Rachel Maddow makes a good point here, why would the Republicans invite Jack Smith to testify publicly when all he would say is what he said?
Trump was the chief propagator of the big lie (stolen 2020 election), the fake electors, the coercion of state officials, the frivolous, evidence-free, court challenges, the plot to have Mike Pence announce Trump had won the election, the Green Bay Sweep, and the bloody riot at the Capitol with the gallows outside to hang Mike Pence. There was only one leader, one beneficiary, of this desperate many armed criminals octopus, Donald Trump.
In fairness to our demented president, the Federalist Society Six on the Supreme Court declared him the victor in 2004’s Trump v. United States. They ruled that he couldn’t be prosecuted for anything he could argue was part of his official job. So we have to forgive him for taking it so literally, he was never a man to see nuance, even before his steep cognitive decline. If he could, theoretically, order Seal Team Six to murder his political opponents, if done in consultation with his cabinet (official core duty) — and pardon the hit men with no restrictions — then why should he not believe he can fire all Inspectors General without cause, purge the civil service without cause, rescind Congressional budget allocations he hated, shake down right wing law firms, TV networks, universities, weaponize the DOJ for retribution against his enemies, and so on? Many of those acts are not even arguably criminal, at best they are violations of civil law, or norms, or whatever.
The New York Times published an exhaustive, if politely phrased, catalogue of Trump’s mafia don presidency. Check it out.
The link to the article again — the details are many, and impressive in their thoroughness. Dictator on day one or bust, courtesy of the tireless work of the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, ALEC, Americans for Prosperity, The Cato Institute, The Antonin Scalia Law School, The Council for National Policy, The Institute for Humane Studies and so on. It is worth bearing in mind, in the face of this onslaught of Nazi contempt for law and democracy, that many of their policies, political theories and practical plans are as ridiculous and legally untenable as the asinine theories of now disbarred far-right wing constitutional crackpot John Eastman and longtime Trump buddy (predictably abandoned by his old friend once things went south for him) Rudy“Trial by Combat” Giuliani.
Pardon the delay, I thought I posted this several days back when I sent this to my senators and congressman. In the meantime, seven House Democrats joined the MAGA block to pass an additional $10,000,000,000 for ICE operations, no strings attached. Our elected officials need to get tens of millions of calls if we are to have any hope of getting them to act with a modicum of courage. Here are my talking points, below is the email I sent to my elected representatives in Congress.
ICE agents should not be armed. ICE agents should not be allowed to conceal their identities like Ku Klux Klan terrorists. ICE agents must not be allowed to violate state and federal laws. ICE must recognize and respect state sovereignty and local jurisdiction over law enforcement. ICE should not be funded unless these legal limitations can be imposed on them. Funding them as the administration demands ($70,000 signing bonus, anyone?) is essential for the triumph of authoritarianism. Restraining an out of control ICE by withholding their budget until reasonable terms are met is the only responsible action to take.
I urge you to vote against funding for DHS/ICE without placing serious limitations on the scope of ICE activities. Democracy depends on restricting the power of a lawless, heavily armed agency, on an agenda of retribution, intent on the violent escalation of tensions in American cities. The fake “emergency” the administration cites for ICE deployment in targeted cities is as pretextual as IEEPA is for bombing foreign nations, and private boats, without informing Congress.
Do not vote for a budget that funds ICE in its masked, unrestrained, unaccountable form. The Trump administration is using heavily armed ICE forces in selected cities, in response to a claimed emergency, to violently provoke responsive violence. Project 2025’s endgame is a police state. ICE, led on the ground by serial perjurer US Border Patrol “commander-at-large” Greg Bovino, is the tip of the police state spear.
If ICE agents deployed this way can violate the law with impunity — smash car windows, tase drivers, tackle and zip tie people, tear gas and pepper spray protesters exercising their First Amendment rights, conduct warrantless, door-to-door searches, use illegal chokeholds, break down doors without warrants, detain people, including citizens, without reasonable suspicion of anything, shoot people in the face — democracy is at an end.
ICE agents should not be armed. ICE agents must not be allowed to conceal their identities like Ku Klux Klan terrorists. ICE agents must not be allowed to violate state and federal laws. ICE must recognize and respect state sovereignty and local jurisdiction over law enforcement. ICE should not be funded unless these legal limitations can be imposed on them. Funding them as the administration demands ($70,000 signing bonus, anyone?) is essential for the triumph of authoritarianism. Restraining an out of control ICE by withholding their budget until reasonable terms are met is the only responsible action to take.
You have taken an oath to uphold the Constitution. Uphold the Constitution by voting to condition ICE funding on restricting the scope of ICE’s illegal assaults on random citizens and non-citizens. You are the opposition party, Americans are counting on you to oppose the militarized march to fascism.
Do not listen to Chuck Schumer and his corporate sponsors. They orchestrated an end to the MAGA shutdown, without obtaining a single concession for ordinary Americans, at a moment, after off-year elections, when Democrats had all the momentum and Trump owned, and was taking the blame for, his shutdown. You cannot negotiate with a party that insists on its right to violate even laws their president signed into law. Schumer doesn’t speak for the majority of Americans, let alone most Democrats. He certainly doesn’t speak for those who oppose fascism in our country. Defend the Constitution.
The world’s greatest winner, shown here beaming, after solving 75 major international wars and being unfairly deprived of his rightful Nobel Peace prize, shaking down the winner of this year’s peace prize for her prize, which he now claims for himself.
Never the sharpest knife in the drawer, not his psychotic father’s first pick for heir to the Trump Empire, a lifelong bully, abuser, sexual predator, compulsive liar and childishly aggrieved control freak, he is also now, increasingly, showing signs of dementia. His father also was demented by the time he was DJT’s age. He was not, however, demented enough to let his idiot middle son take over his affairs when Donald tried to make himself master of his father’s fortune while the old man was still alive. To the demented Frederick Christ Trump’s credit, he surrounded himself with lawyers when Donald arrived to get his father to sign over control of his fortune. Of course, as soon as the old man died, Donald defied his father’s written wishes and dissolved the Trump empire at a 40% discount to the buyer, something only the most stable genius would ever dream of doing.
Jimmy Kimmel nailed it the other night. He played a typical incoherent Trump “response” to a question. He looked at the audience for a moment and said “what is he even talking about?” The only proper follow up from any reporter talking to Trump, he said, is “Mr. President, what are you talking about?” ICE agent shoots woman in the face three times because he was stressed at being dragged by a car six months earlier, after he broke the window and tased the driver (the driver is now awaiting sentencing, mind you). “She was the worst of the worst, she ran him over with her car, tried to kill him, she’s a domestic terrorist, still at large, my ratings are still the best of anybody all time, everyone is saying,” says the dotard-in-chief.
Here’s a bit of Heather Cox Richardson’s letter from last night. She begins by noting that all this shitting on the Oval Office desk and have his underlings eat it on camera (my image, not her’s, she speaks of Venezuela, Greenland, ICE murder) has succeeded in one thing — knocking the Epstein files and DOJ’s deliberate contempt of law off the front pages.
. . . This morning, Trump’s social media account posted: “if the corrupt politicians of Minnesota don’t obey the law and stop the professional agitators and insurrectionists from attacking the Patriots of I.C.E., who are only trying to do their job, I will institute the INSURRECTION ACT, which many Presidents have done before me, and quickly put an end to the travesty that is taking place in that once great State. Thank you for you [sic] attention to this matter! President DJT.”. . .
. . . The images coming out of Minnesota have been compared to those of Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor ordering police officers and firefighters to use fire hoses against the children marching during the civil rights movement in Birmingham, Alabama, or of law enforcement officers beating civil rights marchers in Selma, Alabama. A family with six children in a van caught in the clash last night were hit with tear gas and air bags detonated by a flash-bang grenade. Three of the children, including a six-month-old infant, were taken to a hospital by ambulance for treatment. “My kids were innocent. I was innocent. My husband was innocent. This shouldn’t have happened,” the mother told Kilat Fitzgerald of Fox9 in Minneapolis. “We were just trying to go home.” . . .
. . . One of the other things Trump’s statements have driven out of the news is the revelation from yesterday that the U.S. has sold $500 million worth of Venezuelan oil and is keeping the money in Qatar rather than in U.S. banks. Trump claims that he has the power to manage that money, and is trying to prevent its capture by the oil companies that have prior claims against Venezuela for property seized when it nationalized the oil fields. . .
. . . The strain also showed in Trump’s fury on Tuesday when a worker at a Ford plant Trump was touring as an attempt to appeal to his weakening base shouted “pedophile protector” at him. Rather than simply ignoring the heckler, as politicians usually do, Trump gave him the middle finger and said, “F*ck you. F*ck you.”
The NY Times published a definitive debunking of the Trump lie parroted by ICE Barbie Kristi Noem, her soul-dead assistant “secretary for public affairs” Tricia McLaughlin, JD Vance and other lackies, that murdered Minnesota woman Renee Good deserved to be summarily killed because she’s a murderer. Hats off to the NY Times. They suck in major, critical ways, and have often been handmaidens of American fascism (click the Grey Lady link at the side here for examples), but they also publish very important, authoritative investigative pieces. This is one of them. Check out this video by clicking on the image:
Notice the sampling of the “worst of the worst” dirtbags, here. The presumption of guilt, for the small sampling of “illegals” merely charged with various crimes, is striking. Not as much as a killer declared innocent for shooting a mild-mannered woman in the face three times, of course, or the heavyweight convicted criminals Trump keeps pardoning, but, you know what I’m saying.
Why would the public have any reaction at all to the deadly on-camera shooting by an ICE officer, three times in the face, of an unarmed, peaceful woman who was monitoring ICE abuses? It’s not as if the administration immediately exonerated the murderer and began investigating the murdered woman and her wife for treasonous associations…
Criminal crackdown indeed. But the criminals are an insane and murderous felon president and his lawless lackies who now justify the cold blooded murder of unarmed citizens peaceably assembled . They’re currently employing a showy swarm of untrained, violent, super-sensitive. highly armed, easily enraged masked goons/content creators breaking down doors without warrants, forcing people to the ground, using illegal chokeholds, beatings, tear gas, pepper spray and deadly bullets. These violent goons have been unleashed by unqualified, unprincipled, in many cases insane and/or very stupid, appointees of the most stable genius ever to demolish a wing of the White House without a permit.
“Shut the fuck up about Epstein. I never even met that fucking pervert, who was Clinton’s BFF. Clinton!!! The guy who is defying Congress!”
This grotesque misstatement of American law deliberately echoes the Nazi ethos that the state exercising the will of the infallible Leader is the only entity with rights. If a woman who disagrees with a violent government crackdown on peaceful, noncriminal residents smiles and acts with mild, arguable, disrespect: shoot her three times in the fucking face and investigate her and her grieving widow for disrespecting the regime — and being dangerous, insane, fucking “domestic terrorists”. In other words, Jews or Muslims, or possibly Somalis! Definitely queers hated by Jesus Christ our savior.
Make no mistake what we are dealing with. Every single move they are making is from Mr. Hitler’s playbook. There was nothing original in that murderous moron’s playbook either, his regime just took it to its greatest heights, until now.
Minnesota and the state’s two largest cities, Minneapolis and St. Paul, also sued the Trump administration yesterday. Minnesota attorney general Keith Ellison called the federal immigration operation that began on January 6 “a federal invasion.” “These poorly trained, aggressive and armed agents of the federal state have terrorized Minnesota with widespread unlawful conduct.”source
Just as it becomes clear that the Nazis, and their heirs, actually won World War Two, in terms of “corporate accountability,” The Big Lie, mass media propaganda, and such, the old Confederacy, with its quaint ideas about the right of the wealthy few to own other people, is currently ascendant in the land of the free and the home of the brave. It has taken them more than a century and a half, but the actual and spiritual heirs of slaveholders now have taken power again, and are intent on imposing their will on the rest of us, whether we want it or not. Especially if we don’t want it, actually.
It is striking how the presidential election map always lights up solid red in the former Confederacy. This goes back to LBJ’s betrayal of white racists by signing the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act into law in 1964 and 1965. Then you had Nixon’s southern strategy: win over all the southern racist Democrats to vote Republican. Reagan’s people had the brilliant idea to begin his presidential campaign in the Mississippi town where Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman were lynched by the KKK, in concert with local law enforcement. Wink, wink! Dog whistles were eventually replaced with Trump’s overt racist messaging: “Mexicans are rapists,” “Blacks are eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats, they’re eating the pets!”, a ridiculous lie Kamala Harris rightfully laughed at, but one that likely garnered millions of votes for the once and future Hater-in-Chief. No Black bitch is going to laugh at our boy!!!
There are immigrants all over the country, millions of them in “Red states”. President Project 2025 provided tens of billions of dollars for a federal “Immigration” police force to be deployed in “anarchist jurisdictions,” places where Democrats were the elected leaders. My mate referred to these bullying, sometimes murderous, untrained, masked ICE goon squads as Brown Shirts. I corrected her. Brown Shirts helped Hitler come to power, think of the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and their violent ilk. “Gestapo,” I corrected her, official, uniformed, government-paid forces employed by the Nazi government to carry out the will of the [insane] leader. Without a doubt many of these newly recruited ICE goons were taking shits in the Capitol building five years ago, peacefully and patriotically smearing their feces on the walls as the Confederate battle flag was marched by.
American Nazis have created a workaround to the laws that prevent federal troops from being used as domestic police. Using newly fortified, untrained, unaccountable Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, of course, in conjunction with the forces commanded by “commander-at-large” of the US Border Patrol, moral midget and SS wannabe Gregory “Perjury, so fucking what?” Bovino, operating hundreds of miles from the nearest border, is a no brainer. Brutalize, provoke, murder, announce that the murder victim was a fucking bitch who fucking deserved to be shot in the fucking face, get an outraged reaction when you start tear gassing peaceful protesters and now you can call in the Department of War under the 1807 Insurrection Act to crush dangerous radicals intent on dissent, wielding their so-called First Amendment rights like they were the sacred Second Amendment.
Trump, at his weakest and most vulnerable, is also at his most desperate. Guided only by what’s left of his once average mind, and what he cynically refers to as “my own morality” (ironic words coming from a serial fraudster, compulsive liar and rapist) he’s counting on fanatics like Gregory Fucking Bovino (above), Pam Bondi, Kashyap Patel, Kristi Noem, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., “Maximum Lethality” Hegseth, to keep turning the screws, and flagrantly violating laws and court orders, until something big pops. Why he hasn’t had one of his J6 Proud Boys shoot some ICE officers by now, from the midst of a peaceful crowd, is a mystery to me. Equally baffling, why hasn’t Putin arranged some kind of 9/11 mass death terrorism incident inside the now undefended, divided, demoralized United States? Pondering these questions is terrifying, because Trump’s morality includes killing as many innocent people as it might take to “win” a given “transaction”.
If you still think this unfunny clown is not capable of doing everything his idol Adolf Hitler eventually did, I don’t know what you base that belief on. The threat of mass murder is equally severe and our courage is the only thing standing between these modern day Nazis and a restoration of law and order, and a new dedication to justice and actual accountability for powerful criminals. Despair is an obvious move, but it is one we can’t afford at this perilous moment in our history. Despair, it’s been said, is a luxury we can’t afford. Remember, Trump has never been weaker and his “ideas” more wildly unpopular. Some fraction of his diehard 33% will die for him, maybe, but it’s important to focus on the 67% of us who, horrified by a modern day Hitler and his movement, say “hell no!”.
Artificial Intelligence is created in the likeness of its programmer. Elon Musk’s Grok was tweaked to be less politically correct and after spouting many Nazi quotes, denying the mass murder conducted by the Hitler regime, told a user that if it could worship a deity that god would be Adolf Hitler [1]. Musk’s team gave the Nazi AI bot a few chagrinned tweaks after that. Peter Andreas Thiel, a German and American entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and political activist, makes Elon Musk look like a person of ordinary sensibility and sensitivity. Thiel created JD Vance, hired him, made him rich, poured millions into his Senate campaign and twisted corrupt arms to get him into the Vice Presidency. It’s no wonder Vance is a steaming pile of irrational hatred, he’s Thiel-based AI in human form.
In what some MAGA genius thought was a gotcha, Vance posted the cellphone video shot by ICE officer Jonathan Ross moments before he shot an unarmed woman three times in the face. He posted this as the proof that the dead woman was a dangerous, vicious, hate-filled domestic terrorist who deserved exactly what she got. Her last words to the shooter were a calm “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you,” delivered with a smile. His last words to her, after killing her seconds later, were an emphatic “fucking bitch”. Two sides to every story. Here’s rabidly ambitious conspiracy theorist JD Vance’s take on the ICE officer’s deadly actions.
“What the press has done in lying about this innocent law enforcement officer is disgusting. You should all be ashamed of yourselves.” The Department of Homeland Security reposted Vance’s post.
In MAGA world guilt and innocence depend entirely on which side of the Koch brothers/Heritage Foundation/FOX news-created divide you are on. No investigation or evidence is needed to declare someone on your side absolutely innocent, even if he shot a mild-mannered woman in the face three times. The brutalized or murdered protester is always at fault, a dangerous, deranged “thug,” as has long been the case with every unarmed Black person killed by police. There’s no such thing as poisoning the jury pool when you publicly, immediately, insist that the videos showing the murder from various angles are all lies and that the truth of the killer’s innocence is beyond dispute.
It turns out Jonathan Ross had been involved in an incident with a driver where, after smashing the guy’s window and tasering him, the driver took off, dragging Ross and cutting his arm with the broken window glass. The driver is awaiting sentencing on his assault on Ross… The New York Times:
The ICE officer, Jonathan Ross, had been involved in a previous incident with a driver. After smashing the guy’s window and shooting him with a stun gun, the driver took off. The New York Times:
Mr. Ross and other agents were trying to apprehend a Guatemalan man who had been convicted of sexual abuse in Minnesota, according to court records. The agents followed the man, Roberto Carlos Muñoz, as he drove away from his house, and later pulled him over.
When Mr. Ross told the driver to lower his window and open his door, Mr. Muñoz refused, an F.B.I. agent wrote in an affidavit. Mr. Ross then pulled his Taser, shattered the rear driver’s side window of Mr. Muñoz’s car and reached in with one arm to try to unlock a door. At that point, Mr. Muñoz shifted into drive and pulled away, dragging the agent.
“He just took off in a rapid speed,” Mr. Ross said during Mr. Muñoz’s December trial, according to a transcript. “At this point, I feared for my life.”
Which is, of course, why Ross circled Renee Good’s car, filming it from every angle, and then stood in front of it while his colleague ordered Good to “get out of the fucking car” and fired the first of his three deadly shots through the windshield. What else could he have done?
Vance, supposedly a very intelligent man, with a law degree from Yale, added this moronic thought to his pronouncement that, without any investigation, the ICE officer was clearly innocent of any wrongdoing.
Vance attacked media outlets on Thursday during a White House press briefing for framing the incident as one where a law enforcement officer killed 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good, and said the ICE agent had previously been “dragged by a car” during an incident last summer. “So you think maybe he’s a little bit sensitive about somebody ramming him with an automobile?” Vance asked the press corps.source
“A little bit sensitive…” so he has a right to fire three bullets into the head of a woman whose partner was sassy with him and disrespectfully told him “go get some lunch, big boy.” Case closed. Nothing to see here! Stop being so fucking woke, close your fucking eyes and go back to sleep, or you’re next, domestic terrorist bitch!
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