America is failing

 

Fucking Nazis

 

Pure evil

 

You can almost wish God and Hell were real things for people like this.

Democrats have to take the house in November and not just refuse to allocate MORE money, but claw back most of what has already been allocated.  Abolish ICE.

The plight of detainees (and immigration attorneys)

 

Full thread

Trump camps

More space for evil.

 

UPDATE 09:06 am:

And now, they'll no longer get lotion.

Reminder:

 There are still people - including children - in concentration camps under horrible conditions.

Somebody tell DOGE

 

Surely Trump's judges at the Supreme Court will save it.

Running concentration camps is expensive

 

Tangentially, it might be interesting to see a chart showing proposed costs to government programs versus actual costs.

UPDATE 08/08/2025:

Jesus, Joseph, & Mary!

I spent one day off the doom machine, and, as for each day since Trump went to the White House, that day was worse than all the ones before it.  

Trump is talking about ethnic cleansing of Gaza - but more than that - about going in to "take ownership" of the Strip!  What in blue blazes!  The man is a certified madman.  Is he perhaps syphilitic?  Just asking questions.

Let's see.  What else did I learn last night?  He's also cleaning out the CIA.  He's shutting down the Department of Education and NOAA, the weather service!

Trump insanely said the US is going to occupy Gaza at a joint press conference with Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu tonight: “The US will take over the Gaza Strip - and we will do a good job with it too. We’ll own it. We’ll level the site.” He then said we are going to go in there and develop it with new properties - it is oceanfront property after all.

When asked by a reporter if he was talking about a permanent occupation of Gaza by the US: “I do see a long-term ownership position” for the US. He then said he would use military force if necessary.

Trump in the Oval Office earlier today: “The Gaza has not worked. It has never worked. I think they should get a good fresh piece of land. I don’t know how they could want to stay. It’s a demolition site. If we could find the right piece of land or numerous pieces of land and build them some nice places - could be Jordan, could be in Egypt.”

  Meidas Touch

Hmmmm...kind of like moving the decimated Jewish populatios to a piece of land and calling it Israel? ("The Gaza.")

Earlier today, demented Trump said if Iran assassinates him he “left instructions” to “obliterate” their country. He said this from the Oval Office while announcing new sanctions against Iran and warning them not to try and retaliate that way: "If they did that, they would be obliterated. I left instructions.”

An honest to goodness madman. Joined in federal office by other madmen...

But Trump’s new right-wing white nationalist conspiracy theorist State Department Spokesman Darren Beattie said last September that he really thinks our own intelligence agencies have been trying to have Trump killed, not Iran: “It's more likely that the intelligence officials telling Trump that Iran is behind assassination attempts are actually the ones behind the assassination attempts, than it is for Iran being behind the assassination attempts.”

[...]

Axios reported that about 20,000 federal employees have accepted the buyout offered to them last week by Musk, which is only about 1% of the federal government workforce. That number is way lower than he expected, as Musk reportedly predicted that 5-10% would accept the offer. However, the offer is open until this Thursday so we will see if more people fall for this.

Total insanity. And if those people think they're going to get paid without going to court, god bless 'em.

Trump nominated right-wing podcaster Sean Parnell to be Pete Hegseth’s Chief Pentagon Spokesperson and Asst. Sec Def. Trump endorsed Parnell for Senate in PA in 2022, but he dropped out of the race when he lost custody of his children after his wife testified in court that Parnell abused her and their children by choking her and pinning her down, and also struck one of their children in a fit of rage.

Trump's type.

Hegseth announced that the first flights of migrants to Guantanamo Bay started today. Trump’s executive order allows for up to 30,000 to be housed there while their deportation cases are litigated.

[...]

Trump said that he wants other countries to start housing our prison inmates, and President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador said he is willing to accept the offer: "We have offered the US the opportunity to outsource part of its prison system. We are willing to take in convicted criminals (including convicted US citizens) into our mega-prison (CECOT) in exchange for a fee. The fee would be relatively low for the US but significant for us, making our entire prison system sustainable."

What a fantastic idea! Holy Mary, Mother of God.

Immigration Law expert Aaron Reichlin-Melnick: “Okay, but that's not a thing. I don't care what Bukele says, the US cannot legally banish Americans - such authorities died centuries ago and are the relic of a time of terra nullius. It just is not legal under any modern international laws either.”

You people need to find some other cry. Illegal! is't working. He just keeps doing illegal - and unconstitutional - shit.

Canadian MP Charlie Angus told Meidas Touch that Trump lost the tariff battle: “He blinked. He choked. Two days ago, he was telling us that if we didn’t give up our nationhood, the tariffs would stay on. Then we hit him with $125 billion in tariffs. We pulled KY booze off our shelves. Then we said, ‘You’re getting another $25 billion right after that.’ The market started to tank, and suddenly, he said, ‘Oh, didn’t you guys already have a plan to deal with the border back in December? I love that—I’ll take that.’ This is Mr. Art of the Deal.”

[...]

WaPo columnist Catherine Rampell on CNN: “Trump is trying to repackage the status quo as a victory. That's what the leaders of these foreign countries are learning. You don't actually have to give Trump anything. You just have to let him announce victory on TV.”

[...]

NYT reports that a DC judge just awarded the Proud Boys’ trademarks to the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church. Proud Boys can’t legally use the name and the church can seize the proceeds of any merchandise sold with that name or logo. The church sued the Proud Boys after they destroyed Black Lives Matter signs outside their building. They got a $1 million judgment which PBs refused to pay, so the judge ordered this as an alternative.

Well, thank whatever gods there be for one small bit of good news. Oh, and this...

Italian Green Party politician Andrea Zanoni filed a complaint with a court in Italy accusing Donald Trump Jr. of illegally killing an endangered Ruddy Shelduck bird near Venice, Italy during a recent hunting trip. Local environmentalists and Italian MPs have joined the formal complaint and called for an investigation.

Lock him up and keep him. You'll be protecting the world.

Do we get to know which ones those are?

Are we sure Elon is not simply implementing Project 2025 for Russ Vought and Stephen Miller?  

At any rate, it does seem like the country is being hijacked by a vengeful madman and a Bond villain.  

YOU own this, Rand Paul.  You and your greedy, soulless colleagues in the GOP Congress.

ASSHAT.

Do Democrats STILL not get it?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 05:58 pm:

Trump 2.0 - Gitmo concentration camp

Yep.  Not even on American soil.

UPDATE 01/30/2025:

There's enough blame to go around.

In August 2024, the Biden administration granted a private prison company a $163.4 million contract to run the facility.

"For decades, the Guantanamo migrant detention center has been the hallmark of the most inhumane, racist, and brutal U.S. policies against people seeking refuge," said Jesse Franzblau, senior policy analyst with the National Immigrant Justice Center. "The Biden administration could have shut down the facility but tragically renewed and entered into new contracts to keep it up and running."

[...]

“We have 30,000 beds in Guantanamo to detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people. This will double our capacity immediately,” Trump said.

But according to Department of Homeland Security and Navy documents from 2021 and 2022 reviewed by Drop Site News, the Trump administration may not be able to detain that high of a number of migrants at the facility — at least not immediately. Documents show the Guantánamo migrant detention center only has the capacity to expand to hold 400 people.

[...]

“The idea that the Trump administration is going to send 30,000 migrants to Guantánamo is one of the dumbest ideas I’ve heard all week. It’s utterly absurd,” said J. Wells Dixon, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights who represents detainees at the Guantánamo military prison and frequently visits the base. “It’s purely performative. President Trump is trying to use the image of Guantánamo to project toughness towards refugees and asylum seekers.”

  DropSite

It works.

The Republican Party is half MAGA

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

ICE detention center expansion

AKA concentration camps.

From ACLU newsletter:

Donate to support ACLU

Bolton book bits

During a one-on-one meeting at the June 2019 Group of 20 summit in Japan, Xi complained to Trump about China critics in the United States. But Bolton writes in a book scheduled to be released next week that “Trump immediately assumed Xi meant the Democrats. Trump said approvingly that there was great hostility among the Democrats.

“He then, stunningly, turned the conversation to the coming U.S. presidential election, alluding to China’s economic capability to affect the ongoing campaigns, pleading with Xi to ensure he’d win,” Bolton writes. “He stressed the importance of farmers, and increased Chinese purchases of soybeans and wheat in the electoral outcome. I would print Trump’s exact words but the government’s prepublication review process has decided otherwise.”

[...]

Bolton’s 592-page memoir, obtained by The Washington Post, is the most substantive, critical dissection of the president from an administration insider so far, coming from a conservative who has worked in Republican administrations for decades and is a longtime contributor to Fox News. It portrays Trump as an “erratic” and “stunningly uninformed” commander in chief, and lays out a long series of jarring and troubling encounters between the president, his top advisers and foreign leaders.

  WaPo

And where was Mr. Bolton during the impeachment hearings? That's right. Holding out against testifying.

Bolton recounts numerous private conversations Trump had with other leaders that revealed the limits of his knowledge. He recalls Trump asking Kelly if Finland is part of Russia. In a meeting with then-British Prime Minister Theresa May in 2018, a British official referred to the United Kingdom as a “nuclear power,” and Trump interjects: “Oh, are you a nuclear power?” Bolton adds that he could tell the question about Britain, which has long maintained a nuclear arsenal, “was not intended as a joke.”

[...]

During a NATO summit in the summer of 2018, Bolton recounts a moment when Trump had decided to inform U.S. allies that the United States was going to withdraw from NATO if allies didn’t substantially increase defense spending by January.

“We will walk out, and not defend those who have not [paid],” read a message Trump dictated to Bolton. [The DOJ] filed a lawsuit Tuesday seeking to block [Bolton's book's] publication by alleging that it contains classified material. Bolton’s attorney has said the book does not contain classified material and that it underwent an arduous review process.

[...]

Kayleigh McEnany, the White House press secretary, said on Wednesday that the tome still contained classified information.

[...]

The request for electoral assistance from Xi is one of many instances described by Bolton in which Trump seeks favors or approval from authoritarian leaders. Many of those same leaders were also happy to take advantage of the U.S. president and attempt to manipulate him, Bolton writes, often through simplistic appeals to his various obsessions.

[...]

In May 2018, Bolton says, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan handed Trump a memo claiming innocence for a Turkish firm under investigation by the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York for violating Iranian sanctions.

“Trump then told Erdogan he would take care of things, explaining that the Southern District prosecutors were not his people, but were Obama people, a problem that would be fixed when they were replaced by his people,” Bolton writes.

Bolton says he was so alarmed by Trump’s determination to do favors for autocrats such as Erdogan and Xi that he scheduled a meeting with Attorney General William P. Barr in 2019 to discuss the president’s behavior. Bolton writes that Barr agreed he also was worried about the appearances created by Trump’s behavior.

And Bolton believed that?

Bolton cites personal conversations with Trump confirming a “quid pro quo” on Ukraine that Trump had long denied, including an August meeting in which Trump allegedly made the bargain explicit.“He said he wasn’t in favor of sending them anything until all Russia-investigation material related to Clinton and Biden had been turned over,” Bolton writes.

[...]

[H]e writes that he found Trump’s decision to hold up military assistance to pressure newly elected Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “deeply disturbing,” and that he tried to work internally to counter it, reporting concerns to Barr and the White House Counsel’s Office.

Asking the fox to guard the henhouse. Shows how clueless Bolton was/is.

In the memoir, Bolton describes the president's advisers as frequently flummoxed by Trump and said a variety of officials — including Chief of Staff John F. Kelly, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Bolton himself — all considered resigning in disgust or frustration.

Yes, we can see how disgusted Mike Pompeo has been.

Even some of the president’s most loyal advisers hold a dim view of him in private, he writes.

[...]

“He second-guessed people’s motives, saw conspiracies behind rocks, and remained stunningly uninformed on how to run the White House, let alone the huge federal government,” Bolton writes, always looking to “personal instinct” and opportunities for “reality TV showmanship.”

Tell us something we can't see for ourselves.

After Trump completed a phone call with South Korea’s president ahead of the 2018 Singapore summit with North Korea, Pompeo and Bolton shared their disdain for the president’s handling of the conversation, he writes. Pompeo, having listened in on the call from the Middle East, told Bolton he was “having a cardiac arrest in Saudi Arabia.” Bolton shared his similar disappointment with the call, describing it as a “near death experience.”

[...]

Bolton attributes a litany of shocking statements to the president. Trump said invading Venezuela would be “cool” and that the South American nation was “really part of the United States.” Bolton says Trump kept confusing the current and former presidents of Afghanistan, while asking Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to help him strike a deal with Iran. And Trump told Xi that Americans were clamoring for him to change constitutional rules to serve more than two terms, according to the book.

Well, some of them are.

He also describes a summer 2019 meeting in New Jersey where Trump says journalists should be jailed so they have to divulge their sources: “These people should be executed. They are scumbags,” Trump said, according to Bolton's account.

Bolton describes in depth the feuding and backbiting among Trump’s cadre of advisers, as well as referring dismissively to Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner’s efforts to get involved in domestic and foreign policy issues. Almost every adviser — including Pompeo, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, former defense secretary Jim Mattis and former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley — comes under the scalpel. By contrast, Bolton seems to hold himself in high regard and admits few mistakes of his own.

LOL. What a surprise.

For Trump, Bolton writes, one singular goal loomed above all: securing a second term.

“I am hard pressed to identify any significant Trump decision during my tenure that wasn’t driven by reelection calculations,” Bolton writes.

Bolton says Trump said he wanted out of Afghanistan during his second year instead of his third year so he could blame his predecessor for the war. Screaming about the border wall in a meeting with top advisers in 2018, Trump described why illegal immigration had to go down and the wall had to go up, according to Bolton’s book.

“I got elected on this issue and now I’m going to get unelected,” Trump said, startling those around him.

[...]

Though Trump approved of a proposal from Bolton to publicly declare the United States recognized [Venezuela's Juan] Guaidó rather than [elected president Nicolas] Maduro, within 30 hours Trump was already worrying that Guaidó appeared weak — a “kid” compared to “tough” Maduro — and considering changing course. “You couldn’t make this up,” Bolton writes.

In describing his White House experience on Russia-related issues, Bolton presents a picture of a president who is impulsive, churlish and consistently opposed to U.S. policy designed to discourage Russian aggression and to sanction Putin’s malign behavior.

[...]

He describes in detail the events leading up to the widely panned Helsinki summit in July 2018, when Trump sided with Putin against U.S. intelligence agencies over Moscow’s interference in the 2016 presidential election.

[...]

Soon after he arrived at the White House, Bolton said Kelly gave him a warning. “You can’t imagine how desperate I am to get out of here,” Kelly said, according to Bolton’s book. “This is a bad place to work, as you will find out.”

Throughout the book, he describes Trump and top advisers repeatedly slashing each other, lying to each other and maneuvering to gain advantage.

At one point, Bolton says he learned that Kushner was going to be calling the finance minister of Turkey because he was also Erdogan’s son-in-law.

“I briefed Pompeo and Mnuchin on this new ‘son-in-law channel’ and they both exploded. Pompeo was furious, Bolton writes, “because this was one more example of Kushner’s doing international negotiations he shouldn’t have been doing (along with the never quite ready Middle East peace plan).”

For extended periods of time, Trump kept telling different advisers they were in charge of border policy, according to Bolton’s book. One day in 2018 in the Oval Office, Kelly purportedly learned that Kushner was calling Mexican authorities when he barged into the Oval Office and said so.

“Why is Jared calling Mexicans?” Kelly asked loudly, according to the book. “Because I asked him to. How else are we going to stop the caravans?” Trump responded.

In November 2018, Trump came under fire for writing an unfettered defense of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, littered with exclamation points, over the killing of Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. But according to Bolton’s book, the main goal of the missive was to take away attention from a story about Ivanka Trump using her personal email for government business.

“This will divert from Ivanka,” Trump said, according to Bolton’s book. “If I read the statement in person, that will take over the Ivanka thing.”

[...]

Describing the conflict in Afghanistan, Trump said: “This was done by a stupid person named George Bush.”

[...]

When Bolton recounts the Trump-Kim meeting in Singapore, the first summit of U.S. and North Korean leaders in history, Bolton castigates Trump’s diplomatic efforts, saying the president cared little for the details of the denuclearization effort and saw it merely as a “an exercise in publicity.”

He describes it extensively — including what Kim and his advisers say, and what Trump and his advisers say in return, giving a fly-on-the-wall account of a historic event.

“Trump told . . . me he was prepared to sign a substance-free communique, have his press conference to declare victory and then get out of town,” Bolton wrote.

Which is exactly what we witnessed.

In the months following the summit, Bolton described Trump’s inordinate interest in Pompeo delivering an autographed copy of Elton John’s “Rocket Man” on CD to Kim during Pompeo’s follow-on visit to North Korea. Trump had used the term “Little Rocket Man” to criticize the North Korean leader but subsequently tried to convince Kim that it was a term of affection.

“Trump didn’t seem to realize Pompeo hadn’t actually seen Kim Jong Un [during the trip], asking if Pompeo had handed” the CD, wrote Bolton. “Pompeo had not. Getting this CD to Kim remained a high priority for several months.”

I'm sure Sir Elton is flattered.

"Whoever has ears to hear, let them hear." - Mark 4:9

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:

I had been wondering why Trump was suddenly coming down hard on China over coronavirus and assumed it was just because he was trying to deflect criticism, but now I'm thinking there was more to it than that.  He knew what Bolton's book would say about him being China's bitch.

New revelations from the concentration camps at the border

Immigrants held in Immigration and Customs Enforcement jails around the US received medical care so bad it resulted in two preventable surgeries, including an 8-year-old boy who had to have part of his forehead removed, and contributed to four deaths, according to an internal complaint from an agency whistleblower.

The allegations appear in an explosive Department of Homeland Security memo, obtained by BuzzFeed News, containing reports of detainees being given incorrect medication, suffering from delays in treating withdrawal symptoms, and one who was allowed to become so mentally unstable he lacerated his own penis and required reparative surgery.

[...]

The allegations were laid out in a March 20 memorandum signed by Cameron Quinn, DHS’s officer for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, and sent to top ICE leadership. The memo describes the whistleblower as someone within the ICE Health Service Corps, or IHSC, which provides medical care and oversight for detainees in the agency’s custody. BuzzFeed News does not know the person’s identity.

  

the Trump cabal will be trying to out that person.

This internal memo is one of a trove of remarkable secret documents — including emails, briefing materials, and draft reports — BuzzFeed News has obtained throughout 2019 uncovering how the Trump administration’s immigration policies were formed and executed, and how those policies confused or harmed people who sought to immigrate to the US.

[...]

The memo describes what happened to 17 different immigrants who were held at nine facilities across six states, from Georgia to Washington.

One of the claims in the memo:

That IHSC leadership was unresponsive or even dishonest when confronted. They “failed to take appropriate action” when told of policy violations in 10 of the cases; “did not respond” to concerns about one case in which a detainee with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma died under “deplorable” conditions; and were “erroneous” and told others to “hold off” when looking into several cases.

[...]

ICE has expanded the number of people it detains to record levels under Trump. Thousands of immigrants in its custody had passed their initial asylum screenings, a practice that in the past generally led to release from custody.

[...]

To pay for it all, DHS had to transfer money earmarked for disaster relief and other efforts. In recent weeks, it has dipped to around 44,000 people in custody, still above the numbers during the Obama administration. In the 2019 fiscal year, eight people died in ICE custody. The highest number of deaths in recent years came in the 2017 fiscal year, which included the end of the Obama administration, when 12 people died in ICE custody.

The horror of the particular egregious cases is reported in the article, if you care to read about it all.

Children dying in camps. Families living in fear. We have seen this before. We won’t let it happen again. Never again is now. Thoughts and prayers won't save lives; it is our actions that matter.

We will be the allies that our Jewish ancestors needed in Germany, before it was too late. We will take relentless, bold direct action and we will not stop until ICE is shut down, the camps are closed, and immigrants no longer live in fear. Are you in this with us?

[...]

WE ARE NOT FUCKING AROUND.

We are not going to sit at home while people are dying and families are being rounded up. We are not going to wait and see what happens. We are going to keep building this movement of Jews and allies until we’re strong enough to make it impossible for ICE to function and for the camps to stay open. We owe it to the immigrants we’re in this fight with, and we owe it to our ancestors who gave us a sacred mission: Never Again for Anyone.

  Never Again Action

Donate here:

What we need is more concentration camps

A team of Trump administration officials toured a California facility once used by the Federal Aviation Administration this week as they searched for a potential site to relocate homeless people, according to three government officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the private tour.


Trump is expected to visit California on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Trump has asked aides to figure out “how the hell we can get these people off the streets,” one senior administration official said.

[...]

It also remains unclear how the federal government could accomplish getting homeless people off the streets of Los Angeles, or what legal authority officials would use to do so.

  WaPo

I'm sure they're up to those challenges.

The Washington Post reported Tuesday that the administration is considering razing tent camps, creating new temporary facilities or refurbishing government facilities as part of Trump’s directive on homelessness. The changes would attempt to give the federal government a larger role in supervising housing and health care for residents.

GOP, the party of small government.

Los Angeles officials were blindsided by news of the sweeping plans being considered by the administration for the city’s homeless population. Some had thought White House officials were arriving this week to simply learn more about the issues.

[...]

“They were very cagey with us about what they were doing,” said a Los Angeles city official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to be candid. “Our only understanding from them coming into this was they wanted to poke around and learn more about what we were doing out here. All this stuff about cracking down and sweeping people out of skid row was a total surprise to us.”

They haven't been paying attention.

Senior administration officials said that forcing people into new facilities was not under consideration, with one official telling The Washington Post: “We’re not rounding people up or anything yet. You guys in the media get too ahead of yourselves.”

Yet.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Concentration camps or ???

An immigration judge recently promoted by the Trump administration allegedly threatened a 2-year-old Guatemalan boy with an attack dog in an attempt to make the kid be quiet in court, according to a report. Mother Jones reports Judge Stuart Couch, who was promoted to the Justice Department’s Board of Immigration Appeals in August, threatened the boy at a hearing in March 2016 in a North Carolina courtroom. Reportedly irritated by the noise the boy was making, Couch is said to have yelled: “I have a very big dog in my office, and if you don’t be quiet, he will come out and bite you! ... Want me to go get the dog? If you don’t stop talking, I will bring the dog out. Do you want him to bite you?” According to the report, the Assistant Chief Immigration Judge, Couch’s superior at the time, wrote to a legal advocacy group following its complaints about the incident in June 2016 to say: “Judge Couch acknowledged he did not handle the situation properly and assured me it will not occur again.”

  Mother Jones

So that's okay then.

Yes, they are concentration camps

Yes, they're concentration camps

The Trump administration on Wednesday said it would unveil a new rule that would allow migrant families to be held indefinitely, ending a procedure known as the Flores Settlement Agreement that requires children to be held no longer than 20 days.

The decision is a momentous change in detainee policy that the administration has sought as a disincentive for people crossing the border.

[...]

The rule will be published in the Federal Register on Friday and will be effective 60 days later — if it is approved by the courts.

However, the process is likely to take significantly longer.

"Obviously, there will be litigation."

  The Hill

Impeach the motherfucker.

Defying a court order, the Trump administration is still separating families at the border

What do you do when you have a lawless executive branch if the executive branch holds the power to enforce (or not) court decisions?

Renato and Patti discuss recent news that the Trump Administration has separated over 900 children from their parents despite a court order prohibiting that practice. They are joined by Lee Gelernt, Deputy Director of the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project, who brought that disturbing fact to light in a court filing.

In this episode of On Topic, you'll also hear what the Trump Administration is doing to deter immigration through inhumane policies and actions, what athey're hoping to hide from the public, and how and why things are the despicable mess they are.  And what you can (and can't) do about it.

Click the graphic above, or here to listen

Yes, they are concentration camps

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.