The Difference Between Cowardice and "Brand Protection" is Paper-Thin

This is what "brand protection" is all about. It is an inside-the-Beltway-think that Trumpism will burn out of its own weight and, so, there is nothing to be gained by taking a stand and fighting it in the present day.

I think that a lot of the Democratic establishment is made up of cowards. For example, the main response to Trump's idea of gerrymandering Texas is to carp and whine. Despite the talking of governors like Pritzger and Newsom, most won't do shit to counter the GOP's attempt to set its kleptocracy in stone.

The Declaration of Independence Was Not an Instruction Manual, Donnie

From the Declaration:

From the Demented Felon:

The number of people who seem to be nodding their heads when the Administration says "these people were all bad guys, trust us, and no, we're not going to tell you who they are and what evidence we had against them" is both astonishing and depressing. That Americans can go so willingly along with what is clearly tyranny would seem to be a damning indictment of our basic values.

Sending people to a prison beyond the reach of the laws because "we found this old statute that nobody has used since we stripped American citizens of their rights and sent them to concentration camps, so shut up" is pretty damn horrific.

But this is who we are, now.

If you have the courage, ask yourself these questions: If the Trump Administration can grab a bunch of guys off the street and ship them to a foreign hellhole of a prison without a shred of due process, what prevents them from grabbing you, your friends, your family and doing the same to you?

Deporting Americans

If your father is not a legal resident, then Trump's incoming border czar will deport you, as well.

Former Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Director Thomas Homan said that “families can be deported” together as a solution to separating families when carrying out mass deportation.

In a “60 Minutes” interview Sunday night, Homan, who was ICE director for a part of former President Trump’s administration, spoke on the GOP candidate’s pledge to implement mass deportations.

When journalist Cecilia Vega asked, “Is there a way to carry out mass deportation without separating families?” Homan responded: “Of course there is. Families can be deported together.”

Homan said he's not going to oversee neighborhood sweeps or build concentration camps, but, Gentle Reader, you have to know that he is lying on both counts. They're not arresting eleven or twelve million people by checking IDs at the factory gates or the fields. And they're going to have to out those people somewhere. Immigrants from Venezuela can't just be frog-marched over the border into Mexico. Mexico has no obligation to take them. They'd have to be transported to Venezuela, which likely won't allow the planes to land there. So we're going to get into a shooting war with a good part of Latin America?

But to the main point: If you're going to round up families because one member isn't a legal imigrant, well, that is some Nazi-grade shit.

And everyone knows it, including the Fat Orange Turd who keeps a copy of Mein Kampf on his nightstand.

Trump to Senate: Fuck You and Fuck the Constitution (Dictator on Day One {and those following])

President-elect Donald Trump and his allies signaled Sunday that they will try to call the shots in the Republican-led Senate, pushing the candidacy of Sen. Rick Scott (Florida) for GOP leader and demanding that Republicans allow Trump to make appointments to his administration and the courts without Senate approval.

Trump, who last year promised that he will be dictator “for Day One” of his presidency and has repeatedly expressed admiration for authoritarian leaders, insisted that the next Senate Republican leader make it possible for him to fast-track his nominations over any opposition.

The Constitution requires that presidential appointments be made with the advice and consent of the Senate. But that's too much for the Orange Dictator, even a rubber-stamp process is too slow for him.

A pretty hard-and-fast rule is that no politician ever willingly gives up power. So we'll see if they quickly cave to the Senile Autoctat.

Anyhoo: Toljaso #1

“You’re Smarter Than That”

That is from three different people in three different forms when I said the 2020 election was not stolen. If somebody tells you that "you're smarter than that" as an argument that the election was indeed stolen, they are talking from the latest series of Trumpy talking points.

Which probably sounded better in the original Russian.

To the Women Who Voted For Trump-- Toyota!

Your body, my choice. Forever.

— Nicholas J. Fuentes (@NickJFuentes) November 6, 2024

You asked for it, you got it!

But I do get it, part of it. There are women who hate other women. They would rather see a misogynistic racist get ahead than a woman, and that goes double if she's a minority. Matters not to them if the price of stomping on another woman is letting men like Fuentes trample their autonomy. Fuentes is the sort of troll who wants to repeal the 19th Amendment, the Equal Opportunity Credit Act and the Married Women's Property Acts.

But hey, personal autonomy is a small price to pay for being able to shiv another woman in the back, amirite?

Good Luck Getting Your Roof Done

We had our roof replaced some months ago. The gutter guys had screwed it up, the shingles they installed didn't match and it looked awful. When the roofers ripped off the old shingles, they found that some of the plywood underneath was bad, so it was a good thing overall.

The crew itself was Hispanic. At the end of the job, when we paid the balance to the contractor, we complimented him on the efficiency and cleanliness of his crew. See, after the gutters were done (three times, because they screwed it up twice), we were finding and picking up nails for months. The roofers picked up everything and went around the house a couple of times with magnetic brooms.

We then got into a discussion about the ethnicity of the crew. The contractor said that he had started his business with the intent of providing jobs for Americans. But what he found was that he was constantly getting calls from his workers who were taking an unscheduled day off. The excuses were along the lines of "my car broke down," "I'm a little hung over," "I need to meet with my parole officer" or their partner would call to say that so-and-so was in the hospital after ODing or was in jail. He could almost never field a full crew and he was constantly arranging for rides or picking up guys whose cars had broken down or weren't registered anymore. There were lots of workers' comp claims. And when the crew was there, some worked slowly because they were hung over and most of the time, they took 90 minutes or more for lunch. One day jobs almost always took more than a day. And when they finished, the homeowners' yards were a mess with nails scattered everywhere. Quite often, some of the jobs needed to be redone.

One of his workers was from Central America. He was also his best worker. One fine day, that worker told the contractor that he could put together his own crew if the contractor wanted. The contractor did. What the contractor then found was that the Central American guy had a crew that showed up on time, every day. They had their own transportation. They brought their own lunches and took a short break. They worked carefully (the injury rate sank to almost zero) and diligently. One day jobs took one day. When they finished, they cleaned up after themselves. The rework rate also sank to near zero, he said that he couldn't remember the last time he had to send men out to fix bad work.

Were they all legal? I don't know. But will they be rounded up in Trump's immigrant dragnet? Signs point to yes. To arrest and detain eleven million people, which is what Reichfuhrer Miller wants to do, lots of untrained goobers are going to be tasked/hired to do the work. Even if the error rate is only one-half of a percent, that'll be over fifty thousand legal residents, both naturalized and native-born, who will be detained and possibly deported.

Which brings me to this: If you are not white, it would probably behoove you to cary proof of citizenship with you. It may be too late to get a passport card, which leaves a passport, a copy of your naturalization papers or a copy of your birth certificate (and they should be certified). And commit to memory the number of some sort of legal assistance resource and know where the originals are. Because some cracker with a bent-shitcan attitude might destroy your documents out of sheer MAGA-inspired meanness.

Hope you don't have a taste for lettuce and other crops that are picked by hand. Those are going to largely rot in the fields once the roundup begins. Which will be a roundup that will of a scale of the German roundup of Jews and other groups and may only be slightly more humane.

All you good little Americans, all 73 million of you, will have much to be proud of.

Some Thoughts About the Return of the Orange Emperor

First, some thoughts from a friend:

In the words of Maya Angelou, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”

• If you voted for someone who spews hate and retribution, you didn’t vote for peace and unity in our nation. 

• If you voted for someone who demonstrates bigotry, you didn’t vote for racial equality. 

• If you voted for someone who has a history of misogyny and assaulting women, you didn’t vote for gender equality or the protection of women. 

• If you voted for someone who has cavalierly violated numerous laws, you didn’t vote in support of law enforcement or an equal system of justice for all. 

• If you voted for someone who has unabashedly violated most of the Ten Commandments, you didn’t vote for Judeo-Christian values.

You don’t get to launch an atomic weapon and then say “I hope everyone is okay on the ground where it hit.”

If there is any one person to blame, that would be President Biden. He had alluded to stepping down after one term, but once Trump got into the race, Biden let his ego get the better of him. I guess that's somewhat understandable; you don't spend a life in politics without developing a very large sense of importance. A series of primaries might have resulted in a better candidate. That's not a slam of Vice President Harris, but asking a country where Trumpist-style racism is engrained to choose a Black Asian woman as president was a bridge too far. So was asking her to mount a hundred-day general campaign for the job.

But beyond that, if there is anyone to blame, it is the American people. It was clear to all but the most casual observer that the root cause of inflation over the past few years was the billions and billions of dollars that both Trump and Biden had shoveled out to everyone, individuals and businesses, need be damned, to help keep the economy afloat during the COVID-19 pandemic. That money had to go somewhere and it did. I can understand why Biden didn't point that out, he was a part of it, but it might have helped lower the temperature. Trumpers were bleating about gasoline being $1.80/gal in 2020 without acknowledging that the reason it was so cheap was that millions had been tossed out of work and millions more were working from home. There was a contagious pandemic going on and nobody was going anywhere. Supply and demand; there was gas, but few were buying it. MIB said it best, really.

Trump has said who he is and what he wants to do. This time, there are no guardrails. There are no senior Republicans to suggest that he not do something. The Supremes have neutered the courts for him. He has the unchecked power that Nixon could only dream of having. And if he decides to not leave office in January of 2029, there will be no mechanism to tell him no.

A side note: Don't be shocked if there is a mass exodus of senior civil servants who will decide they would rather secure their retirement than put up with bullshit from the MAGA political appointees.

A side note on the ethics tax: Trump lost in 2020 by millions of votes, but that didn't stop him or his core believers from trying to stage a coup and then whining for four years about the election being stolen. Harris lost by millions of votes, yet she's not calling for a "stop the steal"movement or contesting it. Because Trump never plays fair. He's a liar and a cheat at all things, great and small, from politics to business to golf to his marital vows.

Still, the blame here is on the American people who heard all about what Trump said and knew about his past behavior. his criminality, his grifting the Oval Office, his penchant for treason, his love of all things Putin, and his constant lying and dismissed all of it, whether out of fear, anger, racism or disbelief. Pick one or more. Also, this. And this.

It's going to be an even more interesting time. Strap in.

And one final note: Comment moderation is in effect. Govern yourselves accordingly.