Hitting the links

My lifelong struggle with clinical depression hit a bump this week—if I'm being honest with myself, it was in the works for a while now—and I had me a good old-fashioned lost day yesterday when I didn't even get out of bed. When not asleep, I was unproductively reliving certain memories from younger days that I wish had gone differently, you know. Basically stuck in a wallow.

This shit happens once in a while, I've learned to accept it. It happens less often than it used to thanks to my Rx, and when it does happen is not as severe. Not as severe means, among other things, that I was fully able to muster the willpower to get up, take care of some things, and get some exercise today as I attempt to gain more altitude over the black hole I continually orbit. Early reports are favorable.

Anyhow, now that I'm caught up on two days' worth of email and some administrative housekeeping (still haven't tackled the taxes, though), I've been perusing the Interwebs to see what fresh horrors are in the news and have come across some links to share. To wit:

• Cory Doctorow has a suggestion for Democrats in Congress: make a big deal out of forming what he's calling a "Nuremberg caucus." Basically a committee that keeps track, publicly, with a website and regular on-camera announcements, of all the criminal behavior perpetrated by Felon47, the Cabinet, DHS/ICE/CBP, and the rest of the regime. They would publicize plans for hearings, at least, if not charges and potential trials, regarding each of the crimes noted, to take place when Democrats regain the majority—whether that be after midterm elections or when enough Republicans resign or otherwise leave office. If nothing else, politically this would be a great move as we need to see and hear more form our elected leaders about their intentions to hold the fascists accountable for the destruction they are wreaking on the nation.

  The Nuremberg Caucus could vow to repurpose ICE's $75b budget to pursue Trump's crimes, from corruption to civil rights violations to labor violations to environmental violations. It could announce its intent to fully fund the FTC and DoJ Antitrust Division to undertake scrutiny of all mergers approved under Trump, and put corporations on notice that they should expect lengthy, probing inquiries into any mergers they undertake between now and the fall of Trumpism.

• On a similar topic, today's Bob Cesca Show podcast featured a discussion with Cliff Schecter about oligarchs and the need to once and for all declare as a country that no amount of wealth that effectively places an individual above the law will be allowed, that rule by the rich is the basis of the current regime and now is the time to enact massive reform. From a return to the 90% marginal tax rate to making stock buybacks illegal again to eliminating the distinction between income and capital gains, Cliff notes a plethora of suggested reforms that would not only rein in the obscene levels of wealth disparity that has exploded since the ’80s, but seriously curtail the ability of the super-wealthy to buy their way out of legal consequences for their behavior.

• This isn't new news, but I missed it at the time. A couple of months ago variants of this headline were working their way through social media sites: “Wake Up, Jeff”: Paul McCartney’s Ultimatum to Amazon Sends Shockwaves Across Culture, Business, and Politics. The article's lead paragraph includes, "McCartney announced that he would pull all McCartney-affiliated media partnerships and business collaborations from Amazon, accusing Bezos of a quiet alignment with Donald Trump." It looked legit, made sense. Paul McCartney certainly would be the sort of figure that would object to the cruelty of the current American regime and the businesses that support it. But it's bogus.

  The same piece, with other names substituted for McCartney's—musicians, sports figures, Hollywood celebs—was all over Facebook. It was created by people exploiting Mark Zuckerberg's Meta software to engage users of Facebook (and other Meta platforms) to share the posts, click through, and give advertisers more impressions. When a version using the name Bo Nix, a Denver Broncos football player, in place of McCartney's started going around, it was more obviously bogus (at least to people who follow the Denver Broncos) and a reporter for a Denver paper did a deep dive into it: https://www.denvergazette.com/2025/11/22/this-just-in-facebooks-breaking-news-is-a-total-head-fake/. Among other findings:

  Fake news hooks genuine users, who often react emotionally to it, either by celebrating or condemning its content. This creates what is called “a feedback loop”: More interactions mean more algorithmic promotion, more time spent on the platform, and higher ad exposure. Studies have shown that fake news can generate 20 times more shares than real news, turning one bot’s initial spark into widespread organic traffic.

  How does that turn into money for Meta? Indirectly but hugely. The more exposure an ad gets, the more Meta charges the advertiser. Last year, Meta made $161 billion on advertising placed on its three platforms—Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

  And here’s where it gets downright deplorable. According to a bombshell new Reuters investigation released Nov. 6, 2025, fully 10% of Meta’s ad revenue—up to $16 billion a year—comes from publishing ads that Meta knows to be outright scams or for banned products. This comes from a review of Meta’s own internal documents.

  Yet another (or really a variation on the same) reason to boycott Facebook and all Zuckerberg platforms. Yet, I still post links there because more than a few people I know treat the Internet like it's just an extension of Facebook. Maddening. There are better ways, folks.

• The House passed the latest Republican voter suppression bill today, with one Dem, Henry Cuellar (TX), joining the fascist caucus in voting yes. It needs to be killed with fire by the Senate, then either buried in a deep hole or shot into the sun. The anti-American Speaker of the House, who has already declared his opposition to abiding by law and the Constitution on other matters, tried to conflate the bill's proposed change to voting law with "open[ing] a bank account [and] buy[ing] cold medicine," and asked "why would voting be any different than that?" Well, Mr. Speaker, the fact that voting is a right enshrined by the Constitution is a factor, not that you give a damn about what the Constitution says. Also, no one has to produce a passport or a birth certificate and, if applicable, official name change documentation to buy Sudafed or open a checking account. Yet that's what you want to require to register to vote. So let's ask you that same question—why do you want voting requirements to be so exclusionary, far beyond what would be required to open a bank account? The fact that Speaker Johnson feels the need to obfuscate and distort the truth about his bill tells us that he knows full well that it's unacceptable on its face to the public at large. Asshole.
• "Attorney General" Pam Bondi appeared at a hearing in the House of Representatives today and performed as instructed by the criminal regime for which she works. Speaking with open contempt for Congress, not even pretending that her job as head of the (former) Justice Department is in any way independent of the president, and, of course, lying her ass off.
  
  

There's more, but I have to go to an HOA meeting, so this will have to do. Later, all.

Tagged Politics, President VonClownstick, The Black Hole, Republicans, Posted on February 11, 2026 at 7:00PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

No Comments yet

Uncoded language

Last Friday the big story in the news was that the unrepentantly racist president of the United States did an overtly racist thing and members of his party were shocked, SHOCKED, to find there was gambling going on in this establishment.

To be clear, what Felon47 posted on his janky social media app was not, in and of itself, news in the strictest sense. The headlines about it should have been nothing more than "late-septuagenarian lifelong racist commits racism in public again." But the message was resoundingly offensive and deserved all the outrage it got from people not in his cult of cruelty and grievances. (I especially liked Hakeem Jeffries' reaction of "Fuck Donald Trump and his vile, racist, and malignant behavior.") The reaction from Republicans, though—the outrage voiced by GOP legislators and others within the MAGA cult—that's something else again.

These same Republicans have no issues (publicly, at least) with Felon47’s racist policies; his blaming a plane crash on "DEI"; his indiscriminate assault on Latinos;  his attempts to erase mentions of Jackie Robinson, Medgar Evers, and others from federal facilities and records; his references to majority-black nations as "shithole countries"; his slandering of Somali and Haitian immigrants en masse; nor any of the other remarks and behavior lifted right out of Mein Kampf and Stephen Miller's fantasy dystopia. But this they did. Curious.

Senator Roger Wicker (R–MS) called Felon47’s racist post "totally unacceptable" and called on Felon47 to "take it down and apologize." Congressman Mike Lawler (R–NY) said the post was a "grave failure of judgment." Senator Tim Scott (R–SC, the only African-American Republican in the Senate) called it "the most racist thing I've seen out of this White House." The post was condemned by quite a few elected Republicans, though some implied they were accepting Felon47’s ridiculous claim that it was not him but "a staffer" that posted it.

The thing about all of these GOP condemnations, though, is context.

Since they did not and do not exhibit such outrage at the rest of this regime's racism, since they did not and do not exhibit outrage and the rest of this regime's anti-American agenda, since they did not and do not publicly object to the regime's murder of both Americans in Minnesota and immigrants in detention—not to mention well over 100 Venezuelans on the open sea—it's reasonable to conclude it isn't the racism they're objecting to.

It's the overtness of the racism.

What was "totally unacceptable" to Wicker, what was a "failure of judgment" to Lawler, may well have been the lack of coding. Scott's outrage at "the most racist thing" may well be because the normal Republican rhetorical games weren't used to disguise the racism. Sen. Susan Collins (R–ME) may have been "appalled," but was she appalled at the post's content or was she appalled that the president went and ignored all the stuff she as a Republican senator has been schooled in for so many years to put a gauzy mask on bigoted remarks?

I quote the guru of Republican messaging, Lee Atwater, the disciple of arguably the most racist senator in history, Strom Thurmond, and who championed polarization and demonization as the preferred paths to political victories:

You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968, you can't say "nigger"—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights, and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.... I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this" is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."

Atwater died in 1991, but his playbook remains standard operating procedure for the Republican party and I submit that the GOP outrage over last week's social media post was about Felon47 not using the playbook—not about Felon47 being a racist. They're fine with that. The apology Wicker wants isn't for the public at large, it's for himself and his fellow Republican cultists, who still have to use code.

Tagged Politics, Republicans, President VonClownstick, Posted on February 9, 2026 at 10:07PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

No Comments yet

Chuck & Hakeem audition for Dumb & Dumber II

What the hell, Chuck? Come on.

In the midst of the Congressional debates surrounding a funding bill for the out-of-control Department of Homeland Security (a name which has always sounded fascist even when we weren't being governed by fascists), Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer and House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries wrote a letter to Senate majority leader John Thune and House Speaker Mike Johnson.

The letter opens with a matter-of-fact, almost docile recitation of ICE abuses in Minnesota and elsewhere that lacked any outrage, then proceeds to its real substance, if you can call it that: a list of ten "reforms" to DHS and ICE policy that are presented as suggestions. (The exact language is, "we believe Congress needs to enact the following guardrails.")

The suggestions include several things that are already mandated by the Constitution under the Fourth Amendment. Other suggestions are banning masks, requiring ID badges and body cameras, and adherence to standards common to every other law enforcement agency.

I don't understand how this is "leadership."

These things being suggested should be demanded. The very idea that DHS would be permitted to ignore the Fourth Amendment, to act as a secret police force unaccountable to the law and without any of the regulation every other law enforcement agency in this country is expected to obey, without the Republicans agreeing to suggested reforms is in itself an outrage.

This letter plays into the regime's and the Republican party's corruption and authoritarian wishes by painting these "reforms" as, well, reforms. The law exists. The Constitution exists. Requiring DHS to abide by them is not a "reform," it's the status quo, it's just not being enforced.

Any letter from Democratic leadership to the Republican leadership on this topic should be a laundry list of all the laws DHS has broken and is breaking, a recitation of the Fourth Amendment and SCOTUS history reiterating its application to immigration and how DHS has been violating it. It should remind the Republican leadership that in supporting the regime and its lawless use of DHS agencies in this way (and others), they and their caucus are violating their oaths of office to protect and defend the Constitution. It should demand the resignation of the Speaker and the majority leader if they continue to refuse to accept the legal and Constitutional protections guaranteed to the public.

Instead we got this. A milquetoast, politely sedate and tepid suggestion that the Republicans ask DHS to please stop committing terrorism. Only it doesn't even name the terrorism.

Chuck and Hakeem need to either finally realize that they are not dealing with people of good faith, they are not dealing with honest brokers, they are not dealing with people that respect the values of a democratic republic; or, if they can't do that, they need to give up their leadership positions. Because they are failing to lead. They are being cowed, they are stuck in a reality that has not existed for two decades in which any member of Congress could be assumed to at the very least not be unAmerican. No more.

The Speaker of the House goes on television and declares that his caucus will never go along with the Fourth Amendment and no elected Democrat says anything about it. That is a failure of leadership.

The GOP leadership negotiates an end to a government shutdown in bad faith, promising something everyone knows will never happen, and enough Democrats go along with it to pass the measure. That is a failure of leadership. 

The minority leaders write a mildly-worded letter to the majority to suggest they tell DHS to not be terrorists. That is a failure of leadership.

Tagged Politics, Democrats, Republicans, Posted on February 5, 2026 at 9:12PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

No Comments yet

The quisling caucus

Who has two thumbs and likes to piss on the Constitution? This guy.

Good day, and welcome to my rant.

 

We all know that Felon47, the alleged human occupying the office of President of the United States right now, is contemptuous of the Constitution, the rule of law, the concept of truth, and basic decency. That's made clear on a daily basis, and it's equally clear that he is beyond redemption, implacably corrupt and heinous. Less understood is the nature of his enablers, the Republican caucus of both the House of Representatives and the Senate.

Felon47 needs these enablers. They are the only reason he remains in power—if even a handful of Congressional Republicans respected their oaths of office, both Felon47 and Reichsleiter Vance would have been removed from power long before now. He retains his office at their collective will. So why do they kowtow to him when they have the real power?

Sure, brand loyalty accounts for some of it, but that only goes so far when the guy heading the brand is a corrupt totalitarian thug. Stupidity? No doubt there are plenty that fit this bill, some mind-bogglingly so. Cowardice? This is a big one, I suspect, given how much Felon47 has always valued blackmail as a tool, how rabid the MAGA base of voters can be, and how craven a lot of these people are when it comes to proximity to power.

Then there's the third category: the True Believers.

The Republican party has operated a long con on the American public. After the disgrace of Watergate and the outrage at the lack of accountability demanded of Richard Nixon, you'd think the GOP was headed for a fallow period of disfavor. But no, the party and their Hollywood-made figurehead exploited opportunities created by (a) lingering effects of their own economic policies from the Nixon/Ford years and (b) an Iranian regime willing to cut deals with the opponent of the sitting president to kick off a decades-long campaign to both inflame the bigotries and resentments of conservatives and fool a huge chunk of the electorate into voting against their own interests.

As cons go, it's been remarkably successful, as even Democratic administrations have supported reforms tailored to please conservatives (the Clinton welfare reforms, the "Defense of Marriage Act," tepid tax initiatives, even the Affordable Care Act was based on a Republican model) rather than lead Americans into a more progressive style of politics—which was largely pragmatic, acknowledging the limitations of what one could do when the electorate had been so expertly manipulated since 1980 (and before, really, going back to the Nixon "southern strategy"). The GOP Congressional majority of today is largely a product of the long con. Candidates who got the gigs by continuing, exploiting, and supercharging the tactics of the con started by Lee Atwater and Karl Rove and Dick Cheney and Newt Gingrich and Ed Rollins. Lauren Boebert and Clay Higgins don't get elected without that foundation.

A lot of them don't. Looking over the roster of House Republicans, I see more than 20 names—including that of the Speaker—that are true believers in the cause of shredding the Constitution in favor of totalitarianism. I see half a dozen that are known to be corrupt. I see one that has a modicum of integrity.

One (Massey).

Granted, there are a lot of names on that list that I have no specific familiarity with, so there may in fact be more than one House Republican with a modicum of integrity, but that modicum apparently isn't enough to sway them away from being collaborators in the overthrow of our Constitutional Republic.

This all is on my mind today because I heard Speaker Mike Johnson talking about due process and how inconvenient it is and how we shouldn't have it. Talking to reporters about the House debates on measures proposed by Democrats regarding DHS/CBP/ICE, the actual, real-life SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES said this:

[Democrats] want to have a judicial warrant on top of the immigration warrant. We can't do that. ... Imagine if we had to go through the process of getting a judicial warrant to go and apprehend people who we know are here illegally. How much time would that take? ... It would take decades, probably, to do that.

Not content with that, Johnson went on to claim that Democrats don't want there to be any immigration law at all (got to get those incendiary lies in) and then this:

We've got to apply reason, we do have to apply the Constitution, we have to respect it, and those parameters need to be determined. But we are never going to go along with ... judicial warrants. It cannot be done and it should not be done.

So: Fuck due process, it's a nuisance. It can't and shouldn't be done.

Here's the thing, though: it can and has been done. For many, many years. The Obama administration deported an average of 340,000 undocumented migrants per year. The Biden administration deported 150,000. None were done without due process.

Further, Speaker Johnson, you don't have a choice in the matter. The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution says so. It lays out parameters that in no way need to be determined because they're right there, in place for 250 years.

Johnson is claiming that administrative warrants issued by agencies that have demonstrated themselves to be wholly lawless and ethically bankrupt are somehow just as good as a court order (they may as well be signed "Epstein's mother"). He's making the case that it has to be that way because otherwise it's just too hard. And we'll never go along with it.

Just to drive the point home: The Speaker of the House said, on television, recorded for all to see and hear, that he and by extension his caucus in the House of Representatives, will never go along with what's in the United States Constitution.

That alone should be grounds for expulsion from Congress, and that's just on this one issue; there are countless others that Johnson and his caucus of quislings betray their oaths on. The First Amendment in particular has been treated like so much toilet paper by this Republican party. The emoluments clause is violated routinely. Article IV (section 4) even guarantees protection against "domestic violence," meaning violence perpetrated by domestic forces, something now happening every day in Minnesota and elsewhere. In a reality where the public is aware and engaged, anyone behaving like Johnson and his caucus do would face extreme pressure to resign and the ethics committee would be under extreme pressure to expel them.

Article III Section 3 defines treason as "levying War against [the United States], or in adhering to [the nation's] Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort." Eventually, this president will be recognized by authorities as an enemy of the United States, possibly as having levied war against it depending on how we're defining terms, and Mike Johnson along with each and every Republican in Congress that supports him will be properly labeled as treasonous.

Tagged Politics, Republicans, Posted on February 3, 2026 at 11:11PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

No Comments yet

A mob execution

“It looks like nothing so much as a mob execution.” That's former Deputy Attorney General Harry Litman's description of today's violence—the most widely reported instance of it, anyway—in occupied Minneapolis, where once again ICE agents murdered an American who posed zero threat to them because fuck you, that's why.

The lies from DHS and the White House came fast and furious, just like last time. They described the victim, military veteran and VA nurse Alex Pretti, as a "domestic terrorist." They called him "an assassin." They described a sequence of events that did not happen. They made up a scenario that fit their preferred narrative despite the video evidence that shows the true sequence of events:

ICE agents violently attacked another victim, then Pretti comes to that person's assistance, then—while Pretti's back is to the agents—the agents pepper spray him at close range, then the agents wrestle Pretti to the ground, and while a blinded Pretti is flailing an ICE agent pistol-whops him in the head, then an ICE agent discovers Pretti had a holstered (legally registered and permitted) gun on his person and confiscates it, then one agent shoots Pretti, then other agents shoot Pretti, all while Pretti is struggling to even get to all-fours on the ground. Ten shots. To a disarmed, beaten and and blinded man sprawled face down in the street who at no time posed any threat to anyone involved.

Then some of the agents attempted to leave the scene. Then DHS denied local authorities access to the scene. Then the lies came spewing out.

Felon47 even tried to place blame on Minnesota officials, the same officials that ICE and DHS prevented from even approaching the scene, alleging that Mr. Pretti was menacing ICE agents and local law enforcement is at fault for failing to protect ICE agents. If I may quote Alan Tudyk's TV version of Harry Vanderspiegle, "this is some bullshit."

It now seems inevitable that, unless Congress acts swiftly, Minnesota governor Walz will, someday soon, have to deploy the state's National Guard to protect Minnesotans from the Federal government. And then the fireworks really start.

ICE is a terrorist organization and every elected official not in the thrall of Felon47 and his cult needs to be saying that loud and clear at every opportunity. DHS Secretary Noem needs to be impeached. DHS needs to be defunded. Investigations need to proceed unhindered, real ones, ones performed by state officials and not the corrupted Federal agencies, and the ICE and DHS agents (including Noem) who committed these and every other unjustifiable violent atrocity need to be prosecuted.

And Congress has to WAKE THE FUCK UP and demand every Republican who is currently collaborating with the fascist regime either (belatedly) honor their oaths of office and impeach Felon47 and his entire cadre of enablers or resign immediately. (I see that FINALLY, today Sen. Patty Murray is declaring she won't support the funding bill for DHS. FINALLY, Murray is calling on Republicans to join Dems in efforts to end the abuses. I know she was trying to be pragmatic before, but pragmatic's just not gonna cut it. Better late than never.)

If this is allowed to continue, we're gonna be smack dab in the throes of that second American Civil War Captain Pike told us about.

Some quotes from around the Interwebs:

Whatever one’s views of the circumstances that ICE agents confront, the gravity of these reflexive official lies to the American people can’t be overstated. The highest federal official immediately jumped in to defame and disparage the victim of an ICE killing. That is exactly how totalitarian governments react. It’s the sort of official dishonesty that can and should bring down governments. ... Taken together—the shooting itself and the federal response afterward—the episode screams out profound contempt for both the Constitution and the public it exists to serve.

...

Whatever one’s views of the costs to the country of illegal immigration—and all indications are that the people caught in the dragnet of the Trump surge have overwhelmingly committed no offense other than possible immigration violations—they pale in comparison to the shredding of the Constitution and the vicious tactics of federal law enforcement, cheered on by the highest government officials.

Members of Congress, every one of them, need to assess with the highest sobriety where they want to be now and what they want the United States to represent and portray to the world.

—Harry Litman

 

The murder of Alex Jeffrey Pretti was not a mistake, or a tragedy, or a misunderstanding. It was a choice. The president of the United States and his regime saw what its masked agents had done to Renee Good and decided to do more of it, at a larger scale. Killing Alex Jeffrey Pretti was the Trump administration’s policy.

—Jonathan Last

 

Given DHS making up stories about what we can plainly see in the murder videos, we have to just presume every other death under their purview is also murder.

—Bob Schooley

 

I don’t agree with people saying ICE and CBP need “more training.” They’re doing exactly what this administration has trained them to—impose a reign of fear in blue cities. They don’t need more training. They need to be ripped up root and branch.

—Bill Kristol(!)

 

Thank you Alex Pretti for honoring and caring for veterans like me. You deserved better from this country and I am truly sorry that they failed to protect and honor your life the same way you have protected and honored so many of our lives. This veteran salutes and thanks you.

—@pissedoffarmyvet.bsky.social

 

I want all the right-wing fuckers of this country to see this. They claim to care about veterans, well this guy actually cared for veterans, and their votes murdered him in the street.

—E. Perkins (@hauntedpumpkin.bsky.social)

 

Donald Trump sees blue states as something like conquered territory. In his mind, he won them fair and square in the 2024 presidential election. The country is his. He owns it. And all its might falls on his political foes and those who resist him.

—Josh Marshall

 

Tin soldiers and Trump is coming

We're finally on our own

This winter I hear the drumming

Two dead in Minnesota

Gotta get down to it,

Icemen are cutting us down

Should have been gone long ago

What if you knew her and found her dead on the ground

How can you run when you know?

—DS9 writer Robert Hewitt Wolfe paraphrasing Neil Young

 

Cynics and defeatists share the same story as authoritarians do: that nothing is worth trying, the conclusion is foregone, hope is naïve, and attempts to resist are too small or futile. Don't listen to them. Do not give up. Try. A better world is possible. We will win. We must.

—Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez

Tagged Politics, President VonClownstick, Republicans, Posted on January 24, 2026 at 11:25PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

No Comments yet

Psychoanalyzing a bigoted narcissist

I've got a lot of stuff to do here, from basic household chores to some minor work stuff to website repairs to eBay listings to leisure stuff like sketches, novels, comics, etc., and yet instead I'm allowing myself to go down a rabbit hole based on reading something in the news. Because I'm just that broken, I guess.

Not as broken as President Ralph Wiggum Palpatine, though. I mean, no one is as broken as that guy, which the world was reminded of this week when he made his latest bat-guano-crazy speech in Davos (my favorite moment of which was when he asserted that his Swiss hosts should be worshipping the United States because "without us, you'd all be speaking German"). 

But it's actually something from the big interview he gave to the New York Times a couple of weeks ago—you know, the one in which he said he was restricted in his actions by nothing other than his own morality—that grabbed me today. And it isn't anything new.

It's Felon47’s remarks about the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and its subsequent support measures that got me spinning out.

Everyone knows Felon47 is a racist. That's been clear for decades. Most of us also know that at the root of every grievance that broken human cesspool utters is fear and insecurity. Put those together and you get remarks like he gave the Times, such as "white people were very badly treated" by civil rights laws, and that the Civil Rights Act "hurt a lot of people." He couched this by saying what he no doubt thought was a mitigating context around affirmative action policies without actually mentioning affirmative action policies: "People that deserve to go to a college or deserve to get a job were unable to get a job. So it was, it was a reverse discrimination."

Part of this is, of course, him pandering to his base of wannabe Klansmen. He knows his strongest support comes from people who need to scapegoat their problems on an "other" and the easiest "other" to invoke is the one he's personally held in contempt for his whole pathetic life. But a lot of it is real, borne of a combo package of personality traits and disorders that make him devoid of empathy and have him believing that everyone in the world thinks like he does. Since he cannot conceive of anyone looking at the world any differently—everything is zero-sum, everyone is self-obsessed, anyone that has power abuses power—his view of civil rights laws is not that they are protections for the common good, but rather that they're weapons in a conflict.

"White people were very badly treated." This means, before the law, people with power and privilege—boiled down here as "white people"—were allowed to oppress people with less power and privilege—women, African-Americans and other minorities—with impunity, but after enactment they weren't. Disallowing oppressive behavior equals "very bad treatment" because everything is zero-sum, everything is about exerting power. If I can't exert a power over you, then that means you can exert that power over me.

The concept of equal treatment or the good of the whole doesn't compute, to him that's like trying to divide by zero. "People were unable to go to college or get a job" in his terminology means that before the law, white folks only had to compete with other white folks and thus the pool of college or job applicants was smaller, while after the law that pool was enlarged to include minorities, reducing the likelihood of the less-abled white applicant to get in/get hired. (Affirmative action hasn't been quota-based for decades, it's all about making sure women and minorities are recruited/considered with a goal toward proper representation, i.e. enlarging the pool.) He's probably not exactly sure why odds and ratios work that way (because math is so hard), he just knows that "his side" lost power, which by definition means the "other side" now has that power over him and "his side." 

Bigotry isn't the problem issue in his mind; to him, bigotry is a given and a neutral tool. The issue is who gets to wield the bigotry and to what degree.

That shows up in his use of "reverse discrimination." There's no such thing as "reverse" discrimination, you either discriminate, in whatever context, or you don't; A holds more value than B, B holds more value than A, or A and B are equally valuable. I discriminate between this piece of paper, which is a bulletin from the state telling me I have to now charge sales tax on services (a whole 'nother problem in my world), and that piece of paper, which is a receipt from the Post Office for mailing my latest eBay sale. Discrimination reveals that the former is important, while the latter holds no value to me. I don't "reverse discriminate" against the receipt. Felon47 doesn't get that. If a comparison doesn't fall in his favor, then it's "reversed." If no discriminating is done at all, then it's got to be unfair because his value should always be superior, and if it's not superior, that means someone else is superior, and them's fighting words.

If I can't oppress you, then it follows that you are oppressing me.

Because remember, not only is everything zero-sum, but everyone thinks about using power just like he does.

If African-Americans were given power, then, his thinking is, they would enslave white people as revenge, because that's what he would do. If immigrants were allowed to thrive, then they would subjugate the native-born, because that's what he would do (is doing, actually). If trans folks are given respect, that means less respect for non-trans folks and thus the trans community can better impose "their agenda" (which in his mind means turning more people trans, because his goal is to prevent people from being trans).

Every single thing Felon47 does follows this paradigm. "If I don't abuse my power, someone else will abuse me with their power." If the U.S. doesn't take Greenland from the Danes, then China will and thus diminish U.S. power. If tax policy doesn't benefit the super wealthy, then the super wealthy will be the oppressed class. If the president doesn't usurp power from Congress, then Congress will usurp power from the presidency.

Even tariffs—he genuinely does not understand what a tariff is, so he thinks that imposing a tariff on a country (a tariff isn't imposed on a country, but he thinks it is) is a means of directly taking money from that country for the United States. Zero-sum, exert (abusive) power to diminish their power over (and ability to abuse) you. In this case, because he is so stupid as to be uneducable about what a tariff is, it's a spectacular backfire, but the psychology is the same.

Anyway. None of this is news or really at all helpful in getting through these nightmare years, it's just something I needed to process to get it out of my head so I can focus on something else.

Like soup. I think I'll now try making a big pot of a winter soup since it's so bloody cold out.

Tagged Politics, President VonClownstick, Posted on January 23, 2026 at 8:08PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

1 Comment

Irredeemably Committing Evil

5-year-old Liam Ramos, who was abducted by ICE and renditioned to Texas after ICE arrested his father

ICE has to die.

I don't mean to suggest that the country shouldn't have a mechanism to enforce immigration law. I mean that the existing entity known as Immigration and Customs Enforcement is beyond hope of reform. It is completely off the rails, it is operating in a fashion that cannot be redeemed, and it must be dismantled.

That's true, of course, for the entire so-called Department of Homeland Security (the name alone should have been a a clue that it would abuse its power), but right now I'm focused on DHS's division of violent masked thugs that are told: "break the law at will, kidnap people, use children as bait, imprison said children many states away, and hey, if you murder a completely unthreatening lady out of anger 'cause you couldn't intimidate her, don't worry about facing any consequences."

It has to go.

Quoting our friend Craig Calcaterra:

Just yesterday afternoon [ICE agents] held a person down on the ground and, while they were completely helpless, sprayed a massive amount of pepper spray into their eyes:

Photo: Richard Tsong-Taatarii/The Minnesota Star Tribune

That stuff is designed to subdue a crowd of people from a distance. Doing what they're doing here stands a great chance of blinding this person. This is state-sanctioned torture, carried out in broad daylight against someone who is utterly powerless, for no reason whatsoever.

Later in the day it was reported that ICE agents are acting pursuant to a secret memo, released by a whistleblower, which purports to authorize agents to break into homes without a judicial warrant and drag people away. It's blatantly illegal—it's something straight of out a fascist's most intense fever dream—yet that is what is currently governing the rules of engagement and there is no one doing a thing to stop it despite its manifest unconstitutionality.

Finally, I saw a photo of a young child, a little boy no older than five, being taken away by ICE agents after his father was arrested. First, however, ICE agents apparently used him as bait to apprehend his own father. There was no effort made to find the child's mother. The child has reportedly been whisked, alone, to a prison in Texas. It's an open question as to whether he'll ever even see his parents again. A report about that all can be seen here.

There have been scenes and stories like this every day, but yesterday something broke in me and I was filled with a murderous rage. I feel so helpless. It all feels so hopeless. Twisted, hateful, and evil actors are using the power of the state to attack its own people for no cognizable reason and to no legitimate end. The attack is the end. It's immiseration, terror, torture, child trafficking, and even murder for its own sake, ordered by lawless and immoral people and carried out by an American Gestapo who have been told that the law does not and never will apply to them. They have been told to brutalize others because fuck them, that's why, and they are doing it with gusto while trying to foment riots so that they'll have the pretext to expand their violent campaign.

I had to close the laptop and sit in silence for a good long while after taking that all in. I feel like I'm losing my fucking mind.

 And that's not enough for President Ralph Wiggum Palpatine, who has ordered active-duty military to prepare for deployment to Minnesota. Which is illegal, a direct violation of the Posse Comitatus Act. In order to make such a deployment "legal," Felon47 would have to invoke the Insurrection Act, which would also be illegal as it can only be invoked to enforce Federal law, not defy it.

Those military commanders, as well as the individual soldiers, had best remind themselves of their obligation to refuse illegal orders.

I ask again, WHERE IS CONGRESS? IMPEACH NOW.

Tagged Politics, President VonClownstick, Republicans, Craig Calcaterra, Posted on January 22, 2026 at 5:08PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

No Comments yet

One year on

Today is January 20th (happy birthday, Erik, sorry it falls on a bad anniversary). That means it's been exactly one year since the current president—an improbable amalgam of Ralph Wiggum and Emperor Palpatine—resumed power and re-began his assault on the United States.

I could go into all the atrocities of the past week or so—of which there are many, not the least of which is Felon47’s demented letter to Norway's Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Stoere, in which he obtusely blamed the Norwegian government for the choices of an independent board unaffiliated with the state, claimed (again) to have halted wars that remain ongoing, pretended not to understand territorial rights, implied that the United States existed "hundreds of years ago" and landed boats at Greenland at the same time the Norse did in the 13th Century, and demanded NATO "do something for the United States" as if the common-defense alliance's purpose was to be some sort of patron—but we are all suffering from WTF fatigue, right?

Suffice to say, the outrages continue, largely unabated.

So, I figured it was time for another letter to Congress. I fully expect it to fall on deaf ears, but if enough of us deluge our representatives with demands for action, with pleas to rise to the occasion, with calls to fight for the continued existence of our republic, maybe we'll see some more leaders grow a spine and stand up to these fascist terrorists occupying the White House and the majority party in Congress.

I urge you all to make use of the link in the sidebar and send your own letters to your three House and Senate representatives.

January 20, 2026

Dear Sen. Maria Cantwell (D WA):
Dear Sen. Patty Murray (D WA):
Dear Rep. Pramila Jayapal (WA-7):

 

Hi again.

Just wanted to remind you all that over the weekend President Trump committed several more impeachable offenses and yet no one in Congress seems to be doing anything about it.

I say "seems to be" because I know how Congress works; I know that the minority party is operating at a significant disadvantage. But when I see Democrats go on television and/or speak to the press, very little of what they're saying rises to the reality of the moment. I see Chris Murphy demanding no masks for ICE agents, I hear Ritchie Torres offering a bill to make ICE agents wear QR codes, I read that Hakeem Jeffries declared that "we’ll figure out the accountability mechanisms at the appropriate time."

Milquetoast, small-scale pleas for reform.

Well, I have to ask, if what we've endured for the past year doesn't put us at "the appropriate time" right now, what the hell will it take to get there?!

I am pleased that you, Rep. Jayapal, are one of the few out there recognizing the calamity we're facing if action isn't taken. I am disappointed that you, Sen. Murray, have evidently dismissed the concept of not funding the government at the end of the month because it wouldn't immediately stop DHS from continuing its abuses. I'm not sold on the idea that a shutdown would help, but I don't see how it could hurt (and I'm aware I may be missing something there). No matter what, it's leverage. Just like the Senate had leverage last fall during the shutdown over ACA subsidies and then threw it away for nothing, this stance at least has the appearance of the same kind of capitulation.

DHS is a rogue operation, a sprawling and largely unaccountable behemoth of a department that never should have been created in the first place, a manifestation of paranoia and trauma inflicted by 9/11 and exploited by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. A long-term goal needs to be the dismantling of the whole department and returning some of its functions to their former agencies while doing away with others, including ICE, and I want to hear that goal articulated by people in Congress.

Right now, in this moment, this country is on the brink of civil war. Donald Trump and his ICE Gestapo are firing on Fort Sumter right now in the Twin Cities. You all may not have the ability to use the current funding deadline to immediately strip this lawless militia of its resources, but doing nothing—even maintaining the status quo—is unacceptable.

We need to know that our Democratic leaders and our representatives—this is still a representative democracy, at least for now—understand that you don't "reform" fascism. You impede its workings, you refuse to fund it, you refuse to confirm its operatives, you oppose it however possible until you can crush it for good. And we're not hearing that. Again, Rep. Jayapal, you're on the right track, at least, thank you for that, but you're one voice and we need to hear the whole party speak up.

We need to hear every elected Democrat demand that everyone in Congress, most assuredly including Republicans, abide by their oaths of office and respect and defend the Constitution of the United States. Which REQUIRES CONGRESS TO REMOVE THIS PRESIDENT ASAP:

Article II, Section 4: The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.

"Shall be" isn't an optional phrase. This president, this vice-president, and the majority of this cabinet have all betrayed the Constitution and their oaths to it multiple times in the past year. This president, abetted by the vice-president and the cabinet, has engaged in bribery on a near-daily basis. This president, enthusiastically abetted by this vice-president and this cabinet, has committed multiple other high crimes, both criminally speaking and in the more fungible sense of damage to the nation—including but not limited to murder, abuse of power, betrayal of alliances and treaties, obstruction of justice, corrupt use of the military, piracy, kidnapping of American citizens and a foreign head of state, destruction of government property, illegal taxation, theft, and lest we forget, suppression of the Epstein Files which no doubt implicate the president in even more criminal behavior.

Every single member of both houses of Congress should be made aware, if they are not there already, that failure to impeach and convict equals a betrayal of their oaths. Sooner or later this regime will come to an end. If it ends with the United States surviving, then every Congressperson and Senator who refused to act in accordance with his/her oath will be remembered as a fascist enabler AT BEST and will be subject to consequences ranging from prosecution to ostricization to simply the end of political careers. If the regime ends with the United States transformed into a totalitarian state, then every Congressperson and Senator who refused to act in accordance with his/her oath will have lit the kindling that starts the second revolutionary war.

Milquetoast is insufficient. Small-scale reform is insufficient. Removal is required.

 

Sincerely,

Tim Harrison

Shoreline, WA

Tagged Politics, President VonClownstick, Democrats, Democracy, Posted on January 20, 2026 at 7:38PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

1 Comment

Mélange of miscellany

Kudos to the great people of Minnesota, who go out in the cold to document the fascism

Rather than pick a topic and dive in I'm going with a potpourri of assorted notes on various things today...

Dateline: Occupied Minnesota

• The campaign of state-sponsored terror continues in occupied Minneapolis, and thankfully the good people who live there are out documenting it. One video made it to the cablewaves of the Chicago-based allegedly-centrist-but-Republican-slanted station NewsNation, which showed it over an interview with Congresswoman Mary Miller (R–IL). Rep. Miller said the woman shown in the video being abducted out of her car while trying to drive to a medical appointment deserved to be manhandled and abused because "she's here illegally [and] probably getting free health care." She later admitted that she doesn't know who the woman is and thus has no earthly idea if she's here illegally or not, but she also says, "who cares? She's breaking the law and resisting arrest." For the record, the woman was later identified as a biracial U.S.-born software engineer and ICE had to release her.

  The video, which is all Rep. Miller had to go on, shows no lawbreaking whatsoever on the woman's part; it shows ICE acting illegally, though, breaking her car windows and abducting her rather than allowing her to move along her way. Was she being arrested for cause? Was she to be charged with something? Would the charge be, say, asking an ICE patrol why she was being hindered from traveling to her appointment? That's the "lawbreaking" Rep. Miller sees and says "who cares?" about? This interview is the first and thus far only time I've ever seen Rep. Mary Miller, I'd never heard of her before, but it's plenty sufficient to reveal her as a racist, authoritarian abettor of criminals with no respect for law or her oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. In a sane world, she would be censured, removed from committees, or even expelled from the House by her fellow Congresspeople for what she said in this interview.

  Miller represents a gerrymandered district created in the 2020 redistricting that moved Illinois 15 from the southeastern corner of the state to a rural expanse in the center that is nearly bisected by population centers. If you live in Decatur, Springfield, or Champaign, congratulations, you are not Miller's constituent, though you are completely surrounded by those who are. If you live in East St. Louis, Bloomington, or Peoria, you're less than 20 miles from IL–15. The 2020 census took a seat away from Illinois, necessitating a redistricting, and the state redrew its map to group cities together as much as possible in a "fight back" gerrymander. It gave the state three more Democratic seats in the House but eliminated toss-up districts and made the three remaining R districts deeply, deeply Republican. This new blood-red district had two incumbents, one holding the seat lost in the census, and its voters reelected Miller over the more moderate R and then overwhelmingly reelected her again. Congrats, IL–15, you people are batshit crazy. At best.

• In another incident on Monday, ICE agents kidnapped a black woman, a U.S. citizen, in occupied St. Paul. It wasn't clear if the damage to her car seen in the video was caused by ICE or not, but rather than assist someone after an automotive collision of some kind the agents abducted her, threw her into an unmarked vehicle, and drove off.
• Also Monday, ICE agents abducted two teenage employees of a Twin Cities area Target store, tackling one of them to the ground and beating him, only to dump them out of the unmarked vehicle, bloody and sobbing, eight miles away when they were satisfied that the teens were American citizens. (Video is on X, so I'm not linking it. Screw you, Elon.)
• Three Minnesota school districts (and counting?) are now accommodating remote classes as it is unsafe for students to attend school. ICE has abducted parents, tear-gassed playgrounds, and generally terrorized various Minnesota schools this month in their alleged quest to deport immigrants.
• A Minneapolis resident, abducted by ICE for following an ICE vehicle and alerting neighbors to ICE's presence—agents stopped her car, broke the driver and passenger side windows, and forced the two occupants from the car—said that while being forcibly taken in an unmarked vehicle to a nearby Federal building agents told her, "you guys have to stop obstructing us, that's why that lesbian bitch is dead." The threat, the misogyny, the bigotry, the callous disregard for law, the small-minded insecurity, all there in one quote from a government-sanctioned thug during an illegal arrest. Before being released, agents apparently offered at least one of the two abductees money if they would name or identify other protesters.
• Congresswoman Robin Kelly (D–IL 2, south Chicago suburbs) has spearheaded a move to impeach Kristi Noem over her use of ICE thugs in Minnesota and elsewhere. More power to you and your colleagues, Rep. Kelly. It won't succeed in this House, but I applaud the effort and want to see more of this. Just because Speaker Johnson won't allow such things to be voted on doesn't mean we shouldn't be doing them every damn day.
• An activist in the Netherlands was given a list of more than 4,000 names of people working as ICE agents or support personnel. He put it online. Since these people have no business trying to hide their identities in the first place, I'll link to it. The site is slow to load, I imagine it's getting a bit of strain put on its server.
• I look forward to the massive number of lawsuits that will eventually be filed against DHS, the least of which will be a plethora of demands for financial restitution for property damage to the various cars agents have rammed, broken windows of, sliced seatbelts in, and, you know, shot.

The hot stove league

• With the signing of free-agent third baseman Alex Bregman, the Chicago Cubs have bumped incumbent third-sacker Matt Shaw to the bench. Shaw is a MAGA ideologue who left the team to attend the funeral of Charlie Kirk and again during the pennant race to go to a MAGA rally in Arizona. Thus, when the Bregman signing became official we got this outstanding post on BlueSky:

  

  Our buddy Craig Calcaterra followed up on that with this sentiment:

  I suppose Shaw will now be a super utilityman. Which makes me REALLY want the Cubs to acquire a better utilityman such as Santiago Espinal or someone like him so Shaw can be replaced, in the same offseason, by both a Jew and a Latino guy. That'd probably break his fascist ass.

  Schadenfreude for the win.

• The Kansas City Royals are the latest team to do something stupid with their field dimensions. That's my bias, of course, that it's stupid. The Royals are moving the fences in at Kaufmann Stadium, shortening the alleys between the foul poles and dead-center field by ten feet. Not satisfied with that, they are also making the fence height 18 inches shorter. KC's general manager, J.J. Picollo, claimed he wasn't "trying to jump-start our offense," which is silly, of course he is. But the thing is, Kaufmann has always been a great hitters' park. It just hasn't been a great home run park. Especially in the days when it had AstroTurf, but even with grass, KC's was a terrific park to hit doubles and triples in. A big outfield means potentially fewer homers, but it also means more base hits—outfielders have more ground to cover, balls are going to fall short of their positioning or go over their heads more often than they would in smaller outfields. Also, a curved symmetrical outfield wall meant any roller that hit the wall had the opportunity to hug the wall as it rolled on rather than carom back to an outfielder. I haven't seen whether or not they're trying to keep the curvature of the wall, but no matter what it won't be as prevalent since the degree of curve will be lessened. This is a move intended to make home runs easier to hit and to thus encourage batters—Royals and opponents—to keep up the dumbness that has made for less interesting baseball since the post-strike 1990s. That is, the all or nothing, "three true outcome" style offense that has reduced balls in play, skyrocketed strikeouts, and massively devalued defensive skill, particularly for outfielders.

  I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Home runs are boring. Compared to most other ways to score, unless it's a walkoff ending a game, a homer is dull. It's a flash-in-the-pan event, a potential rally-killer, while a string of base hits keeps pressure on the pitcher and the defense. Other than a bases-loaded walk/hit batter, a balk, or, god forbid, a pitch timer violation, the home run is the least interesting way to score. Teams ought to be doing what the Orioles did a few years back and making their outfields bigger. Encourage more contact, encourage smart baserunning, make outfield defense important, and above all, make the game less reliant on brute force. Rob Deer was an interesting player because there just weren't very many Rob Deers. Nowadays every team has at least two of him. The world champion Los Angeles Dodgers had five players top 120 strikeouts in 2025. Five! (Your Seattle Mariners only had one, which is a big reason they were so much better in ’25 than in prior seasons.)

  I realize I'm never likely to see a team like my beloved 1985 Cardinals ever again, but can we stop trying to make baseball dumber? Please?

• The Washington Nationals are the latest team to ditch their cable television contract, leaving the Mid Atlantic Sports Network and turning over their TV rights to Major League Baseball. The cable TV model is quickly dying and I am here for it. What remains to be seen is how MLB is going to be handling the various teams (now including Your Seattle Mariners) they need to televise. Presumably they will find a cable outlet in each of the markets they can pipe feeds to, but really the need is in streaming. Because Commissioner Dumbass shot himself in the foot trying to extort a better playoff TV deal from ESPN, he ended up losing revenue and to try and make up for the loss in the short term sold ESPN the streaming rights for what had been MLB.TV. Until very recently, MLB.TV was only meant for subscribers to watch out-of-market teams and that's what ESPN now has control over; whether MLB will retain these individual teams' in-market streaming rights or lump them in with the ESPN deal is unclear. We'll find out in a couple of months. Regardless, the death of the cable model means an end to the stupidity of making it difficult/impossible for local fans to watch their own team without paying through the nose for a cable/satellite package. That stupidity remains for playoff games, though, so there's still a ways to go. But it's more evidence that Commander Data was right in Star Trek: TNG when he mentioned that broadcast television didn't last in any significant form beyond the year 2040.

Site tweaks and email issues

• I have succeeded (I think) in eliminating the duplicate email problem with the new daily update email subscription thing. However, I have in the process discovered that the emails being sent have a moderately high spam score. This is mostly because the system is intended for a lot more stuff to be in the emails than I want to include, and thus they go out with a lot of blank lines in the formatting. Lots of blank lines are suspicious to spam filtering algorithms. So I would ask any who like receiving the updates-via-email to add *@starshiptim.com to the whitelist in your spam filter of choice to prevent the emails from going into your junk folders unseen. If you don't know how to do that, just ask me, I'll walk you through it.
• I have always disliked WordPress as a platform, and these days, while I don't exactly hate it with the fire of a thousand suns, I heavily discourage anyone from using it unless there are mitigating circumstances of some sort. This site, obviously, has nothing to do with that platform and never will, and my reasons for eschewing it are many. One of them is that the WordPress platform has become ubiquitous, it's everywhere, and thus bad actors—hackers, phishers, malicious billionaires, etc.—target WordPress sites specifically to do their fuckery. They target other sites too, of course, but there's a reason an entire subindustry of WordPress repair and protection services has popped up over the years. Anyway, with that in mind it should not have surprised me to find in the data from my recent experiments in bot-fighting that many of the malicious bots attacking this site are specifically trying to find WordPress login pages and file structures. Shouldn't have, but it did. In a way, it's comforting—it reinforces the belief that bots and their operators don't do subtlety. They're kind of like Rob Deer, really; brute force, swing hard and either get the homer or strike out. So, another thing to cite in my ever-present recommendation that if you use WordPress you should move to something else (I'll help you, my rates are good!), and if you're thinking about starting a WP site to think again.

Tagged Politics, ICE, President VonClownstick, Republicans, Baseball, Site issues, Craig Calcaterra, Posted on January 14, 2026 at 9:29PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

No Comments yet

Quotes of the day

A few choice quotations from my Sunday reading before I head out to do more umpiring this afternoon/evening...

I know how Congress works. I know that a party in the minority cannot impose their will and that they can't stop what's happening right now. But I do want them to at least acknowledge it and communicate with Americans in a way that demonstrates that they understand why so many of us are being driven to madness and tears at the country being destroyed. I want them to engage in argument and persuasion which meets the moment and which makes it clear that, when the political situation does change, they will act in decisive ways.

This can happen in any number of ways, such as making sure to find the cameras and the microphones to make it clear where they stand when shit goes down. The articulation of a moral stance. It can also happen such as in simply not going along with the Trump Regime in any way whatsoever. Don't vote for things he wants and don't try to find common ground, because finding common ground with a criminal enterprise in a Constitutional crisis only serves to normalize the regime's anti-democratic behavior and to make one an accomplice to criminality.

—Craig Calcaterra

If the American Experiment dies, it will be because we didn’t stop the immorality of a white supremacy that calls Somali refugees “garbage” and a patriarchy that mutters “fucking bitch” as it murders a woman in ice-cold blood. If it lives, it will be because we embraced the higher morality of empathy and compassion for our neighbors—and for people we don’t even know.

—Will Bunch

In my reading of that moment, through everything I know about abusive men and the way they move through the world, that quiet "I’m not mad at you" may have felt like a challenge to someone who needed to be in charge. Because some men don’t hear peace as peace. They hear it as a woman claiming ground that isn’t supposed to belong to her. They hear it as a refusal to be properly afraid. ... 

... I keep thinking about how often women are asked to be the calm in a storm they didn’t create, how often we’re taught to soften danger with our voices and our bodies and our fear, and how often it doesn’t save us anyway.

—Jo Carducci

Trump, until very recently a self-styled antiwar isolationist, now threatens to forcibly revert Greenland’s status to unreconstructed colonialism under a nation forged in high-minded opposition and bloody resistance to that very notion. Why? Probably, judging by his acknowledged fixation on Venezuelan oil and riches in general, for plunder, but also, by his own account, “for national protection.”

That’s funny, because the United States has enjoyed unfettered military access to the island since World War II, when Denmark was occupied by Nazi Germany and the United States took Greenland in defense. A 1951 agreement between Denmark and the United States allows the latter to expand its military presence there at will, and the postwar NATO alliance, of which both nations are founding members, obligates us to defend each other.

—Josh Gohlke

You have to love this line from the State Department’s warning [recommending U.S. citizens leave Venezuela immediately]:

“Venezuela has the highest Travel Advisory level—Level 4: Do Not Travel—due to severe risks to Americans, including wrongful detention, torture in detention, terrorism, kidnapping, arbitrary enforcement of local laws, crime, civil unrest, and poor health infrastructure.”

Did your irony detector just start shrieking? mine did—because you can replace "Venezuela" with "Minneapolis" and not have to change one word in the rest of that paragraph.

—Jeff Tiedrich

And finally, the cartoon that nails the essence of where we are as a nation in the 21st Century: under the yoke of misogynist thugs so insecure in their identities that they're driven to make other people suffer in order to feel better about themselves.

—David Whamond

Have a pleasant Sunday, everyone.

Tagged Politics, Craig Calcaterra, Will Bunch, Jeff Tiedrich, David Whamond, Jo Carducci, Posted on January 11, 2026 at 2:57PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

1 Comment

Rage processing

I said at the turn of the new year that I had optimism regarding how 2026 would play out big-picture-wise, but it was a specific kind of optimism—the kind that says we have to go through worse before the better comes, and this is the year when the worse forces us to make the choice to be better. For whatever reason, I was and am still surprised at just how quickly we're careening into the worse.

I still think we'll have turned the corner by the time we get to New Year's 2027, and I'm trying to take a rose-colored-glasses view that the rapidity of the descent into even greater evil by Felon47, his cronies, and his puppet masters will herald a faster and more powerful move to oust them. I see reasons to think that might be the case, but I'm also more aware than ever of what John Fugelsang calls "WTF fatigue."

Every damn day there's a new WTF incident stemming from the fascist regime in DC. Processing all the outrage is a challenge. And it would go along way in aiding the public's mental health if elected officials were more visibly putting up a fight.

In this way, the speed of the regime's further descent into evil is helping because more officials seem to be finally getting it that these are not your grandparents' Republicans, these are rather the enemies your grandparents fought in World War II. But it's not enough, it's not nearly enough. I'm glad to see the statements by some Democratic Congresspeople voicing outrage over Felon47’s Venezuelan smash-and-grab and ICE’s murderous thuggery and the overt obstructions of justice being perpetrated by the FBI of all agencies. I'm gratified to hear state and local officials making it clear that the regime's actions are criminal. But what we need to see and hear are Senators, Representatives, and potential candidates for Federal office demanding impeachments. Promising reforms. Vowing to prosecute.

Instead we still get Tim Kaine and Amy Klobuchar and others voting to confirm insurrectionists to the Federal bench.

We cannot be giving an inch here. The cult is beginning to crack. A significant number of Republicans in Congress seem to be realizing that they're politically better off opposing Felon47 on at least some things—nine of them helped Democrats succeed in a discharge petition to force a vote on restoring ACA subsidies and then 15 voted for the measure, even though the Speaker refused to put it up for a vote under normal business; five Republican Senators voted in favor of curtailing Felon47’s military adventurism—and that they have to think about their careers post-regime.

Because one way or another, this regime will end. That's where that choosing-to-be-better thing comes into play, and that should be what Democrats nationwide at all levels of power need to be shouting into every microphone they can find.

In the words of our friend Craig Calcaterra:

America is lost. It's completely lost and it is marching deeper and deeper into darkness every day. We're past the point of mere elections fixing it. It's going to take the prosecution of scores if not hundreds of members of the current regime and the eradication of their evil and lawless works to even begin to put us on something resembling a path back into the light. Like, that's where we have to start to even have hope of a positive future.

We cannot go back. We must forge a new path forward and through. Anyone who promises, with clarity and conviction, to do that has my support. Anyone without the courage to do so does not.

Tagged Politics, President VonClownstick, Democrats, Republicans, Craig Calcaterra, Posted on January 9, 2026 at 3:25PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

No Comments yet

Domestic terrorism

Domestic terrorist

Unsurprisingly, the response of the Felon47 regime—principally the Secretary of Homeland Security and Felon47 himself—to the murder of a young mother, an American citizen, by an ICE agent in Minneapolis has been to lie their asses off and claim the incident was something entirely different than what occurred in reality.

They are attempting to spin the killing as some sort of justified self-defense action, but if you've seen the videos taken by eyewitnesses you can plainly see that such a spin is, to echo the term used by Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, bullshit. Everything in the statements by the DHS secretary and Felon47 is profoundly untrue, though there is a kernel of truth in one of the lies. Secretary Noem said that ICE reacted to a case of domestic terrorism. That is a blatant lie, easily debunked by the video records. But this was a case of domestic terrorism—just not in the way Noem would have us believe. The terrorists were the ICE agents, and the ICE agent that fired his gun repeatedly into the open driver-side window of Renee Good's car at point-blank range committed murder.

ICE has become a terrorist organization. By extension, the Department of Homeland Security has become a terrorist organization. By extension, the executive branch of the United States government has become a terrorist organization.

One of the many, many reforms I think is necessary for our country to recover from this dalliance with fascist thuggery is to undo the biggest mistake of the George W. Bush administration outside of his wars. That administration crafted the new cabinet agency, the Department of Homeland Security, in the wake of 9/11, making it a sprawling cluster of bureaucracies borne of paranoia and with overreaching, careless authorities. It needs to be abolished, its constituent parts returned to their former agencies or erased from existence. ICE in particular needs to be disbanded, with customs and border control and immigration duties reorganized in ways that actually keeps them in their own lanes.

Right now ICE is just the American Gestapo, with DHS functioning as the American Schutzstaffel.

These people have to be stopped. Since the Republican party is corrupt and Republican officials are functioning as accomplices and accessories to countless crimes including murder and outright betrayal of the Constitution, we may well have to suffer for another year before a new Congress can finally take these fuckers down, assuming we can overcome the inevitable Republican attempts to subvert the midterm elections. But that doesn't mean we don't try in the meantime.

Write your Congresspeople. Write your Senators. Call their offices, shout from the rooftops, communicate however you can to those with the power to fix this—and make no mistake, Congress could end this reign of terror today if they chose to—that we are mad as hell and won't take any more.

Impeach. Convict. Remove. Do it now.

Tagged Politics, Republicans, Society, Congress, President VonClownstick, Posted on January 8, 2026 at 12:26AM   |   Permalink   |     |  

No Comments yet