Mostly Monday Reads: License to Kill

“There you go.!” John Buss, @repeat1968

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

No one could possibly have any more doubts about the addled and deranged brains of#FARTUS. (Felon, Adjudicated Rapist of the United States) He’s devised another distraction from the Epstein files, and it’s a doozy. Good luck to Congressional Republicans in the attempt to normalize this beahavior. This comes from this morning’s New York Times. Matthew Mpoke Bigg has the story. “Trump posts a fake video of Obama being arrested in the Oval Office.” When in doubt, return to the scene of the original crime.

President Trump reposted a fake video showing former President Barack Obama being arrested in the Oval Office, as Trump administration officials continue to accuse Mr. Obama of trying to harm Mr. Trump’s campaign during the 2016 election, and the president seeks to redirect conversation from the Epstein files.

The short video, which appears to have been generated by artificial intelligence and posted on TikTok before being reposted on Mr. Trump’s Truth Social account on Sunday, comes days after the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued the latest in a series of reports from the Trump administration trying to undermine the eight-year-old assessment that Russia favored the election of Mr. Trump.

The video appears to be manipulated footage of an Oval Office meeting that took place in November 2016 between Mr. Obama, then the president, and Mr. Trump, who days earlier had defeated Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee, in the election.

The fake video purports to show F.B.I. agents bursting into the meeting, pushing Mr. Obama into a kneeling position and putting him in handcuffs as Mr. Trump looks on smiling, while the song “Y.M.C.A.” by the Village People plays. Later, the fake video shows Mr. Obama in an orange jumpsuit pacing in a cell. The start of the video shows a compilation of actual footage of Democratic leaders, including Mr. Obama and former President Joseph R. Biden Jr, saying, “no one is above the law.”

Mr. Obama’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the video.

Mr. Trump regularly reposts A.I.-generated or mocked-up videos and photographs on his Truth Social account.

Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, said last week that the latest report released by her offices showed a “treasonous conspiracy in 2016” by top Obama administration officials to harm Mr. Trump. She said she would make a criminal referral to the F.B.I. based on recently released documents.

A link to real video footage from an interview that Ms. Gabbard gave to Fox News on Sunday on the subject was also posted to Mr. Trump’s social media.

Democrats have denounced the administration’s effort to discredit Mr. Obama as politically motivated and riddled with errors, and contradicting previous reviews of the assessment.

The latest document, issued last week, did not show Russian manipulation of the election, and instead reinforced the view of intelligence officials who found no evidence that Russia hacked voting systems to change votes.

Democrats have cited reports by intelligence agencies and Senate investigators who found that, while Russian hackers probed election systems to see if they could change vote outcomes and extracted voter registration data in at least two states, there was no evidence that they attempted to change votes.

The Obama administration’s assessment also did not say that Russian hackers manipulated votes.

Mr. Trump has been trying to change the conversation among his supporters, after the Justice Department walked back its promise to release the full collection of files about Jeffrey Epstein, a multimillionaire financier and convicted sex offender who died in prison in 2019.

That decision angered some of the president’s most ardent supporters. Some have questioned Mr. Trump’s judgment on the matter, causing strife within the MAGA movement that powered Mr. Trump to two presidential election victories.

“Oops!” John Buss, @repeat1968

Tulsi is still trying to get out of the doghouse, so she’s even reaching back for stale, old conspiracy theories. Meanwhile, there are enough disgusting stories about ICE going around that we hardly need anything totally invented out of a bunch of the brains of sickos. This is from The Guardian. “Migrants at Ice jail in Miami made to kneel to eat ‘like dogs’, report alleges. Incident in which migrants were shackled with hands tied one of succession of alleged abuses at jails in Florida.”  If it’s news about something creepy, sadistic, and inhumane, it’s got to be from either Florida or Texas. The story comes from Richard Luscombe in Miami.

Migrants at a Miami immigration jail were shackled with their hands tied behind their backs and made to kneel to eat food from styrofoam plates “like dogs”, according to a report published on Monday into conditions at three overcrowded south Florida facilities.

The incident at the downtown federal detention center is one of a succession of alleged abuses at Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (Ice) operated jails in the state since January, chronicled by advocacy groups Human Rights Watch, Americans for Immigrant Justice, and Sanctuary of the South from interviews with detainees.

Dozens of men had been packed into a holding cell for hours, the report said, and denied lunch until about 7pm. They remained shackled with the food on chairs in front of them.

“We had to eat like animals,” one detainee named Pedro said.

Degrading treatment by guards is commonplace in all three jails, the groups say. At the Krome North service processing center in west Miami, female detainees were made to use toilets in full view of men being held there, and were denied access to gender-appropriate care, showers, or adequate food.

The jail was so far beyond capacity, some transferring detainees reported, that they were held for more than 24 hours in a bus in the parking lot. Men and women were confined together, and unshackled only when they needed to use the single toilet, which quickly became clogged.

“The bus became disgusting. It was the type of toilet in which normally people only urinate but because we were on the bus for so long, and we were not permitted to leave it, others defecated in the toilet,” one man said.

“Because of this, the whole bus smelled strongly of feces.”

When the group was finally admitted into the facility, they said, many spent up to 12 days crammed into a frigid intake room they christened la hielera – the ice box – with no bedding or warm clothing, sleeping instead on the cold concrete floor.

There was so little space at Krome, and so many detainees, the report says, that every available room was used to hold new arrivals.

“By the time I left, almost all the visitation rooms were full. A few were so full men couldn’t even sit, all had to stand,” Andrea, a female detainee, said.

At the third facility, the Broward transitional center in Pompano Beach, where a 44-year-old Haitian woman, Marie Ange Blaise, died in April, detainees said they were routinely denied adequate medical or psychological care.

Some suffered delayed treatment for injuries and chronic conditions, and dismissive or hostile responses from staff, the report said.

In one alleged incident in April at the downtown Miami jail, staff turned off a surveillance camera and a “disturbance control team” brutalized detainees who were protesting a lack of medical attention to one of their number who was coughing up blood. One detainee suffered a broken finger.

All three facilities were severely overcrowded, the former detainees said, a contributory factor in Florida’s decision to quickly build the controversial “Alligator Alcatraz” jail in the Everglades intended to eventually hold up to 5,000 undocumented migrants awaiting deportation.

Immigration detention numbers nationally were at an average of 56,400 per day in mid-June, with almost 72% having no criminal history, according to the report.

The daily average during the whole of 2024 was 37,500, HRW said.

The groups say that the documented abuses reflect inhumane conditions inside federal immigration facilities that have worsened significantly since Trump’s January inauguration and subsequent push to ramp up detentions and deportations.

“The anti-immigrant escalation and enforcement tactics under the Trump administration are terrorizing communities and ripping families apart, which is especially cruel in the state of Florida, which thrives because of its immigrant communities,” said Katie Blankenship, immigration attorney and co-founder of Sanctuary of the South.

“The rapid, chaotic, and cruel approach to arresting and locking people up is literally deadly and causing a human rights crisis that will plague this state and the entire country for years to come.”

These are the kinds of stories that make me think my country has been flushed down a dirty toilet. I can’t imagine any previous modern president doing this. The closest thing from history that was this barbaric was when Andrew Jackson sent the Cherokee to Oklahoma via The Trail of Tears. There was also Wounded Knee, where hundreds of the Lakota people were murdered for their land. We think that the Civil War ended slavery and that we began making a better Union for all of us. It’s so alarming that it’s been dismantled so quickly by so few. Wounded Knee happened in 1890. The last horrid act of attempted mass termination of our indigenous nations was in 1956.

The Indian Relocation Act of 1956 was one law among others through the 1940s and 1950s that are referred to as Indian Termination. It was an effort by the U.S. government to hasten the assimilation of American Indians. Some scholars have characterized the law as an attempt to encourage people to leave Indian reservations for urban areas, which resulted in poverty, joblessness, homelessness for many in the new urban environment.

The next major ICE assault on an American city will happen in New York. Politico reports that “ICE will ‘flood the zone’ in NYC. Trump administration officials said they’d increase staffing after getting blocked from opening an office in the city’s jails.”  If this doesn’t feel like living under Hitler’s SS, I don’t know what would. What group of people will be on their next assault?

The Department of Homeland Security will “flood the zone” with Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in New York City after the City Council blocked federal law enforcement agencies from opening an office in the city jails, President Donald Trump’s border czar Tom Homan said Monday morning.

Homan joined DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and other Trump administration officials to deliver that message at One World Trade Center after an off-duty federal customs officer was shot by an undocumented immigrant in an attempted robbery Saturday night, Noem said.

“You don’t want to let us in the jails to arrest a bad guy in the safety and security of a jail. You want to release him into the street, which makes it unsafe for the alien, because anything can happen in an on-street arrest,” Homan said. “So what are we gonna do? We’re gonna put more agents in New York City to look for that bad guy. So sanctuary cities get exactly what they don’t want: more agents in the community.”

The alleged shooter entered the country illegally in 2023 during then-President Joe Biden’s tenure and had been arrested and released four times in the years since, Noem said. She blamed the shooting on New York’s sanctuary city policies that limit the city’s cooperation with civil immigration enforcement and Mayor Eric Adams for not changing the policies, despite his good relationship with the Trump administration.

Adams has said he wants to cooperate with federal authorities on immigration more but blamed the left-leaning City Council for not letting him. “I have nothing to do with the rules that are put in place. I just carry out the rules,” Adams said at an unrelated press conference Monday when asked to respond to Noem.

Adams said he welcomes more ICE agents in the city if they’re going to help the city go after “dangerous people” like the alleged shooter, but said that “if it’s going to be to go after everyday individuals who are trying to complete the path, who are trying to be a citizen, I don’t think we should do that.”

I still don’t understand how property crimes can be lumped in with major crimes like sexual assault, murder, or battery, but then I don’t consider my car an extension of my genitalia.  I also don’t understand how any American president can get away with defying judicial orders. Again, it seems we are on a fast, downward spiral to banana republic status. This is from the Washington Post. “Trump officials accused of defying 1 in 3 judges who ruled against him.  A comprehensive analysis of hundreds of lawsuits against Trump policies shows dozens of examples of defiance, delay, and dishonesty, which experts say pose an unprecedented threat to the U.S. legal system.” Justin Jouvenal has the lede.

President Donald Trump and his appointees have been accused of flouting courts in a third of the more than 160 lawsuits against the administration in which a judge has issued a substantive ruling, a Washington Post analysis has found, suggesting widespread noncompliance withAmerica’s legal system.

Plaintiffs say Justice Department lawyers and the agencies they represent aresnubbing rulings, providing false information, failing to turn over evidence, quietly working around court orders and inventing pretexts to carry out actions that have been blocked.

Judges appointed by presidents of both parties have often agreed. None havetaken punitive action to try to force compliance, however, allowing the administration’s defiance of orders to go on for weeks or even months in some instances.

Outside legal analysts say courts typicallyare slow to begin contempt proceedings for noncompliance,especially while their rulings are under appeal.Judges alsoare likely to be concerned, analysts say, that the U.S. Marshals Service — whose director is appointed by the president — might not serve subpoenas or take recalcitrant government officials into custodyif ordered to by the courts.

The allegations against the administrationare crystallized ina whistleblower complaint filedto Congress late last monththat accused Justiceofficials of ignoring court orders in immigration cases, presenting legal arguments with no basis in the law and misrepresenting facts. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor also chided the administration, writing that Trump officials had “openly flouted” a judge’s order not to deport migrants to a country where they did not have citizenship.

The Post examined337 lawsuits filed against the administration since Trump returned to the White House and began a rapid-fire effort to reshape government programs and policy. As of mid-July, courts had ruled against the administration in 165 of the lawsuits. The Post found that the administration is accused of defying or frustrating court oversight in 57 of those cases — almost 35 percent.

Legal experts said the pattern of conductis unprecedented for any presidential administration and threatens to undermine the judiciary’s role as a check on an executive branch asserting vast powers that test the boundaries of the law and Constitution. Immigration cases have emerged as the biggest flash point, but the administration has also been repeatedly accused of failing to comply in lawsuits involving cuts to federal funding and the workforce.

Ed Maza, writing for HuffPo, has this story. “‘Reeks Of A Cover-Up’: Ex-Trump Official Suspects ‘Embarrassing’ Info In Epstein Files. Miles Taylor predicted that Trump will create distractions to keep people from talking about the Epstein case.”

President Donald Trump has backtracked on his promise to release files related to late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, and one former official from his first term thinks he knows why.

There might be “embarrassing” details about Trump in those documents, according to Miles Taylor, who served as Homeland Security chief of staff in 2019.
MSNBC’s Alex Witt asked Taylor about a report that Attorney General Pam Bondi pressured FBI Director Kash Patel into getting 1,000 employees to sort through 100,000 Epstein records and flag any mention of Trump.

“This data point, to me, reeks of a cover-up,” Taylor said Sunday.

If the report is true, he said, that doesn’t necessarily mean there was criminal behavior, but the agents could have uncovered information that the president doesn’t want made public.

“Again, it doesn’t have to be criminal,” he said. “It could just be embarrassing.”

He pointed to a report in The Wall Street Journal of a strange birthday letter Trump allegedly sent to Epstein as an example of something that’s not criminal but “very embarrassing.”

Trump has denied sending the latter and is suing over it.

“The keyword searches looking for Trump’s name, I think, strongly suggest that somewhere, something could have been found that has affected his behavior in this case,” he said, and warned that the case could consume the president in the same way that the Russia investigation did during his first term.

The good news, he said, is that it might keep Trump distracted and unable to follow through on some of the most extreme parts of his agenda.

“The bad news is it’s going to make Donald Trump desperate to create other distractions because he doesn’t want people to focus on this,” he said.

The AP reports that Israeli forces are pushing farther and farther into Gaza. “Israeli forces push into parts of a central Gaza city that the war had largely spared.” It appears that Netanyahoo is using the massive amount of chaos created by Trump’s irrational Foreign Policies to conquer the country and expel its rightful citziens.  This area is also a staging ground for groups providing aid. Trump has lost interest in the region since he’s so involved with Epstein reports.

Israeli ground troops for the first time Monday pushed into areas of a central Gaza city where several aid groups are based, in what appeared to be the latest effort to carve up the Palestinian territory with military corridors.

Deir al-Balah is the only Gaza city that has not seen major ground operations or suffered widespread devastation in 21 months of war, leading to speculation that the Hamas militant group holds large numbers of hostages there. The main group representing hostages’ families said it was “shocked and alarmed” by the incursion, which was confirmed by an Israeli military official, and demanded answers from Israeli leaders.

Israel says the seizure of territory in Gaza is aimed at pressuring Hamas to release hostages, but it is a major point of contention in ongoing ceasefire talks.

The U.N. food agency, meanwhile, accused Israeli forces of firing on a crowd of Palestinians seeking humanitarian aid over the weekend. Gaza’s Health Ministry called it one of the deadliest attacks on aid-seekers in the war that has driven the territory to the brink of famine.

Well, they’ve got a lot of days left to kill off more of us. Let’s see how it goes. Down here in Lousyana, they’re just killing us off with not much excuse at all.  A large Coastal restoration project that was funded by the Gulf Oil Spill settlement has been shut down by our crazy governor and the swampbillies in the legislature. There’s an incredible heatwave here for the next three days, and I’m just trying to stay as dry and cool as possible, but I have a feeling I’ll be cold, bathtub-bound for most of that time.  This is from our local TV station, WDSU. “Louisiana officially cancels state’s largest coastal project.”  Just write death by MAGA’s love of oil in my obit if I don’t make it.

Louisiana has officially canceled the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion.

The project was the largest single ecosystem restoration effort in U.S. history and the cornerstone of the state’s own Coastal Master Plan.

Gov. Jeff Landry has been a critic of the project, saying it’s costing taxpayers $30 to $50 million a year, claiming it’s destroying Grand Isle, and impacting drinking water for several parishes.

Supporters of the program say it is crucial to restoring the coast.

Restore the Mississippi River Delta issued the following statement:

“In a complete abandonment of science-driven decision-making and public transparency, Governor Jeff Landry and his administration have pulled the plug on a fully funded, permitted, and under construction project designed to rebuild tens of thousands of acres of our collapsing coast. The Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion represents decades of research, public engagement, and bipartisan support.

Thursday’s announcement by the TIG was the culmination of a year-and-a-half-long campaign of misinformation and political arm-twisting by Gov. Jeff Landry and his coastal team to undermine and finally kill the state’s largest ecosystem restoration project.

Mid-Barataria is more than a project — it represents a generational investment, paid for with the penalties of an environmental disaster. These dollars were meant to restore the coast, not settle a cancellation of contracts behind closed doors. The project’s cancellation means the state is throwing away more than $618 million intended to be spent to protect the coast’s culture, residents, and businesses.

The state has recently resurrected the idea of a smaller diversion near Myrtle Grove as a substitute, but that project was previously dropped from the state’s master plan years ago due to poor performance in early modeling.

A stopgap project with no data is not a solution. We need diversion designs backed by science — not politics.

Coastal Louisiana is still in an accelerated land loss crisis, and the science remains clear: sediment diversions are essential to building and sustaining wetlands at scale. Any alternative must be grounded in rigorous evaluation, transparent public engagement, and a commitment to outcomes — not opinions and optics.

I think they want all of us dead. It’s the only explanation I have.

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