HORRENDOUS!

 

Congresswoman Chellie Pingree (D-ME, 1st district)  has stated that the 26-year-old Columbian man who was shot by ICE agents in Biddeford, Maine, yesterday morning was not the person ICE was ordered to pick up.

Let me repeat: ICE killed an innocent man. ICE killed him in front of his partner and his 3-year-old child.

This isn't being reported in some third world country, this is your country, America, where this is the second killing in a week of an immigrant by Trump's ICE thugs.

BTW, Joan Sebastian Guerrero was here legally. He was doing everything correctly and LEGALLY, and Trump is responsible for what his murderous thugs did to him, his widow, and his 3-year-old baby, who saw ICE kill her father.

Congratulations, America! 

Elect a convicted criminal and get a lawless administration that kills people in American streets.

"Daniel Boucher, a witness to the aftermath of Monday's fatal ICE shooting in Maine says he heard 26-year-old Joan Sebastian Guerrero tell agents, "I tried to stop," after he was shot and pulled from his vehicle. DHS said that ICE agents had been monitoring what they believed to be the residence of someone who was in the country illegally and for whom they had a removal order, adding that “The vehicle attempted to flee the scene and, fearing for public safety, an officer discharged his weapon.” 

Sen. Angus King of Maine said Guerrero was not the target of the operation and that ICE agents had been given a final order for another man. 

According to two immigration advocacy groups, Guerrero was authorized to work in the United States and had a Social Security number."

 

From Feminist News: 

Joan was a 26‑year‑old father, shot in his car with his three‑year‑old daughter present, during a raid where he wasn’t even the target. 

Lorenzo was a 52‑year‑old worker on his way to his job in Houston’s East End when ICE agents opened fire and left him bleeding in the street. Both are now being posthumously smeared as “illegal” while immigrant rights groups, their families, and eyewitnesses tell a very different story about who they were and what happened. 

Let’s be absolutely clear: immigration status is not a crime, and the punishment is never death. These men contributed to their families and communities as much as anyone, and their only “offense” was existing in a system that has decided Latino lives are disposable. 

We are living in pure barbarism under a government that has turned immigration enforcement into a paramilitary project, directed by a deranged dictator who has openly promised mass deportations and whose crackdowns have already produced a record spike in deaths in ICE custody and during enforcement. And it’s not just these two. 

Lorenzo’s killing came amid an intensified campaign that has produced at least eight deaths in enforcement sweeps, while dozens more have died in ICE cages in just the past year and a half. Every one of those deaths is a policy choice, not an accident. 

ICE chose to ram Joan’s car and approach with guns drawn. ICE chose to “weaponize” Lorenzo’s vehicle in their narrative to justify shooting him. If we let this become normal, we are complicit. 

There is no “reforming” an agency that keeps killing people and then burying the truth; immigrant advocates are already saying the quiet part out loud: it must be dismantled. 

Joan Sebastian Guerrero and Lorenzo Salgado Araujo should be alive with their families right now. Instead, their names join a growing list of people killed for the crime of simply being here.

BREAKING

Another one of Trump's scams to bite the dust. Does he ever do anything within the law as POTUS?

 

New York Times: 

"A federal judge on Monday ruled that President Trump’s lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service was an improper exercise in self-dealing and barred him from claiming that the extraordinary tax protections he received were part of a legitimate settlement agreement. 

In the order, the judge, Kathleen M. Williams, also referred the lawyer who brought Mr. Trump’s case against the I.R.S. to the Florida bar for potential disciplinary proceedings. 

Judge Williams added that she would forward her decision to the New York bar, which is already investigating the acting attorney general, Todd Blanche. 

The decision by the Judge Williams did not explicitly kill the deal that Mr. Trump had worked out with his own government to receive what amounted to amnesty from investigations into tax returns that he, his family and their businesses have already filed. But Judge Williams’s scathing ruling exposed the negotiations between Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers and senior officials at the Justice Department he controls for what she says they were: backroom dealings that did not arise from a legitimate legal process.

The agreement with the I.R.S. included a provision that gave President Trump, his family and his businesses potentially lucrative protection from agency investigations. In June, the acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, said the Justice Department stood by the provision."

HUNTER BIDEN ON THE PASSING OF SENATOR LINDSEY GRAHAM

 

This is apt and tragic:

Class act:

 Remember? 

Trump on the passing of Robert Mueller, Bronze Star and Purple Heart recipient:

There are people in this country who voted for and admire Trump. IMO, a miserable failure of a human being.

YOUR SUNDAY MOMENT OF ZEN

 

Busy this weekend with watching the World Cup (Yay England!). And the Tall Ships celebration here in Boston Hahbah!

But this cartoon was too funny and too true to pass up:

This is wholly unAmerican and dangerous.

 

What is it about our Constitution that these maniacs do not understand? This is not Constitutional -- it's illegal under our laws, and yet this Christian Nationalist fanatic feels comfortable advocating for something completely illegal and unAmerican 

(BTW, to all those who get hysterical over Mayor Mamdani and Senator Bernie Sanders supporting some form of socialism, neither are advocating breaking the law nor changing the Constitution. It is not illegal to support socialism. It IS against our Constitution for the government to favor one religion over all others.): 

"Pete Hegseth’s pastor just told NPR he wants to strip all American women of the right to vote. Asked why, he answered: 'Because it's a good idea.'

And Pete Hegseth invited him to preach at the Pentagon.

Doug Wilson leads Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho. In a sit-down interview, he said he wants the 19th Amendment gone and replaced with 'household voting,' where women only cast a ballot if they are the head of their household. He was blunt about who does the voting in his own home. The man.

He didn't stop at women. Wilson said non-Christians would not be allowed to hold public office in the America he wants. Asked whether they could at least vote, he said, "Yes, probably," then described restrictions on public spaces for non-Christian worship. Church bells, yes. Minarets, no.

Wilson has defended slavery in the American South as a relationship "based upon mutual affection." He believes homosexuality should be a crime. He calls himself a Christian nationalist and says his goal is to turn the United States into a Christian theocracy over the course of several generations, roughly 250 years, one school and one church plant at a time.

And this is the man Hegseth chose to put in front of the U.S. military. In February, the Secretary of Defense invited Wilson to deliver a sermon at the Pentagon, carried on internal Pentagon television, as part of a monthly Christian worship service Hegseth started at the building in 2025. About 300 people attended.

Wilson says he and Hegseth have "met a few times" and "texted some." He opened a Washington church because of how many people in the Trump administration follow his teachings. A Pentagon spokesperson has confirmed Hegseth is a member of Wilson's church network and "very much appreciates" his writings.

Wilson told NPR his vision is "closer to getting a hearing" than at any point in the 40 years he has preached it. He credits the reach he now has to the men who invited him inside the walls of American power. One of them runs the largest military on earth."

THE JOKES ARE WRITING THEMSELVES

 

Note:  I'm glad Platner is out. I'm also glad to see the galloping hypocrisy and non-self-awareness of the Party of Deplorables out in the open.

Platner is as unsavory and disreputable a candidate as ever ran for office, but he has yet to be indicted, put on trial, and convicted of his alleged sexual assault/rape. Unlike Trump, who IS a convicted SA/rapist, AND a convicted felon.

The Republican Party is so insane that it doesn't see that their condemnation of Platner shows them to be the worst, most immoral pandering sycophants on the planet.

The world is laughing at them!

"There's something deeply wrong with him."

 

I'm a fan of Tom Nichols. He's often featured as a guest on our local NPR station in Boston, WGBH, "The Jim and Marjorie Show."

Nichols is also from Chicopee, Mass., a city that produces great thinkers (I'm looking at one of our own commenters!) 

"Nichols registered in 1979 with the Republican Party. 

"In 2016, he described himself as a Never Trump conservative. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Nichols argued that conservatives should vote for Hillary Clinton, whom he detested, because Trump was "too mentally unstable" to serve as commander-in-chief. 

Nichols continued that type of argument for the 2018 midterm elections and advocated that Republicans could save the party by electing as many Democrats as possible in that election.

This observation by him is spot on:

Tom Nichols:  It’s almost like we have a relative in the room, and there’s something deeply wrong with him. And we’ve all agreed not to talk about it. But there is something deeply wrong with him.

His friends know it, his critics know it. His staff, I’m sure, knows it. The world knows it. World leaders know it. And most importantly, our enemies know it, which is why they don’t take him seriously.

Nobody hangs on his words. They kind of do, but mostly out of freakish curiosity to see what kind of wild thing he’s going to say next, not because his words have any inherent meaning or reflect policy.

You know, I spent years teaching students that when the president speaks, it’s policy, and you must pay attention when the president speaks because nobody can contradict him.

Now, you know, are we really cutting off all trade with Spain? Who knows? Maybe. Maybe not. It might have just been a stray electron, you know, careening around inside his brainpan. Who knows?

But this is really dangerous because in the middle of all this stuff—and we can laugh about, you know, the Islamic Republic of Japan and all of that—but he made several statements about an ongoing war that the United States is losing. And no one’s even trying to pretend that they can make any sense of it.

And I’ll just add one last thing that you just brought up.

If this were any other president, this would be a national crisis. I mean, Joe Biden got somebody’s name wrong, and it was headlines. The president gets all kinds of things wrong, completely, you know, is out to lunch at an important NATO summit, and, you know, it’s Wednesday.