Paxton is Yet Another GOP Crook

Might ask him how a guy who has been a public servant manages to amass a real estate portfolio of eleven residential propertes in several states worth over $7 mil.

Lost His Cabbage

So let me be sure I understand it:

When Trump is president, the presidential elections are rigged.

When he's not president, the elections are fair.

Seems to require an easy fix: Remove his fat orange ass.

(Huge nothingburger.)

Because It's Friday

Czech steam:

The Murdering ICE Bastard of Maine

Initial reports were that the killer had been a VA cop. Those reports were not complete.

The federal immigration agent who shot and killed a 26-year-old Colombian man in Biddeford has been identified as David Michael Brouillette.

If you read between the lines of the story, it becomes clear that Brouillette is the sort of clown who hops from one job to another. That's indicative of a guy who keeps getting into trouble, often for excessive use of force, and he quits ahead of being dsciplined and losing his POST certificate (or whatever they call it in Maine).

In short, he's just the kind of cop ICE wants to hire: Barely qualified, mentally unstable, and prone to shooting people on a whim.

Teching These Down, Here

Hegseth Promotes Gender-Affirming Care for Men

Besides being a bitter bigot who blames women and minorities for his own failures[1], he's also a weird-ass pervert who is pushing quack medicine on the troops.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced Wednesday that he is rolling out a new screening program for “testosterone deficiency” among troops, calling it necessary to allow them to operate at their “absolute best.”

The screenings will be conducted annually as part of service members’ required medical screenings for those 30 and older, he said. Troops under 30 can volunteer to be tested. In a video on social media, Hegseth said receiving testosterone replacement therapy would be voluntary.

Sure, it'll be voluntary, as in "we'll medically separate you from the service if you don't take the pills/shots." This is coming from a clown whose very first move as SecDef was to put a makeup studio next to his office.
____________
[1] Hegseth was allegedly separated from the Army because of, shall we say, substance abuse issues. But it would seem that he blames women and minorities for the apparent reality that the Army was less than willing to keep a drunken O-4 on the job.

It Won't Be Ruined When You Spit On It.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent proudly showed Fox’s Jesse Watters a new $ 1 coin — complete with President Donald Trump‘s face on it.

In an interview from the Treasurer’s Office that aired Monday night, Bessent gave Watters a glimpse at the currency changes underway to celebrate America’s 250th anniversary. Among those changes are new paper currency touting Trump and Bessent’s signatures and the $1 coins with Trump’s headshot.

There is something deeply wrong with Trump that he has to have his ugly puss and his name on everything.

He defiles everything he touches.

Wishing These Down, Here

And bless your heart.

This person needs some serious professional help:

The Strait is Closed

And this is why.

A very short take: On any chartered ship, the vessel's insurers, the terms of the charter and the say of the ship's master control. None of them answer to the Senile Orange Fat Traitor.

Aux barricades, mes amis !

Today is Bastille Day, the French National Day.

A version that is more familiar to American audiences:

Allons enfants de la Patrie
Le jour de gloire est arrivé !
Contre nous de la tyrannie
L'étendard sanglant est levé
Entendez-vous dans nos campagnes
Mugir ces féroces soldats ?
Ils viennent jusque dans vos bras.
Égorger vos fils, vos compagnes !

Aux armes citoyens
Formez vos bataillons
Marchons, marchons
Qu'un sang impur
Abreuve nos sillons

(Full translation, which makes The Star-Spangled Banner look pacifistic.)

The Bastille was torn down very soon afterwards. Very little of it survives. The key to the fortress was given by Marquis de Lafayette to President Washington. It is on display at Mount Vernon.

And next year, we may have to do this for reals.

Note Bene

There is no corner, no section of Hell that is not too hot or too nasty to accomodate the spirits of ICE agents.

What happened in Maine was flat-out murder. A local cop in most states who shot that guy would have been arrested and prosecuted.

But not ICE.

May every last ICE agent, when they die, rest in piss and rot in Hell.

Trump Goes Full Mafia/Pirate; Hormuz Ed.

[The TOFF] said the US would start charging fees on ships transiting through the narrow waterway, claiming the US would levy a 20% fee “for any and all costs necessary” to provide security and safety for vessels.

A fee to travel in international waters is nothing short of extortion. But the Seditious Orange Blowhard thinks he's a mob boss and he acts like one.

Disbar Blanche Now!

President Donald Trump’s lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service over his leaked tax returns was filed for an “improper purpose,” a judge said Monday in a scathing decision that referred one of his lawyers for potential disciplinary action and characterized the $10 billion complaint as an exercise in self-dealing.

U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams accused Trump and his lawyers of having manipulated the court system when he sued a federal agency under his control, bypassing a requirement that parties in a lawsuit must have adverse interests and laying the groundwork for a settlement that granted him immunity from tax audits and created a fund to compensate allies of the president who say they were unjustly persecuted.
...
The judge referred Trump attorney Alejandro Brito, who filed the case, for possible disciplinary action before the state bar in Florida and said another lawyer, Daniel Epstein, will not be granted permission to file within the Southern District of Florida for up to a year.

A spokesman for the Trump legal team responded to a request seeking comment from Brito with a statement that blamed the IRS for allowing his tax returns to be leaked.

The judge also ordered that her ruling be sent to the state bars in New York and the District of Columbia, where ethics complaints have been filed against Blanche and Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward.

This case wasn't about graft or bribery, it was outright theft. The lawyers who worked for him on it were enabling a crime.

Everything Trump touches turns to shit, including the reputations of those who work for him.

Blanche should also keep in mind that the last personal lawyer of a president who was then appointed AG ended up in federal prison.

Miss Lindsey is Gone (Updated)

Senator Lindsey Graham is dead.

About the best I can say is that he was the ultimate toady, always running alongside/behind somebody more charismatic or more powerful. He sucked up to Trump about as hard as he could.

On the other hand, the Russians hated him enough to issue an arrest warrant and he was a supporter of Ukraine, so there is that.

And he apparently never deleted his anti-Trump tweet.

ETA this:

Your Sunday Morning Prop Noise

How to fly a seaplane off a hard-surface runway:

Caturday

It's been a decade since Chip came to live with me.

This is a photo taken when he came home:

A recent photo in much the same pose:

He's about thirteen, he's slowed down a little. His health is mostly good, but he has a few issues.

Trump is a Communist

Running a series of gas stations selling fuel for below-marked prices-- how is that not communism?

Because It's Friday

This one will drive the Batshit Right crazy:

ICE Murders and Lies

All of the men in the van where ICE murdered the driver, who are undocumented and are being held apart from each other, are saying the same thing: There were no agents in front of or behind the van and that the ICE goon kept shooting after the van was stopped. The killer stuck his gun into the van from the passenger side's window and executed the driver. Because you don't shoot a driver in the gut from the front of a vehicle.

ICE agents are murderous cocksuckers, slaying people under the color of law and then brazenly lying to cover it up.

Job #1 is defunding ICE and spinning up a new agency with almost everyone working there barred from future employment.

But don't cry for them. They can all go do the jobs that immigrants now do: Picking crops, roofing in the hot sun, working meatpacking plants.

ICE Kills Again

A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer fatally shot Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican national who lived in the U.S. for decades, as the homebuilder drove his construction crew to a Houston job site.

His death set off protests in Texas’ largest city and calls from Democrats and Salgado Araujo ‘s family for an independent investigation. The shooting on Tuesday in a heavily Hispanic neighborhood is at least the eighth death during the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement campaign.

The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, has said federal officers were conducting a targeted operation to arrest a person in the country without legal status when it attempted to stop a vehicle driven by Salgado Araujo. In a statement, DHS said Salgado Araujo rammed an ICE vehicle and that a federal officer fired a weapon in self-defense.

The track record of ICE has been that their stories about what happened in previous incidents have fallen apart under further examination. Not to mention they have a well-documented history of stepping in front of vehicles and using that as a rationale to kill people.

You might remember that the case against the Broadview Six fell apart because of fuckery by the prosecutors and ICE agents. It was so bad that, when the Six sued for malicious prosecution and demanded that the government pay all of their attorney's fees, the Justice Department Trump's Legal Enforcers immediately agreed to pay them as a way of preventing any move towards discovery.

ICE is a lawless paramilitary group. Those miscreants need to be prosecuted and their agency defunded and recreated with people who understand that their first duty is to the Constitution and the law.

Ageing These Down, Here

Ah, the SS is No Fun At All

They had the Ancient Orange Toddler switch from Bribe One to another airplane because reasons.

Paxton is Yet Another Vote Fraudster Complaining About Voter Fraud

Two weeks before this year’s primary elections, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced the creation of a tip line for the public to report people or groups suspected of voter fraud.
...
“You must register to vote using the address where you reside,” the attorney general’s guidance stated.

Despite his own warnings, Paxton appears to have used an address where he did not live while voting in six elections in the past two years, including in May’s runoff that made him the Republican nominee for U.S. senator, according to records obtained by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune.

State Sen. Angela Paxton said in a 2025 divorce filing that Paxton, whom she accused of adultery, moved out of their Collin County home a year earlier. But Paxton continues to list the home’s address in the northern Dallas suburb on his voter registration. Angela Paxton declined to be interviewed. A source close to the Paxtons said the attorney general has not moved back into the home since leaving.

It is unclear where Paxton has lived for the past two years, but reporting by ProPublica and the Tribune has linked him to a home in neighboring Denton County since February.

So, when Paxton isn't busy protecting child molesters, he's committing voter fraud.

Goebbels would be proud of him.

Nursing These Down, Here

Ukraine's Long-Range Oil War

Ukrainian Special Operations Forces (SSO) have struck the Omsk Oil Refinery, Russia’s largest oil refinery, in what they described as the deepest long-range strike carried out by Ukrainian forces since the start of the invasion.

The refinery, in the Siberian city of Omsk, processes over 21 million tons of oil annually.

“The Special Ops have struck the largest and ‘inaccessible’ Russian refinery in Omsk. 3,000 km [1,864 miles]! This is the first strike on this facility,” the SSO said in a statement on Telegram.

That's like launching a drone from Boston and hitting a target deep in Texas. That outranges a Tomahawk.

Ukraine is carrying out targeted attacks on Russia's oil industry while the Russians indiscriminately pound Kyiv.

Everything Trump Touches Turns Into Shit. Everything.

After all the drama related to United States President Donald Trump and his apparent role in USMNT striker Folarin Balogun gaining eligibility to play in Monday night's match against Belgium, it was ultimately Belgium who got the last laugh on Monday at Trump's expense.

After their final goal of the 4-1 victory over the United States, some Belgium players were seen collectively mocking Trumpas they celeb rated both the goal and the blowout victory over the United States.

Anyone doubt that the Belgian players were fired up by Trump's trying to do a little bit of cheating?

Overturn this. 🧏‍♂️ #USABEL pic.twitter.com/KcBAJp3Z7d

— Belgian Red Devils (@BelRedDevils) July 7, 2026

Trump indeed is Reverse King Midas.

Another Day, Another Failure by Temu Caesar

The U.S. has withdrawn most of the troops that were sent to Nigeria earlier this year to help root out Islamic State insurgents, according to the head of U.S. Africa Command, as the military pivots toward what it describes as an African-led model for security cooperation.

"I came, I saw, I bombed, I left." Not sure what that's in Latin, but that's pretty much what happened.

A splashy attack, then Trump gets bored and turns to find some other place to drop bombs on. He's like a squirrel with a gun.

Trump Cheats at Everything

He leaned on FIFA to bend the rules on red card suspensions.

The White House made a call to FIFA to ask Gianni Infantino to review Folarin Balogun’s red card, according to a person familiar with the call who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the matter.
...
Trump celebrated the red card reversal shortly after it was announced, posting on his social media network “Thank you to FIFA for doing what was right, and reversing a great injustice!”

If the American team advances, everyone else around the world will be convinced that Trump got FIFA to bend the rules and that's the only reason the USMST wasn't beaten like a gong. All of its wins will be tainted.

Because everything Trump touches turns to shit.

Your Sunday Bit of Everything Noise

Arrivals for a big RAF air show:

The One Question tRump Has About Everything

Besides "how can I make this about me?"

That is: "How can I make money off of it? How can I grift my gullible supporters into giving me more money?"

And that is just what he did with Freedom 250, a vehicle to enrichen himself, his family, and a handful of supporters.

But that is easy to do because, let's face it, most couldn't outthink a hampster. Especially this clown:

There are things to celebrate. Happy Fourth.

250 Years Ago

In March of 1776, the Continental Army, under the command of Gen. Washington, fortified Dorchester Heights (now part of Boston) with cannon brought overland from Fort Ticonderoga. The British Army almost immediately realized that they could not hold on in Boston, and so they evacuated the city, leaving as soon as the winds were favorable. This was the first major victory of the war. Thomas Jefferson and the Second Continental Congress got to work to declare independence.

Read aloud by the staff at NPR, many years ago.

IN CONGRESS, JULY 4, 1776

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

Caturday

Zoe, age three months:

Not mine, but she's still sweet.