Ted Cruz: "My advice is don't spend much time worrying about what Marjorie is saying. What I've found is that whenever an elected official decides that they are going to turn on Israel and hate Israel, you will very quickly see every other policy out of their mouth become very… pic.twitter.com/jowCodVfBl
“My advice is don’t spend much time worrying about what Marjorie is saying. What I’ve found is that whenever an elected official decides that they are going to turn on Israel and hate Israel, you will very quickly see every other policy out of their mouth become very very liberal. And so suddenly Marjorie is for massive government spending.”
Interesting. Steve Bannon has been publicly worrying about support for Israel hurting the party with young Republicans. And there is a large and increasingly influential Nazi faction in the MAGA movement. I’m pretty sure they’re not pro-Israel. (Of course, they hate Arabs and Muslims too but that’s beside the point.)
Greene is an interesting case. She’s either a canary in the MAGA coal mine or she’s putting herself on her own island. She has a following and fundraising prowess, at least for now. Marge is actually a throwback to the old isolationist, pro-fascists of the pre-WWII era and she may just represent a legit faction in the MAGA coalition. In my lifetime, Republicans always get very aroused at the prospect of war and death so we’ll see how far that goes.
Meanwhile, in Alabama:
Some Jewish voters in New York are concerned about a Muslim candidate for mayor Zoran Mamdani But this white man Jeremy Wayne Shoemaker was just arrested for plotting to shoot up Jewish synagogues. pic.twitter.com/RV07nSq1Bt
Immigration is the defining issue of Donald Trump’s political life. His idiotic but evocative promise to build a wall fueled his 2016 campaign. His first term was defined by the cruelty of putting kids in cages. He won reelection largely because of anger over how Biden and Harris handled the border.
The horrifying videos of masked ICE agents terrorizing communities are now the signature images of Trump’s second term.
While revenge and graft seem to be Trump’s greatest passions, it’s his revanchist, extreme anti-immigration agenda that motivates the people around him. Stephen Miller speaks in apocalyptic terms about immigrants destroying American culture. The Department of Homeland Security is amplifying white supremacist dog whistles. The policy hacks are pulling every lever of government to expel as many legal immigrants as possible and treat anyone undocumented with maximum cruelty.
Guess what?
Trump began his term with broad support on immigration. In the 2024 exit polls, he held a nine-point advantage over Kamala Harris on the issue and won 12 percent of voters who said immigration was their top issue—by 80 points.
At the outset of his presidency, his immigration approval was in the low 50s, with disapproval in the low 40s. But as the true nature of his mass deportation agenda has become clear, his numbers have fallen. Today, Trump is more than three points underwater.
As a general rule of politics: you don’t want to be underwater on your “best issue.”
Especially when you’re underwater in double digits on all the other issues people say are most important to them.
Only 34% support ICE agents wearing masks in public.
52% of independents oppose masked ICE agents.
Voters Don’t Trust Who ICE Is Targeting
47% say ICE is going after peaceful people, not criminals.
Independents are 35 points more likely than Republicans to believe ICE is targeting non-threats.
Support Drops When Voters See How Deportations Happen
45% say deportations make them feel safer overall.
But when deportations are described as “ICE raids in public spaces,” only 36% feel safer—34% say less safe.
They should feel less safe. These thugs are going after anyone they think is in their way and being an American citizen of any race is no barrier.
He says that Trump’s strategy of showing the images of his crackdown work against him and Democrats should make sure people see them. He points out the obvious, as reflected in that Gallup poll above, which I haven’t seen anyone else do, mainly because they’re terrified at the term “pro-immigration.”
Trump’s mass deportation agenda is so cruel, so extreme, and so visible that it is actually making Americans more pro-immigration.
And that means, Democrats could “restructure and reform ICE from the ground up, purge its leadership, end the cruelty baked into its enforcement practices and pass comprehensive immigration reform that secures the border and provides a path to citizenship for millions.”
I suspect that all the strategists are freaking out at the very idea since they believe that Democrats must avoid even thinking about any issue for which they (erroneously) believe the Republicans have an advantage. But truly smart pols would be looking to the future and casting off the pre-cooked assumptions about Republican dominance. This should be one of the issues they jump on.
Most Americans don’t want to live in a police state and they don’t like to see militarized thugs on their streets brutalizing people with impunity. If we manage to live through this phase, they need to realize that this is their advantage.
Trump: The welcome and the beautiful honor you bestowed on me as the only American president. That's really a great tribute to our country. Not to me. It's a great tribute to our country, but I had it focused toward you as opposed to against you, which some people did. pic.twitter.com/c40sDKk3X8
What juvenile has DHS hired to create its not-very-subtle, white nationalist social media posts?
“The horrifying videos of masked ICE agents terrorizing communities are now the signature images of Trump’s second term,” Dan Pfeiffer explains. He makes a greater point that needs making (emphasis mine):
While revenge and graft seem to be Trump’s greatest passions, it’s his revanchist, extreme anti-immigration agenda that motivates the people around him. Stephen Miller speaks in apocalyptic terms about immigrants destroying American culture. The Department of Homeland Security is amplifying white supremacist dog whistles. The policy hacks are pulling every lever of government to expel as many legal immigrants as possible and treat anyone undocumented with maximum cruelty.
Immigration has long been Trump’s political cudgel—used to beat Democrats into submission. The whole premise of high-profile ICE raids, complete with social media crews in tow, is to bait Democrats into a debate on what Trump believes is his strongest issue. He wants to position himself on the side of “law and order” and paint Democrats as defenders of criminals and drug traffickers. This is the reflexive response—delivered with maximum smugness—to any criticism of ICE’s conduct.
If reversing illegal immigration was Trump 2.0’s sales pitch during last year’s campaign, by now it is simply a cover story. The real game here is white nationalism. Examine Stephen Miller’s tweets, if you dare. Or the DHS social media feed’s white nationalist dog whistles. The one at top characterizes its task as destroying “the Flood,” treating undcumented immigrants as parasitic aliens from the HALO franchise.
But it’s not just the dogwhistles doing damage. It’s the lies in which Trump 2.0 trafficks. Marcy Wheeler shines a spotlight on the “flood” of lies from DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin, known for the smugness Pfeiffer mentions. McLaughlin is so proud of it that she’s pinned one display to the top of her X feed. Daily Beast posted a long piece on McLaughlin’s playing fast and loose with facts surrounding ICE arrests.
REMINDER:
Trica lies more than Baghdad Bob did.
You should hold her up as an object of ridicule. In NO circumstances should you believe anything she says, because she very rarely says ANYTHING that resembles reality. https://t.co/1tLiGFtcLX
Radley Balko points to a recent case in which “a cross-deputized federal agent” enjoys immunity for fabricating a sex-trafficking ring. The Minnesota officer, Heather Weyker, jailed an innocent woman for two years pending a trial that never took place. But Weyker acting in a federal capacity gave Hamdi Mohamud no recourse to sue for damages.
This case underscores how SCOTUS made it impossible to hold immigration cops accountable for the abuses you see in all those videos.A federal task force cop manufactured evidence to put an innocent woman behind bars for two years. Because of SCOTUS-conferred immunity, the case never got to a jury.
The Washington Post this morning reports that DHS is posting false and misleading (propagandistic) footage to support its pogrom against nonwhites:
Officials in President Donald Trump’s administration have used similarly misleading footage in at least six videos promoting its immigration agenda shared in the last three months, a Washington Post analysis found, muddying the reality of events in viral clips that have been viewed millions of times.
McLaughlin dismissed the errors as insignificant.
This is a full-on propaganda effort:
DHS’s video operation now includes in-house photographers and videographers who routinely capture the action of ICE raids and protest responses for videos that administration officials have widely promoted online. In a video DHS posted to X this month, a man in a Border Patrol flak jacket, his camera held aloft, can be seen jogging to catch up with officers putting a detainee into an SUV.
The administration’s intense digital strategy has helped grab Americans’ attention and shape discussion around current events, with some of its videos now capturing bigger audiences on social media than mainstream news reports. A White House video claiming Chicago was “in chaos,” which used footage from other states, has been viewed more than 1.4 million times across Instagram, TikTok and X.
It is no accident that American citizens (brown ones) are being snared by ICE in its white-nationalist zeal to rid the country of undesirables. Americans are increasingly unhappy about ICE targets and methods.
A federal judge in Illinois on Tuesday took to task Gregory Bovino, a senior Border Patrol official, both for ICE’s heavy-handed tactics in Chicago and for violating her orders on not using chemical crowd-control agents:
For more than an hour, the judge, Sara L. Ellis of Federal District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, read Mr. Bovino restrictions she had previously set as part of a lawsuit over tactics that agents are using and cited examples of times his agents appeared to violate those restrictions.
They used tear gas in a neighborhood where children were about to march in a Halloween parade, Judge Ellis said. They failed to warn residents before tossing tear gas canisters at them, she said, noting an incident in which an agent threw a canister out of a car as it drove away.
The judge then ordered Mr. Bovino, who took the stand in his usual green fatigues and Border Patrol insignia, to appear at the federal courthouse at the end of every weekday to personally provide her with a report on the day’s arrests and incidents.
Which is to say, federal judges in the Midwest. at least, are tired of the lies and bullshit excuses from ICE. There is no audio, but the transcript drips with scorn from Ellis.
Ellis "It may be that what I am seeing is the result if one of three things:"1. Perhaps the order is unclear2. No one read the order3. "Folks actively chose to ignore it"Ellis said it could not be No. 3, because that would violate Bovino's oath
The official website of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) claims that on November 1, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) will run out of funding. The USDA asserts that Democrats are blocking funding to secure “health care for illegal immigrants” and funding for “gender mutilation procedures.”
All of these claims are false.
No surprise there. MAGA Republicans exist in an alternate reality of their own making.
The USDA maintains that its $6 billion reserve fund, enough to support the program for several more weeks, is “not legally available to cover regular benefits.“ The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities believes the statement is false:
This stands in opposition to the law and prior practice, including by the Trump Administration itself. Also, the Administration could use its legal transfer authority — the same authority it already used to provide additional funds to WIC — to supplement the contingency reserves, which alone are not enough to fund families’ full benefits for November.
Republicans know that. They’re lying.
CBPP provides a breakdown of the emergency funding options.
In addition, the department’s own guidance issued on September 30 concurs (emphasis added by Popular Information:
In addition, Congressional intent is evident that SNAP’s operations should continue since the program has been provided with multi-year contingency funds that can be used for State Administrative Expenses to ensure that the State can also continue operations during a Federal Government shutdown. These multi-year contingency funds are also available to fund participant benefits in the event that a lapse occurs in the middle of the fiscal year.
Popular Information notes, “This guidance has been removed from the USDA website now that the Trump administration has decided that withholding the funds is politically advantageous.”
Lawrence O’Donnell made the point on his show Tuesday night.
Everyone must see this from @lawrenceodonnell.msnbc.com #trumpshutdown #snap #foodstamps
The shutdown also has nothing to do with “gender mutilation procedures,” which is apparently how the Trump administration describes health care for trans people. Nothing in the Republican continuing resolution limits trans health care, and the Democrats are not seeking to expand or protect it in their counter-proposals.
Republicans know that. They’re lying.
Roughly one American in eight (42 million) relies on supplemental nutrition assistance.
Nearly two dozen states are suing the Trump administration to maintain funding for SNAP during the government shutdown (The New Republic):
“Let’s be clear about what’s happening: For the first time ever, SNAP benefits will not be available to the millions of low-income individuals who depend on them to put food on the table,” said California Attorney General Rob Bonta, one of four attorneys general co-leading the lawsuit. “With the holidays around the corner, we are seeing costs for groceries continue to increase and food banks facing unprecedented demand. We are taking a stand because families will experience hunger and malnutrition if the Trump Administration gets its way.”
Food banks will scramble to meet a need that they will not be able to fill (CBS News):
“The charitable food system and food banks don’t have the resources to replace all those food dollars,” John Sayles, CEO of Vermont Foodbank in Barre, Vermont, told CBS News.
Already, food banks are getting an influx of calls from SNAP recipients who are worried about the payment freeze, and food shelves could see long lines next month if the shutdown persists, Sayles said.
“There is no safety net after SNAP other than the food shelf,” he added.
FOOD BANK DIRECTOR: “For every meal a food bank provides, the SNAP program provides 9. There’s no way we can meet that gap. We were not built to do this.”(@TNDemocrats are imploring @GovBillLee to fund SNAP with the billions in reserves as other states are, but he refuses)
After the pandemic, inflation has pushed food prices up, making it more difficult to feed families as wages struggle to keep up. As a result, millions more people have been relying on food banks, which served more than 50 million people in 2023, compared to 40 million in 2019.
Now, ramped-up work requirements for SNAP passed under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act are also pushing people out of the program and increasing reliance on food banks. This comes at the same time that those food banks have lost some of their federal funding. Earlier this year, the USDA cut a program that provided over $400 million to help food banks purchase food.
How about those scary thoughts for Halloween? Is there a MAGA costume on the market?
Republican dissent over House Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-La.) shutdown strategy spilled out on a private GOP call this afternoon, with Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) adding himself to the growing list of lawmakers questioning whether they should still be home in their districts.
Republicans have been largely unified around their strategy of keeping the House out of session and refusing to negotiate with Democrats. But the cracks are growing.
Crenshaw questioned how the House could make up for the lost days, a source on the call told Axios. Lawmakers haven’t voted since Sept. 19.
Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Kevin Kiley (R-Calif.) also raised concerns about being on recess during the shutdown. They both have expressed opposition before.
It’s not just the members who spoke up on the call who are questioning their party’s refusal to even come to the negotiating table with Democrats.
“I do think we should be negotiating the ACA tax credits and have that compromise to put in the Approps bills,” Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.), a retiring centrist, told Axios.
“We don’t need [it] for the CR, but if we all negotiate in good faith within the Approps process, we may break the ice jam.”
Who knows how many these people speak for? But there is rumbling in the senate too.
The House is on track to work one of it’s lightest non-election years in decades, and has effectively removed itself from the conversation around reopening the government.
They’re no doubt enjoying their paid vacation while most others in the government aren’t getting paychecks and we’re about to see kids going hungry. I assume this makes them happy.
I hadn’t heard about the new right wing movement to drive women out of the workplace but apparently, it’s a thing:
Although interest in “The Great Feminization” has been building for a while, it exploded recently with a viral essay by Helen Andrews, a conservative commentator. In it, Andrews argues that female group dynamics are responsible for “wokeness” and “cancel culture,” which she describes as “simply feminine patterns of behavior applied to institutions where women were few in number until recently.” Andrews argues that corporate cultures often suffer when they become majority female, and she worries particularly about the impact of gender dynamics on law. Too many women lawyers, she suggests, might well bring down the American legal system:
The field that frightens me most is the law. All of us depend on a functioning legal system, and, to be blunt, the rule of law will not survive the legal profession becoming majority female. The rule of law is not just about writing rules down. It means following them even when they yield an outcome that tugs at your heartstrings or runs contrary to your gut sense of which party is more sympathetic.
Andrews concludes that while it is “still controversial” to argue that “there are too many women in a given field or that women in large numbers can transform institutions beyond recognition in ways that make them cease to function well,” it is necessary to do so because “we all are … dependent on institutions like the legal system, scientific research, and democratic politics that support the American way of life, and we will all suffer if they cease to perform the tasks they were designed to do.” In a speech at the National Conservatism Conference last month, Andrews argued that “a thoroughly feminized civilization will set itself on the road to collapse.” Although Andrews is careful to point out that she doesn’t want to roll back women’s rights (and acknowledges that individual women can pursue professional excellence), she hopes the trend of feminization will reverse if we take what she sees as needed steps to abandon our “system in which it is illegal for women to lose” and “[r]emove the HR lady’s veto power.” While Andrews is cagey about what future she hopes for, she’s explicit that institutional threats remain “as long as demographics remain unchanged.” She doesn’t say where she wants the apparently too many working women to go.
The essay is notable not only for how much interest it generated, but also how many positive comments it received among pundits. One female business leader called it a “seminal essay,” while a professor at Duke said it “contains far-reaching hypotheses that academics should take seriously and test rigorously.” And it seems to have spread beyond the writerly class: Andrews’ tweet of her essay has, as of this writing, racked up 6.4 million views.
That’s from The Dispatch, a conservative outlet, and the author actually makes the case that this is wrong and warns that Republicans are creating their own gender war and that’s a mistake. She makes a good argument about why this is bad politics but never really grapples with the fact that they are just making the oldest conservative argument in the world. Until very, very recently, the idea that women are incapable of leadership and important responsibility because they’re too dizzy, stupid and soft to do what’s necessary was the consensus and every institution and virtually every society was organized with that understanding. It is hardly some new idea being advanced by exciting original thinker. Good lord.
Patriarchy has always been fundamental to conservatism. Whatever progress has been made for women is always subject to reversion the minute they get the chance. And they have the chance now. Ending abortion rights was only the beginning.
James Comer and the House Oversight Committee are still on the Biden beat and have produced one of the most inane reports the U.S. Congress has ever produced. Philip Bump has the story. He goes through all the Comer atrocities over the last few years and then gets into it:
You will forgive me, then, if I don’t take seriously the Oversight Committee’s new report, alleging that key actions taken by the Biden administration were “illegitimate.” And that’s even before reviewing the report itself, flimsy enough to be at risk of disintegration from even a whisper of wind.
To distill the conclusion, Comer and his majority determined that Biden’s mental capacity was diminished during his last year in office, meaning that maaaybeee people on his staff signed stuff without his knowing it and that maaaybeee that included some of his pardons? If this sounds a lot like something Trump himself would say, that’s not an accident. The probe by Comer’s committee developed in concert with Trump’s rhetoric on the issue, functionally handing over to the president the power of congressional oversight activity.
Trump wants someone to say that Biden’s pardons are illegitimate so that he can push his opponents into the Justice Department’s acquiescent crosshairs. Comer and his friends are happy to give him the pretext. As I wrote for The Washington Post in June, there’s no actual question that those pardons were issued on Biden’s instructions. But the game here has always been to whip up a fog of uncertainty — was the 2020 election somehow stolen? can’t a president just destroy a third of the White House? — that lets Trump move forward with what he always intended.
What an Oversight Committee could be doing, of course, is conducting oversight on the executive branch. There’s no shortage of serious questions about the sitting president that would seem to warrant more urgency than unserious questions about a former one. Trump’s own pardons, the enormous sums of money he’s earning from people who are benefitting from the administration’s decisions, his deployment of the military against nebulously defined actors in the Caribbean — the list goes on. Hell, you’d think that the House might be interested in assessing Trump’s willful disregard for Congress’s power of the purse. But that’s only if you think that the intent of Comer and Oversight is to aid Americans instead of simply siding with the president. (Not that this is a surprise; one of the first things Comer did upon taking leadership of Oversight was kill an investigation into Trump’s finances.)
I write all of this centrally because, despite the past three years, Comer and his committee are still granted the baseline assumption that their work product is offered in good faith. The Post’s coverage of its new report, for example, mentions only in passing that Biden has been an ongoing target of Comer’s and doesn’t add the useful context that his targeting has resulted in any number of misfires. This is the same paper that, in 2023, ran the accurate headline, “Comer mischaracterizes Hunter Biden car payment reimbursement to his dad.” Yet we’re led to assume that his current characterizations should be assumed to be legitimate.
No one would credibly argue that questions about Biden’s acuity were baseless. But no one can credibly argue that the output of a Comer-led Oversight Committee is inherently trustworthy. Comer spent years proving that he would embrace any disparagement of Biden as he ignored any criticism of Trump. That should be a focus of assessments of the committee’s output before we consider the output itself.
On Tuesday morning, the next step of the plan swung into action. Speaking to reporters, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) stated that any Biden administration action that involved the use of an autopen “should be voided,” including pardons. Then come contrived investigations and then come arrests and then come administration lawyers telling district courts that the question isn’t settled and maybe they should just head over and ask Samuel Alito his view of the matter.
Has anyone asked if Trump signed all 1500+ pardons for the January 6th insurrectionists? Maybe he did. But it’s worth asking.
Obviously this is all irrelevant. Biden’s pardons are all valid. It’s just a way to continue to harass him and treat him like shit for the sheer joy of it. There’s no legitimate purpose to any of it, no way to prove the spurious charges they are flinging and no reason for any of this except to give Dear Leader a thrill up the leg.
Meanwhile, he’s walking around Japan like a blind salmon, so out of it it’s clear he has no idea where he is:
Interior minister Diosdado Cabello said that a cell ‘financed by the CIA’ planned to attack the USS Gravely and pin the blame on Caracas, after the missile destroyer docked in Trinidad and Tobago on Sunday to conduct joint exercises with Trinidad’s navy.
Venezuela said that it had captured a group of mercenaries “with direct information of the American intelligence agency” and whose goal it was to carry out a false-flag attack in the region. Cabello said four people had been arrested, without providing details.
True? No idea. Maduro is a liar too. But let’s just say it wouldn’t surprise me. Trump publicly announced that he had approved “covert” CIA action in Venezuela so what should we expect?
Trump: "Nobody makes equipment like we do. Nobody makes the ammunition, the weapons, the missiles, the planes, none of it. And if they do, the American sailor stands ready to crush them and sink them and wreck them and blast them into oblivion, right? … everybody said that I… pic.twitter.com/aolWejYHUx
Trump: We’d go in and we’d win and we’d leave. They used to say to the victor belong the spoils. Well, we'd be the victor. Then we'd leave because we had people that didn't know what the hell they were doing. pic.twitter.com/705lHHqxvA
.@POTUS: "Biden used to say he was a pilot. He was a pilot, he was a truck driver, whatever, whoever walked in. He wasn't a pilot. He wasn't much of a President, either, to be honest with you… That we all know." 🤣 pic.twitter.com/AS46etmlJD
Trump: I am delighted to announce that as your sort of boss, I don't feel like your boss, but I guess I am… we're going to make sure that you receive the full amount that you were owed for the deployment. And we're not going to deduct anything because you came in to listen to… pic.twitter.com/paiXDEpigB
Trump: "They spent $900,093,000 on the catapults trying to get them to work. And they had steam, which worked so beautifully and it has for 50 years, right? So we're gonna go back. Seriously fellas, I want to make that change. I'm gonna do an executive order." pic.twitter.com/znIfA2yJDF
Trump: They have magnets… Somebody decided to use magnets… I’m going to sign an executive order, when we build aircraft carriers, it’s steam for the catapults and hydraulics for the elevators. Do you agree? Everybody agrees. pic.twitter.com/O9TbTucqKR
Trump to troops in Japan: "Unlike past administrations, we will not be politically correct. You don't mind that, do you? When it comes to defending the United States we're no longer politically correct. We're gonna defend our country any way we have to and that's usually not the… pic.twitter.com/0w16wOTbq0
Trump: "People don't care if we send in our military, if we send in our National Guard, if we send in Space Command, they don't care who it is, they just want to be safe … we're gonna go into Chicago … we can do as we want to do." pic.twitter.com/FKEhISQkdv
He's genuinely so crazy and disconnected from reality. Total new foreign direct investment in the U.S. in 2024 was $151 billion. We are not getting 100 times – or ten times that – this year. It's pure fantasy. https://t.co/IhPQncC2m6
