Category Archives: Grey Lady

Insane terrible two year-old as the most powerful man on the planet

Below is Dan Rather’s clear analysis of the deadly box Trump has placed himself (and all of us) in. I’ve been at a loss to explain my recent level of anxiety to myself, this — starting with a photo of a woman walking through a bombed out section of Tehran — puts some of my anxiety into pretty good perspective. After watching the excellent Nuremberg the other night on Netflix — the story of how the nations that defeated Nazism began creating a body of international law to prevent another such threat to life on earth — to see our own country in the hands of creatures so similar to the soul-dead men on the docket at the world’s first war crimes trial, makes my skin crawl. It is horrifying to know that the U.S. is now the single greatest threat to life on the planet the world has ever known. Because we have an enraged victim of lifelong epic fury as our Unitary Executive, manipulated by a cabal of determined “ideological” psychopaths with unlimited wealth and power. Here’s Dan:

Wars are chaotic. They’re unpredictable — hence the phrase “the fog of war.” That fog has descended on the war in the Middle East. There are some people who believe Trump’s war is going well. But the consensus of opinion right now is that the battle is going poorly for the United States and Israel.

You have to wonder if anyone is telling the president the truth. Because his version of what will happen if the war continues much longer differs wildly from that of experts in the region. If we think gas prices are high now, just wait.

It boils down to this: Donald Trump is trapped. As of this writing, there is no good option to end this conflict.

  • The U.S. walks away — as Trump has threatened — and the Strait of Hormuz remains under Iranian control. No one in the region likes that scenario.
  • The U.S. bombs Iranian infrastructure, including power plants, which is a war crime. Iran retaliates, likely targeting energy resources around the Middle East, while retaining a sizable portion of its missile stockpile.
  • Trump launches a ground war, which could be long, bloody, and expensive.

Any of the above scenarios could lead to a worldwide recession, or worse.

By the tone of his tweets, Trump’s frustration with the options is boiling over.

the rest is here

Could be, Grey Lady?  Bombing civilian targets like water desalination plants, power plants, infrastructure like bridges and girls schools, all calculated to terrorize and kill masses of noncombatants ARE war crimes.

Grey Lady highlight

Bold, in its own way. Truth is an undefeatable defense against defamation. Even the most aggressive, vexatiously litigious, criminal ever to be the president has to know this, on some level. Besides, the Commander-in-Chief, now an unprovoked-war time president, has bigger fish to fry at the moment. Got to love the directness of this NY Times headline and lede.

Actually, he threatened Iran with Putin-like war crimes, Netanyahu-scale crimes against humanity. Going to bomb them back to the Stone Age, says the rambling, bellicose, frightened, all-powerful whiner-in-chief, echoing war hawks of the 1960s, when he was but a young molester. He will destroy Iran’s energy grid and blow up their source of fresh water. He will mass murder them, because they’re evil (and he represents the only alternative, a different, more nihilistic, flavor of evil).

After regular prime time broadcasting was interrupted (“we interrupt this program for an incoherent rant by a deranged, criminally insane psychopath…”) for a rambling, out of breath reading, by Mr. Trump, of his recent lying Truth Social posts from the teleprompter, the Times added this:

The speech ended (and The NY Times printed the entire transcript):

Tonight, every American can look forward to a day when we are finally free from the wickedness of Iranian aggression and the specter of nuclear blackmail. Because of the actions we have taken, we are on the cusp of ending Iran’s sinister threat to America and the world. And I’ll tell you, the world is watching.

And when we do, when it’s all over, the United States will be safer, stronger, more prosperous and greater than it has ever been before. May God bless the men and women of the United States Armed Forces, and may God bless the United States of America. Thank you very much, and good night.

In more important news:

Shit sandwich

I love the way the New York Times implies that Trump, who is as empathetic and ethical as his long-time friend Jeff, really wanted to, and actually did, give masses of Americans significant tax breaks, when 99% of the tax cuts went to people who are already billionaires. You’ve got to love the poker face on that Grey Lady…

Traitors, treason, execute them all!

Look at it from President Trump’s point of view. He has been totally up front with everybody about what kind of person he is, and about 35% of the country still loves him, unconditionally. He could, literally, have his masked agents execute peaceful civilians, in their car, restrained face down on the pavement, trying to run from a masked mob of heavily armed agents, and they’d still vote for him. He could promise lower gas prices and no new wars, get over 70,000,000 votes, and then, when necessary, start to carpet bomb Iran (excursion, not war, excursion!) declare immediate victory in the war, and watch as the price of gas spiked. Then righteously vent epic fury that traitorous Europeans and Chinese will do nothing to open the strategic choke point, the Strait of Hormuz

As the president knows very well, the world is a cruel and unfair place. If you don’t get your enemies first, and keep punching, kicking and shooting them while they’re down, they will eventually surround and kill you. That’s why the Iran Excursion is existential for the president. You don’t need a business degree from Wharton to know any of this.

In his first term, he surrounded himself with unreliable people. His first Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, listened to the advice of the DOJ’s Office of Ethics (ethics, for fuck’s sake!), because he’d lied, in the Senate, about his contacts with Russia. Ethics (fucking ETHICS!) told Sessions his involvement in investigating Trump’s ties with Putin had a clear appearance of impropriety — and like a coward he recused himself and refused to un-recuse. By stepping away from the investigation, Sessions paved the way for the traitorous Robert Mueller, who then accused Trump, basically, of ten counts of obstruction of justice, while also totally exonerating him from the Russia Hoax. After his total exoneration Trump publicly humiliated Sessions, and later destroyed what was left of his political career. He had other disloyal, traitorous, selectively “ethical” assholes in his first administration, and they leaked terrible lies about him. Lessons learned, mistakes he would not repeat next time.

An oath of personal loyalty to the president, demonstrated by an ability to angrily lie publicly in any situation, (along with iron-clad nondisclosure agreements), would ensure Trump’s second administration would run much smoother than the first. With Kristi Noem, a posing pinhead, in charge of Homeland Security (along with FEMA and the TSA), Pete ‘no quarter, no mercy’ Hegseth, a misogynistic alcoholic sadist, in charge of the Department of WAR, Kashyap Pramod Patel, enraged author of a children’s book praising a Godlike Trump, leading the FBI, and a pliant, cherub-faced white Christian fascist as Speaker of the House — what could go wrong in squashing protests, intimidating enemies foreign and domestic, dominating the legislative branch, sodomizing the Constitution, and so on? Appoint your criminal and impeachment lawyers to head the Department of Justice and who can touch you? Only the fucking media, with their constant lies and fake news. That’s where loyalist Brendan Carr, partisan head of the FCC, comes in.

The New York Times, often named by name as among the worst of the worst by the president (along with the lickspittle Bezos-owned Washington Post, not currently licking quite enough spittle), reported on the attack on mass media with uncharacteristic urgency, and fewer qualifiers than usual. The gist is that Brendan Carr is openly threatening broadcasters with the loss of their licenses, for failure to serve the public good, if they report lies about the president’s perfect, already historically successful, meticulously planned and war gamed non-war excursion in Iran. Carr is equally outraged about the lie that Biden “won” in 2020, but that’s another story. The Times (from link above):

The goal seems to be pressuring journalists to back off critical coverage of the war effort, or to at least encourage the public to second-guess reporting that runs counter to the administration’s preferred narrative. And the effort has gone well beyond words.

Mr. Trump’s top media regulator, Brendan Carr of the Federal Communications Commission, issued an explicit warning to broadcast television networks on social media, writing that “hoaxes and news distortions” could lead to the revocation of licenses for local stations, a threat that Mr. Trump said he was “so thrilled to see.”

Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, doing what she does so well:

[She] said in a statement on Monday: “The media has been undeniably biased and negative in its coverage of President Trump and Operation Epic Fury. Anybody with eyes and ears can see this.”  

So true, so fucking true, Karoline, it brings tears to the eyes, and also to the ears. Anybody with eyes and ears can see this!

Another [Trump] post blamed Iranian AI and disinformation for stories that he said are “FAKE and, in a certain way, you can say those Media Outlets that generated it should be brought up on Charges for TREASON for the dissemination of false information.” He reiterated support for Carr’s attack on the media and insisted he won the presidential election “IN A LANDSLIDE.” source

Obviously.

Rupert Murdoch: devoted public servant

Brian Tyler Cohen, with a nationwide chorus of fair and balanced analysis of the spike in gasoline prices, “short term pain for long term gain.” You betcha.

HUNTER BIDEN!!!!

Mr. Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law, has spoken with potential investors in recent weeks about raising $5 billion or more for Affinity Partners, his investment firm, according to five people with knowledge of the talks who were not permitted to speak publicly about the discussions.

As part of the fund-raising effort, Affinity’s representatives have already met with Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, which invests the proceeds of the kingdom’s vast oil reserves, two of the people briefed on the discussions said. PIF is led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who has formed close ties with Mr. Kushner and the Trump administration. . .

. . . The efforts show the blurring of the lines between public service and private profit-seeking during Mr. Trump’s second term [1]. Only a few weeks ago, in his role as Mr. Trump’s “peace envoy,” Mr. Kushner met in Geneva with Iran’s foreign minister. The U.S. and Israeli bombing campaign in Iran began shortly after those meetings concluded without a deal on Iran’s nuclear program.

Mr. Kushner, 45, also spearheaded the Trump administration’s successful efforts to extract hostages from Gaza and negotiated between Russia and Ukraine in an attempt to end their war.

In January, Mr. Kushner traveled to Davos, Switzerland, as part of the official U.S. delegation at the World Economic Forum, where he unveiled the Trump administration’s plan for a “New Gaza.” source

I know, what about Hunter Biden and the Biden Crime Family? Why didn’t Merrick Garland prosecute him for his fishy ties to a Ukrainian oil company? THE DOJ WAS WEAPONIZED, OBVIOUSLY.

Meanwhile, Jared’s epically furious father-in-law is selling the glorious game of the already won, hole-in-one, home run, slam dunk Iran War to his gamer fanboys. USA! USA!!!!

[1] Note the classic deployment of the passive voice, blurring the line of how the line has been blurred and by whom, if anyone. Later on, though the Times correctly puts Kushner’s unofficial title of “peace envoy” in quotes, it makes the ambiguous statement that the pinhead Kushner “spearheaded the Trump administration’s successful efforts to extract hostages from Gaza and negotiated between Russia and Ukraine in an attempt to end their war.” You’ve got to love the even-handedness of the Grey Lady in giving Kushner his props. Our way of life, and our current excellent condition on the world stage and here at home, would not be possible without her graceful, line blurring contortions of fairness in the name of someone’s version of the truth.

Nazi enough for you?

While the NY Times frames things, often using the word “suggest”, to suggest everything is more or less normal, the abnormality of our criminal regime continues unabated.  

Secretary of Maximum Lethality, Pete “War is Hell” Hegseth, spent over $93,000,000,000 in use it or lose it funds in September 2025, with no blowback. Hey, if he didn’t spend it all … it would have been waste, (not to mention abuse and fraud).  On the other hand, Representative Nancy Mace, by signing a petition that allowed for the possibility of humiliation for Trump, simply for the fact that he loves beautiful women as much as Jeffrey Epstein did, and often they were on the younger side, (it is said) opened herself to a House Ethics Committee investigation of a $9,500 alleged overpayment to herself for her housing in Washington DC.   Fair is fair.  Nazis will be Nazis.   Here’s Heather:

That argument [that Congress has the sole power to declare war and allocate funds for war] is potent again almost 250 years later. Democrats are calling out that Trump is spending $1 billion a day in his attacks on Iran but that he slashed through government programs that help Americans, claiming the need to address the country’s ballooning national debt. Just yesterday, Berkeley Lovelace Jr. of NBC News reported that Dr. Mehmet Oz, the administration official overseeing the Affordable Care Act, says that many of those enrolled in healthcare under the law should not be there. About 23 million people signed up for ACA coverage this year, down by more than 1.2 million from last year. Oz anticipates cutting another 4 million off the rolls as he targets “waste, fraud, and abuse.”

And yet, as Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling of The New Republic noted last night, according to a report from government watchdog Open the Books, the Pentagon under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth blew through $93.4 billion in September 2025 alone, with more than $50 billion going out in the last five days of the month alone.

To spend the entirety of the defense budget, rather than lose it, Pentagon officials bought “a $98,329 Steinway & Sons grand piano for the Air Force chief of staff’s home, $5.3 million for Apple devices such as the new iPad, and an astronomical amount of shellfish, including $2 million for Alaskan king crab and $6.9 million worth of lobster tail. (Lobster tail is apparently a favorite of Hegseth’s Pentagon—the department spent more than $7.4 million total on the luxury item in March, May, June, and October.) In other pricey food purchases, the government decided to drop $15.1 million for ribeye steak (again, just in September), $124,000 for ice cream machines, and $139,224 on 272 orders of doughnuts.”

In October, Houghtaling noted, the administration said it could not fund the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps, because the government had shut down. Millions of Americans lost food benefits. source

Waste, fraud and abuse for thee, well-deserved perks for me!

That $1 billion a day figure for Trump’s war in Iran might be a little bit low, maybe by 100% or so. The New York Times reports:

The most transparent administration in US history, it was revealed, has more good news for the citizens:

There are major societal implications for that war. It is already costing at least $1 billion a day, and administration officials have suggested they are going to ask Congress for more money for it. That request will come on top of the news of March 10 that, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the U.S. has borrowed $1 trillion over the past five months—that’s $50 billion a week on average—as Trump’s tax cuts slash revenue.   source

Admittedly, some Iranian children (and others) are being killed, a DOD “preliminary” investigation shows that the missile that hit the girls’ school on Day One was an American one; the most unstable region on Earth has been radically destabilized, apparently at the behest of the rightwing expansionist Prime Minister of Israel, who stayed with the Kushners in New Jersey and remained buddies with now-Ambassador Charles Kushner; there is a widespread effort across the government to cover up crimes in many departments of the federal government, as well as ethical violations, (which are a thing of the past, if done by good people); the Epstein Files Transparency Act, signed into law by President Trump, is being actively thwarted by Trump’s former criminal and impeachment attorneys who now run the Department of Justice; and Trump is quietly borrowing 50 billion a week to fund all this, BUT — there’s really nothing to see here.

The US Department of Obstruction of Justice, in conjunction with the Department of Maximum Lethality, the Department of Destruction of Public Education and “History” Erasure, and the president’s taskforce on Why Are Blacks and Dead People Still Allowed to Vote, have issued a joint statement. It reads, in full, “Sir YES, sir!”

Recent polling suggests that everything is still completely normal here in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

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, 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!!!!!

Trump DOJ fucks the Epstein survivors again

Lawrence O’Donnell, one of the best in the business, describes the “inadvertent” outing of previously unidentified Epstein victims in the recently released Epstein files, 50% of the total in the possession of DOJ.   O’Donnell reports that the DOJ had repeated requests from survivors to redact their names.  The names of Epstein co-conspirators in the sex trafficking of girls were all redacted, in direct defiance of the law Trump signed in November, while the names and birthdates, and even photos, of many of the girls themselves were … whoops, uh…  released publicly — also in direct violation of that same law. 

The DOJ’s new front man, soul dead Deputy Attorney General/Trump criminal attorney Todd Blanche (sidelined AG Pam Bondi’s idiocy has been recognized even by Trump) whined that the DOJ corrected these little “mistakes” as soon as they were informed by the women whose nude photos as girls had been publicly released.  Blanche claimed that these “mistakes” reflected like 0.002% of the millions of files, you know, perfectly understandable, given the enormous pressure DOJ is working under (to protect powerful pedophiles). 

Do the math, boys and girls, 0.002% of 3,000,000 is a lot of mistakes (6,000, a fraction of the number of times Trump is mentioned in the released pages) for the country’s top law enforcement agency, The Trump Department of Justice. It’s also a thousand times the incidence of election fraud as documented by the Heritage Foundation in their exhaustive online database. Were these errors incompetence due to any DOJ attorney of character, competence and experience being fired, quitting or being sidelined, or simple vicious retaliation/intimidation against sexually exploited girls who, as adult women, pose an ongoing threat to powerful white billionaire men? You be the judge.

A constantly lying administration, when caught lying, always has an excuse, often a barrage of excuses. The technique is familiar to anyone who has ever encountered an angry narcissist: deny, attack, reverse victim and offender (DARVO). The Trump propaganda machine doctored a photo of civil rights attorney Nekima Levy Armstrong, arrested after peacefully protesting in a Minnesota church. Using AI in the service of truth, justice and racist propaganda [1] it transformed her calm, dignified face, as she was led away in shackles, to a disheveled tearful portrait of an unhinged prisoner. One of the president’s spokes-liars dismissed concerns by calling it a “meme”. Case closed, cucks.

[1] The White House posted a manipulated photo of her arrest to its official social media account, depicting Ms. Levy Armstrong, a civil rights attorney and activist, as hysterical — tears streaming down her face, her hair disheveled, appearing to cry out in despair. “ARRESTED” was emblazoned across the photo, along with a misleading description of Ms. Levy Armstrong as a “far-left agitator” who was “orchestrating church riots in Minnesota.”

While President Trump and the White House regularly circulate imagery altered by artificial intelligence, including demeaning and racist deepfakes, it is usually so over the top that the goal seems more about cartoonish mockery than outright deceit. (source above)

New secret torture memo

Two whistleblowers recently revealed a secret Department of Homeland Security memorandum, dated May 12, 2025, giving a Trump “legal gloss” to the president’s right to instruct his personal agencies to ignore the US Constitution if ordered to by President Project 2025 under an imagined emergency pulled from Trump’s well-tongued ass. In addition to the new claim, echoed by the soul dead JD Vance, that ICE and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP — Bovino) agents are immune from prosecution for unprovoked cold-blooded murder (another 37 year-old, Alex Pretti, was pepper sprayed,  beaten and murdered today, ten shots into his prone body, at least three in the back, by several ICE/CBP agents — firing again in “self-defense” —  in besieged Minneapolis)  the deliberately concealed memo instructs ICE that it is not bound by the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures. It advised that ICE and CBP may, contrary to the Bill of Rights, break down anyone’s door and seize them for any, or no, reason.   The New York Times reports on this legal obscenity in their time honored, squeamishly restrained fashion [1].

“Shot while escaping” George Grosz circa 1936.

Nazis know that it is best to hide illegal actions to the fullest extent possible, particularly while committing atrocities.  When writing up the minutes of the Wannsee conference of January, 20, 1942 — a meeting among top Nazi officials to set up the Final Solution, the administrative mass killings in the countries conquered by Hitler’s army — special neutral words were used to mask goals like “liquidation”, “annihilation” and “mass murder”.   Anodyne substitutions were employed according to strict Nazi sprachregelung, “speech code”, now a staple of authoritarian and corporate communication strategies.  The notes of that meeting were kept top secret and all but one copy was destroyed by the time Hitler shot himself in the mouth after condemning the weakneyss of the German nation that had betrayed him.  That surviving copy of the carefully worded minutes of the Wannsee conference was produced as evidence of deliberate mass murder in the Nuremberg trials

When the aptly named Dick Cheney, as evil an elected official as ever lived, announced that America needed to go to the “dark side” after the 9/11 terrorist attack, to render suspects to secret “black sites” to torture them, in violation of American and international law, and treaties signed by the United States, he kept the details as quiet as possible.  A secret torture memo was written to offer a fig leaf of legal rationale for these illegal, barbaric practices.  Written by two far-right wing “neo-con” lawyers, now tenured constitutional law professor John Yoo and now federal judge for life Jay Bybee, the secret memo narrowly defined torture by torturing the definition of torture until it succumbed to the policy needs of the fascists then intent on torturing whoever they felt like torturing.   President Obama later cleared things up by candidly, almost nonchalantly, admitting that, in terrible times, some well-meaning Americans “tortured some folks.”  

Then Obama ordered the killing by drone, of an American citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, not charged with any crime, but condemned publicly for months as the leading English language Al Q’aeda propagandist and recruiter.   Shortly thereafter al-Awlaki’s teenaged American son was turned into chopped meat by another drone, in what the US classified as a “mistake”.   In 2017 Trump had al-Alwaki’s eight year-old daughter killed, for reasons still unclear.  Shit happens in war and very few people made a peep about any of this.  Jeremy Scahill’s book, Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield, details the radicalizaton of  al-Awlaki, a once moderate Muslim imam who apparently was being blackmailed by the FBI when they uncovered his regular visits to prostitutes.  The authors of the Wikipedia piece on al-Awlaki don’t seem to be aware of Scahill’s research (though FN 246 cites the book), but this is from Wikipedia [2].  The New York Times wrote that the government report on the extrajudicial killing of al-Awlaki (released under FOIA) “provides little confidence that the lethal action was taken with real care”,  describing it as “a slapdash pastiche of legal theories—some based on obscure interpretations of British and Israeli law—that was clearly tailored to the desired result.”[220]

Now we have the whistleblower release of the secret May 12, 2025 memo from Kristi Noem’s/Stephen Miller’s/Corey Lewandowski’s  Department of Homeland Security, instructing supervisors to tell ICE agents that they may break down doors to conduct warrantless searches and detentions illegal under the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution. I don’t know why this is hard for the media to state unambiguously, since the Fourth Amendment is pretty clear about the right of persons to be safe from arbitrary searches and seizures in their own homes without a judicial warrant based on probable cause to support forced entry to a residence. Here again is the NY Times report on the secret memo illegally instructing ICE agents that they don’t need a judicial warrant to break down someone’s door and hustle them out into an unmarked van to be flown to random sites 1,000 miles away.

Like other, similar illegal orders, the memo outlining the legal rationale for ignoring the US Constitution was not distributed widely among ICE agents, most of whom appear to be uneducated, poorly trained, violent, cowardly idiots, Ku Klux Klansmen, misogynists and criminals, a legally sanctioned J6 lynch mob intended to violently provoke a violent public reaction.   The memo asserting that the Fourth Amendment may be ignored during ICE aktions was a secret document that supervisors were read in on.  They could read it once under supervision, to see the rationale that appeared to give their goon squads permission to ignore the Fourth Amendment in this “national emergency” (we are under attack by “narco-terrorist” gangs of illegal immigrants, the worst of the worst, including five year-olds, coming in caravans to eat the dogs and cats of Iceland!) but not have a copy of it.  Nothing to see here.   This is how fucking Nazis always do it..  Speaking of pieces of shit:

[1] why use “appear”, twice, in both the headline and the lede, Grey Lady?  The executed man had no gun in hand at any point in the video, only a camera; the Trump admin says he was killed in self defense.  The three “suggestive” bullets in his back “appear to contradict” the official story that he was a crazed gunman intent on inflicting mass casualties on ICE and CBP agents who shot him ten times while he was on the ground, in self defense?  You appear to squeamishly suck ass, Grey Lady.

[2]  In June 2014, a previously classified memorandum from the U.S. Department of Justice was released; the memorandum described al-Awlaki’s killing as a lawful act of war.[23] Civil liberties advocates have called the killing of al-Awlaki an extrajudicial execution that breached al-Awlaki’s constitutional rights.[24] The New York Times wrote in 2015 that al-Awlaki’s public statements and videos had been more influential in inspiring acts of Islamic terrorism in the wake of his killing than they were before his death.[25] . . .

. . . In January 2010, White House lawyers debated whether or not it was legal to kill al-Awlaki, given his U.S. citizenship.[177] U.S. officials stated that international law allows targeted killing in the event that the subject is an “imminent threat“.[17] Because he was a U.S. citizen, his killing had to be approved by the National Security Council.[17] Such action against a U.S. citizen is extremely rare.[17] As a military enemy of the US, al-Awlaki was not subject to Executive Order 11905, which bans assassination for political reasons.[178] The authorization was nevertheless controversial.[179]

Fascist enterprise graphically laid out by the Grey Lady

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.