Jim Wright explains Trump’s speech last night.

Highest inflation in the G7. Explosive diarrhea. Can't afford meat. Can't afford gas. Can't afford rent and sure as hell can't afford to buy a house. The country is at war, again, still, whatever the term is for this shitshow. Farms in foreclosure because farmers can't sell their crops, can't afford seeds, can't even get fertilizer. Government goons kicking in doors without a warrant, detaining people without due process, murdering citizens in the street. Rich getting rich and the poor getting poorer. 

And Trump goes on TV to complain about imaginary fraud in an election six years ago where the only provable fraud was Trump himself attempting to extort a state into "finding" him enough votes to win. 

That's where we're at. 

Highlights include:

- Trump thinks mail-in ballots are totally corrupt. But he himself along with his family vote by mail-in ballot every year. 

- Trump says the 2016 election and the 2024 elections that put him in office were fine, but the 2020 election where he lost was corrupt. Obama was president in 2016, Biden was president in 2024, TRUMP was president for the alleged corrupt 2020 election. Trump is literally saying the only corrupt elections were under his watch.

- Trump says he ordered certain intelligence documents to be declassified and uploaded online to prove his claims. Literally NONE of those documents prove ... well, anything. Not a single bit of the "evidence" would stand up in a court of law, even under a judge appointed by Trump. He might as well have referenced YouTube conspiracy videos.

- Trump says because of "the Deep State" his own intelligence service hid from him the fact that China was trying to influence our elections. Except Trump's own national security expert, Miles Taylor, who served as DHS Chief of Staff in Trump's first term went online last night after Trump's speech to remind Trump that the Intelligence Community, including Taylor personally, briefed Trump EXTENSIVELY on that very threat not once but repeatedly over several years beginning in 2018 in the lead-up to the 2020 elections. There are records of those meetings. And, ironically, one of the documents released by Trump has a section that specifically notes China targeted Biden's campaign, not Trump's.

- Trump claims there are 250,000 non-citizens on voter rolls. Given that many states, including red states, refused to cooperate with Trump's various election investigation by refusing to hand over their voter rolls, it's hard to determine where Trump got that number from other than the obvious "out of his ass." And in fact, Trump's own government's sources categorically refute that number. There is no record of any non-citizen voting in our elections, certainly not in any significant volume. Those few that attempted to do so were caught and prosecuted. 

Even Fox News wasn't buying it. 

Again, this is a president who has confused "political asylum" with "insane asylum" and who just this week confused "transistors" for "transgenders" when ranting about the manufacture of microchips. This is a guy who thinks windmills cause cancer and who once gave a bizarre unhinged speech about electric boats and sharks. This is a guy who just last week claimed he actually spoke to Teddy Roosevelt and joked about having a "threesome" with his sons. 

What I'm saying here is that maybe this guy is nuts. 

Maybe he's a self-involved narcissist who is suffering from increasing dementia who spends all day imagining persecution to make himself feel better about being such an insecure louse of a human being and his utter humiliation at being defeated by someone he considers inferior. 

I'll say this though: Remember all those QAnon people who were absolutely convinced JFK Jr. staged his own death in 1999 by faking being an inexperienced pilot who should never have been flying over water at night, and how he was going to miraculously return as Trump's VP in 2021 and when he didn't they still show up every year in Dallas all glassy-eyed and expectant to await the return of Republican Jesus?

I'll bet they loved every word of Trump's speech last night. 

Tonight

  

As you watch the President’s address tonight, keep this in mind: Trump was the guy badgering the Republican Secretary of State to “find” 11,760 votes in the 2020 election that did not exist — but would have been just enough to defeat Biden in that state. 

 He was lying then, and he will be lying now. Both to continue to contest the last election he lost, and to set the stage to contest the midterm elections to come.

 

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: