I CAN say I’m disappointed. I can NOT say I’m surprised. An angry person gunned down two Israeli Embassy staff in Washington, D.C. He yelled something about freeing Palestine during the event. I suppose it’s inevitable that Netanyahu’s actions are inspiring fury outside of Gaza, but I seriously doubt these two embassy workers in DC – a research assistant and a travel planner – had anything to do with the decision-makers engaged in the genocidal efforts in Gaza. The shooter took his fight to the wrong people.

Adding even MORE innocent people to the long, long list of dead innocents doesn’t help at all. It won’t change a thing, or worse, could be used as an excuse to escalate in Gaza. Netanyahu is the problem. It might even take violence to stop him. But shooting the first two random Jews you see because you can’t reach Netanyahu is just plain stupid and very disappointing…

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Speaking of disappointments? Donald Trump…

He has officially accepted his Qatari bribe. Now he needs the American taxpayers to spiff up his white elephant plane to bring it up to the standard of Air Force One. That’s FOUR planes dedicated to 47’s use. FOUR! He has his own, the old one, emblazoned (naturally) with his horrific name. He has TWO Air Force One planes. Now he has this bribe plane that costs too much to fly and needs to find special runways to land and take off.

Meanwhile, you get two dolls, not three, and they’re going to cost more. The rich are getting richer while the workers, the people who made them rich in the first place, don’t even get enough. I wonder what excuse MAGA has been conditioned to pitch into the conversation that defends the massive wealth transfer they’ve helped to engineer…

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This is NOT some “libtard” complaint. This information comes from the notoriously right-wing Cato Institute. Cato was formed specifically to inject fraudulent material into the information sphere, disinformation intended to benefit the far right and their objective of dismantling the United States. When they announce something against that goal, it’s likely true.

Cato analyzed 90 cases, where information could be found, of the men kidnapped and sent to El Salvador during the regime’s “bad guys who aren’t really bad guys” purge. Of the 90, Cato was able to show that as many as 50 of them came into the country legally. According to Cato’s report, “Dozens of legal immigrants were stripped of their status and imprisoned in El Salvador.”

We’re supposed to believe that all of the victims of the regime’s incompetence were gang members, but too many of them have been shown to NOT be affiliated with gangs to have that story hold up – even IF MAGA shouts loudly that they ARE TOO gang members. They’re still not.

The fallback story is that they had tattoos. Well, yeah. Tattoos are popular these days. LOTS of people have them. People get tattoos of, well, everything, really. Of ALL the tattoos that ALL the people get, the vast majority of them have nothing to do with gang affiliation.

That leaves brown skin and racism. The idea that those men were “disappeared” because they have brown skin is supported by the invitation to a bunch of white South Africans brought in to the country under false pretenses and without red tape because they’re white. We were told they’re the victims of crime but that story has already been thoroughly debunked, too.

This is the reason the men sent to El Salvador should have received due process, as guaranteed in the Constitution. It looks very much like, had they received the due process they were supposed to receive, they would have been able to clear their names against false assertions. Donny wouldn’t have had his great big photo op of shipping them out in manacles. It would have really hurt the MAGA story. But it would have been good for the men in question, the Constitution, and the United States of America, in general. I guess MAGA opposes those things…

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This was written by Sidney Blumenthal in an article called, ‘Trump can complain all he wants – but he can’t stop his own economic mess.’ It made me laugh – mostly because it’s true. “Trump’s learning curve is a hamster’s wheel. He goes ’round and ’round, repeating belligerent ignorance unaltered over decades. He’s the hamster who thinks he’s making progress if he receives attention.” I just thought I’d share, in case you missed it…

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Two things I’ve noticed. One, despite the characterization of “lazy” undocumented people coming here and taking handouts, ICE keeps raiding workplaces to find them. Two, for reasons still unclear (unless you think about them at all) when undocumented people ARE found at those workplaces, the undocumented people are taken into custody – but not the managers and owners who hired them illegally in the first place…

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Dear MAGA, if your partner tells you, quite honestly and believably, sincere-sounding to the bone, that they would NEVER hurt you, while they’re stabbing you repeatedly, you should pay more attention to the stabbing than the words. The stabbing is more important. The stabbing is where you’ll get your best information.

I know you’ve been conditioned to believe that Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act was a bad thing but it created jobs, jobs, jobs – and it did so mostly in red states. So when the cons reverse the “green new scam,” conservatives will be losing jobs at a higher rate than others. THAT’S the stabbing, what they’re actually doing. Ignore the words. Pay attention to the stabbing…

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“It’s just too damned big to read. Nobody knows what’s in it!” Remember that? I do…

The cons passed their “Big, Beautiful Bill” out of the House. Now it has to go to the Senate. Of course, it’s a huge bill so, to summarize, it does harm to the lowest income people and benefits the highest income people. Sure, it has a couple of provisions to benefit lower income workers. The cons usually put those things in to give MAGA something to use to defend their indefensible actions. But those pieces ALSO usually sunset at some point, while the tax breaks for billionaires and corporations just go on and on and on.

It adds $3.8 trillion dollars to the national debt. The so-called fiscal conservatives have now added the largest single increase to the national debt in history. They follow themselves during 47’s LAST maladministration where they set the first record. In fact, each record increase not associated with war, comes from Republicans – who spend much of their free time whining about the national debt.

Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, one of the two Republicans to vote against the bill, said of the bloated thing, “We’re not rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic tonight. We’re putting coal in the boiler and setting a course for the iceberg.”

Tens of millions of people are going to lose much-needed assistance. I’ve got to add, it seems odd that in the so-called richest country on Earth, so many millions of people should NEED assistance just to get by. But they do, and they’re going to lose it. That will happen across the board – everywhere – but it’s going to hit hardest in taker states, states that take more from the Federal government than they contribute. Mostly, those are red states.