Julia Conley, Common Dreams

New revelations from right-wing political commentator Tucker Carlson about President Donald Trump’s push to wage war on Iran earlier this year prompted the latest calls for Cabinet members to invoke the 25th Amendment and force Trump out of office on the grounds that he is unable to fulfill the duties of the office—namely, to protect the security of the people of the United States.

“Days before the war began,” Carlson told Steve Inskeep of NPR on Thursday, the president explicitly said that the outcome of the conflict didn’t matter, because “in the end we all die, anyway.”

Carlson revealed that he visited Trump in the Oval Office of the White House in late February, after having gone to Tel Aviv and interviewed Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Israel....

A lawyer for Anthony Darrell Hines, a man who was convicted of the 1985 murder of Catherine Jean Jackson Jenkins in Kingston Springs, Tennessee, said the state’s Republican governor will force a “grotesque spectacle” to move forward on Thursday by refusing to stop Hines’ planned execution despite a botched lethal injection involving another death row inmate in May.

The lawyer, Kit Thomas, noted that Hines, 66, has experienced muscular atrophy after several recent strokes, has been in a wheelchair or confined to his bed for eight months, and has stiffness in his arm that forces his hand to remain clenched in a fist—medical issues that could make it challenging for physicians and staffers to establish an IV line to administer lethal drugs.

Hines’ medical condition particularly raises alarm considering the Tennessee Department of Correction’s attempt to execute Tony Carruthers earlier this year in an ordeal that continued for an hour and 15 minutes before a warden intervened....

President Donald Trump has spent years insisting that immigrant communities are “taking our jobs” and that expelling migrants via the mass deportation campaign he’s imposed on cities and towns across the country would swiftly result in an employment boom—but a new study reveals how aggressive raids by federal agents are resulting in a decline in employment for US-born citizens as well as their immigrant neighbors and coworkers.

A study authored by Elizabeth Cox and Chloe East and published by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that while Trump’s sweeping raids and arrests of hundreds of thousands of people have pushed those who have been deported out of their jobs, and “immigrants who remain in the US are working less due to chilling effects,” those changes have done nothing to stimulate job growth among US citizens.

“We show no evidence of positive effects of the labor market outcomes of US-born workers,” wrote the authors. “Instead, ICE activity lowers the employment rate of US-born male workers, likely driven by a combination of complementarities in production and reductions in economic activity both reducing labor demand for US-born workers.”...

A top immigration policy expert accused a right-wing online news source of spreading an “outrageous lie” on Monday about the US Department of Homeland Security’s top statistician, who resigned over the weekend and cited President Donald Trump’s “war on immigrants” as a major reason for his departure.

America First Post wrote in a post on social media that Marc Rosenblum, who until recently was the executive director of the DHS Office of Homeland Security Statistics (OHSS), “easily could’ve been underreporting deportations or illegal populations, ruining data.”

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, countered that Rosenblum sought under both the first Trump administration and the Biden administration to publish “the most transparent data on immigration enforcement ever; monthly information on [US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection] arrests and removals, stuff that had NEVER been published before.”...

Days after his own supporters organized 142 demonstrations against artificial intelligence data centers in 42 states, President Donald Trump claimed that “smart communities” across the U.S. “really want” the facilities known for raising electricity bills, consuming millions of gallons of water daily, and creating few permanent job opportunities.

At an event promoting his “Ratepayer Protection Pledge”—a plan to secure deals with major tech companies to keep household utility bills down in communities with data centers, which experts say is unlikely to produce meaningful savings for families—the president suggested that recent polls showing 7 in 10 Americans oppose data centers in their towns are the result of “propaganda... trying to convince everybody that this isn’t a positive thing.”

“You have some communities that really want this,” said Trump. “And frankly those are the smart communities, because it means a tremendous number of jobs... They’re begging for them.”...