Friday Stuff

Mr. and Mrs. Scar bring us the story of Catholics forming a united front against detention and deportation of immigrants, and that includes Pope Leo commendably speaking out on their behalf, along with other faith leaders getting slammed to the ground by the ICE Gestapo in Chicago at this Broadview facility (with reporter Britt Miller, immigration advocate Dylan Corbett, Willie Geist, and Gabriel Sherman)...and I’m not one bit surprised to find out that almost three quarters of those detained are NOT criminals, since the fear and intimidation is the point (and OF COURSE clergy was refused the chance to administer Holy Communion)...and remind me again about which president the fundie nut jobs supported, the practicing Catholic or Our Treasonous Orange Pustule (from what I’ve seen, the Episcopalian Church has been pretty steadfast on social justice issues, which the Catholic Church has been kind of hit-and-miss on, especially under Pope Benny)...and if Couch Boy and Mush Mouth Tom Homan are alleged Catholics, then I’m a Chinese aviator...



...and to emphasize the importance of Pope Leo’s words, MS NOW’s Alicia Menendez brings us the story of Vicente Ventura Aguilar, who has been detained in ICE custody for at least 44 days; while in detention, he suffered what was called a “medical emergency” and now apparently has gone missing somehow, with Aguilar’s family believing him to be dead (in addition to being supremely evil, it’s plain that the Trumpers are also incompetent)...and to “work like Amazon Prime but for human beings”; I’m sure Pee Wee German heard that and felt what passes for a stir in his manhood...Menendez speaks with reporter David Noriega and Lindsey Toczylowski, President and CEO of Immigrant Defenders Law Center...



...and John and Sharon Reed of The Damage Report bring us the story of a Texas woman who died after being told she couldn’t get an abortion...another casualty from the SCOTUS destroying Roe, though I’m sure our six Philistines on the High Court won’t regard it as such...preeclampsia can be a deadly consequence of pregnancy, and tragically, that’s what happened here at 20 weeks...also, it’s definitely the case here that the woman was looked upon as pretty much an incubator of her fetus and not as a person with agency to make her own health care decisions...and 90 doctors were involved in her care, but nobody helped her to abort the pregnancy??!! Yeah, just keep telling me that we have the greatest health care system in the world...while I laugh in your face (as much as I give the Catholic Church credit for the prior story, I wish nothing but a pox on them for playing a role in leading us to this utterly barbaric moment)...



...and Jerrod Zisser of Ring of Fire lets us know about a massive THC ban tucked away in the government spending bill, affecting people needing medical cannabis and CBD products for all kinds of reasons, including sleep (saying products can contain no more than 0.4 percent of THC per container, which is basically nothing...this bill apparently also gets rid of a provision allowing VA doctors to prescribe medical cannabis)...fortunately, it looks like there’s a one-year ban before this takes effect, so we definitely have a chance to fix this...



...and Tennessee Brando tells us that Pumpkin Pol Pot has now gone on record on calling for the execution of Democratic lawmakers, and I realize that’s the logical result of the deterioration of what passes for our politics under this treasonous orange meat sack...you would think he and his lizard-brained followers would realize they need to tamp that stuff down after the Charlie Kirk killing, but no such luck...good point by Brando that amplifying that garbage, coming form the POTUS, is likely worse than if #47 had said that himself, though that would be awful too (and good for Brando for not giving “faith leaders” a pass on this stuff, like this Joel Webbon nut case I mentioned on Wednesday...mildly NSFW/H)...



...and Ali Velshi speaks with Dem U.S. House candidate Aftyn Behn, running for the TN-07 seat...affordability is a big-time issue up not just in Tennessee but everywhere, and addressing that starts with restoring the credits for the ACA which Trump and his minions destroyed as a result of the shutdown (and while the Senate may vote on the credits – maybe–MAGA Mike Johnson has no interest in doing that in the House)...oh, and gutting Medicaid also ended up shuttering rural hospitals and closing wards such as those for OB/GYN services and maternity care, as well as end-of-life care...so much to be done to rescue our economy from Cheetoh Benito, and it starts with booting every single goddamn Republican...



...and Stephen Colbert gives us a “Late Show” news update...fighting back “tooth and cankle” on the Epstein files – good one (is ANYONE going to just take away this orange nightmare’s cell phone at some point so he stops with these “War and Peace” rants on Truth Septic?)...and I wonder if we can just call her Pam “New Information” Bondi now? And good one about Kash “Terrified, Or The Edibles Just Kicked In” Patel – I mean, yeah, this is all pathetic, but as far as I’m concerned, we need to find a way to laugh at these cretins...oh, and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy thinks that all it takes to solve our flying woes is for everyone to dress up like it’s the 1950s and we’re visiting the doctor; God almighty, what a gaggle of idiots we have in charge of the federal government (and I hope Nancy Sinatra files a cease and desist order about that tune selection)...love the Fix Noise “poll”; watch that trash network actually use it now...



..and happy upcoming 75th birthday to Tina Weymouth of Talking Heads and the Tom-Tom Club.

Thursday Stuff

Robert Reich tells us about “Mickey D’s” seeing a double-digit dip in lower and middle-income customers over the first quarter of the year, which is definitely part of a disturbing trend of income consolidation between the wealthy and everyone else...I’m old enough to remember John Edwards talking about “two Americas” and how he was ridiculed for it, and here’s proof that he was right (and yes, I know he set his political career on fire over a highly transparent infidelity)...I’m also old enough to remember Bill Clinton talking about how this country is the biggest service economy in the world (not sure of that now) and how job growth is dependent across a variety of industries (retail, hospitality, entertainment, all the way up to white collar service jobs, unionized and non-unionized, etc.)...you would think both of our major political parties would get that, but as far as I can see, only one does...



...and speaking of income inequality, Tennessee Brando lets us know that the Tangerine Toddler wants McDonald’s workers to get paid less...you would think he’d be trying to cut those employees a break after this – and yes, I know that’s a bad joke (tied a bit to the Reich clip)...good point by Brando about prices only going in one direction, which NO PRESIDENT can affect one way or the other to be honest...important to emphasize (as Brando points out) that SNAP recipients ALREADY ARE WORKING, AND OFTEN MULTIPLE JOBS, and how it continues to be good sport I guess for selfish people to punch down at others perceived to be lazy or delinquent in some way and that’s why they’re in dire straits...”if we tax them, they’ll take our jobs”; yep, that’s how those one percent bastards hang onto power all right (NSFW/H)...



...and David Pakman tells us about Mango Mussolini’s “quiet, piggy” remark to reporter Catherine Lucey...with all of the “flood the zone” madness from this trash fire of a presidential administration, I realize there are other matters to address, but some, like this, are too odious to ignore...again, the entitlement is the point as far as I’m concerned...what Pumpkin Pol Pot manages to get away with is continually part of an absolutely sickening double standard (and I’m sure the Epstein files have been expurgated every way over Sunday by now...love to be wrong)...”Trump has broken the machinery of shame” indeed...



...and Rachel Maddow brings us the story of the town of Newport, Oregon pushing back against an ICE prison (and yes, I think Dungeness crabs are delicious)...oh, and leave it to Our Demented Orange Toddler to take away the town’s Coast Guard rescue helicopter that’s needed in case of an accident involving anyone fishing for crab (which is something anyone who has watched “The Deadliest Catch” would know about, to say nothing of doing that incredibly dangerous work for real)...sooo, apparently the Coast Guard facility is intended to be converted into an ICE prison (secretly, of course)...to the town’s credit, they protested and now the contractor has backed out (though, apparently, some secretive person or entity is STILL trying to build an ICE detention center in the area)...Maddow speaks with Oregon state rep David Gomberg...



...and Ronny Chieng of The Daily Show informs us of Marjorie Trailer Park Greene acting like a normal human being against Cantaloupe Capone (and as a reminder, that’s because family members need the ACA credits that just got sh*tcanned...if it weren’t affecting her personally, she definitely wouldn’t care)...and yeah, there’s more on those files (important as it is to keep that front and center in our media I know)...also, don’t expect an iota of sympathy from me when it comes to Larry Summers, who I always thought was out of his depth economically, and now morally too, or so it appears...and I’m not one bit surprised that Clay Higgins was the ONLY MEMBER OF CONGRESS to vote against releasing the damn files (including the Senate)...and OH MY FREAKING GOD, I CAN’T WITH THE DAMN ACCORDION HANDS!!!...and oh yeah, about Mohammed Bone Saw and Jamal Khashoggi, there is this – Josh Johnson also gives his take on this also (kind of hit and miss, but that’s OK...NSFW/H)...



...and this tune hit #1 on the Billboard chart on this day in 1955.

Wednesday Stuff

Farron Cousins of Ring of Fire tells us about MAGA “pastor” Joel Webbon (more here) who thinks Trump should arrest anybody who defies him and charge them with treason, because (as Cousins notes) one of the penalties for treason is execution...and I definitely see Cousins’s point that Trump Derangement Syndrome is real, but not in the way that has come to be accepted over the last 10 years or so (at a certain point, though, I don’t know how you can avoid the fact any longer that the Trumpers are just freaking nuts)...



...and Jesse Dollemore tells us that our “Secretary of War” “I’ll Drink To That” Hegseth gave some speech to some Northeast Military Group or something which, as you might expect, was chock full of red meat for his true audience, which is Fix Noise and the wingnutosphere (“toxic ideological garbage,” huh?)...I know our ruling Trumpist cabal wants to recreate 1939 Germany, which is vile enough, through their use of language and iconography, but for Hegseth to come right out in say that, is, among other things, a slap in the face aimed at our World War II vets, living and dead...but “hopefully a 1981 moment?” You mean, two years before this?...and concerning Hegseth’s particularly stoo-pid remarks about climate change, I offer this (and “clearing out debris” is about the language you can expect for this utterly entitled neophyte, who should have remained within the comfy confines of his Fix Noise studio...mildly NSFW/H)...



...and this report from CBC’s The National tells us about Canada’s Algoma Steel, and its CEO Mike Garcia, trying to make a go of it on their own without the US because of those stinking tariffs (which, last I heard, was 50% on Canadian steel, although with our ruling regime in D.C., you never really know)...this forces Algoma to try and capture more of the Canadian market, though their situation as a company is “dire,” unfortunately...others have said this already, and I’ll join the chorus; I don’t know if Cantaloupe Capone is truly “The Manchurian Candidate,” but even if he isn’t, I can’t see how he could be inflicting more damage than he is already (maybe I shouldn’t assume that, since he finds new ways every day to wreck things)...



...and this in-depth story from reporter Mae Ryan of More Perfect Union tells us about Wall Street betting that east Texas will run out of water in the person of this Kyle Bass cretin (and Bass’s lawyer Ed McCarthy), with Bass making about $500 million shorting the subprime mortgage market and now trying to buy up water rights (the James Bond movie “Quantum of Solace” with Daniel Craig was prescient about this issue)...and it does indeed sound like the so-called “rule of capture” needs to be modified, but good luck doing that in the state that The Eternal Molly Ivins called “the laboratory for bad government”...I honestly didn’t know that Texas was gaining about 1,500 people per day because of lower taxes (wonder how many are trying to get out?)...and yeah, this sounds like “disaster capitalism” to yours truly also (in typical lowdown fashion for these life forms, it looks like Bass has sized up this issue every way he can to get the outcome he wants...and I’m sure that the people affected don’t share my political point of view, but I still think they should be allowed to live on their property, especially since it looks like they’re all on a fixed income)...and San Antonio losing 20 billion gallons of water a year because of aging pipes? Sounds like something we should be looking at (i.e., fixing our damn infrastructure at LOOONG LAST) across this country...and private equity selling water rights in Arizona, to say nothing of the Resnicks in California owning a “water bank”? Truly the stuff of nightmares...



...and this “A Closer Look” segment from Seth Meyers tells us about MAGA supposedly moving on from the Jeffrey Epstein files (fat chance, even after Combover Caligula attacked Marjorie Train Wreck Greene and Thomas Massie)...oh, and the Tangerine Toddler had a hissy fit at Meyers, because of course (and over a trebuchet? As if #47 even knows what that is)...and oh yeah, getting an MRI is part of a routine physical...uh, no...and when the Gropenfuhrer says he doesn’t know what they were looking for in the MRI, I ALMOST believe him (and speaking of Greene, I give you this from Markos, who has been on fire lately with his posts)...



...and I hope you’re in the mood for a jaunty little number about the miracle of our capitalist economy (snark), because here it is.

Tuesday Stuff

Belle of the Ranch lets us know that 40 percent of women polled by Gallup (aged 15-44) want to leave the U.S. forever...Belle’s point that “correlation is not causation” is indeed spot-on, and as she says, I think that bump in single women wanting to leave when Biden was president is indeed tied to our wretched SCOTUS overturning Roe (of course, the numbers of married and single women wanting to leave has also spiked during the Gropenfuhrer’s sorry reign...more here and here)...



...and I’m not sure if I’ve ever included a video from this guy before, but now is probably as good a time as any to include this; Jerrod Zisser tells us about Fix Noise and other wingnut media culprits dialing up the misogyny to 11, you might say, calling women “scary,” “insane,” and my personal favorite (snark) “A problem that needs to be fixed”...and yep, “politics wearing a cross” is an apt way to put this (file this under the heading of “wingnuts losing what’s left of their minds because they have absolutely nothing to offer to about half the population of this country”)...



...and Farron Cousins reminds us that we could have ANOTHER shutdown in January, believe it or not, considering that Repugs on Capitol Hill STILL won’t pass an honest-to-goodness budget (with these knuckleheads in charge for three years as Cousins points out), aside from ANOTHER damn continuing resolution to fund the government for a fixed period of time (as I said last night, if you want this nonsense to end, then VOTE FOR FREAKING DEMOCRATS! And once more, I thought this was a really important post from Markos at Daily Kos)...



...and John and Yasmin Khan of The Damage Report inform us that recent polling shows how underwater Trump and his same-party pals are on the economy (at least a negative 26 according to CNN’s Harry Enten)...good point by Khan about corporations benefitting from the tariffs as opposed to the small businesses Repugs pretend to care about (with the latter dealing with startup costs in particular made worse by the hardship inflicted on these folks by Cheetoh Benito)...



...and I don’t know if anybody has noticed or not, but I’ll point this out anyway just in case...I’ve made a conscious effort to try and include clips in this space to hopefully give us a laugh or two because, especially in these times, I think we need our sense of humor, and hopefully you can file this under that category...there are all kinds of lies that our ruling regime tells on a daily basis, but this latest one from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is pretty “over the moon”...according to Bessent, the increase in beef prices is because illegal immigrants have somehow been herding cattle over our border to infect our wholesome, all-American herds with screwworm (which is a real thing affecting cattle)...yeah, I’m just picturing “Duke” and Monty Clift a la “Red River” driving a herd to the Dakotas or wherever and picturing Esteban, Manuel and their families trying to do something similar over the Rio Grande River...leave it to that shrieking harpie Maria Bartiromo to just sit quietly and let Bessent spew this bullpucky without any pushback (more here - NSFW/H)...



...and happy 75th birthday to Graham Parker.

Monday Stuff

Jen Psaki comments on a ProPublica report on the DHS corruption from Kristi (“Unsafe At Any Speed”) Noem, including all of the “Barbie dress up” nonsense she pulls at every opportunity, which she flaunts in TV ads (costing about $200 million, including $30K to run an ad to be viewed by the Gropenfuhrer at Mar-a-Lago, thanking him for supposedly securing our border)...also, there are Noem’s cosplay moments on Fix Noise that figure into this...oh, and it turns out that $143 million of the aforementioned $200 million went to a mysterious LLC formed in Delaware...also, there’s the 10/2 ad Noem made (during the shutdown, no less) with a company called Strategy Group, run by the husband of DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin, who runs the DHS Office of Public Affairs overseeing contract awards – how con-vee-nient...and this Strategy Group outfit is also tied to Noem’s administration as South Dakota governor, with a claim from an official in that state that the bidding process was rigged during Noem’s term as governor (more here)...



Update: Speaking of the shutdown, I thought this was a terrific post by Markos at Daily Kos. And on top of that, I'd like to point out something.

We’re about to enter the busiest travel season of the year, with people in planes all over the place. God willing, everything will go fine for all concerned. But if the shutdown were still going on, and you had air traffic controllers calling out sick, working shorthanded and/or working extra shifts, and somebody makes a mistake leading to a tragedy, do you REALLY think Republicans will be blamed?

No. Our corporate media ecosystem will, en mase, attack Democrats, with an occasional remark from maybe someone on MSNBC or CNN reminding everyone that the Republicans are in charge of the federal government. The “R” party will escape blame, regardless of the consequences.

To me, the answer is simple. STOP ELECTING GODDAMN REPUBLICANS!!!

...and this local TV news report tells us about this Zac Segal cretin who called ICE on some car wash employees who were doing not one thing wrong, unlike this entitled little puke Segal...didn’t know Segal basically emigrated here for an education, soooo, shouldn’t he get the same treatment? Oh, but I guess Segal has a lighter skin complexion, as it were, so it’s all good...and aww, what a shame for Segal as noted here (not really – more here)...and OF COURSE the College Republicans think Segal is a “hero”...



...and turning to Congress, Jesse Dollemore informs us of U.S. Senate Repugs sneaking a bribe scheme into the bill to reopen the government, allowing the “gang of 8” (here) to sue for $500K...apparently, the scheme is to pay off these “insurrectionist sympathizers,” as Hakeem Jeffries correctly puts it, for the allegedly cumbersome chore of dealing with their phone records being investigated, or at least that’s the pretense (including Huckleberry Graham of course)...f*cking criminals, the lot of them (the “R” party cretins in question I mean)...also, it appears that this would make it much harder to investigate anyone in “the world’s greatest deliberative body” should a FREAKING INSURRECTION ever take place again...oh, and the seven Dems and one independent (Angus King) in the Senate who enabled this should realize once more how they got utterly played by Not Your Father’s Republican Party (and I’m not prepared to give this Austin Scott character credit for a damn thing)...based on this, though, it looks like the House may overturn that odious provision (slightly NSFW/H)...



...and David Shuster of Rebel HQ brings us the story of Repug U.S. House Rep Virginia Foxx displaying a bit of bad temper when she was rightly called out by Dem House rep Yassamin Ansari over the shut down, which was tantamount to an 8-week paid vacation imposed by MAGA Mike Johnson to try and save the Gropenfuhrer’s bulbous butt over the Jeffrey Epstein discharge petition (with Ansari’s constituents facing the explosion of the cost of health care coverage as well as a loss of SNAP benefits, which Foxx would care about for her constituents also if she wasn’t a thoroughly compromised partisan hack...and I know I said something already about the “negative gas prices” thing from Fix Noise)...



...and it wouldn’t be a day with a “y” in it unless we paid some attention at least to the malfeasance of Generalissimo Trump, so I’ll let Mr. Newberger take care of that (and with a bit of swing too)...



...and apologies for just missing the chance to note his recent appearance at the Marian Anderson Theater in Philly last Saturday...I’m sure it was a good show.