But they weren’t when posting things like “Let’s Go Brandon” during Biden’s Presidency? Or engaging in actual insurrection on Jan 6? Fucking hypocrites.
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“L’etat, c’est moi”
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I really hate the term “rubber bullets.” Most are rubber- or plastic-coated steel or ceramic cores. The instructions for use say to fire at the ground in front of the target and let it bounce up into them. What LEOs most often do is aim straight at the target. A chest or head strike directly from one of these rounds can easily be lethal. Using them against the instructions should be treated like murder or attempted murder.
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Somehow, there is the money in the economy to pay millions of people (the 50501, Hands-Up, and upcoming No Kings protests) to get tear-gassed and shot with steel-core rounds, but not to pay them a living wage?
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Surely it’s easy enough to source Soros checks?
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A day in which no one died even. Although I heard a saintly patriot virgin was turned to stone when she glimpsed Hunter Biden’s cockatrice.
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June 9, 2025 (Monday)
At 10:19 last night, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller posted on social media: “Stand with ICE. Pass the B[ig] B[eautiful] B[ill].”
And there it is. The Republicans’ “One Big, Beautiful Bill” is the MAGA regime’s attempt to replace the American government we’ve had since the 1930s with one that reflects the antidemocratic values of Project 2025. The measure is unpopular. According to a new CBS News/YouGov poll, 60% of Americans think the bill will help wealthy people, while 54% think it will hurt poor people. Forty-seven percent think it will hurt the middle class, while only 31% think it will help the middle class. As Simon Rosenberg of Hopium Chronicles noted, it’s “[s]tunning how badly Trump and the Rs have lost the debate on what their reconciliation bill will do.”
The measure changes the nature of the American government by extending tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations and adding significantly more money to immigration enforcement and defense spending. According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the measure will add as much as $2.4 trillion to the deficit over ten years; with interest costs of that new debt, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget concluded the measure would increase the debt by nearly $3 trillion.
At the same time that it moves money upward and into the white nationalist project of expelling immigrants, the measure guts federal policies and agencies that serve the American people, apparently with the goal of pushing such policies and agencies to the states. The CBO estimates that as many as 13.7 million Americans will lose healthcare coverage if the measure passes, and cuts of nearly $300 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program will mean cuts of about 30% to the programs on which millions of Americans depend.
Miller’s post underscores the administration’s need to change the conversation around the measure, whose 1,000-plus pages lay out the MAGA vision for the United States. “Don’t kid yourself,” Senator Brian Schatz (D-HI) posted. “[T]hey know they are absolutely getting cooked politically w[ith] their terrible bill and rising prices, and they want to create a violent spectacle to feed their content machine. It’s time for the mainstream media to describe this authoritarian madness accurately.”
Maanvi Singh of The Guardian put the right lens on events in Los Angeles today, noting “Trump’s dramatic escalation” and his vow “to crush opposition to his immigration raids.” Singh identified the administration’s escalation as the trigger for “a roaring backlash.”
Singh noted federal agents carried out arrests in L.A. without judicial warrants and that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has been holding families in the basements of federal buildings, refusing them access to lawyers and family members. Agents in riot gear attacked protesters with tear gas and flash-bang grenades, turning peaceful protests into clashes.
Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance, and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller called the protests an “insurrection,” and last night Trump activated at least 2,000 members of California’s National Guard over the protests of California governor Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass. Just after midnight this morning, Trump posted: “Looking really bad in L.A. BRING IN THE TROOPS!!!”
Administration officials are continuing their emphasis on spectacle and performance to try to bring popular opinion back their way. CNN’s Brian Stelter reported today that television personality Dr. Phil McGraw and his camera crew were embedded with ICE during the raids.
According to Dr. Phil’s right-wing TV channel, he was there “to get a first-hand look at the targeted operations.” He also had “exclusive” access to Tom Homan, the man known as Trump’s “border czar,” and recorded interviews with him before and after the L.A. sweeps.
But that, too, is spectacle. As Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo notes, Homan and Miller are the public face of border enforcement and anti-immigrant policies. But Homan is not part of ICE. He is a White House advisor, working in a civilian capacity. And yet, as Marshall records, he has taken to showing up before the cameras “in either faux military uniforms or, in most cases, civilian garb clearly meant to appear like military-style fatigues along with a ever-changing run of camo or olive drab baseball caps.”
Trump seems happy to let these White House officials take the lead in the immigration performance. On Saturday, Homan threatened to arrest anyone who obstructed immigration enforcement, refusing to exempt L.A. mayor Bass or California governor Gavin Newsom. Newsom responded: “What the hell is this guy? Come after me, arrest me. Let’s just get it over with. Tough guy. You know? I don’t give a damn, but I care about my community. I care about this community. The hell are they doing? These guys need to grow up, they need to stop, and we need to push back, and I’m sorry to be so clear, but—that kind of bloviating is exhausting. So, Tom, arrest me. Let’s go.”
As he arrived back at the White House this morning after spending the weekend at Camp David, Trump told reporters: “I would do it if I were Tom. I think it’s great…. I think it would be a great thing. He’s done a terrible job.” Homan does not have the authority to arrest anyone. Using him to threaten to arrest a governor enables Trump to make the threat while also being able to deny that he made it.
Although members of Congress have legal authority to enter ICE detention facilities to conduct oversight, Jesus Jiménez, Chelsia Rose Marcius, and Nate Schweber of the New York Times reported that over the weekend, five members said officials barred them from doing so. New York Democratic representatives Adriano Espaillat and Nydia Velázquez say they were prevented from checking on the well-being of those detained in New York. In California, Democratic representatives Maxine Waters, Jimmy Gomez, and Norma Torres were turned away from the Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown Los Angeles.
Waters said she was trying to see David Huerta, the popular president of the Service Employees International Union California, who was injured when officers threw him to the ground and arrested him on Friday. Huerta’s arrest has mobilized union workers to protest the immigration sweeps, and today the Department of Justice announced it was charging him with felony conspiracy to impede an officer, which carries a maximum penalty of six years in federal prison. Crowds gathered in Washington, D.C., as well as in L.A. to call for Huerta’s release, and this evening he was released from custody on a $50,000 bond.
In a statement following his arrest, Huerta said: "What happened to me is not about me. This is about something much bigger. This is about how we as a community stand together and resist the injustice that’s happening. Hard-working people, and members of our family and our community, are being treated like criminals. We all collectively have to object to this madness because this is not justice. This is injustice. And we all have to stand on the right side of justice.”
Today Mayor Bass reminded protesters that “LA has a proud history of peaceful protests for immigrants rights.” She called for them to “continue that legacy—don’t fall into the Trump Administration’s trap. Protest peacefully. Looting and vandalism will not be tolerated.” She added: “Trump didn’t inherit a crisis—he created one. To those stoking the fire of lawlessness and chaos alongside him—LA will hold you accountable.” Observers today said the L.A. protests, most of which take place within a five-block radius, are overwhelmingly peaceful, characterized by Tejano music and celebrations of local culture.
This afternoon, a government official told Reuters that it is deploying about 700 Marines to Los Angeles until Wednesday. Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) said: “Here’s what you need to know about what’s going on in Los Angeles. The state and city have the means to control the protests. Donald Trump is getting involved to intentionally make the situation more violent. And potentially to create a pretext for some sort of martial law.”
David Dayen of The American Prospect posted: “The correct way to connect the authoritarian presence in LA and the Big Beautiful Bill is that the bill gives the government the resources to do this in dozens of cities at once. So if you don’t like what’s happening in LA, it’s coming to your town if the bill passes.”
Today, California attorney general Rob Bonta and Governor Newsom sued Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth for their order to federalize the California National Guard without authorization from the governor and against the wishes of local law enforcement, calling it “an inflammatory escalation unsupported by conditions on the ground.” They have asked the court to set aside the order, calling it unlawful.
In addition to being unlawful, it appears the deployment was not terribly well thought through. Matthias Gafni of the San Francisco Chronicle reported tonight that the National Guard troops sent by Trump to Los Angeles received no federal funding for food, water, fuel, equipment, or lodging. Gafni shows a photo of “wildly underprepared” troops sleeping in their clothes on a cement floor. Nonetheless, Trump called another 2,000 California National Guard troops into federal service today “to support ICE.”
Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times looked around at events and wrote: “what i see is a white house whose ambitions outstrip its resources, who did not count on facing mass resistance, and which is scrambling to escalate the situation in hopes that a display of force will make people shut up.”
This evening, Trump posted on social media a photograph of what appeared to be border patrol and ICE agents with the caption: “THE ONE, BIG BEAUTIFUL BILL Boosts Border Patrol and ICE Agents on the Frontlines with the Largest Border Security Investment in History.”
Governor Newsom said: “U.S. Marines serve a valuable purpose for this country—defending democracy. They are not political pawns. The Secretary of Defense is illegally deploying them onto American streets so Trump can have a talking point at his parade this weekend. It’s a blatant abuse of power. We will sue to stop this. The courts and Congress must act. Checks and balances are crumbling. This is a red line—and they’re crossing it. WAKE UP!”
Also tonight, about 400 people turned out in Dallas, Texas, against ICE in solidarity with Los Angeles. At about 9:40 p.m. Dallas police said the protest was an unlawful assembly. At 10:15, officers moved in with pepper spray and smoke to disperse the crowd.
A final note: While the oxygen in the country was taken up by the administration’s escalations, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. today got rid of all 17 of the members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices that advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Kennedy, who has taken a public stand against vaccines, told the Senate in his confirmation hearings that he would not change existing vaccine approval systems. But in an op-ed published today in the Wall Street Journal, he said “a clean sweep is needed to re-establish public confidence in vaccine science.”
Laura Unger and Amanda Seitz of the Associated Press report that Kennedy intends to replace the fired committee members with his own picks.
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Look for Joseph A. Ladapo, MD, PhD, DeSantis’ pick for FL surgeon general, to be on this list. Stella Immanuel, MD, the demon sperm doc, could also show up. I could run through the rogues’ gallery from my days in the vaccine wars that I half expect to turn up here, but I am already in a spiral over this. Holy shit, what a mess. This will take a generation to unravel.
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We need to either completely get rid of “unlawful assembly” laws, which should be plainly unconstitutional, or make it so that it is a criminal offense, with jail time, to declare a peaceful protest an unlawful assembly.
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I’ve seen comments like this before, but do not believe it is true. We have changes in administrations that involve shifting of thousands of positions on a regular basis. We’ve had plenty of examples where governments make something a priority and get the job done in shorter periods of time. While we do have some brain drain going on in science and health, it does not have to be a long-term crisis. Yes, we to take control back from the fascists who want to dismantle our public institutions. We also need to make it a lasting period of control to restore confidence among federal employees, the public, and our partners / allies in other countries. We also need to hand out serious consequences to those responsible for the current mess, and strengthen laws and policies to make it impossible for a repeat of the tactics being used now to ever be used again.
We have the ability, and it will take some effort. That’s why we need to be persistent in pushing for lasting change. Believe it - we can achieve it.
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Well…no. We just need to make sure those laws are actually enforced correctly, which is against groups gathering for the purposes of committing violence or some actual criminal activity. Like lunch mobs, for example. Or a group gathering for the explicit purpose of storming and robbing a store or multiple stores (I’m not including organic looting that occurs during a riot . . . I mean a group that comes together specifically to do some crime). What’s happening all too often these days is that peaceful protests are being declared unlawful assemblies because they’re creating an inconvenience to people by blocking traffic or causing other victimless/damageless problems.
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I mean, we got people on the moon in 10 years, yeah? That honestly seems like a minor miracle to me.
Indeed.
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I hope you are more right than I am. My worry is that this admin has established gov’t as an unstable and potentially dangerous workplace. The biggest attraction has always been good benefits and stable workplace. The pay has always kinda sucked. This adventure has proven that your stability can be gone in the blink of an eye (or at least an election cycle.) And I don’t think we have ever seen the level of disruption that is currently happening. I’ve spoken with a few folks who got axed in this and their attitude is “I am never going back there, that sucked.” Not saying things won’t change for the better, but it is way easier to destroy a system than to build one.
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The silver lining that I see is that nothing that is going away in the US is necessarily going away in the world. Smart people will send their kids somewhere else and the ongoing effort of better medical interventions and better social safety nets and lifestyle recommendations will continue. All is not lost, just some competitive advantage and privilege in the USA. Some people in this world would say we truly deserve it and who am I to criticize them?
In the US we will no doubt backslide a great deal but it will probably be like women’s health through the 1970s where a generation or two at most will suffer depending on their zip code and their access to various patchwork systems of information depending on how severe the government overreach gets. Because people can only abandon each other so much before the absurdity of constantly being asked to sinks in I guess.
People will want better lives. And the map to get back there won’t have been lost, just our place along the path.
I’ve come to accept I’ve simply been alive during a period of loss, regression, oppression, systemic failure, and utter abandonment of any kind of meaningful morality from religious or political leadership.
But this is just a POV based on my time so far and some people have already lived 90 years and may have seen something like this already. Who knows what else might happen and we all have to force ourselves to imagine that it could be something better.
I’m not good at pep talks…
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It just proves the point that no, we don’t want government run like a business. Once we restore normalcy in government, offer the right incentives / protections, and workers will come back.
Again, this is where I disagree. A generation or two is a long time. What’s different now than in the ‘70s? Recent memory of when things worked / were much better. People (those who voted against and those with voters’ remorse) want recent times back - not more backsliding to even worse times.
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That’s my point though. It seems like it never actually gets used for the intended purpose; only for suppressing peaceful protest, with subsequent justification for violence against protesters.
It wasn’t used on Jan 6th. It wasn’t used the dozens of times here in Portland that right wing militias attacked peaceful protesters. Note that peaceful protesters would apply for and be granted permits or they would be immediately dispersed by police, but not once did the right wing, violent groups get permits and they were never dispersed. Even when they set up a sniper overwatch on the roof of a parking garage, the police did nothing.
So, yeah, if those laws are going to be abused, they need to go away or be overhauled in such a way that there are consequences for abuse of the law.
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Maybe when this is through they can bouy recruitment by offering new or rehired employees a chance to kick Musk in the nuts? I’d be tempted to take that over a corporate bonus…
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Yeah, but the problem is that the same people who could make them go away (the Supreme Court) are the same people allowing them to be used more broadly than they should be. Congress, of course, could always rewrite the laws, but the current Congress sure isn’t going to do that. This is all part of the same problem: we can’t fix any of this shit until the fascists are rooted out of government.
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