Trump is such a man of the people, he wants to dump cheap, toxic ground beef on the market for the peasants to buy! Everyone celebrate their benevolent overlord and his brilliant plan to lower the cost of groceries! Please ignore the renewed trade war with Canada, which will send the price of toilet paper through the roof.
Truly, Trump is a political genius of unparalleled mastery of the economy!
And if you believe that, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you for a song, buddy…
Anyway, big episode this week, so come join the Ogre Nation Conversation!
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Ogre Nation News Update
Main Stories (2:51 - 20:35)
2:51 - 9:40 The bad news (and good!) about the infinitely corrupt SCOTUS ruling on Trump’s infinitely corrupt (and unconstitutional) mail-in ballot executive order.
9:41 - 20:35 The leopards are eating the faces of Trump-supporting beef farmers! Have a hamburger made from questionable foreign beef to celebrate!
I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream Because of Fucking ICE (20:36 - 28:53)
20:36 - 24:10 ICE arrests a mother in front of her 18-month-old baby at a routine immigration hearing. More proof that cruelty is the point.
24:11 - 27:24 Green card applicants will be placed under increased “public charge” scrutiny, meaning children will go hungry and without medical care. Republicans: The party of “pro-life.”
27:25 - 28:53 Immigration arrests reach a record high under Markwayne Mullin. So why are Trump and MAGAland still mad at him? We explain.
Headlines for Short Attention Spans (28:54 - 43:01)
28:54 - 31:48 In his never-ending quest for self-glorification, Trump insults a Black WWII hero.
31:49 - 36:14 Trump goes all in on data centers. How will that go over with his base, who absolutely HATE data centers?
36:15 - 37:39 Republican gubernatorial candidate Byron Donalds is blaming immigrants in Florida’s measles outbreak. Guess who is actually the cause?
37:40 - 38:12 Ed Martin, one of Trump’s legal goons, is ready to litigate the midterms! What could possibly go wrong?!
38:13 - 40:25 What did Trump know about how badly a war with Iran would go, and when did he know it? We have the answer, and it’s worse than you thought.
40:26 - 41:37 Trump is wildly unpopular across the country. How unpopular? Come find out!
41:38 - 43:01 The NYT isn’t sugarcoating it: Republicans are in trouble in the Senate.
Welcome back, teachers, to another productive year. As you know, we here at the West Hell School District like to pack these pre-student days with lots of professional development because, here in the administrative offices, we believe deeply in looking like we're getting something done, and for these few days, the only people we can do things to are the professional staff. Here are some of the selections for the upcoming PD sessions.
Welcome Icebreakers
Some of you may think it's silly to play games to help you get acquainted with people you have worked with for years, but the real purpose here is to get you reacquainted with the feeling of being treated like a child instead of a grown-ass adult.
New Procedures Overview
We have taken those internal procedures that you barely got used to last year and changed them again. You'll need to throw out the forms piled up in your desk and/or uninstall the software on your computer to make room for the new procedural materials. This is sure to be a labor-and-time saving new procedure, by which we mean it will save us time and labor in the office by shifting the time and labor to you. Let all that excitement about teaching students suffocate under the load of soul-crushing administrative minutia.
New Software Platform Introduction
We have adopted a new software platform for use in the district because the software we promised you we would use forever just finished its free trial period over the summer. We have not tested this new software yet, so if you run into any problems, just forward a note to the office and we'll pass that along to the company and I'm sure we'll hear back from them some time. Please do not question the usefulness of ethical concerns that come with our tech overlords; in particular, don't try to ask about the ethical or educational issues involved in the AI we're forcing into your classroom. We have heard that it is inevitable and must be accepted. Besides, it's totally free.
Terrifying Legal Stuff
A lawyer will be in to tell you some terrifying stories of teachers who did seemingly ordinary things and ended up facing billions of dollars in fines and decades in a gulag somewhere. Just try not to touch students, hand students anything, or make direct eye contact with them and you'll probably be okay.
New Stupid Social Media Tricks
A law enforcement officer will be in to scare you with tales of the newest social media trends and how to spot trouble with them in your classroom. This would be scarier except that all of these trends ended weeks ago to be replaced with new ones.
Textbook Program Training
A publisher's rep will be in to tell you how to do your job, based on the two years they spent in the classroom before giving up because they couldn't take it any more and wanted to do something cushier like pimping for a publisher. The rep will refuse to answer any questions about how to adapt the program to your classroom, and will instead offer useful advice about how she would use it if she were a teacher, and how you can use a simple 90 minutes from your thirty minute planning period to prepare materials.
Data Session
Teachers will hunch over computer screens and try to find something useful buried in the piles of test scores from the state. There will be charts and graphs, and lots of forms to fill in with numbers and stuff, but no answers to questions like "Exactly what was this question on the test that most students got wrong?" If we just keep finding new ways to process the weighing of the pig, we are sure it will get bigger.
Some Damned Useless Thing
We needed to block out the data time for everyone who teaches reading or math, so here's some placeholder for everyone else, because we didn't have time to find something useful for you.
Discipline
Administration wants teachers to know that they have been heard on the issues of student discipline and teacher morale, and they plan to do implement an assortment of new acronyms and programs this year that continue to put all the responsibility on the classroom teacher. Administration wants you to know that you have their full support, as in they fully support the idea of you handling this stuff yourself and not asking them to do something useful.
Morale
Administration has heard that some of you are unhappy, and administration would like you to just shut up about it. Also, because one teacher made a procedural error last year, the full staff will now be berated like disobedient children. Thanks a lot, Brenda.
At Least One Hour of Cognitive Dissonance
No day of PD is complete without a self-contradictory. A session about how you shouldn't just use direct instruction, delivered entirely through direct instruction. A session about questioning strategies that uses none of those strategies. "Don't just read off the Power Point slide," reads the presenter off the Power Point slide.
Cavalcade of Cliches
Do you remember your why? Have you got your grit and rigor packed? Can you focus on all this inspirational language, or are you just wishing you could get some work done in your classroom? Sometimes these really do stir the soul a bit, until some admin pops up at the end to scold everyone about copier use and getting your lunch lists in on time.
Classroom Prep Time
Teachers are invited to finish preparing their rooms for the students any time after 3:30.
We have adopted a new software platform for use in the district because the software we promised you we would use forever just finished its free trial period over the summer.
Dolly Parton, you have probably heard, died this week at 80. I am rarely affected by celebrity deaths, and yet I found myself crying in the kitchen this morning listening to “I Will Always Love You.”
I teared up again reading the lyrics to Coat of Many Colors:
My coat of many colors That my momma made for me Made only from rags But I wore it so proudly Although we had no money I was rich as I could be In my coat of many colors My momma made for me
So with patches on my britches And holes in both my shoes In my coat of many colors I hurried off to school Just to find the others laughing And making fun of me In my coat of many colors My momma made for me
And oh, I couldn't understand it For I felt I was rich And I told 'em of the love My momma sewed in every stitch And I told 'em all the story Momma told me while she sewed And how my coat of many colors Was worth more than all their clothes
What a woman. What a generational talent. What a loss. What a gift.
Dolly was a feminist icon, even if she rejected the term. She wrote and sang about women working pink-collar jobs all day just to line men’s pockets, about the judgment heaped on unmarried women who got pregnant and how none was laid at the feet of men who impregnated them, about the toughness and love of the Appalachian women she knew whose lives and stories were ignored or mocked by so much of society. She adopted the trappings of hyperfemininity, dressing in a way I can only describe as drag, and one got the feeling that she did it not because she thought it was the way all women should be but because she was, at her core, a performer, and this was her globally recognizable costume that she frankly thought was pretty fun to put on. Dolly was not standing next to Gloria Steinem demanding abortion on demand. But she was just as crucial a part of the broader feminist cause: A woman who made legible the lives and struggles of women most powerful people are happy to never consider, let alone empathize with.
I’ve been thinking about why Dolly’s death has been so deeply felt by so many, and I think it’s at least partly because she showed us how to live well. She clearly had fun being famous — she didn’t complain; she didn’t saddle herself with the obligation to be a spokesperson for one group or another.
She did strive for decency and humility. In 2018, an event she was a part of took some heat because it was called “Dixie Stampede;” Parton renamed it “Dolly Parton’s Stampede,” and explained to Billboard magazine: “When they said ‘Dixie’ was an offensive word, I thought, ‘Well, I don’t want to offend anybody. This is a business. We’ll just call it The Stampede,” she said. “As soon as you realise that [something] is a problem, you should fix it. Don’t be a dumbass. That’s where my heart is. I would never dream of hurting anybody on purpose.”
“Don’t be a dumbass” and “don’t hurt anyone on purpose” are pretty good rules to live by.
Dolly was generous. Her Imagination Library has sent more than 200 million books to children and babies around the world — 200 million. She spent millions helping disaster victims, giving to at-risk young people who graduated from high school, and funding hospitals and scientific research (she helped fund the Moderna Covid vaccine). She was a devout Christian and a devoted defender of LGBT rights.
The anecdotes going around about her on social media speak to this fundamental goodness:
I hate the word “authentic,” but Dolly Parton was somehow intentionally one of the most artificial-looking women on the planet, and also one of the most authentically herself people in the world. She came from poverty and she embraced her background, forgoing not only shame, but any resentment. She embodied the women who are both envied and stigmatized, who provoke both desire and disgust:
Her life was not just rags-to-riches (or “rags-to-rhinestones,” as the Times aptly put it). She struggled. She spoke frankly about being able to do all she did because she didn’t have children — that if she had been raising a family, she would not have had the time or energy for the tens of thousands of songs she wrote and the thousands of shows and events she performed at — but also of the grief of wanting children and not being able to have them. She held unmet desire alongside gratitude for what filled in that space.
And she was funny as hell:
As is now so often the case when a celebrity dies, the worst people on the internet are plumbing her life for some evidence that she was “problematic” or even just kinda imperfect. I can pretty much promise that if Dolly was asked, she’d tell you she’s about as imperfect and problematic as any of us. Very few human beings contribute as much to this world as Dolly Parton did. She was not a perfect woman, but she was an extraordinary one. And we would probably all be better off if we emulated her humor, her humility, her decency, her generosity, and her insistence on taking responsibility for her own life — and having a lot of fun with it.
I have nothing particularly profound to add, except that like so many people around the world, I loved and admired Dolly Parton. I am sad she’s gone. I am glad she knew she was so widely beloved. I hope I can live even a little bit like her.
This is the man firing generals from the Army. ABC News photo
You really have to go back and look hard to find a more incompetent asshole Secretary of Defense than Pete “I used to be a National Guard Major” Hegseth.Even the incompetent ones, like McNamara and Rumsfeld, weren’t as much assholes as they were just plain bad at their jobs.
Hegseth, however, ticks all the boxes.In his confirmation hearing, he had to deny that he had sexually abused a random woman he met at a Lake Tahoe hotel.He had to deny that he had showed up drunk on the job in his three previous places of employment, including his stint as a weekend chat-host on Fox News.Ultimately, he had to swear to Senators that he would stop drinking alcohol if they made him Secretary of Defense.Even then, the vote to confirm him in the full Senate was 50-50.The Vice President had to bestir himself from his Bible-thumping and travel down Pennsylvania Avenue to preside over the Senate and cast the tie-breaking vote to put his falling-down-drunk compatriot in the Pentagon, in charge of the largest and most expensive military in the whole world.
Having been installed in his office on the E-Ring of the Pentagon, Hegseth set about doing all the important stuff that awaited him.He renamed army posts after Confederate generals.He took down photos of previous Secretaries of Defense and Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff whom he didn’t like.He instituted a monthly Christian prayer meeting in the Pentagon, in clear violation of the First Amendment’s bar to the establishment of religion by the government. Hegseth himself attends every Christian prayer meeting, and I can assure you that he looks around and notices who attends, and who doesn’t, who bows their heads in prayer, and who is just showing up because they know that roll is being taken.
Hegseth started firing generals and admirals right away, beginning with women and Blacks.Less than a month into his job, Hegseth fired General CQ Brown Jr., the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.He fired Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first female Chief of Naval Operations, the highest-ranking admiral in the Navy.Both were exception officers with spotless records.He gave no reason for either firing.
Then he moved on to firing more generals, especially those in the Army.In April, Hegseth fired General Randy George, the Chief of Staff of the Army, in what was described as a 15 second phone call.Hegseth cited no cause for the firing, although it has emerged that General George got on Hegseth’s bad side by standing behind an investigation into the flight of two Army combat helicopters past the Tennessee home of Kid Rock three days before George was fired.Hegseth, told of the unapproved helicopter “flyby” at extremely low altitude, which violated multiple Army regulations regarding helicopter flight over civilian areas, later told the pilots involved, “Carry on, patriots.”
The plot thickened today when it was revealed that the Vice Chief of Staff, General Chris LaNeve, had told General George that Hegseth did not want the pilots investigated for their ill-advised “flyby.” Since Hegseth fired the Army Chief of Staff, , Trump nominated LaNeve to the position.He is currently serving in two four-star positions, Vice Chief of Staff and Acting Chief of Staff.Hegseth fired the previous Vice Chief of Staff, General James Mingus, last October, a full year before his term was due to be up, again for no stated reason.
LaNeve came to the attention of both Trump and Hegseth when he placed a congratulatory phone call from his station in South Korea to Trump on the night of his inauguration.It is unheard of for active-duty general officers to place such a phone call to the President of the United States for any reason, much less one that is so nakedly political in nature. Hegseth made LaNeve his senior military aide shortly after Trump spoke highly of him because of his ass-kissing phone call.
In June, without citing a cause, and only 18 months into his command, Hegseth fired General Christopher Donahue, the commander of the Army in Europe and Africa.On the same day he fired General George, Hegseth fired General David Hodne, who was in charge of the Army’s Transformation and Training Command.Hodne had been in the job only eight months.He was fired without cause.Earlier this month, General LaNeve announced that a special battalion that had been studying drone warfare with the aid of the Ukrainian military would return to regular duty as an infantry unit, ending the modernization push that had been underway.
In Ukraine, fully 80 percent of all Russian and Ukrainian combat casualties are being caused by armed drones.It has become obvious to everyone, with the exception of Hegseth and LaNeve, that drone warfare is the way wars will be fought in the future not to mention right now.LaNeve has instituted a “back to basics” approach for the Army.Having ordered the dissolution of the lone drone battalion in Army service, LaNeve said the battalion will “refocus on its core warfighting tasks as an airborne infantry battalion.”
Let me tell you what their obsession with “warfighting” means.Back to digging foxholes and shooting rifles at human silhouette targets and eating MRE’s.Drones?What are they?
All this comes on the heels of the Army, Navy, and Air Force having to abandon all their military bases in the Middle East after they had been hit by waves of drone attacks by Iran.The U.S. military has been left with no presence in the region of the Persian Gulf after only six months of war.They have closed up shop, because they were not prepared to repel attacks by Iranian drones and missiles.
Not to worry, however.Hegseth has been busy reaching down into the promotion systems of the Army, Navy, and Air Force, removing women and Black officers who were slated for promotion from Colonel to Brigadier General.No reason was given for the meddling by the top official in the U.S. military in a promotion system that has studiously avoided political influence for more than 70 years.
It’s obvious.Hegseth has written two books taking on the military for so-called “DEI” policies that he contends have led to the promotion of women and people of color.Hegseth apparently believes that white men can handle the leadership positions in a military comprised of about 18 percent women and 20 percent Blacks.
But hey!Hegseth’s favorite preacher, a fundamentalist known as Doug Wilsont, who heads up an outfit called the Congregation of Reformed Evangelical Churches, wants to repeal the 19th Amendment and create a system of “family voting” where men would have the vote and women would quit their jobs and get back in the kitchen.So, who needs women in the military, anyway?They’re going to be back home having babies and doing the cooking and cleaning while men get killed on a battlefield completely dominated by drone warfare that Pete Hegseth doesn’t want the U.S. military to be prepared for.
Imposing a right-wing political agenda on the U.S. military has real consequences.Zev Shalev of “The Narativ” reported today that applications for conscientious objector status have increased six-fold since Hegseth took over as head of the U.S. military.Applicants for C.O. status used to be young soldiers who had a change of heart about their religious beliefs after becoming soldiers.Now the soldiers who are applying to get out of their service commitments as conscientious objectors have multiple years in the Army, some with ranks as high as major, and many are graduates of the service academies.
Young soldiers aren’t stupid.They’ve all got cell phones.They can log onto the internet and read the news on CNN and the Associated Press and other outlets that have covered Hegseth’s purge of the generals.Why should they stay in the military and try to get ahead if their religion isn’t fundamentalist Christian?If they didn’t vote for Donald Trump?If they’re women or their skin color isn’t white?
Hegseth is running out of generals and admirals.He has fired all the generals who came up through the ranks the old fashioned way.Now he’s appointing military hacks like LaNeve, but he’s running into opposition in the Senate.LaNeve hasn’t got the votes to get his appointment as Army Chief of Staff out of the Armed Services Committee.Even Republican Senator Joni Ernst from Iowa opposes him.With the defection of even one Republican Senator, LaNeve can’t be confirmed.Hegseth is going to find himself stuck with “acting” commanders all the way down to division level in the Army.
Hegseth is an incompetent asshole who works for an incompetent asshole who thinks if he can’t win a shooting war against Iran, maybe he can win a trade war with Canada. Donald Trump is losing that one, too.
Let’s hope that Trump doesn’t start up the shooting war with Iran again.Iran has tens of thousands of drones and a military that is skilled in using them.We’ve got Pete Hegseth, who just disbanded the one drone warfare battalion we had and fired the general who was in charge of warfare planning.
I hope Hegseth’s fundamentalist preacher is praying hard, because we’re going to need it.
I’m going to be so glad when I never have to type the name “Hegseth” ever again. But I’m going to report on his sorry ass until he’s gone. To support my work covering politics and the military, please consider buying a subscription. Your support is how I keep this Substack going without using a paywall.
Aviles, who came to the U.S. from Nicaragua 19 years ago, has a work permit and no apparent criminal record.
The dissonant image of arresting a parent of a serving sailor, particularly one among a crew whose service for nine months aboard the aircraft carrier being recalled amid complaints about supply shortages and deteriorating mental health seems particularly stark and uncaring.
Joshua Aviles wrote on social media Saturday that he was still on the Lincoln “fighting for a country that has given me everything” when he got a call about his father’s detention, adding, “This is heartbreaking for me. I don’t know how I can mentally continue working 12+ hour days knowing that my dad is somewhere, possibly treated like a criminal.”
More broadly, the Aviles arrest comes as the Trump administration is rolling back immigration protections for military families to pursue its mass deportation agenda, detaining at least dozens of parents and spouses of active-duty U.S. troops, according to reporting by the Associated Press. The government naturally does not track deportations of military families, so reporters for AP set out to do so.
But one of the military’s most highly advertised immigration benefits is “military parole-in-place,” which allows the spouses, children and parents of active-duty service members and veterans to obtain legal immigration status from within the country. Not everyone qualifies Those who overstayed visas or who already applied for legal status at the border, for example, may not.
Say One Thing, Do Another
So, the military appeals to immigrant recruits, but is not moving to protect their families.
The Trump administration’s expanded immigration enforcement has led to the detention of dozens of spouses and parents of active-duty U.S. service members after ending protections previously available to military families, the AP investigation found.
Homeland Security said of Aviles’ arrest that “Having a family member in the military is not a free pass to violate our nation’s laws,” adding that the Trump administration “does not pick and choose which laws to enforce.” Of course, it does. And it is doing so in this case with a determination that being a military family member did not matter.
The AP found that while immediate family members of U.S. troops had generally not been targets of immigration enforcement, now at least 52 military parents have been detained, for months. At least six have been deported and one self-deported. At least eight immediate family members of U.S. service members remain in federal immigration custody.
The cases linger as families seek to adjust their legal status – even as the military recruits by advertising these benefits.
The wife of a U.S. soldier who spent more than a month in federal immigration detention, was removed from a deportation flight to Brazil after the AP’s reporting. An Army sergeant had to take personal leave to care for his five-year-old during the detention.
Obvious questions include the effect on military preparedness and mental health for those deployed while hearing such news from home. Or how the military explains its lack of protection from a Homeland Security deportation campaign apparently incapable of distinguishing families who have a serving military member.
The AP’s review is the first accounting of such detentions, and it’s likely an undercount. Reporters analyzed thousands of federal court records compiled by Habeas Docket, a project run by the Immigration Justice Transparency Initiative; by reviewing media coverage and by verifying information with family members and attorneys.
The Policies
Detention of military families is a reversal even from Trump’s first administration. A new policy, implemented in 2025, states that “military service alone does not exempt aliens from the consequences of violating U.S. immigration laws.”
Somehow, we need to reconcile Homeland Security statements that “DHS and ICE value the contributions of all those who have served in the U.S. military” with the reality for immigrant military families. The Pentagon has said nothing.
The policy of offering parole-in-place to immigrant military families was implemented under Republican George W. Bush during the U.S. war with Iraq in 2007 and codified under Democratic Barack Obama. DHS agencies have case-by-case discretion if someone had a serious criminal conviction, for example.
The AP found that family members of troops are being held in detention despite having pending military parole-in-place applications and some were detained while appearing at appointments to adjust their legal status.
Expressions of national disgust at the excesses of the mass deportation campaign are reflected in election polls and primary results. The insistence of a moribund Congress to even discuss alternative solutions is deafening. One would think that offering protection for military families who follow the rules would be a good start to undoing out-of-control arrests and deportations.
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This lawsuit popped up on my radar a few days ago and I let it sit, thinking foolishly that maybe I was reading too much into it. But a Washington Post op-ed from Corey DeAngelis confirmed the worst-- privatizers are ready to try to eliminate public schools entirely.
Education is speech. The curriculum taught, the books assigned, and the values reinforced inside (and outside) of the classroom all convey a message. The Constitution has long recognized that parents—not the government—hold the paramount right to direct that message for their own children.
That's part of the argument. The rest is familiar as well.
Parents also have a legal duty to provide or arrange for educational speech.
In other words, I should not have to pay for a system that educates Other Peoples' Children. Their children are their problem.
Nor is the suit merely about eliminating the public system.
Nebraska’s scheme flips free speech on its head, mandating educational speech then penalizing viewpoints other than the government’s: parents who wish to exercise their right, whether by homeschooling or by choosing a private school, must forgo tens of thousands of dollars of educational benefits available to other families who acquiesce to the government’s viewpoints.
In other words, I should not have to pay for Other Peoples' Children to get an education, but taxpayers should absolutely help me subsidize the education of my own children.
I didn't read the DeAngelis op-ed because the presence of his op-ed in the Washington Post is precisely why I don't have a subscription to the Post any more. But I'm sure it's plenty incendiary and rage-baity. The very idea that public education violates the First Amendment is so destructive and counter-intelligent, but that appears to be where they want to go. The whole system is unconstitutional.
Update: Okay, someone shared it with me. He used his big boy voice for the Post, but it's still an astonishing reach. "Universal school choice resolves the constitutional problem while preserving public support for education," he writes. Tear down public schools, end the promise to all students, and open up the unregulated free market. In many ways, I suppose this whole business is just the quiet part out loud-- this has always been the goal for some of these folks all the way back to Milton Friedman.
The libertarian Reason magazine is taking this seriously, which is not surprising. NCLA says that "Plaintiffs do not seek to end, defund, or influence public schools," and that's pretty clearly bullshit. What other effect can we expect from ruling the entire system unconstitutional? Maybe the idea is simple extortion-- give us a pile of money or we'll tear down your schools-- but the effect would be the same. Who knows how Nebraska's court will jump on this, and there's a whole counter-argument to be made that education (as folks on the right love to point out) is no business of the federal government; public education is a feature of state constitutions.
So it's easy to look at this suit and argue that it will likely fail. That's not really the point; folks on the far right have always been willing to play a long game and make legal and policy moves that slowly inch the Overton window over and move into courts until, voila! We get Dobbs.
So I'm watching this as the next front of the ongoing attack on public schools, the new argument that will be repeated ad nauseum. Pay attention, folks.
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