Four For the Fourth: At Least We Have This to Enjoy This July

(This is the fourth article, going Four For the Fourth on the 4th of July, hope you read the others) 

Thank God there's a decent-looking Superman movie on the horizon:

In terms of technical skill, the Snyder Man Of Steel/DCU movies were okay, but too grim and dark for the more aspirational, brightly lit world of Superman. It may have worked for Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy as Batman is meant for the shadows and moral compromises, but not for a hero who represents Hope. Well, along with Truth and Justice. Just not "the American Way," because in these trumpian times the American Way is sadistic and cruel.

Four For the Fourth: We Hold These Truths to be Self-Evident...

(This is the third article for my Four For the Fourth blogging run. Do check out the previous articles!)

Here's a copy of the Declaration of Independence, America's most sacred text:

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.--Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:

For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our Brittish brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

--

These were all grievances aimed at George III - some of it the fault of Parliament's legislation, due to the UK's own in-fighting between Crown and the governed - but can you tell which ones in the Declaration our current occupant of the White House - I will not call him 'president' - has violated?

They have listed trump's crimes over at Reason (by Ilya Somin):

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands (through trump's war on immigrants, even the naturalized legal immigrants).

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world: For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent (trump's excessive and arbitrary tariffs wars with other nations, without Congressional input).

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences (trump's unjustified and cruel attempts to ship detained migrants - many of them innocent of actual crimes - to overseas prisons, where abuse and death are / will be rampant).

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures (trump's actions deploying the National Guard may fall into a gray area, but sending Marines into L.A. and using them as border guards are clear violations).

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us (JANUARY 6th RING A BELL???).

Those are just the five Somin counts. For myself, I'm also looking at trump "Taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments" and "For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever" through his DOGE purges of our federal agencies and refusal to abide by the laws set by Congress. There's also "For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury" as he and his cronies at the DOJ operate without honoring the legal rights of Due Process.

trump and his Republican allies are currently committing about half of all the crimes we documented against a British king 249 years ago.

When the hell do we honest, law-abiding Americans issue our own Declaration against trump's crimes?

Four For the Fourth: Friction In the Air

(Here's the second article in this 2025 Four For the Fourth)

You say you want a revolution?

You want to stand up against the growing fascism of the trumpian regime?

You might want to watch Star Wars Andor series to get in the proper mindset then (via Derek Pharr at Nerdist):

Andor doesn’t just sideline the Jedi, it reframes the entire rebellion without them. There’s no Force and no Midichlorians. No elegant solutions from a more civilized age. Just people. Flawed, desperate, courageous people, who decide that enough is enough. The result is the most grounded, morally complex, and weirdly hopeful take on resistance the franchise has ever given us. Andor isn’t just “what if Star Wars was prestige TV?” It’s a reevaluation of who actually fought the Empire and a reminder that revolutions are won by the people who show up, not the ones meditating about it...

Let’s start with an uncomfortable truth: the Jedi failed. Not metaphorically. Not in a “the road to hell is paved with good intentions” way. They were spectacularly bad at their jobs. While Palpatine engineered a fascist takeover in broad daylight, the Jedi were too busy pontificating about balance to notice the galaxy was slipping into totalitarianism. Their detachment wasn’t just a quirk of their order. It was their fatal flaw.

Andor doesn’t waste time pointing fingers at them. It simply moves on. The Jedi aren’t mentioned, and frankly they aren’t missed. What replaces them isn’t another elite class of heroes. Instead, it’s working-class people, loners, bureaucrats, and ex-cons who decide to resist in whatever way they can. There’s no talk of prophecy or destiny in Andor. No one’s “the chosen one.” They’re just the ones who showed up.

Through two seasons, the show set up the path of Cassian Andor from youthful dispossessed jungle child into one of the Rebel Alliance fighters who uncover the secret plans that reveal the (engineered) weak spot of the dreaded superweapon Death Star. While the movie Rogue One already spelled out Cassian's fate, the show takes the time to show how and why he stood up against a massive Empire in spite of the overwhelming odds.

Cassian evolves from regular thief stealing Imperial ship parts in a way the government's intelligence agency - the ISB - couldn't identify with any pattern, into a minor participant of a bank robbery to fund the fledging Alliance that sparks an ISB crackdown on galactic civil liberties that underscores the banal cruelty of that regime. Cassian gets imprisoned and forced into a labor facility understaffed and overtly brutal, making it clear how evil and sadistic the Empire is (the side story of Cassian's friends getting tortured and killed adds to that sadism). Aiding in a mass breakout of the prison, Cassian makes his way back to his Alliance handlers and - after listening to an earnest and meaningful manifesto from an early Rebel intellectual (one who died in that bank robbery and ironically so minor a figure in the Alliance even the ISB can't identify him) - actively signs on to the fight.

Interwoven into Andor's narrative are the characters many Star Wars know will be major players in the Rebellion - Senator Mom Mothma for example, destined to denounce the Emperor's cruelty on the Senate Floor and the pure leader around which the Alliance will form - underscoring how the tides of history against oppression are inevitable. Intermixed are incredibly moving monologue's - Nemik's Manifesto is just the first - from others drawn into the fight - like Kino Loy's call to fight to break open the Imperial prisons and Luthen Rael's speech about his emotional sacrifices "I fight to make a sunrise I know I will never see" - that could stir any soul into rebellion.

Towards the end of Season Two, another major Star Wars player gets a monologue of his own, when Saw Guerra - a resistance fighter from the Clone Wars turned violent insurrectionist - explains his motivations to a new recruit (Cassian's young friend from Season One Wilmon). It's one of the most stirring and unsettling calls to fight in television history.

Saw Gerrera: There it is.

(Approaches rhydonium fumes and inhales)

Wilmon: (horrified) What are you doing?

Gerrera: (to the fumes) I have always loved you.

Wilmon: How can you do that?

Gerrera: (turns to face Wilmon) Because I understand it. Because she's my sister, rhydo, and she loves me. That itch... that burn... You feel how badly she wants to explode? (taps Wilmon's shoulders) Remember this. Remember this moment! This... perfect night. 

(Pauses, sees Wilmon's terror)

Gerrera: You think I'm crazy. (smiles) Yes, I am. Revolution is not for the sane. Look at us: Unloved, hunted, cannon fodder. We'll all be dead before the Republic is back and yet... here we are. 

(Pauses again, grabs Wilmon's shoulders harder) 

Gerrera: Where are you, boy? You're here. You're not with Luthen, you're here! You're RIGHT HERE and you're READY to fight!

(Wilmon's eyes go from fear to understanding. He willingly removes his mask to inhale the fumes, breathes deeply, coughing)

Gerrera: We're the ryhdo, kid. We're the fuel. We're the thing that explodes when there's too much friction in the air. 

(Wilmon's gasps and chokes as he accepts his fate with the Rebellion)

Gerrera: Let it in, boy. That's freedom calling! (laughing mad) Let it in! Let it RUN! Let it run WILD!

If you've watched the whole Star Wars storyline from the prequels to the Clone Wars animated series to here, you'll know Gerrera's backstory and how he lost his sanity: fighting first the Separatists that enslaved him and killed his sister, and then the Empire when the Republic fell. And yes if you're wondering, Saw Gerrera talks and acts a lot like his real-world model Che Guevara because the series storyrunners wanted a more violent yet charismatic rebel leader to highlight the more nobler goals of the main Alliance the fans already recognized. 

In that speech, Gerrera speaks to the revolutionary as an unloved fighter, romanticized as Margaret Killjoy puts it in her blog: 

I think a lot about the romanticization of suffering. When I lived in a van, it wasn’t because I wanted hashtag vanlife, it was because I had almost no money and I wanted somewhere dry to sleep and a way to get from place to place to keep doing activist work. I hated the romanticization of van life, the pristine photos of perfect beaches and fifty thousand dollar vans...

Eventually, after years, I moved into an off-grid barn, and slowly saved up the money to build a 12x12’ A-frame off-grid cabin on my friend’s property. From vanlife to tiny house. All the things you’re supposed to romanticize.

A tiny house is only an improvement if you’re coming from no-house, if you ask me. Most people are not happier living off grid. Most people are not happier living in their vehicles.

But if it’s what you have, it’s useful to find beauty in it. It’s useful to romanticize it. Some nights in the van, with the wind whipping through the trees, I was happy. Some summer days in the hammock in front of my cabin, I was happy.

When two revolutionaries, caught up in the ethical imperative to overthrow the galactic empire, start huffing fumes and waxing poetic about their perfect night of crime, they are making the right decision. If you’re going to die before you see your revolution succeed, might as well make the most of it. Might as well fill your brief life with as much meaning as you can possibly cram into it...

There’s this old book, Catechism of a Revolutionary, from 1869. It’s by this Russian nihilist named Sergey Nechayev. People get pretty hooked on this book sometimes. It’s intoxicating. The revolutionary is a doomed man, it says, right in its first sentence... 

According to the catechism, essentially anything is justifiable in the name of revolution. It was written in a time of tsars, less than a decade after the end of serfdom, and during a period where a lot of people were trying awfully hard to find a way to turn the tsar from one full-size person into a bunch of tiny little pieces of person, generally through the application of explosives. Which is, of course, a reasonable thing to do to autocrats.

But it’s worth understanding that the guy who wrote this book, Nechayev, was a piece of shit. That’s the technical term for it I think. Not just “he was so devoted to revolution that he was callous with people,” but just aggressively a bad person who, by my read, was rather detrimental to the movement he claimed to love...

I don’t have a high opinion of Catechism of a Revolutionary, nor of its author. It seems written to excuse a man doing whatever he wants (including imprisoning the woman who turned him down).

Yet when Saw Gerrera talks about “this perfect night,” I think about the pure beauty that can be found in an anti-police riot, when you and others make it clear that you will not accept to be ruled by unaccountable men with guns. Sometimes, you need to shout “fuck you” at the bastards and mean it. You need to shout “you are my enemies” and mean it. Sometimes you need to say “what are you going to do, kill me?” and know that they might, well, kill you, but that it needed to be said anyway.

You don't have to be as violent or terrible as the likes of Saw, or Che, or Nechayev. As much as they speak to the spirit of revolution, the power of pure resistance is more attainable. 

Be that fuel, that friction in the air. Just keep the struggle going. Be the signal, the call to action. Be free in the perfect moments.

Try.

Four For the Fourth 2025: As Usual, What the Hell Republicans?

(This is the first of four articles I write on this blog in honor of the 4th of July, although this 2025 trumpian dystopia is going to make it hard to be a pleasant Fourth)

I once noticed how presidential candidate Mitt Romney had "massive tax cuts for the rich" as his "ever-fixed mark," the one campaign pledge he never flipped against. I should have noted how that massive tax cut was a core belief of the modern (Reagan Era) Republican Party, because even after 2012 the goddamn GOP kept pursuing their massive tax cut plans in order to placate their overlords at the Club For Greed and other SuperPACs.

When the Republicans held control of the federal government back in 2017, one of the few agenda items they were able to pull off was that massive tax cut for the rich, alongside shifting the tax burden more onto lower income brackets to "balance" the shifts in revenue. Even then, it didn't work: Deficits went up and the national debt went up. But the Republican congresscritters didn't care because - under the sway of the minority power of the uber-rich billionaires and mega corps - they honestly don't represent their congressional and state interests anymore.

Which is why this week - again in control of the federal government this 2025 - Congress went and passed an even bigger tax cut for the rich at the expense of the rest of America (via Elena Moore, Claudia Grisales, and Deirdre Walsh at NPR):

President Trump's massive spending and tax cut bill is on the way to his desk for a signature. The bill passed Thursday after Republican leaders in the House of Representatives convinced holdouts in their own party to get in line behind the controversial legislation.

House Republicans passed the bill by a vote of 218 to 214, nearly entirely along party lines. All 212 Democrats voted in unison against the bill, and they were joined by two Republicans, Reps. Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania. Leaders were forced to work all night to win the votes necessary to pass the bill and meet Trump's demand to sign the bill by July 4.

All so donald trump can hold a photo op signing event on the 4th of July, hijacking the symbolism of independence for "independence from taxes" even though that's not going to happen for most Americans. Our taxes - yes my bracket is affected - are going to go up (via David Morgan at Reuters):

Several independent analyses conclude that the bill now before the Senate would effectively transfer money from poor Americans to the rich.

The Penn Wharton Budget Model, for example, found it would reduce after-tax income by $1,500 for families earning less than $22,000 per year, and boost income by $104,000 for those earning more than $5.2 million. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office reached a similar conclusion...

House Republicans say the bill would provide the typical family with a $1,300 tax cut and that business tax breaks would lead to higher wages for workers.

Which is a lie: All the previous massive tax cuts for businesses NEVER turned into higher wages for employees. Tax cuts for the wealthy never balanced budgets and never improved the middle or lower classes. Those families with $5.2 million annual income don't NEED $104k extra pocket change, but that family (or individual) on $22,000 a year WILL NEED that $1,500 for bills, bills, and staying out of massive debt.

And those massive tax cuts are not what a sizable plurality of this nation are asking for, if this Pew Research 2025 report from Andy Cerda and Andrew Daniller is accurate: 

Far more Americans oppose the legislation than favor it. Nearly half (49%) oppose it, while 29% favor it. Another 21% are not sure.

A narrow majority says the legislation would have a negative impact on the country. While 54% say it would have a mostly negative effect on the country in the coming years, 30% say it would have a mostly positive effect. Another 12% think it would not have much of an impact.

About half (51%) expect the bill to increase the budget deficit. Just 18% of Americans say the bill would cut the deficit, and 27% say it would not have much of an effect...

You would think congressional Republicans would be intelligent enough - or at least aware of the polling - to understand their budget bill is going to hurt their support back home. And you'd be right: A number of GOP congresscritters were begging everyone else to stop them (via Bill Scher at Washington Monthly):

Soon after Senator Lisa Murkowski coughed up the 50th vote for the Senate version of the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill, she told reporters what was wrong with it. 

“I struggled mightily with the impact on the most vulnerable in this country, when you look to Medicaid and SNAP,” she said, referring to the bill’s deep cuts to health care and food assistance. The Congressional Budget Office projects that the bill’s onerous provisions would directly strip health coverage from 11.8 million people by 2034, and the omission of any extension for Joe Biden-era health-care tax credits would deny coverage for another 5.1 million, for a total of 16.9 million. And according to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities,  “more than 5 million people—about 1 in 8 SNAP participants…would be at risk of losing at least some of their food assistance”  because of the Republican “red-tape-laden, ineffective work requirement. ” For its part, the Congressional Budget Office predicts 2 million people will lose SNAP benefits altogether because of the work requirement...

And yet, Murkowski, you fucking voted for it. You had the power and ability to say NO for the benefit of your constituents of Alaska - and the nation - and yet...

Opinions differ regarding the potential consequences of historically high post-World War II federal debt levels, and whatever those consequences are, they won’t be felt by households as immediately and acutely as the loss of Medicaid and SNAP coverage will be felt. Many Republicans agree with Senator Johnson that our debt level should be declining. Yet, they continue to support legislation that piles on more debt by cutting taxes far more deeply than cutting spending, and in the process, rewarding high-income households and punishing low-income households. Johnson is one of them. He told NPR that Trump “satisfied my requirement, which was a commitment to a reasonable, pre-pandemic level of spending and a process to achieve and maintain it.” A hollower commitment would be impossible to make...

The modern Republican Party is caught in a fantasy of their own making: Pushed by deep-pocket campaign funders who want to keep their greed expanding at the expense of everyone else (damn you, Citizens United ruling), pressured by anti-government ideologues who want to starve the federal government and drown it in Grover's bathtub, and convinced that their incumbent - and gerrymandered - status makes them protected from voter outrage; the Far Right keep buying into the lie of trickle-down in order to justify their cruelty and disdain towards the lower classes.

The Republicans - with trump hosting his horrific photo op today - are going to be celebrating a bill they know is destructive and harmful to the national well-being - especially the Medicaid cuts that will force far too many rural hospitals and nursing homes even in deep Republican Red states to close - but they hope won't affect their re-election hopes for 2026 and 2028.

If trump lets us have fair elections any more, that is.

Goddamn these Far Right bastards.

Fascism in Florida: Building the Horrors to Come

Update 7/3/25: Oooh, I am so sorry I missed getting mentioned on Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up today. I'm a bit distracted with taking care of an ill kitteh and a few other personal things, sorry. Thank you, Batocchio, for the share. To anybody still visiting, I promise to blog four times for the 4th of July (my Four For the Fourth thing) so I hope to see you tomorrow.

There are times I hate living in this godforsaken deep Republican hellhole that is Florida.

Pandering to the harsh anti-immigrant war on our American communities, Governor DeSantis and his cronies are fast-tracking a migrant detention center in South Florida (via Rachel Treisman at NPR):

Despite resistance, Florida officials are turning an airfield in the Everglades into a migrant detention center, which they've nicknamed "Alligator Alcatraz" due to its proximity to the apex predators.

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier proposed the project last week, saying in a video posted to X that, in support of the Trump administration's crackdown on illegal immigration, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis had asked state leaders to identify places for temporary detention facilities.

"I think this is the best one, as I call it: Alligator Alcatraz," Uthmeier said, referencing the infamous prison island in San Francisco Bay.

The goddamned trumpshirts can't give up their fantasies about Alcatraz, can they?

Uthmeier told the right-wing podcast The Benny Show on Monday that the federal government had approved his plan that morning, with the facility on track to open the first week of July. He said it would have 5,000 beds — half of its total capacity — by "early July."

"Alligator Alcatraz will expand facilities and bed space in just days, thanks to our partnership with Florida," the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) later wrote on X.

DeSantis is using emergency powers to take over the site, which is owned by Miami-Dade County.

But not everyone is on board.

Environmental organizations and immigration advocates have expressed concerns about multiple aspects of the project, from the potential consequences on the fragile Everglades ecosystem to the well-being of the people who will be detained there, especially in the hot summer months.

If anyone's paying attention to the overwhelmed ICE "detention facilities" right now, there are serious overcrowding, food availability, and wellness problems to where people are dying in custody. Even this horrific attempt to alleviate crowding at existing facilities won't stop this new prison - it's not a detention center, trust me - from being overcrowded itself. Stephen Miller wants his fucking quotas filled, and doesn't give a damn about treating his and ICE's victims with any basic decency or civil rights.

From what people can see happening at the airfield - there are already protestors gathering, bless them - it's looking like a bunch of portable classrooms getting converted into barracks, which I guarantee you will not be adequately air-conditioned. I doubt there will be any serviceable water or sewage considering that abandoned airfield would need months of dedicated construction efforts to make it genuinely livable.

This isn't going to be a safe or healthy place to get imprisoned.

And the majority of people getting sent to this forsaken swampy Alcatraz aren't going to be gangbangers, or criminals, or violent people. It's going to be nurses, mothers, veterans, families, honest-to-God citizens.

This isn't even really a prison: it's a goddamned concentration camp, and the first of many under trump.

This is ethnic cleansing, the likes of which we've seen in Nazi Germany, and the Balkans in the 1990s, and dozens of other places we used to pretend we'd never be like. Except that is for the history of us punishing Native Americans in the 19th Century and Japanese residents during the Second World War.

This is us at our worst, America. We need to fight back against what trump and Miller and their ICE thugs and their wingnut allies are doing to our communities and our neighbors. 

Addendum: JFC the Florida Republicans are selling t-shirts promoting this! This is akin to Nazis shilling merch promoting Dachau! Yes I went there, because these goddamn wingnuts are blatantly rounding people up just like 1930s Germany.

The cruelty is not only the point, the cruelty is not only policy, the cruelty is open vice signaling to their fellow haters. GODDAMN THEM.

Escalation Just Means It'll Get Worse

And so it begins (via Elena Moore and Megan Pratz at NPR): 

The U.S. military has joined with Israel to launch military strikes against Iran, a dramatic escalation in the years-long effort by both nations to prevent Tehran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.

"We have completed our very successful attack on the three Nuclear sites in Iran, including Fordow, Natanz, and Esfahan," President Trump wrote on Truth Social Saturday...

Saturday's attack marks the first act of direct military involvement by the U.S. in the rapidly escalating conflict between Iran and Israel.

It included a strike on the heavily-fortified Fordo nuclear site, according to Trump, which is located roughly 300 feet under a mountain about 100 miles south of Tehran. It's a move that Israel has been lobbying the U.S. to carry out, given that only the U.S. has the kind of powerful "bunker buster" bomb capable of reaching the site. Known as the GBU-57 MOP (Massive Ordnance Penetrator), the bomb can only be transported by one specific U.S. warplane, the B-2 stealth bomber, due to its immense 30,000 pound weight...

The U.S. carried out the strike despite years of promises by Trump to keep the country from entangling itself in another Middle East conflict. Yet Trump has also said it is paramount that Iran never be allowed to acquire a nuclear weapon.

Trump initially sought to negotiate a new nuclear deal with Iran — one to replace the Obama-era agreement that he abandoned, despite Iran's apparent compliance, in 2018. But in the days after Israel's initial strikes on Iran earlier this month, he grew increasingly vocal in his opposition to Iran and the possibility it could attack U.S. assets in the region...

Israel considers Iran an existential threat and says its attacks this month have been necessary to keep Tehran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. The attacks have strictly targeted military and nuclear facilities, according to Israel, but the Iranian government says they are already responsible for the deaths of more than 200 civilians.

Iran has responded with a barrage of missile and drone strikes aimed at Israel. The Israeli military says it has intercepted many of those projectiles, but not all. The office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says dozens have been killed, and hundreds more wounded.

Iran has long defended its nuclear program as peaceful, but Netanyahu has argued it poses a risk not just for his nation, but for the U.S. as well...

For its part, the U.S. intelligence community has said it believes Iran suspended its nuclear weapons program in 2003, following the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard relayed that guidance as recently as March during an appearance before the Senate Intelligence Committee...

Gabbard has since backtracked her statements to the Senate, siding with trump's - and Netanyahu's - allegations.

No one can determine for now where all of this will lead. Iran's leadership will be pressed to respond in an escalating manner, which would drag America even further into the mud pit with escalations of our own.

So far, Iran's public response was to blockade the Strait of Hormuz, a key chokehold in the Persian Gulf. It would cut off 20 percent of the oil getting shipped across the globe, triggering spikes in oil prices and worsening inflation woes everywhere especially in the U.S. How they would implement that - using whatever naval forces they have to attack tankers, most likely - would surely sparking a shooting battle and arguably escalate matters even further. There's still the possibility Iran would strike at any of the U.S. military bases across the Middle East, which would definitely escalate things to likely ground invasion.

All of this happening without anyone openly declaring war, even though everyone involved knows full well that this is a war and nobody in this wants to be the one to step back and calm things down.

It's not a war that a majority of Americans want: All of the current polling is opposed to trump leading us into another Middle East debacle. We've been burned out by the mistakes and destruction of the post-9/11 Global War on Terror that sucked us into Iraqi and Afghani quagmires, neither of which ended cleanly (and with a sorrowful return of Afghanistan to a brutal Taliban rule). And yet, the neocons at Fox Not-News and throughout the Republican ranks are salivating at another chance to inflict "Regime Change" on an Iranian population that's already suffered too much from American involvement in their history.

All this threatens is another quagmire full of occupation, torture, terror strikes by local resistance, and years of misery for all involved.

Gods help us all. I keep saying this, and I keep getting proven right: None of this is going to end well.

The Reckless Reprisal

Update: Again, thanks to Steve in Manhattan for sharing this article on Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up. Stay safe and abolish ICE, America.

We're going through the turmoil of having donald trump rattle sabers - again - at Iran, using more direct and dangerous language than he used back in 2019 (via Rebecca Rosman and Franco Ordoñez at NPR):

President Trump on Wednesday declined to say whether the United States is moving closer to a decision to strike Iranian nuclear facilities, after Iran's supreme leader warned the U.S. against an attack and rejected Trump's call to surrender.

"You don't seriously think I'm going to answer that question," Trump said when a reporter at the White House asked whether the U.S. would attack Iran. "I may do it. I may not do it. I mean, nobody knows what I'm going to do..."

"We're the only ones that have the capability to do it — but that doesn't mean I'm going to do it," he told reporters in the Oval Office after an unrelated event. The president said he would be meeting in the Situation Room — which he also referred to as the "war room" — about the crisis...

This comes amid nearly a week of fighting between U.S. ally Israel and Iran, and amid signals from U.S. and Israeli officials that Trump could be considering an attack on Iran.

In a string of social media posts on Tuesday, Trump demanded Iran's "UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER" and boasted, "We now have complete and total control of the skies over Iran," raising speculation that U.S. forces were already more involved than previously acknowledged.

Khamenei responded to the demand in his address Wednesday, his second public appearance since Israel launched strikes on his country last week.

"This is a nation that will never surrender to any form of imposition," he said.

On Tuesday, Trump also issued a direct threat against Khamenei. "We know exactly where the so-called 'Supreme Leader' is hiding. He is an easy target, but is safe there – We are not going to take him out (kill!), at least not for now."

Again, this could all be the bluster of an overgrown bully that we've seen from trump when he's trying to force a deal on others. However, trump is also impulsive, and currently irritable over how disastrous his birthday parade turned out. he's in a mood to hurt somebody, and dropping bombs on civilians over in the Middle East would seem too easy a move for him to make.

You have to remember what happened during trump's first tenure in the White House: sporadic missile attacks on certain Islamic targets, followed by our Army quitting the battlefield and our regional allies to struggle against Russian-backed Syrians, followed by a targeted attack on a high-ranking Iranian official on Iraqi soil that aggravated regional tensions.

All of this impulsive, unfocused acts of a desperate man trying to pose as an elite Alpha Male on the global stage; with no consideration of the consequences and harm those acts imposed on our nation and whatever allies we have left. Most of this getting imposed on our nation by the only "ally" we are counting on in that region, as Israel - led by a genocidal schemer in Netanyahu who's trying to avoid getting kicked out of power again - is forcing the United States to commit to a military action that will honestly lead into another quagmire for us.

I wrote about this the last time around, back in 2019 when I posed seven reasons we shouldn't invade Iran. All of the arguments I made then are still relevant today, with the added possibility that modern technological boosts to drone warfare will expose our Navy fleets and our regional military bases to potentially disastrous (for us) yet effective (for Iran) ends.

We also have to consider trump's flippant attitude towards our own nuclear stockpile, and that if this situation worsens - and considering how inept our current Defense leadership is, that's likely - trump could well exercise that option. Even one nuke dropped on any place in Iran would kill thousands of civilians and leave literal fallout, while the metaphoric fallout would be the entire world turning the US into a pariah state.

If trump thinks this can push Iran to the negotiating table to hammer out a no-nukes agreement to replace the one he blew up, he's wrong. It won't placate Netanyahu, and the escalation will continue to where we'll be back at the "bomb 'em all" brinksmanship only at a more extreme and irrational level.

This was never going to end well with trump in charge. None of you 77 million voters realized that? /headdesk

The Bleak Parade

Just as donald Shitgibbon trump ruined January 6th in my mind, the bastard is going to ruin June 14th on a personal level as well. 

Where June 14th is officially Flag Day for the United States and the anniversary of the official formation of the Continental Army that evolved into the US Armed Forces 250 years later, it also happens to be trump's birthday.

So we're getting the unwarranted - and in some ways offensive - spectacle of a military parade in front of the White House while trump stands there and revels in it.

If this was going to be a celebration of the Army there were better places to host such an event, like Valley Forge or one of the nearby bases, or a memorial held at Arlington National Cemetery. However, trump is not a fan of cemeteries - unless he's the focus of everything - and considering how he keeps dumping on soldiers as "suckers", he's not about to honor the troops with anything when he's too busy honoring himself.

Let Eliot A. Cohen at the Atlantic spell it out for us (paywalled):

The United States Army deserves a celebration, as do the other armed services during their upcoming birthdays. Tens of millions of Americans have passed through the Army’s ranks, and something close to a million have died in the line of duty, while many more were wounded or taken prisoner, or suffered extraordinary hardships. We owe them a lot.

The administration, however, is orchestrating a parade not to honor service, but to celebrate power. Tanks and infantry fighting vehicles will tear up the capital’s streets as helicopters thrash overhead. Tough-guy stuff, in other words, designed to show the world that we are, in the much-overused word of the secretary of defense, lethal...

Nor is this hardware relevant to the strategic choices the Trump administration has avowed, leaving Europe and the Middle East and focusing on the Indo-Pacific. Tanks will not persuade China to keep the People’s Liberation Army Navy behind the first island chain. This is about preening for the American public and indulging a kind of juvenile fascination with big, noisy armored vehicles...

If the draft-evading president and disgruntled former National Guard major running the Department of Defense better understood the American military, they would know that by sending National Guardsmen (and now Marines) to deal with riots when neither the governor of the state nor the mayor of the city concerned want them, they are courting danger. They would not promise, as Trump has, the use of “heavy force” against protesters. They would not, in other words, anticipate, almost with glee, the prospect of Americans in uniform shooting their fellow citizens. For that matter, they would know that deploying thousands of military personnel to the southern border disrupts training for war, which they supposedly value highly...

All this so a confirmed draft-dodging felon and sex offender can pretend to be an Alpha Male in front of his lackeys.

At the least, we should expect the roads of Washington DC torn up by the heavy tanks and transports rolling up and down the square (the military's promised they reinforced the roads but I doubt it will help), adding millions of wasted dollars being spent to deploy the troops and equipment this way.

At the worst, I'm dreading how trump could turn this parade into a public call of a military takeover (technically an autoglope) and declaring the Constitution suspended while he orders the entire military to join in with ICE's mass deportation pogroms across our major (mostly Democratic) cities. And attack any protests that rise up against him.

No matter what happens, I am making the rather miniscule - hello, ten readers of this blog! - call to my fellow Americans to avoid this bleak trumpian parade at all costs. Just don't be in Washington DC at all. Don't add to the numbers that trump will try to claim as turnout, make it as deserted as his 2017 inauguration.

There's a ton of other places to be this Saturday. There's these No Kings rallies happening by the by that you can register and attend across every state. If you're in Chicago, Da Pope is hosting a livestream mass as a blatant counterpunch to trump's self-indulgence (although I've heard it's sold out). If you're not inclined to protest or pray, you can always go to the beaches (it's a bit of a drive to Virginia Beach but worth it)

Just remember that this parade isn't honoring our Army, it's not for the troops to display their discipline and training, it's not anything honoring America.

This parade is for trump's vanity and his alone, and it will be as vulgar as he can make it.

Paramount

As the ICE persecution of legal migrants/refugees escalated over the past month, more protests have erupted across the nation even in places like Minnesota. A lot of anger and frustration towards trump's thugs who are rounding up moms and children instead of the "criminal gangs" that the Far Right have screamed about for the last 40 years.

The tension made its way to Los Angeles this Friday, where the outrage among the residents - many of them in defense of their neighbors getting rounded up for doing nothing wrong - erupted into the kind of protest that brought out the LAPD and their crowd control of gas, rubber bullets, and batons.

Today, the protests continued in the neighborhood of Paramount, and the violence escalated even more (via Steve Patterson and Dennis Romero at NBC News):

Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department deputies deployed tear gas on protesters in Paramount this afternoon as they sought to end the chaotic gathering.

The deployment was preceded by explosive less-lethal rounds and the placement of cinder blocks in the street near a Home Depot where protesters believed federal immigration enforcement agents were conducting a raid. Fireworks also peppered the soundscape.

Sheriff Robert Luna said no immigration raid took place, though there was staging at federal offices adjacent to the Home Depot.

Sheriff's officials ordered the raucous crowd to disperse around 2:30 p.m., though several people remained in the area hours later.

While it's heartening to see Americans rising up against the brutality of trump's - and Stephen Miller's - anti-immigrant campaign, this is unfortunately the response those SOBs were hoping for, because it can justify trump's declaring martial law and assuming dictatorial powers (via Maya Yang and Diana Ramirez-Simon at the Guardian (US)):

The Trump administration will deploy the national guard to immigration protests in Los Angeles, border czar Tom Homan said on Saturday, as an immigration crackdown in the area erupted into mass protests with police in riot gear deploying teargas at bystanders.

“We’re already mobilizing. We’re gonna bring national guard in tonight and we’re gonna continue doing our job. This is about enforcing the law,” Homan said in an interview with Fox News.

US immigration authorities on Saturday extended area raids into Paramount, south-east of Los Angeles, and were met with more protests outside an industrial park.

Border patrol personnel in riot gear and gas masks stood guard outside the park, deploying teargas as bystanders and protesters gathered on medians and across the street, some jeering at authorities while recording the event on smartphones...

Stephen Miller, an immigration hardliner and the White House deputy chief of staff, wrote on social media that Friday’s demonstrations were “an insurrection against the laws and sovereignty of the United States”. On Saturday, he described the day’s protests as a “violent insurrection”.

During Friday’s protests at a federal detention facility in downtown LA, David Huerta, the president of the California branch of the Service Employees International Union, was arrested amid a police response that included teargas and flash-bangs.

Huerta, who was injured and detained, released a statement to the Los Angeles Times from the hospital, saying: “What happened to me is not about me. This is about something much bigger.”

“This is about how we as a community stand together and resist the injustice that’s happening. Hard-working people, and members of our family and our community, are being treated like criminals. We all collectively have to object to this madness because this is not justice,” he added.

The reports are that they'll be sending in about 2,000 Guardsmen, but if they're thinking that will subdue a metro of 18 million people covering a geographic area of 400 square miles or so, that isn't going to help. I'm willing to bet they want this deployment to get overwhelmed so trump can justify sending in the US Army to "pacify" all of Los Angeles.

California's governor Newsom is trying to defuse the situation, but it's a question of what he can do to stop his state's National Guard from answering to trump's generals.

LA authorities are able to access law enforcement assistance at a moment’s notice. We are in close coordination with the city and county, and there is currently no unmet need. The Guard has been admirably serving LA throughout recovery. This is the wrong mission and will erode public trust.

— Governor Gavin Newsom (@governor.ca.gov) June 7, 2025 at 8:14 PM

Somewhere in a dark hole, Stephen Miller is enjoying the suffering and chaos he's wanted to inflict on our nation, if the reports are true about his obsession to terrorize Latino communities (via Tom Boggioni at Raw Story):

Following up on her Wednesday report on how Miller and Donald Trump's war on immigrants is "reshaping" the focus of what crimes should be prioritized, NBC's Julia Ainsley told the hosts of MSNBC's "Morning Joe" that the abrasive Miller is increasingly angering other members of the administration.

For NBC News she wrote that in May, Miller "berated and threatened to fire senior Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials if they did not begin detaining 3,000 migrants a day," and has since demanded other agencies help out with his "Operation At Large..."

Noting plans to use members of the National Guard to round up immigrants, Ainsley added, "This comes a week after the infamous, now infamous meeting where Stephen Miller called in the leaders of ICE and screamed at them, yelled at them, threatened to start firing the bottom 10 percent of performers if they didn't get their arrest numbers to 3000 a day."

Anna Giartelli at the Washington Examiner had more details about that rant:

“Miller came in there and eviscerated everyone. ‘You guys aren’t doing a good job. You’re horrible leaders.’ He just ripped into everybody. He had nothing positive to say about anybody, shot morale down,” said the first official, who spoke with those in the room that day.

“Stephen Miller wants everybody arrested. ‘Why aren’t you at Home Depot? Why aren’t you at 7-Eleven?'” the official recited.

One of the ERO officials in attendance stood up and stated that the Department of Homeland Security and the White House had publicly messaged about targeting criminal illegal immigrants, and therefore, ICE was targeting them, and not the general illegal immigration population.

“Miller said, ‘What do you mean you’re going after criminals?’ Miller got into a little bit of a pissing contest. ‘That’s what Tom Homan says every time he’s on TV: ‘We’re going after criminals,'” the ICE official told Miller, according to the first official...

Miller doesn't want gangbangers. He wants Latino families. And he's desperate to shove too many of them into kennels and basements and overflowing prisons.

It's proof that the anti-immigrant forces were never interested in stopping crime. It's proof that these bastards were interested in their racist agenda to purge America of anyone too dark-skinned for their liking.

We have monsters ruling the nation.

We have to defy them. It is paramount that we do so.

Tiananmen Square 2025: You Cannot Wash Away the Blood and Tears

No matter what the Chinese government does to erase the massacre of the democratic protests that fateful June 4, 1989, the world will not forget (via Helen Davidson at the Guardian): 

The world will never forget the Tiananmen Square massacre, the US secretary of state and Taiwan president have said on the 36th anniversary of the crackdown, which China’s government still tries to erase from domestic memory.

There is no official death toll but activists believe hundreds, possibly thousands, were killed by China’s People’s Liberation Army in the streets around Tiananmen Square, Beijing’s central plaza, on 4 June 1989...

The date of 4 June remains one of China’s strictest taboos, and the Chinese government employs extensive and increasingly sophisticated resources to censor any discussion or acknowledgment of it inside China. Internet censors scrub even the most obscure references to the date from online spaces, and activists in China are often put under increased surveillance or sent on enforced “holidays” away from Beijing.

New research from human rights workers has found that the sensitive date also sees heightened transnational repression of Chinese government critics overseas by the government and its proxies.

The report published on Wednesday by Article 19, a human rights research and advocacy group, said that the Chinese government “has engaged in a systematic international campaign of transnational repression targeting protesters critical of the Chinese Communist party,” with Uyghurs, Tibetans and Hongkongers particularly likely to be affected.

There are too many other nations opposed to Chinese interference and bullying ways. There are too many people - like myself - who remembered what happened and refuse to forget.

I'm still hoping I get to meet Tank Guy some day.