September 15, 2025

Trump should be reassuring the country at this time. Instead he is sowing fear

Francine Prose

The public response to the killing of Charlie Kirk in cold blood, has revealed how drastically our democracy – our belief in the importance of free speech and in the irreplaceable life of each and every individual – has deteriorated over the last half century.

I was a senior in high school when John F Kennedy was assassinated, and a senior in college when Robert F Kennedy and Martin Luther King were killed. Plenty of conspiracy theories, some of which have never been put to rest, were floated and debated. But the difference between what happened then and what we are seeing now is that, in the aftermath of those violent deaths, there was a sense of shared grief, of national mourning. Those tragedies seemed to bring us, as a country, closer together in our shock and sorrow.

Obviously, tha is quite unlike what is occurring today, when the president has publicly declared that he “couldn’t care less” about healing the divisions plaguing and weakening our society. The instinctive and widespread response to Kirk’s death has been to demonize and blame a perceived enemy. Donald Trump, Stephen Miller and their minions were quick to accuse the “lunatic radical left”.

Despite the emerging evidence, they seem unwilling to amend their version of what happened. I will admit that, on hearing the news, my first thought was that the Maga movement had orchestrated the killing to distract us from the Epstein files, or that this was the modern-day equivalent of the 1933 Reichstag fire, which occurred when the German parliament building was torched, and the National Socialists blamed the communists, and used the event as a pretext for suspending civil liberties and installing an authoritarian regime.

The motives of the suspected killer, Tyler Robinson, are still unclear. But it appears that both the right and the left both had it wrong to some degree. Robinson was a studious young man from a solidly Republican, Mormon family, used anti-fascist slogans and apparently disliked Kirk for his hateful views.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/sep/15/trump-response-charlie-kirk-violence

The Felon has no interest in bringing us together. Even Shrub did a better job---remember 9/11?

September 15, 2025

The US town that pays every pregnant woman $1,500: 'We're not OK with our babies being born into poverty'

When Angela Sintery first learned about Rx Kids, a program for new mothers in her home town of Flint, Michigan, she thought someone must be trying to scam her.

“I had some teacher friends that kept sending me links saying: ‘You need to apply for this. It’s a brand-new program. We think you qualify,’” Sintery said. But it seemed too good to be true.

The program promised $1,500 for all expectant mothers during pregnancy and $500 per month for the first year of their infant’s life. All Sintery had to do was upload a copy of her ultrasound and ID. Pregnant with her second child 19 years after she’d had her first, Sintery needed all new baby supplies. And as a preschool teacher, she’d be grateful for any help she could get paying for all of it.

It wasn’t too good to be true. Researchers at Michigan State University had just launched the United States’s first community-wide, unconditional cash transfer program for new families, and Sintery – who gave birth to her daughter Jolene Love in May 2024 – qualified.

“It took so much stress away,” said Sintery. “I used that money to buy my car seat, to buy her bassinet and her crib.” She was also able to take the first 14 weeks of her daughter’s life off from work, and afford diapers and wipes in the months to come. The extra money helped Sintery “step back and enjoy my pregnancy”.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/15/rx-kids-flint-michigan-pregnancy

What a fantastic idea!

September 15, 2025

11 Dems Join House GOP to Pass Bill to "Supercharge" Trump Anti-Migrant Agenda

Eleven Democrats voted with Republicans in the US House of Representatives on Thursday to advance the so-called Stop Illegal Entry Act, which critics have condemned as “dangerously overbroad” as well as “dehumanizing and horrific.”

The final vote was 226-197. The 11 Democrats who joined all GOP members present in backing the bill were Reps. Henry Cuellar (Texas), Don Davis (NC), Laura Gillen (NY), Jared Golden (Maine), Vicente Gonzalez (Texas), Adam Gray (Calif.), Kristen McDonald Rivet (Mich.), Frank Mrvan (Ind.), Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (Wash.), Tom Suozzi (NY), and Gabe Vasquez (NM).

Introduced by Congresswoman Stephanie Bice (R-Okla.) and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), HR 3486 would increase sentences for undocumented immigrants who repeatedly enter the United States illegally or enter the country and then commit a felony. The bill still needs Senate approval to reach the desk of Republican President Donald Trump, who supports it.

After Thursday’s vote, Mike Zamore, the ACLU’s national director of policy and government affairs, warned that “HR 3486 would supercharge President Trump’s reckless deportation drive, which is already damaging our economy and destabilizing communities.”

https://truthout.org/articles/11-dems-join-house-gop-to-pass-bill-to-supercharge-trump-anti-migrant-agenda/

Note the number of Latinos! And if your congresscritter is one of these people, NAME and SHAME them! OUT them!

September 15, 2025

Rising Tenant-Led Movement Aims to Bring Down Corporate Landlords

Derek Seidman

Acutting edge of mass organizing today lies with the tenant movement. Across the U.S., tenant unions have been exploding in growth and visibility. Thousands of tenants — from Los Angeles to Kansas City, from Chicago to Connecticut — have unionized in recent years. This is a bottom-up, multiracial, working-class movement that’s directly countering the catastrophe of the U.S. housing system and the power of landlords with the collective power of tenants.

The movement is knitting tenants together into a self-identified class across geography that is carrying out rent strikes, winning critical policy battles, and even shaping the heights of politics. It’s a radical movement: connecting the dots between the housing system and racial capitalism, framing housing struggle as a class struggle, and critiquing the “rent relation” and commodified housing altogether.

While far from a new thing, today’s tenant movement is an expanding vanguard that’s organizing to frontally challenge the nexus of financial and real estate capital at the heart of the corporate power structure. With its focus on confrontation, striking, collective self-organization, and its aim of empowering tenants to assert control over their housing and communities, the movement flouts the decorum of bourgeois and NGO politics to cultivate direct power and direct solutions for rank-and-file tenants.

In 2024, several tenant unions came together to form the Tenant Union Federation (TUF), founded with the goal of “organizing tenants to wield power at a massive scale, to bargain for tenant protections, to disrupt the flow of capital to those who commodify our homes, to secure alternatives to the current housing market, to guarantee housing as a public good, and to establish tenants as a political class that cannot be ignored.”

https://truthout.org/articles/rising-tenant-led-movement-aims-to-bring-down-corporate-landlords/

September 15, 2025

ICE Barbie's Goons Smeared Grieving Mom as 'Wanted Killer'

Kristi Noem’s Department of Homeland Security falsely accused a mom who lost her baby while locked up by ICE of being a wanted killer.

The DHS smeared Iris Dayana Monterroso-Lemus after she went public with the harrowing story of how she was forced to spend three days in custody carrying the fetus of her dead son when she miscarried at 20 weeks.

Days later, in early May, she was deported to Guatemala as part of a wave of ICE arrests and deportations ordered by President Trump and overseen by Noem, nicknamed ICE Barbie for her elaborate photo-ops.

Monterroso-Lemus alleged she received no prenatal care and minimal medical attention, despite warning guards she was in severe pain before her miscarriage and subsequent stillbirth.

The mother of six, 38, gave an interview about her experience to the Nashville Banner on May 27. She described having to sleep “starving” on the floor of the notorious cockroach-infested Richwood Correctional Center, in Louisiana. She said she was forced to deliver her stillborn child while a prison guard watched over her.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/ice-barbies-goons-smeared-grieving-mom-as-wanted-killer/

Well, that's a new low, even for them.

September 14, 2025

Who is Greg Bovino, the official spearheading Trump's immigration crackdown?

Gregory Bovino is indisputably a man of the political times, perfectly in harmony with the signature theme of Donald Trump’s second presidency.

A previously unheralded regional border patrol agent, Bovino, 55, has risen to prominence in recent weeks as the publicity-hungry spearhead of the Trump administration’s crackdown on undocumented people in Los Angeles.

Amid howls of disapproval from elected Democratic officials, Bovino and squads of Customs and Border Protection (CPB) agents have embarked on aggressive, gun-toting patrols that have netted thousands of arrests, often carried out with little more justification than that detainees are Spanish-speakers or appear to be Latino.

Masked agents have smashed car windows, blown open a door to a house and staged an intimidating horseback patrol in Los Angeles’s MacArthur Park in the service of detaining those suspected of being in the US without documentation.

Bovino, a 29-year CBP veteran who formally heads the border patrol’s El Centro sector in southern California, has trumpeted the operations in a series of videos posted on social media and depicting his team’s work in scenes resembling action films. Put together by a team of agents employed specially for the purpose, the productions seems tailor-made to appeal to the president’s renowned taste for visual imagery.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/14/greg-bovino-trump-immigration

Bobino=bovine=bullshit artist?

September 14, 2025

Ukraine targets key Russian oil refinery as Moscow tests hypersonic missile

Russia and Ukraine have been engaging in major aerial battles, targeting energy and transportation infrastructure, as Moscow presses its fierce ground assault in the Ukrainian east in the war’s fourth year and tests a type of hypersonic weapon.

Russia’s Ministry of Defence announced on Sunday that its air defences shot down 361 drones, four guided aerial bombs, and rockets from a US-made high mobility artillery rocket system (HIMARS) overnight.

The General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces reported bringing down a ballistic missile and 164 drones of different types.

Russian authorities and Ukraine’s military confirmed that a main target of Ukrainian drones was the Kirishi oil refinery in Russia’s northwestern Leningrad region – one of the largest in the world’s second-biggest oil-exporting country.

“Explosions and fire were recorded at the refinery,” Ukraine claimed, calling it a “successful strike”. But the scale of the damage, if any, could not be independently verified.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/9/14/ukraine-targets-key-russian-oil-refinery-as-moscow-tests-hypersonic-missile

Slava Ukraini!

September 14, 2025

Ukraine targets key Russian oil refinery as Moscow tests hypersonic missile

Russia and Ukraine have been engaging in major aerial battles, targeting energy and transportation infrastructure, as Moscow presses its fierce ground assault in the Ukrainian east in the war’s fourth year and tests a type of hypersonic weapon.

Russia’s Ministry of Defence announced on Sunday that its air defences shot down 361 drones, four guided aerial bombs, and rockets from a US-made high mobility artillery rocket system (HIMARS) overnight.

The General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces reported bringing down a ballistic missile and 164 drones of different types.

Russian authorities and Ukraine’s military confirmed that a main target of Ukrainian drones was the Kirishi oil refinery in Russia’s northwestern Leningrad region – one of the largest in the world’s second-biggest oil-exporting country.

“Explosions and fire were recorded at the refinery,” Ukraine claimed, calling it a “successful strike”. But the scale of the damage, if any, could not be independently verified.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/9/14/ukraine-targets-key-russian-oil-refinery-as-moscow-tests-hypersonic-missile

Slava Ukraini!

September 14, 2025

Secret Service agent put on leave for anti-Charlie Kirk Facebook post

A Secret Service agent was put on immediate leave after posting disparaging remarks on social media about slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk, the federal law enforcement agency confirmed.

Kirk became the victim of what officials called a "political assassination" on Wednesday, Sept. 10, while speaking to roughly 3,000 people at Utah Valley University's campus. Authorities arrested Tyler Robinson, 22, on Friday, Sept. 12, and he is facing charges of aggravated murder, felony discharge of a firearm and obstruction of justice, according to court records obtained by USA TODAY. Prosecutors are expected to formally file charges against Robinson at his first court appearance on Tuesday, Sept. 16, according to Christopher Ballard of the Utah County Attorney’s Office.

Following Kirk's murder, many gave their condolences, including President Donald Trump, while others did the opposite and shared negative opinions about the 31-year-old Turning Point USA co-founder. One of the naysayers was Anthony Pough, a Secret Service agent who wrote in a Facebook post on Sept. 10 that Kirk "spewed hate and racism on his show," which is called "The Charlie Kirk Show," CBS News and Fox News reported.

"At the end of the day, you answer to GOD, and speak things into existence. You can only circumvent karma, she doesnt leave," Pough's post about Kirk read, per the outlets.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/09/13/us-secret-service-agent-put-leave-anti-charlie-kirk-post/86136440007/?tbref=hp

And another one. Good thing I don't work any more, because that's pretty much what I said.

September 14, 2025

After controversial Charlie Kirk post, Ohio councilman in hiding

A local northern Ohio councilman says he and his family have gone into hiding at the advice of federal officials after getting more than 500 threats over his Facebook post criticizing Charlie Kirk.

John Impellizzeri told the USA Today Network's Akron Beacon Journal that he's in fear for his life after his post following the conservative leader's assassination was shared nationwide by "Libs of TikTok" and other right-wing groups.

The threats escalated after the post was shared on X on Sept. 12 by Stephen Miller, the Trump administration's deputy chief of staff for policy.

"I'm in physical hiding for fear for my life," Impellizzeri said. "The police department is getting death threats."

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/09/13/charlie-kirk-ohio-councilman-john-impellizzeri-hiding/86144173007/

And another one...