So here’s what I don’t get, he’s [Trump] been sitting on the Epstein Files this whole time and every time someone brings it up there’s suddenly some kind of brand new emergency: Putin gets to keep part of Ukraine, job numbers are “fake,” let’s investigate Letitia James, investigate Jack Smith. It’s like, Dude, just release the files. If your name’s not in there, you’d think you’d want everybody to see them, right? But instead, it’s constant shiny distractions, while the one thing that matters just stays locked up. Look, man, if you still think he’s playing 4D chess, I hate to break it to you, but the guy’s barely playing checkers and he’s eating the pieces. I mean, c’mon, how much horseshit before you realize your Alpha Male is just an 80-year-old dude with early dementia spray-tanning his face at 3 AM while rage tweeting about Rosie.
– Joe Rogan
+ As a naive country kid from the glacier-smoothed farmlands of central Indiana, I arrived in DC in 1977, lived in the District through 1982 and commuted back there to work from Baltimore for another year.
DC was a much rougher place and poorer, though more vibrant, city in the 70s and 80s than it is now that it’s been almost completely gentrified. I didn’t have a car, so I rode the Metro, took the bus, or walked everywhere. I went all over town at all hours, from Tenley Circle to Adams Morgan to Anacostia, often late at night going to clubs to hear bands, going to and from the libraries at Georgetown or Catholic because AU’s was so shitty, working at Blues Alley and a movie theater deep down Connecticut Avenue, and later giving talks and attending organizing meetings for the Freeze Campaign.
In all of those hundreds of trips downtown, I had two “violent” encounters. As a freshman at AU, I was aggressively propositioned in the bathroom of the Rayburn Building by a staffer for a Georgia congressman, who then stalked me back on campus and made harassing and obscene calls to the dorm phone at Hughes Hall for a couple of weeks. The second incident occurred six years later, when I was grabbed from behind, thrown to the sidewalk and kicked repeatedly by two Caucasian men in trench coats after giving a talk at GW against the Reagan arms buildup. They didn’t take my wallet, but they did warn me to “keep my fucking mouth shut.”
I was out for a couple of minutes when a 70-plus-year-old black man bent down and helped me up. His name was Jerome. He walked me the three blocks down H Street and up 23rd Street, where I got patched up in the same Emergency Room that had treated Reagan after he was shot by John Hinckley a couple of months earlier. Jerome told me he’d been sleeping in different city parks since he was evicted from his apartment and now “Reagan is trying to evict us from the streets.” In all my years in DC, Black people treated me only with acts of kindness, not violence. What would you expect from the city of Frederick Douglass and Duke Ellington?
Meanwhile, inside the White House during those years, all sorts of felonious acts and constitutional villainy were being plotted by the likes of Cap Weinberger, Bill Casey, Robert Macfarland and Oliver North.
The real criminals in DC today, who are dangers to the Republic worthy of sending SEAL Team Six to suppress, are the lobbyists for the tobacco, financial, oil, insurance, coal, nuclear, Pharma, and weapons industries (not to mention AIPAC) who have corrupted our political system and profited from using the federal government to inflict death and misery around the globe. Trump is using racial stereotypes to scare his 70+ demographic on Fox News and manufacture a crisis that doesn’t exist so that he can use his Praetorian Guard to shield and distract attention from those who are looting the public estate for private gain.
+ Meet the people in charge of the feds seizing control of DC…
+ The one thing the founders of the Republic feared even more than slave rebellions and tribal uprisings was the kind of standing army Trump has now sent into DC:
“A standing army is one of the greatest mischiefs that can possibly happen.”
– James Madison
“The Army is a dangerous instrument to play with.”
– George Washington
“Standing Armies are dangerous to liberty.”
– Alexander Hamilton
+ Cities whose violent crime rate is higher than DC’s…
Memphis, Tennessee
Kansas City, Missouri
Springfield, Missouri
Alexandria, Louisiana
New Orleans, Louisiana
Monroe, Louisiana
Pueblo, Colorado
Anniston, Alabama
Little Rock, Arkansas
Myrtle Beach, South Carolina
Birmingham, Alabama
Atlantic City, New Jersey
Camden, New Jersey
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Louisville, Kentucky
Indianapolis, Indiana
Tulsa, Oklahoma
Cincinnati, Ohio
+ After ordering the occupation of DC, Trump threatened to send federal troops to NYC, Baltimore and Oakland: “They’re so far gone. This will go further. We’re starting very strongly with DC.” By the way, crime in DC is at historic lows…
+ DC Mayor Muriel Bowser: “I think I speak for all Americans — we don’t believe it’s legal to use the American military against American citizens on American soil.”
+ Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott’s response to Trump’s threat to impose a military occupation of DC, NYC, Oakland and Baltimore:
I think it’s very notable that each and every one of the cities called out by the President has a black mayor, and most of those cities are seeing historic lows in violent crime.
In Baltimore, we have the fewest amount of homicides through this date on record. That’s 50 years, a 50-year low. Maybe we are too far gone. Too far gone from the broken right-wing policies of zero tolerance policing and all the things that did not make our city safer for all those many years.
The president could learn a lot from us. Instead of throwing things at us.
+ As DC came under military occupation, the District’s lone member of Congress, the enfeebled Eleanor Holmes Norton, who is 88 years old, was nowhere to be seen…
+ Biden rejected DC statehood, leaving it vulnerable to the authoritarian takeover of the City Trump is now executing. Its lone representative in Congress is a semi-coherent Congresswoman, who, after ineffectively representing the District for the last 34 years, is running for office again in 2026.
+ How badly did Reconstruction fail DC? A city with one of the country’s largest and most vibrant black populations, whose residents have never enjoyed the full rights and protections of people living in states, is now under occupation by a military led by a man who is renaming Army bases after Confederate generals.
+ Rep. Troy Downing, the Republican from Montana, on Trump’s takeover of DC: “Hopefully this is a harbinger of what we see in these liberally run cities across the country … We need to send in the troops, which is exactly what we’re doing.”
+ Memo to Troy Downing: Since Illinois adopted bail reform, violent and property crimes have dropped below pre-COVID levels and failure-to-appear rates have also declined–the exact opposite of what the lock-em-up critics predicted.
+ The GOP wants to ethnically cleanse Southeast DC, the way the Israelis have Gaza…Bennie Johnson: “Entire neighborhoods, probably, need to be emptied, need to be bulldozed.”
+ Of course, the ethnic cleansing of DC has been taking place for decades, with the real estate industry as the driving force. When Jerome picked me up from the sidewalk along H Street in 1981, the black population of DC was 445,154 (70% of the District’s population). Now it’s less than 280,000 (41%). Blacks are being forced out of one of America’s greatest Black cities by economic predation and political policy.
+ Since military personnel commit crimes at a rate higher than the civilian population (one recent study showed one-third of vets with an arrest record compared to one-fifth of the general population), Trump’s flooding DC with National Guard troops seems likely to actually end up increasing the crime rate.
+ In all of the video footage of Trump’s military occupation of DC, I haven’t seen one foot patrol or armored personnel carrier traverse K Street, which probably has more criminals, swindlers & mass killers per linear foot than any other street in the US, perhaps the entire planet.
+ So what was the trigger, the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, if you will, that Trump used to justify imposing martial law on DC? On Sunday, August 3, at the hour Fitzgerald called “the dark night of the soul” (3 AM), the ex-DOGE staffer Edward Coristine, who calls himself “Big Balls,” was standing with his girlfriend next to his car near Logan Circle, when he was confronted by a group of people who demanded the keys. A fight ensued. Big Balls got bloodied. The cops showed up almost immediately and soon arrested two suspects. Both of them are juveniles: a 15-year-old boy and a 15-year-old girl. Neither were armed. Neither is from DC. Both live in Hyattsville, Maryland–30 minutes from the city. Hardly the crime of the century. Perhaps not even a crime you could credibly blame on what Trump called the “thuggish” residents of DC. (By the way, there were 32 carjackings in Palm Beach in 2024, yet there are no National Guard troops patrolling Worth Avenue and Poinciana Park.)
+ During a White House press briefing, Benny Johnson asked: “Will the president consider giving the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Big Balls?”
Karoline Leavitt: “I haven’t spoken to him about that, but perhaps it’s something that he would consider.”
+ Trump during his press conference on sending the National Guard to patrol DC: “It’s embarrassing for me to be up here. I’m going to see Putin. I’m going to Russia on Friday. I don’t want to be up here talking about how dirty and disgusting this once beautiful capital was.” (He’s actually going to Alaska, but maybe if he visits Sarah Palin, he’ll be able to see Russia from her house.)
+++
+ Netanyahu on why more and more countries are accusing Israel of war crimes and genocide in Gaza: “We are losing the propaganda war because of bots and the algorithm.”
+ One of the greatest and most fearless journalists of our time, Anas Al-Sharif, was targeted and killed by Israel this week, along with the rest of the Al Jazeera crew in Gaza City. When Netanyahu said Israel was losing the propaganda war to bots and algorithms, what he really meant was Israel was losing the truth about the war to journalists like Anas, which is why Israel is systematically killing them…
+ The entire Al Jazeera crew in Gaza City was assassinated by Israel, including reporters and cameramen.
Reporter: Anas al-Sharif
Reporter: Mohammad Qureiqaa
Cameraman: Ibrahim Zaher
Cameraman: Moamen Alaywa
+ Two freelance journalists were also killed in the Israeli airstrike: cameraman Moamen Aliwa and reporter Mohammad al-Khaldi.
+ Remains of the Journalists’ Tent outside Al-Shifa Hospital, where Al Jazeera’s entire Gaza City crew was killed by an Israeli missile strike.
+ Anas’s last message before Israel murdered him…
+ Israel had been threatening Anas for months before it finally killed him and his Al-Jazeera colleague Mohammad Qreiqei by bombing the Journalists’ Tent outside al-Shifa Hospital…
+ Anas Al-Sharif’s brother revealed in an interview that only four days before his assassination, Anas was offered a “tempting” deal by Israel: to leave Gaza with his family in exchange for halting his coverage of the situation there. He refused. Then they killed him.
+ There was never a question about who killed Anas. Israel not only admitted it. They bragged about it, scurriously smearing the Al Jazeera reporter as “a terrorist.” Not only a terrorist but a “leader of Hamas.” Where did he find the time? For the past 19 months, he’s been working nearly 24 hours a day, reporting from a war zone. The allegations fell apart under scrutiny, but not before the smears were credulously repeated by the likes of Reuters, the NYT and CNN.
+ In repeating Israel’s venomous lie that Anas Al-Sharif was a member of a Hamas terrorist cell, Reuters libeled its own journalist. Anas was a key member of the Reuters team that won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography. His photograph of damage from an Israeli missile strike on the Jabalia refugee camp is one of the prominent images in the submission.
+ Ian Williams, president of the Foreign Press Association, rejected CNN’s framing that echoed Israeli military lies to justify murdering Anas Al-Sharif: “Frankly, I don’t care whether Al-Sharif was in Hamas or not. We don’t kill journalists for being Republicans or Democrats or, in Britain, Labour Party,” he said, adding that Al-Sharif worked “24 hours” and couldn’t possibly “have time to work in a cell on the side.
+ Marina Watanabe on Israel’s murder of Al Jazeera’s journalists in Gaza City:
Shortly after the Gaza genocide began, I signed an open letter demanding that Israel stop killing journalists. The LA Times punished me and 100 of my colleagues and banned us from covering Palestine for 3 months. I will never forgive the US media for its complicity in their deaths.
+ CNN’s Clarissa Ward on the reaction to Israel’s killing of Anas al-Shariff:
[We are] angry, outraged, powerless & ashamed. We are confronted by a stream of accusations from the IDF that seek to dehumanize our Palestinian colleagues, that seek to justify their killings. And the nature of the carefully calibrated language that we are using in our stories, I understand to many, just feels so detached and so not proportional to the agony and outrage of the moment. And behind the scenes, many of us continue to push & press & sign letters & write petitions & do meetings, & none of it seems to make a damn bit of difference.
+ Sky News Interviewer: There were seven other people killed in that attack… Is the IDF’s position that all five of those journalists who were killed were also working for Hamas or are they just collateral damage?
IDF’s Nadav Shoshani: We’re we’re looking into further details of the incidents… about additional people — we’re still looking into the incident and we’ll hopefully be able to provide more information soon.
Interviewer: But clearly, you must have understood that there was a risk if you’re going to drop a bomb into a tent containing a load of journalists, that more than the one that you are trying to attack would perish.
Shoshani: Well, we conduct our operations and as you see, he wasn’t with his family and we try and conduct our operations in a way that goes after terrorists in the most minimal way.
Interviewer: Killing eight people when you’re aiming for one, is that— is that the most minimal way, killing eight if you’re aiming for one?
+ Meanwhile, David Bernstein, law professor at George Mason, argues that Israel should be permitted to kill all Al Jazeera journalists (just so long as they label them [‘terrorists” first): “I think Al Jazeera should be designated as a terrorist organization by both Israel and the US. If Israel did so, it would be clarifying that it sees their “journalists” in Gaza as legitimate targets. But it should be explicit. The problem is that Israel has some strange need to treat Qatar as a legitimate interlocutor, and Qatar sponsors Al Jazeera.”
+ In the Occupied Territories of Palestine, you can film your own murder and still not be believed by Israeli courts…
+ 61%* of all the Palestinians who have died of starvation in Gaza over the past 22 months have perished in the past 3 weeks.
+ Lindsey Graham: “If America pulls the plug on Israel, God will pull the plug on us.” Inshallah, Lindsey, Inshallah…
+ Here’s the Democrats’ “best communicator,” freshly restyled in a Mamdani beard, on Palestinian statehood: “I think that that’s a profound question that arouses a lot of the biggest problems that have happened with Israel’s right to survival in the diplomatic scene.” No wonder the party’s at 33% approval and sinking.
+ Madonna urged Pope Leo from the Southside to travel to Gaza amid the ongoing humanitarian crisis, asking him to “bring your light to the children before it’s too late.”
+ Janine de Giovanni, The Reckoning Project: “I’ve reported 18 wars over 35 years. I’ve been shot at, kidnapped, threatened, and nearly raped. I’ve lost friends from Sarajevo to Syria. I thought I’d seen the worst of humanity. I was wrong. Nothing compares to Gaza — or the complicity letting it happen.”
+ According to a detailed report in Haaretz on how Israel continues to restrict the flow of food to starving Palestinians in Gaza, Israel’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), run by the IDF, “rejected requests to bring Israeli-produced dates and potatoes into Gaza. Potatoes were refused due to their long shelf life, which could allow Hamas militants to trade or steal them. Dates were deemed a ‘luxury’ item.”
+ Yugal Peleg, an 18-year-old Israeli, before being sent to prison for refusing to serve in the IDF:
Today, I refuse to enlist in the IDF because the IDF is committing genocide in Gaza and I must oppose these horrible crimes. I am going to be in prison for some time because of my refusal, but I am absolutely certain that this is the right thing to do. Overall, in our society, this is a very niche and unwelcome position to hold. People view me as a traitor, as an enemy, as a disgusting leftist who will ruin us. But I don’t care what people who support the starving of children have to say about my morality.
+ “If Netanyahu visits the US, should the US arrest him?”
Yes: 46%
No: 32%
Unsure: 22%RMG / Aug 5, 2025
+++
+ Trump: “There’s hardly any inflation at all.”
+ Wholesale prices rose by 0.9% in July, a much steeper increase than predicted.
+ An analysis by Goldman Sachs found that through June, foreign exporters ate just 14% of the cost of U.S. tariffs while American companies paid 64% and American consumers paid 22%. Goldman predicts that ultimately the consumer share will climb to 67%.
+ Will the trade in Blood Diamonds be next to get tariff relief?
+ Remember the Giving Pledge, where Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett called on the world’s wealthiest people to give away at least half of their fortunes? It’s been a flop. Fifteen years later, Philanthropy News reports that 32 of the original U.S. signatories are now—in aggregate—nearly three times wealthier, with a combined net worth of $908 billion.”
+ Hotel occupancy rates in Las Vegas have declined to approximately 66.7% in July compared to the same period last year.
+ U.S. spending on services — hotels, airfare, dining — has been down for three straight months, the first time since 2008, per Bank of America.
+ Countries where foreign aid provided more than one-fifth of the annual income in 2023:
Afghanistan
Burundi
Central African Republic
Haiti
Ukraine
South Sudan
Syria
Yemen
+ Trump: “Mexico and Canada do what we tell them to do.” Your serve, Claudia…
+ Episodes in the New American Populism: Trump knows a lot about grass (because he “owns a lot of golf courses”), but unlike nearly every working-class kid in the US, he’s never mowed a lawn.
+ Trump: “You know, grass has a lifetime like people have a lifetime, and the lifetime of this grass has long been gone. When you look at the parks where the grass is all tired, exhausted. We’re going to redo the grass with the finest grasses. I know a lot about grass.”
The lunatic is on the grass
The lunatic is on the grass
Remembering games
And daisy chains and laughs
Got to keep the loonies on the path
+++
+ On August 8, Milwaukee was inundated with 14″ of rain in a day, where 14″ of rain in 10 days represents a 1-in-1,000-year event.
+ As Texas faces a prolonged drought, the state is expected to use 399 billion gallons of water to cool its data centers, around 7% of Texas’s total projected water use.
+ The Arctic has 25-30°C or more every day for the last 4 weeks…
+ Dr. Serge Zaka: “Once extremely rare, 40°C (104°F) temperatures are becoming commonplace in France. Between 1950 and 2000, temperatures above 40°C were observed about 0.8 times per year. Since the 2000s, they have become 19 TIMES more frequent (!) with an average of 16 times per year (with significant year-to-year variability). While humans adapt with air conditioning (or cooler shelters), plants will not adapt. Gradually, biogeography (i.e., the distribution range of plants) will shift northward. Our landscapes will be drastically altered by 2050.”
+ A Haboob dust storm sweeps over Lordsburg, New Mexico, on August 13.
+ According to the International Energy Agency, renewables will be the world’s top power source by 2026.
+ In 1958, the US reported more than 750,000 cases of measles. The first measles vaccine was introduced in 1963. By 1968, there were fewer than 10,000 reported cases. In 1989, a second dose of the vaccine was approved by the FDA. By 2000, measles had been declared eliminated. Twenty-five years later, with vaccination rates falling, it’s back with a vengeance in both the US and Canada.
+ The anti-vaxxer who opened fire on the CDC center in Atlanta got off more than 200 shots at the building, shattering 181 windows and murdering a police officer before killing himself. Staffers at the CDC blame RFK Jr. for stoking the irrational fears about vaccines that drove the shooter on his lethal outburst and Trump for sending the National Guard into DC in response to a mugging, but not even condemning a domestic terrorist attack on a federal workplace.
+ The vaccine panic has now spread to the UK, where the HPV vaccination rate, which is almost 100% effective against the most common forms of cervical cancer, has fallen from 92% in 2015 to 72% in 2024. The decline began in 2020 with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and hasn’t stopped falling.
+ About 1/4 of all deaths for those Americans under the age of 55 in recent years are overdoses from opioids.
+ Alcohol consumption among adults in the United States has fallen to the lowest on record, according to a new survey by Gallup. Only 54% of Americans drank alcohol in the past year, compared with 58% in 204 and 62% in 2023.
+++
Washington mother Sarah Shaw and her three children.
+ We’ve gone beyond the “Show us your papers!” phase of intimidation, because your even your legal papers won’t save you and your children from being arrested, thrown in a sordid jail and deported for no logical reason at all…Consider the case of Sarah Shaw, a Washington mother from New Zealand who has legal residency in the US and works for the state, who was detained along with her 6-year-old son by ICE when she tried to re-enter the US from Vancouver, BC, after a trip to New Zealand to escort her two older children with their parents. Despite showing immigration officials her valid work visa, ICE claimed Shaw had overstayed her travel visa and shipped her and her child to the Dilley Detention Center in Texas. DHS officials ignored Shaw’s repeated pleas to allow her son, who has a valid travel visa, to enter the US.
For the past three years, Shaw has worked as a youth counselor in a juvenile detention facility run by the Washington State Department of Children. She has no criminal record.
Shaw’s attorney Minda Thorward: “Sarah is a survivor. She’s a fighter. She’s really strong. But she’s also very stressed out about all of this. She’s repeatedly requested that her son be released, even at the border DHS refused to permit that. So his detention is unlawful. He should not be there. He should not be in removal proceedings. None of that should be happening…There’s no reason to detain her. She has no criminal history. She simply made a paperwork mistake.”
Benjamin Marcelo Guerrero-Cruz and one of his brothers.
+ Benjamin Marcelo Guerrero-Cruz, a student at Reseda High School in LA, was walking his dog in his Van Nuys neighborhood when he was grabbed by ICE, thrown to the ground and abducted. ICE officers first tied his dog to a tree. Then they cut the leash and let it run loose along one of the LA’s most heavily trafficked roads, Sepulva Boulevard.
Cellphone videos of Benjamin’s arrest record the agents joking about the $2,500 bonuses they’ll receive for nabbing a teenager without any criminal record: “Thanks to him, we get to drink this weekend!”
Benjamin has lived in LA for more than three years with his single-parent mother and is a caretaker for both his six-year-old brother and his twin five-month-old brothers. According to his legal representative, Benjamin is currently “cramped in a holding cell with about 50 others… He is cold, scared, and one of the youngest there.” Meanwhile, his mother is distraught and too afraid to leave her apartment.
+ Masked ICE agents hit a landscaper in Beverly Hills with a taser and pepper spray. Cell phone video shows the man screaming in agony as agents roughly arrest him.
“I couldn’t see what was happening – I just could hear a man screaming ‘my eyes, my eyes!’” a witness said. Another bystander can be heard asking, “What did you taze him for? Why are you doing that?”
The man’s family members say ICE abducted and abused the wrong man, since the lawn maintenance worker has no criminal history. They showed no warrants. They just descended on the neighborhood, assaulted him, abducted him and left.
+ ICE has arrested and is trying to quickly depart Arman Momand, a Virginia High School student, who has a special visa reserved for Afghan families that aided the US military during the occupation of Afghanistan. According to Momand’s lawyer, “It’s a very, very difficult visa to get. It’s reserved for people who—at their own peril—assisted the American military in our operations.” Momand was seized by ICE agents at a court hearing on a December 2024 driving incident that was resolved by the court as a misdemeanor, a mere infraction that should not have affected his visa status and eligibility to stay in the US with his family. Instead, ICE plans to deport him just weeks before classes start at J.R. Tucker High School in Henrico, Virginia. Deportation back to Afghanistan will almost certainly put the young man’s life in jeopardy.
+ Lopez Benitez, a native of Paraguay, is a construction worker in Queens who has lived in the US for two years with his sister, both of whom are US citizens. He applied for asylum and has regularly attended his required immigration meetings. He has no criminal record. Yet when he showed up for a scheduled immigration hearing, he was grabbed by masked federal agents and pulled away from his family.ICE agents violently knocked to the ground one of Benitez’s sisters during his abduction. He was taken to the ICE processing center at Federal Plaza in Manhattan and held in a room without a bed, access to a shower, or a change of clothes for three days. Then he was shipped halfway across the country to the ICE detention center in Conroe, Texas. Benitez and his family weren’t told why he was detained for more than a week.
This week, federal Judge Dale Ho ordered ICE to return Benitez to New York and then release him from custody. In his ruling, Ho castigated the government for arresting lawful immigrants during or after court hearings. Ho writes that the Trump administration has turned attendance at immigration court proceedings into a game of “detention roulette” that violates due process.
+ Another federal judge, Lewis Kaplan, has ordered ICE to improve foul living conditions at a NYC detention facility, including
+ Only 2 meals per day
+ Lack of hygiene/feminine products
+ No in-person access to lawyers
+ No sleeping mats
+ Overcrowding.
+ Remarkably, a senior prosecutor for the Southern District of New York admitted during a court hearing that there was “no factual” dispute over the inhumane conditions at the detention center. Under questioning from Judge Kaplan, Oestereigher says: “I would say there’s no factual dispute that there are no beds in these holding rooms and that they are not provided with sleeping mats. They are only provided with blankets. I think there is no dispute that they are provided with two meals instead of three. I think there’s no dispute that the bathrooms are within the room. “
Judge Kaplan: “Bedding, sleeping mats, any reason that can’t be provided?”
Oestericher: No, your honor. I just think we would need some short period of time to acquire them.
Judge Kaplan: Understood. What about all these problems that I’m told about in the plaintiff’s affidavits concerning soap, towels, toilet paper, oral hygiene products, and feminine supplies? There seems to be quite a gap between the ICE standards, indeed, and what’s really happening, including a 20-year-old, I gather, who was menstruating for five days and couldn’t get any supplies and what was supplied for a room full of people were two items?
Oestericher: I read that as well, your Honor. I don’t have a basis to comment, but we totally agree that necessary hygiene products should be available.
+ The conditions in Florida are, by all accounts, even worse. Gladys, wife of Alligator Alcatraz prisoner Marcos, on conditions inside the swamp concentration camp: “The cage where he’s in right now, everyone is sick & [the guards] are putting on different colored bracelets that tell the guards who’s sick & who’s not.”
+ After a federal court banned racial profiling by ICE in Los Angeles, ICE arrests in LA fell by 66 percent–pretty clear empirical evidence that ICE was detaining people purely based on their suspected race, something they had furiously denied to the court.
+ Border Patrol agents descended on the Japanese-American Museum in LA on Thursday, where California’s Democratic Party leaders, led by Governor Gavin Newsom, had assembled to discuss plans to redraw California’s congressional map–just providing a little extra security, right?
+ In her daily “perp walk” press conference propagandizing ICE arrests, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt doubled the number of noncitizens arrested by ICE in 2025.
+ ICE’s own numbers report that 158,724 arrests have been made in the first six months of the Trump administration. But only 132,548 arrests were made “in the interior of the country” by ICE. The others were made at the border by Border Patrol.
+ 54% of those arrested by ICE in July had never even been charged with a crime, never mind convicted.
+ Accounts from Venezuelans deported from the US to El Salvador’s CECOT concentration camp, most of whom had no criminal record:
“Beatings by guards were random, severe and constant. They kicked them with heavy work boats and shot them at close range with rubber pellets.”
“Colemares recalled seeing one man defecate all over himself after a particularly severe beating. Guards laughed at him and left him there for a day, saying that the Venezuelans weren’t ‘real men.’”
“We were handcuffed on our wrists and ankles and couldn’t walk. But they beat us when we fell.”
“Every morning the guards woke the prisoners at 3 or 4 o’clock, he said, and made them kneel on the floor for hours. The food made people sick, but they were beaten if they didn’t finish their meals.”
“The doctor would watch us get beaten and then ask us, ‘How are you feeling?’ with a smile. It was the most perverse form of humiliation.”
“After repeated beatings in CECOT, Martínez said he could no longer get out of bed. He would wet himself and he relied on his cellmates to feed him.”
“We entered as 252 strangers and left as 252 brothers.”
+ ICE deportation flights are now flying without tail numbers in an attempt to keep human rights groups and legal observers from being able to track the flights. Malcolm Ferguson: “A plane removing a tail number is the equivalent of a car removing a license plate. With the tail number, civilians, journalists, and immigration organizations alike can keep an eye on which deportation flights are leaving, and to where.”
+++
+ NYC radio talk show host Sid Rosenberg on Fox News ranting about Zohran Mamdani’s chances of winning the mayoral election: “Right now there is no logical reason this animal, and he is an animal, is not going to win.”
Zohran is polling better than Adams and Cuomo among conservative voters in NYC…
By political ideology
Liberal
Zohran Mamdani 70%
Andrew Cuomo 15%
Eric Adams 6%
Curtis Sliwa 3%Moderate
Andrew Cuomo 37%
Zohran Mamdani 27%
Curtis Sliwa 10%
Eric Adams 8%Conservative
Curtis Sliwa 40%
Zohran Mamdani 23%
Andrew Cuomo 18%
Eric Adams 9%
+ Ruth Messinger, who in 1997 became the first woman to win the Democratic nomination for NYC mayor, endorsed Zohran Mamdani for mayor: “Zohran will be a mayor who invests in the services that everyone needs to continue to build this fantastic immigrant city for its future.”
+ Chuck Schumer’s brain-dead decision to ignore the most dynamic young politician in NY in ages has backfired on him politically: The new Siena poll of NYers has Schumer at lowest-ever favorability rating (dating from Feb. 2005), 38-50%, down from 41-47% in June. Among Dems, his favorability rating is 49-39%, down from 55-35% in June. For the first time, he is underwater with NYC voters, 39-46%.
+ Fran Lebowitz on why she’s voting for Mamdani: “It’s a very good thing that happened, I think, because I’m dying to get rid of old blood. And I’m old. So, you know, I’m 74. I think: ‘Let’s get rid of these old people’ – imagine what people who are 20 think. And it seems like a reaction against Trump, which is good, because the Democrats in office do nothing.”
+ Mamdani on Cuomo’s allegation that he’s too wealthy to live in a rent-controlled apartment: “I live rent-free in his head.”
Completion of Erie Canal: 1825
Founding of Chicago: 1837
+ Bernie on CNN: “One of the reasons, in my view, Kamala Harris lost this election is because she had too many billionaires telling her not to speak out for the working class of this country.” Apparently, Harris didn’t need anyone to tell her not to speak out against the genocide in Gaza. Her silence just came naturally to her…
+ Did the LaRouchies commandeer Newsweek when I wasn’t looking?
+ Most popular political figures, according to the latest Gallup poll:
Bernie Sanders: +11
AOC: -4
RFK Jr.: -5
Biden: -11
JD Vance: -11
Gavin Newsom: -11
Pete Hegseth: -12
Trump: -16
Marco Rubio: -16
Benjamin Netanyahu: -23
Elon Musk: -28
+ Trump on the Alaska summit with Putin: “There will be some changes in land … Russia has taken some very prime territory. They’ve taken largely ocean — in real estate, we call it oceanfront property. That’s always the most valuable property.”
+ In the latest Pew Survey, Trump’s popularity among his own voters has fallen by 10%.
+ Judith Butler writing in the LRB on Trumpists Against Trump:
Trump insists that the whole Epstein affair is a “hoax” and that his own followers are “stupid” and “weaklings”. Their reaction has been intense and swift, since Trump now sounds like the elitists who disparage them – elitists like Hillary Clinton, who called them “a basket of deplorables”. Trump scoffs at their complaints, noting that his supporters have nowhere else to go. They feel not only deceived by their hero but demeaned, insulted and outraged, the way they felt when Democrats were in power.
+ Speaking of Judith Butler…
+ Oh, get over it, Pinker. The de-thronement is long overdue…By the way, who did Deleuze and Guattari knock off, Descartes?
+ Here for your reading pleasure are a couple of passages from Laura Loomer’s deposition in her defamation suit against Bill Maher, where Loomer gratuitously offers the opinion that many Trump staffers believe Lindsey Graham is gay and tries to explain her allegation that Marjorie Taylor Greene likes to stuff Arby’s roast beef sandwiches down her pants. This could be written off as just another amusing episode in the MAGAfication of America, except for the fact that Loomer has basically handpicked Trump’s current National Security team, after she got the first group fired. How can you effectively satirize these people?
+++
+ The future our tech lords are building for us (without my consent and likely yours, too) is going to make Philip K. Dick seem as quaint as Jules Verne in a couple of years. Check out this story from Reuters: “Months after a cognitively impaired New Jersey man died while trying to meet up with a flirty Meta AI chatbot, ‘Big sis Billie’ was still romancing users…”
+ Child-rearing tips from Fox News host Jesse Watters:
Feeding migrants to alligators. Sometimes you have to make up scary stories in a way to deter bad behavior. Sometimes we tell Gigi (the toddler daughter he had with a Fox News producer) that there’s a bad man in the neighborhood, Dr. Duncan, and if she keeps crying, we’re going to drop her off at Dr. Duncan’s house. And he’s really mean and has an angry dog that bites. And she usually stops crying because she’s so scared.
+ Word came on Thursday that See-Saw Films is planning a Sinéad O’Connor biopic. As one of Sinéad’s old sparring partners, I have four words for these people: “Don’t Fucking Do It!” Listen to her music, read her memoirs, and watch her documentary. Sinéad O’Connor was sui generis. Any portrayal of her will inevitably be a trivialization of who she was and probably a perversion.
+ In 1960, the CIA sent Marita Lorenz to assassinate Fidel Castro with a bottle of poison pills. Instead, they ended up having sex, and Lorenz longing to stay with him in Havana…Happy 99th Birthday, Fidel!
+ Ice T on Trump: “We already know I don’t give a fuck about that clown ass motherfucker. What’s more scary is his followers. The people who follow him blindly have a way of brushing off all he does. If any normal person did one of those things, they’d be outta here.”
+ Oasis has apparently been warned not to make any disparaging remarks about the US president during their long-awaited reunion tour of the US, or risk having their visas revoked. Liam Gallagher once called Trump “a dick.” (He’s called his brother Noel many worse things.)
+ The entire Colombo series is now available on Prime. I watched the second pilot episode last night, starring the wonderful Lee Grant, as a brilliant “lady” trial lawyer, who plots an ingenious way to murder her dull and decrepit husband and then trades barbs and witticisms with Peter Falk for an hour or so until finally being entrapped by the bumbling detective. In Colombo, the working-class detective always nails the rich malefactor.
What I didn’t know about Grant, and endears her even more deeply to me, is that she effectively lost 12 years of her acting (and directing) career for refusing to testify to HUAC, after the snitch Edward Dmytryk named Grant’s husband, the screenwriter Arnold Manoff, as a member of the CP. Grant, who’d been nominated for an Academy Award for her first film role (Detective Story), refused to testify and was blacklisted for more than a decade in the prime of her career. She was probably one of the most talented people of her generation, having danced in the American Ballet Theater under Balanchine & studied method acting with Sanford Meisner, Uta Hagen and Lee Strasberg. Grant later said that the constant hounding she experienced during the McCarthy Era so traumatized her that she would go into “a trance” any time she was asked about it. Grant became an accomplished director; her documentary on homelessness, Down and Out in America, won an Oscar for best documentary feature in 1986.
Turning Journalists Into Heroes Takes Some Doing
Booked Up
What I’m reading this week…
Hardcore Punk in the Age of Reagan: The Lyrical Lashing of an American Presidency
Robert Fitzgerald
(North Carolina)
Nature Needs You: The Fight to Save Our Swifts
Hannah Bourne-Taylor
(Elliott & Thompson)
Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation
Paris Marx
(Verso)
Sound Grammar
What I’m listening to this week…
CBGB 12.13.88
Galaxie 500
(Silver Current)
Surrender Instead
Field Medic
(Many Hats)
Crucial Cuts From the Heart of the Ark (1973-1978)
Lee “Scratch” Perry
(Shanachie)
The Functions of the Secret Police
“The secret police have several functions, my dear . . . The first is the classical one. They keep an ear out for what people are saying and report it to their superiors. The second function is intimidatory. They want to make it seem as if they have us in their power; they want us to be afraid. . . . The third function consists of staging situations that will compromise us. Gone are the days when they tried to accuse us of plotting the downfall of the state. That would only increase our popularity. Now they slip hashish in our pockets or claim we’ve raped a twelve-year-old girl. They can always dig up some girl to back them. . . . They need to trap people… to force them to collaborate and set other traps for other people, so that gradually they can turn the whole nation into a single organization of informers.”
– Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jeffrey St. Clair.