Friday, July 17, 2026

Top O’ Mind This Morning

 So, what’s next?

Is the gash in the room with you right now? Still no sightings of the gash. Must be shy. Let them eat Italian embassy. How’s that working out for him? Two networks didn’t carry it. Fox won’t talk about it. CNN shredded it. And voters are still wondering, literally, what it has to do with the price of eggs. Thank you for your attention to this matter!
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The Plumber From Oklahoma Has Thoughts

Voting machines are not connected to the internet. There is a paper trail for ballots. This claim is demonstrably false. Under what statutory or constitutional authority? The Sinister Six gutted the VRA. What have you got? Because that would be illegal? Zombies 🧟‍♂️ are real! And they collect Social Security, too! 

And haven’t you lost enough cases trying to access voter rolls? Please cite the applicable criminal statute(s). Somebody give him a copy of the First Amendment. With guys like this? When Trump said he was after the worst of the worst, no one knew he meant ICE agents. 🙄 See above. 👆 

Keep calm and carry on.
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Well, I Believed In U.S. Elections….

... until last night.

Now I’m an elections atheist. And it’s all Trump’s fault.
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Trump Did Us All A Favor

There are also a lot of variations on this theme:
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What’s The Best Response To Still More Allegations Of Election Interference?

Let's see: The 25th Amendment requires the POTUS to voluntarily step aside, or a majority of the Cabinet and the VPOTUS to vote to force him to step aside. The Senate is likely to approve the nomination of Blanche, a man who calls himself Trump’s lawyer, and acts like it. Blanche is not an outlier among agency heads. How many members of Trump’s Cabinet are likely to vote to force him to step aside (they can’t vote to remove him, only the Senate can do that)? Much better response.
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Thursday, July 16, 2026

S.ame O.ld S.hit

And he was going to declare Ossoff and Warnock illegitimate tonight, right? Tuberville expected it.

Trump never said what China did, except try to make him not look “hot.” He never actually said they changed the electoral outcome. And he’d need to prove that in court to justify seizing ballot boxes. He certainly can’t do that and not face court challenges. There is no provision in law or the constitution for doing what Himes says Trump will do.
The documents Trump is referring to right now, and CNN has reviewed all of them, largely discuss vulnerabilities that have been known for years and/or are reflected in the 2021 US intel community assessment.

None of the declassified information supports the claim that any previous election results — including the 2020 presidential contest that Trump lost — were manipulated by foreign interference or fraud in a way that would’ve changed the outcome.
The documents & notes Trump is referring to in his speech were largely intended to round up everything the US government had information about that could potentially be considered, per a source w/ direct knowledge.

After analysis, the intel community decided to either incorporate them in the 2021 minority report or assessed -- based on verbiage in the documents themselves -- were not concrete enough to view as consequential enough, the source said.
It’s over, people. Let it go. But Trump has the evidence!

Uh-huh.
This is how authoritarianism begins. Right?
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Post-Mortem

Same as it ever was, then. You can’t blame Trump for this. So why is the DOJ going to court to get them? That’s why.
Warner: Since he's been reelected, he has single handedly dismantled much of the election protection security system that candidly was set up during the Trump administration. He's dismantled the foreign malign influence center at the director of national intelligence and gotten rid of the FBI efforts, the NSA efforts….
ETTD. Everything. And how do they “check” them? Against what? Do they check to be sure Ken Paxton is living at the address where he’s registered to vote with the Texas SOS? Yeah. So what do they “check”? That my father is alive? He’s not. And he hasn’t voted since he left the house he’d lived in for 50 years. He may still be on the voting rolls. But he hasn’t been “active” on them for over a decade. So what do they “check”? There is, indeed, nothing new under the sun. Or, you know, not. And 60 court cases said he didn’t.

Same as it ever was.

Finally: this is a pretty decent summary of the speech:
We watched Trump's dangerous and deranged speech so you don't have to. Here are the moments you need to know about:

— He openly laid groundwork to challenge the midterms. He claimed our elections were "compromised," clearly setting up the justification to tamper with results before a single vote is counted.

— He said he'll "correct vulnerabilities" in our elections. Translation: he told you exactly what he plans to interfere with.

— He contradicted himself on China in real time. He first claimed China was "working to influence" and "undermining confidence" in him, then said he was doing a "great job" with them back when he made the claim. He couldn't keep his own conspiracy straight.

— He claimed China rigged the 2020 election, this time by getting journalists to write bad stories about him, because China supposedly wanted Biden to win since Trump was "wise to them."

— He said they found "burn bags" from the Obama Administration full of supposedly incriminating material, without ever saying what was actually in them.

— He said he needs "urgent measures" to stop our elections from being "hacked," citing Maduro's rigged machines in Venezuela in 2020 as his "evidence."

— He attacked networks for not airing him live, accusing them of being "part of the conspiracy to rig elections" and suggesting they should lose their broadcast licenses.

— He announced he wants to seize voter data from states he's deemed "vulnerable" ahead of the midterms.

This was a sitting president telegraphing, step by step, how he plans to undermine the 2026 midterms with egregious lies and conspiracy theories.
China tried that. And I’m still unclear exactly how Trump “challenges” the midterms. He didn’t mention Warnock and Ossoff, but Warnock’s question is a good place to end:
Warnock: "Look at this from a common sense perspective. I won two elections -- in '21 and '22. Our congressional delegation is majority Republican, so are you saying that on the same ballots that elected my Republican colleagues, their ballots are legitimate and the ballots that elected Ossoff and myself are illegitimate?"
Trump had the same problem in 2020. But none of his 60 cases survived long enough to face it. Authoritarianism doesn’t work in America because no one person is in charge of all the governments.
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“Fox spent little over 5 minutes on Trump’s speech and then shifted back to Iran.”

Warnock: "Look at this from a common sense perspective. I won two elections -- in '21 and '22. Our congressional delegation is majority Republican, so are you saying that on the same ballots that elected my Republican colleagues, their ballots are legitimate and the ballots that elected Ossoff and myself are illegitimate?"
This should be good. Me, my daughter, my wife: everybody was doing it.
Trump: Tonight, I'm announcing the immediate declassification and release of critical intelligence, revealing shocking vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure. This evidence shows that the election system we have dangerously exposes and really exposes like levels never thought possible to hacking, exploitation and foreign interference. Just as disturbingly, this vital information has for many years been covered up and hidden from you
Not enough pictures? Wait, I was told he was going to interfere in the midterms.
Trump: Today we are releasing documents that show the CIA obtained reporting of a specific plot to do a big number in favor of the corrupt Maduro regime in Venezuela. This intelligence underscores why we must take urgent action to ensure that our own system can never ever be hacked or compromised like it was in the past.
What does this have to do with 2020? Or today? Walking around on legs that were blown off. (My parents probably stayed on the voter rolls for a few years after their deaths. I never got new registration cards for them, though. If they were sent to the address of the house they sold, they were either discarded or returned. I know I get a new card every few years. I suppose the Secretary of State could review the death records, but they can’t connect names to addresses. How could they be sure? My parents didn’t die in the county where they were registered to vote (they never changed their registration).

I suppose I’ll be purged from the rolls someday when that card is a dead letter. My parents certainly haven’t been “active” on the rolls since they died.) Pretty sure we knew this in 2021. Just like we knew “dumb” is spelled with a “b.” He has no idea how broadcast networks, work. Or what the first amendment is. (No, I’m not going to touch that “plot” idea. It doesn’t deserve further attention. Grandpa is sundowning.) If you stayed this long,Trump finally got to the point. Though what the SAVE America Act has to do with 2020, Maduro, and countries “meddling in our elections,” is unclear. Perfect ending.
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Feature, Not Bug

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“A White, Crystal Like Substance” 🧂

“Is there a lot of smoke around here to suggest that something terribly wrong and unconstitutional happened?” said Jeff Edwards, an Austin attorney who recently won a significant U.S. Supreme Court case regarding a fatal Amarillo police shooting of a Black teen during a traffic stop. “Oh my gosh, yes.”
So a search for drugs is a good cover?
A federal search warrant filed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation states investigators found multiple bags containing a “white crystal-like substance” they believe “is consistent with methamphetamine” inside Lorenzo Salgado Araujo’s work van. This comes a little more than a week after he was fatally shot by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Houston.

According to the affidavit, FBI investigators sought authorization to search Salgado Araujo’s work van for evidence related to potential federal drug offenses, including possession with intent to distribute controlled substances and simple possession.
Because that’s what Stephen Miller thinks they all do.
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So It’s Incompetence, Then?

I mean:
State and federal health officials have confirmed 1,645 cases of cyclosporiasis, and the cause of the stomach-churning parasitic infection spiking across the country remains under investigation.

More than 5,100 additional cases are also being investigated, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Confirmed or suspected cases have been reported in 34 states.
In 71 years I’ve never even heard of this. Is it just coincidence I hear of an epidemic of it in Trump’s second administration?
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What If Trump Gave A Speech…

Ossoff: "Here's what's going to happen tonight: the world's most famous sore loser will deliver a prime-time presidential sour grapes address to pursue his 6-year-old grievances about the 2020 election, while his war in the Middle East spirals out of control and the cost of living continues to rise for Americans across the country. I expect the president to reheat debunked conspiracy theories about the repeatedly litigated and audited and confirmed 2020 presidential election in Georgia, an election that Donald Trump lost. And let me be very clear about this: if the President declares Georgia's election illegitimate, or if the President declares Georgia's sitting United States Senators illegitimate, he is declaring Georgia voters illegitimate. It's Donald Trump who tried to defraud Georgia voters in that election, Donald Trump who tried to commit election fraud when he called Georgia's Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger -- and it was caught on tape, and you should play the tape to your viewers today -- and badgered and bullied Georgia's top election official to 'find him' the votes that he needed to win in a state where he had lost."
… and nobody listened?
"NBC and ABC will not carry Trump on their respective networks but will carry on their digital feeds, NBC News Now and ABC News Live. Expect CBS to do the same," Wall Street Journal reporter Joe Flint reported on X, hours before the speech was to begin at 9 p.m. Eastern Time.
I really didn’t think Jesus loved me this much. Would that be the audience searching for Trump’s speech live online tonight? All, what, three of them? Anyway, deep background, if that’s still necessary.
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The Statute Of Limitations Has Entered The Chat

If there was evidence upon which charges could be made, it would be more appropriate to turn the materials over to the DOJ,

But it’s my understanding the information about foreign election interference was known in 2020 (when WHO was President?), and declassified in 2021.
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Crooked As A Dog’s Hind Leg

Ken Paxton recently bought three condominiums at a luxury resort in Utah, a set of purchases that offered fresh insight into his wealth amid his run for Senate.

The properties, along with a dozen others owned by Paxton, are at issue in his ongoing divorce negotiations with his wife, State Senator Angela Paxton, who has accused him of adultery.

Mr. Paxton, 63, purchased the condos, worth a total of $1.6 million, in February, according to local property records, and transferred them to his blind trust. On the deeds, Paxton listed his address as a Dallas-area home. Police records indicate a woman who is not his wife lives there. Paxton, who has been photographed vacationing with the woman, has not directly addressed the relationship.

Public records reviewed by The Times show Mr. Paxton, his blind trust and another family trust now own at least 15 properties worth around $9 million, including a luxury cabin in Oklahoma, three homes in Florida and a plot of land in Hawaii.

Mr. Paxton’s expanding real estate portfolio has raised questions in the past about how he has amassed his wealth, despite his $153,000 salary as attorney general. Both Mr. Talarico and Mr. Paxton’s opponent in the Republican primary, Senator John Cornyn, have suggested Mr. Paxton has used his public role to benefit himself. Mr. Talarico has disclosed one property on his state and federal filings, as well as an annual salary of less than $100,000.
This is normally not a scandal in Texas. Texas officeholders not in the Lege (which is a part-time job) often get wealthy in office. LBJ did it (which is not an excuse). But times have changed.  And Talarico is throwing down: He says he’ll be on stage for the debates whether Paxton is there or not.
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“…until morale improves.”

The Blue Angels flew by the Houston hospitals during Covid, on of which is close enough to my house I could see them go by from my yard. We “saw” them mainly by the noise. There are a lot of trees here, and they were low enough to be in the tree line, though that was due to the angle between me and them. The noise was very loud, though, even at that distance. It preceded them, and lingered after they were out of sight.

But it was nothing like this:
Not to mention the sand that was whipped up. Kegsbreath cares. It’s all about the performance.
Rep. Balint on Hegseth's obsession with testosterone, his announcement of testosterone therapy for troops, and his attacks on women in combat:

"I think it is indicative of the fact that there are so many people in this administration that have some weird, intense, homoerotic, feelings towards men while also being incredibly homophobic, and not just homophobic, but like hate-mongering, fear-mongering about the LGBTQ community.

So, let me be clear. I don't think the homoeroticism is the weird part. The weird part is that they pretend that that's not what it's about.

And so, Pete Hegseth is like the example of this, like the manly, manly, rugged, macho man, and it's like, I don't know if you know who Tom of Finland is...this is a gay male porn that was drawn by a man. And, like, Pete Hegseth is the embodiment of that.

So I feel like they must be looking at that as their example for what men look like. And in terms of not promoting women, we know what this is all about.

The military, whether you support the military-industrial complex or not, it has always been merit-based. The people who are the best of the best rise to the top.

And so the fact that he has systematically been keeping down women and people of color gives up the whole game. It's actually not about a merit-based system anymore."
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Eight Days A Week

The minimum?

“It’s a poor excuse for picking a man’s pocket every 25th of December.”
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Sometimes History Rhymes

I’m only surprised the FCC Chair isn’t threatening them.
Major broadcast networks—ABC, CBS, and NBC—along with cable outlets including Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC have remained silent on whether they intend to preempt regular programming to carry the speech, the Daily Beast reported Thursday morning.

As of Tuesday evening, the Thursday 9 p.m. time slot across networks continued to display "their standard scheduled content," with no indication that coverage would be interrupted for the presidential address.
I usually watch PBS in Thursday night, but I fully expect them to cover it. So that’s a miss.

Well, no, the local station doesn’t have it scheduled, either. This looks promising.
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Dese Are De Conditions Dat Prevail

And they have since the Constitution was adopted.

No law, constitutional provision, or Senate rule requires a Senator reveal his medical condition or be present for votes. No Senate official is being sent to Kentucky to review McConnell’s medical records as we speak, or arrest him and return him to the Senate floor.

And it would be an abuse of his power on the order of a Trump stunt for Bashear to order a special election, then cancel it, just to violate McConnell’s privacy (he’s not the POTUS, and even Trump doesn’t tell us what his medical condition is).

And please identify the “crime.” Statute and code, like the big boys have to do.

Stop letting Trump infect your critical thinking skills.
Same to AOC, whom I admire, but: get real. “Not normal” and “not legal” are two very different things. 

Don’t be Trump. ETTD. Don’t let that happen to you.
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No Shit, Sherlock

 Do tell:

"If his goals were to undermine election security in the states, he's failed," Center for Election Innovation & Research founder David Becker told NOTUS. "If his goals were to seize power over elections through executive order, he's failed. If his goals were to seize sensitive voter data from the states, he's failed. If his goal was to pass the SAVE America Act, he's failed."
And the DOJ is a paper tiger:
According to the report, "The DOJ has been the epicenter of Trump’s efforts to scrutinize the results of the 2020 election and remake the administration of future ones. Ahead of the midterms in November, the Justice Department canceled election-integrity training sessions for prosecutors and FBI agents, deleted a 281-page guide to prosecuting election offenses and fired most of the lawyers in its Public Integrity Section."

But the most damning metric reveals the magnitude of the failure: as of Tuesday, the DOJ has lost 15 consecutive lawsuits attempting to access unredacted voter rolls from individual states.

"0-15 should never happen," Becker, a former DOJ lawyer himself, told NOTUS. "What that means is you brought frivolous cases, and then when you were getting handed defeat after defeat after defeat, there's no grown-up there to review this and say, 'Hey, wait a second, should we reel this in?' The president has actually undermined his own efforts because there's not an election official in the country that's scared of the DOJ right now."
Like the lawyer I once worked for told me: “They don’t pay us to be wrong.” But ETTD. Especially what Trump tries to do for Trump.

Don’t fear the incompetence.
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Wednesday, July 15, 2026

Fuck This Guy

The bad guys are the ones chasing people down in unmarked cars and excusing it as “traffic stops.” The bad guys are the ones shooting drivers.

And now the FBI makes sure we know what they found in Ajauro’s van:
A federal search warrant filed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation states investigators found multiple bags containing a “white crystal-like substance” they believe “is consistent with methamphetamine” inside Lorenzo Salgado Araujo’s work van. This comes a little more than a week after he was fatally shot by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Houston.
See?
According to the affidavit, FBI investigators sought authorization to search Salgado Araujo’s work van for evidence related to potential federal drug offenses, including possession with intent to distribute controlled substances and simple possession.
He deserved it. 

Fuck the FBI, too.
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Train’s A’ Comin’

After Thursday, he can just say: “China did it!” In Georgia. With the lead pipe.
"Part of President Trump's speech Thursday night is expected to touch on previously unreported alleged Chinese meddling in U.S. elections," CBS News reported, adding that Trump alleges that "Beijing compromised U.S. voter data and evidence the CIA knew about the action."
Or will he?
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt dismissed the sourcing as speculation when asked by CBS News about the contents of Trump's speech.

"As usual, anonymous sources are speculating about what President Trump will say during his speech on Thursday evening," Leavitt told CBS News in a statement. "The truth is, nobody knows yet what President Trump will ultimately say, which is why everyone should tune in."
We can’t tell you how bad the train wreck’s gonna be, so you’ll have to tune in for yourself to see!
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Come Down Here And Say That

Even Greg Abbott knows which way the wind blows:
Gov. Greg Abbott called for blocking new data center development in rural parts of the state during a campaign stop in East Texas on Tuesday.

“We must prohibit them from building AI data centers in rural Texas neighborhoods,” Abbott said at the Bullard event, which primarily discussed his plan to cut property taxes, adding that this issue “dovetails right into fighting for East Texas values.”

Abbott’s push for a prohibition in rural neighborhoods appears to go further than a sweeping regulatory framework he unveiled earlier this month, which called for data centers to add new power generation to the grid, pay for their own infrastructure costs, reuse their own water and implement measures such as setbacks, among other proposals aimed at limiting their impact on residential communities.

In a statement, Abbott campaign spokesperson Eduardo Leal said, “everything the Governor said today tracks with his June 10th letter.”

“As the Governor said in the letter, he will work with lawmakers to ensure local communities are not adversely impacted,” Leal added.

Abbott reiterated his support on Tuesday for the measures laid out in his earlier announcement.

“I made clear already: Any AI data center even thinking about coming here — they got to bring their own money, bring their own power, reuse their own water and do it in a way that reduces the cost of electricity for residents across our state,” he said. “We must eliminate the tax break they are getting. They must be responsible for funding their own projects here in Texas. We will get that done.”

In outlining his regulatory recommendations this month, Abbott instructed the Public Utility Commission to “guarantee any data center development does not come at the cost of Texans and our local communities” and to consider how to “minimize adverse impacts on local communities.”

The third-term Republican governor had previously been enthusiastic about the influx of companies seeking to build the facilities, calling Texas “the epicenter of AI development” when he announced in November that Google had made a $40 billion investment in cloud and artificial intelligence infrastructure in the state.

Abbott has received over $2 million from people and companies linked to the tech and AI industries since last year, E&E News by Politico reported in April.

His call for a ban in rural neighborhoods Tuesday comes as many rural counties and activists have attempted to pass moratoriums and called for the Legislature to grant them greater local control to prevent the construction of the centers. Opponents argue that the oftentimes gigantic operations will put their water availability and air quality at risk and threaten to hike their power bills.
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Sen. Foghorn Leghorn Is Undermining My Faith…

Kennedy: There's this little game where the Democrats want the nominee to use the magic words that Trump lost the election and the nominees are understandably, in my opinion, don't want to play that game.

Hunt: How is it game? It’s just what happened.

Kennedy: No, it is a game. It’s a game of words.

Hunt: What does it say about where we are that you think that this is a game of words. I mean, when did this get so hard?

Kennedy: The Democrats have made it hard
... in human intelligence.

No, wait! I lost faith in that a long time ago.

Never mind. This is just your country on Trump. Hope you like the price of eggs.
The debris is covering up the 300 yard slash. Would someone remind Sleepy Grandpa that his tariffs were revoked by the Supreme Court. Unless he means these:
On July 24, 2026, the Trump administration’s Section 122 tariffs—a 10 percent import tariff on goods entering the United States, unless exempted by the president—are set to expire.
Which have done nothing but advance inflation. Ummmm.... Time for your nap, Grandpa.
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Don’t 🛑

Miller finally got his way.
Trump: "We CANNOT give up one of I.C.E.’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP! Once we do, we are playing right into the criminal’s hands. The Radical Left Dumocrats would like to see this done, but it won’t happen on my watch. I.C.E., be judicious, fair and smart, and go back and do your very important job. Keep those Crime Stat Records coming! Remember, you are loved and respected in America. Thank you for your attention to this matter! PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP"
Nope. Not a “Crime Fighting tool[]” at all.
Making matters worse, Houser continued, these sorts of traffic stops "[are] not sort of in their tactical ... toolkit. You know, yes, there have been vehicle stops used mainly by fugitive operations and other ... convicted criminals. But just sort of these, these random stops, like it's like a DUI stop in some rural county in America."

That is flatly not "the traditional way" ICE has operated, he added, and Trump's claims to the contrary are "just factually not true."

But neither Trump nor Miller know anything about government or law enforcement. They literally think it’s about “crime fighting,” like they were comic book heroes. 🦸‍♂️  They don’t really care if they hurt people; they just don’t want bad publicity. 

Well, Trump doesn’t want it.

(I was in a Border Patrol traffic stop once. In New Mexico, on a very quiet highway.  They were looking for immigrants, and stopping every car to check the passengers. Maybe the trunk, but we were three white people, and the agent was very polite. The “stop” itself was just a “pull over here” type of thing. Nobody in an unmarked car chasing us down, or I wouldn’t have slowed down. I’ve never seen the police conduct a “traffic stop” by chasing the car down in unmarked cars, no lights.  Come to think of it, “traffic stop” is a helluva euphemism.)

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Kavanaugh Stops

🚨BREAKING: ICE agents were filmed assaulting, handcuffing, and kidnapping a U.S. citizen in Passaic, New Jersey… while refusing to even look at the ID he repeatedly begged them to check.

A man is pleading with federal agents to verify who he is…

And they refused.

Instead, one agent says, “We need to get him on the ground,” puts him in a chokehold, throws him to the ground, and multiple agents pile on top of him before handcuffing him, and throwing him into their vehicle.

Under the Fourth Amendment, the government cannot arrest, or seize someone, without probable cause that they have committed, are committing, or are about to commit an offense that authorizes the arrest.

U.S. citizens are also not required to carry identification unless they’re driving a motorized vehicle.

And if federal agents are refusing to verify someone’s identity before arresting them, then they are openly ignoring the constitution.

Which should terrify every American.

Because that means no one is safe from being kidnapped by the government… and disappeared.

Every agent involved should be publicly identified, and DHS should be forced to explain why they believed they had the legal authority to seize someone, while refusing to verify who he was.

This cannot become normal.
Trump: "We CANNOT give up one of I.C.E.’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP! Once we do, we are playing right into the criminal’s hands. The Radical Left Dumocrats would like to see this done, but it won’t happen on my watch. I.C.E., be judicious, fair and smart, and go back and do your very important job. Keep those Crime Stat Records coming! Remember, you are loved and respected in America. Thank you for your attention to this matter! PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP"
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
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Deja Vu All Over Again

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A Distinction Without A Difference

There’s no attorney-client privilege between the POTUS and any lawyer in the DOJ.
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The Large Print Giveth…

Trump: "We CANNOT give up one of I.C.E.’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP! Once we do, we are playing right into the criminal’s hands. The Radical Left Dumocrats would like to see this done, but it won’t happen on my watch.
And the small print taketh away:
I.C.E., be judicious, fair and smart, and go back and do your very important job. Keep those Crime Stat Records coming! Remember, you are loved and respected in America. Thank you for your attention to this matter! PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP"
“Crime Stat Records” doesn’t have the single reference he thinks it does.
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ICE Breaker

 After the shooting, Houston Mayor John Whitmire said, many times, the city could do nothing. Ever the weathervane:

City Council Member Alejandra Salinas spoke after King, saying she attends her church: “We are going to be out there protesting with you, and we are going to do everything to make sure HPD does everything in its power to make sure no stone is unturned, and we get justice for Lorenzo.”

Whitmire committed to conducting a local investigation into the shooting on Friday, days after he said the city had no jurisdiction to investigate the involvement of federal agents.

Whitmire also on Tuesday directed Houston Police Chief Noe Diaz to send a letter to Texas Department of Public Safety Director Freeman Martin and ask for the Texas Rangers to conduct their own investigation. This came a day after Martin said that DPS has “received no request from any local law enforcement agency” for assistance in the shooting investigation, according to a letter he sent in response to a July 8 demand from several Democratic lawmakers for the state agency to open its own probe.

DPS didn’t immediately respond to The Texas Tribune’s question about the Houston leaders’ request.

Diaz also met with the FBI on Tuesday regarding the case, according to his letter and a social media post by the federal agency. Other attendees, the FBI’s post said, included federal prosecutors in the Southern District of Texas, the Texas Rangers and Harris County District Attorney’s Office, which is also running its own investigation into the shooting.
More importantly, is our children learning?
City Council Member Carolyn Evans-Shabazz told the audience they have another tool to hold leaders accountable: voting.

“Everybody here is appalled, but it’s not much we can do if we don’t have you doing more than coming and talking and protesting,” she said. “We need you at the polls.”

Jeana Magallon, a Houston Independent School District teacher, told the City Council about breaking up a fight between two students and telling them about the “importance of talking out our issues” and “getting a trusted adult involved in their problems.”

The response stunned her: “My fifth-grade student looked me in the eyes and said, ‘That’s not real life, miss. ICE wouldn’t do that to me. Police don’t do that. They fight, they hurt us.’”

“What could I say to him?” Magallon said through tears. “We are teaching our children to expect violence towards them. So please, for my students, for our children, justice for Lorenzo Salgado Araujo — this is on all of you.”

Kendrick Sampson, a Houston resident and actor, asked the City Council, “Why aren’t y’all protecting us? Where do y’all draw the line?”

“It should only take one, it should be not one more, not one more murder,” he said. “If you’re not going to protect us, we should not protect y’all. We shouldn’t protect y’all seats.”

Maria Cervantes, a 57-year-old Houston resident, said: “ICE hunts us worse than animals because when we call animal control, do they just shoot the animal? No, they pick them up right alive.”

“I don’t even consider ICE law enforcement,” she continued. “They’re just like hunting dogs that are killing us left and right.”
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Gasoline On The Fire 🔥

. @JamesTalarico : Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was murdered by ICE.

He wasn't their intended target. But he looked like their intended target.

Lorenzo was our neighbor, a fellow Texan. He lived in Houston for 35 years. He worked as a construction worker and he sent his three boys to college.

His oldest son is a public school teacher. His middle son is an engineer. And his youngest is still in school.

Lorenzo Salgado embodied the American dream. His boys called him ‘El Mundo Intero‘ — the whole world.

And they watched as their whole world died in a video posted on Facebook. Lorenzo was a child of God, endowed with infinite worth. His life was invaluable. His death was senseless. Our neighbor, our fellow Texan, deserves justice
These are rural communities, where people VOTE.  It’s the rural areas of Texas that keep reelecting the GOP. 

And Trump is holding the gasoline can. It’s labeled “ICE.”
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Remember Trump’s “Feral Cunning”?

His almost magical ability to read the national room?

Whatever happened to that?
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Tuesday, July 14, 2026

Remember That In The Midterms

And precisely how does he do that? Step by step, please. 

Show your work.
Me on @MSNOWNews talking about @realDonaldTrump 's continued push to try to delegitimize the 2020 election:

"This is actually exhibit number 55,299 of Trump's fundamental mental unfitness and moral unfitness to be president. If he doesn't believe this, and he's just saying this to be manipulative, that's psychopathic. If he actually believes any of this, he's psychotic. He may well be both. It's just classic Donald Trump."
Well, that’s certainly true.
Anyway, here's what I said:

“Conway said, Trump is engaged in ‘an attempt to undermine faith in elections generally in advance of an election that he is likely to lose one or both houses of Congress ... I mean, this is really, he is just looking in the mirror. He is just talking to himself.’

“This whole situation, Conway continued, ‘is actually exhibit number 55,299 of Trump's fundamental mental unfitness and moral unfitness to be president ... if he doesn't believe this and he's just saying this to be manipulative, that's psychopathic. If he actually believes any of this, he's psychotic. He may well be both.’

“Trump, Conway added, is engaged in his ‘classic’ pattern of behavior and ‘lying, lying, lying without regard to the facts, making new things up, even if they don't make any sense, and even if they don't connect up to things in the real world.’

“Conway added that, for the sake of argument, if you truly entertain Trump's ideas ‘is he saying that the one election where he was president was the one that he lost because there was election interference, and he didn't know that in 2020’ despite having control of all the election apparatus—meanwhile, "the only two good elections we had were 2016 and 2024’ [when Democrats were in charge] ….

“‘That's nonsense,’ Conway said.”
It's the charge of “undermining faith in elections” that I don’t understand.

What percentage of the electorate actually votes? It’s lower in the midterms than it is in Presidential years. It’s always been low. Participation in democracy has never been a hallmark of American democracy. Is that a sign of “undermined faith in elections”?

I’m pretty sure Trump winning the presidency undermined the trust of a lot of people in the electoral process. Maybe not in “elections,” but certainly in the people who voted; both in 2016 and in 2024. Is this where I should mention the common thread of those two elections? Both times, Trump’s opponent was a woman. Does that undermine faith in elections? It certainly damages one’s trust in the electorate. We’re supposed to be better than that. We elected Obama, after all. But we’ve been presented with two women candidates since then, and we’ve rejected them both. Kind of hard not to draw a conclusion from that: better Trump, than a woman.

But “faith in elections” is the key? And Trump undermines it by, what? Complaining about every election that doesn’t go his way? He’s still bitching about the 2020 election, and now he’s expected to declare the election of two democratic Senators illegitimate because…?  Well, Ossoff was elected in 2020, but Warnock doesn’t stand for reelection this year, so how does that even work?  Warnock won a special election in 2021, and then was elected in 2022, so… how does this work, again? The interference continued until 2022, but it stopped in 2024?

As Conway said, Trump was President in 2020. His government was charged with making sure the elections were free of foreign interference. Apparently they were in 2016, and 2024, when Trump was not the head of government. But not in 2020? And Trump only settled this now? Six years later? With evidence he probably won’t show us? Or probably won’t make any sense.

How does this work, again?

And it’s always about cheating that affects Trump? Unless he gets his way, the elections are illegitimate? If that’s the argument that undermines your “faith in elections,” then I’m guessing you never vote in the first place. And the country’s gotten by pretty well so far without you voting. Or caring about elections.

Maybe the idea is just a way of trying to explain Trump and his obsessions. But Trump is simply trying to salve his narcissistic ego. He can’t lose, and he can’t be wrong. He’s not undermining trust in anything except his presidency; what he says, and what he does.

And ultimately, for a politician, for an office holder, what does this (literally) have to do with the price of eggs? Or gasoline? Or inflation?
YINGST: Shipping data trackers indicate that just 10 vessels passed through the Strait of Hormuz on Monday. Less than 10% of what normally goes through this critical waterway. When you say the strait is open, what do you mean?

TRUMP: It's open if people want to go through it. It’s open now.
All Trump is doing is undermining trust in his presidency. Which is why we have a Congress; and why it’s Article I of the Constitution.

“Remember that in the midterms.”
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