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   |     |  

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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   |     |  

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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   |     |  

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If you use technology, read this book

Because I am not made of money, when I buy a book to give someone as a Christmas present (presuming it's one I haven't read yet), if there's enough time I'll read it myself before wrapping it up and sending it off. Thus was the case with one I picked up the other night, the latest nonfic from the great Cory Doctorow.

Doctorow is a longtime tech consumer advocate, with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and just on his own, and his new volume explains how the evolution of the Internet has unfortunately coincided with some truly terrible governance to create what he calls the Enshittocene Era, which we are now living trough.

Digital services in particular and the Internet in general are in dire need of regulation, as evidenced by the continually worsening transitions from software being sold to you on a disc or as a download to what we see more and more of today, software that you "subscribe to"—which is to say, rent from a remote server. Further, some of the tech companies like to tweak their user agreements now and then to try and take ownership of not just the physical software, but your work that you create with it in order to "train AI." As more commodities become digital, you as a consumer own less of what you pay for. When once you owned music you bought on a disc, these days if you purchase an album on iTunes, you didn't really buy it—you're renting it for the duration your iTunes account and device is active and paid up. Even physical goods now use Internet connectivity, the so-called "Internet of Things," to try and prevent consumers from actually owning the products they buy.

You've undoubtedly encountered this sort of thing in your everyday lives, but Doctorow details how its done and why in all its greedy glory, and in quite accessible language, in this book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It.

All the tech outfits are abusing us; bad enough they all spy on us to an extreme degree to facilitate their algorithms and their advertising sales. But over time they've also graduated to just blatantly ripping us off whenever they can and abusing anyone that gets between them and a dollar. Amazon, unsurprisingly, is and always has been the worst offender, but Apple grates my cheese almost as much with the way they insist on control of everything related to any of their products. (Recall my note in the post on the Android app that there was no iOS app; this is because Apple wants total control and wants you to pay for the privilege of giving it to them.) Everyone is in on it. Google, Meta, Microsoft, Adobe, everyone. And a lot fewer companies make up "everyone" after so many mergers and acquisitions and blind-eye-turning on antitrust laws.

Dearth of competition. Dearth of regulation. Diminishing power of tech-industry labor. Binding arbitration of conflicts when the offending company employs the arbitrators. Choices made by companies and governments to gouge consumers without much pushback (but what little there has been is worth paying attention to and replicating). Thus does enshittification metastasize.

Suffice to say, this is a very important book for everyone to read. Especially Americans, since our regulatory system is the most influential (so far) on these businesses.

Some choice quotes:

"Apple didn't treat its customers well because it loved them. It treated them well to lure them into its walled garden, which was then revealed to be a prison."

"Google could spend billions of dollars every year making sure that even someone who's tried every other search engine would still prefer Google. Or it could spend a lot fewer billions of dollars making sure that no one ever tried a search engine other than Google. It chose the latter. ... Apple's single largest source of revenue is a check for more than $20 billion that Google writes it every year to buy the default search box in Safari and on the iPhone."

"The instant Adobe moved its software to the cloud and eliminated the non-subscription versions of its apps, it put a gun on the mantelpiece. It was only a matter of time until someone opened fire on Adobe's customers with that gun."

"If you operate a cloud-based app, you can monitor your customers' every click and keystroke to discover which features are most valuable to your deepest-pocketed users, and then you can remove that feature from the product's basic tier and reclassify it as an upcharged add-on. The CEOs who do this got their MBAs at Darth Vader University, where the first lesson is, 'I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further.'"

"Here's how perverse [the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, section 1201] is: ... If I, as the author, narrator, and investor in an audiobook, allow Amazon to sell you that book and later want to provide you with a tool so you can take your book to a rival platform, I will be committing a felony punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine.... If you were to visit a truckstop and shoplift my audiobook on CD from a spinner rack, you would face a significantly lighter penalty for stealing a physical item that I would for providing you with the means to take a copyrighted work that I created and financed our of the Amazon ecosystem. If you were to hijack the truck that delivers that CD and steal an entire fifty-three-foot trailer full of audiobooks, you would likely face a shorter prison sentence that I would for helping you break the DRM on a title I own."

Doctorow notes some positive changes in recent years and lays out a plan to fix things, but it depends on public and governmental actions that seem unlikely to happen in the near future in this country, at least so long as Republicans are in power. It may be up to the Europeans for now.

Tagged The Internet, Culture, Republicans, Technology, Cory Doctorow, Books, Posted on December 15, 2025 at 2:36PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Affordabilty

Felon47 wants us all to think there's no such thing as "affordability," and increasingly he's right. Not in the way that he wants us to think, of course; his schtick is to claim that talk of things being unaffordable is another "hoax." Given how real all of his other alleged hoaxes are, it's pretty easy to tell he's full of shit (again), but the way he goes about delivering his schtick is kind of funny. He says, “The word ‘affordability’ is a con job by the Democrats,” as if his opponents made up a word to denigrate him with. "The word affordability is a Democrat scam." (Yet  in the same breath he'll tell you you can get by without buying pencils. This man is the president, for fuck's sake.)

You'd think if there was one guy in the world who knew what a scam was, it'd be him, since he's lived his whole life scamming one group after another. But in addition to being a scammer and a fraud, Felon47 is also an idiot who maintains that the word is the scam. Turns out, of course, that the word is just a word. It applies to things in context and not to other things in other contexts. I guess Felon47 just doesn't like that word, it's not one of "the best words."

One context the word does apply to is the Christmas budgets of countless Americans, including me. Thanks in large part to Felon47’s policies and general fuck-you-ness, money is tight. I paid my January health insurance premium yesterday and it's twice what the December premium was. I went grocery shopping last night and spent $100 on what I'd have expected not that long ago to cost $70-$75. I also went Christmas shopping.

Christmas shopping is rarely an efficient way to spend my time, as usually I have no idea what I'm looking for and wait for something to grab me off the shelves or the racks. I did get a couple of things, but after this little mini-spree it's become clear that it's going to be a minimalist Christmas for those on the StarshipTim gift list. Sorry, gang. Better luck next year.

The one bit of sticker shock that for whatever reason sticks with me—even though it's not really "shock," it's less a surprise issue than a scale issue—is that a new paperback book, what used to be classified as a "mass-market" paperback, costs $20+ now. Seems like not that long ago it hit $10 and that seemed steep. But it's not just books, it's everything, and even though I'm a lot more comfortable now than I was in the many years I was straddling the poverty line I am still conditioned in my mind as someone straddling the poverty line. So a paperback with a cover price of $20 hits more than the $45 tag on a pair of jeans.

Anyway, Christmas is a drag for me regardless of the health of my bank account, so whatever. Just a matter of  getting through the month.

Tagged Republicans, Christmas, Money, Posted on December 14, 2025 at 1:01AM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Better late than never

For three months it has irked me greatly that the mainstream press in this country has treated the continual policy of Felon47 and his cabinet of criminal cruelty to extrajudicially murder Venezuelans (and others?) on the open seas as just another curiosity in the vast mozaic of chaos this alleged president has wrought. Now, after almost 90 people have been murdered by the United States for the offense of being on a boat out of (we think) Venezuela, it's finally getting some traction, but it took ancillary stories to get the media to care.

It took six congressional Democrats distributing a video reminding military personnel that it is their duty, as codified in the Uniform Code of Military Justice, to refuse illegal orders; it took Felon47’s outraged reaction to that video in which he essentially admitted that he wants to issue illegal orders and have them followed; that apparently led to someone telling the Washington Post that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered a war crime in the first of these murderous strikes on Venezuelan boats. That what it took to generate any real outrage.

That in itself is maddening, but hey, at least the outrage is starting to spread. Sadly, the outrage is still focused on one egregious element of one incident, the "double-tap" second missile fired to kill two survivors of an initial strike on a boat in September. Because that action is explicitly described by military codes of conduct as a blatantly illegal order that should not be followed—killing the shipwrecked—it's the focus right now. OK, at least it's an entry point to the greater issue. But talking about the killing of the two survivors of a first missile as if it is fundamentally different from the rest of the policy is yet another failure of the American press.

There is no legality—none—to any of the boat strikes. They are all crimes. They are all murders. Getting wrapped up in the nuances of the double-tap strike and Hegseth's alleged order to "kill everybody" as the reason for doing that threatens to justify by implication the rest of the killings. Hegseth and Felon47 insist that they are perfectly  within their rights to conduct these strikes because they are abiding by "the rules of war" in an "armed conflict" with "narco-terrorists" in league with the Venezuelan government. Except those reasons are all bullshit. 

a) The United States is not at war with Venezuela or any other nation. b) There is no armed conflict with these boats—none of the boats took offensive action against US personnel or property. c) The phrase "narco-terrorists" is just a made-up term to stoke propaganda, it makes no sense—the goal of a drug trafficker is to sell drugs, to make money, and instilling terror on their prospective markets is counter to that interest. d) There has been no evidence proffered—zero—as to who or what was even aboard those boats; were they really carrying narcotics? Were they really Venzuelan gang members? Were they affiliated in any way with the Venezuelan government? One thing that is relatively certain is that they were not heading for the United States; none of the boats had that kind of range, particularly if they were laden with a heavy cargo of narcotics. e) Felon47 doesn't give a tinker's damn about drug trafficking—if he did, he wouldn't be pardoning drug kingpins, as he has done repeatedly including just this week—so the entire motivation for the murders is suspect.

Further, drug trafficking, while a serious matter, is not a capital offense. Further still, even if it was a capital offense, it has to be proven in the judicial system before sentence can be carried out. Because, again, it's not a war.

The latest incident that we know about came just yesterday. Hegseth announced on social media that the US "just sunk another narco boat," this time in the eastern Pacific. An official announcement confirmed the strike and noted four deaths, bringing the tally of known  extrajudicial killings—murders—in these operations to 87.

Felon47 and his utterly lawless regime has killed and will kill untold numbers of people, both in the US and around the world; these Venezuelan boats account for only a tiny fraction. Reversals of international aid policies, destruction of public health infrastructure, rollbacks of environmental regulations and incentivizing fossil fuel pollutants, economic oppressions, and poverty-by-intent legislation will be far more deadly in the end. But the in-your-face audacity of just targeting a boat and blowing it up on the open sea because you want to feel like a tough guy is so emblematic of this tyrant and this regime that it should get covered more intently. And with that context: This is outrageous and easy to understand in the moment, but it is just the tip of the iceberg. MAGA is a death cult, even if the members don't know it.

More folks are calling for Pete Hegseth to resign, which is great, but it's insufficient. Pete Hegseth, along with everyone who carried out his illegal orders, should be prosecuted. So, frankly, should the tyrant-in-chief, but John Roberts and his corrupt majority of the Supreme Court decided presidents are above the law. Still, I'd like to see it anyway, bring charges against him and make the Court defend its ruling.

Tagged Politics, President VonClownstick, Pete Hegseth, Republicans, Posted on December 5, 2025 at 11:58PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Dear Democrats

Feckless leader

An open letter to Senate Democrats. Seven specific ones, really, plus independent Angus King. And to one other, alleged minority leader Chuck Schumer.

To Senators Kaine, Durbin, Shaheen, Hassan, Rosen, Masto, Fetterman, and King, along with "leader" Schumer:

Today you voted to advance a Republican measure to reopen the government. (All of you except Sen. Schumer, but we'll get to you in a minute, Chuck.) You must have had your reasons for doing this. They might even make sense to you in some weird way. But that being the case, I have to ask one rather fundamental question of you all:

What the fuck is wrong with you?!

The Federal government has been shut down now for 40 days—insert Noah's Ark joke here—with Democrats holding firm on one comparatively minor demand, one that is politically beneficial for all parties, for agreement on ending the shutdown: Restore subsidies for the Affordable Care Act that Republicans eliminated in their Big Bloodbath of a Bill earlier this year. That's it, that's the one thing Democrats were demanding, and for a while it appeared that you all would stand together and force the issue.

Then came today.

Today, when the eight of you capitulated to the Republican terrorists who have been "negotiating" in bad faith and governing illegally for nearly ten months and counting. You voted to advance the GOP measure rather than use the leverage you had to actually get what you allegedly wanted and allegedly deemed important for the American people. Why?

Senator Shaheen said she voted for it because "this was the only deal on the table." Oh? So next time when the Republicans put up a measure that jails half of all Americans with Spanish surnames instead of all of them, you'll vote for it because it's the only deal on the table?

Last Tuesday the off-year elections showed us that the American people writ large do not support today's Republicans or their policies. Republicans got their clocks cleaned. We're approaching major holiday travel season, with air travel being disrupted in significant ways that are untenable. GOP officials are refusing to do their jobs in the House, taking literal wrecking balls to the White House, and committing crimes at a pace one can't even keep current with. They are exceedingly vulnerable.

They are behaving like authoritarians, and you had a significant piece of leverage to use against them. Until today, when you eight pissed it away.

For what? Let's look at the so-called "deal" you made with the Republicans. This measure does the following:

• Officially funds the government through January 30, 2026. I say "officially" because the Felon47 regime has demonstrated repeatedly that whey do not respect Congressional appropriations and have simply chosen not to spend money they're legally obligated to spend. So what did you get here? Things will be funded, but only at the whim of the regime.
• Guarantees retroactive pay for furloughed workers and those working without pay during the shutdown. Congratulations, you got a promise to OBEY THE EXISTING LAW. Well done.
• Likewise, SNAP benefits will resume being paid. Likewise, the courts were forcing that to happen anyway because the Republicans were withholding that money illegally.
• Rehires employees that were fired during the shutdown and prohibits new firings through January 30. OK, but what's to keep them from being fired again on January 31? Anything? No? Good job.
• Funds the VA and the USDA through fiscal 2026. Really? You believe that? You think the regime won't just decide not to pay those bills like they've refused so many others thus far? Suckers.
• Requires a Senate vote on ACA subsidies by the middle of December. Great, you got a promise for a symbolic vote. In one chamber of Congress. That won't pass. And even if it did, that the Speaker of the House has already said he won't put it up for a vote in his chamber. Utterly worthless.

That's it. Am I missing anything? No?

To paraphrase the late great Gene Wilder, "You got nothing. Good day and get bent."

If one were cynical, one might think you eight were more concerned with your own travel plans being disturbed than in advocating for your constituents. Yes, disrupted air travel is an inconvenience. Potentially a severe one. An untenable one. You know what else it was? Leverage.

Democrats have, once again, bailed out the Republicans. Rather than force them to face the consequences of their disastrous, painful, massively unpopular policy agenda, the eight of you have rewarded them by removing at least some of those consequences. Every time the Republicans enact some policy or other that will, by design, inflict great pain on the American people, they know Democrats will mitigate the damage. They're arsonists that count on the fire brigade to check some of the blazes while they continue to light other infernos with impunity.

I get that you don't want people to go without their paychecks and you don't want travel disrupted. But you were also supposed to be looking out for people's health care. What you have done is communicate to Republicans that terrorism works. That threats of starvation by illegally withholding SNAP funds is a viable tactic. That all it takes to get you to capitulate to their plan to make health insurance unaffordable for many and less affordable for all is to throw empty assurances at you and promise that this time, for real, you'll be allowed to kick the football.

And you, Chuck Schumer:

You didn't vote for this, so good on you for that, but you're supposed to be the leader here. You hold that title. How is it, then, that these defections were allowed to happen? You couldn't communicate the basic facts of the matter here, that this measure gets your party bupkis? That this is not only bad for the country but bad politics? That giving in tells people that there was a 40+ day government shutdown for what in the end was no reason whatsoever? You couldn't keep your caucus in line to prevent doubling and tripling health insurance premiums because flights were being delayed??!

This should have been a gimme issue for you, Chuck, and you blew it. Are you truly that feckless as party leader? Apparently you are. I implore you to recognize that you have failed and resign as leader. Right now. You clearly suck at this now.

May all eight of you—no, all nine of you, this goes for you too, Chuck—may you all lose in primaries the next time you're up for election. And for those of you that have already declared your retirements, may you reap the karmic consequences of your cowardice and spinelessness in whatever post-Senate ventures you undertake.

Assholes.

The only positive that might—might—come out of this is that once the final bill gets out of the Senate the House will have to vote on it, which means the House will have to be in session, which means Speaker Johnson will have to convene the House and swear in Representative-elect Grijalva, which will force a vote to release the Epstein files and bring that scandal back to the forefront. Johnson might invent some new reason not to, though. He's nothing if not craven, he's proven he'll stop at nothing to protect the pedophile in chief.

We'll see if the House Democrats will use their leverage or if they, too, will capitulate to the GOP terrorists.

Tagged Politics, Republicans, Democrats, Posted on November 10, 2025 at 1:34AM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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A tale of two eras

On the drive down here to greater Palm Springs, I played a number of CDs in the car, various album collections on the randomizer. Occasionally a tune would pop up that was written/recorded in 2002 or so that directly or obliquely referenced 9/11. Stuff like Melissa Etheridge's "Tuesday Morning," Springsteen's "Into the Fire," that kind of thing.

Those songs are a manifestation of the collective outrage of both the public and the government over a terrorist attack that was deadly and horrific, yes, but also blunt and spectacular and shocking (we'll leave aside the questions about whether or not GWB and company should have been shocked or not; the point is, the public was). Not for the first time, I was struck by the massive difference in the American reaction to 9/11 from the American reaction to President Convicted Felon's regime of terror and incompetence.

Bin Laden and his minions killed 3,000 Americans with a stunt designed to get everyone's attention and scare us. The reaction was, probably as intended by bin Landen, outsized and detrimental to the American public, but it was swift and massive in the name of defending the United States and our free democratic republic.

Felon47, when he was merely Fraudster45, presided over three million deaths from a pandemic he so grossly mismanaged and, in fact, abetted. As Felon47, his regime has already killed untold millions around the world with the destruction of USAID. He's outright murdered 57 people and counting on the open seas. He's created a secret police force to terrorize Americans and non-citizen residents of his own nation, disappearing people to secret gulags and tear-gassing residential neighborhoods. His Department of Homeland Security thugs—an agency misguidedly and foolishly created in the overreaction to 9/11—are nothing more than mob enforcers abusing people for the sole purpose of making people scared. You know, terrorism.

This country is under a threat so much greater today, from the alleged President and his evil henchmen—and I do not exaggerate when I call them that—an existential crisis brought on by, yes, terrorists with the stated intention of destroying the U.S. Constitutional order and replacing it with a dictatorial regime of oligarchical rule. In the early 2000s, Bin Laden and al-Qaeda were such a threat that the American public collectively lost its mind, elected officials were so frantic in their attempts to protect the country that they basically ran around screaming and bouncing off the walls while passing poorly-considered rush legislation to prevent further damage. Here in the 2010s and 2020s, the entire Republican party has thrown in with the terrorists and the American public is either shrugging its shoulders or cowering in fear.

At least, it seems that way. It feels that way.

The No Kings protests gave me some hope that the majority of us really are trying to resist and push back against the terrorists. But this threat has been here now for ten years, the consequences of it continue to escalate and continue to metastasize with such tepid defiance that I find myself just aghast at the contrast.

9/11: An attack in spectacular fashion from elsewhere that killed thousands, resulting in near-instant panic and fervent defense of America as a concept as well as a territory. Trump: An attack in slow-moving idiotic fashion from within, aided by Russians under cover of night, that killed millions and counting, resulting in the complete abdication of the Congressional majority and the corrupt majority of the Supreme Court as a despotic regime takes over the nation and plunges us into a dark age while the public just sits and looks at Instagram.

Wake the fuck up, people.

 

 

Tagged Politics, Republicans, Posted on October 29, 2025 at 4:34PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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This aggression will not stand, man

It felt good to be out among the protesters at today's No Kings rally. On the one hand, it felt slightly impotent, like it was the literal least one could do; but on the other, seeing—and being among—the throng of folks out there proudly displaying their displeasure and even contempt for the authoritarian American regime circa 2025 was like a balm. Like, there's practical evidence that there are more of us—believers in the ideals of democratic governance and the US Constitution—then there are of them. Them being the Trumpers, the Nazis, the despotic enablers of tyranny that make up the modern party calling itself "Republican."

I've not seen any news today, just a few posts like this one documenting the protests themselves and sharing creative signage. I do know the turnout nationwide was massive, eclipsing June's No Kings events, and doubtless that fact annoys/angers/frightens the regime.

That might mean things get worse before they get better—you just know Stephen Miller is planning something heinous and brutal as revenge—but it reinforces my optimism that sooner or later the reign of terror will end. Just a matter of how much damage is left in its wake by the time sanity returns to the US government.

I took a lot of photos of the signs folks brought out today. I didn't have one of my own, I just wasn't with it enough to make one ahead of time. It would have felt better out there if I'd had one. But others were more on the ball and I will share some favorites. A lot of the photos were from a distance and are thus slightly out of focus; there's only so much Photoshop can help with.

Helps to be in the Mariners know for this one



These two as well









I wish this one had turned out better; Kermit's word balloon says "Release the Epstein Files"






And then these were from the bigger protest downtown, culled from a couple of friends' social media feeds...

I hope you all had similarly good experiences at your local events.

 

Tagged Politics, Republicans, President VonClownstick, Posted on October 19, 2025 at 12:15AM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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More reasons to impeach

Though I've been preoccupied by baseball playoffs this week, the rest of the world kept on turning and the regime at the White House and their collaborators engaged in yet more fascistic malevolence.

There's too much of it to list, so I'm just going to vent about the incident at Quantico, which was another thing to add to the ever-increasing list of actions President Convicted Felon and his entire regime of gangsters would be impeached and removed for if we had a Congressional majority that respected their oaths of office.

This week the United States Secretary of Defense (that's still the name, no matter what the dude says) Pete Hegseth summoned all of the US military's flag officers to listen to him project his insecurities and cosplay as a tough guy. The SecDef essentially told these generals and admirals to go forth and commit war crimes.

It was a speech that former Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele described as "a cross between a political rally and an old Friars Club roast." Hegseth not only disrupted the commands of all of these officers by demanding they give him an in-person audience to hear this inanity, he then fat-shamed them, criticized their grooming habits, encouraged the abuse of new recruits, and implied a blind eye would be turned to future sexual assaults on military bases. He called having to refrain from abuses "walking on eggshells" which shouldn't be anyone's concern. He paid lip service to racially motivated violence and sexual assault "remaining" illegal, but emphasized he wanted "no more frivolous complaints, no more anonymous complaints, no more repeat complaints, no more smearing reputations," which given his own history and predilections can easily be inferred to mean soldiers can do what they want and we won't listen to anyone who is victimized, even if they're fellow soldiers. He said outright that drill sergeants should be allowed to hit their troops. He also implied that officers or enlisted personnel who had been held accountable for various abuses in the past would be essentially pardoned: "At my direction, we're making changes to the retention of adverse information on personnel records that will allow leaders with forgivable, earnest, or minor infractions to not be encumbered by those infractions in perpetuity," he said.

He decried restrictions on military behavior in the field as well, blasting policies and agreements like the Geneva Convention as "stupid" and declaring that the US military should be ruthless. "We untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt and kill the enemies of our country. No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement, just common sense, maximum lethality and authority for warfighters."

There was a fair amount of, I will say, honest explanation of why he and President Convicted Felon want to rebrand the Defense Department as the "War Department," all of it chilling. "We have to be prepared for war, not for defense. We're training warriors, not defenders. We fight wars to win, not to defend." He might as well call it the "Department of Conquering" or the "Department of Global Bullies."

This cabinet secretary with multiple white supremacist tattoos on his body declared that he wanted the military to be white and male and heterosexual, barely coding his language at all. Referring to ethnic and gender diversity in the services, social justice, environmental concerns, and women in combat roles as "toxic ideological garbage," he declared that "we are done with that shit."  He called the new fitness requirement he wants to implement across the military to be "a gender-neutral age normed male standard," code for "no girls or sissies." He called on anyone in that room that wasn't on board with the fascist administration to resign their commissions. 

Hegseth's pro-abuse and pro-bigotry address was followed by a rambling, oft-incoherent speech by the tyrant-in-chief, who was very disturbed by the lack of adulation the flag officers were showing him. The tyrant told the generals and admirals that some of them would have a "major part" in his plan to essentially incite civil war, that he wanted to turn American cities into "training grounds" for the military, a force that would "straighten out" cities he didn't approve of. "That's a war too," he said, "a war from within."

Interestingly, Hegseth made multiple references to oaths taken to the Constitution and how they should be taken seriously, not once showing the slightest recognition that he and his boss violate such oaths on a daily if not hourly basis.

I've no doubt that there were some in that audience who were fully on board with what they heard, but I hold out some hope that some of them—most of them?—recognized that they were witness to leaders who seek to subvert the nation they swore to protect. I hope that enough of them convene among themselves in the aftermath of this and strategize for how to refuse illegal orders, protect each other from illegal firings, how to exert any influence they might have to promote an impeachment or two or twenty without overstepping their apolitical protocols.

We should fully expect President Convicted Felon to try to lay siege to major American cities in an effort to destroy his political opposition. I wish I could fully expect the military to tell him to fuck off when he does.

Tagged President VonClownstick, Republicans, Politics, Posted on October 3, 2025 at 4:54PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Mad enough to chew neutronium

What the fuck are you doing, Hakeem?!

Hakeem Jeffrries, along with 94 other Democrats in the House, voted Yes on "a resolution to honor the life of Charles Kirk."

Why?

I can think of no good reason. I can think of bad ones. Capitulation is what the bad ones all redound to. 

Charlie Kirk—whose middle name I've learned was "James," which bugs me to no end—was, yes, the victim of a horrible crime and that crime was detestable and unconscionable and a black mark on humanity. But is that sufficient to warrant this Congressional resolution? If so, then where are the resolutions honoring the countless other victims of our absurd gun culture? Charlie Kirk gets honored but the woman gunned down in a camp of unhoused folks in Minneapolis this week doesn't? Charlie Kirk gets honored but the guy shot and killed while playing basketball in the Bronx last month doesn't? Charlie Kirk gets honored but Melissa Hortman doesn't? Charlie Kirk gets honored but the 1,400+ minors shot and killed just last year in this country don't?

Charlie Kirk gets honored because his murder is being used by the so-called Republican party to fuel propaganda and as a rallying cry for stochastic terrorism.

The Democratic leader in the House of Representatives shouldn't be voting in favor of that.

I wrote to my senators and congresswoman again today. Not about Jeffries and the resolution honoring a misogynistic bigot that called for the previous president to be killed; I only mentioned that in passing. My focus was, once again, on the duty of every member of Congress to remove the fascist regime currently occupying power in the White House. By not doing so they are betraying their own oaths of office as this regime continues to piss all over the Constitution as they declare the First Amendment dead, as they continue to murder people on the open sea—three more killed today—as they continue to use a de facto secret police force to abduct and disappear people they don't think are "American" enough.

I'm sick of Chuck Schumer insisting that he needs bipartisan support for even the smallest things. We need him—or his replacement as minority leader if he gets out of the way—to insist on bipartisan support for defending and upholding the Constitution. We need Democratic leadership to be demanding the so-called Republicans either respect their oaths of office and end this fascist regime or resign immediately because they are betraying their country. They need to be called out for their rejection of the bill of rights, the very rule of law, every principle this country was founded on. (Well, except racism; if we're honest, that too was part of the country's founding and they're staying true to that.)

Congress could end this nightmare tomorrow.

But they won't.

Because the majority party is too corrupt, too cowed, too myopic, too greedy, and too comfortable with fascism.

That's got to change.

Tagged Politics, Republicans, Hakeem Jeffries, President VonClownstick, Posted on September 20, 2025 at 3:17AM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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The pro-death party

The news has been awful lately.

I know, that seems like an evergreen statement in the year 2025. It kind of is. Every day there's more nightmare fuel.

Since I last posted anything we've had another school shooting, more decimation at the CDC, concrete orders from RFK Jr.'s HHS to stop vaccinating people, the U.S. regime assassinated 11 Venezuelans in the Caribbean on suspicion of drug-running (prior administrations would have impounded and searched the boat, these guys just blew it up), the Russian regime assassinated a Ukrainian official in the midst of continued Russian attacks in their war, and our wannabe despot added Baltimore to the list of cities he wants to deploy troops to in violation of posse comitatus. And that's just off the top of my head.

Remember when Republicans branded themselves the "pro-life party"? Yes, yes, we knew it was bullshit then too, but even Lee Atwater and Karl Rove, the GOP's propaganda masters and spiritual disciples of Joseph Goebbels, would have a hard time spinning today's Republicans as "pro-life" when they are so clearly, actively, and zealously pro-death.

Pro-gun massacres. Pro-disease. Pro-pandemics. Pro-war, so long as it's the tyrant's pals Vlad and Bibi doing the warring and/or it's a convenient excuse to shoot at Spanish-speaking brown folks.

The modern Republican party is the Death Party.

The latest school shooting will not move a single Republican lawmaker to support any curtailment of the availability of assault weapons to the general public. They have accepted—with enthusiasm!—that the occasional massacre of children is an acceptable price to pay for the gun lobby's political support.

The illegal deployment of military to American cities to combat "crime" is, of course, an attempt to intimidate political opposition and an to incite violence; the longer it goes on, the more likely there will be people killed on the streets by government thugs.

We're not three years past a global pandemic that was only (mostly) overcome because of the herculean feat of creating and mass-distributing vaccines, so naturally the guy who mismanaged the start of the COVID-19 fiasco put a guy in charge of public health that opposes not just vaccines but public health measures in general. Because of this moronic regime's first go-round, COVID-19 is still a thing, and now you can't get the vaccine unless you're over 65 or have compounding risk factors. And we have to worry about diseases we thought were behind us again. Measles, anyone? HPV? Tetanus? Fucking polio, perhaps?

And if you do get sick, well, your health insurance is going to get worse and more expensive next year thanks to the one and only piece of legislation this traitorous excuse for a Congressional majority passed so far. Medicaid is basically going away, Medicare is next on the chopping block. For most of us this would be a problem, but Republicans, in the words of Senator Joni Ernst, think "we're all going to die [anyway]" so why fight it when we could instead give more money to rich people?

And this doesn't even touch on the destruction of USAID and the environmental damage being done by deregulation and callous incentives to polluters.

Death Party would be consistent with, you know, how words work. Which is antithetical to how this group handles things like names and labels. This year's HR1 was literally named the "Big Beautiful Bill" when it was the ugliest legislation to see a vote in ages. Back in the George W. Bush Administration there was legislation the Republicans named the "Clear Skies Act"; Al Franken rightly noted that the only way that would be an accurate label is if you added a couple of words and made the the "Clear the Skies of Birds Act." Atwater and Rove pioneered this for Republicans—call the worst things you can think of something positive and you can fool enough suckers into supporting it.

Even the name of their party.

Republican: Supporting a form of government known as a Republic, a governing body made up of Representatives of the Public. Modern Republican officeholders do not represent the public in any way, shape, or form.

The GOP: The "Grand Old Party" is not grand—at its outset it was a regional party, continued to be so in the aftermath of the Civil War, and despite some spans of electoral domination has never been comprised of a majority of the electorate by registration or identification—nor is it old in comparison to the Democratic party, which had already existed for 25 years when the Republican party was formed. If they want to maintain the monicker "GOP," perhaps it should stand for, oh, "Greedy Obnoxious Pedophiles" or "Getting Oligarchs Paid" or "Grotesquely Onerous Policies."

So call them the Death Party. Death by gunfire. Death by disease. Death by environmental cataclysm. Death by starvation. Death by negligence.

Death by a feckless Congressional caucus of neo-Nazi toadies. Death by tyrannical narcissism in the White House. Death by Republicans.

Tagged Politics, Republicans, President VonClownstick, Posted on September 3, 2025 at 12:00AM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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