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L.L. #14, May 3 [1]

['The Geogre', 'View Profile', 'Chitown Kev', 'Miles Estrelle', 'A Pagan In Arizona', 'Chloris Creator', 'Melody', 'Mel']

Date: 2026-05-03  

[Preface:] This is Laudable Links for Sunday, May 3. I have three (usually) stories that I think are worth reading. I provide a link and some enticement to read them (I hope). The right to wrongs is reserved, and mistakes are guaranteed — else what’s a heaven for? Comments needed, authors welcomed, and members devoutly to be wished (more than that other thing).

This morning’s meal:

Senators ban senators from betting on their own campaigns on Polly Market. Ain’t no ban like a self-ban. Ask any Catholic in Lent. A serious but somewhat speculative article on a purported “European strategy” (to make it MAGA) by the Trump administration that is flopping like a kraken on the shore. Kristi Noem gets a benchslap from Judge Ho — the good Judge Ho: Dale — for not even trying to hide her effort to destroy TPS to please President Miller.

Everyone photographs her. She is actually an early example of LGBTQ public art, I’m told.

So the legislature IS concerned about the predictive markets, just not concerned enough for legislation.

Jon Brodkin, who is one of the authors most worthy of following at Ars Technica, writes that “Senators ban themselves from prediction markets after candidates bet on own races.” Apparently, they note that, like gambling on your own baseball team, it’s a bit, oh, corrupt.

[Quote |] US senators voted unanimously to ban themselves from making bets on prediction markets yesterday, about a week after Kalshi said it caught three congressional candidates betting on their own campaigns.

The resolution to prohibit senators from trading on prediction markets passed yesterday by unanimous consent. The action amends the Senate’s conflict-of-interest rules and does not require approval by the House of Representatives. The House has a pending resolution that would impose a similar rule on its own members.[| End Quote]

No one is saying that Governor Mills, for example, gave herself a going away present by betting on her own drop-out down to the hour, but it is exactly the sort of “insider” information that would amount to manipulation that Kalshi would flag. More, though, campaigns spend massive amounts on special polling and strategy documents, so they have, to say the least, insider knowledge. . . and so do their staff.

Bernie Moreno, from whom you would buy a used car, apparently, introduced the measure, but Senator Alex Padillo recognized the hole it left by only blocking senators. He amended it to cover members of the senatorial office and employees. A gap may still exist for campaigns.

[Quote |] Padilla also said he is pushing “for legislation to rein in Trump administration officials who may be profiting off insider knowledge, including military operations.” A US Army soldier was recently arrested for insider trading after being accused of making prediction-market wagers on the timing of the military’s capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. [| End Quote]

That may face trouble. As long as these prediction markets get classified as commodity exchange markets, it’s going to be hard to say that military and executive branch do not have free speech rights to exchange. What we need, and needed all along, is for their to be classified as either gambling or a securities exchange.

About the pols caught on Kalshi, I think we’ll all agree that they were absolutely devastated by their punishment:

[Quote |] Kalshi has an extensive rulebook that allows it to impose fines, bans, and suspensions on traders. Two of the three candidates agreed to settlements with Kalshi. Democrat Matt Klein, a House candidate in Minnesota, agreed to a five-year suspension and fine of $539.85. Republican Ezekiel Enriquez, a House candidate in Texas who lost in the primary, agreed to a five-year suspension and $784.20 fine.

Kalshi also issued a five-year suspension and a penalty of $6,229.30 to independent Mark Moran, a Senate candidate in Virginia, who did not agree to a settlement.[| End Quote]

The Independent was even happy to talk about how chastened he was.

[Quote |] “For $100, I just got more attention from CNN, Fox, WSJ, etc than any media consultant ever,” he wrote. “In politics, money has always bought attention, but I can get attention for almost free.” [| End Quote]

As we know, Kalshi and Polymarket are protected from state oversight and regulation by the ruling that they, and their small fry cousins, are commodities futures exchanges. What commodity? I got no answer, but we can take bets on the answer.

There was a great deal more to Jon Brodkin’s article, but I felt dirty, so I want to move over to the real filth: the Projectile 2025 vision of Europe. The Trump administration put out its 2025 National Security Strategy document, and it was SHOCKING. It was also neo-fascist. It said that nations only exist because of their border patrols and the force they use to ensure integrity. It said that the US is the “inheritor” of the real culture of Europe. It said that Europe had lost its position and its own “culture” in favor of a mixing. It was “blood and soil,” if only “blood and soil” were logorrheic.

At Lawfare, John Drennan and Ariane Tabatabai deduce a “European project” from this and other documents and write “U.S. Meddling in European Domestic Politics Is Backfiring.” Whether there is an explicit European project or just the projection of general fascistic impulses, the essay is sound: Meddling in European domestic politics is backfiring.

Assume you know about Vance and Rubio (and Donald by telephone) in Hungary. The Trump project has been to seek out far-right parties in Europe (Fidesz, AfP, the French National Rally) to “counter this alleged sovereignty-destroying agenda.” For “sovereignty destroying,” the rest of us read “multilateralism,” “alliances,” “trade blocks,” and, most challenging to the Trump view, ethnic and religious toleration. If you, like the Trumpists, think that to be French is to be Catholic, pale skinned, and French-speaking, then every Muslim from Northern Africa is a destruction of “France.”

This tells you that the Trump agenda is to unmake the post-Enlightenment state.

[Quote |] The Trump administration is treating apparent but superficial ideational alignment as durable partnerships that can be leveraged to implement U.S. strategy. U.S. officials are attempting to reverse what they likely see as elite-driven social and demographic transformation by empowering nationalist/sovereigntist governments that seem to share their worldview. These officials have operationalized the NSS through increasingly bold interventions in European domestic politics. Take, for example, the controversies surrounding Trump’s ambassadors in Europe whose attempts at meddling in the domestic affairs of the countries where they represent the United States is creating tensions in Washington’s bilateral relationships with key allies.[| End Quote]

Now we have a fork in the road. What do we think the “Trump worldview” or the “Trump master” is? Do we think that the NSS was to serve American racists for revanchist economic ends? Do we think that the Trump years have been an attempt to destroy multilaterialism so that a new era of scams and “deals” can take its place, or do we think that Donald serves Vlad?

[Quote |] Rather than fragmenting the EU and empowering nationalist governments, U.S. interventions have thus far helped further consolidate Europe’s political identity and commitment to greater strategic autonomy vis-a-vis the United States while also accelerating a rupture in transatlantic relations. In treating European electorates as passive recipients of U.S. political messaging, the administration has underestimated a basic dynamic: Overt U.S. interference is galvanizing precisely the sovereign autonomy and national self-determination that the administration’s NSS claims to be defending. [| End Quote]

I can believe that some zealots of MAGA thought that Tucker Carlson was right and that all of Europe yearned to breathe white might. I can believe that Donald himself could have been told by someone smarter that breaking the EU and NATO would lead to all sorts of bilateral “deals” that could get his firms’ beaks wet. (Bilateral deals are infinitely less efficient than multilateral ones, paradoxically.) And yet we know that Putin’s number one goal is weakening the EU, and his number two goal is severing the tie between the EU and USA.

Sending hateful boors as ambassadors, staffing embassies with shitposting edge lords. . . these will help build anti-Americanism, pro-Europeanism, but they will also weaken the aggregate strength of the EU. In other words, Donald is disappointed, but Vlad can be happy regardless.

This is a first class article, full of meat. I’m stopping here because I’ve taken a good deal of your time and because I’ve gotten to the question that I, your curator, wanted to pose. I’m selfish like that.

We know that the Miller-Trump administration has said, explicitly, that Temporary Protected Status delinda est. They think it’s an Obama policy, even though it was passed by Congress under George H. W. Bush (1990). Specifically, TPS for minors really gets them irritated. Kristi gNoem was very loyal and very lazy. She didn’t do much thinking or rationalizing.

Now, Colin Kalmbacher says that “Judge tears into Kristi Noem for ‘perfunctory’ efforts to bypass the law.” The judge in question is U.S. District Judge Dale Ho, and the case is a class action suit brought by 3,200 Yemeni’s under TPS after DHS announced, without rationale, that their TPS was canceled.

[Quote |] The plaintiffs argued that the termination decision was “not based on an objective review of country conditions as required by statute” but rather part of a “predetermined presidential agenda to end TPS,” according to the 68-page original petition.

“Yemen remains engulfed in armed conflict, mass displacement, hunger, institutional collapse, and a humanitarian emergency,” the lawsuit noted before contrasting the State Department’s warning against traveling to Yemen “for any reason” with the DHS plan to terminate TPS.[| End Quote]

The U.S. State Department warns Americans not to go to Yemen under any circumstances due to security problems, and yet gNoem said that there were no reasons to protect Yemenis in America from deportation. This matters.

[Quote |] Part of the required inquiry under federal law is consultation “with appropriate agencies” before issuing a termination notice, according to the court. And such consultation, Ho notes, is precisely what Noem did not do.

To hear the government tell it, Noem and some of her staff satisfied the consultation requirement by discussing U.S. foreign policy in a single email thread that began with a request to make sure the State Department’s “consultation” was completed by December 2025.[| End Quote]

How bad was the lack of consideration?

[Quote |] “Absolutely no information about the relevant conditions in Yemen (i.e., armed conflict and safety of Yemeni nationals upon return) was requested by DHS, and none was provided by State,” the opinion reads. “At bottom, the Government’s view is that the Secretary can satisfy the consultation requirement by communicating about topics that have no bearing on the conditions that, under the statute, are appropriate to the Secretary’s decision whether to terminate TPS.“

Summing up the relevant analysis, Ho says, “the perfunctory 1-2 sentence emails do not even address the conditions that the Secretary was required to review before making her TPS decision.” [| End Quote]

It sure looks like the plaintiffs are right that the decision was made on no basis except an instruction to terminate TPS by the end of 2025. That’s not legal, but there weren’t supposed to be any people left to get to court, I guess.

From the court’s opinion: [Quote |] At her confirmation hearing in January 2025, then-nominee for Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem stated that TPS “has been abused and manipulated by the Biden Administration and that will no longer be allowed.” After taking office, she then proceeded to vacate various TPS designations issued during the previous Administration, and then terminated the TPS designations for every country that has come up for periodic review, including: Venezuela, Haiti, Afghanistan, Cameroon, Nicaragua, Honduras, Nepal, Syria, South Sudan, Burma (Myanmar), Somalia, Ethiopia, and Yemen. [| End Quote]

It’s not too late for the Yemeni. Sadly, J. Carl Nichols (second most MAGA judge on the DC court) has just made it all but too late for a number of children by giving Donald the green light to make every last one of them renew their vetted sponsors and go into detention while they wait. This is a “blanket re-application process” for the Office of Refugee Resettlement and amounts to child separation, Mach 2.

[Conclusion:] Sorry to end with a bummer, but that’s how it is.

Therefore, let me end actually with real beauty. Richard Lovelace was a Cavalier (a royalist who fought for King Charles I during the first English Civil War). After the war, when the Republicans had won, he was imprisoned. He wrote to his beloved several poems. He referred to her as “Althea.”

“To Althea, from Prison”

By Richard Lovelace

When Love with unconfinèd wings

Hovers within my Gates,

And my divine Althea brings

To whisper at the Grates;

When I lie tangled in her hair,

And fettered to her eye,

The Gods that wanton in the Air,

Know no such Liberty.

— —

When flowing Cups run swiftly round

With no allaying Thames,

Our careless heads with Roses bound,

Our hearts with Loyal Flames;

When thirsty grief in Wine we steep,

When Healths and draughts go free,

Fishes that tipple in the Deep

Know no such Liberty.

— — —

When (like committed linnets*) I *caged birds

With shriller throat shall sing

The sweetness, Mercy, Majesty,

And glories of my King;

When I shall voice aloud how good

He is, how Great should be,

Enlargèd Winds, that curl the Flood,

Know no such Liberty.

— — — —

Stone Walls do not a Prison make,

Nor Iron bars a Cage;

Minds innocent and quiet take

That for an Hermitage.

If I have freedom in my Love,

And in my soul am free,

Angels alone that soar above,

Enjoy such Liberty.

[END]
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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2026/5/3/800032225/community/l-l-14-may-3/

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