Disappear Here: TABS, Mon., April 14, 2025

Monday morning roundup of news and things to read and watch!

Tabs gif by your friend Martini Glambassador!

The Social Security Administration has been scheming to purposefully, falsely and illegally classify living immigrants as dead, and goons frogmarched out Social Security employee Greg Pearre when he tried to stop them (!) (Washington Post archive link)

There was an arson attack at Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shaprio’s house, on Passover; no one injured but significant damage. Cody Balmer, 38, of Harrisburg, faces charges of attempted murder, terrorism, aggravated arson and aggravated assault. (AP)

Old Man With Immigrant Wife is gleeful about the Supreme Court order that effectively lets him keep Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, innocent immigrant and father deported by “mistake,” in El Salvador torture prison indefinitely. You see, the government must “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s release, but doesn’t have to “effectuate” it, because Trump is Executive King of All He Surveys and the only one who can conduct foreign affairs, even when and if he conducts them by OOPS. And El Salvador presidente Nayib Bukele is coming to the White House today, probably so that Trump can rub it in Roberts’ and the world’s face that his foreign policy shall be not asking “President B” for Abrego Garcia back, and instead is praising Bukele for his big, beautiful sovereign person-disappearing torture prisons. (Daily Beast / AFP)

Sean McGarvey, President of the North American Building Trades Union, spoke out:

@moreperfectunionKilmar Abrego Garcia was in the first year of a sheet metal apprenticeship in Baltimore when he was deported because of an “administrative error.” His union @SMART union says, Garcia “was literally helping to build this great country.”

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A Boston immigration attorney got a letter from DHS demanding she lave the country. “I think it says they're not being careful.” (NBC Boston)

Foreign academics are refusing to come to the US for conferences. (Guardian)

Trump’s got Tariffs for our closest trading partners! Tariffs for everybody except certain of our enemies! GREAT TIME TO BUY! Then tariff discount for everybody and still highest tariffs ever. Then 125 percent on China. Then 145 percent. Then 125 percent FROM China. Then no tariffs incoming because tariff-collecting system is broken! Then “hillbilly” JD Vance insulting the Chinese by calling them peasants. Then Trump waiting by the phone for China to call begging with tears in their eyes. But the phone did not ring, and it was them! He walked back tariffs on electronic devices, and starred in AI videos all over TikTok sewing Nikes in a sweatshop. Then Chinese manufacturers got on TikTok exposing the major brands they supply and offering to sell everything from purses to light fixtures to capsule houses to Americans directly. Kicking your own supply chain in the nuts with a steel toe boot, that is THE ART OF THE DEAL! (Washington Post archive link / CNBC)

@lcsign_lightboxWe can ship to you😘😘🙌 #led #ledsign #outdoorlighting #backlit #backlitsign #arcylic #arcylicart #businesslogo #artwork #signsupplier #signfactory #lcsign #signmaking #signmaker #us #donaldtrump

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That election for a North Carolina supreme court judge seat is STILL not certified! On Friday said-same North Carolina supreme court overturned most of the state’s Court of Appeals panel ruling that let LOSER judge Jefferson Griffin throw out more than 60,000 votes over claims that numbers are missing from their paperwork. Now those votes can stay on the tally, but votes from overseas people who have never lived in NC can be thrown out completely, and military or overseas voters without copies of photo identification or ID exception forms on file have 30 days to “cure” their ballots. WINNER judge Allison Riggs has gone back to federal court about it. (AP)

ZUCKERBORG IN COURT! The Federal Trade Commission has been suing Meta since the first Trump administration for antitrust big-mergering / rival-crushing, and now the case is finally in court in DC. Witnesses are expected to include a who’s who of former Faceblort executives like Sheryl “Lean In” Sandberg, and from competitors like TikTok and Pinterest. Will The Zuck’s bribe checks, hatesignaling company policies and singing along with the January 6 choir get him any favors back from Donald Trump, Lord of All Regulators? We shall see. And a separate lawsuit for similar Meta dirty antitrust dealings was also just announced by 48 state attorneys general. (The Verge)

Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez fired up a five-figures-big crowd at “Fighting Oligarchy” rally in downtown LA on Saturday, over the “extraordinary danger” of the authoritarian society we find ourselves in, with people being fired, targeting and disappeared into vans. (LA Times)

Law firms standing up! Susman Godfrey, which happened to have just won a defamation ruling for Dominion Voting Systems against Newsmax, is now the fourth law firm to challenge Trump in court over executive orders against them. (Bloomberg / CNN)

Like China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs just said, “give the bully an inch, he will take a mile.” And now Trump wants to enact a consent decree against Columbia University for the crime of doing civil rights. (Columbia University)

Out at the Naval Academy library: Maya Angelou, “Memorializing the Holocaust.” In: “Mein Kampf,” “The Bell Curve.” (New York Times)

In extra dumb Trump news, maybe he’s gonna buy Greenland by paying everybody there $10,000, maybe he’s gonna boycott the G20 because it’s in white-supremacy-denying South Africa. (Latin Times / Punch)

War on the gender-nonconforming: trans woman Marcy Rheintgen got arrested in Florida for deliberately disobeying their bathroom law. Walmart fired a 6’4” cis woman because a customer thought she was trans. Maine is suing over the administration’s funding freeze over the state’s refusal to to ban trans athletes, and a judge has issued a TRO. Canadian musician Bells Larsen was forced to cancel a US tour after being denied a visa for being trans. (New York Times / The Advocate / AP / Stereogum)

FLUFF PIECES:

New York Magazine: won’t somebody think of the poor LONELY men who are ignoring their girlfriends and wives to spend thousands of dollars to wank to OnlyFans models?! (New York Magazine)

The New York Times has a profile of Natalie Winters, Steve Bannon’s protégé who started working at his “War Room” the literal day she graduated high school. “My best friend from college is, like, Steve,” she says. Very normal, very cool. (NYT)

And the Washington Post also went on a trip to Butterworth’s, to fawn over “MAGA Fashionistas” in their “country club meets J. Crew ad” outfits, drinking specialty cocktails, such as the “Appeal to Heaven,” and proclaimed them hotties from the pages of VOGUE. Spit-take, bwaahhahahaha! (Washington Post)

That’s all we can take for now! Laters!

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