Well, here's an ugly little coda to the story of Sarah Inama.Quick recap. Sarah Inama is a 6th grade world civilizations teacher in West Ada School District (the largest district in the state). She had two posters in her classroom. Here they are.





She was told to take them down. She did. Then she went home, thought about it, and put the second one, the one with many skin tones hands, back up. She's been told to get rid of it by year's end. She took her story to a local reporter, and then all hell broke loose.

We know a lot more now thanks to some stellar reporting by Carly Flandro and the folks at Idaho Ed News, who FOIAed 1200 emails surrounding this. You should read the resulting stories (here and here).

There is a house that was built around the turn of the century – 20^th, that is – just off the corner of 3^rd Street at the end of our block. It has a tall privet hedge guarding its northern flank, and from behind that hedge tonight as I walked our dog Ruby, I heard the voices of small children who, I would guess based on some experience in these matters, were about five or six years old. The voices were high-pitched as all children’s voices are at that age, excited as they played a game in the yard behind the hedge. I could tell they were chasing each other, and I could hear when one of them caught one of the others. There would be an even higher-pitched scream, followed by excited chatter as they set up the next measure in their game.

I have an unusually good memory of those years as a child in my own life, which were spent in Hawaii while my father was away commanding a company in the Korean War, and then at Fort Benning, Georgia, where he attended the Infantry Officer Advanced Course. I was in pre-school at Fort Shafter in Honolulu, followed by kindergarten at Fort Benning. I had a gang of boys my age at Fort Benning. The junior officer housing development where we lived had been freshly-built atop what turned out to be an old mortar range, and we spent a good deal of time out in the fields and woods behind our duplex digging up dud 60 mm mortar rounds and pretending we were mortars, holding them with both hands between our legs, and with a swinging motion, launching them away from us with screams mimicking the flight of a mortar round, followed by imitation explosions. It’s a miracle that none of the duds ever went off. Of course, we concealed the fact of our stash of mortar rounds from our parents, knowing that if we told them, the rounds would be confiscated, and we would be banned from playing in the woods and fields until soldiers with metal detectors had cleared the area.

Much excited squealing and shouting was involved in the pretend battles we fought using wooden rifles and pistols our fathers had cut for us from boards we found in a nearby dump, whittling them smooth and painting them black. We played hide and seek and capture the flag, and in the evenings, just as it got dark, before we had to be home for bedtime, we sat in a circle in the woods and told horror stories.

After my first novel, “Dress Gray” was published in 1979, I received a letter forwarded to me through my publisher Doubleday. The letter began with something like, “You probably don’t remember me, but I was in your gang in Fort Benning in 1954.” I remembered him. How could I not? His name was Paris. He went on to say how much he enjoyed my novel and told me a little about himself since graduating college on the West Coast. At the closing, he said that over the years, he had had nightmares from a horror story I had told the gang about a disembodied hand that walked on its fingers in the night until the hand found little boys and strangled them. His wife didn’t understand why he sometimes awoke bolt upright at night screaming until he finally told her the horror story about the hand. She laughed at the image of the little boys gathered in a circle in the woods in the dark, and he laughed with her. After that night, the nightmares finally stopped, but his memory was still strong.

Tonight, we have news of a nightmare of a different sort. One of the insurrectionists from the January 6 attack on the Capitol has been appointed to a job as counselor to Ed Martin, the newly appointed Pardon Attorney in the Department of Justice, who also serves as Director of the Weaponization Working Group, the DOJ office in charge of Trump’s retribution against his enemies. The new DOJ appointee’s name is Jared Lane Wise. He is a former FBI agent (!) who was indicted for his part in the January 6 insurrection and charged with unlawfully entering the Capitol and disrupting the certification of the 2020 election by the Congress. Wise was filmed during the riot confronting Capitol police and shouting at them, “I’m former law enforcement. You’re disgusting. You are the Nazi. You are the Gestapo. You can’t see it. . . Shame on you! Shame on you! Yeah, fuck them! Yeah, kill ‘em! Kill ‘em! Kill ‘em! Kill ‘em!”

Wise was in the middle of his trial on charges for his part in the Capitol attack when Trump took office on January 20 and almost immediately pardoned all the insurrectionists…all of them…including Wise. Now Wise is working for the official in the Department of Justice who is in charge of new pardons that Donald Trump will issue, such as his commutation of the 9 year sentence of media mogul Carlos Watson, who was absolved of repaying $37 million to people he had conned into investing in his scam start-up, Ozy Media.

Just today, one of the January 6 insurrectionists pardoned by Donald Trump, Edward Kelly, was sentenced to life in prison for conspiracy to murder federal employees, including the FBI agents who investigated him for his part in the January 6 attack on the Capitol. Last week, Pam Bondi, the Attorney General of the United States, fired three prosecutors in the office of the Washington D.C. U.S. Attorney who were involved in prosecuting some of the most violent insurrections on January 6, those who were convicted of assaulting police officers…before being pardoned by Donald Trump.

In late June, another January 6 insurrectionist, who was invited to the Oval Office in April by President Trump for his signing of an executive order against so-called sanctuary cities, was elected as president of the National Sheriff’s Association. Chris West, the sheriff of Canadian County, Oklahoma, is an ardent election conspiracy denier and supporter of so-called “Constitutional sheriffs,” now sometimes called “MAGA sheriffs.” West recently shared a meme on Facebook, posting, “AT ONE POINT NOAH WAS SEEN AS A CRAZY CONSPIRACY THEORIST. BUT THEN THE RAIN CAME AND ALL THE FACT CHECKERS DROWNED.” West commented below his post, “Just call me Noah, because the rain is coming!”

I refuse to accept the celebration of convicted felons as heroes. I refuse to accept a president selling pardons to thieves and scoundrels out of the Oval Office for “donations” to his political campaign funds. I refuse to accept that a plurality of one of our two political parties believes that violence is sometimes necessary in our political life. I refuse to accept a Congress that will soon pass a law that will deny food to hungry children and pregnant women, deny healthcare to the elderly and the needy, and give massive tax cuts to billionaires who have made large political contributions to Republican candidates for office. I refuse to accept an administration that establishes an office to “denaturalize” American citizens because of their political beliefs and activism. I refuse to accept a president who threatens to arrest the Democratic Party’s candidate for Mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, because of his political beliefs. “We don’t need a communist in this country,” Trump said of Mamdani after he won the Democratic primary running as a Democratic Socialist. I refuse to accept a political party and an administration that silently countenances the mass shooting of school children and then loosens gun regulations to allow the sale of silencers and trigger mechanisms that transform an AR-15 into an automatic weapon.

I refuse to accept a nation that long celebrated itself as “a country of immigrants,” even erecting the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor to welcome them to our shores, has now systemized their persecution, arrest, deportation, beating and even death while in custody.

I refuse to consider that there will come a time in this country when little children will be too afraid to run around the side yard of a house in the evening at dusk, tackling each other and squealing with delight. But that is sadly where we are headed.

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In Texas, 38-year-old Justin Banta has been charged with capital murder for allegedly putting abortion-inducing drugs in his girlfriend’s drink, causing her to miscarry. If Banta did what he is accused of doing, he is a terrible person who committed a serious crime and deserves to go to jail.

It’s telling, though, that if the state’s claims are true, then Banta committed a crime against a women — but he’s being prosecuted for an alleged crime against a six-week-old embryo, which is being treated as a person he murdered. Should Banta face criminal penalties if he did what prosecutors say? Yes, because what he did is a serious assault. But that’s a very different question than the one of whether a “pro-life” state should the state kill Banta for killing an embryo.

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Or, to say it differently: If Banta murdered someone, then it’s hard to argue that women who take abortion-inducing drugs aren’t doing the same thing — ditto the fertility specialists who dispose of unused embryos. Which is of course what the anti-abortion movement argues, and what Texas prosecutors are trying to lay the legal groundwork for.

The capital murder charges are even more terrifying. There are many lesser offenses prosecutors could use to charge Banta. But they’ve spent several months building this particular case. And that’s because they are building toward a legal landscape within which they can implement the death penalty for abortion.

That Texas prosecutors seem to have not charged Banta with assaulting a pregnant woman really says it all. She’s the one whose drink was poisoned. She’s the one who suffered the pain and physical ramifications of a miscarriage. But to “pro-life” Texas prosecutors, she’s an incubator, not a person. And so they are using the power of the state to reclassify an embryo as a born human one might be executed for killing, while totally ignoring the injury that was done to the actual born person in question. And not just that — they’re so pro-life they want to kill a guy as punishment.

This really is the anti-abortion movement in a nutshell.

Texas, like many anti-abortion states, has a provision in its law to prevent women who have abortions from being prosecuted. But that’s a matter of political expedience — anti-abortion legislators know that jailing women for abortion is really, really unpopular. What’s not unpopular is jailing men who do things like slip abortion pills into their girlfriends’ drinks. And so they’re using hugely unsympathetic men like Banta to expand the outer reaches of abortion bans and fetal protection laws, working to establish a legal norm of treating even embryos and fertilized eggs as born people — even putting to death people who cause embryonic death. Texas prosecutors are also clear that they would like abortion providers treated like Banta. And at some point, abortion providers might face similar punishments (right now, they face 99 years in prison). But what would make a fertility doctor who discards unused embryos any different? What would make a woman who takes abortion pills of her own volition any different? If the woman is taken out of the equation — and Texas is certainly trying to establish a kind of independent embryonic and fetal personhood in which the woman is shaded out — then the context of who brought about embryonic death isn’t really relevant.

It is very hard to have this both ways: To say that a man who gives a woman an abortion pill is a murderer, but a woman who takes one is not. A man who gives a woman an abortion pill without her consent is a serious asshole and a criminal and an assailant, the same way a man who has sex with a woman without her consent is a rapist but a man who has consent is not. But this is a case that totally disregards the woman involved.

It’s also a vehicle through which to foment distrust in abortion pills. Abortion is banned in Texas and the anti-abortion movement supposedly got what it wanted when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and sent abortion’s legality back to the states, but the anti-abortion movement has never really wanted this to be a state-by-state issue. That’s why they’re working to ban abortion pills nationwide. There are a bunch of strategies at play there, including using old obscenity laws that ban the mailing of abortion devices and classifying the pills as “forever chemicals.” But they’re also trying to make the case, against all evidence, that abortion pills are dangerous. In reality, the pills are safer than many widely-available medications and treatments, including Penicillin (and they are many magnitudes safer than Viagra). Cases like this, which are rare but extremely upsetting acts of domestic violence, are being used to make the case that abortion pills — not men who commit violence against women — are the problem. Texas could prosecute domestic violence and assaults against pregnant women if it wanted to. Instead, abortion opponents are arguing that abortion pills have to be banned in order to protect women, while failing or refusing to use the law to protect women — and passing bans that threaten women’s lives.

To wit: A new analysis by ProPublica finds that abortion bans like the one in Texas have made first-trimester miscarriages much more dangerous. Comparing emergency room data from before Texas’s abortion ban to data from after, ProPublica reporters found that the number of miscarrying women needing blood transfusions in the ER skyrocketed by 54%. That’s likely because, without an abortion ban, women who are miscarrying are offered what is essentially an abortion procedure to safely complete the miscarriage. Without that procedure, they risk hemorrhage — and if that happens, which it often does, women can die. At least one woman in Texas already has, after she bled out for 10 hours after a miscarriage:

What happened to Porsha Ngumezi shows how dangerous it can be to delay care, according to more than a dozen doctors who previously reviewed a detailed summary of her case for ProPublica.

When the mother of two showed up bleeding at Houston Methodist Sugar Land in June 2023, at 11 weeks pregnant, her sonogram suggested an “ongoing miscarriage” was “likely,” her doctor noted. She had no previous ultrasounds to compare it with, and the radiologist did not locate an embryo or fetus — which Ngumezi said she thought she had passed in a toilet; her doctors did not make a definitive diagnosis, calling it a pregnancy of “unknown location.” After hours bleeding, passing “clots the size of grapefruit,” according to a nurse’s notes, she received two blood transfusions — a short-term remedy. But she did not get a procedure to empty her uterus, which medical experts agree is the most effective way to stop the bleeding. Hours later, she died of hemorrhage, leaving behind her husband and young sons.

Abortion bans mean that pregnant women are simply treated as sub-human, not entitled to the same medical care and consideration as other patients. ProPublica reports on one woman, Sarah Pablos Velez, who was pregnant at 30 when her doctor saw her pregnancy wasn’t viable. But she wasn’t offered a termination; instead, she was sent home and told to come back two weeks later and check again. She wound up in the emergency room — and from there, things only got worse:

Over two visits to the emergency room, doctors told her that she could complete the miscarriage at home, even as she reported filling up three toilet bowls with blood and a nurse remarked that they needed a janitor to clean the floor, De Pablos Velez and her husband recalled. No obstetrician ever came to assess her condition, according to medical records, and while her hospital chart says “all management options have been discussed with the patient and her husband,” De Pablos Velez and her husband both told ProPublica no one offered her a D&C.

She was told to follow up with her OB at her next appointment in three days. Six hours after discharge, though, she was trying to ride out the pain at home when her husband heard her muttering “lightheaded” in the bathroom and ran to her in time to catch her as she collapsed. “She was pale as a ghost, sweating, convulsing,” said her husband, Sergio De Pablos Velez. “There was blood on the toilet, the trash can — like a scene out of a horror movie.”

An ambulance rushed her to the hospital, where doctors realized she no longer had enough blood flowing to her organs. She received two blood transfusions. Without them, several doctors who reviewed her records told ProPublica, she would have soon lost her life.

Letting pregnant women bleed out and sometimes die in the name of protecting embryos, while using the full power of the state to try to kill a guy for causing an abortion while not even bothering to prosecute him for assaulting a pregnant woman — I’m not sure I could have invented a clearer distillation of the “pro-life” movement.

xx Jill

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It won’t come as much of a surprise that our…cough cough…president was awake at 12:44 this morning in the White House with his personal phone in his hand making threats on Truth Social against his one-time pal, the deficit slasher whose waste, fraud, and abuse cuts ended up costing more money than they saved:

“Elon Musk knew, long before he so strongly Endorsed me for President, that I was strongly against the EV Mandate. It is ridiculous, and was always a major part of my campaign. Electric cars are fine, but not everyone should be forced to own one. Elon may get more subsidy than any human being in history, by far, and without subsidies, Elon would probably have to close up shop and head back home to South Africa. No more Rocket launches, Satellites, or Electric Car Production, and our Country would save a FORTUNE. Perhaps we should have DOGE take a good, hard, look at this? BIG MONEY TO BE SAVED!!!”

Why did Donny have his Depends in a wad, you might ask? Elon was threatening to form a new political party and run candidates against every Republican who voted for Trump’s Big Deficit-Busting Bill:

“It is obvious with the insane spending of this bill, which increases the debt ceiling by a record FIVE TRILLION DOLLARS that we live in a one-party country—the PORKY PIG PARTY!! Time for a new political party that actually cares about the people.”

And then Musk, who only a month ago had announced that he would be cutting back on his political spending, posted this:

“Every member of Congress who campaigned on reducing government spending and then immediately voted for the biggest debt increase in history should hang their head in shame! And they will lose their primary next year if it is the last thing I do on this earth.”

The bill passed the Senate this morning, of course, and heads over to the House, where Speaker Mike “Biblical Law” Johnson will push it through despite the fact that it will probably close half the rural hospitals in his state of Louisiana.

$930 billion in Medicaid cuts. $120 billion in SNAP food stamp cuts. 12 million fewer people will receive Medicaid benefits according to the Congressional Budget Office.

$3.3 trillion added to the budget deficit over the next ten years, but who’s counting?

Elon Musk, that’s who.

Trump hasn’t gotten back on Air Force One yet from his visit this morning to the Everglades site of his newest concentration camp, which they’re calling “Alligator Alcatraz.” But when he’s back in the air, look for him calling on Pam Bondi to use the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ to go after Elon’s naturalization as a citizen.

Yep, that’s a thing. They announced yesterday that the division of the DOJ that used to sue counties in the South for denying Black citizens the right to vote will now be used to strip some naturalized Americans of their citizen ship:

“The Civil Division shall prioritize and maximally pursue denaturalization proceedings in all cases permitted by law and supported by the evidence," wrote Assistant Attorney General Brett A. Shumate in a memo.

Elon, a former citizen of South Africa, is naturalized. Asked this morning on his way out of the White House to get on Air Force One if he has plans to deport Elon Musk, Trump answered, “I don't know, we'll have to take a look.”

Keep your popcorn handy and make sure your microwave is working. This is going to be good.

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This is it. This is Germany in the 1930s and what you do will be recorded in the history books. Your children and grandchildren will look back and ask what you did. Will you be able to look them in the face?

These are dark times but I will continue to tell the stories you need to hear in a clear (and usually profane) voice. If I entertain/anger/inform you, preferably all three, please consider becoming a supporting subscriber today for only $5 a month or just $50 a year.

👊Punch Nazis👊

I have really bad news for America’s newly-empowered Nazis in ICE: This will all end very badly for you.

I get it! You think you’re protected! Everything is going according to plan. You’re obeying the law! (You’re not, but we’ll get to that) You’re the good guy! And this is America, right? Cops never get in trouble no matter how fucking crazy they get. Just have to wave that badge in front of a jury and all is forgiven. “I was a’feared for muh safety!” are the magic words that allow law enforcement to beat unarmed suspects to a pulp. Allows them to murder people in handcuffs and get a pat on the back. Hell, do it enough times and you get a cool medal for multiple kills!

And, hey, look at this awesome bill the GOP is trying to pass! ICE is gonna be on fucking steroids, bro!

Who is the regime going to hire with that $8 billion? Sober, experienced law enforcement professionals? Men, and it will be 98% men, who take the rule of law seriously and plan to uphold their oath to the Constitution? Bish, please. We all know the screening for candidates will involve questions like, “Have you ever fucked your cousin?” and “Please describe the the intense love you have for pointy white hoods." and “Whose birthday do you masturbate the hardest on: Hitler, Putin, or General Lee?”

Stephen Miller and Tom Homan are not going to be looking for rational adults. They’ll be looking for rabid animals willing to hunt down anyone not deemed sufficiently white enough to be a “real” American. And after they’ve scooped up enough of Those People, they’ll move on to the “enemies of the state.” You know, journalists and activists and “socialists” and Democrats and protesters and anyone who doesn’t fall in line with the new order.

What? You think Miller’s planned concentration camps are gonna fucking fill themselves?!

#NurembergThemAll

Now, this is the important thing to understand, and I really need our good friends in ICE to grasp this concept: Your regime is going to fall. And then we’re going to come for you.

I know…I know. The Fourth Reich will never fall. The last set of Nazis said the same thing. A thousand years, they said. The Bush regime said it would rule for 100 years. Trump said he would be president for life back during his first term and then his little insurrection didn’t succeed. He made it the second time but do you really want to bet your life he’ll be in power until he dies in, what? 8? 9 years? Man’s not looking so good these days. You think his idiot sons are going to take over? Maybe Lara Trump? Maybe Stephen Miller will rise to power as the new Führer! Maybe JD Vance will lead a new techbro oligarchy!

I think we all know that when Trump shuffles off this mortal coil, it’s all over for the MAGA movement. And his brain will be Swiss cheese long before that happens. But unless Trump strokes out before 2028, the regime is going to fall then anyway. You can’t stop it, no matter how much you might think you can.

And then things are going to get really ugly for you, really fast.

Did you know the Opinionated Ogre has a weekly podcast? It’s true! New episodes every Thursday! Catch the latest episode here:

The only good Nazi is a ____ Nazi.

You may be betting that America will just “move on” like we have in the past. That we’ll concentrate on “looking forward, not back” like we did after Trump 1.0. And Bush. And the other Bush. And Reagan. And Nixon. And the decades of lynching and the KKK and the pro-Nazi movement in the 30s and the Civil War and and and. Literally a century and a half of traitors, fascists, slavers, and insurrectionists, almost all of them white men, all of them from the right. Always trying to destroy this country because you hate it and everything it stands for.

And we let you try again and again and again. Because we don’t punish racist white men in America.

Are you REALLY sure that history will hold? Because let me tell ya, buddy, we’re pretty fucking tired of you. We’ve been tired of you for a really long time and you’ve used up all of our tolerance and patience. That well done run dry. Now? Now we just want to put you up against a wall and put a bullet in your head.

Maybe you shouldn’t have come out of the Nazi closet. Maybe you shouldn’t have covered your faces and started grabbing people off the street like a secret police. We don’t have a secret police here. But you couldn’t wait to cosplay as the Gestapo, right? You had a throbbing erection for the unaccountable violence you’d get to visit on those filthy aliens you hate so much.

Maybe you should have stuck to the rule of law instead of wilding out. But you thought the good times would last forever and no one would ever come for you.

But we will.

Do you think Trump will pardon you? Do you think we’re going to give a fuck? We’re going to come for you and you’re either going to spend the rest of your life in a little box or you’re going to swing from the end of a rope. No one cares if you were just following orders. You had a choice but you were so eager to follow Stephen Miller’s Nazi vision for America you didn’t think about what would come after. There’s always an after. The regime always falls.

Sometimes, there are truth and reconciliation commissions. You should only BE so fucking lucky. We will not be having those. At least not at first. America is an extremely bloody-minded country and we do so like taking our revenge. We really REALLY don’t like Nazis and, boy howdy, are you fucks leaning into that swastika life.

When we find out what you’ve done in the camps you’ll be running? The rapes, the murders, the child trafficking? Because let’s be honest, you fucking pedophile freaks, you’re going to molest kids by the hundreds. We’re not going to want to reconcile with you. We’re going to want you dead. And you won’t be able to run fast enough, far enough to get away. How many of you think you can escape to Mother Russia? Think you’ll all be welcome there? Maybe. They need more cannon fodder for their war, after all.

Sure, a lot of you are hiding your faces. Not very well, though. Even so, you’re all on video. over and over again. You’re on video. Do you think we’re not going to be able to take your file and match it to your stupid Nazi face? I don’t give a fuck how much is covered. We’re going to know who you are and what you’ve done. And then you’re going to swing or rot in a cell.

Or maybe you’ll cooperate with the tribunals and you get to live. Oh? What? Did you think all of you would swear a blood oath to never betray your fellow rat fucks? BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! First of all, not all of you are actually Nazis. Some of your fellow agents will manage not to stain their souls with blood and evil. Those agents are going to be more than happy to give the rest of you up. And then there will be the traitors. There are always traitors willing to sell the rest of you out to save their own skin. Fascists are weak and cowardly and, ultimately, pathetic. It’s the core of who you are. If you were a real man, you wouldn’t be a fascist.

So, yeah, we’re going to find out who you are no matter how hard you try to hide your identity. And then you get the Nuremberg treatment. No pardon will save you. No one will mourn you. You’ll just be another piece of shit Nazi crushed by the United States. Your blood will water the tree of liberty, a lesson for the rest of your kind to stay hidden because you’re not getting another shot at this.

You fucked around and I promise you, you’re going to find out.

I hope you feel better informed about the world and ready to kick fascists in the teeth to protect it. This newsletter exists because of you, so please consider becoming a supporting subscriber today for only $5 a month or just $50 a year. Thank you for everything!

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Fascism hates organized protests. They fear the public. They fear US. Make fascists afraid again by joining Indivisible or 50501 and show them whose fucking country this is!

The Blue Wave has begun and the fascist fucks are scared. There are 125 days until it hits Virginia and Pennsylvania. If I were a billionaire fascist loser, I’d think REALLY hard about getting out of the way.

The post Older Americans Backing Trump Now Face Cuts to Medicaid, Services first appeared on The Incidental Economist.