Aside from the large lead for the Democrats (+6 is above average), the Fox News Poll found some striking shifts in issue ownership. Fox finds the Democrats lead on affordability (+14), helping the middle class (+14), and healthcare (+21), while Republicans hold advantages on border security (+15), national security (+12), and immigration (+5) — but their previous edges on taxes, foreign policy, and the deficit have evaporated. Those issues are now essentially tied.
Compared to 2023, the last time Fox asked these questions before Trump became president, support for the GOP is down on immigration by 5 points (10 points since 2022), national security by 8, government spending by 11, foreign policy by 12, taxes by 12, and affordability/prices by 26.
Morris notes that while the GOP still has an edge on immigration despite all that’s happened the trend is moving in the Democrats’ direction.
But second, electorally speaking, what has been a better predictor of election outcomes historically is the percent of voters who say they think the Democratic/Republican party is best at handling each individual’s single most important issue. Per Gallup below, whichever party has led on this question in the past 20 years has won the subsequent presidential election. The results also predict midterms reasonably well if you apply a slight penalty for the party in control of the White House.
Meanwhile, Trump’s standing with independents continues to deteriorate. The Economist/YouGov poll conducted Jan. 23-26 found Trump at -18 net approval overall but -40 among independents. That’s a new record low across both his first and second terms.
And even more stunning is this:
The GOP cannot win without Independents. Neither party can since they make up at least a third of the electorate. That chart is a death knell for the midterms if it holds up.
The generic ballot this far out isn’t predictive of the final result — as I wrote earlier this month, the out-party typically gains about 5 points between now and November. But it does tell us where the race starts. And right now, Democrats are starting from their strongest position in years.
As Tom noted below, last night there was a special election to fill a state Senate seat in the solid red 9th district in Texas. The Democrat won, swinging the vote by over 30 points from 2024. I’m not getting my hopes up but it would be such poetic justice if Texas’ gerrymander came back to bite them in the ass next November. They thought they had a lock on the whole state and could afford to dilute their safe seats to squeeze out a few more. They may have placed the wrong bet.
Another group of kids brutalized by Miller’s gestapo:
Today I saw ICE gas little white kids in the streets of Portland with chemical weapons. Imagine what they're doing to brown and black kids in the detention camps
Can confirm ICE seemingly did this without any real warning at a completely peaceful rally. It was fucking nurses and teachers and their families on a Saturday afternoon…
It's hard to overstate how ell-organized the portland march that got gassed was… organizers made the crowd promise to be peaceful, said the march would slow in front of the ICE building but not stop, that we would stick to one chant (ICE Out). They did absolutely everything right and got gassed.
I got tear gassed too. Totally peaceful protest, largely nurses and teachers. Elderly man near me couldn't open his eyes and a woman near me was comforting her baby. Right now I'm still in the OHSU parking garage nearby wondering why nobody seems able to leave… cars not moving at all.
Democrat Taylor Rehmet won a special election for the Texas state senate on Saturday, flipping a reliably Republican district that Donald Trump won by 17 points when he clinched a second presidency in 2024.
Rehmet, a labor union leader and veteran, easily defeated Republican Leigh Wambsganss, a conservative activist, in the Fort Worth-area district. With almost all votes counted, Rehmet had a comfortable lead of more than 14 percentage points.
His victory added to Democrats’ record of overperforming in special elections so far this cycle. Democrats said it was further evidence that voters under the second Trump administration are motivated to reject GOP candidates and their policies.
A huge political earthquake in Texas tonight as Democrats flipped a State Senate seat from red to blue in a district Trump won by 17 points.
Trump personally waded in — endorsing the Republican and personally urging base turnout — and was dealt a massive loss. pic.twitter.com/RwDUP7jhDk
It doesn’t immediately change anything inside what the late Molly Ivins dubbed “the Austin Fun House.” So don’t get overexcited:
Rehmet’s victory allows him to serve only until early January, and he must win the November general election to keep the seat for a full four-year term. The Texas legislature is not set to reconvene until 2027, and the GOP still will have a comfortable majority.
Liam Ramos (Photos courtesy Columbia Heights Public Schools)
Famous at five, Liam Ramos was news at six. The whole world saw the image above of 5-year-old Liam being held as bait by immigration officers. They’d arrested his father, Adrián Alexander Conejo Arias, as he returned home with Liam from preschool on Jan. 20. to lure his mother outside her house:
Erika Ramos, Liam’s mother, told Telemundo in Spanish that she “witnessed the scene from the window and couldn’t do anything. Adrián begged me repeatedly not to go outside because he was afraid they would arrest me too.”
Ramos said the immigration officers noticed her, took Liam out of their car and brought him to the front door so she would open it.
“They knocked and knocked, and my son Liam kept saying, ‘Mommy, open the door.’ I was terrified,” she said while sobbing.
She said she didn’t open the door out of fear she would be arrested and her other child would be left alone.
Never seen a ruling like this: "Observing human behavior confirms that for some among us, the perfidious lust for unbridled power and the imposition of cruelty in its quest know no bounds and are bereft of human decency. And the rule of law be damned." https://t.co/qykE0glTVCpic.twitter.com/LD3sliUqEd
A federal judge on Saturday ordered the boy and his father released.
Warm up your coffee and please read in its entirety this sharp rebuke to DHS Secretary Krisiti Noem, U.S. AG Pam Bondi, Todd Lyons, Acting Director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and others from U.S. District Judge Fred Biery (3 pages). Note the section I’ve bolded:
OPINION AND ORDER OF THE COURT
Before the Court is the petition of asylum seeker Adrian Conejo Arias and his five-year-old son for protection of the Great Writ of habeas 1 corpus. They seek nothing more than some modicum of due process and the rule of law. The government has responded.
The case has its genesis in the ill-conceived and incompetently-implemented government pursuit of daily deportation quotas, apparently even if it requires traumatizing children. This Court and others regularly send undocumented people to prison and orders them deported but do so by proper legal procedures.
[1 Ex parte Bollman, 8 U.S. (4 Cranch) 75 (1807); Sir William W. Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-1769); see also Magna Carta, Article 39.]
Apparent also is the government’s ignorance of an American historical document called the Declaration of Independence. Thirty-three-year-old Thomas Jefferson enumerated grievances against a would-be authoritarian king over our nascent nation. Among others were:
“He has sent hither Swarms of Officers to harass our People.”
“He has excited domestic Insurrection among us.”
“For quartering large Bodies of Armed Troops among us.”
“He has kept among us, in Times of Peace, Standing Armies without the consent of our Legislatures.”
“We the people” are hearing echos of that history.
And then there is that pesky inconvenience called the Fourth Amendment:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and persons or things to be seized.
U.S. CONST. amend. IV.
Civics lesson to the government: Administrative warrants issued by the executive branch to itself do not pass probable cause muster. That is called the fox guarding the henhouse. The Constitution requires an independent judicial officer.
Accordingly, the Court finds that the Constitution of these United States trumps this administration’s detention of petitioner Adrian Conejo Arias and his minor son, L.C.R. The Great Writ and release from detention are GRANTED pursuant to the attached Judgment.
Observing human behavior confirms that for some among us, the perfidious lust for unbridled power and the imposition of cruelty in its quest know no bounds and are bereft of human decency. And the rule of law be damned.
Ultimately, Petitioners may, because of the arcane United States immigration system, return to their home country, involuntarily or by self-deportation. But that result should occur through a more orderly and humane policy than currently in place.
Philadelphia, September 17, 1787: “Well, Dr. Franklin, what do we have?” “A republic, if you can keep it.”
With a judicial finger in the constitutional dike,
It is so ORDERED.
SIGNED this 31st day of February, 2026. [He meant January.]
Below his signature, Biery added the photo and Bible quotes seen in Kyle Cheney’s post above.
Matthew 19:14 But Jesus said, Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven.
John 11:35 Jesus wept.
In another court decision issued Saturday, federal District Court Judge Kate Menendez punted on a demand from the state of Minnesota and the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul to end “Operation Metro Surge” by thousands of DHS agents. Plaintiffs had not shown that the action (on the whole, see Biery decision above) had not crossed 10th Amendment constitutional lines:
“Plaintiffs have provided no metric by which to determine when lawful law enforcement becomes unlawful commandeering, simply arguing that the excesses of Operation Metro Surge are so extreme that the surge exceeds whatever line must exist,” she wrote, referencing a courtroom exchange with a lawyer for the state. “A proclamation that Operation Metro Surge has simply gone ‘so far on the other side of the line’ is a thin reed on which to base a preliminary injunction.”
Judge Menendez denies Minnesota plaintiffs’ request to end Operation Metro Surge because they don’t meet the high bar set by the 10th Amendment, but she also points to what she doesn’t decide, including the legality of what ICE is doing on the ground. pic.twitter.com/dLNAv7Aalr
The Court pauses to observe what it is not deciding. At this stage, the Court makes no final determination on the merits of any claims asserted by Plaintiffs. Nor does the Court offer any opinion about the wisdom of Operation Metro Surge. And the legality of many of the specific actions taken by federal agents during the operation is not before the Court in this case. Instead, the Court only decides whether to grant the extraordinary remedy of a preliminary injunction halting a federal law enforcement operation based upon the Tenth Amendment. In answering this question, the Court must view Plaintiffs’ claims through the lens of the specific legal framework they invoke, and, having done so, finds that Plaintiffs have not met their burden. For the reasons discussed below, the motion is denied.
An appeals court stayed a preliminary injunction Menendez issued in January ordering agents not to retaliate “against persons who are engaging in peaceful and unobstructive protest activity, including observing the activities of Operation Metro Surge.” The appellate court found her ruling “too broad” and “too vague” to survive appeal.
Trump 2.0 has generated a “deluge” of such court cases leading in recent weeks to judges ordering the release of hundreds of immigrants, The New York Times reports:
In case after case, federal judges have found that the Trump administration has been ignoring longstanding legal interpretations that mandate the release of many people who are taken into immigration custody if they post a bond.
The surge in such cases has dominated the court dockets in some districts, overwhelming government lawyers who have to defend the detentions. And the wave of people who have been set free has upended the Trump administration’s effort to keep detained immigrants locked up indefinitely, even if they do not pose a public safety threat.
But as we’ve seen, the legal pushback has in no way curbed lawless, aggressive violent behavior by armed agents of the Trump-Miller pogrom. Last month they took the lives of Renee Good and Alex Pretti.
PBS reports that Pretti’s shooting was “at least the fourth shooting fatality linked to immigration enforcement since Trump returned to the Oval Office. At least eight other shootings have led to injury, according to a PBS News review of news coverage, as well as tallies from The Trace, NBC News and The Washington Post.”
The Guardian adds, “Pretti and Good are just two people out of at least eight who have either been killed by federal agents or who have died while in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody in 2026 so far.”
Nor has legal pushback stopped an increasingly imperial Trump administration from ignoring judicial rulings or from declaring Trump a law unto himself. The Bill of Rights is no longer operative if the Trump administration finds your constitutional rights inconvenient. Jeff Sharlet’s slow civil war has accelerated since January 20, 2025.
My sign efforts since August were predicated on a simple notion born out of years of greeting harried voters outside polling stations: if people trust you, they will vote with you. Sign Guy (me) is already familiar to 10,000 commuters per week. With trusted messenger status, I might after Labor Day gently persuade more of them to vote. Naive, maybe, but not simply more of the usual thing. But last month’s events have me reconsidering that strategy and timeline. Things are already too dire. This situation requires more boldness on my part and on yours, and now. Democracy can’t wait.
As he villain in Iron Man 3put it, “ever since that big dude with a hammer fell out of the sky, subtlety’s kinda had its day.”
President Merkin Muffley: But this is absolute madness, Ambassador! Why should you *build* such a thing?
Ambassador de Sadesky: There were those of us who fought against it, but in the end we could not keep up with the expense involved in the arms race, the space race, and the peace race. At the same time our people grumbled for more nylons and washing machines. Our doomsday scheme cost us just a small fraction of what we had been spending on defense in a single year. The deciding factor was when we learned that your country was working along similar lines, and we were afraid of a doomsday gap.
President Merkin Muffley: This is preposterous. I’ve never approved of anything like that.
Ambassador de Sadesky: Our source was the New York Times.
— from Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb; screenplay by Stanley Kubrick, Terry Southern and Peter George
Venezuela’s defence minister has accused the United States of using the country as a “weapons laboratory” during the abduction of President Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, on January 3.
Vladimir Padrino Lopez said last week that the US had used Venezuela as a testing ground for “advanced military technologies” that rely on artificial intelligence and weaponry never used before, according to the Venezuelan newspaper El Universal.
On Sunday, US President Donald Trump told the New York Post that US forces had indeed used a weapon he referred to as “the discombobulator”.
“I’m not allowed to talk about it,” he said, adding that the weapon “made equipment not work” during the operation.
Details of the US military mission to abduct Maduro have not been made public, but the US has been known to use weapons to disorient soldiers and guards or disable equipment and infrastructure in the past. […]
Days after Maduro’s abduction, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt reposted comments that appeared to have been posted on X by a Venezuelan security guard. He wrote that the US had “launched something” during the operation that “was like a very intense sound wave”.
“Suddenly, I felt like my head was exploding from the inside,” the security guard wrote. “We all started bleeding from the nose. Some were vomiting blood. We fell to the ground, unable to move.”
Al Jazeera has not been able to verify this account.
The “Discombobulator”. Fanciful term. Like …a “Doomsday Machine”?
A year ago, we warned that the world was perilously close to global disaster and that any delay in reversing course increased the probability of catastrophe. Rather than heed this warning, Russia, China, the United States, and other major countries have instead become increasingly aggressive, adversarial, and nationalistic. Hard-won global understandings are collapsing, accelerating a winner-takes-all great power competition and undermining the international cooperation critical to reducing the risks of nuclear war, climate change, the misuse of biotechnology, the potential threat of artificial intelligence, and other apocalyptic dangers. Far too many leaders have grown complacent and indifferent, in many cases adopting rhetoric and policies that accelerate rather than mitigate these existential risks. Because of this failure of leadership, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Science and Security Board today sets the Doomsday Clock at 85 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been to catastrophe.
Could you be more …specific?
Last year started with a glimmer of hope in regard to nuclear risks, as incoming US President Donald Trump made efforts to halt the Russia-Ukraine war and even suggested that major powers pursue “denuclearization.” Over the course of 2025, however, negative trends—old and new—intensified, with three regional conflicts involving nuclear powers all threatening to escalate. The Russia–Ukraine war has featured novel and potentially destabilizing military tactics and Russian allusions to nuclear weapons use. Conflict between India and Pakistan erupted in May, leading to cross-border drone and missile attacks amid nuclear brinkmanship. In June, Israel and the United States launched aerial attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities suspected of supporting the country’s nuclear weapons ambitions. It remains unclear whether the attacks constrained those efforts—or if they instead persuaded the country to pursue nuclear weapons covertly.
Anyway, feel free to read the entire statement; it goes on to discuss additional factors like climate change, developments in artificial intelligence, the proliferation of autocratic regimes, and there’s something about a magic ring and the end of the world, yadda-yadda-yadda. Don’t panic. These science types tend to be alarmists; I doubt if we’re in any immediate danger.
President Trump’s “massive armada” of warships and fighter planes near Iran mirrors the military buildup of assets in the Caribbean as the president weighs greenlighting strikes against the Islamic Republic.
The military buildup, bolstered with the recent arrival of the USS Abraham Lincoln and its strike group in the U.S. Central Command (Centcom) area, has swelled with additional destroyers approaching Iran, expanding Trump’s attack and defensive options in the region.
The administration dispatched dozens of warships and stationed about 15,000 U.S. service members in the U.S. Southern Command (Southcom) area, which culminated in an early January operation in which Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and his wife were snatched by U.S. Special Forces.
Similarly to Venezuela, the U.S. has at least 10 warships near Iran, and the administration has sent additional fighter jets, air defense systems and drones to the region.
Just like Maduro, Iranian officials are not acquiescing to Trump’s demands. He has called on Iran to halt the enrichment of uranium, place limits on its ballistic missile program and end ties with terror proxy groups. […]
Washington has also sent additional F-15s and cargo planes to the region, expanding the president’s strike options, according to flight-tracking data.
Trump said Friday that he gave Iran a deadline and reiterated that Tehran wants to strike a deal with the U.S. When asked by a reporter if the president has a timeline for potentially pulling back the U.S. presence near Iran, he said, “No, we’ll see how it all works out.”
“You know, they have to float someplace, so they might as well float near Iran. But it’s a rough situation going on,” Trump told reporters at the White House.
OK …I wasn’t saying that we wouldn’t get our hair mussed.
Again, I’m not trying to be Chicken Little here…but if you’ve never had a chance to see the aforementioned Dr. Strangelove, this might be a good time to check it off your bucket list.
Here’s a piece I wrote [checks notes] on the cusp of the first Trump regime:
Plus ca change: Criterion reissues Dr. Strangelove
(Originally posted on Digby’s Hullabaloo on July 16, 2016)
Now then, Dmitri, you know how we’ve always talked about the possibility of something going wrong with the Bomb…The *Bomb*, Dmitri… The *hydrogen* bomb!…Well now, what happened is… ahm…one of our base commanders, he had a sort of…well, he went a little funny in the head… you know…just a little…funny. And, ah…he went and did a silly thing…Well, I’ll tell you what he did. He ordered his planes…to attack your country…
–from Dr. Strangelove (1964)
That’s POTUS Merkin Muffley (Peter Sellers), making “the call” to the Russian premier from the War Room, regarding an unfortunate chain of events that may very well signal the end of civilization as we know it. It’s a nightmare scenario, precipitated by a perfect storm of political paranoia, bureaucratic bungling and ideological demagoguery that enables the actions of a lone nutcase to trigger global thermonuclear war. Sound familiar?
“Mein fuehrer! I can walk!” Although we have yet (knock on wood) to experience the global thermonuclear annihilation that ensues following the wheelchair-bound Dr. Strangelove’s joyous (if short-lived) epiphany, so many other depictions in Stanley Kubrick’s seriocomic 1964 masterpiece about the tendency for people in power to eventually rise to their own level of incompetence have since come to pass, that you wonder why Kubrick and company bothered to make it all up.
In case you skipped the quote at the top of this piece, it’s the movie about an American military base commander who goes a little funny in the head (you know…”funny”) and sort of launches a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. Hilarity (and oblivion) ensues.
You rarely see a cast like this: Peter Sellers (playing three characters), George C. Scott, Sterling Hayden, Slim Pickens, Keenan Wynn, James Earl Jones and Peter Bull (who can be seen breaking character as the Russian ambassador and cracking up as Strangelove’s prosthetic arm seems to take on a mind of its own).
There are so many great lines, that you might as well bracket the entire screenplay (by Kubrick, Terry Southern and Peter George) with quotation marks.
Vodka. That’s what they drink, isn’t it? Never water? On no account will a Commie ever drink water, and not without good reason. Water is the source of all life. Seven-tenths of this earth’s surface is water. Why, do you realize that 70 percent of you is water? And as human beings, you need fresh, pure water to replenish our precious bodily fluids. Are you beginning to understand? –Gen. Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden), from Dr. Strangelove
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (its full title) did not necessarily spring from a, you know, “funny” place. Indeed, Red Alert, ex-RAF officer Peter George’s 1958 source novel, was anything but; and did not even include the character of Dr. Strangelove, the ex-Nazi scientist who emerges from the shadows of the war room just in time to contextualize all that inspired madness of the film’s third act. “He” was the invention of Kubrick and screenwriter Terry Southern.
In a 1994 Grand Street article called “Notes from the War Room”, Southern recounts Kubrick’s epiphany:
[Kubrick] told me he was going to make a film about “our failure to understand the dangers on nuclear war.” He said that he had thought of the story as a “straightforward melodrama” until this morning when he “woke up and realized that nuclear war was too outrageous, too fantastic to be treated in any conventional manner.” He said he could only see it now as “some kind of hideous joke.”
Kubrick had approached Southern as a collaborator on the basis of having read his social satire The MagicChristian (which was itself adapted for the screen in 1969). You have to keep in mind that while Kubrick’s film was in production, the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis was still fresh in the minds of a nervous public.
This was the height of the Cold War; few people found nuclear annihilation to be, you, know, “funny”…least of all studio suits. When Sellers backed out of the role of Major Kong (to Kubrick’s chagrin), it was first offered to Bonanza star Dan Blocker. Southern recalls (from the same article):
[Kubrick] made arrangements for a script to be delivered to Blocker that afternoon, but a cabled response from Blocker’s agent arrived in quick order: “Thanks a lot, but the material is too pinko for Dan. Or anyone else we know, for that matter. Regards, Leibman, CMA.”
As I recall, this was the first hint that this sort of political interpretation of our work in progress might exist. Stanley seemed genuinely surprised and disappointed.
But it worked out in the end. Could you imagine anyone but Slim Pickens as Maj. Kong?
Survival kit contents check. In them you’ll find: one forty-five caliber automatic; two boxes of ammunition; four days’ concentrated emergency rations; one drug issue containing antibiotics, morphine, vitamin pills, pep pills, sleeping pills, tranquilizer pills; one miniature combination Russian phrase book and Bible; one hundred dollars in rubles; one hundred dollars in gold; nine packs of chewing gum; one issue of prophylactics; three lipsticks; three pair of nylon stockings. Shoot, a fella’ could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that stuff. –Major Kong prepping his B-52 crew
It was in the interest of possible “political interpretation” that a critical revision had to be made to that memorable monolog in post-production. In an eerie bit of kismet, Kubrick had scheduled the first test screening of Dr. Strangelove for November 22, 1963…the day of JFK’s assassination; in view of that zeitgeist-shattering event, the film’s originally slated December premiere was postponed until late January of 1964.
But that wasn’t the spookiest part. Originally, the last line of the bit was: “Shoot, a fella’ could have a pretty good weekend in Dallas with all that stuff.” Pickens had to be recruited to re-loop the line as we now know it. If you listen carefully during the scene, you can pick up on the edit.
However it did manage to fall together is really moot; the final product stands the test of time as a satire that will never lose relevancy (one could say that about any Kubrick film, as each ultimately points to the absurdity of all these self-important hominids, scurrying about blissfully oblivious to their insignificance within a vast, randomly cruel cosmos).
Hell, Mr. President…I could do a 2,000 word dissertation on the Freudian subtext alone; from the opening montage of aircraft engaging in (decidedly coital) airborne re-fueling maneuvers, to General Ripper firing the .50 caliber machine gun from his crotch, not to mention his cigar and his monolog about why he denies women his “essence”, to the character’s names (Dr. Strangelove, President Muffley, Buck Turgidson, Mr. Staines), and of course all of that phallic weaponry, and montage of nuclear explosions at the end.
But I won’t.
“Oh…and uh, shug? Don’t forget to say your prayers!”
Fans of the film will be glad to hear that Dr. Strangelove has been given the Criterion treatment, with the release of their Blu-ray edition. The restored 4k transfer is gorgeous; the best print I’ve seen of the film on home video (this is the third digital version I’ve owned…it’s a sickness, I know).
They’ve really piled on the extras; there’s a plethora of archival interviews, as well as featurettes produced exclusively for this edition, like audio essays by film scholars and interviews with Kubrick collaborators and archivists. So fans can immerse themselves in the Strangelovian universe…if that doesn’t seem redundant.
Oh, when November rolls around…don’t forget to say your prayers.
No doubt there is a great documentary to be made about Melania Knauss, the ambitious model from out of Slovenia who married a New York real-estate mogul and then found herself cast in the role of a latter-day Eva Braun, but the horrific Melania emphatically isn’t it. It’s one of those rare, unicorn films that doesn’t have a single redeeming quality. I’m not even sure it qualifies as a documentary, exactly, so much as an elaborate piece of designer taxidermy, horribly overpriced and ice-cold to the touch and proffered like a medieval tribute to placate the greedy king on his throne.
To call Melania vapid would do a disservice to the plumes of florid vape smoke that linger around British teenagers. She calls herself a “mother, wife, daughter, friend”, yet is only depicted preening and scowling. Figures like Brigitte Macron and Queen Rania of Jordan appear to bolster Melania’s geopolitical credentials, yet time and again she returns to banal aphorisms. “Cherish your family and loved ones,” she implores audiences, who were, up until then, neglecting their family and despising their loved ones. Trump himself is an instantly more charismatic presence on screen. His scenes offer a relief from Melania’s mask of pure nothingness. Hitting cinemas as the streets of America remain filled with the angry and grieving – with the country on the verge of an irreparable schism – the vulgar, gilded lifestyle of the Trumps makes them look like Marie Antoinette skulking in her cake-filled chateau, or Hermann Göring’s staring up at his looted Monet.
Melania the book wasn’t an autobiography so much as a highly priced brochure. Melania the movie isn’t a documentary; it’s a protection racket. It’s a reminder that the richest people in the world are investing in entertainment brands not because they care about art but because the public does, and because all of these vanity projects and capitulations are a way to consolidate their own power and fortune. It is galling to think about Jeff Bezos (whose wife is a former TV news anchor) deciding to invest so much money apparently to buy the president’s good graces while reportedly preparing to cut hundreds of jobs at The Washington Post. (Amazon reps have insisted that the company invested so heavily in the movie purely “because we think customers are going to love it.”) It is also galling—to me at least—that Apple CEO Tim Cook attended the premiere of Melania this week while the Trump administration’s militarized forces are killing Americans and detaining preschoolers.
I don’t want to blow anyone’s minds here or throw you off your balance when I inform you that the Melania documentary, now in theaters, is terrible.
The truth is, my soul left my body during the very first seconds of the film, when a drone shot over the ocean makes its way over the Mar-a-Lago grounds to Melania’s feet in heels, walking to her car as The Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” plays. But my soul didn’t just escape and flee, which it would have been in its every right to do. No, it lingered, glaring at me the entire Melania running time with a mixture of disappointment and anger, like an owner would at their dog after it ate the garbage.”
“Last night, I left an empty chickpea can on my counter. When I came back 30 minutes later, small, black bugs had swarmed the tin and were crawling over my sink. I would rather relive that moment a hundred times over than have to watch another minute of the movie Melania.”
“Watching Melania get fitted for expensive clothes in gaudy rooms, or talk up how extravagantly staged she demands her balls be – and both happen a lot in Brett Ratner’s unrelentingly boring feature doc debut – only strengthen perceptions of her as a chilly, lifeless socialite wannabe… Melania is not the story of the First Lady of American politics, but the imagining of the first homeland monarch in U.S. history. This is not a film concerned at all with the America of today; it is propaganda that serves the formation of a future non-democracy.”
“Melania” is a documentary that never comes to life. It’s a “portrait” of the First Lady of the United States, but it’s so orchestrated and airbrushed and stage-managed that it barely rises to the level of a shameless infomercial. Is it cheesy? At moments, but mostly it’s inert. It feels like it’s been stitched together out of the most innocuous outtakes from a reality show. There’s no drama to it. It should have been called “Day of the Living Tradwife.”
The wingnuts are all cheering the fact that the movie made $8 million on its opening night. However, there are numerous reports that the theatres were empty. I’m going to take a wild guess that somebody created a simple program to buy out theatres. After all, $8 million is chump change to someone with billions.
It just sounds so bad and is so openly a corrupt gesture to appease Trump (as if the wholesale destruction of the Washington Post weren’t enough) that it’s a historic documentary for all the wrong reasons. But it fits Melania perfectly: vapid, boring, elitist, cruel and venal.
The resident, a woman, had been observing and recording video of immigration enforcement actions from her car when agents removed her from her car and took her into custody…
The woman, who did not want to be identified because she fears for her safety, is a U.S. citizen and a resident of St. Peter. She told MPR News in an interview that she was out in the community in her car, tracking the movements of federal agents, and recording them on a dash cam.
She shared that video with us. Agents in three vehicles began chasing her and trying to force her to pull over. Eventually they box her in, three agents get out of the car in front of her, with their guns drawn and try to force her out of her vehicle. “Get out of the car! Get out of the car,” the agents scream at her repeatedly, while she calmly responds, “No. I will not get out of the car.”
While she’s alone in the car, the woman can be heard talking with other observers on speaker phone and she tells them to call 911. The agents open the door, which unlocked automatically when she put the gearshift in park, they drag her out and force her to the ground. She said the agents were overly aggressive and physical as they pinned her down and handcuffed her, leaving her with multiple cuts, scrapes and bruises.
The woman’s husband eventually arrives and tries to intervene, and he made a separate recording of the interaction on his phone. He tells the agents not to search her car because they don’t have a warrant and it would be an illegal search. The agents appear dismissive of his constitutional concerns. “I’m not getting into the legality of everything,” One agent responds tersely.
[…]
The woman said the agents put her into one of their vehicles and started driving toward the Twin Cities, presumably to the Whipple Federal Building near MSP Airport, where ICE has an immigration detention facility. About 20 minutes into the drive, when they were near Le Sueur, she says one of the agents got a call, apparently from an ICE supervisor. They turned off Highway 169 at the next exit and drove back toward St. Peter.
The husband told MPR News that after his wife was taken into custody, he called his attorney, and soon after, he got a call from St. Peter Chief of Police Matt Grochow, whom he said he has known for years.
“I was talking to him, kind of venting some of my frustrations,” the man said, adding that he urged the chief to have his officers just be more visible during the federal enforcement actions. “If [local police] were present and they could see you, I promise you their behavior more than likely, or hopefully, would, you know, be appropriate and law abiding.”
The husband says he talked to the chief for a while and “we had a good conversation.” “He asked me, ‘what was your wife’s name’? I told him my wife’s name. He said, ‘was she picked up in a bronco?’ And I said, ‘I’m not sure, but it was an SUV, dark colored. I’d have to look at my video.’ He goes, ‘I think I got her. I’ll call you back’. The husband said a few minutes later, the chief called again, “and said, I got her or I’m bringing her home.”
The ICE officers descended on Compton, targeting immigrants convicted of theft, child abuse and selling drugs. There were no protesters. No whistles alerting targets to the officers’ presence. No face masks. In some cases, residents opened their doors to let the officers inside their homes. One man thanked them for not arresting him in front of his children.
The Los Angeles area operation ended with 162 arrests, including a Mexican national convicted of rape and a Salvadoran national convicted of voluntary manslaughter. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said almost 90% of the people arrested had criminal convictions.
It was June 2018, more than a year into Donald Trump’s first term as president. Seven years later, carrying out the same operation in L.A. or other U.S. cities feels almost impossible without drawing angry crowds and requiring multiple officers, at times across federal agencies, to detain a single target.
Why? Because Stephen Miller has created the first steps in a strategy of ethnic cleansing and suppression of dissent:
In the years since Trump’s first term, ICE and the government’s immigration enforcement apparatus expanded raids well beyond those against known criminals or suspected ones. Increasingly, immigrants with no criminal records and even legal residents and U.S. citizens found themselves stopped and sometimes arrested.
The uncertainty over who is being targeted has fueled a growing pattern of community protests and rapid response mobilizations, even when officials say they are targeting convicted felons, reflecting a widening gap between how enforcement is described and how it is experienced. That gap has become most visible on the ground.
Gangs of masked men dressed in military gear are rampaging through the cities and intimidating, harassing, brutalizing, assaulting and killing people under color of law. And that was the plan from the very beginning:
Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff, is widely seen in the administration as the mastermind of the president’s immigration policy, relentlessly pushing officials to meet goals that he designates on behalf of the president.
His power is evident in his daily 10 a.m. conference calls, including Saturdays, where he demands updates from agencies and exerts pressure on senior officials who deliver less-than-satisfactory results, according to a source familiar.
The call, which a White House official described as a “policy call to ensure interagency coordination,” includes senior leadership of agencies across the administration who are responsible for various aspects of national security and public safety.
And while the call can cover a host of topics, it largely focuses on Trump’s immigration push, a core part of the president’s second-term agenda.
Miller is militant, according to administration sources, in his belief that he must strictly enforce that push. He has been keenly focused on numbers, including how many immigration arrests are being conducted on a given day and how quickly deportations are happening. Last year, he directed ICE officials to meet daily quotas of 3,000 immigration arrests — an unprecedented number that hasn’t yet been met.
The intense White House pressure is felt downstream among agents and officers conducting immigration enforcement operations, resulting in their casting a wide net as to whom they arrest, including those who do not have criminal records.
All you have to do is read Miller’s posts:
A would-be assassin tried to murder federal law enforcement and the official Democrat account sides with the terrorists. https://t.co/UCFCE5p5J1
A day before six career federal prosecutors resigned in protest over the Justice Department’s handling of the killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis, lawyers in the office had a conversation with Gregory Bovino, the Border Patrol field leader, that left them deeply unsettled.
According to several people with knowledge of the telephone conversation, which took place on Jan. 12, Mr. Bovino made derisive remarks about the faith of the U.S. attorney in Minnesota, Daniel N. Rosen. Mr. Rosen is an Orthodox Jew and observes Shabbat, a period of rest between Friday and Saturday nights that often includes refraining from using electronic devices.
Mr. Bovino, who has been the face of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, used the term “chosen people” in a mocking way, according to the people with knowledge of the call. He also asked, sarcastically, whether Mr. Rosen understood that Orthodox Jewish criminals don’t take weekends off, the people said.
Mr. Bovino had requested the meeting with Mr. Rosen to press the Minnesota office to work more aggressively to seek criminal charges against people Mr. Bovino believed were unlawfully impeding the work of his immigration agents.
Remember when Donald Trump and his henchmen blackmailed universities with threats to cut off all funding if they didn’t take action on alleged campus antisemitism? Yeah, I knew that you would.
The only reason they got rid of Bovino is because they needed a fall guy and Trump thought he was too short to be out of central casting. (In reality, Bovino is a perfect Nazi, right down to the fashy haircut and SS Greatcoat.) I have no doubt that Trump and his men loved watching him strut around brutalizing people everywhere he went. If only he were 6’2″…
That’s Tom Morello and Bruce Springsteen at the legendary First Ave venue.
Also last night:
🚨NOW: A video is going viral showing an ICE agent ripping a phone away from an elderly U.S. citizen, keeping it, and throwing her to the ground when she attempts to retrieve it.
No mercy. Identify and prosecute each one of these guys to the FULLEST extent of state law. pic.twitter.com/Li5l9WG8T3
