Let's See if the Press Has Any Balls

Trump is kicking out MSNOW, Politico and CNN from covering the White House.

If the WHCA has any balls, they'd all walk out and leave the White House to Fox, NewsMax and Russia Today.

ICE Goes Further Fascist

ICE, whose job is in their title, you know, immigration and customs enforcement", is compiling a database of voters.

ICE is Trump's paramilitary goon squad, which is why they're spending $125 million in support of Trump's campaign to end fair elections.

History will regard having worked for ICE as the 21st Century equivalent of having been a Gestapo officer or a SS soldier. There should be headers on every online job application form that reads "No Former ICE AGent Need Apply". After we de-MAGAfy the government, "homeless former ICE goon" should be a thing.

Trump's New Slush Fund is Clearly Illegal

Section 4 of the 14th Amendment:

The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any state shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.

But that doesn't matter. The cult of personality that is the modern GOP will do whatever Trump wants, without a quibble or concern for its legality. The Fascist Six on the Supreme Court will ratify whatever Trump wants to do. Until the mid-term elections, the Democrats are essentially powerless to stop Trump enriching his J6 thugs.

Which brings me to this: If you want to see our Republic survive to see 255 years, you had best go to the polls in November and vote for a Democrat. Even if youy're a lifelong Republican, vote for a Democrat. Maybe the GOP, after TRump, will find its way to being a party that is loyal to the Constitution and to the Republic, but they are not now loyal to anything or anyone other than Trump. The only reasonably painless way to stop this GOP march of fascism is to vote every one of those fuckers out, as did the Hungarians.

GOP's Poll Tax on Everyone

That is what the SAVE Act is: a poll tax designed to stop poorer people and women from voting.

Voters need to prove citizenship. If you don't have your birth certificate available, you'll need to get a certified copy. If your name doesn't match, you'll need a certified copy of your name change or a certified copy of your marriage license-- each one of them if you've been married more than once and have had different surnames.

Or you'll need a valid passport or passport card.

None of that is cost-free. You may need to make repeated trips to your vital records department and pay fee after fee.

All is supposedly to prevent voter fraud, which is both extremely rare and mostly perpetrated by Republicans.

No, folks, the goal is to come up with a way to disenfranchise tens of millions of Americans, the ones more likely than not to vote against the Party of Fascism.

In other words, they want to rig the game.

Don't let them. Call or write your congresscritters.

Courts Step Up

The Rule of Law is still holding:

The chief federal judge in Minnesota says the Trump administration has failed to comply with orders to hold hearings for detained immigrants and ordered the head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement to appear before him Friday to explain why he shouldn’t be held in contempt.

In an order dated Monday, Chief Judge Patrick J. Schiltz said Todd Lyons, the acting director of ICE, must appear personally in court. Schlitz took the administration to task over its handling of bond hearings for immigrants it has detained.

“This Court has been extremely patient with respondents, even though respondents decided to send thousands of agents to Minnesota to detain aliens without making any provision for dealing with the hundreds of habeas petitions and other lawsuits that were sure to result,” the judge wrote.

Now it is up to the Senate and the Republicans to step up. At least one Republican is fleeing.

Life in Occupied America

What life is like in the Twin Cities these days.

The Cowards of the Capitol

Even though there's a law requiring this plaque to be displayed, the Trumpist Toadies controlling the Congress won't put it on display.

January 6th, 2001 was a day of infamy. Republicans are traitors, they are seditious weasels, every last one of them.

2025

In an image:

2025 was worse than 2024 and I have no optimism that 2026 will be better than 2025. The Right seems to be fully onboard with the destruction of democracy and the installation of His Fraudulency, King Donald of Bronzer. The Democrats in Congress seem largely feckless.

Not all of the Right has buckled. Grandpa Sundowner pushed Indiana too hard and they didn't like it. As for the Democrats, their leaders in Congress seem to be addicted to tut-tutting as a response.

As for the media, well, a couple of cartoons summed it up:

Oligarchs bought up the companies that control most news outlets and then used that control to bend them to Trump. If they were hesitant, Trump had no qualms signaling that he'd use his power to fuck with their companies. So Larry Ellison, who owns Paramount, put a Trump-loving sycophant in charge of CBS News, who promptly spiked a 60 Minutes story that was unfavorable to the Administration (after he terminated Stephen Colbert's show). Bezos, who is trying hard to get into the rocket biz, muzzled the Washington Post's editorial section and forced out Ann Telnaes (the cartoon that precipitated that is the second one, above).

The only way this gets fixed is if we do it. If we vow, for the duration of Trumpism, to not vote for a Republican for any office whatsover, right down to the Town Dogcatcher. Maybe the non-Trump conservatives can assemble and for a new party, for the GOP may be irrevocably tainted by its slavish devotion to a corrupt wannabee dictator.

But we have to vote. For something like 35% of this country hates the fact that the rest of us can have a say. They want to repeal the Civil Rights Act, as well as the 14th and 19th Amendments. They want to repeal the Married Women's Property Acts. They want to repeal no-fault divorce to make it harder for women to get out of abusive marriages. And I have zero doubt that they want to make husbands immune from spousal violence laws.

The only way to stop this in a civil matter is to vote those fuckers out.

The GOP is the American Nazi Party.

Nazis of a feather, hang together.

The GOP is merely reclaiming its roots as a Nazi-adjacent party, which they were before Hitler declared war following the Pearl Harbor attack.

Racist and Hateful Я Trump

The masked goons at CBP/ICE plan to raid Spanish-language churches over the holidays.

The sight of those neo-Nazi goons dragging abuelas out of churches shoild shame the soul of any decent human being.

Which is to say, not Republicans.

For Trump and the Nazi Republicans, Starvation and Cruelty Are the Point

The Trump administration is telling states not to pay full November food stamp benefits, revising its previous guidance after winning a temporary victory at the Supreme Court on Friday.

USDA’s latest memo, sent Saturday to state directors of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, instructed states to deliver just 65 percent of benefits during the government shutdown and required those who already sent full payments to claw back that money.

“To the extent States sent full SNAP payment files for November 2025, this was unauthorized. Accordingly, States must immediately undo any steps taken to issue full SNAP benefits for November 2025,” the memo notes.

Intentional cruelty is a happmark of modern "conservatism" and this administration.

Nancy Mace is an Arrogant, Entitled Piece of Shit

She was berating the cops and the TSA officers at an airport because, I guess, they didn't lie down and let her walk across their bodies.

Her media staff puke tried to play the Charlie Kirk card. I'm betting the cops weren't impressed.

After all, this is the party that says they back the blue, except when they're beating them with flagpoles,

Scratch a Republican, Find a Nazi

They're not even trying to hide it.

U.S. Capitol Police were called about an American flag altered to include a swastika and displayed inside the office of Rep. Dave Taylor (R-Ohio), his spokesperson said.

POLITICO obtained an image taken during a virtual meeting that shows the flag pinned to what appears to be a cubicle wall behind Angelo Elia, one of Taylor’s staffers.

The "vandalism" or "sabotage" theories don't hold water. Nobody noticed that there was a flag with a swastika in the office? One would think that such a thing would stand out like Melania Trump at the Apollo Theatre.

Republicans Keep on Lying for Fascism

Before a federal judge blocked Donald Trump from putting members of California’s national guard on the streets of Portland, Oregon, late on Sunday, the state’s Republican party welcomed the planned deployment in celebratory posts on social media.

“President Trump on Sunday deployed 300 California National Guard troops to Portland, Oregon after a judge ruled that the Oregon National Guard could not be deployed to keep federal facilities and personnel in Portland safe,” Oregon Republicans wrote on their official Facebook, Instagram and X accounts.

On all three platforms, the statement was illustrated with an image that seemed designed to support Trump’s false claim that protests against immigration sweeps in Portland are so out of control that the city is “burning to the ground”. On one side of the image, a line of police officers held riot shields; on the other, a crowd of young men held up flares that lit up a night sky filled with red smoke.

On closer inspection, however, it turned out that the image was not a photograph of a real event in Portland, but instead a fabrication created by combining two photographs of scenes that unfolded in South America nearly a decade apart.

Republicans are lying to support Trump's push to turn this country into a police state. They are not loyal to the Constitution, they are loyal to Trump.

To be an active Republican is to be a traitor. They are the Confederates of this century and they are just as evil as the Confederates were.

GOP: Free Speech For Me, Executions For Thee

An Arizona Republican lawmaker on Wednesday called for the execution of a Democratic congresswoman because she urged people upset with President Donald Trump to protest in the streets.

Kingman Republican Rep. John Gillette wrote on the social media site X that U.S. Rep. Pramila Jayapal, a Democrat from Washington, was calling for the the government to be overthrown and should be hanged.

Right, the party that has spent the last several years bleating about free speech and screaming about "cancel culture" now wants to lynch anyone who says anything nasty about Lord Voldemoron of Mar-a-Lago. And don't think it is a coincidence that this clown wants to hang a woman of color for having the temerity to say anything derogatory about His Orange Babyman God.

Conservatives: Guns and free spech only for white men.

Prove me wrong.

Perfidity, Thy Name is "Republican"

Republican pols are pleading for calm in their official social media accounts and calling for violence in their personal accounts.

If you happen to follow Rep. Derrick Van Orden’s official account on X, you’d see his swift rejection of violence in response to last week’s horrific killing of right-wing political activist Charlie Kirk.
...
But on his personal account, Van Orden is giving a different message: He’s inviting war against “these leftist scumbags” as retaliation for Kirk’s murder.

Mike Lee, Nancy Mace, Randy Fine, probably others, they're calling for nice-nice in public and violence in private.

And, of course, the Elderly Orange Dementia Case is being consistent in calling for hatred and violence.

The "Free Speech for Me, But Not for Thee" Party. (Updated)

Vice President JD Vance on Monday jumped onto the conservative movement demanding consequences for those who have cheered Charlie Kirk’s killing, calling on the public to turn in anyone who says distasteful things about the assassination of his friend and political ally.

Killing somebody for their political beliefs is wrong.

But it would be nice if that was an ideal followed by the dead guy, who celebrated the attempted murder of Paul Pelosi. I am absolutely sure that if the perp had found Nancy Pelosi at home and killed her, Kirk and his ilk would have been figuratively dancing in her blood in celebration. Just like Republicans celebrated the murders of Melissa and Mark Hortman.

It is becoming clearer and clearer after Kirk’s slaying that freedom of speech, like every other constitutional right, is one that is to be freely enjoyed only by straight, white, conservative, christian men.

In that, they are dishonoring the man they seek to honor:

And it is no coincidence that whenever the Feds began looking at domestic terrorism, they found out every time that the threat was coming from the Right and the Republicans made them shut down the programs/inquiries.

As Sen. Murphy warns, we may be in for some dark times. For the Right is doing its best to turn this killing into their Reichstag moment and use that to quash freedom for everyone else. And they are not shy about their aims.

And above all, Trump needs to distract people from the fact that he is prominently mentioned in the Epstein files.

Rewarding Traitors, the Enshittification of Our Government

The Air Force is offering full military honors to a person who shit all over her oath.

The U.S. government is offering military funeral honors for Ashli Babbitt, the rioter who was killed at 35 by an officer in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

Babbitt was a U.S. Air Force veteran from California who was shot dead wearing a Trump campaign flag wrapped around her shoulders while attempting to climb through the broken window of a barricaded door leading to the Speaker’s Lobby inside the Capitol.

Offering military honors to one of the Capitol rioters is part of President Donald Trump’s attempts to rewrite that chapter after the 2020 election as a patriotic stand, given he still denies he lost that election. Babbitt has gained martyr status among Republicans, and the Trump administration agreed to pay just under $5 million to settle a wrongful-death lawsuit that her family filed over her shooting.

Providing military honors to a putschist who was trying to overturn the government as part of Trump's first coup is despicable. The Nazis who died in Hitler's failed putsch also got full honors once his second coup succeeded.

That's the roll that the GOP and the Senile Orange Agent are on, nowadays: Honoring traitors and rewriting history so that treason is patriotic.

With the Hell of War They’ve Come To Grips, Policing Up the Filter-Tips

A full busload of National Guard members were seen Tuesday morning picking up trash around Lafayette Park, just outside of the White House.
...
An official confirmed to FOX 5 DC that 110 National Guard members were picking up trash Tuesday at Lafayette Square, the National Mall, and the Tidal Basin.

Hep, take away a bunch of people from their jobs, families and lives in order to set them to work on litter detail. Bet that does wonders for troop morale.

But that's something Generalissimo Bone Spurs has no concept of. To him, they're all suckers and losers for signing up.

Remember, Trump Pardoned Guys Who Beat Cops With Poles, Clubs, Crushed Them in Doors and Sprayed Them With Bear Spray

But he and Bondi are going after a guy who threw a sandwich at a Feebie. And, instead of letting him turn himself in (as was offered), they sent twenty goons to do an early-morning performative arrest.

Compare this case to how they've treated the J6 criminals who assaulted cops: All pardoned and quite a few have been hired by Bondi and Trump.

It's all a massive distraction to get something on the news other than the continuing fact that
Trump is in the Epstein Files.