the reasoning for their decision in Thursday’s order. Alabama’s procedural misstep is significant enough, however, that it would not surprise me if the six justices who voted to deny the state’s request did so entirely for the reasons Vladeck described, regardless of their thoughts on the underlying merits of the lower courts’ rulings. Since the justices didn’t explain themselves, however, that would be only speculation on my part.

You might wonder why I spent so much time describing execution methods if this is simply a procedural outcome. I admit that the court may ultimately overturn the district court’s ruling on the merits docket; that too would not surprise me given the court’s post-Kennedy approach to capital punishment. Surely there is another bespoke rule that they could craft to ensure that the state of Alabama can kill people without hindrance that would not repeal the Eighth Amendment altogether.

But that brings me to the third and final thing that’s revealing about this case: Three justices still would have sided with Alabama. Alito, along with Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, indicated in the court’s order that they would have granted Alabama’s motion to stay the lower court ruling. Since we’re talking about an execution here, that is also effectively a judgment on the merits—Jeffrey Lee could hardly retain counsel or continue appeals from beyond the grave.

As I’ve noted before, the Roberts court is almost institutionally hostile to death-row prisoners. It treats the capital-defense bar as almost inherently suspect, as evidenced by Alito’s affront to the “guerrilla war” that death penalty opponents once waged. Again, nobody wrote any opinions in this matter so we can’t say for sure why they voted the way that they did.

That doesn’t stop us from drawing some reasonable inferences. For Roberts, Kavanaugh, and Justice Amy Coney Barrett, their skepticism of death-row inmates has limits and Alabama’s plea to suffocate this particular prisoner to death apparently found them. For the court’s other three conservative justices, there appears to be almost nothing that they are willing to prioritize over a state’s desire to kill someone.

Decades before Covid-19, the AIDS epidemic tore through communities in the US and around the world. It has killed some 40 million people and continues to take lives today. 

But early on, research and public policy focused on AIDS as a gay men’s disease, overlooking other vulnerable groups—including communities of color and women. 

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This month marks 45 years since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published its first report about a mysterious illness that would eventually be called AIDS. So we’re bringing back Blindspot: The Plague in the Shadows, from reporters Kai Wright and Lizzy Ratner, which chronicles the first years of the HIV epidemic in New York City. 

One of the most influential activists for women with AIDS was Katrina Haslip, a prisoner at a maximum-security prison in upstate New York. In the 1980s, Haslip and other incarcerated women started a support group to educate each other about HIV and AIDS. 

Haslip took her activism beyond prison walls after her release in 1990, even meeting with CDC leaders. One of the main goals was to change the definition of AIDS, which at the time excluded many symptoms that appeared in HIV-positive women. This meant that women with AIDS often did not qualify for government benefits such as Medicaid and disability insurance. 

The podcast series Blindspot: The Plague in the Shadows is a co-production of The History Channel and WNYC Studios. 

This is an update of an episode that originally aired in February 2024.

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If you enjoy the slow sight of defeat, you might take some joy in watching one of the many videos circulating online of workers preparing to remove President Donald Trump’s name from the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts. On Friday afternoon, neon-vested, hard-hatted construction workers began piecing together the scaffolding needed to reach above Kennedy’s name.

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The White House UFC tournament’s biggest problem might be just a few millimeters in size.

The UFC is hosting its America 250 celebration on Sunday, June 14—Donald Trump’s 80th birthday and Flag Day—on the White House’s South Lawn. But in an unexpected turn of events, bugs are likely to be the major opponent during the executive mansion’s first ever cage match.

University of Maryland entomologist Michael Raupp told Axios Friday that the odds of a winged invasion during Sunday’s festivities was 100 percent.

“This event is going to draw a big crowd,” Raupp said. “But guess what? There are going to be even more bugs joining.”

The swarm will include midges, mayflies, stoneflies, caddisflies, winged beetles, “a whole cadre of night-flying moths,” mosquitos, and possibly biting black flies. The buzz will also serve as a banquet for bats that feed on small, flying insects.

The unfortunate reality of the grounds has not been lost on UFC President Dana White, who told Boardroom that he had encountered a “holy shit” level of gnats during a visit last month to the White House’s recently renovated Rose Garden (an artifact of Jackie Onassis’s gentle touch that Trump has since paved with concrete).

“The amount of gnats that were flying around, I’m like, ‘Holy shit’,” White said.

“As soon as I got on the plane, I called my head of production and said, ‘Let me tell you about the gnat situation.’”

Fighters in the octagon will be lit by an enormous, five-ton lighting rig that includes more than 175 square feet of LED lighting—a setup that White observed would be the perfect magnet for all sorts of flying insects.

Beyond that, the bugs could cause a sticky problem between fighters. “In your nose, in your mouth while you’re trying to fight,” White noted while lamenting the complicated nature of outdoor events. He added that his team was considering installing large fans around the cage to keep the bugs away from the action. Those in attendance, however, are unlikely to find similar reprieve.

Mother Nature has other challenges in store for Trump’s birthday bash, as well. Washington is expected to be hot and muggy this weekend, with possible thunderstorms on Sunday evening that could affect the 8 p.m. main card.

White has told reporters that the show will go on, no matter if there’s rain, snow, or “even lightning.”

“You guys all played sports when you were growing up,” White said Wednesday. “Whenever there was lightning, you’d sit the lightning out. When it was over, you played. That’s what we’ll do.”

Could you count to a trillion? Oh, hell no.

I just timed myself counting to 100 as fast as I could. It took 38 seconds.

The higher you count, the longer the numbers get, and so the slower the count becomes, but let’s be ridiculously conservative and assume I could maintain that rapid counting pace. Counting to a trillion would then take 380 billion seconds.

That’s 12,050 years.

How high could a person count? Well, for the sake of argument, suppose I commenced counting immediately upon emerging from my mama’s vagina and kept at it for 100 years—before dying abruptly, because I hadn’t eaten, drank, nor slept during those 100 years.

I would have only made it to 8.3 billion.

A trillion is 1,000 billion. It’s an unfathomable number. As the Wall Street Journal noted yesterday, if you stack a trillion pennies one atop the other, they’ll stretch to the moon and back—twice.

Back in 2021, I published a book, Jackpot, about runaway wealth in America and its effects on those who come into it, and on society at large. One question that came up a lot was, well, should billionaires exist? Even some of my very wealthy sources felt there should perhaps be some upper limits placed on wealth accumulation.

Should billionaires exist? How quaint. What I can now say with authority is that nobody should have a trillion bucks—ever. It’s entirely absurd. Among the nearly 200 nations on earth, only about 20 have a GDP that big. Simply put, it’s way, way, way too much money for any individual to possess—not to mention that Musk didn’t earn it. We allowed him to accumulate it. That was a choice—a bad one, and also dangerous.

I will elaborate, but first let’s have a little fun.

I did some calculations a while back to demonstrate how egregiously rich the world’s richest guy was—and that was at a time when Musk’s net worth was only $200 billion. Here’s my update:

Suppose we wanted to have a game of Monopoly in which the amount of money each player starts with reflects their relative wealth in real life.

And suppose we want it to be Elon Musk vs. some guy with the average middle-class wealth of $453,300. (Economists define middle class as the 50th through 90th wealth percentiles—the “middle 40″—and this number comes from RealTimeInequality.org.)

So, normally, each player starts a Monopoly game with $1,500. In our rigged version, we want our middle-class player to have at least enough to buy a property or two, so we’ll let him start with $500. How much would Musk then get?

He gets $1.1 billion. (Actually more, since he’s now up to $1.1 trillion, per Forbes, but I’ll stick with $1 trillion for simplicity.)

You couldn’t realistically count that high, either, in your lifetime.

So now we’ve got a problem, because each Monopoly set only comes with $20,580. To play this game requires 53,597 sets, which at today’s low Amazon price of $11.99 will run you $643,162. Our middle-class player couldn’t cover that even if he sold his home and liquidated his other assets.

And also, where would you put the boxes? Each set comes in a box 0.19 cubic feet in volume. All told, they would consume 10,183 cubic feet. Assuming you have standard 9-foot ceilings, they would completely fill a 1,131-square-foot room from floor to ceiling.

Our middle-class player doesn’t have any rooms that big in his house—which he had to sell anyway to cover his half of the cost of the sets.

Suppose you took all Musk’s Monopoly money and spread it out on the ground? Turns out, it would paper over roughly 11 football fields, including the end zones. But as those bills are small and multiple denominations, let’s try this with real-life currency.

If you were to convert Musk’s trillion dollars into $100 bills, we’re talking about 10 billion Franklins. Those bills would paper over 1,112,875,000 square feet—just under 40 square miles—enough to cover Manhattan and then some. Put in World Cup terms, Musk’s wealth would cover 14,480 FIFA-approved soccer pitches with $100 bills. Fields of green, indeed.

Far more important than the physical magnitude of $1 trillion, of course, is the power it musters. With his ridiculous trove, Musk, already unaccountable, becomes even more so. Tax expert Bob Lord—who wrote for Mother Jones in 2024 on the coming of the world’s first trillionaire—had a more recent piece on the rise of American oligarchy and how it has infected our democracy. He wrote:

No person anywhere, in any era, has spent as much to sway election outcomes as Musk, the richest person in history who, according to Open Secrets, shelled out almost $292 million in 2024 helping get Trump and other Republican candidates elected. And that doesn’t count the value of harnessing his X platform to support a twice-impeached, felonious former president who openly promised to make the rich richer—and delivered.

Musk expended 0.1 percent of his wealth in the process and got far more in return. The Trump administration promptly shelved dozens of investigations into Musk’s companies, awarded him billions of dollars in new contracts, and sent his firms’ share prices soaring by placing him in charge of the Department of Government Efficiency, an unsanctioned body that succeeded wildly—not in eliminating government fraud and waste as promised, but in gutting and disabling federal agencies, including the ones creating headaches for Musk’s companies. 

Lord details policy choices that have enabled wealth to concentrate in an increasingly small number of hands, culminating in the rise of a hyper-privileged few with the undeserved power to sway public affairs in their interests. This oligarchic class, as Northwestern University scholar Jeffrey Winters demonstrates in a powerful recent book excerpt, is untaxable and untouchable. And none so much as the trillionaire Musk.

The oligarchs, as it were, paid off the government’s keeper, and now Musk has scored the winning goal.

It is, alas, an own-goal for America and her democratic experiment.

Sen. John Husted appeared on Spectrum News channel where a reporter tried his darndest to get the Ohio Republican to answer whether Congress needed to step in and do anything about President Donald Trump’s costly war with Iran. You know, since that is sort of its job. “Iran needs to stop the war,” Husted said. “Iran needs to open the Strait of Hormuz as soon as they stop attacking ships and…

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The Trump administration came incredibly close to putting boots on the ground in Iran to seize enriched uranium, according to reporting from CNN.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine was briefed on the plan last month before briefing President Trump himself. But Trump apparently put the plan on hold given the high potential for U.S. casualties and increased Iranian aggression—a massive risk for his political standing in the midst of a widely unpopular war.

“It would be insanely difficult to fish through those tunnels and all the barrels,” an anonymous source told CNN. “We’d have to set up a massive presence. Essentially, we’d have to invade.”

An invasion would most certainly ensure an Iranian response, either economically—through the continued closing of the Strait of Hormuz—or militarily, by continuing to attack U.S. allies in the region, like Israel and the UAE.

Senate Republicans on Thursday shot down efforts to keep federal troops from getting involved in federal elections.

Republicans on the Senate Armed Services Committee first killed an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act, proposed by Democratic Senator Elissa Slotkin, that would have prohibited using Pentagon funds to deploy the military to seize ballots, voting machines, voter rolls, or any other election materials. The NDAA is the fiscal year’s main funding bill for the military.

After that effort failed, Slotkin proposed another amendment that would have required the Pentagon to notify Congress if troops were deployed to polling places for any reason other than repelling “armed enemies of the United States.” But even that was too much for Republicans on the committee.

“I introduced these amendments to protect our free and fair elections from military interference,” Slotkin told MS NOW. “It’s deeply concerning that none of my Republican colleagues on the committee voted to include it.”

Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal agreed, calling the committee’s party-line votes a worrying sign for November’s midterm elections.

“Republican opposition to barring use of federal troops at the polls is deeply alarming, signaling this extreme step is part of Trump’s agenda to suppress voting,” Blumenthal said. “I’m fearful about it portending illegal domestic deployment of our military.”

Last year, Slotkin was among several Democratic members of Congress who urged members of the military not to follow illegal orders from the Trump administration, and she said that her amendments included language reaffirming that.

“I introduced these amendments to protect our free and fair elections from military interference and intimidation, and importantly, to protect the military and service members from the exact kind of illegal orders I warned about last year,” Slotkin said to MS NOW.

President Trump always claims fraud whenever Republicans don’t perform well in an election, and his allies in the Senate don’t seem willing to check his worst impulses. Refusing to pass what would seem to be obvious affirmations of existing laws suggests that these Republicans would let Trump use the military to overturn elections if he wants.

A cartoon by Pedro Molina. Related | Americans don’t want a data center in their backyard…

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