Oh, here we fucking go. The demands for civility and forgiveness are starting to roll in. Eat an entire bag of dicks and miss me with that shit, son. Trump voters made their pigsty. They can lay down and die in it without an ounce of pity from me. They certainly will never receive forgiveness. I’m fresh out, and I can’t be fucked to go to the store to get any more. Sorry, MAGA, you get nothing but the back of my hand until the day you die. Then you’ll get a round of applause. The world will be a better place without you in it.

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 (a 17% discount!).

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OK, this is where we are: Just six weeks out from the midterms, and Republican voters have pretty much abandoned their party of pedophiles, Nazis, and thieves. Not because they’re pedophiles, Nazis, and thieves, of course. THAT, they don’t give a fuck about. The problem, you see, is that the collection of corrupt white nationalist sexual deviants is also manifestly incapable of governing, resulting in economic conditions that could charitably be described as “dog shit.”

It really is impressive how the regime took one of the strongest economies in the world in the last 50+ years and destroyed it in less than twenty months. Not only destroyed it, but did so in such a way that it is impossible to blame anyone else other than the regime. Joe Biden did not start a trade war with, well, everyone. Joe Biden did not slap tariffs on, well, everyone. Immigrants didn’t start a war with Iran and send the price of gas and diesel through the roof. Trans kids didn’t double your grocery bill.

Trump did all of that and then went on TV and bragged about it because he’s a fucking moron suffering from severe dementia. Thus, the entire country is furious at Republicans for the state of the dog-shit economy, and they’re either going to vote for Democrats or not vote at all.

That means Republicans are going to take a huge electoral hit. One they’re going to struggle to recover from, even two years from now (when Trump’s economy will be even worse). The illusion that Trump and MAGA are an unstoppable political and cultural power is about to be crushed like an empty beer can under a monster truck wheel. This brutal midterm beating will spawn the very real possibility that the GOP will turn on Trump in a desperate bid to save themselves ahead of 2028. He can’t run again, not legally, not physically, and not mentally. If Trump were twenty years younger, they would absolutely try to overthrow the government with their Hitler leading the charge, but he’s dying, and everyone sees it. He won’t last long enough to even be a figurehead for a 2028 coup.

Republicans understand, very clearly, that they are in a lot of trouble. There will be no Tea Party to erase their sins the way they erased the George W. Bush administration. The press will try as hard as possible to delete Trump, but over a decade of cult worship will not dissipate overnight, and Trump himself will not go away. He will remain on the scene, long after he’s been removed from power, screaming at the top of his lungs that he still controls the GOP and he’s still president. Trump will be an albatross around the neck of the Republican Party until the day he chokes to death on a hamburger.

After a full decade of lawlessness and hate and cruelty and sadism and evil and violence, Republicans have pushed the rest of the country into unknown territory. We are not talking about “moving forward” and “reaching across the aisle.” We are talking about investigations and tribunals and Nuremberg Trials. We are talking about accountability on a mass scale, and it is sending the right into an absolute fucking panic.

That’s why we’re starting to see bullshit like this:

The Social Contract with Joe Walsh

When A Trump Voter Finally sees The Light, Don’t Give Them The Middle Finger. Welcome Them.

So this pisses me off. I completely get it, I completely understand this human reaction, but it’s not helpful, and it pisses me off…

Read more

2 days ago · 81 likes · 31 comments · Joe Walsh

Fuuuuuuccccckkkk yyyyoooouuuuu! The middle finger is EXACTLY what they deserve. And so does Joe Walsh.

It’s hilarious, to me at least, that Joe Walsh calls his newsletter “The Social Contract.” Motherfucker, your party shredded the social contract decades ago. Long before Trump waddled down the escalator. Your party of racists and traitors and pedophiles has been hard at work actively undermining democracy longer than I’ve been alive. You do not get to show up after you lost control of your death cult and tell ME how to treat Republicans.

We both know that after Trump is gone, you will immediately, without a moment’s hesitation, try to reclaim your place in your party of rancid white nationalists. You will be right back to calling us “baby killers” and “godless communists” and “child-mutilating perverts.” You will be all in on white grievance and Great Replacement bullshit because yours will be the party of Nazis, and if that’s what you need to be to get back in on the grift, that’s what you’ll do.

It’s the same for every Republican voter. Not the wibbly-wobbly independents who switch back and forth depending on the weather. No one who voted for Obama, Trump, Biden, Trump is a committed Trump ideologue. They don’t really pay attention to politics or what Trump is doing. They have a middle-schooler’s understanding of the news and vote based on vibes. But the three-time Trump voter? They know exactly what they’re doing, and they feel no shame at all.

That’s really who Joe Walsh wants us to forgive. The GOP base. MAGAland and the ones who don’t love Trump but vote for him anyway because they hate the rest of us THAT much. Forgive those motherfuckers? Never in a million fucking years.

“Trust me, these Trump voters, when they wake up, feel bad enough about what they’ve done.” The fuck they do! Trump voters don’t “feel bad” about what they’ve done except in the sense that it hurt them personally.

They don’t feel bad that ICE is kidnapping children, torturing tens of thousands of people, and murdering Americans in the street unless it happens to one of them or one of their relatives.

They don’t feel bad that hundreds of thousands of government employees have lost their jobs until they need help and that help is gone.

They didn’t feel bad that Trump is a lawless, bloodthirsty warmonger until it cost $100 to fill up their pickup truck.

They don’t feel bad about any of the pain and suffering inflicted on Trans kids or Muslims or the Black community or Latinos or anyone the regime has targeted for destruction and humiliation and terror. They loved all of that because that’s what they voted for. They wanted the concentration camps and violent assaults in the streets and the abuse of government power. That was the promise Trump made to them, and they gave him their vote eagerly.

He gave them exactly what they demanded. But he also gave the billionaires (both domestic and foreign) what THEY demanded: The wholesale destruction of the government. The crippling of American economic power. The demolition of global order and the spread of chaos.

That’s all great for the rich. It’s all terrible for the rest of us, especially Trump’s rural voters, who feel the full brunt of his economic sabotage quicker than the rest of us. I only have to drive a mile or two a day, if I have to drive at all. My dentist, doctor, and hospital are all within 10 minutes if I’m taking my time.

Your typical Trump voter in the middle of nowhere Sisterfuck, Klannsylvania has to drive 20 miles just to reach the closest doctor. Their closest hospital is three counties over now that Medicaid cuts have closed every emergency room within 100 miles. Their kids don’t get school lunches anymore, and school is only four days a week because the Department of Education cut the grants that kept it open on the fifth. Oh, and the giant solar panel factory and all the good jobs up the road that Biden’s Build Back Better bill paid for are gone because Trump paid the company $20 billion to shut it down.

Doesn’t quite seem worth it to hurt some Trans kid in some school in California you’ve never met, does it? It’s all fun and games until there’s a price to pay, and MAGAland is the one paying it.

Now they’re mad as hell, not voting in the midterms, and Democrats are coming to look for a little retribution of their own. That means it’s time for civility and politeness, and everyone needs to be calm and rational. This is America! We don’t hold anyone accountable for their actions! Especially when they’re mediocre racist white people who have spent years engaged in an orgy of violence and evil. Why, it’s as American as Mom’s apple pie to forgive and forget. Right now. Immediately. Complete and total absolution. Do not pass go. Do not collect your pound of flesh.

Oh, but we are. Even in the middle of the massive economic collapse we will be in when Trump is gone, we will be coming for the masked ICE agents who thought they were safe. We will be coming for the concentration camp guards who thought no one would ever show up at their door with a warrant for their arrest. The billionaires will flee the country only to watch their companies and assets be seized. The collaborators who thought they would walk away unscathed will be shocked when they’re exposed and put on trial for corruption.

All those presidential pardons? Not worth the paper they’re written on when state AGs show up with subpoenas. Should have thought of that before you broke state laws in service to a fascist, kiddos. Trump has immunity. You do not.

As for Trump voters? Sure, some of them really will feel regret. Some of them may even do the work to earn forgiveness. But history tells us that the majority of them will not. History tells us that the vast majority of them will magically transform into “constitutional conservatives” or “independents” or “libertarians.” Anything but a Republican, so don’t you DARE try to hold them accountable for a decade of supporting Trump!

They can all burn in hell. None of them will regret anything. They’ll be embarrassed because they were wrong and they lost. Trump was a loser. He didn’t end democracy and install the white nationalist fascist dictatorship they were promised. He was a corrupt pedophile, and they’ll be furious we’ll want them to apologize for supporting him. That we’ll expect them to clean up their mess. THEIR mess? They didn’t do anything! Nothing is ever the fault of a Republican voter. Everyone else is to blame! Not them! Goddamn libtards! You’re making them vote for Republicans by being so mean!

That’s what they did after Bush. I promise you, this is what they’ll do after Trump. There’s no point in even trying to reach out to them. The only “civility” they want is for us to give them back power and surrender. They consider our very existence an affront. They will never EVER consider Democrats a legitimate governing party. No matter how much they lose an election by, they will never again accept the results. They will insist they were cheated, so how can they work with us if only Republicans are the rightful rulers of America?

The sooner we accept the reality that these people are lost to us forever, by their own choice, the sooner we can get to work isolating them from power and rebuilding around them. They cannot be saved because they do not WANT to be saved. And frankly, I’m OK with that. They’re not worth the effort to redeem. They chose to be soulless monsters? Let them live their lives apart from the rest of us, alone and angry and bitter and unwanted. It’s the very LEAST they deserve for what they’ve done, and Joe Walsh can eat shit. Don’t fucking ask me to be kind to people who laughed at kids being locked up in cages. Just because their fascist overlord fucked them, too, doesn’t make them worthy of pity. They’re still trash, and they always will be. Fuck them and fuck Joe Walsh.

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This by far the most dangerous thing that could possibly happen before the midterm elections. This morning, once again using its so-called “emergency docket,” the Supreme Court handed the Trump administration a submachine gun it can use to shoot up the voting rights of citizens of the United States. With just over a month before polls open for voting on November 3 and in violation of its own long-standing practice of not ruling on cases that have a major effect on elections soon before the elections take place, the Supreme Court today said in an unsigned order that the Trump administration can allow states to use a notoriously inaccurate Homeland Security Administration tool called the “Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system” to verify the citizenship and voter eligibility of millions of American citizens. The Homeland Security system is normally used to check the immigration and citizenship status of people applying for federal benefits and licenses for businesses.

Today’s Supreme Court emergency docket ruling was issued without the presentation of arguments before the court. The ruling overturned a lower court decision barring the use of the Homeland Security system by states to analyze and screen their voter rolls. That decision was made by Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan, who heard evidence and arguments in a case challenging Trump’s executive order that the federal government could combine the resources of several different departments, including the IRS, Social Security Administration, and Homeland Security into a system that could be used to screen for people who were ineligible to vote.

Trump issued his executive order based on his obsession that “millions” of undocumented immigrants and foreigners have voted in U.S. elections. There is exactly no evidence that this is true. In fact, every time that states have conducted studies looking for voting by ineligible non-citizens, they have found no such votes were cast, or only a handful, a number that was far short of being enough to affect the outcome of the election.

In Georgia recently, three non-citizens were indicted for voting in federal elections. In 2024, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger did an audit of the election that showed that out of 5.3 million ballots cast that year, 20 ineligible people had attempted to register and nine had cast ballots. The three indicted this week were among that number. This year 8.2 million people in Georgia are registered to vote in the midterm elections.

So, what’s going on here? Well, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson gave us a hint in a speech she made at the University of the District of Columbia when she called the court’s use of its emergency docket “problematic” and told students that the public could lose faith in the judicial system if the court kept ruling on major issues on an emergency basis without argument or signed decisions by the full court. At the time she made the speech yesterday, Jackson had clearly already written a 12-page dissent that was signed by herself and Justices Kagan and Sotomayor. “The harm caused by burdening or disenfranchising even a few lawful voters outweighs the nonexistent harm that the government experiences when it is prevented from taking an action that it likely lacks the authority to take,” Jackson wrote in the dissent.

It’s even worse than that. Today’s action by the Supreme Court addresses a non-existent problem with a “solution” that will cause chaos as states attempt to cobble together a system to check the registration of voters who have already gone through the identification and approval process long used by states to verify their eligibility. Trump doesn’t want to find ineligible voters. He wants to make it harder for eligible citizens to vote. The plaintiffs in the court case heard by Judge Sooknanan presented evidence of the inaccuracies in the Homeland Security “Alien Verification for Entitlements” system. In the decision that was overturned today, Sooknanan wrote that “scrambling to comply with an executive order aimed at reshaping federal elections, private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable” was “haphazardly repurposed” by federal agencies that were combined in Trump’s executive order allowing states to use the system to weed through voter registration rolls.

That is exactly what Trump set out to do with his executive order. He wants to create chaos in the states. Here is what will likely happen. Citizens who thought that they were legitimately registered to vote will show up at the polls and be told that they were “flagged” by the Homeland Security system as a non-citizen. Who knows what will happen next. Maybe some cities and states will allow voters to vote provisionally. If the voters subsequently provide proof of citizenship to a judge, their vote might count. Or maybe they’ll have to provide proof of citizenship to the Homeland Security official running the system that denied them the right to vote in the first place. With 39 days to go before the election, no specific rules to implement Trump’s new system have been established.

Trump’s executive order amounts to a backdoor way to require proof of citizenship to vote, something the court ruled in 2013 was unconstitutional. The court ruled that Arizona could not unilaterally impose a proof of citizenship requirement for voters in a federal election. Only Congress has the right under the Constitution to regulate federal election procedures.

Until today, that is. The Supreme Court in today’s emergency docket ruling said that the lower court’s ruling “inhibits the Federal Government’s efforts to assist state and local agencies in the proper administration of the midterm elections.”

Nowhere in the Constitution does it say that it is the business of the Federal Government, administered by the President, to “assist” the states in running elections. Here is what Article 1, Section 4 states about federal elections such as the one scheduled to be held on November 3: “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of choosing Senators.”

Where in that clause are the words “Homeland Security department” to be found? Where are the words “Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system?” Where does the Constitution say that the President can write an executive order that has the effect of requiring voters to provide proof that they are citizens, which is what the Homeland Security verification of citizenship system does?

The Supreme Court is supposed to interpret the Constitution, not unilaterally amend it with new requirements for voting imposed by the Federal Government. Trump and the Republican Party know that they are on track for a major loss in November. Instead of seeking to convince people to vote for their candidates, they are trying to pick who can vote and who can’t.

Trump has made noises that he might go to the next step and deploy ICE agents to polling places looking for people with skin that is not white and accents that come from south of the border. We may see people pulled out of voting lines and asked for their citizenship papers. That’s how bad it could get after today’s Supreme Court order. Buckle up. Election day is going to be a fight like we have never seen.

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The White House credentials of CNN, MSNOW, and Politico were restored at noon today, eight minutes after a lawyer for the three news outlets had filed an emergency motion to Judge Timothy J. Kelly complaining that the White House had not complied with Kelly’s midnight order that the credentials must be restored. The state of the White House press office and Secret Service was described as “chaos” this morning, as reporters and producers for CNN, MSNOW and Politico showed up at the White House expecting that Judge Kelly’s order would be followed, and they would be admitted to White House grounds.

Over the weekend Trump had ordered the press passes cancelled, alleging that the three news outlets had run stories that were false and contained “fake news.” The news outlets sued the White House on First Amendment grounds, demanding that their access be restored. The Department of Justice responded to the lawsuit at a Wednesday hearing in federal court by alleging that all three news organizations had run stories that compromised “national security,” a change from Trump’s statements that he didn’t like their negative and false reporting on him.

Trump’s Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, who insists on referring to himself without evidence as “Secretary of War,” has had similarly contentious relations with the press covering the Pentagon. Last year, Hegseth tried to get Pentagon reporters to sign what amounted to a loyalty oath, essentially pledging not to print stories about Hegseth and the military without first clearing them with Hegseth’s press office. The major news outlets, including CNN, CBS, NBC, PBS, ABC, the New York Times and the Washington Post, refused to sign and their Pentagon press access was cancelled. It took a lawsuit to force Hegseth to restore their press access. Hegseth retaliated by taking away the small press cubicles the major news outlets had been assigned in the Pentagon and forcing them to report from an annex building some distance from the Pentagon itself.

Hegseth did everything he could to limit press coverage of the war against Iran. There were no reporters or TV news crews “embedded” with military units on the ground in the Gulf region or aboard ships patrolling the Strait of Hormuz. All news that was reported about unsanitary and unsafe conditions on the SS Abraham Lincoln and sailors who had attempted suicide – with one actually jumping from the ship into the sea – came from families back in the United States who had heard from their husbands, wives, or sons and daughters on naval patrol in the Gulf of Oman and Indian Ocean.

Here is what happens when authoritarians decide that controlling the press is a better idea than providing reporters with information. The reporters work harder to learn what’s going on and report what they discover from unofficial sources. That’s what happened when families began calling news outlets and telling the stories they had learned from sailors in their families. More recently, reports from the Gulf about the destruction of American bases in the region have been sourced from commercial satellite imaging companies that showed photos of U.S. aircraft damaged on the ground in Saudi Arabia and photos and video footage of a drone attacking a U.S. base in Kuwait that came from unidentified sources on the ground.

Now photos and other reporting is emerging about the severe damage that was done by Iranian missiles and drones to U.S. bases that have been located in Gulf countries for years. Reports from Bahrain showed heavily damaged buildings in the 5^th Fleet headquarters and port that had for decades served as the main U.S. military base in the region. The photos came from unidentified sources. Hegseth’s Pentagon reacted with fury. Apparently, at least some of the DOJ’s allegations of reporters causing damage to national security came from the release of evidence that every U.S. base in the Middle East was damaged severely enough that they are now unusable. Reporting that soldiers, sailors, and airmen and women had been removed from the damaged bases came from families back home who learned that their family members in the Middle East had been moved to bases further away from Iran’s missiles, some of them in Europe.

Something along the same lines is happening to Trump right now with reporting about the visit of Chinese President Xi to the White House. Reports this morning about the visit concentrated on the fact that when Trump greeted Xi at Joint Base Andrews, he was wearing a heavy overcoat and black leather gloves in 64-degree weather, while Xi was attired in a business suit. The immediate speculation was that Trump was covering up marks on the back of his hand from IV infusions, and sure enough, as soon as Trump was photographed without the gloves showing Xi the work being done on his ballroom, there were the IV marks, covered by what reports described as heavy pancake makeup.

When Trump said that China has “the friendliest press corps,” the internet lit up with reporters’ descriptions of Chinese reporters and cameramen pushing and shoving U.S. reporters out of the way as they jockeyed to get better shots of their leader, Xi. Some of the reports noted that the Chinese press is under constant pressure to produce favorable coverage of Xi because of the controls on the press by the authoritarian Chinese government.

Every time Trump tries to force or coerce the press to cover him more positively, it backfires. When he makes his constant claims that he won the 2020 election, more reporting is done proving that he didn’t. When Trump had the DOJ go to court on Thursday to defend his ban of reporters from the White House, several outlets made a point to report that Michael Velchik, the DOJ lawyer making the argument in court, had written positively in college about Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” and praised Hitler’s mastery of propaganda in emails to friends. That’s the guy Trump sent to defend his propagandistic attempts to control the way the press covers him.

And then we come to Trump’s other obsession, the price of diesel fuel. Not only has Trump pressured Ukrainian President Zelenskyy to stop attacking Russian refineries that produce diesel fuel, saying he wants the price of diesel to come down, he has talked about banning the export of diesel fuel by U.S. producers. He apparently thinks that if he can prevent exports of diesel, the price of the fuel will go down in this country because there will be more fuel to sell.

Just the opposite is true. A ban on diesel exports that artificially lowers prices in this country will cause refiners to cut the amount of fuel they distill to push supplies down and prices back up. Diesel prices reflect not only domestic demand for the fuel, but global demand as well. If the price being offered for diesel on the world market is high, producers in this country will want to export the fuel to get that higher price. Diesel supplies in this country are not in a shortage but are more than adequate to meet demand. The price of diesel here reflects the price of the fuel everywhere, because the market is not domestic, it is global.

This kind of misunderstanding of the market is what led Trump to impose his insane tariffs last year. He thought he could force companies to build more manufacturing plants in the U.S. to avoid tariffs. Instead, they just raised prices on consumers and kept their manufacturing where it was – in countries with cheaper labor and fewer regulations. Free market Republicans understand this. Authoritarians who think they can change the market by fiat do not. Trump is paying with terrible poll numbers right now for his misunderstanding of market dynamics.

In House and Senate races all over the country, Republicans are paying for Trump’s idiocy. When prices go up, votes for Republican candidates go down. That is the political market at work.

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It is not everything that my family and my cousins in the Hemings family have been working on for more than 25 years, but it is a step in the right direction. Earlier this month, Cedric Jessup Jr. was buried in the Jefferson family graveyard at Monticello. Cedric was a Black man descended from Thomas Jefferson through Jefferson’s great-great grandson Moncure Robinson Taylor and Rachael Robinson, who was enslaved by Taylor’s family. Cedric was the brother of Gayle Jessup White, a long-time friend of mine who worked for 10 years at Monticello in public relations and as a community engagement officer whose job was to reach out to the Black community of Charlottesville and beyond, especially to people descended from slaves who were owned by Jefferson and lived and worked at the Monticello plantation.

Cedric Jessup’s burial at Monticello was facilitated by Robert Eppes, a past president of the Monticello Association, the group of white descendants of Jefferson who have refused for years to include descendants of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson as members of the Association with rights to burial in the graveyard. Eppes was among those who voted against allowing the Hemings family to become members of the Monticello Association.

Gayle was quoted on the issue of the Hemings by a reporter for the New York Times who wrote a story about the burial at Monticello. In addition to being a direct descendant of Jefferson, Gayle is related to the Hemings family through Sally’s brother, Peter, who is her great-great-great grandfather. “The descendants of Hemings are also Jefferson descendants,” Gayle told the Times reporter. “There is no place on the mountaintop or anyplace in America where Black people should be barred.”

Gayle’s ancestor Peter Hemings was the younger brother of James Hemings, the older brother of Sally’s who accompanied Jefferson along with Sally to Paris when he was ambassador, learned to cook there from French chefs, and returned to Monticello and his life as a slave where he cooked for Jefferson until 1809. Peter Hemings learned was taught to cook by James and continued cooking for Jefferson after James left. He was also the chief brewer at Monticello.

The graveyard at Monticello has been a major sticking point with members of the Monticello Association opposed to the inclusion of the Hemings family as descendants of Jefferson. I remember attending meetings of the Monticello Association in 1999 and 2000 and hearing members claiming that if the Hemings family was included as descendants of Jefferson, they would “overwhelm” the graveyard, which they said was too small to contain Hemings descendants too. One Association member complained that there were way more people among Hemings descendants than there were white descendants of Jefferson, which just for starters ignored the fact that many descendants of Hemings and Jefferson have white, not Black, skin.

The size of the graveyard was an issue manufactured by Monticello Association members who opposed the Hemings. All along, when they were saying there wasn’t enough room in the graveyard for the Hemings, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which owns Monticello but not the graveyard, was willing to sell adjacent land, of which there was plenty, to the Monticello Association to expand the graveyard’s footprint. This was finally done a number of years ago, and the graveyard is now about twice as large as it used to be.

The Monticello Association owns the graveyard, which was separated from the land of Monticello itself and sold for $1.00 to the Monticello Association at the time that Jefferson’s home and land was transferred from the family of Uriah Levy to the Jefferson Foundation in 1923. My great grandmother, Mary Walker Randolph, was one of the founders of the Monticello Association who was involved in the transfer of the graveyard to ownership by Jefferson descendants.

The ownership of the graveyard is further complicated by the fact that there are two deeds. One deed includes the land under Jefferson’s grave and the graves of his wife and close relatives and friends, such as Dabney Carr, a friend since childhood. In fact, Jefferson established the graveyard to bury Carr when he died. He was the first person buried there. The deed for that land extends from the fence behind Jefferson’s grave to the main gate of the graveyard. That land is owned by descendants of Thomas Jefferson Randolph, about whom I wrote yesterday, who took care of Monticello and lived there with Jefferson in the years just before Jefferson’s death on July 4, 1826. Technically, I, along with my sisters and children, are among the owners of that portion of the graveyard as descendants of Thomas Jefferson Randoph. The rest of the graveyard was deeded to the Monticello Association.

I hesitate to say that the Monticello graveyard is a magical place, but every time I visit and get the key to the graveyard, I open it and invite tourists to come in and explore the graveyard and take their pictures standing on Jefferson’s grave. The look on their faces is enough to argue that for them, as citizens of the country Jefferson helped found, the graveyard is magical. Over the years, I have also taken dozens and dozens of friends and Hemings cousins through the graveyard and pointed out the graves of my great grandmother and her two husbands – who were her second and third cousins – and my great aunts and uncles and the graves of my parents and my brother Frank and the graves of Uncle James and Aunt Mary, my father’s brother and sister. My brother and sisters and I and our Hemings cousins held graveside memorial services for my mother and father when they died. One day in the hopefully distant future, I will be buried at Monticello near my family and alongside my wife, Tracy.

Hopefully, if the Monticello Association comes to accept the Smithsonian’s new DNA findings and admits the Hemings are Jefferson descendants just as we are, one day my Hemings cousins will be buried somewhere along our row of graves in the Monticello graveyard. Some of us are directly descended from the man who owned slaves, and some of us are descended from the slave owner and one of the slaves he owned, Sally Hemings.

We Jefferson descendants are all one family, complicated and strained and sometimes misunderstanding of and nasty to one another, as America has long been to itself.

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ICE was never a good idea. It was always a cesspit filled with racists hoping to cleanse America of the people they hated. Now? It’s a rabid animal that has to be put down. There is no fixing ICE. It cannot be redeemed or returned to its core mission. This IS its core mission. It always was. The only difference is that they’ve stopped pretending to be law enforcement. ICE has become the fascist white nationalist paramilitary weapon it was intended to be from the start.

Abolish ICE. Fire every agent. Ban them from law enforcement for life. Charge them with crimes against humanity. Lock them up for 25 years. Execute the ones responsible for murder. Send the clear and unambiguous message that America will no longer tolerate lawless fascism. #NurembergThemAll

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Ogre Nation News Update!

Main Stories

:30 - 3:50 Trump’s Brownshirts shot a DoorDash deliveryman and may have left him paralyzed. If he survives. Abolish ICE. Nuremberg them all.

3:51 - 10:45 Trump banned MS Now, CNN, and Politico from the White House. His little fascist temper tantrum immediately bit him in his fascist ass.

We’re Living in the Stupidest Timeline

11:20 - 16:20 The EPA is going to manufacture a bullshit excuse about hormones in the water to ban contraceptives and medical care for the trans community

16:21 - 19:40 MAGAland is crying big, sobby tears about the Canadian national anthem being sung at the Buffalo Bills game last week. Boo fucking hoo.

Headlines for Short Attention Spans 19:41 -

19:41 - 22:38 Cornell University puts on a master class of rape culture. These are the seven rapists.

22:39 - 24:15 The crypto industry is pouring at least $30 million into the Ohio Senate race because Sherrod Brown thinks they’re thieving liars. Spoiler alert: They are.

24:16 - 25:20 The regime is stealing healthcare from another 750,000 Americans by crying “fraud!” with no evidence. The death cult strikes again.

25:21 - 27:05 Air Force Maj. Jason Watson is being court-martialed for speaking out against the regime’s illegal wars. Because that’s what fascist governments do to dissenters.

27:06 - 28:45 America’s first DEI (Didn’t Earn It) Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, is moving forward with mandatory testosterone testing. What a fucking moron.

28:46 - 29:55 The Senate map is expanding for Democrats as Kansas and Nebraska turn into potential battlegrounds.

29:56 - 34:25 Just how fucked ARE Republicans? We’re no longer discussing how much they’re going to lose, but rather how much damage the coming bloodbath is going to do to Trump. Ouch…

Self-care of the Week 34:26 - 37:25

The Unedited Hotmess Livestream

The Fed Tracks Inflation and Employment—but What About the Long-Term Cost to Workers?

What!? Fighting inflation cuts your income? So which is worse, inflation making things more expensive, or the amount of income you lose in the long run? And nobody has checked?

Some readers will have some vague awareness that fighting inflation dampens the economy. For others, this, “cuts your income” part is a shocking idea. One so crazy you’ll think I must have it wrong.

Your right to wonder. Media have been terrible at getting the general public up to speed on this. But the media failure is a topic for another piece. There are numerous parts of this that are worth a more detailed description that will come in pieces to follow and some previous pieces I’ll link to.

SCROLL DOWN TO READ INFLATION COMIC STRIP

How Does the Federal Reserve Fight Inflation?

When the Federal Reserve (Fed) fights inflation it dampens the economy. There’s supposed to be less borrowing, expanding, spending. Everything slows down a little, and that leads to ever rising prices rising a little slower. That it cuts what employers offer new hires is in some sense a side effect, and in some sense a core target. Things besides pay slow down too, like businesses borrowing, expanding, and consumer spending. In that sense wages are a side effect. But the Fed also sees that when new businesses are expanding fast enough they have a hard time finding workers, so they offer higher wages and benefits, that can lead to higher prices. So getting the situation changed to where new hires are no longer getting higher starting offers is part of their target.

Does Fighting Inflation Lower Wages?

By the way, you might wonder, when wages go up do prices go up the same amount so you’re no better off? Not nearly. Employees really do benefit from the higher wage. Again, a topic for another piece.

As I’ve written before, regarding this part about new hires getting less, there’s a lot, a whole lot, more to it. The key thing is leverage. When there are so many jobs employers compete with one another to hire new people, the applicant has leverage to hold out for more. When there are too few jobs and lots of people apply for every job, then the employer has the leverage to offer less, and take it or leave it. “Next!”

Leverage does not just affect starting offers. First, people who start at a lower wage probably never catch up to where they would have been. Studies after the crash of 2008 when new college grads were getting low offers because jobs were scarce found that over the years they didn’t catch up. They never did as well as those who started much better a few years earlier. So it’s a wage loss that ripples through their whole career.

There are many other ways it affects you. If you’ve been employed for a while and expecting a raise, why should the employer give you one, or as much of one, when lots of new employees are coming in, and cheap? Why should they give a matching contribution to your 401(k), or as much of one, when they know you’re not going anywhere because jobs are tight? By far one of the best ways to raise your income is by changing jobs. Go to a new employer who values your experience and has to offer more to get you to switch. But that’s hard to do when jobs are tight. When unions negotiate new contracts they get better deals when employers are anxious about keeping their employees. That new contract will then set the standard for years to come. All of these, your sequence of raises, the retirement contribution, whether you could switch jobs, ripple forward for your working life and accumulate year upon year.

Do Workers Recover Their Lost Income After Inflation Falls?

When inflation rises enough that the Fed fights it there’s a good chance it will come down fairly quickly. The Fed will then loosen the reins, and the economy will get back to some normal.

But you won’t. The lower starting wage, the less retirement fund, the lower raises, the missed job switch, the union contract, are in the past and aren’t undone. They continue that ripple forward. You will end up at retirement with less.

Which Costs Workers More: Inflation or Fighting Inflation?

But would the inflation have been worse? You retire with less but things cost less. Do we know which is worse? No. Shouldn’t we calculate that? Yes. The Fed has done some looking at this a little way into the future, not across a working career. They acknowledge these factors affect people and that they do so over time. They point out it’s very hard to project so far forward across a whole career, and they’re right. Yet it’s essential that this be done as well as possible, and for that to be primary in decisions on fighting inflation.

Should the Fed Consider Workers’ Lifetime Earnings?

So two reasons to bring all this up. One, why isn’t every working person so aware of this that when they hear news about inflation, and fighting inflation, they immediately think, “They better damn well get this right so it works out best for us! So it doesn’t end up leaving us less than we should have had!”. Awareness that would put tremendous pressure on the Fed and the governmental/economic system, that the people are aware and watching.

Second, Fed policy. The lifetime effect of inflation policy is very hard to predict, but the Fed needs to make it policy to take it’s best shot and consider that data in making their moves. And here’s a vitally important part of policy: Employee results needs to be an enforceable rule. While inflation doesn’t just affect worker income it needs to be the highest priority. Inflation affects business and finance and multiple other factors. It also affects consumers, but darn near every consumer is also either a worker or part of a household with worker income, so it still comes down to how employees do.

What policy works best for employees can’t be the only consideration because other things are affected. But it can be the primary one. Calculate what move in any give circumstance best helps employees long term. Only then consider whether that’s so hard on business and finance that any balancing of action is warranted.

Business and finance interests, plus politicians’ claims regarding their record on the economy, put tremendous pressure on inflation policy. (Note this is not the same as Trump pressuring the Fed to lower interest rates. What’s proposed here is an optimal target to help people, regardless whether that means rates should go up or down. Trump only wants rates to go down, regardless of what’s best, so he can brag about numbers that look good on paper.) All of those other forces pressuring inflation policy? That needs to be flipped. Employees need to come first. That needs to be in the rules clearly enough that citizens and groups can challenge it when it isn’t followed.

Now you’re aware. Try the pyramid method. You make two people aware, and they each make two people aware, etc. It’s needed.

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