There’s this whole argument being advanced by the right that a single “activist” judge (according to MAGA, an “activist” judge is a judge who rules in a way they don’t like) should not be able to make rules that affect the entire government. It’s one thing, they say, to make a ruling that affects the people before the court, sure. But a ruling that affects people NOT before the court? Like, a CLASS of people?

For clarity, say, for example, some unknown, mythical government was about to deport several hundred people based on little more than a combination of skin color and tattoos, without due process, making the deportations a crime. ONE of them manages to get before a court (somehow) and insist they’re NOT part of a gang and that they’re here legally.

If you’re MAGA, you’re arguing that only that ONE person should be affected by the judge’s ruling. The judge should be barred from, say, noticing that the entire process is a violation of the Constitution and putting a stop to it, even temporarily. Instead, each individual should have to seek justice themselves, on the same issues, over and over again.

Taking things on a case-by-case basis is a very old con trick. It slows the defense. How many can they deport illegally while each individual seeks their own justice? How many have no access to seek that justice in the first place? How frivolous is it, to have judges ruling, over and over again on the same issues, especially when the “issues” in question are so obviously unconstitutional?

Fortunately, nothing like that happened in the United States of America. Stay tuned to see how the world works in this Bizarro America. But when we followed the Constitution, no single judge COULD issue a nationwide order that stood, all alone. That’s because we have – I’m sorry, I’m still getting used to this, HAD – a review process.

You walk into a lower court and make your case. The judge rules against you. “No, you can NOT simply grab people off the streets and send them to foreign prisons without charge, hearing, or trial.” But you hate brown people. Are you stuck? Nope. You file an appeal with a higher court. That’s usually a three judge panel. You can sometimes request a larger panel, but at least three MORE judges are looking over the lower court’s shoulder to make sure the ruling made sense.

If you STILL can’t be openly racist and deport people based on skin color and tattoos alone, you take your case higher – to the Supreme Court. That goes to one Justice and then, maybe, to the whole panel. One to nine MORE judges looking at the question. So at a minimum, by the time the process is finished, the smallest number of judges to review a question is five. It could go as high as twenty. But rarely is the question settled with just one.

See, I wouldn’t want only one judge to have that kind of power, either. I mean, what if said judge was ideological in nature and ruled based on their love of a certain person rather than the words in the constitution? What if THAT happened? One might end up with decisions that rule the exact opposite of the plain English words in the Constitution.

One might read the words that say it takes an act of Congress to remove the “disability” of a person barred from holding public office if they have, say, engaged in insurrection against the United States of America, and then rule that it takes an act of Congress to engage the disability – the exact opposite of the words on the page! I would HATE that.

That would be insanity! We might well end up with a felonious fraudster in the White House, moving from one grift to the next, fleecing the Federal government as fast as their greedy, tiny little hands can shove money into their already overflowing pockets. That would be a terrible, dark, ugly day for the United States of America and I’m glad that we– Aw, crap…

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Well, we’ve finally gotten a glimpse of 47’s brilliant and very easy but secret plan to end Russia’s war against Ukraine: he intends to say, in a very meaningful and strong way, “Stop it, stop it, STOP IT!” If THAT doesn’t work, well, he’s pretty much out of ideas.

One problem with 47 is that he invariably surrounds himself with ass-kissing yes-men who ALWAYS nod in assent and laugh at ALL of his jokes, and THEN decides that “everybody agrees” with him since he will not put up with dissent. In his mind, “Stop it, stop it, STOP IT!” shouted at people NOT on his payroll should work just as well as when he yells at employees paid to take his garbage.

Donny often reminds me of a spoiled six-year-old, laying on the ground, kicking and screaming, shouting and crying, pounding his fists and his feet on the floor and threatening to hold his breath until he turns blue…

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Recently, I mentioned that the government was offering $1,000 dollar “Trump Accounts” to women if they would have a baby. I haven’t seen the fine print, yet, but I’m guessing they mean a white baby. They call that an “incentive.” Ever since I learned that, I’ve been thinking, “That amount will ALMOST pay for one month of day care!” After that? The kid is, entirely, on you. Wow, what a great incentive…

Americans need to engage in a game of “It’s Only Stupid IF…” Hell, the whole world is allowed to play – encouraged even. “It’s Only Stupid IF…” is a game I made up intended to help rational, decent people make some sense of the USA today. No, not the newspaper, the country. It’s easy to play, too. All one does is start a sentence with “It’s only stupid IF…” and finish the sentence with what ethical and honorable people might do.

Here’s an example: on the left, it’s a great laugh line just to mention any or all of the failed businesses 47 has started and destroyed. “He’s so stupid,” they say, “he even bankrupted a casino! A-ha, ha, ha! Oh, isn’t he dumb?” But then you play the game, see? “It’s Only Stupid IF…” he intended to create going concerns in the first place.

But if his goal was to create – and destroy – “bust-outs,” then, really, Donny’s various business ventures, casino included, represent a master class. He forms a corporation and uses it to start a business on borrowed money. He builds it out on empty promises to pay craftsmen later. He hires employees (human beings) to work the business, paying them with that borrowed money, then he fleeces every cent out of that business. Every dollar that comes in flows directly into his own pocket. Eventually, inevitably, the business fails and the corporation files for bankruptcy protection.

The lender loses. The craftsmen lose. The employees lose. The municipality he ran his scam in loses. But HE, personally, pockets lots and lots of lucre! The reason ethical people have difficulty seeing that is because such a scheme is profitable to one or two people and damaging to hundreds, maybe thousands, of others. Every. Single. Time. Profitable for him, harmful to everyone else. But if one doesn’t CARE that they’re harming people… It’s easy money.

He recently started a crypto currency business. Crypto is, essentially, pseudo-money. It has nothing behind it, not even debt. It has value because people agree it has value but the moment that agreement changes, so does the value. Jumping in to such a venture seems stupid. But, “It’s Only Stupid IF…” he intends to make money from the crypto. But he doesn’t. He’s “mining the miners,” as the saying goes. HE makes money from the fees and charges that come from facilitating the hopes and dreams of people who DO intend to make money off the currency itself. 47 doesn’t CARE if his coin makes money or loses money. HE makes money either way.

Let’s think about his on again, off again tariffs. THAT game hurts millions, not just a measly few thousand. Demanding, rescinding, insisting upon, then removing tariffs SEEMS like incredibly stupid economic management, and I mean world-class stupid. He’s destabilizing the world economy, destroying the American dollar, and voluntarily surrendering American hegemony. He’s only been in office a short time, and the US has seen her credit rating downgraded as a direct result of his actions. Not Biden’s. Not Obama’s. Not even Hillary’s. HIS.

But “It’s Only Stupid IF…” he intends the US to have a strong, vibrant economy that works well for as many as possible. You know, like the one Biden left him. If your actual goal is to turn ALL OF AMERICA into one, giant “bust-out,” OMG is doing a good job. Think about it, if you wanted to devastate the financial power of a once-great nation, if that was your goal, what would you do that Donny isn’t doing? He’s covered all the bases, right?

Another round? Okay. He lies as easily as drinking water. No, that’s wrong. He sometimes has difficulty drinking water. The thing is, he’ll look right into a camera that he KNOWS is recording and promise that, say, tariffs will never raise prices on the end consumer. Sometimes as short as a day later, he’ll look into those STILL RECORDING cameras and tell the same people that of course their prices are going to go up because of his tariffs. See, to me, that seems stupid. Does he not realize that someone, somewhere, will show those two clips side by side, proving he’s lying?

But, of course, “It’s Only Stupid IF…” he expects his lies to be a problem, which, for reasons I can’t grasp, they never, ever are. MOST of the time, when he’s talking, he’s not talking to the world. He’s not even talking to Americans. He’s talking to MAGA. He’s feeding soundbites into MAGA media that the complicit broadcasters can play on a loop, all day, every day. Americans know Donny is lying. Hell, the whole world knows Donny is lying. But MAGA does NOT know Donny is lying.

During the campaign, Donny promised he would release the Epstein files so the world can finally see the details of Epstein’s human trafficking crimes. The whole world knows there are names of some very wealthy, very powerful people associated with Epstein’s crimes. We just don’t know exactly whose names we might find on such a list. So the regime is pretending they just can’t seem to get the files together. Those particular files seem to be constantly “under review.” It seems to be little more than stupid incompetence.

Once again, though, “It’s Only Stupid IF…” you DON’T know that the three most prominent names that would likely show in that record are of the very dear friends, ‘Jeffery Epstein,’ ‘Ghislaine Maxwell,’ and ‘Donald Trump.’ But Donny DOES know whose name shows up as much as Epstein and Maxwell and he doesn’t DARE release the details. Sure, he can promise, but he can NEVER follow through. He’s concerned about what MAGA might think if they thought he was knowingly having sex with underage women.

To my mind, this one gets a rare “double stupid.” See, “It’s Only Stupid IF…” MAGA might react badly to the statutory rapes, but they won’t. MAGA will overlook the criminal sex the same way they disregard any – ALL – of his other moral failings. 47 just seems too stupid to realize that. So it’s a pretended stupid, disguised and confounded by an actual stupid.

So there you go, the rules of the game. Now you can play along on your own time and it applies to everything, all the time. EVERY time you hear about some new, apparently “stupid” thing he’s done, play the game. “It’s Only Stupid IF…” then fill in what a decent, moral, honorable person would do. Donny NEVER does what a decent, moral, honorable person might do, so the game helps to clarify his true intent, even as he tells whatever lie is needed to facilitate the current grift at hand. And, sadly, “It’s Only Stupid IF…” it doesn’t work…

The LAST time the low-information, conservative, anti-American crowd came together and started forcing their low-information, conservative, anti-America views on everybody, the battle that ensued was between the Blue and the Grey. THIS time, it looks like it’s going to be the Blue vs the Red. It seems the good guys always get blue. I like that. Blue is my favorite color…

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I suspect 47 thinks he’s being tough when he receives a visit from some other country’s leader, and then attacks them publicly over some pretended “issue.” I guess it plays well in MAGA media. For reasons I can only pretend not to understand, he only seems to do it to darker skinned world leaders, too. The thing is, so far anyway, he attacks dark-skinned foreign dignitaries with false information. That kind of makes him look dumb… everywhere – except MAGA media, of course.

He did it with Zelenskyy when Team Evil was all butthurt that Ukraine hadn’t said “thank you” enough. Now he’s done it with the President of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa. 47 claimed, falsely, that white farmers are being attacked and killed in South Africa. MAGA loves stories about dark-skinned people killing white farmers. Do you remember when they were telling that exact same story about farmers that lived along the Mexican border here in the US?

They had LOTS of fun with that one – until some wet blanket reporter investigated the charges and proved they were nothing more than a fun story for racists. Farmers were NOT getting their heads chopped off by illegals along the Mexican border. So, you won’t be surprised to learn that white farmers are NOT suffering crime at a much higher rate than other citizens of South Africa. It’s just a fun story for racists.

So, of course, 47 is all in on it. He’s SO sure it’s true, he even went so far as to show a photograph of women in the Democratic Republic of Congo being buried after being murdered. He didn’t SAY it was a photo from the Democratic Republic of Congo and, in fairness to him, he likely didn’t know or care that it was a photo from the Democratic Republic of Congo. He believed it for the moment because it fit his story for the moment so he showed it for a moment so he could get his moment in MAGA media.

But if your story depends on showing actual atrocities from the Democratic Republic of Congo and pretending their imagined atrocities in South Africa, your story doesn’t deserve to be told. But maybe someone could check on the women from the Democratic Republic of Congo? Oh, yeah, the US isn’t in the good guy business anymore…

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The left-leaning media is characterizing the discussions among Team Evil as to exactly how much damage they should inflict on defenseless individuals as some kind of ‘Freedom Caucus Revolt.’ Ooh, how did MAGA Mike handle THAT? (He told them to STFU and vote as instructed – and they did.)

Was there EVER any question in your minds that the GOP would fall in line and do as they’re told? Not in mine. They always do as they’re told. I’m not sure they know HOW to stand up, since their spines simply don’t seem to exist. Sure, they’ll say things in public, but they vote dependably.

Donny is out there, promoting his “Big, Beautiful Bill.” He says it’s a once-in-a-generation opportunity to bolster the US economy. Remember, kids! It’s ALWAYS a safe bet that if 47 says a thing, the opposite is true. It’s almost a fact of life, like sunrise. So when he says the “Big, Beautiful Bill” is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to bolster the US economy, you just KNOW the one thing this behemoth nightmare does NOT do is bolster the US economy.

Experts in economics seem to be in a near panic about the US destabilizing their own economy to such a dangerous extent. Our credit rating is down and investors are flocking to other places with their investment dollars. Instability is a bad, bad thing for most investors and the US is very unstable at the moment. Well, at least it’s current “leader” is. Unstable, I mean.

It DOES strip regulations related to buying a silencer for your gun. I mean, obviously. If you’re trying to stimulate the economy, what better way than eliminating some gun regulations?

It also eliminates all of that pesky oversight from the courts the cons hate so much. It never crosses their minds to simply stop breaking the law. They need to silence the people who keep pointing out that they’re breaking the law. The bit they tossed in? It reads: “No court of the United States may use appropriated funds to enforce a contempt citation for failure to comply with an injunction or restraining order…” Sure, you can make a ruling, but you’re not allowed to enforce that ruling.

It should go without saying that they attacked transgender people a little bit more, too. Remember, the goal is to stimulate the economy – and MAGA finds attacking defenseless people one of the most stimulating activities they’ve ever pursued.

They’re trying to bribe women into having babies. Sure, the economy sucks. You could be on the streets in a moment’s notice. Maybe you can feed your kid, maybe you can’t. Need a doctor? Oh, HELL no! Pay no attention to the fear that an actual shooting war becomes just a little more likely, here, in Bizarro America every day. “Have you a baby. Here, we’ll give ya $1,000 dollars.”

They were GOING to call these little baby-bribes “MAGA Accounts.” Apparently, they wanted a little credit for creating the things, and naming the accounts after their cult seemed like a lovely way to make sure people understood, this was a MAGA thing. Alas, that didn’t satisfy the ego of the Precious enough so at the last minute, the accounts were renamed “Trump Accounts.”

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It’s classic GOP. During the campaign, The Felon started claiming – falsely, of course – that FEMA wasn’t on the ground for a natural disaster in South Carolina. FEMA WAS on the ground, helping as much and as quickly as they could. Donny was just lying, as he does so easily. But, it seems he wasn’t JUST lying. He was foreshadowing.

While FEMA worked just fine under – well, every President not named ‘Trump’ since it’s inception – it’s not working now. It turns out, cutting funding and personnel cripples the agency. Who knew? I mean, everybody but MAGA knew but, ignore that part. Now, even MAGA gets to see what it feels like when “government inefficiency” shifts from being a fun taunt to being a real thing.

Here’s what IS true, and I’m not making this up: it looks very much like natural disasters don’t pick and choose between Red Hats and Americans. We ALL get hit at the same time and at about the same rate. Hurricanes aren’t a surprise to anyone. People even refer to “hurricane season,” suggesting it’s a regular event.

They’re coming, like it or not, and FEMA isn’t ready, at least, according to FEMA. In fact, since I know the regime fires ANYBODY who dares tell any truth, I wonder why the director of FEMA hasn’t been fired as well. They should just drag him out of the– wait, what? Oh, he HAS been fired? Yeah. Perfect. That’s certain to make America great again…

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.