Wednesday, July 09, 2025

Disastrous Relief

The last time I heard anyone talking about “states’ rights” was in high school history class. My teachers (yes, two of them; I can’t remember why) insisted the Civil War was not about slavery, but about “states’ rights.”

I’ve known ever since what that phrase means; and I’ve never heard it used any other way, except the one I learned so long ago: states have the rights to treat some people the way they fucking want to. Here, Noem is extending that “right” to the federal government.
Yeah, about that:
Despite Trump officially activating FEMA on Sunday, FEMA has just 86 total staff deployed at this point, according to figures shared with staff Monday evening. That includes a national incident management team, plus regional and headquarter staff. In the past it would normally be in the several hundreds at this point in the disaster recovery process. “We are doing a lot less than normal,” the FEMA staffer said.

Though a formal emergency declaration was announced Sunday, which makes it possible for people to apply for FEMA funding, the teams meant to help victims implement the process have yet to be deployed. Typically in the immediate aftermath of a disaster, FEMA will set up multiple disaster recovery centers to give locals information and educate them about eligibility. But because of the DHS bottleneck, the FEMA staffer says, everything is delayed. “This means people are going to have a hard time getting assistance.”

In an email Monday evening, FEMA staffers finally got word that search and rescue teams were being deployed to Texas. Thus far the search and rescue teams who have been working tirelessly since Friday have been deployed by Texas and neighboring states.
So the flood was July 4; FEMA was activated on the 6th; as of the 7th there were 86 FEMA personnel on the ground, fir a disaster involving 300 dead and missing (no idea now how many homeless), over six counties. Yeah, that’s plenty of help. Sometime today, or tomorrow, or…who knows ?, more rescuers will show up to help…find bodies??At this point, that’s about all that’s left. That and clearing debris:
“We don’t even know where to start,” Smith says, reporting huge piles of branches, refrigerators and furniture where the water flowed deepest, but they’re worried most about their fellow central Texans who didn’t fare as well. “We were driving around at lunchtime,” Smith recalls, “and my husband said, ‘Tragic isn’t a strong enough word.’”
FEMA is supposed to provide funding for debris removal. We’ll see if they do. FEMA is also supposed to be providing providing food and shelter. All I can say about the former is: Thank God for H-E-B.
Regional grocery chain icon H-E-B is famously reluctant to respond to media inquiries about its charitable and disaster relief efforts in the state, preferring to keep the focus on the people who need help and other organizations it’s joined with like the volunteer group Texas Search and Rescue. But its role doesn’t go unnoticed. In fact, it’s widely revered. Affectionately called “Texas’ FEMA,” H-E-B has a long history of stepping up in a big way, and people who have received their help often report their dedicated disaster response trucks arrived before any government assistance, and then were the last to leave.

It’s not just 18-wheelers of food and supplies, either — they also deploy mobile kitchens staffed by its disaster relief and public relations teams, along with other teams and volunteers from around the company, to serve people who are affected, volunteers, officials and first responders alike. It’s always personal, because the chain’s 455 stores cover most of the sizable state (and a little bit of Mexico), but this time, the recent floods have literally hit home. H-E-B’s first store opened in Kerrville in 1905, as just a few shelves in one room of the family home. Some of the people now receiving its help are its own area employees.

“Our H-E-B Family is heartbroken by the enormous devastation and loss caused by the flooding in and around the Kerrville area,” the grocery chain said in a brief Instagram post, “We are grateful to local authorities, first responders, and volunteers for their tireless efforts … Our teams are staying close to the hardest-hit areas, and we will continue to provide needed support as these tragic situations evolve.”

In addition to the meals on the ground, H-E-B has also committed to a $5 million donation for aid and recovery from these floods, and is coordinating donations from the public both at in-store checkstands and online through its Spirit of Giving Fund.
I really don’t expect FEMA to catch up; or Noem to ever understand the scope of the disaster.
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Four Dimensional Chess?

Yesterday all the past:

The president snapped at CNN's Kaitlin Collins on Tuesday when she first asked who had paused the shipments.

"I don't know. Why don't you tell me?" Trump said.

What a difference a day makes:

On Wednesday, he was asked if he had solved the mystery.

"Sir, yesterday you said that you were not sure who ordered the munitions halted to Ukraine," a reporter said. "Have you since been able to figure that out?"

"Well, I haven't thought about it, because we're looking at Ukraine right now and munitions, but I have — no, I have not gotten into it," Trump replied.

"What does it say that such a big decision could be made inside your government without you knowing?" the reporter pressed.

"I would know," Trump insisted despite his earlier claims. "If a decision was made, I will know. I'll be the first to know. In fact, most likely I'd give the order, but I haven't done that yet." 

But, you know, Biden was "insular" in his last days in office.   Trump, on the other hand, is...Trump?

And then there's Trump's new and improved "Madman theory:"

“With Putin, I said ‘If you go into Ukraine, I’m going to bomb the s--- out of Moscow,” Trump told donors. “‘I’m telling you I have no choice,' and then [Putin] goes, like, ‘I don’t believe you.’ But he believed me 10 percent.”

Trump later told donors he gave a similar warning to Chinese president Xi Jinping over a potential invasion of Taiwan, claiming he told the world leader the U.S. would bomb Beijing in response.

“He thought I was crazy,” Trump said, but added that “we never had a problem.” 

Did Trump actually make these threats?  Against two nuclear powers?  Or did he just decide he did?  And are we worried he did?  Or that he thinks he did? Which is worse?

But let's parse Biden's "insularity" some more.  Apparently there's a new book in it.....

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In A Round Room Desperately Seeking The Corner

 Except…

Jeffrey Epstein’s supposed client list is a fiction, dreamed up by conspiracy theorists who want to believe the infamous pedophile was also a world-class blackmail artist, even though the journalists who exposed the case have repeatedly denied that allegation. It’s weird that MAGA is so fixated on this. If such a list existed — and let me reiterate, it does not — there is one person whose name would almost certainly be near the top: Donald J. Trump.
...then MAGA would say: “That’s the fake list.” And why is MAGA so obsessed with this non-existent list?
...[T]he MAGA faithful are furious because they expected Attorney General Pam Bondi to release the "Epstein files." The hope is that the files will finally fulfill the QAnon prophecy of Trump revealing Hillary Clinton and Tom Hanks as blood-drinking Satanists, leading to the mass arrests of Democrats, Hollywood celebrities and anyone else they don't like. The imagined list of who will be exposed as a child-murdering pedophile varies from conspiracy theorist to conspiracy theorist, but the basic faith remains the same: the Justice Department is sitting on files showing that deceased sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein had a "client list" that Trump would soon release, proving their most depraved fantasies true.
But there is no list. As Marcotte points out, Julia Brown won awards for exposing Epstein in the Miami Herald, and Of course, responses at that tweet include people who “know”more than Brown does about Epstein because the internet didn’t change gossip, it just made it more widely available. In fact, my biggest problem with reporting on this announcement (“There is no list”, reported as “The Administration says…”, giving the tacit assumption there must be one.) The “list” really doesn’t exist, but reporters treat that as if it’s, at best, an allegation, and at worst, an obvious lie. Such is “objective journalism.”*

Marcotte thinks Trump is using this issue to distract from other issues, but I don’t think Trump is that strategic. Which makes it worse. I’m convinced Trump and Bondi and Bongino and Patel thought they had the goods: on everybody except Trump. They believed the Q-Anon bullshit.  But when they finally opened Al Capone’s vault, whaddya know? There’s nothing there!
This is their Cosmic Pizza “where the hell’s the cellar?”  moment.

But now who’s gonna believe ‘em? 🤷🏻‍♂️

Marcotte thinks this points to the inevitable demise of the Republic, because who on the intertoobs doesn’t these days? Me, I just want to watch the conspiracy theorists eat their young. That part was always inevitable, and it’s finally here.

🍿🍾


*I have to emphasize this because I’ve seen other journalists mention it in passing on social media. It should, in other words, be common knowledge. They have to explain, because few people seem to know; but most should. But journalists, particularly, are not making it so. Why not, is another mystery.
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Wish In One Hand…

You go first. Set the example.

Farmers already report crops in the fields are not harvested because “Americans” don’t want the work. It’s low pay, long hours, outside in the summer, and it lasts until the harvest is done. That’s the aspect Chavez-DeRemer and the other empty heads don’t grasp. Farm labor is migrant because it’s seasonal. Laborers are itinerant because they go where the crops are, and not too many crops are harvested by hand in the winter and early spring. This is what drew people out of the fields into the factories in the first place: year ‘round, steady work. Where’d the factories go? Capitalism went international and foreign countries had lower labor costs (and fewer labor protections), so American companies had to outsource, or go out of business. Because despite the internet yahoos who declare they’d pay $65 for a 🍑 picked by “real” American hands, nobody else in America will. Or will pick it, either. No one except the people here who don’t have other choices open to them.

The market rules. And now some don’t like the results; for the worst, most racist and xenophobic reasons possible. But we did this to ourselves. We have met the enemy, etc., etc., etc. And yes, this is still Omelas. Those people aren’t better off working as migrant farm workers. Nobody is. But nobody even hums Woody Guthrie’s “Pastures of Plenty,” or “Deportee,” any more. Even fewer know the lyrics.

So who’s surprised?
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“Burdensome Regulations”

 If you want to start assigning blame, start here:

On July 4, the broken remnants of a powerful tropical storm spun off the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico so heavy with moisture that it seemed to stagger under its load. Then, colliding with another soggy system sliding north off the Pacific, the storm wobbled and its clouds tipped, waterboarding south central Texas with an extraordinary 20 inches of rain. In the predawn blackness, the Guadalupe River, which drains from the Hill Country, rose by more than 26 vertical feet in just 45 minutes, jumping its banks and hurtling downstream, killing 109 people, including at least 27 children at a summer camp located inside a federally designated floodway.
Why the hell were children EVER allowed to bed down in a floodplain? Because it had never flooded before? Wrong answer. Why hadn’t the city, or the county, or the state, or the Feds, done anything about that?

Start there.

When Harvey dumped  50” of rain on Houston, some of the worst flooding, and deaths, occurred after the rain stopped. That flooding occurred because the 1930’s flood control project once far beyond the Houston city limits, is now well within it, and surrounded by developed land that in the ‘40’s was prairie. It held water out of the bayou, then drained to it when the flood threat was gone. It is well away from the bayou, so it drained over open prairie. Which prairie is now traversed by I-10 and development from the reservoir to the bayou, with development along the bayou to the Gulf. That bayou drained the rainfall for the entire time of the storm. After the storm, the reservoir gates were opened (lest the reservoir collapse from the record amount of water held), and the water flooded neighborhoods from the reservoir to the Gulf, including streets that were closed for days after.  The worst damage of Harvey was done by that development in the floodplain.

No one has ever really investigated why that happened, or what to do about it, mostly because the cost of clearing that floodplain would be astronomical. The City of Austin bought up houses on Shoal Creek to clear some of the floodplain after the Memorial Day flood in the’80’s. No one proposed that for Houston, in part because some of the most expensive real estate in the city is along the bayou, residential as well as commercial. That real estate was flooded by the release; but there was, and has been, no attempt at mass relocation.

The camps on the Guadalupe don’t have to close; unless they don’t have higher ground to relocate to. Better warnings would be good. Evacuation plans would be good. But given the power, speed, and danger of flash flooding, not being in the flood plain, is the only real security. There are plenty of levels of government who could have foreseen that.

Why they didn’t, and what they do now, are the real governmental issues.
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Time For The Finger Pointing…

 …it is:

Host Katy Tur cited Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick (R-TX), who claimed that the state would fund a flood alert system along the Guadalupe River. Her comments came as news to Herring.

"Your report is the first time I've heard that the state is going to help us have sirens up and down the river," the mayor said. "The truth is, our community, or the county government, looked into that in 2017. And from what I heard, their grand application was denied. So, I wasn't in government at that time, but it sounds like we talk about it, we ask for help, and we were denied before."

Patrick and Gov. Greg Abbott (R) were both in office when that application was submitted in 2017.

Herring said he is a longtime resident of the city and was there when it flooded before, including in the large 1987 flood. He said that he was alerted to the flooding due to a call from the city manager at 5:30 a.m. CDT. The city manager stated that he wasn't informed about the flood alert when the first National Weather Service warning was issued at 1:14 a.m.

Instead, he learned of the flood dangers at approximately 4:45 a.m. At 3 a.m. he said that he was jogging along the river to keep an eye on the situation and at 4 a.m., things all appeared "fine," he said in a Fox4 News interview.
This is disingenuous, at best. Flash floods are caused by heavy rains at one point, rushing downstream to the lower point, in this case the Guadalupe River. What’s “fine” now is calamitous in 30 minutes. You need a better warning system than a jogging city official.
The mayor stated that an investigation would be conducted and that the community would engage in a conversation about what went wrong and the plan to prevent it from happening again.

"I also need to let you know: I checked the weather that night. Yeah, I am positive that the owner of Camp Mystic checked the weather that night. I'm positive the owner of Heart of the Hills Camp for Girls checked the weather that night. That night we had a very slim chance of rain the next day. Yeah, we had no flash flood warnings. It happened so fast," Herring added.
That warning came at 1 in the morning. That’s when conditions for flooding began to be seen. Anything before that would be a “watch.”
A flash flood "warning" means that a flood is likely or already underway. A "watch" means that the conditions are perfect for one to happen.

NBC 5 reviewed the National Weather Service's alerts sent on Thursday. They were warning of "potentially dangerous flooding in Kerr County" approximately 12 hours before the storm hit.

On Sunday, Abbott complained in a press conference that the warning of a "potentially dangerous flood" did not convey the risks.

“The amount of rain that fell in this specific location was never in any of those forecasts,” Abbott said.
This, too, is chickenshit.
Forecasts can't predict the precise amounts of rain that will fall.

The National Weather Service alert sent out at 1:32 a.m., read in part, "IMPACTS...Excessive runoff may result in flooding of rivers, creeks, streams, and other low-lying and flood-prone locations. Creeks and streams may rise out of their banks."
That’s as much warning as I’ve ever seen for imminent flooding. When Hurricane Harvey was coming to Houston, forecasters said it would be a rain event. Nobody could predict the 30”” to 50” of rain that fell.

In Texas parlance, these officials are all desperately proclaiming: “Me no Alamo!”*

(The story goes (and it’s probably more legend than fact), that at the Battle of San Jacinto, where Texas won independence from Mexico, the Texican soldiers ran into battle shouting “Remember the Alamo!” Overwhelmed Mexican soldiers responded “Me no Alamo” as they surrendered.)
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Tuesday, July 08, 2025

Blame Game

The losing teams are the ones who try to point out who is to blame. The championship teams are the ones who say don’t worry about it, we got this
He should have stuck with “Democrats are politicizing this tragedy.” Or just said this is a tragedy and a time for families to grieve. Because this doesn’t make any damned sense at all. WTF is that football analogy? Losing teams always try to figure out why they lost. Winning teams don’t need to.

Over 100 lives were lost in this tragedy. That’s exactly when we ask “What went wrong?”

Abbott said the Lege will be in special session soon, and they can assess what happened and how to prevent it. He should have stopped there. But then he had to make everyone in Texas look like thin-skinned boobs tired of being the subject of negative national attention. He could have said this is a time for the grieving families; and when the legislature meets will be a time for examining facts. But he embarrassed Texas, by behaving like Trump.

The city and county officials taking questions are clearly not used to national scrutiny. Abbott has sought national attention for years. He knows how to behave. He should do better than this.
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BREAKING NEWS!🗞️

Blind hog finds acorn! But only one.
hear me out but maybe the guy who did a nazi salute, pals around with nazis, posts and reposts nazi tweets, and personally redesigns his AI minion to refer to itself as "MechaHitler" is a nazi
The America Party!

And MAGA says the James Gunn Superman is too woke!
Cooperating with the National Social Welfare Assembly is clearly socialism! Gunn shouldn’t have drawn his inspiration from comic books!
The filmmaker explained that, in general, "Superman is the story of America," in the sense that it follows "an immigrant that came from other places and populated the country."

"But for me it is mostly a story that says basic human kindness is a value and is something we have lost," Gunn continued
Yeah, he’s turned Superman into a commie.
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Redux

 


Again, simply change “Biden” to “Trump.” And tell me there’s any difference: from Miller telling Trump in the Oval Office that the Supreme Court ruled for him instead of against him in the Abrego Garcia case (when Garcia was still in El Salvador), to Trump repeatedly insisting:

... that farmers need reliable workers and that ICE would not raid agricultural sites. He suggested the administration was developing a program allowing farmers to effectively sponsor undocumented laborers—only to have multiple senior officials publicly contradict or appear to override his plan, as recently as just hours ago.

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, also on Tuesday, told reporters there will be “no amnesty” for undocumented immigrants working on farms, and, “mass deportations continue.”
To today, when Trump doesn’t know who cancelled the weapons shipments to Ukraine. And doesn’t seem to much care that he doesn’t know.

But Biden’s presidency is dead (metaphorically). Trump’s presidency is still “alive.” It’s unseemly to opine on a living Presidency. I guess. 🤷🏻‍♂️

Trump’s presidency is so insular he believes the racist trash spouted by Miller and the insane economic theories of Navarro, and insists all his Cabinet members praise him slavishly and lavishly, down to Noem making TV commercials to do so. He insists China has no electricity generated by wind, and whales are beaching in New England because of windmills. And no one contradicts him.

But Biden had a “problem.”
Joe Biden wasn’t capable of holding forth about gold leaf moulding so there
George Conway has a (sardonic) point, there.

I’ll retire to Bedlam.
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Dear Jake Tapper

Fact check: true. Is Trump lying? Or is he that stupid? And by the way:
Trump: We want to put defensive weapons because Putin is not treating human beings right. We're sending some defensive weapons to Ukraine. And I have approved it.

Collins: So who put the pause last week?

Trump: I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me?
Who’s in charge around here? And why doesn’t Trump care that it isn’t him?

Or is that not a secret you can write a book about?
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“Seems like a desecration”

Texas Comptroller:
IN 2023, WIND REPRESENTED 28.6 PERCENT OF TEXAS ENERGY GENERATION, SECOND TO NATURAL GAS (41.8 PERCENT).

THERE ARE 239 WIND-RELATED PROJECTS IN TEXAS AND MORE THAN 15,300 WIND TURBINES, THE MOST OF ANY STATE.

TEXAS WIND POWER GENERATION SURPASSED THE STATE'S NUCLEAR GENERATION IN 2014 AND COAL-FIRED GENERATION IN 2020.
Does he just really want to piss off Texas? Is he thinking of Scotland? We’re stupid brilliant. But not smart? Has he lived near a crypto mining operation?  I understand the noise is tremendous. This is where I remind you again of the good old days, when Congress actually legislated and held hearings and passed laws based on facts, and government wasn’t run on the wildly ignorant conjectures of one very stupid man. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a fuck ton better than this.

I mean, it’s perfectly apparent he should be sitting in a room with nothing sharper than a rubber ball to entertain him:
See?
That the Great Depression lasted until 1954 will surprise a lot of people. Um...what? And, the question everyone is asking:
 Since no one will admit the emperor is a naked, gibbering loon, I’ll entertain myself with watching his conspiracy theories consume him:
That is, in fact, the replacement theory: The conspiracy theory can never fail, it can only be failed.
"The Great Leader cannot fail, he can only be failed,” is a corollary to the idea it’s unfair politics to criticize my leader, but not yours.

Even when he’s a complete idiot: Something certainly seems like a desecration.
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The Deplorables

"And tell us, Rep. Jordan: when did you stop beating your wife?” Because I swear, he would answer that one, too. Those of us who remember 1992: 🙄 Or George Wallace in ‘68. (Oddly, the conventional wisdom is that Perot hurt G.H.W., but Wallace didn’t hurt Nixon. Because third parties always hurt someone; except when they don’t. These things that pass for knowledge, I don’t understand.)

Ross Perot made the same claim. And a 3rd party was built around him, not by him. Real grassroots stuff. His vote tally was exceeded only by T.R. in 1912. So people settled for Coke or Pepsi, as they always do. And Perot was popular. Well, compared to Musk. The simple fact is: more than half the country doesn’t want to make a decision.
Our wage slaves should be home grown! And grateful they have a job to give them dignity! We have 34 million Americans who will be glad to become migrant farm workers in exchange for Medicaid! So long as they remain poor enough to qualify. And, you know, don’t move around too much, so we can keep track of them 

Have I mentioned how important Congressional fact finding actually is?
Because all the Mexicans were crowding the streets with their low riders they bought with money they got from Medicaid?

These people are deplorable.
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Heckuva Job, Brownie

 Has Trump flown over the disaster site yet?

The deadly Texas flooding isn’t the first natural disaster of this administration — devastating tornadoes ripped through Arkansas, Oklahoma and Missouri this spring — but it’s the first to gain widespread national attention," Kabas wrote on her Handbasket website. "But according to sources within FEMA, 'barely any staff' have been deployed, and the Acting Administrator David Richardson 'is nowhere to be found.'"

"Per one source, 'if this is how they are going to do a major hurricane response, people are f---ed,'" the journalist added.
But! The price of eggs!
“We would have hundreds of people on scene in FEMA jackets registering people for assistance, regional coordination center fully activated, national at least partly activated,” one current FEMA employee told The Handbasket on the condition of anonymity. “Setting up disaster recovery centers with federal partners, we’d have our search and rescue there already. We would have mission assigned other agencies like USACE (U.S/ Army Corp of Engineers) to clear debris and establish power.”

Trump officially activated FEMA on Sunday, but the agency has so far deployed just 86 total staffers to the area, according to figures shared Monday evening with agency staffers, and sources told Kabas that in the past several hundred aid workers would be on the ground by now.

“We are doing a lot less than normal,” the FEMA staffer said.

Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem sent out a memo last month announcing she would have greater control over FEMA operations going forward, saying she must personally approve every contract or grant over $100,000, and Kabas said staffers indicated to her that the Trump official was failing her first major test.

"In Kerr County where 84 people perished in the floods, 28 were children, most of whom were campers at Camp Mystic," Kabas wrote. "It is every family’s worst nightmare; and now the agency typically tasked with assuaging the pain of a disaster are slow-walking the recovery response."
Did Cos-Play Barbie pick her official governor’s portrait yet?
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ICE Will Be In Kerrville By Friday

 Stephen Miller will insist on it:

AP) – Volunteer firefighters from Acuña, Mexico, are helping rescue and recover teams in Texas after flash floods killed more than 80 people over the Fourth of July holiday weekend and left others still missing.

According to a protective services government agency in Mexico, the Civil Protection Water Rescue Team and Cure Firefighters teamed up with the nonprofit organization Foundation 911 to assist in search efforts in Kerrville, Texas.

The crews arrived Sunday morning and got straight to work.
The thought of brown men searching for little white girls is gonna make his head explode. 🤯 
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Monday, July 07, 2025

The Art Of The Deal

Meanwhile:
"Tesla shares tanking, closing down nearly 7 percent for the day," said Burnett. "That's a massive drop. $12 billion gone from Elon Musk's personal net wealth worth, according to Forbes. And the reason for this is Musk's latest public fight with President Trump. I mean, just imagine juxtaposing me saying this with what we were saying two months ago. Talk about what a weird, warped world we're living in."
Maybe if you quit expecting two pathologically narcissistic super-annuated children to behave like adults, you’d understand better. Or if you stopped to wonder how a company with the highest market cap in the world can’t seem to use it to actually, you know, make money, you might begin to wonder if it isn’t just a con. At least by its CEO. When conspiracy theories go bad. Ya hate to see it. Except when you don’t. I put it to you: they can’t be this unaware of what they are saying. None dare call it racism. For reasons I don’t understand. 🤣🤣🤣 In other news, Hell has still not frozen over.🤣🤣🤣
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Does Anybody In This Administration…

...have any idea how the Fed operates?

And if so, do they dare let on?
Never mind. Question answered. Is that how they explain letting a bunch of ignorant 20-somethings fire people without any reason except “too many people”? In other words, the same approach that ruined Twitter (technology; the Nazis did the rest). She might have a little more moral authority if she wasn’t sitting in a studio 1700 miles away.

Well, no; she’d have as much moral authority as she does now.
Is he talking to himself? Well, he’s certainly not making any sense. A reminder that Trump is the best economics President in history. Bessent said so. And everyone agrees. How did he address the penguins? 🐧  Because they all want to give permanent tax cuts to billionaires? Even the firehouse? Big, strong men with tears in their eyes, pleading: “Please, sir, take more money away from us! For the billionaires!” Poverty is caused by laziness. The cure for poverty is dignity.

Pretty sure this is where I came in.
Or maybe it was there. Distinctly feels like a movie I’ve seen once or twice before, anyway.
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Karoline Leavitt Is A Very Bad Liar

"Thank you for your attention to this matter.” (He really did include that as his closing.) And won’t somebody think of the penguins?! 🐧 

But the real question is: How long will these last? 🌮
Six months? Is that the new “two weeks”?

None of those are trade agreements ratified by Congress. The only historic part is the cowardice of Congress in letting Trump throw international trade relations into the wood chipper. Didn’t they just say no one was calling? Why, yes! Yes, they did. And I recall some MAGA clown responding to that post, that both things could be true. But can all three things now be true? Can we start with Trump, who reflexively said it was Biden’s fault?
This Administration is like a duck. Trying to project calm authority on the surface, while furiously paddling away from responsibility below.  🤥
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Why It’s Called A “Flash Flood”

 You’ll have to follow the link, here. You may need to search for the week: June 30 -July 7.

The river starts at .18 feet on July 2nd. It begins rising after midnight on July 4th, and goes almost straight up to 34 feet shortly thereafter. The gauge doesn’t show it, but that was between 2 and 7 AM. On the graph, the high water mark is well into the “major flood” stage. It drops off almost as quickly, ending at 5 feet (below “action level”) by midnight on the 4th.

Flash floods are terrible, but they don’t tend to last long. It’s the only good thing you can say about them.

And while tout le internet is bandying about the term “flash flood alley” for this portion of the Hill Country, I’ve never heard that term in my life. Like “Tornado Alley,” which my family and family members lived in (live in), it’s a term somebody far from here made up and attached as a label. Tornadoes were/are just part of the landscape, like hurricanes on the Gulf Coast, and earthquakes and mudslides in California. We never thought of ourselves as living in an “alley” of them.

It’s a small thing, but it’s a chickenshit term. You think it’s enlightening, or explanatory, but it’s not. It’s something somebody just made up, to make themselves sound knowledgeable. Chickenshit, as I said.

And here: pictures of the gone world.

Adding: how quickly?

A flash flood watch was issued by the National Weather Service by Thursday afternoon for the region. Then, in the middle of the night, at 1:14 a.m. Friday, a flash food warning was issued as possibly “catastrophic,” for Bandera and Kerr Counties, according to the NWS. Those alerts would have automatically triggered Wireless Emergency Alerts on enabled mobile devices, the weather service said.

But because the alerts went out when most residents and visitors were asleep, coupled with the fact that many of those children attending summer camp as well as their counselors were without cell phones, the alerts likely went unheeded by many.

Residents who were up before daylight on Friday 4 reported rain misting by 3 a.m. but nothing out of the ordinary. That changed quickly by 5 a.m. Friday when flooding was detected on roadways in Kerr County.

The flooding reached its peak at around 6:45 a.m. in Kerrville, hours after warnings were first issued, according to the local flood gauge.
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The Same People Who Told Us Abrego Garcia Is A Gangster

(TBH, I don’t think the list ever existed. The Administration is a victim of its own conspiracy mindset. Which would be fine, if it wasn’t the Administration.)
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Where Angels Fear To Tread

 Ted Cruz is not a pastor:

Why does God allow bad things to happen to young children?" Cruz opined. "I don't know that I have any additional insight other than saying God is a good and loving God, and He will help us through this."

"And all I know to do is to lean on God, to lean on prayer, to lean on family, to lean on friends, and just grieve," he continued. "We have a good and benevolent God, but God allows things to happen sometimes that defy human explanation, and that's where we need love and where we need grace."

"I do think Texas has benefited [from] such a strong community of believers in Texas that you have churches that step in and do the role we should."
He is not a theologian. He is not a grief counselor. He should have demurred on this topic, at best.

I was called upon to do an infant’s funeral once. Another time, I served at one funeral for teenagers who had been killed in a car accident, with their friends. The entire tiny, rural community turned out for that one (the infant’s funeral was later, in Chicago). The grief in the community was so deep the dead children’s peers stood by the open graves until sunset. They had to be asked to leave so the graves could be closed.

The mother of the baby and I were strangers to each other. She had some distant connection to my congregation, called me because she didn’t know who else to call; and asked me why her baby had died.

The people in the rural community had the same question, though they never put it to me.

If I had answered that mother the way Cruz answered that podcaster, she’d have slapped my teeth out. And I would have deserved it. People in grief don’t want answers, even if they think they do. They want support. There are no good answers, either. You don’t “solve” grief. You help people experience it, at best.

And you don’t play cartoon pastor because Daddy was a lay preacher. My grandfather was a lay preacher among the Primitive Baptists. He knew when to be there, rather than rely on words. Politicians usually don’t.  But then, they aren’t grief counselors; or pastors.
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I’m Ready To Welcome Blame On The Trump Administration Now

I can’t even…🤦‍♂️
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I Know, I Know, The Horse Is Dead

This is ignorant bullshit: (They’re back pedaling so fast on FEMA they’re going to get windburn.) But then, so is this: What term in “flash flood” do you fail to grasp, Michigander?

I am heartily sick of people who couldn’t spot the Hill Country on an unmarked map of Texas, suddenly becoming experts in the hydrology, geography, and geology of the region. Can we consider the tragedy of the families first, and leave the assessment of cause to investigation?
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Straining At Gnats

 So, this happened:

Sakeik said she was transferred between three different detention centers, and at various points faced harrowing conditions. During her first transfer, she was on a bus for 16 hours. “We were not given any water or food, and we could smell the driver eating Chick-fil-A,” she said. “We would ask for water, bang on the door for food, and he would just turn up the radio and act like he wasn’t listening to us.”

Sakeik said she did not eat because she was fasting for Ramadan. Eventually, she said: “I broke my fast next to a toilet in the intake room.”

At the Prairieland detention center, Sakeik said there was so much dust that “women are getting sick left and right”.

“The restrooms are also very, very, very much unhygienic. The beds have rust everywhere. They’re not properly maintained. And cockroaches, grasshoppers, spiders, you name it, all over the facility. Girls would get bit.”

Throughout, Sakeik was preoccupied with the worry that she would be deported. Had she been sent to Israel without documents proving her nationality, she worried she would be arrested.

“I was criminalized for being stateless, something that I absolutely have no control over,” she said. “I didn’t choose to be stateless … I had no choice.”

The Department of Homeland Security has claimed Sakeik was flagged because she “chose to fly over international waters and outside the US customs zone and was then flagged by CBP [Customs and Border Protection] trying to re-enter the continental US”.

But the Virgin Islands are a US territory – and no passport is required to visit there.
And, quite separately, this happened:
After she was arrested by ICE in Lenoir City, she ended up at the Richwood Correctional Center in Louisiana, where she experienced the unimaginable. After pleading for medical help for days, she lost her mid-term pregnancy.

“I had him inside here for three days, in this Louisiana facility, my baby dead in my stomach, inside my stomach for three days, dead,” she said.

Monterroso-Lemus’s experience in detention comes amid the Trump administration’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants and the mounting claims of abuse and discrimination tied to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrests across the country. In Nashville, ICE and the Tennessee Highway Patrol officials recently made 588 traffic stops in predominantly Latino neighborhoods as part of a joint operation that led to the arrests of 196 undocumented residents. Despite claims that ICE was only targeting criminals, fewer than half had prior criminal records. As the Banner reported, in the overnight operation between May 3 and 4, THP made more than twice as many traffic stops as Metro Nashville police did during both days combined, fueling allegations of racial profiling.

Questions remain about the identities of those arrested and what conditions they face once detained. On May 14, ICE Acting Director Todd M. Lyons announced that nine detainees have died in custody since Trump took office, reigniting concerns about the quality of medical care in immigration detention centers. The deaths have drawn attention to the treatment of immigrants while in ICE custody, including pregnant women, who, under recent Democratic administrations, had been largely shielded from detention.
With little to no outcry. Meanwhile, outrage continues that Jeffrey Epstein was able to kill himself in prison. People who’ve never known anyone in prison and probably couldn’t find the closest one to them with Google Maps, are sure such a thing is impossible, and Mr. Epstein must have been murdered.
I wrote about Epstein’s suicide and how the disbelief about it shows a lack of familiarity with how inhuman America’s prison’s are. It remains one of the things that made people maddest (not saying jail is bad, disbelieving he was murdered).

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/thirty-two-stories-jeffrey-epstein-prison-death/596029/
Mostly because that’s what they want to believe. This may, or may not, be true as well:
There was never an “Epstein List.”

Every single person who is deeply familiar with the case has always known that.

Attorneys representing Epstein victims told me that.

But here’s the issue: on Fox News earlier this year, Attorney General Pam Bondi said she had the list on her desk to review.
There’s not going to be any nationwide conversation about what those two (among many) women reported about ICE custody. There’s barely a conversation about masked men dragging people off the streets into vans, never to be seen again. That’s the stuff of dystopian nightmares, yet when it happens IRL…

But conspiracy theories about Jeffrey Epstein thrive. He was rich so he must have been able to get away with it until someone finally killed him, at the behest of other rich men.
“But he was a billionaire!”

All they saw was another subhuman inmate in prisoner’s clothes. They didn’t care.

“He had dirt on powerful figures!”

The feds already grabbed everything. If he had a bargaining chip, he would’ve used it. All he had left was life in prison as a convicted child-abuser.

He had nothing to get him out, no-one was coming to his rescue, and all he had to look forward to was either living in solitary 24/7 or getting shanked to death by other inmates.

That he took the quick way out to avoid that makes a helluva lot more sense than some conspiracy to assassinate him.
Sometimes, even money doesn’t matter. But the people in ICE custody? Eh; they aren’t rich, they aren’t scandalous they aren’t associated with the rich and famous. Sure, our government is being cruel, even savage in our name, but these people are virtually anonymous. Who’s ever heard of them? Who cares?

Aye, there’s the rub…
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Seriously

I’m glad there aren’t any serious problems the President needs to be focusing on.
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Sunday, July 06, 2025

“Rest Assured, No One Knew This Kind Of Flood Was Coming.”

“We didn’t know this flood was coming,” Kelly told reporters. “Rest assured, no one knew this kind of flood was coming. We have floods all the time. This is the most dangerous river valley in the United States and we deal with floods on a regular basis. When it rains, we get water. We had no reason to believe that this was going to be anything like what’s happened here. None whatsoever.”
That’s the Kerr County Judge; the highest county office, but no, not a judge of a court of law. And no, he’s not at all ready to respond to this disaster.

Kerr County doesn’t have a warning system for floods or other natural disasters. They do have Facebook.
While the National Weather Service issued flash flood warnings and the city of Kerrville’s Facebook paged warned to “move to higher ground immediately,” the young campers at Camp Mystic likely wouldn’t have seen that since cell phones, smart watches, iPads and anything with Wi-Fi capability were considered “unacceptable electronic devices” to bring and “not allowed,” according to a recent list of instructions sent to parents.
Whether that extends to the camp staff is one question. How any one was supposed to get a flood warning at 4 in the morning is a separate question. Except someone in charge at the camp should have had a weather radio, one that reports NOAA weather alerts. A Facebook page doesn’t, so far as I know, alert your phone.

What else didn’t happen?
This past legislative session, lawmakers filed a bill that would have created a council to operate a grant program assisting local governments with acquiring emergency communications equipment. One of its tasks, if the bill had passed, would have been to develop a statewide strategic plan that included “the use of outdoor warning sirens.” The council would have also been asked to “develop and implement, as advisable, emergency alert systems and incorporate as necessary communication technologies into the emergency communications network of this state.”
I guess we didn’t need that.  Probably for the same reason Kerr County doesn’t have a warning system.
In an interview with the New York Times, Kelly said one reason Kerr County doesn’t have a flood warning system is due to the cost.

“Taxpayers won’t pay for it,” Kelly is quoted as saying.

Asked if residents might reconsider now, he responded: “I don’t know.”
One does wonder: where does the responsibility for this tragedy finally land?
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🐢🐢🐢 All The Way Down

 So:

I have no difficulty saying that Trump and Musk caused some of the 50+ flood deaths in Texas,” Abramson wrote in a widely shared thread on the social platform X.

“And here's why: these two men with no expertise in disaster preparedness were told not to cut the positions they cut, and were told people would die if they did. And then people died," he said.
But:
The Texas floods, which resulted from unprecedented rainfall and infrastructure failures across several counties, are among the deadliest in recent state history. Emergency responders have said many deaths occurred in areas where early warning systems failed or where evacuation routes were unmaintained
Yes, from the same article.

Might I add that, without evacuation routes that went AWAY from where the water was coming (NOAA issued a warning at 1 AM; the county issued one at 4 AM. These are rural roads, not well lit urban streets. People drive into high water in Houston after dark despite street lights. And this water would have been a flash flood. Your first warning might have been when it picked up your vehicle.), early warning systems might not have done much. So: were the routes maintained? And where did they go? Were routes available for this kind of flood? Safe ones? And why not? What is the state responsibility? What is the county responsibility?

There’s a complex series of errors and bad judgment here (like putting the cabins of the youngest campers in the river floodplain), and some just plain misfortune. But everyone is going to decide what happened and who to blame (or praise; some of the press conferences have been rightly criticized for officials congratulating each other for what they are doing NOW. Then? Well, that’s someone else’s fault, someone way down the food chain. Here’s where I point out the Legislature is taking more and more authority over the major (all blue!) cities of Texas. But when shit happens? State officials are quick to blame local authorities. As we will soon see.). Having assessed blame by mid-week (I’m being generous; Monday will be the deadline) , they’ll move on, leaving the dead to mourn and bury the dead.

And what really needs to be learned, will be forgotten about again.

IDEAS DON’T MATTER. THINGS DON’T MATTER. 

PEOPLE MATTER.

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The Best President On The Economy, Ever—SOT Bessent

Really?
Trump: They're going to be tariffs. The tariffs are going to be the tariffs. I think we'll have most countries done by July 9th. Yeah. Either a letter or a deal.

Lutnick: But they go into effect August 1st
No paper towels will be thrown. 😿 I don’t blame NOAA (for one thing they have no authority to order evacuations), and I don’t think that’s what happened AT ALL!
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Why State Officials Were Quick To Blame NOAA

 Because Kerrville officials wish they had, too:

On Sunday, officials in Kerrville offered scant details about the flooding that left more than 50 people dead. Rice said he was ending the press conference after the second question.

"One of the questions that still hasn't been answered three days into this is despite TEM's warning on July 2nd and July 3rd that something like this could have happened, that the threat existed, why that information didn't get down at the camps and why they weren't evacuated," a reporter asked after Rice signaled it would be the final question.

"We want to make sure that we continue to focus — we still have 11 missing children that we want to get reunited with their families," the city manager replied. "Until we can get reunited with our families, we are not going to stop until we do."

"So, thank you," he added as he quickly turned to exit the room.

"Sir, was any emergency alert given out on the 4th that morning of?" the reporter shouted. "Did anyone get an alert?"

"Sir, there are families who deserve better than that!" he exclaimed.
Yes, yes they do. From so many people.
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Trump Is A Fantasist

There are no “deals.” There never were. Not in the enforceable sense of “ratified by Congress.

Leavitt is a liar. Bessent sucks Trump off in public so he can be the next Fed Chair.

Trump is playing with his toys.🧸 Letters? Are you fucking kidding me?!? 

Why nobody admits the Emperor is naked and stark raving mad, is beyond understanding.
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AI Will Save The World!

 

Or, you know, not.

Elmo “fixed” it. GIGO is a law of the universe. There is no escape from the human condition.

The only way out, is through.

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They Said/They Said

 Wired gets into the weeds:

Meteorologists first had an idea that a storm may be coming for this part of Texas last weekend, after Tropical Storm Barry made landfall in Mexico. “When you have a tropical system, it’s just pumping moisture northward,” says Chris Vagasky, an American Meteorological Society-certified digital meteorologist based in Wisconsin. “It starts setting the stage for heavy rainfall events.”

The NWS office in San Antonio on Monday predicted a potential for “downpours”—as well as heavy rain specifically at nighttime—later on in the week as the result of these conditions. By Thursday, it forecast up to 7 inches of rainfall in isolated areas.
Local officials say they had no warning of what was coming. There’s more than a little special pleading in that.
Predicting “how much rain is going to fall out of a thunderstorm, that’s the hardest thing that a meteorologist can do,” Vagasky says. A number of unpredictable factors—including some element of chance—go into determining the amount of rainfall in a specific area, he says.

“The signal was out there that this is going to be a heavy, significant rainfall event,” says Vagasky. “But pinpointing exactly where that’s going to fall, you can’t do that.”

Flash floods in this part of Texas are nothing new. Eight inches of rainfall in the state “could be on a day that ends in Y,” says Matt Lanza, also a certified digital meteorologist based in Houston. It’s a challenge, he says, to balance forecasts that often show extreme amounts of rainfall with how to adequately prepare the public for these rare but serious storms.
And yeah, let’s all blame NOAA:
And meteorologists say that the NWS did send out adequate warnings as it got updated information. By Thursday afternoon, it had issued a flood watch for the area, and a flash flood warning was in effect by 1am Friday. The agency had issued a flash flood emergency alert by 4:30am.

“The Weather Service was on the ball,” Vagasky says. “They were getting the message out.”

But as local outlet KXAN first reported, it appears that the first flood warnings posted from safety officials to the public were sent out on Facebook at 5am, hours after the NWS issued its warning.

“Clearly there was a breakdown between when the warning was issued and how people got it, and I think that’s really what has to be talked about,” Lanza says.
As an aside, I signed up for Next Door because the county told me emergency announcements would appear there first. I still get reliable emergency alerts on television. I don’t get any from Next Door. And I’ve never been on Facebook, and don’t want to be.
“I really just want people to understand that the forecast office in San Antonio did a fantastic job,” Vagansky says. “They got the warning out, but this was an extreme event. The rainfall rates over this six-hour period were higher than 1,000-year rainfall rates. That equates to there being less than 0.1 percent of a chance of that happening in any given year.”
Cold comfort to the families of the dead and the missing.  But then, so is blaming NOAA.

And if you want some of the human side of this story: here. It’s being called a 100 year flood. Ironically, Camp Mystic will be 100 years old next April.
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Trump Plays With His Toys 🧸

 Politico:

That ambivalence has been a hallmark of the past three months of negotiations, as world leaders rushed to make deals to avoid levies between 20 and 50 percent, in many cases, an effective trading blockade. And it highlights an important tension of Trump’s second administration: The president’s long-standing affinity for imposing tariffs is clashing with his reputation as a canny dealmaker.
Or: the President is an idiot with no understanding of international commerce who has ridden the reputation of a book title by a ghostwriter who long ago repudiated it, as far as he can. Which is remarkable given the string of business failures the President has had since that book came out. Remarkable for how gullible the public and the political press are, that is. So maybe he can ride that unearned reputation a little further.

But it’s Politico, so they bury the lede:
But the announced deals are unlikely to be full-fledged bilateral trade agreements that need approval by Congress. Instead, the process seems to be following the example set by the first trade framework the administration rolled out in May, with the United Kingdom. Rather than hammer out the details, the two sides agreed to specific terms in relation to goods purchases and tariff rate quotas and agreed to keep talking about some of the more difficult issues — like the U.K.’s digital service taxes and agriculture barriers — down the road.

“Even though the deal may be done, the negotiations continue. They’re framework agreements. They’re not final,” said Everett Eissenstat, a White House trade adviser in Trump’s first term.
It’s all bullshit at the end of the day. Trump is just playing with his toys, as ever.

None of this is new, sadly.
We are discreet sheep; we wait to see how the drove is going, and then go with the drove. We have two opinions: one private, which we are afraid to express; and another one—the one we use—which we force ourselves to wear to please Mrs. Grundy, until habit makes us comfortable in it, and the custom of defending it presently makes us love it, adore it, and forget how pitifully we came by it. Look at it in politics. Look at the candidates whom we loathe one year and are afraid to vote against the next; whom we cover with unimaginable filth one year and fall down on the public platform and worship the next—and keep on doing it until the habitual shutting of our eyes to last year’s evidence brings us presently to a sincere and stupid belief in this year’s. Look at the tyranny of party—at what is called party allegiance, party loyalty—a snare invented by designing men for selfish purposes—and which turns voters into chattels, slaves, rabbits, and all the while their masters and they themselves are shouting rubbish about liberty, independence, freedom of opinion, freedom of speech, honestly unconscious of the fantastic contradiction; and forgetting or ignoring that their fathers and the churches shouted the same blasphemies a generation earlier when they were closing their doors against the hunted slave, beating his handful of humane defenders with Bible texts and billies, and pocketing the insults and licking the shoes of his Southern master.

If we would learn what the human race really is at bottom, we need only observe it in election times. A Hartford clergyman met me in the street and spoke of a new nominee—­denounced the nomination, in strong, earnest words—words that were refreshing for their independence, their manliness. He said, “I ought to be proud, perhaps, for this nominee is a relative of mine. On the contrary, I am humiliated and disgusted, for I know him intimately—familiarly—and I know that he is an unscrupulous scoundrel, and always has been.” You should have seen this clergyman preside at a political meeting forty days later, and urge, and plead, and gush—and you should have heard him paint the character of this same nominee. You would have supposed he was describing the Cid, and Greatheart, and Sir Galahad, and Bayard the Spotless all rolled into one. Was he sincere? Yes—by that time; and therein lies the pathos of it all, the hopelessness of it all. It shows at what trivial cost of effort a man can teach himself to lie, and learn to believe it, when he perceives, by the general drift, that that is the popular thing to do. Does he believe his lie yet? Oh, probably not; he has no further use for it. It was but a passing incident; he spared to it the moment that was its due, then hastened back to the serious business of his life.
--Mark Twain
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