Imagine living in a country so terrifying you are willing to walk thousands of miles, carrying you baby to ensure a safe future. You get to that destination and ask for asylum. After some time has passed you are accosted by six masked men and pushed into an unmarked van. You are then transferred from that area to a prison far from your home. From there you a transferred to a prison in a country that doesn’t speak a language you know and beats you when you don’t obey the commands you cannot comprehend. You have no idea why you have been treated this way, you worry about children you may have left behind, you become a slave, doing the bidding of the people who so obviously hate you. There is no relief, no help, and no future. You thought you had done everything asked of you and yet here you are probably for the rest of your life.
If immoral Trump were to be impeached for his numerous violations of law since taking office, it would leave who - JD Vance, who is even more clueless but just as ruthless as Trump? So Vance too would need to be impeached. But then you get toady Johnson. In fact, the first 12 in succession are all incompetent clowns with histories of corruption since taking office all the way down to #12 - Wormbrain Kennedy. How do you impeach an entire administration? I doubt that you can, so it makes impeachment pointless - untill 2016.
The only solution is to turn both houses of Congress Blue, replace Johnson with a competent Democrat, and then impeach both Trump and Vance.
“To my friends in the Senate, lock yourself in a room if you must, don’t go home, and GET THE DEAL DONE THIS WEEK,” Trump wrote Tuesday on Truth Social. “Work with the House so they can pick it up, and pass it, IMMEDIATELY. NO ONE GOES ON VACATION UNTIL IT’S DONE.”
The parlimentarian ruled out the sale of national parks and national lands from the Big Crappy bill. Hope it holds up.
From NBC. A significant source of consternation is the steeper Medicaid cuts in the Senate bill, which include lowering provider taxes that are used to fund the program, and limiting payments to states.
Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., who faces re-election in a battleground state next year, warned his party at a meeting Tuesday that it will lose the 2026 midterm elections if it pushes ahead on proposed Medicaid cuts. He compared the situation to the heavy losses Democrats suffered in the 2014 midterms after a rocky Obamacare rollout, according to a source in the room.
Tillis circulated a document Monday with estimates of how much Medicaid money states would lose if the Senate bill passes, including $38.9 billion in losses for North Carolina, $16 billion for Tennessee and $6.1 billion for Missouri.
Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., said the current version of the bill — which would also extend the 2017 Trump tax cuts — doesn’t have enough votes and would harm rural hospitals in his state.
Which will adversely hurt millions of their own voters when their rural hospitals and clinics shut down leaving them without local medical assistance. I guess Rs think they can just lie to them when someone in their family dies because their rural hospital has closed due to the Rs gutting Medicaid. Those tural medical resources were built because the locals could finally get health insurance that made it possible those medical resources would get paid due to the ACA policies that residents could acquire and at least pay something for instead of having to show up at the ER as indigents 3 to 4 hour drives away if they could pay for the gas to get there. Once they realize the Rs and Trump screwed them over and one of their beloved family members died as a result of the blatant greed to enrich themselves by killing the healthcare that would have saved their lives they are going to be very angry.
I think the answer is in the 2026 election. We need to get exquisitely SERIOUS and ORGANIZED so that we can take the House and Senate with a huge majority, then impeach the 6 members of the so-called Supreme Court, and send each one of the traitors out of the country where no one can locate THEM. Give 'em their own creation. That list will be all the House & Senate voters for Trump, Trump himself and corporate heads that enabled him, and down into their organizations and root the evil out. They deserve no better.
I don't want to give Trump any ideas, but Russia uses "internal exile." Maybe that's what Trump/DeSantis are doing here in Baghdad By the Sea with the Allegator Alcatraz. Construction is underway for an "immigrant detention center" in the heart of the Everglades, where Florida says it plans to stash detainees in tents as soon as next week.
Once upon a time I was a lawyer who would get court appointments in Florida, which has a series of prisons that border the Everglades. The state would move my clients around so I'd have a tough time finding them. One, in Immokalee, used chain gangs, who did contract work . Think Cool Hand Luke in the middle of the swamps. The principal crop was sugarcane.
Much later, at DOL, my office heard cases involving labor pools, used extensively with legal temporary agricultural labor. The H-2A visa program, administered by DOL, allows U.S. employers to bring foreign workers to the United States to fill temporary or seasonal agricultural jobs. These jobs typically last no longer than one year. To use the H-2A program, employers must first obtain a temporary labor certification from the DOL, demonstrating that there are not enough U.S. workers available for the job and that employing H-2A workers will not negatively impact the wages and working conditions of similarly employed U.S. workers.
The accusation was that many of the pools didn't follow the law and the employers didn’t hold them to produce I-8 forms and other authority. We had a category of penalty cases -- we could debar some employers for continuing violations.
Imagine the prisoners at "peonage." Peonage, also called debt slavery or debt servitude, is a system where an employer compels a worker to pay off a debt with work. Legally, peonage was outlawed by Congress in 1867. However, in many states, prisoners still are the exception, under a convict lease system. Under this system, individuals convicted of crimes (disproportionately African American men) were leased out to private employers, often plantation owners or industrialists. These employers paid a fee to the state for the use of convict labor, generating substantial revenue for the states.
I visited places like Glades Correctional, in the middle of the Florida sugar industry, which also leased prisoners.
In addition, in 2008, six members of a family in Immokalee were charged with enslaving Mexican and Guatemalan immigrants and forcing them into agricultural labor. The charges included:
Enslavement and forced labor: The Navarrete family was accused of beating, threatening, restraining, and locking workers in trucks to force them to work.
Underpayment and debt manipulation: The defendants allegedly underpaid workers and created escalating debts, threatening physical harm if they left before the debts were repaid.
Harboring undocumented immigrants: The family was also charged with harboring undocumented foreign nationals for financial gain.
Other charges: Some family members were also charged with document fraud, identity theft, and feloniously re-entering the United States after being deported.
*A 17-count indictment alleged that the Navarrete family held more than a dozen men captive, forcing them to sleep in boxes, shacks, and trucks.
*Workers were told they would earn a minimal wage, but were driven into increasing debt through exorbitant charges for basic necessities like food and showers.
*Several workers managed to escape and reported the situation to authorities.
Five members of the family pleaded guilty to various charges in September 2008.
*In December 2008, four defendants were sentenced for their roles in the scheme.
The largest prison in Louisiana, with its reputation for brutality and enslavement of prisoners is Angola, and it was built on the site of the largest plantation In Louisiana.
His aunt and uncle are (or were) a nun and a priest in Youngstown. His maternal grandpa was the chair of the Republican Party in Mahoning County, Ohio, at a time when it was besieged with riots....
A criminal investigation related to the Hope Florida Foundation, a nonprofit associated with Florida First Lady Casey DeSantis' signature Hope Florida program, has been opened by Leon County prosecutors. The investigation, first reported by the Miami Herald and Tampa Bay Times, stems from concerns raised by state lawmakers about a $10 million state grant given to the charity.
He has a myriad of probems but the most pressing involves his wife's charity,
Daniel Solomon, you are a treasure. Don't know what was erased, but important to praise informatiion: the depth and the details of your shares. Would hope that now everone remembers De Santis' cruel religious heritage--that aunt and uncle!
How sad that the Catholic Church has so much damaging history! Pope Francis tried to make improvements, and Leo 14 has a full platter of peccadillos confronting him.
The Catholic Church is an institution that is designed for one thing, survival.
In 11333 the First Lateran council declared priest marriages invalid, the Second Lateran Council in 1139, made celibacy mandatory.
This had nothing to do with "godliness" or spirituality, but everything to do with the church inheriting the immense wealth accumulated by priests, bishops and cardinals, yet despite that they continued to have mistresses and children
Several Popes had children, both before and after becoming Pope. Some were legally married before becoming Pope, while others had children out of wedlock. Notable examples include Adrian II, John XVII, Clement IV, and Honorius IV who were legally married. Additionally, Popes like Alexander VI, Julius II, Paul III, and Pius IV had children before or during their papacies. Some, like Innocent VIII, openly acknowledged their illegitimate children.
Bishops and Cardinals, especially were very wealthy, but when they died they left their fortunes to their wives and children, and the church would have none of that, they wanted it all.
Ye gods’ what a litany of crime you had to fight. I can’t get the image of alligators out of my mind the government might use to make detainees disappear at Alligator Alcatraz.
I am horrified, of all the crap SCOTUS has ruled on, and Trump has done. This takes the cake.
Imagine some Spanish speaking person, who has been roofing homes and blow drying streets, finds himself dumped into South Sudan or Somalia. Not only does he not speak the language, but those are Muslim countries, and wrought with internal conflict, civil war and crime.
Thom can tell us about Sudan, nothing but desert and scrub, basically by deporting these people hey are sending them to their death and I am sure that is the purpose. Fuck SCOTUS, it is an inhuman, self righteous, theocrtically inclined organization.
Biden and the Democrats controlled the government for a short period of time and could have, and should have, packed the Supreme Court. Another Biden failure, besides Merrick Garland and the failure to use Trumps EO 13957, to cleanse DOJ, NSA, DHS of Trump humpers embedded at the last moment by Trump.
Biden paved the way for Trump, this moderation shit, this bipartisanship, is cowardice and at worse complicity and corruption.
I completely agree with you. A piece from Elie Mystal on the legal rationale of the Supreme Court on this. Solicitor General John Sauer found a "loophole" in the Convention Against Torture treaty, like Elie says 'if someone asks you to find a loophole in a treaty called the Convention Against Torture, that's a sure sign you are working for the bad guys'.
Worse? "Since Trump began his second term, his administration has directed immigration agents to target unaccompanied minors, moved to cut contracts that fund their legal representation and sent Homeland Security agents to homes where unaccompanied children are released to conduct welfare checks.
"In at least one case, it has leaned on Florida’s state government to violate its own rules and laws by sharing information about the immigrant children in its care. And earlier this month, the Department of Homeland Security announced a new policy that will clear the way for the agency to deport children who are in the United States as documented victims of abuse, neglect or abandonment under a classification known as Special Immigrant Juveniles."
I just read an article in Baltimore Banner talking about the extreme shortage of daycare for children in Baltimore. That’s bad enough, but I shudder to think of children being left to their own devises with ICE agents targeting residences, now.
In Florida ICE is now a contractor with childrens' services. They'll eventually turn in every kid.
In Maryland, the YMCA was often the subcontractor for preschool or head start via Chapter 1 money. Trump tries to kill off the Chapter 1 funding. If there's no funding, maybe that will make it tougher for ICE to find them.
Elie Mystal one of my all time favorites. He doesn't pull punches and tells it like it is. I am surprised that the producers of MSNBC haven't canceled his contract.
So, as anticipated decades ago, 'murka now has the judicial branch writing law and enforcing those laws. The Extreme Sport of Injustice. Led by whom? The Ken Starr hit man, Roberts, who grifted his legal rise via looking in dumpsters and up ladies' skirts for slander to use against, well, anyone who needed putting down via the orders of the Koch/Bush empires. Never, never forget where/when this all began - Prescott Bush, Harriman, Hearst, Ford, Trump the elder, et. al., the addiction to Naziism coursing through the veins of political/blue blood 'murka. Hoover, McCarthy, Cohn, the Dulles bros., the Cosa Nostra, the Jim Crow D brands, stoking the KKK fever that never goes down, just sweats out the electrolytes of 'murkan attempts at real democracy, which were very weak from the get-go.
When you have a potent, powerful job for LIFE, what might occur inside your curling brain cells? The feast of hubris. Six of Nine, a doppelganger for the Borg Queen quislings. But this hive is toxic, it pollinates nothing but death. The female three, all the ilk of Obama via Biden's last hurrah, an Hispanic, a Jew, a Black African, wow, how that must wrinkle the noses of those pompous white boys and their handmaiden. Anyone who dares to believe that this mess is about anything other than the FEAR of the 'other' who happens to be the ilk of various slaves of various eras, is drowning in denial and fecklessness. If you are really a racist, then you must hate yourself, because there is absolutely zero real evidence that more than one race exists, and it is a junkyard from top to bottom. At the top is the chief injustice, a model of the king's English if ever there was one. It just took 245 years to get him out of the crypt and into the morgue.
The Supreme Court’s corrupt majority denies due process to enable cruel and unusual punishment via deportation to foreign gulags. An opportunity to expand the Court was recently wasted, allowing our hypocritical Federalists/“originalists” to mangle the Constitution at every opportunity for the foreseeable future. Dumping democracy in favor of fascism is radical and will only be thwarted by equally “radical” measures.
SCOTUS shows how an elite education means nothing insofar as the honor, integrity, ethics, morals and compassion of those profiting, and I do mean profiting, from it. Admission: I am in that group too, as are the three Justices who are all that the other six are not. Proof of the old acronym GIGO—garbage in, garbage out. Except with shiny diplomas.
The biggest problem is that too many Americans either support the New Old Cruelty or are apathetic about it. That is why I think as a country we are beyond saving, and not worth saving. The good people in it are, but I don’t know how they can be. I know I want our youngest daughter and grandson to leave for a more decent country while they still can, though they may not be able to do that. The depth of my loathing for what we have become is captured by my wish that our grandson, the most precious and adorable element of my life, whom I have helped raise from the day he was born, and who clings to me, had never been born. Because I fear his childhood will be his best years, and that his future, and that of the rest of his generation, is bleak.
In fairness, our problems may be inherent in our species. We are unworthy of this planet we are hastening to destroy. And despite the many good people among us, I fear the troglodytes will overwhelm us, and when we go extinct, possibly at the hands of thecAI we keep “improving”, the planet may be far better for it.
Every decent country has powerful Fascists trying to do exactly what Trump has done and those countries are barely keeping those foul people out of power. You essentially are doing the same thing as the Fascists by wanting to burn down what is good as well as what is bad here as long as you save your own. That only gives the power of the military in the hands of whoever has the keys when the fire began.
There is truth in what you say, but it shows our dilemmas. If we are past the tipping point, as I fear we are, sacrificing ourselves in a doomed struggle is a pointless martyrdom. I still hold the faint hope that we will have elections next year, that they will overwhelmingly reject MAGA, and that the results will stand. But it is a very faint hope. As always, Germany is a sad lesson. Its evil regime could not be overturned from within. It took that nation’s destruction by a coalition of very different allies to do that. No such coalition is out there in the world now, not strong enough, but more importantly, not better enough. So we have to save ourselves. My pessimism comes from the reality that a critical mass of those living here (I will not call them Americans, for they are not) want fascism, want power over the “other”, want indecency, incivility, injustice, ignorance, cruelty, and delight in the crudeness, incoherence and insufferable narcissism of the felon in chief. Hence my comment.
Shame. Shame. Shame. It is rare that I would wish to live in DC, but I do. I'd want to shout SHAME on the steps of the Supreme Court and to the faces of the evil six.
This ruling is about torture and death for seeking asylum. It's how Republicans thank the very people that feed this country, clean the houses and businesses, help raise our children, and build or maintain our homes and infrastructure
These six Republicans think they are the Lords and have crowned Trump king. Get The House so we can control the money, get the Presidency and Senate, and make new laws. We must impeach them all---prosecute the ones we can. I hear there is a prison in a swamp in Florida.....
"The real reason that we can’t have the Ten Commandments in a courthouse: You cannot post 'Thou shalt not steal,' 'Thou shalt not commit adultery,' and 'Thou shalt not lie' in a building full of lawyers, judges, and politicians. It creates a hostile work environment.” – George Carlin
Our government - "We" - are now complicit in international human trafficking. It is a short and obvious next step for these countries accepting deportees from the U.S. to begin using deportees as slave labor or selling them to other countries to do so. I wonder if Trump minions such as Bondi, Miller, Hedgeseth, Noem, understand that the presidential immunity recently invented by the Supreme Court does not protect underlings committing crimes on behalf of the president. They can certainly face prosecution in the future, when Trump is no longer in office to pardon them.
Only need 3 Congressional Republicans to blow up his agenda. Rand Paul, Ron Johnson are nutsy koo koo, but we'll take them.
Besides the Medicaid issue, there's Ukraine, and several others.
Where I live, we have 3 MAGA Cuban American House members who oppose Trump's immigration policy. We need to pressure them. I've published this several times. Miami healthcare CEO Michael “Mike” B. Fernandez wrote the following open letter to U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and members of the Republican Cuban-American Miami-Dade congressional delegation: U.S. Reps. Mario Diaz-Balart, Carlos Giménez and Maria Elvira Salazar.
"For decades, I have stood with you in defense of the freedoms we cherish, those we were denied in the country of our birth and found in the grace of this one. I know what it means to flee tyranny. Like you, I carry that history in my bones and that pain in my heart. But like a growing number in our community,
"I have watched with dismay as the very values we once found sanctuary in are now being attacked by a previously unthinkable threat — the sitting president of the United States."
The idea that we are a democratic Republic and that via our vote and participation we can take back the government, is a fools thought.
Once a tick is buried into the skin, it either fills itself with blood and falls off, or is extracted (best way is via a hot needle that makes it back out, because if you pull it off, you leave the head embedded and open yourself up to infection even sepsis.
Once a dictator takes effective control of the government, he or she must be dislodged by external force, or like Franco of Spain, die.
A dictatorship can rot from within or implode, but the dictator will be replaced by another of it's ilk, most likely an heir, a family member.
The theocratic, patriarchal, right has effectively grabbed the reins of power, and are not letting go. that is what Project 2025 is all about.
In 100 Days, Russel Vought and Yarvin, using Trump have irretrievably altered the politics and control of the U.S. of A.
All of those federal agencies, commissions, boards that Trump has dismantled are gone, and like Humpty Dumpty can't be put back together again.
Anyone who is not a white heterosexual Christian male is now in danger. They’ve been looking for a place to stash anybody they don’t like and now they have the ability to set any number of people whatsoever. Now all they do is change the laws in such a way as to make people prosecutable for doing things they don’t like and there you have it. Perfect they’ve even explained it in project 2025 if you read, read it carefully. They’ve already said they’re going to make pornography, illegal and highly prosecutable. Then anything they don’t like is called pornography or something similar. They just invent new words for covering a wider swath of behavior they don’t like.
Though often broken and faltering, we have taken a degree of democratic justice for granted for a long time. The cruelty of these deportations should be waking us up to just how inhumane and vicious is the rule that Trump is in the process of installing. For a descussion and enumeration of the techniques Trump has so far demonstrated to engineer his dismanttling of democracy and fascist takeover, see Shea Foote's substack @ substack.com.
Imagine living in a country so terrifying you are willing to walk thousands of miles, carrying you baby to ensure a safe future. You get to that destination and ask for asylum. After some time has passed you are accosted by six masked men and pushed into an unmarked van. You are then transferred from that area to a prison far from your home. From there you a transferred to a prison in a country that doesn’t speak a language you know and beats you when you don’t obey the commands you cannot comprehend. You have no idea why you have been treated this way, you worry about children you may have left behind, you become a slave, doing the bidding of the people who so obviously hate you. There is no relief, no help, and no future. You thought you had done everything asked of you and yet here you are probably for the rest of your life.
Not a comment I "like", but one I agree with.
And first they took your baby...
No, this is negative fantasy--absolutely self-immolating!
This is a cruel, vicious, and sick mob.
Irredeemable.
So true!
If immoral Trump were to be impeached for his numerous violations of law since taking office, it would leave who - JD Vance, who is even more clueless but just as ruthless as Trump? So Vance too would need to be impeached. But then you get toady Johnson. In fact, the first 12 in succession are all incompetent clowns with histories of corruption since taking office all the way down to #12 - Wormbrain Kennedy. How do you impeach an entire administration? I doubt that you can, so it makes impeachment pointless - untill 2016.
The only solution is to turn both houses of Congress Blue, replace Johnson with a competent Democrat, and then impeach both Trump and Vance.
That's certainly not the only solution.
Can do both. Check out the Jerry Weiss scenario. https://jerryweiss.substack.com/
The real fight is in the senate.
“To my friends in the Senate, lock yourself in a room if you must, don’t go home, and GET THE DEAL DONE THIS WEEK,” Trump wrote Tuesday on Truth Social. “Work with the House so they can pick it up, and pass it, IMMEDIATELY. NO ONE GOES ON VACATION UNTIL IT’S DONE.”
The parlimentarian ruled out the sale of national parks and national lands from the Big Crappy bill. Hope it holds up.
From NBC. A significant source of consternation is the steeper Medicaid cuts in the Senate bill, which include lowering provider taxes that are used to fund the program, and limiting payments to states.
Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., who faces re-election in a battleground state next year, warned his party at a meeting Tuesday that it will lose the 2026 midterm elections if it pushes ahead on proposed Medicaid cuts. He compared the situation to the heavy losses Democrats suffered in the 2014 midterms after a rocky Obamacare rollout, according to a source in the room.
Tillis circulated a document Monday with estimates of how much Medicaid money states would lose if the Senate bill passes, including $38.9 billion in losses for North Carolina, $16 billion for Tennessee and $6.1 billion for Missouri.
Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., said the current version of the bill — which would also extend the 2017 Trump tax cuts — doesn’t have enough votes and would harm rural hospitals in his state.
Which will adversely hurt millions of their own voters when their rural hospitals and clinics shut down leaving them without local medical assistance. I guess Rs think they can just lie to them when someone in their family dies because their rural hospital has closed due to the Rs gutting Medicaid. Those tural medical resources were built because the locals could finally get health insurance that made it possible those medical resources would get paid due to the ACA policies that residents could acquire and at least pay something for instead of having to show up at the ER as indigents 3 to 4 hour drives away if they could pay for the gas to get there. Once they realize the Rs and Trump screwed them over and one of their beloved family members died as a result of the blatant greed to enrich themselves by killing the healthcare that would have saved their lives they are going to be very angry.
Wow, my so- called "representative" Coward Hawley actually is dying sneering good for once? Stopped clock syndrome.
It is if you want to dump our dimbulb President and his entire unqualified clowncar cabinet.
Let us all visualize that outcome, in process now,
I think the answer is in the 2026 election. We need to get exquisitely SERIOUS and ORGANIZED so that we can take the House and Senate with a huge majority, then impeach the 6 members of the so-called Supreme Court, and send each one of the traitors out of the country where no one can locate THEM. Give 'em their own creation. That list will be all the House & Senate voters for Trump, Trump himself and corporate heads that enabled him, and down into their organizations and root the evil out. They deserve no better.
I don't want to give Trump any ideas, but Russia uses "internal exile." Maybe that's what Trump/DeSantis are doing here in Baghdad By the Sea with the Allegator Alcatraz. Construction is underway for an "immigrant detention center" in the heart of the Everglades, where Florida says it plans to stash detainees in tents as soon as next week.
Read more at: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/article309369375.html#storylink=cpy
Once upon a time I was a lawyer who would get court appointments in Florida, which has a series of prisons that border the Everglades. The state would move my clients around so I'd have a tough time finding them. One, in Immokalee, used chain gangs, who did contract work . Think Cool Hand Luke in the middle of the swamps. The principal crop was sugarcane.
Much later, at DOL, my office heard cases involving labor pools, used extensively with legal temporary agricultural labor. The H-2A visa program, administered by DOL, allows U.S. employers to bring foreign workers to the United States to fill temporary or seasonal agricultural jobs. These jobs typically last no longer than one year. To use the H-2A program, employers must first obtain a temporary labor certification from the DOL, demonstrating that there are not enough U.S. workers available for the job and that employing H-2A workers will not negatively impact the wages and working conditions of similarly employed U.S. workers.
The accusation was that many of the pools didn't follow the law and the employers didn’t hold them to produce I-8 forms and other authority. We had a category of penalty cases -- we could debar some employers for continuing violations.
Imagine the prisoners at "peonage." Peonage, also called debt slavery or debt servitude, is a system where an employer compels a worker to pay off a debt with work. Legally, peonage was outlawed by Congress in 1867. However, in many states, prisoners still are the exception, under a convict lease system. Under this system, individuals convicted of crimes (disproportionately African American men) were leased out to private employers, often plantation owners or industrialists. These employers paid a fee to the state for the use of convict labor, generating substantial revenue for the states.
I visited places like Glades Correctional, in the middle of the Florida sugar industry, which also leased prisoners.
In addition, in 2008, six members of a family in Immokalee were charged with enslaving Mexican and Guatemalan immigrants and forcing them into agricultural labor. The charges included:
Enslavement and forced labor: The Navarrete family was accused of beating, threatening, restraining, and locking workers in trucks to force them to work.
Underpayment and debt manipulation: The defendants allegedly underpaid workers and created escalating debts, threatening physical harm if they left before the debts were repaid.
Harboring undocumented immigrants: The family was also charged with harboring undocumented foreign nationals for financial gain.
Other charges: Some family members were also charged with document fraud, identity theft, and feloniously re-entering the United States after being deported.
*A 17-count indictment alleged that the Navarrete family held more than a dozen men captive, forcing them to sleep in boxes, shacks, and trucks.
*Workers were told they would earn a minimal wage, but were driven into increasing debt through exorbitant charges for basic necessities like food and showers.
*Several workers managed to escape and reported the situation to authorities.
Five members of the family pleaded guilty to various charges in September 2008.
*In December 2008, four defendants were sentenced for their roles in the scheme.
The largest prison in Louisiana, with its reputation for brutality and enslavement of prisoners is Angola, and it was built on the site of the largest plantation In Louisiana.
Of which Christian denomination were the Navarrete family members?
Don't know...but DeSantis is a super Catholic. https://www.americamagazine.org/politics-society/2023/05/23/desantis-catholic-presidential-race-republican-245350
His aunt and uncle are (or were) a nun and a priest in Youngstown. His maternal grandpa was the chair of the Republican Party in Mahoning County, Ohio, at a time when it was besieged with riots....
A criminal investigation related to the Hope Florida Foundation, a nonprofit associated with Florida First Lady Casey DeSantis' signature Hope Florida program, has been opened by Leon County prosecutors. The investigation, first reported by the Miami Herald and Tampa Bay Times, stems from concerns raised by state lawmakers about a $10 million state grant given to the charity.
He has a myriad of probems but the most pressing involves his wife's charity,
Daniel Solomon, you are a treasure. Don't know what was erased, but important to praise informatiion: the depth and the details of your shares. Would hope that now everone remembers De Santis' cruel religious heritage--that aunt and uncle!
How sad that the Catholic Church has so much damaging history! Pope Francis tried to make improvements, and Leo 14 has a full platter of peccadillos confronting him.
The Catholic Church is an institution that is designed for one thing, survival.
In 11333 the First Lateran council declared priest marriages invalid, the Second Lateran Council in 1139, made celibacy mandatory.
This had nothing to do with "godliness" or spirituality, but everything to do with the church inheriting the immense wealth accumulated by priests, bishops and cardinals, yet despite that they continued to have mistresses and children
Several Popes had children, both before and after becoming Pope. Some were legally married before becoming Pope, while others had children out of wedlock. Notable examples include Adrian II, John XVII, Clement IV, and Honorius IV who were legally married. Additionally, Popes like Alexander VI, Julius II, Paul III, and Pius IV had children before or during their papacies. Some, like Innocent VIII, openly acknowledged their illegitimate children.
Bishops and Cardinals, especially were very wealthy, but when they died they left their fortunes to their wives and children, and the church would have none of that, they wanted it all.
Ye gods’ what a litany of crime you had to fight. I can’t get the image of alligators out of my mind the government might use to make detainees disappear at Alligator Alcatraz.
I am horrified, of all the crap SCOTUS has ruled on, and Trump has done. This takes the cake.
Imagine some Spanish speaking person, who has been roofing homes and blow drying streets, finds himself dumped into South Sudan or Somalia. Not only does he not speak the language, but those are Muslim countries, and wrought with internal conflict, civil war and crime.
Thom can tell us about Sudan, nothing but desert and scrub, basically by deporting these people hey are sending them to their death and I am sure that is the purpose. Fuck SCOTUS, it is an inhuman, self righteous, theocrtically inclined organization.
Biden and the Democrats controlled the government for a short period of time and could have, and should have, packed the Supreme Court. Another Biden failure, besides Merrick Garland and the failure to use Trumps EO 13957, to cleanse DOJ, NSA, DHS of Trump humpers embedded at the last moment by Trump.
Biden paved the way for Trump, this moderation shit, this bipartisanship, is cowardice and at worse complicity and corruption.
I completely agree with you. A piece from Elie Mystal on the legal rationale of the Supreme Court on this. Solicitor General John Sauer found a "loophole" in the Convention Against Torture treaty, like Elie says 'if someone asks you to find a loophole in a treaty called the Convention Against Torture, that's a sure sign you are working for the bad guys'.
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/supreme-court-trump-deportations/
Worse? "Since Trump began his second term, his administration has directed immigration agents to target unaccompanied minors, moved to cut contracts that fund their legal representation and sent Homeland Security agents to homes where unaccompanied children are released to conduct welfare checks.
"In at least one case, it has leaned on Florida’s state government to violate its own rules and laws by sharing information about the immigrant children in its care. And earlier this month, the Department of Homeland Security announced a new policy that will clear the way for the agency to deport children who are in the United States as documented victims of abuse, neglect or abandonment under a classification known as Special Immigrant Juveniles."
Read more at: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/article309334350.html#storylink=cpy
Horrible. Something I just read this morning, very sad.
https://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/2025/06/24/us-army-purple-heart-veteran-forced-self-deport-hawaii/
I just read an article in Baltimore Banner talking about the extreme shortage of daycare for children in Baltimore. That’s bad enough, but I shudder to think of children being left to their own devises with ICE agents targeting residences, now.
In Florida ICE is now a contractor with childrens' services. They'll eventually turn in every kid.
In Maryland, the YMCA was often the subcontractor for preschool or head start via Chapter 1 money. Trump tries to kill off the Chapter 1 funding. If there's no funding, maybe that will make it tougher for ICE to find them.
Elie Mystal one of my all time favorites. He doesn't pull punches and tells it like it is. I am surprised that the producers of MSNBC haven't canceled his contract.
Speaking of the Nobel Peace Prize, I lost all respect for it in 1973, when Bloody Henry Kissinger was the recipient.
There is a long list of unworthy's who have received the prize Terry.
So, as anticipated decades ago, 'murka now has the judicial branch writing law and enforcing those laws. The Extreme Sport of Injustice. Led by whom? The Ken Starr hit man, Roberts, who grifted his legal rise via looking in dumpsters and up ladies' skirts for slander to use against, well, anyone who needed putting down via the orders of the Koch/Bush empires. Never, never forget where/when this all began - Prescott Bush, Harriman, Hearst, Ford, Trump the elder, et. al., the addiction to Naziism coursing through the veins of political/blue blood 'murka. Hoover, McCarthy, Cohn, the Dulles bros., the Cosa Nostra, the Jim Crow D brands, stoking the KKK fever that never goes down, just sweats out the electrolytes of 'murkan attempts at real democracy, which were very weak from the get-go.
When you have a potent, powerful job for LIFE, what might occur inside your curling brain cells? The feast of hubris. Six of Nine, a doppelganger for the Borg Queen quislings. But this hive is toxic, it pollinates nothing but death. The female three, all the ilk of Obama via Biden's last hurrah, an Hispanic, a Jew, a Black African, wow, how that must wrinkle the noses of those pompous white boys and their handmaiden. Anyone who dares to believe that this mess is about anything other than the FEAR of the 'other' who happens to be the ilk of various slaves of various eras, is drowning in denial and fecklessness. If you are really a racist, then you must hate yourself, because there is absolutely zero real evidence that more than one race exists, and it is a junkyard from top to bottom. At the top is the chief injustice, a model of the king's English if ever there was one. It just took 245 years to get him out of the crypt and into the morgue.
The Supreme Court’s corrupt majority denies due process to enable cruel and unusual punishment via deportation to foreign gulags. An opportunity to expand the Court was recently wasted, allowing our hypocritical Federalists/“originalists” to mangle the Constitution at every opportunity for the foreseeable future. Dumping democracy in favor of fascism is radical and will only be thwarted by equally “radical” measures.
SCOTUS shows how an elite education means nothing insofar as the honor, integrity, ethics, morals and compassion of those profiting, and I do mean profiting, from it. Admission: I am in that group too, as are the three Justices who are all that the other six are not. Proof of the old acronym GIGO—garbage in, garbage out. Except with shiny diplomas.
The biggest problem is that too many Americans either support the New Old Cruelty or are apathetic about it. That is why I think as a country we are beyond saving, and not worth saving. The good people in it are, but I don’t know how they can be. I know I want our youngest daughter and grandson to leave for a more decent country while they still can, though they may not be able to do that. The depth of my loathing for what we have become is captured by my wish that our grandson, the most precious and adorable element of my life, whom I have helped raise from the day he was born, and who clings to me, had never been born. Because I fear his childhood will be his best years, and that his future, and that of the rest of his generation, is bleak.
In fairness, our problems may be inherent in our species. We are unworthy of this planet we are hastening to destroy. And despite the many good people among us, I fear the troglodytes will overwhelm us, and when we go extinct, possibly at the hands of thecAI we keep “improving”, the planet may be far better for it.
Every decent country has powerful Fascists trying to do exactly what Trump has done and those countries are barely keeping those foul people out of power. You essentially are doing the same thing as the Fascists by wanting to burn down what is good as well as what is bad here as long as you save your own. That only gives the power of the military in the hands of whoever has the keys when the fire began.
There is truth in what you say, but it shows our dilemmas. If we are past the tipping point, as I fear we are, sacrificing ourselves in a doomed struggle is a pointless martyrdom. I still hold the faint hope that we will have elections next year, that they will overwhelmingly reject MAGA, and that the results will stand. But it is a very faint hope. As always, Germany is a sad lesson. Its evil regime could not be overturned from within. It took that nation’s destruction by a coalition of very different allies to do that. No such coalition is out there in the world now, not strong enough, but more importantly, not better enough. So we have to save ourselves. My pessimism comes from the reality that a critical mass of those living here (I will not call them Americans, for they are not) want fascism, want power over the “other”, want indecency, incivility, injustice, ignorance, cruelty, and delight in the crudeness, incoherence and insufferable narcissism of the felon in chief. Hence my comment.
Another jewel for the crown of their king.
Shame. Shame. Shame. It is rare that I would wish to live in DC, but I do. I'd want to shout SHAME on the steps of the Supreme Court and to the faces of the evil six.
This ruling is about torture and death for seeking asylum. It's how Republicans thank the very people that feed this country, clean the houses and businesses, help raise our children, and build or maintain our homes and infrastructure
These six Republicans think they are the Lords and have crowned Trump king. Get The House so we can control the money, get the Presidency and Senate, and make new laws. We must impeach them all---prosecute the ones we can. I hear there is a prison in a swamp in Florida.....
The phrase, “History will not be kind to…” is demanding overtime pay now.
The amoral Trumpers think they’re on a journey to Heaven on Earth much as Germans bought into the myth of the Thousand Year Reich.
"The real reason that we can’t have the Ten Commandments in a courthouse: You cannot post 'Thou shalt not steal,' 'Thou shalt not commit adultery,' and 'Thou shalt not lie' in a building full of lawyers, judges, and politicians. It creates a hostile work environment.” – George Carlin
What's next? Show trials? Or will trump stop short of going full-Stalin and simply arrange a few notable defenestrations? Novichok, anybody?
Our government - "We" - are now complicit in international human trafficking. It is a short and obvious next step for these countries accepting deportees from the U.S. to begin using deportees as slave labor or selling them to other countries to do so. I wonder if Trump minions such as Bondi, Miller, Hedgeseth, Noem, understand that the presidential immunity recently invented by the Supreme Court does not protect underlings committing crimes on behalf of the president. They can certainly face prosecution in the future, when Trump is no longer in office to pardon them.
What's the solution? What do you do with a dictator in a failed state? Just talking about how bad it is doesn't change anything.
Only need 3 Congressional Republicans to blow up his agenda. Rand Paul, Ron Johnson are nutsy koo koo, but we'll take them.
Besides the Medicaid issue, there's Ukraine, and several others.
Where I live, we have 3 MAGA Cuban American House members who oppose Trump's immigration policy. We need to pressure them. I've published this several times. Miami healthcare CEO Michael “Mike” B. Fernandez wrote the following open letter to U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and members of the Republican Cuban-American Miami-Dade congressional delegation: U.S. Reps. Mario Diaz-Balart, Carlos Giménez and Maria Elvira Salazar.
"For decades, I have stood with you in defense of the freedoms we cherish, those we were denied in the country of our birth and found in the grace of this one. I know what it means to flee tyranny. Like you, I carry that history in my bones and that pain in my heart. But like a growing number in our community,
"I have watched with dismay as the very values we once found sanctuary in are now being attacked by a previously unthinkable threat — the sitting president of the United States."
Read more at: https://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/op-ed/article304271841.html#storylink=cpy
I admire your hopefulness.
The two you mentioned are not "nutsy koo koo" enough to risk being primaried. Remember the two rules: Get elected, get reelected. Nothing else counts.
The idea that we are a democratic Republic and that via our vote and participation we can take back the government, is a fools thought.
Once a tick is buried into the skin, it either fills itself with blood and falls off, or is extracted (best way is via a hot needle that makes it back out, because if you pull it off, you leave the head embedded and open yourself up to infection even sepsis.
Once a dictator takes effective control of the government, he or she must be dislodged by external force, or like Franco of Spain, die.
A dictatorship can rot from within or implode, but the dictator will be replaced by another of it's ilk, most likely an heir, a family member.
The theocratic, patriarchal, right has effectively grabbed the reins of power, and are not letting go. that is what Project 2025 is all about.
In 100 Days, Russel Vought and Yarvin, using Trump have irretrievably altered the politics and control of the U.S. of A.
All of those federal agencies, commissions, boards that Trump has dismantled are gone, and like Humpty Dumpty can't be put back together again.
Can't argue with that. Like your comparison to the tick. Don't notice ' til it's too late.
Anyone who is not a white heterosexual Christian male is now in danger. They’ve been looking for a place to stash anybody they don’t like and now they have the ability to set any number of people whatsoever. Now all they do is change the laws in such a way as to make people prosecutable for doing things they don’t like and there you have it. Perfect they’ve even explained it in project 2025 if you read, read it carefully. They’ve already said they’re going to make pornography, illegal and highly prosecutable. Then anything they don’t like is called pornography or something similar. They just invent new words for covering a wider swath of behavior they don’t like.
Though often broken and faltering, we have taken a degree of democratic justice for granted for a long time. The cruelty of these deportations should be waking us up to just how inhumane and vicious is the rule that Trump is in the process of installing. For a descussion and enumeration of the techniques Trump has so far demonstrated to engineer his dismanttling of democracy and fascist takeover, see Shea Foote's substack @ substack.com.