Corrupt Homan Fits the Profile of a Wife-Beater, Defending His Snowflakes

This is what he said:

"I begged for the last two months on TV for the rhetoric to stop. I said in March -- if the rhetoric doesn't stop, there is gonna be bloodshed. And there has been."

That's almost classic wife-abuser speech: "If you weren't so mean to me, I wouldn't have to hit you."

ICE, the Border Patrol and the other fascists are just snowflakes. They can't take anybody being mean to them. They can't take anyone exercising their First Amendment rights around them.

Like here, where ICE is pepper-spraying a middle-aged white woman who has the utter gall to record what they are doing.

These clowns are the worst at winning hearts and minds since MACV.

And, as much as everyone joking that Bovino was a Nazi Munchkin, turns out that the characterization was accurate.

A Palate-Cleanser

AC/DC's Thunderstruck:

ICE Lies, Again and Again and Again, My Friend

The upshot of this story, in which ICE claimed a detainee ran headfirst into a wall, is that they more likely beat the guy half to death and then concocted a wildly improbably fairy tale to disguise what they did.

Which is why, when Trump's legal team promises an investigation into the murder of Alex Pretti, only a person with a liquified cortex would believe that there will be an honest investigation. Those who would have done the investigation have quit or have been pushed out. What's left are Trumpy sycophants. Bondi, Noem, Patel, and Miller all said, within hours of the murder, that Pretti was a domestic terrorist or an assassin. So it's reasonable to conclude that this investigation will be a real heavy whitewashing of the murder.

Caturday

I only have two cats to photograph this week and they're both spending most of their days stacking Zs in warm spots, so I searched for "bodega cat" and grabbed the first one.

Yes, Trump is a Pedophile. Allegedly.

He reportedly forced a 13-year-old girl to give him a blow job.

We all knew that this was coming, right?

Russia's Rep Was in Fulton County

Putin's girlfriend, Tulsi Gabbard, was in Fulton County, skulking around at the Trump-mandated raid on county election offices. What the DNI has to do with elections is yours to speculate.

Meanwhile, as it would be put if the press was covering a third-world dictatorship: State secret police arrested a journalist who was covering a protest. He wasn't the only one Trump's Blackshirts arrested for covering a protest.

Bribe-taking Barbie had to go judge-shopping to find one who would sign an arrest warning.

As others have noticed, using the KKK Act to arrest a journalist who was covering a protest at a neo-Nazi church that has a high-ranking ICE official as an assistant pastor is some seriously twisted shit. The point of all this is to intimidate reporters, because Trump can't abide freedom of the press.

The presumption of innocence should apply ten-fold to anyone charged by the feds. The standard of proof for a conviction in federal court should be beyond an unreasonable doubt. Because it's reasonable, now, to suppose that a federal charge is persecution.

And every reporter, editor and publisher who doesn't speedily condemn those arrests is a fucking Quisling who should quit and take a job washing Lindsey Graham's balls.

Face-Stomping These Down, Here

Because It's Friday

Old Cuban steam.

Bruce Brings It

The Streets of Minneapolis.

Defecating These Down, Here

Thank Apple and Samsung

Without lots of video taken by bystanders, this might have worked:

This was an attempt to intimidate witnesses, pure and simple. Arresting witnesses is not a benign act.

Defund ICE and the Border Patrol now.

Another Corporate Evildoer

NEC, which sells facial recognition software to the DHS ghouls.

If you work for NEC or do business with them, you are one evil motherfucker.

Trump Threatens to Send His Secret Police In Order to Extort Money

These are screenshots of a fundraising email his team sent out, threatening to send his secret police to drag non-doners out of their homes:

Yeah, yeah, you can say he's not directly threatening people, but that's his fundraising arm and you can bet your feet that there is someone close to him doing this.

Maybe him. He's sleazy enough.

Trump Hires Stupid Fuckers While He Bashes the 2A

The interim head of the country’s cyber defense agency uploaded sensitive contracting documents into a public version of ChatGPT last summer, triggering multiple automated security warnings that are meant to stop the theft or unintentional disclosure of government material from federal networks, according to four Department of Homeland Security officials with knowledge of the incident.

How stupid does one have to be in order as, a computer security expert, to do this stupid shit?

Meanwhile, the Orange Sundowner continues to bash the Second Amendment.

Imagine Obama saying that; the frothing from the Right would have been monumentous. Because the Right has not been shy about bringing their guns to demonstrations.

But when it's not thier side, they bleat, without an ounce of self-reflection, that people shouldn't bring guns to demonstrations.

Hell, they want to ban whistles, too.

That's a common theme with the Right: freedoms and liberties are only theirs to exercise. The rest of us should shut up, lie down, and let them stamp on our faces, forever. They haven't changed since the 18th Century, when they were the Loyalists collaborating in the oppression of the Colonialists by the armed forces of Mad King George.

They lost, then. They'll lose, now.

Heh.

Flipping These Down, Here

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.

The Rhythm of History

Rodney Balko has some thoughts:

The Republicans’ veneration of the Founders is particularly rich at the moment because, of all the abuses England heaped on the colonies, nothing angered them more than the Crown’s deployment of soldiers on city streets — and the streets of Boston in particular. Anger, resentment, and violence simmered in Boston for years before the Boston Massacre in 1770. The Declaration of Independence Trump hangs in his office came six years later, followed by the American Revolution, then the birth of the United States.

The rage from those pre-revolution clashes in Boston continued to linger for years into the Constitutional Convention, and then the debate over the Bill of Rights. The Founders were also students of history, and saw how the domestic use of the military led to the fall of the Roman Republic. This, in large part, is why we have the Second, Third, and Fourth Amendments, and why the Constitution splits control of the military between the president and Congress. You really can’t overstate how much the Founders worried about . . . exactly what we’re seeing in Minneapolis.
...
From the perspective of the people of Minneapolis — and the rest of the country — the message is clear: This administration believes that killing protesters is a thing to be celebrated and encouraged. They believe that performatively lying about these killings in the face of directly contradictory video evidence is a display of strength and power. And they believe that the First, Second, and Fourth Amendments forged after the violence in Boston are mere suggestions.

Read the whole thing. The parallels are fairly clear.

Also, as reported, the ICE List.

Fascist ICE

They're threatening people who are exercizing their Consitutional rights.

It's not illegal to follow or record their activities, even if they don't like it.

Fuck ICE.

Aww. Nobody Loves the Secret Policemen, and They're Feeling Butthurt

Morale is “plummeting” among federal law enforcement officers tasked with carrying out the Trump administration’s aggressive anti-immigration operation, as they complained that long hours, ambitious arrest quotas and hatred from the public, according to reports.
...
One agent with the department told the Times that he had “always given the benefit of the doubt to the government in these situations,” but that he now no longer believed “any of the statements they put out anymore.”

“We lost all trust,” a current ICE official added. “I’m not sure I can see how we exist three years from now.”

Fox News correspondent Bill Melugin also reported “extreme frustration” in the department over “some of the claims & narratives DHS pushed in the aftermath of the shooting.”

“These sources say this messaging from DHS officials has been catastrophic from a PR and morale perspective, as it is eroding trust and credibility,” Melugin reported Sunday.

They got their widdle feewings hurt becasue people don't like them wiping their filthy feet on the Constitution. They can cry themselves to sleep and comfort themselves with the realization that someday, some of them may be sitting at the defendant's table.

Meanwhile, the Minnesota National Guard came to a protest at the federal building with coffee, donuts and hot chocolate. They wore reflective vests, so nobody would mistake them for ICE goons cosplaying as soldiers.

The Closest They Can Get

This headline:

Videos of the deadly Minneapolis shooting of Alex Pretti contradict government statements

I suppose that "Videos of the deadly Minneapolis shooting of Alex Pretti show the government is lying" would be too much.

Even Murdoch's rag can't abide Trump's lies:

This bears repeating: In two-thirds of the homicides in Minneapolis since New Years Day, the perps have been Feds.

I have to chuckle at all of the Trumpy officials who are foaming at the mouth about some guy who was carrying (not brandishing) a gun at a protest, while forgetting all of the "Second Amendment" demonstrations that have been going on for years, not to mention the Teabagger protests of the early 2010s and, of course, J6.

That's what the Right has always believed, the right to own and carry a gun only applies to them. It's no accident that gun control laws have historically been tighter where there are higher numbers of minorities.

(And the Epstein Files still haven't been released.)