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.

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.

If We Are a Just Nation, One Day, The People Running These Places Will Be In Jail, Themselves

Starting with Discount Goebbels, himself, Stephen Miller.

Migrants at a Miami immigration jail were shackled with their hands tied behind their backs and made to kneel to eat food from styrofoam plates “like dogs”, according to a report published on Monday into conditions at three overcrowded south Florida facilities.
...
Degrading treatment by guards is commonplace in all three jails, the groups say. At the Krome North service processing center in west Miami, female detainees were made to use toilets in full view of men being held there, and were denied access to gender-appropriate care, showers, or adequate food.

The jail was so far beyond capacity, some transferring detainees reported, that they were held for more than 24 hours in a bus in the parking lot. Men and women were confined together, and unshackled only when they needed to use the single toilet, which quickly became clogged.
...
When the group was finally admitted into the facility, they said, many spent up to 12 days crammed into a frigid intake room they christened la hielera – the ice box – with no bedding or warm clothing, sleeping instead on the cold concrete floor.

ICE is showing itself to be just an evil organization, committng human rights abuses willy-nilly, with a percentage of the population cheering them on.

We are not much different than the good little Germans who turned their backs on what was happening in the 1930s.

DeSantis's Dachau

A new plan to convert a remote Everglades airstrip into a migrant detention center, dubbed "Alligator Alcatraz," has been celebrated by MAGA supporters, who hailed it as a victory for the hard-line immigration agenda they voted for.

Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem said the facility would be funded through the Federal Emergency Management Agency's (FEMA) Shelter and Services Program, which has been used to provide housing and support for undocumented migrants.

Remember this: for MAGA, cruelty is the point. These are not the "worst of the worst", these are people who have not committed a crime. Overstaying a visa or not having one is a civil, not a criminal violation. And yes, the Puppy-Killer is reveling in the cruelty.

MAGA are the same sort of people who reveled at cramming Jews into boxcars. They are just as despicable.

Trump is Suffering from Dain Bramage

This is why:

Trump now calling for a regime change in Iran. Just FYI.

[image or embed]

— Mueller, She Wrote (@muellershewrote.com) June 22, 2025 at 5:11 PM

We are still dealing with the fallout from the last time we engaged in regime change in Iran. What a dumbass.

The Couch-Fucker is no better, claiming that we are not at war with Iran. I don't know about you, but it seems to me that dropping brloody great bombs on a country is an act of war. We kind of took it that way in December of 1941, but Vance will plead ignorance because he wasn't around then.

It’s as Though Trump Dug Up Neville Chamberlain and Made Him Secretary of State

The United States wants to hear what concessions Ukraine would be willing to make in negotiations to end the war with Russia, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said ahead of a high-stakes meeting between the two nations on Tuesday.

What a pack of gutless, soulless surrender monkeys Republicans have become!

The disgust I feel for MAGA and the rest of the Party of Treason is hard to put into words. They are worse than dogshit. They might as well go to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldiers and smear shit all over it. That would only symbolize how much they have defiled our country.

Nuclear World

This took no great thinking to foresee:

Work is under way to make all men in Poland undergo military training, Prime Minister Donald Tusk said.
...
Tusk pointed out Ukraine was invaded after it got rid of its own nuclear arsenal, adding Warsaw would like to acquire its own nuclear weapons, however remote a possibility that may be.

"Today, it is clear that we would be safer if we had our own nuclear arsenal, that is beyond doubt. In any case the road to that would be very long and there would have to be a consensus too," he said.

Poland is already planning to spend 4.7% of its economic output on defence this year, the highest proportion in the Nato alliance.

Tusk told parliament that spending should increase to 5% of GDP.

Our long national nightmare of there being peace and prosperity seems to be over. {/sarc}

More to the point, we in the West spent something like 45 years in a cold war with the USSR. We won, as the republicans are often wont to say, because of Reagan. (I disagree, but that's for historians to debate.) The West watched, with some dismay, as Russia fell apart and then began to knit itself back together under a dictator using a democratic system as a fig leaf. Russia began, more and more, to interfere with other European nations, including backing coup attempts in a few.

But the Cold War alliances held. Until this year.

45 years to wage and win the Cold War and now, that Fat Old Demented Bastard has thrown it all away in six weeks. European nations are seriously pursuing rearmament, not just in a token amount, not to support NATO, but to protect their own security because they can no longer count on the United States.

Hell, six weeks and this treasonous ancient sex pest of a president is doing what he can to join a new Warsaw Pact, a new Axis of Evil with Russia.

And the very same Republicans who cheered Reagan for winning the Cold War are siding with country that he knew to be our principal adversary. Because they are, in their hearts, the same pro-fascist political movement that was around in the 1930s.

And then there is this bit of betrayal:

ICE Raids

“Terrible things are happening. Poor helpless people are being dragged out of their homes. Families are torn apart. Men, women, and children are separated. Children come home from school to find that their parents have disappeared.”

Funny how the past resonates with the present. Those words could be written today about the Fat Orange Bastard's ICE raids. But they were written over eighty years ago.

Probably Time for American Civilians to Bug Out of Lebanon

The U.S. is sending a small number of additional troops to the Middle East in response to a sharp spike in violence between Israel and Hezbollah forces in Lebanon that has raised the risk of a greater regional war, the Pentagon said Monday.

Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder, Pentagon press secretary, would not say how many more forces would be deployed or what they would be tasked to do.
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The State Department is warning Americans to leave Lebanon as the risk of a regional war increases.

“Due to the unpredictable nature of ongoing conflict between Hezbollah and Israel and recent explosions throughout Lebanon, including Beirut, the U.S. Embassy urges U.S. citizens to depart Lebanon while commercial options still remain available,” the State Department cautioned Saturday.

Ryder would not say if the additional forces might support the evacuation of American citizens if needed.

I hope they are drafting contingency plans to evacuate people, because doing it on the fly is a heavy lift.

Putin’s European Asset Reported In

Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orban has met Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow, in a visit that has been heavily criticised by EU leaders and Ukraine's government.

Friday's meeting was part of what Mr Orban called a "peace mission", coming three days after a visit to Kyiv where he met Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky.

The "peace" envisioned by Orban and Putin is the same deal offered to Czechoslovakia in 1938: "You guys surrender to aggression in the vain hope of avoiding a wider war." Putin's terms for suspending the war include the surrender of territory Russia doesn't control.

And it is a suspension, for as soon as Putin can rebuild his second-rate army, he'll finish the job. Maybe he's convinced Orban Russia will invade Hungary last.

The Hungarians haven't changed since they were allied with the Nazis. One might have thought that 1956 would have reminded them of what life was like under Russian rule, but I guess they've forgotten.

Miss Lindsey Loses His Mind and Shits on the D-Day Veterans

This is what he said:

We celebrated the 80th anniversary of D-Day. It was a failure. It was the unnecessary war, described by Winston Churchill. We had a dozen chances to stop Hitler.

If you read the transcrpt, it's pretty clear that Lindsey Graham has lost his mind. D-Day was a failure because the rest of the world didn't stop Hitler earlier? That's just fucking bananas.

Let's be clear about this, too: One of the reasons that Hitler was not stopped earlier was because Graham's party obstructed every move to do so until Germany committed geopolitical seppuku and declared war on the United States. Without that, we would have been fighting Japan and funnelling aid to the British Commonwealth and the Soviet Union over the objections of Republicans, who were as pro-isolationist and pro-fascist then as they have become again.

The Problem is in Your Own House, Mitch

Sen. Mitch McConnell has written an opinion piece in the NY Times saying that we cannot afford to repeat the mistakes of the 1930s. This is a non-paywalled link to the piece.

What McConnell only hints at is that the difficulty in the 2020s when it comes to resisting Russian aggression comes from within his own party, just as it did in the 1930s, when the isolationists (and the Nazi sympathizers) were also in his own party.

The recent gains on the battlefield by the Russians were as a direct result of Republicans delaying aid to Ukraine for nearly half-a-year. Of course, you won't hear McConnell acknowledging that fact, either.

So his opinion peace is pretty weak sauce.

Political Courage in the Age of MAGA

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell went agains the MAGA fascists in pushing aid to Ukraine to President Biden's desk.

Before The Dead Radio Fascist and Newtie the Terrorist changed things, bipartisanship was normal. It was fairly rate to have a supermajority in the Senate, so if anything was to be done, it took working across the aisle to do it. Legislators from both parties would, from time to time, get together socially. Their families were friends and neighbors with each other. But that ended whtn those two assholes elected to engage in a decades'-long demonization of those who disagreed with them.

A majority of Republicans in both bodies bought into Russian and MAGA propaganda about the Russo-Ukrainian War. Some of the loonier onew, such as Moscow Marjorie Traitor Greene, did little more than repeat and push Russian propaganda. The rest of those low-wattage boobs were content to throw away Republican hawkishness on Russia (and the USSR) and turn their backs on Putin's push to rebuild the Soviet Union. They were happy to repeat the pro-Nazi mistake of the America First jerkoffs in 1940 and 1941, bury their heads in the dirt and wait until the war came to our shores.

McConnell knew the danger early on and has been outspoken in the need to help Ukraine beat back the Ruscist Katsaps. Johnson, on the other hand, took some persuasion. Maybe it was the lesson of history. Maybe it was the fact that his son will be in the Naval Academy this summer and, if we get into a war with Russia, his kid may be one of those who gets shot at.

But either way, those two leaders stood up to the MAGA morons in their caucus and they deserve to be honored for it.

Trump's Plan for Ukraine: "Peace For Our Time"

Former President Donald Trump has privately said he could end Russia’s war in Ukraine by pressuring its embattled government to give up territory, the Washington Post reported, despite the repeated and vehement refusal of Ukraine's leaders to cede any land in the conflict.

Trump has said publicly he could end the war within a day of returning to the presidency, although he has revealed few details of his plan. The Post − citing people who discussed the plans with Trump or his advisers and spoke on the condition of anonymity because those conversations were confidential − said Trump wants to pressure Ukraine to cede Crimea and the Donbas border regions to Russia.

That would be the boldest move for peace since Neville Chamberlain secured peace on the Eurpoean continent in 1938. And it would be just as long-lasting, just as effective as Chamberlain's declaration.

Putin has not wavered in his goal to conquer all of Ukraine. Chamberlain's Trump's plan would have the same effect: Delay the onset of another world war and also give both sides more time to prepare.

Except Trump wouldn't prepare. He would do everything in his power to smooth over Putin's road to restoration of the Russian Empire, including turning his back on Europe. Just as the Republicans tried their level best to do in 1940.

If Trump has his way, by 2027 at the latest, there will be another general war in Europe. Oh, he may say that isn't his goal and the toadies on the GOP will bury their heads in the sand and say they don't want to see it, but it will happen.

And instead of opening the pipelines and giving the Ukrainians everything they need (which, by the way, is mostly made by American companies), we will, once again, send our young men and yes, women, to fight and die in the mud of Europe.

So, conservatives, why do you want to see our people go fight another world war in Europe? Why do you want to run the risk of a thermonuclear conflict? Or are you that willfully blind to the reality facing the globe?

This Loss of a Ukrainian City Is Brought to You By Bible Mike and His Caucus of Appeasers

Ukraine says its troops have withdrawn from Avdiivka - a key eastern town besieged by Russian forces for months.

The decision was taken in order to save the soldiers' lives, said President Volodymyr Zelensky. Russia's defence ministry said on Saturday it had taken "full control" of the town, with President Vladimir Putin hailing it as an "important victory".

Its fall marks Russia's biggest win for months, and Mr Zelensky blamed faltering Western weapons supplies.

This is on the Party of Appeasement. They have done everything that they can do to choke off aid to Ukraine because they think that people who want to remain free should, instead, bend their necks to a murderous dictator. In that regard, they have not changed a bit from their stance 83 years ago.

One of Putin's Poodles is in Munich to argue that appeasement is the proper policy. I suppose he's blind to the outcome of the last time Western politicians went to Munch to argue that the aggressor should be given terrirtory to appease him.

Vance, Johnson and the rest of those useful idiots will be condemned by history for being the appeasement monkeys that they are.

Torture Nation, Russian Ed.

These are the people that the so-called "Freedom Caucus" are supporting.

The UN’s high commissioner for human rights, Volker Türk, says his office has documented at least 100 civilian deaths in Russian custody in the Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine, including the annexed Crimea peninsula.

Citing a new UN report, Türk reported in Geneva on Tuesday that there were signs that at least 39 of the civilians had been tortured before their deaths.

None of this is any surprise. Russia is about as uncivilized a nation as there is for a country with all or part of its territory in Europe.

RobertaX remarks that Republicans are bound and determined to ignore history and play douchebag politics. I think it's worse than that, but you're familiar. But as she put it, if we get into a war with Russia, nobody's going to be sweating who crosses the Rio Grande. Hell, most people will be going the other way.

Remember What Happened After the Last European War

Czechoslovakia, among other nations, expelled their ethnic German citizens. The basis for those expulsions was pretty much "we're not going to give those fuckers that excuse to invade us again."

Fast-forward to this century. The so-called need to protect Russophone populations was one of the ginned-up rationales behind Putin's war of conquest against Ukraine. If the Ukrainians prevail, I will not be a bit surprised if the Ukrainians push the Russia-aligned civilians out of the country, followed by other countries that border Russia.

Here We Go Again (maybe)

U.S. regulators on Sunday shut down New York-based Signature Bank, a big lender in the crypto industry, in a bid to prevent the spreading banking crisis.

“We are also announcing a similar systemic risk exception for Signature Bank, New York, New York, which was closed today by its state chartering authority,” the Treasury Department, Federal Reserve and Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. said in a joint statement Sunday evening.

That's the second bank to go belly-up in two days.

As I pointed out the other day, the bankster running Silicon Valley Bank worked very hard to ensure that there was little regulation of his bank. The banksters chafe at federal regulations, they throw money around Congress to get regulations cut, they wine/dine/pressure the regulators themselves, they tell everyone "trust us, we learned from the last series of failures" and then they walk really close to the edge of the fiscal cliff and some of them fall over. Which will cost the rest of us money to bail their asses out.

Haven't we seen this movie before? But with the Congress largely populated by millionaires, don't expect anything to change anytime soon.

One Year Into Tsar Vladimir III's Three-Day War

First, for those who have been carping about the cost to American taxpayers of this war, I present this graphic:

Find more statistics at Statista

Four countries with direct experience of the brunt of Russian aggression have been, by GDP, giving a lot. Poland, in particular, has done far more for Ukrainian refugees that most people probably thought that they would. Germany is starting to step up, a little. By GDP, they've given a bit, but they've still been rather stingy. It's high time that the Germans get over feeling bad because they invaded the Soviet Union (which is why they've pretty much let the Russians riddle thier intelligence service with moles). Are they going to close their eyes to Russia doing similar acts in this century?

I've heard people talking about the amount of money that we are "giving" to Ukraine. But a lot of that isn't being paid to Ukraine. We've given Ukraine a lot of weapons, but those weapons were made in the U.S. Those 155mm shells that the Ukrainians are firing lots of? They're made here. Javelins? Stingers? Cannons? HIMARS launchers and its various rockets? Made here.

And let's not forget that, as a result of what is happening on the Ukrainian battlefield, those weapons are now in demand worldwide. Every country that has threatening neighbors wants HIMARS (or something similar). If you're the Defense Minister of a country outside of the Western bloc and you have sketchy neighbors you mght be less inclined to sign off on a purchase of new weaponry that is either Russian or based on their designs (without being bribed, that is). For nothing is a better advertisement for any particular weapon system than battlefield success.

CDR Salamander has advocated for those countries on the Russian border to spin up militia teams armed with AGTMs in every village. That's a worthy idea, and one that the Taiwanese may want to take a hard look at implementing. But I'd backstop them with a lot more people armed with RPG-7s or similar weapons. True, they may not be that effective against tanks with modern defenses. But they are the bees' knees for blowing up trucks in convoys, especially fuel tankers. Tanks go through a lot of fuel; a tank without tanker trucks to refuel it will become a pillbox.

The pro-Russian apologists (you know who they are) keep on saying that we can trust Putin's word when he says that he only has designs on Ukraine (plus Belarus and Kazakhstan) and all other countries are safe. Well, in my opinion, they are idiots. Putin has masterfully aligned his domestic repressions to be in line with those of the Christian Taliban in this country. They see Putin stamping on the same people they hate, so they love Vlad the Invader.

Of everything, it's Putin's kicking over the world order of the last seventy years that is the most wworrisome. He seeks to return to the Law of Conquest. Anybody who thinks that is a good idea needs to have their head examined. For that reason alone, it is the duty of every civilized nation on the planet to help Ukraine repel Russian invaders.

There are, though, a lot of countries that aren't helping, if even a little. We should keep in mind who they are and, in the future, adjust our dealings with them accordingly.

No Shit, That

Wars of conquest could become the new normal if unprovoked attacks like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine go unchecked, France’s minister for Europe and foreign affairs warned last week.

The invasion provides models for other aggressors in Europe, the Indo-Pacific, Middle East and Africa, Catherine Colonna said Friday at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“The stakes are far beyond Ukraine and Europe,” she said. “We cannot afford that” to happen.

That is no shit. One of the hallmarks of the post-1945 world is that borders, however imperfectly drawn, were respected.[1] For example, Alsace–Lorraine changed hands four times in seventy-four years. But it hasn't in the last seventy-seven years. There are lots of places around the world where the borders have been disputed and the neighboring nations have not taken their disagreements to active conflict, instead, choosing to arbitrate and negotiate their differences (or just live with them).[2]

If the rest of the world does not contest Russia's war on conquest, then all bets are off.
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[1] Those whining about Israel should recall that, after the 1967 war, the Arab neighbors were offered ;and for peace. All said no. Egypt eventually said yes and, after 1970, Jordan decided that it didn't want the West Bank back.
[2] This is not true of China, of course.