Quick Hitter: The Bill is Bad, But There Was Far Worse Yesterday
Let’s get the obvious out of the way: The Big Beautiful Pile of Shit is bad. Like, really, really bad. The nearly one trillion dollars of cuts to Medicare are horrible and will cause 17 million Americans to lose their health insurance. Rural hospitals will likely have to close for lack of funding, severely limiting access for those who don’t lose coverage. Even though some of the worst parts of the bill were either removed by negotiations or by the Senate Parliamentarian, what remains still represents the single largest transfer of wealth from the Not 1% to the 1% in our nation’s history. It’s disgusting on many levels, and that’s not even considering the sheer amount of cash the bill dumps into Trump’s private military, Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Just take a look at this:
(By the way, Aaron is an excellent follow if you are on BlueSky. His coverage of almost all of the things when it comes to immigration is deep and thorough.
This, the ICE of it all, and multiple comments made by the president and his staffers yesterday are, in my opinion, far worse than anything in the bill.
How bad? Well, let’s recap. During his visit to the concentration camp that just opened in Florida, the official press conference as a part of that visit, and in contemporaneous comments afterward, the President of the United States:
Claimed that Zohran Mamdani, a Muslim Democratic Socialist who just won the Democratic primary to become Mayor of the country’s largest city, is a Communist and will be investigated for possibly being in the country illegally. Of course Mamdani is not here illegally, but that hasn’t mattered to T2.0 for a while.
Not content with just one threat of a politically motivated arrest, Dear Leader also suggested investigating and jailing Biden’s Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas for the “crime” of “gross incompetence”. Trump is claiming that the influx of undocumented folks during the Biden admin should be laid at Mayorkas’ feet, and for that he should be jailed. Or, maybe, Trump thinks that Mayorkas should have done more ICE Cosplay like his girl Kristy.
The catfight between Taco and Elon continues apace, with the latter flooding his social media site with blistering criticism of The Bill, including threats to primary anyone who votes for it. Of course, Taco Daddy already threatened to primary anyone who votes against the bill, so we have a good old-fashioned stalemate. Or we would, except one part is the manbaby President of the United States, who mused that he may look into deporting the Richest Man in the World due to his recalcitrant ways.
MOAR DEPORTATION! During his presser, El Naranja Gordo mused, again, about how nice it would be to “deport” American citizens. I use quotes because you can’t actually deport someone who is a citizen here. Where will you send them, back where they are from? Anyway, yeah, he said the following:
"They're not new to our country. They're old to our country. Many of them were born in our country. I think we ought to get them the hell out of here, too, if you want to know the truth … So maybe that will be the next job."He also promised that the current concentration camp is only the first of many. He mentioned that LadyBoots Desantis has already confirmed plans for at least one more, while other Southern MAGA states are likely chomping at the bit to get a bite of the newly engorged ICE apple to create their own hellscapes. Soon the entire southeast may look like Central Florida after a hurricane, tarps as far as the eye can see.
Staying with the new deTENTion facility1 (I will never, ever, use their disgusting official name for it), they are bragging about how it only took 4 days (but apparently $450 million? Where is DOGE?) to build. I am not a contractor, but I can’t imagine there’s a lot of work in laying a slab, throwing up some cages, and covering it all with what looks like the party tents one would see at a backyard wedding. A friend of mine tells me that due to some heavy rains, the facility is already flooding on this, it’s second official day. It’s a good thing that heavy rains are really kind of rare in the Everglades or that could be a bit of an issue.
While the political attacks on Mamdani and Mayorkas are par for the course with this admin, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention a couple of developments in T2.0’s continued attack on the First Amendment. Firstly, we have ICE Barbiew discussing a prosecution of the creator of an app called ICEBlock. This app allows folks to share the location of ICE raids and other nefarious activities. GardenNoem feels that this is not fair to her jackbooted thugs and wants the app taken down. Tom Homan has claimed that it’s obstruction. He feels that way about pretty much everything though.
Secondly, the Free Speech Champions also suggested that they may go after CNN for a story simply reporting on the existence of the aforementioned app.
Finally, in the late of night, Paramount (all too expectedly) caved and bribed the Taco to have him dismiss his lawsuit alleging that 60 Minutes carried out the mortal sin of editing an interview. Paramount/CBS will admit no wrong and will provide transcripts of every interview (which they already do), so at the end of the day this was just a $16 million shakedown. I would really like to see the entire staff of 60 Minutes walk out en masse.
There is a lot more that I wanted to cover, but this Quick Hitter is already not so quick, so I’ll leave it there. But before I go, let me leave you with this gem, courtesy of a woman who, for reasons I suspect but would rather not consider too deeply, has the ear of the president.
The entire Latino population of the United States is… 65 million.
Fuck all of these people.
Take Care and Stay Strong, Together.
See what I did there? I slay myself.