Whatever their immediate trigger, the strikes [on Iran] fall in line with the ideology of cowboy individualism that began to take over the Republican Party in the 1980s and which, under Trump, has turned into brutal displays of dominance. The old idea of a cowboy from rural America who cuts through the government bureaucracy that threatens his livelihood by coddling racial minorities and women has curdled into the notion that a leader can do whatever it takes, including violence, to force opponents to submit to his will.
In foreign affairs, that means smashing the international alliances built after World War II. One of the crowning achievements of that international order is the United Nations, constructed to maintain international peace and security by creating organizations that could provide a forum for diplomacy and stop countries from attacking each other. The U.S. currently owes the U.N. nearly $4 billion in unpaid dues as Trump seeks to replace the organization with his own “Board of Peace” that he alone controls. This month, the U.S. holds the presidency of the U.N. Security Council, enabling it to set the agenda. Today, Trump sent First Lady Melania Trump to chair the meeting, the first time a presidential spouse has done so. source
So apparently this genius, the son of a Trump-pardoned felonious billionaire who is now serving as the U.S. ambassador to France under the totally uncorrupt regime of Donald Trump, was unable to make peace in his talks with Iran, even with the able assistance of the brilliant Steve Witkoff.
Accordingly, Jared’s father-in-law, lifetime head of the powerful Board of Peace and proud owner of someone else’s 2025 Nobel Peace Prize, had to order massive air strikes and the mass killing of civilians in Iran, as well as the assassination of its leader.
I had to look this one up just to make sure that this guy is as fucking stupid as I remember he is. Listen to his imbecilic comment about Federal stockpiles of PPE when he was the czar of the inept and deadly U.S. Covid response. Just watch the first few seconds where he speaks, incoherently, and publicly, for the first time. His powers as a natural diplomat can be observed in this great interview with Christiane Amanpour , the chyrons alone are worth the watch.
And Donald Trump, a man of fundamental incoherence, is the perfect point man to effortlessly make that point over and over again. Below Lawrence O’Donnell lays it out with characteristic intelligence and thoroughness.
Trump: “We may have casualties, that often happens in war.” Often, yes, so true, and shrewdly observed, war kills and maims, very, very often.
And this recent tour de force of presidential incoherence, which truly never gets old:
Legal arguments not yet articulated or vetted, but irrefutable. No need for Congress, or hostile voters with TDS, I alone will ensure that I remain irrefutable. And be honest, those drapes I picked out are to die for, as is often necessary in a room done up like one of Saddam’s castles.
Good night, boys and girls, don’t let the Nazis bite.
I saw a video last night from Angela at Parkrose Permaculture in which she reminded viewers that an executive order is not a law or a royal decree. Executive orders that are illegal, and most of Trump’s have been, can be challenged in court and ruled unconstitutional, as many of Trump’s have. But what jumped out at me was the reporting she played that kept saying that Trump is “reviewing” a draft secret executive order. He’s considering it. But who wrote the executive order for his review and consideration?
My money is on the cabal of fascist billionaires who put him back in the Oval Office, using both hook and crook. These amoral organisms, focused solely on increasing their already obscene wealth and profiting handsomely off every economic disaster, are intent on a creating a new feudalism where most of the work is done by unpaid robots and where all non-billionaire humans are dependent on their mercy. Billionaires have shown over and over that they have very limited mercy for anyone but themselves.
Bear in mind that Trump’s DOJ (literally, since he consistently lied that Biden weaponized his DOJ, he considers himself fully entitled to use it as his personal Roy Cohn) has sued 30 states for their detailed voter rolls, the better to identify and disenfranchise anyone who voted against MAGA in the past, lives in certain zip codes, or who can be identified as Black, Hispanic, young, female, Asian, a voter in Democratic primaries, etc. Since the five-four 2010 decision in Citizens United, when unlimited campaign contributions from billionaires and corporate “persons” became unquestionable “free speech”, these sick bastards have spent literally thousands of millions of dollars getting their preferred candidates into power.
Meanwhile, wielding his dependable high-powered fire hose of diarrhea, and spraying it in every direction at once, Trump, acting unilaterally, at the prodding of Netanyahu, Kushner and Witkoff, and on behalf of the monetary interests of these same obscenely wealthy monsters, sent US forces to attack Iran and destabilize the Middle East. The Iranian head of state has been killed by either the US or Israel. USA! USA!!! Or should I say, TRUMP! TRUMP!!!!.
So today we don’t see stories on the front page about the 13 year-old interviewed by the FBI four times about Trump forcing sex on her and smacking her around when she tried to resist. Once a rapist, always a rapist, most would say. If you can do whatever you want to girls and women, because you’re an aggressively litigious star with a hundred white-shoed pit bull lawyers on staff, you’re golden. You can do whatever you want to the people who donated to your charity, the suckers who attended your “university”, that multitude who died of COVID because you weaponized the pandemic, the millions of working class voters you suckered into voting for you. The question is — why not do it to THE WHOLE WORLD? Why wouldn’t you, if you were Trumpie?
Trump’s favorite poem is The Snake. When someone recites their favorite poem over and over, believe it.
Freedom is safety from domination by willful, arbitrary state powers, or the violence of mobs, under the protection of law. Fascism is obedience to the will of willful, arbitrary state powers. The Leader’s word, truthful or blatantly false, is the law. Fascists demand obedience to the will of the infallible Leader or death. Death in service to the infallible Leader is seen as the greatest show of patriotism in a fascist regime. Killing to enforce the will of the infallible Leader is the sacred duty of the duped faithful. The ultimate weapon of fascists is their ability to convince their citizens to kill all dangerous, sick, hated, inhuman enemies, to unleash the faithful and obedient on everyone else.
Stephen Miller, American Nazi, is the worst of the worst. Born Jewish, to a family that escaped Nazi persecution and found refuge in the U.S., he has embraced a murderous ideology of force based, as all such ideologies, on a series of hate-inspiring lies. Miller himself is a prolific liar and perhaps the most adept Trump whisperer in history. There is nothing worse than a Jewish Nazi, from my perspective as a Jew with zero tolerance for Nazi behavior, especially when done by those who call themselves Jews. I compare Miller to Black Klansman Clarence Thomas, a “conservative” Black man who shows no hesitation to consistently delight white racists with his racist rulings.
These Nazis, our own homegrown Nazis, have already shown they will fully support those who murder protesters who hurt their delicate feelings. When their agents shoot a compliant woman in the face, or kill a man pinned to the ground with multiple gunshots into his back, they instantly announce that these people were terrorists who got what they deserved. When videos emerge showing that these claims are blatant lies (like the lie that Derek Chauvin was not deliberately killing a restrained, unarmed man suspected of passing a counterfeit $20 bill), they shift the story slightly, without retracting the lie.
When ICE and CBP repeatedly violate the Fourth Amendment by breaking down doors without a warrant, and send the people they capture to concentration camps a thousand miles away, the constitutionality of this becomes a matter for the Supreme Court to ponder for months or years, since there is, in the mind of the majority, no REAL emergency involved. When Trump petitions them for an emergency ruling to allow him to continue violating the law, they jump to give him enough rope to hang his enemies until they can rule on the merits. People die while the Federalist Society Six jumps through hoops to accommodate the deranged, fully transactional avatar of their merciless ideology.
Recall Trump’s murderous zeal, during his rage after losing the 2020 election, to execute (with the zealous help of religious Catholic fascist Bill Barr) as many federal death row prisoners as possible before he was dragged out of the White House kicking, screaming and stealing classified documents, two weeks after his riot at the Capitol to overturn the election results. How many innocent South Americans on small boats did he have Hegseth murder in international waters far from our shores? How many have died, and continue to die, in ICE detention here in the United States of America, in our lucrative, privately owned concentration camp system? How many Ukrainians and Palestinians have died while Trump ridiculously postures on the international stage and instructs his DOJ to prosecute his enemies here in America? The only death that means anything to Trump and his power-drunk ilk are their own deaths. Killing others is the ultimate high for these Nazi fucks.
Heather Cox Richardson’s report from last night contains this account of the depraved state murder of a highly vulnerable political refugee legally in the United States. Makes me wanna holler.
But the timing of the Republicans’ story [Stephen Miller on how Democrats hate the US and love illegal aliens — ed] coincided with the horrific story that on February 19, Border Patrol agents had dropped Nurul Amin Shah Alam, a nearly blind legal refugee from genocide in Myanmar who spoke no English and could not read, write, or use electronic devices, miles from his home in Buffalo, New York. They did not notify either his lawyer or his family that he had been dropped off, and when his family filed a missing persons case, the police believed Shah Alam was with Border Patrol and closed the file. He was found dead on the street on February 24.
A spokesperson for Customs and Border Protection, the parent agency of Border Patrol, said: “Border Patrol agents offered him a courtesy ride, which he chose to accept to a coffee shop, determined to be a warm, safe location near his last known address, rather than be released directly from the Border Patrol station. He showed no signs of distress, mobility issues or disabilities requiring special assistance.”source
Of course he showed no signs of distress, mobility issues or a need for special assistance. He was inhuman, couldn’t speak a recognizable language, he was a dead man walking — into the Arctic winter of Buffalo, New York. Nothing to see here.
I wonder if the NY Times put this sickening story on their front page. Hey, what do you know? Here’s a gift link to the article, headlined:
Border Patrol Left a Refugee at a Cafe. Days Later, He Was Found Dead.
The disabled man had been released from jail when federal officers showed up and drove him to a coffee shop. His family searched for him for days.
Bad timing, Mr. Shah Alam, coming here on the eve of weaponized Christ’s birth, less than a year before the suspicious reelection of America’s Dictator on Day One…
By the way, the DOJ disabled the search function on their public Epstein Transparency Act database. Nothing to see here!
I’d estimate that most people in the US and worldwide believe that Trump would have punched a fourteen year-old who bit him when he proffered his dick for a blowjob. He’d punched his first wife, Ivana, before raping her, then paying her to recant the story, after all. He has a foul temper, as everyone knows. The FBI talked to this girl on four separate occasions, indicating they found her complaint credible (records of all these interviews put into a black hole by Bondi, Blanche and Patel, to protect the real victim), but there’s no reason to think THAT SHE WASN’T LYING BECAUSE SHE’S A PEDOPHILE HERSELF WHO USED A TIME MACHINE TO GO BACK AND MOLEST AN INNOCENT FOUR YEAR-OLD DONALD TRUMP TO TRY TO PREVENT THE DOW FROM REACHING $50,000!!!!!
And, just an hour later, one more from the most fair and the most balanced News/entertainment network out there. What a brilliant and accomplished woman the first lady is, apparently. It’s miraculous how a $70,000,000 publicity spend by a psychopath billionaire can transform a former lingerie model who arrived here on a visa for extraordinarily accomplished people.
Murdered American citizens, asylum seekers dead in US custody, a dead child here and there — all immediately attacked for causing their own deaths by being the worst of the worst!
Fascism smells the same every place it takes root. If the smell had a face, it would be Stephen Miller’s.
The flailing president, sinking to a historic low in the polls and recently “betrayed” by members of a partisan judicial fraternity that he appointed, is railing against — among many other things — mail-in voting. He wants to ban it, has threatened to do so with a stroke of the Sharpie at the bottom of a royal decree. He claims, without evidence, that mail-in voting is ripe for cheating, as the corrupt Bill Barr also insisted, on national TV, in the lead-up to the election his boss would insist was stolen from him (Barr later said under oath that he told Trump the election fraud claim was “bullshit”). The entire idea of widespread voter fraud, of any kind, is definitively debunked by the far right Heritage Foundation’s own voter fraud database.
I was super concerned, in the lead up to the 2024 election, that Trump megadonor, pugnacious Postmaster Louis DeJoy, had the motive and the means, the lack of scruples and the demonstrated track record of slowing mail delivery, to not deliver ballots from selected zip codes. Aided by, as far as I could tell, the unprincipled “independent” Kyrsten Sinema, the Postal Board of Governor nominees that could have removed DeJoy were permanently stuck in committee as the swing vote, Sinema, kept the status quo in place. There was no reporting on this deadlock.
I read somewhere recently that mail in voting in Fulton County decreased from 29% of votes cast in 2020 to 5% in 2024. This would support my theory that MAGA man was on the job in Fulton County, Georgia, and other key counties nationwide, for his corrupt buddy in 2024, the guy who never met Jeffrey Epstein, the guy who told Florida officials, after Epstein’s arrest, that Ghislaine Maxwell was evil.
I did a search for percentage of votes by mail in Fulton County, 2020 vs. 2024. Elon Musk/Peter Thiel/Mark Zuckerberg/Jeff Bezos’s AI belched out this non-answer, the first search result that always comes up, a dubious one at best. You can type -AI at the end of your search term and sometimes avoid this Artificial Idiocy bullshit with its disclaimer that it might be totally false.
Auto-generated, may contain inaccuracies, or outright falsehoods. Bots programmed by those who work for psychopathic oligarchs do not necessarily reflect the views of the transactional oligarchs who had them programmed. Tried doing ten or twenty more searches, for potentially better results.
Georgiavotes.com has this number for early voting in 2020, but nothing for 2024:
Early Voters (Fulton County)
318,565 (71.4%) of 2024 general election early voters voted early in the 2020 general
It has been virtually impossible to compare mail-in ballots from 2020 and 2024. I haven’t been able to verify the drop from 29% to 5% mail-in ballots in Fulton County with numerous searches. Google directs me to a string of articles alleging (without evidence) massive voter fraud, many involving a purported 315,000 votes, in Fulton County in 2020 and other claims related to Trump’s ongoing propaganda war against mail-in and Black, and female, voting. There were also numerous hits, totally unrelated to my search, about the seizure of 2020 ballots in Fulton County, based on an affidavit that did not make out probable cause for a search and seizure.
After a frustrating amount of dead end searches, these, from Georgiavotes.com, seem to confirm the steep decline in mail-in voting from 2020 to 2024. I have to think pugnacious weasel DeJoy played his part, as did RAGA, the Republican Attorneys General Association.
The numbers, in each case, seem to have been posted during the election. But note that almost three times as many people (451,520) requested ballots in 2024 as in 2020 (166,603), if the very specific numbers on Georgiavotes.com are to be believed. Note also, the 451,000 early ballots requested in 2024 doesn’t specify how many were mail-in. It’s not like I’ve been able to verify any of this anywhere else. Here is Louis DeJoy’s public relations press release, why would he lie?
The determined squids of the right have spread ink, mud and shit in the water, nothing to see here! Frustrating that straightforward searches no longer yield relevant search results. Place AI in charge of internet searches and you can cook the information people get to see. AI, of course, can be programmed to do whatever its masters need. The horror. Here’s another piece of random data I was able to glean somewhere:
If you have any questions about the United States Postal Service’s commitment to the timely delivery of every mail-in ballot, this should reassure you.
Meanwhile, call your senators, especially if they are Republicans, and tell them to vote no on the SAVE MAGA Act. The Senate switchboard number is (202) 224-3121.
CEO of “the most transparent administration” in US history
I have a category on my list to the right of this post called “Impossible Letters.” I wrote such letters for many years, each time making a case for kindness, consideration or decency, once all other appeals for these things failed.
I recognized, as I toiled over these pages, trying to get each phrase to ring just right, that the letters were impossible, that the most gently worded, generous, most persuasive, moving case I could present would change nothing. Nonetheless, I continued writing these impossible letters well into the start of old age. I almost never heard a peep in response to any of these letters, but of course, I was complaining, no matter how gently — and now in writing! — about not getting a human response, so the person I was writing to was too defensive to dignify my letter with an acknowledgement.
I’m done writing these letters. If you have to write a letter setting out why you require basic decency, you might as well stick a feather up your ass, dip the end in ink, and write your letter that way. It seems simple beyond needing an explanation, if a doctor, let’s say, treats you carelessly, dismisses your medical questions, claims to have answered them all already (even if you never discussed those concerns with him) NO LETTER IS GOING TO CHANGE THIS. In fact, the letter will make you an enemy to the vain doctor, and a threat, if the letter is written well. Plus, nobody is paying the doctor to read your whining prose.
Amazing that it took me so many years to understand this simple concept: if something is emotionally impossible for someone to give, it is emotionally impossible. That doesn’t mean you’re not raising entirely reasonable concerns, or expressing basic human things that virtually anyone would agree with. It means, if the person you’re writing the letter to has already demonstrated, over and over, that they will not cede any ground to make things better, the best letter anyone could compose will only make matters worse.
Here’s the big discovery. There is a certain personality type that cannot be wrong, must blame others when they are wrong, and will fight to the death if the person they blame refuses to take all responsibility for conflict. This type is immune to persuasion since they are compelled to do these things, by a terror of humiliation based in childhood trauma and shame. Not every traumatized child winds up this way. In some people, being abused actually fosters empathy later in life, but people who cannot be wrong or ever admit hurting others are this way because they were damaged as young children. They can’t help themselves. As long as you are always agreeable, avoid anything that makes them uncomfortable, make them laugh when things get tense, are conciliatory at all times, you need never see the implacable side of these relentless motherfuckers. Once they sense you have some kind of issue or problem with them, the game is on and you must either submit to an irrational narrative (like a conflict is caused solely by one party — you) or it is a fight to the death.
Is there any universe where it makes sense to write letters to someone like this? None that I know of. The only use for a letter to one of them is to make the break complete, if needed. A final word to show you understand the unwinnable game you are now in, increase their defensiveness, fear, anger and make sure their brittle vanity ensures they will never contact you again. I take pleasure in doing this as politely as possible, on the rare occasion that I need to write one last impossible letter.
There is a certain sweetness in crafting a cold ending like this one, to a very old woman, a onetime friend of my mother’s, the mother of a childhood friend I haven’t seen in years, who angrily insists I have to forgive people who claim to love and admire me, no matter what I think they’ve done to me:
When you raised your voice to me a few months back, in response to something you didn’t want to hear about your son, and told me to “be quiet and listen! You’re not going to get the last word!” that should have been the last time I talked to you. Like your son, you mistake my good will and calm manner answering questions about my health for some kind of deep friendship.
Then I took a red crayon and drew a small heart, in the matter of an angry Christian, wishing somebody a facetious “have a blessed day”, under which I wrote my name one last time. Her daily stream of indignant phone messages should finally stop, once the mailman delivers this kiss goodbye.
As Trump has a temper tantrum that anybody could dare accuse him of being a racist when several of his most ardent ass lickers have been Black, The Onion scores another bullseye.
It’s almost impossible to satirize incoherence like what we see from this totalitarian baby, but The Onion keeps managing. America’s finest news source.
gratuitousblahg 