Are they Nazis yet?

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, shortly after 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!!!!!

State of the Union

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.

And these creatures are always immensely corrupt.

And always the outraged victims.

Stolen Elections, 2026 edition

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.

There was also virtually no reporting that DeJoy had refused the Postal Inspector General’s recommendation that USPS postmark ballots the day they arrived and segregate ballots from the rest of the mail to make tracing and counting ballots easier. DeJoy, to my knowledge, refused both of these conditions, at least when the IG made the recommendations and he refused those two specifically, from a list of ten.

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

No More Impossible Letters

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.

Onward in the battle for our collective soul

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.

The Onion’s got nothing on these babies.

Here’s Clay Jones:

Why Heather Cox Richardson is the best at what she does

And why Donald J. Trump is the biggest psycho grifter ever to hold our experiment in democracy hostage. Heather begins:

On February 13 and 14, President Donald J. Trump’s representatives filed three applications with the United States Patent and Trademark Office to trademark his name for future use on an airport. As trademark lawyer Josh Gerben of Gerben IP noted, the application also covers merchandise branded “President Donald J. Trump International Airport,” “Donald J. Trump International Airport,” and “DJT,” including “clothing, handbags, luggage, jewelry, watches, and tie clips.”

Because of the trademark filing, Gerben notes, any airport adopting the Trump name would have to get a license to use the name, potentially paying a licensing fee. Gerben emphasizes that while it is common for public officials to have landmarks named after them, “never in the history of the United States” has “a sitting president’s private company…sought trademark rights” before such a naming.

In October, Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought withheld billions of dollars Congress appropriated for a tunnel between New York and New Jersey under the Hudson River, saying he wanted “to ensure funding is not flowing based on unconstitutional DEI principles.” Trump told Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) that he would release the funds if Schumer would agree to name Dulles Airport outside Washington, D.C., and New York City’s Penn Station after him.

source

Russell Vought, the Koch Brother’s own Project 2025 Nazi state architect and unelected Czar of the US budget (apart from his party-line confirmation in the Senate), the constitutional scholar/genius who declared Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs unconstitutional and grounds for denying funding already approved by Congress, quietly diverted $15,000,000 in appropriated USAID funds (cut by nongovernment employee/new government agency head Elon Musk’s nongovernment DOGE) to pay for his security detail. Better, for him, that his super important life be protected from every possible threat, by a $15,000,000 private army, than to have two or three hundred thousand insignificant brown children die preventable deaths formerly prevented by USAID.

Happy belated Presidents Day to these Nazi motherfuckers. Don’t forget to give generously to the Donald Trump Mount Rushmore Memorial Legacy, a wonderful new charity that, since an IRS ruling in September, 2025, can accept tax-free donations. USA! USA!!!!

The SAVE MAGA Act, in 60 seconds

Liz Oyer, the former DOJ Pardon Attorney (until Trump 2.0 began and all pardons became purely transactional) lays out the real intent of the SAVE Act. Not only is it designed to make it harder for Democrats to vote, its real purpose is to create complete chaos ahead of the midterm elections. Liz does an excellent job laying out the method and desired effects of this heavy handed Nazi attempt to fully Nazify our United States in the midterm elections. This proposed law (which does not yet have support in the senate to become law) will be particularly important in the disobedient, so-called Blue States, the places Bill Barr dubbed “Anarchist Jurisdictions” under Trump’s first wild spin as president. They can’t afford another Minneapolis!

Generally a sweeping nationwide change in laws takes a year or more to efficiently roll out, but efficiency is clearly not the goal here. Elon Musk and Peter Thiel (and Bezos, Zuckerberg, etc.) don’t have that long, they’ve got to get this done chop chop, with the zeal of billionaire “disrupters” who break the thing into too many parts to ever put back together before asking permission, or getting sued and stopped by courts enforcing the law.

The business model of disrupters is also the business model of MAGA. Break things you hate, smash them to smithereens, like Trump Postmaster Louis DeJoy did by disassembling gigantic mail sorting machines in “Blue” cities, delaying mail delivery and so on, and let your accursed enemies try to stop you in court. Let them keep trying this defensive tactic after you’ve ramped up to targeting them, killing them (when needed) and shoving them into concentration camps a thousand miles from their homes.

Not losing in 2026 is a TOP priority for the VERY STABLE GENIUS and his united billionaire benefactors/beneficiaries, if there is going to be a country anymore! So much the better if they are able to bring on the chaos in time to disrupt the 2026 elections, eh, Susan Collins (an announced “yay” for the SAVE MAGA Act in the Senate)?

Trump Derangement Syndrome

It’s a real thing.

“The Democrats refuse to vote for Voter I.D., or Citizenship. The reason is very simple—They want to continue to cheat in Elections. This was not what our Founders desired. I have searched the depths of Legal Arguments not yet articulated or vetted on this subject, and will be presenting an irrefutable one in the very near future. There will be Voter I.D. for the Midterm Elections, whether approved by Congress or not! Also, the People of our Country are insisting on Citizenship, and No Mail-In Ballots, with exceptions for Military, Disability, Illness, or Travel. Thank you for your attention to this matter! PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP”

They want to continue to cheat in Elections.

It is universally recognized that President Donald J. Trump is the most popular and accomplished president ever, in any country in history. This is confirmed by every objective poll and every honest white historian. If the Democrats are not allowed to flagrantly cheat, as they have been over and over in all the recent elections they “won” by “wide margins,” they will be wiped out in the midterms and certainly in 2028. This is beyond dispute, as is the President’s overwhelming, historic electoral mandate.

. . . the depths of Legal Arguments not yet articulated or vetted…will be presenting an irrefutable one in the very near future.

President Donald J. Trump will convene a legal team of John Eastman, Rudy Giuliani, Pam Bondi, Todd Blanche, Alina Habba, Alan Dershowitz, Jeffrey Clark, Stephen Miller, Jim Jordan, Lindsey Halligan, Lindsey Graham, Lyin’ Ted Cruz, Jeanine Pirro, Mike Johnson, Ginni Thomas and other top constitutional scholars to craft the concept of an irrefutable legal plan that will be fully articulated in time to implement a nationally supervised, no-cheating, no do-over election that the president’s candidates will all win in landslides, once the Democrats’ cheating has been eliminated by an Executive Order and all elected Democrats are in private detention facilities in Red States under a national security lockdown.

Call me crazy, but TDS seems like a real thing.

The SAVE MAGA Act

There is only one purpose to this proposed legislation which will make it harder for tens of millions to vote in the upcoming midterm elections — to save MAGA.  The Senate would have to change the filibuster rules to pass this Jim Crow 2.0 bill with 54 votes. If we want to preserve our experiment in democracy, we have to keep Democratic senators honest, and a few set to retire Republican senators, (and good luck with some of these mf’s).

For future reference (when Congress returns from yet another break during yet another Trump shutdown — this time only TSA, FEMA, the Coast Guard and a few other agencies within DHS will lose funding, ICE and CBP are fully funded through the Big, Gorgeous, Junior High School Girl Bill)

The U.S. Senate switchboard is (202) 224-3121.  Ask to be connected to your senators’ offices.  

Update:

The Capitol emptied out on Thursday, a full day before the midnight Friday deadline for funding the Department of Homeland Security. Lawmakers who were deadlocked over new restrictions on immigration officers jetted off to Munich for a security conference or headed home for a weeklong recess, seemingly unconcerned with the looming closure. It was a jarring change from the past, when lawmakers were reluctant to seem like they were giving up for even a moment before time ran out for a deal.

“We are not even going to pretend that we are trying to figure it out,” said Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, one of those bound for Germany. “It doesn’t look great.”

The blasé attitude reflected a conviction on the part of both parties that they were in the stronger political position in this round of the shutdown wars. (source, NY Times)

Brian continues on the fake fraud behind the latest, and perhaps most brazen, Republican voter suppression effort:

Levitt’s study found exactly no instances of a noncitizen knowingly or purposefully voting illegally. And why would they? The penalty is deportation.

Trump’s own investigation into illegal voting by migrants turned up not one shred of evidence of widespread fraud.

Out of 49.5 million voter registrations checked, 0.02% of the names were investigated as possible registered noncitizens. There was no evidence that any of those people had actually voted. A serious blow to Trump’s unfounded hysteria over droves of illegal voters sandbagging elections in favor of Democrats.

for more details on Jim Crow 2.0, a federal voter suppression law that will target women, young people, college students, people of color, people with various accents, people with physical disabilities, (while allowing Trump’s administration to access a national database voter information more powerful than what his then campaign manager Paul Manafort gave Russian agent Konstantin Kilimnik during the 2016 “Russia Hoax”) here’s Brian Tyler Cohen’s full report on this desperate fascist move

We fight like hell or we won’t have a country anymore

In a desperate move to disenfranchise millions of voters ahead of a midterm election MAGA is expected to lose badly, and to foster the election rigging myth of widespread voter fraud, the MAGA House passed the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) America Act by a typical 218-213 margin (reflective of their mandate) . Like all of Trump’s other bogus national emergencies, the SAVE Act is designed to solve a crisis that doesn’t exist. SAVE is a transparent pile of lies designed to advance the organized right-wing’s consolidation of one party rule.

We come to this ugly precipice because our country was unable to punish a president who lost an election, hatched a multipart scheme to overturn the election, and finally urged a violent, armed crowd to march to the Capitol (without a permit, which would have lined the route with police) to confront a joint session of Congress and “fight like hell or you won’t have a country anymore” We all know the story. Here are a few details about the bill which must now go through the Senate and will have a hard time getting 60 votes.

President Trump has called on Republicans to support the legislation, saying “we won’t have a country any longer” [sound familiar? — ed] if it’s not enacted. Mr. Trump has said it’s essential that all voters show identification and proof of citizenship. But he’s also gone a step further and demanded an end to mail-in ballots, with some exceptions. CBS news

Heather Cos Richardson:

The Republicans are also trying to pass the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) America Act, which would require a document proving citizenship in order to register to vote and in order to vote. Only Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Vermont, and Washington have “enhanced” driver’s licenses that would meet the requirement. In all other states, voters would need either a passport or a birth certificate.

Half of Americans don’t have a passport, others don’t have their birth certificates, and the names of married women who took their husband’s last name and transgender Americans would not match their birth certificates. All of these groups tend to vote for Democrats. The bill also calls for state officials to purge voter rolls. The Brennan Center for Justice found that if the measure passes, about 21 million Americans could lose their votes.

The goals of the far-right — no tax on the super-wealthy, taxpayer subsidies for lucrative corporations, cutting government funding for social programs, ending regulations designed to lessen pollution, ending public education , enabling government agents, armed for an insurrection, to conduct warrantless searches and make arbitrary arrests of non-criminals that are difficult and expensive to contest in court, etc. — are very unpopular. These “policies” are increasingly unpopular even among those who voted for President Project 2025.

So unpopular that Gallup will stop conducting presidential popularity polls (they’ve been doing it for 88 years, but are taking no chances with this vindictive madman at the wheel). A police state to “own the libs,” and kill or detain citizens with complete impunity, doesn’t seem to be all it was cracked up to be for screwed working people who were lied to extravagantly in exchange for their MAGA votes. Like much of the MAGA agenda, it’s based on easily demonstrable lies, endlessly repeated by right-wing “influencers” and transactional media conglomerates.

For more than a decade amid Republican bluster about widespread noncitizen voting, the Heritage Foundation has been investigating and documenting such cases. And according to its own dataset, from 1982 to 2025 there have been only 99 documented cases of noncitizens voting in U.S. elections.

But don’t take our word for it—explore their data directly at this link: Explore the Heritage Foundation Data source