Here's' the latest thing I've seen about the ICESTAPO murder in Maine today, from the Portland Press Herald,  by Isabell Oss and Abby Driscoll

Cecelia Humiston woke up Monday morning to commotion outside her Chapel Street apartment in Biddeford.

The 22-year-old walked out and saw what appeared to be a person on the ground on Pool Street, then heard yelling from other neighbors and cries from a family in distress — two women and a young child.

“She couldn’t have been older than three,” said Humiston, who has a 2-year-old son. “She was still in her Bluey pajamas.”

Just minutes after a man was shot and killed, reportedly by federal immigration officials, Humiston saw who she believes was the victim’s daughter. She said the older of the two women yelled to law enforcement, “You took her dad, you took her dad!”

The Maine Immigrants’ Rights Coalition and Presente! Maine identified the victim as a 26-year-old Columbian man. His name has not been released, but the organizations said he had been issued a Social Security number and was authorized to work in the U.S.

Humiston said she did not know the family, but her father told her he’d seen them around town several times over the last few years.

From her window, Humiston could see law enforcement asking the family to stay on the scene and if they had spoken to investigators yet. A member of the family told an officer she “didn’t care,” and wanted to leave, Humiston said.

Humiston described the law enforcement officials as “rude,” and said they barricaded the family’s car from leaving. Another yelled at the little girl, who she said was trying to smell flowers.

Several neighbors said they have seen ICE activity in the city since February. Some recall agents patrolling bus stops and stopping people on the street, but Humiston was shocked to learn about Monday’s incident.

“This is Biddeford, things like this never happen here,” she said.

Naw, I don't feel in the least bit ashamed of saying it - Rain Delay Hate Mail

I HAVE AN UNSHAKABLE FAITH that Lindsey Graham is in hell, what most of you would know Catholics call purgatory.   Where Trump will go.  Which one will spend more time there, that I don't know. 

There's an old joke about Unitarian Universalists,  that the Universalists believe God was too good to damn anyone to hell for eternity and the Unitarians firmly believe that THEY are too good for God to damn THEM to eternity.   I'm with the universalists.  

I'm a Catholic universalist,  I think there's a hell where all the evil we have done and been gets burned out of us but that it's not eternal.   I wouldn't want to go there but I'm sure someone does. 

Charlie Kirk is there getting his racism and slander against TransPeople burned out of him, his promotion of gun murder, too.   And for the same reasons that Lindsey is there. 

Aren't you glad you demanded an answer?  

I Don't Know How Much Coverage It's Getting

but there has been another ICESTAPO murder, this one in Biddeford, Maine.  That's not far from where I life.   There haven't been many details in the media, and those will, I'm sure, come from witnesses and not the Trump regime.   

I haven't read anything from our governor, Janet Mills.   I hope she's as good on this as she was on standing up to Trump up till now.  Not that she'll have much more success with that than governors in other places where ICE and the other federal fascist police entities have murdered People.

Did these assholes get all their training from watching cop shows on TV and video games?   I'll bet our local cops probably got more training than to do stuff like that. 

This is the Trump regime at war with the American People. 

Before Going Out To Weed

 I'll repost what I said at RMJ's

I think it's pretty funny that a lot of the conspiracy theorists find it unreasonable that a 71-year-old man who is known to have eaten pretty much every meal from a restaurant (when a TV was stolen from his kitchen he didn't know it for weeks because he never went in there) and who is known to have drunk heavily - believe me, he was an alcoholic and not a recent one - could have died as a result of hardening of the arteries.

I was just talking to one of my younger relatives a couple of weeks back about how when I was a kid it was far from unusual for men in their 30s and 40s to die of heart attacks. Off hand, thinking of it right now, I could name you at least four or five of those who died in my town at the time. It's not because diets have generally gotten better, drugs for treating the effects of a meat centered diet mixed with other health endangering habits have gotten better.

Still, since the Republicans live by spreading rumors and lies, I've got no problem with what they do being turned against them, except it does nothing to defeat the deadly error that there is such a thing as a "right to lie."

Todays Article Slamming Democrats

BY MICHAEL SEAN WINTERS embodies what I really like about his journalism and what I really dislike about it.   I will pass by the typical and rather superficial comments about Graham Platner,  I have yet to read someone who isn't a long time observer of Maine politics who really gets that.  He is somewhat more at home when talking about New York. 

Like most American journalists, for him Democrats, except for the farthest right of them (see below), can only do wrong.  

Here for example is a paragraph I think is both rather unaware and unfair as it is, in part,  insightful.

The problem with the democratic socialists is not their economics. It is their indifference to the way liberal democracy works.  If they called themselves "social Democrats" they would not be such an easy target. Or, better, if they called themselves "FDR Democrats" they would put their opponents on the back foot. And there is not a single item on their agenda that requires one label over the others.  One suspects that they like the fact that "democratic socialist" sounds more radical.  In a democracy, however, one has to persuade, and this group of progressives prefers to hector. They speak as if their ideas are self-evident.

I would like to have Winters give us a paragraph or two just what is "the way liberal democracy works."  Because as the United States, Britain, Germany, Italy, etc. show, it's either not working very well or it isn't working at all.   The turmoil in the United States that gave us things like the phenomenon of the Obama voter becoming the Trump voter and, I will go on to say, so many of those very same people turning from MAGA to FAFO regrets over their support for Trump is exactly that LIBERAL DEMOCRACY NOT WORKING AS ADVERTISED, IN ANY WAY. 

Liberal democracy with its maximum emphasis on "freedom" especially under the name of "liberty" as became a slogan in both the American and French revolutions of the late 18th century has proven to be entirely compatible with inequality, ECONOMIC INEQUALITY most of all, but also the rankest of racial, gender, ethnic, class inequality in terms of political participation and legal rights.   AND ALL OF THOSE AREAS OF INEQUALITY UNDER LIBERAL DEMOCRACY ARE INTERTWINED.   In the Post WWII years, when, through Democrats enhancing the power of organized labor and such massive economic and social leveling under things like the GI Bill and increased support of higher education - the tuition at Land Grant Universities in those years should certainly count as welfare as much as payment to poor families - the white working and middle class flourished as never before.   That was even as Black Americans and other People of Color were far, far less included in that until the passage of the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts in the mid-1960s.   

Once that happened and with the economic consequences of things like spending for the War in Vietnam and increasing transfer of wealth from the working class TO THE RICH and poor and middle class whites felt the pinch, they were either talked into or fell back on those long, long ingrained habits under liberal democracy to kick down and kiss up.  

Michael Sean Winters' liberal democratic habits of thought are one thing that leads his desire for the consequences of egalitarian liberty with the very "freedoms" such as the freedom of the media to lie us into fascism, the freedom of those with money to buy government, the freedom of them to set up guess pools and programming on such as PBS in the past and in online "influencers" like the late Charlie Kirk to propagandize using such notions as "freedom" and, most potently destructive of equality, "free speech." to lie us into Trumpism.  

His notion that Democratic Socialists, who I have certainly been critical of in several ways, would be any more acceptable in 2026 by calling themselves "Social Democrats" or even "FDR Democrats" is naive in the extreme.    If calling themselves either of the two would in any way benefit their chances of getting elected or putting their economic equality agenda into law then that would have happened back when Democrats ran on the memory of FDR and called their agenda "social justice."   So corrupted has the memory of history become, under the liberal democratic definition of "free-press, media, speech" that those wouldn't work any better than "Democratic Socialism."  

He is, though, correct in the fact that so many lefties, especially those with college credentials, seem to be blissfully unaware of,  that in order to govern, make laws and put them into effect,  you do need to win a majority of the votes, though, as I noted yesterday, under our "liberal democracy" with its rigging to ensure that the right and ignorant and influenced by billionaire money actually win, the Electoral College and, especially under Supreme Court usurpation, can short circuit that.    Liberal democracy, American style, is even more corrupt than it is in many of the newer liberal democracies.  Ours is intentionally and explicitly rigged to ensure inequality will always be a major force in American politics.

Almost the entire news media, almost as much of academia and the conventional wisdom of the plutocracy will lie to you about that, never so much as in the month of July 4th and never so much as in a year that ends in a 76 or a 26.  

The most self-evident clause in the Declaration of Independence was rendered moot almost as soon as the leaders of the Revolution, slave owners and their allies, every one,  got actual power.  That was already clear when they got around to the parts about enumeration of population in the slave states and how they would be assessed for taxation at the commencement of the revolution. 

Before giving his article a bit of praise I have to address this obscene passage:

Nowhere is the progressives' morally obtuse self-certainty more obvious, and more troubling, than in the ease with which they accuse Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. Everyone is free to criticize any decision of the Israeli, or any other, government. . . 

THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NO MORAL OR RATIONAL ARGUMENT THAT WHAT ISRAEL HAS DONE IN GAZA IS NOT A GENOCIDE.  If you want to give that decision to the 'experts' there are numerous ISRAELI scholars of genocide who have said that what the Israeli government is doing in Gaza is a genocide.   The Nazis did their best to cover up their genocide as they were committing it.  As I recently linked to a piece by a Holocaust scholar noted, there is a rare instance of a soldier writing to his wife in Vienna about what he and his unit were doing in Eastern Europe,  and it is one of the rare instances of something like that.  The genocide by Israel in Gaza has been videotaped and commented on by the genocidalists as they were gleefully committing it TO THE WORLD ON THE INTERNET.  If Winters wants to argue about the definition of "genocide" to defend what the IDF an the widely supported Israeli government is doing as some lesser act, then he is in need of some serious moral reflection.   Maybe he should seriously contemplate a picture of a child shot in the head by the IDF like the baby who was shot while they were breast feeding.  

. . . Former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel delivered a master class in how you criticize an ally in his speech in Tel Aviv last week. When a person only criticizes Israel, and ignores Hamas' responsibility not just for the pogrom of Oct. 7, 2023, but for repeatedly placing Gaza's civilian population in harm's way and refusing to turn over hostages which would have brought the war to a speedy conclusion, why is that? Avila Chevalier attended a pro-Palestinian rally the day after the Oct. 7 attack. There is a word for looking at a complex problem and only blaming the Jews involved: antisemitism.

Dear Jesus, don't tell me that MSW is going to endorse Emanuel for president.   

There have been myriads of those who condemned the actions of Hamas on October 7th who are fully able to see that the scores and scores of thousands of civilians killed and outright murdered and millions removed from Gaza in what MEMBERS OF THE ISRAELI GOVERNMENT AND ZIONISTS INSIDE AND OUTSIDE OF ISRAEL ADMIT IS AN ATTEMPT TO DESTROY GAZA AND DEPOPULATE IT, LEBANSRAUM 2026, IN A WORD IS THE VERY DEFINITION OF GENOCIDE .  

What is Israel but a program of putting Jews "in harms way?"   One of the great criticisms of the Zionist project was that it would concentrate Jews in a way that killing them would make it far easier.   And it was seen from before the establishment of the state that it would exist in a perpetual state of war because of how it was built on land stolen from Palestinians, Muslims, Christians and others.   Dorothy Thompson went from an ardent supporter of Zionism - unlike Hannah Arendt, she supported the overtly exclusionary (and racist) Zionist Biltmore Conference - only for her to realize when she saw what was happening for herself to see the Israel project as a deeply dangerous trap for both Jews and Palestinians.   I think Winters would do himself a favor by looking closely at the evolution of Dorothy Thompson's position on the establishment of a "Jewish state" that has turned into an explicitly apartheid state which has steadily expanded its land by terrorizing, attacking and killing Palestinians and those in surrounding states, especially Lebanon.   Thompson was consistent in her opposition to that kind of thing, whether in Europe by Hitler or, eventually, in the middle east by Israel.  

I would love to hear what he would have to say about this recent quote:

 "What is Jewish supremacy? Eighty years after the Holocaust, it's Mein Kampf in reverse. The superior race is us." 

And this one:

"The Israeli government is encouraging Jewish pogromists to dispossess Arabs of their land through abuse, including shooting at them,"

That was said by former Israeli Defense Minister, Moshe Ya'alon .

I could go on with what is wrong with what Winters said,  here is something that demonstrates why he is pretty good in his real area of expertise, recent and past Catholic history and culture.

. . . The record of democratic socialism in postwar Europe is something Americans would do well to emulate. At its heart, it stands for the proposition that the common good needs to play a larger role in setting national priorities, that the hyper-individualism, and most especially the deregulation of capital, that characterized the Reagan-Thatcher revolution was a mistake. John Judis has penned an excellent analysis of the development of democratic socialism in recent years vis-à-vis the Democratic Party.

This is not merely my opinion. That noted leftie pol Pope Benedict XVI, in his 2006 book co-written with Marcello Pera, Without Roots, famously said: "In many respects, democratic socialism was and is close to Catholic social doctrine and has in any case made a remarkable contribution to the formation of a social consciousness."

Maybe he could get the recent Catholic converts like J.D. Vance to refute the second most adored recent Pope of the trad-caths to good effect.   I have pointed out that, having to deal with both the far more radical than socialist economics of the Mosaic Law or its intensification under the Gospel of Jesus and the earliest church, even the recent reactionary Popes,  Benedict and JPII have sounded like economic radicals in their writings and speeches.   

I would, though, caution that European democratic socialism has rested on a reform of the liberal democratic order* and, so, it has not prevented the devolution of its retained inegalitarian features into neo-fascism and even neo-Nazism.   Which gets us to something we do really agree on,  I agree with MSW that the word "socialist" makes it a political liability if not a non-starter.   The Nazis along with the Marxists, the putrid Fabians and a myriad of other pseudo-socialism have made the word poison in far too many cases.   For the good that came from post-war European democratic socialism, it was certainly not an end of history any more than liberal democracy - you can safely read that "rampant capitalism" - has been. 

NOTE:  I have come to distrust any political or legal or, really, intellectual framing that pretends it can extend the methods of science as used in the more exact physical sciences into the realms of society, economics, and, most dangerous of all, perhaps, civil law.   Liberal democracy is, inherently, that kind of a pretense of extending scientific method way beyond where it can legitimately, honestly or safely be applied.  That danger intensifies with that most dangerous of all such attempts becoming part of the mix, the theory of natural selection.   For the Catholic journalist Michael Sean Winters, he might want to consider the consequences for the Gospel of Jesus under the intellectual framing of "natural selection" which Darwin, himself, said was identical to Spencer's "survival of the fittest." 

The Law, the Gospel, the Epistles, and their equivalent in other religious traditions are  the only secure foundation of egalitarian democracy and you can't find that with the scientific method.  "Liberal democracy" shuns that truth. 

The Clearly "AI" "Proof of Life" "Photo" Of Mitch McConnell Proves One Thing

and that is that an intelligent and skilled user of Photoshop type computer software could do a much better job at faking it.   

I won't go into the list of telling details in the first picture they put up because those probably are already known to you.

Then there is the report that they took the original one down and put up a revised "photo" then, according to some reports, they took even that down. 

I looked at the images in some of the reporting on this and was certain it was a fake.  

Really,  have Republican hacks, flacks, tech assistants gotten so lazy by already relying on "AI" that they can't be bothered to fake "photos" better than that?  

It is entirely absurd that the governor of Kentucky cannot demand to see and talk to McConnell in person, with someone else who knows him - they'd probably try to find a body double, they're so desperate to keep the Republican-fascist majority in the Senate - so I wouldn't necessarily trust anything less than that for "proof of life."    Surely if Mitch is as "well" as the "photo" shows him being he would welcome a courtesy visit from the governor of his state.

What we've learned from this is that "AI" is stupid and that it has already made those who lie for fascism for a living really, really lazy.  

Graham has died after what family members described as a "brief and sudden illness."

BRIEF AND SUDDEN ILLNESS like alcohol poisoning?    It's been known for years that Lindsey was a heavy drinker.   I've noticed this year that in hearings, in interviews,  in Q&As that he's been rather obviously under the influence, generally heavily so - I have been intimately involved with alcoholics, I can tell one when I see one.  

He's been a thoroughly evil man his entire life, living a lie as an in-the-closet and active gay man who was a stalwart of the party that has made hatred and oppression of LGBTQ+ People a plank in it's party platform, nowhere more so than in his little corner of the traditional bastion of bigotry,  South Carolina.   His record in the Congress has been one of sheer evil in almost every case, his record as a talking head of Republican-fascism as well.   I can think of literally nothing good to say about him in all of the decades I've been reading about him and hearing him.  Like with the several times when the late Mitch (Moscow's bitch) McConnell said something mildly positive, it only showed him to be as big a hypocrite as he was a constant force for the bad.  

The only thing I'm sorry about is that he didn't live till after the election in November because I think it's likely that he would have lost it.   I always want the truly evil to experience maximum consequences in this life though if that's not going to happen, yeah, death overtaking them is a second best and under our crooked system probably the best that we can look forward to for the worst. 

I do not hold with "De mortuis nil nisi bonum"  I say of the dead speak nothing but THE TRUTH.    And when there's literally nothing good to say about them,  the hell with lying about them.   I hope that purgatory burns out of him all the evil he's done and been, I'm expecting in his case it'll take a lot of that. 

Holding Public Office Is Not A Right It Is An Obligation To The People

THE UNITED STATES FOUNDED ON THERE BEING NO KING has become a total lie because we have a monarch,  before the New Taney Court issued its string of rulings making Republicans kings - when it's a Democrat in the office, they certain hold that "that's different" - things were bad enough.  Now there is no denying that they have made the presidency into a "unitary executive" and absolute monarchy.  In this 250th year after the slavers, aristocratic lawyers and others signed the Declaration of Independence issued their lofty and, sadly empty, words,  we have a mad king who is unusually stupid, unusually crooked and dishonest who has far, far more power to do evil than a King George III ever had.   And there is no way under out insanely retained 18th century Constitution and the political system that has evolved out of it to get rid of him.  

Look at the title of this post again, it states a truth that is entirely ignored.   No one has a "right" to hold a public office,  there is no rational basis for claiming that there is any such a right.  Under the U.S. Constitution, if it was to be claimed that the winner of an election has a "right" to hold the seat then that is certainly nullified by the atrocity of the Electoral College which has put the loser of the popular vote into the office five times in our history,  three of which imposed some of the worst presidents in our history on us including Rutherford Hayes,  George W. Bush and Donald Trump.   Of the other two, Benjamin Harrison was a pretty bad president and only John Quincy Adams is generally ranked in the top half in those historian surveys they love to take at C-Span.  

But the point of this is to show that even if you want to make what should have always been, explicitly, understood as not a "right" but as an obligation freely taken to The People is now treated in a more extreme fashon than a "divine right of kings"  to the detriment of the country and the world.   

The next congress, if it is controlled by Democrats should make it a law that all presidential candidates take a physical examination and psychological evaluation made by a panel of doctors not of their choice AND NOT ANSWERABLE TO A PRESIDENT and the conclusions of those doctors be made part of the public record.   The laws, the regulations and the courts allow those hiring People for minimum wage and low paying jobs to demand those kinds of tests of People who apply or accept an offer of a job often with the slightest of public safety implications.   Yet we are stupid enough under our president deifying law and culture to let a Trump hire hack doctors and those with clear political and personal agendas to lie about their physical and mental states over the course of going on two decades.    There is nothing rational in that, it is as much sheer madness as any of Trump's most extreme and obsessive nocturnal emissions that prove his dementia.    The ways of pretending to deal with that in the past, the idiotic myth of impeaching even the worst presidents in the process of the most public criminatlity and dangerous wrecklessness has never happened and with Bush II and Trump it's clear that will never happen.

Yet we don't require the qualifications for office that a fast food franchise can ask of someone looking for a job to flip burgers.  

The equally stupid "25th Amendment" means of dealing with the matter of removing a demented or damaged president from office is going to prove as much of an illusion as impeachment as a means of removing a Trump from office.   It gives exactly those with the greatest motive of keeping a Trump in the presidency,  HIS CABINET veto power over any proposal to do that.   

Nothing that depends on the "honor" of the powerful and generally rich is worth the photons with which you read the worthless ink on the parchment it is written on. 

I BREAK IN TO NOTE;  As I type this the news that the radio tells me the evil Lindsey Graham has died, suddenly at the age of 71, I'll have more to say about that.   And don't forget the rumors are that Mitch McConnell has died and the Republicans are covering it up,  both such evil hags as Virginia Foxx and liars like Scott Jennings claiming to have talked to him - It would seem that McConnell's Chinese gangster family wife and former Trump cabinet member Elaine Chao may have taken it on the lam as soon as she knew he was either dead or about to die.    

What a wonderful Republic the Constitution has given us in fact as it lies in mere words. 

A Democratic Congress should immediately put a Constitutional Amendment with an age limit for President and Vice President out for ratification.    I think if Joe Biden had not gotten caught up in the reflexive Zionist mindset of blindly and reflexively supporting Israel's genocide in Gaza and he had not been enough of a sentimental fool as to appoint Merrick Garland as Attorney General, he may have gone down as one of the greatest presidents we ever had.   Especially if age and exhaustion had not caught up with him - I blame his staffers for that, they really let him down.   But I am unwilling to ever take another chance on someone who will reach or surpass the age of Eighty in who I will vote for for president.   I think 75 should be an absolute cut off after which any presidential candidate will be ineligible and any sitting president should have to retire.   I think 70 may be a better age for that but I doubt such an amendment would pass congress, though it might be acceptable in many statehouses.  

Speaking of state legislatures.  I would say Congress should put one out an age limit for the Senate and House, too but there is no way you're going to get the many geezers who the voters should have put out to pasture long ago to let that through that initial phase of adoption.    If that is to be done it will have to be done through the state legislative route.  Which has the advantage that there will certainly be many members of those who would like the chance to run for a seat that some dithering person of my age cohort has a lock on.   

As I noted, the many PMs that the Brits have recently gone through,  seven or so in the past 10 years, several of them not through election, shows that their system gives them a way to get rid of a Keir Starmer or Boris Johnson or Liz Trott.  Unlike the stupid American system which gives those with the greatest incentive to keep a corrupt or incompetent member of their party in the presidency,  the British system makes it far easier for voters to make that party pay for a bad PM and their cabinet will be full of those who would like a chance to become PM or to move up in power in the one that will succeed the present one.  It makes it in their interest to dump the worst though they will often keep a really bad one in office for the wrong reasons.  Our system only has wrong reasons for keeping the worst presidents in office even as their crimes are flagrant, public and deadly.