TV News LIES

The Supreme Court on Thursday came to the rescue of Texas Republicans, allowing next year’s elections to be held under the state’s congressional redistricting plan favorable to the GOP and pushed by President Donald Trump despite a lower-court ruling that the map likely discriminates on the basis of race.

The justices acted on an emergency request from Texas for quick action because qualifying in the new districts already has begun, with primary elections in March.

The Supreme Court’s order puts the 2-1 ruling blocking the map on hold at least until after the high court issues a final decision in the case. Justice Samuel Alito had previously temporarily blocked the order while the full court considered the Texas appeal.

The justices have blocked past lower-court rulings in congressional redistricting cases, most recently in Alabama and Louisiana, that came several months before elections.

The Texas congressional map enacted last summer at Trump’s urging was engineered to give Republicans five additional House seats.

More...

A federal judge late on Tuesday blocked the Trump administration from making widespread immigration arrests in the nation’s capital without warrants or probable cause that the person would be an imminent flight risk.

The US district judge Beryl Howell in Washington granted a preliminary injunction sought by civil liberties and immigrants’ rights groups in a lawsuit against the US Department of Homeland Security.

The lawsuit alleged that since Donald Trump declared an emergency in Washington in August, there has been a pattern of widespread, unlawful immigration arrests. Community members have reported living in fear of being stopped while driving or walking through their neighborhoods and many have avoided going to work, walking children to school or other daily activities in an attempt to avoid checkpoints and immigration enforcement agents.

Officers making civil immigration arrests generally have to have an administrative warrant. Under the Immigration and Nationality Act, they may make arrests without a warrant only if they have probable cause to believe the person is in the US illegally and is likely to escape before a warrant can be obtained, according to Howell’s ruling.

More...

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz condemned President Donald Trump for his use of a slur in a social media post on Thanksgiving, Nov. 27, and for his characterization of the state's Somali immigrant and diaspora community.

Appearing on NBC's "Meet the Press" on Nov. 30, Walz said Trump's use of the r-word, which the president used to insult to the Democratic governor and 2024 vice presidential hopeful, was "damaging."

"This is what Donald Trump has done. He has normalized this type of hateful behavior and this type of language," Walz said of Trump's social media post. "At first, I think it’s just because he’s not a good human being. But secondly, (it’s) to distract from his incompetency."

While the word was introduced as a medical term in 1961, it has evolved over the decades to become a slur used to demean people with and without disabilities. Disability advocates seek to end its use, and the president's post has ignited backlash.

Walz told NBC that "kids know better" than to use the word, and criticized attempts to brush off outrage as "woke" language policing.

More...

The Trump administration is framing its boat strikes against drug cartels in the Caribbean in part as a collective self-defense effort on behalf of US allies in the region, according to three people directly familiar with the administration’s internal legal argument.

The legal analysis rests on a premise – for which there is no immediate public evidence – that the cartels are waging armed violence against the security forces of allies like Mexico, and that the violence is financed by cocaine shipments.

As a result, according to the legal analysis, the strikes are targeting the cocaine, and the deaths of anyone on board should be treated as an enemy casualty or collateral damage if any civilians are killed, rather than murder.

That line of reasoning, which forms the backbone of a classified justice department office of legal counsel (OLC) opinion, provides the clearest explanation to date how the US satisfied the conditions to use lethal force.

But it marks a sharp departure from Donald Trump’s narrative to the public every time he has discussed the 21 strikes that have killed more than 80 people, which he has portrayed as an effort to stop overdose deaths.

A White House official responded that Trump has not been making a legal argument. Still, Trump’s remarks remain the only public reason for why the US is firing missiles – when the legal justification is in fact very different.

And it would also be the first time the US has claimed – dubiously, and contrary to the widely held understanding – that the cartels are using cocaine proceeds to wage wars, rather than to make money.

In a statement, a justice department spokesperson said: “These operations were ordered consistent with the law of armed conflict.” The Pentagon did not respond to a request for comment.

More...

The widow of Jamal Khashoggi slammed President Trump on Tuesday for seeking to discredit her late husband’s reputation amid a visit from Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. 

Khashoggi, who was an opinions journalist for The Washington Post, was killed in 2018 at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey.

“@potus There is no justification to murder my husband. While Jamal was a good transparent and brave man many people may not have agreed with his opinions and desire for freedom of the press,” Hanan Elatr Khashoggi wrote in a statement on the social platform X.

“The Crown Prince said he was sorry so he should meet me, apologize and compensate me for the murder of my husband,” added Khashoggi, who had married her husband in Virginia in 2018, months before he was killed.

She previously submitted a letter to Trump and first lady Melania Trump requesting they back her demands to have her husband’s body returned and receive financial compensation for Khashoggi’s death during the crown prince’s Tuesday White House visit.

However, when asked about Khashoggi’s death, the president defended Crown Prince Mohammed, telling reporters that the leader “knew nothing about that” and alleging “a lot of people didn’t like that gentleman.”

More...

Lawyers for Lisa Cook, the Federal Reserve governor, called Trump administration allegations of mortgage fraud against her “baseless” on Monday and accused the administration of “cherry-picking” discrepancies to bolster their claims.

After accusing Cook of misrepresenting multiple residences as her primary residence to get a better mortgage rate, Donald Trump briefly fired Cook from her role as a Fed governor and as one of 12 voting members of the Federal Reserve board that sets interest rates. The supreme court reinstated her and will in January hear arguments over Cook’s removal.

In the letter, addressed to Pam Bondi, the US attorney general, and Edward Martin, the deputy attorney general, Abbe Lowell, Cook’s lawyer, outlined for the first time Cook’s detailed defense against the accusations. Lowell said that the dispute involves three of Cook’s properties: a home in Ann Arbor, Michigan, a condo in Atlanta, Georgia, and a home in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Lowell said Cook’s primary residence is in Ann Arbor, where she has been a professor at Michigan State University since 2005. While she has been on unpaid leave from the position as she serves on the Fed board, she intends to return to Ann Arbor once her post ends, the letter said.

More...