How the new pope will be elected

I have not yet seen the new thriller film Conclave (the word comes from the Latin cum clave, meaning “with key”) about the election of a pope but it looks like the filmmakers hit the jackpot in terms of timing since the death today of pope Francis means that we will have the process unfolding before us within the next few weeks when the cardinals gather in Rome to elect a new pope and the storm of publicity will make people even more curious about the film

Only 135 of the cardinals are eligible to vote, with the remaining 117 excluded from voting because they are over the age of 80. 108 of the voting cardinals were appointed by Francis so this election will very much bear his imprint. Although he was from Argentina, most of the voting cardinals are still from Europe, though now a quarter of the cardinals are from Asia. They meet in a locked room after excluding all but the voting cardinals and a handful of people such as doctors, confessors, masters of ceremonies, cooks, and cleaning staff, all of whom are also sworn to secrecy.
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Supreme Court stops deportations

It has become clear that the Trump gang’s plan is to summarily detain and deport people before they have had a chance to challenge their detention in the courts via a habeas corpus petition. Once the people have been deported, they then claim that there is nothing they can do to bring them back, even if the plane carrying them was still in the air. This practice so enraged a district court judge James Boasberg that he began criminal contempt proceedings against the government because of their earlier defiance of his order to turn around planes that had been transporting people to El Salvador prions and then stonewalling his attempts to get them to give him a clear timeline of their actions.

A federal judge found probable cause Wednesday to hold the Trump administration in criminal contempt for willfully disobeying his order to immediately halt deportations under the rarely used Alien Enemies Act and turn around any airborne planes.

U.S. District Judge James Boasberg’s order gives the administration a final opportunity to come into compliance but says he otherwise will take steps to identify the specific people who flouted his March 15 ruling, which was later lifted by the Supreme Court, and refer them for prosecution.
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In dispute is whether the government violated an oral order from Boasberg given around 6:45 p.m. that day to halt or turn around any flights carrying migrants. 

The White House has sought to sidestep that question, saying it complied with a 7:27 p.m. written order. In court, however, they have declined to provide Boasberg with flight details and have asserted the ability to do so under the state secrets privilege.

Boasberg on Thursday raised the specter that the administration’s delay in publicizing the proclamation could have been “trying to put measures in place to get people subject to the proclamation removed from the country before it’s possible to challenge” their deportation and before it could be blocked by a court.

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Appeals Court slaps down Trump

After the US Supreme Court said that the Trump administration needed to facilitate Kilmar Ábrego García’s release from a prison in El Salvador, they started, as predicted, playing word games to not do anything, arguing that ‘facilitate’ only meant that if he should turn up at the US border, they would let him in but that they need do nothing more. They had earlier admitted that sending him had been a mistake but said that since he was now in the custody of El Salvador there was nothing that they could do.

The president of El Salvador came to the White House and he and Trump gave a joint press conference where they yucked it up and seemed to find it highly amusing that an innocent man is now in a foreign prison separated from his family here, and has been reportedly traumatized by the experience. It was disgusting to see how little regard they had for the fate of an innocent man.

The case went before a three-judge panel from the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and they blasted this line of reasoning in a unanimous opinion, saying that the word ‘facilitate’ did not allow the government to do nothing
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Affirmative action for US students

It is clear that the Trump gang is going after foreign students by revoking their student visas willy-nilly for the most trivial of reasons, while pretending that it is about fighting anti-Semitism.

“The fight for the freedom of Palestine and the fight against antisemitism go hand in hand because injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Columbia student Mohsen Mahdawi was crystal clear in his condemnation of antisemitism during his 2023 “60 Minutes” interview. “To be antisemitic is unjust,” the student activist plainly stated, denouncing anyone who uses antisemitic rhetoric when protesting Israel’s war on Gaza.

On Monday, Donald Trump’s administration arrested Mahdawi after sadistically luring him to an immigration office by implying his citizenship application process was complete. The excuse offered by Secretary of State Marco Rubio is that Mahdawi needs to be deported to halt the spread of antisemitism. But Rubio’s team offered no evidence that Mahdawi is antisemitic, and did not bother to acknowledge his very public denunciation of antisemitism. 

Similar accusations have been leveled at Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia graduate and green card holder arrested for participating in the Gaza protests, and Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts student on a visa from Turkey, arrested for signing an op-ed opposing the war. There has been no evidence produced of antisemitism from either, however. On the contrary, the Washington Post reports that an internal State Department memo written before Ozturk’s arrest found no evidence to support the accusation. Mikey Barat, Mahdawi’s Israeli friend, told The Intercept that while they “do not agree on everything,” Mahdawi “has denounced violence” and seeks “coexistence.” 

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Trump’s China obsession will hurt him and the US

One of the features of Trump is how he seems to view China as not merely a trade rival to be competed with but as an arch enemy to be vanquished, while viewing Russia as a friend. There are many pieces of evidence for this but perhaps the most significant is how he he has imposed massive tariffs on just China (while backing off on most of his tariffs on the rest of the world) while Russia was excluded from all the tariffs. It is a curious reversal of long standing US foreign policy that viewed Russia (as the successor to the Soviet Union) as the enemy symbolizing the evil empire of Communism while Richard Nixon began the policy of engaging with China.

The contrast between China’s and Trump’s policy-making cannot be starker. China is big on long-term planning with its five-year plans, ten-year plans, and even longer-term strategic planning while Trump careens from one policy to another as the whim seems to strike him, reversing himself sometimes within a few days. He wants to somehow hurt China and thinks that high tariffs will damage their economy and cause them to grovel before him.
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What’s happening in Canada

One of the most inexplicable things that Trump has done (and he has done so many that it is hard to keep score) is him going out of his way to insult and demean Canada, America’s long-time friend, ally, and neighbor. One can understand Trump doing that to another long-time friend and neighbor Mexico because that country is full of, well, Mexicans, and thus in MAGA eyes an inferior people. But Canada is largely affluent, white, English-speaking, and (at least nominally) Christian, just the kind of people Trump likes. So why go after Canada, claiming that they will become the 51st state and referring to their then prime minister Justin Trudeau as ‘governor’? Does he think that speaking of them as potentially the 51st state is some kind of compliment to them, of their desirability?

If so, he has badly miscalculated. Canada goes to the polls on April 28 and at the beginning of the year it looked like like the Conservatives would cruise to an easy victory, crushing the incumbent Liberals. But since Trump took office, things have changed dramatically, and now it looks like the new leader of the Liberals Mark Carney, by taking a defiant line in response to Trump’s threats, might well lead his party to victory over the Conservatives led by Pierre Poilievre.
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Trump has blustered himself into a corner

What happens when you are confronted by an enemy and you fire all the weapons in your arsenal at it but after using up all your ammunition, you still fail to stop it and it keeps coming at you? Your only option then is to run like hell in the opposite direction. This is what Trump is learning.

Trump is finding this out the hard way as we can see from his reversals on tariffs, something that is comical to watch if it were not causing serious gyrations in the world economy. To his ignorant brain, the problem with the US economy was that it was running a global trade deficit in terms of goods. (It is running a global trade surplus in terms of services but since that is not something tangible, he does not seem to care as much about it.) He wants the US to have a global trade surplus on goods and thinks that the way to do that is to hugely raise tariffs on imports, making imports more expensive and thus reducing the local demand. He also wants to raise government revenue so that he can provide a tax cut for the wealthy, the desirability of which has long been an article of faith for Republicans, but which is in stark contradiction to their professed goal of cutting the deficit since their tax cuts would cause the deficits to skyrocket.

One can see how Trump would think that he could solve both problems with one stroke, by massively raising tariffs on imports. This would result in imports getting reduced while also raising revenues for the government, never mind that those two results work against each other since reduced imports would also mean reduced revenues. No doubt he thought that even if imports came down, the extra tariffs would still increase revenues. Of course there is the problem, known to anyone with even the mildest grasp of trade, that tariffs are paid by the importer and passed on to the consumer so any rise in revenues is effectively a tax increase on US consumers. Trump tried to bluff his way out of that by falsely claiming that the exporting countries would be paying the tariffs, something that even he, as ignorant as he is, could not possibly believe but thinks that the rubes will buy it.
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Jesus, not patriotism, has become the last refuge of the scoundrel

Russell Brand is a British media personality who started out as a standup comedian before branching out into other fields. In 2023, an investigation by various British media outlets revealed a pattern of abusive behavior dating back to 2006. The reports resulted in more women coming forward with new allegations of a disgusting nature.

Brand has denied all of the allegations and promoted conspiracy theories regarding them. He has since been charged with multiple counts of rape, oral rape, indecent assault, and sexual assault, and is due to appear at Westminster Magistrates’ Court on 2 May 2025 for his first hearing. In addition, on 7 April 2025, news outlets reported Brand to be the subject of a civil action case filed in New York state, accusing him of sexual assault whilst intoxicated, during filming of Arthur in 2010.

While he once used to espouse progressive causes, around 2021 or so his views shifted and he became more involved with American rightwing causes. Since the allegations of abuse have become public, he now claims to have found Jesus and was publicly baptized in the river Thames, and now claims that he is a victim of a conspiracy. He has become MAGA-adjacent and of course they have embraced him.
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Supreme Court says Trump must return man illegally sent to El Salvador

I posted three days ago about how Trump faced his first major test before the US Supreme Court about the extent of his powers in a case involving a man who was sent illegally to a prison in El Salvador.

The Supreme Court issued a ruling today that Trump’s action has to be reversed.

The US supreme court upheld on Thursday a judge’s order requiring Donald Trump’s administration to facilitate the return to the United States of a Salvadoran man who the government has acknowledged was deported in error to El Salvador.

US district judge Paula Xinis last week issued an order that the administration “facilitate and effectuate” the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, in response to a lawsuit filed by the man and his family challenging the legality of his deportation.

The supreme court, in an unsigned decision, said that the judge’s order “properly requires the government to ‘facilitate’ Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador”.
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