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What comes first, the shirt sponsor or the stadium? 😅

We will not have a new stadium until the early mid 2030s (2033 or 2034 or so) at the earliest. Maybe longer, I fear.

Uefa gives ‘reluctant’ approval for domestic games to be played abroad this season Governing body says go-ahead shouldn’t set precedent Barcelona poised to play in US, and Milan in Australiahttps://www.theguardian.com/football/2025/oct/06/uefa-approval-domestic-games-to-be-played-abroad

EXCLUSIVE: Arsenal exploring options to increase capacity beyond 70,000 as 20th anniversary of move from Highbury approaches (@JWTelegraph and @SamWallaceTel) And Chelsea continues to hover around 41,000K😔 All of these teams have larger and newer stadiums or renovated stands. Spurs, Arsenal, Newcastle, West Ham, Everton United, and Liverpool City have already implemented their stadium plans or are well on their way to doing so.

So any hope of Hamas and Israel war coming to conclusion this week? Or will it drag on? And after the war is finish a lot of people in Israel goverment should be trial, as many committed big war crimes.

Let’s check in on one of our players currently out on loan, Kendry Paez. The attacking midfielder is…View the full article

Probably 7 games played and no team is unbeaten

Think he needs a run of games, seems he doesn’t have the managers trust as much as Colwill, Fofana and Tosin do but only one way to earn it: performances like that. In a good place going into the international break but can’t let this be a passing moment, need to kick on and win the next few games. And play more to the standard shown in this game. Next 4 games in October (PL, CL & cup) should all be very much winnable before what will be a tough match against Spurs in November. Then after that, 3 more games we should be winning before playing Barcelona & Arsenal at the end of November. Cant afford to not win these games outside of Spurs, Barca & Arsenal.

Marescaball 🔥

Im afraid he needs more games before you can say his this or is that as a yardstick. Only one decent game out of so many is not no where near enough. On the night everyone played well for whatever reason. Why cant they do that more often.

A lot of our key players are missing this next international break. For many it's not even injuries but given additional days off after CWC. For sure there are deals with national teams after all it's in everyone's interest to have rested players. Caicedo, Santos, Pedro also didn't travel overseas for friendly games which is great news. Enzo is going to USA but don't forget he skipped international break in September. Only Jorgensen, Cucurella, Gusto, Enzo, Estevao, Neto are on international break plus U21 players Gittens, Acheampong and George. For Nottingham away next game early kick off Saturday after international break we can put very decent team from players that stayed in Cobham and had offs. Sanchez, James, Chalobah or Fofana, Badiashile, Hato, Caicedo, Lavia, Santos or Buonanotte, Palmer, Garnacho and Pedro.

Well, if its from the game, and because he played the full 90 mins, might not be too bad. Probably the gash on his leg that he showed on Instagram after the game?

Christian group ‘deceived’ supreme court about LGBTQ+ research, cited scholars say Exclusive: Experts say Alliance Defending Freedom, arguing to revive ‘conversion therapy’, ‘profoundly misrepresented’ their work in case threatening trans and queer youth https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/06/alliance-defending-freedom-supreme-court-conversion-therapy On Tuesday, a Christian legal group will urge the US supreme court to overturn a ban on anti-LGBTQ+ “conversion therapy” in a case that could erode protections for transgender and queer youth across the country. Lawyers from Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), which has opposed abortion and LGBTQ+ rights in high-profile litigation, are representing a woman challenging a 2019 Colorado law that prohibited conversion practices for youth under age 18. The ban applies to licensed clinicians who seek to change a patient’s sexual orientation or gender identity, tactics medical groups have discredited as harmful and ineffective. ADF’s petition in the case, Chiles v Salazar, cited several scholars to support its argument that conversion practices should once again be permitted. Two of those experts, however, told the Guardian that ADF had “profoundly” misrepresented their research, which discussed the “psychological damage” of conversion therapy. The family of a deceased researcher, also quoted by ADF, said they were “deeply disturbed” by the “distortion” of his work. “This is the most upsetting use of my scholarship that has ever happened in my career,” said Clifford Rosky, a University of Utah professor of constitutional law and civil rights. He has worked to ban conversion practices, but ADF nonetheless cited his research on sexual orientation and LGBTQ+ rights, co-authored with the renowned sexuality researcher Dr Lisa Diamond, to bolster its petition. “It’s upsetting because this is lethally dangerous to LGBTQ+ kids,” he said. ADF defended its quotations as “accurate” in a statement. Colorado is one of more than 20 states that have prohibited practitioners from using conversion tactics – bans that could be vulnerable if ADF succeeds. Conversion practices, sometimes called “reparative” therapy or “sexual orientation change efforts”, can take the form of “pray the gay away” religious counseling, therapy aimed at suppressing patients’ behaviors and expression, or outdated techniques such as electrical shocks. The practice is condemned by the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association and other major groups, which note links to increased depression and suicide attempts. Chiles v Salazar comes as US political attacks on trans and LGBTQ+ youth are dramatically escalating. The case originated with Kaley Chiles, a licensed counselor who argued Colorado’s conversion therapy ban infringed on her free speech rights to discuss her Christian faith and beliefs about “biological sex” with patients. Chiles, ADF says, “has begun censoring herself in conversations with clients” due to the law. Colorado’s attorneys responded that Chiles’s claim was manufactured: the state has not received a complaint about her nor disciplined her. Rather, she filed a “pre-enforcement challenge” in 2022, three years after the ban passed. The law, the state said, does not apply to clinicians outside of work nor to other professions, including religious ministers or life coaches. ADF petitioned the supreme court to take Chiles’s case last November, days after Donald Trump was elected. The group previously represented a Colorado web designer who argued she had a free speech right to refuse to provide services to gay couples. ‘Deceptive and damaging’ While Chiles’s case focuses on free speech, ADF’s petition also asserted that scientific evidence supported its arguments, saying a “growing body of research reveals how critical Chiles’s counseling is”, demonstrating that “actions and desires related to human sexuality are … subject to change”. ADF then cited Diamond and Rosky as “respected researchers who support LGBT advocacy”, quoting a section of the Utah researchers’ 2016 paper that said “arguments based on the immutability of sexual orientation are unscientific”. The paper argued some people’s attractions can naturally shift over time – and LGBTQ+ civil rights should be protected regardless of whether people’s sexuality is fixed or fluid. In another brief for Chiles, ADF excerpted a quote from the paper, writing: “Sexual orientation changes for many people. Respected researchers of LGBT issues have long observed that ‘longitudinal, population-based studies’ show ‘changes in the same-sex attractions of some individuals over time’.” Left out of ADF’s reference was the sentence in the paper introducing those studies, which said the research was referencing “change that occurs outside the context of [conversion therapy]”. ADF also failed to acknowledge the researchers’ forceful rejection of conversion practices as “not only ineffective in changing sexual orientation but … psychologically damaging, often resulting in elevated rates of depression, anxiety, and suicidality”. Clifford Rosky, University of Utah “They are using our work to minimize the harm of conversion therapy. There are few practices where there is as much demonstrated evidence of harm,” Diamond, a distinguished professor of psychology and gender studies, said. “That’s where I find the misinterpretation to be so profound.” ADF, she said, was conflating naturally occurring sexual fluidity with efforts to force someone to repress their identity: “It’s erasing the fact that conversion therapy is motivated by shame, fear of disconnection, fear of expulsion, fear of the loss of God’s love, fear of abandonment. Those are triggers of suicidality. That’s where the damage comes in.” “It’s deceptive,” Rosky said of ADF’s selective quotations. “Lawyers owe a duty of candor to the court. You cannot offer false evidence, and if you do so accidentally and find out, you have to correct that … They claim our work supports conversion therapy when our work clearly and specifically condemns conversion therapy on the same page they’re citing.” Diamond and Rosky filed a brief with the court “to correct the mischaracterizations of their research”. ADF has never contacted them, the scholars said. Jonathan Scruggs, ADF’s vice-president of litigation strategy and senior counsel, did not respond to detailed questions about specific citations and claims of misrepresentation, but said in a statement: “We stand by what we quoted in the briefs as accurate quotations.” He repeated Chiles’s assertions that she was seeking to have “voluntary conversations” with clients, arguing there was “no proof” those conversations would “cause any harm”. Scruggs added: “Kaley is not forcing anyone to listen to her conversations and only counsels those who voluntarily come to her … It’s unfortunate that the state and certain ‘experts’ aligned with the state are trying to shut down conversations because they disagree with certain views.” Rosky – who helped draft Utah’s 2023 ban on conversion – noted research finding 44% to 63% of youth who undergo conversion therapy attempt suicide: “We’re not talking about suicidal ideation. We’re talking about actual attempts. By kids. The stakes couldn’t be higher. It’s a grave public health threat.” He added: “All the scientific evidence is horrible for their side. I’m sure they felt they needed someone credible to cite, like Lisa Diamond.” Diamond has for years spoken out about her work on sexual fluidity being distorted to support anti-LGBTQ+ causes. She gave a 2018 Ted talk about the article cited by ADF where she spelled out the harms of conversion practices. “That’s what’s diabolical about [ADF] using me. They know they are misrepresenting my views. It also feels very hard to counter because it’s not coming from facts or reason. It’s coming from animus,” Diamond said, adding: “This case could do some real harm to the very individuals we’ve spent our lives trying to protect.” More ‘dubious’ claims ADF also cited Nicholas Cummings, who served as the American Psychological Association’s president in 1979, writing: “After counseling hundreds of clients who successfully changed their unwanted sexual orientations and gender identities, Dr Cummings concluded that it is ‘a distortion of reality’ to suggest that change is impossible.” The petition references a 2013 op-ed from Cummings, who said he oversaw thousands of gay and lesbian patients from 1959 to 1979 and the “majority were able to attain a happier and more stable homosexual lifestyle”. He said for a select group who “sought to change their orientation”, “hundreds were successful”. In 2015, he endorsed the Trevor Project, a leading LGBTQ+ suicide prevention group, and said efforts to try to “cure” gay people and turn them straight were “unethical and a violation of human rights”. The family of Cummings, who died in 2020, wrote in a 2023 open letter that he “strongly condemned all forms of conversion therapy” and his statements had been “manipulated by those who support an anti-gay agenda”. Asked about the supreme court citation, a family representative provided a brief statement referring back to its 2023 letter, adding: “We are deeply disturbed by and we regret any distortion of Dr Cummings’ work for political purposes.” ADF also cited a 2022 paper titled “Sexual Orientation Change Efforts Do Not Increase Suicide: Correcting a False Research Narrative.” It was authored by the Rev D Paul Sullins, a senior research associate at the Ruth Institute, which works to “defend traditional Christian sexual ethics”. That paper was based on publicly available data from the Williams Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), a leading LGBTQ+ policy research center, which concluded in its own 2020 study that sexual minorities exposed to conversion therapy “had nearly twice the odds of lifetime suicidal ideation”. Those researchers reviewed Sullins’s work and said his conclusions were “invalid” and “not supported by the data”. Lisa Diamond, sexuality researcher In a supreme court brief, the Williams Institute said it had reviewed 13 studies on conversion practices published since 2020 – and Sullins’s was the only one that reported positive impact. “You don’t go with the one study that showed the opposite of what everybody else found,” said Ilan Meyer of the Williams Institute, who co-authored the 2020 research. The literature, he added, was “straightforward”. “Conversion therapists do exactly the opposite of what mental health professionals recommend. If somebody is struggling with their sexuality or gender, you don’t tell them it’s right to feel shameful.” Sullins defended his research in an email, asserting it was “false” to claim conversion tactics “induced suicide”. Other “authorities” cited in ADF’s petition include an anonymous Reddit post from someone who said they regretted their gender transition, and an interview with a teenager who said she had identified as trans but later changed her mind, from a site that took down its article at the request of the subject. Colorado’s lawyers noted Chiles had not put forward any expert declarations or affidavits to “develop a record to support her claims”, instead relying on “unvetted and irrelevant … material”. ADF did not respond to questions about the Cummings and Sullins citations and its references to anonymous online commentary. A spokesperson for the Colorado attorney general declined to comment. “The petitioner’s case is based on dubious science and practices that have been discredited,” said Tony Carrk, the executive director of Accountable.US, a progressive watchdog group that documented discrepancies in Chiles’s citations. “What does this mean for the supreme court that yet again they’re agreeing to hear another ideologically driven case propped up on flimsy scientific evidence and aimed at LGBTQ+ Americans?” Fearing ‘catastrophic’ consequences The supreme court’s conservative supermajority has repeatedly ruled against LGBTQ+ rights in recent years. That includes upholding a state ban on trans youth healthcare, siding with parents who objected to LGBTQ+ literature in schools, and in ADF’s 2023 case, ruling Colorado civil rights law violated the free speech of the web designer who didn’t want to serve LGBTQ+ couples. That track record is worrying to advocates, who warn of far-reaching consequences if Chiles prevails, including similar efforts in other states. The case is aligned with the agenda of Trump and his allies to remove trans people from public life and force trans youth to suppress their identities, said Julia Serano, an author who writes about gender and sexuality: “There have been relentless efforts for more than a century to try to make trans people not trans … This case, like a lot of policy interventions, is about making the existence of trans people questionable.” Conversion therapy survivors said it was painful to think so much progress could be undone. “It would be absolutely catastrophic,” Curtis Lopez-Galloway, the founder of the Conversion Therapy Survivor Network, said of a Chiles victory. He said he will face lifelong effects from being subjected to conversion practices at age 16 and hoped the US could someday pass a national ban, akin to Canada’s, which broadly outlawed these practices for children and adults. Cairn Journey Yakey, a Colorado licensed counselor who is non-binary, filed an affidavit with Advocates for Trans Equality about the conversion practices they endured in church and the post-traumatic stress disorder that it caused: “It was a big moment when Colorado passed this law. We could take a deep breath because we took this step forward and collectively decided we can’t do this kind of harm in our state.” If the ban is undone, Yakey said there would be renewed advocacy efforts to educate people about the dangers of conversion tactics and support LGBTQ+ youth and survivors. This moment reminded them of when Maine repealed marriage equality in 2009 soon after it had been passed: “That was my first time realizing our rights are not static. So there’s familiarity in what I’m feeling now, but also shock and sadness and grief that this ban is being challenged.”

Hopefully not too long, one of our crucial players in the back line

The “Dual State” Theory Was Invented to Describe Nazis. The US Supreme Court Could Take Us There. Authoritarianism—but make it look like the rule of law. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/10/dual-state-supreme-court/ Perhaps the most brazenly illegal action of President Donald Trump’s second term so far took place on his first day in office: an order to deny birthright citizenship to thousands of newborns. Within months, the question had reached the Supreme Court. But rather than affirm the right to birthright citizenship, which is plainly enshrined in the Constitution, the high court used the case to strip lower courts of the ability to issue nationwide emergency relief in most cases—now only those who sue can get reprieve. Instead of halting the administration’s lawless action, the justices made it easier for Trump to get away with future illegal abuses. In her dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson accused the majority of facilitating a two-track system of justice: One for those with the resources to challenge illegal actions, and a second where those without recourse are subjected to the president’s illegal whims. “The law-free zone that results from this Court’s near elimination of universal injunctions is not an unfamiliar archetype,” Jackson wrote. It is, she added, “eerily echoing history’s horrors” that “the zone of lawlessness the majority has now authorized will disproportionately impact the poor, the uneducated, and the unpopular.” To eliminate any doubt about which historic “horrors” she had in mind, Jackson included a footnote citing Ernst Fraenkel, a Jewish labor lawyer who observed the transformation of the German legal system under Adolf Hitler. When Fraenkel fled Berlin in 1938, he smuggled out a manuscript on the legal mechanisms of Nazi authoritarianism. He eventually came to the University of Chicago and in 1941 published The Dual State: A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship. Fraenkel’s work has seen a resurgence of interest in the United States in recent months because it provides a framework for a phenomenon we are increasingly experiencing under the second Trump administration: How a dictator can exercise unfettered power while life appears ordinary for most people. Or, as Jackson observed, how a “zone of lawlessness” can swallow some, while the rest go about their lives under the protection of the law. In the Third Reich, Hitler’s will replaced German law. Whatever he wanted, he did. If anyone was perceived to threaten the Nazi project of a fascist ethno-state, no legal protection could save them. Fraenkel called this realm the “prerogative state.” But the broader legal system didn’t immediately crumble under arbitrary rule. To the contrary, the Nazis purposefully left some of the existing legal system intact in the 1930s and courts were allowed to function, particularly in areas of contracts and other economic concerns. This parallel “normative state,” Fraenkel observed, enabled Germany’s capitalist system to continue against the backdrop of an uninhibited regime. Most Germans generally lived in the law-bound normative state, while Jews and other disfavored people were victims of the arbitrary and violent prerogative state. The dual state is thus two-faced twice over: it is characterized by a bifurcation in the law, but also by the facade of normalcy obscuring the fact of an authoritarian state. Life in the early months of Trump’s second presidency hews to this framework in important respects. How else to explain that most people enjoy a sense of normalcy while, for example, foreign students like Rümeysa Öztürk and green card holders like Mahmoud Khalil can be detained for their speech. Americans and immigrants alike can be terrorized by ICE, the federal government’s unleashed immigration force, if they speak Spanish, look nonwhite, or happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The administration is sinking Venezuelan vessels and executing the civilians on board without any legal authorization—killings that look like war crimes or murder. The government demanded that Disney fire comedian Jimmy Kimmel as if the First Amendment didn’t exist. But at the same time, the Trump administration’s law-breaking in its war on immigrants, its crusade against dissent, its takeover of the machinery of the federal government, its unrestrained use of the military, have not cannibalized the broader legal system or society—at least not yet. While these actions augur the onset of a dual state, the Trump administration hasn’t gotten us to this point alone. The Supreme Court, with its Republican-appointed 6-3 majority, has been a crucial facilitator. When the court blesses the administration’s disregard for the law while maintaining the appearance that the law still rules, it is enabling a dual state. When Jackson made explicit reference to Fraenkel, she was sounding an alarm on the court’s role in the shift toward a dual state. As Evan Bernick, a constitutional law professor at Northern Illinois University College of Law, puts it: “The reality is that the court is adjusting the law to make place for arbitrary power.” With the Supreme Court beginning its next term this week, the question hanging in the air is whether the Republican-appointed majority will finally draw legal boundaries to fence in the president or, confronted with Trump’s demands for ever-increasing power, it will revise or abandon the law to accommodate him. The results could consolidate a dual state or, in the extreme, extend Trump’s leash so far that all Americans begin to feel the effects of his unbridled powers—the onset of an authoritarian state without the dual state’s pretense of normalcy. In three major cases, the Supreme Court will be addressing a key feature of a dual state: the ability of the government to switch a person or entity from the normative state and the protection of the law to the prerogative state, where the laws do not apply. Emergency powers, like the ones Trump has cited in these cases, are a quintessential switch. In November, the justices will hear oral arguments over Trump’s sweeping tariffs. In his first three months in office, Trump announced tariffs on dozens of countries. Tariffs are Congress’ bailiwick, but Trump claimed power to impose them under the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act. That law gives presidents power to respond to “any unusual and extraordinary threat” from abroad, but does not explicitly name tariffs as an available tool. Citing the Roberts Court’s own recent precedents, the lower courts found that the president cannot unilaterally impose such a major policy—indeed, a policy that could hamstring both the United States and global economies. The question, as UC Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky wrote last month, is “Will the conservative justices adhere to what they have said and held recently, or will they just rubber stamp whatever Trump does?” The case will be an important signal of whether the United States is operating as a dual state. If the justices abandon their legal principles in order to give the president more power, but do so under the color of law, then they will be bowing to the prerogative state while maintaining the illusion of the normative state. Though it is not currently on the court’s docket, the justices will likely have to confront the question of whether Trump can once again use the specter of an emergency—even a pretend one—to round up and deport people. Since March, Trump has claimed the power to invoke the Alien Enemies Act with the baseless assertion that Tren de Aragua is invading the United States. This case, if it reaches the Supreme Court, will similarly test the justices’ willingness to maintain the guardrails around presidential power or whether, when it comes to the president’s targets, the law suddenly does not apply. The justices will also consider the president’s attempt to remove Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve Board of Governors even though her position is protected from firing except for cause. Trump claims sufficient cause in allegations of mortgage fraud—allegations that are factually weak and unproven. If the court blesses this as sufficient for immediate removal, even as the dispute moves forward in the lower courts, it will have ultimately handed control of the Federal Reserve to the president, unlocking Trump’s ability to control interest rates and transform the Fed’s coffers into a personal slush fund. Worse, Trump could use the Fed to withhold access to the financial system to any entity or individual who crosses him. It’s hard to overstate the degree to which the entire economy could tumble into the prerogative state if Trump were to stack the Federal Reserve Board with loyalists. Should the court hand Trump the unchecked power to declare emergencies, invasions, and causes for removal, it would give him a legal tool that can nullify the law he claims to be invoking. As Aziz Huq, a constitutional scholar at the University of Chicago explains, in a dual state, the high “court’s role is in creating affordances within the law that operate as off switches for the law… The classic example of that is the emergency powers article in the Weimar Constitution that was used to switch off the Weimar Constitution.” It’s lawlessness dressed up as law. The Supreme Court is also facilitating the creation of a dual state through its emergency or “shadow” docket, where the court issues decisions in cases it has taken up outside of its typical procedures. In the first nine months of Trump’s second term, the six Republican-appointed justices have issued weakly or unexplained orders via this docket that switched off legal constraints on the president. They’ve blessed Trump’s firings of federal officials—despite those firings being illegal—enabling Trump to take control of bodies that Congress created to be bipartisan and independent, and to hollow out other agencies beyond what the law allows. It used it to reinstate Trump’s ban on transgender service members in the military, greenlighting a policy unconstitutionally animated by disdain for a minority group. In the realm of immigration enforcement, a shadow docket decision allowed the administration to violate federal and international law to send immigrants to dangerous places like South Sudan, and sanctioned the administration’s policy of racially profiling people as part of its immigration enforcement toolkit, subjecting both citizens and immigrants alike to harassment and inhumane detainment. The court even used the shadow docket in the birthright citizenship case to stop the lower courts from issuing universal relief from these abuses. When Trump refused to spend $4 billion in foreign aid appropriated by Congress, the Supreme Court used the shadow docket to let him ignore the law and withhold the money—even though Congress is supposed to have the power of the purse. “A prerogative state situation is a situation where it seems like there’s this rule that should apply and require X—and then all of a sudden, it’s Y,” says Bernick. “The court says it’s Y and there’s no explanation that’s given. That is a dual state situation. And that’s one of the frightening things about the shadow docket.” In The Dual State, Fraenkel recounts how the German courts allowed landlords to stop renting to Jews in the 1930s, even though tenancy laws protected Jewish and Aryan renters alike. “The courts therefore had to choose between doing their duty and applying the law for the protection of the defenseless victim or sacrificing justice to the demands of National-Socialism,” Fraenkel wrote. Initially, courts protected Jewish renters. But after the Nazi press criticized those decisions, the courts changed their tune—not by reinterpreting the law, but by forgoing with the business of law entirely; a decision Fraenkel cites from the Appellate Court of Berlin held that the “question before the court is not a problem of the law of landlord and tenant, but a question involving a fundamental outlook on life.” In complying with the Third Reich, the courts elevated Nazi policies, as Fraenkel put it, “above the laws.” It’s hard not to see echoes of this in the court’s current use of the shadow docket. Often, the court’s orders, issued with little or no explanation, don’t even attempt to find justification in the law. The law appears ignored. Take the decision last month to permit ICE officers to racially profile people who don’t look white. After years of decrying any state use of race to differentiate between people, the court allowed ICE to use race without any explanation. Only Justice Brett Kavanaugh attempted a justification, though it was the legal equivalent of swiss cheese. “ICE is the face of a prerogative state, emerging or actual: It swoops in, it ignores safeguards, you can’t escape it,” says Bernick. “A Supreme Court that gets out of the way in that context, where the state is at its most brutal, and tries to manage everything else as normal, is a dual state Supreme Court.” The key to understanding the Supreme Court’s interest in creating a dual state—and how close the United States actually is to becoming one—is that the normative state is not truly a safe zone. While the dual state framework generally refers to the law-bound normative state and the lawless prerogative state, that doesn’t capture the dual state Fraenkel described. Under the Nazis, the normative state proved to be a fiction. As much as the Nazis wanted to use the courts to preserve the country’s capitalist economy, they would never be constrained by them. “Where the Prerogative State does not require jurisdiction, the Normative State is allowed to function,” Fraenkel wrote. “The limits of the Prerogative State are not imposed from the outside; they are imposed by the Prerogative State itself.” In such a dual state, the normative state remains a useful illusion, but it is not truly bound by the rule of law. Huq, who is working on a book about Fraenkel’s theory and today’s United States, suggests that Fraenkel thought of the prerogative state as something like a black hole: “It’s this void, but it’s a void that exerts a gravitational pull on everything around it. So there’s this constant distortion of what he calls the normative state. And there are these moments where some piece of the normative state just gets collapsed and blown away.” As long as there are actual limits, a real safe zone, the United States is not a Fraenkelian dual state. Öztürk and Khalil were eventually released from detention on judges’ orders, while Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whom the administration deported in violation of a court order and then claimed it did not have to retrieve him, did finally bring him back. While these are signals that a true dual state hasn’t yet arrived, their situations remain touch-and-go, with the administration still attempting to deport Khalil and Abrego Garcia to farflung nations. Similarly, insofar as the Supreme Court actually is a critical facilitator of Donald Trump’s increasingly unfettered power—which would also mean it retains its authority to limit the administration’s actions—then Trump has not succeeded in creating a true prerogative state. However, the justices appear to have a keen understanding, possibly intuitive, of Fraenkel’s dual state theory. In recent months, the court’s Republican wing has let Trump opt out of following the law virtually every time Trump has asked the justices for a hall pass. Covetous of their authority, this improbable winning streak—some 21 shadow docket cases—may actually signal the conservative justices’ unwillingness to cross him. They may realize that should Trump defy the court, it would mean that the court’s authority was, just as in Fraenkel’s world, an illusion of normalcy projected by the prerogative state to lull the masses into complacency. The Republican appointed justices, to the extent the United States has become a dual state, would rather stave off such a collapse, not least because their legitimacy and power relies on such a mirage. Thus, they prefer a hidden authoritarianism to one that is out in the open. And more than anyone else, the justices are in the position to paper over Trump’s lawlessness or expose it. But this is precisely why the dual state is so dangerous: It allows the would-be autocrat to consolidate power under the cloak of democracy and norms. Clearly, the Republican appointees are not mere victims of Trump’s authoritarian aims. Their role in the creation of a dual state began before Trump’s second term. Kim Lane Scheppele, an expert on authoritarian regimes at Princeton, has documented the ascendance of “autocratic legalism,” a modern form of authoritarianism that uses existing laws and constitutions to ultimately subvert those guardrails and establish an autocratic state. To succeed, she notes, autocrats must inherit an already weakened democracy or first weaken it substantially; a robust democracy is much harder to conquer. Any account of America’s sclerotal democracy must include the Supreme Court. As often happens in backsliding democracies, the US’ highest court has been captured by loyalists to the autocrat. Between 2017 and 2020, Trump appointed three Supreme Court justices when, under historical precedent, at least one if not two of those seats should have gone to the Democratic president who either preceded or succeeded him. In other words, the current court is the result of a partisan plot to seize power through court appointments, enabled by a president who took office without majority support. But even before those appointments, the Supreme Court under John Roberts—he has been its chief for 20 years—was already facilitating the US’s democratic decline. From voting rights to campaign finance, the Roberts Court has repeatedly interfered with the machinery of a healthy democracy. A dual state is a legal artifice of authoritarianism, and under Chief Justice John Roberts, the Supreme Court inflated the powers of the president in case after case, as critics warned that the justices were paving the way to autocracy. The capstone in this progression was Roberts’ July 2024 opinion granting former presidents immunity from criminal prosecution for most official acts. “It’s basically saying Congress cannot constrain the President with criminal statutes,” Scheppele previously explained to Mother Jones. “So then why should Congress be able to constrain the President with appropriation statutes or anything else?” You can look at these Roberts court opinions building up to the immunity decision, says Huq, as giving “the presidency the option, essentially, to opt out of statutory laws.” The opinions created a dual state mechanism wherein the Constitution itself could be used to switch off the law when it comes to the president. In his book, Fraenkel defined the “principle of the inviolability of law” as meaning that “once the sovereign has promulgated a law, he may not violate it at his discretion” and explained that its abandonment is quintessential to the prerogative state: “The complete abolition of the inviolability of law is the chief characteristic of the Prerogative State.” It’s likely no accident that a year after Trump was given the unregulable power to launch sham prosecutions of political enemies, he is doing just that. Why would a dictator prefer a dual state to an overtly authoritarian regime? In Fraenkel’s telling, the normative state served the Nazis’ aims by maintaining an illusion of normalcy, especially in economics. Similarly, an American president with authoritarian ambitions would be more likely to realize them if people thought their lives wouldn’t be affected. The Republican wing of the Supreme Court has a self-interest in a dual state as well; without the illusion of the normative state, the justices’ are revealed to be pawns, not power brokers. Their authority would evaporate because it is based on the perception of the rule of law. But maintaining a stable dual state means that the prerogative state must hold itself back, particularly in when it comes to the economy—the black hole cannot grow too large. The upcoming term contains key tests of whether this administration and this court can maintain the sort of dual state that reassures voters and financial markets. In May, the Supreme Court used the shadow docket to allow Trump to fire commissioners on the National Labor Relations Board and Merit Systems Protection Board, even though the law prohibited their removals. But in its order, the GOP appointees attempted to protect the similarly-situated Federal Reserve Board from Trump’s firing authority. “The Federal Reserve is a uniquely structured, quasi-private entity that follows in the distinct historical tradition of the First and Second Banks of the United States,” the opinion stated. That exemption isn’t actually grounded in any set of laws or precedents—and neither is the Fed board quasi-private. But the distinction’s utility in a dual state context is clear: hand Trump control of every other agency but reassure the markets by protecting the Fed. As Bernick put it, “It’s like the court is offering, ‘We’re going to help you. We’ll do this for you. And if you want to have a dual state, we’ll give it to you.’” Unappeased, the administration is back before the court in the Lisa Cook case, again pushing it to hand Trump control of the Fed by allowing him to remove members for obviously pretextual “causes.” The dual state response would be to fashion a compromise in which the court both lets the administration remove Cook while also calming the markets by making it seem like a complete Trump takeover of the nation’s monetary policy is not about to happen. That balancing act may be impossible. “The paradox is that if the markets don’t believe you, because they see through it, then you don’t have a dual state,” says Bernick. “If it’s too transparent that what’s going on here is just capitulation to authoritarians who want to do whatever they want, then you don’t have the normative state. And then markets get spooked because they like the normative state.” The tariff case carries the same economic perils for the dual state—and the administration seems to know it. Its reassurances in its briefs in both cases that its positions will only help the economy are likely its own attempt to calm both the justices and the markets. Similarly, Trump’s decision in April to back off his most extreme tariffs when bond prices began to wobble signals that the administration is aware, at least on some level, that a takeover of the machinery of the economy is self-defeating. And yet, the desire to seize this power and quite likely wield it in aggressive and economically disastrous ways has been a feature of Trump’s second term. “You can read Fraenkel as a story of inevitability; going back to the black hole, at some point the prerogative state just sucks everything in,” says Huq. “That’s one version of the story, where the dual state eventually collapses into a single prerogative state.” Justice Jackson’s warning in the birthright citizenship case tries to halt the shift to authoritarianism before it is too late. In her dissent citing Fraenkel, she tells the public that the Republican appointees are not applying the law so much as clearing it out of Trump’s way. “To hear the majority tell it, this suit raises a mind-numbingly technical query” about the historical analogues to universal injunctions, she wrote. “But that legalese is a smokescreen. It obscures a far more basic question of enormous legal and practical significance: May a federal court in the United States of America order the Executive to follow the law?” The dual state is dual in two respects: First, it divides the law into the prerogative and normative zones; next it uses the normative zone to create an illusion of normalcy to cover up an authoritarian reality. This “smokescreen” sustains the economy and fosters acceptance by the people until it’s too late. Jackson accuses her colleagues of creating this dual state on both tracks: first, by sanctioning a zone of lawlessness, and second, by pretending that doing so is business as usual. But, she warns, “Were courts unable or unwilling to command the Government to follow the law—they would ‘sanctio[n] a tyranny.’” Jackson, in the court’s minority, cannot stop her colleagues from hastening this tyranny. But in her dissents, she can blow their cover.

House of South Carolina Judge Criticized by Trump Administration Burns Down Trump Administration’s targeting of judges is increasing https://time.com/7323442/south-carolina-judge-diane-goodstein-house-fire-trump-political-violence/ Police are investigating the cause of a fire that burned down the home of South Carolina Circuit Court judge Diane Goodstein, who had reportedly received death threats for weeks related to her work. State law enforcement is investigating the house fire on Edisto Beach, which began at around 11:30 a.m. E.T. on Saturday, sources told local news outlet FITSNews. Goodstein was reportedly not at home at the time of the fire, but at least three members of her family, including her husband, former Democratic state senator Arnold Goodstein, and their son, have been hospitalized with serious injuries. According to the St. Paul’s Fire District, which responded to the scene, the occupants had to be rescued via kayak. Law enforcement has not disclosed whether the fire is being investigated as an arson attack. “At this time, we do not know whether the fire was accidental or arson. Until that determination is made, [State Law Enforcement Division Chief Mark Keel] has alerted local law enforcement to provide extra patrols and security,” South Caroline Chief Justice John Kittredge told FITSNews, adding that the fire appeared to have been caused by an “explosion.” The 69-year-old judge had received death threats in the weeks leading up to the fire, multiple sources told FITSNews. Last month, Goodstein had temporarily blocked the state’s election commission from releasing its voter files to the Department of Justice, a decision that was openly criticized by Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon and later reversed by the state Supreme Court. The DOJ had sought the information, including names, addresses, driver’s license numbers, and social security numbers, of over three million registered voters as part of President Donald Trump’s March executive order restricting non-citizens from registering to vote. (Non-citizens are already not allowed to vote in federal and state elections.) The Trump Administration has sought to drastically reshape the election system in the name of election integrity by requesting, and in some cases suing, states for voter registration data to compile a comprehensive centralized database. The administration has sought data from more than 30 states and has considered pursuing criminal investigations into state election officials. Critics have argued that the Administration’s efforts are an attempt at disenfranchising voters from marginalized communities and overstepping states’ constitutional authority to control election procedures. If the fire at the judge’s house turns out to be targeted, it may mark the latest incident of a startling rise in political violence in the U.S. And while the Trump Administration has blamed the left’s rhetoric for inspiring violence such as the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, an attack on a judge would come as the Administration has increasingly vilified the judiciary, blasting judges that rule against it as “U.S.A-hating” insurrectionists. Political violence on the rise In addition to Kirk’s murder last month, the murder of Democratic Speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives Melissa Hortman and her husband in June, and an arson attack at Democratic Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s residence in April, a number of judges who have ruled against Trump have also received attacks and threats from his supporters. Chief Judge for the District of Rhode Island Jack McConnell told NPR in August that his court has received more than 400 threatening voicemails, including several credible death threats. McConnell had issued a ruling blocking Trump’s freeze on federal aid earlier this year. Judges told NPR that they have received unsolicited anonymous pizza deliveries, a tactic known as “pizza doxxing” that implies that the sender knows the judges’ addresses. A White House spokesperson told NPR that attacks on public officials have “no place in our society,” noting the President’s own experience with assassination attempts last year. “I’m hearing everywhere that judges are worried about their own safety. There are people who are inflamed by the incendiary comments of our president and members of Congress about judges. Public officials have legitimized attacks on judges with whom they disagree,” Nancy Gertner, a former judge and current professor of practice at Harvard, told the Guardian in May. That month, Richard Durbin, top Democrat on the Senate judiciary committee, penned a letter to Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel requesting an investigation into “pizza doxxing” incidents against at least a dozen judges. “Threats against judges are threats against constitutional government. Everyone should be taking this seriously,” New York Judge Richard Sullivan, a Trump first-term appointee, told the Associated Press in March. “This is a basic authoritarian instinct,” Steven Levitsky, a political scientist at Harvard University and coauthor of How Democracies Die, told the AP. “You cannot have a democracy where the elected government can do whatever it wants.” Trump Administration’s targeting of judges Less than a year into his second presidential term, Trump has asserted an expansive view of his executive powers. As of October, Trump has issued over 300 orders, proclamations, and memoranda, many of which have resulted in thorny and protracted legal battles. Between May 1 and June 23, federal district courts blocked Trump’s actions with temporary restraining orders or preliminary injunctions around 94% of the time, according to data analyzed by Adam Bonica, an associate professor of political science at Stanford University, while the Supreme Court reversed those orders in close to 94% of its cases. Critics have said that the sheer amount of litigation, some of which has been brought or appealed by the Trump Administration, could overwhelm the judiciary. “What President Trump has done, perhaps more than other presidents, has been to not only bring the test cases and force the courts to deal with these issues, but to do it in a shock and awe strategy, which puts additional stress on the courts,” Steven Richman, Chair of the IBA Bar Issues Commission, told podcast Global Insight, speaking in a personal capacity. “Test cases are one thing, but as in any litigation involving parties and lawyers on both sides, the facts and positions taken must satisfy rules of professional ethics in terms of not being frivolous.” Others have said the bigger threat comes from Trump officials attacking judges that rule against the Administration. Trump and his allies have also sought to portray the judiciary and their decisions as politicized and “judicial overreach.” Hours before the fire at Goodstein’s house, Trump’s deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller accused U.S. District Judge Karin Immergut of “legal insurrection” for granting a restraining order that blocks Trump’s deployment of the Oregon National Guard in Portland. California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, said in a post from his office that Miller’s accusation “for ruling on a case isn’t just reckless. It’s authoritarian propaganda, plain and simple.” (Miller has previously accused Democrats of using incendiary language to “mark people” for political violence.) Trump has called specific judges who have pushed back on his executive orders “radical left lunatic” and “troublemaker and agitator.” In May, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt called the panel of judges that ruled against Trump’s sweeping tariffs “activist judges.” In a post that month, Miller said, “We are living under a judicial tyranny.” Miller posted on X in March, “Under the precedents now being established by radical rogue judges, a district court in Hawaii could enjoin troop movements in Iraq. Judges have no authority to administer the executive branch. Or to nullify the results of a national election.” “Another day, another judge unilaterally deciding policy for the whole country. This time to benefit foreign gang members,” Republican Chuck Grassley, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, posted in March after a Washington judge temporarily barred Trump from carrying out mass deportations. “If the Supreme Court or Congress doesn’t fix, we’re headed towards a constitutional crisis.” In April, Attorney General Pam Bondi called the swathe of lawsuits filed against White House actions a “constitutional crisis.” “President Trump’s executive authority has been undermined since the first hours of his presidency by an endless barrage of injunctions designed to halt his agenda,” she said in June. Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson asserted congressional authority over U.S. courts, and appeared in March to threaten to disempower district courts if it came down to it. “We do have the authority over the federal courts, as you know. We can eliminate an entire district court,” Johnson said. “We have power of funding over the courts and all these other things. But desperate times call for desperate measures, and Congress is going to act.” But the Administration has also gone beyond verbally criticizing the courts. The Justice Department in Trump’s second term has moved to prosecute several of his perceived enemies and judges that have pushed back on his political agenda. In April, Hannah Dugan, a Wisconsin judge, was arrested for allegedly aiding an undocumented immigrant to leave a courthouse. In July, the DOJ filed a misconduct complaint against James Boasberg, chief judge of the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., over alleged comments Boasberg made at a meeting of judges in March. In a social media post, Trump called for Boasberg, without naming him, to be impeached: “This judge, like many of the Crooked Judges' I am forced to appear before, should be IMPEACHED!!!” The Administration has disregarded court orders, including plowing ahead with deporting 238 Venezuelans to an El Salvador prison in March after Boasberg blocked the deportations. A Washington Post examination of 165 lawsuits in which judges ruled against the Trump Administration found “widespread noncompliance with America’s legal system” by the Administration. The White House is accused of “defying or frustrating court oversight” in nearly 35% of those cases. Nonprofit media outlet Truthout reported in June that the Trump Administration also appeared to have defied a federal court order allowing transgender people to update gender markers on their passports. “Lawyers are a regulated profession,” Dana Gold of the Government Accountability Project in Washington, D.C., told Global Insight. “The Department of Justice is inherently the bastion where the rules of professional conduct play a meta role because they are supposed to be serving justice.” “If the Department of Justice is willing to bend, to basically break its own rules of professional conduct, it’s a red line being crossed,” she added. More than 150 ex-federal and state judges in May signed a letter to Bondi and Patel rebuking the Administration’s attacks on the judiciary, as critics have said that the Trump Administration’s rhetoric fuels broader threats against judges. “What we need is our political leaders from the top down to stop fanning these flames, to stop using irresponsible rhetoric, to stop referring to judges as corrupt and biased and monsters that hate America,” Esther Salas, a federal judge in New Jersey whose son was killed in 2020 by an attorney pretending to be delivering pizza, told NPR.

already confirmed he will miss no games same for Josh Acheampong

not really Olise is a left footed RWer we lost out to Bayern on him on July 7, 2024 we have purchased only 2 left-footed RWers since then (Estêvão was purchased before we lost out on Olise) during that window and the next 2 In August 2024, dropped £54m on Pedro Neto, another left-footed RWer. Then, in March 2025, we purchased Geovany Quenda for around £44m (he comes next summer) The total for those 2 is £98m, which is far less than £130m. (Kendry Páez, like Estêvão, was also purchased before we lost out on Olise and is more of an AMF type, and we only dropped £8.5m on him anyway) None of our other buys in the last 3 windows (Summer 2024, January 2025, and Summer 2025) were left footed RWers (ie the same as Olise), they all have been right-footed LWers

First and foremost, is Moises Caicedo an avid reader of this site and part of the SPTC community!?…View the full article

He is not world class, but the flack he got on here was OTT. The amount of times I see people called him 'Badiashite' and names like that was not nice, but he has been brilliant for the past 2 games. When he first joined, he was actually really solid but then got hampered with injuries, however I really like his composure on the ball and his ability to pass between the lines. Decent amount of pace too. Hopefully his injury was just a knock and he is back after the international break, as he deserves his spot on the team.

And who would blame them? Our expenditure on alternatives since missing out on Olise has been a lot more than that.