The Plague swept the kingdom and the prince's subject were dying like flies.
Blood was its Avator and its seal — the redness and the horror of blood.
In response, prince lavishly provisioned his castle, then gathered all the fancy people
behind the safety of its thick walls.
When his dominions were half depopulated, he summoned to his presence a
thousand hale and light-hearted friends from among the knights and dames of
his court, and with these retired to the deep seclusion of one of his
castellated abbeys.
Finally, they welded the doors shut so no one could enter or leave.
This wall had gates of iron. The courtiers, having entered, brought
furnaces and massy hammers and welded the bolts. They resolved to leave
means neither of ingress or egress to the sudden impulses of despair from
without or of frenzy from within.
Then they partied!
The prince had provided all the appliances of pleasure. There were
buffoons, there were improvisatori, there were ballêt-dancers, there were
musicians, there were cards, there was Beauty, there was wine. All these and
security were within. Without was the “Red Death.”
But uh-oh! Spoiler! The Plague got in!
And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a
thief in the night.
And that was that.
And one by one dropped the revellers in the
blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture
of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last
of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay
and the Red Death MAGA Republican Party held
illimitable dominion over all.
TRUMP: Chavez stole the 2020 election. My good friend Nickolas "Mad Dog" Maduro -- I call him Mad Dog...I invented that -- he confessed after some light persuasion by Stephen Miller's boys. I am appointing My Pillow Guy as National Election Czar.
KIRK: Watch his mouth.
TRUMP: Also I won the popular vote in 2016 by 35 million votes. We have it on tape. We have the files. Just before he exploded, my friend Lindsay Graham told me. 60 million illegals voted for Demon Rats in 2016. These scum will be prosecuted and execute for treason.
SPOCK: Captain, the speech follows no logical pattern.
KIRK: Random sentences strung together.
TRUMP: Reflecting Pool was sabotaged by Antifa terrorists. Their headquarters are Barack Hussein Obummer's big, ugly, low-IQ so-called library where there are no books, just Muslim terrorist things. We have the details. Chavez has confessed. Arrests are coming.
MCCOY: He looks drugged, Jim. Almost at a cataleptic state.
TRUMP: Iran is over. We won. The Strait is open. Unlike Barack Hussein Obummer who gave the Strait away to his Muslim terrorist friends. We're going to make billions.
MCCOY: I have to have a close look at him.
TRUMP: Many people say I am the best president ever. I am the biggest winner. No one could have done what I did. Ballroom. Reflecting Pool. Epstein files are a hoax. Stopping 125 wars.... zzzzzz.
President Trump says the peeling blue coating and algae blooms that mar
his $16.4 million renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool are
the fault of vandals working with “knives” in the “dark of night.”
But government documents obtained by The New York Times show that
while National Park Service workers found two cuts in sections of foam
between the pool’s expansion joints, those were not directly related to
the “American flag blue” coating that is now peeling, or to the algae that
has turned the pool a bright shade of green.
Even as the documents show workers were attempting to address
deteriorating conditions, Trump administration officials were insisting
publicly that the pool was pristine.
The pool had been drained, resealed and then refilled by June 5.
Four days later, Park Service workers discovered holes, cracks and peeling
caulking in parts of the pool, along with cuts in sections of the foam,
according to the documents.
The cause of the cuts was unclear. While a June 9 report by the
U.S. Park Police described the cuts as “razor blade slashes” made along a
20-foot-long stretch of the foam, the administration has yet to present
evidence supporting that assertion. The documents reviewed by The Times
described them as two 171-foot blade cuts but did not address how they
were made.
By June 16, workers had noticed that chunks of blue sealant that
covered the pool’s bottom were peeling and floating to the surface, the
documents show. That sealant was separate from the foam in the pool’s
expansion joints, which allow its concrete slabs to expand and
contract.
The workers had also discovered that some devices installed to kill
algae were not working as intended, according to the documents. And
enormous algae blooms had turned portions of the pool bright green instead
of dark blue.
But on June 15, Mr. Trump was still declaring the renovation a
success, telling reporters that “I’m very good at building things and
constructing things.”
...On Tuesday, the president said on social media that six people
had been arrested, and seven others had been cited, for slashing the
pool’s sealant with a “sharp knife or razors.”
“It was purposefully and criminally done, and somebody had to work
very hard, probably in the dark of night,” he wrote.
Mr. Trump also told reporters on Monday, without offering evidence,
that vandals had poured fertilizer into the pool to feed the algae.
Neither the Interior Department nor the White House would provide
charging documents, citations or the names of anyone arrested. They did
share the Park Police incident report, which said any suspect or suspects
were unknown. The report also did not mention any damage to the pool’s
blue sealant, nor did it describe any vandals dumping fertilizer.
...
The administration is setting up fencing around the site before the
July 4 fireworks display for safety reasons, Ms. Martin said. But it’s
going up earlier than originally planned because of what she called an
“increase in vandalism by leftist activists.”
The Trump administration awarded two no-bid contracts for the
Reflecting Pool renovations, bypassing the legally required process of
seeking competitive bids because of what it called an urgent need to
complete the project for events around the nation’s 250th birthday.
Even as this smelly, old bigot's brain rots in his skull, he still
retains that one characteristic which unites all Republicans: the
categorical refusal to take responsibility for their own fuck ups at which
they keep getting caught red-handed over and over again.
I was pleased and proud to have this man as my president. Pleased and
proud to have his family as our First Family. I was proud to vote for
him for senator once and for president twice. I was proud to have been
one of the panelists who vetted him when he was still a relatively obscure
state senator during his ultimately failed primary bid for the U.S. House of
Representatives against incumbent Bobby Rush. In fact, I still have my ticket
stub from his "Barack the Vote" fundraiser.
However, as pleased and proud as I was to have Barack Obama as my president, it is also worth remembering the environment in which Obama governed, including taking a moment to remember much furious shit we Obama supporters took from our "allies" on the
left. In case you'd forgotten, here's a sample from a now-deadlinked post
on Common Dreams from May, 2013. I have an archive full of this stuff:
When Obama finally declares martial law and announces the new Fascist
States of American, O-bots like Maddow will eagerly put on their Nazi
armbands -- cute little pastel hope & change swastikas, of course --
and join the goose-stepping parade. She's nothing but a propagandist and
has absolutely no scruples whatsoever, just like the corporation that
pays her, just like the "commander-in-chief" she props up with her lies
and half-truths...
That kind of rhetoric was not unusual at the time: over-the-top rage from the whole Conservative media machine and from the dirtbag Left. And in that environment, the Obama administration constituted a grand social experiment in
offering the Republican party base -- which had been trained by Republican
leadership and Conservative media to automatically loathe Democrats with an
almost unhinged ferocity -- a different option. Offering them
compromise, thoughtfulness, dignity and respect, as well as policies that
materially benefited them.
And that grand social experiment failed spectacularly. Which is why it is worth our time and attention to diagnose why that experiment
failed. But to do that we'd have to journey into the past further back
than 2016, which is something that pundits, the consulting class and our Never
Trump "allies" almost all categorically refuse to do.
That is because to examine the state of our union prior to 2016 makes the
pundits, the consulting class and our Never Trump "allies" either look like
arrogant idiots whose opinions should never be trusted again...or ambitious
fools who were complicit in creating the ideal conditions for a monster like
Trump to emerge...or both. And since pundits, the consulting class and
our Never Trump "allies" now dominate any media conversation about politics,
that once again leaves it to dirty, disreputable outsiders like us to do the
work of explaining why everything went to hell.
To start with, President Barack Obama might as well
have been built in a Centrist/Moderate/Both Siderist lab by the New York Times
editorial board. He was everything the pundits and the consultant class said
would be the "solve" for what was dividing America.
This is from me 16 years ago, in 2010:
For his entire adult life, Barack Obama has succeeded by offering himself as
the perfect midpoint between others. As a mathematical function, not a
leader. As an averaging equation, not a true believer.
Since he
showed up on the political radar, he has marketed himself relentlessly as
Half black and half white... Half American urbanite, half
world-citizen... Half wonk, half preacher... Half Harvard Yard,
half
Back o' the Yards... Half red and half blue...
And this bone-deep reflex -- plus his formidable intellect and ability to
rise to the rhetorical occasion -- would have prepared him perfectly for the
Presidency...if this were 1960.
But it is not 1960 -- nor is he
dealing with Harvard Conservatives pals or Springfield Republican pols --
and being a results-agnostic "process guy" when the process is utterly
broken no longer works.
Instead, the ideologically-lockstepping
Right led by Rupert Murdoch and the Koch brothers have found in Obama their
perfect patsy: the Democrat who seems constitutionally incapable of
counter-punching, who can only feel comfortable while suspended between two
opposing positions and who will, therefore, find a compromise between
opposites
even when he has to invent wholly fictional opposing views to which he can
cede half the playing field.
In order to avoid wasting his presidency, squandering the opportunity we
have given him, and letting the country spiral into a permanent corporate
feudal pest-hole, Barack Obama must do the hardest thing of all: he must
exceed his design specifications. This is not unprecedented, but like
Franklin Roosevelt the capitalist-turned-social-Democrat or Abraham Lincoln
the compromiser-turned-Emancipator, Obama must let go of a central pillar of
his identity and embrace the brutal fact that our modern
house divided against itself cannot stand.
That we cannot endure permanently half-Fox and half-free.
That
we will become all one thing, or all the other.
And that this is
your fight,
President Obama.
This burden has fallen to you: it cannot be
shirked and cannot be delegated.
If you take up this challenge,
millions of us will have your back, Mr. President.
But if you
cannot summon the inner strength to evolve past your reflexive need to
compromise with people who want to destroy you, then we are all well and
truly fucked.
Because in 2008, Democrats took a chance on an outsider conjured out of their
best hopes, but by 2010 it was clear to anyone with eyes to see that the
Republican party and Conservative media were too far gone to be saved.
That by now there was too much power and too much profit trafficking in racism
and conspiracy mongering and hatred for them to change. That they viewed
compromise, thoughtfulness, dignity and respect as weakness, and Obama as a
patsy for continuing to offer calm, civility and concessions over and over
again.
That what the nation needed in that moment was a president who took to the
bully pulpit every day to beat the shit out of GOP in the Truman style:
“I never did give them hell. I just told the truth, and they thought it was
hell.”
And to go after the working men and women who voted against their own
interests in the same manner:
But that never happened. And the reaction from Republicans to this
decent, honorable, thoughtful man who begged them to work with him solve our
common problems was an eight-year-long, racist primal scream and the to nominate
and elect the personification of their most dangerously ignorant, racist
fears.
The King of the Birthers.
Then they renominated him again in 2020.
Then, when he lost, they attempted a coup to overthrow the government, and
spent the next four years screaming that the election had been stolen.
Then they renominated him yet again in 2024, re-elected him, and here we are. And by now it should be plain enough for even the punditocracy to
see that the problem was never Trump. The problem has always been the
bigots and imbeciles of the Republican base who manifested Trump, and the
Conservative media which continues to belt-feed the most lurid red-meat lies
to that base, which eagerly gobbles it up and asks for seconds.
So, to quote another president from Illinois whose presidential library and
museum are also here,
The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The
occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion.
As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall
ourselves, and then we shall save our country. Fellow-citizens, we can not
escape history. We of this Congress and this Administration will be
remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance or insignificance
can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass will
light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation. We say we are
for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to
save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it...
And to repeat what I shamelessly stole from Lincoln 16 years ago and
modified to fit our times:
That we cannot endure permanently half-Fox and half-free.
That we
will become all one thing, or all the other.
“Opportunities multiply as they are seized.”-- American author and teacher Verna Hills, 1937, later adapted by teachers and parents to the melody of the traditional English folk song "Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush"... which itself probably originated with female inmates at England's HMP Wakefield, who exercised around a courtyard mulberry tree with their children.
Deaths of migrants in ICE custody hit record high under Trump
The number of immigrants who have died while in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody has reached an all-time high this fiscal year.
Twenty-nine people have died in ICE custody since October, the start of the federal government's fiscal year, already surpassing 2004's toll of 28, the previous record, according to government data.
However bad you think it is, you know that, under this fascist regime, the truth is so much worse
"Senator McCarthy's reckless and unfounded attempt to impugn my loyalty is just one more example of his typical tactic of attempting to tie up to Communism anyone who disagrees with him."-- Edward R. Murrow
