“When you’re born into this world, you’re given a ticket to the freak show. If you’re born in America, you get a front row seat.”
– George Carlin
+ Guess which person was charged with felony assault in this photo of an ICE agent hauling away a 4’10” woman, an American citizen abducted on her way to work in LA’s garment district…?
+ A former employee at Alligator Auschwitz backed up what detainees have been telling people about the horrific conditions at the prison, where she said detainees are kept in cages, like “an oversized kennel,” hold 35 to 38 inmates each: “ It’s inhumane the way that they’re keeping their residents. When I got there, it was overwhelming,” she said. “I thought it would get better. But it just never did. They have no sunlight. There’s no clock in there. They don’t even know what time of day it is. They shower every other day or every four days. The bathrooms are backed up because they have so many people using them. On rainy days, water pours into the tents.”
+ It doesn’t get much creepier than this…
+ It’s like Faulkner’s “The Bear,” only Pop and Jr. bond by hunting humans…
+ ICE “targeted” a female priest for expedited removal. Yeonsoo Go is a South Korean national with a valid visa that does not expire until December 2025. She spent most of her life working to protect the rights of Korean immigrants—and was the first woman ordained by the Anglican Church of Korea. “I never imagined my own family would end up being a target of Trump,” Yeonsoo said.
“She’s staying at 26 Federal Plaza, which, as we know, is not actually a facility that has showers or beds or hot food. And so the detentions here are not only illegal, but they’re immoral,” said Rev. Matthew Heyd.
+ According to a new suit filed in the federal court for the Middle District of Louisiana, ICE illegally deported three children who are US citizens along with their noncitizen family members, including a two-year-old girl and a four-year-old boy with Stage Four kidney cancer. The children and their families were abducted by ICE in April when they showed up for scheduled hearings with immigration officials. The children were immediately separated from their families and denied contact with their parents or lawyers before they were deported to Honduras. The four-year-old cancer patient’s mother was not even allowed the opportunity to tell ICE officials about his perilous condition or arrange for his ongoing chemotherapy treatments.
+ The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals just shot down Trump’s attempt to use racial profiling to abduct and deport people in Los Angeles…
ICE and Border Patrol agents exiting the Penkse van during Operation Trojan Horse in LA.
+ Just days after a federal appeals court upheld a ban on ICE using roving patrols and racial profiling to target immigrants, Trump’s secret police launched Operation Trojan Horse, a shock raid outside of a Home Dept in the Westlake area of Los Angeles. Posing as building contractors, ICE agents drove a yellow Penske van in front of a group of day laborers at 6:44 in the morning, asking in Spanish if any of them were looking for work. Then masked ICE agents, one of them wearing a cowboy hat, jumped out of the van and began grabbing people. In all, 16 men were arrested and taken into ICE custody in defiance of a federal appeals court.
Penske (whose owner, Roger Penske, is a big Trump donor) issued this statement after video showed one of its vans being used to entrap in ICE’s latest entrapment operation…
+ Re: Operation Trojan Horse: It may be worth recalling that the Greeks who perfidiously slipped out of crafty Odysseus’ wooden horse into Troy were the invaders, who proceeded to commit genocide against the Trojans, butchering all of the men, including the male children, and raping the women and taking them and their daughters into slavery.
+ ICE is arresting white people for filming them arresting non-white people. Dan Mathers, a US citizen in Florida, had been filming an ICE raid from a safe distance with a large row of hedges between them. He was not in any position to interfere with the raid. Mathers said he told one of the ICE agents that he “was short and it hurt his feelings.” Offended by the tweak about his height, the pumped-up ICE agent yelled, “You threatening me?” And then threw Mathers to the ground, arrested him and kept him in ICE custody for more than 10 hours, where he was prevented from contacting his family until 2:00 am the following morning.
+ In mid-hurricane season, many probationary employees of FEMA received notices that they’ve been resassigned to ICE, effective immediately, to “assist with hiring and vetting.” If the employees don’t report to ICE within seven days, they are threatened with termination.
+ The New Republic obtained an internal DHS memo that suggests Trump’s use of military for domestic enforcement is about to expand dramatically, which some officials called “alarming.” I hate to think of what’s more “alarming” than what’s going on right now…
+ Feeling free to openly espouse his eugenic view of human nature, Trump told CNBC’s Squawkbox that Mexican and Central American migrants are biologically programmed to be farm laborers: “These people do it naturally. I said to a farmer the other day, ‘What happens if they get a bad back?’ He said, ‘They don’t get a bad back, sir, because if they get a bad back, they die.’”
+++
+ Dr Nada Al Hadithy, a consulting plastic surgeon who just returned from Nasser Hospital in Gaza, told Britain’s Channel 4 about the starvation, ‘relentless’ injuries, and targeting of health workers she witnessed when working there…
“Nothing could have prepared me for the extent of the starvation I witnessed firsthand in the patients in the patients I was treating. The other thing that really struck me was how relentless the injuries and the casualties coming in were. The cleaners were working at their absolute maximum, trying to mop up the blood off the floor and they couldn’t keep up. And that was one of the days that the Israeli and American food distribution centers had fired on people at 3 AM, where they were asked to be in the middle of the night, having crossed the evacuation zones to get food and get aid…What I’ve seen from my first-hand experience is a 10-year-old girl who was shot through the leg at one of the GHF sites and subsequently had an amputation. This girl, Janna, loved dancing before she had an amputation and this is a life-changing injury. But other colleagues who were there with me said that they saw a pattern, where multiple times they saw many people coming in on the same day. All were shot in the testicles or all were shot in the upper quadrant of their stomach. And it looked like there was very specific targeting happening. My scrub nurse that I was working with every single day was followed home by a quadcopter drone, and it didn’t kill him on the way home… it waited until he was home, in his tent, and had greeted his three children and killed them all.
+ Irish President Michael D. Higgins calls on the UN to invoke Chapter 7 — allowing military action to secure aid routes into Gaza: “Are we to simply watch children starve? Something must happen.” It’s about time someone upped the ante from the bullshit censure resolutions the US keeps vetoing in the Security Council, which wouldn’t DO anything even if they passed.
+ Famine expert Alex de Waal in an interview with the New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner on the Palestinian children being starved to death in Gaza by Israel:
Today, you have a situation in which it’s impossible to know the true number, but there are an increasing number of children–probably in the thousands–that need to be in the hospital because they can’t eat food. They have reached that stage of severe acute malnutrition where their bodies just can’t digest food. And so those kids need to be in intensive care. I was just trying to figure out how many hospital beds there are in Gaza. It looks like there are about 1800 total surviving beds, but the number fluctuates daily for all sorts of reasons. So, on top of flooding Gaza with food, which remains essential, there needs to be a massive infusion of intensive-care capability.
+ There are hundreds of reporters in Gaza. How do we know? Israel has killed 225 of them & still the dispatches, photos, videos and interviews come out every day, from reporters who are targeted for doing their jobs. Simpson (World Affairs Editor at BBC), you debase their heroic & informative work by ignoring it & discounting it. Do your job, they’re doing theirs.
+ Since October 13, 2023, Israel has killed more than 10 journalists a month in Gaza.
+ ITV’s aerial footage of Gaza: “This landscape of destruction looks otherworldly, but it’s not, it’s this world. What is happening may come to define one of its darkest eras, one that casts a stain on humanity, which will endure for generations.”
+ Netanyahu’s office announced this week that Israel will proceed with the “full occupation of the Gaza Strip, including operations in areas where hostages are held,” which is redundant since Israel has fully occupied Gaza for decades. Nothing goes in or out without Israel’s permission. What they mean is that Israel move forward with the complete destruction of Gaza, killing, imprisoning or evicting the remaining Palestinian population. This is, of course, where Netanyahu was always going, notwithstanding all of the faints, demurals and misdirections. Biden knew it and lied about it. Trump knew it and wanted in on the real estate action…The Prime Minister’s office confirmed that Benjamin Netanyahu has come to a decision for the full occupation of the Gaza Strip, including operations in areas where hostages are held.”
+ Melanie O’Brien, President of the International Association of Genocide Scholars: “It is without a doubt that we are witnessing a genocide now in Gaza, and state parties to the Convention are failing in their obligation to prevent and punish it.”
+ Laleh Khalili: “In the first week after 7 October, Israel had killed more Palestinians in Gaza than Hamas had [killed Israelis] in its entire existence.”
+ Imagine what it takes to finally turn Max Boot’s war-mongering stomach…
+ Nimer Sultany, Law & Revolution: Legitimacy and Constitutionalism After the Arab Spring and Editor-in-Chief, The Palestine Yearbook of Int’l Law: “According to the US and Israel, Palestinians cannot use violence. Palestinians cannot use nonviolence (BDS). Palestinians cannot go to the courts and demand their rights. Palestinians cannot say bad things about Israel. Even the compliant Palestinian Authority is sanctioned!”
+ Yuval Abraham, co-director of No Other Land: “Israeli courts released violent settler Yinon Levi and he is now back in the village working to expand the nearby illegal settlement, a week after killing Odeh Hathalin. Odeh’s family members are still imprisoned and the police are refusing to give back his body.”
+ Netanyahu: “The New York Times should be sued. I am looking into whether a country can sue The New York Times. I am looking into it right now. I think it is such clear defamation.”
+ This threat really does put one in an impossible situation, in terms of who to root for…
+++
+ Rep. Mike Flood (R-NEB.): “Do you think that people who are 28 years old, that can work, and refuse to work, should get free healthcare?”
Town Hall Crowd: “YESSSSSSSSSS!”
Later, Flood was asked if he would support a Medicare for All bill. He responds, “We can’t afford that,” which is greeted by boos from the audience and shouts of, “Yes, we can!”
+ Who will Trump fire for “fabricating” these numbers?
+ Only “suckers’ and “losers” moan about inflation now…
+ Elizabeth Warren: What Zohran is saying is ‘I want people to be able to afford to live in NYC’
CNBC Host: But raising taxes in order to do it?
Warren: Oh my goodness! Oh dear! Are you worried that billionaires are going to go hungry?
+ Jesse Topper, the Republican leader of the Pennsylvania House, in a speech about the minimum wage: “Not every wage is meant to be a livable wage.”
+ Medicare Advantage is what we said it was: privatized health insurance where the companies prioritize their bottom lines at the expense of your pocketbook and your health. Now, the Wall Street Journal reports that Medicare Advantage insurers are “planning to scale back benefits, trim plans and exit from unprofitable markets.”
+ Joe Weisnthal: “The AI boom may create a new super intelligent life form. Or it may usher in an age of productivity miracles. Or neither. At this moment, though, it’s making a small number of people fantastically rich, while placing strain on an economy that’s already been strained for five years.”
+ Here are Microsoft’s predictions for the top 40 professions that will be first replaced by AI and the last 40 to be replaced. Historians and writers are Red Listed for imminent Extinction…Apparently, we should all become dredge operators.
+ With or without these ghoulish glasses, most of us can be assured of enjoying a cognitive advantage over Zuckerberg.
+ Lula on Trump’s 50% tariffs against Brazil, arbitrarily imposed because Brazil prosecuted Jair Bolsonaro for attempting to overthrow the 2022 elections, even though the US enjoys a trade surplus with Brazil:
“A president of the Republic cannot keep humbling himself to another. I respect everyone and demand respect in return. [Trump] could have communicated with Brazil, called, and negotiated. We received the announcement in a completely authoritarian manner.”
+ Will Trump now increase tariffs on the UK for arresting one of his racist mob leaders, as he did Brazil for prosecuting Bolsonaro?
+++
+ When you’ve lost Alexander Dugin and Tucker Carlson…
+ Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy (who moonlights as NASA administrator) announced this week plans to build a nuclear reactor on the Moon (maybe they can put all of them up there). Over to you, Gil…
Was all that money I made last year
For whitey on the moon?
How come I ain’t got no money here?
Hmm! Whitey’s on the moon
Y’ know I just ’bout had my fill
Of whitey on the moon
I think I’ll send these doctor bills
Airmail special
To whitey on the moon
+ Trump has almost completely deregulated the fossil fuel industry in the US, but his pals on Wall Street don’t seem to be buying it. The financing of new oil, gas and coal projects by the six largest banks has dropped by 25% percent, as compared to the last year of the Biden administration. Morgan-Stanely’s financing of fossil fuels fell by 54%.
+ Radioactive wasp nests have been found near the Savanah River Nuclear Site in South Carolina. According to a federal report, one of the nests found near the nuclear waste storage site had a radiation level 10 times what is allowed by federal regulations. It’s not exactly comforting to realize that the person ultimately responsible for overseeing nuclear waste storage in the US, Energy Secretary Chris Wright, once drank fracking fluid to prove it is “safe.”
+ A new study published in Science finds that breathing polluted air increases the risk of osteoporosis.
+ The same day RKF, Jr announced he was terminating federal funding for mRNA vaccines, NATURE reported that two vaccine candidates using mRNA technologies “elicit potent immune responses against HIV.”
+ Democratic senators who have cast the most votes for Trump’s policies so far this session…
Fetterman: 95Hassan: 93Shaheen: 90Warner: 87Rosen: 82King: 78Slotkin: 77
+ What Adams neglects to mention is that the same poll shows Mamdani at 37%…
+ Bill Clinton’s former pollster, Mark Penn, is advising Trump on the best way he can insert himself into the NYC mayor’s race to defeat Mamdani…
+ Cuomo on Thursday: “I can’t remember the last time I spoke with Trump.”
NYT on Thursday: “In a previously undisclosed call in recent weeks, Trump spoke about the race directly with Mr. Cuomo, an old associate and foil, according to three people briefed on the call, who were not authorized to discuss it.”
+ Cory Booker pumps out more verbal flatulence per hour than almost any person on the Hill…Cory Booker refuses to endorse Zohran Mamdani for NYC mayor:
“NYC, I love you. You’re my neighbor. You guys figure out your elections. I’m going to be focused on mine.”
+ Booker’s claim that he didn’t endorse Mamdani because he only concerns himself with New Jersey elections is belied by his early endorsements of Michael Bloomberg for Mayor in 2009 (Bloomberg wasn’t even a Democrat then), Eric Adams for mayor in 2021 and this from even farther afield…
+ Cory Booker explained in Cory Booker’s own words…Imagine saying this (never mind actually DOING it) about an entity that has declared war on so many members of your own political party, in defense of land theft, ethnic cleansing and, now, inevitably genocide.
CBS NEWS REPORTER: “You know that Republicans in the state, Republicans out of the state, look at what you guys are doing and thinking you’re running away from the fight…”
TEXAS STATE REP. ANN JOHNSON (D-HOUSTON): “Yeah, no, abandoning your job is going to Cancun in the middle of a deadly freeze, right? Abandoning your job is cutting health care when people need access. Abandoning your job is cutting public education when we already have one of the worst education systems in the nation…When Donald Trump called Georgia Republicans and said, ‘I just need you to find me 11,000 votes,’ they said, ‘No, sir, that’s a step too far.’ But when he called Texas Republicans and said, ‘I need you to steal me five seats,’ they said, ‘Does July work for you?’”
+++
+ Imagine spending $200 million to build a ballroom at the White House for someone who dances like Donald Trump.
+ Got an instructive note on this subject from our friend Carl Ginsburg:
It might be good reading to get the details of this $200 million project, no? Perhaps we’ll see a Seder there next spring, celebrating the achievement of “sea to sea”? (This visionary campaign was a battle cry of Netanyahu’s dad.)
On another note: Let’s see how Trump’s brazen effort to control BLS goes. You can be sure that the “new” numbers will not reflect the rapidly expanding ranks of the unemployed. The DC housing market is crashing because there is no relief in sight….
I am not sure how the buy-low-sell-high functionaries on Wall Street will take the jettisoning of BLS’s executive director. It is one thing to support Kennedy’s reorientation of human anatomy, but you cannot fuck with the financial numbers…
Manipulate them— yes, for sure, that’s the game! But why invite headlines?
+ Charlie Kirk: “There’s a lot you can call Donald Trump. No one has ever called him feminine. Trump is a giant middle finger to all the screeching hall monitors that attacked young men for just existing. He’s a giant F YOU to the feminist establishment that was never challenged before he came down the golden escalator. Most of the media missed this. Young men did not.”
+ For a manly-man, Trump spends a lot of time talking about decorating:
Here we put out – you know these, these lamps have been very important actually, whether people love them or not but they’re if you see pictures like Pearl Harbor or Tora! Tora! Tora!, you see movies about the White House where wars are being discussed, oftentimes they’ll show those lamps or something like those lamps, something that looks like them. Probably not the reals, because I don’t think they’re allowed to – this is a very important room, this is a sacred room, and I don’t think they made movies from here.
You never know what they do. But they were missing, er, medallions. See the medallions on top? They had a chain going into the ceiling. And I said: ‘You can’t do that. You have to have a medallion.’ They said, ‘What’s a medallion?’ I said: ‘I’ll show you.’ And then we got some beautiful medallions, and you see them, they were put up there, makes the lamps look [inaudible] so we did these changes.
And when you think of it, the cost was almost nothing. We also painted the room a nice color, beige color, and it’s been really something. The only question is, will I gold-leaf the corners? You could maybe tell me. My cabinet could take a vote. You see the top-line moldings, and the only question is, do you go and leaf it? Because you can’t paint it, if you paint it, it won’t look good because they’ve never found a paint that looks like gold. You see that in the Oval Office.
Er, they’ve tried for years and years. Somebody could become very wealthy, but they’ve never found a paint that looks like gold. So painting is easy, but it won’t look right.”
+ You’re eating on the wrong side of town, gringo…
+ Spanish filmmakers and actors, including Javier Bardem, have condemned director Christopher Nolan for filming portions of The Odyssey in occupied Western Sahara: “Nolan filmed there without the consent of the Sahrawi people. The only consent he received came from the occupying force: Morocco.”
+ Woody Allen’s rather sinister letter describing his visits to Jeffrey Epstein’s NYC condo, which he describes as “Castle Dracula,” a place where he could imagine Epstein “sleeping in damp earth,” and a place Allen kept going back to, again and again…
+ Hanging on the walls of Castle Dracula are photos of Epstein with Crown Prince Bonesaw and Bill Clinton. There’s also one of him dressed as an Emirati and a map of Israel drawn by Ehud Barak.
+ From one Epstein pal to another: Alan Dershowitz is an un-wanted man, especially among the people who know him best in the resort town of Martha’s Vineyard, where the Harvard law professor plops himself for the summer. Two years ago, Dershowitz threatened to sue the local book fair because they stopped featuring his books. A couple of months later, he again threatened to file a lawsuit against the local library for cancelling a book talk. Now Dershowitz is threatening to sue the owner of Good Pierogi because, according to the police report filed in the matter, Dershowitz told the cop, “they won’t sell me a pierogi.” Dershowitz warned the policeman that “he was going to spread the word to others at the market not to buy from the pierogi booth.” The cop told Dershowitz that if he followed through with the threat, he would be asked to leave the market and that he could be slapped with a “No Trespass Order.” The cop wandered away, but soon heard Dershowitz’s grating voice over at the lemonade stand, where he was scolding the people in line not to visit the pierogi booth. When Dershowitz saw the cop approaching him again, he turned tail and fled the scene, with no pierogi in his clutches.
+ MAGA Newsflash: Sydney Sweeney HOT, Taylor Swift No Longer HOT…
+ I’m probably missing something (though she’s left very little to the imagination), but I just don’t find the pin-up for Teutonic purity (though I’ll wager her DNA profile wouldn’t end up that “pure”) Sydney Sweeney that “hot”–not Claudia Cardinale, Anna Karina, Pam Grier, Isabelle Adjani, Angela Davis, Julie Christie, Gong Li, Juliet Binoche, Chaka Khan, Francesca Albanese, or Béyoncé “hot.” Though I’m sure Fellini (despite her limited skills in the acting profession) would have made rich sport with her assets, she strikes me as someone who teenage boys and septuagenarians still stagnating in the oral stage of development would find “hot.”
+ Speaking of Bé, here’s more racist drool from the woman who went apoplectic about black Santas and Beyoncé having the temerity to sing country and western music, which, like almost all popular music in the US, has– to use a term these cretinous bigots are obsessed with–”genetic” roots in the Blues…
+ As evident from their Portland gig last week, Mekons still rock, still radical, still scabrously funny, still both of and ahead of their time…
Sally Timms: “Thank you all, you Americans who came out and made this tour so fantastic. Watch out California in early October. The luxury chickens will be back in San Francisco, Wonder Valley and Los Angeles.”
+ My former editor at In These Times, Craig Aaron, is putting out a new weekly newsletter with Julio Ricardo Varela, called Pressing Issues, which Craig says will “tell stories of resistance, innovation and community service. We’re going to tell those stories while wrestling with big ideas and the strategies needed to make them a reality.” And in an age of almost universal commercialism, subscriptions to Pressing Issues are free. Sign up here.
Downpressor Man, Where You Gonna Run To? If You Run to the Sea, the Sea Will be Boiling?
Booked Up
What I’m reading this week…
Citizens of the Whole World: Anti-Zionism and the Cultures of the American Jewish Left
Benjamin Balthaser
(Verso)
Maya Wisdom and the Survival of Our Planet
Lisa J. Lucero
(Oxford Univ. Press)
Sins of the Shovel: Looting, Murder and the Evolution of American Archaeology
Rachel Morgan
(Chicago)
Sound Grammar
What I’m listening to this week…
Now Would be a Good Time
Folk Bitch Trio
(Jagjaguwar)
Ain’t Done With the Blues
Buddy Guy
(RCA)
The Future is Here and Everything Needs to Be Destroyed
The Armed
(Sargent House)
Sleaziness, Cynicism and Sheer Stupidity
“The two pillars of America’s global power – military and financial – are still firmly in place. What has ended is any claim on the part of American democracy to provide a political model. This is certainly a historic break. Trump closes the chapter begun by Woodrow Wilson in the First World War, with his claim that American democracy articulated the deepest feelings of liberal humanity. A hundred years later, Trump has forever personified the sleaziness, cynicism and sheer stupidity that dominate much of American political life.”
– Adam Tooze in the London Review of Books, “The End of the American Century?”
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