watched it again....she knew it was water....
#14 | POSTED BY SHRIMPTACODAN

You really ought to see if your psychic abilities might be the ticket out of that basement.

Meanwhile, the financial spigot is wide open for mobs of heavily armed, masked paramilitaries murdering people in the streets under the banner of what the vice president of the United States claims is "absolute immunity."

Perhaps if at any time during the past five generations a Trump or two had ever actually served on one of those US military bases they might actually give a dam ...

What "hoax" are you yip-yapping about now?
Dogish behavior from one of Pavlov's own.

#2
If true, he sounds like one of yours.
Dig deeper.
Check back soon, maybe next week.
Thanks of a grateful nation.
Trump swag bag en route.

I
Really
Don't
Care
Do U?

Tell Homan there's a bag of cash involved and he'll be there in a jiffy.

you're the perfect DR client...
you're stooooopid.
#9 | POSTED BY [DR CLIENT] SHRIMPTACODAN

There's a weird symmetry in a guy with dozens of felony convictions turning to a goon over whom he may hold the goods about a bribery charge for help in covering up his lethal mess.

Why does Trump need a huge, weaponized, massively funded paramilitary force emboldened the Get Out Of Jail Free card of "absolute immunity"?

Pretti's death was a public execution, carried out by paramilitary thugs acting with impunity, their actions instantly sanctioned by the regime.

It's MAGA's message to America.

"ICE misrule isn't happening because someone skipped a meeting during their onboarding process," Linkins points out.

This is a deeply ingrained and incurable corruption"not that anyone at ICE wants to be "cured." ICE agents already receive comprehensive training, which they comprehensively ignore. In the latest instance, we've learned from a whistleblower that agents have claimed the right to break into homes without a judicial warrant, directly countermanding their vaunted legal training. No one can or should trust a retrained version of this agency. A root-and-branch teardown is in order. Mass firings are in order (I guess the leakers and whistleblowers can stay in some capacity). The clawback of billions of dollars is in order. Damnation, in every sense of the word, is in order.

And, all of a sudden, possessing a firearm sets you up for kill shots? From this crowd? Chaitt nails these lying hypocrites.

Until very recently, conservative rhetoric has valorized gun ownership as a bulwark against tyrannical government, to the point of fetishization. Conservatives defended Kyle Rittenhouse as a hero for bringing a rifle to a chaotic protest in Wisconsin during the summer of 2020, as well as armed bands of protesters who marched into state capitol buildings during the COVID lockdowns.

For Trumpists to infer homicidal intent from the exercise of a right they have fetishized is a Fifth Avenue"level mental reversal. Their view of the Second Amendment turns out to be no different from their view of the First: one whose protections apply exclusively to themselves.
[Emphasis added]

"They sank the ship we all sailed on."

Pithy, mournful, accurate, and memorable. Thank you for a perfect haiku-ish summing up, Coriolanus.

This is the real face of the hot fascistic mess the Republican Party has become, complete with their hillbilly version of the Praetorian Guard. Roid raging, poorly trained bums like you'd expect to find guarding the red door at a beyond creepy club where patrons are routinely dragged into in the back alley and beaten. Total effin psychos.

Masked, of course. Ergo, anonymous. With assurances from on-high of "absolute immunity" covering their behavior.

And their frontmen and frontwomen in their crisp shirts ad expensive suits? They can't speak out when their paramilitary thugs brazenly murder people in our streets?

Don't forget.

This is the real face of the hot fascistic mess the Republican Party has become, complete with their hillbilly version of the Praetorian Guard. Roid raging, poorly trained bums like you'd expect to find guarding the red door at a beyond creepy club where patrons are routinely dragged into in the back alley and beaten. Total effin psychos.

Masked, of course. Ergo, anonymous. With assurances from on-high of "absolute immunity" covering their behavior.

And their frontmen and frontwomen in their crisp shirts ad expensive suits? They can't speak out when their paramilitary thugs brazenly murder people in our streets?

Don't forget.

"The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (that is, the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (that is, the standards of thought) no longer exist."
Hannah Arendt

The main driver in Trump's sh*tty poll numbers is ... wait for it ... no, it's coming..almost here ... TRUMP.

Even some MAGAts, after helping install a thief, grifter, multi-bankrupt, pathological liar, convicted felon (34 times), adjudicated sexual abuser, and informational ignoramus in the Oval Office, seem a bit queasy.

They will calm down and reassume their customary position.

But the normals? Lost to this wretched creature. Forever.

Advice from congressional Republicans, aka the Traitors' Caucus?
About what?
Cowering in a corner, lower lip quivering, beady eyes darting?
Fuhgedaboudit,lewzwes, just stfu and slink away from the wreckage to which you've so greatly contributed.

"The randomness is the difference between a regime based on terror and a regime that is plainly repressive," Gessen explains. "Even in brutally repressive regimes, including those of the Soviet colonies in Eastern Europe, one knew where the boundaries of acceptable behavior lay."

Open protest would get one arrested; kitchen conversation would not. Writing subversive essays or novels or editing underground journals would get one arrested; reading these banned works and quietly passing them on to friends probably would not. A regime based on terror, on the other hand, deploys violence precisely to reinforce the message that anyone can be subjected to it.

When we think of the terror regimes of the past, it is tempting to superimpose a logical narrative on them, as though totalitarian leaders had an extermination to-do list and worked their way through it methodically. This, I think, is how most people understand Martin Niemller's classic poem "First They Came." In reality, though, the people living under those regimes never knew which group of people would be designated an enemy of the state next.

"Terror itself was not the end goal of those regimes," Gessen writes of Nazi Germany and Stalin's USSR, "but nothing that followed would have been possible without it."

For this was the secret about the secret police that became clear when the K.G.B. archives were opened (briefly) in the 1990s: They were ruled by quotas. Local squadrons had to arrest a certain number of citizens so they could be designated enemies of the people. That the officers often swept up groups of colleagues, friends and family members was probably a matter of convenience more than anything else. Fundamentally, the terror was random. That is, in fact, how state terror works.

That's Old Yeller, working hard at his real job: attempting to prove the Infinite Monkey Theorem.

Old Yeller TACOed.
Again.
Yuuge coward.

"The need for authoritarian regimes to promote the least able is easy to understand in theory, but has seldom been studied scientifically since existing or aspirant autocracies do not disclose their recruitment and promotion policies," writes Cockburn. "But some years back Adam Scharpf and Christian Glassel wrote a fascinating article entitled Why Underachievers Dominate Secret Police Organisations: Evidence from Autocratic Argentina', published in the American Journal of Political Science."

They looked at the careers of 4,000 officers in the core institution of state repression in Argentina during the 1975-83 military dictatorship, asking: "Why would anyone do dirty work for the regime? Are these people sadistic psychopaths, sectarian fanatics, or forced by the regime to terrorise the population?"

They concluded that, while all these factors may play a role, the typical profile of secret police agents is shaped rather by the mundane need to keep a job and win promotion.

"In competition with better qualified peers, officials with weak early performances have little chances of climbing up to the most lucrative positions at the top," they wrote. "For such underachievers the arduous nature of secret police work offers the opportunity to signal their value to the regime and get ahead of competitors for higher positions."

It is shocking to realise that what was true of Argentinian security services half a century ago is likely to apply to ICE today.

The response from the regime? A lie.

Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary for public affairs at DHS, told the Guardian that the coat was standard issue and responded to a query by saying it was a "manufactured outrage". Previously she said to the New York Times that the coat was part of a "standard-issue border patrol winter dress uniform", although the newspaper also cited a 2025 document detailing the Border Patrol's Uniform and Grooming Standards in which the coat in question was not listed as part of any official uniform.