Monday Smile

 

Newsom Strikes Back

BREAKING: Governor Gavin Newsom fights FIRE WITH FIRE and announces that California will cut off all funding to any college that signs Donald Trump's MAGA loyalty pledge.

This is a brilliant chess move from Newsom...

"IF ANY CALIFORNIA UNIVERSITY SIGNS THIS RADICAL AGREEMENT, THEY'LL LOSE BILLIONS IN STATE FUNDING — INCLUDING CAL GRANTS — INSTANTLY," Newsom wrote on X. "CALIFORNIA WILL NOT BANKROLL SCHOOLS THAT SELL OUT THEIR STUDENTS, PROFESSORS, RESEARCHERS, AND SURRENDER ACADEMIC FREEDOM."

The post included a screenshot of a New York Times report on the Trump administration's new "compact." The administration sent a document to nine major universities asking them to commit to the MAGA agenda in return for preferred access to federal funds.

By signing the compact, the universities would be committing to remaining lockstep on Trump's pet issues including his definition of gender. They'd have to apply that definition to campus bathrooms, locker rooms, and women's sport teams. Schools would have to stop considering, race, gender, and other key demographics in the admissions process (a red meat issue for the white nationalist segment of Trump's base).

International enrollment would be capped at 15% for a given college's undergraduate body and no more than 5% could come from the same country.

More broadly, the unversities would have to aggressively push conservative viewpoints. For example, they'd have to make sure that their campuses are "vibrant marketplace of ideas," which in practice would mean astroturfing right-wing beliefs and suppressing leftist thought. They'd also have to  inflate the number of professors who are conservative and would be tasked with “transforming or abolishing institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas.”

According to the administration, signing the compact will grant universities "multiple positive benefits" that include “substantial and meaningful federal grants” and “increased overhead payments where feasible."

“It’s not worth the compromises that they would have to make. This is a Faustian bargain," said Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education.

Newsom's threat to these universities carries real bite. Cal Grants is a massive student financial aid program totaling $2.8 billion. Losing access to it would be disastrous for these colleges. This is what we need from our Democratic leadership. Fight back with concrete threats. Democracy is on the line. Via: Occupy Democrats

What Happened In Quantico

Unfortunately it's not satire.

 

"Donald Trump walked into Quantico Tuesday expecting a rally. He got a funeral.

The generals sat in perfect silence, faces locked in the kind of grim stillness that comes from years of watching idiots talk and choosing not to react. Trump, of course, couldn’t handle it. “I’ve never walked into a room so silent before,” he confessed, his voice trembling somewhere between wounded pride and panic. Then came the kicker: “If you want to applaud, you applaud.”

This wasn’t leadership. This was a washed-up Vegas act begging the crowd to clap. The Commander-in-Chief turned into the Clapper-in-Chief, reduced to prodding the nation’s top brass like a sad carnival barker who forgot his punchline.

A campaign rally in uniform.

Instead of strategy, Trump delivered his usual medley of grievances: Barack Obama ruined everything, Joe Biden ruined it twice as hard, and only Donald J. Trump, self-proclaimed “two-term, maybe three-term president” could save America. It was less a military briefing than an episode of The Apprentice: Pentagon Edition.

The generals, trained to withstand battlefield chaos, sat stone-faced through the barrage of nonsense. They have endured artillery fire with more enthusiasm.

Enter Pete Hegseth, America’s Pastor-in-Arms. Trump’s “Secretary of War” took the podium with the intensity of a man who thinks Tom Clancy novels are actual military doctrine. He promised “fire and brimstone,” called for purges of “fat generals,” and announced he wants the next war to look exactly like the Gulf War, because apparently it’s still 1991 and CNN is running that same grainy footage of tanks in the desert.

But Hegseth wasn’t done. He led them in prayer. Yes, prayer. The nation’s top generals, summoned by presidential ego, now folded into a forced altar call like extras at a megachurch revival. The separation of church and state? Obliterated. Constitution? Shredded. Jesus, apparently, is now Commander-in-Chief. Trump can play Vice.

Weakness on parade

Trump likes to brag about firing generals who “aren’t warriors.” But on Tuesday, the real firing squad was silence. Not one clap. Not one cheer. Just the steady hum of contempt vibrating off the brass like feedback from a dead microphone.

These men and women have seen actual combat. They’ve buried soldiers. They’ve lived with the weight of real command. And now they’re expected to cheer for a man who brags about moving “a submarine or two” like it’s a toy in a bathtub, or who lectures about “two N-words” as though nuclear strategy were a stand-up routine.

No wonder they didn’t clap.

The pin-drop presidency

What happened at Quantico wasn’t just awkward. It was diagnostic. Trump’s presidency is a hollow shell propped up by applause, and when the applause disappears, so does he.

And Hegseth? He’s the zealot-in-chief, delivering sermons about war and Christ in equal measure, a man confusing the Book of Revelation with the Pentagon’s operations manual. Together, they make quite the duo: one desperate for claps, the other desperate for amens.

The generals gave them neither.

Instead, they gave silence, the most cutting judgment of all." ~ Michael Jochum

Monday Smile

 

ICE Goons Must Go

BREAKING: In an OUTRAGEOUS scene that has quickly gone viral, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent dropped his pistol and then POINTED IT AT BYSTANDERS during a chaotic arrest Wednesday morning in Hyattsville, Maryland. The incident, captured on video by local photographer Raphi Talisman, unfolded just seven miles northeast of the White House—right in the heart of morning rush hour.

Talisman, who witnessed and recorded the ordeal, says he was driving home after dropping his child off at school when traffic suddenly halted. Moments later, he stepped out of his car to find ICE officers pinning a man to the asphalt in the middle of a busy intersection. The man, who appeared to be resisting arrest, cried out for help in both English and Spanish as two agents—one masked and wearing a vest labeled “POLICE ICE”—struggled to handcuff him.  

During the struggle, as one of the agents maneuvered to restrain the man, his pistol fell from his holster and hit the ground. The detainee then reached for the weapon and smacked it a few feet away. The agent immediately lunged to retrieve the unsecured firearm. 

As the agent recovered the weapon and moved back into a crouched position, video evidence shows him briefly pointing the pistol in the direction of the gathered onlookers. This action drew immediate and angry reactions from witnesses, with one person reportedly yelling, “What, you going to shoot me? Go ahead, shoot me.” Additionally, some online critics of the footage noted that the pistol's magazine appeared to have fallen out during the scuffle, indicating improper handling of the firearm.

The tension escalated after the suspect was finally handcuffed and placed into an unmarked Dodge minivan. At one point, the agent who dropped the pistol engaged directly with the crowd of witnesses, asking, "Do you want to take him home? Are you going to take care of him?" When an onlooker asked why the man was being arrested, the agent shouted back, "Because he is a criminal. How about that?"

Later in the clip, the second ICE agent, wearing the balaclava, walked toward the group of onlookers and appeared to issue a further challenge, asking, "Want to be next?"

ICE has not released any official details regarding the operation or the identity of the detainee.  However, according to the photographer who recorded the clip, the arrest was "brutal”. The video has sparked widespread debate over federal law enforcement procedures and the treatment of detainees and the public during enforcement actions by Trump's out-of-control immigration agents.

I Hope Reich is Right

 Friends,

I can’t tell you exactly how I know but after sixty years in and around politics I’ve developed a sixth sense, and my sixth sense tells me the tide is now turning on Trump.

This past week did it.

On Monday, he sued the Times in a lawsuit that, as CNN put it, read “like a pro-Trump op-ed, with page after page of gushing praise for the president.”

On Tuesday, he accused reporter Jonathan Karl and his employer, ABC News, of engaging in hate speech against him, and warned that Pam Bondi, the attorney general, might go after them.

On Wednesday, after Brendan Carr, his lapdog chair of the FCC, pressured ABC to suspend Jimmy Kimmel, he claimed that Kimmel being “CANCELLED” was “Great News for America,” and urged NBC to fire Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers next.

On Thursday, he said broadcast networks have been mean to him and that Brendan Carr might have to start taking their licenses away. “When you have a network and you have evening shows, and all they do is hit Trump,” he said, “they’re licensed. They’re not allowed to do that. They’re an arm of the Democrat Party.”

On Friday, he suggested that negative coverage about him is “really illegal.” Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office he said: “They’ll take a great story and they’ll make it bad. See, I think that’s really illegal,” adding “Personally, you can’t take, you can’t have a free airwave if you’re getting free airwaves from the United States government.”

On Saturday, he demanded that Bondi prosecute several of his political rivals even though grand juries and federal prosecutors couldn’t find any evidence of wrongdoing. He demanded that she do it “NOW!!!”

On Sunday, at the memorial service for Charlie Kirk, he said that he disagreed with Kirk’s supposed leniency toward his ideological foes, adding: “I hate my opponent, and I don’t want the best for them.”

You could almost feel the great sleeping giant of America open an eye and frown, then blink both eyes and sit up and stretch, and then roar “what the hell is going on here?”

Immediately after Kimmel’s suspension, Disney viewers and customers began to cancel their subscriptions to Disney+ and Hulu and threaten a broader consumer boycott.

According to Strength in Numbers, the Disney boycott quickly became four times as large as any boycott over the last five years.

Disney’s stock dipped about 3.5 percent and continued to trade lower in subsequent days — a loss in market value amounting to some $4 billion.

Even Ted Cruz — Ted Cruz! — began issuing grave warnings about censorship.

By then the giant was roaring and stomping.

By Monday, Disney decided to put Kimmel back on the air.

Trump’s poll numbers were dipping even before last week’s explosion of authoritarianism. Now they’re in free fall.

I’m old enough to have witnessed the great sleeping giant of America awaken before.

Joe McCarthy’s communist witch hunt destroyed countless careers before the giant roared: “have you no sense of decency?”

McCarthy melted almost as quickly as the Wicked Witch of the West. His national popularity evaporated. Three years later, censored by his Senate colleagues, ostracized by his party, and ignored by the press, McCarthy drank himself to death, a broken man at the age of forty-eight.

The giant roared again a decade later, after television showed civil rights marchers getting clobbered by white supremacists. Congress passed the Civil Rights Act.

It roared again after tens of thousands of young Americans were killed in the jungles of Vietnam, finally bringing to an end one of the nation’s costliest, deadliest, and stupidest wars.

It roared again at Richard Nixon after Nixon was heard on tape plotting the coverup of Watergate — then being forced to exit the White House by helicopter on his way back to California.

It is starting to roar again now — at the sociopathic occupant of the Oval Office who won’t tolerate criticism, who in one wild week revealed his utter contempt for the freedom of Americans to criticize him, to write or speak negatively about him, even to joke about him.

Maybe I’m being too optimistic, but I’ve seen a lot. I know the signs. The sleeping giant always remains asleep until some venality becomes so noxious, some action so disrespectful of the common good, some brutality so noisy, that he has no choice but to awaken.

And when he does, the good sense of the American people causes him to put an end to whatever it was that awakened him.

What do you think?

Monday Smile

 

Monday Morning Smile

 

Regarding Chalie Kirk's Death

 BREAKING: A prominent Black influencer goes viral with a powerful post about Charlie Kirk, condemning the assassination as "absolutely horrific" while being bluntly honest about how history will remember the right-wing demagogue.

It's crucial that we push back on attempts to whitewash this man's hateful legacy...

"America lost Charlie Kirk a couple hours ago, violently, tragically, and in a moment that was recorded, and is circulating social. I will not post it because it’s absolutely horrific," wrote The Hungry Black Man wrote to his 300,000 followers on Facebook.

Kirk, a hardcore pro-gun advocate and professional racebaiter, was tragically shot and killed yesterday at Utah Valley University. The killer remains at large.

"Charlie was not a figure of grace or empathy," continued The Hungry Black Man. "History will not remember him as a voice of unity or a champion of justice. He will be remembered for the words he chose, words that often wounded and divided. As he lay bleeding out onstage, those words, once weapons, became dust."

"When he was shot, he was speaking about one of America’s deepest wounds: mass shootings," he went on. "When asked about school shootings, his response was not measured compassion but deflection. 'Counting or not counting gang violence?' he said, as if the grief of families who send their children to school only to bury them could be minimized by a technicality. And then, almost instantly, a shot rang out. He fell, his voice instantly silenced."

"This is not eulogy-flattery," he continued. "This is memory. We remember the things he said about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: 'MLK was awful. He’s not a good person.' We remember his calculation on gun violence: 'I think it’s worth … some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational.' These are not the words of healing, not the words of unity. And yet they, too, are part of the ledger he leaves behind."

"So what do we do with a legacy like this? First, we tell the truth. We acknowledge what he said, how he said it, and the hurt it caused," he went on. "Second, we resist the temptation to let violence beget violence. For if this act tells us anything, it is that political violence has become a siren call to the unhinged, a spark they would gladly use to ignite the tinderbox of racial and class resentment. Today it was a conservative voice silenced. Tomorrow, it could just as easily be a progressive one. We must not let this become the currency of politics."

"We should also understand the warning buried in this moment," he wrote. "What we say matters. How we live matters. The words we choose, the causes we defend, the way we treat one another, these become the bricks of our legacy. Kirk’s words were often sharp, sometimes cruel, but they are now etched into his memory as surely as his death. Let the rest of us take note: legacies should be rooted in love, in justice, in equality, not in division or deflection."

"Rest, if you can, Mr. Kirk. May your final act teach us something lasting: that even in grief, we are called to choose better," the post concluded.

Kirk's assassination is a dark moment for America and it's a direct result of allowing a country awash in guns to descend into hyper-polarized politicization. His death is a tragedy, but so is every death caused by gun violence. If we want to create a safer, more peaceful nation we must turn away from the hateful rhetoric that Kirk spread and embrace a vision of America where equality and understanding are celebrated.

FUCK FOX AND EVERYONE WHO WORKS THERE

 I don't give a shit that Charlie Kirk is dead.  He was an evil human being and I'm glad I don't have to see that goofy face anymore.

Now we have Brian Killmead saying on the morning of September 10, 2025,  advocated for the killing of mentally ill homeless people during a discussion.

link: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/brian-kilmeade-fox-news-host-kill-homeless-b2826035.html

Fox News is getting dangerous by saying things like this that get MAGATs stirred up. WTF is happening in this country?

THIS Wacko