Mark Fitzpatrick, the owner of the Old State Saloon, poses in front of the bar area at his establishment. He describes himself as ‘a Christian, conservative, Constitution supporter, retired police officer, and family man.
A country-themed bar in the deep red state of Idaho delighted the Trump administration and some conservatives with its latest social media stunt on Saturday evening.
Old State Saloon, a watering hole in Eagle, pledged free beer for one month to anyone who ‘helps ICE identify and ultimately deport an illegal from Idaho,’ in an X post that went viral, garnering over 3.6 million views in under 24 hours.
The bar shared some of the messages they had received with alleged tips, encouraging law enforcement to target a hotel and an apartment complex in the vicinity of Boise, Idaho.
The post even drew the attention of President Donald Trump‘s Department of Homeland Security, which shared it with a GIF of Earl Sinclair, the main character from the family sitcom Dinosaurs that aired from 1991 to 1994, dropping his drink and jaw in a clip, seemingly approving of the offer.
The bar replied to the DHS post: ‘Let’s go! Deport them all!’ At least one person has qualified for the offer already, according to reports.
It would be one thing if they sold themselves as the hateful, Satan acolytes they are. But the Christian stuff is galling not so much because they are hypocrites and liars but because so many of their church leaders and fellow Christians either agree or stay silent in the face of this cruel, crude behavior.
I don’t ever want to hear moralizing from these people again. Ever. Not one word.
Update — Dear leader speaking of a Democratic candidate at a “virtual rally” earlier today
"She hates Christianity" — Trump rants on Mike Johnson's phone at a Van Epps rally
His latest plan for the new ballroom. It will dwarf the White House and be in the running with those in Las Vegas at Caesars and the Fontainebleau as the biggest on Earth.
Yes he’s got short fingers, but vulgarian is really the point of the name we assigned him 37 years ago. pic.twitter.com/G2McD3bQR9
Rosa Parks sparked a movement 70 years ago today by refusing to surrender her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus to a white passenger. She was arrested. The Montgomery bus boycott lasted over a year and ended when a U.S. Supreme Court very different from ours ruled segregation on public buses unconstitutional.
Parks said of her role, “People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn’t true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”
But it took courage. The year-long boycott shows that such courage is contagious. Oppressors fear it.
Jim Crow segregation and Klan lynchings had terrorized the Black community across the South for one nearly hundred years. A decade earlier, a murderous Nazi regime ruling Germany through fear had executed millions it deemed undesirable.
German novelist Hans Fallada, the pen name of Rudolf Ditzen, wrote Every Man Dies Alone in the fall of 1946. He based his novel on a Berlin couple that resisted the Nazis with a two-year postcard-writing campaign. Hillary Kelly discusses the work, its background, and Fallada’s plot in The Atlantic. Fallada examines how ordinary Germans dealt with the Nazi culture of fear. Many submitted, but not all.
The German authorities relied on terror, even toward party members, to keep their citizenry in line. But where they erred, as Fallada writes, was in “the assumption that all Germans were cowards.” No German freedom fighters brought down the government, no anti-propaganda mission persuaded the people to rise up en masse against their tyrants; it took a world war to knock Hitler from his perch. Yet some Germans, Fallada shows, found ways to surmount their fear and assert their moral integrity in acts of dissidence, even if they could not topple the regime.
Nazis assumed all Germans were cowards. White Democrats in the Jim Crow South assumed Blacks would never tire of remaining “in their place.”
And so it begins again. New Orleans expects a visit from Greg Bovino’s immigrant-snatchers this morning. Axios reports:
Border Patrol agents are expected to start immigration enforcement efforts Monday in New Orleans, with the goal of arresting 5,000 people in south Louisiana and Mississippi, according to reports.
Why it matters: Communities are rushing to prepare amid uncertainty and mounting fear.
The big picture: Greg Bovino, the commander of Customs and Border Protection, is reportedly leading the mission after wrapping up enforcement in Charlotte and Chicago.
The DHS claim that it is targeting violent ciminals for deportation is transparent pretext:
Two months ago, DHS sent immigration officers to Chicago to detain and deport “violent offenders” that the agency said were released from state and local jails because of “sanctuary” policies. So far, the agency says it has arrested more than 4,000 people. Officials have publicly identified only about 120 of those as having a criminal arrest or conviction, some for major crimes such as murder, and others for nonviolent offenses such as illegally crossing the border.
During arrests in Gretna, Louisiana on Wednesday, customs agents tried to enforce a 25-foot buffer zone for those filming their arrests. But a federal judge in January issued a temporary injunction on that Louisiana buffer zone law ICE appears to reference. Observers resisted.
In and around New Orleans, some immigration lawyers say they have been inundated with calls from people trying to prepare for the upcoming operation. One immigration lawyer, Miguel Elias, says his firm is conducting many consultations virtually or by telephone because people are too afraid to come in person.
He likens the steps many in the immigrant community are taking to what people do to prepare for a hurricane — hunker down or evacuate. Families are stocking up on groceries and making arrangements for friends to take their children to school to limit how frequently they leave the house, he said.
In the days leading up to Border Patrol’s planned operations, businesses have posted signs barring federal agents from entry and grassroots advocacy groups have offered rights-related trainings and workshops on documenting the planned crackdown.
The Trump administration assumes it can terrorize immigrant communities without them and their neighbors resisting. They were wrong. Not all Americans are cowards.
Six Democratic officials, five of them military veterans, did not write post cards. The made a video cautioning service members not to obey criminal orders (as some may have already).
We want to speak directly to members of the Military and the Intelligence Community.
The American people need you to stand up for our laws and our Constitution.
Has Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth started drinking again? With the pressure he’s under, it would surprise no one. The Hill reports that Hegseth faces “bipartisan scrutiny over his reported order to strike a boat in the Caribbean a second time, killing two survivors who were clinging to the ship’s wreckage on Sept. 2.”
US lawmakers are pressing the Trump administration for answers about military strikes on suspected Venezuelan drug boats, after a report alleged that a follow-up strike was ordered to kill survivors of an initial attack.
Republican-led committees overseeing the Pentagon have vowed to conduct “vigorous oversight” into the US boat strikes in the Caribbean, following the report.
If reports are true, what gave him and Donald Trump the idea that blowing up small boats in international waters was a thing? Consider then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s testimony before the 9/11 Commission: “No one could have imagined them taking a plane, slamming it into the Pentagon … into the World Trade Center, using planes as missiles.”
Um, Tom Clancey?
Stephen Miller advocated drone strikes on migrant boats filled with unarmed civilians in 2018. He argued the boats were in international waters and not protected under the US Constitution, according to Miles Taylor a former Trump administration official.
It turns out that someone in the Trump administration did imagine using drones to blow up boatloads of civilians in international waters. Stephen Miller did. It’s who he is.
Stephen Miller, one of Donald Trump’s top immigration advisers, advocated using U.S. predator drones in 2018 to blow up migrant boats full of unarmed civilians, according to an upcoming book by a former administration official.
In a passage reviewed by Rolling Stone, former Trump Department of Homeland Security appointee Miles Taylor writes about an April 2018 conversation in which Miller allegedly advocated an attack on a migrant ship headed for the United States. Miller, Taylor writes, argued for the potential mass killing of civilians by suggesting they were not protected under the U.S. Constitution because they were in international waters.
Miller contested Taylor’s account at the time.
“This is a complete fiction that exists only in the mind of Miles Taylor desperate to stay relevant by fabricating material for his new book,” says a spokesman for Miller.
What about now?
According to a converstion related in Taylor’s book Miller agued with Paul Zukunft, then an commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard:
[The] United States launched airstrikes on terrorists in disputed areas all the time, Miller said, or retaliated against pirates commandeering ships off the coast of Somalia. The Coast Guard chief calmly explained the difference. America attacked enemy forces when they were armed and posed an imminent threat. Seafaring migrants were generally unarmed civilians. They quarreled for a few minutes. Stephen wasn’t interested in the moral conflict of drone-bombing migrants. He wanted to know whether anyone could stop America from doing it.
I’m thinking Hegseth did not come up with the idea of striking boats in the Caribbean (and leaving no survivors) alone.
Democracy Docket got the inside scoop on what some right wing vote stealing operations are up to:
Anti-voting activists met earlier this month in Worcester, Mass. for the annual fall summit of the New England chapter of Cleta Mitchell’s influential Election Integrity Network. I obtained the agenda and notes from the confab, where Mitchell and other anti-voting activists and election deniers, as well as two friendly state lawmakers, discussed plans to push for severely limiting early and mail voting.
“In-person voting on Election Day should be primary,” Mitchell said at one of the event’s panels, explaining to attendees that nearly all voting should take place in person on Election Day. Her voting policy wishlist is close to what President Donald Trump has called for, and would radically curtail access to the ballot, taking the U.S. back decades to the era of one-day elections.
Throughout the panel, Mitchell spread a stream of voting conspiracy theories, including false claims that early-voting polling places are more prone to voter fraud and that Service Employees International Union members who work at care homes for the elderly frequently steal ballots from their patients.
One of the state lawmakers who spoke at the event was a Maine Republican who marched on the U.S. Capitol Jan. 6, 2021, and has falsely accused Capitol Police of trying to incite violence that day.
They are working feverishly to end early voting and vote by mail, under the assumption that it will help them. I’m not so sure. Republicans like to use those options as well. And unless the Supremes decide to change the constitution to put themselves in charge of elections (certainly possible…) even red states may balk at doing this.
But they also have other tricks up their sleeves which I suspect is where they are really headed:
Also at Friday’s EIN meeting, Phani Mantravadi, a Michigan anti-voting activist who co-founded the group Check My Vote, discussed ways for citizens to take it upon themselves to hunt for voter fraud, according to the notes.
In addition to plugging Check My Vote, which uses incomplete or inaccurate public data to check voter registrations, Mantravadi encouraged attendees to drive by the homes of voters they suspect of fraud to check that their addresses are valid.
That’s probably the tip of the intimidation iceberg, I’m afraid. They are working feverishly to ensure that they never lose elections in the future. It’s going to be a huge battle for some time to come.
If you’re unfamiliar with Mitchell’s work, read this. She’s a very dangerous person.
Henry Bolton, British former politician who was the leader of the UK Independence Party, is utterly aghast at the rumors that Trump is sending emissaries to moscow to rubber-stamp putin's invasion.
Henry Bolton, British former politician who was the leader of the UK Independence Party, is utterly aghast at the rumors that Trump is sending emissaries to moscow to rubber-stamp putin’s invasion. If this is true, Bolton argues, Trump isn’t just selling out Ukraine, he’s tearing up every rule that’s kept europe relatively peaceful for the last 50 years and confirming to every tin-pot dictator that borders are just suggestions. it’s either total incompetence or something “far worse.”
Bolton: “The Daily Telegraph and other outlets are reporting that President Trump has sent Steve Whitkoff and Jared Kushner to Moscow to tell President Putin that he is prepared to formally recognize Luhansk, Donetsk, and Crimea as Russian territory. And if that’s correct, then this marks a very, very dark day for European security.
If he does this, he’d be rewarding an invader, an aggressor, betraying Ukraine’s defense, and ripping up something called the Helsinki Final Act, which laid the foundations for peace and territorial integrity in Europe since 1975. He’d be driving a wedge between the United States and the European allies, undermining NATO’s deterrent power and effect, and would send a very bad signal indeed to every autocrat in the world that they can change borders by force.
We have of course got to try everything we can to end this war, but appeasing the aggressor has never, ever brought peace. It’s only invited further conflict. And if we’ve learned anything at all from history, it’s surely got to be that. And as I say, I keep saying, if indeed this is happening, I’m praying it’s not, but if it is, then it’s not diplomacy or pragmatism. It is surrender, American surrender.
But even worse, President Trump could be undermining the security of all of us here in Britain and Europe without even consulting us. It would confirm either extraordinary incompetence on his part, arrogance, or maybe even something far worse. I mean, after all, what is motivating the American president if it isn’t the interests of Ukraine, Europe, or the United States?
The world is watching, and people in the know are holding their breath. Britain and Europe have got to stand firm. We’ve got to defend the principles of sovereignty and law and resolutely remind Washington and Moscow that peace cannot be built on the foundations of force, aggression, or oppression. And this is a moment I think for clarity, courage, and leadership, not capitulation or compromise.
Someone in Britain or in Europe has got to stand up and show some real statesmanlike leadership in a measured, proper, diplomatic manner, but firmly and strongly, because otherwise, the years to come are going to be…”
US retail sales on Black Friday, the busiest shopping day of the year, climbed 4.1% compared with last year, according to data released Saturday by Mastercard SpendingPulse. Online shoppers alone spent $11.8 billion, up 9.1% from 2024, according to data collection platform Adobe Analytics.
But those gains don’t account for higher prices due to inflation, so actual spending could be flat. “We have 3% inflation, so maybe (the 4.1% increase in spending) is a real increase of just 1% or so, which is not that much of an increase,” Rick Newman, who writes The Pinpoint Press, a newsletter on the US economy, told CNN on Friday.
There’s also a bifurcation in who’s spending. The Federal Reserve’s most recent Beige Book, a collection of anecdotes about the economy, showed consumer spending among low- and middle-income consumers is on the decline. Meanwhile, the Fed found high-end consumers are continuing to spend — including on luxury items and travel.
Consumers have bought fewer items this holiday season, but the average selling prices are higher, according to Claudia Lombana, a national consumer expert. “The ones that have higher income are spending at will, but those who are less affluent are budgeting,” Lombana told CNN’s Omar Jimenez on Saturday.
It’s part of the so-called K-shaped economy, in which higher earners get a boost from their stock market investments and home valuations and use their fatter paychecks to spend. But lower earners increasingly live paycheck to paycheck and look for discounts — or curtail their spending to cope with rising prices.
Wealthier people don’t have any problem with these higher prices, natch. It’s all fun and games for them. Everyone else, not so much. Is this sustainable? Unlikely, since the political blow back from the have nots tends to get very intense.
Income inequality is nothing new, of course. But it’s gotten much worse over just the last few years and with Trump at the helm hosting lavish celebrations with his billionaire buddies, the public will get less and less tolerant of this “let them eat cake” bs. He promises bread and circuses and he’s certainly delivering on the latter. But the bread comes first and he’s certainly not delivering on that.
She wrote this last week in the wake of Trump’s calls for the death of veterans who said that the military must not follow illegal orders, but I think it applies throughout this holiday season as we gather with colleagues friends and family:
In many American homes, discussion of politics has become verboten. Whatever the value of sacrificing discussion to keep the peace, this news from today is not politics, and it should be discussed at kitchen tables and Thanksgiving dinner tables across our country. Every American should understand both this news and what it means: That the president of the United States, who has killed people abroad, is now asserting the desire to see elected representatives in this country killed, that the president who stood alongside the Saudi crown prince who suborned the murder of Jamal Khashoggi defended the murderer, not the victim. George Washington would, most certainly, not have hanged members of Congress for expressing their views. He would not have approved of what Donald Trump said today, or pretty much any day. We can no longer afford to permit those around us to bury their heads in the sand and pretend this isn’t happening. It is all too real. It is all too risky, given that this president’s words have all too frequently become actions once spoken to his followers.
He once boasted that he would “stuff the drugs up the gringos’ noses.” He accepted a $1 million bribe from El Chapo to allow cocaine shipments to pass through Honduras. A man was killed in prison to protect him.
At the federal trial of Juan Orlando Hernández in New York, testimony and evidence showed how the former president maintained Honduras as a bastion of the global drug trade. He orchestrated a vast trafficking conspiracy that prosecutors said raked in millions for cartels while keeping Honduras one of Central America’s poorest, most violent and most corrupt countries.
Last year, Mr. Hernández was convicted on drug trafficking and weapons charges and sentenced to 45 years in prison. It was one of the most sweeping drug-trafficking cases to come before a U.S. court since the trial of the Panamanian strongman Gen. Manuel Noriega three decades before.
[…]
But on Friday, President Trump announced that he would pardon Mr. Hernandez, 57, who he said was a victim of political persecution, though Mr. Trump offered no evidence to support that claim. It would be a head-spinning resolution to a case that for prosecutors was a pinnacle, striking at the heart of a narcostate.
I am including a gift link for you to read the whole sordid story. This man is a monster. One of the worst ever. And Trump pardoned him.
That may seem counterintuitive since he’s simultaneously waging war on Venezuela over cocaine trafficking but he’s acting entirely on impulse now and Roger Stone told him that he was “unfairly” prosecuted so Trump did it. He rightly sees himself in Hernandez — a corrupt criminal president:
For many Hondurans, his conviction was a rare taste of justice. A woman in a crowd outside the courthouse celebrating his punishment had held a sign that read “No clemency for narcopolitics.”
But on Saturday, Mr. Trump said in a statement to The New York Times that “many friends” had asked him to pardon Mr. Hernández: “They gave him 45 years because he was the President of the Country — you could do this to any President.”
No doubt that is the argument Roger made to him.
Trump 2.0 has been a train wreck from the beginning but it does feel like he’s just saying “fuck it” now and doing what he feels like doing no matter how insane it might be. We are entering a new phase of lunacy.
Although Republicans have expressed just a tiny bit of “concern” over Pete Hegseth’s order to “kill ’em all” in the Caribbean, I haven’t heard any of them speak out about this. I honestly don’t think there’s any red line for them. If Trump decided to set up camps to throw all of his political enemies in them I’m fairly sure he wouldn’t get any trouble from the GOP.
A secretive Fort Bragg operation that specializes in influencing people’s thoughts has released a hypnotic recruitment video that is laced with hidden meanings and strange images.
The 1:17-second clip, posted Nov. 19 on social media, is a string of baffling clips, including old cartoons, masked figures hiding in plain sight and a group of people staring blankly at the viewer over the phrase: “We are everywhere.”
“There is another force applied in combat that we generally don’t think of as a weapon of war. That weapon is words,” the video says. “Words are weapons. … This is psychological warfare.”
The video then beckons: “Join PSYOP.”
Some responses:
Among the surprises found, references to conspiracy theories, the “Ghost Army” that deceived the Nazi generals in WWII and the popular Pepe the Frog GIF shows up in a clown suit. At one point, the phrase “anything we touch is a weapon” flashes and fades.
“Watch it over and over again. Great little nuggets of information for us,” Nidia Law posted on Facebook.
“A lot of crumb drops in this one,” TheJason wrote on Instagram.
“I think y’all have so much fun at work! Would love to be on the other side of this ‘fog show’,” Leigh Eschew said on Instagram.
I’m sure the recruits will be the finest conspiracy theorists the country has to offer.
Oh, and then there’s this. (Note that eleven stars represented the eleven states that had originally seceded from the Union to form the Confederacy.)
