That fool Donald Trump. Is he finally realizing he can’t play the bully with Vladimir Putin after leaving all his own cards behind in a futile effort to be the phony "deal maker"—remember his “deal” with the Taliban 1 mostly out of boredom, and what came out of being “friends” with this guy from a little country?
Trump is foolishly busy trying to "re-establish" his sad and pining “friendship” with a man who holds him in contempt as a stupid individual who is totally lacking in common sense, even laughing and smirking when told he was late for his phone call with him during some conference with industrialists in which Putin appeared in no hurry to leave. It was apparent that what Trump had to say was not important to Putin. Why should he care about a stupid man who threw away all his own cards, including the power of the U.S.’ EU and NATO allies?
Of course an “outside observer” made the point more succinctly. The Australian News Service SBS noted that “there were signs of potential trouble spots ahead, including a call from Putin for a ‘complete cessation of foreign military assistance and the provision of intelligence information to Kyiv’. Putin also said an 'essential' condition for any truce would be halting the ‘forced mobilization’ of Ukrainian soldiers and the country's ‘rearmament.’"
Andrew Bolt of The Herald Sun (also in Australia) held nothing back when he asserted that “Putin humiliated Trump in their 90-minute call, and if Trump is the tough guy his fans adore the only way he can respond is by helping Europe rearm Ukraine.”
Of course Trump first has to come to the realization that Putin is not his friend and there is nothing to be gained by trying. But Trump can’t help himself; he doesn’t want to be bothered by the evidence that he is fool, so he has his treasonously incompetent stooges like Pete Hegseth and Tulsi Gabbard not only halting both offensive and defensive measures against Russian cyber threats and hacking against U.S. targets, but even bothering to report them at all, as Reuters reports that “Several U.S. national security agencies have halted work on a coordinated effort to counter Russian sabotage, disinformation and cyberattacks.”
We all should find it “amusing” that Trump believes that there would have been no “war” if he was president in 2022. Putin would have played Trump then just as he is playing him now. Trump has zero understanding of the complexities of international relations, and seems to have little grasp of the power he actually has as the president of the leader of the "free world." Thus it is likely he would have had a "talk" with Putin and agreed that Ukraine just as much belonged to Russia as Trump thinks Canada and Greenland belongs to the U.S.
Putin only talks about a “reset” of U.S.-Russian “relations,” meaning untying it from the Europe. He knows Trump and his desire to not be “embarrassed,” and so as not to have Trump go “crazy” on him, he throws him a pathetic bone of a “limited ceasefire” while Russian forces continue to act as if they are supposed to just ignore it since, as Fortune points out “As Tuesday’s call showed, Putin is in no hurry to end the war. His strategic goal remains fully disabling Ukrainian sovereignty. As Trump and Putin negotiate an ‘unconditional cease-fire,’ Putin only adds conditions.”
So while Putin is just going to go yada, yada, yada to whatever Trump says and see if he is a fraction of the man Zelensky (Putin himself certainly isn’t) is--which frankly is probably the reason Trump hates him so much--Trump is showing what passes for his “manly” side by deploying his ICE thugs led by Tom Holman, a man who enjoys his work, as proven by his ties to white supremacist and hate figures and groups. Call him a racist? Bring it on, he has said when asked in broadcast news appearances.
One may ask why so many people in this country hate Hispanics so much. They have been around since, well, longer than the English (let alone “Americans”). Spanish imperial claims in 1790 encompassed most of both North and South America:
Not that anyone living in this country even knows the history of the Hispanic presence in this country, because, you know, that is “DEI” stuff, like you are not supposed to know the “Lone Star State” was “founded” by uninvited slave holders upset by the Mexican government passing a law banning slavery in its territory (and yes, Texas was not only a Confederate slave state, but ignored the banning of slavery until Union troops arrived after the war to tell Texans that the emancipation law applied to them, too).
In this report published in the American Sociological Review written by researchers from Washington University in St. Louis 2, white people assume people like these farm workers…
…are “probably” illegal aliens. Sure, many of them are, but as talked about before, this resulted from anti-“Mexican” prejudice that tried to ban temporary work programs that had kept the incentive to enter the country “illegally” to what would today be considered miniscule levels—and when policy makers realized their mistake and allowed some legal temporary work permits, it was too little and too late, as again this graph shows:
Rather than try to understand these people and their problems, Trump and the assorted racists in his administration headed by the fascist fanatic Stephen Miller (note that no one mentions he is Jewish), is to conduct a “Final Solution” of mass deportation, and not just “animals,” “stone cold killers,” the “worst people,” and the “enemy from within.” Even Green Card holders are being deported for exercising their constitutional right of free expression, and U.S. citizens (as reported in Chicago) are being dredged-up as “collateral,” the sole rationalization being to fill Trump-desired daily "quotas" and because if they look “Hispanic” they must be “illegal” 2 as "defined" by ICE thugs.
I encounter this kind of “suspicion” every time I walk out the door, even in “liberal” Seattle, and it is only getting worse—although perhaps more “subtly” than before. I recall when I was working at the airport, I was on my way to catch a bus from Kent early in the morning when I noticed a Kent cop car sitting at a corner. I walked past it wondering what the cop was doing there. I was near the end of the block when I did what I usually did, which was to cut across an empty parking lot; suddenly that cop came racing around the corner and stopped in front me, gleefully asserting that now he had an “excuse” to detain me.
He demanded my driver’s license, but looking at it he seemed "confused" about what he was reading, and gave it back to me without a word and just left me standing there wondering WTF just happened. But it wasn’t that hard to figure out: he was expecting to find someone with a Spanish name with a warrant or some other rationalization to arrest.
If you look “Mexican,” you’ve got to be “guilty” of “something.” I recall another "incident" when I had just gotten off a bus in Renton and headed down the sidewalk to Fry’s Electronics when it was still a going concern. I noticed that a Renton cop car was acting “suspiciously” behind me, weaving in and out of parking lots. Suddenly I found myself surrounded by four cop cars to prevent my “escape.” Apparently the white female cop had been trailing me, and called in the "suspect.” I was told that a bank robbery had just occurred and I was acting “suspiciously.”
I told them I just got off the bus from the airport. Probably because they had no “choice” but to prove to me that this wasn’t all happening because of racial profiling, the cop in charge called in for a description of the “suspect” so that I could hear: 5-10, white, with grey hair and beard, wearing dark clothes. “See, see” the cop exclaimed, “you are wearing dark clothes!” Yeah, my airport uniform with the company logo plain as day to see was “dark.”
But everything else in the description didn’t “match,” so why was I a “suspect”? For good measure, a witness was summoned and I saw her sitting in the back seat of another cop car, shaking her heard. And then everybody disappeared without a word, let alone an apology. The only reason why I was “suspect” in the first place was because I looked “Mexican”—and anyone who looks “Mexican” all must be “guilty” of “something.” All this stupidity did was afford the bank robber another 15 minutes to make his getaway.
So back to that American Sociological report: “Fueled by political rhetoric evoking dangerous criminal immigrants, many white Americans assume low-status immigrants from Mexico, El Salvador, Syria, Somalia and other countries President Donald Trump labeled “shithole” nations have no legal right to be in the United States. In the eyes of many white Americans, just knowing an immigrant’s national origin is enough to believe they are probably undocumented.” Of course being “low-status” can be merely the function of the effect of prejudice against “ugly brown-skinned people.”
The report notes that white Americans beliefs about immigrants is more likely to be formed by what they are told rather than what they actually know:
Most tellingly, even the slightest hint of an immigrant with a criminal background has a huge effect on whether a white American suspects that the immigrant is in the country illegally…This is true for both white Democrats and white Republicans. There’s a clear implication that the Trump administration’s rhetoric on immigrant criminality is driving these beliefs, which, again, are not based in reality. In fact, other research finds that undocumented immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans.
I did take some issue with the report, however. The graph provided suggested that 60 percent of white Americans thought that a “low-status, informal” male of Mexican heritage was probably illegal, but in place of “no crime” like the other non-Hispanic examples, a “crime” of “false papers” was applied. It would have been more informative to know what the respondents would have thought if told that the Mexican immigrant had committed “no crime” with all other “biographical details” the same.
Lawrence Downes—who admits that he, like every other American—does something that is technically “illegal” almost every day—stated this in an editorial in The New York Times:
Good thing I am not an illegal immigrant. There is no way out of that trap. It’s the crime you can’t make amends for. Nothing short of deportation will free you from it, such is the mood of the country today. And that is a problem. America has a big problem with illegal immigration, but a big part of it stems from the word “illegal.” It pollutes the debate. It blocks solutions. Used dispassionately and technically, there is nothing wrong with it. Used as an irreducible modifier for a large and largely decent group of people, it is badly damaging. And as a code word for racial and ethnic hatred, it is detestable.
Since the word modifies not the crime but the whole person, it goes too far. It spreads, like a stain that cannot wash out. It leaves its target diminished as a human, a lifetime member of a presumptive criminal class. People are often surprised to learn that illegal immigrants have rights. Really? Constitutional rights? But aren’t they illegal? Of course they have rights: they have the presumption of innocence and the civil liberties that the Constitution wisely bestows on all people, not just citizens.
But at least “undocumented” — and an even better word, “unauthorized” — contain the possibility of reparation and atonement, and allow for a sensible reaction proportional to the offense. The paralysis in Congress and the country over fixing our immigration laws stems from our inability to get our heads around the wrenching change involved in making an illegal person legal. Think of doing that with a crime, like cocaine dealing or arson. Unthinkable!
So people who want to enact sensible immigration policies to help everybody — to make the roads safer, as Gov. Eliot Spitzer would with his driver’s license plan, or to allow immigrants’ children to go to college or serve in the military — face the inevitable incredulity and outrage. How dare you! They’re illegal.
Meanwhile, out on the edges of the debate — edges that are coming closer to the mainstream every day — bigots pour all their loathing of Spanish-speaking people into the word. Rant about “illegals” — call them congenital criminals, lepers, thieves, unclean — and people will nod and applaud. They will send money to your Web site and heed your calls to deluge lawmakers with phone calls and faxes. Your TV ratings will go way up.
This is not only ugly, it is counterproductive, paralyzing any effort toward immigration reform. Comprehensive legislation in Congress and sensible policies at the state and local level have all been stymied and will be forever, as long as anything positive can be branded as “amnesty for illegals.”
This was written in 2007, after two election cycles in which Republicans were ramping up racist fears against those “ugly brown-skinned people” in campaign advertisements, such as those depicted in this image used by Sharron Angle in her campaign ads in 2010:
The photographer, a British freelancer named Chris Floyd, took the photograph not in the U.S. but in Mexico. Concerning the use of the photograph, Floyd told the Las Vegas Sun “I’m pissed off about the way that the photograph is being used. It will be very hard for this picture to be seen now without someone saying, ‘That’s the picture from the Sharron Angle ad; that’s those illegal aliens.’ Before she used it, those were just three Mexican dudes in Mexico.”
“Looks” are very important in defining someone. After the illegal promulgation of the Alien Enemies Act, anyone who “looks” like a gang member from Venezuela is being rounded up. In a Fox News interview, even the show host couldn't shut up Miller while being forced to admit that those detained and deported are only “suspected” of being gang members and might be in the country legally.
The fact is that these men are all having their heads shaved is to make them “look” like how a gang member is supposed to "look" like, since Trump has told us he knows what they look like “on sight”—and so they all have to have shaved heads:
While the Tren de Aragua gang is reportedly less particular than other gangs in concealing their activities, the fact is that Trump and Miller are using the Enemies act as a way to inflame the public and allow ICE to disregard the law, especially in regard to failing to acquire warrants to make these arrests—or belatedly having warrants created after the fact when they make arrests of legal residents who committed no crimes and U.S. citizens, as they have done in Chicago 4.
In this story 5 a professional Venezuelan soccer player was deported as a “gang member” to that infamous prison in El Salvador simply because he had a tattoo of a soccer team, “mistakenly” identified as a “gang” tattoo. Hell, who knows what these tattoos mean;
maybe Angelina Jolie should be arrested as a “suspected” gang member too.
I talked previously of what is “wrong” with Venezuela and how hypocritical U.S. foreign policy—especially during the first Trump administration—has made whatever was “bad” there much worse and established the atmosphere in which people living there were compelled to leave with the “understanding” that the U.S. was a “safe” haven 6 . But in “safe haven” cities like Aurora, Colorado, that meant living in abandoned, dilapidated tenements where once a gang like Tren de Aragua discovered there was no management to improve conditions, they decided to do some “improvements” themselves, whether the tenants liked it or not.
But the fact is that Venezuelans don't feels safe anywhere in this country regardless of circumstances. The Venezuelan population in Florida feels betrayed by Republican politicians who arrived in their communities asking for their votes, claiming Trump wasn’t after them. That was before he set his dogs on them, because Trump needs some "good" news to keep people's minds off the economic, governmental and foreign policy chaos he is creating.
In this story 7 we are reminded that ICE has been operating outside the law since its creation in 2003. Not surprisingly given this, Holman has proclaimed that “We are going to make this country safe again … We are not stopping. I don’t care what the judges think. I don’t care what the Left thinks.”
But the reality is
that most “illegals” have committed only the “civil” offense of being in the
country without the “proper papers,” although some red states like Iowa have passed laws
declaring being in their states "illegally" is an actual “crime.” In Tennessee,
where the governor refused to accept federal money for a free summer lunch program for
starving kids, the Nashville Tennessean is reporting that local law enforcement
involved in immigration enforcement operations is now empowered “to conceal any information
considered ‘sensitive or confidential
law enforcement information.’"
This "makes the newly created division almost entirely exempt from the Tennessee Public Records Act, meaning that while the office could release whatever information it wants, members of the media and public can be denied nearly any information requested from it.” Which of course means not responding to requests concerning explanations for unlawful “collateral” arrests.
But people believe what they are told. I blame the “mainstream media”—outside of MSNBC—just as much as Fox News, because they don’t allow Latinos or Hispanics to speak for themselves, and providing little in the way of the actual truth, which is that even with the presence gangs, the Hispanic communities are no more crime prone in the generality than most others, and yet people are allowed to believe the opposite, and despite the fact that most white people do not mix socially or even live in neighborhoods with Hispanics, they still act as if they “know” them—even if it is what they were “told” by thugs and liars to “know.”
Of course if people are not told about something, it doesn’t “exist.” Take for example Russian organized crime, which is as extensive as it is secretive in the U.S., as described in this paper 7. The report mentions that
The threat and use of violence is a defining characteristic of Russian organized crime. Violence is used to gain and maintain control of criminal markets, and retributive violence is used within and between criminal groups. The common use of violence is not surprising since extortion and protection rackets are such a staple of Russian criminal activity. ROC has engaged extensively in contract murders, kidnapping, and arson against businesses whose owners refuse to pay extortion money. For example, in September 1999, six members of the Gufield-Kutsenko Brigade plead guilty in New York to federal racketeering charges involving terrorizing business owners to extort money.
But then again, Russians are white people, and Trump and other white supremacists like David Duke believe that this country should be more like Russia. For people like me who live between the rock and a hard place of ignorance and hypocrisy, we know this only too well. We are supposed to feel sorry for a far-right "influencer" named Larry Taunton getting "swatted"?
Immigrants guilty of much less are being "swatted" every minute of every hour today in this country.
