The cruelty is the point

 

Jesus Christ

 

We're being run by 12-year-old Nazis.

UPDATE 03/06/2026:

UPDATE 03/07/2026:

Trump's Gestapo

 

UPDATE 03/06/2026:

UPDATE 04/02/2026:

GoFundMe St. Paul immigrants at risk

 

NOW I'll say it: Abolish ICE

 At this point, it cannot be reformed.  An entirely new system needs to be set up for immigration issues.

How it happens

 Third party countries cannot be controlled by the US. DOJ knows that.

Starve the kids and freeze out the old and poor

 

Evil and cruel

 

They'll probably do it anyway

 

Precisely, Harry.  You've answered your own question.

In case you missed it, this is a dig at Kavanaugh for saying it's okay for ICE to snatch people up and hold them without warrants because they get released relatively quickly - or "promptly" in Kavanaugh's terms - after a "typically brief" encounter: now derisively called "Kavanaugh Stops".  

Cruelty is the point

Don't fucking comply!  Sue!

UPDATE 05:30 pm:

 

GOP: Party of deplorables

 

Preach, Rosa

 And they could find the money for bombing boats in the Caribbean if they wanted.

 

Trump's war on hunger the hungry

SNAP is the current iteration of the Food Stamp program, which first came into being during the Great Depression, was made permanent in 1964, and went nationwide in 1974. Almost ever since, it’s faced attacks—and not just from Republicans. In 1996, neoliberal Bill Clinton announced the “end of welfare as we know it”—which just meant inflicting harsh new work requirements on people in need of government assistance, including food stamps—as he triangulated away the Democratic Party’s soul. Making hungry people performatively dance for their supper is apparently a bipartisan fascination.

[...]

Trump’s changes to the SNAP program are nasty and myriad (yep, he’s cutting off refugees)—but I want to focus on the even stricter “work requirements” he and the well-fed dauphins who run Congress put in place. Among other petty cruelties, veterans, people who are homeless, and young adults transitioning out of foster care are now required to work in exchange for their meager food-stamp allowance. So are older people, younger people with older kids, and more.

[...]

It’s hard to overstate how harmful this is. Over 42 million people receive some form of SNAP assistance. Those living in states that previously had waivers account for 36.5 million of those recipients. All those people could now be at risk of losing their benefits. The (Republican-controlled) Congressional Budget Office estimates that at least 4 million people will lose all or part of their SNAP benefits once the changes go into effect, but we will never know the true numbers, because the Trump administration canceled the annual reporting on food insecurity that we use to track the numbers of people who need assistance.

Whatever the real number is, it’s unconscionable. Many of those people are already about to face the toughest part of their year—winter—and now, suddenly, they will not know where their next meal is coming from.

[...]

Thanks to our long, bipartisan, embarrassing history of cruelty toward the needy, we know one thing about work requirements: They don’t work. First of all, most working-age people on SNAP already work. This is a simple fact that consistently gets lost or ignored every time this issue comes up. Most of the adults work, but they work unstable or part-time or simply poorly paid jobs that cannot cover their food needs.

All work requirements do is increase the paperwork necessary to get the benefit, and that means fewer people will be able to access the assistance they need even though they meet the work requirements. It’s not like people on SNAP are likely to have access to a personal assistant or a stay-at-home spouse or a lawyer or a CPA or anybody at all who is able to help them navigate through all the red tape. And it’s not like they have a lot of extra time on their hands, during business hours, to sit on the phone or show up to the government office because, you know, they’re working.

[...]

Moreover, focusing on the adult working requirements misses the fact that nearly two-thirds of the people who get food through SNAP are children.

[...]

But I also feel compelled to defend what Alfie P. Doolittle would call the “undeserving” poor. Regardless of what you think about any individual person, food assistance should not be predicated on meeting your personal definition of deserving. People shouldn’t have to perform feats of social worth to get food; in our incredibly wealthy society, people should just get food.

[...]

Of course, this country’s war against the poor does not stop at food stamps. In addition to cutting Medicaid and CHIP, the Trump administration is also covertly cutting Social Security Disability Benefits. Over 8 million people receive Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) checks. SSDI assistance is available to people with disabilities, regardless of age, but Trump is trying to change the eligibility requirements so that a person’s age is not taken into account when assessing their ability to find another job. I don’t think I’m being “ageist” to say that telling a 60-year-old grandpa to “learn to code, lmao” is not really a practical idea, but that’s pretty much where we are.

[...]

SNAP and SSDI make up part of the safety net for the whole economy in times of recession. When people who are out of work can still buy necessities, like groceries, it props up the businesses who sell those goods, even in times when consumer spending is at a premium. Public benefit programs create a floor that keeps local economies going when whatever bubble we happen to be in at the time bursts.

What’s maddening is that neither Trump, MAGA, mainline Republicans, or some Democrats actually want to do what is necessary so that people don’t have to turn to food assistance. They don’t want to address the underlying, structural factors. They don’t want to address food deserts. They don’t want to provide free childcare. They don’t want to raise wages so that people who have jobs can afford food. They just want to kick people and their children off of welfare, and lie in order to blame the hungry for their suffering. Hunger is a solvable problem. It’s a political problem, not a scarcity problem.

[...]

We have facts and figures proving that work requirements result in people who are working being denied the food assistance they need. Yet there are still people in both parties who think they are a good idea.

  The Nation

In case you wonder where those proving data come from, Georgia and Arkansas tried work requirements for Medicaid and found out they don't work. Doesn't mean they aren't still trying. The cruelty is a GOP bonus in any program.

PS. The government is still shut down.  Republicans in Congress are still not going to work.  Maybe they should have some work requirements.

UPDATE 10/28/2025:  Trump administration has announced SNAP benefits will be cut off November 1.  Because they're hoping people will believe them when they say it's the Democrats' fault people will go hungry.  Or that they can force the Democrats to vote for their cruel budget. Despicable beyond belief.  

The agriculture bait and switch

The Department of Labor’s new rule cutting farmworker wages bluntly states that souped-up immigration enforcement has devastated the agricultural workforce and created a significant “risk of supply shock-induced food shortages,” according to a document filed in the Federal Register last week. The document also indicates that American workers are simply not interested in and do not have the skills to perform agricultural jobs, at odds with Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins’s claim that the farm workforce will soon be 100 percent American.

“The near total cessation of the inflow of illegal aliens combined with the lack of an available legal workforce, results in significant disruptions to production costs and threatening the stability of domestic food production and prices for U.S consumers,” the document says, adding that “this threat will grow” given new federal funding for immigration enforcement under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

The rule seeks to bring in guest workers through the H-2A program at lower wages, potentially reducing wages across the spectrum for all farmworkers, regardless of legal status. But in order to do so quickly, Trump’s Department of Labor is surprisingly citing the downside risks of its own president’s mass deportation program, arguing that it is causing “immediate dangers to the American food supply.”

  Prospect

Does Trump know they're saying that?

Only one of two things can be true: Either Trump’s Labor Department actually believes that Trump’s immigration enforcement is destroying the agricultural sector and threatening food security, or they are pretending this threat is real in order to crush wages for both foreign and domestic agricultural workers. Neither look particularly good.

[...]

In some states like California, Washington, New York, and Arizona, the resulting wages for H-2A workers will be well below state minimum wages.

[...]

THE RULE IN QUESTION CONCERNS WHAT IS KNOWN as the Adverse Effect Wage Rate (AEWR), which is set for H-2A agricultural workers. H-2A gives one-year visas to foreign nationals to work in agriculture. They must work for the grower who sponsors the visa, and they lack basic worker protections that domestic workers have, like the ability to get overtime pay. The program has been called a form of slavery by critics in the past.

H-2A, which was established in the 1980s, has evolved from an occasional program to fill gaps in the workforce to one increasingly relied on by employers. [...] There is no cap on the program, so agribusiness can bring in an unlimited number of foreign workers.

Because H-2A workers don’t have bargaining rights, federal guidelines effectively set their wages.

[...]

In addition, the new rule allows farm employers to charge H-2A workers for their housing, which was not allowed before.

Sounds very on brand for Trump and today's GOP.

[T]he Labor Department definitively rejects the idea of Americans replacing the missing workers. “The Department does not believe American workers currently unemployed or marginally employed will make themselves readily available in sufficient numbers to replace large numbers of aliens,” the filing states, adding that agricultural work involves “a distinct set of skills and is among the most physically demanding and hazardous occupations in the U.S. labor market.”

[...]

The Labor Department even claims that broadly advertising agricultural jobs, which is required under the H2-A rules, has not led to a boost in applications from U.S. workers. This is a bit of a fiction; workers who apply often do not receive jobs, and nobody is really checking to see if applications are coming in. “The system isn’t set up to prove that there’s a labor shortage of U.S. workers,” said Costa, of EPI.

In the end, the Labor Department concludes, the only way to protect agricultural employers from disaster and consumers from rising prices and food shortages is to slash wages in the H-2A program to make it more viable to bring in workers. This is an odd response to a workforce crisis, since cutting wages across the sector will likely drive existing workers to look elsewhere for jobs. In fact, farm employers in Florida fear that H-2A foreign workers won’t apply for these jobs anymore because the wages are so low.

[...]

[I]mmigration enforcement is working hand in hand with the H-2A program. Farm employers do not fear losing their immigrant workforce because they can import them, now at lower wages, from abroad. Farmworkers trying to organize have said they’ve been told explicitly that they will be replaced with H-2A workers, in fact.

[...]

That’s certainly not the way MAGA sells immigration enforcement. For years they have said that Americans should benefit from open jobs in the United States. But instead, their favorite administration is enabling the mass importation of exploitable workers, and blaming their own immigration enforcement actions for giving them no alternative.

Agribusinesses “are very capitalist except when it comes to hiring and paying workers, then they become the most left-wing central planners I’ve ever seen,” Costa said. “They want the free market to prevail except when it comes to paying the workers. In that case we need government intervention immediately.”

So despicable. 

The cost of Trump defunding USAID

MAE SOT, Thailand (AP) — Mohammed Taher clutched the lifeless body of his 2-year-old son and wept. Ever since his family’s food rations stopped arriving at their internment camp in Myanmar in April, the father had watched helplessly as his once-vibrant baby boy weakened, suffering from diarrhea and begging for food.

On May 21, exactly two weeks after Taher’s little boy died, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio sat before Congress and declared: “No one has died” because of his government’s decision to gut its foreign aid program. Rubio also insisted: “No children are dying on my watch.”

That, Taher says, “is a lie.”

“I lost my son because of the funding cuts,” he says. “And it is not only me — many more children in other camps have also died helplessly from hunger, malnutrition and no medical treatment.”

Taher’s grief is echoed in families across conflict-ravaged Myanmar, where the United Nations estimates 40% of the population needs humanitarian assistance and which once counted the U.S. as its largest humanitarian donor. Now, in Asia, it has become the epicenter of the suffering unleashed upon the world’s most vulnerable by President Donald Trump’s dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development.

[...]

A study published in The Lancet journal in June said the U.S. funding cuts could result in more than 14 million deaths, including more than 4.5 million children under age 5, by 2030.

  AP

Lawsuit against ICE

 

SCOTUS told them that's okay.

There is no bottom to ICE evil

 

UPDATE 02:29 pm:

It isn't happening if they don't write it down

 

Unnecessary to carry out the work of the Department?  Just what then IS the work of the Department? 

 Yes, and there's going to be a devastating four year gap in necessary data collection for research and development.

UPDATE 09/22/2025:

More

Trump, in a nutshell

Cruelty is intoxicating. Cruelty is contagious. Cruelty is empowering. This is the algebra of our politics now.

Donald Trump is the font of it all. A broken man, one of the strangest men in history. That fraying helmet of hair perched atop a fat, crinkled face that glows with peachy phosphorescence. A hulking bloat, draped in oversize suits or stuffed in tits-high pants and sagging acres of polo shirt. A man insanely insecure, so desperately in need of affirmation that everything he says contains, explicitly or implicitly, a wild boast and a relentless demand that he be praised to the skies by everyone around him at that moment. Anyone else, anyone normal, would be embarrassed to be Donald Trump.

But Trump has no shame. That is his secret power. He is, literally, shameless. So he can parade his vivid inadequacies—his ignorance, his vanity, his physical grossness, his overall gaucheness—before the world, shielded by this power of shamelessness. But there are times he needs more, and so he protects himself from the mortal threat that someone might stand up to him and compel him to recognize his own absurdity with an armor of cruelty. He is cruel. He must be cruel, must lash out, must smash, must humiliate and dominate any person who dares to notice how ridiculous he is, how wrong, how unlawful, how ignorant. That has probably happened a lot in Donald Trump’s life, and it has made him a master of cruelty.

  Terry Moran

And there are too many minions who are drunk on cruelty.

America was ripe for a populist revolt, as the 2016 campaign of Bernie Sanders showed. But Sanders is an eminently decent man. He lacked the elixir of hatreds, the cup of cruelty that Trump offers to all who follow him. This is the key to Trump’s demagoguery: He gives people permission to be the worst version of themselves.

[...]

The culture of cruelty is now the center of power in our country. The ideal of American solidarity, that way of life that recognizes we are all bound together in this nation, all brothers and sisters living in one shared national community, working out our differences under law through democratic debates—that’s a joke in Trump’s America. MAGA doesn’t even pay lip service to it. [...] The only community that truly matters is MAGA. MAGA is America and America is MAGA. You’re in or you’re out. And once you are in, you are complicit, because MAGA is built and bound together by the endorsement of, and the participation in, this culture of cruelty. There can be no dissent. Dissent of any kind is dangerous, because it exposes the truth: That the ecstasy of being cruel is a sickness, not a triumph.

Cruelty and fear.  America is failing.   

The first duty we have to our beloved country in this moment is to refuse fear, refuse their lies, and live in truth.

 

Brave and commendable.  Of course, she's now on their list and will be harrassed and targeted.  I hope she has a clean police record and her taxes are all paid up.

This is the point

 It was never about violent criminals.